David Hawkins, distinguished professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder, will deliver the main address at CU聮s commencement ceremony on Aug. 7.
Hawkins retired in 1982 after a 35-year teaching career at CU-Boulder during which he won numerous prestigious honors and awards. A year before his retirement he received a $300,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation, the so-called "genius grant," the first awarded to a CU faculty member.
He was a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and a visiting professor at colleges and universities in the United States, England, Canada and Italy.
He also was official historian of the Manhattan Project, which ushered in the creation of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Japan at the end of World War II.
Hawkins was a 30-year-old philosophy instructor at the University of California, Berkeley, when he became an administrative aide at the Los Alamos Laboratory in 1943 and later the project聮s historian in 1945-46.
In that role he had free access to all the top people involved, including the project director J. Robert Oppenheimer.
However, Hawkins did not attend the testing when the first atomic bomb was exploded on a 10-story steel tower in New Mexico on July 16, 1945.
In an interview in the university聮s "Summit" magazine in 1990, Hawkins said he could have had a grandstand seat but he did not want to see the explosion.
"When people came back from the test they were manic, joyous, delirious. I was upset by that reaction," he recalled, even though he understood the emotions of physicists who had dedicated themselves to making the project work.
In 1970 Hawkins and his wife, Frances, a leader in early childhood education, founded the CU campus-based Mountain View Center for Environmental Education, which provided advanced education for elementary and pre-school teachers.
The Aug. 7 commencement ceremony for 984 students receiving degrees is free and open to the public. It will be held on the Norlin Quadrangle regardless of the weather beginning with a procession at 8:30 a.m.