Alex Jones and Susan Tifft Gain Honorary Degrees At Graduation Thursday
Alex Jones, who just 13 months ago received the Honorary Alumnus citation at our 40th reunion, and his wife, Susan Tifft, were awarded honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degrees Thursday (June 4) at commencement exercises.
Alex, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, covered the press for the New York Times from 1983 to 1992. His Pulitzer came for his coverage of the collapse of the Bingham dynasty (the centerpiece of which was the once pre-eminent Louisville Courier-Journal). He is the scion of a distinguished Tennessee newspaper family and son of its still-active patriarch, John M. Jones, W&L ’37.
Susan is the Eugene C. Patterson Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy Studies at Duke University, her alma mater. She began a prolific career in journalism at Time magazine, where she was a national writer and associate editor from 1982 to 1991. She has also contributed to the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Smithsonian Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Glamour and Working Woman.
Besides each having the longest titles in academia, Alex and Susan are co-authors of two books, The Patriarch: The Rise and Fall of the Bingham Dynasty (Summit Books; 1991), based on Alex’s Pulitzer-winning reporting, and The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times (Little, Brown; 1999), the first and only book about the Times written with the full cooperation of the controlling families.
Here’s the official university press release about the commencement ceremony.