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Filmmaker Ken Burns joins William Jewell
to honor alumni for life achievements
 Filmmaker and historian Ken Burns joined alumni,
students and friends of William Jewell to honor
alumni for lifetime achievements at the college’s
annual Celebration of Achievement March 2.
Honorees for the Citation for Achievement were Stephen
R. Hemphill ’78, Former U.S.
Senior Consul-Justice, Department of State,
U.S. Embassy, Baghdad; David M.Israelite ’90,
President and CEO, National Music Publishers’ Association; Donald
M.Marolf ’87, Professor of Physics,
University of California at Santa Barbara;
and David D. Powell ’80,
Vice President, Latin America, Occidental Petroleum.
Achievement Day honorees shared their perspectives
on leadership with students and interested community
members at a morning convocation March 3 in John
Gano Memorial Chapel on the college campus.
Honorees were saluted at a pre-dinner reception
at the Hyatt Regency in Kansas City. Buck O’Neil,
Board Chairman of the Negro Leagues Baseball
Museum in Kansas City, served as Honorary Chair
for the event. Achievement Day Co-Chairs were
Patty and Charles Garney and Shirley ’56
and Fred ’56 Pryor.
 Ken Burns’ film career debuted with his
Oscar-nominated history on the Brooklyn Bridge,
one of America’s most beloved monuments.
It was the beginning of a remarkable career in
documentary filmmaking dedicated to exploring
one deceptively simple question: Who are we as
Americans? Burns explores fundamental questions
about the soul of the nation and helps us understand
how our historical and cultural roots shape who
we are as Americans. He gives history an immediacy
that more conventional approaches lack.
Burns has since produced a string of landmark
television series for Public Broadcasting: “The
Civil War,” “Baseball,” “Thomas
Jefferson,” “Lewis and Clark: Journey
of the Corps of Discovery” and “JAZZ,” a
10-part series examining this most American of
art forms. His films are the highest-rated series
in the history of American Public Television
and have received nearly every major film and
television award imaginable: the Emmy Award,
Grammy Award, Peabody and the duPont-Columbia
Award, just to name a few. When commenting on
his films, critics use terms like “epic
filmmaking” and “heroic television.”
Details of the 2006 Achievement Day
honorees and their accomplishments:
 Stephen R. Hemphill recently
completed an 18-month White House appointment
as Senior Consultant, Justice in the Iraq Reconstruction
Management Office for the U.S. State Department
at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq. In this
capacity, he was senior policy advisor to the
Embassy on rule of law, judicial and penal matters.
He currently serves as an international business
consultant with an emphasis on the Iraq-Jordan-Palestine
corridor. From 1999 to 2002, he served as the
elected Prosecuting Attorney in Barry County,
Mo. He served as Assistant Prosecuting Attorney
from 1995 to 1997. He has served as a consultant
to the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee Task
Force and as an adjunct professor of business
law at William Jewell College. He received his
juris doctorate from the University of Missouri-Kansas
City School of Law and his B.A. from William
Jewell. Hemphill is co-owner of B&B Movie
Company, L.L.C., which operates a 12-screen cinema
complex in Liberty, Mo., and a 5-screen complex
in Monett, Mo. He served as Mayor Pro Tem and
City Council member in Liberty from 1991 to 1995
and has served his alma mater as a member of
the National Alumni Association Board of Governors
and the President’s Advisory Council.
 David M. Israelite is President
and Chief Executive Officer of the National Music
Publishers’ Association, the premiere
trade association representing American music
publishers and their songwriter partners. The
NMPA’s mandate is to protect and advance
the interests of music publishers and songwriters
in matters relating to the domestic and global
protection of music copyrights. From 2001 through
early 2005, Israelite served as Deputy Chief
of Staff and Counselor to the Attorney General
of the United States. In this capacity he helped
manage the U.S. Department of Justice’s
112,000 employees and $22 billion annual budget.
Prior to joining the Department of Justice, he
served as the Director of Political and Governmental
Affairs for the Republican National Committee.
From 1997 through 1998, Israelite served as Missouri
Senator Kit Bond’s Administrative Assistant,
and also served as Campaign Manager for Senator
Bond’s successful 1998 re-election campaign.
He also practiced law at the Bryan Cave firm
in Kansas City from 1994 to 1997. He earned his
juris doctorate from the University of Missouri
and received a B.A. from William Jewell in 1990.
 Donald M. Marolf is a Professor
of Physics at the University of California-Santa
Barbara. He studies the thermodynamics of black
holes, issues associated with gravity and entropy,
and gravitational aspects of string theory and
supergravity. In this context, he is most interested
in the classical and quantum physics of branes,
especially in connection with the AdS/CFT conjecture
and black hole physics. His recent studies indicate
that observers can disagree on the amount of
entropy that an object carries into a black hole
when it falls through the horizon. In particular,
observers falling in with the object find the
object to carry more entropy than do observers
who remain outside the black hole. Marolf’s
past work has addressed canonical approaches
to quantum gravity, finite dimensional models,
and certain algebraic approaches to quantum gravity
which may be applicable to many theories of quantum
gravity, independent of their underlying structure.
Some of the most interesting results derived
from this approach address the instanton approximation
to quantum gravity. Marolf has also investigated
spacetime singularities, the loop representation
for quantum gravity, lower dimensional gravity
and issues related to diffeomorphism invariance.
 David D. Powell currently serves
as Vice President, Latin America for Occidental
Petroleum. In this capacity, he oversees Occidental
assets in Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia and Ecuador,
assets which represent approximately 25% of the
company’s total oil and gas production.
He began his career with Occidental as an audit
supervisor in the company’s Tulsa and Houston
offices in 1981, and has held a series of progressively
responsible positions in financial management
at company offices in Los Angeles, Buenos Aires,
Malaysia, Quatar and New York. Prior to assuming
his current responsibilities in 2006, Powell
served for three years as Director of Investor
Relations for Occidental International Corporation
in New York. A native of Salina, Kan., he received
his B.S. in accounting from William Jewell College
and has completed advanced management study at
the Harvard Business School.
William Jewell College formally established
Achievement Day in 1944. As part of the 62-year
tradition, honorees meet formally and informally
with students to discuss their individual roads
to achievement. |
