Gordon Wood is the Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University. He is a contributor and reviewer for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and The New Republic, and is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
Professor Wood's work has received numerous awards, including: the Bancroft Prize, the De Lancey K. Jay Prize, the Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award, the John H. Dunning Prize, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize, and the Julia Ward Howe Prize by the Boston Authors Club. He has also won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize Award for History. In 2011, President Barack Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal.
"I am humbled by the honor and very grateful for having [this award] bestowed on me. It will be a great privilege to visit Utah Valley University once again and to receive this prestigious award."
- Gordon Wood
On April 16, 2014, the Center for Constitutional Studies conferred its highest award of Honorary Fellow upon Dallin H. Oaks. Currently, Elder Dallin H. Oaks is a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Dallin H. Oaks is a former Justice of the Utah Supreme Court, law clerk to Chief Justice Earl Warren of the United States Supreme Court, Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, and lawyer at the firm Kirtland and Ellis in Chicago. A graduate of Brigham Young University and the University of Chicago Law School, Oaks has been an officer or member of the board of many business, and educational and charitable organizations. He is also the author or co-author of many books and articles on religious and legal subjects. In May 2013, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty awarded him the Canterbury Medal for "courage in the defense of religious liberty."
"I feel inadequate to follow David McCullough, but I feel greatly honored. Maybe the analogy that occurs to me is how John Adams must have felt following George Washington; honored with the same office, but he wasn't the father of our country. But I do feel very grateful for what has been said, and for the distinction of being an honorary fellow for the Center for Constitutional Studies at Utah Valley University. Thank you my friends."
- Dallin H. Oaks
David McCullough is the inaugural Honorary Fellow of the Center for Constitutional Studies. He is an American author, narrator, historian, and lecturer. He is also a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian award. David McCullough was honored as the inaugural Honorary Fellow of the Center for Constitutional Studies in September 2012.
"I am pleased, proud, honored, and feel a nice afternoon surge of adrenaline that this is happening to me in this wonderful campus at the inaugural of what can be a prime example set for other colleges and universities all over our country. Is this going to work? You bet it is going to work. And it's going to work because it's needed."
- David McCullough
