KU News Release

Two KU alumni to receive Distinguished Service Citations

Eric Sundquist

LAWRENCE — Two University of Kansas alumni who have helped improve understanding of diverse cultures will receive the 2008 Distinguished Service Citation, the highest honor bestowed by the university and the KU Alumni Association for humanitarian service. They are Eric Sundquist of Sherman Oaks, Calif., and Roger Youmans of Princeton, N.J.

Since 1941, the award has been presented to individuals whose lives and careers benefit humanity. The citation winners will be honored during the All-University Supper at 7:30 p.m. Friday, May 16, at the Kansas Union ballroom.

Sundquist earned a bachelor’s degree in English and philosophy from KU in 1974. As a teacher and author, he has highlighted the voices of racial and ethnic minorities in American literature and has been a driving force behind the study of multicultural literature. Currently the UCLA Foundation Professor of Literature at the University of California-Los Angeles, he has written or edited nine books and has won a senior fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a rare honor for a literary scholar.

Roger Youmans

In 1993, Sundquist’s book “To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature” won the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association as the best book published that year. His most recent work, “Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America,” won the Weinberg Judaic Studies Institute Book Award. He received the prestigious Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award in 2006; the $1.5 million award over three years helps fund his ongoing research and teaching related to the Holocaust’s role in American and modern culture. He is currently writing a book for Yale University Press titled “King’s Dream,” a study of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

Youmans completed a KU bachelor’s degree in 1955 before entering the KU School of Medicine, where he earned his medical degree in 1958 and completed his surgical residency in 1965. Throughout his career, he has sought to heal racial differences and other inequities. As a Summerfield Scholar and varsity tennis player, he joined the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity — the first intercollegiate greek fraternity for African-Americans. Later, as a first-year medical student, he traveled across the South with his fraternity brothers and experienced racism and discrimination firsthand.

In 1961, Youmans took a leave of absence from his KU residency and traveled to Africa, where he worked as the medical director of the Sona Bata Hospital in the Democratic Republic of Congo shortly after the nation gained its independence. After receiving a diploma in tropical medicine from the Princess Astrid School of Tropical Medicine in Belgium, he returned to Congo, working 10 years in bush hospitals. He also worked in Ghana and Nigeria as a visiting professor of surgery and as a medical missionary in South American nations.

In the United States, Youmans was a surgeon at California hospitals before he returned to the Midwest. He taught surgery at the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine and the Oral Roberts University School of Medicine, where he received awards for outstanding teaching each year from 1983 to 1987.

His experiences led him to write numerous articles and books, including “When Bull Elephants Fight: An American Surgeon’s Chronicle of Congo,” in 2006. Youmans serves on the board of the United Front Against Riverblindness — a disease prevalent in Africa’s tropical areas — and the boards of Health Teams International and Blessings International, both based in Tulsa, Okla.

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