From left: Charles C. Freyer ’69, Jean S. Hendry *80, professor emeritus James M. McPherson, and Mika Provata-Carlone *02

For more than 35 years, Charles C. Freyer ’69 has been a leader of his class, serving on the class Board of Governors as a member and in various officer roles. But his loyalty to Princeton extends beyond the Class of 1969. Since 2009, Freyer has been chair of the Princeton Internships in Civic Service (PICS) board, which places undergraduates in paid summer internships with nonprofits. A member of Elm Club as an undergraduate, Freyer still cares deeply about the Street, acting as vice chair of the graduate board for Cannon Dial Elm, secretary of the Interclub Council, and in other club-related roles. An ROTC alum and retired Army lieutenant colonel, Freyer has been an officer of Alumni and Friends of Princeton ROTC and is a leader of the new Princeton Veterans Alumni Association.

Since Jean S. Hendry *80 began volunteering with Annual Giving in 2004, she has served Princeton in myriad ways: as a board member of the Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni (APGA) and chair of its Reunions Committee, member of the nominating committee for the Madison Medal and the Princetoniana Committee, vice chair of the Graduate Alumni Relations Committee, and an interviewer for the Alumni Schools Committee, among other roles. She wrote a manual for mounting successful APGA reunions and has spearheaded projects that have special appeal to graduate alumni, including an oral-history project about the Butler Tract. She has long worn another hat as well: the DaVinci hat of a P-rade marshal. 

“Jim McPherson is a rock star,” begins the citation for James M. McPherson, Pulitzer Prize-winning professor emeritus of history and perhaps the nation’s most eminent scholar of the Civil War. An honorary member of five classes, McPherson first taught a Civil War course in 1975, telling students to meet in the U-Store parking lot early one morning if they wanted to join him on a visit to Gettysburg. In 2004, the year he retired, that trip — by then a tradition — drew 200 people. Alumni also have benefited: Since 1984, McPherson has led nearly a dozen trips under the auspices of the Office of Alumni Affairs, as well as 20 mini-reunion visits to battlefields. 

Her Princeton Schools Committee colleagues consider Mika Provata-Carlone *02 “the single most important Princeton ASC volunteer outside the U.S,” according to the award citation. As chair of the Schools Committee of the United Kingdom for nine years, she has recruited a large corps of volunteers, greatly expanded the number of interviews conducted there, and created the Princeton telethons in London to interview applicants from more than 20 countries. In total, the U.K. committee completes more than 500 interviews per year. Provata-Carlone “draws the community together,” the citation said, “creating a family of Princetonians abroad by cultivating a powerful sense of connection.”