ITHACA, N.Y. -- Clifton R. Wharton Jr., a former deputy secretary of state, chancellor of the State University of New York system and chairman of the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association and the College Retirement Equities Fund (TIAA-CREF), will give the Messenger Lecture at Cornell University on Thursday, April 18, at 4:30 p.m. in the David L. Call Alumni Auditorium of Kennedy Hall.

The title of the free and open lecture is "Presidential Politics and Foreign Policy: Diminishing America's Global Stature."

As one who has served at the highest levels of international diplomacy, business and higher education, Wharton can address the topic from a rare array of perspectives. From 1987 to 1993, he was chairman and chief executive officer of TIAA- CREF, the world's largest pension fund (whose current CEO is Cornell trustee Thomas W. Jones '69).

Earlier, Wharton was president of Michigan State University (1970-78) and chancellor of SUNY (1978-87). In the foreign-policy arena, he has held appointments under six U.S. presidents. He served on the Presidential Task Force on Agriculture in Vietnam in 1966, on the Department of State's Advisory Panel on East Asia and the Pacific from 1966 to 1969, on Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller's Presidential Mission to Latin America in 1969 and on President Carter's Commission on World Hunger from 1978 to 1980.

He was chairman of the board for International Food and Agricultural Development of the U.S. State Department's AID program from 1976 to 1983, co-chairman of the state department's Commission on Security and Economic Assistance in 1983 and a member of the Advisory Commission on Trade Policy and Negotiations in 1991. More recently, in 1993, he was President Clinton's deputy secretary of state. Wharton received the Joseph C. Wilson Award for achievement and promise in international affairs in 1977 and the President's Award on World Hunger in 1983. He holds a master's degree in international affairs from Johns Hopkins University, master's and doctoral degrees in economics from the University of Chicago and no less than 56 honorary degrees from a host of other universities.

As a trustee, his name has graced the masthead of such institutions as the Rockefeller Foundation, Equitable Life, Time, Public Broadcasting System and Federal Reserve Bank. He is a current trustee of the Overseas Development Council, SUNY Rockefeller Institute of Government, American Assembly, Winrock International and Clark Foundation. He also is a member of TIAA-CREF's Board of Overseers.

"Dr. Wharton's vast foreign policy experience and extraordinary leadership abilities have equipped him with a clear-eyed understanding of the pressing problems of a post- Cold War world," said Ralph Christy, Cornell professor of agricultural economics and a longtime friend of Wharton's, whom he met as a Michigan State University graduate student.

"He knows that many of these problems are rooted in poverty, social inequality, malnutrition and environmental degradation," Christy added, "and that a foreign policy that does not address these problems will not likely be successful."

The Messenger Lectures were established in 1924 by a gift from Hiram Messenger, who graduated from Cornell in 1880, and are designed to raise the moral standards of political, business and social life. Wharton's visit is being co- sponsored by the Department of Agricultural, Resource and Managerial Economics, the Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture and Development, and the South Asia Program.