The annual Perkins Prize for Interracial Understanding and Harmony at Cornell will be awarded for the third time at a ceremony on campus Monday, April 28, at 3 p.m. at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art.

Orpheus M. Williams, a senior in human ecology and co-leader of Peer Educators in Human Relations (PEHR), will receive this year's $5,000 award.

Speaking at the ceremony will be President Hunter Rawlings; Trustee Thomas W. Jones, who established the prize in 1995; President Emeritus James A. Perkins, for whom the prize is named; and John L. Ford, the Robert W. and Elizabeth C. Staley Dean of Students.

PEHR is a student-led organization at Cornell whose mission is to address areas of tension and intolerance plaguing the student environment and to endow those who participate in PEHR workshops with new perspectives and solutions. The organization has 15 student staff members, including the co-leaders, and two non-student co-coordinators.

As a member and then co-leader of the organization, Williams has helped PEHR address such targeted issues as sexism, racism, homophobia and ageism through workshops, meetings and community organizing, both on and off campus. PEHR's annual Connection Series helps participants address those issues during nine weeks of workshops. The series takes place each spring semester at Cornell and during the fall semester at Hobart & William Smith Colleges in Geneva.

"Our enrollment in the series has increased every year since it began," Williams said. This year there were about 80 participants at Cornell.

Williams said the atmosphere created by the PEHR workshops allows those who take part to feel safe enough to challenge their assumptions about others, while healing from the abuse they have been experiencing through intolerance, hatred and/or violence.

Two finalists for the Perkins Prize will be given certificates of honorable mention at the April 28 ceremony: Donald Barr, professor of human service studies, for his involvement in education and organizing efforts on campus and in the community toward building a more equitable society; and Mary Webber, director of the Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy, for her efforts to bring about greater interracial understanding and intergroup harmony by establishing programming for the campus to discuss these issues and by training others in the skills of bridge-building.

Jones established the annual James A. Perkins Prize to promote efforts for the advancement of campus interracial understanding and harmony and to honor a past president's "historic decision" to increase the enrollment of minority students during the tumultuous 1960s. Three criteria are used to select the professor, student, administrator or program that receives the prize:

-- The number and diversity of students participating in a sustained level of involvement which leads to a set of accomplishments;

-- the extent to which these accomplishments promote common values and shared community standards among diverse students; and

-- the extent to which these accomplishments enhance the abilities of students to work with, live with, and learn from individuals from a wide range of backgrounds, beliefs and cultural perspectives.

"President Perkins made the historic decision to increase very significantly the enrollment of African-American and other minority students at Cornell," Jones said in announcing the award two years ago. "He did so in the conviction that Cornell could serve the nation by nurturing the underutilized reservoir of human talent among minorities, and in the faith that the great American universities should and could lead the way in helping America to surmount the racial agony which was playing out in the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s."

Perkins served as Cornell president from 1963 to 1969. Jones, who was an undergraduate at Cornell during the student takeover of Willard Straight Hall in 1969, is president and chief operating officer of the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association-College Retirement Equities Fund (TIAA-CREF), the world's largest pension fund.

The Perkins Prize grant is administered by Dean of Students Ford. Winners are selected by a nine-member executive committee of the Student Community Fund, made up of students, faculty and administrators.

For online information about the prize, including the application and nomination process, visit the Perkins Prize Page athttp://www.dos.cornell.edu/dos/dos/PerkinsPrize.html.