Harris Raynor, Bob Huret receive ILR School awards

By Courtney Potts '06

At a gathering in New York City today (March 31), Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations is presenting its highest honors to two alumni who have made significant contributions to both their industry and their alma mater.

Raynor

Huret

Harris L. Raynor '69 will receive the Judge William B. Groat Alumni Award. This award is given annually to a graduate who has demonstrated exceptional professional accomplishment in the field of industrial and labor relations. It is named in honor of former New York State Supreme Court Judge William B. Groat (1899-1986), who played a pivotal role in founding the ILR School and drafting its charter.

Robert A. Huret '65 will be the recipient of the Jerome Alpern Distinguished Alumni Award. Named for Jerome Alpern, B.S. '49, MBA '50, this award is given periodically to a graduate whose career accomplishments have been primarily outside the field of industrial and labor relations. Alpern works as a business and financial consultant and has demonstrated a lifelong commitment to the ILR school.

Both awards will be presented as part of Celebration ILR 2005 at a reception at the Grand Hyatt Hotel on Park Avenue.

Raynor has dedicated his career to pursuing social justice and public policy for the common good. From 1970 to 1978, he was a public school teacher in the central Harlem school district in New York City. During that time he also attended graduate school, receiving his M.S.Ed. from New York University in 1974.

Since 1978 he has remained in the industrial and labor relations field, working with the United Furniture Workers of America, the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union and UNITE (formerly the Union of Needletrades, Textiles and Industrial Employees). He currently serves as the southern regional director and an international vice president of UNITE HERE, formed by UNITE's merger with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union in 2004.

Despite his professional obligations, Raynor has always found time to stay involved with Cornell and the ILR school. Along with visiting classrooms and sitting on career panels, he serves as a member of two key advisory groups: the Cornell University Council and the ILR Dean's Advisory Council, which he formerly chaired. He also has served as a personal adviser to ILR Deans David Lipsky and Edward Lawler.

He and his wife, Dr. B. Denise Raynor, A.B. '70, live in Decatur, Ga. They have three children, one of them a Cornell graduate.

Huret, who received his MBA from Harvard in 1968, is a founding general partner of Financial Technology Ventures, a private equity firm based in San Francisco. He also is the chairman of a private investment firm, Huret Rothenburg & Co., and a director for the Bank of Hawaii Corp., as well as several other private companies. In the past, he served as a senior consultant to Montgomery Securities and as a senior vice president and finance and trust executive officer at the Bank of California.

Like Raynor, Huret remains very involved at Cornell. In July 2004 he was elected to serve a four-year term as a university trustee. He also is active on the Cornell Athletics Alumni Advisory Committee, the Student and Academic Services Committee and the Cornell University Council, for which he served as vice chair from 1998 to 2000.

He and his wife currently reside in San Francisco. They have three daughters, two of whom are Cornell alumnae.

Courtney Potts is a student intern with the Cornell News Service.