Washington — Several academics are among this year’s recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, announced today by the White House. The medal, the nation’s highest civilian honor, recognizes people who have made an especially “meritorious contribution” to the United States. President Bush will honor the recipients at a ceremony on June 19.

Donna E. Shalala, president of the University of Miami and a professor of political science, is being honored for two and a half decades of work as an educator and administrator, at Columbia University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, among other places. She also was secretary of health and human services in the Clinton administration.

Benjamin S. Carson Sr. has been director of pediatric neurosurgery at the Johns Hopkins University since the early 1980s. In 1987 Dr. Carson was the first doctor to successfully separate conjoined Siamese twins.

Other medal recipients with academic ties are Anthony S. Fauci and Laurence H. Silberman. Dr. Fauci, one of the world’s most cited HIV/AIDs researchers, has worked at the National Institutes of Health since 1968 and has been a visiting professor at medical schools across the country. Judge Silberman, a senior judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, has been an adjunct law professor at New York and Harvard Universities. He now teaches at Georgetown Law Center.

The other two honorees were the late U.S. Rep. Tom Lantos, a Holocaust survivor who advocated for human rights, and Peter Pace, a retired general in the Marine Corps and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. —Ingrid Norton