Alumni Merit Award

Larry Irving
BA, Judd A. and Marjorie Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, 1976

A leading technology consultant, Larry Irving has made it his mission to increase the access of at-risk populations — including the elderly, low-income and rural communities, and minorities — to electronic resources. As an adviser to President Bill Clinton, Irving even coined the popular term for this pressing social issue: “the digital divide.”

Irving received a JD from Stanford University, where he was president of the law school class of 1979. He then specialized in communication law, antitrust law, and commercial litigation for Hogan and Hartson of Washington, D.C. Joining the staff of Congressman Mickey Leland in 1983, he served as legislative director and counsel from 1983 to 1987 and acting chief of staff from 1983 to 1985. Irving was the senior counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance from 1987 until 1993, when President Clinton appointed him assistant secretary of commerce for communications and information.

As a Clinton administration official for nearly seven years, Irving offered his expertise in information technology and telecommunications during a period when Internet popularity skyrocketed. He was instrumental in developing the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the most significant change to U.S. telecommunication statutes in 60 years, and played a key role in developing the administration’s policies and strategies with regard to electronic commerce and the domestic and international Internet and information technology industries.

While helping shape legislation to advance the nation’s telecommunications policies, Irving worked to keep underserved groups from slipping through the cracks. He was the primary author of Falling through the Net, a landmark federal survey that found great disparities in Americans’ access to technology. To counteract this trend, the Clinton administration funded programs to demonstrate how information technology could effect positive change in underserved areas. “My visits to the sites of grant recipients, where I could see how people were using technological tools and were benefiting from access to technology, are among the most powerful memories of my service in government,” Irving recalls.

Irving credits his career in public service to “my understanding, forged in large measure at Northwestern, of the need — on the part of those who have been blessed with privileges that others in this country and across the globe have been denied — to give back, to work for greater opportunity for those who might benefit from assistance.”

In 1995 Newsweek honored Irving as one of the Fifty Most Influential People in the Year of the Internet, dubbing him “the ’Net’s conscience.” The Congressional Black Caucus proclaimed him a “technology champion,” and he received awards from the American Library Association and the National Association for Minorities in Communications, among many others.
Irving is now president of the Irving Information Group, a consulting firm he formed in 1999 to provide strategic planning and market development services to information technology and telecommunications companies, nonprofit organizations, and foundations. He serves on the board of visitors for Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and the advisory council for the Law, Science, and Technology Program at Stanford’s School of Law. He is also a member of the boards of Covad Communications, Worldgate Communications, and Aequus Technologies as well as the advisory boards of Plugged In, Intel’s Computer Clubhouse, and the Independent Television Service.

Irving and his wife, Leslie Wiley (McC79), reside in Washington, D.C.