ROBERT E. RICH SR., founder and chairman of the board of Rich Products Corp., will receive the University at Buffalo's most prestigious award, the Chancellor Charles P. Norton Medal, at the university's sesquicentennial commencement ceremony on May 19.

Also at the ceremony, Jeremy M. Jacobs, chairman and chief executive officer of Delaware North Companies, will receive an honorary degree.

About 5,500 students will be candidates for degrees from the university during 13 separate commencement ceremonies to be held May 17-19; the Medical School's commencement was held May 12.

UB President William R. Greiner will speak at the university's 150th commencement ceremony, to be held at 10 a.m. on Sunday, May 19, in Alumni Arena on the North Campus.

Greiner and Provost Thomas E. Headrick will confer degrees on graduating seniors from the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, the Faculty of Arts and Letters and the Faculty of Social Sciences.

The university also will award honorary degrees during individual school commencement ceremonies to Max B.E. Clarkson, former president of Graphic Controls, Inc.; Gaynor and Florence Jacobson, a husband and wife who have won international acclaim for helping hundreds of thousands of persecuted Jews, including survivors of Nazi death camps, immigrate to friendly countries, and Helen M. Ranney, a pioneer in research on sickle cell anemia.

The Norton Medal is presented annually in public recognition of a person who has, in Norton's words, "performed some great thing which is identified with Buffaloƒa great civic or political act, a great book, a great work of art, a great scientific achievement, or any other thing which in itself is truly great and ennobling and which dignifies the performer and Buffalo in the eyes of the world." Philip B. Wels, chair of the University Council, will confer the medal.

As founder and chairman of the board of Rich Products, the country's largest family-owned frozen-food manufacturer, Rich is a pre-eminent corporate citizen of the Niagara Frontier, as well as a key partner for the university. Fifty years ago, he served as chair of the University Centennial Committee. He also has served as president of the UB Alumni Association, as a member of the University Council and as an advisor on many other major university initiatives.

A 1935 graduate of UB, he was captain of both the football and wrestling teams. His lifelong commitment to college and professional sports-as an athlete, coach and patron-won him one of the first places in the Buffalo Sports Hall of Fame. He also has been a supporter of the arts, health care and businesses in Western New York.

A graduate of the UB School of Management, Jacobs will receive the honorary doctorate in humane letters from the State University of New York.

He heads Delaware North Companies, Inc., a $1 billion-plus diversified international holding company that he and his immediate family own. Delaware North has interests in the foodservice, sports, sports-facility ownership and management, hospitality, parks services and pari-mutuel industries.

He has served as chairman, director, and currently, trustee of the University at Buffalo Foundation, Inc. In 1983, Jacobs donated $1 million to establish Jacobs Management Center, home of the UB School of Management, and to fund two academic chairs in the school. He was named the school's Niagara Frontier Executive of the Year in 1985.

In addition, he chairs a group of international leaders, known as the UB President's Board of Visitors, who advise the university on strategic issues.

The Jacob-sons, who earned bachelor's degrees, social-work certifica- tion and master's degrees in social work from UB, will receive honorary doctorates in humane letters from SUNY at the School of Social Work commencement ceremony, to be held at 6 p.m. on May 19 in Slee Concert Hall on the North Campus. The Hon. Barbra Kavanaugh, Buffalo council member-at-large, will address graduates. Greiner will confer degrees.

Gaynor Jacobson worked for 30 years to help hundreds of thousands of Jews, many of them Holocaust survivors, escape discrimination, torture and death, and to negotiate their safe immigration to new settlements in the United States, Brazil, Turkey, Israel and elsewhere.

He initially worked for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) in the 1940s and early 1950s, serving as country director overseeing the organization's relief activities in Italy, Greece, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. At one point, he was arrested and jailed as a spy for a short time in Hungary. He was instrumental in keeping the Czech borders open to Jews fleeing from Poland following World War II.

In 1953, he joined the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) as director of Latin American Operations. He was named executive director in 1966 and two years later became executive vice president, a post he held until retiring in 1981.

Florence Jacobson often worked alongside her husband, putting social-work concepts learned at UB into practice as she worked with immigrants. She worked with the JDC in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, setting up and supervising social services for thousands of Jews living in those countries and to those who immigrated to them from Eastern Europe.

She later specialized in immigrant cases with the Jewish Social Service Agency of Chicago; worked with HIAS in Rio de Janeiro in programs involving resettlement of immigrants from Europe, and worked for the New York City Department of Social Services.

Ranney, professor emerita of medicine at the University of California at San Diego, will receive a SUNY honorary doctorate in science at the commencement ceremony for the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, to be held at 3 p.m. on Sunday, May 12, in the Center for the Arts on the North Campus. Ranney also will deliver the commencement address. Greiner will confer degrees.

A member of the UB Department of Medicine from 1970-73, Ranney also has held faculty positions at Columbia University and Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She was named professor and chair of the Department of Medicine at UC-San Diego in 1973, making her the first woman to hold such a position at an American medical school.

Clarkson, retired dean of the Faculty of Management at the University of Toronto, will receive the honorary doctorate in humane letters from SUNY at the School of Management ceremonies, to be held at 5 p.m. on Saturday, May 18, in Alumni Arena. Dean Frederick W. Winter will deliver the address at the ceremony. Greiner will confer degrees.

Clarkson led Graphic Controls, Inc. to international prominence during the 1950s and 1960s, and was instrumental in founding the Allentown Community Center in the early 1970s to serve the unemployed and disadvantaged. Renamed the Clarkson Center for Human Services in 1990, the center is today one of Buffalo's largest providers of social services.

A former visiting lecturer at UB and one-time trustee of the UB Foundation, Clarkson left Buffalo to become dean of the Faculty of Management at the University of Toronto. In 1980, he founded the Centre for Corporate Social Performance and Ethics, where, as director, he continues to advance the principles of corporate responsibility that shaped his efforts as a community and business leader in Buffalo.

Other commencement ceremonies, speakers and those who will confer degrees are: