President Safa Zaki will preside over Commencement and award degrees on the terrace of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art on the Quad. In the event of very severe weather, Commencement will be held in Sidney J. Watson Arena.
Of the 475 graduates, fifty are from Maine. Forty-four states as well as the District of Columbia and Northern Mariana Islands are represented, including Massachusetts with seventy-nine students, New York with forty-five, California with thirty-five, and Connecticut with twenty-four. Forty graduating seniors hail from outside the US; thirty-three countries and territories have citizens graduating from Bowdoin.
Commencement Speakers
Since 1806, Bowdoin has given the honor of speaking at Commencement to graduating seniors. Until 1877 every graduate had a speaking part. The custom of selecting student Commencement speakers through competition began in the 1880s.
Past speakers have included poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 1825, House Speaker Thomas Brackett Reed 1860, Arctic explorer Robert E. Peary 1877, and biologist and researcher Alfred Kinsey 1916. This year’s Commencement speakers are Colleen Doucette ’24 and Dylan Richmond ’24.
Other participants include Anna Cox ’24, who will deliver greetings from the State of Maine, and Oliver Goodrich, director of the Rachel Lord Center for Religious and Spiritual Life, who will deliver the invocation, and class president Melissa Su ’24.
Honorary Degrees
During Commencement, Bowdoin will award honorary doctorates to Grammy-winning opera singer Ryan Speedo Green, award-winning journalist Maria Hinojosa, and trustee emeritus and philanthropist David J. Roux.
While the honorary degree recipients will not give speeches at the Commencement ceremony, they will deliver talks, which will be streamed live.
Friday, May 24
- A conversation with Maria Hinojosa, moderated by Bowdoin Orient coeditors-in-chief Juliana Vandermark ’24 and Sam Pausman ’24. Kresge Auditorium, Visual Arts Center, 1:30 p.m.–2:15 p.m.
- A conversation with Ryan Speedo Green, moderated by Trustee Andrew Serwer ’81. Kanbar Auditorium, Studzinski Recital Hall, 2:30 p.m.–3:15 p.m.
- David J. Roux is to deliver the keynote address at Baccalaureate. Sidney J. Watson Arena, 4:30 p.m.
Commencement History
Bowdoin College was chartered in 1794 and held its first Commencement ceremony in 1806 in the second meetinghouse of First Parish Church across the street from the College. There were seven graduates in the Class of 1806. The following year saw the smallest graduating class in the College’s history, with just three members in the Class of 1807.
The best-known class was the Class of 1825. In addition to Longfellow, the class included writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. In 1875, on the day before Commencement at the fiftieth reunion of the class, Longfellow recited his poem “Morituri Salutamus,” an elegiac reflection on youth and age.
