Six honorary degrees awarded at 374th Commencement

Honorary degree recipients Rita Moreno (clockwise from top left), Elaine H. Kim, Abraham Verghese, Richard Alley, Esther Duflo, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar pose for their portrait with President Alan Garber and Provost John Manning in front of Massachusetts Hall.

Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer

Lucia Huntington

Harvard Correspondent

May 29, 2025 long read

Recipients are Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Richard Alley, Esther Duflo, Elaine H. Kim, Rita Moreno, Abraham Verghese

Part of the Commencement 2025 series

A collection of features and profiles covering Harvard University’s 374th Commencement.

The University conferred six honorary degrees during Thursday’s Commencement ceremony.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Doctor of Laws

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is known world-wide over as one of the greatest basketball players to ever play the game as well as a committed social activist and award-winning writer. As a player, he was the NBA’s all-time leading scorer for 39 years, with 38,387, until his record was broken in 2023 by fellow Laker great Lebron James. Abdul-Jabbar is a six-time NBA champion, and the league’s only six-time MVP. Time magazine dubbed him “History’s Greatest Player” and ESPN and The Pac 12 named him the No. 1 Collegiate Athlete of the 21st Century.

Abdul-Jabbar has a national platform as a regular contributing columnist for newspapers and magazines around the world. He currently publishes on kareem.substack.com, where he shares his thoughts on some of the most socially relevant and politically controversial topics facing our nation. He is a nationally recognized speaker and regularly appears on the lecture circuit.

President Barack Obama awarded Abdul-Jabbar the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest honor for civilians. He has also received The Ford Medal of Freedom, The Rosa Parks Award, The Double Helix Medal, and Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Medal of Courage. Abdul-Jabbar holds eight honorary doctorate degrees and is a U.S. Cultural Ambassador, a title created specifically for him by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Abdul-Jabbar is a New York Times bestselling author of 17 books, most of which explore the often-overlooked history of African Americans, from the achievements of the Harlem Renaissance to forgotten Black inventors who changed daily life. He currently has several book and film projects in development.

He is an award-winning documentary producer and was twice nominated for an Emmy. He was featured in HBO’s most watched sports documentary of all time, “Kareem: Minority of One,” and he a writer/producer on Season 5 of “Veronica Mars.”

In 2015, the Basketball Hall of Fame created the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar College Center of the Year Award, and in 2021, the NBA created the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Social Justice Champion Award.

Abdul-Jabbar is the California STEM Ambassador because of his commitment to youth education, and also serves on the Advisory Board for UCLA Health. Now 76 years old, he likes to say, “Only my jersey is retired.”

Richard Alley

Doctor of Science

Geologist Richard Alley, widely known as one of the best professors at Pennsylvania State University, is an expert who studies the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets to predict coming changes in climate and sea level. A 2007 Nobel Peace Prize winner (with Al Gore), he has been honored for research, teaching, and service, including election to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and The Royal Society, and has advised top government officials from both major political parties.

Educated at Ohio State University and University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1987, Alley has authored or co-authored than 400 articles for scholarly publications about the relationships between Earth’s cryosphere and global climate change. His research was the first to show that the last Ice Age ended abruptly and violently rather than as a result of gradual change, suggesting a warning to look to the past before making environmental decisions for the future.

Alley’s “The Two-Mile Time Machine,” a Phi Beta Kappa science book of the year, focuses not on the long-term changes that may have caused the ice ages, but on newly discovered “flickering” climate changes revealed by drilling through Greenland’s ice. The ice core showed sudden, immense climate shifts that have changed the Earth from livable to inhospitably frozen to unbearably hot.

Alley has warned that the U.N.’s “best estimate” of 3 feet of sea-level rise by the end of this century is misleading: “It could be 2, it could be 15 or 20,” he has said.

“People who study the history of climate desperately need a record,” he told Knowable Magazine in 2022. “I really do think that this understanding of the ice ages, the role of carbon dioxide, has been a key step in the full understanding of the role of carbon dioxide in our climate.”

Alley participated in the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and presented the PBS TV miniseries “Earth: The Operators’ Manual,” based on his book of the same name. In it, he wrote, “Science is not the result of dispassionate machines spitting out Truth; it involves passionate humans pursuing truth and fame and next week’s paycheck, while satisfying curiosity at the same time.”

Esther Duflo

Doctor of Laws

Esther Duflo is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and Chaire, Pauvreté et politiques publiques at the Collège de France. Her research seeks to understand the economic lives of the poor, with the aim of helping design and evaluate social policies.

Duflo has worked on health, education, financial inclusion, environment and governance, believing that “Evidence-based policies are the key to solving complex social issues.”

Known for the “Randomista Movement,” which uses randomized control trials to study poverty interventions, Duflo says that without these trials poverty reduction efforts do no more than simply hope for the best. From 2000 to 2012 the number of published economic studies relying on randomized controlled studies nearly quadrupled.

Duflo has written, “If you want to understand the root causes of poverty, you have to lookbeyond the symptoms,” which she defines as a lack of cash. “If we want to fight poverty effectively, we must first understand the lives of the poor.”

Duflo’s first degrees were in history and economics from Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris. She earned a Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1999.

Duflo has received numerous academic honors and prizes, including 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (with co-laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer), the Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences in 2015, the A.SK Social Science Award (2015), Infosys Prize in 2014, the David N. Kershaw Award in 2011, a John Bates Clark Medal in 2010, and a MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship in 2009.

With Banerjee, she wrote “Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty,” which won the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2011 and has been translated into more than 17 languages. She also wrote “Good Economics for Hard Times.”

Duflo is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

Elaine Kim

Doctor of Laws

Elaine H. Kim is professor emerita of Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was also chair of the Ethnic Studies Department, associate dean of the Graduate Division, faculty assistant for the Status of Women, and assistant dean in the College of Letters and Science.

Questions of who is represented and how are central to Kim’s work. At UC Berkeley, believing that, “If something you want does not exist, you can try to create it,” she helped establish the Ethnic Studies Department.

Kim has written, edited, and co-edited 10 books and directed or produced and co-produced three video documentaries, including “Labor Women” in 2002 and “Slaying the Dragon: Reloaded” in 2011. She received the Asian Pacific American Heritage Lifetime Achievement Award, the Association for Asian American Studies Lifetime Achievement Award, the State of California Award for Excellence in Education, and the Association for Asian American Studies Cultural Studies Book Award.

Drawn to questions of representation by Hollywood stereotyping (“Very early on, everybody was interested in representation and felt the importance of films and television in our fate. And so all the students could relate to the fact that, for men, there was only Charlie Chan. Bruce Lee wasn’t even a possibility because they wouldn’t let him play in the roles. And then for women, it was just as bad — Madame Butterfly and Dragon Lady,” she told the Cal Alumni Association in 2021), she has worked hard to correct misimpressions of the Korean community in the U.S. and Asians more broadly, though she pointedly dislikes hearing one person speak for an entire group. She has served as president of the Association for Asian American Studies and on the National Council of the American Studies Association. She also co-founded Asian Women United of California, the Korean Community Center of the East Bay in Oakland, and Asian Immigrant Women Advocates.

Kim earlier received an honorary doctorate of laws from Notre Dame University, honorary doctorates in human letters from the University of Massachusetts Boston, Amherst College, the Global Korea Award, and a Fulbright Fellowship.

Rita Moreno

Doctor of Arts

Rita Moreno is a triple-threat performer whose legendary performances include roles as Anita in “West Side Story,” for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role; Louise in “Carnal Knowledge”; Miller in “The Electric Company” (a role in which she popularized the shout “Hey, you guys!”); Sister Peter Marie Reimondo in “Oz”; and recently, Abuelita Toretto in “Fast X.” She is one of only six women to have won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony.

She began her career at 9 years old, dancing in New York City nightclubs, and broke into movies two years later by dubbing Spanish-language films. Her first appearance on stage, opposite Eli Wallach, came in 1945, when she was still 13. She broke into movies in 1950 with “So Young, So Bad” and worked steadily in movies and television throughout that era. Her 43 wins and 51 nominations include honors from the American Latino Media Arts, Critics Choice, Golden Globes, BAFTA, Daytime and Primetime Emmys, Grammy, and NAACP Image awards.

Moreno broke barriers for Latines and others. A social activist, she worked with the Civil Rights Movement and was part of the March on Washington in 1963. She has championed racial, gender, immigration, education (she herself attended Public School 132 in Brooklyn but dropped out of high school at age16), and LGBTQ+ rights, and advocated for relief for Puerto Rico, her homeland.

Acknowledging that she was typecast early in her career, even having her skin darkened for her role in “West Side Story,” she believes she owes her professional longevity to her ability “to get up and dust myself off and keep moving forward.” Moreno has said, “No one’s going to tell me how to make my own choices. For too many years, everybody told me what to say and what to do and how to be.”

She has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Kennedy Center Honor, the Peabody Award, and the Medal for the National Endowment for the Arts. The 2021 Netflix documentary “Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It” tells the story of her amazing 85-year Hollywood career.

Abraham Verghese

Principal Speaker
Doctor of Humane Letters

Abraham Verghese is the Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor in the Department of Medicine, Stanford University. He also leads PRESENCE, a multidisciplinary center that studies the human experience of patients, physicians, and caregivers.

He began his medical training in Ethiopia in 1974, but when a military government deposed Emperor Haile Selassie he immigrated to America and worked as a hospital orderly for a year. He has written that that experience made him determined to finish his medical training. He earned his bachelor’s in medicine in India, completed a residency in Johnson City, Tennessee, and a fellowship at Boston University School of Medicine.

Verghese returned to Johnson City in 1985 and was quickly overwhelmed by the rural AIDS epidemic. To tell that story, he attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, writing in 2009, “I found my purpose and it was to become a physician. My intent wasn’t to save the world as much as to heal myself. Few doctors will admit this, certainly not young ones, but subconsciously, in entering the profession, we must believe that ministering to others will heal our woundedness. And it can. but it can also deepen the wound.”

Since 1991 Verghese has published in The New Yorker, Granta, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and elsewhere. His first book, “My Own Country,” was made into a movie directed by Mira Nair; and his novel, “Cutting for Stone,” spent 107 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. “The Covenant of Water,” his latest, was a New York Times bestseller, an Oprah pick, and is currently being made into a series by Netflix and Harpo Productions.

Verghese is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2015 President Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal, “For reminding us that the patient is the center of the medical enterprise. His range of proficiency embodies the diversity of the humanities; from his efforts to emphasize empathy in medicine, to his imaginative renderings of the human drama.” In 2023, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. This is his seventh honorary doctorate.