Mary Louise Kelly, a journalist and co-host of NPR’s All Things Considered and author of It. Goes. So. Fast.: The Year of No Do-Overs, will deliver the Bates College Commencement address on Sunday, May 26, 2024.

A journalist who has never wavered in her chosen duty to inform the public about the forces at work in our society and their impact on our lives, Kelly will receive an honorary Doctor of Letters degree and be joined by two other honorary degree recipients:

• Richard Blanco, an award-winning author and poet who explores ideas of identity, love, and home, will receive a Doctor of Letters degree.
• Clayton Spencer, a transformative leader in U.S. higher education who oversaw far-reaching strategic improvements at Bates as the college’s eighth president, will receive a Doctor of Humane Letters degree.

The 158th Bates Commencement will be the first for President Garry W. Jenkins, who took office as the college’s ninth president on July 1, 2023.

“I am proud and honored to welcome individuals who are so incredibly deserving of the college’s highest recognition,” said Jenkins. “From the strength of Bates today to how we interpret, comprehend, and understand ourselves and our world, they have made significant and wide-ranging contributions to our lives and society.”

Beginning at 10 a.m. and concluding shortly after noon, Commencement takes place on the Coram Library Terrace on the Historic Quad. The event will be streamed live on the Bates Facebook and Bates Instagram pages as well as on the Bates website.

Richard Blanco

An award-winning author and poet whose close attention to the ordinary illuminates extraordinary truths, Richard Blanco explores ideas of identity, love, and home. In 2013, he was selected as the fifth inaugural poet by President Obama, the youngest as well as the first Latinx, immigrant, and gay person to serve in that role.

Born in Madrid, Spain, to Cuban-exile parents and raised in Miami in a working-class family, Blanco, who has called Maine his home in recent years, uses his poetry to negotiate universal themes of identity, place and belonging. His most recent collection of new and selected works, Homeland of My Body, evokes “home” as not just a specific, tangible place but also internal, within one’s entire being.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Florida International University in 1991 and working as an engineer, Blanco turned his insights and expression toward poetry, returning to his alma mater and earning a master’s in creative writing from FIU in 1997. He has also authored the memoirs For All of Us; One Today: An Inaugural Poet’s Journey; and The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood.

Blanco’s numerous awards and honorary degrees include the Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize, the PEN American Beyond Margins Award, the Patterson Prize, and a Lambda Literary Award for memoir. A Woodrow Wilson Fellow who is now an associate professor at FIU, Blanco was The Academy of American Poets’ first education ambassador and the first poet laureate for Miami-Dade County. The citation for his National Humanities Medal, awarded in 2023, noted, “Personal experience anchors the poetry and prose of Richard Blanco, but he also somehow includes us all.”

Mary Louise Kelly

As a journalist, Mary Louise Kelly has sought authenticity over artifice, conducting incisive interviews, sharing deeply researched reports, and never wavering in her chosen duty to inform the public about the forces at work in our society and their impact on our lives. Well-known as a host of NPR’s All Things Considered since 2018, she has long moved fluidly between the worlds of broadcast and print journalism, providing the highest degree of service to both readers and listeners in her more than three decades as a journalist.

Early in her career, she reported for the BBC World Service and was a CNN producer. She joined NPR in 2001 as a senior editor and, in 2004, became its first intelligence reporter. Her truth seeking has taken her to North Korea, Russia, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Israel, Iran, and beyond, and her byline has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek, and she is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. She led the NPR team that was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2021 for reporting from Iran.

Kelly is also the author of two novels, Anonymous Sources and The Bullet, which have been translated into more than a dozen languages worldwide. Her memoir of parenting amidst her older son’s last year at home before college, It. Goes. So. Fast., was an instant New York Times bestseller. Kelly earned her bachelor’s degree from Harvard University in government and French language and literature, and a master’s in European studies at the University of Cambridge in England. She created and taught a graduate course on national security and journalism at Georgetown University.

Clayton Spencer

A transformative leader in U.S. higher education for more than three decades and a powerful voice in service of the liberal arts, Clayton Spencer served as president of Bates from 2012 to 2023. As president, she oversaw far-reaching strategic improvements that elevated the college’s strength and reputation.

Centering equity and inclusion as animating Bates values, the college made significant advances under her leadership in its academic program, the student experience, and fundraising. Bates created a Program in Digital and Computational Studies; built a state-of-the-art STEM facility; expanded the faculty; launched major transformations in curriculum and teaching; and completed its largest fundraising campaign ever, while doubling the college’s endowment. Spencer also spearheaded the creation of Bates’ nationally recognized Purposeful Work program, which mobilizes core strengths of the liberal arts to prepare students for lives of meaning and purpose.

Before Bates, she served on Harvard University’s senior leadership team for 15 years, overseeing strategic initiatives on behalf of four successive presidents. In the early 1990s, she worked for the late U.S. Senator Edward M. Kennedy as chief education counsel, directing the Senate’s legislative agenda in education. As Bates president, she served on the boards of the American Council on Education and the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, among others. Spencer currently serves on the boards of the Davis Educational Foundation and the Portland Museum of Art, and previously served as a Trustee of Williams College and Phillips Exeter Academy. She earned a B.A. from Williams College, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa; a J.D. from Yale Law School; and master’s degrees from Oxford and Harvard universities.