Honorary Degree Recipients 2014

Anne-Marie Slaughter

Anne-Marie Slaughter delivered Tufts University’s commencement address Sunday, May 18, 2014, at 9 a.m. on The Green on Tufts’ Medford/Somerville campus. She also received an honorary doctorate of laws.

Slaughter is the president and CEO of the New America Foundation, a public policy institute and idea incubator based in Washington and New York. She is also the Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 University Professor Emerita of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. From 2009–2011 she served as director of policy planning for the United States Department of State, the first woman to hold that position. Prior to her government service, Slaughter was the dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the J. Sinclair Armstrong Professor of International, Foreign, and Comparative Law at Harvard Law School.

In 2012, following her decision the previous year to leave the Department of State, Slaughter published “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” in The Atlantic; it quickly became the most-read article in the history of the magazine and helped spawn a renewed national debate on the continued obstacles to genuine full male-female equality.

“As a distinguished scholar, academic leader and advocate for innovation in public policy and national affairs, Anne-Marie Slaughter represents the multi-faceted excellence and civic engagement to which Tufts is committed. She is also one of the most thoughtful and widely quoted commentators on the issues of personal and professional equality for women in contemporary America. We are anticipating her commencement address with great interest,” said Tufts President Anthony P. Monaco.

Slaughter has written or edited six books and more than 100 scholarly articles. She was the convener and academic co-chair of the Princeton Project on National Security, a multi-year research project aimed at developing a new, bipartisan national security strategy for the United States.

Upon leaving the state department in 2011, she received the Secretary’s Distinguished Service Award for her work leading the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, as well as meritorious service awards from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Supreme Allied Commander for Europe.

Slaughter writes a monthly column for the online commentary site Project Syndicate. She provides frequent commentary for mainstream and new media outlets and curates foreign policy news for more than 90,000 followers on Twitter (@SlaughterAM). Foreign Policy magazine has named her to its annual list of the Top 100 Global Thinkers multiple times. She received a B.A. from Princeton, an M.Phil. and D.Phil. in international relations from Oxford, and a J.D. from Harvard. She is married to Andrew Moravcsik; they live in Princeton, N.J., with their two sons.

Other distinguished men and women also receiving honorary degrees at Tufts’ commencement were:

James Lawson, social activist, architect of the non-violence movement in pursuit of Civil Rights, educator and religious leader. Described by Martin Luther King Jr. as one of the “noble men” who had deeply influenced the struggle for equal rights, the Reverend Lawson has showed over five decades how the power of non-violence can effect profound social change. Lawson received an honorary doctorate of public service.

Jill Lepore, historian, writer and Tufts alumna. Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History, Harvard College Professor, chair of Harvard’s History and Literature Program, a staff writer at The New Yorker and an award-winning author. Her books and essays focus on the histories of war and violence and of language and literacy. Lepore received an honorary doctorate of humane letters.

Haruki Murakami, novelist. Acclaimed not only in his native Japan but also internationally for fiction that is humorous and surreal, Murakami has earned numerous literary prizes and been praised as being “among the world’s greatest living novelists” by The Guardian. Murakami received an honorary doctorate of letters.

James Stern, financier, philanthropist, Tufts alumnus and chairman emeritus of the Tufts board of trustees. Chair of the Cypress Group LLC, Stern is the youngest person ever elected to the Tufts board of trustees, at age 32. He served 31 years on the board, including a decade as chairman, endowing multiple professorships and student scholarships and spearheading two successful capital fundraising campaigns. Stern received an honorary doctorate of business administration.

In addition, on Saturday, May 17, Dr. Rajiv Shah, administrator of USAID, addressed Fletcher graduates during their Class Day ceremonies.