Honorary Degrees

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Ryan Speedo Green is a three-time Grammy-winning bass baritone opera singer and star of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City and the Vienna State Opera in Austria. Green is a two-time winner of the Beverly Sills Artist Award (2021 and 2023), created to help further the careers of rising stars by providing additional funding for vocal coaching, language study, travel costs, and other professional expenses. Among his many career highlights, he has appeared as Wotan in Das Rheingold with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, as King Heinrich in Lohengrin with both Deutsche Oper Berlin and Bayerische Staatsoper, and as Emile Griffith in Champion at the Metropolitan Opera. In 2019, Green was the recipient of Bowdoin’s Henni and Harry Friedlander Award for the Common Good, presented to an individual who has overcome significant adversity in his or her life and gone on to make a highly significant contribution to the common good. In accepting the award on campus, Green described his impoverished childhood in southeastern Virginia, at one point living in a trailer pockmarked with bullet holes, and how he fell in love with opera at age fifteen on a school trip to the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, where he saw the great African American mezzo soprano Denyce Graves perform in Carmen and decided he, too, wanted to sing on that stage. He would go on to become a member of the Metropolitan Opera Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, and earn a bachelor’s degree in music from the Hartt School of Music and a master’s from Florida State University.

Maria de Lourdes Hinojosa Ojeda is an award-winning journalist and founder of Futuro Media Group. Based in Harlem, Futuro Media is a multimedia journalism nonprofit committed to exploring American diversity. Among other projects, Futuro Media produces Latino USA, a public radio program and podcast hosted by Hinojosa and distributed nationwide by the Public Radio Exchange. In 2022, Hinojosa and the Futuro team won a Pulitzer Prize in audio reporting for the podcast series Suave profiling a juvenile lifer reentering society after more than thirty years of incarceration. Hinojosa is currently the Distinguished Journalist in Residence at her alma mater, Barnard College. On January 10, she was announced as the 2024 recipient of the Edward R. Murrow Lifetime Achievement Award, conferred by the Murrow School of Journalism at Washington State University. Hinojosa’s previous awards include four Emmys, the John Chancellor Award, the Studs Terkel Community Media Award, two Robert F. Kennedy Awards, and the Ruben Salazar Lifetime Achievement Award. During a journalism career spanning more than three decades, Hinojosa has reported for CBS, CNN, NPR, PBS, and WNBC in New York City. She has been recognized by People en Español as one of the twenty-five most powerful Latina women. Hinojosa is the author of four books, the most recent of which is Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America (2020), which explores some of issues surrounding immigration in America through the lens of her family’s personal experience.

David J. Roux is a trustee emeritus with whom Bowdoin and Maine share deep ties. A generous gift from Roux and his wife, Barbara, made possible the Roux Center for the Environment, which was completed in fall 2018. The Roux Center brings together faculty from across academic disciplines to encourage collaboration and creativity in the teaching and scholarship of the environment and further strengthens Bowdoin’s position as a leader in this field of study. Roux’s philanthropy and significant impact on Maine is also evident in the launch of the Roux Institute, a collaboration with Northeastern University, and the establishment of The Roux Family Center for Genomics and Computational Biology at Jackson Labs in Bar Harbor, where he served as board chair. He has also served on the boards of the National Audubon Society, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Roux is a cofounder and chairman of BayPine Capital. He previously cofounded and was chairman, co-CEO and co-managing partner of Silver Lake, a global private equity firm focused on technology and technology-enabled investments. He was formerly chairman and CEO of Liberate Technologies, executive vice president at Oracle Corporation, and senior vice president at Lotus Development. A graduate of Harvard College, Roux earned an MBA at the Harvard Business School and an MPhil at King’s College, Cambridge University. Roux’s extensive family connections to the College include his parents, Donald Roux ’55 and Constance “Connie” Roux, who took classes at the College and was a sister of former Maine governor James B. Longley ’48, his brother James Roux ’81, sister Mary Roux Train ’91; brother-in-law Daniel Train ’91; and niece Moira Train ’21.

Commencement

Honorary Degrees

2023

2022

2021

2020

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