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 520 graduates, forty-six are from Maine. Forty-one states, as well as the District of Columbia and Northern Mariana Islands, are represented, including Massachusetts with seventy-nine students, California with fifty-one, New York with forty-nine, and Connecticut with twenty-seven.
Thirty-two graduating seniors hail from outside the US; fifty-one 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 Carina Lim-Huang ’25 and Weatherspoon ’25.
Other participants include Khalil Kilani ’25, who will deliver greetings from the State of Maine, Oliver Goodrich, director of the Rachel Lord Center for Religious and Spiritual Life, who will deliver the invocation, and class president Alejandro Ramos ’25.
- A conversation with 2025 honorary degree recipient Jeremy Frey in Kanbar Auditorium, Studzinski Recital Hall, 1:30 p.m.
- Tom Putnam ’84, former director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, is to deliver the keynote address at Baccalaureate. Sidney J. Watson Arena, 4:30 p.m. Watch Baccalaureate live online here.
Honorary Degrees
During Commencement, Bowdoin will award honorary doctorates to physician, medical educator and former chair of the Bowdoin College Board of Trustees Michele Cyr ’76 and renowned Wabanaki basket maker Jeremy Frey.
While the honorary degree recipients will not give speeches at the Commencement ceremony, a presentation with Frey will be streamed live (details in sidebar, above right).
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.
