Bowdoin College will confer three honorary degrees at its 221st Commencement exercises, to be held Saturday, May 23, 2026, on the steps of the Walker Art Building.
This year’s honorary degree recipients are longtime Maine island health care provider Sharon Daley, author and Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich ’14, and economic policy thought leader Cecilia Elena Rouse.
Sharon Daley, a registered nurse and board vice president of The Beacon Project, an Islesboro eldercare nonprofit that runs the assisted living home Boardman Cottage, has dedicated her career to delivering health care to those without easy access and strengthening coastal and island communities through education and connection. For twenty-two years, Daley served as the Maine Seacoast Mission’s director of island health and nurse on the Sunbeam, the mission’s seventy-four-foot boat, until her retirement in December 2022. Maine Seacoast Mission (MSM) is a long-standing nonprofit that supports the state’s remote coastal communities and islands by focusing on health care, youth education, fighting food insecurity, improving housing, and fostering community connections. Daley came aboard the Sunbeam in 2000 to launch MSM’s telemedicine program with a goal of connecting the islands to mainland hospitals and clinics. Upon the discovery that many people in those service areas were homebound and could not easily obtain blood work, and as other needs were uncovered, the program and Daley’s role began and continued to evolve. Over the years, Daley has focused on all aspects of living and aging on an island. Part of her work was founding and facilitating the Island Eldercare Network, which brings together islanders and health care providers who work with island elders to share resources, connect, and continue to help those who wish to live on an island in their later years. Daley also recognized a need to connect island residents with mental health resources, contacting local providers and facilitating telemedicine visits on the Sunbeam. As people struggled with addiction, Daley was instrumental in setting up Narcan stations and connecting those in need to AA meetings, and when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, she worked with the Maine Center for Disease Control to ensure islanders had access to vaccinations. Daley graduated from what was then the Barnes Hospital School of Nursing in St. Louis, Missouri. Prior to joining MSM, Daley worked in a number of nursing roles, including in pediatrics at Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston Children’s Hospital, and in home health care and rehabilitative and hospice nursing in Boston and rural Maine.
Evan Gershkovich is a journalist at The Wall Street Journal and a member of the Class of 2014. Gershkovich, who had been living and working in Russia for six years, most recently working out of the WSJ’s Moscow bureau, was imprisoned in Russia for more than a year after he was detained by Russia’s Federal Security Service in March 2023 on unsubstantiated charges of espionage. This marked the first time since the Cold War that a journalist working for an American news outlet had been arrested on charges of spying. In July 2024, despite declarations by the White House and WSJ that he was not involved in espionage and was being “wrongfully detained,” Gershkovich was sentenced to sixteen years in prison. He was released on August 1, 2024, as part of a prisoner exchange, which some say had been the Russian government’s end goal all along. Four months after his release from captivity, Gershkovich and three of his WSJcolleagues published an article that shined a spotlight on the Department for Counterintelligence Operations, known as DKRO, the secretive Kremlin agency that arrested him and reported to be “at the very core of Putin’s wartime regime.” Gershkovich’s memoir, This Cursed Beautiful Land: A Russian-American Story, chronicling his time in prison and Russia’s move toward autocracy, is to be published by Crown Publishing, an imprint of Penguin Random House, and will be available September 29, 2026. A philosophy major and English minor at Bowdoin, Gershkovich worked for The New York Times from 2016 to 2017, The Moscow Times from 2017 to 2020, and Agence France-Presse from 2020 to 2022 before moving to the WSJ in January 2022. In 2024, Gershkovich was awarded the National Press Foundation’s Chairman’s Citation, which recognizes individuals whose accomplishments fall outside the traditional categories of excellence but who nevertheless have a profound impact on journalism, and the Radio Television Digital News Association Foundation’s First Amendment Award, honoring those who “practice, promote, and defend journalism.” He was also named one of TIME’s “100 Most Influential People,” appearing on the magazine’s March 25, 2024, cover.
