Honorary degree nominees for the University of Michigan’s 2024 Winter Commencement represent achievements in a broad range of fields including journalism, historical and literary scholarship, computer science, and philanthropy and communications.
Rebecca Blumenstein, a U-M alumna and President of Editorial at NBC News, will be the main speaker at the Dec. 15 ceremony at Crisler Center. She has been recommended for an honorary Doctor of Laws degree.
Others recommended for honorary degrees by the university’s Honorary Degree Committee are:
- John D. Evans, U-M alumnus, philanthropist and co-founder of C-SPAN, Doctor of Laws.
- Henry Louis Gates Jr., literary scholar, educator, historian and TV host, Doctor of Humane Letters.
- Margaret H. Hamilton, pioneering systems and software engineer and computer scientist, Doctor of Engineering.
The degrees are pending approval by the Board of Regents at its Dec. 5 meeting.
The following information about each recommended recipient was provided by University and Development Events.
Rebecca Blumenstein
Blumenstein, who grew up in Essexville, Michigan, spent much of her career working in high-ranking roles within print journalism during a time of seismic change.
After serving as editor-in-chief at The Michigan Daily and earning a bachelor’s degree from U-M’s Residential College, she began her professional career at The Tampa Tribune, soon moving to Gannett Newspapers, and then Long Island-based Newsday.
In 1995, she joined The Wall Street Journal’s Detroit bureau and later was part of the Journal’s New York Technology Group, before accepting a position leading the Journal’s China bureau in 2005. During her tenure abroad, Blumenstein led a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 2007 for its “Naked Capitalism” series.
She subsequently served as the Journal’s deputy international editor, page one editor and deputy editor in chief until 2017, when she became deputy managing editor at The New York Times. She was tasked in part with elevating and reinvigorating the Times’ business coverage, and one of the highest-ranking women in its newsroom.
Blumenstein subsequently oversaw digital and live news during the pandemic and 2020 election, as well as recruiting efforts and operations. She advised the Times’ publisher and played a central role in evacuating and relocating more than 200 Times employees and family members from Afghanistan in 2021.
In 2022, Blumenstein was named board chair of the Columbia Journalism Review, and she currently serves on the Executive Advisory Board of U-M’s Wallace House Center for Journalists.
Blumenstein became President of Editorial at NBC News in 2023, overseeing newsgathering, editorial teams, field operations and news programs like “Meet the Press” and “Dateline NBC.” She’s responsible for driving journalism and original content across the organization’s broadcast and digital platforms.
John D. Evans
Evans has spent decades working as a significant and positive change-maker within the worlds of media, AIDS research, philanthropy, political transparency, the LGBTQIA+ community, and his alma mater, U-M.
Born and raised in Detroit, Evans earned a bachelor’s degree in 1966 from U-M, where he was station manager of campus radio station WCBN. He also was a Washtenaw County deputy sheriff. After graduating, Evans served in the U.S. Navy on the USS America and USS John F. Kennedy, and was also on the Chief of Naval Operations staff.
In 1976, Arlington Telecommunications Corp. recruited Evans to build the first cable system in the Washington, D.C., metro area. After the House of Representatives installed a closed-circuit TV system, Evans and his friend Brian Lamb saw the potential to better inform the public on government proceedings.
They and industry colleagues founded the nonprofit Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network, or C-SPAN. When the House overwhelmingly passed a historic resolution to permit gavel-to-gavel coverage in late 1977, C-SPAN began, for the first time, to provide unfiltered public affairs coverage.
Evans’ leadership roles for C-SPAN spanned 44 years and, in 2016, he was inducted into the national Cable Hall of Fame.
Outside of his work in media, he established the John D. Evans Foundation, which supports AIDS and cancer research, environmental issues, technological innovation, the arts and higher education.
In 2001, he received the League of African American Women’s award for the Waterford Project, an initiative using the internet to accelerate collaborative research into HIV/AIDS. He currently chairs the American Medical Association Foundation’s LGBTQ+ Health Commission.
At U-M, Evans has supported several LGBTQ+ initiatives and scholarships, and provided funding for the International LGBTQ Psychology Summer Institute. He created the John D. Evans Fund for Media and Technology, and serves on several advisory councils.
Henry Louis Gates Jr.
With his versatile array of career achievements, Gates may be the ultimate American multi-hyphenate, as few people could be described as a public intellectual, literary scholar, cultural critic, educator, historian, TV star and filmmaker.
Gates came of age in the small factory town of Piedmont, West Virginia. He attended Potomac State College for one year then transferred to Yale University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa during his junior year and graduated summa cum laude in 1973.
He was the first Black student to receive an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award, which allowed him to study at the University of Cambridge, where he received his Ph.D. in English literature in 1979. He then was appointed an assistant professor at Yale, became co-director of its Black Periodical Literature Project, and won a MacArthur Fellowship.
Gates subsequently served on the faculties of Cornell and Duke universities, and in 1991 joined Harvard University as a professor and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. He currently is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard.
In 1998, he became the first African American scholar to receive the National Humanities Medal, and this past summer, the NAACP awarded him the prestigious Spingarn Medal for his work to preserve and celebrate African American history and culture.
In 2006, Gates’ show on PBS, “African American Lives,” traced the genealogical lineage of several notable Black Americans, and this became the blueprint for future PBS projects like “Faces of America” and “Finding Your Roots.”
His series “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross” won an Emmy, a Peabody Award and an NAACP Image Award in 2013.
Margaret H. Hamilton
Hamilton not only paved the way for more women to work in science at the highest levels, but also distinguished herself in a field just coming into existence. She coined the term “software engineer” and developed onboard flight software for NASA’s Apollo missions.
Born in Indiana, Hamilton and her parents moved around the Midwest before settling in the Upper Peninsula. She studied math at U-M for a semester before transferring to the liberal arts school Earlham College.
Upon graduation, she moved to Boston and accepted a job at MIT, which introduced Hamilton to computers. She learned to code in a time when computers seemed, to the public, like science fiction. She also worked at MIT’s Lincoln Lab, writing software to detect enemy aircraft during the Cold War.
Answering a newspaper ad seeking software developers for NASA’s Apollo project, Hamilton was the first programmer as well as the first woman hired.
One important feature Hamilton fought to include in the project was inspired by her daughter, Lauren, who, while playing in the lab, crashed a simulator by starting a pre-launch program mid-flight. This accident convinced Hamilton to advocate for coding that would override human error, an idea NASA initially rejected.
Five days into the Apollo 8 mission, astronaut Jim Lovell committed the same error as Hamilton’s daughter, and Hamilton and her team spent nine hours developing a fix. Following this, she focused on developing software that could detect system errors and recover information in a system crash.
Hamilton would later do work for the Skylab project before leaving NASA to co-found Higher Order Software in 1976 and Hamilton Technologies in 1986. Since then, she’s been awarded NASA’s Exceptional Space Act Award and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
