According to the administration, Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, will give Hamilton College’s 2018 Commencement address and receive an honorary degree as well.
Walker was a member of the first class of Head Start in 1965 and graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1982; he also received a Juris Doctor from Austin’s School of Law. University of Texas, in 2009, recognized him with its Distinguished Alumnus Award — its highest alumni honor. In 1995, Walker left the corporate world, volunteering at a school in Harlem, NY, eventually becoming chief operating officer at Abyssinian Development Corporation, a community-development group also based in Harlem. In 2001, Walker became the Director of the Rockefeller Foundation’s U.S. Program, a position in which he served until 2005, when he became the Vice President of Rockefeller’s Foundation Initiatives. At Rockefeller, Walker oversaw programs including the post-Hurricane Katrina Rebuild New Orleans initiative.
In 2010, Walker moved to the Ford Foundation, becoming the Vice President for Education, Creativity and Free Expression. Following three years in this position, in 2013, Walker was selected as Ford’s next president; he continues to hold this position. As president of the Ford Foundation, Walker manages a social justice philanthropy with a $13 billion endowment and $600 million in annual grant making. He chaired the philanthropy committee that brought a resolution to Detroit’s bankruptcy. He is also the co-founder and chair of the U.S. Impact Investing Alliance.
Walker has been widely praised by philanthropy peers. “I’ve never seen anyone with a better capacity to move across sectors than Darren,” Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, told
The Chronicle of Philanthropy
. Irene Hirano Inouye, chair of Ford’s Board of Trustees said that Walker is “an excellent leader for a global organization with grassroots sensibilities, and we’re very proud that he emerged from within Ford’s own pool of talent.”
In addition to Walker, honorary degrees will be awarded to Nan Aron, founder of Alliance for Justice, John Rice ’78, former vice chairman of General Electric and a Hamilton College life trustee, and Anne-Marie Slaughter, president and CEO of the think-tank New America.
Nan Aron’s Alliance for Justice is a judicial advocacy group in the United States. Aron is nationally recognized for her expertise in public interest law. She is the author of Liberty and Justice for All: Public Interest Law in the 1980s and Beyond. She received her bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College and her J.D. from Case Western Reserve University School of Law. She has taught at Georgetown and George Washington University Law Schools, and serves on the Dean’s Advisory Council at American University’s Washington College of Law.
Hamilton College life trustee John G. Rice was vice chairman of GE; since November 2010, he had led the company’s global operations. He retired from GE effective April 1, 2018. Immediately prior to his most recent role, he served as the vice chairman of GE and the president & CEO of GE Technology Infrastructure.
He graduated from Hamilton in 1978 with a bachelor’s degree in economics. Rice is also a trustee of Emory University in Atlanta, GA and serves on several other boards including Li and Fung Limited; Baker Hughes, a GE Company; the International Advisory Board of the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia; and the Foundation for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
Anne-Marie Slaughter is the president and CEO of New America. Founded in 1999, New America is a think tank and civic enterprise committed to renewing American politics, prosperity, and purpose in the Digital Age. Slaughter is the Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 University Professor Emerita of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. From 2002 to 2009, she served as dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
Slaughter has written or edited seven books and is a frequent contributor to a number of publications, including
The Atlantic
,
Financial Times
, and
Project Syndicate
.
The Commencement address and awarding of honorary degrees will take place on Sunday, May 20, at 10:30 AM in the Margaret Bundy Scott Field House.
