Rebecca Chang (CAS’22) (from left), June Lin (Questrom’22), and Victoria Phang (Questrom’22) enjoying the slideshow during the 2022 Senior Breakfast at the GSU’s Metcalf Ballroom.

Commencement 2022

Pulitzer-Winning Journalist and Author Bob Woodward Will Be BU’s 149th Commencement Speaker

Class of 2022 Senior Breakfast draws record crowd

The 2022 in-person Senior Class Breakfast was a return to form for the University after the pandemic mandated the last two Senior Breakfasts be virtual. The event honoring this year’s BU grads drew the largest crowd ever to attend a Senior Breakfast, according to organizers, and the lively students seemed happy to be there.

Addressing the estimated 1,800 graduating seniors, President Robert A. Brown said that no one could have expected their college experience to go the way it has for the class entering in 2018. “You had a normal freshman year and three quarters of a sophomore year,” he said, “and then the world changed.” Class of 2022 grads will look back at this demanding time and realize how resilient they were, he told them, and he hopes they’ll find that gratifying. At the same time, they must work to “reduce the polarization both in our country and in the world,” noting the “horrific conflict” in Ukraine, and the potential Supreme Court ruling that would ban abortion. “We are poised to go backward on the reproductive rights of women,” Brown said. 

The big news coming out of the Senior Breakfast: who would be the speaker at the University’s 149th Commencement on Sunday, May 22, on Nickerson Field? It’s famed investigative journalist and author Bob Woodward—Watergate scandal whistleblower and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, who will receive an honorary Doctor of Laws at the ceremony. 

To kick off the breakfast, event emcee Kenneth Elmore (Wheelock’87), associate provost and dean of students, interviewed students in the Ziskind Lounge, reserved for the breakfast’s overflow crowd, teasing them for being late and not getting the prime seats in the Metcalf Ballroom. 

The Allegrettos coed a cappella group performed as the seniors made their way to their seats, and the crowd heard an invocation by Rev. Robert Allan Hill, dean of Marsh Chapel. Seniors then tucked into a meal of fruit salad, cinnamon rolls, a roasted asparagus and Swiss strata, and Lyonnaise potatoes while listening to throwback songs like The Weeknd’s Blinding Lights and laughing through a slideshow of BU and pop culture highlights over the last four years.

The annual slideshow looking back on their college experience is always a popular feature of Senior Breakfast.

Class Gift committee member Julia Willetts (CGS’20, COM’22) urged her classmates to donate to the Class Gift, which supports programs like scholarships, student life, and athletics. Participation is more important than revenue, she said. After a brief rundown of Commencement dos and don’ts (no backpacks, pointy heels are not Nickerson Field–friendly, Elmore said), and the news that Amanda Berke (CAS’22, GRS’22) will be the Commencement student speaker, Brown then announced the honorary degree recipients. 

In a series of Washington Post stories in the early 1970s, Woodward and colleague Carl Bernstein publicly chronicled the Nixon administration’s abuses of power that came to be known as the Watergate scandal. Their reporting led to Nixon’s resignation and was the subject of their 1974 book All the President’s Men, described by Time magazine as “perhaps the most influential piece of journalism in history.” The book was made into an Oscar-winning film starring Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein. 

Woodward has worked for the Washington Post since 1971 and is currently the paper’s associate editor. He has authored more than 20 books, shared two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism (one for Watergate, one for coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks), and earned nearly every other major American journalism award, including the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism.

This year’s other honorary degree recipients are Marylou Sudders (CAS’76, SSW’78), Commonwealth of Massachusetts secretary of health and human services; international human rights and racial discrimination expert Gay J. McDougall; and Richard Shipley (Questrom’68,’72), a BU trustee emeritus.

In 2015, Sudders, a veteran mental health advocate, was appointed by Governor Charlie Baker to direct the Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services. As Secretary of Health & Human Services, she has restructured MassHealth, reformed the commonwealth’s child welfare system, confronted the opioid epidemic, strengthened community-based services, and worked on the state’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout. Sudders will receive an honorary Doctor of Laws, and will deliver the Baccalaureate address on Sunday May 22, at 11 am, at Marsh Chapel.

Human rights activist McDougall started her career registering first-time Black voters after passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and later traveled throughout the South with the US Commission on Civil Rights identifying civil rights violations. After graduating from Yale Law School, she became aware that racial discrimination is a global issue, and later helped administer South Africa’s first democratic elections, in 1994, which seated Nelson Mandela as president and ended apartheid. McDougal spent more than a decade as executive director of Global Rights, a group that works with activists in more than 10 countries, and has served in a variety of roles with the United Nations. Today she is a distinguished scholar-in-residence with the Fordham Law School Leitner Center for International Law and Justice and its Center on Race, Law and Justice. She will receive an honorary Doctor of Laws. 

Shipley, founder of Shiprock Capital LLC, a venture capital firm specializing in emerging technology companies, has provided extensive support to the University, donating $8 million in 2021 to fund the Shipley Center for Digital Learning & Innovation. He also established the Shipley Prostate Cancer Research Center at the School of Medicine in 2016. Other gifts to BU include $2.5 million in 2008 to endow the Richard C. Shipley Professorship in Management and $4 million in 2013 to endow the Beverly A. Brown Professorship for the Improvement of Urban Health. He will receive an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters.

Brown also announced the recipients of the University’s highest teaching honors, the Metcalf Cup & Prize and Metcalf Awards for Excellence in Teaching. The top honor, the Cup and Prize, will be awarded to Constance Browne, a School of Law clinical professor of law. The Metcalf Award will go to Leslie Dietiker, a Wheelock College of Education & Human Development associate professor of mathematics education. The two will be honored during the main Commencement ceremony. 

Anthony Harrison (COM’81), president of the BU alumni association, helped Elmore announce this year’s Senior Week lineup, which includes a takeover of Time Out Market, a day out at the Boston Seaport, an outing to Encore Casino (“the next best thing to Vegas,” Harrison said), a Red Sox game at Fenway Park, and a barbecue on the BU Beach. Elmore asked the seniors to look at the bottom of their seat, where one one lucky person at every table would find a coin allowing them to skip the line at any Senior Week event of their choice. The last surprise: the announcement that Steve Huang (CAS’22, GRS’22) has been selected to conduct the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the 107th annual BU Night at the Pops on May 21 and would receive four free tickets to the event. 

Brown ended his remarks by urging the grads to be cautious: “Stay safe. I really mean it. Stay out of isolation. You have one goal: don’t spend Commencement in a dorm room.”