BRUNSWICK, Maine — Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, will be among four recipients of honorary degrees at Bowdoin College's 2021 commencement, the college announced.
Fauci will be joined by NASA astronaut Jessica Meir, a native of Caribou, Maine; civil rights activist, Campaign Zero co-founder and Bowdoin graduate DeRay McKesson; and civil rights activist and Freedom Rider William Harbour, who will be presented with the award posthumously.
The awards will be presented at the college's 216th commencement, scheduled for May 29, 2021, in front of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.
Fauci has taken on a cult-like status during the COVID-19 pandemic, and was described by The New York Times and The New Yorker as one of the most trusted medical figures in the country.
Director of the NIAID since 1984 and a physician with the National Institutes of Health, Fauci has advised every president since Ronald Reagan and served in public health for more than 50 years.
Fauci is the recipient of many awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor given to a civilian by the president of the United States.
Harbour participated in the Freedom Rides in 1961, traveling from Nashville to Montgomery, Alabama, and later from Nashville to Jackson, Mississippi.
He and a group of other activists, both Black and white, faced violent mobs, members of the KKK, and hostile police forces as they protested enforced racial segregation on public bus systems and the nonenforcement of several Supreme Court decisions that ruled such segregation unconstitutional," the release states.
Harbour was jailed several times for his activism, and expelled from Tennessee State University, although he was later reinstated and awarded an honorary doctorate.
He was the unofficial archivist of the Freedom Riders, featured in documentaries and was instrumental in the establishment of the Freedom Riders National Monument in 2017, at the site of a former Greyhound bus depot in Anniston, Alabama, where Freedom Riders were attacked and a bus was burned.
Bowdoin offered Harbour the honorary degree just prior to his death in August 2020, the college said.
McKesson, who graduated from Bowdoin in 2007, is a leading voice in the Black Lives Matter movement and co-founded Campaign Zero, a nonprofit organization that promotes legislative and policy solutions to police violence and mass incarceration.
McKesson taught with Teach for America in New York City and then in Baltimore and Minneapolis until the 2014 murder of Mike Brown and subsequent protests in Ferguson, Missouri, which prompted him to commit himself to full-time activism. In 2018 he published the book, "On the Other Side of Freedom" about his experiences and offering a framework for dismantling the legacy of racism, the release said. He speaks frequently to national media outlets; with organizer Johnetta Elzie received the Howard Zinn Freedom to Write Award from PEN New England 2015; and, also with Elzie, was named to Fortune magazine's list of the World's 50 Greatest Leaders and one of the 30 Most Influential People on the Internet.
Meir, who grew up in Caribou, Maine, is a NASA astronaut, marine biologist, and physiologist. She was an assistant professor of anesthesia at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, participated in Smithsonian Institution diving expeditions to the Antarctic and Belize.
In 2013, Meir was selected as one of eight members of the 21st NASA astronaut class. In 2019 she launched to the International Space Station and then she and Christina Koch became the first women to participate in an all-female spacewalk.
Meir spent 205 days in space. In December, she became a member of the Artemis Team, which will send the first human to the moon in nearly 50 years. If she's chosen, Meir could be the first woman on the moon.