Clark University Commencement 2025
To Members of the Clark Community,
I am pleased to announce that Clark University’s 121st Commencement will take place on Monday, May 19, at the DCU Center in Downtown Worcester. In a departure from last year, and in an effort to ensure the occasion is both intimate and memorable, two ceremonies will be held: Bachelor’s degrees will be awarded at 10 a.m., and master’s and doctoral degrees will be presented at 3 p.m.
Commencement gives us an opportunity to reflect and celebrate together, and I’m looking forward to sharing this special day, and joyous milestone, with all our Clark graduates, families, and friends.
In addition to recognizing the incredible achievements of graduating students, Clark will award honorary degrees to two highly accomplished individuals: a Nobel Prize-winning economist who has dedicated her career to understanding the lives of people living in poverty, and a journalist whose award-winning work has taken him from Air Force One to the Arctic Circle.
Esther Duflo, the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will deliver the Commencement Address during the bachelor’s degree ceremony.
Dr. Duflo is co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT, which promotes the use of randomized controlled trials in policy evaluation — more than 400 million people have been impacted by programs tested by the lab’s affiliated researchers — and the chair of Poverty and Public Policy at the Collège de France. Since 2024 she has also served as the president of the Paris School of Economics.
Her research seeks to understand the economic lives of people living in poverty, with the aim of helping design and evaluate social policies. She has worked on health, education, financial inclusion, environment, and governance. In 2019, she, Abhijit Banerjee, and Michael Kremer received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.”
Dr. Duflo has received numerous academic honors and prizes: the Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences, the A.SK Social Science Award, Infosys Prize, the David N. Kershaw Award, a John Bates Clark Medal, and a MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship. With Abhijit Banerjee, she wrote Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, which won the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2011 and has been translated into more than 17 languages, and Good Economics for Hard Times.
Duflo is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a board member of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development, and the director of the development economics program of the Centre for Economic Policy Research.
Professor Junfu Zhang will present Dr. Duflo for the degree of Doctor of Laws.
Delivering the address at the graduate Commencement will be Ari Shapiro, an award-winning journalist who has hosted National Public Radio’s flagship “All Things Considered” news program since 2015.
Before joining “All Things Considered,” Mr. Shapiro spent two years as NPR’s international correspondent based in London, traveling the world to cover a wide range of topics. He was NPR’s White House Correspondent for four years during the Obama Administration and was the Justice Correspondent during the George W. Bush Administration, covering debates around surveillance, detention, and interrogation in the years after Sept. 11.
Mr. Shapiro’s work has won three national Edward R. Murrow awards: one for a global series that connected the dots between climate change, migration, and far-right political leaders; another for his reporting on Breonna Taylor’s life and death; and a third for his coverage of the Trump Administration’s asylum policies on the U.S.-Mexico border. In 2023, he was named Journalist of the Year by NLGJA, the association of LGBTQ+ journalists.
Other honors include a laurel from the Columbia Journalism Review for his investigation into disability benefits for injured American veterans; a Silver Gavel from the American Bar Association for exposing the failures of Louisiana’s detention system after Hurricane Katrina; the first-ever American Gavel Award from the American Judges Association’ for his work on U.S. courts and the American justice system; and the Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize from WBUR and Boston University for an investigation of methamphetamine use and HIV transmission.
Mr. Shapiro is also a singer and has performed in venues from Carnegie Hall to the Hollywood Bowl — and across the U.S. in “Och and Oy: A Considered Cabaret” with Tony Award winner Alan Cumming. He also makes frequent guest appearances with the “little orchestra” Pink Martini. His debut memoir, “The Best Strangers in the World,” was an instant New York Times bestseller. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale University, Mr. Shapiro began his journalism career as an intern for NPR Legal Affairs Correspondent Nina Totenberg.
Professor Eduard Arriaga-Arango will present Ari Shapiro for the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters.
Sincerely,
David B. Fithian ’87
President
