2013 Speakers and Honorary Degree Recipients
Duncan L. Niederauer ’81, chief executive officer of NYSE Euronext, will deliver the keynote address at this year's commencement ceremony on Sunday, May 19.
Duncan L. Niederauer ’81
Doctor of Humane Letters Duncan L. Niederauer ‘81, Chief Executive Officer and a Director of NYSE Euronext, has played a pivotal role in leading the evolution of global markets.
Before joining NYSE Euronext in April 2007, he was managing director and co-head of the Equities Division Execution Services franchise at Goldman, Sachs & Co. His career at Goldman Sachs spanned 22 years — experience that he would use to facilitate the merger of NYSE and Euronext and transform the organization into an applied technology company with a high-tech, high-touch focus.
Niederauer serves on several boards and is involved in many charity efforts, most notably his advocacy for autism awareness. He and his wife, Alison, are co-chairs of the Newmark School’s Destination of Promise campaign, which is building a state-of-the art-school in New Jersey for children with autism and related disabilities. During Passion for the Climb: The Campaign for Colgate, Niederauer provided generous support for the Case Library and Geyer Center for Information Technology, making gifts in honor of both his mother and his father.
After graduating from Colgate
cum laude in 1981 with a degree in economics, Niederauer earned an MBA from Emory University in 1985. His current board service includes the Congressional Medal of Honor Foundation, Operation Hope, the American Ireland Fund, and the Partnership for New York City. A 2006 recipient of Colgate’s Maroon Citation, he has also served on the university’s alumni council and board of trustees. Niederauer and his wife reside in New Jersey with their three children and enjoy beekeeping as a hobby.
Baccalaureate Speaker – The Very Reverend Dr. Jane Shaw
Doctor of Divinity
As dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, Dr. Jane Shaw is the spiritual, intellectual, and liturgical leader of one of the largest and most well-known churches in the United States. She is heralded as much for her intellect as for her sense of embrace, as she engages the church in the civic life of San Francisco and beyond, and fosters an environment where the arts, technology, sustainability, and education flourish along with questions of faith.
Before becoming the first woman dean of Grace Cathedral in 2010, Dr. Shaw was one of the highest-ranking female religious leaders in England. As dean of divinity and fellow of New College, Oxford, she ran the college chapel, and taught history and theology at Oxford University for 16 years. She is the author of three books, including the prize-winning Octavia Daughter of God: the Story of a Female Messiah.a From 2003 to 2011, she co-directed The Prophecy Project, on modern prophecy movements, which was the largest research project in the humanities at Oxford University. She has served the Church of England as canon theologian of Salisbury Cathedral, honorary canon at Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford, and theological consultant to the House of Bishops.
Raised on the grounds of a 13th-century medieval hospital in Norwich, England, Dr. Shaw
was educated at Oxford University (BA and MA in history); Harvard Divinity School (MDiv) and the University of California at Berkeley (PhD in history). She is currently a visiting scholar at the Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.
Honorary Degree Recipients
Both Niederauer and Shaw will receive honorary degrees during commencement. The other honorary degree recipients will be:
Jeff Fager
Doctor of Humane Letters Jeff Fager ’77 became the first chairman of CBS News in February 2011, after re-energizing the network’s flagship broadcast,
60 Minutes, and growing the program’s brand online. With
60 Minutes, he created a model of successful electronic journalism in the digital age and began a strategy to reshape all of the CBS News division’s platforms on television, radio, and the Internet.
Fager has infused a fresh focus on harder news and brought in new talent. One year after promoting Scott Pelley to the helm of
CBS Evening News, the show won a Peabody Award and became the only network evening news broadcast to grow its audience. A year later, Fager guided the re-launch of the network’s morning news program,
CBS This Morning. These successes and others led the Hollywood Reporter to name Fager one of the “35 Most Powerful People in Media” in 2011 and 2012.
Fager began his career in Boston at the CBS station WBZ-TV. He was the executive producer of the
CBS Evening News with Dan Rather from 1996 to 1998 and the program’s senior broadcast producer from 1994-96. Fager launched
60 Minutes II, serving as its executive producer from 1998-2004. His experience includes coverage of the war in Bosnia and the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Fager graduated from Colgate with a bachelor of arts degree in English. He is a trustee emeritus and a frequent presenter at university events both on and off campus, connecting with students and acting as a mentor to those interested in pursuing careers in media.
Jill Lepore
Doctor of Letters
Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper Professor of American History at Harvard College, chair of Harvard's History and Literature Program, and a staff writer at
The New Yorker.
Lepore, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, focuses on the histories of war and violence and of language and literacy. In 2012, she received the Sarah Josepha Hale Medal for Distinction in Literature.
Lepore's biography of Benjamin Franklin's sister,
Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin, will be published in October 2013. Her most recent book,
The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death, is a finalist for the Carnegie Medal. Her previous books include
The Story of America: Essays on Origins; The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle for American History;
New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan;
The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity; and
Blindspot, a novel written jointly with Jane Kamensky.
Lepore received her bachelor of arts in English from Tufts University in 1987, a master of arts degree in American culture from the University of Michigan in 1990, and a doctorate in American studies from Yale University in 1995. In 1999, she co-founded the magazine Commonplace. Her writings have been featured in the
New York Times, the
Los Angeles Times, the
Washington Post,
The Daily Beast,
Smithsonian Magazine, the
Journal of American History, and
American Quarterly. She currently serves on the boards of the National Portrait Gallery and the Society of American Historians.
Hamdi Ulukaya
Doctor of Humane Letters
Hamdi Ulukaya was born in Erzincan, Turkey. A political science student at Ankara University, he moved to the United States in 1994 to study English at Adelphi University, later transferring to the State University of New York at Albany to continue his studies.
In 2002, Ulukaya founded Euphrates, a wholesale feta cheese company that found quick success. Capitalizing on that success, three years later, he purchased an 84-year-old Kraft yogurt facility in South Edmeston, NY, and with just five employees, he set out to introduce high-quality, low-priced Greek yogurt to America’s consumer market. Ulukaya called his new company Chobani.
Since October of 2007, Ulukaya’s yogurt start-up has exceeded the $1 billion mark and become America’s top-selling yogurt brand. His team of five has grown to more than 1,700 in South Edmeston alone, and local dairy farmers help supply the almost four million pounds of milk that Chobani requires every day. In 2011, Ulukaya opened a Chobani plant in Australia, and in December 2012, he opened the largest yogurt plant in the world — a one million square-foot facility in Idaho.
In 2010, Ulukaya founded the Shepherd’s Gift Foundation, which gives 10 percent of Chobani’s proceeds to nonprofit initiatives worldwide. He was named Ernst & Young National Entrepreneur of the Year in 2012, the same year that he won the Small Business Association’s Entrepreneurial Success Award. He is an advisory board member of Pathfinder Village, the American Turkish Council, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.