During last week’s commencement ceremony, Academy Award-winner Jack Nicholson accepted his honorary degree from President Simmons, along with other honorees including Nicholas Kristoff. Though he hadn’t planned on speaking, some student heckling brought him to the podium for a few witty words and a big thank you. Now he can finally check Doctor of Fine Arts off of his bucket list…

And as promised, Binder calling the class of 2011 a bunch of “crazy shits,” after the jump

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Morgan Freeman accepts honorary degree at last year's commencement / brown.edu

Last week, the University announced this year’s ten-person list of honorary degree recipients, which includes esteemed film actor Jack Nicholson, National Medal of Science winner (and professor emeritus of mathematics) David Mumford and HuffPo’s own Arianna Huffington. While none of the honorees will actually speak during the May 29 ceremony, several of them (predictably the more academic types) will be participating in other Commencement Weekend events.

According to Encyclopedia Brunonia, the University has been awarding honorary degrees since the first commencement ceremony 1769 — though the practice has seen some major changes since its inception. The first class of recipients consisted of male graduates from other institutions who received the awards “at their own request” (but maybe they won them for effectively negating the meaning of ‘award’). While the University initially kept the names of the award-winners secret, the custom of pre-ceremony announcement began in 1963 and now the whole school can eagerly anticipate the arrival of NYT op-ed columnist Nicholas D. Kristof.  A fun fact about each of the five best-known recipients-with requisite commentary-after the jump. [Read more →]

Simmons, pictured while not speaking at RISD. (Nick Sinnott-Armstrong / Herald)

Ruth Simmons had several commencements on her plate this season, following up Brown’s festivities of last week with a keynote address at RISD’s commencement Saturday.

She told the Herald in May that she couldn’t reveal her remarks because she hadn’t written them yet — but BlogDailyHerald has learned the real reason for Simmons’ reticence: she didn’t want us to know she was going to badmouth us behind our backs.

Lucky for us, the ProJo was there to report on the speech. Remarking on students’ fun costuming — and, we guess, unaware she was speaking into a microphone — Simmons told the crowd, “I hope no one will repeat this, but the Brown commencement was last weekend, and it was a sleeper compared to this.” She also spilled the beans about all our innermost desires, revealing to the crowd that “people up the Hill are very envious” of RISD students’ style.

“Did you know there is someone here with antlers on their head?” she asked. (We weren’t, but that does sound pretty stylish.)

Et tu, Ruth? But maybe the Prez had a point. As the ProJo notes, RISD grads get to wear “festive and zany” costumes — and as one senior told us of Brown’s ceremony, “it was a sleeper.” Just one more thing to be envious of.

“Unlike most colleges and universities, Brown imports no Commencement speaker for the College ceremonies,” according to the university’s Commencement website (though we’ve ‘exported’: President Simmons has given commencement speech at multiple campuses). Last year, we got journo Fareed Zakaria for the baccalaureate address, (which is apparently very similar to, but not the same thing as, commencement?!), and the year before that it was Dave Eggers. This year’s speaker — who addresses only graduating seniors in a small ceremony, rather than the whole mess of PhDs, MDs, and family and friends at the big Commencement — has yet to be announced, but here’s a — completely subjective — list of the most interesting people addressing the class of ’10 on other campuses:

10) Vanderbilt University: Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns

9) Western Connecticut State University: Wyclef Jean, musician and producer

8 ) Vassar College: Lisa Kudrow, actress [Read more →]