Honorary Degrees 2026

Fareed Zakaria hosts CNN’s flagship international affairs program, Fareed Zakaria GPS, and produces documentaries for the network. He has interviewed Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Emmanuel Macron, Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, among others.
 
Zakaria is a columnist for The Washington Post and has written five New York Times bestsellers: The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (2003), The Post-American World (2008), In Defense of a Liberal Education (2015), Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World (2020), and Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present (2024). 
 
Zakaria was named a Top 10 Global Thinker of the Last 10 Years by Foreign Policy magazine in 2019. He has received a Peabody Award and three Emmys for his television work, and a National Magazine Award for his writing. In 2010, India awarded him the Padma Bhushan, one of the country’s highest civilian honors, and, in 2022, Ukraine awarded him the Order of Merit. 
He holds a BA from Yale and a PhD from Harvard.

 

Marieluise Hessel is an art collector and philanthropist. She established the Marieluise Hessel Foundation, founded the Hessel Museum of Art, and cofounded the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard), where she also established the research library and archives.

Hessel has been a collector of contemporary art since the late 1960s. The Marieluise Hessel Collection of over 2000 artworks and objects has been housed at CCS Bard and subsequently the Hessel Museum since the early 1990s, and the collection has continued to grow, providing the students and visiting public free access to the art of our time. She founded the Save the Mexican Murals and Monuments Fund, now affiliated with the World Monuments Fund, to restore and preserve important works damaged in the devastating 1985 Mexico City earthquake.

She is a trustee emeritus of the American-German Institute, was a member of the Painting and Sculpture Committee at the Whitney Museum of American Art, serves on the International Council and Executive Committee of the Museum of Modern Art, served for many years on the Bard College Board of Trustees; and currently serves on the CCS Bard Board of Governors.

Hessel lived for many years in Mexico City and now makes her home in Florida and New York. She was married to Edwin Artzt, retired chairman and CEO of Procter and Gamble, until his death in 2023.
 

Raymond Peterson grew up in the Midwest, beginning his undergraduate studies at Simpson College and completing graduate work in American studies at the University of Iowa. He began teaching composition and American literature at Central Missouri State University before moving to Santa Rosa Junior College in California, where he served as English department chair. While at Santa Rosa, he was the recipient of National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships in both American studies and intellectual history. He moved to New York to begin doctoral studies at New York University and was subsequently appointed  chair of the English department at Rye High School, then director of the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College.
 
In 2001, Bard launched the first of its Early College campuses in New York City, where Peterson served as the school’s founding principal. Eleven years later, he helped open Bard’s third campus in Newark, also serving as principal, and later became a member of Bard’s Early College Board of Trustees. 

 

Thomas F. Rosenbaum is the ninth president of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) where he is also professor of physics. He is an expert on the quantum-mechanical nature of materials, having conducted research at Bell Laboratories, INC.; the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center; Argonne National Laboratory; and the University of Chicago. At the latter, he served as vice president for research and then as provost before moving to Caltech in 2014. He received his bachelor’s degree in physics with honors from Harvard University and a PhD in physics from Princeton University. He serves as the chair of the Board of Trustees of the Society for Science, as a board member of the Aspen Center for Physics, and on the Los Angeles Committee of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

 

Richard Wilson is the composer of three symphonies, four concertos, six string quartets,
numerous songs, as well as chamber and piano works, and the comic opera Aethelred the Unready. He was born in Cleveland in 1941 and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard in 1963, where his principal teacher in composition was Robert Moevs. An active pianist, his teachers also included Egbert Fischer, Leonard Shure, and Friedrich Wührer.

Wilson taught for more than 50 years at Vassar College, where he held the Mary Conover Mellon Chair in Music. He has received numerous awards and prizes, including an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Music, a Roger Sessions Memorial Bogliasco Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His works have been performed by orchestras across the globe such as the American Symphony, Jerusalem Symphony, London Philharmonic, Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de Colombia, Residentie Orkest Den Haag, and the San Francisco Symphony. He is composer-in-residence with the American Symphony Orchestra and has been a member of the program committee of the Bard Music Festival since its inception.