Honoring Civic Leaders
Four receive honorary degrees
June 10, 2026
By
Sadie Downing ’26
William & Mary granted honorary degrees this year to four Americans widely known for their community and national leadership.
During the 2026 Charter Day Ceremony celebrating the university’s founding 333 years ago and launching the Year of Civic Leadership, Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker Ken Burns received a Doctor of Arts (D.A.) and Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger received a Doctor of Public Service (D.P.S.).
Burns, whose documentary series about the American Revolution premiered last fall, encouraged students to “do something that will last and be beautiful.”
Spanberger, a former congresswoman and CIA case officer who is now Virginia’s first woman governor, emphasized the power of community in her speech, advocating to choose “service to one another over self-interest.”
At the Commencement ceremony on May 15, acclaimed political scientist and author Francis Fukuyama and journalist and Holocaust survivor Frank Shatz HON ’15 received Doctor of Humane Letters (L.H.D.) degrees. Both “share William & Mary’s dedication to our pluralistic democracy,” President Katherine A. Rowe says.
Fukuyama, best known for his 1992 book “The End of History and the Last Man,” serves as the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
Shatz is a longtime weekly columnist for the Virginia Gazette whose memoir, “Reports From a Distant Place,” was published in 2012. He helped establish the Reves Center for International Studies in 1989, expanding William & Mary’s global reach.