| Year |
Recipient |
Degree |
| 1753 |
Benjamin Franklin |
AM |
| 1776 |
George Washington |
LLD |
| 1781 |
John Adams |
LLD |
| 1787 |
Thomas Jefferson |
LLD |
| 1792 |
Samuel Adams |
LLD |
| 1822 |
John Quincy Adams |
LLD |
| 1832 |
Washington Irving |
LLD |
| 1833 |
Andrew Jackson |
LLD |
| 1852 |
Alexis Charles Henri de Tocqueville |
LLD |
| 1859 |
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow |
LLD |
| 1866 |
Ralph Waldo Emerson |
LLD |
| 1872 |
Ulysses S. Grant |
LLD |
| 1896 |
Booker T. Washington |
AM |
| 1905 |
William Howard Taft |
LLD |
| 1907 |
Woodrow Wilson |
LLD |
| 1916 |
John Singer Sargent |
ArtD |
| 1917 |
Herbert Hoover |
LLD |
| 1919 |
Theodore Roosevelt |
AM |
| 1929 |
Franklin Delano Roosevelt |
LLD |
| 1935 |
Albert Einstein |
SD |
| 1937 |
Robert Frost |
LittD |
| 1938 |
Walt Disney |
AM |
| 1940 |
Carl Sandburg |
LittD |
| 1943 |
Winston Churchill |
LLD |
| 1946 |
Dwight Eisenhower |
LLD |
| 1947 |
George Marshall |
LLD |
| 1951 |
Thornton Wilder |
LittD |
| 1956 |
John F. Kennedy |
LLD |
| 1961 |
Aaron Copland |
MusD |
| 1966 |
Martha Graham |
ArtD |
| 1967 |
Leonard Bernstein |
MusD |
| 1968 |
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi |
LLD |
| 1972 |
Saul Bellow |
LittD |
| 1973 |
Georgia O’Keeffe |
ArtD |
| 1973 |
Robert Penn Warren |
LittD |
| 1974 |
Mstislav L. Rostropovich |
MusD |
| 1974 |
Beverly Sills |
MusD |
| 1976 |
Arthur Fiedler |
ArtD |
| 1977 |
Barbara Jordan |
LLD |
| 1977 |
Eudora Welty |
LittD |
| 1978 |
John Cheever |
LittD |
| 1978 |
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |
LittD |
| 1979 |
Desmond Tutu |
LLD |
| 1980 |
Octavio Paz |
LittD |
| 1981 |
Ansel Adams |
ArtD |
| 1981 |
Leontyne Price |
ArtD |
| 1982 |
Mother Teresa |
LLD |
| 1982 |
Tennessee Williams |
LittD |
| 1983 |
Carlos Fuentes |
LLD |
| 1984 |
Juan Carlos I |
LLD |
| 1984 |
Benny Goodman |
MusD |
| 1985 |
Louise Nevelson |
ArtD |
| 1986 |
Lord Carrington |
LLD |
| 1986 |
Itzhak Perlman |
MusD |
| 1987 |
Thomas P. O’Neill Jr. |
LLD |
| 1988 |
Jessye Norman |
MusD |
| 1988 |
Oscar Arias Sánchez |
LLD |
| 1989 |
Benazir Bhutto |
LLD |
| 1989 |
Toni Morrison |
LLD |
| 1990 |
Ella Fitzgerald |
MusD |
| 1990 |
Stephen W. Hawking |
SD |
| 1990 |
Helmut Kohl |
LLD |
| 1991 |
Yo-Yo Ma |
MusD |
| 1991 |
Eduard Shevardnadze |
LLD |
| 1992 |
Gro Harlem Brundtland |
LLD |
| 1992 |
Isaac Stern |
MusD |
| 1993 |
Colin Powell |
LLD |
| 1993 |
Ravi Shankar |
ArtD |
| 1994 |
Albert Gore Jr. |
LLD |
| 1995 |
Vaclav Havel |
LLD |
| 1997 |
Quincy Jones |
MusD |
| 1997 |
John Rawls |
LLD |
| 1998 |
Gertrude B. Elion |
SD |
| 1998 |
Nelson Mandela |
LLD (awarded during a special convocation in September) |
| 1999 |
Julia Kristeva |
LLD |
| 1999 |
Herbert Block |
ArtD |
| 2000 |
Seiji Ozawa |
MusD |
| 2001 |
John Ashbery |
LittD |
| 2000 |
Nicolaas Bloembergen |
SD |
| 2001 |
Jürgen Habermas |
LLD |
| 2001 |
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. |
LLD |
| 2002 |
Daniel Patrick Moynihan |
LLD |
| 2002 |
Neil L. Rudenstine |
LLD |
| 2002 |
Ruth J. Simmons |
LLD |
| 2003 |
Philip Roth |
LittD |
| 2003 |
Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon |
LLD |
| 2004 |
Kofi Annan |
LLD |
| 2004 |
Margaret Atwood |
LittD |
| 2004 |
Shirley M. Tilghman |
LLD |
| 2004 |
Edward O. Wilson |
SD |
| 2005 |
D. Ronald Daniel |
LLD |
| 2005 |
John Lithgow |
ArtD |
| 2005 |
Charles M. Vest |
LLD |
