Duke University will award six honorary degrees at its commencement exercises on May 13, Duke President Richard H. Brodhead announced Monday.
The recipients are business and philanthropic leader James Barksdale; former Ambassador Nancy Brinker, founder and CEO of Susan G. Komen for the Cure; musician Emmylou Harris; wrongful convictions spokesman Darryl Hunt; Nobel physicist Robert Richardson; and journalist and author Fareed Zakaria.
Barksdale is president and chairman of Barksdale Management Corp., a philanthropic investment company. He also serves as chairman of Spread Networks. Before founding The Barksdale Group in 1999, he worked as COO of Federal Express, CEO of AT&T Wireless Services, and then as president and CEO of Netscape Communications Corp. until the company merged with America Online in 1999. In January 2000, the Barksdale Foundation granted $100 million to the State of Mississippi to create a statewide reading institute.
Brinker in 1982 founded Susan G. Komen for the Cure after promising her dying sister, Susan G. Komen, that she would do everything in her power to end breast cancer. Komen for the Cure has invested almost $2 billion to research, community health, advocacy and global programs that serve hundreds of thousands of women in more than 50 countries. A U.S. Ambassador to Hungary from 2001 to 2003 and former U.S. chief of protocol, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her work to end breast cancer.
Harris has been a major contributor to several genres of music for nearly four decades. Her many honors include 12 Grammy Awards, induction into the Grand Ole Opry in 1992 and induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009. Harris began to study music seriously while attending the University of North Carolina at Greensboro on a drama scholarship but left college to pursue her musical aspirations. She is an active member of PETA who founded an animal shelter in Nashville, Tenn.
Hunt served nearly 19 years in prison and nearly received the death penalty after being accused and twice convicted of the 1984 rape and murder of Deborah Sykes in Winston-Salem. New DNA evidence led to Hunt's exoneration in 2004. Today Hunt is active in the nonprofit Darryl Hunt Project for Freedom and Justice, which provides assistance to individuals who have been wrongfully incarcerated, helps ex-offenders adapt to life outside prison and advocates for changes in the justice system so innocent people won't spend time incarcerated. He's also active with the Innocence Project.
Richardson is the Floyd Newman Professor of Physics at Cornell University. In 1996, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for the 1972 discovery of the property of superfluidity in helium-3 atoms.
Zakaria, the commencement speaker, is a CNN anchor, TIME magazine editor-at-large and Washington Post columnist. Since 2008, he has hosted "Fareed Zakaria GPS," an international and domestic affairs program viewed worldwide on CNN. From 1992-2010, he was managing editor of Foreign Affairs, an analyst for ABC News, a columnist for Newsweek and an editor of Newsweek International.
