| 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 |
| 2006 |
Sir Michael Atiyah, Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Philip E. Converse, Philippe de Montebello, Shirley Ann Jackson, Jim Lehrer, Robert P. Moses, Norman F. Ramsey, Leo Steinberg |
various |
| 2007 |
Daniel Aaron, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, William H. Gates III, Conrad K. Harper, William Felton ‘Bill’ Russell, Joan Wallach Scott, Robert Silvers, Lawrence H. Summers, Karen K. Uhlenbeck |
various |
| 2008 |
His Highness the Aga Khan, James P. Comer, Wen C. Fong, Eric R. Kandel, The Hon. Damon J. Keith, Gerda Lerner, John McCarthy, Janet Rowley, J.K. Rowling, Daniel C. Tosteson, Sen. Edward Kennedy |
various |
| 2009 |
Steven Chu, Pedro Almodóvar, Joan Didion, Wendy Doniger, Ronald Dworkin, Anthony S. Fauci, Sarah Hrdy, Robert Langer, Wynton Marsalis, Sidney Verba |
various |
| 2010 |
Thomas R. Cech, Renée C. Fox, Freeman A. Hrabowski III, Susan Lindquist, Thomas Nagel, David G. Nathan, The Baroness Onora O’Neill of Bengarve, Richard Serra, David H. Souter, Meryl Streep |
various |
| 2011 |
Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, Plácido Domingo, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Dudley Herschbach, James R. Houghton, Rosalind Krauss, J.G.A. Pocock, David Satcher, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf |
various |
| 2012 |
John Adams, K. Anthony Appiah, Dame Gillian Beer, Walter Kohn, Wendy Kopp, Hon. John Lewis, Mario Molina, Fareed Zakaria |
various |