Roger H. Brown

Yikes! Could this be the resume of one person? After college you taught math in Kenya while moonlighting as a drummer for an award-winning gospel choir. You later interrupted professional school to join your future wife in alleviating the humanitarian crisis on the Thai-Cambodian border, where you built a program that fed more than twenty-five thousand people per day, averting countless starvations. While there you also made recordings with musicians in refugee camps to preserve traditional music that was being suppressed by the Khmer Rouge. The two of you then co-directed a Save the Children Federation initiative on famine relief that served more than four hundred thousand Sudanese, saved an estimated twenty thousand lives, and established a model for future U.N. relief efforts. Returning home with a desire to help American families, you together launched Bright Horizons, now the largest worldwide provider of worksite childcare and early education, with more than twenty-four thousand employees serving more than eighty thousand families. Returning to your musical roots, you now preside at Berklee College of Music, where, among a raft of accomplishments, you have developed the world’s largest online music education system, facilitated a merger with the Boston Conservatory, and quadrupled funding for financial aid. Are you tired yet? Somehow, we think not.

I hereby declare you recipient of the honorary degree Doctor of Laws, entitled to all the rights, honors, and privileges appertaining thereto.

June 2, 2019