Harvard Commencement 2026 names five honorary degree recipients
Harvard will confer honorary degrees on five distinguished recipients at harvard commencement 2026 this morning, including guest speaker Conan O’Brien, who is also the final recipient in the traditional order. The class includes three men and two women.
Among the honorees are Peggy Noonan, Geoffrey Hinton, and Sir Noel Robert Malcolm. Harvard’s 375th Commencement brings the list to five and places O’Brien at the end of the ceremony’s honorary-degree sequence.
Conan O’Brien at Commencement
O’Brien serves as this year’s guest speaker and receives an honorary degree as the last honoree named during Commencement. Harvard traditionally recognizes the guest speaker in that position, linking the speech to the closing honor of the ceremony.
The structure gives the ceremony a clear order: the speech comes with the final degree, and O’Brien occupies both roles this morning. For students and families following the program, that means the honorary-degree portion ends with the speaker rather than with a separate presenter or later announcement.
Geoffrey Hinton and AI
Hinton is distinguished professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Toronto. He won the 2018 Turing Award for his work on deep learning and was a co-recipient of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics.
His recent path also includes a break from Google. After 2013, when Google acquired DNNresearch Inc., the artificial intelligence startup he co-founded, Hinton became a part-time employee. He resigned in 2023 so he could speak more freely about the dangers of AI.
Sir Noel Robert Malcolm
Harvard’s other honorary-degree recipient in the provided facts is Sir Noel Robert Malcolm, a scholar who spent a year at Harvard in 1999 during the Kosovo war. He has been a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford since 2002.
The list blends disciplines that rarely share the same stage: journalism, artificial intelligence, comedy, and scholarship. Harvard’s ceremony this morning ties those careers together in one class of five, with the guest speaker closing the honorary-degree count.
That makes the order of the ceremony the most immediate detail for attendees: once O’Brien speaks and receives the final degree, the honorary-degree portion is complete.
