Prominent Speakers to Address Pomona College Graduates

Pomona College will hold its 133rd Commencement ceremony on May 17, honoring over 400 graduates. The event will feature addresses from three distinguished speakers who will also receive honorary doctorates. The ceremony will take place on Marston Quad and will also recognize graduating seniors with the Rena Gurley Archibald High Prize and announce the winners of the Wig Distinguished Professor awards.

Commencement Speakers

Goodwin Liu, Jane Olson, and Daniel Ziblatt will address the graduating class and guests. Commencement weekend includes department receptions, a class photo, and the Senior Parade, featuring the inscription “They only are loyal to this college who departing bear their added riches in trust for mankind.”

Goodwin Liu

Goodwin Liu serves as an associate justice of the California Supreme Court, a position he has held since 2011. He was re-elected in 2014 and 2022. Prior to his appointment, he was a professor of law and associate dean at the UC Berkeley School of Law. Liu specializes in constitutional law, education law and policy, and diversity in the legal profession, and continues to teach as a visiting professor at Harvard, Columbia, and Stanford law schools.

Liu, the son of immigrants from Taiwan, attended public schools in Sacramento and earned a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University. He received a Rhodes Scholarship and a master’s degree from Oxford, and later graduated from Yale Law School, where he clerked for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He is an elected member and chair of the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and a member of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Law Institute. He previously served as special assistant to the deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Education and helped launch the AmeriCorps national service program.

Jane Olson

Jane Olson is a humanitarian known for her work promoting international peace, justice, and human rights. She has volunteered with organizations dedicated to humanitarian work across the globe, including Nicaragua, El Salvador, Bosnia, and the Caucasus region. Her work has focused on issues such as landmines, HIV/AIDS, refugee conditions, human rights abuse, and the impact of conflict and poverty. Olson authored the book World Citizen, Journeys of a Humanitarian in 2022.

From 2004 to 2010, Olson chaired the International Board of Trustees of Human Rights Watch, an organization she has supported since 1988. She was the founding chair of the board of Landmine Survivors Network/Survivor Corps and served as co-chair of the Women’s Refugee Commission in New York, which she continues to support. Olson received the inaugural Alison Des Forges Award from Human Rights Watch in 2010 and the Eleanor Roosevelt Award from Feminist Majority in 2005. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations.

Daniel Ziblatt

Daniel Ziblatt is the Eaton Professor of Government at Harvard University and directs the university’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. He also leads a research group on democracy and democratic erosion at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center in Germany.

Ziblatt, along with co-author Steven Levitsky, has published two New York Times bestselling books: How Democracies Die (2018) and The Tyranny of the Minority (2023). His book Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy (2017) won the American Political Science Association’s Woodrow Wilson Prize. He is also the author of Structuring the State: The Formation of Italy and Germany and the Puzzle of Federalism (2006).

Ziblatt’s writings appear in journals such as the American Political Science Review and World Politics, as well as in publications like The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and Die Zeit. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.