Smith College Announces Speaker, Honorary Degree Recipients

EDITOR'S NOTE: This story was updated on April 28, 2022. We regret that Luma Mufleh ‘97 will not be able to serve as the college's 2022 commencement speaker.  

Luma Mufleh ’97, the visionary activist who founded Fugees Family, Inc.—a nonprofit organization that is reimagining schools and retraining teachers to make America’s education system more accessible to refugee and immigrant children—will deliver the address at Smith College’s commencement ceremony on Sunday, May 15.

Mufleh will receive an honorary degree at the event.

Honorary degrees will also be awarded to:

• Judith E. Heumann, lifelong advocate for the rights of disabled people
• Midori, violinist, activist and educator
• Isabel Wilkerson, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author
• Marianne Winters, leader in movements to end and address interpersonal violence

Smith’s commencement will take place at 10 a.m. Sunday, May 15. At this time, the college expects to host an in-person Commencement Weekend. More information will be available at a later date.

About the Honorary Degree Recipients

Luma Mufleh ’97

Luma Mufleh ’97 is changing the lives of refugees through education—and soccer. Her work began in 2004, when she stumbled across a group of boys playing soccer in the streets of Clarkston, Georgia, and asked to join them. Mufleh quickly learned that the players were refugees from Liberia, Afghanistan and Sudan, most of whom could read no English. An experienced soccer coach—and a Jordanian immigrant and Muslim of Syrian descent—Mufleh wanted to provide the young students with the same opportunities that she’d found in the U.S., so she created a formal soccer team, the Fugees, for which she served as coach, counselor and tutor. By 2006, Mufleh had grown the group into Fugees Family, Inc., a nonprofit organization—part school, part summer camp, part college prep program—that now has a 90 percent graduation rate and serves as a national model for reimagining schools and making education accessible. Mufleh has been widely honored for her work: She received a Smith College Medal in 2010 and was named a CNN Hero in 2017. An anthropology major at Smith, Mufleh completed the Executive Program in Social Entrepreneurship at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Her TED Talk on educational justice has been viewed more than 1.8 million times, and her first book, “Learning America: One Woman’s Fight for Educational Justice for Refugee Children,” will be released in April.

Judith E. Heumann

Judy Heumann is a lifelong advocate for the rights of disabled people. She has been instrumental in the development and implementation of legislation, such as Section 504, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Rehabilitation Act, and the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Her memoir, “Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist,” co-authored by Kristen Joiner, was published in 2020. She is also featured in the Oscar-nominated documentary “Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution,” directed by James LeBrecht and Nicole Newnham. Heumann produces a podcast called The Heumann Perspective, which features a variety of members from the disability community. Heumann serves on a number of nonprofit boards, including the American Association of People with Disabilities, the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, Humanity and Inclusion, Human Rights Watch, and the United States International Council on Disability. She has 20 years of non-profit experience working with various disability organizations, including as a founding member of the Berkeley Center for Independent Living. Prior to starting Judith Heumann LLC, she served in the Clinton and Obama administrations.

Midori

Violinist Midori is a visionary artist, activist and educator who has performed with many of the world’s most prestigious orchestras and collaborated with world-renowned musicians including Leonard Bernstein, Yo-Yo Ma and others. Deeply committed to furthering humanitarian and educational goals, she has founded several non-profit organizations: the New York City-based Midori & Friends; MUSIC SHARING, based in Japan; Partners in Performance, which helps to bring chamber music to smaller communities in the U.S.; and the Orchestra Residencies Program, which supports American youth orchestras. In recognition of her work as an artist and humanitarian, she serves as a United Nations Messenger of Peace. In 2021, she was named a Kennedy Center honoree. Midori was born in Osaka in 1971 and began her violin studies with her mother, Setsu Goto, at an early age. In 1982, conductor Zubin Mehta invited the then 11-year-old Midori to perform with the New York Philharmonic in the orchestra’s annual New Year’s Eve concert. Midori holds academic positions at the Curtis Institute of Music and the Peabody Institute. She plays the 1734 Guarnerius del Gesù ‘ex-Huberman’ and uses four bows – two by Dominique Peccatte, one by François Peccatte and one by Paul Siefried.

Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, is the author of The New York Times bestsellers “The Warmth of Other Suns” and “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.” Published in 2011, “The Warmth of Other Suns” tells the true story of three people, among the 6 million, who made the decision of their lives during the Great Migration. In addition to the National Book Critics Circle Award, the book received the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, the Lynton History Prize from Harvard and Columbia universities, and a number of other awards. Wilkerson’s latest book, “Caste,” was published in 2020 to critical acclaim; The New York Times called it “An instant American classic,” and Oprah Winfrey chose it for her monthly book club. “Caste” is being adapted into a Netflix film directed, written and produced by Ava Duvernay. Wilkerson won the Pulitzer Prize for her work as Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times in 1994, making her the first Black woman to win a Pulitzer and the first African-American to win for individual reporting.

Marianne Winters

Marianne Winters has been an advocate and activist in movements to end and address interpersonal violence for 35 years, starting as a volunteer hotline counselor. In her current role as executive director of Safe Passage in Massachusetts’ Pioneer Valley, Winters has established a dynamic prevention program and overseen the growth of Safe Passage in all areas, resulting in greater resources for survivors and their children, as well as increased community engagement. In 2008 Winters established Praxis for Change, a training and consultation practice that she led until 2012. Winters’ work has consistently focused on social change through public policy, program development, training and organizational sustainability. While serving as executive director of the Rape Crisis Center of Central Massachusetts, Winters advanced privacy protection for survivors of sexual assault; in six cases she was held in contempt of court, resulting in codified protections won through the Supreme Judicial Court. Winters was the recipient of the 2005 National Sexual Violence Resource Center Award, which recognizes outstanding advocacy and community work in ending sexual violence. In 1997, she received the Massachusetts Public Policy Award from the Massachusetts Office of Victim Assistance.