College Names Honorary Degree Recipients

Philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, U.S. Assistant Secretary of Health Rachel Levine, and filmmaker Dawn Porter will receive honorary degrees at Swarthmore College’s commencement. Photo courtesy of Swarthmore College

Swarthmore College President Valerie Smith will award honorary degrees to philosopher Elizabeth Anderson (Swarthmore class of ’81), U.S. Assistant Secretary of Health Rachel Levine, and filmmaker Dawn Porter (Swarthmore class of ’88) at the college’s 149th commencement ceremony on June 6. Approximately 350 undergraduates will also receive degrees at the online ceremony.

Elizabeth Anderson 

A professor of both philosophy and women’s studies at the University of Michigan, Elizabeth Anderson studies how evolving concepts of freedom and equality are experienced in people’s daily lives. In 2019, she was named a MacArthur fellow for her contributions to philosophical debates about how institutions, policies, and social practices influence people’s relationships and promote or hinder equality and human flourishing. 

Anderson’s 2010 book, The Imperative of Integration, examines the effects of racial segregation on status inequality between Black and white Americans. Her 2017 book, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It), explores how many employers exercise more power and arbitrary authority over workers’ lives, speech, and privacy than is generally acknowledged. 

A 2019 profile in the New Yorker described Anderson as “maybe the philosopher best suited to this awkward moment in American life.” 

Rachel Levine

Rachel Levine, the assistant secretary of health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is the first openly transgender federal official to have received Senate confirmation. From 2017 to 2021, when she was Pennsylvania’s secretary of health, Levine helped shape and execute the commonwealth’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Earlier in her career, as Pennsylvania’s physician general, Levine worked on mitigating the state’s opioid crisis, signing an order that allowed law enforcement officers to carry the anti-overdose medication naloxone. The effort is credited with saving up to 1,000 lives.

While working as a pediatrician at Penn State Hershey Medical Center from 1996 to 2015, Levine specialized in treating people with eating disorders. She also started the medical center’s eating disorders program — one of the nation’s first.

In 2017, Levine was included on NBC’s #Pride30, a national list of 30 LGBTQ people who are making a positive difference in the life of their community. 

Dawn Porter 

Dawn Porter is an award-winning filmmaker and the co-founder of Trilogy Films, a production company that specializes in social justice documentaries and independent features. Having begun her career as an attorney, Porter left what she describes as a “stable direct-deposit job” in corporate law to pursue filmmaking. 

Porter’s directorial debut, the 2013 documentary film Gideon’s Army, follows three idealistic young public defenders in the Deep South struggling to represent their clients despite underfunded and understaffed offices. The film takes its name from the landmark 1963 Supreme Court case, Gideon v. Wainwright, which guaranteed an accused’s right to counsel. It earned the top editing prize at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Emmy award.

Porter’s second film, Spies of Mississippi, tells the story of that state’s efforts to preserve segregation during the 1950s and ’60s. Her third film, Trapped, chronicles the lives of medical staff in Alabama and Texas clinics that provide abortions, and their struggles with a raft of new laws regulating their work. Her other works include a four-part series, Bobby Kennedy for President; the 2020 documentary John Lewis: Good Trouble; and The Way I See It, about Pete Souza, a former chief official White House photographer.

In 2016, Paste magazine named Porter one of 10 Black directors to watch. She is the parent of a student in the college’s class of 2024.

In 2013, Porter delivered Swarthmore’s annual McCabe Lecture, in which she discussed filmmaking and how the college shaped her career. “What I think is so crucially important,” she said, “is the culture and community and commitment to justice and fairness that is really in the ether here.” 

Published in cooperation with Swarthmore College.