Utah Senator and 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney will be the keynote speaker for Johns Hopkins University’s commencement ceremony on May 23, the university announced this week.
Romney, who was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2018 and has said he will not seek a second term, will address about 1,700 undergraduates, graduate students and professional students who are expected to attend the commencement ceremony at Homewood Field, and he’ll receive an honorary doctor of humane letters degree, according to the JHU Hub.
Romney follows Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who was Hopkins’ surprise commencement speaker in 2023. In all, about 11,000 students will graduate from Hopkins in 2024.
“Mitt Romney’s track record of public and private leadership is extraordinary,” the Hub quoted Hopkins President Ron Daniels as saying.
“He has demonstrated a remarkable commitment to working with colleagues from across the political aisle to improve the lives of America’s citizens in areas ranging from healthcare delivery and gun safety to environmental protection and infrastructure investment. At a time when our politics are at serious risk of being undermined by extreme polarization, Senator Romney reminds us that the spirit of compromise and civic friendship — even among political rivals — remains a vital and relevant foundation of our democracy.”
According to the Hub, Willard Mitt Romney started out as a business consultant with the Boston-based investment company Bain & Company, where he became CEO, and later co-founded Bain Capital.
In 1994, Romney was named to lead the organizing committee for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. In 1995, he was elected governor of Massachusetts. In 2012, he was the Republican Party’s presidential nominee but lost to incumbent President Barack Obama, who was running for a second term.
In 2018, Romney ran to replace retiring U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch and won. During his first term he has been a leading voice on foreign affairs and a champion of democracy. He has also been a dissenting voice in his party as former President Donald Trump increasingly gained control of it.
In 2021, the Hub noted, Romney received the JFK Library’s Profile in Courage Award for “his consistent and courageous defense of democracy” after he became the first senator in history to vote to convict a member of his own party, Trump, in a presidential impeachment trial.
“There’s extraordinary division, enmity, and vitriol that we see day to day,” the Hub quoted Romney as saying. “It makes it very hard for us to accomplish very much here in Washington, if anything at all, and if we’re going to be able to deal with the challenges like climate change, the massive debt…we’re going to have to have people that can work together. That means recognizing that the differences are something we can learn from, not something we should demonize. That’s not actually the message of the day in the world of politics. Hopefully, it’s something graduates from our great universities like Johns Hopkins can help spread in our country and in our communities.”
Hopkins’ Homewood Field commencement ceremony is scheduled to begin at 9 a.m. on May 23, with May 24 as a rain date.
