Brown University will confer honorary doctorate degrees on musician Sting and his spouse, the actress Trudie Styler, at the university’s 250th commencement exercises on Sunday, May 27th.
Sting is one of the world’s most distinctive performers. He formed The Police with Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers in 1977. The band releases five albums, landed six Grammy awards and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2003.
As a solo artist, Sting has collected 10 Grammy awards, an Emmy, four Oscar nominations, a Tony nomination and Billboard Magazine’s Century Award. He has appeared in more than 15 films and on Broadway.
Sting and Styler founded the Rainforest Fund in 1989 to protect the world’s rain forests and the indigenous people who live in the forests. They couple has held many benefit concerts to raise money for this effort.
Among the other honorees at commencement is the university’s longtime chief legal counsel, Beverly Ledbetter. Ledbetter is a former Providence Housing Court judge. In her four decades at Brown, Ledbetter has had wide community involvement, devoting her time and expertise to diverse organizations, including the Thurgood Marshall Law Society, the Urban League, the Girl Scouts of Rhode Island and the Rhode Island Foundation. She helped launch the Black Philanthropy Fund at the RI Foundation.
A graduate of Howard University and the University of Colorado Law School, Ledbetter is retiring as Brown’s top lawyer this year. Ledbetter also will deliver the Baccalaureate address to the class of 2018 at the First Baptist Church in America on Saturday.
Other 2018 honorees include Lonnie Bunch III, educator, historian and the founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. He has spent more than 40 years in the museum field, where he is recognized as one of the leaders. Also being honored are , J. Michael Kosterlitz, physicist, educator and Nobel Prize winner; Giuseppe Penone, visual artist and one of the foremost figures of the Arte Povera, the Italian avant-garde movement; and Nancy Northrup, lawyer and president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which advances the cause of women’s rights worldwide.
