From NASA pioneer to media moguls: 4 people University of Michigan wants to honor with degrees

ANN ARBOR, MI — What do a Pulitzer Prize-winning news editor, a C-SPAN co-founder, an Emmy-winning historian and a trailblazing female NASA software engineer have in common?

They’re all being considered for honorary doctorates from the University of Michigan during winter commencement on Dec. 15 at Crisler Center.

The university’s Board of Regents is expected to vote on the approval of the degrees for Rebecca Blumenstein, John D. Evans, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Margaret H. Hamilton on Thursday, Dec. 5.

Blumenstein became president of editorial at NBC News in 2023. She has been recommended for an honorary Doctor of Laws degree.

At NBC News, she oversees programs like “Meet the Press” and Dateline NBC.”

Blumenstein‘s journalism career launched after she served as editor in chief at The Michigan Daily. She earned a bachelor’s degree from the UM Residential College.

While leading The Wall Street Journal‘s China bureau abroad, her team won a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 2007 for its “Naked Capitalism” series.

She had previously worked for the Journal’s Detroit bureau and New York Technology Group, after early-career jobs with the Tampa Tribune, Gannett Newspapers and Newsday. She later served as a deputy editor and chief for The Journal and then moved to The New York Times to serve as a deputy managing editor.

Evans had leadership roles for C-SPAN, which he helped co-found, for 44 years. In 2016, Evans was inducted into the national Cable Hall of Fame. He has been recommended for a Doctor of Laws degree.

He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan in 1966 and served as the station manager of WCBN, a campus radio station. He was also a Washtenaw County deputy sheriff who went on to serve in the U.S. Navy.

Evans is credited with building the first cable system in the Washington, D.C. metro area. He has also championed AIDS research and the LGBTQ+ community through research and philanthropy.

He currently chairs the American Medical Association Foundation’s LGBTQ+ Health Commission and has also supporting LGBTQ+ initiatives and scholarships through the UM. He also created the John D. Evans Fund for Media and Technology.

Gates is an Emmy-winning documentarian and literary scholar who has built a career at top universities. Gates currently directs Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. He has been recommended for a Doctor of Humane Letters.

Among his many books and documentaries, “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross,” a six-part PBS documentary, won an Emmy, a Peabody Award and an NAACP Image Award in 2013. He also hosts PBS show “Finding Your Roots,” a series that dives into celebrities’ ancestries.

Before joining the faculties at the universities of Yale, Cornell, Duke and Harvard, he graduated from Yale summa cum laude in 1973 and was the first Black student to receive an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award. He received his doctorate in English literature from the University of Cambridge.

Among other accomplishments, he was the first Black scholar to receive a National Humanities Medal, and the NAACP awarded him “for his work to preserve and celebrate African American history and culture,” this summer.

Hamilton is credited with coining the title of software engineer. She is a woman pioneer in the field who worked on NASA’s Apollo missions and the Skylab space station. She has been recommended for a Doctor of Engineering degree.

A Presidential Medal of Freedom awardee, she is also credited with being the first woman programmer hired by NASA. She also co-founded Higher Order Software in 1976 and Hamilton Technologies in 1986.

While with NASA, she advocated for coding to override human error, after her daughter crashed a simulator in the lab.

In her early days, she spent a semester studying math at the University of Michigan before transferring to Earlham College. She went on to work at MIT, including for the school’s Lincoln Lab, writing software to detect enemy aircraft during the Cold War.

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