2023 Honorary Degree Recipients
Grinnell College is honored to recognize exceptional individuals who have made significant contributions to their fields of expertise. During the 2023 Commencement ceremony, the College will bestow honorary degrees upon distinguished scholars in social studies, science, and humanities.
Ham Serunjogi ’16
Doctor of Social Studies
When Ham Serunjogi arrived at Grinnell in 2012, he already had an enviable resume: the Ugandan student had represented his home country at the 2010 Youth Olympic Games as a swimmer and had served as student council president at his high school – The Aga Khan Academy in Mombasa, Kenya.
At Grinnell, Serunjogi took advantage of every opportunity to pour rocket fuel on his ambitions: he competed on the swim team, earned an economics degree, served as treasurer of the Student Government Association, and landed an internship at Facebook (now Meta).
At Grinnell, he also met a fellow international student, Ghanaian Maijid Moujaled, who shared Serunjogi’s ambitious mindset. On a roadtrip in 2016, the pair dreamed up what would later become Chipper Cash, an app that allows Africans to send money across borders easily.
Together, the pair assembled a small team to start working on Chipper, and in early 2019 they raised a seed investment of more than $2 million. Chipper Cash, positioned as Africa’s modern mobile payments platform, has gone on to raise more than $300 million in investments from numerous high-profile backers, including Jeff Bezos’ personal investment arm.
The platform has seen astonishing growth over the past five years: it has over 5 million registered users and processes billions of dollars per year. Headquartered in San Francisco, Chipper Cash has hundreds of employees in more than 10 countries and has been valued as high as $2 billion. In 2023, Serunjogi was named to Forbes’ 30 under 30 list in the finance category.
Even as Serunjogi has steered Chipper Cash on its rocketship trajectory, he continues to make time for his alma mater. In 2022, he was elected to the Grinnell College Board of Trustees, where he sits on the investment committee that oversees the College’s endowment. At 28, Serunjogi became the youngest person to serve as a trustee for Grinnell College.
For his ambitions to bring simple and streamlined options for cross-border payments in Africa, and for his vision to do so faster than many ever thought possible, we are pleased to recognize Ham Serunjogi ’16.
Peggy Barlett ’69
Doctor of Science
As an anthropologist at Emory who started her career focusing on farmer decision-making in Central America and the United States, Peggy Barlett had always been attuned to the specific ways humans transform the environments around them.
And in 1999, when a road project in a forest near her institution sparked controversy, she saw opportunities to make changes in her own backyard. For the next two decades, she was one of her university’s biggest champions for meaningful sustainability — and quickly became a powerful voice influencing the work of hundreds of campuses nationwide.
After graduating from Grinnell, Barlett earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University, then joined the faculty of Emory University. Her studies of farmer decision-making took her to Costa Rica, Ecuador, and rural Georgia. She wrote or edited three books on the topic, including one that won the James Mooney Award from the Southern Anthropological Society.
In 1999, she took a year-long sabbatical to find ways to harness the growing interest in sustainability and climate issues that she saw on campus. She supported projects to infuse sustainability ideas into the curriculum, and in 2004, she co-edited Sustainability on Campus, the first of two related volumes on the topic. The book offered inspiring and practical approaches to pursuing sustainability on academic campuses.
Barlett co-chaired the first Sustainability Vision Committee at Emory, urging the institution to slash its energy use, reduce its total waste stream, and procure three quarters of its food for campus dining facilities from local or sustainably-grown sources. These ambitious aims ultimately became an essential part of the University’s strategic plan in 2005 and again in 2015.
Barlett has been frequently recognized for her efforts: she earned the Thomas Jefferson Award from Emory in 2012, the university’s highest award for academic achievement and leadership. She has also been recognized with a Sustainability Lifetime Achievement Award and was the first faculty member to be honored by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education.
For her methodically ambitious efforts to partner with hundreds of faculty, staff, students, and alumni to make her own campus more sustainable — and for providing a roadmap for other colleges and universities to do the same, we are pleased to honor Peggy Barlett ’69.
Will Love
Doctor of Humane Letters
When students arrive in Will Love’s journalism classroom, he pushes them immediately out of their comfort zone. “I want them to feel a little bit lost in those first couple weeks,” he says of his hands-off approach that relies on students to take control of their learning. “I don’t tell them what to do minute by minute. There’s no test.”
He nudges them to experiment: to try their hand at writing a story, to test out a graphic design program, or to pick up a camera to shoot photos of a school event.
Love pairs that push for exploration by highlighting students’ growth over time. When he shares the work of his students, he praises not simply the one stunning photo from an event, but the series of images that show a trajectory of gradual improvement.
He hopes that this approach helps students embrace the often messy, very human process of pursuing excellence. By lowering the stakes of any single project, he wants students to see what is possible when they pair openness to imperfection with methodical practice.
It’s an approach that’s proven to be remarkably successful: students often discover an unexpected passion, and the newspaper Love leads has won numerous awards under his guidance.
Love brings that same attitude of continual growth and trust in others to the girls basketball team he coaches. His teams have seen significant success on the court. This past year, the Bulldogs won the 4A state championship, the first for either basketball team at the school.
But perhaps even more meaningful than the specific skills and lessons that Love instills in the classroom and the basketball court are the connections he builds with students and athletes. One former student says that Love “is someone who takes students as they are, and who doesn’t attempt to mold them into anything but themselves.”
For creating spaces for students and athletes to explore their interests, to grow, and to achieve at the very highest levels, we are pleased to honor Will Love.
Irma McClaurin ’73
Doctor of Social Studies
A multi-talented artist, writer and leader, Irma McClaurin believes one must “change minds, change hearts and change behavior to achieve transformation.” Never content to settle, throughout her career, she has taken on numerous roles and invariably become a standout in all of them. McClaurin earned a bachelor’s degree in American Studies at Grinnell, becoming one of the first members of her family to graduate from college. She made an early splash as a poet: in 1975, she won the Gwendolyn Brooks Award for poetry. She went on to earn an MFA in English and a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and made her mark as an academic entrepreneur. In addition to tenured faculty roles at Grinnell College, the University of Florida, and the University of Minnesota, her accomplishments have include founding the Africana Women’s Studies Program at Bennett College for Women, launching the Urban Research and Outreach-Engagement Center at the University of Minnesota, serving as deputy provost at Fisk University and working for the United States government.
In 2010, McClaurin was named president of Shaw University, where she became the institution’s first permanent female president and guided it through recovery from a devastating tornado. She was a program officer for Education and Scholarship at the Ford Foundation and also served as chief diversity officer at Teach for America. Throughout her career, McClaurin has been a thoughtful and recognized writer: she has authored or edited several academic books and volumes of poetry. Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis and Poetics, was selected as a 2002 Outstanding Academic Title by Choice magazine. In 2015, she received the Emory O. Jackson National Column Writing Award from the National Newspaper Publishers Association for a column she published in Insight News, where she is culture and education editor.
Today, she continues to serve others as a busy consultant and executive coach while speaking regularly to national audiences. Recognition for her work includes the 2021 American Anthropological Association’s Engaged Anthropology Award and the Vision and Commitment Award from the National Women’s Studies Association in 2017. For her relentless pursuit of excellence in many fields, for her innovative mindset, and for her steadfast commitment to social justice in many forms and across many fields, we are pleased to recognize Irma McClaurin ’73.