May 19, 2026

Lafayette to award two honorary degrees at 191st Commencement

Professor and author Arthur C. Brooks, and American visual artist Audrey Flack to earn honorary degrees during Lafayette College’s May 23 Commencement ceremony

Photo by Jenny Sherman Photography

Arthur C. Brooks

Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters

Educator, author, national expert on leadership and happiness

Read Brooks’ biography

Arthur C. Brooks (who also is delivering this year’s keynote address) is a university professor, bestselling author, and one of the world’s leading experts on happiness.

Brooks is a university professor who teaches courses on leadership and happiness. He is the author of 16 books, including No. 1 New York Times bestsellers Build the Life You Want (2023), co-authored with Oprah Winfrey, and From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life. His latest book, The Meaning of Your Life, was released in March 2026 and offers practical, evidence-based strategies for breaking free of the powerful trends and personal habits that dull the focus on the purpose of life.

Brooks joined CBS’ The Free Press earlier this year with a new weekly column, “The Pursuit of Happiness,” which grapples with how today’s greatest moral questions impact our sense of meaning, purpose, and joy—and provides data-driven insights on how to achieve a good life in the modern world. He is also a CBS News contributor and host of the weekly podcast “Office Hours with Arthur Brooks.”

Brooks appears in the media and travels the world to teach people in private companies, universities, public agencies, and faith communities how they can live happier lives and bring greater well-being to others.

Brooks writes in his inaugural column at The Free Press, “I feel I have a sacred vocation: to lift others up and bring them together. We all must work on our own happiness, but that project is best and most joyfully done together.”

Photo courtesy of Hannah Marie Marcus

Audrey Flack

Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts (Posthumous)

American visual artist: Painter, printmaker, sculptor

Read Flack’s biography

Audrey Flack was a trailblazing woman artist who continually advanced her work and creativity to challenge the boundaries of the American art scene. Professionally active until the days before her death, Flack died in 2024 at age 93.

Flack earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Yale University and studied art history at New York University Institute of Fine Arts. She received a graduate and an honorary doctoral degree from Cooper Union in New York City. In May 2015, she received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from Clark University.

Starting as an abstract expressionist in the 1950s, Flack evolved into new realism and was the first photorealist painter to be added to the collection at the Museum of Modern Art in the 1960s. For 20 years, she was widely known for her work in the medium until she shifted into sculpture in the 1980s. She was also a writer who shared her stories and thoughts through essays and a personal memoir.

Flack was one of the first women to be included in the third volume of Janson’s History of Art in 1986, with early volumes of the text devoted only to male artists. She was an honorary vice president of the National Association of Women Artists. While facing early gender barriers and often sexist reviews, she would not stray from her feminine and feminist subject matters.

In line with her art and focus, in 2015, when Flack served as Lafayette College’s Richard A. and Rissa W. Grossman Visiting Artist, she took notice of the predominant campus imagery of the Marquis de Lafayette. She voiced that Adrienne, the wife of the College’s namesake—who supported Lafayette’s ambitions and endured hardship and personal loss with great dignity during the French Revolution—might also be represented. This inspiration ultimately led to a commission for the College’s Bicentennial.

The commission would prove historic. Following her experience executing larger-than-life-sized bronze sculptures of female goddesses—including Athena, Daphne and Medusa—Flack began work on a prototype of a detailed bust of Adrienne. She completed the maquette just days before her death, and it will be known as her last major work. The final 350-pound sculpture was installed outside of Skillman Library and unveiled and dedicated during the Council of Lafayette Women Conference on March 7, 2026.

Flack’s art and legacy remain displayed at major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.