Gov. Maura Healey named Mount Holyoke’s Commencement speaker

Mount Holyoke College has announced that Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey will be the primary speaker and address the undergraduates, graduate students and certificate recipients of the class of 2025 at its one hundred eighty-eighth Commencement. Two Mount Holyoke alums, Bess Weatherman ’82 and Tara Roberts ’91, will also be honored at the event.

The ceremony will be held in person on May 25 at 10:30 am at the outdoor location of Pageant Green. Mount Holyoke President Danielle R. Holley will preside over the ceremony and award degrees to more than 500 bachelor’s and master’s degree graduates.

Maura Healey is the seventy-third Governor of Massachusetts. In 2022, she became the first woman and first openly LGBTQ+ person elected to lead the Commonwealth.

Governor Healey has delivered on key promises to make Massachusetts a more affordable place to live and a great place for businesses to operate. In her first year in office, she cut taxes for the first time in 20 years, putting money back in the pockets of families, renters, seniors and businesses. She filed and signed the $5 billion Affordable Homes Act, the state’s largest ever housing investment, to create tens of thousands of homes and the Mass Leads economic development bill to invest in Massachusetts businesses. Governor Healey has also prioritized education and workforce development by expanding financial aid at public colleges and universities, made community college cost-free for all Massachusetts residents, and increased access to career and technical education and apprenticeships for students and workers.

Healey previously served two terms as Massachusetts Attorney General, first elected in 2014 and re-elected in 2018. She grew up the oldest of five children with a single mom, captained her basketball team at Harvard and played professionally in Austria, and worked as a business and civil rights lawyer.

Bess Weatherman ’82 is a Special Limited Partner of Warburg Pincus LLC, a leading global private equity firm focused on growth investing, where she spent 28 years as a healthcare investor. She has twice been named to Forbes’ Midas List recognizing her as one of the 100 most highly-regarded leaders in the venture capital industry. A dedicated and generous volunteer, she is a Mount Holyoke College trustee and chair of the College’s investment committee, composed exclusively of distinguished alums; she has also made investments toward scholarship efforts, student safety net and capital projects at MHC. She is the co-founder of the R.T. Weatherman Foundation which is currently dedicated to filling gaps in humanitarian aid to Ukraine, including the transportation of critically wounded international volunteer soldiers to specialty hospitals in Western Europe and the identification and repatriation of the remains of Americans killed in action. Weatherman was a 2014 recipient of the Women of Power and Influence Award from the National Organization for Women. She has served as a mentor for W.O.M.E.N. in America, an organization of senior business executives in New York City focused on mentoring young high-potential female professionals, and she awards a college scholarship every year to the top female math student at Rockbridge County High School, her alma mater in Lexington, Virginia.

Tara Roberts ’91 has written extensively on the group Dive With a Purpose, a group of scuba divers documenting shipwrecks from the Middle Passage. She first launched a blog series which became the six-part podcast series “Into the Depths.” The podcast resulted in Roberts being named 2022’s Rolex National Geographic Explorer of the Year. She was the first Black woman explorer to ever be featured on the cover of National Geographic. “Into the Depths” also won the Jackson Wild’s Special Jury Recognition for engaging platforms, an award given by her peers in the media industry for work that uses digital media to engage and create awareness about the natural world. She has recently released the memoir “Written in the Waters” about her time with Diving with a Purpose. The book has been highly praised, with one reviewer calling it a “profound emotional journey into the heaviness of the past and how history moves fluidly into the beauty and problems of the present.”