Charter Trustee Drew S. Days III '63 presented Stephen L. Carter for an honorary degree, Doctor of Humane Letters:
"We live in an age when, it has been said, people have become uncomfortable talking about morality. At the same time, news reports leave us in no doubt that there are ethical problems of scandalous proportions in our society. The times cry out for a critical survey of our moral landscape, even at the risk of discomfort, and among the most clarion and compelling voices in response to that cry is yours.
Educated at Stanford University and Yale Law School, you served a clerkship with Justice Thurgood Marshall before soon returning to Yale to teach law. Today, as the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law, you not only teach, but through your writings, address critical political and societal problems from an ethical point of view. In a series of notable, and notably provocative, books, beginning with Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby and The Culture of Disbelief, you have sought to stimulate our national conscience. In taking the moral temperature of our secular society and finding it alarmingly low, you have prescribed a remedy: that religious values and convictions should play, and constitutionally can play, a role in our public life.
Although recognized and widely hailed as among our nation's leading public intellectuals, you have continued to defy political and ideological categorization. Critics on both the right and the left have described you as everything from a contrarian to a dubious liberal. That is eloquent tribute, we conclude, to your uncompromising independence of mind and judgment.
Stephen L. Carter, acting on the authority of the Board of Trustees, I am very pleased to confer on you the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters of Hamilton College, admitting you to all its rights and privileges. In token whereof, we present you with this diploma and invest you with this hood."
