Rekha Basu, Doctor of Humane Letters

Rekha Basu received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters at Grinnell College Commencement 2008.

Sometimes the issues that are the most difficult to discuss are precisely the ones that most require our attention. In her columns for the Des Moines Register, Rekha Basu has taught us how to begin difficult conversations and what we can gain by doing so. Her ability to shed light on sensitive subjects with delicacy and insight has enriched readers' lives for a decade and a half.

In that time, she has chronicled the growing diversity in Iowa's communities, both large and small. She looks beneath the surface to discern the hardships and the joys of the many cultures that make up Iowa. She reminds us that Iowa is not isolated from larger forces that are changing our world. She does not let us forget that change comes at a cost or that, despite our fears, we can profit from acknowledging its occurrence.

Born in New Delhi, India, to parents whose work with the United Nations took her family all over the world, she grew up seeing the world as a network of connections among human beings.

Educated at Brandeis University, the Goddard-Cambridge Graduate Program, and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, yshe taught political economy to college and graduate students and worked in documentary film and television production in New York before becoming a newspaper journalist. She joined the editorial page staff of the Des Moines Register in 1991 and became a columnist there two years later. She has devoted many of her columns to exploring her interests in human rights, civil liberties, and hidden cultural messages.

She is particularly skilled at illuminating the international contexts that bear upon Iowans' lives and capturing how events in Iowa affect the wider world. She models the kind of global citizen that Grinnell College has long sought to educate.

Grinnell College is proud to honor Rekha Basu for raising her genuinely humane voice in defense of the voiceless, and for showing us how crucial it is for us to raise ours.