F&M Stories

United States Senator Cory Booker often says, "Life is about purpose, not position." Throughout his life, he has acted on that principle, purposefully working to make changes that improve the lives of others.

After earning his bachelor's and master's degrees in political science and sociology, respectively, from Stanford University, where he played tight end on the football team in addition to serving as senior class president, Booker was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship that he used to complete an honors degree in history at the University of Oxford. He then earned his Juris Doctor in 1997 from Yale Law School, where he operated free legal clinics for low-income residents of New Haven, Connecticut, volunteered as a Big Brother, and was active in the National Black Law Students Association.

He served as staff attorney for the Urban Justice Center in New York before returning to northern New Jersey, where he grew up, to work as program coordinator of the Newark Youth Project and start a nonprofit organization to provide legal services for low-income families, helping tenants take on slumlords, improve living conditions, and stay in their homes. He was first elected to the Newark City Council in 1998, at age 29, and became the city's mayor in 2006, serving for seven years, doubling the amount of affordable housing under development, and catalyzing education reforms that include, among many other things, a new pipeline of talented students attending Franklin & Marshall College.

Reducing crime in Newark was such a central concern to Booker that he, along with members of his security team, was known to personally patrol city streets, and from 2006 through 2008, Newark led the nation in violent crime reduction. In 2009, Booker was honored with the Sarah Brady Visionary Award from the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, and in 2010, he received the U.S. Senator John Heinz Award for Greatest Public Service by an Elected or Appointed Official from the Jefferson Awards Foundation of the American Institute for Public Service.

He won a special election to succeed the late U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg in 2013, thereby becoming the first African American Senator from New Jersey and the first African American elected to the Senate since Barack Obama in 2004.

Cory Booker, for your commitment to improving the lives of all, for your focus on finding solutions to problems that create community, and for your outstanding public service to the people of Newark, New Jersey, and the nation, Franklin & Marshall College bestows upon you the Honorary Degree, Doctor of Laws.

United States Senator Cory A. Booker