Sen was selected by a large committee that draws up the list of honorary degree candidates and, from that list, chooses the commencement speaker.
Rudenstine said, "There was some effort to...try and reflect both the past and the future. Several of the honorary degree candidates were chosen with some sense of the different kinds of contributions of significance that were made in the last half of the century."
Recent commencement speakers include Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan; Mary Robinson, U.N High Commissioner for Human Rights and former President of Ireland; U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright; Harold Varmus, director of the National Institutes of Health; Vaclav Havel, president of the Czech Republic, and Vice President Al Gore '69.