2019 Honorary Degree Recipients

By Noah Crenshaw | ONLINE EDITOR

Those who receive Honorary Degrees at the University of Indianapolis are often “individuals who are innovators, society and industry leaders, and visionaries who embody the mission of our University,” University President Robert Manuel said in a press release on March 29 announcing that NASA engineer Lonnie Johnson and civil rights activist Bob Zellner were the 2019 recipients. Manuel said that an honorary degree is one of the highest honors a college can give.

“There's not many [people] receiving that honor from the university over time,” Manuel said. “There’s a prestige associated with it [and] that is the honor part of it....There's no speaker's fee here [or] anything like that. There is just coming here for the honor of receiving the degree, talking to the students and engaging our population.”

Manuel said that both Johnson and Zellner were chosen because their lives can be a model to students. He said that the values they have are the values the university hopes students will leave with after graduation.

“Creative inquiry, service, creativity, social justice, all those things are inherent in the life examples of both Lonnie [Johnson] and Bob [Zellner],” Manuel said. “So, when you sit in the crowd and you look at who we're giving an honorary degree to, hopefully, as a student, you'd sit there and think, 'Okay, I get what the university is about. I get how it's connected to the values that we share.'”

Photo contributed by UIndy Communications

Lonnie Johnson

• Inventor of the Super Soaker water gun

• President and founder of the Johnson Research and Development Company

• NASA engineer

• Worked at the NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory

• Worked on the Galileo mission to Jupiter, the Cassini mission to Saturn and the Mars Observer project

• Received the Air Force Achievement Medal and the Air Force Commendation Medal

• Speaking at the undergraduate ceremony on Saturday, May 4

Photo contributed by UIndy Communications

Bob Zellner

• First white southerner to have a field secretary position for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in 1961

• Arrested 18 times for trying to challenge segregation in the South

• Featured in the 2005 award-winning documentary “Come Walk in My Shoes,

• Wrote a memoir, “The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement,” which is being made into a film that will be produced by Spike Lee

• Speaking at the graduate ceremony on Friday, May 3

Information for the bios from UIndy360