As a pioneer advocate and practitioner of service learning in colleges and universities across the country, you have inspired the civic engagement of thousands.
Originally from the Philippines, your formal education includes studies at the University of the Philippines, University of San Francisco, Marquette University, University of Minnesota, and most recently the California Institute of Integral Studies. But your informal education includes more than 25 years of profound community organizing, in the Philippines and the United States, focused on experiential education.
As executive director of the Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs in Saint Paul, Minnesota, you led a consortium of 18 colleges and universities to develop community-based learning programs. You also spent nearly ten years as associate director and director of the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford University, where you founded and directed the Public Service Scholars program.
You have been a visiting professor at Swarthmore and Carleton Colleges, and co-authored the book Service-Learning: A Movement’s Pioneers Reflect on its Origins, Practice and Future. In recognition of exemplary leadership and motivation of others, you received the Alec Dickson Servant Leader Award from the National Youth Leadership Council, among other awards.
You have said, “Moral brilliance is at the core of the circle of knowledge, integral to education for creating a better world … All we need to do is admit that not all the knowledge is in the academy, and that we actually have to go out and search for what it is that will inspire that knowledge to make a difference in the world.”
Your commitment to service-learning pedagogy, diversity, and social justice stand as evidence to the loftiest values of community engagement. Nadinne Cruz, for your life of public service in keeping with the ideals of Marlboro College, it is our pleasure to confer upon you the degree: Doctor of Humane Letters.