Libraries

Renowned Activist & Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg Awarded Honorary Degree

UMass Amherst Libraries is home to the Daniel Ellsberg Papers

Daniel Ellsberg, one of the nation’s foremost political activists and whistleblowers, was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Massachusetts Amherst in a special ceremony held January 21, 2023, in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Ellsberg resides.  

Ellsberg has been deeply engaged with UMass Amherst since 2019 when, impressed by the university’s longstanding commitment to social justice, he chose to make the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Center of the UMass Amherst Libraries the home for his research papers. 

Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy with honorary degree recipient Daniel Ellsberg and his wife, Patricia Marx Ellsberg.
Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy with honorary degree recipient Daniel Ellsberg and his wife, Patricia Marx Ellsberg.

Following a decade as a high-level government official, researcher and consultant, Ellsberg distributed the top-secret Pentagon Papers in 1971, exposing decades of deceit by American policymakers during the Vietnam War. Since the end of the war, Ellsberg has been a lecturer, scholar, writer, and activist on the dangers of the nuclear era, wrongful U.S. interventions, and the urgent need for patriotic whistleblowing.  

Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy lauded Ellsberg’s devotion to public service, saying, “We honor you for a lifetime of truth-telling that demonstrates how dissent can be the highest form of patriotism and citizenship. We thank you for inspiring others to follow your example.”   

Ellsberg expressed deep appreciation for the honor, noting that he has found an institutional home at UMass that supports his work and ideals. “This is actually the first institutional community that I’ve been in for 50 years,” he said, “since I left RAND IN 1970 and MIT in 1972 when they terminated my fellowship at the Center for International Studies because I was on trial.”  

The Ellsberg collection at UMass Amherst Libraries is a vast treasure trove—500+ boxes of materials—that document the still relevant issues of his long life: the threats posed by nuclear weapons, the expansion of U.S. imperial ambition, the Vietnam War, Watergate, the proliferation of state secrecy, freedom of the press and First Amendment rights, the struggle for a more democratic and accountable foreign policy, and the challenges of civic courage and nonviolent dissent.   

In 2020-2021, inspired by the arrival of Ellsberg’s papers, the university sponsored a host of historic ventures to explore his life and legacy—a yearlong seminar, the creation of a website (the Ellsberg Archive Project), a series of podcasts by The GroundTruth Project, and a two-day, international, online conference with more than two dozen high profile scholars, journalists, former policymakers, whistleblowers, and activists that was attended by thousands.