Harvard to bestow Honorary Doctorate on Bill Gates

More than three decades after dropping out from the elite Harvard University, Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft Corp., will get an honorary degree at school graduation ceremonies in June.

Honorary degree will be bestowed to the world’s richest man by the University at the 356th Commencement on June 7, 2007. Gates will be the principal speaker at the momentous occasion.

He would also get opportunity to meet his class, the Harvard College Class of 1977, which will celebrate its 30th reunion during Commencement Week.

“I am very pleased that the Harvard community will have the opportunity to hear from Bill Gates on June 7,” said Paul Finnegan, president of the Harvard Alumni Association. “His contributions to the world of business and technology, and the great example he has set through his far-reaching philanthropy, will rightfully put him on center stage in Harvard Yard. I look forward to greeting him in June.”

Gates, 51, first joined Harvard, the wealthiest school in the U.S., in 1973 but left in 1975 to pursue his ambitions with the formation of Microsoft, which he founded in the same year with childhood friend Paul Allen. He Worked together with Allen to develop a version of the programming language BASIC for the first microcomputer, the MITS Altair.

"With a foresighted vision of the immense future potential of desktop computing," Harvard said in its commencement announcement, "Gates left Harvard during his junior year to devote himself to building Microsoft, the company he and Allen founded in 1975."

Though he left his course mid way, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft is considered a member of Harvard's class of 1977.

Born in 1955, Gates grew up in Seattle and is one of the world’s most influential figures. He has been a generous benefactor to Harvard. Gates and Ballmer, now Microsoft's chief executive, financed Harvard's $25 million electrical engineering and computer science facility, the Maxwell Dworkin Building, which was named for their mothers, Mary Maxwell Gates and Beatrice Dworkin Ballmer. Gates stepped down as Microsoft CEO in 2000 though he remains its chairman.

His Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft company is the world's largest software maker with annual revenues over $44 billion in 2006 fiscal year.

Gates and his wife Melinda set up a $33-billion foundation in 2000 to support research into the prevention of malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS as well as measures against hunger and poverty. The world’s largest transparently operated charitable foundation works in developing countries to improve health and reduce poverty and in the US to support education and libraries nationwide and children and families in the Pacific Northwest.

Gates also has written two best-selling books, "The Road Ahead" (1995) and "Business @ the Speed of Thought" (1999), and has donated the proceeds of both books to nonprofit organizations that support the use of technology in education and skills development.

Gates has already three honorary doctorates in his kitty, one from the Nyenrode Business Universiteit, Breukelen, The Netherlands in 2000, second from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden in 2002 and third from the Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan in 2005.

He was also given an honorary KBE (Knighthood) from Queen Elizabeth II of the Great Britain in 2005, in addition to having entomologists name the Bill Gates flower fly, Eristalis gatesi, in his honor.