Doctor of Humane Letters, Honoris Causa
Graduate Commencement Speaker
Farragher is a columnist and associate editor at The Boston Globe. A quintessential journalist, Farragher has spent nearly 40 years using his instinct, talent and dogged determination to find, research and share genuine stories.
Farragher was on the Globe’s Spotlight Team whose courageous research and sustained determination revealed a decades-long cover-up of the sexual abuse of children by priests within the Archdiocese of Boston. Its exhaustive series exposed and catalogued the egregious mistakes, sins and crimes that were at the core of what became a national crisis. The team received a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2003.
In 2002, Farragher co-authored the book Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church, that pulled together more than a decade of the team’s reporting on the scandal. The whole chilling, truthful story was then captured in the 2015 Academy Award winning film Spotlight.
Under his leadership, the Spotlight team uncovered many more breaches in public faith including rampant patronage in the Massachusetts Probation Department, monopolistic practices by hospitals and dangerous overcrowding of college students in Boston apartments, a series that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2015.
Before joining the Globe in 1997, Farragher was a reporter and editor of several publications including The Day of New London, Conn., and the San Jose Mercury News. As an undergraduate journalism major, Farragher cut his teeth as a dedicated reporter and editor for URI’s student newspaper, The Good 5 Cent Cigar.