BRUNSWICK (AP) – Graduating seniors this spring continued a nearly 200-year-old tradition of student delivered commencement speeches at Bowdoin College.

Northport native Joel Moser was among two speakers of the Class of 2004 to address his fellow graduates at Bowdoin’s 199th commencement ceremony Saturday, telling classmates they should work to promote the common good.

“The common good is in real peril in our time and in our place. Let us not forget it,” said Moser, who last year was named the Bowdoin’s first Truman Scholar in seven years.

Another graduate speaker, Alison Rau, of Burlington, Conn., drew parallels between Bowdoin’s creative, committed students and its excellent dining room fare. The Princeton Review gave the school’s food high ratings last year.

“I bet that Bowdoin students spend at least a half hour more at the table than students at any other institution in the country,” Rau said.

She did confess one complaint about Maine cuisine, though.

“I really hate lobsters,” she said.

U.S. Rep. Tom Allen, who graduated from Bowdoin in 1967, also spoke to the graduating class. Allen told students during his address that wherever they go in life, they will always have something of Maine within them.

The Maine connections Allen spoke of were important to graduate James Wilkins, the nation’s fourth-ranked Division III high jumper, who skipped the national championships Friday in Decatur, Ill., to attend commencement ceremonies.

His parents did not want him to miss graduation, he said.

The college awarded five honorary degrees, including one to Justice Richard Goldstone of South Africa, who was named this month to the panel investigating allegations of corruption in the United Nations’ oil-for-food program with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Also honored were: Torsten Wiesel, a Nobel Prize-winning neurobiologist; Dorothy Schwartz, executive director of the Maine Humanities Council; Irish poet Eavan Boland; and Israeli composer Shulamit Ran.

AP-ES-05-30-04 1127EDT