BRUNSWICK – A Northport native was one of the two graduating speakers at Bowdoin College’s commencement, carrying on a nearly 200-year-old tradition this weekend.

Senior Joel Moser of Northport addressed 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 Bowdoin’s first Truman Scholar in seven years.

Another graduate speaker, Alison Rau of Burlington, Conn., drew parallels between Bowdoin’s 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.

The two students’ speeches represent a two-century tradition at the four-year, liberal arts college.

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.

“It was a tough decision,” Wilkins said. “It was good to spend these last couple days with my friends.”

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.

Goldstone, who served as chief prosecutor of the U.N.’s criminal tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, received an honorary doctor of laws degree.

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.