Welcome to Marietta College’s one hundred and seventy-ninth Annual Commencement
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ith roots that reach back to the 18th century Muskingum Academy, Marietta College was officially chartered on February 14, 1835, by the State of Ohio as an institution charged with educating youth in all the various branches of the liberal arts and sciences. From the beginning, Marietta has been an independent, nonsectarian, liberal arts college. Today’s graduates share a common foundation of courses in written and spoken communication, and have been required to acquire a coherent experience in several fields of study. Moreover, each has pursued an in-depth study of a discipline in one or more of the nearly 50 undergraduate or graduate programs. Marietta College grants degrees to these individuals, confident they have been readied to exercise their callings with competence and to fulfill their civic and social responsibilities with understanding. The men and women receiving degrees today will join more than 25,000 living Marietta College alumni as members of The Long Blue Line.
Commencement Speaker Helene Cooper
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elene Cooper is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for The New York Times and author of New York Times best-selling autobiography, The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood.
Ms. Cooper has been with The Times since 2004, and is currently the Pentagon correspondent. During the height of the deadly 2014 Ebola outbreak in Africa, a team of journalists from The Times reported on various aspects of the virus’ impact on West Africa that ranged from the medical community and global response to how a close-knit culture began changing in an effort to stave off the disease’s spread. Ms. Cooper’s piece, “Ebola’s cultural casualty: Hugs in a hands-on land,” was among the newspaper’s coverage that garnered the 2015 Pulitzer. From 2008 to 2012, she covered the White House, and prior to that was the diplomatic correspondent. She has reported from more than 60 countries. Prior to The New York Times, she worked for The Wall Street Journal in the paper’s London, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta bureaus. Born in Monrovia, Liberia, Ms. Cooper, her mother, and her sister escaped to the United States during the 1980 Liberian coup d’état. Her book, which was a 2009 finalist for the National Books Critics Circle, detailed her family’s ordeal and her return to her homeland many years later. She earned a degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize and National Books Critics Circle finalist, Cooper has won the Raymond Clapper Award for Washington reporting in 2000, the Sandy Hume Memorial Award for Excellence in Political Journalism for best reporter under the age of 35 in 2001, the Missouri Lifestyle Award for feature writing in 2002, a National Association of Black Journalists Award for feature writing in 2004, the Urbino Press Award for foreign reporting in 2011, the George Polk Award for Health Reporting in 2015, and the Overseas Press Club Award in 2015.
As a courtesy to the graduates and those in attendance today, please turn your cell phones to vibrate. We also ask that all family photographers remain in their seats when taking photos or go to the assigned area off to the left of the stage.
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