Convocation 2015 with Dr. Daniel Porterfield

2015 CONVOCATION

Presentation by Daniel R. Porterfield, Ph.D.

September 8, 2015—Athletic Convocation and Wellness Center

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REMARKS OF THOMAS P. FOLEY, JD

President, Mount Aloysius College

Good afternoon to all of you and welcome to this 76th Convocation in the life of Mount Aloysius College.

Welcome to Trustees, to faculty, staff, students, honored guests and friends.

Thank you for this comfortable day, for the picturesque setting that is our college, thank you for all these uplifted faces in front of us.

It is over 160 years since the Sisters of Mercy first demonstrated their affection for these Southern Allegheny Mountains, when seven of their number welcomed 22 young ladies to what was then St. Aloysius Academy. It is 118 years since Old Main, the building my sons think is where Harry Potter was filmed, first opened its doors as Mount Aloysius here in Cresson.

And as you sit here—a century and a half after Sister of Mercy Francis Xavier Warde commanded a similar but smaller assembly—I am acutely aware that your ability to concentrate is inversely related to how close we come to the dinner hour. So I have four distinct functions to perform here today, and about eight minutes left in which to do it. Let me get right to it.

First, a few words of thanks; second, a word or two about what makes this event necessary; third, a few thoughts on what makes your first year here so special; and finally, a few words on our theme this year—Voice. Let’s begin with thanks to those who make it possible.

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First, to our faculty—We have an extraordinarily dedicated faculty at Mount Aloysius College. These are the people who are your academic, intellectual, professional and career guides. They will teach and test you in the classroom, in the laboratory, at your clinicals, on your fieldwork and beyond. They won’t pick up after you, but they will look after you—when you need their help on a concept in the classroom or a personal challenge outside it. Today, we acknowledge their scholarship, we appreciate their service both in the classroom and in the clinical settings, at which 65 percent of you will find yourselves, and we applaud their commitment to the mission of this college. If you let them, they will be your greatest advocates here!!!

Second, to our staff—these too are guides and teachers to you. Some of them recruited you to come here, some helped you figure out how to pay for it, some of them will keep you warm and well fed, some will work with you on campus activities, campus ministry and intercollegiate sports. All of them will work together to keep you safe, healthy and involved. They are true partners to our trustees, to me and to our faculty—every day—in providing the best possible experience for these next few years for all of you.

Third, to the President’s Executive Council—they are the institutional glue on this campus, holding us all together through the challenges of freshmen orientation, new construction, old sewers, the creation of new academic programs of study, the balance between professional and academic curricula and so much more.

Fourth, to Board of Trustees members with us today—The Trustees support, steward and strengthen Mount Aloysius. In short,

they guide us through times good and bad. They all serve because they believe so strongly in the very idea of Mount Aloysius College and because they want, fiercely, to create opportunities for all of you.

A special thank you to our predecessors who stood at these very places these last 161 years. Though the Sisters of Mercy are few in number on our campus today, we salute them at this time in a special way every year—because it is they who built this institution from the ground up, and it is they whose commitment to core principles of mercy and justice, service and hospitality inspire us each and every day.

So thank you Trustees, faculty, students, staff and all who conspired and inspired us to this day.

Second assignment, explain why a formal convocation is necessary.

Why did we bother to set up all these chairs and require you to sit in them?

In one sentence—we are acting out a symbolic tradition that is literally hundreds of years old.

This formal convocation ceremony has even deeper roots than Mount Aloysius College, dating back as much as 800 years to the traditions of teaching and learning at the great medieval universities of Europe.

This afternoon, we properly carry on a tradition that began in Bologna, Italy and at the Sorbonne in France, at Heidelberg in Germany and Edinburgh in Scotland, at Valencia in Spain, Vilnius in Lithuania, Basel in Switzerland and Oxford and Cambridge in England.

Nearly 1,000 years after the very first convocation, an American Secretary of Education spoke directly to the

importance of what we begin here today. He said: “In an interconnected, competitive global economy, the only way to secure our common future is through education. It is the one true path out of poverty, the great equalizer that overcomes differences in background, culture and privilege.

In the 21st Century, a quality education system is the centerpiece of a country’s economic development, and it can be the one thing that unites us as a world.”

The message of Convocation is very simple. We are engaged, all of us, in the education of citizens for the betterment of themselves and the world in which they live.

We convocate, convene—from the Latin con and vocare—literally, “to come together” to begin our serious endeavors of a new academic year, in this case by opening our minds to the ideas of a prominent thinker of our time—and to look for something that as US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says “unites us as a world.”

So welcome to your very own Convocation, 1,000 years after the first convocation was held—5,000 miles from where we sit today.

Third assignment—so what are our goals for you as you begin your journey here?

First goal is to help you grow in appropriate ways. Globalization is testing America’s resolve in the world and even challenging our standard of living. As you begin your higher education we want to be sure that you are able to respond to these global trends.

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classroom. Our hope is that you’ll enjoy attending a wide range of non-classroom events that enhance your learning—from Speakers Series lectures to community events and to theatrical, athletic and musical performances.

I encourage you to be bold and connect with the faculty and staff.

Each one of them has an interesting story all their own. I encourage you to get to know their stories because they too will inspire you.

To that end, we feel that it is our job— whether you are in a two-year professional degree program or a four-year Capstone curriculum—it is our job to help you develop your ability to think broadly, to speak and to write clearly, to be able to look at the world with a critical eye on occasion, and be able to adapt to whatever circumstances the future brings you.

You are important to us, and so we are determined to challenge you and we are equally determined to give you all the support that you might need.

Our goal is that when you leave here, you will have all the tools to enable you to lead meaningful lives—that you will be job-ready, communityready and technology-ready.

Second goal, to teach you the value of asking good questions. At orientation, we told you that the first rule of higher education is that there are no dumb questions. Today I want to tell you that to succeed at lifelong learning, it is all about learning how to learn and the first step there is not being afraid to ask questions.

The second step in learning how to learn is to cultivate a passion for asking good questions— whether you are in Connections 101 or down in Johnstown at a clinical rotation for radiology. Trust me on this. The winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1944 grew up in an overcrowded tenement in New York City. Each day after school the mothers of his neighborhood friends asked their children, “what did you learn today?”

The future Nobel Prize winner Izzi Rabi’s mother, however, inquired of him: “did you ask a good question today, Izzy?”

After he won the Nobel Prize, they asked Izzi how he became a world class scientist, and Rabi replied that his mother deserved most of the credit. He said that “asking good questions made me become a good scientist.” So I want to say to you today, again, that there is no such thing as a dumb question. And the real lesson is to never stop asking good questions.

Third goal, to impress on you that learning doesn’t begin and end in the

And get to know your classmates as more than class-mates. One-third of this class has already been out in the so-called real world doing real jobs to earn a living. I want to challenge each of you to become a vibrant part of this campus community—we need your life skills and experience to be successful—and I ask you to do that by developing truly meaningful relationships with your classmates.

Most of you have begun already to reach out to one another; you need to continue to support and learn from each other because you really can be an important part of the success of your friends— •

as partners in study sessions, in labs, in clinicals

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at performances and in community service

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as teammates on the stage, court or athletic field

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as members of college clubs on campus or simply

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as good friends, brought together by the coincidence of dorms or dining.

Fourth goal, to be sure you understand you are the one with the most control over your success or failure. You play the most important role in whether you reach these first three goals. For you to succeed here, it’s crucial that you get involved— build relationships with friends and

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faculty, join a club or invent a new one.

For you to succeed here, it’s important that you embrace Thomas Edison’s approach to failure—when asked about his first 10,000 attempts to invent the light bulb, he insisted that he hadn’t failed, he just found 10,000 ways that didn’t work.”

And for you to succeed here, it’s essential that you understand that you are here to prepare for the rest of your life, with habits that will serve you well in all those future endeavors. I strongly encourage you to be aggressive, to be proactive in asking for help even before you feel you need it.

And for those of you who are the first in your family or in the first generation to attend college, which is three out of five of you, it’s important to understand what an inspiration you are to other members of your family. The first family member to attend college often serves as a model, inspiring other family members to follow, and it’s not uncommon for entire families to become educated this way.

I speak on this topic from first-hand experience. None of my grandparents had the chance to finish elementary school—they went to work as soon as they were able. My parents are proud high school graduates. I was the first in our long family history to have the chance to go away for college. Ten brothers and sisters followed me, and they have 14 degrees between them.

You can do this too!!

My final assignment today—a few words on the idea of Voice. Mount Aloysius is fairly unique in the ranks of higher education institutions in that we choose a theme each year

and try to coordinate orientation, the Connections courses, our Speakers Series, our faculty symposium, dorm activities—even the activities in our Little People’s Place—around that single idea. Our theme this year is a simple one, “Voice.”

Voice—it can be written or spoken, first or third person, active or passive, digital or analog, cyber or literal, mythic or spiritual. Voice is the original social medium, first expressed physically as drawings on a

cave wall, today through emoticoms in a text message.

Voices come to us in other mediums as well. Actors have voice. Musicians have voice. There are voices you will study in history, in politics, in science and the arts. Paintings, sculpture, digital art are often powerful expressions of voice—evoking emotions that range from rage to rapture and inspiring reflections that are at once philosophical, imaginary, even practical.

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This year, you will also hear about some voices of courage. There is Mairead. A woman loses her sister and three young children, crushed to death against a church railing when a self-anointed freedom fighter decided to engage in a gun battle on a city street on a gorgeous summer afternoon. The sister who survived had a seventh grade education and didn’t think her voice mattered. But she founded a movement of women and men who felt like she did—that violence was not the answer to the conundrum of Ireland—led marches of 100,000 people at a time in Belfast, Dublin, London and helped cut that violence by 80 percent. She won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1978.

Then there is Mandela. A man spends 28 years of his life unjustly imprisoned in solitary confinement in nasty, brutish, filthy conditions.

He had been a leader of the major opposition group in his country, one that often resorted to violence to press its point. And his first act on his release is to invite his jailer to lunch. His name is Nelson Mandela and his voice evolved over those three decades in prison from loud, angry bursts of recrimination to a universal message of forgiveness and for peace and reconciliation. He won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1993.

And finally there is Malala. She was 11 when she first found her voice and started to blog on the importance of education for young girls like herself in her native Pakistan. She was 12 when the BBC did a documentary about her. She was 14 when the Taliban shot her as a warning to all those who advocated for the rights of women. Though she had to leave her country, she never moderated her voice. And she was 17 when she won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2014.

Now here is a surprise about all three of these voices. Not one of them set

out to win a Nobel Prize. Not one of them started out with a desire to influence anyone’s life beyond their own neighborhood. They each started out by finding their own voice and then by talking to one person about their concerns, and then another and another.

But these three voices—from Northern Ireland, South Africa and Pakistan—have one other thing in common—they found their listeners, literally millions of people—people just like all of us at this assembly here today—people who responded to the unique resonance of their particular vocal chords, their particular stories— people like us who responded to their authenticity.

This is where we all begin this academic year—with authenticity. And a big part of our job here at Mount Aloysius is to help you find and develop that authentic Voice which is yours.

How are we going to do that? It all comes back to some of the goals the faculty and I set out for you just a few minutes ago.

First, we are going to help you grow in appropriate ways, so that you are job-ready, technology-ready and community-ready. Second, we are going to impress upon you the value of asking good questions, and as you will learn from our faculty, the key antecedent to asking a good question is being a good listener. Third, we are going to implant in you the importance of lifelong learning, encouraging you to reach beyond the classroom and to embrace careful listening, critical thinking and authentic expression as lifelong pursuits.

Most of this learning will take place initially in your classrooms. But to truly find your voice, you are going to have to take some chances outside the

classroom as well. What you choose to read, what opinions you dare to try out on your friends, which Ted Talks and other digital voices you choose to listen to—all will help in your journey to finding your own voice.

We will also offer you a ton of other opportunities through which to explore the idea of Voice and with which to begin the process of developing your own. We have seven guest speakers who will talk to us about the idea of voice this year and probably at least that number of less official occasions where we will have some fun exploring the notion of voice.

I encourage you to be inspired by those who come to this campus, to be inspired by those who help teach and run this campus, and to be inspired by those who become your friends on this campus. I also want to challenge you to develop your voice and as you do so to remember this oft-cited prescription: Watch your thoughts; they become your words.

Watch your words; they become your actions.

Watch your actions; they become your habits.

Watch your habits; they become your character.

Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.

Again, welcome to this 76th Convocation and to our year on Voice.

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REMARKS OF DANIEL R. PORTERFIELD, PH.D.

President, Franklin & Marshall College

Thank you, President Foley and Trustees Kupchella, Barnhart, Calandra, and McLanahan for inviting me to join you today.

My congratulations to all of the new students gathered here to begin your college education.

Students, this institution is deeply invested in your futures, especially under the visionary leadership of President Foley, a superb educator committed—with his wife and life partner Michele—to serving this outstanding College and advancing the greater good.

I’ve had the joy of mentoring at Franklin & Marshall the Foley’s brilliant son, Andrew, who has just started his studies at Harvard Medical School. Andy is an awesome student and an even better person—and it was a great pleasure to celebrate his many achievements with his parents and older brothers, Matt and Tom, who happens to be married to F&M alumna Emily Weir.

I’m also very excited that two first-year students here today—Brittany Repasky and Paige Low—were mentored by two of F&M’s finest young graduates— Liz Middleton and Malorie Sassaman—who loved their own F&M educations so much they are giving back as college counselors in rural PA public schools where too many students don’t know about the college opportunities available to them.

Mount Aloysius offers every student tremendous opportunity—and with more than 90 percent of the student body receiving financial aid, including 59 percent who are first generation college students, your mission is making an outsized difference and you have a lot of momentum. It’s no surprise that the College was so glowingly re-accredited last year by both the Conference on Mercy Higher Education and the Middle States Commission on Higher Education.

This institution’s value proposition and service to society are extraordinary.

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Let me thank you for the recognition of this honorary degree. I’m completely beneath the honor. My dad would have loved the citation, and my mom would have believed it.

And actually, my mom, Dr. Anne Butler, would have been very proud. An historian who passed away last November, she wrote an acclaimed history of nuns in the American West called Across God’s Frontiers, and she greatly admired the Sisters of Mercy and the Order’s legendary founder, Mother Catherine McAuley.

She’d go into the hall of records and comb through dust-sealed 100 year-old registers to find the names of women who’d been arrested for disorderly conduct.

And then she’d use other records to piece together their personal histories and, eventually, the larger narrative of the thousands of women who went or were brought west as sex workers.

There are good lessons in the ways my mom developed her voice as a scholar. She grew up in foster care in Massachusetts and married very young. After my parents divorced in 1968, she was a single mom with two children to raise, so she got a job teaching school during the day and made a fateful decision to start going to Towson College at night.

This was a largely untold story— those women’s voices had barely been heard—and many scholars in the 1980s said her work wasn’t real history. Perhaps because of her age, perhaps because of her expertise, she only received one college teaching offer—but the more she published about Western prostitutes, domestic workers, prisoners, wives, and nuns, the more other people would join this discourse on gender, or develop their own related scholarship, or share stories about the frontier women in their own lineage.

A few years later, at age 33, after earning her bachelor’s degree, she opted to keep up her nocturnal studies and go for a master’s degree at The University of Maryland—in history, because she loved it.

That is a story about voice— and the widening circles of good that can come when we develop our voices—a topic worthy of your best thinking throughout the year.

Next came a Ph.D., which meant she’d have to conduct original research for her dissertation—just like your professors have done.

She decided to research the lives and experiences of prostitutes on the frontier in the era of westward expansion and the Gold Rush.

In a world where billions of people live in conditions that prevent free expression, each of you will enjoy countless opportunities at Mount Aloysius to cultivate your voices, together.

To do this, she made summer research trips to little towns in Oklahoma, Texas, and California.

I’d argue that one’s voice is more than, literally, what we say. A voice grows out of how we express ourselves, how we create ideas, what we value,

what we choose, how we act, how we carry ourselves, who formed us, our life experiences, and the cultures that mold us. Voice is the public expression of all these fused factors and influences, which is why no two voices are identical.

In my mom’s case, she used her voice when she chose to go back to college—and that sent a message to her children, her students, and her neighbors.

She used her voice when she absorbed and acted on the red ink in the margins of those first overwritten papers she submitted to her professors.

She used her voice when she chose to counter the massive national myth of manifest destiny with real, human stories of westward expansion.

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New students, you now have your own voices to develop. You are now full partners in a college that offers so much toward that goal.

Nothing essential is lacking. You have food, friends, freedom, this faculty, a liberal arts curriculum, and—an added bonus—exposure to profound Catholic ideas about the dignity and equality of every human being.

upon sex, religion, race, sexual orientation, economic position, or any other form of diversity is misplaced and destructive. To judge others based on appearance is ... a mistaken path. To love one another is the basis of society’s health.

In his essay for the Mercy Presidential Scholarship, first year student Jacob Pasley wrote:

Jacob is calling us to attend to one another, to see one another, to listen. Our powers of observation, our discerning ears, will give us insights and growth that shape how we see and how we speak.

And the respect we show one another in silence by listening attentively, by giving each person the benefit of the doubt, by caring to hear, becomes itself a component of our voices. Our silence can be a part of speech.

I understand that to serve within society as an educated and considerate human being, the neglect of other human beings based

In class, in your residence halls, at campus events, do everything you can to obtain the perspectives of others. We need to slow down.

Today as you set new goals for a new year, I’d like discuss four ways that you can cultivate your voices.

The first—perhaps surprising—is by listening.

We need to suspend judgment.

We need to open our minds. We need to actively invite one another to speak. We need to reflect upon what we have heard. And all of that listening will enable us to build upon one another’s ideas as we use our voices.

And that leads to the second way of cultivating your voice, which is by learning. You have the invitation here to invest yourself in discovery. To engage new material in multiple disciplines.

To learn how faculty think and how they constantly question. To tap the potential of those beautiful glowing brains you brought here.

This is what liberal arts education is all about—flourishing as humans by learning, choosing more freely because we know more—and for that reason we tend to deepen our voices more with our questions than with our declarations.

I’m a teacher, so I’ve seen this process many times, none more powerfully than when I taught college courses in prisons.

Sometimes we stereotype prisoners as sociopaths or deviants or animals or con men. But my students were grown-up men who were also fathers, spouses, and mentors. Locked in a block of rock and bearing the mark of Cain, they wanted to live, they wanted to express their humanity, they wanted to shape and steer their children and grandchildren from behind the Wall by using the language of learning.

These adult students loved reading classic literature. I remember one

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discussion, about King Lear, when a student named Slim talked about how his “so-called friends” disappeared after he was locked up and no longer had power. Another time, after reading Antigone, a student named Tony offered in one trenchant sentence a thesis that an entire field of Critical Legal Studies has since explored, when he remarked, “Law represents the interests of those who make law.”

I loved hearing these terrific ideas emerge, so to speak, “from the bottom,” and I saw how these social cast-offs could use their newly-honed voices to develop a

youth mentoring program and, much later, to rejoin their communities with dignity.

And their voices, in turn, shaped my own—giving me themes to study in graduate school, and ideas to share with you today. If those deadened men can come back to life with nothing more than a book, a pencil, a teacher, and a small windowless room, just think what you can create here with wide-open horizons.

Listening. Learning. And then there’s the third way to cultivate your voices: Which is, when you

speak, you must try to express not what is easy but what is very most difficult. I’m going to call this lurching, because even with constant effort, it only happens in fits and starts.

Your classmate Teresa Goc describes this process in her Mercy Scholarship essay on being a medical sign language interpreter: My career will enable me to be a voice; a branch between doctor and patient. I understand patients’ fear and anger as they cope with a complex illness. Within the community, suffering is an unfor-

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tunate, everyday plight, and it is ultimately through serving others with a merciful heart that suffering can be mitigated… Sharing my personal story makes me vulnerable and breaks down barriers, welcoming others to share their stories.

In the solitude of our thoughts, we circle around an idea, a fear, a feeling, a dream, a loss, a sense, a calling. We have our vocabularies, but the idea flits past our efforts to pin it down with the right words.

We try literal language. That fails.

We try imagery, but that’s not right either. How to know it? How to say it? Are we chasing the idea, or is it chasing us?

Such are the lurching moments when voices emerge, when we are working at the mind’s limits, against the imprecision of language, trying to get it right.

Which leads to the fourth element of how we develop our own voices, which I’ll call leading—leading in the creation of an inviting, respectful campus environment in which each person can feel trust that he or she belongs. How is this related to voice?

When we can trust that we are known and valued, when we believe that we are where we need to be, when we know that we can be ourselves and that we can change, then we can take the risk of sharing our ideas. But if we

don’t feel such trust it makes little sense to speak.

Sustaining a culture of trust is crucial work you undertake together—and the four pillars of Mount Aloysius—hospitality, service, justice, and mercy—are a magnificent resource.

All you have to do is live by those pillars, class by class, conversation by conversation, by building each other up, by authentically trying to understand, by responding generously and thoughtfully to each other and making your friendships a running conversation.

That will empower and inspire each of you to take the risk,

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somewhere, some time, of giving voice to a new idea or a halfformed thought or a deeply personal conviction. Some of those ideas may be incorrect, some unpopular, some controversial, some hard to say or to hear—and that’s good.

You are in college. If you can’t think out and talk out difficult ideas here, weigh and consider and revise and reject them—always respectfully—in this free space owned by no one campus group, no political party, no government, and no advertiser, then where can you do that? But you have to be leaders each day in sustaining this trusting space for each other.

It’s just as noble to empower others to think and speak as to think and speak ourselves. It’s just as worthy. Indeed, encouraging others to discover and express— and protecting their inalienable right to do so—is the very basis of civilization and, closer to home, the liberal arts tradition.

And that tradition matters more in 2015, I submit, than ever before.

I won’t make the full case for liberal arts education here, except by way of an imaginative exercise.

Let’s pretend that President Foley has wandered the earth with his favorite Mount Aloysius baseball cap, zip code by zip code, asking people to drop inside that perhaps dusty cap a slip of paper containing in one to three words what they think is the greatest game-changing challenge we face as a people.

Let’s imagine we’re holding that cap right here.

chain reaction; all it takes is one person at a time.

One slip says, “Global economic change. “ One says, “Global Warming.” One says, “Global Conflict.” Others say, “The Global Economy,” “Clash of Civilizations,” and “Human Rights.”

And that one person, even if acting alone, can begin to develop that catalyzing power of an authentic voice right here, at one of the finest learning communities in the country, by listening, learning, lurching, and leading. That’s how it’s always been done, from Mother Catherine McAuley to Dr. Anne Butler and from my students in prison to all of you here.

And what about challenges closer to home? I’m sure someone would write, “Racism in America.”

“Dysfunctional Politics.” “The American Economy.” “Vast Demographic Change.” “No More Privacy.”

We could debate what’s missing or how they rank, but it’s undeniable that the solutions will require welleducated citizens and leaders with the lifelong brainpower to think, write, research, analyze, compute, create, and communicate in multicultural work groups—people who have a voice, and who use it. There are no real answers that don’t have rigorous education and your voices at the core.

Education and the voices of the young? Is that really enough to make change in the face of melting polar caps or ancient religious hatreds or a runaway digital media culture? I like the way senior Jessica Bressler wrote about social change in her Mercy Scholarship essay: By bringing together the ideas of hospitality, service, justice, and mercy I realize that I can make a difference in somebody’s life. That person will then make a difference in another person’s life. It is like a

Thank you, Teresa, Jacob and Jessica, for allowing me to share your words. Thank you President Foley and members of the faculty and Board.

Thank you, Mount Aloysius College, for all the good you do as you cultivate the voices of the young, and best wishes for another high-impact academic year.

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HONORARY DEGREE Dr. Daniel R. Porterfield President, Franklin & Marshall College Dr. Porterfield, you were writing a record of exceptional service to public institutions and the nonprofit community in our nation long before you arrived at Franklin & Marshall College. Your work at the Department of Health and Human Services, your leadership at Georgetown University promoting community service and civic engagement, and working to expand access to higher education for lowerincome students, your support for Teach for America, your celebrated teaching on human rights and social justice via your chosen field of literature, and your work with prisoners and on behalf of refugees are wellknown and substantial.

Today, we honor you for the leadership that you have shown since taking over at Franklin & Marshall College. Your commitment to the recruitment, financing and graduation of lower income/high achieving students is absolutely remarkable—so remarkable, in fact, that you were one of just five college presidents to be profiled recently on national public television for the extraordinary work that you have done in this area in just half a decade at Franklin & Marshall. You have continued your commitment to opening higher education to all qualified students through your active support of access networks including the Posse Foundation, KIPP, Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, the College Advising Corps, and the Cristo Rey Network. For these efforts, you were recognized with the I Have a Dream Foundation’s 2014 Eugene M. Lang Lifetime Achievement Award for your “visionary efforts and devotion to ensuring that every child… has the opportunity to achieve greatness.”

You have quickly become a national leader in higher education, one of the few college presidents invited to both recent White House Summits on higher education. Your public commentaries in Forbes magazine and the Huffington Post are models of higher education leadership and must reading for all of us interested in improving retention and graduation rates, and in addressing real issues about access, affordability, and technology in the higher education world.

Perhaps what is most profound about your service is your commitment to both higher education and social justice—a dual commitment that is very consistent with the history and the work of the Sisters of Mercy.

Here at Mount Aloysius, we commend your work in the field and your leadership in the academy on issues like recruitment, retention, and graduation of lower income students—these are the building blocks of access and affordability.

We also applaud your personal approach to these very real issues and see a direct connection between your authentic commitment and the larger successes of Franklin and Marshall in addressing all these issues. For your vision and leadership in higher education, for your commitment to expanded access to a college degree for all aspiring students, and for your deep, passionate, and multifaceted promotion of social justice, Mount Aloysius College proudly confers upon you now the degree of Doctor of Social Justice, honoris causa, this Eighth day of September Two Thousand Fifteen.