Skidmore Prepares for 91st Commencement

Approximately 558 members of the Class of 2002 will receive their bachelor’s degrees at Skidmore’s 91st commencement ceremony, scheduled to begin at 1 p.m. Sunday, May 19, at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center.

Four people will receive honorary doctoral degrees at the ceremony: award-winning documentary filmmaker Ken Burns; Arline Fisch, Skidmore Class of ’52, a noted artist who specializes in jewelry making; Harold Hongju Koh, professor of international law at Yale Law School; and Sara Lubin Schupf, Skidmore Class of ’62, a trustee of the College. Each degree recipient will deliver remarks to the graduates and their guests. As is tradition at Skidmore, the keynote commencement address will be given by a faculty member selected by the graduating class. This year’s selection is Professor of French John Anzalone.

The ceremony also will feature remarks by Skidmore President Jamienne S. Studley; Joan Layng Dayton, Skidmore Class of ’63, chair of the College’s board of trustees; and Reed Fischer, president of the Class of ’02.

Other members of the Class of ’02 to be honored at the ceremony include approximately 40 members of the University Without Walls, who will receive their bachelor’s degrees, and seven candidates for the master of arts in liberal studies degree.

For more than 25 years, Ken Burns has produced popular, comprehensive documentary films that explore American history and culture. The most recent of these, Mark Twain, aired in January on the PBS network. Jazz is the third in Burns’s trilogy of epic documentaries, which began with The Civil War and continued with Baseball.

His documentary Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio, a look at the impact of radio on the 20th century, was based on a book written by Thomas S.W. Lewis, Quadracci Professor of Social Responsibility and professor of English at Skidmore. Lewis and Burns first collaborated on the 1981 film Brooklyn Bridge, which was nominated for an Academy Award. The duo also collaborated on the 1985 documentary The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God.

Arline Fisch is a crafter of metal and a jewelry designer whose works have won international acclaim. Now a professor emerita at San Diego State University, Fisch taught for more than 40 years, passing her craft along to younger generations.

Fisch’s specialty is metal, and her works are considered as much art as adornment. Her distinctive creations combine metal and textile technologies, resulting in creations that are woven, braided, knitted, or crocheted metal. The structured forms are also soft and pliable -- dramatic in scale yet comfortable to the wearer.

She is represented in a number of prestigious permanent collections, including the American Craft Museum in New York City; the National Museum of Art in Kyoto, Japan; the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; and the Vatican Museum in Rome. A multiple Fulbright Fellowship winner, she earned a master’s degree in art at the University of Illinois-Urbana.

Harold Hongju Koh is a leading authority on international law and human rights. A member of the Yale Law School faculty since 1985, he left Yale briefly in 1998 to serve as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor -- the department’s chief human rights officer. He has received a number of awards for his human rights work, such as his representation of Haitian and Cuban refugees before the U.S. Supreme Court. He returned to Yale last year and is currently the Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law.

Koh has written more than 70 articles and several books, including The National Security Constitution: Sharing Power After the Iran-Contra Affair (1990, Yale University Press), which won the American Political Science Association’s award as the best book on the American presidency.

A graduate of Harvard, Oxford, and Harvard Law School, Koh was named a Marshall Scholar at Oxford in 1977 and was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000.

Sara Lubin Schupf has long demonstrated a commitment to science, to women, and to education through her work on behalf of Skidmore and a number of other organizations. A graduate of the Emma Willard School in Troy, N.Y., and Skidmore, Schupf has served both as a trustee and in a number of other volunteer roles. She is a former president and former chair of the American Committee of the Weizmann Institute of Science, a multidisciplinary center devoted to research and teaching in the natural sciences, located in Rehovot, Israel. In 1997, the organization presented Schupf with its Chaim Weizmann Philanthropic Leadership Award for her dedication and singular commitment to the American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science.

One of Schupf’s major interests is increasing the role of women in the sciences. Toward this goal, she has worked in leadership positions at a number of organizations: as a trustee of the New York Academy of Science and the New York Hall of Science, and as a member of the President’s Circle of the National Academy of Science. She was recently elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the nation’s preeminent scholarly society and research institution. At Skidmore, where she has been a trustee since 1993, Schupf and her family endowed the Charles Lubin Family Professorship for Women in Science, an endowed chair currently held by astrophysicist Dr. Mary Crone.

Keynote speaker John Anzalone was this year named the first recipient of Skidmore’s Ralph A. Ciancio Award for Excellence in Teaching. (The award is named in honor of Ciancio, who retired in 2001 after a distinguished career as a professor of English at Skidmore.)

A Skidmore faculty member since 1985, Anzalone is known for an animated teaching style that brings some of the most difficult material to life for his students. His methods and style have had a remarkable impact, as demonstrated by this observation from one of Anzalone’s students: “He changes the way you think about your work. Once you’ve had the experience of learning like this, you can’t go back.”

Anzalone earned a B.A. degree in French language and literature at the University of Massachusetts and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees, also in French language and literature, at Tufts University.



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