Skidmore's 97th Commencement set for May 17 at SPAC

Ruth Johnson Colvin

Approximately 600 members of the Class of 2008 will receive bachelor's degrees at Skidmore's 97th commencement exercises on Saturday, May 17. The ceremony, open to the public, will begin at 11 a.m. at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center.

Thirty-seven students in the College's University Without Walls also will receive bachelor's degrees. In addition, the College will award 12 master of arts in liberal studies degrees.

Skidmore will award honorary doctoral degrees to three distinguished guests: Rita R. Colwell, distinguished professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, and at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health; Ruth Johnson Colvin, founder of Literacy Volunteers of America; and Bill T. Jones, Tony Award-winning choreographer. Each degree recipient will address the audience.

Bill T. Jones

Following tradition, the keynote commencement address will be given by a faculty member?this year, Associate Professor of English Barbara Black?chosen by the graduating class. President Philip A. Glotzbach will address the graduates and their guests, as will Katherine Caulfield, president of the Class of 2008, and Suzanne Corbet Thomas, a 1962 Skidmore graduate who chairs the College's Board of Trustees.

Keynote speaker Black is a specialist in Victorian literature and culture who joined the Skidmore faculty in 1991. She earned a bachelor's degree magna cum laude at Bryn Mawr College and obtained master's and doctoral degrees at the University of Virginia. Black is the author of a book titled On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums (2002, UP of University of Virginia) and is currently working on A Room of His Own, a cultural and literary analysis of Victorian London's gentlemen's clubs.

Rita R. Colwell

Rita R. Colwell is an environmental microbiologist who headed the National Science Foundation from 1998 to 2004. She is currently developing an international network to address emerging infectious diseases and water issues, including safe drinking water for both the developed and developing world. Colwell was at Skidmore earlier this academic year to lecture on "Global Climate, the Oceans and Human Health: The Cholera Paradigm."

Ruth Johnson Colvin founded Literacy Volunteers of America in 1962 after learning that there were more than 11,000 functionally illiterate people in her home city of Syracuse, N.Y. The organization has since merged with Laubach Literacy International to become ProLiteracy Worldwide, with more than 1,200 affiliates across the U.S., and more than 50 international partners.

Bill T. Jones is a MacArthur Foundation Award recipient who founded the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. Acclaimed for its original dance movement and theatrical flair, the 10-member company has been in residence at Skidmore three times since 1992. Many of Jones's best-known works employ spoken text and stage spectacle as well as dance movement to explore such powerful issues as race, political and moral concerns, and life and death.