Newsweek Editor to Deliver Commencement Address

Jon Meacham also will receive an honorary degree in journalism.

May 14, 2010

Jon Meacham, editor of Newsweek magazine and Pulitzer Prize-winning author will deliver Dickinson College’s commencement address on Sunday, May 23. Meacham won the Pulitzer Prize last year for his 2008 book, “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House.” Photo by Damien Donck

Jon Meacham, editor of Newsweek magazine and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, will deliver Dickinson College’s commencement address on Sunday, May 23. Commencement is scheduled for 10 a.m. in front of the Old West administration building off West High Street between West and North College streets.

Meacham will receive an honorary degree in journalism. Honorary degrees also will be awarded to Paula S. Apsell, senior executive producer of the science television series NOVA; Deborah Bial, president and founder of Posse Foundation Inc.; and Marcia Dale Weary, founder and artistic director of the Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet.

Jon Meacham

Meacham joined Newsweek as a writer in 1995, became national affairs editor later that year, was named managing editor in 1998 and was appointed editor of the magazine in 2006.

Meacham won the Pulitzer Prize last year for his 2008 book, “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House.” He also wrote two other New York Times bestsellers—“American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation”and“Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship,” about the wartime relationship between Roosevelt and Churchill. Named a book of the year by The Los Angeles Times, “Franklin and Winston” won The Churchill Centre’s 2005 Emery Reves Award for the best book of the year on Winston Churchill and the William H. Colby Military Writers’ Symposium’s Book of the Year Award.

Meacham edited “Voices in Our Blood: America’s Best on the Civil Rights Movement,” a collection of distinguished nonfiction about the mid-century struggle against Jim Crow. He is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, and has written for The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Washington Post Book WorldandThe Los Angeles Times Book Review. He has served as a judge for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and received the Hubert H. Humphrey First Amendment Medal from the Anti-Defamation League. Last year, he was elected to the Society of American Historians.

Meacham serves on the Vestry of Trinity Church Wall Street, the Leadership Council of the Harvard Divinity School, the board of trustees of the Churchill Centre and the National Advisory Group of Washington National Cathedral. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and is a former member of the board of trustees and of the board of regents of the University of the South, in Sewanee, Tenn.

Meacham earned a degree in English literature from the University of the South; he graduated summa cum laude and was salutatorian.

Paula S. Apsell

Apsell, senior executive producer of the television series NOVA and director of the Boston-based WGBH Science Unit, will receive an honorary degree in science education.

In addition to her work at NOVA—the highest rated science series on television and the most watched documentary series on public television—Apsell has overseen production of many award-winning WGBH Science Unit specials, including: “A Science Odyssey,” “Secrets of Lost Empires,” “Building Big,” and the eight-part miniseries, “Evolution.”

Apsell led NOVA’s diversification into other media, including its award-winning Web site. She oversaw the production of “Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure,” “To the Limit,” “Stormchasers,” “Island of the Sharks,” and “Special Effects,” the first IMAX film nominated for an Academy Award.

After graduating from Brandeis University, Apsell began her career in radio broadcasting at WGBH in Boston, where she developed the award-winning children’s drama series “The Spider’s Web” and became a news producer. From there she moved on to television and science. In 1975, she joined NOVA, then a fledgling WGBH-produced national series that would go on to set the standard for science programming on television.

Apsell produced several critically acclaimed NOVA episodes before joining Dr. Timothy Johnson at WCVB, an ABC affiliate in Boston, as senior producer for medical programming. In 1983, she spent a year studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a Knight Fellow, which was then named the Vannevar Bush Fellowship in the Public Understanding of Science. She returned to WGBH in 1984 to become executive producer of NOVA, guiding the series into today's highly competitive, multi-media environment.

Apsell received 1994 Bradford Washburn Award from the Museum of Science in Boston; the 1996 Carl Sagan Award from the Council of Scientific Society Presidents; and, in 1999, the American Physics Institute’s Andrew Gemant Award. She has served on the boards of several organizations, including the Earthwatch Institute, Hebrew College in Brookline, Mass., and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. She is a trustee of the International Documentary Association.

Deborah Bial

Bial, president and founder of Posse Foundation Inc., will receive an honorary degree in education.

Early in her career, Bial recognized the challenges of college access for underrepresented populations. Traditional admissions metrics such as grade point average, class rank, and entrance exam scores have long been recognized as inadequate predictors of success for some undergraduates. Responding to this challenge, Bial founded the Posse Foundation in 1989 and, in doing so, has offered an alternative model for identifying promising young people from less advantaged, urban environments and has opened opportunities for these students to pursue higher education.

The Posse Foundation serves as a youth leadership development and college scholarship organization that sends teams of students from diverse backgrounds to selective colleges and universities. Working with public high schools and other community organizations, Bial evaluates potential candidates using a rigorous assessment process based on qualities such as leadership, teamwork, communication skills, and motivation – qualities that are as critical to successful navigation of undergraduate education as academic track records. The most promising students are invited to join a “posse,” a small group that participates in an eight-month, pre-collegiate training program that builds individual and team skills and serves as an essential social support system once students arrive at college. By demonstrating the importance of less-recognized skills in educational achievement, Bial continues to open doors for thousands of students and to reframe college admissions into a more successful and inclusive process. Today, 90 percent of “posse” students graduate, a rate significantly higher than the national average.

In recognition of her work as an education strategist, Bial was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2007 through the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. She also is founding partner of the consulting company Firefly Education, LLC.

Bial earned a bachelor of arts degree from Brandeis University. She earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in education from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education.

 Marcia Dale Weary

Weary, founder and artistic director of the Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet (CPYB), will receive an honorary degree in performing arts.

Weary is widely regarded as a legend among teachers of classical ballet. She began her journey 55 years ago when she founded the Marcia Dale Weary School of Dance in a renovated barn at the end of a country lane in Carlisle after her own studies with Thalia Mara and Arthur Mahoney at the School of Ballet Repertory in New York City. Today, the CPYB is universally admired. Nearly every major U.S. ballet company has hired CPYB graduates, including Tina LeBlanc, Ethan Stiefel, Vanessa Zahorian, Kristin Long, Ashley Bouder, Adam Hendrickson, Abi and Jonathan Stafford, and Tara and Zachary Hench.

The New York Times dance critic Joseph Carman said, “London, Paris, St. Petersburg and New York are well known for their first-rate ballet academies, training many of the best dancers in the classical form. Add to that list Carlisle… Marcia Dale Weary and her Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet have produced dancers well known in the ballet world.”

Weary was featured on the cover of the January 2004 issue of Dance Teacher. In the article, titled “Marcia’s Magic,” Weary is described as someone who “produces students who have the whole package—attention to detail, early technical development and a broad socialization into the arts. It seems a given that companies nationwide will continue to be stacked with her dancers for many years to come.”

In addition to acclaim in leading newspapers and magazines, Weary and the CPYB have been featured in the award-winning documentary film presented on national public television, “Children with a Dream.”

Weary received the 1992 Distinguished Service to the Arts Award for Central Pennsylvania, the 2000 Carlisle Regional Arts Award and the 2007 Pennsylvania Governor’s Award for the Arts for Outstanding Leadership and Service to Youth. She is a guest teacher at the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University.

For more information about Commencement 2010.