Commencement Honors

Three honorary degrees mark 2008 Commencement

May 13, 2008

Kwame Anthony Appiah will deliver the commencement address.

The 2008 Commencement ceremony on Sunday, May 18, at 10 a.m. will feature Kwame Anthony Appiah, Rockefeller University professor of philosophy at Princeton University with a cross-appointment at the University Center for Human Values. He is the Commencement speaker and recipient of an honorary doctor of philosophy degree.

Other honorary degree recipients are William M. Kelso and Kathleen Alana McGinty.

Commencement weekend officially opens with the baccalaureate service on Sat., May 17, at 3 p.m. Legend has it that baccalaureate services originated at Oxford University in 1432, when each graduate was required to deliver a sermon in Latin. Because many American universities began primarily to educate ministers, baccalaureate services continued to be a part of the Commencement tradition. Today, however, the services are usually nondenominational or interfaith celebrations of undergraduate accomplishment that feature speeches and musical performances.

Appiah was born in London and raised in Ghana. He earned a B.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from Cambridge University in England and has taught at Yale, Cornell, Duke and Harvard universities and lectured at many institutions in the United States, France, Germany, Ghana and South Africa.

His early philosophical work deals with probabilistic semantics and theories of meaning, but his more recent books have tackled the philosophical problems of race, racism, identity and moral theory. His interests include African and African-American intellectual history and literary studies, ethics, philosophy of mind and language, and the philosophical foundations of liberalism.

Appiah is the incoming chair of the Executive Board of the American Philosophical Association and chair of the Board of the American Council of Learned Societies. He is past president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association. He has published widely, Experiments in Ethics being his most recent work, and has won awards including the Arthur Ross Award of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Kelso, director of archaeology for the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities Jamestown Rediscovery Project, will receive an honorary doctor of archaeology degree. As one of America's foremost historical archaeologists concentrating on early American history, he has served as director of archaeology at Carter's Grove in Colonial Williamsburg, Va., and at Thomas Jefferson's homes, Monticello and Poplar Forest, in Virginia.

Kelso is responsible for the archeological excavations, begun in 1994, that unearthed the remains of the 1607 James Fort, thought by most people to have long been destroyed by river erosion. He directs a team of archaeologists, conservators and a curator who continue to explore this significant American landmark. Kelso is a widely published author and serves as adjunct professor at the College of William and Mary.

McGinty will receive an honorary doctor of public service degree. She is the first woman to head the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.

In 1996, she was named a Global Leader for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum. During her tenure with the U.S. Senate, McGinty worked to advance environmental issues by creating the White House Office on Environmental Policy and chairing the White House Council on Environmental Quality during Bill Clinton's presidency. During the 2000 general-election cycle, she acted as counselor to Vice President Al Gore's campaign and served as a senior policy adviser to the Democratic National Committee.

In the private sector, McGinty served as vice president for asset management at Natsource LLC, a financial-services firm specializing in energy transactions; director of Proton Energy Systems Inc., a leading fuel-cell infrastructure company; and adviser for a European venture capital firm interested in clean energy. She holds a degree in chemistry from Saint Joseph's University and a law degree from Columbia University. She has won awards including the Alternative Fuels Renewable Energies Council's Flame Award, the Wilderness Society's Ansel Adams Award and the League of Conservation Voters' Award for Environmental Leadership.

Baccalaureate and Commencement exercises will take place in front of Old West on the John Dickinson campus.