Commencement Newsmakers

Jon Meacham to share with class of 2010 what they “need to know”

by Hillary Leeb ’10

May 18, 2010

Commencement speaker Jon Meacham has much to say about the changing media landscape. “Journalism is kind of like baseball: if you win, great, but if you lose, you suck it up and get back up the next day to do it again,” he recently wrote.

Commencement speaker Jon Meacham knows something about charting new waters. The editor-in-chief of Newsweek magazine recently joined public-radio correspondent Alison Stewart to launch Need to Know, a new PBS-TV series replacing the venerable Bill Moyers Journal.

Meacham became editor of Newsweek in 2006, a time of growing media fragmentation and plummeting readership. Two weeks ago, the magazine’s owner, The Washington Post Company, announced plans to sell it. Yet Meacham continues to advocate for good journalism and general-interest publications.

“What we do here, which is taking serious people seriously and engaging them on important issues, means something to the country,” he wrote in the May 17 issue. “We represent an opportunity to focus the attention of a large number of people on a single topic. The moment of focus may be fleeting, but there are fewer and fewer common denominators left in American life, and the conversation is not going to be enriched by having fewer still.”

A prolific author, Meacham won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for his book American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House and a book of the year award from the Los Angeles Times for Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship.

Meacham graduated summa cum laude in English literature from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., and received an honorary doctor of humane letters from Yale University’s Berkeley Divinity School in 2005. He will receive an honorary doctor of journalism from Dickinson.

Joining Meacham on the dais to celebrate the class of 2010 will be Paula 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 (CPYB).

Bright star

Paula S. Apsell, senior executive producer of the PBS science series NOVA and director of the science unit at Boston-based WGBH, will receive an honorary doctor of science education. After graduating from Brandeis University, she found success with WGBH radio, where she developed the award-winning children’s drama series The Spider’s Web and became a radio news producer.

In 1975, Apsell joined NOVA, a new WGBH-produced television series that would set the national standard for science programming. She became executive producer in 1984. Her awards include the 1994 Bradford Washburn Award from the Museum of Science, Boston; the 1996 Carl Sagan Award by the Council of Scientific Society Presidents; and the 1999 American Physics Institute’s Andrew Gemant Award.

Posse genius

Deborah Bial, president of the Posse Foundation Inc., will receive an honorary doctor of education degree. Bial graduated in 1987 with a bachelor of arts degree from Brandeis University. She earned her master’s and doctorate of education from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education.

In 1989 she founded the Posse Foundation, which identifies promising young people from urban environments and offers opportunities for them to pursue higher education. Dickinson became a Posse partner college in 2001 and has graduated 82 Posse scholars from New York City and Los Angeles.

In 2007, Biel was named a MacArthur Fellow for her work as an education strategist. She also is a founding partner of the consulting company Firefly Education LLC.

Dance legend

Marcia Dale Weary, founding artistic director of Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet (CPYB) and one of the nation’s foremost instructors of classical ballet, will receive an honorary degree in performing arts. Weary studied with Thalia Mara and Arthur Mahoney at the School of Ballet Repertory in New York City. In 1955, she founded what was then the Marcia Dale Weary School of Dance in a renovated barn in Carlisle. Today, CPYB graduates are represented in nearly every major U.S. ballet company.

Weary has received numerous awards and distinctions, including 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.

Dickinson will host A Tribute to Marcia Dale Weary: Performance by Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet on May 22, at 4:30 p.m. in the Holland Union Building’s Mathers Theatre.