Commencement Speaker Announced

President of Institute of International Education to give address

Allan Goodman, president and CEO of the Institute of International Education (IIE), will deliver the commencement address at Dickinson College on May 22. Goodman replaces Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, who is unable to deliver the address due to his commitments as commander of the U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Goodman was already scheduled to receive an honorary degree at commencement.  Gen. Petraeus said he hopes to return to Dickinson to deliver the commencement address in the future.

Goodman is the sixth president of the International IIE, the leading nonprofit organization in the field of international educational exchange and development training. IIE administers the Fulbright program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, and 200 other corporate, government and privately-sponsored programs. Previously, he was executive dean of the School of Foreign Service and professor at Georgetown University. He is the author of books on international affairs published by Harvard, Princeton and Yale University presses and “Diversity in Governance,” published by the American Council on Education.

Goodman also served as presidential briefing coordinator for the director of Central Intelligence and as special assistant to the director of the National Foreign Assessment Center in the Carter Administration. He was the first American professor to lecture at the Foreign Affairs College of Beijing.

Goodman also helped create the first U.S. academic exchange program with the Moscow Diplomatic Academy for the Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs and developed the diplomatic training program of the Foreign Ministry of Vietnam.  Goodman also has served as a consultant to Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the United States Information Agency and IBM. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Goodman has a Ph.D. in government from Harvard, a master’s degree from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University. He holds honorary degrees from Toyota and Chatham Universities, Mount Ida, Ramapo, and Middlebury colleges, and The State University of New York. He has received awards from Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, and Tufts universities, the University of South Florida, and the French Légion d’honneur.

Other scheduled honorary degree recipients at commencement are: Harriet M. Fulbright, president of the J. William & Harriet Fulbright Center, and Herta Müller, the 2009 Nobel Prize recipient for Literature. Commencement is scheduled for Sunday, May 22.

Fulbright is president of the J. William & Harriet Fulbright Center, a nonprofit organization that serves to advance the work of her late husband, Senator J. William Fulbright, and to continue her own lifework.  She served as an unofficial ambassador for the 50th anniversary of the Fulbright program and in that capacity traveled to countries on five continents and throughout the United States to speak about the importance of international educational exchange and the pivotal role played by the Fulbright Program.

Müller, the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature recipient, is an honorary fellow of the college and a former Dickinson writer-in-residence. Müller came to Dickinson as a writer-in-residence in spring 1996 and was awarded an honorary fellowship the following year. She remains a friend of the college and stays in contact with members of the German faculty. She has written many German-language novels and short stories depicting the hypocrisy and oppression of the post-World War II Romania, where she was born.

When Dickinson announced in December that Gen. Petraeus had accepted an invitation to be the commencement speaker, it included the caveat that the speech would take place only if world conditions permitted. In a Feb. 10 letter to Dickinson President William G. Durden, Gen. Petraeus explained that he would not be able to able to attend due to his new role in charge of the NATO International Security Assistance Force and United States Forces in Afghanistan.

Published June 17, 2013