Mount Saint Vincent to Hold Annual Commencement Exercises May 19th

5/1/2007

Commencement will be held rain or shine Saturday morning under the tent on River Lawn. Graduating students must assemble by 9:30 a.m. in Hayes auditorium. Families and friends of graduating students are asked to be under the tent on River Lawn for the beginning of Commencement exercises at 10:30 a.m.

The University of Mount Saint Vincent will hold commencement exercises for the Class of 2007 Saturday, May 19, 2007 at 10:30 a.m. Undergraduate degrees will be awarded in the liberal arts, humanities, and sciences as well as graduate degrees in nursing and education. Nicholas Lemann, Henry R. Luce Professor and Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, will deliver the Commencement Address at the ceremony to be held on the Mount Saint Vincent campus located at 6301 Riverdale Avenue, Riverdale, NY. He will also receive an honorary doctorate of law.

Lemann became the dean in September 2003 at the end of a process of re-examination of the school’s mission conducted by a national task force convened by Lee C. Bollinger, Columbia’s President. Prior to his appointment, Lemann worked in various editorial roles for many national publications, including The Washington Post, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New Yorker.

Lemann has published five books, most recently Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (2006); The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (1999), which helped lead to a major reform of the SAT; and The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (1991), which won several book prizes. He has written widely for such publications as The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Slate, and American Heritage; worked in documentary television with Blackside, Inc., Frontline, the Discovery Channel, and the BBC; and lectured at many universities. Lemann continues to write for The New Yorker, and serves on the boards of directors of the Authors Guild, the Center for the Humanities at the City University of New York Graduate Center, and the Society of American Historians, and is a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities. He lives in Pelham, New York with his wife, Judith Shulevitz, a critic and author, and four children.