MMC Celebrates 61st Commencement

MMC Student Speaker Zachary Harrell '10 and Valedictorian Ming Yan Angela Poh '10.

At the baccalaureate, the College will present this year’s graduates with their hoods, which will be worn at commencement. Baccalaureate is an important part of the conferring of degrees for the entire MMC community and offers an opportunity for students to reflect on their experience at the College. Associate Professor of International Studies Ghassan Shabaneh, Ph.D., recipient of the 2010 Excellence in Teaching Award, will present remarks. Student achievement awards will also be presented. 

MMC’s commencement is the culmination of students’ undergraduate years. The ceremony will feature addresses by President Judson R. Shaver Ph.D., valedictorian Ming Yan Angela Poh ’10, a philosophy and religious studies major, and senior class speaker Zachary Harrell ’10, a theatre major. The Class of 2010 will wear environmentally friendly GreenWeaver™ attire from Oak Hall Cap & Gown. Made from 100 percent post-consumer plastic bottles, each GreenWeaver™ gown prevents approximately 23 bottles from being deposited in a landfill. 

At commencement, Marymount Manhattan College will present honorary degrees to U.S. historian Dr. John Hope Franklin (posthumously) and art historian Dr. Barbara Novak. 

Dr. John Hope Franklin (1915 – 2009) was a scholar in African-American history and a civil rights activist. He was a past president of Phi Beta Kappa, the Organization of American Historians, the American Historian Association and the Southern Historical Association. Franklin, the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at The University of Chicago, is best known for his work From Slavery to Freedom, first published in 1947, and continually updated. More than three million copies have been sold. In 1995, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. Marymount Manhattan presented Franklin (posthumously) with an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters. Dr. Franklin’s degree will be accepted by his son, John Whittington Franklin. 

An art historian widely respected for her critical studies of American landscape painting, Dr. Barbara Novak is also a watercolor painter of florals. She studied at The Art Students League of New York, Parsons School of Design and the Brooklyn Museum. Novak is one of America’s premier art historians and the author of the seminal books American Painting of the Nineteenth Century, Nature and Culture and Voyages of the Self. During her 40 years at Barnard College at Columbia University, Novak’s interdisciplinary scholarship changed the study of American art. She joined Barnard’s art history department in 1958 and retired in 1998 as the Helen Goodhart Altschul Professor Emerita. Marymount Manhattan College presented Novak with an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters. 

Marymount Manhattan College is an urban, independent, liberal arts college. The mission of the College is to educate a socially and economically diverse student body by fostering intellectual achievement and personal growth and by providing opportunities for career development.

Published: April 30, 2010