{"id":108,"date":"2023-03-30T20:03:39","date_gmt":"2023-03-31T00:03:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.golive.clarku.edu\/president\/2023\/03\/30\/clark-university-commencement-2023\/"},"modified":"2025-03-31T10:46:36","modified_gmt":"2025-03-31T14:46:36","slug":"clark-university-commencement-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/president\/2023\/03\/30\/clark-university-commencement-2023\/","title":{"rendered":"Clark University Commencement 2023"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"wp-block-post-date\"><time datetime=\"2023-03-30T20:03:39-04:00\">March 30, 2023<\/time><\/div>\n\n<p>To Members of the Clark Community,<\/p>\n<p>I am pleased to announce that Clark\u2019s 119th Commencement exercises will take place Sunday, May 21, on the Campus Green. Commencement is among our most meaningful and celebratory occasions each year, and I am looking forward to sharing the day with our Clark graduates, families, and friends.<\/p>\n<p>In addition to recognizing the wonderful achievements of graduating seniors, this year\u2019s ceremony will award honorary degrees to three extraordinarily accomplished individuals: a political scientist who has counseled U.S. presidents; a geographer who has championed the end of unjust incarcerations; and a legendary bass player whose transcendent performances have helped shape jazz music for more than six decades.<\/p>\n<p>A renowned scholar, political scientist, and keen observer of American society, <strong>Dr. Robert D. Putnam<\/strong> will receive an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree and will deliver our Commencement Address. Dr. Putnam is the Malkin Research Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, having retired from active teaching in May 2018. Across his long career, he has collaborated with U.S. and world leaders, taught thousands of students, and been a vocal and tireless advocate for building American communities that sustain and empower their members.\u00a0He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the British Academy, and past president of the American Political Science Association. In 2006 Dr. Putnam received the Skytte Prize, the world\u2019s highest accolade for a political scientist. In 2013, President Barack Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal \u2014 the nation\u2019s highest honor for contributions to the humanities \u2014 for \u201cdeepening our understanding of community in America,\u201d and in 2018 the International Political Science Association awarded him the Karl Deutsch Award for cross-disciplinary research.<\/p>\n<p>Dr. Putnam has written fifteen books, including the seminal \u201c<em>Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community<\/em><em>,\u201d<\/em> one of the most-cited social science works in the last half-century. His most recent bestseller,\u00a0\u201c<em>Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis<\/em>,\u201d chronicled the growing class gap among American youth. He has just completed a study of broad 20th-century American economic, social, political, and cultural trends, entitled \u201cThe Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>At Harvard, he has served as Dean of the Kennedy School, Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. He co-founded the Saguaro Seminar, bringing together leading thinkers and practitioners (including President Obama) to develop actionable ideas for civic renewal. His counsel has been sought by national and grassroots leaders on both sides of the aisle and both sides of the Atlantic, including Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama, and British Prime Ministers Tony Blair and David Cameron.<\/p>\n<p>Dr. Putnam will be introduced at Commencement by Professor Rob Boatright of the Department of Political Science.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Ruth Wilson Gilmore<\/strong> is a professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, and of American Studies, and is the director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. She is a renowned pioneer in the discipline of carceral geography \u2014 the study of the forces and institutions that have come to define modern incarceration. Dr. Gilmore has been a leading scholar and speaker on topics including prisons, decarceration, racial capitalism, oppositional movements, state-making, and more. She is a co-founder of many grassroots organizations, including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network. Dr. Gilmore is the author of the prize-winning \u201cGolden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California,\u201d and has written in multiple venues on abolition geography and racial capitalism.<\/p>\n<p>Dr. Gilmore has lectured in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. Her honors include the American Studies Association Angela Y. Davis Award for Public Scholarship (2012); the Association of American Geographers Harold Rose Award for Anti-Racist Research and Practice (2014); the SUNY-Purchase College Eugene V. Grant Distinguished Scholar Prize for Social and Environmental Justice (2015\u201316); the American Studies Association Richard A Yarborough Mentorship Award (2017); and the Association of American Geographers Lifetime Achievement Award (2020). Most recently (along with Angela Y. Davis and Mike Davis), she was named winner of the 2020 Lannan Foundation Lifetime Cultural Freedom Prize. She also serves on the Executive Committee of the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean. We are delighted to welcome Dr. Gilmore to campus and to award her an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree.<\/p>\n<p>Dr. Gilmore will be introduced at Commencement by Professor James McCarthy, Director of the Graduate School of Geography.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Ronald Carter,<\/strong>\u00a0Grammy-winning musician and one of the most prolific and influential bassists in jazz history, will receive an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree. Over the course of his six-decade career, Mr. Carter has recorded more than 2,000 records and played with jazz giants \u2014 from Thelonius Monk to Miles Davis. He was a member of the second\u00a0Miles Davis Quintet\u00a0in the mid-1960s, and later was a mainstay of\u00a0CTI Records, making albums under his own name and appearing on many of the label\u2019s records with a diverse range of other musicians. In 1987, Mr. Carter won a Grammy for an instrumental composition for the film \u201cRound Midnight<em>,\u201d <\/em>and in 1994 won another\u00a0Grammy\u00a0for Best Jazz Instrumental Group for a tribute album to Miles Davis.\u00a0He performed on the\u00a0Red Hot Organization\u2019s compilation album,\u00a0\u201cStolen Moments: Red Hot + Cool,\u201d which was heralded as Album of the Year by\u00a0<em>TIME<\/em> magazine.\u00a0He performed at Clark in 2014.<\/p>\n<p>Mr. Carter is a Distinguished\u00a0Professor Emeritus\u00a0in the music department of\u00a0City College of New York, having taught there for 20 years. He joined the faculty of the\u00a0Juilliard School\u00a0in New York City in 2008, teaching bass in the school\u2019s Jazz Studies program. In 2010, he was honored with France\u2019s premier cultural award, the medallion and title of Commander of the\u00a0Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He was elected to the\u00a0DownBeat\u00a0Jazz Hall of Fame in 2012.<\/p>\n<p>Mr. Carter will be introduced at Commencement by Professor Matt Malsky, the Tina Sweeney, M.A. \u201949 Professor of Music in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts.<\/p>\n<p>I look forward to honoring these individuals alongside our amazing graduating students and express the hope that many members of our community will join in the festivities.<\/p>\n<p>Sincerely,<\/p>\n<p>David B. Fithian \u201987<br \/>\nPresident<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>To Members of the Clark Community, I am pleased to announce that Clark\u2019s 119th Commencement exercises will take place Sunday, May 21, on the Campus Green. Commencement is among our most meaningful and celebratory occasions each year, and I am looking forward to sharing the day with our Clark graduates, families, and friends. In addition [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v27.2 (Yoast SEO v27.3) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Clark University Commencement 2023 | Office of the President | Clark University<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/president\/2023\/03\/30\/clark-university-commencement-2023\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Clark University Commencement 2023\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"To Members of the Clark Community, I am pleased to announce that Clark\u2019s 119th Commencement exercises will take place Sunday, May 21, on the Campus Green. 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