106th Commencement Slated for Saturday, May 19

Some 1,318 graduates will be awarded degrees at Ithaca College’s 106th Commencement on Saturday, May 19, with author and journalist Gail Sheehy delivering the main address. Also speaking to the graduating seniors and their guests will be Ithaca College president Peggy R. Williams, chairman of the board of trustees Herman E. Muller Jr., and senior class president Meg Booze.

The academic procession will form at 9:00 a.m., with the ceremony at Butterfield Stadium to begin at 10:00 a.m., an hour earlier than in previous years. Guests are encouraged to be seated by 9:15 a.m.

Sheehy is best known for her 1976 book, Passages, which remained on the New York Times best-seller list for more than three years and was named in a Library of Congress survey as one of the 10 most influential books of our time. She later revisited the stages of adulthood in such best-sellers as New Passages: Mapping Your Life across Time (1995) and Understanding Men’s Passages: Discovering the New Map of Men’s Lives (1998). As a political journalist and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, Sheehy has written character studies of such leaders as George W. Bush, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Jesse Jackson. Her 1999 biography, Hillary’s Choice, explored the life of one of the nation’s most intriguing women.

Among other honors, Sheehy has won the National Magazine Award, Washington Journalism Review Award as best magazine writer in America, Headliner Award from the Association for Women in Communications, and Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Race Relations. She is a six-time recipient of the New York News-women’s Club Front Page Award for distinguished journalism.