Commencement Speaker: Anna Quindlen

It's official! Anna Quindlen P’07 will be the commencement address speaker!

From an All-Student Email entitled "Wesleyan Honorary Degree Recipients":

It is with great pleasure that I announce to the Wesleyan community that an award-winning best-selling author, a pioneering entrepreneur and philanthropist and two dedicated members of the Middletown community will be the honorary degree recipients at the 177th Wesleyan Commencement on May 24, 2009.

Anna Quindlen P’07, who will also give the Commencement Address, is a novelist, a journalist, and a champion of higher education. She currently writes the “Last Word” column on the back page of Newsweek and serves as chair of the board of Barnard College, where she received a degree in English literature.
(AP Photo)

Ms. Quindlen has published five novels, all of them bestsellers. Her most recent, Rise and Shine, debuted at number one on The New York Times bestseller list. She has also published many nonfiction books, including Thinking Out Loud, How Reading Changed My Life, and A Short Guide to a Happy Life, which has sold more than a million copies.

Ms. Quindlen spent most of her journalism career at The New York Times, where she wrote three columns, “About New York,” “Life in the 30s,” and “Public and Private.” She won the Pulitzer Prize for her work on the paper's OpEd page. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and holds honorary degrees from more than a dozen colleges and universities.

Ms. Quindlen is the mother of three children. Her son Christopher Krovatin, also a novelist, graduated from Wesleyan in 2007.

[Via Michael Roth '78]

Student Commencement Speaker Reconsidered

It's usually taken for granted that the senior class president will give a speech at graduation each year, but the WSA is apparently entertaining a motion this week to turn over selection of a student speaker to a committee composed of senior class officers, who would choose from a pool of applicants and be barred from applying themselves.

Which seems kind of arbitrary. If someone's being chosen to represent an entire graduating class, they should be chosen by more students in the class than just a few WSA members.

But I'm surprised that the article and Wespeaks in the Argus about this issue neglect to mention the likely reason that this resolution was even put forward - last year's senior class president gave a speech to mixed reactions, and it was kind of embarrassing to have someone like Barack Obama (not to mention everyone else present) witness the Wesleyan student body represented by one somewhat erratic speaker.

Which isn't to say that would be the case this year - by at least several accounts, 2009's class president Ravid Chowdhury is deserving of the privilege, and it would be unfair to take it away when he was ostensibly elected by seniors last year with the knowledge that he'd be speaking at graduation.

But the Argus doesn't have a bad idea in proposing that in addition to the class president, who is elected mainly for being a good organizer if not necessarily a good speech-maker, another student be chosen to address the class based solely on their ability to deliver a great speech.

In any case, the WSA votes on the issue this weekend. You can watch the 2008 student commencement address here (cut ahead to 9:40 for it), or read the full transcript.