Academic Convocation – August 30, 2023
The Academic Convocation was held on Wednesday, August 30, 2023, at 3 p.m. in the Peterson Recreation Center.
Academic Convocation, which marks the official opening of the academic year, welcomed new members of our community – students in the Class of 2027, transfer students, and new faculty members. On Convocation day, the College follows an abbreviated class schedule.
Keynote Speaker
Andrew Delbanco
Andrew Delbanco is Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia University and president of the Teagle Foundation. He earned his A.B., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University.
Professor Delbanco served as president of the Society of American Historians for 2021-2022. His most recent book, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul (2018), a New York Times notable book, was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf prize for “books that have made important contributions to our understanding of racism and human diversity,” the Lionel Trilling Award, and the Mark Lynton History Prize, sponsored by the Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, for a work “of history, on any subject, that best combines intellectual or scholarly distinction with felicity of expression.”
Among Professor Delbanco’ other books, Melville: His World and Work (Knopf, 2005) was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in biography. College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be (Princeton University Press, 2012), has been translated into several languages, and will be published in a second edition in 2023. His essays appear in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, and other periodicals, on topics ranging from American literature and history to contemporary issues in higher education.
Andrew Delbanco, Ph.D. has been a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2001. That same year he was named “America’s Best Social Critic” by Time Magazine. In 2006 he was honored with the Great Teacher Award by the Society of Columbia Graduates, and in 2013 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society. He holds honorary degrees from Ursinus College, Occidental College, and Marlboro College.
In 2012, he was awarded a National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama. In 2022 he was invited by the National Endowment for the Humanities to deliver the Jefferson Lecture, “the highest honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.”
