Rice to Give 2018 Baccalaureate Address
Thursday, April 26, 2018
The University of the South has announced the Baccalaureate speaker and honorary degree recipients who will be honored during Commencement weekend, May 11–13, 2018. Condoleezza Rice, U.S. Secretary of State from 2005 to 2009 and a professor at Stanford University, will receive an honorary degree and will give the Baccalaureate address during the service Saturday, May 12.
Episcopal priest, author, and historian of American religion Randall Balmer will receive an honorary degree and will preach during the School of Theology Commencement service Friday, May 11. The Rt. Rev. David Mitchell Reed, bishop of the Diocese of West Texas, and Richard Heitzenrater, the William Kellon Quick Professor Emeritus of Church History and Wesley Studies at Duke Divinity School, will also receive honorary degrees during the service.
Honorary degrees will also be presented during the University Baccalaureate to Jamaican journalist, playwright, and director Barbara Goodison Gloudon, and David Lodge, C’79, Rhodes Scholar and now the Francis J. DiSalvo Director of Cornell University’s Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future.
Rice is currently the Denning Professor in Global Business and the Economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business; the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution; and a professor of political science at Stanford University. She is also a founding partner of RiceHadleyGates, LLC, an international strategic consulting firm.
From January 2005 to 2009, Rice served as the 66th Secretary of State, the second woman and first African American woman to hold the post. Rice also served as President George W. Bush’s National Security Advisor from January 2001 to 2005, the first woman to hold that position.