Three distinguished professionals receiving honorary degrees will accompany CBS correspondent Andy Rooney in addressing graduates at the May 22 Commencement.
Miami Herald publisher Alberto Ibarguen, Army medical researcher and doctor Philip Russell and Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Mildred Dresselhaus will each speak for a few minutes at the ceremony on the Ellipse.
"It's an interesting group of people," University President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg said in an interview last month. "Any one of those people you'd be happy to have dinner with."
In a change from past years, none of the four speakers are GW alumni, though Rooney's granddaughter is a graduating senior.
The only former GW student scheduled to take center stage at Commencement this year is Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who graduated from the GW School of Law in 1964 and will be the school's speaker this year.
Trachtenberg said having a Commencement speaker who is a GW graduate is "fortuitous, not an obligatory thing."
Alberto Ibarguen
Publisher of The Miami Herald and its Spanish counterpart, El Nuevo Herald, Alberto Ibarguen started as a newspaper executive in 1984, working at two papers in the Northeast.
"It's an extraordinary honor that I'm really very, very proud to receive," Ibarguen said in an interview with The Hatchet. "And to be perfectly honest to you, since (GW) rejected me from ... (its) law school, there was a great irony."
Ibarguen, who got his bachelor's from Wesleyan College in Middletown, Conn., said his liberal arts education was a very formative part of his life. It taught him how to think methodically, a talent he said helped him while doing humanitarian work in South America.
"I grew up in South Orange, New Jersey ... and the Peace Corps sends me to work in the Amazon Federal Territory, and what got me through was my great liberal education," he said. "To ask, to connect the dots, to always ask questions ... My success there was due to the education that I received."
Miami Herald publisher Alberto Ibarguen, Army medical researcher and doctor Philip Russell and Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Mildred Dresselhaus will each speak for a few minutes at the ceremony on the Ellipse.
"It's an interesting group of people," University President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg said in an interview last month. "Any one of those people you'd be happy to have dinner with."
In a change from past years, none of the four speakers are GW alumni, though Rooney's granddaughter is a graduating senior.
The only former GW student scheduled to take center stage at Commencement this year is Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who graduated from the GW School of Law in 1964 and will be the school's speaker this year.
Trachtenberg said having a Commencement speaker who is a GW graduate is "fortuitous, not an obligatory thing."
Alberto Ibarguen
Publisher of The Miami Herald and its Spanish counterpart, El Nuevo Herald, Alberto Ibarguen started as a newspaper executive in 1984, working at two papers in the Northeast.
"It's an extraordinary honor that I'm really very, very proud to receive," Ibarguen said in an interview with The Hatchet. "And to be perfectly honest to you, since (GW) rejected me from ... (its) law school, there was a great irony."
Ibarguen, who got his bachelor's from Wesleyan College in Middletown, Conn., said his liberal arts education was a very formative part of his life. It taught him how to think methodically, a talent he said helped him while doing humanitarian work in South America.
"I grew up in South Orange, New Jersey ... and the Peace Corps sends me to work in the Amazon Federal Territory, and what got me through was my great liberal education," he said. "To ask, to connect the dots, to always ask questions ... My success there was due to the education that I received."
