For the majority of Longwood University students, it is simply the end of the year. However, for 750 undergraduate students and 100 graduate students, the situation is much more novel. The end of this year will herald the accomplishment of a college career and the acquisition of a degree.
This year, there will be a major change. The graduate and undergraduate ceremonies will be held separately with the graduate ceremony held on Friday, May 10 at 7 p.m. in Jarman Auditorium and the undergraduate on Saturday, May 11 at 9:30 a.m.
The Friday ceremony for graduates will be preceded by a reception for the soon-to-be Master’s recipients and their families in Blackwell Hall from 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 pm. After this, the line-up will collect at the ground floor of Lancaster Hall. The speaker for the event will be
Interim President Marge Connelly.
The Saturday ceremony will begin with a line-up of graduating students at Willett Hall at 8:00 a.m. After the processional at 9 a.m., the undergraduate students will be ushered into seats on Wheeler Mall. The speaker for the event will be Ransford Doherty, a ’97 Longwood University alumnus.
The dress code for the events for graduating students will be that men dress in dark shoes and trousers and that women dress in dark shoes and skirts not longer than their gown.
As usual, the undergraduate students will turn their tassels from right to left, while the graduate students will keep their tassels on the left.
Diane Easter, special assistant to the president and director of Events and Ceremonies, said, “I do around 25 events a year, and that includes Convocation and Commencement. All the major faculty and staff events come out of this office.”
While Connelly is a well0known and perfectly understood speaker for the
graduate ceremony, Doherty is a bit of an exciting surprise for all attendees.
Explaining the selection for him, Easter said, “They said it doesn’t have to be somebody where everybody recognizes their name, doesn’t have to be somebody very famous, but someone inspiring that we can relate to. They’d had that sort of speaker for convocation, so they were looking for the same type for commencement.”
She said, “We looked at who our most accomplished alumni were, and Ransford kind of rose to the top just because he’s a successful actor and substitute teaches at local schools in his spare time. He tells his students all the time about Longwood. So, he’s taken his degree, become successful and is still showing that citizen leader mindset.”
Explained on the short bio provided by the Commencement page on Longwood.edu, Doherty isa Washington D.C. native who received a B.F.A from Longwood College in Theatre Performance. His acting career has landed recurring roles on network television shows, including, “The Closer,” “Body of Proof” and “Joan of Arcadia.”
He has also had numerous appearances on “The Office,” “Bones,” “Girlfriends” and “ER.” Doherty works as a substitute teacher in LA-area schools and is an advocate of arts education. t
Explaining the reason for separating graduate and undergraduate ceremonies into a two-day event, Easter said, “The Graduate College for a long time has asked for and needed
something different for its students. We have to remember that their students have families or they work.”
Easter added, “They [graduate students] are kind of at a different place than our undergraduates are, and so they were going to go ahead and do a hooding ceremony on Friday and participate on Saturday as they have done in the past. So, it seemed as a natural tie in that since you are going to have this hooding on Friday and all the families are going to be there [and] all the dignitaries are going to be there, why don’t we make that their commencement ceremony?”
Easter further stated, “It seemed like the perfect fit. It’s been very widely accepted across campus as a good thing to do. Everyone’s been very enthusiastic about participating.“
Easter announced another smaller change to proceedings, saying, “The only other change people might see if they have been to recent commencements is that for the last couple years ROTC commissions have been handled through a separate ceremony. This year, we have added it back in because there are only two.”
Of the two is Donald Knight, who served as president of the Student
Government Association during the 2013-2014 school year.
With all of this in mind, the combined number of ceremony attendees will be lower than the previous years’ numbers that gravitated to around 900 students. The slightly smaller size of the ceremony should not decrease its pomp as the vaunted gate waits for Longwood University’s own not-so-wayward sons and daughters.
