With help from students’ suggestions, commencement speaker committees are currently working on securing individuals for this year’s ceremony and 2015.

The annual commencement speaker selection process has begun for the 2015 ceremony. The 2014 commencement has been going on since last year, but a name has not yet been released.

For current juniors, the selection process has started.

Community members have the opportunity to suggest a speaker online, said Josie Torrillo, the assistant director of the Office of Special Events.  The names submitted online are then given to a student committee, which will submit them to Chancellor Kent Syverud, she said.

Syverud will make a final decision and start contacting potential speakers. The student committee includes two seniors to represent the graduating class, individual student representatives from each college and student representatives from the Board of Trustees, according to the Syracuse University commencement website.

People can submit nominations for speaker suggestions through the website, based on certain characteristics such as the nature of the speaker’s achievements, the lessons that the speaker can offer to students and “the honor brought to SU should the candidate accept the nomination.”

All commencement speakers also receive honorary degrees from the university, and therefore all nominees must be eligible for an honorary degree.  The University Senate Committee on Honorary Degrees is responsible for conferring these degrees.

For the speaker, Syverud passes a list of possible commencement speakers to the committee. The Honorary Degree Committee would give the names selected to University Senate, according to its website. The committee also confers degrees to others besides the commencement speaker based on nominations from the committee.

Chris Day, chair of the Honorary Degree Committee, said the committee’s selection and nomination process is very secretive.  He added that people that receive nominations often have some connection with SU.

“(These are) people who are very prominent, done a great deal of things,” Day said.

Torrillo said it is important for the process to start this early. Many of the potential speakers are very busy and need to be given a lot of advance notice, she added.

“Its important to get the process started earlier to get the names of who students want,” Torrillo said.

Although students have the opportunity to submit names early, not all of them choose to do so. Anthony Rini, a junior international relations major, said he probably will not fill out the form.

“The form isn’t like a multiple choice poll,” Rini said. “The odds of people coalescing on one person are pretty small so the odds of me getting what I wanted are pretty minimal.”

Page Garbee, a junior transfer student, said she submitted author John Green’s name to the online form.

“Right now I’m facing the fact that I’m graduating next year and I have no idea what I’m going to do,” Garbee said.  “I feel like in some ways he’s kind of a grown man who things kind of spontaneously worked out for him, but at the same time he had no idea what he really wanted to do…and I feel like I just really relate to that right now.”

Garbee added that she would look for a speaker who had “wit” in order to make the speech more interesting.

“I think they need to have something to offer to people who are just graduating, some kind of perspective on the world,” Garbee said.

Published on February 18, 2014 at 2:55 am

Contact: clmoran@syr.edu