Celebrated Playwright Tony Kushner Named Commencement Speaker; Honorary Degree Recipients Announced
Multi-award winning playwright Tony Kushner will speak at Muhlenberg College’s 163rd Commencement on May 22, 2011 at 10 a.m.Tuesday, April 12, 2011 11:45 AM
The ceremony will be held on the College’s historic College Green. Kushner will also be awarded an honorary doctorate. Other individuals receiving honorary degrees will be Dr. Benjamin Carson, Joseph B. Scheller and Rita Scheller, James B. Stewart and Peter Yarrow.
Kushner is best known for his two-part epic, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. His other plays include A Bright Room Called Day, Slavs!, Hydrotaphia, Homebody/Kabul and Caroline, or Change, the musical for which he wrote book and lyrics, with music by composer Jeanine Tesori. He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols’ film of Angels in America and Steven Spielberg’s Munich. His books include But the Giraffe: A Curtain Raising; Brundibar: the Libretto, with illustrations by Maurice Sendak; The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present; and Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to Palestinian/Israeli Conflict, co-edited with Alisa Solomon. His latest work includes The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism & Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, which premiered at the Guthrie Theatre in May 2009.
He is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, an Emmy Award, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, and Oscar nomination, and Arts Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the PEN/Laura Pels Award for a Mid-Career Playwright, a Spirit of Justice Award from the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, and a Cultural Achievement Award from The National Foundation for Jewish Culture, among many others. Caroline, or Change, produced in autumn of 2006 at the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain, received the Evening Standard Award, the London Drama Critics’ Circle Award and the Oliver Award for Best Musical. He was also awarded the 2009 Chicago Tribune Literary Prize for lifetime achievement. Kushner is the subject of a documentary film, Wrestling with Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner, made by the Oscar-winning filmmaker Freida Lee Mock.
Dr. Benjamin Carson is known as a miracle worker by families whose children have been in his care following serious cognitive damage. He majored in psychology at Yale and graduated from the University of Michigan School of Medicine. He went on to complete both his internship in general surgery and residency in neurological surgery at The Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. He also served in neurosurgery at the Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital, Queen Elizabeth II Medical Center in Western Australia. Now the longstanding Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, Carson focuses on traumatic brain injuries, brain and spinal cord tumors, achondroplasia, neurological and congenital disorders, craniosynostosis, epilepsy and trigeminal neuralgia. An internationally renowned physician, Carson has authored over 100 neurosurgical publications, along with three best-selling books, and has been awarded 38 honorary degrees and dozens of national merit citations.
Joseph B. Scheller and Rita Scheller founded the R.J. Fellows program at Muhlenberg College in 2001. Since its inception, over 100 students have participated in this honors community of high-achieving and imaginative students who develop the capacity for leadership and service in a world of dramatic and constant change. As Mr. Sheller has said, “The program is centered on the realization that the future is, and always will be, uncertain. It is the individual’s ability to make intelligent and ethical decisions in the face of this uncertainty that leads to a fulfilling and productive life.” The Schellers have also been longtime supporters of the Institute of Jewish-Christian Understanding of Muhlenberg College, receiving the Raoul Wallenberg Tribute Award in 1998. Their philanthropy reaches well beyond Muhlenberg College and the Lehigh Valley. The Scheller Teacher Education Program (STEP) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) supports both certification for MIT graduates to teach math and science in grades 5-12 and research into new educational technologies. Mr. Scheller earned a B.S, in business and engineering administration from MIT and served as a pilot in the U.S. Air Force. After military service, he became an engineer at Silberline Manufacturing, eventually serving as company president and chairman of the board. He has served as a trustee for a number of institutions, including the DaVinci Discovery Center, Muhlenberg College, the Academy of Natural Sciences and the Allentown Art Museum. Mrs. Scheller received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Miami and a master’s in reading at Lehigh University. She is a former teacher and has been a member of the Allentown Art Museum’s Society of the Arts for 24 years. She also serves on the Board of Directors for the Jewish Federation of the Lehigh Valley and the Allentown Art Museum.
James B. Stewart is an exceptional practitioner of journalism and law. He is a member of the Bar of New York and Bloomberg Professor of Business and Economic Journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is a former associate at New York law firm Cravath, Swiane & Moore. In 1988, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism for his articles in The Wall Street Journal about the 1987 dramatic upheaval in the stock market and insider trading. These writings led to the publishing of his best-selling work of non-fiction, Den of Thieves, that recounted the criminal conduct of Wall Street arbitrager Ivan Boesky and junk bond king Michael Milken. Stewart’s 1999 work, Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story of a Doctor Who Got Away With Murder, won the 2000 Edgar Award in the Best Crime Fact category. DisneyWar, his 2005 book on Michael Eisner’s reign at Disney, won the Gerald Loeb Award for Best Business Book. In 2007, he was ranked 21st on Out magazine’s “50 Most Powerful Gay Men and Women in America.”
Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul & Mary, is a celebrated singer/songwriter and social activist. With his collaborators, Paul Stuckey and Mary Travers, Yarrow participated in the Civil Rights Movement, which brought them to Washington in 1963 to sing for the historic march led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as the equally historic Selma-Montgomery march in 1965. His gift for songwriting has produced some of the most moving songs Peter, Paul & Mary have recorded, including Puff, The Magic Dragon, Day Is Done, The Great Mandela and Light One Candle. Yarrow has been active on behalf of personal projects such as his advocacy on behalf of the Hospice Movement. He is a board member of the Connecticut Hospice, the first hospice established in the United States, where he frequently sings for the patients and staff and for whom he has been a voice of media advocacy for over a decade. Also in the health care arena, he founded the “Save One Child” Fund at Beth Israel Hospital’s Institute of Neurology and Neurosurgery (INN) in 1996. Another project, called Operation Respect: “Don’t Laugh at Me,” is based on his passionate belief that music, with its power to build community and catalyze change, can be a particularly powerful organizing tool as well as a source of inspiration for children. The song, “Don’t Laugh at Me,” is used to create a climate of respect in the schools of America. When properly positioned in a classroom-based character education, social/emotional learning program, it could serve as an anthem for the growing movement to build safer and more respectful school environments for children.
For more information about the Commencement ceremony and weekend, please visit our website.
