Task force finalizes graduation

The Graduation Task Force Committee has finalized the decision to hold the May Commencement Ceremony on front campus.

“I respect the decision of the Graduation Task Force, which carefully considered the question of whether graduation should remain at Centennial Center or moved to front campus,” President Dorothy Leland said. “The front campus is a beautiful setting and I know the staff will work hard to create a memorable ceremony.”

Leland initiated the idea of moving the location of graduation and the possibility was then studied by the Graduation Task Force committee before being endorsed by the University Senate Student Affairs Committee.

Vice President of Enrollment Management and Chair of the Task Force Committee Paul Jones said the beauty of front campus was one of the primary reasons for the final decision.

“I think holding commencement on front campus is a way of trying to go back to our roots,” Jones said. “It will also give us some flexibility that The Centennial Center wasn’t able to give us. We wanted to bring a kind of tradition to GC&SU.”

The Graduation Task Force Committee, comprised of students, faculty and staff, modeled the format of the ceremony after those at similar universities. Jones said College of Charleston was the main model for the outdoor commencement exercises.

There will be two separate ceremonies on May 7, with processions beginning at 8:45 a.m. and 12:45 p.m. The ceremonies will include the School of Health Sciences and the J. Whitney Bunting School of Business, and the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the John H. Lounsbury School of Education, respectively.

The ceremony will be only the second in GC&SU’s history to require admission tickets for commencement.

“I like being outside, but I don’t like the limiting of tickets,” said senior Ross Crutchfield, who will be graduating in May.

“It means my whole family can’t come and for my fiancee it’s even worse. Her grandmother is handicapped and they said she’d have to watch it on a projection screen inside. We paid too much money for this to happen,” said Crutchfield.

Jones said the ticket system was created for Fall Graduation 2004 and is likely to continue as a result of the increasing number of students, past fire code violations and a need for crowd control.

“We will no longer just crowd people into an event and risk violating regulations,” Jones said. “Something had to be done.”

The Centennial Center will be prepared as a back up a location for ceremonies in the event of inclement weather or unusually high temperatures.

Even if the location for May graduation had remained in the Centennial Center as in the past, Jones said size restrictions would still have been limited to five per graduate.

As of February 2005, over 850 students petitioned to graduate. The increase in projected graduates resulted in a decrease of tickets from the 10 allotted to each graduate in December.

Jones said this change was to be expected, as Spring Graduation is always much larger than Fall Graduation. He also said a lottery system will allow students who do not need all of their tickets to redistribute them among students who have a greater need for them.

Jones said his committee is optimistic about the upcoming ceremony.

“This is monumental,” Jones said. “It’s really coming into place quite nicely.”

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Mar 25 2005. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry