Award-Winning Author Joanna Scott to deliver Commencement Address
HARTFORD, Conn. – Helping to kick off a yearlong celebration of the 40th anniversary of Trinity going co-educational, three distinguished women will be honored at the College’s 183rd Commencement on Sunday, May 17.
They are Joanna Jeanne Scott ’82, an award-winning author who will deliver the commencement address, and Margorie Van Eenam Butcher and Deborah Bial, both of whom will also receive honorary degrees.
Scott, who was born and raised in Darien, CT, is the Roswell Smith Burrows Professor of English at the University of Rochester in New York. She is the author of Follow Me (published last month); Fading; My Parmacheene Belle; The Closest Possible Union; Liberation; Tourmaline; Make Believe; The Manikin; and Arrogance; as well as two collections of short fiction, Various Antidotes, and Everybody Loves Somebody. Her books have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN-Faulkner Award, and The Los Angeles Times Book Award.
Her stories and essays have appeared in many journals, among them, The Paris Review; Harpers; Esquire; Conjunctions; Black Clock; and Subtropics.
In addition, Scott has been honored with a MacArthur Fellowship; a Lannan Literary Award; a Guggenheim Fellowship; the Ambassador Book Award from the English-Speaking Union; and the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
At Trinity, Scott was described by Thalia Selz, then Trinity’s writer-in-residence, as a “brilliant student and an extremely gifted thinker with a very imaginative mind.” In her senior year, Scott was awarded the Trinity Alumnus Prize in Prose Fiction, the College’s highest honor for a writer. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa with honors in English, Scott earned her master’s degree at Brown University and subsequently taught creative writing at Brown, the University of Maryland and Princeton University before joining the faculty at the University of Rochester.
Scott will be presented with an honorary Doctor of Letters degree.
Butcher will receive an honorary Doctor of Science degree in recognition of “her more than 33 years of conveying the elegance of mathematics” to Trinity students, according to President James F. Jones, Jr.
A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Michigan, Butcher moved to Hartford and became an actuarial trainee at a local insurance company. In 1956, she began her career at Trinity as a part-time instructor, becoming Trinity’s first female faculty member. In 1979, Butcher attained the rank of full professor, the first woman at Trinity to do so, and became a professor emeritus in 1989. Two years later, the Student Government Association commissioned a painting of Butcher to mark the profound path she paved for co-education at Trinity.
Since Butcher’s retirement, she has continued her unwavering support of the College, attending events, lectures, performances, organ recitals, and other events at the Trinity Chapel.
When in 2006 Butcher learned that a former student, Christian Minard, ‘83, was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s Disease, she committed herself to creating awareness of the debilitating disease. With the support of President Jones, Butcher—15 years into her retirement —made the trans-Atlantic journey to visit Minard at his home in France for an organ recital organized by the College in his honor. In the town of Auxerre, where Minard spent his last years, Butcher demonstrated what made her more than just a teacher of mathematics but a person dedicated to each student and his or her potential to overcome any obstacle—be it a mathematical equation or one of life’s most terrible illnesses.
Trinity’s other honorand is Bial, president and founder of The Posse Foundation. She will receive an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters.
As an alumna of Brandeis University 20 years ago, Bial decided to do something about the fact that only 25 percent of Americans obtained college degrees and even fewer minorities. As a result, Bial created a leadership and diversity program called the Posse Foundation, which uses an innovative model to identify promising young people who come from disadvantaged urban communities. The foundation provides the youngsters with support systems that make it possible for them to get access to high-quality college education.
Recognizing that academic records are not the only measure of a student’s skill or potential, Posse employs a rigorous assessment process that Bial refined with a $1.9 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation while she completed her Ed.D. at Harvard University. Her “Adaptability Index” measures qualities such as leadership, teamwork, communications skills, and motivation that are as critical to successful navigation of undergraduate education as academic track records.
The most promising students, selected from cities across the United States, are invited to join “posses” -- small groups that participate in rigorous eight-month, pre-college training programs that build individual and team skills and function as an essential support system once students arrive at college.
Since 1989, the Posse Foundation has identified 2,650 scholars who have been awarded more than $265 million in leadership scholarships from Posse’s 30 partner colleges and universities, of which Trinity is proud to be one. The students are graduating at a 90 percent rate, significantly higher than the national average.
As Bial has put it, “Posse connects really phenomenal kids from big urban schools to some of the top colleges and universities in the nation. It opens fabulous futures for great young people.”
In 2007, Bial received a MacArthur Fellowship for her groundbreaking work.
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