Newswise — National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice will be the guest speaker at Vanderbilt University's inaugural Senior Class Day on Thursday, May 13, at 10 a.m.
An addition to Vanderbilt's graduation celebrations, Senior Class Day occurs prior to the University's Commencement exercises on May 14. The day will include the convocation, faculty-led seminars, a ceremonial walk through the gates of the University and the first Senior Send-Off Party. All graduating students, their guests and members of the Vanderbilt University community are invited to attend the festivities.
"I am delighted to welcome Dr. Rice to Vanderbilt to celebrate the achievements of our graduates," said Chancellor Gordon Gee. "As a scholar, an academic executive, a student and practitioner of public policy, she is a unique and demonstrated leader who will have much to say."
Gee will present Rice with the Chancellor's Medal for Distinguished Public Service during the assembly on Alumni Lawn. In the case of rain, the festivities will be held in Memorial Gym.
Rice has served as President Bush's chief national security and foreign policy adviser since January 2001. In June 1999, she completed a six-year tenure as Stanford University's provost, during which she was the institution's chief budget and academic officer. As provost, she was responsible for a $1.5 billion annual budget and an academic program involving 1,400 faculty members and 14,000 students.
As professor of political science, Rice has been on the Stanford faculty since 1981 and has won two of the highest teaching honors—the 1984 Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching and the 1993 School of Humanities and Sciences Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching.
At Stanford, she has been a member of the Center for International Security and Arms Control, a senior fellow of the Institute for International Studies and a fellow (by courtesy) of the Hoover Institution. Her books include Germany Unified and Europe Transformed (1995) with Philip Zelikow, The Gorbachev Era (1986) with Alexander Dallin, and Uncertain Allegiance: The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army (1984).
She also has written numerous articles on Soviet and East European foreign and defense policy and has addressed audiences in settings ranging from the U.S. ambassador's residence in Moscow to the Commonwealth Club to the 1992 and 2000 Republican National Conventions.
From 1989 through March 1991, the period of German reunification and the final days of the Soviet Union, she served in the Bush administration as director, and then senior director, of Soviet and East European Affairs in the National Security Council, and as special assistant to the president for national security affairs. In 1986, while an international affairs fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, she served as special assistant to the director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In 1997 she served on the Federal Advisory Committee on Gender-Integrated Training in the Military.
She was a member of the boards of directors for the Chevron Corporation, the Charles Schwab Corporation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the University of Notre Dame, the International Advisory Council of J.P. Morgan and the San Francisco Symphony Board of Governors. She was a founding board member of the Center for a New Generation, an educational support fund for schools in East Palo Alto and East Menlo Park, Calif., and was vice president of the Boys and Girls Club of the Peninsula. In addition, her past board service has encompassed such organizations as Transamerica Corporation, Hewlett Packard, the Carnegie Corporation, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Rand Corporation, the National Council for Soviet and East European Studies, the Mid-Peninsula Urban Coalition and KQED, public broadcasting for San Francisco.
Born Nov. 14, 1954, in Birmingham, Ala., she earned her bachelor's degree in political science, cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Denver in 1974; her master's from the University of Notre Dame in 1975; and her Ph.D. from the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver in 1981.
She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been awarded honorary doctorates from Morehouse College in 1991, the University of Alabama in 1994, the University of Notre Dame in 1995, the Mississippi College School of Law in 2003 and the University of Louisville in 2004.
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