Newswise — The 90th awarding of the undergraduate degrees for Babson College and the 57th awarding of graduate degrees for the F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson will take place during commencement exercises, Saturday, May 16, 2009, on the upper Athletic Fields of the Wellesley campus.
Approximately 386 Undergraduate Candidates will receive BS degrees; and 409 Graduate Candidates will receive MBA, MS in Management, and MS in Management with a Concentration in Technological Entrepreneurship degrees.
Undergraduate Ceremony " 10:00 a.m.
Brian M. Barefoot '66, P'01 - Undergraduate Honorary Degree Recipient
Ray Kurzweil " Undergraduate Speaker and Honorary Degree Recipient
Erik Weihenmayer " Undergraduate and MBA Speaker, MBA Honorary Degree Recipient
Graduate Ceremony " 2:30 p.m.
William F. Markey Jr. M'64 " MBA Honorary Degree Recipient
Erik Weihenmayer " Undergraduate and MBA Speaker, MBA Honorary Degree Recipient
Both ceremonies will be broadcast live in Babson's Sorenson Theater and online via streaming video.
Brian M. Barefoot '66, P'01 - Undergraduate Honorary Degree Recipient
Brian M. Barefoot is a Senior Advisor to Carl Marks & Co. LP., a longstanding and respected middle market merchant bank, with expertise in Corporate Revitalization, Distressed Securities, Investment Banking, Private Equity and Real Estate. Previously, he served as president of Babson College, one of the nation's leading management schools, from July 1, 2001 until he retired on June 30, 2008, at which time he was elected President Emeritus. Located in Wellesley, Massachusetts, Babson is internationally recognized for its leadership in entrepreneurial management education.
A graduate of the college, Mr. Barefoot served as Chair of the Board of Trustees from 1996 to 2001. He joined the governing board of the College in 1985 and served in many capacities including Chair of the Investment Committee, Chair of the Development and Alumni Relations Committee, Co-Chair of the 1992 Capital Campaign and Chair of the Executive Committee.
Under President Barefoot's leadership, Babson continued to strengthen its innovative programs for undergraduate and MBA students and business professionals, which have earned Babson College the #1 ranking in entrepreneurship for 15 consecutive years. Babson's F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business is among the top 25 MBA programs in the country; the undergraduate program is one of the top ranked private colleges for business in the U.S.; and Babson Executive Education is among the 10 leading providers of executive education worldwide.
Previously, Mr. Barefoot's career in financial services spanned more than three decades. At PaineWebber, Inc. from 1994 to 2001, he served as Executive Vice President and Director of Investment Banking, a member of its Board of Directors, and President and Chief Executive Officer of its subsidiary, PaineWebber International. During twenty-five years at Merrill Lynch & Co., from 1967 to 1992, he held various senior management positions, retiring as Senior Vice President and Managing Director. From January 2001 to July 2002, Mr. Barefoot served in various capacities, including Chairman of the Board, President, and CEO, at NeoVision Hypersystems Inc., a leading provider of software solutions specializing in advanced visualization and decision support for the financial services industry. In 1992, he founded Frontier Sports Development Corp. and served as Founder, President and CEO until its sale in 1994.
Mr. Barefoot is a Director, member of the Audit Committee and Chair of the Finance and Business Operations Committee of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. He is also a Director of Aveon Capital, a private New York based investment management company, Array Healthcare Solutions, and a special advisor to a Boston based family office. He is a past member of the Massachusetts Business Roundtable and a past Director of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston, where he continues as a member of its Investment Committee. He is also a past member of the American Council on Education Commission on International Education and the Council on Competitiveness. He presently serves on the Board of Trustees of St. Edwards School, a private independent school in Vero Beach, Florida and has served on the Board of Trustees of the Kent Place School in Summit, New Jersey, a leading private independent school for women, from 1987 to 1998. In 1998, he was awarded the prestigious Ellis Island Medal of Honor by the Ellis Island Honor Society for his contributions to the business and educational communities.
Mr. Barefoot is a 1966 graduate of Babson College. He received an MBA degree from Pace University Lubin School of Management in 1970 and attended various Harvard Executive Education Programs.
Mr. Barefoot was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, is married and has three children.
Ray Kurzweil " Undergraduate Speaker and Honorary Degree Recipient
Ray Kurzweil has been described as "the restless genius" by the Wall Street Journal, and "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the "rightful heir to Thomas Edison," and PBS included Ray as one of 16 "revolutionaries who made America," along with other inventors of the past two centuries.
As one of the leading inventors of our time, Ray was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Ray's web site Kurzweil AI.net has over one million readers.Among Ray's many honors, he is the recipient of the $500,000 MIT-Lemelson Prize, the world's largest for innovation. In 1999, he received the National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. And in 2002, he was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame, established by the US Patent Office.
He has received sixteen honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents.
Ray has written five books, four of which have been national best sellers. The Age of Spiritual Machines has been translated into 9 languages and was the #1 bestselling book on Amazon in science. Ray's latest book, The Singularity is Near, was a New York Times best seller, and has been the #1 book on Amazon in both science and philosophy.
William F. Markey Jr. M'64 " MBA Honorary Degree Recipient
Mr. Markey, currently Trustee Emeritus, had been a member of Babson's governance since 1991 " and, when he became Board Chair in 2001, he was the first MBA alumnus ever to do so. He was the Vice Chair of the highly successful MBA 50th Campaign and the MBA Chair of the President's Society Council. He was past chair of the Babson Graduate/Executive Education Committee, the Babson President's Society Council and the Marketing Committee. Mr. Markey helped launch the Babson Rising Campaign and was co-chair of the Presidential Search Committee that brought us President Schlesinger. He received two of our highest honors: the Cruickshank Alumni Leadership Award and the Alumni Academy of Achievement Award.
In October 2007, he was honored with the dedication of Markey Commons "¦ an important gathering place in Olin Hall, formerly known as the Olin Café.
Mr. Markey is president of The Wilmark Group. Before establishing The Wilmark Group, he served as executive vice president of Talent Tree Staffing Services; president of ManPowerInc.; president and CEO of Blue Arrow Services Inc.; president and cofounder of Position Inc.; and product manager at General Foods. Mr. Markey earned a BA from Providence College and an MBA from Babson in 1964.
Erik Weihenmayer " Undergraduate and MBA Speaker, MBA Honorary Degree Recipient
On May 25, 2001, Erik Weihenmayer became the only blind man in history to reach the summit of the world's highest peak - Mount Everest. And on September 5, 2002, when he stood on top of Mt. Kosciusko in Australia, Weihenmayer completed his 7-year quest to climb the Seven Summits - the highest mountains on each of the seven continents, joining only 100 mountaineers who have accomplished that feat. At age 33, he was also one of the youngest. Additionally, he has scaled El Capitan, a 3300-foot overhanging rock wall in Yosemite; Polar Circus, a 3000-foot ice waterfall in The Canadian Rockies; and a difficult and rarely climbed rock face on 17,000-foot Mt. Kenya.
In September, 2003, Erik joined 320 stellar athletes from 17 countries to compete in the Primal Quest, the richest and toughest multi-sport adventure race in the world: 457 miles through the Sierra Nevada's, nine days, sixty thousand feet of elevation gain, and no time-outs. Averaging only two hours of sleep a night, Erik and his team surged past the finish line on Lake Tahoe, becoming one of the 42 teams to cross the finish line out of the 80 teams that began.
After Erik's Mt. Everest ascent, Braille Without Borders, a school for the blind in Tibet, invited him to teach its students mountaineering and rock climbing. His many climbs gave the teenagers the courage to excel in a culture which affords few opportunities for the blind. Erik and six Everest team members went to Tibet in May 2004 to train the students, then in October led them on a climb to the Rombuk Glacier on the north side of Mt. Everest. Once seen as pariahs, the teenagers ultimately stood together at 21,500-feet., higher than any team of blind people in history. Steven Haft, producer of such blockbusters as Dead Poets' Society, made a documentary on the ascent which opened to standing ovations at the Toronto, Los Angeles, and London Film Festivals. The film will be released theatrically in spring of 2007.
A former middle school teacher and wrestling coach, Erik is one of the most exciting and well-known athletes in the world. Despite losing his vision at the age of 13, Erik has become an accomplished mountain climber, paraglider, and skier, who has never let his blindness interfere with his passion for an exhilarating and fulfilling life. Erik's feats have earned him an ESPY award, recognition by Time Magazine for one of the greatest sporting achievements of 2001, induction into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame, an ARETE Award for the superlative athletic performance of the year, the Helen Keller Lifetime Achievement award, Nike's Casey Martin Award, and the Freedom Foundation's Free Spirit Award. He has also carried the Olympic Torch for both the Summer and Winter Games.
In addition to being a world-class athlete, Erik is also the author of the book, Touch the Top of the World, published in ten countries and six languages. According to Publisher's Weekly, Erik's memoir is "moving and adventure packed, Weihenmayer tells his extraordinary story with humor, honesty and vivid detail, and his fortitude and enthusiasm are deeply inspiring." The book was made into a feature film which aired on A&E in June, 2006.
Erik's second book, The Adversity Advantage: Turning Everyday Struggles Into Everyday Greatness, co-authored with business guru and bestselling author, Dr. Paul Stoltz, was released by Simon and Schuster in January, 2007. Through Paul's science and Erik's experience, the book shares seven "summits" for harnessing the power of adversity and turning it into the never-ending fuel to growth and innovation. Steven Covey, author of the best selling business book of all time, wrote the Foreword. Erik has also been published in Time, Forbes, and Reader's Digest.
Erik's award winning film, Farther Than the Eye Can See, shot in the same stunning quality HDTV format as the 'Star Wars' prequels, was ranked in the top twenty adventure films of all time by Men's Journal. Bringing home first prize at 19 film festivals and nominated for two Emmy's, the film beautifully captures the emotion, humor and drama of Erik's historic ascent as well as his team's three other remarkable 'firsts': the first American father/son team to summit, the oldest man to summit, and the most people from one team to reach the top of Everest in a single day. The film has played at New York's Lincoln Center, the National Geographic Theater in Washington D.C., and the Writers' Guild Theater in Beverly Hills, and at numerous fund-raising events for charitable organizations.
Erik's extraordinary accomplishments have gained him abundant press coverage, including repeat visits to NBC's Today Show and Nightly News, Oprah, Good Morning America, Nightline, and the Tonight Show, to name a few. He has also been featured on the cover of Time, Outside, and Climbing Magazine.
In 1999, Erik joined Mark Wellman, the first paraplegic to climb the 3000-foot face of El Capitan, and Hugh Herr, a double-leg-amputee and scientist at Harvard's prestigious Prosthetics Laboratory, to climb an 800-foot rock tower in Moab, Utah. As a result of their successful climb together, the three formed No Barriers, a non-profit organization with a goal of promoting innovative ideas, approaches, and assistive technologies which help people with disabilities push through their own personal barriers to live full and active lives. Erik also serves as a National Braille Literacy Champion on behalf of the American Foundation for the Blind.
Erik's speaking career has taken him around the world, from Hong Kong to Switzerland, from Thailand to the 2005 APEC Summit in Chile. He speaks to audiences on harnessing the power of adversity, the importance of a "rope team," and the daily struggle to pursue your dreams. Clearly, Erik's accomplishments show that one does not have to have perfect eyesight to have extraordinary vision.
Erik has shared speaking platforms with Mayor Rudy Giuliani, General Norman Schwarzkopf, and President George Bush, and authors Tom Peters, Marcus Buckingham, and Stephen Covey. A partial list of his corporate clients includes Google, Bank of America, General Mills, Proctor and Gamble, Wal-Mart, Cisco Systems, Hilton, Computer Associates, Abbott, IBM, Merrill Lynch, Cingular, General Electric, Baxter, American Express, Wells Fargo, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, and UBS.
Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., is recognized internationally as a leader in entrepreneurial management education. Babson grants BS degrees through its innovative undergraduate program, and grants MBA and custom MS and MBA degrees through the F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College. Babson Executive Education offers executive development programs to experienced managers worldwide. For information, visit www.babson.edu.
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