Next May, students will see new changes in the way UW holds graduation commencement ceremonies. The changes will come about via the decisions of a Commencement Review Task Force and the input it receives from the campus community.
President Laurie Nichols said since she was named president of the university, she had been asked what she intended to do with how commencement ceremonies are conducted here.
“When I came, I was asked almost immediately, asked what I planned to do about commencement and I didn’t have a lot of background about what had been the problem with commencement,” Nichols said. “I went to as many college ceremonies as I could, just to see how each college does commencement.”
After last academic year’s commencement, Nichols assessed what had been observed at the graduation ceremonies and decided to designate the task force.
“After commencement was done, I circled back at that point of time and quite honestly was more impressed than I thought I would be, I thought that some of the ceremonies were lovely,” Nichols said. “I said that I was ready to leave it alone, if everyone was happy with it because I actually didn’t think we were in [a] crisis situation, but I was happy to pull a group together to look at it.”
Nichols said she directed that question primarily to the academic deans, the vice presidents and the provost and the response was almost unanimous that a task force should be designated.
“Really, everybody thought it should be looked at, I got complete ‘yes, let’s push this forward, let’s look at it,’” Nichols said. “So thus, the task force was formed.”
Dean of the College of Education Ray Reutzel was selected by Nichols to be the chair of the task force. He has given presentations regarding the changes that the task force came up with at two town hall events and at the ASUW meeting a couple weeks ago.
According to slides from Reutzel’s presentation, the primary changes to the May 2018 commencement, made by the task force, was to consolidate all graduation ceremonies to a single venue on the same day. The ceremony will include three two-hour sessions.
According to the slides, the task force was comprised of a wide array of representation, ranging from faculty to ASUW voices.
“The president’s charge to the task force was to reduce cost, the current cost is $250,000 annually, limit it to a single day and limit each session length to two hours,” Reutzel said.
The new system of commencement will allow for some flexibility and convenience for families, which was the biggest difficulty the task force faced.
“Our biggest difficulty was trying to figure out what would be the family experience coming to the campus and if they had more than one graduate at more than one level, how would we make that more accessible,” Reutzel said.
Reutzel said that the task force sought to make changes that would address the following hypothetical situation.
“Just imagine, you’ve got a couple of kids and they’re in different colleges, you’ll have to go to two separate ceremonies, which might keep you here from Friday to Saturday night,” Reutzel said. “So we were trying to arrange this in such as a way that would allow for families to not have to stay two nights to attend their graduate’s graduation.”
Reutzel said other changes will be seen including the process of hooding of doctoral candidates, the reading of names, the flow of graduates on the stage, the number of speakers (1 per commencement ceremony) and programs (1 per student family).
Colin Gray, a freshman civil engineering major, said he is interested in the commencement changes, since he will be graduating in a number of years. He said it largely depends on personal preferences of students.
“It depends on what type of ceremony people want,” Gray said. “As a freshman, I’m thinking about my graduation and how nice it is going to be.”
Gray said he is happy with the goal of saving money for commencement.
“On the other hand, if the university spends less money on the graduation ceremony and puts the money to other places that could use it, I would be fine with that,” Gray said.
