Commencement is the highlight of our academic year. It is a wonderful time for the campus community to come together and celebrate with graduating students and their families. This year’s Commencement ceremony will be held Monday, May 20, on Hearn Plaza, beginning at 9 a.m.

It is always important for us to be gracious hosts to our visitors and make sure their access to campus is as easy as possible. To make this the best commencement experience possible for our graduates and guests, please observe the following guidelines:

• Faculty and staff should not attempt to park on campus prior to 1 p.m. on the day of commencement. Passes, which have been issued to graduates and their families, will be required for all cars entering campus.
• Faculty and staff who need parking should park at Bridger Field House and ride the shuttle to campus. Enter the stadium parking lot through the Deacon Boulevard entrance and follow the signs to the parking area and the shuttle pickup point. Shuttles will run continuously throughout the day from 5:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. A Wake Forest ID will be needed to access the shuttle.
• Faculty and staff may park on campus after 1 p.m.
• Reynolda Campus staff who do not have a direct commencement responsibility need not report for work until 9:30 a.m. on Monday, unless otherwise required by their department.
• Please have your Wake Forest I.D. with you at all times on campus during commencement.

In case of rain, the Commencement ceremony will be held at Joel Coliseum, beginning at 9:30 a.m. Parking on campus will not be affected if the ceremony is held at the coliseum.

Wake Forest will be hosting the Benjamin Franklin Transatlantic Fellows Summer Institute (BFTF) for the seventh consecutive year. This is a program funded by the U.S. State Department that focuses on leadership, international relations, social entrepreneurship, and civic engagement to prepare the Fellows for their role as engaged citizens.

The Fellows are 16-18-year-old students who come from 35 different Western, Eastern European, and Eurasian countries, as well as numerous U.S. states. They will be on campus from June 30 to July 27, taking classes, participating in workshops, and volunteering in the community. They also travel to Philadelphia and Washington for a week.

Wake Forest is looking for host families for the 2013 BFTF Fellows for the period of July 12-22. Please see the flier [PDF] and application [PDF] if you are interested in being a host family. Feel free to distribute the information to anyone who may be interested in being involved with the BFTF.

Email bftfhostfamily@gmail.com or contact Annamae Giles at 336.918.7124 for questions. Deadline to apply is May 24.

The following faculty had writings published in April 2013:

Bardon, Adrian, & Heather Dyke, Eds. (Philosophy). A Companion to the Philosophy of Time (Blackwell Companions to Philosophy series). Wiley-Blackwell. April 2013.

Fisher, Louis, & Katy J. Harriger. (Politics & International Affairs). American Constitutional Law, 10^th ed. Carolina Academic Press. March 2013.

Hyde, Michael J., & James A. Herrick, Eds. (Communication). After the Genome: A Language for Our Biotechnological Future (Studies in Rhetoric and Religion series). Baylor University Press. April 2013.

Pressley, Lauren, Craig Fansler, Kevin Gilbertson, Rebecca Petersen, Kaeley McMahan, Gretchen Edwards, & Audra Eagle Yun, Eds. (Z. Smith Reynolds Library). Research like a Librarian: Accessing Information in the 21^st Century. WFU Digital Publishing. April 2013.

Whaples, Robert M., & Randall E. Parker, Eds. (Economics). The Routledge Handbook of Modern Economic History (Routledge International Handbooks). Routledge. March 2013.

The following is a message from President Nathan Hatch: 

While commencement season always brings about a sense of new beginnings and opportunities, it’s also a time to say thank you and bid farewell to many of our friends, colleagues and mentors who have called Wake Forest University home.

Please join me in congratulating and commemorating a marvelous class of Reynolda Campus faculty and staff retiring from Wake Forest this year. We are grateful for the many contributions from this remarkable group of individuals, who together have more than 800 years of service to the University: Continue reading »

The School of Business faculty celebrated a successful and very busy year with an awards dinner at the Proximity Hotel on May 3.

The awards and recipients are: Continue reading »

Mary Pendergraft, professor of classical languages, has been honored by the Classical Association of the Middle West and South (CAMWS) with an Ovatio, the organization’s highest award for service to CAMWS and the Classics profession. The award presentation was made in Latin at a banquet attended by more than 450 members of the organization at its annual meeting in Iowa City, Iowa. At the same meeting, Pendergraft also was the recipient of the CAMWS Award for Excellence in College Teaching.

According to Tom Sienkewicz, professor of classics at Monmouth College and secretary-treasurer of CAMWS, Pendergraft was recognized for contributions in the areas of promotion of the study of Latin in North Carolina and throughout the United States and for her work as chief reader of the Latin College Board Exams.

Peter Knox, professor of classics at the University of Colorado and president of CAMWS, said: “Professor Pendergraft is an inspiring teacher, who is also actively engaged in collaborating with colleagues in pedagogical initiatives. Her service to the profession as chief reader of the AP Latin exam and her contributions to our association are justly acknowledged in this award.”

The Classical Association of the Middle West and South, Inc., is a professional organization for classicists and non-classicists at all levels of instruction which promotes the classics through the broad scope of its annual meeting, through the publication of both original research and pedagogical contributions and through its awards, scholarships and outreach initiatives. CAMWS was founded at the University of Chicago in 1905 and now covers 32 states and three Canadian provinces.

Tina Smith, the museum educator at Wake Forest’s Museum of Anthropology, was recently featured in an article in the Mt. Airy News. The article highlighted the curriculum for eight-graders at Central Middle School in Pilot Mountain, N.C. Smith helped judge projects by students who worked to design portable exhibits that explained the Holocaust to 4- and 5-year-olds.

Read more about Smith and the program »

The following is a message from President Nathan Hatch:

At the start of the fall semester, I established four campus-wide committees to foster inclusive discussion around particular aspects of Wake Forest University. I am grateful to the members of these committees who devoted countless hours in pursuit of a better Wake Forest. Through these committees, dozens of faculty, staff and students contributed to the following results: Continue reading »

A funeral service for Melvin Reid will be held at noon on May 13 at Praise Assembly Church Ministries, 3254 Kernersville Road, in Winston-Salem. Visitation will be from 11 a.m. to noon at the church.

Mr. Reid was familiar to many at Wake Forest as a long-time driver for the University’s shuttle bus system. He died May 6.

Molly Keener, the scholarly communication librarian at the Z. Smith Reynolds Library, will take part in a discussion on HuffPost Live on Friday at 3:40 p.m. Keener will discuss her experiences with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and chat about their future. Keener recently completed a MOOC offered by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and she shared her thoughts on a ZSR blog post.

The HuffPost Live discussion was triggered by an announcement from a MOOC facilitator, Coursera, which announced a deal with leading academic publishers to provide free access to etextbooks for students in MOOCs.