Baccalaureate Celebration

Saturday, June 14, 2008
9:30 a.m. - Main Quadrangle

Baccalaureate at Stanford is a celebratory gathering for graduating seniors, graduate students, and professional students, as well as their families and friends. It is a time to acknowledge the spiritual contribution to the education of the whole person and a perfect complement to Commencement. The celebration also includes readings from a variety of religious traditions reflecting on this important life passage.

Under the auspices of the Office for Religious Life, this year's student-led Multi-faith Baccalaureate Celebration features guest speaker, The Reverend Professor Peter J. Gomes, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in The Memorial Church at Harvard University.

The winner of the Office for Religious Life's Baccalaureate Student Speaker Contest, Barry Fischer, will add poignant insights about his spiritual journey while a student at Stanford.

Talisman, Taiko and Menlo Brass will punctuate the morning with rousing celebratory music.

Instructions for graduates: all degree candidates who wish to participate in the Baccalaureate ceremony, report inside Memorial Church by 8:45 a.m. in cap and gown. Please visit the Student Information section for more details.

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Baccalaureate Speakers Biographies

The Reverend Professor Peter J. Gomes, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in The Memorial Church at Harvard University, is a New York Times best-selling author who is widely praised for his ability to make ideas from philosophical and biblical texts accessible to secular audiences. Professor Gomes fulfills preaching and lecturing engagements throughout this country and the United Kingdom.  Profiled in The New Yorker and interviewed on 60 Minutes, he was included in the premiere issue of Talk magazine as one of 'The Best Talkers in America: Fifty Big Mouths We Hope Will Never Shut Up.'

Professor Gomes outlines ways in which we might try to make and experience a good life rather than simply a good living.  As tools for the journey toward this end, he offers insight into such challenges as failure, and what might actually be good about it; success, and how we understand it; discipline, and how the practice of perfection might lead to a certain freedom -- but from what, or for what, or toward what?  He speaks of the ancient yet modern wisdom of the values of faith, hope, and love, which he calls the "content and expression of the good life," and his belief that this so-called 'Millennial Generation," with its moral curiosity and desire to know, to be, and to do good, has the potential of becoming the nation's next "greatest generation."

Barry Fischer is graduating with a BA in economics and an MS in environmental engineering.  In his years at Stanford, he has enthusiastically engaged in national and international efforts to achieve environmentally sustainable economic development.  His activities in the sustainable development arena have included policy work in Washington DC and Berlin, a community development project in rural Nicaragua, and advocacy on behalf of a major environmental organization at the World Water Week in Stockholm.  Barry wrote his honors thesis about the importance of economic incentives for rainforest conservation in the Brazilian Amazon.

Outside of the classroom, Barry is a member of the Stanford Improvisers, through which he has learned to turn mistakes into gifts.  He also serves as a counselor in Stanford's Camp Kesem -- a summer camp for children whose families have been affected by cancer. When he is not doing his own school work or extracurricular activities, Barry is a teaching assistant in the economics department.  Looking ahead, he is currently a finalist for a 2009 Fulbright Scholarship in New Zealand.