Don Michael Randel, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will be the principal speaker May 16 (Saturday) at the Commencement ceremony for the University of Notre Dame Graduate School. He will receive an honorary degree the next day at Notre Dame’s 164th Commencement exercises.
The Graduate School ceremony will take place at 10 a.m. at the Joyce Center. An outdoor reception for graduates and their guests will immediately follow the ceremony in the area adjacent to the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center.
Randel is a prolific and internationally prominent historian of music. He specializes in music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance but has written and lectured on topics ranging from Arabic music theory and Latin American popular music to medieval liturgical chant and 15th century French music and poetry. He also is editor of the Harvard Dictionary of Music, the Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music and the Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
Randel taught for 32 years at Cornell University, serving as dean of the university’s college of arts and letters and for five years as its provost before becoming president of the University of Chicago in 2000. At Chicago, he led a $2 billion fund-raising campaign, the largest in the university’s history.
Randel earned undergraduate, master’s and doctoral degrees in music from Princeton University. He has been an Honorary Woodrow Wilson fellow, a Danforth Graduate fellow and a Fulbright award winner.
The Graduate School Commencement ceremony will include recognition of all graduates and the recipients of the Shaheen Awards, the Graduate School’s highest student distinction, and the recipient of the Distinguished Graduate Alumni Award. The Rev. James A. Burns, C.S.C., Graduate School Award, presented to a faculty member for outstanding contributions to graduate education, also will be presented during the event.