The University of Notre Dame will inaugurate the 2003-04 academic year Aug. 26 (Tuesday) with a convocation of the faculty, a Mass, a campus picnic for faculty, administrators, staff and students, and a fireworks display.p. Ruth J. Simmons, president of Brown University, will address the convocation, which will be held in Washington Hall at 4 p.m. The first African-American woman to lead an Ivy League institution, Simmons is a native of Texas and a 1967 graduate of Dillard University in New Orleans. She earned a doctoral degree in Romance languages and literatures from Harvard in 1973; held teaching and administrative positions at the University of Southern California, Princeton and Spelman College and served as president of Smith College from 1995-2001, when she became president of Brown. A professor of comparative literature and African studies at Brown, she has written and lectured on the poetry of David Diop and Aime Cesaire and is the author of a book on education in Haiti.p. Mass for the opening of the academic year will be celebrated in the Joyce Center at 5:30 p.m. A formal academic procession of faculty will precede the Mass, at which Notre Dame’s president, Rev. Edward A. Malloy, C.S.C., will preside.p. Following the Mass a picnic for students, faculty, staff members and their families will be held at 7 p.m. on the DeBartolo Quadrangle. A fireworks display will begin at 7:45 p.m.
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