MAY 11, UPDATE: Invited guest speaker Howard Dean is unable to attend the graduation ceremony. The faculty speaker Professor I. Michael Heyman and Dean Christopher Edley will deliver graduation talks.
Democratic National Committee Chairman and former Vermont Governor Howard Dean will deliver the keynote address at Boalt’s 2006 commencement ceremony on May 13, at the Greek Theatre. Professor and former UC Berkeley Chancellor I. Michael Heyman will present the faculty address to this year’s graduating class.
Dean, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee and founder of Democracy for America, was elected chairman of the DNC in 2005. He began his political career in the early 1980’s as the Chittenden County ( Vermont) Democratic Party chair and rose through state party ranks to become Vermont’s lieutenant governor in 1986. Dean served as Vermont’s governor upon the death of Governor Richard A. Snelling in 1991, was elected to a full term as governor in November 1992, and then re-elected to four more terms. Prior to entering politics, Dean earned a medical degree from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City in 1978, and following his residency, practiced internal medicine in Shelburne, Vermont.
Heyman, the Herman F. Selvin Professor of Law, Emeritus, was Berkeley’s sixth chancellor from 1980 to 1990. He joined the Boalt faculty in 1959 and has held a joint appointment with the Department of City and Regional Planning since 1966. He served as counselor to the secretary and deputy assistant secretary for policy of the U.S. Department of the Interior, and as secretary of the Smithsonian Institution from 1994 to 1999, during which time he oversaw 6,000 employees, 16 museums and galleries, the National Zoo, and numerous research facilities.