Photo note: To download a photo of Whitaker, see the end of the release.

By BRIAN MacPHERSON
UNC News Services

CHAPEL HILL -- A new tradition will become part of this year’s commencement weekend at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill when the inaugural Graduate School doctoral hooding ceremony takes place on May 17 on Polk Place.

The featured speaker will be Dr. Beth Elise Whitaker, who received M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in political science from Carolina and now serves on the faculty of UNC-Charlotte.

The 10 a.m. event, scheduled the day prior to the annual campuswide ceremony in Kenan Stadium, will honor a long-standing tradition in graduate education that symbolizes the completion of doctoral training. It is designed specifically to recognize students who receive their doctoral degree through the Graduate School, said Dr. Linda Dykstra, school dean.

Each graduate participating in this ceremony will be called to the stage and will have the hood of the commencement regalia conferred by his or her adviser or dissertation committee chair. Family and friends will be invited to attend.

"I believe a ceremony such as this will bring greater visibility to a very important aspect of Carolina’s education mission -- doctoral training," Dykstra said. "Almost a third of our students are graduate students, and the contributions they make to the university are significant. Since each doctoral student will be hooded by their major faculty adviser, this ceremony also provides a way to acknowledge the central role that our faculty play in doctoral education."

The decision to hold a hooding ceremony was a cooperative effort, she said. Chancellor James Moeser’s support moved the initiative forward; Executive Associate Provost Bernadette Gray-Little carried the proposal to the Dean’s Council and to faculty across campus; and the Executive Committee of the Faculty Council endorsed it.

"In addition," Dykstra said, "there was a great deal of support from individual doctoral students as well as from the Graduate Student Federation and its current president, Branson Page."

The hooding ceremony will include all students who receive their doctoral degrees from the Graduate School and will include all Ph.D. and Dr.PH. students. The School of Public Health also offers the Dr.PH. degree, and these students will be included in the hooding ceremony, she said, but professional doctorates will not be a part of this ceremony as these degrees are not awarded through the Graduate School.

Whitaker’s return to Chapel Hill to speak will help focus attention on her successful Graduate School record. As a Carolina graduate student, Whitaker was a Lovick P. Corn Dissertation Fellow in the Graduate School’s prestigious Society of Fellows. Her research focused on the impact of the approximately 1.3 million refugees from Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), who fled to communities in northwestern Tanzania. She spent two years in Tanzania, looking at the costs and benefits of the African refugees’ presence in that country.

After graduating from Carolina, Whitaker moved to Washington, D.C., where she served as a senior research assistant for the Africa Project at the Brookings Institution.

Now an assistant professor in the department of political science at UNC-Charlotte, Whitaker is one of two former Carolina graduate students who sits on the university’s Graduate Education Advancement Board. The board is responsible for championing the cause of Carolina graduate education and to increase support for graduate students.

Rain site for the hooding ceremony is Carmichael Auditorium.

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Hooding ceremony Web Page: www.unc.edu/commencement/hooding.html
Contact: Mike McFarland, 962-8593