The University of Maryland, Baltimore’s (UMB) mission statement encompasses two central themes — to improve the human condition and serve the public good — and the featured speakers at the Universitywide commencement ceremony drove home those points May 16 at Royal Farms Arena.
Keynote speaker Barbara Pierce Bush, the co-founder and board chair of Global Health Corps, a nonprofit committed to global health equity, delivered the first part of the message to the 2,000-plus graduates of UMB’s six professional schools and interdisciplinary Graduate School, telling the Class of 2019 to “remain engaged in the missions and the values that matter most to us.”
Barbara Pierce Bush, co-founder and board chair of the nonprofit Global Health Corps, delivers the keynote speech to the University of Maryland, Baltimore's 2019 graduates at the universitywide commencement ceremony.
“Each generation has buzzwords, and for ours, one is the concept of ‘engagement,’ ” said Bush, the daughter of former President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura Bush. “We may change jobs and cities, but most of us do not change our commitment to our ideals, a truth that is exemplified by the community sitting here today and your commitment to improve the human condition.”
Bush was preceded by student remarker Sarah Montague Shepson, MPPA, among the graduates of the Francis King Carey School of Law, who focused her message on the public service side of the UMB ledger. She talked about the late John Dingell, who spent nearly 60 years as a congressman from Michigan and helped to write some of the most significant legislation of his time, including the Civil Rights Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Affordable Care Act.
“Most of us could only dream of creating the legacy he left,” Shepson said of Dingell, who died in February. “And yet, at the end of his life, he still wondered if he had done enough to make a difference. But I imagine Congressman Dingell knew better than anyone that the work in public service is never done, that the truly worthwhile endeavors take years, decades, lifetimes to accomplish. It is all of our jobs to continue improving our collective society.”
(Watch a video of the ceremony below and read about Party in the Park).
UMB President Jay A. Perman, MD, presided over the event and opened with an apology, saying a delay to add several more rows of seats on the arena floor was his fault. “We decided to move the Universitywide ceremony from Friday afternoon to Thursday morning in hopes of boosting attendance. You exceeded our expectations. So I’ll claim this as a problem of success.”
In introducing Bush, Perman hailed her work with Global Health Corps and her commitment to fighting health inequities, noting that her success has not gone unnoticed. Newsweek recognized Bush as one of its Women of Impact in 2013, and she won the Skoll Foundation’s Award for Social Entrepreneurship in 2018.
“Ms. Bush has committed her life’s work to improving access to health care in some of the world’s most underserved areas,” Perman said. “Hers is a passionate — and compelling — voice in the fight to confront the most serious issues of health, poverty, and equity, issues that endanger vulnerable populations at home and abroad.”
Bush to Grads: Be Leaders and Make a Difference
Bush related her experience in graduating from Yale University 15 years ago, describing her mindset that day as “a sensation I crave and want to experience again and again — that teetering and wonderfully frightening feeling you get right before you jump into something new and unknown. When it feels like anything is possible.”
She quoted historian James Truslow Adams, who wrote, “There are two educations — one should teach us how to make a living, and the other should teach us how to live.”
“Today, with your diplomas in hand, you have gone a long way toward completing your first education,” Bush said. “But the second one, the ‘how to live’ part, is every bit as important. And in many ways, it is far more challenging.”
Bush said her challenge was to make a difference by working to reduce global health inequities under the ideal that health is a human right. At Yale, she changed her major from architecture to humanities after joining her parents on a trip to Uganda to launch the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.
“I saw health care workers, families, and communities that believed in a better future and believed that through their work, they could change the future for the better, one person at a time,” Bush said. “After graduation, instead of designing buildings or furniture or dresses, I was now designing a career in global health and service. And I was living in that feeling of in-between — unsure where my career would go, while knowing service was what motivated me.”
She spoke about co-founding Global Health Corps in 2009 and creating a model in which young professionals, working in pairs and from a variety of backgrounds, serve one-year fellowships helping to fill gaps with government health entities or nonprofits in Africa and the United States. The organization boasts more than 1,000 alumni, with more than 90 percent remaining in the global health field. She told stories of three fellows and the impact they are making from Sierra Leone to Malawi to South Africa, providing access to medicine to fight diseases such as Ebola and AIDS.
“All of you sitting here today will be leaders like them, in a field of your choosing,” Bush said. “Every individual talent can be used to make an impact on the world. Because whether the challenge is the water supply in Flint, Mich., or the Zika virus, or Ebola, or something else completely, that challenge is going to be solved not by a smartphone, but by a smart, creative human being that cares.”
Shepson, too, urged her fellow graduates to be leaders and to make a difference.
“We all have something to contribute,” she said. “What’s important is that you get started. The good news is, by your work here at UMB, you already have. And today, upon our graduation, I ask you to be courageous in tackling the challenges of our time and to use the skills that you learned here to continue to shape our society for the better.”
Honorees and Special Guests Brighten Day
A School of Dentistry graduating student, Marisa Rushing, sang the national anthem to kick off the ceremony. The procession into the arena was led by marshals Robert Beardsley, PhD, MS, of the School of Pharmacy; Jane Lipscomb, PhD, RN, MS, FAAN, retired professor of the School of Nursing and former director of UMB’s Center for Community-Based Engagement and Learning; and Jacquelyn L. Fried, retired associate professor and former director, Division of Dental Hygiene, School of Dentistry.
In addition, two notable UMB alumni — Victoria Hale, BSP ’83, PhD, and Philip Needleman, PhD ’64, MS — received honorary Doctor of Science degrees.
Hale is a School of Pharmacy alumnus, one of its founding pharmapreneurs, and the founder of OneWorld Health, the first nonprofit pharmaceutical company in the United States, and Medicines 360, a pharmaceutical nonprofit dedicated to women’s health.
Needleman is a renowned scientist and pharmacologist whose work in the 1990s contributed to the discovery of the anti-inflammatory medicine celecoxib (brand name Celebrex). He earned his PhD in pharmacology from the School of Medicine and is a member of its Scientific Advisory Council.
(Read more about members of the platform party.)
Perman also welcomed a special guest among the platform party, Errol Reese, DDS, former UMB president and former dean of the School of Dentistry. Maryland Secretary of Higher Education James D. Fielder Jr., PhD, was in attendance, too, offering congratulations from Gov. Larry Hogan. And William T. Wood, JD ’66, a member of the UMB Foundation Board of Trustees, brought greetings from the University System of Maryland Board of Regents.
In his remarks, Wood also urged the graduates to give back to society — and to consider doing so locally.
“I think everyone on this stage will agree that one way to lead a satisfying and meaningful life is to give back your time and talent to help others,” he said. “And so I have one request for the graduates: Your talent, your energy, your drive, and your leadership can be tremendous assets to the city of Baltimore and this region. As your personal and professional lives advance, consider that a commitment to greater Baltimore can be an enormous benefit to a lot of people.”