Garrett Graff and Aly Richards to address graduates and receive Honorary Degrees
Vermont Business Magazine Mortarboards will fly once more as Champlain College will hold in-person commencement ceremonies for its traditional undergraduate and Champlain College Online undergraduate and graduate students on Saturday, May 14, 2022.
Champlain will award honorary doctorates to commencement speakers Aly Richards, chief executive officer of Let’s Grow Kids, and nationally renowned journalist and author Garrett Graff. The ceremonies will also feature student speakers Izzy Bell and Paula Realbuto. Hilary Delisle, a Champlain College staff member and alumna, will sing the national anthem.
The events will take place at the Champlain Valley Expo in Essex Junction, at 10 am for traditional undergraduate students and 3 pm for students receiving Champlain College Online undergraduate and master’s degrees.
The return to in-person events comes after virtual ceremonies in 2020 and an in-person/virtual hybrid event in 2021. Interim President Dave Finney is expected to confer 334 bachelor’s degrees during the traditional undergraduate ceremony, and 133 master’s degrees, 126 bachelor’s degrees, and 19 associate degrees during the afternoon ceremony for Champlain College Online graduates.
“We are tremendously excited to celebrate this milestone face-to-face with our students and their families,” Interim President Finney said. “This is the culmination of the hard work of our students, and of all that our Champlain community does to prepare and support our graduates for successful careers and lives.” Finney continued: “We are also pleased to recognize Garrett Graff and Aly Richards for their significant contributions to our broader community, and know their words will inspire our students as they enter a complex world and seek to make their mark as Champlain College graduates.”
Aly Richards, chief executive officer of Let's Grow Kids, will speak to the traditional undergraduate community and will receive a Doctor of Public Service, honoris causa. Before taking the lead of the Vermont nonprofit, whose mission is to ensure that by 2025 all children in Vermont can access and afford high-quality child care, Richards served as deputy chief of staff for former Gov. Peter Shumlin. She also worked for former President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, and was named a 2013 Toll Fellow and 2014 Vermont Champion for Education. Richards has said the power of education, in its many forms, has driven her to carve her own path to success. This opportunity to speak to students as they turn the page to their next chapter serves as a full-circle moment for her.
Students receiving Champlain College Online undergraduate and master’s degrees will hear from Garrett Graff, who will receive a Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa. The Vermont native is a prolific journalist, historian, commentator, producer, and author. His most recent book, Watergate: A New History, is a New York Times bestseller, and his previous book, The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11, was a national bestseller and named the 2020 Audiobook of the Year. Graff is also the founding director of the Aspen Institute’s cybersecurity and technology program, where he helped start the prestigious Aspen Cybersecurity Group, and has a long history as a new media pioneer. Graff brings a unique expertise and perspective during an unprecedented time for Champlain’s graduates, who have during their college career experienced a confluence of complex national and global events.
In addition to the 2022 Honorary Degree recipients, student speakers will address graduates in each of the two ceremonies. Izzy Bell, representing traditional undergraduate students, is graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Professional Writing and is originally from Hamilton, VA. Paula Realbuto, who will represent Champlain College Online, is graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Business Management. Hailing from Troy, NY, she received an Associate in Science in Paralegal Studies from Champlain in 1988, and will be pursuing her master’s degree at Champlain this fall.
For more information about Champlain College’s 2022 Commencement ceremonies, visit commencement.champlain.edu. In addition to the in-person ceremony, the College will provide an online broadcast for both ceremonies on this site.
Honorary degree recipient Aly Richards, chief executive officer of Let’s Grow Kids, will speak to the Champlain College traditional undergraduate community on Saturday, May 14, 2022 and receive a Doctor of Public Service, honoris causa.
Let’s Grow Kids is a statewide organization leading the campaign to solve Vermont’s child care crisis by 2025. Champlain College is recognizing Richards’ work this May with an honorary degree.
Let’s Grow Kids has created a movement, mobilizing support from more than 35,000 Vermonters as well as businesses, early childhood educators, community-based organizations, and the state’s Governor and tri-partisan legislature, which passed landmark legislation in 2021 that put Vermont on a path to transform its child care system.
Aly Richards, CEO of Let’s Grow Kids, will receive an honorary degree from Champlain College on Saturday, May 14, 2022.
Prior to her current role, Richards served as the Deputy Chief of Staff for Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin where she led the effort to pass Vermont’s universal Pre-Kindergarten legislation, which established Vermont as a leader in early childhood education policy and significantly increased access to early childhood education opportunities for Vermont’s youngest learners.
Her commitment to education dates back to 2001, when Governor Howard Dean appointed her as the youngest person to serve as a student member on the Vermont State Board of Education. Richards also served on the 2008 Obama Campaign after graduating with honors in International Relations from Brown University.
For her leadership, in 2019 Richards was honored by Save The Children as a Changemaker for Children; in 2013 as a Toll Fellow by the Council of State Governments; and, in 2014 as the Vermont Champion for Education by the New England Secondary School Consortium.
Richards is also actively engaged in her community, serving as a Trustee of the University of Vermont Medical Center and Vice-Chair of the Board of the Vermont Council on Rural Development, and is a former Trustee of the Vermont State Colleges.
Aly, her husband James Pepper, their identical twin toddlers Beau and Wesley, and two dogs Bella and Ellie, live in Montpelier, Vermont and can often be found at a local creek in search of the perfect skipping rock, sampling apple cider donuts and maple creemees across the state, and partaking in the many adventures of the Green Mountains, from VINS to the Burlington Bike Path.
Journalist Garrett M. Graff will receive a Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, from Champlain College and serve as the commencement speaker to Champlain College Online undergraduate and Master’s students.
Commencement speaker Garrett M. Graff is recognized as one of the nation’s most prolific and wide-ranging journalists and historians. He has spent nearly two decades covering politics, technology, and national security, and his award-winning work—including a half-dozen books on topics ranging from presidential history and the Cold War to 9/11 and cybersecurity, as well as dozens of magazine articles, essays, podcasts, and documentaries—uses history to explain the story of today, illuminating where we’ve been as a country and where we’re headed as a world.
Garrett M. Graff will receive an honorary degree from Champlain College on May 14, 2022.
A current contributor to WIRED and CNN and director of the cyber initiatives at The Aspen Institute, he has written for publications from Esquire to Rolling Stone to the New York Times, and served as the editor of two of Washington’s most prestigious magazines, Washingtonian (2009-2014)and POLITICO Magazine (2014-2015), which he helped lead to its first National Magazine Award, the industry’s highest honor.
Graff’s books include The Threat Matrix: Inside Robert Mueller’s FBI and Raven Rock, about the government’s Cold War Doomsday plans, as well as co-authoring Dawn of the Code War, tracing the global cybersecurity threat. Douglas Brinkley called his most recent book, Watergate: A New History, “dazzling” in the New York Times Book Review. Graff’s previous book, The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11, compiling the voices of 500 Americans as they experienced that tragic day, was a #1 national bestseller and was named the 2020 Audiobook of the Year.
A regular voice and analyst on NPR, PBS NewsHour, the History Channel, and elsewhere, he hosted “Long Shadow,” a podcast series about the lingering questions of 9/11—a #1 Apple History podcast—and served as executive producer of “While the Rest of Us Die,” a VICE TV series based on his book Raven Rock, among other multimedia, TV, and film projects.
He is the founding director of the Aspen Institute’s cybersecurity and technology program, where he helped start the prestigious Aspen Cybersecurity Group, and has a long history as a new media pioneer. As the founding editor of mediaBistro.com’s FishbowlDC, he was the first blogger admitted to cover a White House press briefing in 2005. A Vermont native and graduate of Harvard, he served as deputy press secretary on Howard Dean’s presidential campaign and, beginning in 1997, was then-Governor Dean’s first webmaster.
He taught at Georgetown University for seven years, including courses on journalism and technology, and has served on the boards of the Burlington Housing Authority, Vermont Public Radio, and the National Conference on Citizenship, a congressionally-chartered civic engagement group founded by Dwight Eisenhower and Harry Truman. Garrett lives in Vermont with his wife Katherine and their two children.
Find more information about 2022 commencement speakers at commencement.champlain.edu and stay up-to-date on the latest news from Champlain College here.
About Champlain College: Founded in 1878, Champlain College is a small, not-for-profit, private college in Burlington, Vermont, with additional campuses in Montreal, Canada, and Dublin, Ireland. Champlain offers a traditional undergraduate experience from its beautiful campus overlooking Lake Champlain and more than 90 residential undergraduate and online undergraduate and graduate degree programs and certificates. Champlain’s distinctive career-driven approach to higher education embodies the notion that true learning occurs when information and experience come together to create knowledge. For the seventh year in a row, Champlain was named a “Most Innovative School” in the North by U.S. News & World Report’s “America's Best Colleges” rankings, and was listed among The Princeton Review’s “The Best 387 Colleges” in 2022. Champlain is also featured in the 2021 Fiske Guide to Colleges as one of the “best and most interesting schools” in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain and was recognized as a 2022 College of Distinction for its “Engagement, Teaching, Community, and Outcomes.” For more information, visit www.champlain.edu.
Burlington, VERMONT (May 3, 2022)—Champlain College