About 4,000 students and 14,000 relatives and friends will be filing into Hec Edmundson Pavilion this month to celebrate the 117th time the University of Washington has produced graduates. The night before the June 13th commencement ceremonies, the Tacoma and Bothell branch campuses will also celebrate their new graduates, as the two-year-old branches begin to harvest their first full crop of students.
The demand for tickets to the UW commencement exercises continues to grow, despite doubling the capacity of Hec Ed by splitting the occasion into two ceremonies. Glance over the Daily the last weeks of May, and you will find classified ads from students desperate enough to pay up to $20 per ticket for entrance to the event.
Each year the call goes out from student leaders and Daily editorialists to “do something” about the crush, but in reality not much can be done. Moving the ceremonies to an off-campus site such as the Kingdome would defeat the whole purpose of celebrating a University event. Putting graduation exercises in Husky Stadium would put graduates at risk of having it rain on their parade.
This year’s event promises to be particularly dramatic, as House Speaker Tom Foley delivers the commencement address and receives the UW Alumnus Summa Laude Dignatus Award, the highest honor the UW can bestow upon a graduate. We asked Joel Connelly, ’71, the national correspondent of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, for a look behind the headlines at the man, including Foley’s years as a UW student. That report begins on page 12. Also included in this issue are articles on the Hanford cleanup, how your biological rhythms can give you the blues, and a photojournalism exhibit on view at the Henry Art Gallery. There are nine brief profiles of the best professors, TAs and UW volunteers for 1992. Also included are University news items, alumni events and the ever-popular class notes section. The commencement crush will echo through that last section of future Columns as thousands of ’92 grads add their names to the rolls of UW alumni.