Following is the text of President Obama’s commencement address at Arizona State University on May, 13, 2009, as released by the White House.

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, ASU. (Applause.) Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Thank you — please. Well, thank you, President Crow, for that extremely generous introduction, for your inspired leadership as well here at ASU. And I want to thank the entire ASU community for the honor of attaching my name to a scholarship program that will help open the doors of higher education to students from every background. What a wonderful gift. Thank you. (Applause.) That notion of opening doors of opportunity to everybody, that is the core mission of this school; it’s a core mission of my presidency; and I hope this program will serve as a model for universities across this country. So thank you so much. (Applause.)

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Five Loyola University New Orleans public relations students were awarded first-place honors Friday in the 2009 Bateman Case Study Competition. The annual competition, organized by the Public Relations Student Society of America, asks teams from universities to tackle a full-scale public relations campaign for a nonprofit organization. This year, students worked with the Consumer Bankers Association to raise college awareness among public school students.

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May 6, 2009 – BusinessWeek’s 2009 ranking of the top undergraduate business schools has recognized Loyola University Chicago’s School of Business Administration (SBA) for its commitment to teaching in the area of ethics. Thousands of business majors at more than 100 schools nationwide were surveyed, resulting in a No. 1 ranking for Loyola in the specialty area of ethics.

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Pastors have always ministered to their flocks about economic matters, reminding them of the good things the Bible says about thrift and self-reliance, and how it criticizes such exploitive practices as predatory lending. But a recent study by University of Iowa law student Jonathan Landon shows that, like with so many other messages, their testimony doesn’t always get through.

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Pomp and circumstance, talks and music, and events on Northwestern’s Evanston and Chicago campuses will highlight the inauguration of Morton O. Schapiro as the 16th president of Northwestern University Oct. 7-10, 2009.

An inauguration planning committee, led by Sarah Pearson, vice president for alumni relations and development, has begun the Herculean task of scheduling and developing myriad events surrounding the inauguration.

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May 5, 2009- Test robotic mouse in maze. Note any problems with robot behavior. Tweak computer code. Compile code. Load new code on robotic mouse now tethered to laptop. Unplug mouse and return it to maze. Repeat.

Iterating through the to-do list above served as a recipe for extreme learning for an intrepid group of University of California, San Diego undergraduates who dared to design and build a robotic mouse from scratch. The electrical engineering and computer science undergraduates from the Jacobs School of Engineering also wrote the software to teach the robot to solve a maze. The team unveiled their mouse at the IEEE Region 6 Southwest Area Spring Meeting on Saturday, April 25th, held at UC San Diego.

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Ann Davies, the Edwin F. Wilde, Jr. Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at Beloit College, has been named vice president for academic affairs and dean of the college. The two-year appointment was announced by Beloit College President-elect Scott Bierman on April 27, following the spring meeting of the college’s board of trustees. Davies will assume the position on June 1.

“The college is extremely fortunate, and I am personally appreciative, that Prof. Davies is willing, even eager, to take on these responsibilities,” Bierman said, noting that she is widely respected by her colleagues and peers.”

A member of the college faculty since 1997, Davies has also served on a number of committees and task forces. She teaches courses in political theory and public law, and also serves as a pre-law advisor and contributor to the legal studies program. In 2005, she received the James R. Underkofler Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award.

Davies was named the Wilde Professor in 2008, in recognition of her outstanding teaching, scholarship and service to Beloit College. A graduate of Kenyon College, Davies holds a master’s degree and a doctorate from the University of Chicago. Her research interests include liberal political thought and its reflection in modern U.S. jurisprudence, as well as liberal theory’s treatment of coercion within political systems. Davies’ appointment follows the announcement by Lynn Franken, dean of the college since 2005, that she would step down at the end of the 2008-09 academic year. An English scholar with a doctorate from the University of Texas-Austin, Franken will join the faculty in the department of English.

Award-winning sports journalist Dick Enberg will be the speaker for Marquette University’s commencement ceremony on Sunday, May 17. The ceremony will take place at the Bradley Center, 1001 N. 4th St., at 9:30 a.m.

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Walden University (Minnesota) is offering a new bachelor’s program in Communication that will help students acquire the skills they need to meet the growing demand for expertise in communication fields such as new media.

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Intelliworks, Inc., a leading provider of relationship management software for higher education, today announced the availability of Intelliworks Social Marketing, an innovative application connecting university admissions departments’ constituent relationship management (CRM) systems with prospective students on social network Facebook.

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San José State University has established a new research and training center focusing on global concerns, especially immigration. The center’s first official act will be sponsoring “Opening the Floodgates: Symposium on Immigration,” at 3 p.m. Thursday, April 30, in the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, rooms 225-229.

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April 13, 2009 — In an ongoing effort to open the doors to new educational pathways for prospective and current students in the field of Information Technology, University of Phoenix, the nation’s largest institution of higher education, has signed a collaborative articulation agreement with Sun Microsystems where college credit can be awarded to students who hold Sun certifications.

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The Michael & Susan Dell Foundation Awards $6,000,000 in Scholarships to 300 Graduating Seniors

Needs-Based Dell Scholars Program Recognizes Low-Income Students Who Have a Determination to Succeed

As part of a scholarship program unique in the type of students it supports and its retention rates that far exceed the national average, the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation’s Dell Scholars Program today awarded 300 students with $6,000,000 in college scholarship funds. To date, the Dell Scholars Program has awarded 1,250 scholarships and paid out $25 million in scholarship funds.

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April 9, 2009 – A team of UNLV researchers has completed the first-ever comprehensive health status report of children entering kindergarten in Nevada – a tool that can be used to identify and remediate health disparities and may ultimately lead to increased academic success among Nevada’s students.

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Pepperdine University president Andrew K. Benton convened a group of higher education leaders in Los Angeles on March 30 to discuss the potential challenges from the Obama administration’s proposals to increase access to higher education.

Obama’s goal is to have the highest college graduation rate in the world by 2020, and he is calling for as much as $50 billion in funding to help make it happen. Benton, the former chairman of the board of the American Council on Education (ACE), underscored that the changes will have significant impact on higher education providers and that it was important for the institutions to remain abreast of major developments.

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First Lady Michelle Obama will address the graduating class at the fourth Commencement at the University of California, Merced,  campus on Saturday, May 16. The Office of the First Lady announced today (March 27) that Mrs. Obama will deliver the commencement speech to UC Merced’s first full senior class – the University opened in 2005. UC Merced students actively sought out the First Lady as commencement speaker by writing letters to Mrs. Obama, her office, and her friends and family.

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President Barack Obama will be the principal speaker and the recipient of an honorary doctor of laws degree at the University of Notre Dame’s 164th University Commencement Ceremony at 2 p.m. May 17 (Sunday) in the Joyce Center on campus.

Mr. Obama will be the ninth U.S. president to be awarded an honorary degree by the University and the sixth to be the Commencement speaker.

The University will confer degrees on approximately 2,000 undergraduates, 420 MBA students and 200 Notre Dame Law School students.

Background: Presidential Commencement addresses at Notre Dame?Barack Obama will be the ninth U.S. president to be awarded an honorary degree by the University of Notre Dame and the sixth to be the Commencement speaker.

On June 5, 1960, President Dwight Eisenhower delivered Notre Dame’s first presidential Commencement speech, interrupting the 45th reunion of his class at the U.S. Military Academy to make the trip. In his 20-minute address, Eisenhower foreshadowed a U.S. government on the verge of social and political change.

President Jimmy Carter made what many regard as the key foreign policy address of his presidency at Notre Dame’s 1977 Commencement exercises. He spoke of a diminishing threat from the Soviet Union, a notion dismissed as naive at the time but which proved prophetic. He also advocated for the creation of new global alliances and championed human rights, policies built upon the “new reality of a politically awakening world.”

In May 1981, President Ronald Reagan made his first public appearance after the attempt on his life in March of that year. Like Carter, Reagan proved prescient in his remarks on foreign policy, saying: “The West will not contain communism, it will transcend communism. We’ll dismiss it as a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.”

President George H.W. Bush, was the University’s principal Commencement speaker in 1992. The elder Bush used the occasion to focus on family values and service to society.

Bush’s son, President George W. Bush, delivered his first presidential commencement address at Notre Dame in May 2001, declaring that the nation’s faith-based organizations were central to the war on poverty.

President John F. Kennedy — the nation’s only Catholic president — received the Laetare Medal, Notre Dame’s highest honor, in a White House ceremony in 1961, and as a U.S. senator in 1950 delivered the winter Commencement address and received an honorary degree.

Notre Dame also awarded honorary degrees to Presidents Franklin ?Roosevelt and Gerald Ford, but those were at special academic convocations, not at Commencement ceremonies.

New York Governor David A. Paterson today issued an executive order creating a task force that will bring together State leaders in industry and higher education to generate ideas to diversify the New York State economy through industry-higher education partnerships. The Task Force on Diversifying the New York State Economy through Industry-Higher Education Partnerships, established by Executive Order No. 19, will study best practices and generate recommendations on fostering business incubation, growth and emerging technology commercialization. (more…)

Privacy management in online social networks will be the topic of the Raynor Memorial Libraries’ Spring Colloquium Thursday, Feb. 26.  Sarah Bonewits Feldner and Scott D’Urso, assistant professors of communication studies, will present “Facebook Just Got Creepy” at 3 p.m. in the John P. Raynor, S.J., Library’s Beaumier Conference Center, 1355 W. Wisconsin Ave.  The colloquium is free and open to public.

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Responding to the need for creative solutions to increased financial pressures on college students and their families, the Columbia College Chicago board of trustees has approved several initiatives designed to assist current and prospective students as they continue to pursue a college education during these tough economic times.

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David M. Steele, former president of Chevron Latin America and dean of the Silberman College of Business at Fairleigh Dickinson University, has been appointed dean of the College of Business at San José State University. Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Carmen Sigler selected Steele after a national search that focused on candidates with substantive experience in both the corporate and academic arenas. (more…)