Alumni

Commencement 2004

Commencement 2004, held Saturday, May 8 at Ravinia Festival Park was the 126th time family and friends gathered to mark a milestone in the academic journey of the College’s graduates.

This year’s graduating class heard addresses from professors Robert A. Baade, David M. Boden, Judy Massey Dozier, and Carolyn Tuttle, all of whom have received the College’s Great Teacher of the Year Award.

Reflecting on the accomplishments of the class of 2004, Katie Cotter ’04, senior class speaker, said, “Here at Lake Forest College we pride ourselves on diversity — diversity in ethnicity, diversity of opinion, and diversity of extracurricular and educational possibilities. Among us today sit students from Saudi Arabia to Los Angeles, British Colombia to Romania. We have students receiving degrees in every
discipline including personalized independent study majors such as one in sociolinguistics.

“While a Lake Forest College education depends heavily on classroom participation and an individualized relationship with our faculty, the students’ experience outside the classroom greatly differentiates our students from those graduating at other institutions. Our class has been honored with the talent of students interested in everything from beginning the community service group Circle K to appearing in Sports Illustrated for holding the record as national collegiate champion in handball.  And the list does not stop there….

“…The class of 2004 embodies the message of the [College’s] mission statement: that through this journey of college we become well-rounded individuals with the knowledge to enter our next stage of life with the skills and talents to be confident in our future.”

2004 Honorary Degree Recipients

Laurence R. Lee, Doctor of Laws

Laurence R. Lee, known to many at Lake Forest College as Larry Lee, was born in Chicago but has been a Lake Bluff neighbor of the College for 45 years. He received both a bachelor’s and a law degree from the Univer-sity of Chicago, where he learned to love the “Great Books” in the storied days of the university’s distinguished president Robert Hutchins. The possessor of a powerful, take-no-prisoners intellect, Lee is devoted to the liberal arts and to the health and well-being of Lake Forest College. For more than 30 years, he excelled as an attorney for Abbott Laboratories, ultimately retiring as Senior Vice President, Secretary, and General Counsel. 

Both at Abbott and in retirement, Lee worked with great conviction on behalf of philanthropic and civic causes. In addition to the College, his beneficiaries have included the scholarship programs of the Clara Abbott Foundation, the Village of Lake Bluff, the Lake Bluff Public Library, the Safe Place Shelter for abused women, Shimer College, and other entities.

A life trustee of Lake Forest College, Lee has been a stalwart member of our Board for more than a dozen years. His association with the College began long before his Board service, however, when he audited his first course. Because Larry Lee is a keen student, our faculty know that when he audits a course, the intellectual fire power in the classroom invariably rises — and they cannot risk any holes in their own class preparation.

Lee’s commitment to our College has been manifested in myriad ways, but most notably and most recently through his family’s unparalleled generosity in helping fulfill the vision of the Donnelley and Lee Library, which will open this fall.

The Honorable Blanche M. Manning, Doctor of Laws

The Honorable Blanche M. Manning has been a judge on the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois for a decade, having been nominated by President Bill Clinton in 1994.  Before her appointment to the federal bench, Judge Manning served the State of Illinois as a trial court judge in Cook County and as the first African American woman ever elected to the Illinois Appellate Court.  A Chicago native, she holds an undergraduate degree from Chicago Teachers College, a law degree from the John Marshall Law School, a master’s degree from Roosevelt University, and a Master of Laws degree from the University of Virginia School of Law.

Prior to her judicial service, Judge Manning held many key positions as a practicing trial attorney, including assistant state’s attorney in the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, supervisory trial attorney for the Chicago office of the U.S. Equal Opportunity Commis-sion, Counsel for United Airlines, and assistant United States attorney.  A legal scholar, she also taught courses at DePaul University College of Law for more than a decade.

Judge Manning is devoted to the cause of inspiring Chicago area youth to achieve and excel. She speaks regularly at public schools in the city, and for more than ten years she has taken part in the “We Care Role Model Program” jointly sponsored by the Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Police Department.

Judge Manning is an accomplished jazz musician who is now completing her second jazz CD and plays with several jazz groups across the city. She is a Renaissance woman whose multiple interests and talents should inspire us all.

Ralph J. Mills Jr. ’54, Doctor of Letters

Ralph Mills Jr., is an acclaimed poet, scholar, professor, native Lake Forester, and distinguished alumnus of Lake Forest College. His literary ambitions date to his college years; he studied English and published his early work in Tusitala, the College’s literary magazine.

After graduation, Mills earned an MA and PhD in English from Northwestern University and studied at Oxford. He led a distinguished academic career, teaching first at the University of Chicago and later becoming the first director of graduate studies in English at the University of Illinois–Chicago, where he taught modern literature and creative writing for more than 30 years.

Mills committed himself to poetry scholarship early in his career; he edited the letters of the great American poet Theodore Roethke and the notebooks of David Ignatow. His interests have been diverse — including poets such as Wallace Stevens and William Butler Yeats, experimental writers such as Samuel Beckett, and French men of letters such as René Char and André Michaux. Mills’s scholarly essays and reviews have appeared in the most distinguished literary and academic journals, but he has also written with great verve and clarity for a popular audience in the Chicago Sun-Times. He edited the famous anthology Contemporary American Poetry, which introduced a generation of American college students to the best contemporary poetry.

Mills is a distinguished poet in his own right. He has published a series of well-received volumes of poetry and won such nationally recognized awards as the Carl Sandburg Award and the William Carlos Williams prize.  His selected poems, Grasses Rising, appeared in 2001 as a capstone to a truly impressive creative career.

José “Pepe” Vargas, Doctor of Fine Arts

José A. Vargas, known around the world as “Pepe” Vargas, was born in a small town outside Bogota, Colombia. He received a degree in law and social science from the University of Buenos Aires in 1976, and then traveled extensively throughout Latin America.

He arrived in Chicago in 1980 with $200 in his pocket; he enrolled at Columbia College, earning a degree in Broadcast Journalism and Television/Film Production in 1985.

Vargas taught international law, Latin American economics, and sociology in his native Colombia, and his lectures on Latino arts have inspired students at universities throughout the Midwest. He has given motivational speeches at state prisons and participated as a “Principal for a Day” in the Chicago Public School system. He gave the Annual Latin American Studies Lecture last year at Lake Forest College and has mentored our students by involving them as interns at the Chicago Latino Film Festival, which he founded in 1985. 

In 1999 Vargas founded the International Latino Cultural Center in order to bring Americans the best in classical Spanish drama, music, arts, dance, and poetry. Throughout his career, Vargas has shown his love for the creativity of all Latin Americans, be they women boxers born in the Bronx, indigenous Brazilians fighting to keep their land and culture in the jungle, Chileans who disappeared during the Pinochet regime, Sephardic Jews in Mexico, or tango dancers in Argentina. He has given a human face to the suffering wrought by economic injustice and has helped others grow by showing them the world through the eyes of others.