Commencement, Baccalaureate speakers announced

President Rob Huntington has announced that alumnus John Buccigross, the ESPN anchor, will deliver the 2017 Commencement address and Rev. John Dorhauer, General Minister and president of the UCC, will deliver the Baccalaureate sermon in May.

Commencement Weekend is May 13-14. It begins with Baccalaureate at 4 p.m. Saturday, May 13, followed by the undergraduate and graduate honors ceremony at 7:30 that evening. Commencement will be at 10 a.m. Sunday, May 14, in Hoernemann Stadium.

We are excited to welcome back to campus Mr. Buccigross, who currently serves as co-host of ESPN’s SportsCenter weeknights at 11 p.m.  He landed his dream job in 1996 when he was hired as an anchor at ESPN.  In his early days at the network, he was the primary host of NHL 2Night, ESPN2’s 30-minute program dedicated to hockey highlights and news.  Currently, Mr. Buccigross also serves as the play-by-play voice of the NCAA Hockey Championship.  Since 2001, he also has been an ESPN.com columnist.
 
Before joining ESPN, he had been at WPRI-TV in Providence, R.I., starting as the station’s weekend sports anchor in 1994, and later becoming weekday anchor.  He started his career at local news network Cape 11 News in Massachusetts.
 
Mr. Buccigross is the author of a book, Jonesy: Put Your Head Down and Skate: The Improbable Career of Keith Jones, a memoir of the former NHL player and current analyst.
 
A native of Pittsburgh, Mr. Buccigross grew up in Steubenville, Ohio.  He majored in communication and theatre arts at Heidelberg, graduating in 1988.  He has never forgotten his Heidelberg roots or his faculty mentors.  Heidelberg honored him with a Young Alumni Achievement Award in 2003.  He has spoken numerous times with Heidelberg students about his career in broadcasting.  In the fall of 2013, he taught Principles of Media Management via Skype in the Media Communication Center.
 
In 2012, Mr. Buccigross began a charitable venture utilizing social media called “BucciOvertimeChallenge,” which raises funds for hockey-themed or hockey-led charities.  He has served on the advisory board for You Can Play, a campaign dedicated to fighting homophobia in sports.

We are fortunate to welcome the Rev. John Dorhauer onto campus for Baccalaureate this year.  Previously, Rev. Dorhauer was the Conference Minister of the Southwest Conference of the UCC, serving congregations and clergy in Arizona, New Mexico and El Paso, Texas.  He received his bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from Cardinal Glennon College, his master’s degree in Divinity from Eden Theological Seminary and his Doctor of Ministry degree from United Theological Seminary, where he studied white privilege and its effects on the church. 

Passionate about justice and the future of the denomination, Rev. Dorhauer has called on the UCC to rethink itself and to consider new ways of “being church” in light of reduced societal interest in institutional religion and the decline in UCC membership since the 1960s.  He is the author of Beyond Resistance: The Institutional Church Meets the Postmodern World (2015) and Steeplejacking: How the Christian Right is Hijacking Mainstream Religion (2007).
 
Under Rev. Dorhauer’s leadership during his first year in office, UCC congregations addressed racism through the Black Lives Matter movement and the denomination’s White Privilege curriculum, released in September 2016, which Rev. Dorhauer initiated; campaigned against discrimination, including that aimed at the LGBTQ community; and offered welcome and visible public support for Muslim neighbors through its Building Bridges initiative.