Rudolph Giuliani to Deliver Middlebury College Commencement Address, May 22; Honorary Degree Recipients Will Be Donald Sutherland, Charles Houston, Mary Patterson McPherson, Robert P. Moses.

(From AScribe)

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. -- Former Mayor of New York City and Time magazine 2001 Person of the Year Rudolph Giuliani will deliver the commencement address on Sunday, May 22, at the Middlebury College graduation ceremony, which will begin at 10 a.m. Giuliani will also receive an honorary Doctor of Laws degree.

According to Middlebury College administrators, Giuliani was selected to be the commencement speaker and an honorary degree recipient in order to recognize his leadership as mayor in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

Prior to his election as mayor, Giuliani served in a number of positions in the federal government, including United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, where he compiled a record of 1,452 convictions. Following an unsuccessful mayoral campaign in 1989, Giuliani ran again in 1993 and was elected the 107th mayor of the City of New York. In 1997, he was re-elected by a wide margin, carrying four out of New York City's five boroughs.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, on hearing that a plane had hit one of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, Guiliani rushed to the scene, arriving just after another plane hit the second tower. He took charge of the emergency efforts from a nearby building, but when the second tower collapsed, the building was engulfed in a wave of dust, ash and debris. Giuliani led his colleagues through the ash and smoke to a firehouse several blocks away, where a detective pried the door open and the group found momentary safety. Giuliani established a new command post at the New York Police Academy on East 20th Street, where he remained for the next three days. He took to the airwaves immediately, reassuring the nation and giving straightforward information about the ongoing rescue effort.

Following the terrorist attacks, Guiliani's leadership earned the admiration and respect of many national and international leaders as well as residents of New York City. Giuliani left office at the end of 2001, and is now the president of Giuliani Partners, a New York-based consulting firm specializing in security, preparedness and crisis-management.

Charles Houston will receive an honorary Doctor of Science degree. A resident of Burlington, Houston is emeritus professor of epidemiology and environmental medicine at the University of Vermont. As a physician, he helped invent a forerunner of the Jarvik artificial heart and is one of the world's foremost authorities on high altitude medicine. His studies of the altitude tolerance of bomber pilots during World War II were crucial in helping the Allies design strategies to defeat Japanese and German flyers. Houston also led the first Peace Corps project in India. He is an author as well, having written a number of books documenting his notable mountaineering achievements. Houston helped plot routes on K-2 in Pakistan and Everest in Nepal that were used by the first teams to successfully summit those peaks, and in 1936, he was part of the team that reached the top of 25,600-foot Nanda Devi in India, at that time the highest mountain ever climbed.