COMMUNITY NEWS

Spring graduation ceremonies and speakers Glenn Stultz Johnson

BSC Professor of Chemistry Dr. Laura Stultz, the 2013 Alabama CASE/Carnegie Professor of the Year, will address the Class of 2014 during the 155th Commencement ceremony on Saturday, May 17, at 9 a.m. at Bill Battle Coliseum on campus. A President’s Reception will be held on campus immediately after the ceremony. Stultz was named the BSC Outstanding Educator of the Year during the college’s 2013 graduation ceremony. The award is given to a member of the BSC faculty who, according to recommendations by his or her colleagues, excels in all aspects of teaching, including scholarship, classroom performance, and student advising. The award includes a cash stipend and an invitation to speak at the following Commencement. Stultz joined the BSC faculty in 1997 after doing postdoctoral research and teaching at Indiana University. She received her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of at Chapel Hill and her bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Oberlin College. Dr. Luke Timothy Johnson, Distinguished Professor of New Testament at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, will deliver the annual Baccalaureate address on Friday, May 16, at 1 p.m. at Canterbury United Methodist Church in Mountain Brook. A Capping ceremony will be held that same day at 4 p.m. in the coliseum. Lisa Glenn ’06 will deliver the Convocation address at BSC’s Honors Day ceremony on Thursday, May 1, in Munger Hall Auditorium. Glenn was recently promoted to director of programs at New Global Citizens, an education nonprofit in Tempe, Ariz.

Ambassador of “happyness” shares secrets at BSC

Chris Gardner, whose best-selling 2006 autobiography, , was made into an acclaimed film of the same name starring , delivered BSC’s 2014 Alex P. Stirling Lecture on campus in March to an audience of about 600. Gardner talked about his one-year struggle in San Francisco as a broke, homeless, single parent to a 14-month- old son, and how he held on to his dream of financial independence. With no college education and virtually no connections, he earned a spot in the training program and became the sole trainee offered a job at the firm in 1981. Now, after just trying to survive, he has some advice for others. “You can achieve success in life regardless of your circumstances if you find your passion, have a plan, and take practical steps,” said Gardner, whose talk was preceded by a trailer of the movie. “Start where you are. Find your ‘button’ and do what you love.” Science doesn’t tell you who you’ll become in life; only spirituality does, according to Gardner, age 60, whose talk was called “Spiritual Genetics and the .” “Spiritual genetics is what makes you, you,” he stated. “Your future is not already determined because of your zip code or family situation or DNA. If it were, I should have become an alcoholic and an abuser like my step-father.” Instead, Gardner said he chose to take a different path. He told how his mother, Betty Jean Triplett, encouraged Gardner him. “I saw the light in my mom and I embraced it,” he said. “She told me that I could be or do anything.” Gardner explained that he spelled “happiness” with a “y.” He said the “y” is to remind people that they and they alone determine their success. Gardner started his own successful brokerage firm; he has now resigned from it to allow more time for speaking, writing, and philanthropy, including working with programs for the homeless and for victims of domestic violence. He also is a board member of the National Fatherhood Initiative and received the group’s Father of the Year Award in 2002. “My book is really a love story about a man committed to giving his son what he never had—a father,” said Gardner, who also has a daughter and granddaughter. “It’s the book of all us who had the opportunity to be all the negative stuff in our faces, but chose to go the other way.” The Stirling Lecture Series is sponsored by the Birmingham-Southern Student Government Association in 8 / ’southern memory of Alex Stirling, a BSC student who died of cancer in 1995.