Dear CAS Leadership,
The CAS Commencement Advisory Group, UO Student Life and CAS Leadership have come together to determine how best to develop our commencement programs in the absence of individual department ceremonies. We have now confirmed many of the details of our June commencement events and we’d like to share them with you. Please forward this information to your faculty and staff. We also will be communicating directly with students tomorrow, so please don’t forward this email to students. [emp added]
In order to balance our time and venue constraints with length of ceremony concerns, CAS will hold separate ceremonies for undergraduate students by division: Humanities, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and the School of Global Studies and Languages (GSL). In addition, a separate CAS graduate ceremony will be held with hooding offered to PhDs.
Our CAS Commencement website lists locations and times for each of the five ceremonies on Tuesday, June 20, 2023. Here are the details in brief:
| DIVISIONAL COMMENCEMENT CEREMONY | TIME AND DATE | LOCATION |
| Natural Sciences majors | June 20th at 11:30 am | Autzen Stadium |
| Humanities majors | June 20th at 1:00 pm | East Campus Green |
| Social Sciences majors | June 20th at 3:00 pm | Autzen Stadium |
| School of Global Studies & Languages majors | June 20th at 4:00 pm | Memorial Quad |
| All CAS Master’s and PhD students | June 20th at 4:00 pm | East Campus Green |
At each ceremony, students will cross a stage, have their name called and receive a diploma cover. There also will be a reception for all CAS graduates and their families. More information on this reception will be shared soon.
We know faculty, staff, students, and families may have additional questions in the coming days and weeks, and we are working on finalizing program details now. As plans become final, we will update the CAS commencement website and we will soon be sharing RSVP information and an FAQ document to answer the most commonly asked questions.
Best regards,
Chris
Chris J. Poulsen
Tykeson Dean of Arts and Sciences
Professor of Earth Sciences
College of Arts and Sciences | University of Oregon
1030 E. 13th Avenue | Eugene, OR | 97403
Pronouns: he/his
The question has come up as to how Soc Sci faculty are supposed to attend an hour long name-reading at Autzen that starts at 3PM and is followed by a reception with parents, and then get to a 4PM hooding Ceremony in the field behind the law school. Presumably our leadership checked this schedule with Concur first?
A little off topic, but if you bold a sentence should you also add: (emp added). This double emphasis would make me want to forward the message to my students out of immature spite. (You can’t tell me what to do!)
On a more important note, I’m really glad you’re back! Have a great Friday!
All good comments. My general reaction is ‘what a brilliantly student-centered change from departmental major ceremonies to a three ring circus’ I’m just behind the new times I suppose.
And, as a classified member of one of these ridiculous CAS Shared Services/ASU, I was told I was to not forward to students and it was no longer part of my position description, even though it has been part of my original job description for the 20+ years that I’ve worked for the UO.
And slightly off topic, I would love to hear faculty and other stakeholders opinions of this decision made by CAS and who is to blame.
Such a telling and inauspicious way to hold commencement, starting with the delay for the track stuff. There’s just so much going wrong with UO and CAS on top of everything else in higher education. I’m thinking of local stuff like the shared services fiasco, the Tykeson advising fiasco, the failure to add classrooms over the years. It goes on and on.
So if you are a history/english double major (not a super unusual configuration), you’re supposed to sit through a long humanities ceremony on campus and then bust it to get to autzen for another long ceremony? Or (as is also not very unusual) something like history or political science, and a language? And I have no idea how dreadful the schedule situation might be if one studied something like psych and education (non-cas) or music and marketing (both non-cas). Previously you did have the two ceremonies and there might be conflict, but since the ceremonies were a lot smaller, transit and parking and general congestion were less likely to be an issue.
Also, “in the absence of departmental ceremonies” sounds like the departments just up and opted not to play this year and I feel like that’s not actually how this whole situation unfurled. Ugh. I await the response when UO calls up this year’s crop (you know, in August or so, when they’ve had plenty of time to settle into their new lives as cogs in corporate wealthmachines) to ask for donations. It will serve us right if the general answer is, well, I was planning to give, but then it turned out my interests weren’t important to y’all and so nah, bro, I’m supporting greenpeace instead.