Contact: Sammy McDavid
STARKVILLE, Miss.--Two high-level members of the United States military establishment will help send off Mississippi State graduates during commencement exercises taking place the second week of May.
More than 2,400 university students are receiving spring-semester degrees.
To be held in Humphrey Coliseum, the first graduation program at 7 p.m. on the 11th will hear remarks by Lt. Gen. Darrell D. Jones, U.S. Air Force deputy chief of staff for manpower, personnel and services. Ray Mabus, U.S. Secretary of the Navy and former Mississippi governor, will address the second ceremony at 10 a.m. on the 12th.
Jones, a 1979 MSU and Air Force ROTC graduate, calls Jackson home, while Secretary Mabus, a University of Mississippi graduate and former Navy officer, was reared in Ackerman.
Also during the weekend programs, honorary doctoral degrees will be bestowed on Robert B. Deen Jr. of Meridian, president and chairman of the philanthropic Riley Foundation, and alumnus James L. Flanagan of Warren, N.J., retired Rutgers University research vice president and 1996 National Medal of Science winner.
Flanagan, a former Greenwood resident, receives the doctor of science degree at the Friday night ceremony; Deen, a Tupelo native who grew up in Starkville, the doctor of public service degree at the Saturday morning event.
Participating Friday will be graduates of the Bagley College of Engineering, including its Swalm School of Chemical Engineering; and the colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences, including its School of Human Sciences; Education; Forest Resources; and Veterinary Medicine (master's and doctoral degrees).
Degrees awarded Saturday will be from the colleges of Architecture, Art and Design, Arts and Sciences, and Business, including its Adkerson School of Accountancy.
Jones currently is the senior officer responsible for comprehensive Air Force plans and policies covering all life cycles of military and civilian personnel management, which includes military and civilian end strength management, education and training, compensation, resource allocation, and the worldwide USAF services program.
A College of Education alumnus, he has served in a wide variety of assignments at the base, major command, secretariat, combatant commands, and USAF headquarters levels. In addition to the MSU degree, he holds a master's degree in business administration from Webster University in St. Louis, Mo.
Mabus was appointed by President Barack Obama to be the 75th Navy secretary. As leader of the Navy and Marine Corps, he is responsible for almost 900,000 people and an annual budget of more than $150 billion.
At his 1987 election, Mabus became the youngest Mississippi governor in more than 100 years. Stressing education and job creation, the former state auditor led in passing one of America's most comprehensive education reform programs and, as a result, became a Fortune magazine's top 10 education governors honoree.
In 1994, Mabus was appointed by President Bill Clinton to be ambassador to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Holding master's and law degrees from, respectively, Johns Hopkins and Harvard universities, he also is a former chairman and CEO of Foamex, and an officer aboard the Navy cruiser USS Little Rock.
Deen, a 1950 Vanderbilt University Law School graduate, was a Lauderdale County attorney in general practice for 55 years. He is a founding member of both the Phil Hardin and Riley foundations, as well as the Mississippi Bar Association Foundation.
A 1943 Starkville High School graduate, Deen served in the Pacific Theater during World War II. In 1946, he entered Mississippi State after three years in the Army Air Corps, studying electrical engineering until the summer of 1947, when he left for law school.
A national and international award-winning photographer, he is a former national secretary of the Photographic Society of America.
Flanagan, a Greenwood High School graduate, received a 1948 MSU electrical engineering degree after having served in the Army Air Corps during World War II. He holds master's and doctoral degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
For more than three decades, he worked at what was then Bell Telephone Laboratories, contributing to development of voice mail, speech recognition, the artificial larynx, packet-switched voice, and other technologies now part of daily 21st century life. His work in information processing and telecommunications led to 46 patents and numerous national awards.
Upon retirement from Bell Labs, Flanagan joined Rutgers as Board of Governor's Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering and director of the Center for Advanced Information Processing. He later was promoted to the research vice presidency.
He long has supported MSU engineering and physics scholarships, and established an endowed scholarship fund in honor of his father.