263 receive degrees at Birmingham-Southern College commencement

Birmingham-Southern College held its spring commencement ceremony for the school’s class of 2022 on May 20 at Bill Battle Coliseum on campus.

The school conferred 263 degrees, including 79 Bachelor of Arts degrees, nine Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees and 175 Bachelor of Science degrees, according to a BSC news release.

The featured speaker was Duane Pontius, the T. Morris Hackney Professor of Physics at BSC. He has been a member of the faculty since 1999, following a career as research scientist in space physics. 

“What follows is distilled from my advice to myself, which you’ll listen to as I talk to myself,” Pontius told attendees. “There is great wisdom in Dostoevsky’s observation, ‘Beauty will save the world.’ Learn to seek beauty continually, and be open to what qualifies as beauty. Beauty permeates the world as peoples, as well as the ideas used to understand our place in it.”

In his research, Pontius has made important discoveries about Jupiter and Saturn by exploring electromagnetic coupling between the planets’ atmospheres and their magnetospheres. He developed a theoretical model that played a role in the Cassini spacecraft’s discovery of geysers on Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

Other platform participants included BSC President Daniel B. Coleman; BSC Board of Trustees Vice Chair Rev. Keith Thompson, senior pastor of Canterbury United Methodist Church in Birmingham; alumni representative Dr. Daniel C. Potts, an attending neurologist at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in Tuscaloosa; and BSC Chaplain Rev. Julie Blackwelder Holly.

Thompson, Potts and Holly are also BSC graduates.

At the ceremony, BSC Interim Provost Timothy B. Smith named Professor of Art Pamela Venz as the 2022 Outstanding Educator of the Year. 

Venz created the concentration in photography when she joined the Department of Art and Art History in 1998. Her work has been exhibited in Birmingham, around the country and in the Czech Republic. 

Pontius was the winner of the Outstanding Educator of the Year in 2021.

Other events for the Class of 2022 included a capping ceremony for graduating seniors held on May 19 in Bill Battle Coliseum. Seniors honor a mentor or family member by having that person place the mortarboard on their head. The speaker, chosen by graduating seniors, was Dr. Joseph Chandler ’03, associate professor of psychology and director of grants and special projects. 

The annual baccalaureate service was held on May 19 at Canterbury United Methodist Church.