University announces slate of commencement speakers
The speakers will deliver remarks at places around campus May 10 or earlier.
By JENNIFER NEHRER
As of Tuesday, a slate of commencement speakers have been revealed for various schools within USC including the Rossier School of Education, the Kaufman School of Dance and the Price School of Public Policy.
Billie Jean King, tennis and activist “icon,” is the latest commencement speaker to be announced. She will speak at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism’s commencement, the school announced in an article Tuesday morning.
“Billie Jean King has used the power of sports, and her towering accomplishments as an athlete, not simply to reflect culture but to shape it,” Annenberg Dean Willow Bay wrote in the release. The ceremony will take place May 10.
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King earned her fame on the tennis court but held it off-court as well. On the courts, King won 39 Grand Slam titles in singles, doubles and mixed doubles matches. She won the Wimbledon tournament a record 20 times. Her most famous tennis match was the “Battle of the Sexes” on Sept. 20, 1973, where she faced Bobby Riggs in a match viewed by 90 million people around the world.
Off the court, King is known for her lobbying efforts that helped pass Title IX, a landmark piece of legislation prohibiting sex-based discrimination in educational settings, in 1972. In 1973, King founded the Women’s Tennis Association and served as its first president. In this position, she lobbied for the successful equalizing of prize money between men and women at the U.S. Open.
King grew up in Long Beach, California, and now has ownership stakes in several local professional women’s teams, including Angel City and the Los Angeles Sparks.
A week ago, the USC Marshall School of Business’ Instagram account announced that Byron Allen, CEO of Allen Media Group, will be the keynote speaker for the school’s commencement ceremony May 10.
In the same post, the account also announced that Karen Schoenbaum, executive vice president and chief financial officer of American Business Bank, will be the keynote speaker for the Leventhal School of Accounting’s commencement ceremony earlier the same day.
On March 26, Price announced Maria Rosario Jackson, chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, as its keynote speaker. Jackson is the first African American and first Mexican American woman to be the NEA chair, appointed by President Joe Biden in 2021. She obtained her Master of Public Administration from Price in 1989.
Phil Chan, co-founder of Final Bow for Yellowface, will be the keynote speaker at the Kaufman commencement ceremony on May 10, the school announced March 19. Final Bow for Yellowface works to uplift Asian representation in the performing arts.
Rossier announced its speakers for their master’s and doctoral commencement ceremonies on March 15. C Pam Zhang, author and recipient of the Academy of Arts and Letters’ Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Art, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and a California Book Award, will be the keynote speaker at the doctoral hooding ceremony on May 8.
On May 10, Safiya Umoja Noble — a 2021 MacArthur Fellow and current interim director of the UCLA DataX Initiative, director of the Center on Race & Digital Justice as well as the David O. Sears Presidential Endowed Chair in the division of Social Sciences at UCLA — will speak at the Rossier master’s ceremony.
