Commencement 2003

Two distinguished alumni—heart surgeon Robert D. Dowling ’81 and translator Richard L. Pevear ’64—returned to campus on May 11 to address almost four hundred graduates, families, and other members of the Allegheny community at Commencement exercises held in the 188th year of the College. Pevear’s wife and colleague, Larissa Volokhonsky, also presented a Commencement address.

The College honored Dowling with an honorary doctor of science degree. Pevear and Volokhonsky were awarded honorary doctor of humane letters degrees.

Dowling is associate professor of surgery at the University of Louisville School of Medicine and director of the Heart Transplant and Cardiac Assist Devices Program for the Transplant Center at Jewish Hospital. In 2001 Dowling and his colleague, Laman Gray, Jr., performed the world’s first implant of the AbioCor, a wholly self-contained artificial heart, in a human patient.

Pevear and Volokhonsky have won prestigious PEN Translation Prizes for their translations of The Brothers Karamazov and Anna Karenina. They have also translated classics by Bulgakov, Gogol, and Chekhov. Pevear is an adjunct professor of comparative literature and English at the American University of Paris.

For only the second time in seventeen years, Commencement was held indoors—in the Wise Center—because of inclement weather.
Pictured at right are members of the platform party: Allegheny College Trustee Willow Wilcox Brost ’74, Professor of Modern Languages Louis Wagner, Robert Dowling ’81, Associate Professor of Biology Ann Kleinschmidt, Larissa Volokhonsky, Richard Pevear ’64, and President Richard Cook.

Commencement Brings Best Mother’s Day Gift of All
by Erin Brady

Forget flowers or candy. Roxane Fucci got what she really wanted for Mother’s Day this year, something for which she had waited thirty years: her diploma from Allegheny College.

Fucci first matriculated at Allegheny in 1973. It was the only college she had applied to, and she says it has always been the only place she wanted to attend. She left after two trimesters, because of financial constraints, but Fucci says she never gave up her dream of finishing her undergraduate studies.

In 1996 Fucci’s dream moved a step closer to reality when she was awarded an Allegheny College Association Continuing Education Scholarship. Later she received the Mary Loretta Walsh Scholarship, which enabled her to study part time for a year. “Returning to college was a huge opportunity and also a risk,” Fucci says. “If I didn’t finish, not only would I be letting myself down, but all those people who put their faith in me.”

Once back on campus, Fucci says, “I fell in love with the classroom and learning all over again.” Familiar faces were a comfort, she says—noting that one of the first professors she ever had, Lloyd Michaels, was still on the faculty—but she says the Allegheny community always felt like home. “From the students, to professors, to the workers in the bookstore and post office,” she says, “the people at Allegheny are polite, kind, friendly, and guiding.”

A managerial economics major, Fucci spent the next seven years balancing the demands of a single parent with two teenage children, working fifty hours a week at her job at Advanced Cast Products in Meadville, and doing her coursework. Often she would leave home at 4 a.m., not to return until 10 p.m. But Fucci says her situation only fostered the family’s growth. “I could identify with what my children were going through as college students themselves, with midterms or finals,” she says.
Her children also provided her with additional motivation for finishing her undergraduate work. “My goal was to beat my kids out of college,” she says with understandable pride, “and I did.”