Xavier University to honor Class of 2022 at spring Commencement on Saturday
May 12, 2022
Xavier University’s 184th Commencement Ceremonies will be held on Saturday, May 14 at the Cintas Center.Xavier will confer 1,418 undergraduate degrees, 691 master’s degrees, 42 doctoral degrees and 18 associate degrees during Saturday’s two ceremonies. The Undergraduate Commencement Ceremony will begin at 9:00 a.m., with the Graduate Commencement Ceremony to follow at 2:30 p.m.
A livestream of each ceremony will be available.
This year marks the University's first Commencement under the leadership of President Colleen Hanycz, PhD, the first woman and layperson to hold the title in Xavier's history.
The Commencement speaker for the undergraduate ceremony is Mark A. Godsey, director of the Ohio Innocence Project at the University of Cincinnati’s Institute for Justice. Godsey is a leading scholar and activist in the innocence movement. The Ohio Innocence Project, which he co-founded in 2003, is considered one of the most successful organizations of its kind, having secured the release of 34 wrongfully convicted Ohioans.
His efforts toward the exoneration of wrongfully convicted individuals include the development of a network of student groups at colleges statewide, including at Xavier, at which a university chapter was formed in 2021.
The graduate ceremony speaker, the Rev. Thomas Firestone, serves as the lead pastor for the Catholic Community of Flint, formed in 2015 by merging Flint’s five remaining parishes amid the city’s water crisis. With carte blanche to organize the new community, Firestone developed a team of religious and lay leaders and volunteers to minister to the former parishes with campus ministries, food banks, work skills programs and youth outreach.
Firestone began his education at Xavier in 1970 and earned degrees at Holy Redeemer College, the State University of New York, Michigan State University and the Thomas Cooley Law School. He returns to Xavier to share his story about Flint and his message about the importance of relationships and community.
Graduates will join the network of more than 80,000 Xavier alumni from across the globe.
Xavier University is a private university located in Cincinnati, Ohio, providing a liberal arts education in the Jesuit Catholic tradition. Founded in 1831, the University is the sixth-oldest Catholic university in the nation. It has been ranked among the top 10 master's-level universities in the Midwest by U.S. News & World Report for the past two decades. The Princeton Review names it one of the "Best 387 Colleges in America."