Bill Clinton, Ted Koppel, Billy Joel and Vice President Joe Biden — each have been commencement speakers at Syracuse University in the past.

Now the 2012 commencement speaker is up for selection, and SU is accepting nominations on the university’s commencement website until March 18. Anyone can submit suggestions, including students, alumni, faculty, parents and members of the Syracuse community.

A couple hundred names are submitted to the website every year, said Susan Germain, executive director of special events. All nominations will be compiled into an unranked alphabetical list and sent to a student committee, she said.

The committee is made up of two senior class marshals, student marshals from each school and college, and student representatives of the Board of Trustees, Germain said.

‘Syracuse University is fortunate that they take the marshals from each of the schools and colleges, which is a pretty representative group,’ Germain said.

Although SU allows students to participate in the decision process, only the chancellor and president at other universities choose who the commencement speaker will be, Germain said.

‘In many cases, it may be the chancellor or president who speaks,’ she said.

On April 1, the student committee will meet with Chancellor Nancy Cantor and Germain, who will thank the students for taking part in the decision process and advise the committee to select a list that is representative of the student body, Germain said.

After the first meeting, the student committee will meet on its own — without any member of the administration — at least four more times, Germain said. During these meetings, the students will narrow down the original list of candidates so it includes 30 to 40 suggestions. Every member of the committee must agree on a candidate to include him or her on the final list, which is passed on to the chancellor May 1, Germain said.

Commencement speaker suggestions should be eligible for an honorary degree, but this is not a requirement, according to the commencement website. Suggestions should be based on the nominees’ outstanding and innovative achievements, humanitarian deeds, achievements that represent sustained efforts, connection to the university, the degree to which the candidates have touched others’ lives and the extent to which the candidates represent models to the graduates, according to the website.

Once Cantor receives the final list, she will choose the commencement speaker based on the speaker’s availability, relevance to the community and cost.

‘It’s a difficult process because there are hundreds of schools and colleges who are competing for the same individuals,’ Germain said.

The commencement speaker decision process used to begin in the fall, and the chancellor would receive the list of suggestions in November, she said, but the availability of speakers has become more difficult to determine.

‘It’s really too short a time to get the caliber speaker that we’d like to have,’ Germain said.

As a result, the process was moved up so there would be more time to decide who the commencement speaker would be.

Last year’s commencement speaker, JPMorgan Chase & Co. Executive Director Jamie Dimon, faced backlash when students protested the decision by chanting and dancing on the Quad, according to an April 16 article published in The Daily Orange.

The same decision process used now and in the past was used when Dimon was selected to be the commencement speaker for the Class of 2010. Many students protested the decision because they questioned whether Dimon was actually on the list provided to the chancellor, Germain said.

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Published on February 6, 2011 at 12:00 pm

Contact Laurence: [email protected] | @lgleveille