Dr. Jerry McGee, president emeritus of Wingate University and longtime American Indian studies professor Dr. Jane Haladay, will give the Winter Commencement address at UNC Pembroke this weekend.
Haladay will speak at The Graduate School ceremony on Friday, December 8. McGee is the keynote speaker at the undergraduate ceremony on Saturday, December 9.
The Graduate School ceremony will begin at 7 p.m. at Givens Performing Arts Center. The undergraduate ceremony will begin at 9 a.m. at the English Jones Center. Both ceremonies will be livestreamed and available for viewing here.
A native of Rockingham, McGee shares a personal connection with UNCP. His late wife, Hannah, was a graduate, earning a degree in elementary education in 1970.
McGee was the longest-tenured university president in North Carolina when he retired in 2015 after serving 23 years. During his tenure, the former Wingate College gained university status, tripled its enrollment, added numerous facilities and programs and began a School of Pharmacy.
McGee devoted more than 40 years to his career in higher education, including roles as vice president at Gardner-Webb University, Meredith College and Furman University. After retiring as president of Wingate, he served as interim president of South Piedmont Community College.
McGee was an accomplished NCAA Division I football official. He spent 36 years on the sidelines, officiating over 400 college games, including the Rose Bowl, Fiesta Bowl and Cotton Bowl.
McGee has written two books, and in 2020, he and his two sons, Ryan and Sam, released “Sidelines and Bloodlines: A Father, His Sons and Our Life in College Football.” In 2006, he received the Order of the Long Leaf Pine, North Carolina’s highest award for state service.
Haladay, who joined the faculty in 2006, is the recipient of the 2023 Board of Governors Award for Excellence in Teaching. She received her bachelor’s in world literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, her master’s in American Indian studies at the University of Arizona, and her Ph.D. in Native American studies at the University of California, Davis.
A native of California, Dr. Haladay taught high school English in the San Francisco Bay Area before developing a passion for Native American and Indigenous literature, which led her to grad school and her faculty position at UNCP.
Along with department chair Dr. Mary Ann Jacobs, Haladay has been one of the founding faculty of the Indigenous International Indigenous Exchange Consortium (IIEC), a collective of faculty at UNCP, the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada and Swinburne Technical University in Melbourne, Australia.
An advocate of travel-study and experiential learning, Dr. Haladay has traveled with students to Canada, Australia, New Mexico and Costa Rica. Her scholarship includes the 2023 essay “Coming Home: Affirming Community in Lumbee Children’s Literature,” for which she received the 2023 Randall Kenan Prize.
