Christ Chapel was set to hold a convocation for the first time, as faculty, students, and others prepared to honor academic achievement as well as several special guests on Thursday.
The all-school average GPA for the 2019 spring semester was 3.399. The all-women’s GPA was 3.486, while the all-men’s was 3.317. Pi Beta Phi earned the Greek scholarship cup for sororities with a 3.520 GPA, while Alpha Tau Omega won for the fraternities, with a 3.302 GPA.
Assistant Professor of German Stephen Naumann was chosen to receive the Daugherty Award for Teaching Excellence at the event.
“Dr. Naumann has consistently demonstrated the features of teaching excellence that the Daugherty Award was created to celebrate,” Dean of Faculty and Professor of History Mark Kalthoff said in an email. “Those features include outstanding classroom teaching, conscientious student advising, notable collegiality, rigorous scholarship, and engagement in campus life beyond the classroom. Dr. Naumann’s excellence has been clear in all of these areas.”
Guests invited to the ceremony included local business leaders and the women commissioners, as well as contractors who worked on the chapel and chief architect Duncan Stroik and his wife, Ruth.
The main scheduled speaker was Michael Ward, senior research fellow at Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford. Ward delivered the college’s commencement address in 2015 and participated in the college’s online course on C.S. Lewis. He is the author of “Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis” and serves as professor of apologetics at Houston Baptist University.