Read Dr. John Beckford’s Commencement Address<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\nFurman University awarded 60 undergraduate and graduate degrees during its summer commencement exercises Saturday, Aug. 13 at in McAlister Auditorium.<\/p>\n
Dr. John Beckford, professor of music and former Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean at Furman University, served as commencement speaker.\u00a0 Furman president Elizabeth Davis presided over the ceremony.<\/p>\n
Beckford, who joined the Furman music faculty in 1976, spent five years as Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean before retiring at the end of the 2015-16 academic year.\u00a0 He has also served the university as Dean of the Faculty (2008-11) and Chair of the Faculty (2005-07).\u00a0 He will return to full-time teaching at Furman in the spring of 2017 after a fall sabbatical.<\/p>\n
Beckford was the first full-time percussion instructor at Furman, and he has been principal percussionist and timpanist for the Quad-City (Iowa\/Illinois) Symphony Orchestra and percussionist for the Greenville Symphony Orchestra and Chamber Orchestra.\u00a0 He is also an active freelance musician, having performed with such artists as Henry Mancini, Marvin Hamlisch, Natalie Cole, and the Three Irish Tenors.<\/p>\n
In addition to serving for three years as Chair of the Council of Deans for the Associated Colleges of the South, Beckford was a faculty member and chair of the music division with the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts (1982-1999) and past president of the South Carolina Chapter of the Percussive Arts Society.\u00a0 He holds Bachelor of Music, Master of Fine Arts, and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees from the University of Iowa.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read Dr. John Beckford’s Commencement Address Furman University awarded 60 undergraduate and graduate degrees during its summer commencement exercises Saturday, Aug. 13 at in McAlister Auditorium. Dr. John Beckford, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":6018,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-top-stories","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6017"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6017\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}