Ambassador of Israel to the United States Michael Oren will deliver the Commencement Address to Monmouth University graduates at its winter Commencement ceremony and receive an honorary degree on Friday, January 13 at 1:30 p.m. at the Multipurpose Activity Center (MAC). Monmouth University will award approximately 650 undergraduate and graduate degrees. Harry S. Pozycki, chairman and founder of The Citizens Campaign, will also receive an honorary degree during the ceremony.
Ambassador Oren is a graduate of Princeton University and Columbia University and has received fellowships from the U.S. Departments of State and Defense, and from the British and Canadian governments. Formerly, he was the Lady Davis Fellow of Hebrew University, a Moshe Dayan Fellow at Tel-Aviv University, and the Distinguished Fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Yale, and Georgetown. Ambassador Oren has written extensively for major newspapers and is author of the bestselling books, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East and Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present. Ambassador Oren was raised in New Jersey and moved to Israel in the 1970s. He acted as an Israeli Emissary to Jewish refuseniks in the Soviet Union, as an advisor to Israel’s delegation to the United Nations, and as the government’s director of Inter-Religious Affairs.
Harry Pozycki is the chairman and founder of The Citizens Campaign, a non-partisan volunteer civic empowerment group that teaches citizens that they don’t need to be elected officials to get things done. Pozycki has also authored several model municipal reforms for use by citizen leaders who have won their adoption in over 150 cities and towns. He was Monmouth University’s Public Servant in Residence in 2007 and 2008. In 2004, he developed New Jersey’s anti-pay-to-play law, which has been heralded as the strongest in the nation and has served as a model for laws adopted in Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, and Philadelphia. Mr. Pozycki is also the author of The Citizens’ Manual: Paths to Power for Regular Citizens. Previously, Mr. Pozycki brought all sides together to pass New Jersey’s Open Public Records Act which gives citizens access to government information so they can build solutions without waiting for their elected representatives to act. Mr. Pozycki is a 1969 graduate of Brown University and holds a law degree from Fordham Law School. In 1973, he founded a law firm specializing in growth planning and environmental law. In 1997, Mr. Pozycki and his wife Caroline founded what is now The Citizens Campaign.