David Porter is a former Professor and Carleton’s 8th President. David Porter taught classics and music at Carleton College from 1962-1987, serving also as Carleton’s president in 1986-1987. From 1987-1999 he was president of Skidmore College, then taught at Williams (1999-2008) and Indiana University (2008) before returning to Skidmore last year as the Tisch Family Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts. He has given recitals and lecture-recitals throughout the United States, in Great Britain and on radio and TV, including a number of performances of the Concord Sonata in recent years. Porter is the author of books on Horace and on Greek tragedy and of three monographs on Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury. He is also editor, with Gunther Schuller and Clara Steuermann, of a book on pianist and Schoenberg colleague Edward Steuermann, with whom Porter studied from 1955-1962. His book On the Divide: the Many Lives of Willa Cather was published in 2008 by the University of Nebraska Press, and a second book on Cather, co-authored with a colleague at Drew University, will appear in late 2009.
Link to text for David Porter’s Commencement Speech
Link to audio for David Porter’s Commencement Speech