Graduate Commencement

Lewis & Clark’s Graduate School Commencement is Sunday, June 3, 2018.

Student Commencement Speaker

Araceli Cruz, MA ’18 Student Affairs Administration

Araceli Cruz is an Assistant Director of Financial Aid at Lewis & Clark College and a graduate of the Student Affairs Administration program at the Graduate School of Education and Counseling. Her work focuses on breaking down barriers for historically marginalized students, ensuring they can access and thrive in higher education. The Student Affairs Administration program has helped her understand how to mitigate policies and procedures that may produce inequalities for marginalized communities in higher education. Araceli’s future career goals including becoming a university president.

Her work has been presented at the Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education regional conference and is under review for an upcoming edited volume on a collection of narratives detailing the experiences of student affairs professionals of color in higher education. Her contribution offers recommendations for success for student affairs professionals of color and ways they can construct opportunities to flourish.

Araceli currently serves as a board member of the Portland Leadership Foundation and is the Co-Chair of the Equity Diversity Inclusion committee for the Oregon Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. In addition, Araceli serves on various scholarship selection committees and volunteers with local college readiness programs.

Araceli received her bachelor’s degree from Linfield College where she majored in Sociology and Spanish. In her free time, she enjoys traveling with her husband and spending time with her family.

Guest Commencement Speaker

Manivong J. Ratts, Ph.D., L.M.H.C., N.C.C.

Workshop with Dr. Ratts: Challenging the Nationalist Discourse in America: The Urgent Need for Social Change Agents in Community and Educational Settings

Registration Required; Saturday, June 2, 2018; Lewis & Clark Graduate School, South Chapel 

Manivong J. Ratts is professor of counseling at Seattle University and chair of the Department of
Leadership and Professional Studies (AEDT, Counseling, EDLR, SDA, and TESOL).

Dr. Ratts received his Ph.D. in Counseling from Oregon State University (OSU). He holds an
associate’s degree from Yakima Valley Community College, a bachelor’s degree in psychology
from Western Washington University, and a master’s degree in counseling from OSU. He is a
licensed mental health counselor (L.M.H.C.) and past President of Counselors for Social Justice,
a division of the American Counseling Association (ACA) 

His research is in the area of
multiculturalism and social justice. He is one of the nation’s leading scholars in the area of social
justice counseling. He coined the term “social justice counseling” and argued that social justice
is a “fifth force” among counseling paradigms, following the psychoanalytic, cognitive-behavioral, humanistic, and multicultural traditions.

Recently, he chaired a committee which developed Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies (MSJCC) for the counseling profession with Drs. Anneliese Singh, Sylvia Nassar-McMillan, Kent Butler, and Rafe McCullough. The MSJCC serve as a guide to help counseling professionals develop multicultural and social justice competence. The competencies have been adopted by the American Counseling Association (ACA), the leading organization for professional counselors and they are used in counselor training programs across the country.

Dr. Ratts has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Counseling and Development and the Journal for Social Action in Counseling and Psychology. He has published in various peer reviewed journals on social justice counseling and is lead author of the following books Counseling for Multiculturalism and Social Justice: Integration, Theory, and Application (2014) with Dr. Paul B. Pedersen and ACA Advocacy Competencies: A Social Justice Framework for Counselors (2010) with Dr. Judy Lewis and Dr. Rebecca Toporek. He has produced two video series through Alexander Street Press titled Four Approaches to Counseling One Client: Medical, Intrapsychic, Multicultural, and Social Justice Counseling Paradigms (2011) and Five forces of Counseling and Psychotherapy: Psychoanalytic, Cognitive-Behavioral, Existential-Humanistic, Multicultural, and Social Justice (2013). He is also founder of Seattle University Counselors for Social Justice, an advocacy organization that addresses issues of equity impacting individuals, communities, and schools.

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