Cora Weiss to Receive Honorary Degree at Adelphi Commencement

Adelphi University will confer an honorary Doctor of Laws degree to Cora Weiss, president of the Hague Appeal for Peace. Weiss will receive the degree at Adelphi’s 119th Commencement on Thursday, May 21, 2015 at 10:00 a.m. in the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum, 1255 Hempstead Turnpike, Uniondale, NY.

Cora Weiss has devoted her life to the movements for peace, the advancement of women, civil rights and human rights both at home and abroad. She calls for the abolition of nuclear weapons and says that humanity has abolished slavery, colonialism, the prohibition of women voting, and apartheid, why not war?

Weiss is President of the Hague Appeal for Peace which launched the Global Campaign for Peace Education and has been well known as a peace activist since the early ‘60’s when she was a leader of Women Strike for Peace. She helped to organize anti-Vietnam war demonstrations including the largest on November 15, 1969 in Washington DC.

Weiss, who recently was inducted as an Honorary Member of the Delta Kappa Gamma society of key women educators, was a volunteer teacher in the NYC school system.

As a Trustee of Hampshire College she responded to students who called for divesting from corporations doing business in apartheid South Africa, and worked with co-trustees to develop a socially responsible investment policy.

Weiss has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000 and 2001, for her role in organizing the largest peace congress in history, and again in 2005, with 1000 women proposed by Members of the Swiss Parliament, and in 2012 with her husband, Peter, for their work for peace.

Among her many other awards are the Peace Studies Medal of Manhattan College, and the Joseph C. Wilson Award on the 50th anniversary of the UN by the Rochester United Nations Association. In 1998 she and the Rev. William Sloane Coffin were honored at The Riverside Church of New York on the 20th anniversary of their founding The Riverside Church Disarmament Program which she directed for 10 years. In 1999 The Phelps Stokes Fund honored her for her work in the 50’s and 60’s for the de colonization of Africa and for bringing nearly 800 students from East Africa to the US for education under the African American Students Foundation.

Weiss was President of the International Peace Bureau (Nobel Laureate 1910) which she now serves as UN Representative. She is an Honorary Patron of CTAUN, the Committee on Teaching About the United Nations.

Among her most prized possessions is the President’s Medal of Merit awarded at Dr. Scott’s inauguration in 2001.

For more information and the full day’s program, please contact Adelphi’s Commencement Office at 516.877.4695 or visit commencement.adelphi.edu.