FAYETTEVILLE — As he was handed his diploma Saturday morning, it was announced that at 88 years old, Richard Murie was the oldest graduate in the class of 2012 at the University of Arkansas.
Murie’s fellow graduate students reacted with a round of applause, which quickly spread to the crowd gathered in Bud Walton Arena for the Fayetteville campus’ All-University Commencement.
“I was so surprised that I was the oldest one,” Muriesaid after the ceremony. “I thought, ‘This is fantastic.’”
Murie received a master’s degree in Spanish, 57 years after earning a doctorate in chemistry from Iowa State University. Sixty-two years ago, he earned his first college degree, a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Ohio University.
Murie now holds four degrees, including three at the post-graduate level.
“Learning is my pleasure,” he said.
His advice to anyone think-ing of going back to college: “It’s never too late. If you have the opportunity, do it. You have to have a goal in life. You can’t just sit.”
Murie taught night classes in analytical chemistry for 30 years at colleges in West Virginia, Ohio and Michigan while he worked in research laboratories for corporate giants such as Monsanto and General Motors.
“I’ve worked night and day all my life,” he said.
He retired from GM in 1991 and moved with his wife to Bella Vista in 1992. Murie had taken two years of Spanish as an undergraduate and taught chemistry courses in Mexico back in the 1970s and 1980s.
About six years ago, he began teaching conversational Spanish for tourists at College at the Crossing in Bella Vista, an outreach center of Northwest Arkansas Community College that offers non-credit personal enrichment courses.
After his wife died in 2006, Murie decided to pursue an advanced degree in Spanish at the University of Arkansas. He took advantage of the university’s program of free tuition for admitted students who are 60 or older and meet certain requirements.
Murie wasn’t always able to take a full load of classes because of medical problems, he said. Also, he has difficulty hearing, so he relied on notes taken by fellow students.
But Murie never complained, said Juliana Antonio, who took notes for him for two years.
Antonio, who received a master’s degree in Spanish literature on Saturday, said students were never exactly sure of Murie’s age.
“We knew he was around his 80s, but that was it,” she said. “It was always a mystery.
“He’s a legend,” she said.“We’d call him, ‘Sir Richard.’”
Murie wasn’t the only octogenarian in the state to graduate on Saturday.
Charlie Ball, 89, of North Little Rock received a bachelor of professional studies degree in public relations from Arkansas Tech University in Russellville. Ball earned his diploma through an accelerated degree program at Tech for individuals who have 60 or more hours of college credit, according to Tech.
Back in Fayetteville, Alice Walton received an honorary doctorate at the All-University Commencement, a ceremony that recognizes only those earning master’s and doctoral degrees.
Walton, the only daughter of late Wal-Mart Stores Inc. founder Sam Walton, was honored for her business career and philanthropy, university Chancellor G. David Gearhart said.
Through her family’s two charitable foundations, whichhave given hundreds of millions of dollars to colleges and universities around the nation, Alice Walton’s “philanthropy extends to literally thousands and thousands of students,” Gearhart said.
She serves on the boards of the Walton Family Foundation and Walton Family Charitable Support Foundation, the latter of which is notable for two historic gifts made to the University of Arkansas.
In 2002, it made a $300 million gift that still is the single largest gift made to an American public university and the fifth-largest to any university, public or private.
In 1998, it gave $50 million to the university’s business college that led to the naming of what is now the Sam M. Walton College of Business. At the time, it was the largest single gift made to a business school.
Walton’s “crowning achievement” is the foundingof Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Gearhart said. The museum has drawn more than 300,000 visitors since it opened in November, he said.
Walton, now a Texas resident, grew up in Bentonville and attended Trinity University in San Antonio, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and finance.
She was greeted Saturday with a standing ovation.
“Wow,” she responded. “What a special day for all of us.”
Walton said that she had to let the graduates “in on a little secret.”
When she graduated from Trinity, she decided to skip commencement to go on a float trip in the Pacific Northwest with her family.
“So I missed my graduation,” she said. “I was on the Snake River having a grand old time. This is my first graduation.”
Walton, wearing redrimmed glasses, told the crowd that she was “humbled by this great honor.”
“With this degree, I can finally say I am a real Razorback,” she said.
She concluded her remarks by stepping to the side of the lectern and leading the graduates in a Hog call.
“That’s the best Hog call I’ve ever heard, I can tell you that,” Gearhart said, stepping to the microphone.
Following the All-University Commencement were undergraduate ceremonies throughout the day for Walton College, J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, Fay Jones School of Architecture, College of Engineering, College of Education and Health Professions, and Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences.
Gearhart said the university expected to confer about 4,500 degrees on Saturday, the 141st commencement in the school’s history.
Among the new degree holders was a journalism major whose punning parents intended for him, from birth, to attend the university.
Full name: Ray Zorback Ford.
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Northwest Arkansas, Pages 15 on 05/13/2012