Author P.M. Forni will be awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters during the 148th Commencement of Towson University.
Forni is widely regarded as a public intellectual of the first rank: a superbly educated and productive scholar and teacher, fully engaged in the issues of the day.
An award-winning professor at Johns Hopkins University, where he has taught since 1985, it is his work on civility that has brought him into the spotlight.
In 1997 he co-founded the Johns Hopkins Civility Project, an aggregation of academic and community outreach activities aimed at “assembling the significance of civility, manners and politeness in contemporary society.” He also directs The Civility Initiative at Johns Hopkins University, which he founded in 2000.
In a profile that appeared in 2008, Smithsonian Magazine said that Forni “will be remembered as one of the greatest generals in our nation’s struggle for civility.”
His book, Choosing Civility: The Twenty-Five Rules of Considerate Conduct (2002), has been translated into six languages, and in 2008 he published The Civility Solution: What to do When People are Rude.
Forni’s work has been mentioned in The New York Times, The Times of London, The WashingtonPost, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times and Forbes Magazine. In 2008 he received an annual NEA award for his article, “The Civil Classroom in the Age of the Net,” which appeared in the journal Thought and Action.
He has also appeared on a number of radio and television shows, including ABC’s “World News Tonight,” “CBS Sunday Morning,” “Oprah” and BBC’s “Outlook.”
Forni was nominated by the College of Liberal Arts and will be honored during the commencement exercise of the College of Business and Economics on Wed., May 22 at 3 p.m.
