York College announces 2024 Commencement Keynote Speaker

Columbia Graduate School of Journalism Dean Jelani Cobb will deliver the address to the graduating class

Dr. Jelani Cobb, Dean, Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and Peabody Award winner, will deliver the keynote address at York College/City University of New York 54^th Commencement Ceremony on Thursday.

During the ceremony, Dean Cobb will receive York College’s Presidential Medal from Dr. Claudia Schrader, interim President at York College.

Dr. Cobb joined the Columbia Journalism School faculty in 2016 and became Dean in 2022. He has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2015. He received a Peabody Award for his 2020 PBS Frontline film Whose Vote Counts? and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary in 2018. He has also been a political analyst for MSNBC since 2019.

He is the author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress and To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic. He is the editor or co-editor of several volumes including The Matter of Black Lives, a collection of The New Yorker’s writings on race and The Essential Kerner Commission Report. He is producer or co-producer on a number of documentaries including Lincoln’s Dilemma, Obama: A More Perfect Union and Policing the Police.

Dr. Cobb was educated at Jamaica High School in Queens, NY, Howard University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in English, and Rutgers University, where he completed his master’s degree and doctorate in American History in 2003. He is also a recipient of fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation and the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

He currently serves on the board of directors of the American Journalism Project and was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2023.

York’s Commencement exercised will take place at the UBS Arena in Elmont, NY.