Class of 2012 Commencement Ceremony is 2–4:30 p.m., Sunday, May 13
TACOMA, Wash. – Dennis Flannigan ’61, former Washington state legislator and pioneering Tacoma community leader, and Ruth Purtilo, a scholar in ethics who has influenced health care delivery nationally and internationally, will be awarded honorary doctoral degrees by University of Puget Sound.
Flannigan’s honorary Doctor of Laws degree and Purtilo’s Doctor of Humane Letters degree will be presented by President Ronald R. Thomas at Puget Sound’s Class of 2012 Commencement Ceremony in Baker Stadium on campus, Sunday, May 13, from 2 to 4:30 p.m.
“Dennis Flannigan and Ruth Purtilo have defined their lives according to humanitarian principles that they have embraced consistently and without compromise,” Thomas said. “Their records of service across decades, their commitment to achieving things beyond anything their communities could have asked, and their generous offering of hope for others in the fields of public policy and health care tell a story that our 2012 graduates will value as they, too, head down the roads they choose for the future.”
Dennis Flannigan, who retired in 2010 after four terms as a Washington state representative, had an unusual start to a career that dramatically changed for the better his own community and communities that have learned from him.
In his early twenties, rather than finishing his studies in American literature at University of Puget Sound, Flannigan decided to join the 1964 Freedom Summer campaign to help register African American voters in Mississippi. Despite the murder of three civil rights workers just as he was finishing his training, he went ahead with the trip.
On returning to Tacoma, Flannigan, a member of Puget Sound’s Class of 1961, married Ilse Silins ’62, a thoughtful and passionate history major whom he had met at the university library. Flannigan’s talents were quickly recognized and he was hired to direct a federal program to develop fair housing services under the Hilltop Housing and Relocation Office. Working next for Washington Governor Dan Evans, he created a program to increase the number of workers from underrepresented groups in the State Department of Public Welfare. The effort was so successful that he was asked to teach at Western Washington University in social sciences.
Keen to be free of any bureaucracy, Flannigan soon returned to serve his community independently. He subsequently founded or co-founded organizations including The Pierce County Alliance, which offers mental health and addiction treatment; Emergency Food Network, where he served as executive director; Tacoma Area Council on Giftedness (with University of Puget Sound as a partner); and Pierce County Reading Foundation. He also held numerous charitable and civic board roles.
In 1988 Flannigan was elected to Pierce County Council, where he led an initiative uniting residents and civic leaders in a fight against gangs and violence. This created the Safe Streets Campaign, later recognized by President Bill Clinton as the best community mobilization program in the nation.
Flannigan was elected as a Democrat state representative in 2002. Among many accomplishments, he helped secure funding for the Chinese Reconciliation Project, the restoration of Murray Morgan Bridge, the McCarver Park renovation, and the Joy Building at University of Washington Tacoma. In 1994 he was named an American Leadership Forum Fellow and in 2008 the Washington State Psychologists Association Citizen of the Year.
In February 2010, at age 70, Flannigan announced he would not seek reelection. In an email message to his party, he wrote that, among others, he wanted to thank “all who have supported me” and “all who worked against me for their causes.”
Ruth Purtilo, professor emerita in ethics at Massachusetts General Hospital Institute of Health Professions, is widely known for her work in identifying compelling and unmet needs among health care professionals. Early in her young life she set out to fill these needs.
Purtilo trained as a physical therapist and began her career in rural North Dakota, then inner-city Chicago. Pursuing a dream to improve people’s lives, she joined Project Hope in Colombia, South America, and pursued a humanitarian fellowship in Swaziland, Africa.
Back in the United States, she noticed that patients, surrounded by their expert health care teams, had lost their sense of being meaningful participants in their own recovery. In a June 2000 speech, Purtilo related how she had earnestly explained this team partnership to a teenage patient, only to get the response: “Yeah, you’re the players, and I’m the football.”
It was only one of many strains on health care professionals that she encountered. Moral conflicts and misunderstandings, she realized, were creating stress, loss of confidence, and, in the worst case, compromises in patient care.
Determined to find some answers, Purtilo enrolled at Harvard University to study ethics and the philosophical and religious traditions of ethical inquiry. During her doctoral studies she was named a Joseph P. Kennedy Fellow in Medical Ethics, joining a group that grappled with emerging ethical issues such as transplantation, kidney dialysis, intensive care technologies, and health care rationing.
In the long journey thereafter, Purtilo took on many leading roles in the ethics of health care practice and policy. She wrote six books and more than 90 articles, and pursued ground-breaking research, including writing a 1983 prize-winning article predicting major ethical and social issues that would arise from the new killer disease AIDS.
While many of Purtilo’s roles have been at the national level, including her positions as past president of the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics (1992–93) and as a member of the Clinton health care task force (1991), she has never lost touch with the needs of doctors, nurses, patients, and their families.
Her published works include Health Professional-Patient Interaction (co-authored with Amy Haddad); Ethical Dimensions in the Health Professions; Ethical Foundations of Palliative Care for Alzheimer Disease (co-editor); and, stemming from her own Minnesota heritage, a chapter in The Ethical Life of Rural Health Care.
Much of Purtilo’s focus as an ethicist has been on chronic illness, disability, and issues arising in interprofessional health care teams. But she also has worked fearlessly to prevent discrimination against socially marginalized groups nationally and internationally.
Purtilo’s current roles include senior research associate at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Yvonne L. Munn Center for Nursing Research and presidential visiting professor at University of Vermont. Among much recognition, she holds four honorary degrees and a distinguished alumni award from Harvard Divinity School. She is a Catherine Worthingham Fellow and Mary MacMillan Award recipient of the American Physical Therapy Association. Purtilo lives with her husband Vard Johnson in Boston, Mass.
For more about the 120th Commencement Ceremony at University of Puget Sound visit: www.pugetsound.edu/commencement
For directions and a map of the campus: www.pugetsound.edu/directions
Photos of Dennis Flannigan and Ruth Purtilo can be downloaded from: www.pugetsound.edu/pressphotos
Photos on page: Top right: 2011 Commencement Ceremony; Top left: Dennis Flannigan (photo by Ross Mulhausen); Above left: Ruth Purtilo (courtesy photo).
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