Commencement Speakers and Honorees

Keynote Address and Honorary Degree Recipient - Virginia Rowan Smith

Virginia Rowan Smith is chairman of Inductotherm Group Worldwide, headquartered in Rancocas, New Jersey. The Inductotherm Group, leading manufacturers of melting and thermal processing and production systems for the metals and materials industry, is a global company with manufacturing facilities around the world.

Both the Inductotherm Group of companies and its sister group, the Diversified Group of companies, are managed by Indel Services, LLC, and owned by Rockbridge Technologies, LLC. Smith is on the Board of Directors of Indel Services and is a principal and director of Rockbridge Technologies, LLC.

Now celebrating 42 years at Indel Services, Smith joined the firm in 1984 as manager of Advertising & Communications for Inductotherm Corp. In 1990, she was appointed director of Advertising and later vice president of Corporate Communications for Indel Services. In addition to those responsibilities, in 2002, Smith became a group vice president for the Inductotherm Group—responsible for worldwide corporate advertising. At the same time, she became a member of the Corporate Management Advisory Board.

In 2010, Smith was appointed chairman of Inductotherm Corp., and in 2016 she was named chairman of its parent company, Inductotherm Group Worldwide.

A graduate of Cornell University, Smith holds an MBA in Marketing Management from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. She served as an account supervisor at several major international advertising agencies, including Foote, Cone & Belding and McCann-Erickson, before coming to Inductotherm. In 1998, she was inducted into Sigma Beta Delta, the international honor society for business management.

Beyond her corporate leadership, Smith serves on the Advisory Board of the Lake George Land Conservancy—an arm of the Nature Conservancy. She also serves on the President’s Advisory Committee for the Everglades Foundation in Florida. She has served on the Advisory Council for Doane Academy in Burlington, New Jersey, and serves on the Art Collections Committee at the Union League of Philadelphia. Both Smith and her husband, Manning Smith III, are active supporters of the U.S. Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation, which awards college scholarships to the children of Marines.

For two consecutive terms, from 1993 to 2006, and from 2009 to the present, Smith has been a member of the Rowan University Board of Trustees.

Smith is president of the Henry M. Rowan Family Foundation and the daughter of Henry and Betty Rowan, whose gift to Glassboro State College in 1992 remains one of the largest gifts to a public college in higher education history. Smith and her family continue to be dedicated supporters of Rowan University. They recently established the first endowed chair in the Henry M. Rowan College of Engineering.

In recognition of her distinguished leadership in global business, higher education governance and philanthropy, Virginia Rowan Smith will receive an Honorary Doctor of Humanities from Rowan University.

2026 Distinguished Alumna - Antoinette “Toni” Libro B’60, M’67, Ph.D.

Antoinette “Toni” Libro credits her many accomplishments to the exceptional foundation she received during her undergraduate and graduate work as an English major at then-Glassboro State College, which led to her Ph.D from New York University in 1983.

Libro returned to her alma mater to teach in its new communication department in 1969, helping establish and expand the program’s writing disciplines to serve communication majors and, with composition classes, students throughout the college.

She co-founded the women’s studies concentration in 1974 – now Women’s & Gender Studies– where she designed and taught the first required course in the new curriculum. One of the nation’s earliest women’s studies programs, it won a Council on the Humanities grant that affirmed the substance and significance of Libro’s work with fellow educators and as coordinator.

She advanced to full professor in writing arts; then as an administrator, became founding dean of the College of Communication, where she ushered in the new Master of Arts in writing in 2000. She won a prestigious faculty fellowship at Princeton University, where, in 1992, she furthered her studies in east Asian literature and culture.

Libro has been a prolific writer since her days as a student journalist and editor for The Whit and Avant. Her award-winning poetry and prose continue to be widely published in respected literary journals. Her most recent chapbook, “The Carpenter’s Lament in Winter” (Finishing Line Press), received praise from established poets and critics.

As a produced playwright, her critically acclaimed drama “Out of Bounds” received grants from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation to tour every county in New Jersey. In April, she presented new scholarly research at the 37th Annual Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Conference, named for the Pulitzer Prize-winning author. The paper is slated to be published in the Journal of Florida Literature.

Committed to supporting and encouraging exceptional student writers where she began her academic career, Libro has endowed the writing arts scholarship, a Medallion award and a poetry award. 

Since retiring from Rowan in 2006, she has resided in St. Augustine, Florida, where she contributes to its flourishing artistic community. She also maintains ties to her hometown and family at the Jersey Shore, where she coordinates the popular Beach Bards Poetry & Prose Reading Series each summer – ever the advocate of the literary arts.