23 March 2006

Former governor Mark Warner to speak at Longwood’s commencement

Former Virginia governor and potential 2008 presidential candidate Mark Warner will be the speaker for Longwood University’s commencement.

The ceremony will be held Saturday, May 13, at 9:30 a.m. on Wheeler Mall.

Warner, who lives in Alexandria, was the state’s chief executive from 2002 until leaving office this year with record approval ratings for a Virginia governor. He chaired the National Governors Association in 2004-2005 and last November was named one of “America’s 5 Best Governors” by Time magazine.

Since leaving office in January, he has been traveling across the country as honorary chairman of the Forward Together political action committee. Governor Warner is serving as a Visiting Fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics in April.

In 1996 he ran an unsuccessful but surprisingly strong race for the U.S. Senate against Virginia’s senior senator, John Warner. He managed Doug Wilder’s successful campaign for governor in 1989, then chaired the Virginia Democratic Party from 1993 to 1995.

Warner’s political career was preceded by a career in business that, despite its inauspicious origins, turned out spectacularly successful. In the early 1980s, after graduating from George Washington University and Harvard University law school, he invested his life savings, $6,000, in an energy start-up company that went broke in six weeks.

 “My next venture, a real estate company, took six months to fail, but I saw that as a big improvement,” he has said. “At the ripe old age of 27, I had two business failures under my belt, student loans coming due, and a lot of the time I was sleeping on my friends’ couches.”

Then, against the advice of law school friends who questioned his judgment, he got into a brand new technology: cellular phones. He co-founded Nextel and later became a founding partner of Columbia Capital Corporation, a technology venture capital fund in Alexandria that provides start-up money and advice for new business ideas. Over the years, he has helped to create more than 70 telecommunications and information technology companies, many of which later went public.

Active in technology and education issues, Warner launched the Virginia High-Tech Partnership and has chaired the Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges and the Virginia Math and Science Coalition. He was the founding chair of the Virginia Health Care Foundation, which has provided health care to more than 476,000 under-served Virginians.

As governor, he visited Longwood on April 24, 2002, the first anniversary of the Great Fire of 2001, for a ceremonial signing of the bill designating Longwood a university.

Warner, 51, who grew up in Illinois and later Connecticut, was the first member of his family to graduate from college. He and his wife, Lisa Collis, have three daughters.

For more information on Commencement 2006, please visit the Commencement web site.