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Levar Burton is UMass Lowell's 2015 commencement speaker.

04/07/2015
BBJ
By Mary Moore

Actor and digital education entrepreneur LeVar Burton will grace the stage at University of Massachusetts Lowell this May as the university's commencement speaker.

The words to the theme song of Burton's famed PBS series "Reading Rainbow" – "I can go twice as high" and "I can go anywhere" – should resonate with 2015 UMass Lowell graduates.

Burton and partner Mark Wolfe in 2012 launched RRKidz, a digital education publishing company, and Reading Rainbow, which has become a top education app on iTunes. He had been the executive producer and host of "Reading Rainbow" on PBS, which ran for 23 seasons, and subsequently bought the global rights to the brand. Burton and Wolfe raised $6.5 million in a Kickstarter campaign to bring the show into 10,000 classrooms around the country.

Early in his career, Burton played Kunta Kinte in the TV miniseries Roots and starred as Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge in "Star Trek: The Next Generation."

UMass Lowell's commencement is scheduled for May 16.