Posted on Sep 29, 2000

Incorrect information was published on two new faculty members in last week's
issue

Cheikh Ndiaye, visiting instructor of modern languages, holds a Ph.D.
from the University of Connecticut. He has been teaching courses in French and
West African oral literature at Trinity College.

Wilfried Wilms, visiting assistant professor of modern languages
(German), earned his master's and Ph.D. degrees from Indiana University. His
interests include German intellectual history, enlightenment philosophy,
political philosophy and contemporary debates on modernity and postmodernity.

Posted on Sep 29, 2000

Now it's the authors' turn.

Five authors of recent books on the Erie Canal will have a forum —
“The Erie Canal Revolution and Its Meaning Today” — on Thursday,
Oct. 5, at 7:30 p.m. in the Nott Memorial.

Perhaps more than any other construction project in American history, the
building of the Erie Canal shaped the nation's conception of progress. The
symposium's chairman, historian Carol Sheriff, has written, the canal's
planners “hoped to prove to skeptical Europeans that their republic
permitted unprecedented political freedoms and played a leading role in God's
plan to improve the earthly world.” But they got more than they bargained
for when the canal's construction brought into the heartland a horde of
foreign unskilled laborers. How that challenge was met and its relevance to the
U.S. today will be major symposium themes.

The authors are:

Carol Sheriff (symposium chairman), College of William and Mary,
author of The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress,
1817-1862 (Hill and Wang, 1996).

Laurence M. Hauptman, State University of New York at New Paltz,
author of Conspiracy of Interests and the Rise of New York State
(Syracuse University Press, 1999).

Andy Olenick and Richard O. Reisem, co-authors of Erie Canal Legacy
(Landmark Society of Western New York, 2000).

Richard E. Sylla, New York University, co-editor of The State, the
Financial System, and Economic Modernization (Cambridge University Press,
1999)

The forum is another in the series of events connected with the College's
exhibition, “Monument of Progress: The 175th Anniversary of the Erie
Canal,” which runs through Oct. 29. The exhibit is the largest Erie Canal
exhibit in living memory. Among the exhibit's 122 items: an incomparable
collection of 31 original, never-before-shown color drawings by draftsmen and
engineers who worked on the canal.

Posted on Sep 29, 2000

Philanthropist and former Schenectady County Health Commissioner Dr. Anne E.
Dyson died Sept. 21 in Millbrook, N.Y., as the result of breast cancer. She was
52.

Born in White Plains, she was educated at New York University and received
her medical degree from New York Medical College in 1977. She moved to
Schenectady in September 1990, when her former husband, Roger H. Hull, assumed
the presidency of Union College. She served on the pediatrics staff at Ellis
Hospital in Schenectady and was medical director of the county public health
department before becoming commissioner of the public health services agency in
1992.

Since 1979, she served as president and director of the Dyson Foundation, a
family philanthropy established in 1957 by her parents, Margaret and Charles
Dyson. The foundation focused on improving the life opportunities of young
children across the country. She was chairwoman of the board of directors of the
Hole in the Wall Gang Fund, Paul Newman's camp for children who have cancer
and life-threatening blood disorders. She also served on the boards of the Joan
and Sanford J. Weill Medical College and Graduate School of Medical Sciences of
Cornell University, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, and the Dyson-Kissner-Moran
Corp., an international multi-industry holding company founded by her father in
1954.

Survivors include her husband, Michael S. Kramer, managing editor of the New
York Daily News; two sons, Roberto and Mac Hull; a stepson, Ben Kramer,
of Millbrook; and three brothers, Robert, John, and Peter Dyson.

Posted on Sep 29, 2000

Brenda Wineapple, Washington Irving Professor of Modern Literary and
Historical Studies, recently published an essay, “The Transformation in Parnassus,“
about novelists who use real poets as subjects in their fiction, and an
essay about her choice of biographical subjects, “Strange Bedfellows,”
in culturefront, the magazine for the New York State Council for the
Humanities. She also gave the concluding remarks at last spring's Nathaniel
Hawthorne Society meeting in Boston, which celebrated the 150th publication of The
Scarlet Letter. Called “Scarlet Letters and White Lies,” her talk
discussed the problems she faced writing Hawthorne's biography.

Joseph B. Board Jr., Robert Porter Patterson Professor of Government,
was inducted into the Indiana University School of Law's Academy of Law
Alumni, a recognition of graduates who have attained distinction in the legal
profession. Board and three other inductees were honored at a ceremony recently
at the IU-Bloomington campus. Board earned his A.B. in government from IU. He
also earned a B.A. and master's in jurisprudence at Oxford University, where
he was a Rhodes Scholar. He earned a law degree from IU School of Law, and a
Ph.D. in government, also from IU. At Union since 1965, he specializes in
Swedish government and politics.

Robert Fleischer, research professor of geology, was co-author (with
W. R. Giard and L. G. Turner of GE) of an article “Membrane-Based Thermal
Effects in Rn-222 Dosimetry” in the journal Radiation Measurements.
The article discussed an improvement in methods for measuring radon, showing
that membranes used to exclude the unwanted isotope radon-220 from measurements
of the usual radon (Rn-222) allow different amounts to pass depending on the
temperature of the membrane. Documenting the effect permits more accurate
measurements. He also co-authored (with students Stephen A. Hadley and Nicholas
R. Meyer, and Alfred Cavallo of the U. S. Department of Energy) an article,
“Eyeglass Lenses for Personel Radon Dosimetry,” in Health Physics. The
article describes the technique (developed by Fleischer) of using the nuclear
track detection ability of most plastic lenses for eyeglasses. Because the
radioactive decay of radon gives off particles that the lenses record, the
accumulation of tracks is a record of the radon exposure of the lenses, and
hence of their wearers.

Posted on Sep 29, 2000

The dedication of the Ralph B. '29 and Marjorie Kenney Community Center,
the distinctive wedge-shaped building at the corner of Park Place and Nott
Street, was to have been re-scheduled after a postponement this week.

The new date will be announced shortly.