Retired: From the Board of Trustees, Richard E. Roberts '50, an alumni trustee from 1978 to 1986 and a term trustee from 1986 to 1994.
Promoted: To the rank of professor, Bruce Connolly of Schaffer Library, Michael Frame of mathematics, Walter Hatke of visual arts, and Hilary Tann of performing arts.
Joseph M. Hinchey '47, of Westwood, Mass., an attorney and former senior vice president of Analog Devices, Inc., was elected chairman of the College's Board of Trustees at its January meeting.
He succeeds Norton H. Reamer '58, of Chestnut Hill, Mass., who completed a four-year term as chairman. Reamer is president of United Asset Management Corp. in Boston.
Hinchey received his B.S. in electrical engineering and went
on to earn his law degree from Boston College Law School in 1980. He had worked for General Dynamics and Texas Instruments before taking a leave to study law. He joined Analog Devices in 1980.
A life trustee of the College, he has been national chairman of the $150 million Bicentennial Campaign.
Other officers elected by the board include Robert DeMichele '66, vice chairman; David B. Chapnick '59, counsel; Norton H. Reamer '58, secretary; and Patricia Tappa, assistant secretary.
The College's new Term Abroad in Kenya got off to an auspicious start when fifty-five students applied for the twelve available spots.
The new Term Abroad will start in the fall at the University of Nairobi. The university is the primary public institution in Kenya, with 22,000 undergraduate and graduate students in law, art and social sciences, medicine, agriculture, and engineering.
Randolph Quaye, assistant professor of sociology and anthropology, will be the faculty member in residence for the program.
About forty-five percent of the College's students take part in the Terms Abroad program at some point. The College offers terms in Austria, Brazil, China, England, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, and Spain as well as a Marine Term Abroad and a summer Study of Nationalized Health Systems in several European countries.
The College also will expand its exchange program next fall when it begins a program with preference for engineering students at the University College of Swansea in Wales.
The program will send six students to the Wales university. The Union students will take three courses from the Swansea catalog.
Swansea, which has about 6,000 undergraduates, offers civil, electrical, and mechanical engineering.
Union has exchange programs with universities in Switzerland, Germany, Japan, China, and the former Soviet Union.
Robert Sharlet, professor of political science who specializes in Russian and post-Soviet law and politics, has accepted a position as coordinator of the major U.S. Rule of Law
program to assist the former Soviet republics.
Sharlet is taking a leave from the College while working in Washington.
The program, funded by Congress under the auspices of the U.S. Agency of International
Development, is designed to render technical assistance to twelve of the former republics of the USSR
in the area of legal and Robert Sharlet political development.
Sharlet will be the coordinator of institutional building in the Rule of Law program, which is responsible for Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. He is the principal member of the Russian Federation Assessment Group and deputy team leader for the Ukrainian assessment effort, for which he conducted a two-week field study in January.
Sharlet has published six books and more than 100 articles and chapters, testified before Congress, and been a frequent source to the national and international press. Before the December referendum on the Russian Constitution, he was one of four scholars asked to assess the draft by the U.S. State Department.
Martin Benjamin, associate professor of photography, had a number of his photographs on exhibit last fall at Nanjing Normal University in China. Benjamin had been in Nanjing with the College's Term Abroad program there.
Roset Khosropour, assistant professor of physics, Rawlings Lamberton '93, and Scott Paulinsky '95 are the authors of “SpacePhone: Propagating Interest in Waves” in a recent issue of The Physics Teacher. The article describes an experiment that Lamberton and Paulinsky demonstrated at a meeting at Union of physics faculty from several colleges. The experiment was designed to teach the basic features of wave propagation using a toy that would generate interest and discussion in lecture halls and laboratories.
John Sowa, professor of chemistry, led a panel discussion by families and survivors of head injuries
at a conference sponsored by the Independent Living Center, New York's Developmental Disability Planning Council, and a number of agencies that serve head-injured people.
Thomas Werner, professor of chemistry, presented a seminar on “The Use of Fluorescence Probes to Study Binding Sites in Cyclodextrin Polymers” to the Department of Chemistry at Louisiana State University. A paper, “The Binding of 2-Acetylnaphthalene to Cyclodextrins Studied by Fluorescence Quenching,” was scheduled to appear in the journal Applied Spectroscopy. Coauthors of the paper were Lee Fraiji '90 and Tim Cregan '91.
Richard Wilk, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, has received a three-year, $130,000 research grant from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority to study the combustion behavior of alcohol fuels. The research will involve conducting experiments and computer modeling to assess the combustion characteristics of methanol and ethanol, both promising candidates for widespread use as fuels.
Brenda Wineapple, professor of English, is the author of “And Judas Writes the Biography” in the fall issue of the journal culturefront, which was devoted to feminist biography. She spoke in
December at a meeting of the New York Council for the Humanities on topics raised by this issue.
The restoration of the Nott Memorial continues at a furious pace.
In December and January, scaffolding was erected to encircle the exterior of the building while workers gutted the interior.
The structure has been opened to restore the dramatic view from the main floor to the dome ceiling some ninety feet above, and crews removed the plaster that covered the interior stonework.
There is scarcely any evidence that the building once housed a theater or a library. All partitions have been removed to reveal the interior framework. Gone, too, are the theater lights and the massive ventilation system that blocked the floor-to-ceiling view.
Despite the cold weather that hit the Northeast in January, the project is advancing on schedule, according to
Paul Pothier, project superintendent for A.J. Martini, Inc., of Malden, Mass. The rededication of the Nott Memorial is planned for Founders Day in February, 1995-a highlight of the College's bicentennial celebration.
The first floor has been covered with a layer of plywood to protect the encaustic tile, which will be restored or replaced as necessary. A representative from Craven, Dunnill & Company, of Shropshire, England-the company that produced the tiles in the 1870svisited the Nott to take samples of the tiles to be reproduced.
At this writing (late January), the next steps are stabilization of the building's main walls by installing ring beams that circle the interior at three levels, removal and restoration of the windows (to be covered temporarily by plywood), and reinforcement of the concrete piers in the basement.