Beginning this fall, all students living on campus will participate in the College's meal plan.
The decision to include all resident students will primarily affect about 370 students who live in the fourteen fraternities and sororities that have private meal plans.
In a letter to the campus community, President Roger Hull explained that the College's Planning and Priorities Committee had identified three key priorities-to continue to meet students' financial aid needs, to maintain academic and non-academic programs, and to continue to maintain the College's facilities.
Given the importance of these objectives, and faced with such financial pressures as federal and state budget cuts in higher education programs and the failure of the Schenectady City Council to give Union the use of its Lenox Road properties, the College can no longer justify exempting fraternity and sorority members from the requirements that all other resident students must meet, the letter said.
The meal plan offers three options with costs that ranged from $2,586 to $2,907 in 1994-95.
Fred Bleakley, a senior writer with The Wall Street Journal, came to campus for two days in February to observe our 200th birthday celebration and to see the Nott Memorial. Reprinted here is his story, which appeared March 21.
Schenectady, N.Y.
If there are ghosts, they would have been soaring with delight over the rededication recently of a High Victorian Gothic masterpiece here at Union College.
Saved from ruin by a $9 million makeover, the Nott Memorial, a giant folly and a National Historic Landmark, captures the spirit of one remarkable educator, two renowned architects and the exuberance of a time when whimsy counted as much as practicality.
The 16-sided, 10-story salute to Eliphalet Nott (Union's president from 1804 to 1866) looms over America's first planned campus. “The Nott,” as it is affectionately known, is a
hot-blooded wonder of colored stone, soaring arches and stained-glass windows sitting majestically apart from Union's neoclassical buildings of cool
gray-and-white stucco. Somehow the disharmony is enchanting-all the way up to the giant slated dome encircled with Hebrew lettering that means: “The work is great, the day short and the master presses the workmen.”
Much of what visitors marvel at has been impossible to see for almost a century. For the first time since 1903, the restoration allows a viewer on the encaustic tiled ground floor to look 106 feet up to the vaulted, cobalt-blue ceiling. The effect is like a planetarium, with literally celestial light filtering through 709 red, yellow, purple and green tiny glass “illuminators” that appear to flicker like stars as you tilt your gaze. Set in from the stone walls are 16 cast-iron columns-a
crystal-palace-like skeleton-that support the dome and second- and third-floor balconies encircling the open center space.
Only hours after workmen had finished clearing construction debris on a recent weekend, historian David McCullough told Nott Memorial fans and alumni donors that
“when every airport, every ketchup bottle, every sitcom and every magazine rack looks the same, how much more important it is to come into a structure where the idea is not to look like anything else.”
Mr. McCullough put the Nott in the same league as the the Roeblings' Brooklyn Bridge and H.H. Richardson's City Hall in Albany, calling all three “distinctive and important examples of 19th-century American public architecture.” It is also a relic of a time when Union was a leader in American education and intellectual life.
In Nott's time, Union, which celebrates its bicentennial this year, was the first nondenominational college (a union of all faiths) in the nation. First also to introduce modern languages, the sciences and engineering to the curriculum, it became an innovator in liberal arts education. Nott, it's said, was the equal of Jefferson in tearing down the walls of education that kept students from changes in society. Nott also pushed New York state to pay Union's tuition for indigent students so higher education was not just for the rich. And he usually accepted students expelled by other colleges.
A Presbyterian minister, he believed students would come to know God better by “embracing the world.” Emphasizing practical education as much as classical studies, Union paved the way for careers in medicine, law, mining and other sciences. Dozens of Nott's students went on to head American colleges and universities. He also invented the Nott stove, which for several decades gave Americans a safe, efficient way to heat their homes.
He was just as innovative when he picked an architect to plan a college campus on a hill overlooking Schenectady, in the Hudson Valley some 170 miles north of New York City. Discarding the tight, medieval-cloister look of America's colleges, the French landscape architect Joseph
Ramee envisaged a sloping plateau opening frontier-like to the West. He planned to have Union's buildings flank a Roman rotunda and a formal garden.
Construction of the North and South colleges (which remain today) began around 1812. That was several years before ground was broken for Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia, even though his plans were already on the drawing board, but without the eventual domed centerpiece.
But: “Evidence shows that a large domed rotunda building being the central focus of a campus, as at the University of Virginia, came from Ramee's plan for
Union College,” says Stanford University professor of architectural history Paul Turner. A Union graduate and U.S. campus expert, he is writing a book on Ramee.
Still, for nearly 50 years Ramee's domed building never got started. Financial stewardship was not Nott's strength and his autocratic style made matters worse as he entered his dotage. But when alumni pledged funds, Nott had the foresight to choose Edward Tuckerman Potter (his grandson) as architect. One of two brothers recognized as leading American architects in the Victorian Gothic style, he immediately discarded the Ramee rotunda as too squat and opted for a grander, more flamboyant look. It was completed in 1878.
Despite Nott's renown for practicality, no one ever quite knew what to do with the 80-foot-round, 100-foot-high space. It failed as a chapel and was ill-suited as a library (though it was used as one for nearly 60 years). For a while, when the rotunda went out of fashion in this century and was considered “vulgar,” there was talk of demolishing it or making it more Union-like.
When Roger Hull became Union's president in 1990, the Nott was a leaky, decrepit giant dropping slabs of granite and roof tiles and buttressed by railroad ties that kept its stony sides from bulging further. On the ground floor was a theater in the round. Upper stories housed an art studio, a dumping ground for old props “and more dead pigeons than I wanted to count,” said Mr. Hull.
Still, it was the symbol and, some say, the soul of a school that has 18,000 graduates and 2000 current students. So
Mr. Hull decided to preserve it for current and future Unionites. As part of an even more ambitious $150 million fund-raising campaign, he set out to raise $9 million to return the Nott to its splendor and $2 million for maintenance. More than 1,700 alumni and friends gave. A surprise gift of $5 million came from Mr. Hull's late mother-in-law
Mrs. Margaret MacGregor Dyson, the mother of New York Deputy Mayor John Dyson.
Getting the money together for it was only the beginning of the job. Finegold Alexander & Associates, the Boston architectural firm that directed the restoration of buildings on Ellis Island, took on the challenge. Under its supervision, contractors ripped out the two floors separating the ground floor from the ceiling, drove 900 steel shafts through four feet of outer walls and bolted the shafts to circular steel hoops, making the Nott stronger than ever. For the leaky dome, the architects kept the horsehair insulation but devised a high-tech rubber membrane that had to be punctured and resealed for each of the tiny new illuminators. And they replaced missing tiles with new ones specially made by Craven Dunnill, the original English supplier.
At a time when colleges are so pressed for funds, it's either something of a feat or a folly to spend so much money restoring a building that does so little. It will now serve as a reception and lecture hall with a study center and college museum on its balconies.
One of Nott's critics over a century ago wrote that the building is “all show, all to catch the vulgar eye, all to be gazed at.” But as Mr. McCullough said at last month's unveiling, “It may be all show, but what a show, what a feast for the eye.”
Mr. Bleakley is a senior writer on economics for the Journal.
A procedure that can make dividing anything fair and envy-free – and which was devised by Alan Taylor, the Marie Louise Bailey Professor of Mathematics, and Steve Brams, a political scientist at New York University-was the subject of an eight-page article in the March
issue of Discover magazine.
The article, titled “Dividing the Spoils,” says the two professors, working together over the past two years, “have figured out an equitable way to divide the world's goods-tangible or not-that's mathematically guaranteed to do everyone justice.”
Taylor and Brams published their procedure in the January 1995 American Mathematical Monthly. Their new book, to be published later this year, explains everything a layperson might need to know about fair division, the article notes.
The magazine article said the book “illustrates various ways to apply this new technique (and several others) to divorce settlements, inheritance squabbles, treaty negotiations, wage disputes, and many other knotty problems, including the fair distribution of 'bads,' such as taxes and household chores.”
Charles and Anne Dyson, and President Hull cut the ribbon
David McCullough, historian and litter Prize-winning author, was the est speaker at the rededication of the Nott Memorial. Here are excerpts from
his remarks:
What a thrilling setting we're gathered. in. Look at this building-look at this expression of exuberance and confidence and, yes, a little excess. Look and see how Victorian it is, how Venetian it is, and how very American.
It was the work of a young man, a mere apprentice, whose name is certainly not a household word-Edward Tuckerman Potter. Look what he was able to do. There's nothing like it anywhere else-not just anywhere else in New York or anywhere else in the United States, but anywhere in the whole world. It was built when New York was the Empire State, and that was an idea taken literally-the Empire State, the state of the New York Central Railroad, the state with the Brooklyn Bridge, the state of H.H. Richardson's City Hall in Albany, and this Nott Memorial.
There was a rather grouchy figure on this campus for many, many years named Jonathan Pearson, and his diaries are in the archives of the College. They're illuminating and highly entertaining. Mr. Pearson was intermittently a professor, a librarian, the treasurer, and the general business manager of the College. I just want to read very briefly some of his observations back in the year 1858 and later on.
“Saw Dr. Nott this p.m. Among other things he spoke of the contemplated Graduates Hall. From what he said there seems no doubt he still thinks of the absurd old pepperbox plan of Ramee. He says Ed Potter, Blatchford's
son-in-law, inclines to this plan. One thing is quite certain. If the matter is left to that young New York architect's apprentice, instead of $25,000,
$75,000 will be needed, and instead of a decent building for use we will have a huge pantheon for show.”
That was June 5. On June 12, a Saturday, he writes,
“Call from Dr. Nott to come to his study when he preferred the singular request that I should procure the cornerstone for the Graduates Hall to be laid at Commencement by the alumni. What
makes the oddity of the thing more striking is the fact that no plan for a building is yet fixed upon, and that the circular plan is as likely as any to be the favorite and it has no corner.”
The time clock speeds forward and ifs many years later and the Nott Memorial is a fact. “Now what is all this great building for? In fact it's a mere show building, ostensibly for books, for which it is entirely unfitted, but really for pictures, etc., a mere museum. It is all show, all to catch the vulgar eye, to be talked about, published in the papers, and gazed at by the passing stranger.”
And yet it was built, and here it is today, and it's still, of course, all show
but what a show. What a feast for the eye-and the eyes have it.
Think of the eyes that have gazed on this building. Imagine, in theory, in the mid-1870s when it opened, the oldest eyes among the ancient citizens and ancient alumni at the opening ceremony could have been born when Thomas Jefferson was president. Conversely, if you then come forward, the youngest eyes that gazed upon the structure at that time could have lived
to see men traveling in space as reproduced on television.
But I think more even than the eyes, one comes into a building like this thinking about echoes. What voices from the past a building like this evokes. What voices does the building itself speak with. This is a language we're looking at. Just as an eighteenth-century chair speaks of the world of the Founding Fathers and attitudes toward form and simplicity, just as the Brooklyn Bridge is in many ways the most vivid of all the icons of late nineteenth-century America, this building speaks in the language of a bygone culture.
What did they believe in, the people who built this structure? Well, they believed in America, they believed in expansion, they believed in possibilities, they were visionaries. Eliphalet Nott was, in many things, the ultimate visionary. They believed in the perfectibility of society and they believed fervently that the basis of our way of life has to be an informed public. They believed in education. And we must, too.
We look at this building and we learn from it. We leave this building today and we will not be the same for having been here. In a country and in a culture that is becoming increasingly the same, where every airport looks the same, where every bottle of ketchup, every sitcom, and every magazine rack looks the same-how much more important it is to come into a structure where the idea is not to look like anything else.
Civilization does not exist without continuity; it doesn't exist without inspiration. And in this time of such skepticism and attack on everything, isn't it wonderful to be here to celebrate so obvious and so memorable an expression of good, strong, perpetual, and perpetuating American optimism.
I congratulate all of you who had a part in what's happened here. I'm going to leave this campus and tell everybody I know that if they're in the vicinity of Albany and Schenectady-don't miss going over to the Union College campus to see the new, spectacular, thrilling Nott Memorial.
The Founders Day convocation saw the inauguration of a new honor – Eliphalet Nott Medals, to recognize the perseverance of alumni who have attained great distinction in their fields.
Here are excerpts from the comments made by the first six medalists.
Robert I. Chartoff '55, president of Chartoff Productions:
When I was contacted by the College and told I was going to receive this medal, a lot of
wonderful thoughts emerged about the school.
But along with them was another feeling, a rather anxious one. Perhaps if will resonated with some of the students who are here now…. It usually came on a Friday
or Saturday night… I'd be walking on Library Field and saying to myself, “It's getting close to the end now.
You'll be leaving Union. What do I do next? Where do I go from here?” …I've discovered that it isn't so bad;
I've discovered there are lots of opportunities, lots of chances for people. And I'm grateful for the education I got here that made it possible.
A. Lee Fritschler '59, president of Dickinson College:
The last time I attended an event in this auditorium I was required to be here.
In those days a few faculty members sat up in the balcony and the students say downstairs, out mind being improved – somewhat forcibly, I suppose – by being required to listen to lectures and music. But I'm glad I was here. I think Union changed me, and I believe over the years Union has changed….
The sun shines brightly on the brook that bounds, and I believe it shines more brightly than it ever has in the past.
Michael J. Fuchs '67, chairman and chief executive officer of Home Box Office:
When I was at Union the students were caught up with the social turmoil of the 1960's, particularly the Civil Rights movement and the
Vietnam War.
They were the fundamental issues. But it was the “coedification” of Union that occupied my spare thoughts in those days…. It's a great thrill to be up on this stage receiving such a nice award on such a proud occasion, and knowing that I don't have to go back to North College to study for the rest of the weekend.
Robert A. Laudise '52, adjunct research director for chemistry at AT&T Bell Laboratories:
This, for me, is not so much a recognition of an individual as a continuing commitment of Union's part to the second Union triad – the commitment to science, engineering, and the humanities…. I think it shows what you can do if you take a kid from Amsterdam and let him come to a great school and expose him to a wonderful chemical faculty.
Kathleen M. White '72, editor-in-chief of Redbook magazine:
I picked Union because it had a great reputation and some journalism courses. I also picked it because on my interview day it was snowing and there were some guys at Chi Psi sliding down the hill on cafeteria trays.
I thought, “I really want to be at a place where people are having that much fun with that much zest.” The summer before I got here they did
away with all the journalism courses. Bin in a sense it didn't matter, because what I gout out of Union had more to do with what I saw that day in the snowstorm. From the professors and the students, I came away with a sense that life is a wonderful challenge and adventure.
Baruch S. Blumberg '46, Fox Chase Distinguished Scientist at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia and winner of the Nobel Prize in 1976:
In 1795 the country was still new, fresh, experimental, We had started on one of the great political adventures of all time and it caught the imagination of the world.
The foundation of the College was stimulated by the perception, which is strong in the history of the United States, that we could prosper by maintaining an educated citizenry who could take advantage of the new learning generated by the cultural and scientific renaissance of the eighteenth century.
