Posted on Sep 8, 1995

Campus Safety has installed four new emergency phones on campus, each
mounted to a green pole with the word “Emergency.” The poles are topped with a
blue light, which flashes to alert passersby when activated. The user simply pushes a red
button to connect with the campus dispatcher via a “hands-free” intercom. The
new emergency phones, which are in addition to those at other locations, are at the corner
of South Lane and Alexander Lane (near the Union Avenue gate and Alumni Gym), between
Social Sciences and Reamer Campus Center, the corner of North Lane and Terrace Lane North
(near North College), and the corner of South Lane and Terrace Lane South (near South
College).

Posted on Sep 8, 1995

With about half of the Class of 1999's 517 members from New York
State, the College has seen an increase in representation from other U.S. states and
foreign countries, according to Dan Lundquist, vice president for admissions and financial
aid.

The College welcomes 30 transfer students this fall.

Over one fifth of freshmen, 106, are from Massachusetts; 41 are from
Connecticut; 29 are from New Jersey.

The freshman class is 47 percent female, 53 percent male.

With 1995 being a record year for applications (3,554), the College has
had a 23 percent increase in applications over the last four years.

Union is still one of a select few colleges in the U.S. that continues
to meet the full need of students who apply for aid, Lundquist said. About 55 percent of
the freshmen are receiving Union College scholarships, he noted.

Posted on Sep 8, 1995

On the Sesquicentennial of engineering and the 25th anniversary
of co-education at Union, President Roger Hull on Wednesday called on the College to
develop an innovative speakers forum on technology, terms abroad offerings which team
liberal arts and engineering students, and interdisciplinary courses that bridge liberal
arts and technology.

He also urged that the College “insure that women are truly equal
partners.”

Speaking at the Opening Convocation in observance of the College's 201st
year, Hull cited Union's history of innovation: modern languages, experimental sciences,
innovative financing, a planned campus.

He lauded the 150th celebration of engineering, adding, “what we
initiated in 1845, expanded during our Centennial in 1895 with the introduction of
electrical engineering, and sometimes feel uncomfortable with today must – and will – be
improved.” During the course of the year, he said, the College would unveil an
“Engineering Curriculum for the 21st Century” that is being developed with a
$750,000 grant from the General Electric Foundation.

Referring to the 25th anniversary of co-education, Hull lamented the
paradox that a historically innovative institution like Union did not admit women earlier.
“While we take great pride in 200 years of educating men and 150 years of providing a
first-rate education for aspiring engineers, we cannot be very proud of the fact that
today we are celebrating but 25 years of women on the campus,” he said.

“If liberal arts colleges are to maintain their honored place in
society, we must increasingly be sensitive to the need for change,” Hull said.
“Nowhere will change be more apparent in the first quarter of our third century of
service than in the makeup of our student body,” he said. There will be more
technologically-aware high school students with different learning styles, he continued,
and a cultural change that will accompany an increase of millions of students of color and
a corresponding decrease of millions of white students.

“As we think about what it is we should do, we must always remember
that we must take stands based on principle. We should insure, for example, that women –
especially on their eve of our 25-year celebration – are equal partners at Union. For far
too long women were invisible on this campus; for far too long, too, students of color
were equally invisible. We cannot afford either to overlook or look through anyone or to
allow any part of our society to remain invisible – not because it is expedient, but
because it is right.”

Also at the convocation, Jay E. Newman was invested as the R.
Gordon Gould Professor of Physics. Newman, a member of the faculty since 1978 and current
chair of the department, earned his B.S. degree from the City College of the City
University of New York, and his master's and Ph.D. from New York University. His areas of
specialization include light scattering and biophysics, and his teaching has ranged from
introductory courses to National Science Foundation honors courses for distinguished
teachers. The professorship was established by R. Gordon Gould '41, inventor of the laser,
to honor Professor Frank Studer.

The Phi Beta Kappa Award was presented to Sara Saltsman '98, with an
honorable mention to Laurie Kirschner '98. It was established by the Alpha chapter of New
York to honor a freshman for outstanding achievement in General Education.

The convocation also recognized Dean's List students, whose names appear
on a plaque at the Reamer Campus Center.

Posted on Sep 1, 1995

For Mark Coven '72 only the wardrobe has changed.

An antiwar activist at the time of the Vietnam War, he now wears the robes of a state trial court judge in Massachusetts.

Although it might seem ironic that a man with an arrest record ended up behind the judicial bench, Coven sees his progression as nothing more than an extension of the same battle he has been fighting for more than a quarter of a century.

Coven and approximately thirty other students regularly challenged
the Union student body, faculty, and administration to ask the same questions being asked on campuses across the country.

“What was happening was
not just a challenge to government policy, but also a questioning of the values and the type of college we wanted to be,” he says.

Coven helped organize marches, demonstrations, and student strikes in the name of educational freedom and a participatory system of rule; the College created both an all-College senate and appointed a student member to the Board of Trustees.

“For a small school, Union was a very dynamic place in those years,” he says.

Part of what made the school dynamic, he says, was strong conservative opposition from students and faculty to what was seen as liberal causes. It was, Coven says, “conservative opposition in the best sense of the word. There was principled disagreement, rational discourse, arguments, and intellectual challenges. It was not hostile acrimony.”

Today, from his chambers in Somerville, Massachusetts, Coven insists that “there is not a major difference between accepting responsibility by doing civil disobedience to draw attention to issues you feel are important and trying to enhance the moral fabric of the country through your rulings as a judge.”

It is a statement not every antiwar protester could get away with. After all, Jerry Rubin raised more than a few eyebrows as a successful investment banker during the 1980s.

But Coven has more than earned his credibility. His career of service has brought him from the desegregation cases in Georgia in the 1970s to a lawsuit against President Ronald Reagan and the federal
government over social security benefits for the elderly during the 1980s.

In fact, Coven began fighting for
the rights of the less fortunate as a student when he helped organize both a food cooperative and a poverty rights office in Schenectady. He spent his college summers organizing tenants and welfare recipients in Atlanta and returned to Georgia during law school to pick up the desegregation fight. After
a clerkship with the New Hampshire Supreme Court and a stint as the legislative director for New Hampshire Senator John Durkin, Coven returned to Massachusetts, where he
organized a
legal services program for the elderly in Boston and in the Berkshires. “After being in the belly of the beast I wanted
to return to a community and become actively involved,” he says

His work earned him a spot Governor Michael Dukakis's administration as assistant
secretary for human services. In 1986, Coven moved to the attorney general's office, serving as deputy
attorney general,
before becoming a judge in 1989. 

He hears both civil and criminal cases
and says he enjoys a diverse caseload that forces him to deal with some of the most serious problems facing the country, such as domestic violence and child abuse.

“There is not a day that goes by that I feel ineffective,” he says. °I love the intellectual challenge, and I also feel I can intervene and help the lives of some very troubled people.”

According to Coven, that kind of intervention is where the spirit of the antiwar movement endures on today's campuses. Just because there isn't a war or an overriding national issue to protest doesn't mean students have become apathetic, he says. “There are lots of outlets for community involvement and students doing all kinds of worthwhile things. There may not be major demonstrations, but I don't think there's any less concern with social action.”

The liberal in Coven, who believes in the government's ability to help people through its dedication to justice, says he tries not to get too disheartened about the recent shift to the political right.

“I'm patient enough to realize that the government has its ebbs and flows and like a pendulum ultimately returns to the center.”

Posted on Sep 1, 1995

When Estelle Cooke-Sampson arrived at Union in the fall of 1970, a bright seventeen-year-old out of the southeast quarter of Washington, D.C., she suddenly realized she had a problem that she needed to take care of.

°I could read English quite well,” Cooke-Sampson says today from the office of DC Imaging, her radiology clinic near Howard University Hospital. “But I really couldn't
speak. I grew up and went to a school in an environment where keeping quiet meant staying out of trouble. And that's what I did.”

While other students in her inner-city junior high school raised a ruckus in the classroom, Cooke-Sampson sat quietly in the back doing her work and hoping one day to escape what was quickly becoming a treacherous urban landscape. She thought her chance had arrived when a representative of the ABC education program offered to send her to a prestigious northeastern prep school.

But her mother wasn't ready to let her adopted, half-Korean, half African-American daughter go. So Cooke-Sampson kept quiet, and remained in the D.C. school district. “I realized then that I was going to be responsible for my own education,” she says.

A few years later, she came to Union along with approximately 100 other young women, the first such group to arrive on campus.

In addition to recognizing her speech difficulties, Cooke-Sampson also quickly became aware of how deficient her junior and senior high school education had been. She says that she can't remember having to write a paper before she came to Union,
and that she had “no knowledge of sentence structure.” So she decided that she would take her time, not worry about graduating in four years, and take advantage of the chance Union was giving to catch up to her classmates.

“For me Union was like good, fertile soil,” she says. “There was enough sunshine, enough rain, and enough storm. I learned enough to know how to go about learning in the future. I felt I was in the right place and that eventually I was going to be able to compete in society.”

And compete she has.

During her senior year, she showed up at the admissions office of the Georgetown Medical School during the Christmas break, said she couldn't afford the bus fare to come back, and was granted an interview. She received a public health service scholarship to Georgetown, where she decided on radiology because she was having difficulty communicating with patients. She has painful memories of patients criticizing her speech; radiology offered her the comfort of communicating through her written reports and the occasional forays into primary care procedures.

Nearly two decades later, though, Cooke-Sampson is hardly the kind of radiologist who sits in a back room and studies medical images. As the medical director of DC Imaging, she sees some fifty patients and performs 100 procedures every day, ranging from prenatal sonograms to mammograms and prostate biopsies.

Cooke-Sampson says she doesn't mind that she has to see twenty to thirty percent more patients than her suburban colleagues to generate the same amount of money. And, she says, she likes the added responsibilities of taking a truly active interest in her patients' overall health programs. She sees to it that her office workers make the extra call to remind patients of their appointments and help arrange for transportation if it is needed.

“One must serve in order to get any fulfillment out of life,” she says.

She learned that lesson during high school while working with nurses in the public health services. Today, as a doctor affiliated with the nonprofit Daughters of Charity Providence Hospital and as a member of the DC Army Reserves, she continues to practice and preach the gospel of service. During the conflict with Iraq, she was sent to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to take the place of a radiologist who was sent to the Persian Gulf.

“I feel very fortunate to live in America,” she says. “This is the only country I know of that has laws that regulate civil rights. I was a 'war-baby,' and if I hadn't been lucky enough to get out of Korea, I don't know what would have become of me. So I take my service very seriously.”

Earlier this year, the College awarded her an Eliphalet Nott Medal for her outstanding career achievements.