David Cossey, executive director of computer services, was elected chair of the computing section of the Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges. The committee deals with
issues of academic computing, administrative computing, library automation, telecommunications and campus-wide networking. With Diane Keller, director of academic computing, he participated in a panel at a CLAC conference on supporting
residential networking.
Walter Hatke, professor of visual arts, was invited to submit four paintings to
the American Academy of Arts and Letters purchase program (for a major museum to be
determined). The U.S. Department of State has requested a work, Option, to be
loaned to the ambassador of Chad through the Art in the Embassies program. The Museum of
Art of the Rhode Island School of Design has acquired Hatke's Schuyler's Post for
its collection in memory of the late Daniel Robbins, May I. Baker Professor of Art History
at Union. Two of Hatke's paintings are being shown by Edward Montgomery Fine Art, a
gallery in Carmel, Calif. His work was also included in a show of seven contemporary
artists at New York's Babcock Galleries. Finally, 10 of Hatke's paintings are being
featured at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American Art. Images of those
10 paintings will be digitized to be archived and made available through internet sites
maintained by NMAA and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Seyfollah Maleki and James McWhirter, associate professors of physics,
are cited in a publication by the Pew Science Program in Undergraduate Education. Maleki
and a collaborator, Enrique Galvez of Colgate University, developed a course to bring
modern techniques of laser spectroscopy into the advanced undergraduate physics
laboratory. They say the techniques help students better understand the abstract concepts
of quantum and atomic physics. At Union, the techniques are taught in Methods of Modern
Experimental Physics, a three-term lab course. McWhirter and two collaborators developed a
laboratory that includes the use of an inexpensive liquid helium cryostat for experiments
in low-temperature phenomena.