July 1-Sept. 30, 1996 The Terrace Council began in 1905 as a senior honorary society. Today's Terrace Council seeks to promote leadership in the College community through giving and involvement. Membership in the Terrace Council is renewed annually with a gift of $1,000 or more. The College is delighted to welcome the Terrace Council's newest members:
William E. Hawthorne, Jr., Friend, Bridgeport, Conn.
Robert M. Lupoli '65, Westport, Conn.
Robert P. O'Hara '79G, Redmond, Wash.
Warren G. Tarshis '46, Walnut Creek, Calif.
Interested? Call Michael Lynch, assistant director of annual giving and alumni programs, at (518) 388-6174 or on e-mail at lynchm2@alice.union.edu.
Fred F. Fagal '38 and his wife, Janet Beardsley Fagal, have established the Henry C. Fagal Endowed Scholarship with a gift in excess of $25,000. In addition, $100,000 will be added to the scholarship from their estate in compliance with a will commitment on behalf of the College.
The scholarship honors Fred's uncle, Henry, a former mayor of Schenectady, whose encouragement and support allowed Fred to attend Union.
Annually-funded scholarships add an additional measure of flexibility to the scholarship funds generated from the College's endowment-and they can be especially meaningful to donors.
Nedra Oren, daughter of Morton Yulman '36, said that she and her brother wanted to do something unique for their father's seventieth birthday.
“Because Union is so dear to his heart, we decided to create an annual scholarship at Union in his honor,” she says.
“We also wanted to help local kids afford a Union education,” adds her brother, Richard.
Both say Morton Yulman '36 they receive “beautiful” letters from recipients each year.
Another supporter of an annual scholarship, Stanley Becker '40, '80 L.H.D., says his “biggest charge” came several years ago when his son-in-law, who was interviewing and hiring young people as interns or new lawyers at a large firm, noticed that one applicant had been a “Stanley R. Becker Scholar” at Union.
“He, of course, hired him on the spot,” Becker says. “And that former Becker Scholar is now a well-respected partner in the firm.”
Annual scholarships are funded through yearly gifts, are expended
in full each year (unlike endowed scholarships, which are funded by endowment earnings), and offer an alternative to donors who want to create a scholarship fund below the $25,000 needed to establish a named, endowed fund.
Mike Brown, the College's director of financial aid, says, “An annual scholarship of $2,500 is roughly the equivalent of the earnings distribution from a $50,000 endowment.”
An endowed fund is established in perpetuity and a portion of the income is reinvested each year to protect the fund's purchasing power over time. An annual scholarship is a yearly commitment because it is expended, in full, as current support.
“Because of that, increased support of annual scholarship funds has a tangible, immediate, and positive impact on our financial aid budget,” Brown says.
Annual scholarships have an immediate impact on students, too. One of them, Patrick DiCerbo '88, now chairs the Annual Business Campaign, an annual effort that raises scholarship funds from local area businesses.
DiCerbo says, “I couldn't have come to Union without scholarship help, and this is one small way in which I can keep
that tradition alive, well, and growing.”
To find out more about creating an annual scholarship, please contact Deb Balliet, director of development, at (518) 388-6166.
Michael Greenbaum '97 wants to be a doctor, but his major at Union is music, and for his thesis he is creating a composition for three-part female voice.
“I view medical school as vocational school and college as something I'm doing for my own enjoyment and enlightenment,” he says. As a result, Greenbaum is using his time at Union to pursue his many
interests diverse interests that say a lot about who he is:
President of the ballroom dancing club;
Science editor of the Concordiensis;
Member of the orchestra and the choir;
Runner on the cross country team.
Greenbaum has wanted to be a doctor since high school and plans to combine being a practitioner and a researcher by pursuing academic medicine, eventually practicing at a large research medical school. “I could have my practice and then sort of dip into my research,” he says.
Interested in science since high school in his hometown of Oakridge, Tenn., Greenbaum “dipped into research” at an early age.
Hoping to “earn a few bucks” as a junior in high school, Greenbaum accompanied his father to a scientific conference in Florida. There, he gained not only a
quick buck serving as a projectionist but also got an idea for an experiment that would culminate in a paper later that
year and a flooded basement at home.
At the conference, he sat in on a discussion about the dangers of electromagnetic fields-that is, whether or not they could cause cancer and childhood leukemia. Greenbaum watched in amazement as the scientists argued. “I was just boggled to see all of these people with Ph.D.s totally disagreeing-people from prestigious institutions saying the other person was totally wrong,” he says. “I just
had to investigate it. My curiosity was too much.”
He ordered bioluminescent bacteria from a catalogue, borrowed a photodetector and a solenoid from his father, and set up his experiment in his basement. Using the bacteria as his subject, he measured the changes in the amount of light they emitted with the photodetector, and blasted them with electromagnetic fields from the solenoid. After overcoming a few
glitches burning up the bacteria and flooding the basement-he concluded that electromagnetic fields did not significantly affect the organisms-a conclusion recently echoed by the National Research Council.
Later, he gave his paper at the annual meetings of the American Physical Society and the American Society for Photobiology (the
latter interrupting his summer at the Governor's School for the Arts in Tennessee).
Greenbaum's days of doing research in the basement are over, he says, but he has been doing significant research during the summers at Oakridge National Laboratory. Last summer, he worked in nuclear medicine; in previous years, he worked in molecular immunology and also studied at the Bessie F. Lawrence Summer Science Research Institute at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
Now, carrying out his many interests, Greenbaum's days are filled with running, studying, singing, writing, working on his composition, perfecting the steps to the tango, maintaining his “A” average, and preparing for medical school, where he predicts he won't have time to do all of the fun things that he does at Union.
Janet Anderson, professor of chemistry, received an honorable mention in the U.S. Department of Energy's Undergraduate Computational Science Education Awards. She was cited for her work incorporating a variety of computer applications into the undergraduate quantum chemistry curriculum. Using computers and scientific visualization, said the judging panel, extends traditional applications into more interesting and realistic problems.
Robert Baker, professor of philosophy, has been awarded a Francis Wood Fellowship by the College of Physicians of Philadelphia in support of his research on the history of American medical ethics.
Joseph Board, Robert Porter Patterson Professor of Government, was co-author of a paper on “The Judicialization of Politics” that was read at the annual meeting of the Committee on Judicial Studies of the International Political Science Association. Board also has been elected chairman of the board of Schenectady County Community College and received the distinguished service award from the Association of Boards of Community Colleges.
Karen Brison and Stephen Leavitt, assistant professors of anthropology, have been awarded a National Science Foundation grant to study gender differences in play among Fijian children. The research will take place this summer.
The Research Corporation has awarded James Adrian, Jr., assistant professor of chemistry, a $30,500 Cottrell College Science Award to support his project, “Biomimetic guest orientation in a charge separated macrolytic receptor.”
Pilar Moyano, associate professor of Spanish, is the author of “Gender, Tradition, and Nationalism in the Writings of Gioconda Belli” in Interventions: Feminist Dialogues on Third World Women's Literature and Film, published by Garland Publishing.
A twenty-minute piece for orchestra, titled From Afar and composed by Hilary
Tann, professor of music, had its premiere in November with the Knoxville (Tenn.) Symphony Orchestra. The work was a commission from the Meet the Composer/Reader's Digest/National Endowment for the Arts Consortium Commissioning Program. The work will receive performances by five other orchestras this year.
Mark Walker, associate professor of history, and two colleagues (Elisabeth Crawford of Universite Louis Pasteur and Lewin Wime of Sacramento City College) are the authors of “A Nobel Tale of Wartime Injustice” in a recent issue of Nature magazine. They write that
newly released documents show that the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded unjustly to Germany's Otto Hahn alone. The authors claim that credit for the discovery of nuclear fission should also have gone to Lise Meitner, a physicist of Jewish origin who had been forced to flee Germany in 1938.
“Gertrude Stein reads JAMA,” an essay by Brenda Wineapple, Washington Irving Professor of Modern Literary and Historical Studies, appeared in the Oct. 9 issue of the Journal of
the American Medical Association. Having discovered a manuscript by Stein written circa 1902, Wineapple discusses AMA's turn-of-the-century medical (and moral) attitudes towards childbirth-attitudes that inspired Stein to her surprising response (a story about the discovery appeared in the September issue of Union College). Wineapple's biography, Sister Brother Gertrude and Leo Stein (G.P. Putnam's) is being translated into German for publication.
