Posted on Aug 1, 1999

Rules to live by

To the 610 persons receiving degrees at this year's Commencement, Raymond V. Gilmartin '63 offered the following rules to live by:

— take risks (“You will find that your greatest opportunities come when you are called upon to take risks or to handle failure.”);

— follow your instincts (“Pursue what you enjoy, whether it's writing or teaching or the arts or the sciences.”);

— act ethically (“Results do matter … but equally important, and sometimes even more so, is how you achieve those results. Genuine success depends on your values and your ethics.”);

— remember what's really important (“Regardless of what you achieve according to the measurements of our society or of others, the most important times are ones like today — ones that you share with your family and friends.”).

“You may be wondering, 'Does this advice actually work?' ” said Gilmartin, now the president, chairman, and chief executive officer of Merck & Co. “Or is it just hindsight? Well, of course, it's hindsight — I'm distilling the failures and successes of forty years. But it really does work.”

Gilmartin, who leads one of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies, told the graduates that a few years ago, when he joined Merck, he entered a world in which he was a relative unknown.

“How did I make things work?” he said. “I made it clear I was willing to take the risks necessary to lead a company in an industry that was facing difficult times. I made it clear that I was not just in it for immediate results or personal glorification, but for the long haul. I made it clear I was committed to the values and ethics that informed Merck's 100 -year history. I made it clear I was determined to do the right thing.”

Gilmartin recalled arriving at Union in 1959 from his home in Sayville, Long Island. “It was the furthest I'd been from home in more than one way; I was the first person in my immediate family to attend college.”

He said his time at Union was exhilarating. “Union gave me — someone from a small town — the opportunity to try new things and meet people from diverse backgrounds, expanding my horizons intellectually and socially. I can see now just how critical my experience was to my career.”

After earning his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, Gilmartin worked for Eastman Kodak before entering Harvard Business School, where he received his M.B.A. After eight years with Arthur D. Little, a management consulting firm, he joined Becton Dickinson and Co. as vice president for strategic planning. He came to Merck & Co. in 1994 and recently was named one of the top twenty-five global managers by Business Week.

The citation accompanying Gilmartin's honorary degree noted his “intense commitment to innovation” — a commitment that has helped make Merck one of America's most admired companies. “In the challenging world of health care, you continue to challenge your company to produce ideas that will improve the health of us all,” the citation said.

The student speaker, Raquel Millman, introduced her class as “the class caught somewhere between the way things always were and the way things always will be.

“While we once changed our vinyl records on turntables, we were also the first to run to the store for compact discs. While we once wrote letters to friends far way, we have made the world into a very small place as we check e-mail daily. We remember a time without answering machines, microwave ovens, remote controls, and cable, though we can't fathom living without any of them now.”

But, she added, Union has given the class the knowledge and drive to become the leaders of tomorrow. “We are prepared now. We are ready. And if we should ever forget that, the family that we have adopted here will remind us,” she said.

In other news from this year's Commencement:

— This year's class had co-valedictorians — Daniel Kelmanovich, a biochemistry major from Selden, N.Y., and Edward Valachovic, of Guilderland, N.Y., who had a double major in mathematics and economics.

Kelmanovich entered Union three years ago in the Union Scholars program, in which selected students may undertake an intensive program to graduate early or pursue a second major. He did two research projects — one in physics on rhodopsin (a photo pigment) in the eye with Professor Jay Newman, the other a biology study of actin stress fibers and microtubules in cells with Professor Barbara Danowski. He will attend the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in the fall.

Valachovic collaborated with Professors Alan Taylor of mathematics, Roset Khosropour of physics, and Stephen Schmidt of economics on several research projects. An amateur astronomer, he also was an intern in the new observatory in the F.W. Olin Center, helping install a twenty-inch telescope under the direction of Professor Jonathan Marr. He will enter the mathematics Ph.D. program at the State University of New York at Albany and plans to teach either mathematics or economics at the college level.

Other Commencement news items:

— For six of the graduates, the march to get their diplomas was just a warm-up. Two days after the Commencement ceremony, they were in Bilbao, Spain, to begin a 200-mile trek on the pilgrimage trail to Santiago de Compostela. For more than 1,000 years, Spaniards and others have been walking the trail to the great St. James shrine at Compostela in northwest Spain; in modern times, the Camino de Santiago has become a journey for those seeking spiritual renewal.

The walk is actually the second part of a spring term course that focused on the history, literature, art, architecture, and music found along the medieval pilgrimage trail. The six graduates and seven underclassmen, led by Victoria Martinez, associate professor of Spanish, and Louisa Matthew, associate professor of visual arts, were guaranteed about ten miles of hiking per day over varied terrain.

— Tom Jenne '99, a mechanical engineering major, turned his senior design project into a gift for his sister, Christina. Tom and Christina, who has spinabifida, often hike the trails of the conservation center near their home in Sherburne, N.Y., but Tom says that it was difficult to maneuver Christina's wheelchair on the trails.

Helping her overcome that problem seemed a logical design project. Noting that the frame of a traditional wheelchair is unstable for off-road use, he remedied that by extending the frame to provide balance. His model also includes bigger front wheels — borrowed from children's BMX bicycles — with aggressive treads for more grip along difficult terrain. He says that he looks forward to sharing his design with his sister. “It will be nice to enable her to do some of the things that she hasn't been able to do before,” he says.

— Rather than start a job or head for graduate school, Lauren Locke '99, of Chicago, and Sarah Moss '99, of Andover, Mass., headed for Costa Rica for three months of volunteer work. Through Global Service Corps, they will live with a native family and assist with rainforest conservation, educational programs, sustainable development, and other projects. Locke plans to attend law school when she returns and says her goal is to provide pro bono legal services or work for a nonprofit organization that seeks legal representation; Moss, who intends to become a teacher, says she did not go on a term abroad as an undergraduate, “and I knew that I wanted to do something really different.”

— Each year, the College awards bachelor's degrees to alumni whose study at Union was cut short — in many cases because of military service. This year's graduates included Peter Milsky, a dentist from Eastham, Mass., who also serves on the faculty of Cape Cod Community College and who has traveled to Honduras and Nepal with programs that provide dental treatment in rural areas, and Dr. Josef Weissberg, of New York City, who has been an associate professor of psychitary at Columbia University and a former president of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis.

To be eligible for the program, alumni must have completed at least three years at Union, did not receive a bachelor's degree from another institution, have received an advanced degree, and attained distinction in their field. More than forty alumni have received their bachelor's degrees through the program.

Posted on Aug 1, 1999

The renovation and expansion of Schaffer Library has transformed an aging building into a spacious, 110,000-square-foot facility that accommodates new and emerging electronic technologies while maintaining a commitment to traditional print resources.

At the library's dedication on May 22, Paul LeClerc, president of the New York Public Library (and a former professor of French at Union) hailed what he called “one of the best collegiate libraries in the land.” Here are excerpts from his remarks:

Libraries have enjoyed what is arguably the simplest and most enduring set of organizing principles of any cultural enterprise. Simply put, libraries have had, since their origins in antiquity, only three basic functions — to acquire materials, to store and preserve those materials, and to make them available for inspection. These are the fundamental characteristics of any library, as valid for Schaffer Library as they were in the great library at Ephesus.

What separates one library from another is the attitude its proprietors adopt in relation to the traditional functions. And what sets the present era apart from virtually all others is the rapid — indeed revolutionary — ways in which information technology is transforming each of these core functions. And it is in the skill with which the new Schaffer Library accommodates superb print collections and electronic information that will make it a central place in the life of this community of students and scholars.

The actual physical possession of texts — whether inscribed on cuneiform tablets, on papyrus or vellum or paper — has, until the very recent past, been at the heart of the library enterprise. Precisely what kind of things a library owned, in which subject fields, and in what scope or scale gave collection building a necessary focus and gave an individual library a particular — and at times a peculiar — identity. The founders and directors of the legendary library of Alexandria, for example, set out to build an authentically global collection. And they did, even if it meant resorting to outright theft, as was the case of the manuscript copies of the works of Aeschulyus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

Yet this paradigm, that a library is what it owns, has come under the powerful influence of information technology within the past decade. As a consequence, a library can suddenly bring its readers into contact with abundant information found in products that cannot be purchased and owned by the library. These products may reside physically anywhere in the world, instantly available to patrons in the Schaffer Library's reading rooms through regional, national, or worldwide telecommunications networks. If the library's function is to satisfy the curiosity of its patrons, doing so by placing them at electronic gateways that take them to information dispersed globally but retrievable locally through a computer network is no less valid a function than putting books, journals, and manuscripts from our physical collections in their hands in reading rooms.

If collections, either print or electronic, are the point of origin in a library's identity, then access to these collections is a necessary corollary. For two millenia, using a library collection meant going physically to the library itself and actually getting into the reading rooms to use its materials. In the realm of access, information technology is also working wonders for libraries. Because no library today can afford to collect everything it fancies for its readers, satisfying their information needs means accessing the collections of other libraries. Today, one can sit at a computer terminal in Schaffer Library and search the catalogs of the New York Public Library and virtually all the catalogs of our world's greatest research libraries.

It is, of course, through digitizing library collections and making their actual content available on-line that we see technology's greatest potential to transform traditional definitions of access. We now have the technical ability to create perfect, computer-based replicas of books, manuscripts, photographs, prints, maps, films, and sound recordings and make them available to readers world-wide through the Internet. This is the brave new world of the so-called virtual library. Will it ever really come into being in a way that fulfills the research and teaching needs of an academic community such as Union's? Not really, I think. I've calculated that to digitize the superb collection of nearly 600,000 books now housed in the Schaffer Library would cost a minimum of $240 million dollars. We are surrounded by generous benefactors this afternoon, but I think it is unrealistic that any great library will ever be given the resources to engage in the mass digitization of its collections.

No one should therefore place any credence in the prognostications of naive futurists who predict that libraries will be rendered irrelevant or obsolete as a consequence of information technology; who predict, on a regular basis, the demise of the book; or who promise that the contents of the Library of Congress will become available on a computer chip the size of a penny. Rather, the function of libraries for generations to come will be precisely what you are seeing here at Schaffer Library. Libraries will continue to build and preserve impressive print collections while simultaneously broadening technology platforms to access ever greater numbers of electronic information sources. The better a library is at merging traditional concepts of library service with advances in information technology, the more central a place it will become in campus life. And the more compelling it will be to visit physically, not virtually.

You have managed this merger of the traditional and the new with exceptional skill at Union, and it is this success, as well as the sheer beauty of the new Schaffer Library, that is already bringing so many students and faculty here every day and night. The best context in which Union's newest achievement should be seen is, I think, not simply that of an advanced information center. The latter is indeed important and it is clear that the Schaffer Library is an enormous success. But what this facility best represents is the continually evolving, centuries' old commitment of Union to learning, to scholarship, to writing, to teaching, to the transmission of information. This wonderful college has — with the generous support of alumni, friends, and the Trustees — given to the next century of Union students and faculty the most wonderful library imaginable. Could any gift be better, be more timely, or more in keeping with Union's superb tradition of quality? I think not.

The new Schaffer Library has a number of features that enhance ease and convenience of use by faculty, staff, and students:

Shelving capacity for 750,000 books and bound periodicals;

A current periodicals reading room with display capacity for 1,400 journal titles;

400 seats for users, including tables, study carrels, and lounge chairs;

Ten group study rooms;

Multimedia, electronic classroom workstations throughout the building for Internet and electronic database access;

The Preservation and Digital Imaging Laboratory;

The Writing Center;

The Language Laboratory;

Instructional Technology and Audiovisual Services.

Posted on Aug 1, 1999

Some of Union's liveliest learners are also the oldest students on campus.

Their academic work does not involve grades or course credits, and they don't worry about getting into grad school or finding a job. These students are involved in the best kind of education — learning for the pure satisfaction of gaining knowledge about a topic they are interested in. They are members of the Union College Academy for Lifelong Learners (UCALL).

“UCALL is a program created to provide people who are retired, semi-retired, or just want something to do, and who consider themselves lifelong learners, with a place to be intellectually enriched and learn something they have always wanted to know,” explains the program's director, Michela French, a retired xxxxx professor.

UCALL classes radiate a great sense of energy — an energy felt by everyone in the classroom. Happy to be there, students are more than willing to be a part of each lecture. In fact, lecture is a misnomer; the “teacher” is more a moderator, and the classes are better described as conversations among people exchanging ideas and deeply engaged in what is taking place. Every UCALL student wears a nametag; knowing each other and being able to address one another personally is an important aspect of the program.

French says, “The thing I remember most about our beginning is how many people would come up to me and ask 'Where have you been? I've been waiting for something like this.' I have members who have been with this program since before I was involved, and they just keep coming back.”

Bob Hall, a retired inventor and scientist from General Electric, says, “I got a great undergraduate education at Union, and this is a way of continuing that. UCALL is a great place with great programs and great people. And I'm not too old to keep learning.”

Charles Stamm, a retired radiologist, says that he and his wife are involved for many of the same reasons. “I don't remember exactly how it was that we found out about UCALL, but ever since, I've been happy we did. For us, being back on campus is great, but our reasons for being involved in UCALL are not nostalgic. We were both interested in the idea of continuing our education after retirement. Seminars are always stimulating and, without exception, a great educational experience. It's great to keep your head alive after you retire.”

Established in the summer of 1989, UCALL began when an associate dean of the College asked French if she would be interested in developing and working on a continuing education program. French, whose position is part-time, has led the program for the last ten years.

Membership to UCALL is open to all, regardless of formal education (there are more than 150 members now). Seminars, which run in the fall and spring, are generally limited in number to allow for discussion and interaction. Six seminars are offered each term, and each seminar has five two-hour meetings. Course leaders come from within the UCALL membership, or through associations that members have with others in the community. UCALL members pay $65 a year and then $15 for each class selected. Past courses have ranged from “The History of Middle Eastern Culture” to “Chinese Brush Painting.”

UCALL has a Curriculum Committee that ultimately chooses the courses to be offered, but before final decisions are made all members of UCALL make suggestions about possible topics and coordinators for classes. French says, “After handing out the surveys to our members, I often get a wide range of topics that they are interested in. Then begins the process of deciding what is possible and what is not.”

French says that she definitely thinks UCALL has a place in Union's future. “The main thing is that we keep the quality of the program high and at the same time we keep it challenging, because if people aren't challenged they aren't going to come.”

French hopes the future might bring greater interaction between UCALL members and Union students. “We have so many retired professionals, and often Union students are interested in going into the same professions that our members have worked in and often retired from. We have doctors, lawyers, and GE engineers who are all willing to talk about their experiences, and this sort of interaction could be very useful for students.”

Anyone interested in learning more about UCALL should call the Office of Graduate and Continuing Studies at (518) 388-6288.

A sampling of courses previously offered by UCALL:

Origins of Our Language

Dreams and the Unconscious

Immigrant Women in the United States

Introduction to Personal Computing

The History of the Galapagos Islands

DNA and Genetic Engineering

Enjoying Opera: Puccini

Our Astonishing Universe

Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales

Understanding Financial Markets

The Development of Modern Medicine

Posted on Aug 1, 1999

Every Tuesday night, students from across campus head toward Raymond House, where Coffeehouse has become a staple of the student social diet.

Greeted by a warm atmosphere, comfortable furniture, and the choice of coffee, tea, or hot chocolate, visitors settle down to enjoy a few hours of entertainment. Spotlights focus on a small stage, where the entertainment can range from professional bands to campus performers, such as the Dutch Pipers. And, on good nights, a hitherto undiscovered star will step onto the stage during an “open-mike” session.

The idea for Coffeehouse came in the fall of 1995, when Brian Goldberg '99 and several other freshmen began talking at a football game. “We started talking about the idea, 'What if we had our own house?' ” Goldberg says. “And we said, 'Wouldn't it be great if there was a place where people could be social but it was also a showcase for artistic talent.' ”

Answering those questions led to the accumulation of new interested members, discussions with administrators, a proposal, and, in the fall of 1996, the opening of Coffeehouse.

The Coffeehouse stage has been the scene of stellar performances. “We wanted, essentially, to have a stage that gave people the opportunity to do something,” Goldberg says. “If there is some kid who sits up in his room and plays the guitar but he has no place on campus to play his first time, we wanted to give him a stage.”

That, they have. “At the end of the night someone sees the stage and it kind of beckons them and they step up, maybe with only a few people listening,” Goldberg says with a smile. “What's so wonderful is to see them a few months later and they're the ones stepping up when the crowd is still big.”

The group that runs Coffeehouse is called “The Society,” and members have worked to make Coffeehouse as accessible to the campus community as possible. They have implemented such programs as “Coffeehouse on the Road,” which brings the Coffeehouse experience to other spaces on campus such as Dutch Hollow and Old Chapel, and opened their doors to countless club meetings, poetry readings, and band rehearsals.

The true draw of The Society and its Coffeehouse is the freedom they represent. Whether it is the ability to get up in front of people and perform on a whim, or the opportunity to implement events, Coffeehouse is an opportunity for self-empowerment. Simply put, as Goldberg points out, “You come up with an idea, you can do it!”

Posted on Aug 1, 1999

Mikhail Iossel had a convoluted route to becoming the College's writer-in-residence

Engineer, writer, teacher, night watchman — Mikhail Iossel's resume reads like that of an eccentric character in a novel.

That's not surprising given that Iossel, the writer-in-residence at the College, writes fiction, and some of the best fiction-writers draw on their unique life experiences in their work. The recent winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Iossel is at work on his second book, comprising two linked novellas. His first book, Every Hunter Wants to Know: A Leningrad Life, a collection of stories, was published in 1991.

Iossel grew up in Leningrad, and his family's library was filled with the Russian classics (as well as Twain, Jack London, Faulkner, and Hemingway). He remembers always wanting to be a writer, and he began as a boy, winning several writing competitions. But that was not a simple path for a Jewish boy in St. Petersburg (as Leningrad was called until recently). “Jews could not be admitted to any college that had anything to do with humanities because that would be infringing upon the ideological sphere,” he says.

So, rather than enter the Soviet army, he chose to attend the Leningrad Shipbuilding Institute, where he studied engineering, electromagnetic fields, mathematics, and physics. “It was not something that I could envision myself doing for my whole life because I knew that I wanted to write,” he says.

Nevertheless, he spent several years after graduation screening Soviet submarines and lowering their electromagnetic levels to the point where American submarines wouldn't detect them. Then, in the early 1980s, he became involved with an underground literary club, called “Club 81” for the year of its founding. He began to publish his work in “samizdat” (underground magazines) and meet frequently with foreign writers — even though such contact jeopardized his engineering work, which banned contact with foreigners.

He negotiated to leave his position at the research institution and went to work for a computer center, which required little secrecy. Shortly thereafter, like many underground writers and artists, he quit his day job and took a position as a night guard at the central park in St. Petersburg. His primary responsibility was watching over the roller coaster.

“I spent two-and-a-half years very happily that way,” he says. “I was writing and meeting people, publishing in the underground magazines, and co-editing a magazine of translations published by Club 81. By that time I had already made up my mind that I was going to leave the country.”

He applied for emigration to the United States several times, and was turned down repeatedly for a variety of reasons. He also started having “minor run-ins” with the KGB – due to his status as both a “refusenik” (someone who had been turned down for emigration from the Soviet Union) and as member of the underground. “Either you are an underground writer or you are trying to leave,” he says. “You don't want to be an underground writer trying to leave.”

Iossel was tracked by two departments of the KGB — one that watched his activities as a writer and one that watched refuseniks. “The counter propaganda were sophisticates, secret police who could discuss current trends in literature,” he says. “They just wanted to make sure that what you were writing would not find its way to the West.”

Those who tracked refuseniks were simply hoodlums. “They tried to make life uncomfortable for those who tried to appeal their situation,” he says. “Essentially, their job was to keep you as quiet as possible so that you would not attract international attention. If you started sending letters about your case, they would find a way to indicate that they didn't want you to do that, which was to bop you over the head, for instance.”

After five years of waiting to emigrate while the KGB made his life “uncomfortable,” Iossel was finally granted permission to leave the Soviet Union in 1986, when Gorbachev came to power and tensions eased.

Iossel settled in Boston, where he knew a few writers and poets whom he had met in Leningrad. He was also attracted to the large Russian immigrant community in Boston. “It gave you a certain degree of support,” he says. Working in bookstores for $5 an hour, Iossel continued to write. He resolved to write fiction only in English, which he had taught himself when he was still in middle school (he also took a series of courses on the theory of translation after earning his engineering degree and published Russian translations of contemporary American poetry in a literary magazine).

“I wanted to limit the scope of my self-expression,” he says. “Samuel Beckett said he began to write in French because he knew too many works in English. In Russian, I was too fluent, too many words, too much emotion. Writing English was an exercise of a mechanical nature, like a crossword puzzle. Forget untrammeled emotion.”

After working and writing in Boston for a year, he began to think about returning to engineering. “But I basically still wanted to write. Then someone told me about the notion of writing programs, so I applied,” he says. He entered a graduate writing program at the University of New Hampshire, eager to have blocks of time to write. He developed his own literary voice and style, which critics widely praised with the publication of his first book in 1991. He went from New Hampshire to Stanford, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction writing, and then taught at several other universities before coming to Union in 1995.

Iossel enjoys teaching writing because it allows him to talk about the things that he loves. And, of course, he has the chance to write, which he tries to do every day. For Iossel, the best thing about writing is the opportunity to “say whatever you want to say — about life, about yourself, about other people — and know that others will probably be able to relate to that.”

Iossel has returned to Russia several times. On his first trip in 1993, he was extremely apprehensive. “It is very difficult, but then, a couple of days into your stay, you realize that you actually have never left,” he says. “Russia, while changing, still remains the same. Though you can no longer belong there 100 percent because you have already severed your ties, there is a very strong pull because your first language is there, many of your friends are there, and it is the place of your youth, the landmarks of your life.”

Iossel has returned to St. Petersburg several times since that initial journey, sharing his enthusiasm for writing in a series of summer literary seminars, where American students study with well-known American and Russian writers.

Now in his mid-forties, Iossel lives in Schenectady with his wife, Victoria. Like Iossel, she was born in Leningrad, of a Russian mother and a Kenyan father. She grew up in Kenya speaking English, but she speaks fluent Russian and the couple speaks only Russian to their daughter, Yana, who is two years old. “We hope she will become bilingual,” Iossel says. Although he plans to take at least six months away from teaching to write thanks to the Guggenheim Fellowship, he has not yet solidified his plans. “Maybe I'll just throw a party at Geppetto's for 7,000 people and that will be the end of my Guggenheim,” he says with a laugh.