Augusta A. Schwab, a longtime trustee of the College, died Aug. 12 at her home in Bryn Mawr, Pa.
A graduate of Smith College, she was involved in many community activities in the Schenectady area before moving to Bryn Mawr in 1993, including the local chapter of the American Red Cross, the Girls Club, the Child Guidance Center, the Carver Community Center, the Junior League, and the Fort Orange Garden Club. She was elected to Union's board in 1978 and became a trustee emerita in 1986. She was a devoted supporter of crew at Union, and one of the College's racing shells is named the “Augusta A. Schwab” in her honor.
President Roger Hull said, “Augie was one of the most gracious and dignified people whom I have met. Even after moving from Union and Schenctady, she remained concerned about and connected to both.”
Her family has extensive connections to the College. Her father, the Rev. H. Laurence Achilles, former director of religious education at Union, was the major benefactor of Achilles Rink. A brother, the late H. Laurence Achilles, Jr., graduated from Union in 1938, and a grandson, Peter, graduated in 1993.
Her late husband, Henry, was business manager and a director of Fullam, Inc., a science research and development firm in Colonie, N.Y. Survivors include two children, Larry and Emily, and five grandchildren, Annie, Peter, Emily, Jeremy, and Laurel.
Donations may be made in her name in support of the environment or heart, lung, or brain research.
In the twenty-first of a series on American presidents, C-SPAN came to campus in early August to examine the life and career of Chester Arthur.
Arthur, of course, was a member of the Class of 1848, and his ascension to the presidency after the assassination of James Garfield caused one Republican party boss to exclaim, “Chet Arthur, president of the United States? Good God.”
The exclamation was a reaction to Arthur's early and active participation in the political patronage system. But, as Thomas Reeves, a biographer of Arthur, noted on the television show, Arthur rose above his background. The late nineteenth century was a time when political power lay with the Congress, Reeves said, and the people expected the chief executive to be a leader of some dignity. Arthur became known for his honesty and efficiency as president, and his legacy included Civil Service reform.
Reeves, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, is the author of Gentleman Boss: The Life of Chester Alan Arthur. Other C-SPAN guests were Mark Will '99, a history major, and Jim Underwood, professor of political science.
Will showed C-SPAN viewers a number of items from the College's archives — the 1884 book that claimed Arthur was born in Canada (“absolutely untrue,” Reeves said); books showing Arthur's grades (a 99 in attendance was his lowest, and he ranked in the top one-third of his class of seventy-nine); a record of charges (room and board was $125 a year, tuition was $28); the famous wooden windowsill from North College with “C.A. Arthur” carved into it (with the year “1848” also carved, very faintly); and some of the Thomas Nast cartoons in Harper's Weekly, which savaged Arthur regularly until he became president.
Underwood noted that the Union of Arthur's time was a very political campus, full of students whose fathers were in public life. “Arthur had a lot of contacts as a result of being at Union, many because of President Eliphalet Nott, who, in his lectures, gave specific examples of how to attain political office,” Underwood said.
The lectures must have worked; in addition to Arthur and his presidency, ninety of Nott's students were elected to the House of Representatives, twelve became U.S. senators, and another dozen served as governors.
Underwood also noted that if Arthur were to return today he would find some striking similarities, both academically and physically. “Arthur chose the classical curriculum, but he still had to take science courses, just as today's students have to take liberal arts and science courses,” Underwood said. “And he would feel fairly comfortable in the central part of the campus, with North and South Colleges and Jackson's Garden.”
C-SPAN, the national public affairs television network, arrived on campus two days before the broadcast. As technicians set up miles of cable (there were three sites for the show — inside the Nott Memorial, inside Schaffer Library, and next to the statue of Arthur), schoolchildren and visitors were welcomed aboard the C-SPAN school bus — a forty-five foot motor coach, traveling production studio, and media demonstration center.
The day of the program had ideal weather, and from the opening panorama, taken from a crane high above campus, to the closing, the College received wonderful national exposure.
Those interested in seeing the program anytime via computer may go to the C-SPAN web page (www.c-span.org), click on the American Presidents icon, and then choose Arthur when asked to pick a president.
President Roger Hull invited Union's newest students to join the College's tradition of “following the courage of their convictions” during his address at the opening convocation on September 7.
“Members of the class have a wide range of interests, and if they are like the students already here, they will add lively and new perspectives in many, many ways,” the president said.
Hull began with examples of courage from Union's history — the founding of the College by frontier settlers; Eliphalet Nott's introduction of modern languages, the sciences, and a planned campus; William Seward, Class of 1820, the man who bought Alaska; and U.S. President Chester Arthur, Class of 1848, who founded the Civil Service Commission.
Citing more recent alumni, he noted Gordon Gould '41 and his long battle against large corporations to secure his claim as the inventor of the laser; Norton Reamer '58, who turned his dream into United Asset Management with portfolios of more than $200 billion; and Andrea Barrett '74, a biology student who became a writer, winning the National Book Award in 1996 for Ship Fever.
He also cited Frank Federici '98, who spoke out against hazing and earned the Bailey Cup; Mikhail Iossel, writer in residence, who supported himself as an engineer and night watchman before emigrating from Russia; and Prof. Steven Sargent, who left a career in engineering to teach history.
The College also has followed the courage of its convictions, the president said, noting its investment in the College Park neighborhood and its commitment to undergraduate research and community service.
Bonney MacDonald, associate professor of English, received the Stillman Prize for Excellence in Teaching. One student said of her, “I hated Emerson when I had to read him in high school, but I truly enjoyed him in her class.” Another wrote, “Her enthusiasm kept me awake at 8:40 classes in winter term.”
Julia Naftulin '02 received the Phi Beta Kappa Prize for outstanding achievement in general education, and Maureen Farrell '02 received honorable mention.
In a reception before the convocation, the College recognized 629 students who made the Dean's List last year. Their names appear on a plaque in the Reamer Campus Center.
There was a different kind of reunion on campus this July, when more than thirty descendants of Solomon Northup honored the man who was sold into slavery in 1841.
Led by ninety-year-old Victoria Northup Dunham, Northup's great-great-granddaughter, three generations of family came from as far away as Los Angeles to get acquainted with a relative who died long before they were born.
Northup, born a free black man, lived in Saratoga Springs with his wife and three children. In the spring of 1841, he was kidnapped and sold into slavery. After twelve years as a slave on various plantations in the South, he was rescued; his autobiographical account of those years, Twelve Years a Slave, became a bestseller in its time.
Northup's story was the subject of an enormously popular exhibit last spring in the Nott Memorial, created by Rachel Seligman, director and curator of the Mandeville Gallery, and Clifford Brown, professor of political science. A news story about the exhibit, which said it was not known if Northup had any living descendants, prompted the reunion. The exhibit ended in March, but the material that was lent to historical societies and libraries was reassembled in the Reamer Campus Center for the family gathering.
Lori Williams, an elementary school teacher from Syracuse, N.Y., said she was both sad and angry about slavery from learning what her great-great-great-greatgrandfather had experienced. “You don't feel the emotion until it hits you this close,” she said, pointing to a set of iron shackles displayed on a table.
She said her seven-year-old daughter reacted to the exhibit with one sentence: “This is a very bad thing.”
Another family member, Carol Adams-Sally, of Waterloo, N.Y., said, “It was good having the children find out where they come from.” She said that when younger family members looked at the drawings showing Northup in chains and being beaten, “They couldn't understand how people could be that cruel.”
More memories of Northup
When the spring issue of Union College arrived, I scanned the contents listing on the cover. “Recapturing Lost History” immediately piqued my interest, so I opened the magazine to that story.
What a pleasant surprise. Not more than ten days earlier, I had briefly discussed Solomon Northup's story with my daughter, Afia, a sixteen-year-old tenth grader.
My introduction to Solomon Northup occurred about 1984 or 1985 when I attended a screening of the film Solomon Northup's Journey by the world-renowned photographer Gordon Parks. The screening was part of a black film festival and was immediately followed by a question and answer period between the audience and Mr. Parks.
If memory serves, he said it cost $3 million, a paltry sum by Hollywood standards even fifteen years ago. Nevertheless, Mr. Parks was able to boldly dramatize Mr. Northup's story while simultaneously demonstrating his considerable and exquisite artistic/photographic talents. It truly is a pity that the film has not received much more extensive exposure over the years. Since it was mentioned in the Union College article, I thought, perhaps, you and your associates were unaware of it, and, if so, would be interested in learning of its existence.
Because Mr. Northup's story is part and parcel of the African experience in America — a saga that has yet to be made sufficiently known to the world — any endeavor that seeks to inform the public of his experience is to be heartily applauded. In the interest of broadening the exhibit's exposure to the public, are there any plans for its circulation around the country? I would think that numerous institutions — especially the smaller American-African community museums that dot the landscape — would have an interest in it. A tour of the exhibit would enable even more people to become aware of the vitally important story that Solomon Northup has shared with us.
Kofi Michel Guy Williams Opantiri '71
Hawthorne, Calif.
The Solomon Northup exhibit will be at the Visitor's Center in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., next February and at the Chapman Historical Museum in Glens Falls, N.Y., from March through May. It is tentatively scheduled to go to Louisiana in the fall of 2000. Its availability is being promoted in such listings as the National Collections Exchange Newsletter. — Editor
A painter puts the finishing touches on a house in the Union-Schenectady Initiative area.
The following article appeared in The Washington Post on Sunday, June 6
SCHENECTADY, N.Y.- General Electric has pulled the plug on the Electric City, shifting its corporate campus to the Connecticut suburbs, scattering its factories around the world. But Union College cannot just pack up and move to a better place. It's stuck in Schenectady.
So in the tradition of the old GE slogan, Union president Roger Hull is trying to bring good things to life. He co-founded Schenectady 2000, a major effort to rejuvenate the city's dismal downtown. He launched the Union-Schenectady Initiative, pouring Union money into the blighted College Park neighborhood at the western edge of his campus. And he revived town-gown relations in a city where Union was once an known as “the Island,” the ivory tower oasis in this urban desert. Mayor Al Jurczynski now calls the College Park project “the best thing to happen to this city in fifty years.”
“Union was always like Vatican in Rome, a city isolated within the city,” said Jurczynski, who now refers to College Park as Dr. Roger's Neighborhood. “Now Roger's providing the vision for all of Schenectady. The rest of us are just scrambling to keep up.”
Union's newfound commitment to its rather un-Rome-like host city reflects a national sea change in higher education, as universities from San Francisco to Milwaukee to New Haven try to help the troubled communities they once tried to keep at a distance. Some are offering incentives for faculty and staff to buy houses nearby. Others are buying more from local suppliers, training local entrepreneurs or investing in local projects. Many are pushing students to do more community service. Several, including Trinity College in Hartford Conn., and Clark University in Worcester, Mass., are taking lead roles in major revitalization efforts.
It's a great deal for impoverished cities, which are increasingly reliant on the vast financial and intellectual resources of academia at a time when other industries are more mobile than ever. At the same time, more college presidents are beginning to realize that it's smart competition to address the world outside their gates, that students prefer colleges in safe and vibrant neighborhoods. A Union survey found that sixty percent of prospective students who turn down its admission offers do so because of Schenectady.
“Some of these schools have enormous investments in crummy communities,” said Liz Hollander, director of Campus Compact, a national town-gown organization that has expanded from 240 to 620 campuses since 1990. “Look, it's scary to come to Schenectady. So there's some idealism involved here, and there's also enlightened self-interest.”
The landscape has certainly changed from the “urban renewal” era of the 1960s and 1970s, when city schools such as Columbia and the University of Chicago tried to create buffers between their campuses and their neighborhoods. Now the emphasis is on development and on the duties of universities as citizens. Harvard's newest vice president, Paul Grogan, cam from the Local Initiative Support Corp., a national bank for community revival projects; Yale vice president Bruce Alexander was a developer at Rouse Corp. In Connecticut alone, Yale has awarded cash grants to more than 400 faculty and staff members for buying homes in New Haven; Trinity has spearheaded a $175 million reinvestment in a decrepit section of Hartford; and the president of Connecticut College is now chairing the New London Economic Development Authority.
The Clinton administration has become involved as well, awarding more than $40 million in grants through the Department of Housing and Urban Development's five-year-old Office for University Partnerships. The money is funding projects from an Arizona State University tutoring program in a Phoenix elementary school to a DePaul University welfare-to-work program in Chicago to a Stillman College entrepreneur training center in Tuscaloosa.
“It's the opposite of the old siege mentality, when you tried to get rid of the offending neighborhoods,” said National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities and Universities President David Warren, a former deputy mayor of New Haven and town-gown representative at Yale. “Now there's an effort to resuscitate neighborhoods. There's an embrace of the city.”
Schenectady could use a hug. Half a century ago, it was an engine of Upstate New York, with 40,000 jobs at GE and 12,000 at American Locomotive Co. Now GE has transferred all but 4,500 employees, ALCO is long gone, and the city's population has dropped forty percent. Today, three-fifths of Schenectady's public school students get subsidized lunches, and its once-proud downtown is a desolate mix of dollar stores, pizza joints, and vacant storefronts.
Just a few blocks and a world away from downtown stands America's first planned college campus, a 200-year-old gated enclave of expansive lawns and gray-stucco neoclassical buildings. Schenectady may be suffering, but Union isn't. Since Hull took over in 1990, its endowment has tripled, to $260 million. Hull has raised $50 million to renovate nine buildings, including the historic Nott Memorial, a sixteen-sided, multicolored Victorian Gothic extravaganza that had deteriorated into a pigeon cemetery but is now the focal point of the campus. Its giant dome is ringed by Hebrew words that seem to sum up Hull's decade at Union: “The work is great, the day is short, the master presses the workmen.”
Hull, who once sued the city over zoning, says he knows there will always be tensions between a downtrodden city with a $17,000 per capita income and an exclusive liberal arts college with a $30,000 tuition. (Some Union students refer to the locals as “Doids,” short for “Schenectoids”.) But in his last job, as president of Beloit College in Wisconsin, Hull led a $6 million riverfront redevelopment. Even during his lawsuit against the city, he decided that once he had Union's house in order, he would try to help fix Schenectady's.
“The problem with this place was the attitude,” said Hull, fifty-six, a child of refugees from Nazi Germany who once served as counsel to former Virginia governor A. Linwood Holton, Jr. (R). “Everyone was stuck in the past, all that GE nostalgia. We had to get people thinking about the future.”
The first thing Hull did was send his students into the community. He reserved one day of Union's orientation for “mandatory volunteerism,” cleaning parks, planting flowers, painting bridges. Now sixty percent of the students perform community service on their own time.
Then Hull and a Union trustee launched Schenectady 2000 and successfully lobbied Gov. George E. Pataki (R) to create a local authority to float bonds for downtown projects. So far, the progress has been slow — an unused hockey rink has been converted into an indoor soccer arena, an abandoned building has been reborn as an arts center, and a state agency has moved into a shuttered Woolworth's — but plans are in the works for a new train station, a new state office building, loft apartments, and a multiscreen theater.
Finally, there is Dr. Roger's Neighborhood, which is now dotted with red diamonds that announce “A Partnership at Work.” Before the Union-Schenectady Initiative began, the College Park neighborhood had shifted from middle class and stable to poor transient, with 188 of the 258 properties owned by absentee landlords. So Hull is spending $10 million to buy and rehabilitate forty shabby two-family homes into attractive off-campus apartments, a security office, a Montessori school, and a community center.
Union will also assume the down payments and closing costs for any faculty and staff members who buy homes in College Park and will subsidize their mortgages as well. And in an unusual touch, Hull is offering free tuition for qualified children of any homeowners who stay in College Park for more than five years.
This, Hull says, is real urban renewal, as opposed to the urban removal of the past. Property values are climbing. The College Park Neighborhood Association has been reborn after a long hiatus. The first thirteen renovated homes will be ready for students this fall.
“It's spectacular; Union is saving this neighborhood,” said association president Judy Goberman, fifty-seven, a musician who is restoring a grand but rundown Italianate-Victorian she bought for $88,000. Even Marv Cermak, a grizzled Albany Times Union reporter who has been covering the city for forty-four years, said he thinks the initiative is changing the city for the better.
“I've looked for the rat in this, but I can't find it,” Cermak said. “Is he doing it for selfish reasons? Of course. He doesn't want a ghetto on his doorstep. But what isn't done for selfish reasons? People give their girlfriends flowers for selfish reasons.”
Hull hit some disappointments on the road to a renewed Electric City. Union's $10 million investment has yet to attract much private capital to College Park. He has also fought local politicians over his plans downtown; Schenectady 2000 has support from the Republican mayor, county Democrats, and the Republican state senator, but it has battled the independent county manager, county Republicans, and the Democratic state assemblyman.
But the keys to Hull's plans for Schenectady may lie with his constituents at Union. Two years ago, Hull wanted to relocate the school's hockey rink in College Park; students protested because of safety. Now he is floating the idea again, and students seem to be warming to the idea. But there is widespread impatience with the pace of change in Schenectady, even for a civic-minded student like Ed Lallier, a junior who lives in the community service theme house and organized a lecture series on town-gown relations.
“It's good that Union's trying to help, but the kids will still hate Schenectady,” he said. “I mean, we don't care what downtown will look like in 2010. We want a decent restaurant now.”
Copyright 1999, The Washington Post.
Reprinted with permission.
An update on College Park
Getting ready for the fall start of classes, the College renovated fourteen properties in the neighborhood to the immediate west of campus:
Twelve houses on Seward Place and Huron Street are used for student housing, including four theme houses:
Symposium House, where students and faculty will meet for intellectual discussions, films, etc.;
a Spanish House;
a German House;
Seneca House, for students interested in women's issues and the women's studies program.
A nine-unit apartment building for graduate students at 246, 248-250 Park Place;
A Montessori school.
In the second phase of the project through January, the College will renovate thirteen more properties on Seward and Huron for use as student housing. In all, 161 students will live in the College Park neighborhood, and four houses will be reserved for faculty and staff rental. Also part of the second phase:
The College Park Community Outreach Center (formerly the Alps Grill) will be completed. The center will sponsor health and wellness workshops in cooperation with St. Clare's and Ellis Hospitals and Girls Inc., and will be used as a homework center, where Union students will serve as mentors to children in local elementary schools.
A satellite office of Campus Safety and Security will open on Seward Place. Open twenty-four hours, it will serve as a station for officers and bike patrols.
