Posted on May 1, 2002

Eleven years after the end of the Soviet Union,
Bob Sharlet can still remember vividly where he was when he heard the news.

“It was Christmas Day, 1991, and I and my son, Jeff, were in Cairo visiting his sister, Jocelyn. We were out shopping, picking up a few things in a small
convenience store. An old Egyptian woman in traditional garb, with head covered, was minding the cash register while engrossed in a television news bulletin. I asked of the news and the old woman told my daughter that President Gorbachev of the USSR had just resigned.

“In a flash, that had been the final stroke, the mighty Soviet Union was no more, and the Cold War had become history.”

Over the next few weeks, Sharlet fielded hundreds of requests for media interviews. As a specialist in Soviet law and politics, he had established a national reputation as a Soviet watcher, and he soon seemed to be everywhere, from the pages of The New York Times and USA Today to the studios of CBS, the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, and the Voice
of America.

He and his colleagues in the field of Soviet studies, both at Union and across the country, also had to race to revise and rewrite their courses as the imperial Soviet system became fifteen sovereign states. It was, he recalls, an exciting time-but then, his entire career has been exciting. “The Soviet Union was always intriguing to me because it was, and still is-with Russia as its main successor-the largest country on earth, with a fascinating history. I have always felt it was important.”

That Sharlet should become one of the country's most respected Soviet scholars might surprise some of his college classmates. After starting at Brandeis on a football scholarship, he transferred to Wesleyan, where, in a creative writing class, he got carried away and decided to become a novelist. He took a leave of absence, went home to Albany
-and promptly lost his enthusiasm for writing.

“My father gave me three choices-go back to college, which would, of course, have been embarrassing after I had left with such high hopes; go to work, which I didn't want to do yet; or get my military service out of the way. I chose the Army.”

Attracted by the opportunity to see Europe, he enrolled in a school that trained young Americans in the languages of those areas that the American military was watching closely. While sitting in a cold basement on an Army base in Massachusetts, Sharlet was given ten minutes to choose the language he wanted to study. He chose Czechoslovak, spent nearly a year being trained, and then went off to work as a translator for eighteen months in West Germany. When he returned (complete with a citation from the Army Security Agency), he finished his degree at Brandeis and headed for Indiana University to work on his master's degree and Ph.D.

“I found the field absolutely fascinating,” he says. “We were in the middle of the Cold War, Stalin had been dead for about ten years and the Soviet Union was changing, I had had a great experience in Europe (part of which I'm still not allowed to talk about), and, with all that Czech, taking the next step
to Russia was easy. I look back at that decision I had to make at that Army base as truly serendipitous.”

Like many American-Jewish families, Sharlet's ancestors had come from the Russian empire of the late nineteenth century. That played little role in his choice of career, however, since no one in his family spoke with affection of the old days. In fact, Sharlet's career choice dismayed his grandfather, who remembered escaping from Russia by hiding under his mother's hoop skirt as she walked across the border.

Today, when news stories and books pour out of a Russia that has gone through glasnost (openness), we can forget what it was like during the Cold War.

“I remember in 1963 a professor from Yale came over wanting to do some elementary survey research,” Sharlet says. “A fellow approached him on a Moscow street, telling him he had some material for him. As soon as the professor took it, KGB agents were on him. He was put in prison for interrogation, and we all were told by the American ambassador that we should be prepared to leave. Eventually, the professor was released, but that was the atmosphere-if you asked too many questions, you fell under suspicion.”

Sharlet himself never had that kind of adventure, but he does recall that his roommate in the Moscow University dormitories was pretty inquisitive. “Every time I would leave, he would ask where I was going
-in a very friendly way. And when I came back, he would pop out of his room and ask where I had been. Since the only places I went were to the law faculty to take my courses and the law library to do my research, he stopped doing this after three or four months.”

So began a career that, as Sharlet says, “has never had a dull moment. Virtually every year I've had to change a topic in my courses because things were changing so rapidly. From 1985 to 1991, when Gorbachev was leading the country through tumultuous changes, at times I had to have the daily New York Times on hand to lead my students. I had to start each class with the latest development and what implication it had for the past and what implications it might have for the future.”

Part of the excitement for Sharlet was the detective work he had to do to keep on top of his subject. Before glasnost, he combined personal observations he had made on several trips to the Soviet Union with close reading of official pronouncements and the Russian newspapers. As the longtime American coordinator on Eastern Europe for Amnesty International, he had access to vast amounts of information about Polish underground activity. And there was a great deal of self-published material written by Soviet citizens and available through back channels as well as memoirs written by those who managed to leave.

Today, Sharlet has a surfeit of information, including five electronic sources-two from Moscow, one from Prague, two from Washington-plus newspapers, journals, e-mail, and more. “Today, in fact, you have to have a very disciplined perspective to sort it all out,” he says.

Sharlet got a long look at the “new Russia” in 1994-96, when he took a leave of absence to work as the senior coordinator of a Rule of Law program to assist former Soviet republics. He was the resident specialist on post-Soviet law and politics in Washington and supervised Rule of Law projects in a handful of states through offices in Moscow and Kiev.

“Law was always secondary to politics in the Soviet Union,” he says. “Gorbachev began to underscore the importance of law and of constitutions. At times during the 1990s, we Russia watchers wondered if they were going to make it. It was analogous to when I began teaching in the mid-1960s, during the post-Stalin transition. There was great concern that Leonid Brezhnev was going to re-Stalinize, and there was the same concern with Boris Yeltsin. I'm glad to see that the Russian constitution of 1993 has provided the framework for political struggles, and now I am confident-especially with Vladimir Putin-that they are going to make it.”

Sharlet is quick to note that while he is retiring from teaching (“my day job,” he jokes), he will expand his “night job”-research and writing. First on his to-do list is to complete a book on Russian constitutional politics. Beyond that, he has been gathering information for what he calls an unorthodox memoir.

“Not about myself, but about the Cold War as I viewed it and experienced it from two vantage points-as a Soviet and East European specialist who visited that part of the world a number of times, and as someone whose teaching was always interested in what the fallout of the Cold War was on domestic American society,” he says. “So I've been gathering material, hoping to use my experience to illuminate the larger issues in the interrelationship between the two countries,” he continues. “I don't know how long this will take, but I'm excited about it. How great to have had this kind of perspective on the Cold War.”

Bob Sharlet, a nationally
and internationally-known specialist on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, is the Chauncey H. Winters Professor of Political Science. A member of the Union faculty since 1967, he retired from teaching after the winter term.
Books he has written or
edited include:

• Legal Aspects of Verification in the Soviet Union (U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 1967)
•  The Soviet Legal System and Arms Inspection, Praeger, 1972) 

• The New Soviet Constitution
  of 1977–Analysis and Text (King's Court, 1978) 

• Pashukanis: Selected
  Writings on Marixism and Law (Harcourt Brace, 1980) 

• The Soviet Union Since Stalin (Indiana University Press, 1980) 

• Stuchka: Selected Writings
  on Soviet Law and Marxism (M.E. Sharpe, 1988) 

• Soviet Constitutional Crisis: From De-Stalinization
  to Distintegration (M.E. Sharpe, 1992)

He has been a visiting professor or guest lecturer at Columbia, Cornell, CUNY, George Washington, Middlebury, Moscow Law School, North Carolina, Princeton, Wisconsin, and Yale, and he has been
a consultant to the Republic of Georgia Parliament, the Ukrainian Constitutional
Commission, and the Russian Constitutional Commission, among others.

Posted on May 1, 2002

Whenever I can, I like to have lunch with students-preferably students Whom
I do not know-to talk about their experiences and their
reactions to what is going on at the College. Recently, I sat down with several sophomore women, and I was surprised during our conversation when they told me that, when the
new House System is in place, all fraternities are going to be forced off campus.

Their comments were surprising because one of the central points of the House System-a point we have made repeatedly
-is the retention of fraternities and sororities. Rather than close our fraternity system, as most colleges like Union in the Northeast have done, we are creating a social and residential environment to complement the contributions of fraternities and sororities to the vitality of campus life. Simply stated, sororities and fraternities-with the exception of Chi Psi,
Psi Upsilon, and Sigma Phi, which will be rehoused in spaces built for fraternities in Davidson and Fox-will remain
where they are now.

As unsettling as it was, the students' misunderstanding of
the House System did have a positive side. It reminded me
of the need to communicate, communicate again, and then communicate once more. In that regard I am happy to tell you, and perhaps retell you, about some of the exciting developments at our college:

-Tom McEvoy joined us as our new dean of campus and
residential life. Tom, who came to Union from Williams, is already busy meeting as many students as he can, and working on the recommendations regarding residential improvements, which were made to us last fall by Sasaki Associates and adopted by the Board of Trustees. This summer, as a first step, we will start work on the renovation of South College to convert
it from a dormitory to two houses in the new House System.

-Our pioneering work with converging technologies received a major boost from IBM, which announced that it would give the College $1million in support that will help
our students gain access to leading-edge technology. Their
gift includes software access, software development, visiting faculty, and a variety of sophisticated equipment (you can
read far more about this initiative on our converging
technologies website, www.ct.union.edu).

-Two faculty members received prestigious national awards. Ed Pavlic, assistant professor of English, won the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize for Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue, and Tom Werner, the Florence B. Sherwood Professor of Physical Sciences, received the American Chemical Society's Award for Research at an Undergraduate Institution. (And alumna Andrea Barrett '74 recently received
a so-called “genius” award from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; Andrea won the National Book Award in 1996 for Ship Fever and Other Stories.)

-All faculty now have access to their advisees' transcripts on the Web, which enables them to better review and plan a student's course of study.

-Several recent gifts will strengthen our faculty and
programs. The Mellon Foundation provided $250,000 as a presidential discretionary fund to help implement the House System and our efforts at converging technologies. The Freeman Foundation gave us $1.2 million for our East Asian Studies program, which will include adding two faculty
members. Two gifts totaling $3 million have been contributed to create two named professorships. Finally, Gordon Gould '41, the inventor of the laser, recently gave the College $3.1
million, in addition to the Gordon Gould Professorship of Physics he established in 1995.

-The Geology Department was ranked fourth in geoscience research at national liberal arts colleges in a recent study, and Union was ranked eleventh among all U.S. colleges in the
number of students who studied abroad in the most recent study by the Institute for International Education.

-As part of our renewed emphasis on helping students
prepare for life after Union, we have opened the new Stanley R. Becker '40 Career Center, which combines inviting space with state-of-the-art resources, such as an electronic seminar room. Frank Bailey Field is getting a new look with an upgrade of the stands and press box, with the work to be completed by the time students return next fall. And work is accelerating on Abbe Hall, the College's new alumni center and home for its alumni and development offices.

Our goal with these efforts-as with all of our efforts-
is to continue to offer our students the best possible array
of experiences. Our society is one of rising expectations,
with our students mirroring that characteristic, and I remain convinced that we must continue to prudently but aggressively engage our various constituencies to move Union forward.
We must also make sure that we find the right way to communicate what we are doing, for, although I want to continue to learn from students over lunch, I do not want to learn that they are uninformed.

Roger H. Hull

Posted on May 1, 2002

Work has begun on an upgrade of the stands and press box on Frank Bailey Field, with the project expected to be completed by the time students return this fall.

The project will cost $1.7 million and include seating for 1,500, four public rest rooms, a concession area, thirty seats for those who are physically challenged, and a fifty-five-foot enclosed press box. The facility will replace the wooden bleachers and ladder-structured press box that have been on the field since 1984.

“The renovation addresses a facilities need that we have faced for a long time,” said President Roger Hull. “The project is an important element in our Plan for Union
to make our facilities-academic, residential, and athletic-among the finest of the nation's liberal arts colleges. The upgrades will not only enhance our popular intramural program but will also vastly improve the appearance of that part of campus. I want to thank the many alumni, parents, friends, and corporations who have contributed to this project.”

Football, men's and women's lacrosse, men's and women's track, and women's field hockey compete on Bailey Field. The men's and women's soccer teams have the option of playing on Bailey Field, which has an artificial surface, or Garis Field, which is grass. Twelve of the College's twenty-seven team-oriented intramural programs play on Bailey Field.

Athletic Direcror Val Belmonte said the upgrade “is the first step in moving Union's athletic and recreational facilities into the twenty-first century, benefiting the entire campus community.”

The new press box will be enclosed with sliding tinted windows and will have electricity, telephone, and Internet connections. The current structure is an open-air box with a canvas covering over the top and down the side.

“This will be a fantastic recruiting tool for us,” said head football coach John Audino. “Our coaches have always sold Union on its outstanding academic reputation, the small class size, the involvement of the faculty, and the beauty of the campus. Now we have a great new facility to add to that already impressive list.”

Linda Bevelander, assistant director of athletics and head woman's lacrosse coach, looks at the improvements as a sign of a commitment to a campus community interested in a healthy body as well as an educated mind. “We have always been known for our strong commitment to educational opportunities, and we now will have a facility the entire campus can take pride in.”

Frank Bailey Field is named for the Class of 1885 alumnus who was a long-time trustee and treasurer of the College.

Posted on May 1, 2002

It was a long wait, but the men's basketball team made its first NCAA tournament appearance since the 1982-83 season, delighting a large home crowd with a thrilling 75-73 win over Lasell in the first-round game.

Two days later, the Dutchmen encountered the very tough defense of Babson, which held Union to no points on nine consecutive possessions in the second half on the way to a 63-50 win. Union ended the year at 21-8, and three individuals received special recognition as senior guard Aaron Galletta was named the Upstate Athletic Conference's “Player of the Year,” Head Coach Bob Montana was named the conference's “Coach of the Year,” and forward C. J. Rodgers was named to the all-conference second team-the third straight year he was a first or second team selection.

In the Lasell game, the last-minute heroics came from Galletta-but not as a scorer. With three seconds remaining, he blocked a shot, and the Dutchmen, who at one point led by sixteen, held on. In the Babson game, Union led by two points with nine minutes to play, but the Babson defense stiffened and its offense scored fifteen straight points.

The Dutchmen clinched their NCAA appearance with a win over St. Lawrence, 70-63, in the championship game of the Upstate Collegiate Athletic Association. It was a game, said Montana, that reflected the entire season-“The guys played this game just like they did every other game-as a team. Everyone contributed to the success of this season.”

To underscore his comment, the UCAA tournament's most valuable player award went to Rodgers, who scored fifteen points and had sixteen rebounds in the championship game. Galletta, who earlier had set a Union career scoring record (see adjacent story), had nineteen points, and senior guard Jason Manning had fourteen assists and twenty-three points in the two-game tournament.

In the first round of the tournament, Union beat Hamilton 80-66, with four starters scoring in double figures.

The twenty-one wins this year tied the all-time Union record. The 1983-83 team finished 21-5, losing to Hartwick in the first round of the NCAA tournament and beating Ithaca in the consolation game.

The women's basketball team also made a postseason appearance. In the first round of the UCAA Tournament, Union faced top-seeded St. Lawrence, which had beaten the Dutchwomen twice during the season by more than twenty points. Unfazed, Union stayed with the Saints for much of the game before fading in the final minutes and losing, 68-53. The team finished 15-11.

In early February, the men's hockey team appeared to be in position to obtain home ice in the first round of the ECAC playoffs. But the Dutchmen gave up three third-period goals to Dartmouth in a 3-2 loss and never seemed the same afterwards. Union won just two of its final eight games and went from a tie for fifth place to eleventh-and out of the playoffs. The team finished
13-13-6 overall and 8-11-3 in the league.

Head Coach Kevin Sneddon said one of his priorities next year will be the mental approach to the season. “If you look at when we were in the top six in the league, even our seniors had never been there,” he said. “Even though we had some experience with age, we didn't have a lot of experience in vying for home ice.”

The women's hockey team made its third year as a varsity sport its most successful and earned a spot in the ECAC Tournament. In the first round with Rensselaer, the game was even for the first period before the Engineers pulled away for a 9-2 win. Union finished 8-15-2 and at one point during the season had a six-game unbeaten streak.

Posted on May 1, 2002

When basketball head coach Bob Montana recruited Aaron Galletta '02 five years ago, he knew he was looking at a good shooter.
Anything else would be a bonus.

Today, Montana says, Galletta is a complete basketball player who can read defenses extremely well.

And he has not forgotten how to shoot.

This February, during a game against Clarkson in Memorial Field House, Galletta became the all-time leading scorer in the College's basketball history. Playing in front of his parents on Senior Night, in his last regular-season home game, he made a three-point shot with a little more than two minutes left in the first half to give him 1,791 points in his career, eclipsing the old career record of 1,790 set by Joe Cardany '81. (Galletta finished the season with 1,949 points, and his 663 points this year broke the previous single-season record of 652 held by Jim Tedisco '72, now a New York State Assemblyman representing the Schenectady area.)

Just as important, those three points against Clarkson were part of the twenty he scored to lead the Dutchmen to a 70-59 win that gave Union sole possession of first place in the Upstate Collegiate Athletic Association (UCAA). The team went on to finish with a fine 21-8 record, won its first UCAA regular season championship, made its first NCAA Tournament appearance since 1983, and Galletta was named “Player of the Year” in the UCAA and a second team All-American by the National Basketball Coaches Association.

Galletta, a 6'7″, 180-pound guard, was happy when the record chase was over. “Everyone I talked to on campus was talking about it. I just wanted to get it over with. It was a little much, but I never lost track of what the main goal was-to win games and do what I could to help the team out.”

When Galletta was attending Franklin D. Roosevelt High School in Hyde Park, N.Y., it would have been hard to imagine him reaching these heights. Only one college that offers athletic scholarships looked at him, even through he was the school's scoring leader.

“It's probably because I was really skinny, and colleges probably thought the only thing I could do was shoot,” Galletta says. “People really didn't respect my game back then.”

He has worked hard, Montana says, and has become a complete ballplayer and a team leader. That leadership was recognized near the end of the season, when Galletta was named one of ten national finalists for the Jostens Trophy, which is awarded to the outstanding student-athlete in Division III basketball. The trophy is awarded on three criteria-basketball ability, academic ability, and community service. Galletta is a managerial economics major with a history minor, former president of his fraternity, and has organized blood drives and volunteer efforts at soup kitchens in Schenectady. “He is one of those guys that you hope for when you recruit-a complete college kid, not just a basketball player,” Montana says.

Galletta was the Dutchmen's leading scorer in all but four games this year and had a career high of forty-five to lead Union over Cazenovia in the Desert Shootout in Las Vegas, Nev. He started all 108 games of his career, scored in double figures 91 times, and pulled down double-digit rebounds in six games. An outstanding three-point shooter, he finished sixth in the country in three-point field goal percentage (50.7 percent) and first in three-point field goals per game (2.76).

Union career scoring

• Aaron Galletta '02 – 1,949 

• Joe Cardany '81 – 1,790 
• Jim Tedisco '72 – 1,632 
• Sam Poulis '95 – 1,426 
• Joe Wood '84 – 1,398 
• Ken D'Orazio '85 – 1,292 
• C.J. Rodgers '02 – 1,274 
• Joe Clinton '83 – 1,270 
• Ken Evans '94 – 1,233 
• Rob Groelz '99 – 1,199 
• Kevin Bartlett '85 – 1,147 
• Dave Santos '63 – 1,117 
• Jerry Brescia '91 – 1,050