My summer jaunt this year was to Greenland, which-despite its name-proudly offers, as its website says, “adventures of ice and snow like nowhere else on the planet.”
I had to wonder, of course, about the early visitors who gave this northern island a name that we would charitably call imaginative. Rumor has it that the Vikings, wanting to keep others away from Iceland, named the island in such a way to draw people away from Iceland and to Greenland.
Of course, since Union is never off my mind, I started thinking about the College. Its name is, to me, an accurate guide to what Union is all about.
Take, for example, our recent cooperative efforts with the larger community around us. Most of you know the story of our founding-how some 975 residents of this area came together in the first popular effort to found a college in America. Despite that early cooperation, the relationship between town and gown has hardly been a uniformly smooth one in the intervening two centuries. For every effort at cooperation-the community involvement in raising the money to build Memorial Chapel, for example-there have been times of indifference and even antipathy. Now, with efforts that range from our first-year students' involvement in community clean-up efforts, to the Kenney Community Center, to our College Park neighborhood investment, I think it's fair to say that town and gown are increasingly on the same page. To my mind, we are closer to that initial spirit of cooperation than we have been in many years-or perhaps than we have ever been.
Or take our new venture, the House System. Every student will be a member of a house, and every house will be many things-a focal point for social and intellectual activities, a vehicle for community service, a welcoming place for making new friends or simply hanging out. Add the fact that every faculty member will be affiliated with one of the houses, and the fact that every student will also be able to join a fraternity, sorority, or a Theme House, and you have a an initiative that will offer wonderful opportunities for enhancing the campus's sense of union.
The spirit of union is also showing up in our academic program. The early Union College did pioneering work in the sciences (thanks largely to President Eliphalet Nott), and its nature changed considerably in the mid-nineteenth century, when we became the first liberal arts college to teach engineering.
On the whole, Union and its students have benefited from the unusual breadth of our curriculum. Yet there have been times when our attempts to bring a better sense of unity to the curriculum have not worked as well as we would wish (one of my predecessors, Dixon Ryan Fox, once wrote in some exasperation that the problem of integrating the liberal arts and engineering was insoluble).
Now, we are optimistic that our work in converging technologies will prove him wrong. Recognizing that many recent technological advances have taken place where the liberal arts and engineering have come together, we are developing four key areas-bioengineering, mechatronics, nanotechnology, and pervasive computing. Each will reach broadly across our curriculum-again, enlarging our concept of “union.”
So, as I mused about the misleading nature of the name “Greenland,” I was reassured that the name Union an accurate one for what we are. In our relationship with the larger community around us, in our sense of community on campus, in our initiatives in our curriculum, we continue to build strengths that truly reflect the name the founders so wisely chose more than two centuries ago.
Roger H. Hull