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Abramov named co-salutatorian

Posted on Jun 15, 2003

Commencement, June 15, 2003

Dmitry Abramov, a biology and political science
major from Guilderland, was co-salutatorian of Union College's Class of 2003.

He is a 1999 graduate of Guilderland High School.

Abramov is enrolled in the eight-year Leadership in Medicine
Program, a joint degree program with Union College and Albany Medical College. He received from Union bachelor's
degrees in biology and political science, and a master's degree in health
systems administration. He will enroll at AMC this fall.

At Union, he served on the Academic Affairs Council, and he was a
member of subcommittees on scheduling and transfer credits. He was a four-year
volunteer with the College's Kenney Center, where students serve as mentors to
students in after-school programs. He was a member of Alpha Epsilon Pi
fraternity.

He participated in Union's National Health Systems term, a summer
program in which students study the health professions in England, the Netherlands
and Hungary.
He also participated in the political science term in Washington,
D.C., where he was an
intern at Congressional Quarterly.

He wrote his senior thesis
on developing a new infrastructure for the medical malpractice system.

A native of Belorussia, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1989.

He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Pi Sigma Alpha, the
political science honor society.

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Roblee is valedictorian

Posted on Jun 15, 2003

Christopher
Roblee of Waltham, Mass., was the valedictorian of the Union
College Class of 2003.

The computer
engineering major and mathematics minor is a 1999 graduate of the Cambridge
School of Weston.

Roblee plans
to pursue a master's degree and perhaps a Ph.D. in computer engineering at the Dartmouth College's Thayer School of Engineering.

He said he
is considering a career that focuses on managing a product or program that will
influence the direction of technology in business and industry.

At Union, his senior project involved the
development of a genetic algorithm that designs filters for image processing.
He was president of the College's Robot Club, which built machines for use in
competition. He was a tutor in the Electrical Engineering Help Center. He was a
four-year volunteer with the College's Kenney Center, where students serve as mentors to
students in after-school programs.

He was
active in his fraternity, Alpha Epsilon Pi, serving as treasurer and
representative on the College's Inter Fraternity Council. He was also involved
in organizing the fraternity's food drives, discussions with faculty members,
and a team in Relay for Life, a recent College fundraiser that collected nearly
$60,000 for the American Cancer Society.

In 2001, he
studied abroad on a Union program in Prague, Czech Republic.

While on
breaks from College, he worked with the software group at IBM in Westford, Mass.

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Jeff Silver delivers student address

Posted on Jun 15, 2003

commencement

Jeffrey Silver, a theater major, was selected to give the student address at the College's Commencement on June 15, 2003.

A native of Oyster Bay,
Silver is the son of Mark and Ginny Silver. He was a 1999 graduate of Portledge
School in Locust
Valley.

While at Union,
Silver also earned a minor in political science. He was a member of Mountebanks,
the student theater group; chair of the Student Conduct Committee; a news
writer for Concordiensis, the student
newspaper; and a member of Phi Delta Theta fraternity.

Following is the text from
Silver's speech:

An angel appears at a faculty meeting and tells the dean
that in return for his unselfish and exemplary behavior, the Lord will reward
him with his choice of infinite wealth, wisdom, or beauty.  Without hesitating, the dean selects infinite
wisdom. “Done!” says the angel, and disappears in a cloud of smoke and a bolt
of lightning.  Now, all heads turn toward
the dean, who sits surrounded by a faint halo of light. At length, one of his
colleagues whispers, “Say something.”

The dean sighs and says, “I should have taken the money.”

Parents, Family, Professors, Administration, Alumni, and
most importantly, fellow students, welcome to Graduation.  Welcome to the day when we celebrate the
culmination of the best four (or maybe five or even occasionally six) years of
our lives.  We have spent so much time
studying, working, memorizing, analyzing, debating, deliberating,
contemplating, and cramming together.  We
have feasted together, drunk together, danced together, played together,
protested together, laughed together, cried together, rejoiced together,
mourned together.  And be it the global
tragedy of terrorism or the internal tragedy of the death of a student, we have
bonded together. 

Many of us sitting here today started out right behind you,
down in West College. I have many memories of that dorm
that I will hold with me forever.  Living
in the same room with a stranger, walking to the shower in a towel in front of
thirty people, my first time being sick without my mother to bring me toast and
soup, ordering mozzarella sticks and buffalo wings at four in the morning,
staying up two nights in a row for exams, sleeping in until 6 p.m., and of
course, the occasional beer.  The one
constant in my four years of wonderful and occasionally painful memories are my
friends.  Union College has given us many things, but we
have given ourselves and each other the greatest gift — friendship. 

Fred Rogers was supposed to be here today, but
unfortunately, he is no longer with us. 
I watched his show religiously during my childhood, as I'm sure many of
you did.  I very much wish Mr. Rogers
could be here with us today, because he is the godfather of friendship.  But if he were here, I'm sure he would agree
with me — the most important lessons learned in college, exceeding any
engineering design or history thesis, are friendship and care towards one
another.  In that regard, I think we have
all succeeded.  As Mr. Rogers would say,
we turned Union into our own “land of
make-believe.”

What have we learned here at Union? 
Biology, chemistry, history, English, philosophy, political science, and
other departments have taught us many facts and figures.  Our brains have grown, we have been
educated.  But what of this
education?  As the dean in my story first
suggests, we should all be striving for infinite wisdom.  But many educated world leaders strive to
oppress, enslave, harass, afflict, torment, and torture their own people.  Depending on your opinion, our own educated
leaders strive to make war.  So, besides
the occasional pleasure of quoting Plato or reiterating facts about the nucleus
at cocktail parties, what can we do with our education? 

Many graduating seniors have big plans for next year.  Many are going on to graduate school to study
medicine, law or business.  Many already
have jobs lined up with prestigious companies. 
Our education at Union has given us graduate school admission and acceptance in
the workplace.  But a great deal of
students sitting here are unsure of their future, myself included.  We are scared, indecisive, uncertain, and
unassured.  We are suspicious of this
mysterious idea of life after college. 
The real world, as they say — real jobs and real responsibilities.  And we ask – what has Union taught us?  What has it gotten us, besides bank debts and
uncertainties? 

On paper, we go into the real world with a Bachelor of Arts
and not much else.  But as I have been
told many times by my professors, we must learn to think outside the box.  The English poet Alexander Pope says “Tis
education forms the common mind, Just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined.”  And if we consider our four years here, we
should be proud of our accomplishments. 
Of course we should be proud of acing a midterm or writing a fantastic
paper, but the accomplishments to which I refer do not appear on paper.  They are intangibles.  The ability to think in different
dimensions.  The capacity to analyze a
problem on different levels.  And the
want and desire for more knowledge.  This
has been taught to us not only by our professors, but by our peers and friends
as well. 

John Locke said that “the only fence against the world is a
thorough knowledge of it.”  The real
world which we are about to embark on can be a cold and difficult place.  But with our inclination of knowledge, with
our Union College experience, we will be okay.  Of this I have no doubt.  Absolute wisdom and knowledge is impossibility.  But we have learned enough here to be ready
to move into the next stage of our lives. 
The beginning may certainly be rough — finding work, making new
friends, paying bills, moving into your own apartment — these are not easy
things.  With the exception of the food,
we will all miss College very much.  But
we are ready.  Our friends and our teachers
have prepared us.  This is the first day
of the rest of our lives. 

Seniors, we are graduating today.  No more Sunday brunches in West, or hockey
games against RPI, or painting the idol. 
No more trips to Chet's, the Skellar, or Gepetto's.  No more teacher conferences and office hours
and begging for a higher grade and spending ten hours in the library.  But our friendships won't end.  Distance does make the heart grow fonder, and
hopefully we will all see each other soon. 
But it's time for us to bring our land of make-believe into the real
world.  To execute the lessons that we
learned here.  To make our own
lives. 

Four long wonderful years are behind us, and we are stepping
into a world of untold riches and greatness. 
I wish you all the greatest success in the world.  Congratulations, and keep in touch. 

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Text of tribute to Fred Rogers

Posted on Jun 15, 2003

Commencement, June 15, 2003

Latrobe, Pennsylvania can
claim several distinctions: the first professional football game, the banana
split, Rolling Rock beer, and golfer Arnold Palmer, who it should be noted, won
the U.S. Open forty-three years ago today. But best known of all of Latrobe's
favorite sons must certainly be Fred Rogers, born in that tough coal mining
town on March 20, 1928, as Fred McFeely Rogers
(and now you know where that Neighborhood character comes from). It was
an  unremarkable year otherwise, although
the Yankees won the World Series – four games to none – against the St. Louis
Cardinals, and the New York Times reported that the annual cost of
enforcing Prohibition had begun to approach the $200 million mark.

Much more important for
the future Mr. Rogers, however, was the appearance of a brief article in the
April issue of Popular Mechanics Magazine for that year announcing the
development of television for the home. The feature illustration for the report
was a family sitting around what looks like a radio with a three-inch-square
window on the front – in some living
room (actually, a neighborhood in Schenectady). Television's first drama, The
Queen's Messenger
, was broadcast later that year from station WGY in Schenectady. And so, in one of
those minor coincidences of history, Mr. Rogers and the technology that became
his medium were born at nearly the same time.

Fred Rogers graduated
from high school in 1946 and set off to Dartmouth College to study for a career
in diplomacy, starting with a major in Romance languages. But Hanover proved to be too cold
for Mr. Rogers, in more ways than one, and he decided to return to one of his
first loves and transferred to Rollins College in sunny Florida to study musical
composition and performance. Legend has it, incidentally, that one of the first
students to greet Mr. Rogers during his first visit to Rollins, riding rather
smartly in a Maxwell automobile with a rumble seat, was a young woman named
Joanne Byrd.

Music had been an
important part of Mr. Rogers' life from his earliest childhood, both as a way
of expressing feelings and emotions as well as a way to tell stories that would
speak directly to very small children. Yo-Yo Ma , a guest on the Neighborhood, once remarked that Mr. Rogers used music to show that all things are
possible within you, that music creates a space of possible knowledge,
of feeling with words, stories, fears – all those things. 

On vacation in Spring,
1951, Mr. Rogers saw his first television programming. He hated it. This was,
after all, the heyday of Milton Berle, Ernie Kovaks, Red Skelton, and Howdy
Doody
.  So he decided to do something
about it. Instead of going on to graduate school, Mr. Rogers went to NBC
television as an assistant producer for The Voice of Firestone and later
as floor director for the Lucky Strike Hit Parade, The Kate Smith Hour, and
the NBC Opera Theatre. This experience may account in part for the
popularity of the comic opera productions among the denizens of the Neighborhood
of Make-Believe
. Television critic Joyce Millman observed that these
“trippy productions” were a “cross between the innocently disjointed imaginings
of a preschooler and some avant-garde opus by John Adams.”

But Mr. Rogers still had
a good reason to continue visiting Florida: Joanne Byrd. The story
is that, during one visit and in a gesture worthy of the Neighborhood of
Make-Believe
, Mr. Rogers slipped with Joanne into a church entirely on the
spur of the moment – and proposed.

They were married on July
9, 1952.
The very next year, a new educational station in Pittsburgh, WQED, asked Mr. Rogers
to return to plan and schedule programming. His friends thought he was crazy. After
all, WQED had yet to begin broadcasting and was the nation's first
community-sponsored educational television station – not exactly a promising
start. But Mr. Rogers was ready to make the change.

Mr. Rogers and his
co-host, Josie Carey, went on the air in 1954 with one of the station's first
programs: “The Children's Corner,” a program that, in the following year, would
win the prestigious Sylvania Award for the best locally produced children's
program. But Mr. Rogers did not appear on this show in person. He was Daniel
Striped Tiger, X the Owl, King Friday XIII, Henrietta Pussycat, and Lady Elaine
Fairchilde – just as he continued to be to the end of his career. Carey
later remarked that she would sometimes find herself confiding in these
puppets, forgetting that Mr. Rogers was behind them – the same reaction children,
and children at heart, would continue to have for decades. Incidentally, each
one of these shows cost about $30 to produce.


Student readings:

— All through our lives, there are resignations of
wishes.  As children, once we learn to
walk, we must resign ourselves to not being a baby anymore.

— I really think that everybody, every day, should be able
to feel some success.

— How we deal with the big disappointments in life depends
a great deal on how the people who loved us helped us deal with small
disappointments when were little.

— Childhood isn't just something we “get through.”  It's a big journey, and it's one we've all
taken.  Most likely, though, we've
forgotten how much we had to learn along the way about ourselves.

— One of the hardest things for young children to
understand is that their actions have real consequences for others.  That's because for a time a child's own world
seems like the whole world: That's all
there is.

— I like you just the way you are.

Mr. Rogers was ordained
a Presbyterian minister in 1963; his call was to continue working with children
and families through television, radio, magazines, and newspapers.  Almost immediately Mr. Rogers went to Toronto to work for the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, producing a short children's program called
“Mister Rogers.” It was on this show that he appeared on-camera for the first
time as himself. The following year the program, now ½-hour long, was picked up
in Pittsburgh. In 1966 the Eastern
Educational Network bought 100 of the programs, gave them the new name of
“Mister Rogers' Neighborhood,” and distributed them to Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and a few other
American cities for the first time. Two
years later, the National Educational Television network, later to become PBS,
made the show available for national distribution. Mr. Rogers became an instant
celebrity and the Neighborhood became part of millions of homes. By
1985, 8 percent of American households were tuning in to Mr. Rogers and by 1991
a poll revealed that 45 percent of preschoolers thought that Mr. Rogers ought
to be President. Five years later, TV Guide declared Mr. Rogers to be
one of the 50 greatest television stars of all time.

Student readings:

— Taking
care is one way to show your love. 
Another way is letting people take good care of you when you need it.

— There's never been a time in our history when there have
been so many changes, so many unusual things to deal with for which we have no
experience.  It's as if our whole society
were walking along a road through a wilderness of constant change with
strangers we think we should know, but don't quite understand.

— There are times when explanations, no matter how
reasonable, just don't seem to help.

— Just displaying his or her picture on a refrigerator or
at the office can make a four-year-old as proud as an artist at a gallery
opening.

— We have all been children and have had children's
feelings….  But many of us have
forgotten.  We've forgotten what it's
like not to be able to reach the light switch. 
We've forgotten a lot of the monsters that seemed to live in our room at
night.  Nevertheless, those memories are
still there, somewhere inside us.

— We all have different gifts, so
we all have different ways of saying to the world who we are.

Fred Rogers was given
every significant broadcasting award for which he was eligible, including
lifetime achievement awards from the Television Critics Association and the
National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. He has a star on the
Hollywood Walk of Fame and is in the Television Hall of Fame. But it wasn't
until 1999 that he was persuaded to establish a Web site for his show. He was
resolutely non-commercial. There is no Mr. Rogers talking doll, no Fred Rogers
line of cardigans, and no Prince Tuesday cologne (imagine a T-Shirt of the Simpsons on vacation in the
Neighborhood of Make-Believe). He refused to make commercial
appearances, not even for PBS station pledge breaks (for which we may all be
grateful). It was all about the children. But he did play a key role in one
commercial decision that was to have unexpected and fruitful consequences for
us all. We can thank Mr. Rogers in large measure for the fact that we can watch
television programs anytime we want with the assistance of our VCRs and the
technologically advanced successors to VCRs that we use today.

In 1976, a group of
television companies brought suit against the Sony Corporation to prevent
off-air duplication of copyrighted television programs: time-shifting, in other
words.  This case made its way through
District Court and the Court of Appeals, ending up finally on the docket of the
U.S. Supreme Court nearly a decade later as Sony
Corporation of
America v. Universal City Studios. In a very close decision, the Court sided with
Sony and referred explicitly to the testimony of Mr. Rogers in support of the
majority opinion. Here is what Mr. Rogers testified:

“Some
public stations, as well as commercial stations, program the Neighborhood at hours when some children
cannot use it. I think that it's a real service to families to be able to
record such programs and show them at  appropriate times. I have
always felt that with the advent of all of this new  technology that
allows people to tape the Neighborhood
off-the-air, and I'm speaking for the Neighborhood
because that's what I produce, that they then  become much more active in the
programming of their family's television life. 
Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others. My
whole approach in broadcasting has always been: 'You are an important
person just the way you are. You can make healthy decisions.'”  

We
can just hear him saying it – and believing it to be so simple that even a
four-year old could understand.

It
would be easy to say that Mr. Rogers remained a child all of his life. But this
would be a mistake. Mr. Rogers' gift was that he always remembered what
it was like to be a child. He remembered what it was like to be afraid of going
down the bathtub drain, or of not being able to make the dark go away because
the light switch was too high to reach. And he remembered how a small child
might wonder about, and be frightened by, divorce and death. Few are given this
gift, and fewer still know what to do with it.Your mothers and fathers
will remember with gratitude the many late afternoons that they relied on Mr.
Rogers to bring a little peace into your life and theirs. Someday you may
remember that you absorbed some important lessons about being a kind and
considerate person in the time you spent in the Neighborhood.

Student readings:

— Almost all of us who have been parents have had the
feeling of wanting to give our children perfect lives, lives without pain or
sorrow.  But, of course, none of us can.

— Grandparents are both our past and our future.  In some ways they are what has gone before,
and in others they are what we will become.

— There are no perfect parents . . .  just as there are no perfect children.

— I recently learned that in an average lifetime a person
walks about 65,000 miles.  That's two and
half times around the world.  I wonder
where your steps will take you.  I wonder
how you'll use the rest of the miles you're given.

— Parents are like shuttles on a loom.  They join the threads of the past with the
threads of the future and leave their own bright patterns as they go, providing
continuity to succeeding ages.

— I have really never considered myself a TV star.  I always thought I was a neighbor who
just came in for a visit.

Mr. Rogers, you were, and still are, special. We liked you – just the way you were.

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Joanne Rogers accepts husband’s 41st honorary degree

Posted on Jun 15, 2003

Commencement, June 15, 2003

Fred Rogers, the host of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, proved as popular with graduating college seniors as he was with children. In all, he received more than 40 honorary degrees from colleges and universities.

Rogers had agreed to speak at Union's Commencement before he died on Feb. 27. But instead of choosing another Commencement speaker, the College had Dean of Students Fred Alford read a tribute to Rogers, and graduating seniors Katrina Tentor and Pooja Kothari took turns reading excerpts from his writings.

After Rogers died, instead of choosing another Commencement speaker, the College will have Dean of Students Fred Alford read a tribute to Rogers, and graduating seniors Katrina Tentor and Pooja Kothari will take turns reading excerpts from his writings.

Accepting the honorary degree for her husband will be Sara Joanne Rogers, who celebrated a golden wedding anniversary with her husband last July 9.

Though she was looking forward to her husband speaking at Union and accepting his honorary degree, she said earlier this week, “He'll be looking down on this from heaven and he'll be happy about it.”

Although Mrs. Rogers shared her husband's background in music, she never got involved in Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, aside from lending her name to Queen Sara of the Neighborhood of Make-Believe.
But she has had a considerable career of her own as a concert pianist, initially playing solo and since 1976 teaming up with fellow pianist Jeannine Morrison, a friend since college days. The duo plays widely around the country — Mozart to contemporary, often combining their concerts with workshops and master classes at colleges.

Mrs. Rogers interrupted her career to raise the couple's two sons. Two years ago she described in an interview how her husband would react to the boys' shenanigans with stoic patience. “I didn't have his patience,” she recalled laughing. “Sometimes I would wait for him to say something, and it didn't happen. And so I always ended up being the one to discipline, the ogre.”

The couple met when they were music majors at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. “We were 11 days apart in age,” she says. “I was older, and, boy, I used to hear it about that.”

After graduation, Fred Rogers went to New York to work for NBC but returned for visits to Florida, where Joanne was a graduate student studying piano performance. During one visit, in a gesture worthy of the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, he led Joanne into a church on the spur of the moment — and proposed.

Joanne Rogers rarely accompanied her husband to college commencements where he was honored. But she is no stranger to contemporary college life: she serves on the board of Rollins, her alma mater.

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