Posted on Aug 25, 2003

The modern fraternity system at colleges and universities across the nation is generally recognized as beginning with the founding of Kappa Alpha (1825), Sigma Phi (1827), and Delta Phi (1827) at Union. Also beginning at Union were Psi Upsilon (1833), Chi Psi (1841), and Theta Delta Chi (1847).

Although a few other colleges had older societies-The Flat Hat began at William and Mary in 1750, the Porcellian started at Harvard in 1789-no other college saw the start of so many fraternities. By 1857 Union had ten fraternities.

The number has varied since then, with a high of twenty-three in 1931.

The following Greek organizations are active today:

Alpha Delta Phi fraternity was founded at Hamilton College in 1832, and the Union chapter began in 1859. Begun as a literary society concentrating on moral, social, and academic betterment within the community, Alpha Delta Phi today hosts two to three dinners each term with professors and sponsors an annual literary competition open to the entire campus. In 2002-2003, Alpha Delta Phi had 27 active brothers.

Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity was founded at New York University in 1913 and began at Union in 1985. Although founded to promote Jewish principles, AEPi is nondiscriminatory, and about half its membership of twenty is non-Jewish. The brothers tutor young students regularly at the Kenney Center, hold a Toy Drive for the Marine Corps Reserves' Toys for Tots program, and raise money for the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program. In 2002, AEPi received the Brown Cup, awarded to the Greek organization that best embodies the spirit of Greek life on campus.

Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity was founded in 1906 at Cornell University by seven men who desired to maintain outstanding scholarship and companionship. Alpha Phi Alpha was established at Union in May of 1983 as the first black fraternity on campus. This spring the fraternity announced the establishment of the Mohammad A. Omar '94 Memorial Community Service Internship-a $2,500 stipend to be awarded to a student who volunteers at a nonprofit community organization (see separate story).

Chi Psi fraternity, which had 47 members this year, says its mission is to create and maintain an enduring society that stimulates intellectual, ethical, and social growth while encouraging leadership, respect, and responsibility to the college and the community. The organization participates in many philanthropic events such as Big Brothers/Big Sisters, Relay for Life, and Prison Basketball. The fraternity lived in the Philip Spencer Lodge from 1908 to 2003, when it is relocating as part of the development of the House System.

Delta Delta Delta sorority was founded in 1888 at Boston College and established at Union in 1981. In the 2002-2003 academic year, “Tri-Delt” had 103 active sisters. They offer financial and volunteer contributions to the research and treatment of children with cancer and also participate in the National Easting Disorder Awareness Week.

Gamma Phi Beta sorority was founded in November of 1874 at Syracuse University and started at Union in 1986 as the College's fourth sorority. Gamma Phi Beta's objective is to promote the highest type of womanhood through education, social life, and service to country and humanity.

Kappa Sigma fraternity was founded in 1869 at the University of Virginia and at Union in March of 1929. Kappa Sigma's 23 members are dedicated to performing community service and have raised money for numerous charities, volunteered at UCare day care center, and built houses for the Hill and Vale Affordable Housing project.

Phi Delta Theta fraternity, founded at Miami of Ohio in 1848, began at Union in 1883. Since that time, more than 1,000 brothers have maintained a promise of friendship, sound learning, and moral rectitude. In the 2002-2003 academic year there were 23 active members, who participated in such community service events as Special Olympics Bowling and Skiing, Youth Olympics, Big Brothers/Big Sisters, volunteering at a food pantry, and walking in the Relay for Life.

Phi Iota Alpha fraternity was founded at RPI in 1931 and established at Union in 1991 as the only Spanish- speaking fraternity on campus. The fraternity provides service to the college community through social and cultural programs based on a philosophy of Pan-Americanism. The challenge of providing these services drives their primary organizational goal of professionally developing its network of undergraduate, graduate, and professional men (also known as “La Familia”). Phi Iota Alpha had three active members this year.

Psi Upsilon began with a meeting in (old) West College on Nov. 24, 1833. Psi Upsilon is the first fraternity to build a house on campus, and now will relocate as part of the House System. In a self study this year, the fraternity said it believes the transition “will only help us to become stronger as we strive to develop a new Psi Upsilon founded on our ever-enduring ideals and principles.” As part of the move, the fraternity is donating the volumes in its library to Schaffer Library.

Sigma Chi fraternity, founded in 1855 at Miami of Ohio, began at Union in 1923. In the 2002-2003 academic year, there were 53 active brothers who strived to cultivate an appreciation of and commitment to the ideas of friendship, justice, and learning. A few of Sigma Chi's main activities include a Yates Elementary School tutoring program, a school-wide blood drive, and Youth Olympics. The brothers are required to take on at least 15 hours of individual community service per term.

Sigma Delta Tau sorority was founded at Cornell University in March of 1917 as a predominantly Jewish national sorority. The organization began at Union in 1977 as the College's first sorority. There are 90 members whose mission is to enrich the college experiences of women of similar ideas, build everlasting friendships, and foster personal growth. The sorority holds several philanthropic events each year, with all proceeds going to Prevention Child Abuse America. The group raised $500 in April for Jewish Women International.

Sigma Iota Alpha sorority was founded in 1990 at Union. The sorority is based on Latino culture, and in 2002-2003 there were four active members.

Sigma Phi fraternity had 37 members in 2002-2003, and the organization encourages leadership and friendship. Founded in 1827, it is the oldest surviving fraternity in the country. In recent years the Union chapter has participated in Big Brothers/Big Sisters, sponsored an annual golf tournament to benefit cancer research, and hosted a dinner/
fundraiser for the Family and Child Services of Schenectady.

Theta Delta Chi, founded in 1847 at the College, has offered young men the opportunity to enjoy lifelong friendships and develop important academic, business, and social skills that will prepare them for a lifetime of learning and success.

The above information was compiled from Union College archives, the Union College Encyclopedia, and information provided by the individual fraternities and sororities.

A tribute to Mohammad Omar '94

In the early 1980s, as war waged around them in their native Afghanistan, the family of Mohammad Omar fled to America.

They arrived in New York City, where Mohammad eventually graduated eleventh in his high school class of 337 in 1989. From there, he came to Union to study mechanical engineering. On Aug. 8, 1993, he drowned in a canoeing accident on the Sacandaga River while doing summer research aimed at improving the performance of electric vehicle batteries. He was awarded his bachelor's degree posthumously.

Mohammad was a member of the Pi Pi chapter at Union of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, the first intercollegiate Greek-letter fraternity established for African-American students. This spring the brothers of the Union chapter recognized Mohammad's dedication to community service by establishing the Mohammad A. Omar '94 Memorial Community Service
Internship. The internship, which will be open to all students, will award $2,500 annually to outstanding undergraduates who volunteer for nonprofit community organizations.

Announcing the internship, the fraternity said, “Before his passing, Mohammad's life could best be described as a dedication to community service, and he instilled that ethic of responsibility in all those he touched. As a remembrance of his life's work, the brothers of Alpha Phi Alpha have dedicated this internship award in his memory so that his vision of service may live in perpetuity.”

The internship was announced at the fraternity's twentieth anniversary celebration in May in Old Chapel, which was attended by members of the Omar family. Victor Owusu '96 reported that gifts and pledges to the internship total more than $55,000. Also attending the event were twenty-eight of the forty-three members of the fraternity and their families, including the eight alumni who founded the Union chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha in 1983-Gregory Bowler '85, Winston Britton '85, Philip Gist '88, Martin Glaze '86, John Johnson '85, Jim Mann '86, Larry Romaine '85, and Reinhard Walker '86.

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Posted on Aug 25, 2003

Much of the Encyclopedia of Union History, to
be published this fall, deals with weighty issues such as the curriculum or a history of the History Department or academic freedom and civil liberties. But there also are hundreds of “I didn't know that” items, and here are a few examples:

• The most widely known of Union's many campus dogs was Throckmorton, mascot of the Navy V-12 unit during World War II.
• The latter part of the nineteenth century saw a host of facetious student societies, such as “The Mystic Order of the Green Table,” “Knights of the Dark Lantern,” “Agnostic Choir,” and “Society for the Advancement of Social Feeling.”
• The earliest known musical organization at Union was a ten-man Glee Club, which existed by 1854. The earliest student society to be formed in an academic field was the Chemical Society, which adopted its constitution in 1861. The first attempt to disseminate a systematic appraisal of courses was in 1927, when the
  Concordiensis published “Comment on Electives Made By Students Taking Courses.”

• The first student magazine titled The Idol (1910) called itself “a quarterly of scintillating sarcasm strongly soliciting the ceasing of swiftly circulating student sobriety.”
• The first commencement ceremony, in 1797, saw three graduates. Although early statistics are crude, it appears that the College's enrollment reached 100 about 1808, 200 in 1818, 300 in 1938-and then dropped to a low of 80 in 1872.
• The first student automobile was a Pierce Arrow brought to campus in 1903. The first recorded accident was in 1920, when a member of the engineering faculty ran into a concrete post. And the first auto theft (a Ford parked in front of Kappa Alpha) occurred in 1929.
• Modern digital computing began in the early 1960s with the use of an IBM 403 accounting machine in the business office. Academic
  computing was born in 1962 with the installation of an IBM 1630; it had paper tape input
  and output, a console typewriter, and 20,000 decimal digits of memory.

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Posted on Aug 25, 2003

This fall will see the publication of the
Encyclopedia of Union History, a one-volume, 860-page exploration of Union from its founding to 1990.

The word “encyclopedia” was chosen carefully. The book is not a history in the sense of
a systematic attempt to summarize the past. Rather, it is, as author Wayne Somers '61 puts it, a compendium of historical data.

“Planning this book, I could see two very different ways to proceed,” Somers says. “I
could chart only those roads which lead from the past to the present, or I could also survey the cul-de-sacs and meandering cow paths of Union's past-the roads that seem from our vantage point to have led in the wrong direction or nowhere at all.”

Somers chose the second approach, and the result is a collection of more than 825 separate articles. Most were researched and written by Somers; about 100 were done by others and then edited by him. The reader who wanders through the volume will undoubtedly learn something about Union that he or she did not know beforehand.

Recently we asked Somers to look back at a project that turned out to be far bigger than he-or anyone else, for that matter-had imagined.

Q: How did this
project originate?

A: I'd done some previous writing on Union history, and my friend Jan Ludwig, a professor of philosophy who was co-chairing the Bicentennial Committee, asked me if I'd undertake a volume modeled on Alexander Leitch's A Princeton Companion. President Hull commissioned the work in 1991, and we all thought it could be completed in time for the Bicentennial celebration in early 1995.

I recruited more than fifty people, mostly current or retired faculty members, to write 102 articles on topics with which they were already familiar, and I set out to research and write what turned out to be another 726 articles myself. I was joined in the research by my old friend Ruth Anne Evans, who had just retired from the library. She was an almost infallible source of information and a dogged researcher until her death in 2001.

Q: How did you decide
what to include?

A: We wanted to cast the widest possible net, to reflect the full life of the College over almost two centuries and to give every segment a history. Not just presidents, trustees, benefactors, and academic departments, but sailing clubs and Garnet editors and chaplains and maintenance workers and fundraisers and students in wheelchairs and admissions officers and Jews and women and blacks and basketball players. And we wanted a full spectrum of broader topics, such as curriculum, security, alumni relations, governance, religion, tenure, academic freedom, town-gown relations. We also wanted to re-examine the historical claims commonly made about Union, and either put them on a solid basis or retire them.

Standards of collegiate history used to be disgracefully low, but they've risen a lot in recent years (though not all colleges have noticed that). We tried always to get beneath the surface and to avoid hype; to anticipate the hard questions that would occur to the kind of critical readers Union aims to produce. It will take a few years of use to see how well we succeeded in that, but I suspect we came close to meeting another goal: that no reader, however familiar with the topic, would come away from any article without learning something. There's a lot of detail in this book.

I think one must always start from the tangible, and so the physical campus is covered very thoroughly-there are separate articles on almost every structure, past and
present. As well as the brook, the terrace wall, fences, gates, roads, landscaping. Even
utilities-electricity, water, sewage, telephones are covered. Everything that changed daily life in the past.

Q: How does one research such topics?

A: You can't do it one topic
at a time because most of the sources aren't indexed adequately, if at all. I read, and took notes on, all of the
Concordy and other newspapers, the various alumni
magazines, the Idol and the Garnet and their predecessors, selections from the papers of various presidents and trustees, and many miscellaneous sources. Ruth Anne read and took notes on the trustees minutes. All this reading, of course, turned up new topics that had to be dealt with. The notes went into a computer database on which I drew while writing articles.

Q: Were you frustrated by unanswerable questions, or gaps in the research material?

A: Constantly, because of that deliberate policy of trying to write the full story instead of just fashioning an entertaining article from the materials readily at hand.

The College's earliest decades are the most obscure; there were no student or alumni publications, and
only a few alumni recorded their memories.

Two broader deficiencies also concerned me:

Although the College exists for teaching, there is very little direct evidence of the nature and effectiveness of what went on in the classroom. This is a problem noticed by educational historians generally.

The other deficiency concerns the College's financial history. Plenty of source material survives, but I lacked both the training and the time to make full use of it. Not only is financial history important in itself-most college functions depend on money-but it can often provide useful details about non-financial matters. For instance, in 1809 President Nott announced that Union would no longer offer French. We would have had to assume that French did disappear-the catalogues are no help on this question-if we hadn't found in the treasurer's records that payments continued to be made to the French instructor for the next twelve years.

Q: So it's really
like detective work?

A: It's probably equally undramatic most of the time, but more interesting, because academics, on average, are more intelligent than criminals and-believe it or not-many of them lead more imaginative lives.

We had a couple very
satisfying investigative breakthroughs. For instance, if you like, the Case of the President's Gallstone. Through most of his tenure President Day had vague health problems which some of his contemporaries seemed to doubt had an objective medical cause. In 1933 he had a gallstone removed, but although he was a vigorous middle-aged man, his recovery was so slow that he had to take a leave of absence, and then the trustees fired him, in part because they doubted he would fully recover.

I really wanted to get to the bottom of this, but it seemed impossible. I discussed it with a doctor I knew, who suggested I contact a pathologist at the hospital. It turns out that they keep surgical records for a very long time, and he found the records of the operation, which showed that Day had a bad infection and, in those pre-antibiotic days, would have been plagued with abscesses for a long time.

And then there was the Case of the Mysterious Sculptor. When the statue of Chester Arthur came to Union, the alumni magazine reported the sculptor's name as Ephraim Peyser. Such a commission would surely have been given to a well-established sculptor, but we could find no trace of Peyser in any reference book, or even on Google. Finally Ruth Anne did what academic historians too rarely do: she left the archives and looked for herself, and under Chet's coattails she found the correct name, Ephraim Keyser.

Q: Some people might
doubt that academics have interesting lives.

A: Elias Peissner, who was Lola Montez's lover at the same time as the King of Bavaria, then joined the Union faculty, and eventually died leading troops at Chancellorsville, was sui generis, but Union's first professor, John Taylor, had been with George Washington in the Crossing of the Delaware. President Day was once Oxford-Cambridge heavyweight boxing champion and published three novels. Alan Mozley had to evade murderous brigands to do his early zoological work in Siberia, and Johann Ludwig Tellkampf later served in the first Reichstag.

And in less violent modes, many faculty members have led more than one life: Lawrence Abbott was a well-established writer on music before he converted to economics, and he then published an important book on that subject. In the mid-nineteenth century, Tayler Lewis was simultaneously a much-published Greek and Hebrew scholar and a columnist for Harper's Monthly. Walter Langsam interrupted his academic career as an historian during the Second World War to serve as a division chief in the OSS. Burges Johnson's non-academic life was so full he devoted his memoirs to it exclusively. A college may be a tower, but it isn't ivory and the gates don't lock.

Even when a professor works only in his or her proper academic field, that work can be dramatic if one takes the trouble to understand the context, which we tried to do.

Q: What surprised you
most about the project?

A: When we first look at the past, especially the recent past, we project the present onto it, and then at some point in our investigation the accumulating evidence forces us to reassess. In other words, we set ourselves up for the big surprises.

For example, I was in the Class of 1961, and I had always accepted the old claims that Union was “a balanced college.” Not until midway through the book did I realize that these claims were just beginning to have validity in my student years. A few years earlier, in 1953, when mechanical engineering was added, the engineering faculty increased to fifteen. The arts faculty at that time consisted of an organist who gave a single course in music appreciation, a member of the English Department who also taught theater, and a slot for a professor of art which was not always filled. The library had desperately needed a new building for decades, but Schaffer Library was still eight years ahead because a field house had higher priority.

Q: How current
is the Encyclopedia?

A: To preserve objectivity and perspective, we stopped at the end of the Morris administration-August 31, 1990. After that, a few major changes, such as renovation of the Nott Memorial and the erection of the Yulman Theater, receive brief mention.

Q: Who does the
Encyclopedia see as Union's heroes and villains?

A: No major villains, if you mean people who seriously harmed the institution by exploiting it for their own ends. Even those who did the most damage, such as President Eliphalet Nott Potter, were working, by their lights, for the College's welfare. Eliphalet Nott was a hero and a potential villain; what he did for the College is well known, but it still isn't widely understood that he kept the trustees in the dark while taking financial risks that could have destroyed the institution. And by staying in office much too long, he contributed to Union's decline to near extinction in the late nineteenth century.

Actually, no Union administrator has been as irresponsible as the Board of Trustees was at certain periods. But there was no malice in it; they simply had not come to an understanding of what the board's role had to be. Other institutions had the same problem; Princeton's president once wrote that his board was “full of old dotards and sometimes they go to sleep.”

As for heroes, one has to admire Frank Bailey for his quiet generosity throughout a long life, though unfortunately he embarked in old age on a McCarthyite campaign that nearly did real harm. Walter Baker transformed the board by setting a model for conscientious, hard-working chairmanship for twenty-two years, and incidentally helped to thwart Bailey's crusade. Charles Waldron, the first director of alumni affairs, drew thousands of alumni closer to the College by the simple but rare expedient of talking to them like an educated man rather than a salesman.

Personally, I particularly admire Presidents Harrison Webster and Frank Parker Day as men, though neither was a success in the office. I think Union's unsung hero among presidents is Andrew Van Vranken Raymond. He worked very hard, through thirteen discouraging years, entirely subordinating his ego and his personal welfare to bringing Union back from the brink of insolvency. With minor exceptions, he made all the right decisions, in the right order, and left the College in a far healthier state. And he did it with no previous experience of either educational administration or business.

Q: Does the Encyclopedia include articles on all
these men?

A: Yes. Good ones if I'm not mistaken.

Q: What about
faculty members?

A: We have articles on everyone who stayed at least ten years and died before 1990, as well as several interesting people who stayed a shorter time. My personal favorites are the ones I knew, such as Harold Larrabee and Alan Mozley, but there are many fascinating people from earlier periods: Isaac Jackson, John Foster, Tayler Lewis, Jonathan Pearson, William Gillespie, Cady Staley, William Wells, Henry Whitehorne, Edward Everett Hale Jr., Burges Johnson, Charles Steinmetz, William Bennett. Many, many others.

Q: Alumni?

A: No. We hoped to include 200-300 distinguished non-living alumni, but the book is already very thick and very late.

Q: Does the Encyclopedia shed any useful light on current controversies, such as those concerning fraternities and civil engineering?

A: I think history makes a treacherous servant of politics, including educational politics. One minute it says just what you want it to say, and the next minute it betrays you. It tells you about Union's unique place in the history of fraternities, and that fraternities have played a very useful role in some periods, but it also tells you that fraternities have frequently tended to bring out the worst in their members, to encourage behavior that few students would engage in as individuals, and this despite many briefly successful attempts to reform the system. Eliphalet Nott pointed out the problem in 1846, and it's still true.

Likewise, history tells you that Union was the first liberal arts college to offer a full engineering course, but it also tells you that the College has closed highly successful programs in the past, because they didn't fit a new conception of its educational goals.

Q: For instance?

A: There was a special B.S. in chemistry program-really a chemical engineering program
-from about 1917 to 1950. Graduates easily found good jobs; Carl Frosch, who invented the technique that made possible large-scale inexpensive production of transistors, was a graduate of that program. But when President Davidson took office he saw a program with almost no non-technical content, and he eventually persuaded the trustees that, however successful it was, it didn't belong at Union. There was much pain, and Davidson eventually had to oust the department chairman over the issue. But few people would advocate bringing back such
a program now.

Combatants on all sides hurl lumps of history at each other, and the Encyclopedia will be a boon to them, but I think the only useful thing history can tell us about these issues is that ultimately they'll probably be decided in terms of the institution's present goals and resources. Debates should focus there. That's what Charlie Waldron believed, incidentally, and nobody has ever been more in love with Union's traditions than he was.

Q: If we had a time machine, where would you go?

A: I've thought about it often. I'd like to observe Eliphalet Nott at various periods, because for all that's been written about him, he's still something of an enigma and no one has sufficiently considered his evolution. And if my ticket permitted, I'd stop to watch the moment in 1936 when the freshmen, rebelling against sophomore hazing and rules requiring them to wear beanies, stay off the grass and avoid the front door of Bailey Hall, threw away their beanies and marched across the grass and into Bailey Hall, singing the Marseillaise! So little of past spirit leaves a mark on written history, but some Concordy writer kindly recorded that for us.

Q: Has Union progressed, long-term?

A: Sure. Also regressed and moved sideways. Like most institutions. There are so many different ways of looking at it that drawing up a comprehensive balance sheet is impossible. That's why history is most interesting if you're not trying to prove something.

Q: Any advice for
someone who does a
comparable project at
our 300th anniversary?

A: So much may change beyond our imagining, including the very nature of interest in the past. Collegiate history will long since have matured as a discipline, with methodologies that would probably strike us as bizarre, and one fears that in the distant future responsibility for such books will always be collective and official.

But if I'm wrong about that last, and if a thirst for honest reporting endures, my advice would be: Posit a reader who is smarter than you are, more curious, more critical, and generally harder to please, and then make satisfying that reader your highest priority. Even at the expense of your commitment to the institution, or of methodology, or of your personal relationship with contributors. If there are no such conflicts, you probably aren't doing it right. Worry constantly that the book won't be good enough. Don't just tell What and How; try to figure out Why.

That's really the only kind of book worth making, for the author or for the College.

The Encyclopedia of Union
History, to be published this fall, may be ordered through the College Bookstore at bookstore.union.edu
or 518-388-6188.

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Posted on Aug 25, 2003

The College is implementing its Converging Technologies initiative in a variety of ways. Here are a few examples from across campus.

In the lab:

Stephen G. Romero, assistant professor of psychology, and half a dozen students-Marie Krug '04, Lesley Chuang '03, Aaron D'Addario '03, Kalyn Quintin '03, Shoma Singh '03, and Adam Taylor '04-collaborated on research during the year. Romero, also an adjunct assistant professor of neurology at Albany Medical College, has a goal of developing tools to help us find out how the brain recovers cognitive function after injury.

Says Romero, “Students have been involved in everything from designing and programming tasks, to actually conducting experimental sessions with patients, to running controls and analyzing behavioral and imaging data. One student worked on programming a computer model to simulate previous results in the literature.”

Romero is one of only two researchers in New York's Capital Region trained in the use of functional MRI, and he has been intimately involved in planning and starting up the Advanced Imaging Research Center at the medical college. This center, a partnership between GE Global Research and the Neurosciences Institute at the medical college, houses a state-of-the-art GE 3 Tesla magnetic resonance imaging facility.

---

For the past two years, Cherrice Traver, professor of electrical and computer engineering, has been working with several students in projects at the University of Albany School of Nanosciences and Nanoengineering. Palma Catravas, visiting assistant professor in the department, has also worked with a number of students.

The joint Union and UAlbany Student Capstone Design Projects have allowed ten Union students to participate in collaborative research with UAlbany faculty. This cutting-edge research covers high-tech areas such as semiconductor chip fabrication, nanotechnology, sensors, and optical micro-electromechanical devices (MEMS). Projects also foster collaboration between scientists at UAlbany and engineers at Union.

In most cases, Union engineering students help design and implement circuits, computer programs, and other supporting elements. In some cases, the students do experimental work.

---

During a three-month field study in Fiji, John Thompson '03 used digital ethnography to crate a cultural learning tool and establish a continual cross-cultural dialogue between Union students on a term abroad in Fiji and anthropology students back on campus as well as high school students in Fiji and Niskayuna, N.Y. In the classroom, the list of cross-disciplinary areas that students can explore includes:

---

Bioengineering-Examples of courses in this area are Introduction to Bioengineering, Concepts of Vision (an introduction to the biology and physics of vision), and The Illustrated Organism (direct observation in the field, studio, and laboratory integrating biology and visual arts)

Mechatronics-Mechatronics is a design philosophy that encourages engineers to integrate precision mechanical engineering, digital and analog electronics, control theory, and computer engineering in the design of “intelligent” products, systems, and processes. Courses include Introduction to Engineering and Mechatronics, Design of Mechanical Systems, and Mechatronics Design.

Nanotechnology-the ability to work at the level of atoms, molecules, and supramolecular structures to generate larger structures with fundamentally new molecular organization-offers Frontiers of Nanotechnology; Quantum Chemistry; and Relativity, Quantum, and Their Applications, among others.

Neuroscience-The focus here is on the relationships among brain function, cognitive processing, and behavior, with courses such as has Comparative Animal Physiology, Organic Chemistry, Philosophy of Mind, Introduction to Experimental Psychology, and Psychology of Language.

Pervasive computing-Pervasive computing refers to a family of technologies that allow mobile or diffuse access to networks and especially to the Internet. The program under development at the College establishes a footing for the intelligent study of the technical, social, and cultural dimensions of these new dynamics.

Science, technology, medicine and society courses cover a range, including such special interests as Language and Culture, Medical Anthropology, The Economics of Health, Information Technology and Society, Literature and Medicine, and Mental Illness and Literature.

Comfortable in the lab

If Converging Technologies is an approach, and not a specific major, what kind of student gets involved?

Meet Desirée Plata '03, who this spring was awarded the Bailey Cup for “the greatest service to the College in any field.”

A self-styled student leader who never sought campus- wide elected office, Plata has been secretary of U-MED, the student EMS organization; manager and president of the Coffee House; general manager of WRUC; member of the U2K steering committee; president of the Chemistry Club; a chemistry tutor; and a teacher in Mad Science, an off- campus program that does science shows for children.

Plata, a native of Portland, Me., is a chemistry major with minors in math and biology. As a member of the Aerogel Research Team, a research collaboration of mechanical engineering and chemistry, she specialized in developing aerogel oxygen sensors. She also did research on fresh water fish communication and the effects of acid rain and was a co-author (with Prof. James Adrian of chemistry and former Prof. Grant Brown of biology) of a paper in the Journal of Chemical Ecology & Behavior.

Plata says she can't help noticing that when it comes to working in a lab or presenting research, Union students seem to be more at ease than their counterparts at larger institutions. “Because we're a smaller school, we have access to the faculty and we get our hands on all the equipment,” she says. “That doesn't happen at other schools. They can put us in a lab, and we know our way around. And we present our research all the time.”

Plata will enroll this fall in MIT's Ph.D. program in chemical oceanography at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. She did research last summer at Woods Hole on diesel fuel contamination during a summer student fellowship from the National Science Foundation. She received an honorable mention as a finalist for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

Much more CT information can be found on the web at:

• www.union.edu/ct

 

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Posted on Aug 25, 2003

In recent months, New York's Capital Region has received some unusual attention from the nation's media.

Unusual, because the attention is not about the activities of state government, but about a burgeoning high-technology industry. From Forbes to Newsday, articles talk about an upstate transformation-a transformation that now means 1,000 tech companies, 50,000 employees, and a $2 billion annual payroll. The seventeen counties along New York State's eastern boundary have united to present themselves as Tech Valley.

At the center of the transformation is a new branch of International Sematech, the consortium of ten semiconductor companies based in Austin, Texas. International Sematech North, as the Albany location is known, has already opened part of a $403 million semiconductor research and development center focused on developing 300-millimeter chip wafers. At least 250 scientists and technicians will work here.

Four months after the Sematech North announcement last year, Tokyo Electron Ltd. said it would create a $300-million, 220,000-square-foot facility adjacent to Sematech. The company is the world's second-largest manufacturer of computer chip-making tools.

Other recent developments include:

• IBM is constructing a $2.5-billion computer chip fabrication plant in East Fishkill, N.Y.-the single largest private investment in New York history. It also is moving researchers to Albany from some of its laboratories 100 miles south and has agreed
  to donate about $100 million worth of equipment and
  intellectual property to Albany Nanotech.

  (One of the forces behind Tech Valley is John Kelly III '76, senior vice president and group executive of the IBM Technology Group. Kelly, who grew up in the Capital Region, recently joined Union's Board of Trustees. President Roger Hull says of him, “He knows the area. I think what he is driven by is an understanding of what technology can do to revitalize a section of the state.” Kelly, for his part, says, “Growing up in this area, I always believed that there was a tremendous capabilities in the universities.”)

• General Electric is investing $100 million in GE Global Research in Niskayuna, next to the city of Schenectady. The center is the world headquarters for several GE industrial businesses and is the site of advanced research and development.

• Albany Molecular Research, a pharmaceutical research firm founded with four researchers, has expanded over the past few years to 150 employees.

• Saratoga County is planning the Luther Forest Technology Campus, which will encompass 1,350 acres.

• According to the Center for Economic Growth in Albany, the Capital Region gained more than $1.8 billion in technology research and development investments in 2002. In June, the Milken Institute, an economic think tank, ranked the Capital
  District thirty-seventh among the country's 200 largest
  metropolitan areas in producing jobs and good wages.
  The institute credited the region with developing a diverse economy and strong partnerships between the state and its universities.

  The region's colleges and universities are contributing to the pace in a variety of ways. The State University of New York at Albany, where Sematech North will be located, is creating a Center for Excellence in Nanoelectronics and a School of Nanosciences and Nanoengineering. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute recently broke ground for a Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies.

Union is involved in
several ways:

• The College's U-Start is a high technology business incubator designed to spawn new entrepreneurial ventures. In U-Start's intern program, student volunteers provide part-time assistance in projects selected by tenant companies, such as product testing and evaluation. U-Start also has a mentoring network in which experts from local businesses offer volunteer assistance in such areas as marketing, quality control, and business plan development (see separate story about Tree Top Solutions).

• In the classroom and laboratory, the Center for Converging Technologies (CT) at Union is creating programs to prepare students to understand both the new technologies and their global implications. The Center brings together faculty from engineering and the liberal arts so that students graduate with an understanding that goes beyond that provided by a traditional disciplinary major (see separate story for several examples).

  Doug Klein, professor of economics and director of the Center for CT, says, “As technology reshapes our world, the forces of change are increasingly emerging at the boundaries of traditional disciplines. As examples, between biology, mechanical engineering, ethics, and computer science lies bioengineering; between physics, chemistry, biology, and materials science lies nanotechnology; and between computer science, economics, sociology, the arts, and psychology lies pervasive computing.”

John Corey '76, president of the Clever Fellows Innvovation Consortium in Troy, N.Y., and a member of the
CT Board at Union, adds, “High-tech leaders must span the chasm that traditionally separates the worlds of liberal arts and business from that
of science and engineering. Union's specialty of engineering in a liberal arts environment provides context and relevance for cutting-edge technologists, and comprehension and access to the engines of change for humanists.”

Lyn Taylor, president of the Albany-Colonie Regional Chamber of Commerce, adds, “The Capital Region is exceedingly fortunate to have a wide range of outstanding colleges and universities. As one of the oldest and most respected institutions in Tech Valley, Union will be one of the key drivers in the economic and cultural future of the region. Union's rich history of liberal arts and engineering will play a pivotal role in proving the critical knowledge and skills that a technology-based economy demands.”

In recent years, the College has compiled an enviable record of financial support for its CT initiatives. The National Science Foundation has made seven awards, ranging from the institution-wide (support for CT planning) to the specific (support to buy a laser confocal microscope). IBM made a gift valued at $1 million, which included such research tools as a Veeco atomic force microscope, and other awards have come from Albany Molecular, the Booth Ferris Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation.

Aside from the direct involvement in the growth of Tech Valley, the colleges and universities contribute to an ambience favorable to this kind of education-intensive growth. There are more than 65,000 college and university students in the Capital Region, and, of course, the institutions offer thousands
of events, from cultural to athletic, each year. The Places Rated Almanac, which rates 354 areas in the country by a variety of factors, has the Albany-Schenectady-Troy area third on its list of best educational communities-behind only Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, N.C., and Boston, but ahead of such metropolitan areas as Chicago, San Francisco, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C.

Mark Walsh '76

“We may have gotten the evaluation wrong,” said Mark Walsh '76 of the collapse of the technology market, “but we didn't get the value wrong. We didn't get the value wrong of what [technology] means to your life and my life.”

Speaking at a Tech Valley Summit in Albany in late April, the entrepreneur and venture capitalist in online applications explored the three-year slide of the technology market, made some predictions about connectivity, and did some cheerleading for technology initiatives in New York's Capital Region. His remarks came at a two-day meeting that brought together several hundred of the region's technology, business, academic, and government leaders.

His talk, “From Phoenix to Ashes to Phoenix: The Power of Technology Cycles,” described factors in what he called “the largest single monetary loss of wealth in the history of mankind.” First, he said, was the “land-grab belief that the Internet buzz opened fields that we must claim.” Investors followed the earlier financial model of cable television, when the value of entertainment companies exploded. “Think of compressing that knowledge curve of cable television…this is why you saw a lot of financing.”

Another element was the flawed analysis that the Internet and technology were bringing new money into the marketplace, he said. “In fact, it was just moving current transactions over to a new pipeline.”

Walsh said that the tech market is now in the “punishment phase, which gets back to FUD-fear, uncertainty, and doubt.”

Also, Walsh said, we did not predict how quickly consumers would adopt “this new technological wrinkle called the net.” So-called “old economy companies” reacted and started to use the Web to find new vendors and save money. “They started doing business the way they used to do business, but better. Financial results began to matter again, and there needed to be an 'E' in the P/E [price to earnings] ratios for a lot of these companies.

“The next chapter,” said Walsh, “is connectivity of everything to everything.

“What if inventory management of your household or business got better? What if you knew that videotapes were late and you were going to start getting charged for them? What if your refrigerator, your dishwasher, all the devices in your household, were smarter and knew to manage your inventory in a better way? What if things were connected, and what if they knew how to use that connectivity? The mind reels with how cool things could be.”

He predicted that wireless will become ubiquitous. “You will not go to companies, to restaurants, you will not take trains, you will not go in rental cars, you will not go places that aren't, in some fashion, connected in a wireless environment.”

Walsh said the Capital Region is poised to become a center of technological innovation. “I would suggest to you that we sit in a catbird seat because [we] have the motivation, education, tradition, financing, geographical support, the Chamber of Commerce support, and government support to get this done. Timing is everything, and the time is now. From boom to bust to boom, strap on your seatbelts, Tech Valley. It's going to be, in my opinion, one hell of a ride.”

Walsh is managing partner at private investment entity Ruxton Associates in Washington. After graduating from Union, he earned an M.B.A. at Harvard Business School in 1980 and then joined Home Box Office in New York in new business development for the HBO and Cinemax brands. He joined AOL in 1995 and created and ran AOL Enterprise, the business-to-business division of AOL. In 1997, he joined VerticalNet Inc., and as CEO made it the first publicly-traded, business-to-business Internet company.

Tree Top Solutions

Like a mother bird prodding a fledgling out of the nest, the College's U-Start Business Incubator gently nudged Tree Top Solutions out into the real world in September 2002.

The company's founders, Derek Mebus '04 and Dave Ward '02, got their start when they were residence hall neighbors with a common interest-creating web sites. From their hobby, the two grew Tree Top Solutions, a burgeoning local web site design and hosting venture. Mebus is the programmer and Ward is administrator, accountant, and sales rep.

Among their first regional clients are the Chamber of
Schenectady County, the City of Schenectady, the Merriam Insurance Agency, and General Business Solutions. Tree
Top also has clients in Massachusetts, Georgia, North
Carolina, and California, and in Ireland, France, and Australia.

The company is focused on launching its eChamber Suite-specially designed software for chambers of commerce. Tree Top hopes the Schenectady chamber's page will create new clients from among the country's 6,000 other chambers.

Tree Top also offers custom internet application design and development; web site hosting; e-commerce solutions; and custom web programming for businesses of all sizes.

What inspired these two young entrepreneurs? “Schenectady is at a pivotal point,” says Mebus. He cites the creation of a downtown Business Improvement District as a positive step.

Adds Ward, “When we started to build the business, we started to learn about Schenectady and revitalization. We realized that for our business success, it would behoove us to be a part of that revitalization. This job we have is so exciting. We do something different everyday. We're involved in so much beyond just the technology.”

Schenectady is located in the heart of the Tech Valley corridor. Both Ward and Mebus call Schenectady the “next Saratoga Springs”-referring to the latter's transformation from a city resting on its former glory to a vibrant cultural destination. Confidently, Ward says, “The good times are coming.”

Mebus and Ward are still involved with U Start, and they helped start the College's Entrepreneurship Club. They have postings on the Tree Top web site about their intern program. Mebus says, “Our [Union] interns have been great. Last term our interns put together a prospective market database with a list of all the chambers of commerce with analyses of their web sites.” This database will help the partners prepare their sales strategy.

Much more Tech Valley information can be found on the web at:

• www.treetopsolutions.com
• www.ceg.org/about/impact.htm
• www.techvalley.org
• www.fabnewyork.com
• www.union.edu/Resources/Technology/U-Start/

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