Thomas N. Bonner, the fifteenth president of the College and a distinguished scholar
of the medical profession and medical education, died
Sept. 2 in Scottsdale, Ariz. He was eighty.
Dr. Bonner was appointed to the Union presidency in March 1974, coming here from three years as president of the University of New Hampshire. He resigned in 1978 after four years of increasing tension
on campus.
A native of Rochester, N.Y., he entered the University of Rochester but withdrew to serve four years with the Army Radio Intelligence Corps in Europe during World War II. Returning to the university after the war, he earned undergraduate and graduate degrees and then went on to Northwestern, where he received his Ph.D. with a dissertation on the history of medicine in Chicago.
In 1961, Dr. Bonner became academic dean at William Woods College, followed by a year as a Fulbright lecturer in Germany. He then spent seven years as a history professor at the University of Omaha, where he was awarded his first Guggenheim Fellowship and published his first three books. After joining the faculty at the University of Cincinnati in 1963, he published two more books, received another Guggenheim Fellowship, and eventually entered administrative work as provost and vice president for academic affairs. In April 1971, the University of New Hampshire appointed him president. Well regarded within the university system, he nonetheless had to endure a continuing series of attacks from the conservative newspaper, the Manchester
Union-Leader.
In his inaugural remarks at Union, he said that he was looking forward to working at the “final frontier of education
-the private college.” During his first year, he announced several major gifts, such as a $250,000 Mellon Faculty Development Grant and $230,000 for a new computer center, and he appointed two task forces, the President's Commission on the Status of Women and the Campus Commission on Race Relations, both intended to improve the quality of life on campus.
One of his first responsibilities after arriving at Union was to deal with a building project carried over from the previous administration-the Achilles Rink-and it was his handling of this that proved a major cause in the unraveling of his administration. The gift to build the rink had been given on short notice, and Dr. Bonner felt that he needed to quickly appoint an experienced hockey coach and rink manager. He chose Ned Harkness, who had taken both RPI and Cornell to national championships.
The appointment, and subsequent attention to athletics, caused disquiet on campus; concern increased when Dr. Bonner used the phrase “a comprehensive college in a university setting” to describe his vision of Union. His remarks and actions were interpreted by many faculty as taking the College beyond its undergraduate orientation. His difficulties were compounded when evidence surfaced of irregularities in the hockey program; not only did the hockey coach violate recruiting rules of the conference to which the College then belonged (and then lie to the president about it), but there was widespread suspicion on campus that admission standards for hockey players had been compromised. By 1977, the campus was in turmoil-turmoil that increased when Harkness abruptly resigned at the start of the 1977 season, with his team saying they would not play without him as coach.
Dr. Bonner resigned in May 1978, to became president of Wayne State University in Detroit. There, despite the university's severe fiscal problems, he created exchange agreements with universities in Israel, Germany, Poland, Costa Rica, and with the Chinese Academy of Science. He resigned the presidency in 1982 in order to teach in the university's history department. He soon reestablished his scholarly reputation, and his seven books in the field of American medicine, such as
Becoming a Physician: Medical Education in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, 1750-1945 (1995), were widely praised. He retired from Wayne State in 1997 as the Distinguished Professor of History and Higher Education, becoming a visiting scholar in history and biology at Arizona State University. He also served as president of the National Academy of Scholars.
He is survived by his wife, Sylvia Firnhaber Bonner, of Scottsdale; a son, Philip Bonner, of Columbus, Ohio; and a daughter, Diana Bonner, of Glendale, Ariz.
Charles W.J. Scaife, professor emeritus of chemistry, died of cancer Aug. 24 at his Schenectady home. He was sixty-five.
Scaife, who joined the faculty in 1972 and retired in 2001, spent much of the last decade with his wife, Priscilla, doing hands-on science programs for elementary- and middle-school students and their teachers. An obituary in
The New York Times referred to him as “a Johnny Appleseed of science.”
Scaife said that his campaign was spurred by the conviction that children take to science when they are able to work with their hands and experience a sense of surprise. “The kids realize they are going to have fun,” he once said. “But they don't always know they will accidentally learn something along the way.”
With his wife, a social worker, he hit the road in the family car, doing demonstrations in youngsters' science classes by day, holding evening science workshops for parents and children, and sleeping wherever they could get a free bed. Starting in the Northeast in 1994, they later expanded their travels to include the entire country, using additional sabbaticals as well as vacation time.
In the schools they visited, the Scaifes trained a team of volunteers to take over where they left off. Through school visits, teacher workshops, and a web site (www.kids.union.edu), they built a corps of volunteers across the country dedicated to improved science teaching. The Scaifes estimated they had reached more than 40,000 students in thirty states.
The couple's exploits also caught the eye of the national media, inspiring a front-page story in
The Wall Street Journal, as well as subsequent stories in USA Today, the Christian Science Monitor, and
Education Week. In 1999, Scaife received the Community Service Award from the Hudson Mohawk Consortium of Colleges and Universities. He accepted the award by acknowledging all the students “who wear their enthusiasm right out in front.”
Scaife, who with student Rich Cavoli '87 designed a crystal-growing experiment that was aboard the Challenger shuttle in 1986, got to know astronauts Ron McNair and Greg Jarvis, who lost their lives on the mission. Scaife, a guest at the ill-fated launch, got to see the experiment fly on the Discovery shuttle two years after Challenger.
Charles Walter John Scaife was born in Williamsport, Pa., the son of a middle-school mathematics teacher, and received his bachelor's degree in chemistry from Cornell University and a Ph.D. there in inorganic chemistry. He was a commissioned officer in the Navy from 1959 to 1961 and a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of York, England, in 1967. He taught at Middlebury College before joining Union in 1972. He specialized in inorganic chemistry, taught a range of courses in inorganic chemistry, designed laboratory experiments for chemistry majors, and published a number of papers in chemistry journals. He was a Danforth Associate and a member of the American Chemical Society and Sigma Xi, an honorary society dedicated to scientific research.
Surviving, in addition to Priscilla, are two daughters, Rebecca Sanders, of Lyndon, Vt. (and her husband, James), and Jennifer Craig, of Lakeville, Conn. (and her husband, Ken); a sister, Betty Scorese, of Pennsylvania; and seven grandchildren. He was predeceased by his sister, Laura.
Norman P. Auburn, acting president of the College in 1978-79, died July 21. He was ninety-eight.
A graduate of the University of Cincinnati, he began his career in higher education in 1933 as editor of the alumni magazine and director of the alumni association at his alma mater. After serving in a variety of offices at Cincinnati, he was named president of the University of Akron in 1951. There, he oversaw the creation of four colleges, the law school, and several doctoral programs. After his retirement in 1971, he joined the Academy for Educational Development and served as acting president of several colleges.
Thomas Racht, Jr., a member of the College's Facilities Services Department, died July 22 after a battle with Crohn's Disease. He was forty-four. Racht had been with the College since 1986, most recently as the building maintainer for the Reamer Center, the Yulman Theater, the Arts Buildings, North College, and Richmond Hall.