Posted on Sep 1, 2003

The College inducted the second class into its new Athletic Hall of Fame as part of Homecoming and Family Weekend. The new members are George Daley, Class of 1892; Ralph Semerad '35; Sam Hammerstrom '40; Greg Olson '67; Bob Moffat '78; and Julie Benker O'Brien '93.

George Daley, of the Class of 1892, was the originator of the Block U Dinner in 1928, an event that was held in his honor in 1938. During his college days, Daley was a three-sport athlete-quarterback and captain of the football team, tennis player, and shotputter on the track and field team.

Daley served as sports editor of The New York Tribune for 16 years and The World for 15 years before joining
The Herald Tribune in 1931 as head of the sports department. He is credited with introducing the all-star football game to New York and with the inauguration of the
Herald Tribune football school in 1935.

A former chairman of the Graduate Council's Committee on Undergraduate Affairs, treasurer of his class, and president of the New York City Alumni Association, Daley's catch phrase of “Athletics for everybody and everybody for athletics” became well known among his Union family friends. After Daley passed away in 1938, President Dixon Ryan Fox stated, “It was to sport-its events, its heroes and its codes-that George Herbert Daley devoted his long career.” The name of the Graduate Council Field was renamed George Daley Field in his honor.

Ralph Semerad, Class of 1935, was a three-year, three-sport varsity star in football, basketball, and baseball. In 1934, Semerad was named to the Little All-American Football Team and received honorable mention honors at the Major All-American level. In 1959, Semerad was named to the Silver Anniversary All-American Football Team, announced by
Sports Illustrated, for his accomplishments as the quarterback and leader of the 1932, 1933, and 1934 varsity football teams. Astoundingly, during his four-year football career at Union, Semerad played every minute of every game.

On the baseball diamond he was captain during his senior year, and over three varsity seasons he committed only one error, was a .400 hitter, and had a perfect fielding
percentage as a centerfielder. Upon graduation he successfully tried his hand at professional baseball before turning down an offer from Newark, of the Yankee organization, to pursue a career in law.

While at Union, Semerad was elected to Phi Betta Kappa, earned the Pullman Prize for his scholastic standing, and was awarded the Daggett Prize as the outstanding member of his class “in conduct and character.” He went on to Harvard Law School, where he received his J.D. in 1938. He returned to Union to coach varsity football and basketball from 1941-1943, followed by a two-year stint as an FBI special agent. During the next thirty years, Semerad was a professor of law at Albany Law School. He died in 1977.

Samuel C. Hammerstrom, Class of 1940, is widely-considered to be the finest football player in Union's history.

He holds the Union mark for most rushing yards in a game, with 236 versus Rochester during his senior season. He captained that year's Dutchmen to their first undefeated season in 25 years (7-0-1), rushing for 1,143 yards and leading the East and finishing fourth in the country in points, with 86 (13 touchdowns and eight extra points). He also was the team's top passer and punter. Hammerstrom was so dominant during his senior campaign that only once all season was he thrown for a loss, and even then, only for one yard.

Those around the campus affectionately knew Hammerstrom as the “Big Swede,” and he was appropriately dubbed “Slammin Sammy” by his gridiron opponents. His efforts as a senior earned him “Small College All-American Honors,” recognition on the United Press's 1939 All-Upstate New York football team, and a spot on the 1940 Eastern College All-Star football team that played against the Giants in the Polo Grounds.

Outside of football, Hammerstrom served as president of his senior class, as a four-year representative on the student council, and as a member of the Garnet Key and the Terrace Council (the College's senior honorary society). Perhaps the greatest honor he received was the prestigious Bailey Cup for his overall contributions to Union.

Hammerstrom returned to the College as a coach from 1950-1957, posting a season best record of 6-2 in 1956. He was honored by three local sportswriters that year as “Coach of the Year.” He died in 1995.

Gregory R. Olson, Class of 1967, was a three-year letter winner in basketball, baseball, and soccer, accumulating nine varsity letters overall. During his senior campaign, he captained all three sports, only the second athlete in Union's modern day history to do so.

Olson received the 1966 William Pike Award as the most outstanding athlete in the junior class and the 1967 Eastern Collegiate Athletic Association (ECAC) Medal of Merit, which is awarded to the outstanding student-athlete at Union. Olson was also recognized as the first
Concordiensis Athlete of the Year in 1967.

His 1967 senior campaign saw Olson crowned team MVP for both soccer and baseball. On the diamond, he led the team in batting average and RBIs, and did not commit a single error all season. He was scouted by the Mets, Red Sox, White Sox, and Phillies.

Olson has been teaching chemistry at Scotia-Glenville (N.Y.) High School for the past thirty-six years and has coached varsity boys basketball for nineteen years, J.V. girls basketball for four years, and varsity boys and girls tennis for eighteen and sixteen years, respectively. He coached the varsity boys basketball team to the school's first and only class A-AA sectional championship.

Robert W. Moffat, Jr., Class of 1978, was the 1978 NCAA Division III 400 meter-outdoor champion, winning in a record-setting time of 46.8 to earn All-American status for the second consecutive year. His performance as a senior followed a second-place finish in 1977.

A week before the national meet in 1978, Moffat won the McDonough Trophy as the outstanding track competitor at the New York State Track Championships. He won the 220, set a record while winning the 440, and anchored the victorious 440 relay team. Prior to the outdoor season, he placed third in the NCAA Division I 600-yard run and earned All-American honors. He finished his collegiate career with three consecutive state championships in the indoor 600-yard run.

Moffat was awarded the Joseph Daggett Prize, presented to a senior for conduct and character, and the William B. Jaffe Medal, to the outstanding athlete of the year.

Affectionately known as The Iron Dutchman, he showed why on many occasions, but most notably on one special mid-winter weekend during the peak of his senior indoor track season. He ran Friday in the Star Leaf Games in Toronto and set a college record for the 600 yards with a 1:11.2 clocking. Saturday he arrived at Dartmouth for an invitational meet and came within two-tenths of a second of the world record with a 1:03.2 in the 500. Finally, Sunday he was in Syracuse for another invitational and tied his own Manly Field House record in the 600 with a 1:10.7.

Today, Moffat is senior vice president and group executive for the Personal Systems and Integrated Supply Chain group at IBM.

Julie Benker O'Brien, Class of 1993, was the first and only woman from Union to win a national championship in swimming, winning the 1993 100-meter backstroke with a record-setting time of 57.25.

An All-American in each of her last three seasons, O'Brien helped lead the Dutchwomen to a 7-1 dual meet record, a second-place finish in the New York State meet, and an eighth-place finish in the NCAA meet, the best finish in the College's history at the time.

O'Brien, who still holds all of Union's backstroke records, was a member of three record-setting relay teams whose records still stand today (200 medley, 400 medley, and 200 free). As a senior, she was awarded the Robert B. Reddings Award, to the outstanding senior female student-athlete, and the Women's Commission Senior Athletic Prize, to the female senior student-athlete who has done the most to promote sports for women at Union. During her junior year, O'Brien won the Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference Medal of Merit.

After serving as the head women's swimming coach at the University of Rochester for seven years, O'Brien became the aquatics coordinator and head swimming coach at Roger Williams University in Bristol, R.I., in July of 2003.

Posted on Sep 1, 2003

Prof. Jim Hedrick is admiring a frame of synthetic honeycomb in front of a class of
students at the Summer
Science Workshop.

“This is technology coming from our understanding of the way nature works,” he says. It was nineteenth-century beekeeper L.L. Langstroth who discovered the “bee space,” explains Hedrick, himself a beekeeper. The discovery meant that bees could be kept in human-built hives, and that the honey could be harvested without damaging the colony.

Not the kind of lecture you might expect from a professor who specializes in computer technology. But Summer Science Workshop is not a narrow curriculum. Rather, it takes a wide-ranging, cross-disciplinary route to bring college-level work to students who show promise in the sciences. Hedrick, like the other instructors in the workshop, emphasizes the cross-disciplinary nature of learning.

The College's Summer
Science Workshop gives high-schoolers valuable exposure to college-level study. And Union gets something valuable, too-nineteen eager students who researched the scientific, social, and political aspects of AIDS and gave presentations on a variety of topics related to the epidemic. Beyond classes and labs in immunology, computer technology, and cellular biology, students attended lectures at Albany Medical College and met HIV-positive people and their families.

This is the eighth year of the Summer Science Workshop, in which Hedrick is joined by colleagues Peter Tobiessen, Twitty Styles, and Quynh Chu-LaGraff, all of the Biology Department. Now funded entirely by the College, the program was launched with support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Besides exposing budding scientists to the rigors of scientific research, the two-week residential program has been something of a boon to the College's minority recruitment effort. Since its inception in 1996, twenty-four students from the program have enrolled as students at Union. Several have become counselors for the two-week summer program. Last year, three of four counselors were former campers; this year, it was three of five.

“We used to soft-sell the students on Union,” says
program coordinator Karen Williams, of the first few years of the workshop. “Now we take them down to the Admissions Office for interviews and invite them to a reunion in the fall.”

To date, approximately 180 students have participated in the program. Of the seven who so far have graduated from the College, most went into medical, science, or math-related graduate programs, and two current Union students are in the eight-year Leadership in Medicine Program with Albany Medical College.

One of the teachers this year, Rizwan Jaffer, participated as a student in the first workshop in 1996, graduated from Union in 2001, and is now a student at the New England College of Optometry in Boston. Among other former SSW students are:

• Gretchen M. Pobee-Mensah '03, who has started the post baccalaureate pre-med program at Drexel University;
• Kendra P. Tinglin '03, who is in the graduate math program at Columbia, with a goal of teaching math at the university level;
• Kirk A. Campbell, who started NYU Medical School this fall;
• Abigail N. Belle '03, who
  is a global risk management solutions associate for PriceWaterhouseCoopers in Boston;

• Ayanna B. Cato '03, who has begun a graduate program in social work at Tulane;
• Claudio S. Flores '04, a counselor and emergency medical technician for the past two years;
• Emma E. Bendana '04, who is in the eight-year program with Albany Med;
• Keba K. Foster '04, a counselor this year;
• Roberto J. Millan '05, who is a political science major, pre-med, and counselor for the past three years; and
• Sabrina Hydery '05, who is in the eight-year program with Albany Med, and was a counselor last year.

Posted on Sep 1, 2003

Beginning this fall, the College began receiving about five percent of its electricity from wind power through a program operated by Community Energy, Inc., of Pennsylvania.

The energy comes from a wind farm located in Madison County in central New York, where twenty 220-foot turbines generate thirty megawatts of
electricity annually. Union joins Hobart and William Smith
Colleges, the State University of New York at Buffalo, the University of Pennsylvania, Penn State, and Carnegie Mellon in getting a portion of their electricity from wind power.

Posted on Sep 1, 2003

This fall's entering class has students from all over, but perhaps none with as unusual a background as Jessica Gildersleeve, who grew up in Southeast Alaska on a floating logging camp.

The family business, Gildersleeve Logging, is now in its fourth generation. Her great-grandfather founded the business in the early 1900s in British Columbia. In 1953, the company moved to Alaska, and in 1983, Jessica's parents bought the business, now located at Grace Harbor, Dall Island.

Growing up in the pristine Alaskan wilderness offered the camp kids a unique opportunity to experience “the adventure of the outdoors,” as Jessica says. “We were outside rain or shine, building forts in the woods, playing tracking, going swimming [even in 'brisk' 50-degree water], boating, fishing, and camping.” The highlight of the week was a visit by a float plane that delivered mail and groceries.

Of course, the chance of misadventure, such as “falling into the bay” or “running into black bears while horsing around in the woods,” was always present. Children under age 12 always had to wear lifejackets outside. When they reached the age of 12 or so, they had their own rite of passage-the swim test. “It was a big milestone in every kid's life,” said Jessica. “You had a big 'coolness factor' when you got to go around without your lifejacket on.”

But the Alaskan wilderness can be as punishing as it is spectacular. Jessica recalls the winters that froze water pipes, shook the blinds in the house, and made “the boats jump nearly onto the dock.”

Despite the remoteness, the camp kids, like kids everywhere, still managed a social life. They'd gather at friends' homes to watch videos (before satellite dishes came to the camp) and play video games. They would also organize pick up volleyball or basketball games (often drafting the “bunk house guys”) in the small gym, which also was the venue for potluck suppers, plays, and dances.

Jessica reports that she and her pals held jobs at young ages. They'd work in the company store (commissary) and manned the “kiddie crew”-which did the “grunt work” that included cleaning, painting, and decking. “It was hard work, but great fun,” she says.

As expected, the camp school was small-only 17 students in K-12. Because the enrollment was down, in her sophomore year Jessica transferred to an all-girl boarding school in Tacoma, Wash., graduating from there in 2002. She was accepted by Union and then received a deferment to spend a year at a language school in Braunau, Austria. She spent the summer in Oregon, earning a private pilot's license before summer's end.

Jessica is very aware of her childhood's unique setting. In retrospect, she recalls the slower pace, the countryside's beauty, and the people. “Great memories stream from home; but many of them come from the summers and the nights after work where my buds and I would get together for a barbecue and do some waterskiing,” she says.

Although she looks forward to her freshman year, Jessica looks to her Alaskan home and cannot deny, “I miss it like crazy.”

Posted on Sep 1, 2003

The College's Center for Graduate Education and Special Programs became a new and independent college this fall, following approval of its charter this summer by the New York State Board of Regents.

The new college, which is called the Graduate College of Union University, will have three schools-management, engineering, and education-and the Center for Bioethics. It will offer graduate programs in educational studies, engineering (electrical and mechanical), computer science, business administration, health administration, and bioethics. It will have its own board of trustees, including Union College President Roger Hull.

Professor Susan Lehrman, who directed the Center for Graduate Education and Special Programs, said an independent graduate college will allow expansion through targeted marketing, fundraising, and recruitment to meet the growing regional demand for full- and part-time graduate study.

“This is an exciting time for the Capital Region, as the Tech Valley initiative takes flight and there is more focus on a highly-educated workforce,” she said. “Union College and the new Graduate College will be vital players in this initiative.”

Lehrman said that Union's graduate program has seen substantial growth in recent years. “By becoming an independent college, we can continue to grow our programs, add enrollments, create more community partnerships, and do more and better marketing and fundraising,” she said.

The graduate college will have a unique academic relationship with Union College through a lease arrangement in which faculty and students will continue to have access to all Union College facilities and ancillary services. The graduate college's offices will remain in Lamont House on campus, with classes and labs at Union.

The graduate college will be affiliated with Union University, a federation of independent undergraduate and graduate institutions. It currently consists of Union College, Albany Medical College, Albany Law College, Dudley Observatory, and Albany College of Pharmacy. Established in 1873, Union University has a board of governors comprising representatives of the member institutions' boards of trustees. The president of Union College serves as the chancellor of Union University.

Programs in the Center for Graduate Education and Special Programs that will be part of the new graduate college include:

• Educational Studies, one of the few secondary education teacher programs that requires a full year of student teaching. The program has a placement rate of nearly ninety-eight percent in Capital Region schools, an area that does not have a teacher shortage, and a seventy-eight percent pass rate on the National Teachers Certification Exam, compared to the forty-eight percent national average.
• The College's M.B.A. program, which is the largest full-time program in the Capital Region. There has been a twenty-five percent increase in students over the past two years, and the M.B.A. job placement rate is more than ninety percent.
• The Health Systems M.B.A., which is one of only twenty-one dually-accredited programs in the country and one of only four accredited programs in the state.
• The Global M.B.A. program, which attracts students from nearly twenty countries.
• The Engineering Division, which features a mix of practical and theoretical curriculum, has partnered with a consortium of engineering companies to ensure it meets the needs of the changing Capital Region economy.
• The Center for Bioethics, which offers one of the nation's two distance learning programs
  -a joint venture with Albany Medical College with the flexibility to serve working healthcare professionals.

The College's graduate
program enrolls some 400 students, about half of whom are full time.