The Nott Memorial, an erstwhile home for pigeons,
is once again “for the birds.”
Not the real Nott, which was bird-proofed as part of its restoration in 1995. This Nott is a birdhouse measuring about two feet high. The creation of Schenectady residents George Woodzell, a woodworker, and artist Peg Foley, the structure was auctioned this summer to benefit Habitat for Humanity of Schenectady, which builds affordable housing for those who qualify.
The 100 or so birdhouses that were part of the auction include a submarine, several outhouses, a lighthouse, and
a caboose-but nothing like the Nott.
Woodzell, who spent three months on his creation, used elevation drawings supplied by the College's Special Collections. “Figuring out how to do it
was most of the fun,” he said of cutting the pieces from cedar to represent Union's sixteen-sided centerpiece building. Foley did the paint job, but only after carefully surveying the building during many walks through campus, she said.
The Trustee Nominating Committee of the Alumni Council will select up to three candidates to run in an alumni body election next spring for the position of alumni trustee.
The alumnus who is elected
will serve a four-year term through June 2008. Trustee Paul Wintrich'60 is eligible for reelection this year.
In addition, any graduate of
the College under the age of sixty-seven may run as a petition candidate. To do so, a
petition must be obtained from the Alumni Relations Office and signed by fifty alumni. The signed petition must be returned to the Alumni Office with:
a recent 5 x 7 black and white, head and shoulders photograph;
a brief biography;
a statement from the candidate detailing why he or she wishes to serve as a trustee.
The material must be received at the College by Feb. 1, 2004. Petition candidates will automatically appear on the election ballot, if duly certified. Petitions may be requested from the Alumni Office, Union College, 807 Union St., Schenectady, N.Y. 12308 (1-888-the-idol,
ext. 6168).
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.
Prof. Charles Scaife
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.
With a wail of bagpipes, and a call to get involved, the College's 209th year got underway
for 559 first-year students.
At the annual opening convocation in Memorial Chapel, President Roger Hull urged students to “think about the broader community” and get involved with community or national service.
“I believe that you and others across the land would welcome the idea of giving something back to the communities or country of which you are a part,” he said. “Not only is service right because it will help this country in war and peace, but it is right because it will help participants develop a sense of worth and provide a measure of satisfaction and happiness.”
David P. Cervone, associate professor of mathematics, received the Stillman Prize
for Excellence in Teaching. The prize was created by David I. Stillman '72, Abbott Stillman '69 and Alan Stillman in honor of Abraham Stillman, father and grandfather, and
is awarded annually to a
faculty member to encourage outstanding teaching.
Dean of Faculty Christina Sorum recognized Dean's List students, whose names appear on a plaque that was unveiled in Reamer Campus Center. Professor Byron Nichols presented the Phi Beta Kappa Prize to Mark W. Weston '06 for excellence in General
Education, and Lawrence J. Hollander, dean of engineering emeritus, presented the Hollander Convocation Musician Prize to Christopher A. Neal '05, who performed a musical interlude on piano, “Bryllupsdag Pa Troldhaugen” by Edvard Grieg.
For the first-year students, the year began several days before the convocation, when hundreds of them wielded brooms, paintbrushes, and shovels as they took to the streets for the ninth annual John Calvin Toll Day.
The College's annual community service day is named for one of the College's first graduates, John Calvin Toll, and is supported by Al Hill '46 and his wife, Perrie. Toll was the great-great-grandfather of Hill, a retired attorney from Buffalo. The Hills created the fund to encourage Union students to undertake volunteer service. Students, College staff and faculty, city leaders and residents, and business owners alike participated in the volunteer cleanup. A number of parks, city-owned properties, and not-for-profit facilities were spruced up.
A block party featuring live music on Jay Street concluded the day as local leaders thanked students for their community service and presented them
with bags containing discounts and offers from area businesses and activities.
Two nights after the convocation, hundreds came together around the Nott Memorial to pay tribute to the victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. President Hull's brief remarks were followed by a candlelight reflection, in which participants encircled the Nott, and the playing of “Taps,” the bugle call composed by Daniel Butterfield, Class of 1849, who rose to the rank of major general in the Union Army.
Losses to the Union family from the attacks included Thomas Duffy '71; Andrew Fredericks '83; Peter Freund '77; Donald Kauth '74; Alexander Steinman '91; Christopher Quackenbush, husband of Traci S. Quackenbush '80; Timothy Haviland, brother
of David Haviland '83; Arlene Fried, mother of Allison Fried '02; and James Patrick, brother of Kevin Patrick, former assistant hockey coach.
Through drawing, learn biology; through biology, learn to draw
Illustration by Kelly Ennis ’03
“How are we doing on the wings and the dragonflies?” Walter Hatke asks the class.
A voice from the far side of the room calls out, “Slow!”
Laughter follows.
Students in the biology and art course titled “The Illustrated Organism” are still busy working on both projects. Fiona Kyte '05 pays rapt attention to the dragonfly she is holding in one hand and drawing with the other. Another student, Emily Klug '03, consults with Biology Professor Peter Tobiessen about her dragonfly drawing.
At the same time, Jason Tucciarone '05 works on an illustration of the wing of a green-winged teal. “Which is not really green,” points out Hatke; “it's irridescent.” He urges the students to “get color as true, as accurate as possible, using base color and colored pencil over it.”
Hatke, the May I. Baker Professor of Fine Arts, and Tobiessen preside at the twice-weekly, three-hour sessions in this course, which is so popular that “We always have to turn students away.”
In the course, drawing is used to teach biology, and biology is used to teach drawing. The course requires painstaking attention to detail. To the two professors, the minutiae of things observed are not irrelevant distractions. Says Hatke, “The students have to resign themselves to a huge time commitment. It is pretty much two courses in one-we get our pound of flesh!”
Students begin each project using sketchpads to get their ideas down. They then transfer preliminary sketches to heavier paper using a light table, adjusting composition as they go. The students work mostly in pen and ink on the first few projects. Once they progress to drawing duck wings and flowers, they move into watercolor.
The course was first offered ten years ago by Hatke and Carl George, now professor emeritus of biology. Before that, says Hatke, “When Professor George, who's a kind of Renaissance man, was on my tenure review committee, I talked about the 'physiology' course I had taken in high school, and he said, 'You know, we should have a course like that.'”
Today's class entails not only drawing and painting, but also attending a wind tunnel demonstration of the aerodynamic properties of a duck's wing. The students must understand and be able to explain the flight dynamics of bird versus insect. Ann Anderson, associate professor of mechanical engineering, demonstrates the circulation of air over the wing, at a high angle of attack. She injects smoke into the wind tunnel and illuminates the tunnel with a laser, so the paths of air currents became visible. An attached computer tracks particle velocity on the screen and allows students to visualize turbulence.
Students learn through individual observation in the classroom and on regional field trips to places such as Collins Lake; using the College's resources, such as its Audubon portfolio of birds; doing outside research; engaging in teamwork; and the professors' lectures. They have visited an exhibit of biological illustrations at the New York State Museum, and they have gone fishing-catching, killing, preserving, and then drawing whatever fish they caught. There also are guest lectures from well-known botanical illustrators, such as Eleanor Wunderlich, from the New York Botanical Gardens, and Carol Woodin, from Kew Gardens in London.
Around the classroom-biology lab are old illustrations and prints, along with boxes of mounted dragonflies, a set of spread turkey wings, diagrams, and mounted drawings from last year's class-images of birds' wings (blue-winged teal, American black duck), dragonflies, sunflowers, trees (white ash, Norway spruce, scarlet oak), lilies, dandelions, skulls of coyote (teeth overlapping like scissors indicates a carnivore), lynx, beaver, black bear; and fish (Johnny darter, spotfin shiner, pumpkinseed sunfish, blue gill sunfish, largemouth black bass).
Tobiessen points out an interesting pattern: Species that are prey have eyes on the sides; with predators, the eyes are in front. We humans are predators.
With boyish enthusiasm, he then passes around a heron's wing for everyone to hold-it's amazingly light for its great size.
Artist at work: Peter Sage '04
Then, it's on to their new homework assignment: the skull project. Each student gets a skull of a different but related small mammal to draw and study. Says Tobiessen, “You'll be expected to identify the approximately thirty bones and teeth in the skull and be able to talk about how evolution changes them.”
Each three-student team works on the skulls of one carnivore, one rodent, and something in between, from different ecological niches, explains Tobiessen. Peter Sage '04 examines a wolverine skull, while Michael Losure '04 looks over a lynx skull. Their assignment-to draw skulls accurately and illustratively, to discover how and why the skull is built the way it is, and to compare it to other skulls, annotating their drawings with scientific fact and theory. In the drawings, the students are asked to take multiple perspectives and interrelate them; this allows the discovery of key organizing ideas involving both the structure and functions and the evolution of living things.
The professors place great emphasis on student teamwork, as well as the interactive nature of scientific inquiry. Developing a portfolio is a way of integrating not only text and graphics but also the element of teamwork, which is so important professionally. The teams work together, critique one another's work, rotate roles. Each team combines students with different majors-arts, sciences, interdepartmental or interdivisional
-and each student contributes his or her strengths.
The complexity of the material unfolds progressively. While Tobiessen introduces biological concepts, Hatke gradually teaches more sophisticated techniques of drawing and working with various media, progressing from black and white to color. Asked if he, too, does this kind of drawing, Tobiessen grins and replies, “Sure,” challenging us to pick out his own illustration from amid student works on a display board.
Did Hatke ever take a course like this? “Yes, in high school, though it was really a college-level course. We dissected sheep hearts, eyes, whole frogs. It's like learning new grammars-it gives you a new slant on life. That way of thinking has influenced my work.
“It used to be that any educated person would have some drawing,” he continues. “That's kind of fallen by the wayside. It can be a very humanizing experience in addition to great intellectual exercise.”
For the past five years, Hatke has been invited to Yale to teach freehand drawing to graduate architecture students. “It's important for them to be able to get ideas down fast. You've got to know where to start-there's no substitute for hands-on drawing.”
Drawing is a learning tool, in service to science, says Hatke. “The way you scrutinize things in biology is not unlike the way you scrutinize things in painting. I've always felt there was a real closeness between art and science. There's a real unity that runs throughout life and thought. People in our disciplines have become too isolated and specialized.”
Prof. Peter Tobiessen and Emily Klug ’03.
Adds course co-founder Carl George, “As with so many innovative ideas, the course is partly a rediscovery of the past, a past in which drawing was a recognized approach to understanding structure, a confirmation of intense examination,” citing the examples of drawings from nature by German poet-dramatist-scientist Johann Goethe and British scientist Thomas Huxley.
George, who retired in 1997 after thirty years at Union, is now involved in aquatic ecology, and the importance of wilderness in the development of human character (he's also a trustee of the Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks).
“When I was a student,” he says, “we were called upon to do a lot of drawing. In my introductory biology course, we were required to draw what we saw through the microscope. I still have those memories. Those images have served me. In a field so intensively structural, learning vocabulary is just a trivialization-not that that isn't essential, but to reduce the study of biology to names is a loss.
“Drawing programs the brain in a very important way,” he says. “Images that you implant when you draw something, particularly when you're younger, last a lifetime and are important references for all kinds of analytical work, no matter the field.”
He agrees that “the ideal is the two forms of communication working together. But drawing leads you to look more closely. The process of engaging graphically forces you into a dialog that's very intimate. And you gather information that can break old paradigms. So this course is challenging on many levels. It's also an important way of recognizing that art and science are not all that different if conducted well.
“Finally, it's a lesson in patience-learning how to regulate the self so you don't get exhausted-learning to back off, recoup, return after have re-gathered energy.
Otherwise, you will destroy your undertaking.”
Can anyone learn how to draw? Says George, “A lot of kids claim they can't. But if you can write, you can draw.”
Students not only drew but created etchings from their fish drawings, learning in the process how Audubon made prints. Students etched the images onto plates photographically. The prints they made on fine paper wound up as many holiday gifts.
At the end of the course, the Biology Department displays some of the students' prints
in its third-floor display case, challenging passers-by to
distinguish the art majors from the biology majors. No one's been able to tell yet.
Prof. Walter Hatke and Sam Commarto ’04.
The Audubon
collection at Union
One of the most remarkable teaching aids in American colleges is the group of Audubon lithographs in the College's Special Collections. Students from “The Illustrated Organism” course can often be found systematically visiting and studying these historic pieces.
Carl George explains how this treasure arrived at Union:
“In 1844, Audubon came to Union as the first visiting artist here. Eliphalet Nott cannily bought one of the last copies of his portfolios. He sold us the double elephant folio-a masterpiece of lithography-as a personal favor, as this was his parlor copy. Nott had the wisdom to spend $1,000 for the Birds and another $300 for the Quadrupeds. A superb investment!”
The Audubon prints are now worth millions of dollars and are the centerpiece of a rich collection of natural history materials housed in Special Collections.
“I never realized
a fish had
so many scales.”
“For me, biology was the easy part,” says biology major Kim Maison '03, who took “The Illustrated Organism” course last year. “I hadn't taken art since high school. I was excited. Before, art was never a feasible option. It was overwhelming at the beginning. Professor Hatke told us the basics and threw us in.”
She talked about the tedious work of drawing her bluegill sunfish: “We stippled the whole thing-it took forever. I never realized a fish had so many scales. But it was beautiful.”
Her classmate, art and psychology major Brett Kessler '04, hadn't taken a science course since high school. It was helpful to her working in groups of three-“I was confused about the parts of the flower, but a biology major helped me out
a lot.”
She also hadn't drawn much from nature before: “It's different if you go out and observe it for yourself. I really like watercolor now because of this course. I took a watercolor course afterwards, and did a lot of paintings of flowers.”
On Hatke's suggestion, Kessler used the work she'd done in “The Illustrated Organism” to apply to the International School of Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture in Italy. “I got in-I didn't think I would, but I did. Only twenty-five people from all over the world were accepted.” She plans to go on to fine arts school after graduation.
An earlier student used his portfolio to get into dental school. Says Carl George, “He came by to thank me. 'What do you mean,' I asked? 'They looked at my portfolio during my interview,' said he, and they said 'you're in! It shows you have patience. And manual skill-anyone with that kind of control over pen and pencil should have no trouble with a dental drill.' ”
Biology major Kelly Ennis '03, who had never before taken an art class, says, “We learned to see patterns. Pine cones should spiral, for example. That's something we would never think about otherwise. We had to look much closer; we even had to count the scales for the fish drawings.”
Ennis, who admits to having an artistic side, loved the idea of drawing, but found the course a bit overwhelming at first. But the following year, she went on to take oil painting with Hatke. “I would never have thought of doing this otherwise.”
Ennis began graduate studies this fall at the Graduate College of Union University, pursuing a master's in teaching biology and perhaps chemistry. “This course helped me make the decision-I want to go in the direction of having to be creative every day.”
