The Union community has
sustained a great loss with the death of Prof. William Baker Bristol. He was an outstanding scholar, a refined gentleman, and a very good friend. In
his capable hands, the Latin American history courses he taught became living,
breathing subjects.
In the spring term of 1968,
he taught historiography to those who would begin their senior theses in the following term. It was simply a tour
de force, covering historical
writing from Thucydides and Herodotus to Arnold Toynbee. All who knew Dr. Bristol are diminished by the passing of this remarkable man.
Kevin J. Dulin '69
Yes to teaming up
I was delighted to read the
article on the teaming up of drawing and biology (“The
Illustrated Organism”). Art is a tool for learning about our world-investigation (looking) and recording and storing of information (drawing)-as well as for self-expression.
I remember a drawing exercise we did at day camp years ago, when a young man discovered the mechanism that causes the aspen trees to “quake” when he observed and drew their leaves. That Union is restoring that relationship is a wonderful thing. However, this needs to start earlier, in fourth grade, when the relative poverty of the word symbol and linear thinking relegates the arts to activities and banishes them from the academic world.
Also, the article on The Idol and its checkered past made me think back with a shudder to the illustrations that Don Abood encouraged me to
contribute. Thank you and
keep up the good work.
Rob Carrick '68
Thrilling result
I would very much like to thank you, and the entire team of people at Union, for the wonderful job you did printing the letter I wrote. My copy of the magazine arrived this morning, and when I saw the inside of the back cover, I was truly thrilled with the result. So much so, in fact, that I would like to request some extra copies to give to friends. I doubt in all my life that I have ever written words that came more from the heart than these. Finally, I hope that my guest column moves other alumni to further their support of Union.
Paul F. Jacobs '60
We welcome letters. Send them to: Office of Communications, Union College, Schenectady, N.Y. 12308 or magazine@union.edu.
Scott Scullion, associate professor of classics and chair of the department, has taken a position at Worcester College of Oxford University. He holds the titles of fellow and tutor in classics of Worcester College and university lecturer in Greek and Latin language and literature.
A member of the Union faculty since 1989, he spent a sabbatical year at Oxford three years ago. He interviewed for the Worcester position in July, delivering a paper, “Maenads and Men,” in which he argued that the female followers of Dionysus carried on their rituals in the presence of men.
Scullion holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Toronto, and master's and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University. A Toronto native who holds Canadian citizenship, he is the first Canadian ever to be appointed to a position in classics at Oxford, where there are three Americans on the fifty-two-member faculty.
“I'm hugely excited about going to Oxford,” says Scullion, “which is probably the best place in the world for a classicist to be. The libraries are superb, unmatched elsewhere, and the place is full of first-rate scholars, both those who work there and the many who come to visit from all over the world.”
The dragonfly, it turns out, is one of the most accurate prey capturers in nature, and one of the best fliers, too. In an instant, it darts from a perch atop a cattail to intercept a tiny insect-the mosquito-for a quick meal.
So you can imagine how difficult it is for researchers like Professor of Biology Rob Olberg and his students, Rebecca Seaman '04 and Jon Jackson '04, to capture the predators on film.
Last summer, in the southwest corner of the Science and Engineering Courtyard, they set up a “Dragonfly Flight Cage,” a contraption that looks a lot like one of those screen gazebos favored by the lakeside party set. But inside is a miniature ecosystem complete with a pond (read: kiddie pool) and an assortment of vegetation that comes natural to Odonoatarium.
The researchers tempted the fliers with tiny glass beads that resemble mosquitoes, and recorded the action on high-speed video. Back in the lab, they analyzed the footage, paying special attention to head motion before and after the dragonfly catches its food. Their goal: learn as much as possible about how the dragonfly can so effectively catch food in mid-air.
The project is supported
by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
In other works in progress:
Deidre Hill Butler, assistant professor of sociology, organized and moderated a panel at the annual meeting of the Association of Black Sociologists in Atlanta. The panel, “Black Female Professors at Small Liberal Arts Schools: Dilemmas and Contradictions of Status,” addressed strategies for career advancement at liberal arts colleges. Panelist included faculty members from Vassar, Dartmouth, and Colby colleges.
Robert Fleischer
Robert Fleischer, research professor of geology, published a paper, “Use Of Glazes On Porcelain From Near Ground Zero To Measure Hiroshima Neutron Fluence,” with J. MacDonald (former student in geology), S. Fujita, and M. Hoshi (both at Japanese research institutions) in the October 2003 issue of Health Physics. Fleischer and colleagues used the nuclear fission tracks in porcelain-an abundant material not used before-to determine the radiation dose at ground zero. Fleischer is co-author of another article, “On Search and Identification of Tracks Due to Short-Lived Super-heavy Nuclei in Extraterrestrial Crystals,” that appeared in the journal Radiation Measurements of September 2003. It describes the search for the heaviest atomic nuclei in the cosmic radiation and the finding of atomic nuclei that are appreciably more massive than
uranium and thorium-the heaviest atoms that are
commonly found on earth.
Chris Duncan, associate
professor of sculpture and drawing, has two outdoor pieces in an exhibit, “Open(ed) Spaces,” on the campus of Hudson Valley Community College in Troy. The show is in conjunction with HVCC's 50th anniversary celebration. It features the work of nine artists from the Capital Region and beyond.
Michelle Chilcoat, assistant professor of French, has written an article, “In/Civility, In Death: On Becoming French in Colonial Martinique,” that will be published in the journal boundary 2, a Duke University Press publication. Another article, “Brain Sex, Cyberpunk Cinema, Feminism and the Dis/Location of Heterosexuality,” is to be published in the National Women's Studies Association Journal.
Donald Rodbell
Donald Rodbell, professor of geology, is co-author of a paper in the September issue of Quaternary Research: “Sedimentologic and Palynologic Records of the Last Deglaciation and Holocene from Ballston Lake, New York.” One of the co-authors is Jaime Toney '00, whose research was part of
his senior thesis on the pollen record of climate change
preserved in Ballston Lake. The nine-meter-long core that Toney worked on was taken by students in Rodbell's “Lakes and Environmental Change” class. The record turns out to be the highest-resolution pollen record yet from eastern New York State and reveals the sudden and dramatic change in climate that occurred at the end of the last Ice Age (about 11,000 years ago) as well as several small climatic changes that occurred over the past 10,000 years.
Michael F. Vineyard, Frank and Marie Louise Bailey
Professor of Physics, gave an invited talk, “Measurements of the Neutron Magnetic Form Factor with CLAS,”
at the Workshop on Nucleon Form Factors and Parity
Violation in October in Athens, Greece.
Robert V. Wells, Chauncey Winters Professor of History and Social Science, has published “Preparation, Resignation, and Memory: Attitudes toward Death in Early America” in OASIS, the Odense American Studies International Series. Wells spent the academic year 1997-98 as a Fulbright Professor in the Center for American Studies at Odense University in Denmark. The university is now known as the University of Southern Denmark.
Megan Ferry, the Luce Junior Professor of Chinese, has published two articles: “Advertising, Consumerism and Nostalgia for the New Woman in Contemporary China” in Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, and “Marketing Chinese Women Writers in the 1990s, or the Politics of Self-Fashioning” in Journal of Contemporary China.
After weeks of debate, the
faculty voted in November to retain the College's current
academic calendar of three
ten-week terms.
The vote was 124 to 99.
The proposal to change the
calendar engendered a good deal of discussion on campus among faculty and students, and one straw poll found a large majority of students in favor of the trimester system. The proposal called for an
academic year divided into
two fourteen-week semesters, each followed by a four-day reading period and four or
five days of exams.
Like most colleges founded in the eighteenth century, Union originally divided the academic year into three terms. Although starting dates, term breaks,
and the date of Commencement changed a number of times, this calendar was followed for more than a century.
In 1915, the College went to
the semester system, which was used for more than fifty years (except in 1942-45, when the College adopted an accelerated twelve-month calendar because of World War II). In
the early 1960s there was extensive debate about a proposed four-term calendar;
finally adopted was a trimester system, which went into effect in the fall of 1966.
Two juniors who were home on the winter holiday break were killed in the early morning of Dec. 13, when their car veered off a road near Pittsfield, Mass., and collided with snowbanks and trees.
Killed in the crash were Kyle Schrade, 20, of Delanson,
N.Y., and Craig LeDuc, 20, of Pittsfield. A third person in the car, Joshua Shepard, 20, of Pittsfield and a student at Lafayette College, was injured (he is the brother of Courtney Shepard '06).
Pittsfield police said the car, driven by LeDuc, missed a curve and veered off the road at about 12:45 a.m. Police said the car
hit a tree stump, went through several snowbanks, and came to rest on the driver's side in a cluster of trees.
President Roger Hull said a memorial service would be
held on campus during the
winter term.
Schrade, a political science major, was remembered by friends as a dedicated member of Sigma Chi fraternity who loved playing and watching basketball. A high school basketball player at Duanesburg (N.Y.) Central School, he continued to play in intramurals. Ryan Smith '05 recalls Schrade, his first-year roommate, as a young man who overcame an initial shyness to become a popular student who enjoyed trading barbs with friends over his
basketball prowess. Schrade was also a disc jockey on WRUC.
He is survived by his parents, Steven '70 and Sherry Egan Schrade, who received her
master's in teaching from the College in 1990; and two sisters, Kelly Ann Schrade '99, of Newton, Mass., and Amy Lynn Schrade '02, of Albany, N.Y.
Smith remembers LeDuc, his roommate during sophomore year, as a bright, friendly, and curious student who early in
his time at Union “changed majors just about every week.” As an economics major, LeDuc wrote a paper about the effects of changing oil prices on
consumer spending patterns.
A diehard Boston Red Sox fan, LeDuc would stay up late to
discuss the merits of each player on the roster, said Smith. This year, LeDuc had begun to get involved with the College's Concert Committee, an activity he shared with Schrade, Smith said. Friends said that LeDuc and Schrade were looking
forward next year to living in
a residence hall at the former Ramada Inn, now being
renovated by the College.
