Posted on May 7, 2004

Bill Schwarz rejoins Union
as director of corporate and government relations with a renewed focus on
integrating the College and its Converging Technologies initiative with the
region's quickly developing technology sector.

Schwarz will play a lead role in
securing corporate and government funding to support Union's
programs.

“Union has
a proud history of innovation, and we continue to find new and effective ways
to meet the challenges and maximize opportunities,” Hull
said. “As the Tech Valley
initiative continues to transform this region, Bill will play a key role in
ensuring Union is an integral part of this exciting
process.”

Schwarz joined Union
in 1998 as director of media and government relations, moving to director of
corporate and government relations four years later. For much of the past year,
he worked in global communications and public affairs for GE Energy in Houston,
Texas.

Posted on May 7, 2004

The careers and words of three rising writers will be
explored in “Emerging Writers: An Evening of Poetry and Prose with Barbara
DeCesare, Elena Georgiou and Selah Saterstrom” on Tuesday, May 11, at 7:30 p.m. in Old Chapel.

The event, free and open to the public, is sponsored by
the English Department, Women's Studies, the Dean of Students Office and
Schaffer Library.

Barbara DeCesare
is a 2004 Pushcart nominee whose poetry and fiction has appeared in more than
50 major literary publications. Her collection of poems, jigsaweyesore (Anti-Man Press 1999), is being adapted for a musical
production in New York City. She is
the poet laureate of Baltimore's
Number 1 rock radio station, WIYY FM 98. 
The mother of three, she lives in Pennsylvania
where she works as a domestic law paralegal. The Baltimore
Sun says that Barbara's work is “what thunder looks like in writing.”

Elena Georgiou's
first book of poetry, Mercy Mercy Me
(Painted Leaf Press 2000), received the Lambda Literary Award for poetry and
was a finalist in the Publishing Triangle Award. The book was reissued by the University
of Wisconsin Press in the spring of
2003. With Michael Lassell, she co-edited the poetry anthology The World in Us. She has received many
major awards and fellowships including an Astraea Emerging Writers Award and a
New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. She is the coordinator of the MFA
in Creative Writing program at Hunter
College, where she also teaches
poetry. She also serves on the MFA faculty at Goddard
College. She lives in Brooklyn.

Selah Saterstrom's
experimental fiction has appeared in many literary journals including 3rd Bed, Monkey Puzzle and Tarpaulin Sky. She is an editor at The Ensign Literary Journal. Her first
novel, The Pink Institution, was
published by Coffee House Press in April. The Seattle
writer Rebecca Brown has said, “I am confident The Pink Institution is only the first of many astoundingly
beautiful, brutally disturbing works of art.” The author Jeanne Mackin has
called the book “a masterful debut.” Born and raised in the region
around Natchez, Miss.,
Selah lives in Asheville, N.C.,
and teaches at Warren Wilson
College.

A reception will follow the event. For more information,
call ext. 6620.

Posted on May 7, 2004

Attorney and author David Cole
will speak on “Enemy Aliens and American Freedoms: Double Standards and
Civil Liberties in the War on Terror” Tuesday, May 11, at 4 p.m. in Reamer Campus Center Auditorium.

Cole is a professor at Georgetown
University Law Center,
a volunteer staff attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights, the legal
affairs correspondent for The Nation, and a commentator on National
Public Radio's All Things Considered. He is an expert on constitutional
law, criminal procedure, civil liberties and national security, and immigration
law.

A graduate of Yale
University and Yale
Law School,
he has litigated many First Amendment cases, including Texas v. Johnson and
United States v. Eichman, which extended First Amendment protection to
flag-burning. He has represented the “Los Angeles
8” for sixteen years, and has also represented numerous Arab and Muslim immigrants
against whom the INS sought to use secret evidence.

The American Lawyer named Cole one
of the top 45 public sector lawyers in the country under 45. New York Times
columnist Anthony Lewis has called him “one of the country's great legal
voice for civil liberties today,” and former CIA Director James Woolsey
has called Cole's new book, Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional
Freedoms in the War on Terrorism (2003), “the essential book in the
field.” Cole's first book, No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the
American Criminal Justice System, was named Best Non-Fiction Book of 1999
by the Boston Book Review, best book on an issue of national policy in 1999 by
the American Political Science Association, and awarded the Alpha Sigma Nu
prize from the Jesuit Honor Society in 2001.

Cole's talk is sponsored by the
American Studies Program and the Minerva Committee.

For more information, call ext. 6787.

Posted on May 7, 2004

With America's
pastime in full swing, some scholars are meeting to consider the culture of
baseball half a world away.

A day-long roundtable called “Baseball in Asia”
will feature a lineup of speakers on Friday, May 7, and a trip to the Baseball
Hall of Fame in Cooperstown for events there on
Saturday.

Here is the schedule for Friday (all talks in SS 016):

10 a.m. to noon — Joe Reaves, journalist and author of
the award winning Taking in a Game: Baseball
In Asia; and Marty Kuehnert, journalist,
broadcaster and author of books on Japanese baseball.

2 to 4 p.m. — Robert Whiting, author of You've Gotta Have Wa  and recently, The Meaning Of Ichiro; and Bill Kelly of Yale
University, who has written on
Japanese fans and the Hanshin Tigers.

For more information, contact Prof. Ted Gilman at ext.
6064 or Prof. George Gmelch at ext. 6083.

Posted on May 7, 2004

Impermeable Molding Company, a
company founded by Union College
students and housed in the U-Start Business Incubator, won the “elevator pitch”
contest in last week's Tech Valley Collegiate Business Plan Competition.

Junior Lucas Englehart, chief marketing officer, did the elevator
pitch on behalf of the six-member company.

To qualify for the two-minute
contest, which simulates a brief elevator ride with a venture capitalist, the
teams had to be one of five semi-finalists in the overall business plan competition.
The Union team won $1,000.

Impermeable Molding was founded
this year to produce environmentally friendly tanks for the storage of various
fluids such as oil and gasoline. Union students in the College's Entrepreneurship Club have been
working on this new business idea, using a state-of-the-art plastic resin from
the Cyclics Corporation of Schenectady, founded by Union alumni John Ciovacco and Ted Eveleth.

Other partners in Impermeable Molding are Bobby Syed '03, chief executive
officer, MBA student at the Graduate College of Union
University, and co-founder and former president of the Union College
Entrepreneurship Club; Josh Fiorini '04, chief financial officer, co-founder
and vice president of the Entrepreneurship Club; Brian Lindenberg '05, chief operating officer; Kerem Kacel
'03, chief information officer; and Brett Durie '04, chief technical officer.

“We are extremely proud of our team's work in getting to the
semi-finals and winning the elevator pitch competition,” said Jon Lemelin, executive director of the
U-Start Incubator and an advisor to the team. “This is the first time a team
from Union has entered the competition. To
qualify as a semi-finalist, the Union team outperformed 30 other student
teams.”

The business plan competition was
sponsored by the Severino Center
for Technological Entrepreneurship at Rensselaer's Lally
School of Management and Technology. The annual competition is open to
full-time students at area colleges and universities.

Besides Lemelin and Ciovacco, the club's advisors
are Y.F. King Wang, marketing director of Americas for Cyclics Corporation; Prof. Hal
Fried, economics; Mike O'Hara, director of development; and Mel Chudzik, dean
of the School of Management, GCUU.