Posted on Feb 18, 2005

Deidre Hill Butler, assistant professor of sociology, presented a
paper, “Fictive Family Relationships and Women's Leadership Roles: An Analysis
of African American Community Mothering” at the Association for Research on
Mothering conference at York University in Toronto,
Canada last
October. The paper dealt with the roles African American women play in fictive
kin community institutions. It was presented as part of a panel on Mothering,
Religion and Spirituality.

Posted on Feb 18, 2005

The 15th annual Steinmetz
Symposium has been set for Friday, May 6, and Saturday, May 7, and students are
invited to register at the following web site: http://www.union.edu/Steinmetz.

Each year, some 300 students
participate in the annual showcase of student scholarly, research and creative
achievement.

Steinmetz 2005 will include
concurrent sessions for oral presentations, posters, performances, and art
exhibits. Most sessions will be held on Friday and classes will be cancelled to
allow all students to attend Steinmetz sessions.

Presentations will be in
Humanities, Social Sciences, Arts Building, Steinmetz, Science & Engineering and F.W. Olin
Center. Presenters will
be notified of time and place about two weeks before the symposium. Copies of
the schedule, as it appears on the web, will be available in the Dean's Office,
(S-100), Science &
Engineering Building.

Dance performances will take
place during Session III on Friday, May 6, in the Dance Studio of the Arts Building.

Students' art work will be
exhibited throughout the weekend in the Burns Arts Atrium of the Arts Building.

The poster session will be in Hale House on Saturday May 7. Poster stands and display guidelines will
be available in the Dean's Office, S100.

The Choir and Orchestra
will perform Friday evening, May 6, from 8 to 10 p.m. in Memorial Chapel. The Jazz Ensemble
will perform Saturday, May 7, from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. in Dutch Hollow.

All presenters, faculty sponsors,
and faculty moderators are invited to a banquet. More information will follow.

Contact Barb Tricozzi in the Dean
for Undergraduate Education office at tricozzb@union.edu
with questions.

Posted on Feb 18, 2005

Lester
Brown, called the “guru of the environmental movement,” will give the keynote
address at a one-day conference on “Sustainable Development: Balancing Growth,
Preservation and the Environment” on Friday, Feb. 25, from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
at Union's College Park Hall (the former Ramada Inn) on Nott Street.

Brown, founder and
president of the Earth Policy Institute, also will give a pre-conference
talk on Thursday, Feb. 24, at 7 p.m. in Union College's
Nott Memorial. He will talk on his recent book, Plan B: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble.
The talk is free to the public.

James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere and a renowned
lecturer on America's
man-made landscape, will speak at the conference on Friday, Feb. 25, at 1 p.m.

The one-day conference also will
feature a plenary session on “Balancing Regional Economic Growth, Community
Preservation and Environmental Protection” with regional planning, government
and economic development leaders; and a number of break-out sessions on topics
including smart growth, the costs of sprawl, storm water regulations and
comprehensive planning.

Brown is the author of 48 books
and numerous articles. The Washington Post called
him “one of the world's most influential thinkers.” The Telegraph
of Calcutta refers to him as “the guru of the
environmental movement.” In 1986, the Library of Congress requested his
personal papers noting that his writings “have already strongly affected
thinking about problems of world population and resources.”

Kunstler, who has also written Home From Nowhere and The City in Mind, is a frequent lecturer and presenter
at professional organizations. He has been called”one of the great
commentators on American space and place.”

The conference is co-sponsored by ECOS: The
Environmental Clearinghouse and the Union College Environmental Studies
Program. Additional sponsors are the League of Women Voters of Schenectady
County, Schenectady County Environmental Advisory Council, Social Action
Committee of the First Unitarian Society of Schenectady, and the Environmental
Awareness Club of Union College.

“The impact of development on taxes, traffic, water
and air quality, open space and community character is of increasing concern to
residents and community decision makers,” said conference organizer Patrick
Clear, executive director of ECOS. “This conference will bring people together
and provide participants with information and tools they need to work toward
sustainable development in our region.”

Cost is $25 (including buffet lunch). Students are
free (lunch $10). Registration deadline is Feb. 18. For information, contact
ECOS at 370-4125 or ecos@global2000.net.

Posted on Feb 18, 2005

The College's Board of Trustees
has adopted a balanced budget of $111 million for the 2005-06 academic year, it
was announced by Stephen Ciesinski '70, chairman of the board.

“Once again, I can report that the
College's overall financial situation is strong and that we have a balanced
budget,” Ciesinski said in his report. “After much collaboration with the
College's financial staff and the campus Planning and Priorities Committee, the
board has adopted a balanced budget for 2005-2006.”

The compensation pool, which
represents almost half of the College's operating budget, will be increased by
4 percent, the largest increase in a few years. “The College places great
emphasis on attracting and retaining the best faculty and staff,” Ciesinski
said. The budget also includes one-year supplemental additions to the salary
pool — $200,000 for faculty, $100,000 for staff.

The budget calls for a
comprehensive student fee of $41,595, a 7.5 percent increase over the current
year. Since the College remains committed to keeping Union accessible to all
students and to supporting a limited merit-aid program, the Board has approved
a financial aid budget of $26.1 million, nearly one-quarter of the operating
budget.

The comprehensive fee (tuition,
room, board and other fees) allows students to take extra courses at no
additional cost provided they meet academic prerequisites. The College
instituted the comprehensive fee last year in response to requests from
students who wanted to further enrich their academic experience.

“The past several years have been difficult ones for all
of us, and Union has been hit especially hard
by the rising costs of providing an intensive, high-quality education,” said
President Roger Hull. “We are not alone in this regard, but we have worked hard
to keep our fees at or below those of other selective, liberal arts colleges.”

Although the College has implemented a number of
cost-saving measures that last year totaled $1.2 million, some costs –
financial aid, energy, medical benefits and the skyrocketing cost of books and
publications – are beyond our control, Hull
said.

Hull
said the College has not reduced the size of the faculty, thereby preserving close
student-faculty collaboration, but that it will continue to reduce staff size
by carefully reexamining requests to replace or add positions. The College's
no-layoff policy remains, Hull
said.

“We will continue to do all that we can to contain
costs,” Hull
said, “but we want at all times to preserve the excellence that makes a Union
education one of the best in the nation.”

To read
the full chairman's report, visit:

http://www.union.edu/About/Board/Archive/2005_02/

Posted on Feb 17, 2005

Union College will host this year's Northeast Region Ethics Bowl for college students on
Saturday, Feb. 19 from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. at College Park Hall.

The Ethics Bowl is a debate-style competition during
which teams of undergraduates discuss ethical issues related to a set of
prepared case studies.  Moderators will pose questions to teams of three
to five students. They will address ethical problems on classroom topics (i.e.
cheating or plagiarism), personal relationships (i.e. dating or friendship),
professional ethics (i.e. engineering, law, medicine), or social and political
ethics (i.e. free speech, gun control, etc.) 

Each team receives a set of ethical
issues in advance of the competition, and questions posed to teams at the
competition are taken from that set. A panel of judges evaluates answers.
Rating criteria are soundness of intelligibility, focus on ethically relevant
considerations, avoidance of ethical irrelevance, and deliberative
thoughtfulness.

 This is the third year that Union College will participate in the Ethics Bowl. It was started 11 years ago by professor Robert
Ladenson of Illinois Institute of Technology. Teams from Boston College, Dartmouth, Marist, Rochester, and Williams will be on campus to compete against Union's team.

 The
competition has grown so much over the years that the bowl had to be broken
down regionally before teams compete nationally. Forty teams,
representing colleges and universities throughout the U. S. will attend the national ethics bowl.

A round of three
preliminary matches begins at 10 a.m. and finishes at 2 p.m. Semi-final matches
begin at 3 p.m. and end at 4:15 p.m., and the final match begins at 4:20 p.m.
and ends at 5:30 p.m.