Posted on Aug 29, 2005

The College is mourning the loss of Morton “Mike” Yulman '36, who died Sunday, Aug. 28, at the age of 91.

“I am sad to report that we have lost a steadfast friend and trustee who made a tremendous difference for Union College,” said James Underwood, interim president. “We will greatly miss Mike's close involvement with the College, but we move forward as a much better place as a result of the love, loyalty and support he provided.”

Yulman and his wife, Helen, were longtime benefactors of the College, perhaps most visibly in recent years in the theater that bears their name. The Morton H. and Helen Yulman Theater was dedicated as part of the College's Bicentennial celebration in 1995 as the first facility at the College dedicated solely to theater and performing arts.

“The building — host to hundreds of performances, rehearsals and classes — has done nothing but transform our theater program into one of recognized excellence,” Underwood said.

Among the many gifts to the College from Yulman and his family, the Morton H. Yulman Annual Scholarship, established by his children Richard and Nedra, has provided support to Capital Region students for more than a decade.

The retired president and chairman of Sealy Mattress Company, Yulman earned his bachelor's degree in chemistry from Union. He served many years as a trustee and trustee emeritus. He received the Alumni Council's Gold Medal for distinguished service in 1980, and one of the College's highest honors – the Founders Medal – in 1988.

He also served on a number of national and local boards, was a charter member of the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, and sponsored the “I Have a Dream” college scholarship program in his native Albany.

Posted on Aug 27, 2005

Never say your friendly neighborhood congressman is afraid to sweat.

To wit: Steve Israel, who represents Long Island in the U.S. House of Representatives, helping his daughter move into the University at Albany by lugging a combination refrigerator-and-microwave up three flights of stairs.

Israel, resting briefly on the second floor, said he is “now seeking an appropriation for an elevator for Anthony Hall.”

The seemingly endless haul was thousands of times Friday, as UAlbany welcomed 2,550 freshmen. And it will be repeated thousands of times more over the next several weeks, as the region's colleges and universities start class. New students finished moving into Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute earlier this week; over the weekend, students will hit the College of Saint Rose.

Israel's daughter, Carly, is entering the UAlbany business program. As she passed by dad in the hall, delivering the fridge, she was asked, ready to get rid of the parents?

“Yes,” she said, before correcting herself. “No.”

UAlbany's enrollment is up nearly 500 from last fall; the school benefited from more students accepting their invitations to enroll than expected. It joins several other Capital Region schools in posting higher-than-usual enrollments.

Union College expects 585 freshmen, nearly a record. Hudson Valley Community College and Skidmore College are expecting bumper crops. And at Albany Medical College, the 135 incoming students aren't a record, but the class composition is unusual: 63 percent of its entering students are women, up from 51 percent last year.

The bigger sizes threatened to make for some close quarters.

“There was a point this year where we were afraid we were going to have to stack them like cordwood, which would not make us, them or their parents happy,” said Dan Lundquist, Union's dean of admissions and financial aid. At one point, the Schenectady school offered volunteers a $1,500 incentive to move into triples.

Only a couple of triples were needed, though, as just 20 more students than expected ultimately enrolled.

Skidmore also had to add triples, said Mary Lou Bates, dean of admissions and financial aid at the Saratoga Springs college. Skidmore planned for 620 students this fall, but wound up with 700.

“It's going to be a full housing situation,” said Bates, who added that when admissions officials start planning for the class of 2010 come October, they may decide to cut next year's target enrollment.

The high enrollment is a recurring story statewide, said Abraham Lackman, president of the Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities, which represents private schools in the state. “New York state has become a hot destination for college students,” he said. “There's a lot of things going on both in terms of perception and of quality.”

The full beds mean not only that the state gets a big economic jolt — out-of-state students will spend $1.3 billion this year — but also that education will continue to be a big part of the upstate labor market.

Posted on Aug 26, 2005

The College's Presidential Search Committee has narrowed the field of 60 applicants to 12, and plans to begin interviews in September, it was reported by Trustee Frank Messa '73, chairman of the committee.

Messa issued the following progress report from the Committee on Aug. 24:

To: Members of the Union College Community
From: Frank Messa '73, Presidential Search Committee Chairman Subject: Presidential Search Committee Activities Update

Although we have been in a predominantly silent phase of our Presidential search over the last few months, I thought it would be helpful to update you on the activities of our committee since my last report.

Following Barbara Taylor's campus visit of April 27 – 28, the Presidential Search Committee met on May 19 at College Park Hall. The committee members were joined by Barbara Taylor of Academic Search Consultants. The highlights of the committee meeting were as follows: Steve Ciesinski, Chairman of the Board of Trustees addressed the committee and provided it with a formal charge from the Board of Trustees. He directed the committee members to work deliberately but expeditiously throughout the summer and fall with a goal of presenting to the Board of Trustees 2-3 candidates for ultimate Board review and selection.

All members of the Presidential Search Committee signed confidentiality agreements which, among other provisions, authorized Frank Messa, as Committee Chairman to be the sole spokesperson for the committee on all matters relating to the Presidential search;

The committee set a schedule for meetings throughout the summer and fall in order to review resumes, complete reference checks, and interview candidates;

The committee discussed and provided input on the position prospectus and ads;

The committee provided input regarding the development and composition of the search website;

The faculty representatives on the committee agreed to report to the faculty on future involvement of the Faculty Executive Committee and the need for confidentiality in the search process.

Following this meeting in May, Frank Messa reported on the progress of the committee to the Board of Trustees at the May 20 meeting.

During the months of June and July, the committee, and most notably Barbara Taylor, spent the bulk of their time reviewing resumes that had been submitted as well as speaking with potential candidates. As of the end of July, we had received approximately 60 formal applications. The applications were submitted from all over the country and contained a wide variety of backgrounds and qualifications.

Following the deadline for the submission of formal applications, each of the committee members reviewed all of the applications. The committee met on campus on August 11 to review all of the materials and we were able to narrow the candidate pool to 12. Over the next month, the committee members will meet with several of the candidates and conduct background and reference checks on all of the remaining candidates. We will then meet in early September to discuss the results of the reference checks and, if appropriate, further narrow the candidate pool in anticipation of the formal interview process which will begin in September.

Posted on Aug 25, 2005

[For more about Prof. Louisa Matthew's research visit: http://www.union.edu/N/DS/s.php?s=5260]

How did paintings by Tintoretto and other Venetian Renaissance artists get their special glow? Using an electron microscope, Barbara Berrie, senior conservation scientist at the National Gallery of Art, discovered one of their secrets: tiny bits of glass the artists mixed with their pigments.

“By looking beyond the limits of their usual practice and transforming materials from other trades to their painting, the great artists of the Renaissance created a palette that gave them an immediate and lasting reputation as brilliant colorists,” Berrie said.

It was long thought that Venetian painters, glassmakers and ceramic designers each had their own ways of concocting paints and dyes, probably getting the ingredients through apothecaries, as in most of Europe.

But Louisa Matthew, head of the Visual Arts Departments at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., found evidence that Venice developed a special market for dyes and pigments a century before other European areas did.

She was poring through the Venetian archives for information on how local artists did business. Among the dusty wills and tax records, she came upon an inventory of 102 items drawn up after the death of shop owner Domenico de Gardignano. He is identified in Italian as “dai colori” – “among the men in the color business.”

“There are certain pigments that contain glass mentioned in the 1534 inventory, but by no means all,” Matthew said. “Because (customers) were all buying colorants in the same place, we hypothesize that they traded ideas and ingredients including materials not on the shelf.”

People from many different trades bought supplies at de Gardignano's shop and were likely to have shared both ideas and materials, Matthew surmised.

That possibility led to Berrie's examination of paint samples under an electronic microscope. She discovered rounded bits of powdered glass, only thousandths of an inch thick, in two paintings by Lorenzo Lotto – one in a red gown worn by St. Catherine, another in an orange-red coat worn by Joseph in a Nativity scene.

Glass was also discovered in a yellow pigment used in a Tintoretto painting of Jesus at the Sea of Galilee.

“They're also teaching me a lesson: to try to go beyond the bounds of what I know and what I think is right,” Berrie said. “It's a good trick for an old artist to teach a new scientist something.”

Posted on Aug 24, 2005

August 24, 2005

To: Members of the Union College Community
From: Frank Messa '73, Presidential Search Committee Chairman
Subject: Presidential Search Committee Activities Update

Although we have been in a predominantly silent phase of our Presidential search over the last few months, I thought it would be helpful to update you on the activities of our committee since my last report.

Following Barbara Taylor's campus visit of April 27 – 28, the Presidential Search Committee met on May 19 at College Park Hall. The committee members were joined by Barbara Taylor of Academic Search Consultants. The highlights of the committee meeting were as follows:

1. Steve Ciesinski, Chairman of the Board of Trustees addressed the committee and provided it with a formal charge from the Board of Trustees. He directed the committee members to work deliberately but expeditiously throughout the summer and fall with a goal of presenting to the Board of Trustees 2-3 candidates for ultimate Board review and selection;
   
   


2. All members of the Presidential Search Committee signed confidentiality agreements which, among other provisions, authorized Frank Messa, as Committee Chairman to be the sole spokesperson for the committee on all matters relating to the Presidential search;
   
   


3. The committee set a schedule for meetings throughout the summer and fall in order to review resumes, complete reference checks, and interview candidates;
   
   


4. The committee discussed and provided input on the position prospectus and ads;
   
   


5. The committee provided input regarding the development and composition of the search website;
   
   


6. The faculty representatives on the committee agreed to report to the faculty on future involvement of the Faculty Executive Committee and the need for confidentiality in the search process.

Following this meeting in May, Frank Messa reported on the progress of the committee to the Board of Trustees at the May 20 meeting.

During the months of June and July, the committee, and most notably Barbara Taylor, spent the bulk of their time reviewing resumes that had been submitted as well as speaking with potential candidates. As of the end of July, we had received approximately 60 formal applications. The applications were submitted from all over the country and contained a wide variety of backgrounds and qualifications.

Following the deadline for the submission of formal applications, each of the committee members reviewed all of the applications. The committee met on campus on August 11 to review all of the materials and we were able to narrow the candidate pool to 12. Over the next month, the committee members will meet with several of the candidates and conduct background and reference checks on all of the remaining candidates. We will then meet in early September to discuss the results of the reference checks and, if appropriate, further narrow the candidate pool in anticipation of the formal interview process which will begin in September.