Posted on Jun 19, 2006

GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass.
   Randy Weinstein doesn't expect everyone in Great Barrington to feel exactly the same way he does about W.E.B. Du Bois.
   That's not the point of the Du Bois Center for American History that Weinstein opened in February on Route 7 in this Berkshires community, Du Bois' hometown.
   “I didn't run around trying to convince everyone that Du Bois was a great man,” said Weinstein, a native of Norwalk, Conn., who moved to Great Barrington almost 40 years ago. “I don't know that I agree with everything he said or wrote or some of the things he did. All I want people to realize is that he was a historical personage, a very significant one, who was born and raised here. That's all I'm looking to acknowledge.”
   Du Bois, a civil-rights activist, sociologist, educator, historian, editor and poet, was born in 1868, and was the first black man to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard. In 1961, at the age of 93, he renounced his U.S. citizenship, joined the Communist Party, and moved to Ghana with his second wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois. He died there two years later.
   “I think when someone tries to better a group of people, then it's a wonderful thing, and he did that in many ways,” said Weinstein. “He helped found the NAACP, he wrote over 20 books, books that were published by mainstream publishers. He was one of the first blacks to be successful in the “white” black market. I could go on and on. He was a very special man, but for years there was nothing in Great Barrington about him.”
EDUCATION CENTER
   That changed in February when Weinstein, the owner of North Star Rare Books in Great Barrington, opened the Du Bois Center of American History. He rented the space next to his store at 684 S. Main St. and knocked out the adjoining wall, creating 2,500 square feet of space to accommodate Washington Carver, but as for his standing among black intellectuals he would be first, unquestionably.”
   Union College history professor Erica Ball said that Du Bois' ties to communism probably hurt his reputation with some Americans.
   “During the climate of the Cold War, his work was not something that was remembered by folks outside the African-American community,” said Ball. “But when you consider the climate of race relations in America for most of the 20 th century when he was alive, and judge his decisions in that context, it shouldn't detract from his work. He was an amazing, extraordinary man.”
   Du Bois was often at odds with Booker T. Washington philosophically, and the two men had a falling out over the black man's role in society.
   “Washington thought that due to industrialization, the black man could play a vital role as a worker,” said Deidre Hill-Butler, an assistant professor of sociology at Union College. “Du Bois was more about shaking up the political and social order of the 19 th and 20 th centuries. He wanted people to ascribe to their own strategies about personal uplift. His writings are still very timely and relevant today.”
   While some members of his hometown weren't pleased with Du Bois' actions, he always spoke of Great Barrington in glowing terms.
   “He visited here in the 1930s and '40s, and probably the '50s, too,” said Weinstein. “He wrote letters to people in Great Barrington his whole life, and in all his autobiographical writings, there are three accounts of Great Barrington, all of them putting the town in the best of light.”
   Du Bois buried his first wife and one of his children in the cemetery right behind Weinstein's bookstore.
   “People would come from all over the country to see his hometown, but there'd be nothing to show them – no monument, no memorial,” said Weinstein. “So people would direct them to my store and I would give a tour of the cemetery. That was it.”
   Weinstein has changed all that, and he's hopeful that everybody in Great Barrington will eventually warm up to a number of historical artifacts and more than 2,000 books related to the black American experience.
   “I view this as an education center and with that in mind we've had four or five high school classes in here already,” said Weinstein, who charges no admission fee. “We're getting local colleges involved and one of them is having the students build a Web site for us. It's not just for graduate students finishing up their master's. This place is tailormade for high school kids or community college students.”
   Weinstein also made the center available as a home base for the Great Barrington Historical Society, which purchased a 72-inch television screen that sits in one corner of the Du Bois Center. A film and lecture series is expected to begin shortly at the facility, and Weinstein hopes to have some of the nation's top scholars in attendance. Many of them, such as Du Bois biographer David Levering Louis of New York University, David Blight of Amherst, John Y. Simon of Northern Illinois and Duke University's John Hope Franklin were at the center's grand opening in February.
   “I didn't get the support I was hoping for from the community. So I decided to build from without, so to speak,” said Weinstein. “I got men like John Simon, David Blight and David Levering Louis to serve on my board of directors, and we got 500 people for the opening. Some very big names showed up, and I think that woke up the community a little bit.
the idea of honoring one of its most prominent citizens.
   “He infuriated a lot of people in this town when he became a Communist,” said Weinstein. “Sure, he was flawed and so are the rest of us. He took some bad turns along the road, but when you look at any great man, they come to a position on great issues through trial and error. To simply ignore all the great things he did, all the good he accomplished, would be ridiculous.”
IMPORTANT FIGURE
   Although some members of the Great Barrington community may harbor some resentment against Du Bois for his embrace of communism, his name (the W.E.B. stands for William Edward Burghardt) packs a powerful punch for academics who deal with the black American experience.
   “Without a doubt, I would consider him the most important African-American of the whole last century,” said Allen B. Ballard, a history professor at the University at Albany. “He dominates everything. He doesn't have the same fame in white America as Booker T. Washington or George

Posted on Jun 15, 2006

All 435 plates of John James Audubon's ''Birds of America'' are back together again, looking even more exquisite and astonishingly detailed than when Union College's President Eliphalet Nott purchased them from the artist for $1,000 in gold in 1844.

The ''double elephant folio'' plates, which measure 26-by-39 inches, represent the pinnacle of artistic achievement for America's foremost wildlife artist. Created with a labor-intensive engraving and aquatint process, they are a rare and valuable collection of 19th-century avian art.

The intriguing backstory to the Audubon birds at Union includes a theft in 1971, arrest of the thief and recovery of the plates following an FBI sting. Now, with a just-completed $50,000 restoration project, the plates have been removed from their bound leather volumes and mounted separately.

Union put a sampling of Audubon's birds on public display for the first time recently at the Schaffer Library on the Schenectady campus. They are a wondrous sight to behold, especially since the thief's blood stains — he cut himself breaking a window to gain entry — have been professionally removed, and tears and rips sustained when he cut them out of the binding with a box cutter during the heist have been repaired.

To view the article go to:http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=491185&TextPage=3

Posted on Jun 14, 2006

Eliot Spitzer said he would accept the Working Families Party's nomination for governor but not necessarily the party's pet legislative proposal, to assess companies to pay for workers' health insurance.

“We must be extraordinarily careful before we impose upon small businesses in this state–and obviously how you define that is subject to dispute–a cost per person that would simply lead them to drop employees or to close up shop altogether,” Spitzer said. “I'm hesitant to take a step that would be injurious to small businesses, in particular.”

This is the man who won billions in settlements from Marsh & McLennan, Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and other corporate giants? The one U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Thomas Donohue accused of using the “most egregious and unacceptable form of intimidation” as attorney general to coerce companies into settling?

Little of the “Sheriff of Wall Street” is evident in Spitzer as the Democrat makes appearances in his campaign for governor. After being bad for many individual companies–or at least their executives and, initially, their shareholders–Spitzer is campaigning on the platform that he will be very good for business as New York's next governor.

“We're going to make this the most business-friendly state in the nation,” he said after getting the Democrats' nomination for governor.

And even before a group wary of business such as the Working Families Party, he talked more about reclaiming jobs New York has lost to places like Arizona than about the party's cherished “Fair Share for Health Care” proposal.

“I want that message out there for everybody: Get back here,” Spitzer told the party's convention June 3 at the Desmond Hotel & Convention Center in Colonie. “We need you. We want your jobs here. We want your kids here. We're going to build in this state by educating our children, by creating a climate that says to folks, 'We want you to create opportunity here.'”

Polling place
Polls from Siena College, Marist College and elsewhere show Spitzer with solid, double-digit leads over his Democratic opponent, Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi. They also show Spitzer easily defeating John Faso, the former state Assembly minority leader from Kinderhook, Columbia County. Faso is the only Republican running for governor following William Weld's withdrawal from the race June 6.

Angela Ledford, assistant professor of political science at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, said Spitzer is “walking a bit of a thin line” in talking up job development after making his reputation by going after big business. Ledford said Spitzer can pull it off, however, by stressing that his investigations were ultimately good for all businesses be­cause he made more companies “play fair.”

“You can't run for dog catcher these days without being pro-business,” she said. “This notion that one party is more pro-business than another, that Republicans are more pro-business than Democrats, is ancient history.”

Richard Fox, chairman of the political science department at Union College in Schenectady, said the economics of running for governor in New York means that Spitzer needs friends in the business community.

“I heard him say he has to raise $40 million to run for governor,” Fox said. “You can't raise $40 million without support from business.”

Spitzer's television commercials share the theme of either Spitzer being the little guy taking on monied interests or of Spitzer fighting those interests on behalf of the little guy.

One series features tabloid headlines such as “Spitzer: Execs must pay” and ” 'Fearless' Spitzer: Sure to Rattle Wall Street.” Another features images of New Yorkers who Spitzer helped with such titles as “restored his back pay” and “protected his pension.”

Spitzer said the ads take a “very quiet, muted” approach and are not designed to inject anti-business “rhetoric” into the campaign.

“I think it's a fair statement of what we did, a statement of fact about what we did,” he said.

Spitzer called his relationships with most CEOs good, despite the way he pilloried former American International Group CEO Maurice “Hank” Greenberg and others as part of his probes of bid-rigging, fraud and other corrupt business practices on Wall Street. Spitzer continues to pursue a suit against former New York Stock Exchange Chairman Richard Grasso and his $187.5 million compensation package.

“There are some who obviously disagree with some of what I've done,” Spitzer said. “I think if you speak to most, they will say what we were targeting was right. There were some serious problems that had to be dealt with, that the integrity of the capital markets and the business environment has to be protected.”

No 'insane' indictments
In fact, Spitzer said, he has judiciously pursued corporate targets. He has preferred to persuade rather than prosecute, to “come down like a ton of bricks” on wrongdoers but to back off when they admit their errors and correct them.

“In no case where there was a significant company … we said we wanted to drive the company out [of business],” he said. “Just the opposite. We have struggled to maintain companies. Whether it was Merrill–we could have indicted Merrill. It would have been insane. We've struggled to say, “Carve out the cancerous behavior. Get rid of it. And the company will thrive.'”

The Republican majority leader of the state Senate, Joseph Bruno of Brunswick, Rensselaer County, said the acceptance Spitzer perceives among business leaders for his enforcement activities is deceptive.

“People are scared to death and people will not make a peep because you're going to be the next target,” he said.

The Fair Share for Health Care bill would impose a $3-an-hour, per-employee assessment on companies employing 100 or more workers, with the money going into a special fund to pay for employees' health insurance. Companies providing coverage could deduct its cost from the assessments.

Dan Cantor, chairman of the Working Families Party, said at least 450,000 New Yorkers work for companies with 100 employees or more which do not provide health insurance.

While the Fair Share for Health Care bill had yet to get to the floor of either the state Senate or Assembly with two weeks to go in the regular 2006 session, Cantor said the party has forced serious discussion of the health insurance issue in Albany. The party's membership is heavily unionized, with leaders from the Communications Workers of America, Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union, the United Auto Workers and other labor organizations.

“We have set the stage,” Cantor said. “Eliot's got to do something next year.”

Posted on Jun 14, 2006

In a shady nook of the Union College campus, where an old metal picnic table once was the central feature, an Asian garden now grows.

The garden is the culmination of art history instructor Nixi Cura's spring term seminar in Asian garden design. Nine students built it from a plan proposed by one of two competing student teams in the seminar, and they celebrated its completion with a reception earlier this month.
 
“I like all of it,” said Jeff Brais, a senior from Connecticut who was on the team whose plan wasn't selected by a panel of faculty judges. “This wasn't really my choice, but it turned out well, actually.”

Meanwhile, freshman Greta Murphy, also from Connecticut, and sophomore Guy Corey, of Mount Marion near Kingston, who both were on the winning design team, basked in the satisfaction of seeing their concept take root.

While Asian garden design seminar students in previous years have opted to design gardens in a more-urban Chinese style on a site amid a group of buildings, the class this year carried out their inspiration in a small clearing in a wooded area next to Jackson's Garden. A stream, Hans Groot's Kill, runs along the edge of the site and provides one of the four basic Japanese garden themes: water.

Corey was a fan of the spot, even before he joined the seminar and learned it was a candidate for conversion to an Asian garden.

“This is my personal favorite area,” he said. “It's tucked away.”

Now, with its meandering path and distinctive sections, Corey said visitors can come away from the garden with a variety of impressions.

“The garden is supposed to be like an assembly of landscape paintings,” he said.

Cura said the garden seminar offers a good opportunity to employ a signature academic approach that Union is cultivating. Called “converging technologies,” the approach aims to infuse more elements of liberal arts and humanities into scientific studies and vice versa.
 
Officially, the seminar is part of the college's art history program. But using engineering design principles and considering horticultural issues are just two ways that science becomes part of a course focused on aesthetic and cultural aspects of Asian garden design.

Cura said a collaborative approach also is an important hallmark of the seminar.

“Group projects are almost exclusively limited to the engineering school,” Cura said, and the collaborative nature of art is often overlooked in traditional western art history classes.

“They learn something about how art is made, and they learn something about how to work with other people, so I see the course as having fulfilled several goals in that way,” Cura said.

 Union's landscape specialist, Connie Schmitz, who oversees the adjacent grounds, including Jackson's Garden, will take on the long-range stewardship for the Asian garden. And the students credit Schmitz with anticipating a potential pitfall in one part of their plan.
 
The original design included bamboo, a classic Asian plant that prospers as an invasive species in upstate New York.

“We asked Connie, and it was a flat-out 'no,' ” Murphy recalled.
 
Instead, the group planted hostas in that area and were pleased with the result, she said.

With Cura leaving the college, this particular product of the Asian garden design seminar may be the last — and the most enduring.

“I think that gave the construction a little bit of poignancy,” Cura said. “That garden is going to stay there in perpetuity.”

Posted on Jun 12, 2006

Trust your instincts and always remember to “carry with you your humanity” were the parting lessons Union College's interim president offered the Class of 2006. 

Under dismal gray skies and in a cool wind that made June feel like October, James E. Underwood cautioned the robed and shivering grads at Sunday's commencement that following his advice will not always be easy. 

“Listen to your own inner voice. I can tell you from personal experience, whenever I have failed to listen to my own inner voice I have come to regret it,” Underwood said in his keynote address, which he briefly paused to pick up the mortarboard that was blown off his head.
  

“We must cultivate the habit because that inner voice, always there, does not necessarily shout – sometimes it barely whispers,” he added.
  

The college, which counts prolific scientists and engineers, award-winning writers and 21 st U.S. president Chester A. Arthur among its alumni, graduated 500 this year. Fifteen of them were Schenectady residents, 11 more from elsewhere in Schenectady County and 50 hail from the greater Capital Region.
  

After tassels were turned and caps tossed in the air, the sea of black robes dispersed. Many will end up in different parts of the country, though for 21-year-old Brian Selchick, Washington, D.C., will be a stop on the way back to the area.
  

After his internship with a capital investment banking firm, he will return to Union to pursue his graduate degree – and to run his company.
  

While recovering from an illness his freshman year, the Menands native got the idea to use the online auction site eBay to raise money for charities. His company, eWired Auctions LLC, branched out and runs live auctions with wireless Internet-enabled handheld computers.
  

In between rugby practice, fraternity parties and concerts with the Union all-male a cappella group the Dutch Pipers, Selchick has planned for his future in what he sees as an increasingly tech-savvy area.
  

“My plan is definitely to stay local,” he said. “Why leave? Union students have the Capital Region at their fingertips.”
  

For co-salutatorian Fatima Mahmood, her bachelor of science degree is a tradition of sorts in her Clifton Park family.
  

Her mother, Durray Mahmood, received her teaching certificate from Union in 2001. Her brother, Bilal, is currently a sophomore at the school.
  

Mahmood, 21, who graduated with a double major in math and physics, said the opportunity to do physics research and her art classes were among college highlights. And, when the dining hall food got to be a bit much, her family was 20 minutes away.
  

“It was nice. I was able to go home Sundays to eat lunch,” she said.
  

In the fall, Mahmood will transfer to Cornell to pursue a Ph.D. in mathematics.
  

Underwood's address came as his tenure at the helm of the private college is about to come to an end.
  

Stephen C. Ainlay, the vice president of academic affairs at the College of the Holy Cross in Worchester, Mass., will begin his tenure as president on Thursday.
  

Underwood, who has been a faculty member for more than four decades, was named interim president when Roger Hull stepped down last June.
  

“It was typical of you last year to eagerly answer the call, my call, to lead this college during an important transition,” Union Board of Trustees President Stephen J. Ciesinski said, before presenting Underwood with an honorary doctorate degree. “You have left Union a much stronger place.”
  

Underwood will remain involved with the school as a professor emeritus, Union spokesman Philip J. Wajda said.
  

Underwood quoted an 1805 commencement speech from then-college President Eliphalet Nott, who urged his graduates to “carry with you your humanity” to improve the world.
  

“We who are privileged to be here owe an obligation to ourselves to make the good community that is ours into a truly superior community,” Underwood said. ” . . . Unless that is the case, we will always run the risk of failing to assist each other and of isolating community members because they do not share the characteristics of the great majority within the community.”