Posted on May 15, 2007

Before the start of the 2006 baseball season, Neil Kramer ’70 and sons Gabriel ’09 and Daniel were sitting around the dinner table in the family’s Los Angeles home.

As passionate baseball fans, the Kramer men wondered how they would deal with what now seems inevitable: San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds overtaking Hank Aaron to become the all-time home run king.

The Kramers cringed at the thought of Bonds, who has been dogged by accusations of illegal steroid use, passing Aaron’s mark of 755. They needed to make a statement.

“Boycott Barry,” said Neil Kramer, who coached his sons in Little League, instilling in them the importance of hard work and an even playing field.

Daniel added the dot com, and the Web site, BoycottBarry.com took off. Daniel handles the day-to-day operation of the site, while Gabe, a political science major, is credited as the co-founder and designed some of the logos. Neil provides spiritual encouragement and advice.

“It’s Daniel’s operation,” said Neil, who received a B.A. in history. “For him, it’s both a labor of love and a little entrepreneurial laboratory. I’m just Dad. I watch it happen and say ‘attaboy.’ ”

The site attracts about 5,000 new visitors a month. It features a poll question asking what substance Barry is using these days (human growth hormone; steroids; amphetamines). It also hawks T-shirts and Bondsfolds, a red patch with white letters touting the site that is to be worn each time Bonds comes to the plate. You can also find photos of Boycott Babes, women recruited from different cities who flaunt their anti-Barry bodies at stadiums around the country.

“Baseball is great,” said Daniel, a public affairs consultant and real estate investor. “Its past, present and future should not be clouded by the performance of drug users. If you love baseball, if you are a real fan, how can you not be engaged in this issue?”

Bonds is also being discussed formally in a Union classroom this term. Professor Tom Werner’s course, “Chemistry and Athletic Performance,” uses the best-selling book “Game of Shadows” about the probe into the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO) for alleged doping by the Giants superstar and others.

As Bonds creeps closer to the cherished record, the pursuit has become a sticky matter for baseball and its fans. Commissioner Bud Selig has repeatedly said baseball would provide an “appropriate tribute” but refuses to be more specific. Aaron said last month he won’t be around to congratulate Bonds, and instead will likely be on a golf course in Florida if his record is broken.

“I don’t want to be around that sort of thing anymore,” the Hall-of-Famer told the Atlanta Journal Constitution, emphasizing he has nothing against Bonds. “I just want to be at peace with myself. I don’t want to answer questions.”

A recent poll by ABC News and ESPN found that only about four in 10 baseball fans are rooting for the slugger to break the record, while nearly three-quarters believe Bonds knowingly took performance-enhancing drugs. The Bonds backlash is also fueled by the left fielder’s demeanor, considered surly and arrogant by most.

“This is not just about being a jerk,” said Daniel Kramer. “A lot of great baseball players were not nice guys. But their performances were honest and legitimate.”

At Union, Neil was editor of the campus newspaper, the Concordiensis, while also stringing for area papers including the Times Union in Albany and the Schenectady Gazette. He is the dean of faculty at New Community Jewish High School in West Hills, Calif.

If Bonds steps to the plate ready to smack number 756, Neil won’t be watching. To him, the issue goes beyond Bonds.

“I’m somewhere between a purist and a dinosaur,” said Neil, who recently attended a Union alumni event in Los Angeles featuring President Stephen C. Ainlay. “Whether it’s the impact of pharmacology or vile materialism, much of the contemporary sports scene is bad. Barry is just one example of some of the excesses and moral challenges.”

Gabe fields the issue more directly.

“I watch baseball for pleasure,” he said. “Watching (Bonds) break the record would not be pleasurable because he’s a cheat.”

Posted on May 15, 2007

For a moment, best-selling novelist Walter Mosley sounded like a late-night infomercial pitchman as he addressed a group of Union College students May 9 in Schenectady.

He wasn't promising them they would grow more hair, increase their sex drives or shed inches from their waistlines.

What Mosley, best known for his Easy Rawlins mystery series, was hawking was something far more lasting and transformative.

Give him 90 minutes a day for one full year, he told the 30 students in flip-flops, cargo shorts and backward baseball caps, and he can make every last one of them a novelist.

"You're all writers in waiting," he said during a 60-minute discussion. He delivered the talk, spiked with political and social outrage, in a jazzy rhythm, his left hand fluttering in the air, rendering his chunky gold ring a flickering, mesmerizing flame.

He's a large, bearish presence with a gray goatee, clad in black jacket, black T-shirt, black jeans and black sneakers. His powerful words are delivered in a surprisingly soft, feathery voice with a slight lisp.

"There's not much to say about writing, and it's extraordinarily pedestrian anyway," said Mosley, who discussed his recently published book, "This Year You Write Your Novel" (Little, Brown and Company; $19.99), a 112-page primer on the craft.

The slim volume grew out of an essay Mosley wrote for The New York Times in 2000 as part of a "Writers on Writing" series.

Mosley said you must be motivated by an inner drive to tell a story and by the personal satisfaction that comes from exercising your creative imagination. Don't expect fame and fortune.

"If you want to make a lot of money, go into real estate," he said.

After publishing 28 books over the past 17 years — his first, "Devil in a Blue Dress," was a best-seller in 1990 and was later made into a movie starring Denzel Washington — Mosley has distilled the myths and mystique of writing a novel into three simple steps he laid out for the English literature class.

1. Write every day.

Spend a minimum of 90 minutes daily at your computer, no matter what. Mosley writes for three hours each morning, rarely missing a day. "Writing is primarily an unconscious activity," he said. "You get your 600 words down in 90 minutes and the rest of the day, your mind is working on the dream of your story."

2. Write without restraint.

"We're limited by false aesthetics," he said. "I'm against what the university has done with fiction writing. It doesn't own the field. Just because you're a Ph.D. doesn't make you a great storyteller."

3. Fight the urge to find excuses to avoid writing.

"Procrastination is the writer's greatest enemy," he said. "Let the lawn get shaggy and the paint peel from the walls. Keep at the writing. You'll discover a story to be told."

Binyavanga Wainaina, Union's visiting writer and an accomplished essayist and short story writer from Kenya, is admittedly frightened of tackling the long form of a novel.

"I'm the classic lazy procrastinator," he conceded to Mosley. "I start something new, get sidetracked and find ways to avoid the novel."

Mosley replied, "Don't expect to like writing a novel. Joseph Conrad wrote a lot about how much he hated writing."

Be ruthlessly disciplined and the words, and novels, will pile up.

"I finish a book on Tuesday and start a new one on Wednesday," he said.

Mosley talked about how he washed out of one college before earning a bachelor's degree, knocked around in a variety of jobs, including computer programming, before he hit his stride as a writer.

Mosley had to coax the Union students into admitting they had "committed fiction" in the past and might aspire to becoming novelists.

"It's OK. You don't have to be afraid to say you write," he said.

Mosley's message struck a chord with Ross Marvin, a senior English major who lugged a 2,500-page "Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism" under his arm and carried dreams of becoming a writer in his head.

"I'm planning to do the journalism thing for a while while I try to break into the literary field," said Marvin, of Clifton Park, a senior English major at Union and a 2003 Shenendahowa High School graduate who worked at the Borders bookstore in his hometown.

Marvin is also managing editor and a contributor to a campus journal of satire, The Dutch Oven.

He writes poetry and short stories for the Idol, Union's literary journal, and completed an 80-page senior thesis on suburbia.

After graduation, he'll attend a summer writing workshop, travel to Europe and then try to land a job as a newspaper reporter.

But his main aspiration, whenever he might be able to find the time, is to write a novel.

Mosley cut Marvin no slack on that score. Everyone's busy, busy, busy these days, he said, and he hears all the time from folks who say they'd love to write a novel if only they had the time.

"Make the time," Mosley said. "No excuses."

Look for inspiration no further than Homer.

"He was illiterate and blind and he was the greatest writer of all time," Mosley said.

Posted on May 15, 2007

SCHENECTADY — For cyclist Floyd Landis, the doping hearing that began Monday could be the final climb in a 10-month campaign to salvage his Tour de France title from cheating charges.

For Union College professor Tom Werner, the case is a compelling way to teach chemistry.

It's got questionable science. Personality conflicts. Politics.

And the story only got sexier last week when Landis claimed the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency offered him leniency to dish incriminating information about seven-time Tour winner Lance Armstrong.

"It's got everything," Werner told his students Monday. "And so it will be very, very interesting to see how all this plays out."

It'll be playing out in real time for the 19 students following the ripped-from-the-headlines "living syllabus" in Werner's class.

The new course, "Chemistry and Athletic Performance," looks at the cat-and-mouse competition between the athletes who dope and the scientists and sports administrators who try to catch them. Werner knows of no other class like it.

Monday the periodic table hung in the corner while a projector flashed lecture notes with headings like "Ways to Blood Dope" and "Scandals and Cycling: How did it Come to This?"

"It's pretty interesting — it's not your standard chemistry course," said John Ferrarone, 22, a chemistry major and former football player.

Werner developed the course in part because he feels professors could do better at linking classroom chemistry to the outside world. The 36-year Union veteran linked up with the California lab that's considered the gold standard for performance drug analysis: The U.S. Olympic Testing Laboratory at UCLA.

The lab's leader until recently, Don Catlin, performed the chemical sleuthing central to the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO) investigation involving alleged doping by Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi and others.

Catlin plays a role in the best-selling book about that case, "Game of Shadows." Catlin and his staff helped Werner develop the course, which uses "Game of Shadows" as a text. Werner spent part of February at Catlin's lab observing its operation.

Beyond molecules, Werner is also a devoted observer of baseballs. The 64-year-old used to worship Mickey Mantle. He defected to Red Sox Nation while studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In class, Werner delves into the chemistry of how banned substances work. He calls it a "really attractive topic" for students, who tend to enjoy talking about drugs.

But he also poses broader questions about sports doping.

Why do we care when an athlete cheats? How do anti-cheating policies differ between sports? How do fans react to cheating scandals among different sports?

The Landis case is a natural vehicle to explore both the science and the human story because of the approach he has taken to arguing his innocence.

It's been called the "Wiki Defense," a term that echoes the user-written Internet encyclopedia called Wikipedia. Landis posted 370 pages of testing documents on the Internet, material Werner makes use of in class. Landis also chose to hold the hearing that began Monday in public.

As the Web site of his "Floyd Fairness Fund" puts it, Landis is encouraging "discussion by experts and laymen alike."

In class Monday, the discussion was largely about BALCO. Werner asked whether students felt those who served jail time in the case got what they deserved.

"I would say it fits the crime," Ferrarone said. "You have to consider, of the drug being dealt, what portion of the population does this affect? We're talking about athletes, which is a very, very narrow portion of America. Whereas like a cocaine dealer or a pot dealer, that's going to be distributed to a much larger audience."

Ferrarone's classmate William Tamparo added: "I love Barry Bonds. After reading this book, I kind of look at him differently."

Posted on May 14, 2007

Political science major Karyn Amira ’07 was on a Vietnam term abroad her junior year when she and several friends visited the legendary Angkor Temples in Siem Reap, Cambodia. The driver they hired for the day added an unexpected stop: a landmine ‘museum.’

“It was more or less a shack nestled in the outskirts of the city. That’s where I learned about the horrific nature of landmines that continue to litter the Cambodian countryside,” Amira said.

After discovering that the United States was the only NATO country that has not signed  the Treaty to Ban Landmines, “I was shocked and a bit embarrassed,” Amira said.

She was also inspired.

Back on campus, she started a grassroots political action campaign aimed at college students to encourage the U.S. government to sign the international treaty. The campaign became her senior project. It also garnered the attention of a philanthropist who is giving 100 awards of $10,000 each – for a total of $1 million – to students from 66 American colleges and universities who are motivated to build peace throughout the world in the 21st century.

The winners of the Kathryn Wasserman Davis 100 Projects for Peace awards will complete their projects this summer. Davis, who turned 100 in February, established the program to mark her milestone birthday.

Amira’s proposal is titled “Students for a Mine-Free World.”

In Cambodia, Amira met the owner of the landmine museum, Aki Ra. Once a member, by force, of the extremist Khmer Rouge that ruled Cambodia from 1975-1979, he is trained to clear up to 40 mines within an hour, Amira said. The museum also serves as his home and a safe haven for children who have been maimed and injured by mines.

“I learned that land mines are still present in many Third World countries and kill innocent civilians every 22 minutes,” Amira said. “They hinder agriculture and tourism. They cause family burdens and break international humanitarian laws. Land mines obstruct peace, as they continue to kill innocent civilians even after the end of a war. Unlike armies, they do not abide by peace treaties since they are left in the ground, waiting for local men, women and children to step on them. Land mines are the unfortunate legacies of expired warfare.

“This treaty, if signed, will prohibit the use, stockpiling, transfer and production of landmines forever,” she said.

Campus action

Last year, Amira organized two demonstrations at Union about the dangers of landmines. She is now focusing on getting college students from other schools to view her Web site, www.minefreeworld.com, which includes everything from tips on how students can help, complete with sample advocacy letters and treaties, to links to politicians’ Web sites.

With the funds from her recent award, she plans to extend her outreach to other colleges, urge students to write advocacy letters to government officials in support of the treaty and raise money for land mine clearance.

“It is time to show that a new generation has taken notice of this international landmine crisis,” Amira said. “College students are an untapped resource that must be encouraged to participate in the political process.”        

Projects for Peace

100 Projects for Peace invited students from schools participating in the Davis United World College (UWC) Scholars Program to submit specific plans of action that will have lasting effects on world peace.

The Scholars Program provides grants to select American colleges and universities in support of students from all over the world who have completed their pre-university studies at UWC schools. Union joined the UWC Scholars’ community last year. The program is funded by Shelby M.C. Davis, the son of Kathryn Davis.

Among the many campuses represented in the peace projects are Amherst, Bates, Bowdoin, Bryn Mawr, Columbia, Cornell, Carleton, Harvard, Middlebury and Yale. Students will travel to more than 40 countries this summer to implement their projects and report on their experiences once they return.

For more information, visit the program’s Web site at www.kwd100projectsforpeace.org. 

Posted on May 14, 2007

It was the busiest lock on the Erie Canal. In its heyday around 1880, it served 47,000 vessels a season – one boat every four minutes – on the Empire State’s most famous waterway.

Today, Lock 23 in the Town of Rotterdam is little known except by bikers and walkers who might give it a glance as they pass along an overgrown section of the Mohawk Bikepath.

On Saturday, a group of students, faculty and staff from Union College worked with other volunteers to clear brush and small trees.

Saturday’s project revealed Lock 23 as a marvel of engineering, its meticulous stonework nearly as neat as it was century ago.

The lock was important historically as a busy transfer point for the overland route to Albany, which avoided waiting at locks in Cohoes and Waterford. Due to high volume, Lock 23 was expanded to a double lock. The lock doors are gone, but an observer can get a sense of what it was like as boats passed through.

Four years ago, Union students and faculty rebuilt the wooden pier on the west end of the lock; in 2001 they installed a replica of a locktender’s hut, the yellow and brown building on the site.

“I hope that this is a step in a longer term program of preserving and promoting this historic structure,” said Andrew Morris, assistant professor of history, who organized the event.

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