Helping Habitat for Humanity
The College donated a house near campus and pitched in hundreds of volunteer labor hours to help Habitat for Humanity to renovate the house for a family in need.
The two-family home on Barrett Street near the lower athletic fields was among 13 purchased by faculty and staff under the Union-Schenectady Initiative, an ambitious plan to revitalize the neighborhood west of the campus unveiled in October 1999. The College assumed ownership of the home in February 2004, after the former employee moved, and transferred the house to with the Schenectady chapter of Habitat for Humanity in late 2007, said President Stephen C. Ainlay.
The College kicked off the campaign to renovate the house during a press conference in mid October. Ainlay addressed a crowd of supporters and a work crew from Psi Upsilon. Roughly 15 members of the fraternity helped gut the house, said Chip Miller ’09, of Rye, N.Y.
“We are going to be working on this house all year round. We are going to be able to see the changes that it goes through. We are going to see it rebuilt and when Habitat finds a family to live here, we are going to be able to meet them and talk to them and get a personal connection,” Miller said.
Habitat for Humanity International is a nonprofit, nondenominational housing organization. Since 1976, Habitat has built more than 200,000 houses around the world, providing more than 1 million people in some 3,000 communities with safe, decent, and affordable shelter.
Ainlay, calling Habitat “a remarkable organization,” said donating the house presents the campus with an extraordinary opportunity. Shortly after he became president last year, Ainlay challenged the campus community to re-cultivate its sense of social connectedness and civic commitment.
He envisions the Union community—students, faculty, staff and alumni—taking the lead in restoring the house, which was built in 1910.
“My hope is that all of us can work alongside others from Schenectady and the family that will occupy the house to complete the project,” he said. “It will make a material difference, and it should pull us together as a community working for the common good."
Investing in Schenectady
General Electric will add 500 jobs as part of a $39 million plan to renovate buildings on the company’s Erie Boulevard campus and leaders of Price Chopper grocery stores plan to build a $22 million headquarters across the street from Union’s College Park Hall. Both GE and Price Chopper’s Golub Corp. originated in Schenectady and have strong ties to Union.
“Schenectady’s renaissance is a key reason why GE chose the city for its emerging alternative energy operations. Downtown revitalization has already added over 2,000 new jobs and now businesses are locating here,” said Jayme Lahut ’83, the executive director of Schenectady Metroplex.
GE’s expansion stems from its power generation business and will create jobs ranging from managers to engineers. Those jobs are in addition to 150 new positions at GE’s wind turbine service center, also on the Erie Boulevard campus, located near Union’s campus.
The Golub headquarters will be built on a 9.5-acre parcel that was formerly home to the Big N Plaza. An estimated 850 to 1,000 people will work in the building, which is set to be built next to a new YMCA. Price Chopper grocery stores are scattered throughout New England, New York and Pennsylvania and the company employs about 24,000.
Enhancing Greek life at Union
Timothy Dunn, Union’s new director of Fraternity and Sorority Affairs, began his career with Greek groups as a result of talking with a fraternity brother.
“Fraternities and sororities are about having lifelong relationships, building real bonds among brothers and sisters,” he said.
Dunn earned a bachelor’s degree in speech communications at Northeastern State University in Oklahoma, where he “was exposed to my first real large dyed-in-the-wool Greek system.” He went on to get a law degree from the University of Oklahoma, where he was a member of Kappa Alpha Psi. He was working in social services in California when his KAPsi brother hired him as an assistant director of residential life at the University of Hartford. In that position, he began co-advising for Greek organizations.
“Greek advising gave me a great understanding of the challenges faced on the academic side when dealing with problems created by an unhealthy Greek system, which is why I worked so hard to make it healthy and an asset to the university,” Dunn said.
He also was an adjunct professor of ethics, teaching an applied ethics course, “a great way to evaluate the students’ moral behavior and codes.”
A native of Abilene, Texas, Dunn had a brief stint as an advisor to fraternities at the University of Georgia before settling into the close-knit Union community this fall. Dunn’s training and experience seem well suited to a job that is one part counselor, one part liaison, and many parts champion for the 12 fraternities and five sororities at Union.
Speaking recently from his office on the fourth floor of Reamer Campus Center, Dunn reflected that he faces “a lot of the same challenges I’ve seen before. One is to broadcast the positive aspects of the Greek experience to the campus. The only thing people see is the quite visible social life, but there are lots of good things going on.”
Greek life at Union dates to 1825, with the founding of the nation’s first fraternity, Kappa Alpha. Over the next few years, two more fraternities were founded at Union, Sigma Phi, which is still active, and Delta Phi. They comprised the well-known Union triad.
Currently, about a third of all Union students belong to fraternities and sororities, which are governed by the Inter-Fraternity Council, Pan-Hellenic Council and Multicultural Greek Council. Forty-seven percent of eligible students (sophomore, juniors and seniors) are members.
“I want them to be one unified Greek community,” Dunn said. Recently, members of the three governing bodies volunteered together on the Habitat for Humanity house on Barrett Street, and “to my knowledge, it was the first joint community council endeavor,” he said.
Another goal of Dunn’s is to formalize the Greek system. “For a system to be valid and healthy, certain elements have to be in place,” he said. These include formalization of accreditation process, annual awards and recognition ceremonies for chapter accomplishments, and academic success and rehabilitation programs.
He also would like to work on new member education and membership recruitment and retention.
“Lifelong relationships are among the core values that the organization builds,” Dunn said. “Society today isn’t founded on too much. A colleague and I were talking about how genuine relationships don’t happen much. People text, they IM, they seek friends on Facebook. At their core, the Greek organizations stand for the very principles that our country was founded on—brotherhood, service to the community and living lives of integrity.”
While Greek numbers at Union have remained steady over the last decade, fraternities and sororities exist today as one choice among many for social, recreational and community service activities, along with Minerva houses and theme houses.
“It all works together,” said Dunn, noting that some of the most dynamic students on campus are leaders in all realms.
Angelou's message of hope
Maya Angelou, the award-winning poet, civil rights activist and playwright, captivated an overflow crowd of more than 900 in Memorial Chapel during a talk given in late October. People began lining up at least an hour before the event, hoping to get inside to hear the 79-year-old literary icon. For the people who packed the Chapel, Angelou did not disappoint.
Displaying her wide range of talents, Angelou sang, recited poetry, told jokes and offered words of wisdom to the audience, who responded with two standing ovations during the night.
She also recounted her difficult childhood growing up black and poor in Arkansas, which included being molested at age 7 by her mother’s boyfriend. Traumatized by the incident and the subsequent news that an uncle had killed her attacker, Angelou lost the ability to speak for five years.
Instead, she turned to reading for salvation. She was especially attracted to the words of Shakespeare, who seemed to understand her troubles.
“At one point I was sure that Shakespeare was probably a black girl,” she told the crowd.
Angelou is the recipient of dozens of honorary degrees, and she became one of only two poets to read an original work at a presidential inauguration when she was invited by President Bill Clinton to speak in 1993. Her poem, “On the Pulse of Morning,” earned Angelou a Grammy award. Her best known book is I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first of six volumes of her memoirs. The 1970 autobiography was nominated for a National Book Award.
Angelou’s visit was part of the College’s President’s Forum on Diversity.
Notables at Schaffer Library
A writer, a physician and a politician—Andrea Barrett ’74, Baruch Samuel Blumberg ’46 and William Henry Seward, Class of 1820—were the first to be featured in Union Notables, a new exhibit in the atrium of Schaffer Library.
The rotating exhibit features three outstanding alumni every six months.
Barrett graduated from Union with a degree in biology and pursued zoology and medieval history before writing fiction in earnest. In 1996, she received a National Book Award for Ship Fever, a collection of short stories. Her other top writing prizes include a Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize and two O. Henry awards.
Blumberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1976 for his pioneering work in studying the origin and dissemination of Hepatitis A and B.
During his career, Seward served as New York State governor, U.S. senator and secretary of state under President Abraham Lincoln. Seward helped write and sign the Emancipation Proclamation and is perhaps best known for engineering the $7.2 million United States purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867.
When each new group of Union Notables is installed, the preceding alumni will be relocated to a permanent home elsewhere on campus.
The initial group was on display through Feb. 29. The next group will feature Phil Alden Robinson ’71, screenwriter and director of Field of Dreams, Sneakers and Sum of All Fears; Gordon Gould ’41, inventor of the laser; and Lewis Henry Morgan, class of 1840, who is considered by many to be the father of modern American anthropology. That group will be on display from March 1 through Aug. 31. www.union.edu/notables.
Grants advance educational opportunities across disciplines
NSF grant boosts computer science
Union is among about 50 U.S. schools working to rejuvenate computing education using a major grant unveiled last fall by the National Science Foundation.
The foundation awarded $1.15 million to Union and Lafayette College, in Easton, Pa., for a joint five-year initiative to improve computing education and attract more students. That grant was part of $13 million awarded to the roughly 50 schools by the foundation’s Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering.
With a steep decline—60 percent—in undergraduate computing enrollments in recent years, “it’s important to figure out how to get these kids back in as majors, or at least to learn about computing,” said Computer Science Chair Valerie Barr.
Barr prepared the grant application in 2006 and is leading the project with Lafayette’s department chair, Chun Wai Liew. Their work, along with the work of other grant recipients, is aimed at ensuring the talent needed to address computing challenges of the 21st century workplace.
The grant dovetails with other changes already under way in Union’s Computer Science Department. There are now five introductory courses that focus on a range of areas, including computational science, artificial intelligence, robotics, game development and media computation.
“Our goal is to get more students involved by creating a curriculum that works across disciplines. Students in various fields, from biology to psychology, would take a computation course and go back to their home departments prepared to do discipline-specific, computationally intensive work,” Barr said.
Barr noted that Union has interdisciplinary majors who are pairing computer science with visual arts, music, philosophy, psychology, economics, biology and math. This focus on making connections between and across disciplinary boundaries corresponds with key academic components of the College’s Strategic Plan.
Barr, who came to Union in 2004 after nine years at Hofstra University, holds a Ph.D. from Rutgers University. She helps coordinate Union’s Digital Arts Program, which includes a new introductory computer science course, several visual arts courses, and classes in gaming and Web programming.
The grant will also help support faculty travel to conferences and supervision of summer research. Other schools that received grants include Trinity College, Ohio State, Wake Forest, Penn State, Washington and Purdue universities, and the University of California at Berkeley.
Social robotics grant
The Union-Lafayette collaboration follows on the heels of another National Science Foundation grant aimed at studying and revitalizing undergraduate computer science education.
The College has joined with researchers from the University at Albany, Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute, Schenectady County Community College and the Schenectady Museum & Suits-Bueche Planetarium to study the field using interactive social robots. A social robotics curriculum typically incorporates elements of design, psychology, cognitive science, communication and philosophy in addition teaching to key computer science and engineering principles.
Through workshops for academics, students, industry leaders and others, the group will create a multi-disciplinary program in social robotics that would appeal to nontraditional computer science and engineering majors.
Union’s share of the two-year $330,000 grant is $40,000.
“We are going to lay the foundation for social robotics to help bring more students into the computer science field,” Barr said.
Seminar for entrepreneurs
Hal Fried, the David L. and Beverly B. Yunich Professor of Business Ethics, along with the Thomas J. Watson, Sr. and Emma Watson Day Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Ron Bucinell, received a $32,000 grant from the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance. The grant will support a seminar, taught by both professors, that will bring to together teams of engineering, performing arts, economics and humanities students to pursue socially productive entrepreneurial ideas that can become operating and marketable concepts. The grant was the only one given to a small liberal arts college.
Tutu discusses South Africa
Naomi Tutu, the daughter of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, of South Africa, visited a sociology class and spoke at the Nott Memorial in mid-October on behalf of the Diana Legacy Fund, an international campaign to bring hospice care and other services to sub-Saharan Africa. Phil Di Sorbo ’71 helped launch the Diana Legacy Fund and helped bring Tutu to campus. Di Sorbo manages a hospice care organization that serves AIDS-ravaged Africa.
'A lving society'
About 115 alumni ranging from the Class of 1936 to 2007 gathered in early October for a Terrace Council reception at The Ritz-Carlton near Central Park in New York City. The reception was hosted by President Stephen C. Ainlay and his wife, Judith. Similar events are held each year to thank leadership donors.
Terrace Council members give $2,000 or more to Union each year, though membership for young alumni is set at reduced levels. The council, made up of nearly 700 members, accounted for $2.4 million, or half of all gifts, to the Union Fund during the 2006-2007 academic year.
“The event made me feel that we are part of something that is more than just giving money. It’s a living society with values and a common identity shared across the years,” said Nick Salvatoriello ’07.
Ainlay joins with state panel
A state commission charged with improving higher education in New York issued a series of sweeping recommendations in December designed to make college more affordable for families, spur economic development by investing billions for research in fields like bioscience and engineering, and transform New York into one of the “idea capitals” of the 21st century.
“As I stated in my convocation address, no institution of higher education today can afford to operate without a clear understanding of need, without a clear sense of educational mission, or without a plan to move ahead,” said President Stephen C. Ainlay.
Ainlay is among 30 experts culled from public and private colleges and universities, as well as the business community, who were named to the state Commission on Higher Education last May. The panel was created by Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who received the commission’s preliminary report in mid December. A final report is due by June 1, 2008.
Among the proposals recommended by the commission, which was chaired by Hunter Rawlings III, the former president of Cornell University:
• Create a low-interest loan program financed by tax-exempt bonds so New Yorkers gain access to lower-cost capital to meet college expenses.
• Increase financial aid and program support for students enrolled in the state’s opportunity programs.
• Establish a $3 billion, peer-review Empire State Innovation Fund to spur research and foster economic development.
• Support innovative education partnerships between colleges and universities and school districts to address the comprehensive needs of students.
• Promote New York’s colleges and universities in nations abroad.
“It has been an honor to serve on a commission that has identified several significant steps that should be considered if we are to meet the challenges and embrace the opportunities before us,’’ Ainlay said.
Founded in 1795, the first college chartered by the Board of Regents of the State of New York, Union has historically played a key role in shaping higher education in the state.
The series of recommendations outlined in the commission’s preliminary report are “but one step in our collective effort to reshape higher education in New York by preparing well-rounded citizens who understand the demands of our technological and scientific society,” Ainlay said.
Commencement speaker
Brown University President Ruth J. Simmons, a prominent national leader in higher education and the first African-American president of an Ivy League institution, will be the featured speaker and honorary chancellor at the June 15. Commencement. Simmons, who will receive an honorary doctorate in humane letters, is noted for her commitment to diversity and engineering, two key initiatives that are also integral to the Union campus.
Turner tells of Ramée’s plan
Paul V. Turner ’62, professor of architectural history at Stanford University, gave a lecture in late October dealing with Joseph Ramée and his design of Union’s campus. Turner, a native of Schenectady, is the author of the 1996 book, Joseph Ramée, International Architect of the Revolutionary Era. He holds a master’s degree in architecture and a doctorate in art history from Harvard University.
In conjunction with his visit, Schaffer Library created an exhibit of Ramée’s plans and drawings for Union, which are preserved in the College archives.
Ramée, a French architect and landscape designer, trained in Paris in the 1780s and came to the United States in 1812. He produced his design for the Union campus in 1813. He was considered one of the two or three most experienced and talented architects in this country at the time.
According to Turner, “Ramée’s design for Union created new standards of collegiate and university planning, which have helped shape American campuses ever since.”
A film crew from DoubleJay Creative recorded Turner giving a walking tour of campus. That film will be made available to the College community later this year.