Posted on Jun 5, 2008

Jim Spanfeller ’79 was right. In January 2001 Spanfeller told the news Web site, The Industry Standard, that Internet businesses were suffering from too much pessimism. The hangover from the dot-com crash would be washed away by reinvigorated Web revenue, he said.

Spanfeller was then in his first days as president and CEO of Forbes.com, a sister product to Forbes magazine. Despite investing millions, Forbes.com was in 2001 losing money and pulling in too few unique visitors to boost advertising revenue. By early 2008, things had changed. The Web site had gone from 500,000 to 22 million unique users per month and ad revenue had grown 50 to 60 percent each year, said Spanfeller during a January visit to Union College. The site employed 120 in 2001 and employs about 300 today.

So, what worked for Forbes.com?

“You can take brands and iterate them into different mediums. Hopefully, we have proved that. But if you take a brand into a different medium, you really can’t be slavish to what previously made the brand work. What people look for on the Web is different from what they are looking for in a magazine,” Spanfeller said. “I think that is a huge mistake that people make and continue to make. The Web is not a medium. It’s like electricity, it’s an enabler.”

Spanfeller joined Forbes.com after a stint as head of the consumer magazine division for Ziff Davis Media. Prior to that Spanfeller held an executive post overseeing Yahoo! Internet Life, Family PC and Expedia magazines. In his current role, Spanfeller oversees reporters, editors and Web support staff who help publish about 3,500 stories a day, manage video news content and offer a host of online tools.

And Spanfeller expects that if Forbes.com remains a popular Web destination, ad revenue will expand.

“It is going to grow. Time spent online is growing rapidly. Dollars spent on online advertising is way underweighted. The standard investment house analysis says that those numbers will come together,” Spanfeller said.

There may be more good reasons to trust Spanfeller’s insight. In a 1997 Union College magazine profile, Spanfeller said of the Internet, “We are still in the embryonic stages of growth.” The impact of what was then called the World Wide Web would be greater than television, he predicted.

Soon after Spanfeller left Union in 1979, he joined the Soho Weekly News as a reporter. His goal was to write a great American novel in the same vein as one-time newspaper reporter Ernest Hemmingway. The novel remains unwritten; but maybe there is a story to be pulled from Spanfeller’s career track, which also includes a stint as publisher of the former Newsweek On Campus, a senior manager at Playboy, publisher of Inc. magazine from 1993 to 1996, and later an executive slot at Yahoo! Internet Life, a magazine about compelling Web sites. The magazine had a paid subscription of 1.1 million but shut down in July 2002 as ad revenue declined and online publications grew in popularity.

Spanfeller, 51, lives in New York City’s West Side with his wife, Margaret (DiMarco) Spanfeller ’79. Spanfeller travelled to campus in January to give students career advice during a panel discussion with College Trustee Mark Walsh ’76, CEO of Genius Rocket, and Peter Handy ’79, general partner of Star Media Group.

As for the lasting impact of his time at Union, he said: “That’s easy. The people I met. My best friends in life came from my time at Union. It speaks to the community that Union is and continues to be."

Posted on Jun 4, 2008

Dr. Lewis Drusin ’60 was given in mid-May a prestigious award by the American College of Physicians to honor decades of work in the prevention and treatment of sexually transmitted diseases and hospital-acquired infections. The award marked a high point along a career path that changed course after a conversation in fall 1959 with former Union College biology professor Bill Winne.

Winne noticed that Drusin, then a lab assistant, appeared disappointed about his plans to attend the University of Rochester’s medical school. Drusin told Winne, who had earned a doctorate from Cornell University in 1947, that he aspired to attend Cornell’s medical college but had been unable to secure an interview.

“He said, ‘Bring me the name of the dean and I’ll phone him.’ And he did and that’s how I got an interview at Cornell,” Drusin said. “It led to everything that I do.”

Drusin is today a professor of clinical medicine and clinical public health at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York City and an attending physician at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. But his work extends beyond the classroom and hospital walls. The college of physicians in May gave Drusin the James D. Bruce Memorial Award for clinical and public policy work aimed at preventing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases through education, treatment and clinical studies.

The American College of Physicians is a national organization of doctors who specialize in the prevention, detection and treatment of medical illnesses in adults. Past recipients of the award, which recognizes distinguished contributions in preventive medicine, include Nobel Prize winner Dr. Jonas Salk, for the polio vaccine, and Dr. Donald Henderson, for eradicating smallpox.

“It’s just amazing to me to be on a list with those people,” Drusin said.

Drusin has published more than 50 papers and book chapters dealing with sexually transmitted diseases and the epidemiology of hospital-acquired infections. At Weill-Cornell, he directs a program placing public health and community medicine students in field locations, and has helped establish an endowment that offers international rotations to medical students. He served as president of the American Venereal Disease Association (now the American STD Association), and he has held prominent roles in many international scientific congresses and study groups relating to sexually transmitted diseases.

“The impact of dealing with sexually transmitted diseases is immediate. Consider the side effects of STDs: infertility; a lot of anxiety in the people who are infected; economic depravation due to lost time at work; severe disability; and sometimes death,” Drusin said.

Since 1995 he has served as the main representative of the International Union Against Sexually Transmitted Infections to the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. He is a fellow of the American College of Physicians, a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London and one of only two American honorary life members of the British Association for Sexual Health and HIV. He also earned a master’s degree from the Columbia University School of Public Health.

In laying the foundation of his career, Drusin relied on mentor relationships with Dr. Walsh McDermott, professor and Chairman of Public health, and Bruce Webster, Emeritis Professor of Medicine and our country’s leading venereologist, at Cornell. Drusin’s work in the realm of STDs stemmed from a stint at the Centers for Disease Control from 1966 to 1968. Drusin modeled relationships with these two leading doctors at Cornell after those that he built with Winne and Henry Butzel, who was an associate professor of biology during Drusin’s years at Union.

“Close working relationships with full professors at Union fostered the development of both my confidence to act independently and think critically for problem solving. I continued the same thing at Cornell. I decided early on that Dr. McDermott would be my role model and mentor. I got to know him and spent summers working with him. After I returned from the CDC, he introduced me to Dr. Webster, who also became my mentor,” Drusin said. “Interacting one-on-one with professors who really take an interest is critical for a young person’s development.”

Posted on Jun 4, 2008

Ten Union seniors joined more than 13,000 graduate students and doctoral and medical researchers at the 2008 Experimental Biology conference in San Diego recently. The conference is the international meeting for the American Physiological Society, American Society of Molecular Biology and numerous other societies.

The Union students are: Kaitlin Arntzen, Alex Carrese, Olga Davydenko, Cassandra Denefrio, Bridget Duffy, Michael Gallagher, Syed Hussnain, Dionna Kasper, Jennifer Libous and Latoya Roper.

They presented their original senior theses in poster format and included work ranging from understanding how development affects grasshopper locomotory physiology to using organic chemistry to improve drug delivery across cell membranes. 

Faculty co-authors on posters include: Kristen Fox, assistant professor of Chemistry, John Horton, associate professor of Biology, Brian Cohen, lecturer in Biology; Joanne Kehlbeck, assistant professor of Chemistry; Barbara Danowski, associate professor of Biology; Quynh Chu-LaGraff, associate professor of Biology; and Scott Kirkton, assistant professor of Biology.

In addition, Kirkton presented a poster that described a new lab for the Biology 101 course at Union that he designed with Stephen Rice, associate professor of Biology.

Kirkton and Rice received the Research Recognition Award from the Teaching Section of the APS for their poster.

Attending the meeting with Kirkton and students was Chu-LaGraff.

Posted on Jun 4, 2008

Paul LeClerc traced the course of his career and cited Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom, as a constant companion during a keynote address at the annual Founders Day gathering in Memorial Chapel.

At the February event, LeClerc received the inaugural John Bigelow Medal, established by President Stephen C. Ainlay to recognize friends of the College who have contributed to the advancement of humanity. Bigelow, Class of 1835, was an author, publisher, lawyer and statesman who was instrumental in the formation of the New York Public Library, which LeClerc has led since 1993.

As a scholar, LeClerc specializes in 18th century French literature and the Enlightenment, a field he researched beginning in 1966 using Bigelow’s personal library. The collection was donated to the College and is housed in Special Collections. “My career at Union began with Minerva. It began with Bigelow’s books. Minerva stayed with [Bigelow]. Minerva, for him, became a symbol for the New York Public Library. Minerva and the Enlightenment became core principles that guide this College and guide so many of us,” LeClerc said.

The College’s seal bears the image of Minerva and a French phrase meaning, “We all become brothers under the laws of Minerva.” The New York Public Library also holds Minerva as an important symbol of the pursuit of knowledge, as does Hunter College, where LeClerc served as president from 1988 to 1993.

LeClerc, who was a professor of French at Union from 1966 to 1979, expanded the College motto in connecting Minerva with Union and the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was a philosophical movement in the 18th century which rejected traditional social, religious and political ideas in favor of rationalism and individual rights.

“The motto, ‘We all become brothers and sisters under the laws of Minerva,’ is a direct result of the philosophy of the 18th century,” LeClerc said. “If you give people access to information and you prepare them to look at that information and think about it in critical way, they will achieve the discovery of truth.”

LeClerc was chair of Union’s Department of Modern Languages and Literatures from 1971 through 1977. He is the author of five scholarly volumes on writers of the French Enlightenment. His contributions to French culture have earned him the Order of the Academic Palms (Officer) and the French Legion of Honor (Chevalier). He is a trustee of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and is a director of the National Book Foundation, which gives out National Book Awards and seeks to expand the audience for the best American literature.

Founders Day commemorated the 213th anniversary of the granting of the College’s charter from the New York State Board of Regents. Prior to his speech, Ainlay gave LeClerc the Bigelow Medal and discussed the importance of the College’s history.

“We look to our past as a source of inspiration, we should remember our history of firsts, our history of contribution as a matter of pride, to be sure,” Ainlay said. “But we should also view them as reminders of the ongoing opportunity and ongoing responsibility we have to make a difference. Making a difference—this is our history; this is central to our mission; this is who we are.”

John Bigelow

John Bigelow Union may have been fortunate to avoid John Bigelow’s first few college years in the early 1830s. Bigelow entered a college in Hartford, Conn. two months shy of his 14th birthday and became known as a prankster with strong opinions who was often quick to anger.

At Union, Bigelow matured and became a dedicated intellectual but still held tight to passionate opinions. Bigelow joined Union in the spring 1834 and was active in the Sigma Phi Society, joined a debating club and spent hours reading at the Union library. He was awarded a bachelor’s degree in July 1835 but was passed over as Commencement speaker.

“I left burning with indignation against the faculty and the institution. The reason given by Professor [Alonzo] Potter for refusing to grant the honor was not true and I have never been able to feel toward the College again as my Alma Mater,” Bigelow wrote.

But time seems to have healed that wound. Bigelow later donated his large personal collection of books to Union. And in 1869 he addressed Union graduates at a New York City meeting and recalled the “learned and accomplished” teachers from Union who left an “inheritance of usefulness,” according to an essay by former Union professor Joseph D. Doty.

After leaving Union, Bigelow became an author, publisher, lawyer and statesman who helped form the New York Public Library. He worked for several years as an attorney in the 1840s and by 1849 became the managing editor and part owner, with poet William Cullen Bryant, of the New York Evening Post. “Bigelow became noted, as editor, for sincerity, undeviating regard for principle, and biting strength of expression,” wrote Margaret Clapp, former Wellesley College president who won a Pulitzer Prize for her 1947 Bigelow biography called Forgotten First Citizen.

In 1861, Bigelow became U.S. consul in Paris during the Civil War. In that role he prevented the delivery of warships from France to the Confederacy, which he detailed in his book, France and the Confederate Navy, 1862–1868.

While living in Paris, Bigelow discovered and published the lost manuscript for The e Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin; he later edited Franklin’s complete works. He wrote a biography of U.S. presidential candidate Samuel Jones Tilden, a close friend, and several works on the theology of Emanuel Swedenborg.

“There was no room for laziness in his schedule. Hours empty of thought or purposeful activity did not exist. There was too much to be known, too many ideas to explore in conversation and in reading, just as there had been in college,” Clapp wrote.

He was politically active, serving as New York’s secretary of state; an advisor to the Republican’s first presidential candidate, John Charles Frémont. He was a proponent of the construction of the Panama Canal, and exposed the political corruption of William “Boss” Tweed’s Tammany Hall in New York City.

As a student at Union, Bigelow found the College’s library a revelation. With Tilden and others, he worked tirelessly to form the New York Public Library that he said would play an important role in creating an informed citizenry that is basic to democracy. In 1911, seven months before he died, Bigelow saw the completion of the main branch of the New York Public Library.

Though he championed the library’s formation, Bigelow often cautioned against reading too much too quickly: “Beware of the ambition of reading fast or much. It is the most certain way you can adopt of being a long time in learning very little. You should read to get new ideas and not distractions… Reading without meditation is like eating without digestion.

Posted on Jun 4, 2008

Members of the Union family came out in force this spring and raised a significant sum – more than $70,000 – that will help everything from health care organizations to earthquake victims. Here’s a sampling of those charitable efforts:

• Relay for Life: nearly $34,000 to benefit the American Cancer Society
• Women’s ice hockey team Pink at the Rink event: $11,800 for the American Cancer Society (the league-wide ECAC effort raised $40,000)
• Sigma Delta Tau sorority gala: $8,000 for Prevent Child Abuse New York
• Las Hermanas of Tau Chapter of Latinas Promoviendo Comunidad/Lambda Pi Chi sorority’s third annual Domestic Violence and Rape Awareness Banquet, “Out of the Silence, Finding Our Voices”: $4,000 to benefit the National Organization of Sisters of Color Ending Sexual Assault, A Long Walk Home, Inc. and the YWCA of Schenectady

• Asian Student Union faculty fundraiser for earthquake relief in the Sichuan Province of China: More than $2,500
• Sigma Chi fraternity’s annual Derby Days: $1,525 to support The Elephant in the Living Room, a domestic violence prevention organization  
• Tri Delta sorority’s annual pancake breakfast and a clothing sale co-hosted with Golub House: $800 for St. Jude’s Hospital
• Catwalk for a Cause fashion show: More than $500 for Student Advocacy for Equitable Recovery (SAFER), Tulane student recovery project
• Run, Ribs and Reggae, organized by the Student Athlete Advisory Committee: $600 for the Ronald McDonald House

• Phi Delta Theta fraternity’s Car Bash: $350 for the ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) Association
• Alpha Delta Phi fraternity’s pizza and grill sales: $100 to help sponsor a youth in Uganda
• Alpha Epsilon Pi, Wold House and Green House barbecue and movie screening of “Wet Hot American Summer”: $100 to the Red Cross to help earthquake victims in China.