Pulitzer Prize-winning author James M. McPherson will deliver the keynote address at the Founders Day convocation Thursday, Feb. 26 at 12:45 p.m. in Memorial Chapel. The event, which commemorates the 214th anniversary of the granting of the College’s charter by the state, will also celebrate Union’s role in the 19th-century abolitionist movement.
During the ceremony, the College will unveil a portrait of Moses Viney, a runaway slave from Maryland who escaped to Schenectady on the Underground Railroad. Viney was a coachman, messenger and constant companion of Eliphalet Nott, the longtime president of Union who eventually secured Viney’s freedom.
Viney’s portrait was completed by Simmie Knox, a renowned African-American artist who has painted the official White House portraits of former President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and other political and cultural figures.
Jared M. Gourrier ’10 will discuss Viney’s life and his role as a central figure on campus.
McPherson, the George Henry Davis ’86 Professor of American History Emeritus at Princeton University, will give the address: “Union College’s Role in the Abolitionist Movement.” A Civil War historian, McPherson has authored 11 books, including “Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era,"which received the Pulitzer Prize in 1989. His latest book, “Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief,” was recently awarded the prestigious Lincoln Prize. McPherson also won the Lincoln Prize in 1998 for “For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War.”
James McPherson, George Henry Davis '86 Professor of American History Emeritus at Princeton University, Founders Day 2009, author, Battle Cry of Freedom
Also at Founders Day, Daniel Frio, a history teacher at Wayland High School in Massachusetts, will receive the Gideon Hawley Teacher Recognition Award. Frio was nominated by Priscilla Wright ’12. The award, named for the 1809 graduate of Union who was New York state’s first superintendent of public education, is given to secondary school teachers who have had a continuing influence on the academic life of Union students.
Two students – seniors Adrienne B. Hart and Alexander H. Schlosberg – are to receive the Hollander Prize for Music, and will provide a musical interlude.
The Founders Day convocation is the first in a series of events to commemorate Union’s role in the abolitionist movement. From Feb. 27 through 29, the College is hosting “The Underground Railroad, Its Legacies, and Our Communities,” the eighth annual Underground Railroad History Conference, at College Park Hall. Schaffer Library is hosting an exhibit, “Abolitionism and the Struggle for African-American Freedom: The Union College Experience,” chronicling the College’s involvement in the struggle for African-American freedom.
The amazing or phenomenal is often found in the seemingly simplest thing – like a dragonfly. Common insects though they are, dragonflies possess an exceptional ability that has fascinated one Union biologist for years.
A dragonfly takes a break on Prof. Robert Olberg's neck in the indoor flight arena at the Janelia Farm Research Campus in Virginia.
“Dragonflies have the best eyes in the insect world and probably the best flight – and they’re 97-percent accurate in catching flying insects like mosquitoes,” professor Robert Olberg said. “With a visual response time of only 30 milliseconds, they typically capture their prey midflight in about 150 milliseconds.”
“Our own visual systems are much slower. By the time we realize they’ve taken off, they’ve already caught their prey,” he continued. “I want to understand how they do this.”
In his quest to discover why the dragonfly is such a remarkable aerial assassin, Olberg has learned the insect owes much of its enviable skill to a specialized set of neurons.
“We have identified neurons directly involved with this behavior,” Olberg said. “And when those neurons fire, they make the dragonfly turn its wings just so or move its head a certain way.”
Olberg knows this because he and his colleagues have actually placed tiny electrodes on the insects’ neurons. These microelectrodes, whose tips are smaller than a wavelength of light and require specialized equipment to insert, measure the response of neurons to stimuli in Olberg’s lab.
“We show a stationary dragonfly moving images on a computer screen and see how they respond,” he explained. “We’ve found the specific function for each neuron this way. One might say, ‘Go left.’ Another might say, ‘Go right.’”
A prototype version of the telemetry chip, developed to record and transmit neuron and muscle activity from a freely flying dragonfly.
Olberg and his student-researchers also conducted experiments outside with a small bead masquerading as tasty prey. In filming the dragonflies’ pursuit of the bead and playing it back in slow motion, they saw something else that makes these arthropods awesomely efficient predators.
“We’ve learned they have a very sophisticated prey-capture strategy – they predict the location prey will be at and intercept it there,” Olberg said. “Most animals aim at where the prey is, but dragonflies aim at where it will be.”
Having accumulated all this knowledge, Olberg is preceding with the next phase of his investigation into the neurological workings of the dragonfly. He knows how the insects’ neurons respond to images on a computer screen, but he doesn’t know how those same neurons respond when the animals are actually free to behave normally.
In an indoor flight arena full of dragonflies, their prey, a built-in pond and artificial sunlight, Olberg is working with Dr. Anthony Leonardo at Janelia Farm, a research campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Ashburn, Va. Here, he explained, the dragonflies can react to food-items like fruit flies more naturally.
“The big dream is to outfit the arena dragonflies with very small telemetry chips containing accelerometers, amplifiers and transmitters,” Olberg said. “We have a colleague, Dr. Reid Harrison at the University of Utah, who is working on this.”
“We are now testing the first version, a 600-milligram chip, and development is underway for an even smaller, lighter one,” he added. “We’re not there yet – this is a many-year project – but it’s where we’re going.”
The Air Force is interested in where Olberg’s efforts are taking him.
Union Prof. Robert Olberg, and Anthony Leonardo of Howard Hughes Medical Institute, attach an RFID tag to a dragonfly. The RFID tags are being tested as a possible power source for an implanted telemetry chip.
“My lab at Union gets helpful support from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, whose mission is to fund pure research in areas it believes have value,” Olberg said. “There are possible applications for what we’re studying in biomimetics. We can take what we learn from insects and apply that knowledge to technologies like robotics and machine vision.”
For his part, though, Olberg doesn’t think of his research in terms of applications.
“I just want to understand how it works,” he said.
Professor Franklin H. Gidding’s sociology lectures at Columbia University often drifted off topic. As World War I drew to a close in 1918, Giddings increasingly voiced his disdain for German and Russian political policy. The classroom diatribes, which were not welcome by some students, displayed Giddings’ intellectual range and compelling speaking style but also revealed his at-times overbearing personality and dogmatic nature, according to Clarence H. Northcott, a scholar and author of a chapter on Giddings in An Introduction to the History of Sociology, published in 1948.
It was a mix of these traits that launched Giddings career as a pioneering American sociologist. He drew on varying intellectual influences, ranging from Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution to his work as a Union civil engineering student, to build his career in sociology. He employed scientific principles to produce an analysis of human society that helped move sociology into the realm of research science.
Before entering Union, Giddings studied the work of Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Thomas Henry Huxley and John Tyndall. After leaving Union in 1875, he became a newspaper editor, writer, statistician and later a full-time professor and leading social scientist. From the mid-1890s until his death in 1931, Giddings authored several books in the then-fledgling field of sociology, became well known for his theory of “consciousness of kind” and is today considered one of the founders of American sociology.
“To sum up, Giddings approaches the social process from the standpoint of a psychologist who is a statistician and a scientist,” Northcott wrote.
Giddings was born in March 1855 in Sherman, Conn. to a well-known orthodox Congregationalist minister named Edward Jonathan Giddings. The younger Giddings did not follow his father’s path of religious instruction, but instead studied under his two grandfathers, and pursued surveying and mechanical drawing and the art of tanning, according to Ellsworth R. Fuhrman, who wrote Giddings’ entry in AmericanNational Biography.
Giddings entered Union in 1873 and departed in 1875 for a job as associate editor of the Winston Connecticut Herald. In 1888, he was awarded a degree as a member of the Class of 1877. Giddings was given an honorary Union degree in 1897 and returned to the College as a guest lecturer on at least one occasion.
In the mid-1880s, Giddings became known as a writer for two Springfield, Mass. newspapers and worked for the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics. He was also publishing articles in scholarly and nonacademic journals, which enjoyed wide readership. In 1888, future U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, then a professor at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, invited Giddings to be a lecturer on politics, according to American National Biography.
In 1894 Giddings joined the faculty at Columbia, where he was the first full professor in sociology in the United States. He remained there as professor of sociology and the history of civilization for more than 35 years.
In the footnotes of Northcott’s book chapter on Giddings, he and book editor Harry Elmer Barnes, write:
“No other American sociologist could lecture with the power, conciseness and organization that Giddings could exhibit when he wished to do so, but he rarely conducted a course systematically, and at times, a course of lectures might bear little resemblance to the subject matter announced. That was especially true after 1914. In a certain sense, Giddings was an intellectual ‘war casualty.’ He was veritably obsessed with anti-Germanism, which after 1918, turned into anti-Bolshevism, and for years his lectures were more diatribes against his pet hates than calm sociological analysis. But, however little they might contribute to sociological clarification, they were always interesting and stimulating.”
Yet in much of his scholarly work, Giddings was a calm analyst who laid a foundation for hsi successors. [Editor's note: The printed magazine contained an error in this sentence.]
Giddings best-known contribution to sociology was the theory of consciousness of kind, which sought to explain the evolution of knowledge and society, according to Fuhrman.
“[Consciousness of kind] is that pleasurable state of mind which included organic sympathy, the perception of resemblance, conscious or reflective sympathy, affection, and the desire for recognition,” wrote Giddings in Elements of Sociology, published in 1898.
Consciousness of kind develops naturally among a group over a long period of time and dictates reaction to stimuli, according to Giddings. After humans developed language, Giddings theorized that the emotions connected with consciousness of kind converted the herd or pack into society, according to Northcott.
Giddings would go on to author several more books, some colored by his political beliefs, and others that were largely scientific, like Studies in the Theory of Human Society, published in 1924. He saw his work as a kind of psychology of society, based in statistical method, aimed at categorizing group behavior and providing a criticism that might help build a social ideal.
The seeds of change for the U.S. health care system may have been sown in the Nott Memorial on a Friday night last October. That’s where a group of alumni friends—physicians, health administrators, college faculty, lawyers, insurance executives and nurses—heard from a leading health care reformer and began a weekend symposium aimed at creating guidelines for improving what they called a system in crisis.
The event was the second in the Alumni and Friends Symposium series supported by College Trustee Nancy Eppler-Wolff ’75 and her brother, David Eppler ’82. The three-day event produced a detailed report and memo sent to U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and to members of President Barack Obama’s administration, who last fall targeted several health care reforms in their campaign platform.
“First, it was unanimous that the status quo is unacceptable and the current path is untenable in the long run,” reads the report generated by the symposium. “Health insurance is the fastest growing cost component for employers. Premiums generally increasing at twice the rate of inflation put an undue burden on both American workers and businesses. Clearly health care reform must be a part of any long-term solution to our economic problems and international competitiveness.”
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, chairman of the Department of Bioethics, Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health was the Friday night keynote speaker. Emanuel is a breast oncologist and the author and editor of numerous books, including Healthcare Guaranteed and the recently published Oxford Textbook of Clinical Research Ethics.
In January, he was named as a health care expert in the White House Office of Management and Budget. His brother, Rahm Emanuel, is President Obama’s chief of staff.
During his speech at Union, Emanuel outlined a comprehensive tax-supported universal health care plan in which Americans get vouchers to buy basic health insurance coverage, with additional vouchers offered for advanced care. The plan keeps insurance companies in place and shifts costs of health care away from employers.
“This system is much more likely to emphasize primary care doctors. You are likely to see health care plans pay more to primary care doctors and less to specialists,” Emanuel said. “Pediatricians, psychiatrists, internists and family practice doctors are likely to get a much better deal in this system. In the current system, it is true that most American docs are very unsatisfied.”
The symposium’s second day of events featured Timothy E.Quill, professor of medicine, psychiatry and medical humanities at the University of Rochester Medical Center. He talked about end-of-life care in a discussion moderated by Carol Weisse, professor of psychology and director of Health Professions Program.
Throughout the weekend, guests participated in a series of workshops aimed at defining problems facing America’s health care system and proposing solutions. Part of the symposium’s goal was to help graduates re-engage in the intellectual life they enjoyed at Union, said political science Professor Terry Weiner.
“Union should be part of a continuing intellectual stimulation; an intellectual and professional growth through a lifetime. Hopefully these seminars will allow alumni and friends to renew the intellectual experience they enjoyed at Union and think about important issues,” Weiner said.
The first Alumni and Friends Symposium, held in June 2007, was modeled after the “Moral Dilemmas of Governing” class led for many years by Byron Nichols. Twenty former students of Nichols, a popular political science professor at Union from 1968 to 2008, returned for a spirited discussion on the moral and political issues surrounding illegal immigration.
Both symposiums have been aimed at providing impactful suggestions for changing faltering federal systems.
“Symposium members generated a compelling set of guidelines that focus on issues of cost control, prevention and equitable care. I hope that our state and federal officials will use these guidelines wisely to help guide their own thinking about these difficult issues,” Eppler-Wolf said.
Guidelines for change:
Major points from the symposium letter sent to Capitol Hill
• The status quo is not an option. Reform is critical to promote recovery and expand coverage to all Americans.
• We must not only guarantee universal access, but equally important is controlling costs and improving quality.
• The current link of health insurance to employment is costly to employers and expensive to administer. Plans that break that link are to be preferred.
• Reform must place a renewed emphasis on primary care and prevention as the best strategy to improve quality and reduce cost.
• To gather the support of physicians and improve the morale of the profession, malpractice reform should be addressed and not postponed.
• Whatever system of financing and delivery is ultimately chosen, care must be taken to structure incentives that match the goals of the system such as adjusting reimbursement rates to reward primary U care and prevention
In the spring of 1970 a group of about 300 students marched from campus through the streets of Schenectady to protest the Vietnam War. George S. Bain ’73 recounts the march and two alumni reflect on that transformational period.
Someone had a TV in his room on the fourth floor of West College, a freshman floor, and that’s where we watched President Nixon’s speech that Thursday evening, April 30, 1970. He announced the “incursion” into Cambodia. We viewed it as an expansion of the Vietnam War. Was it someone in the room, or some TV commentator who said it first? “It’s Nixon’s war now.”
Union College magazine. Winter 2009. At a May 1, 1970 Vietnam
War protest in downtown
Schenectady, Jim Murphy, then
a Catholic priest and College
chaplain, uses a bullhorn to
address Union students. (Photo
by Dr. Lester Kritzer ’73)
That was one of the slogans we chanted Friday morning as we marched into downtown Schenectady to protest. “It’s Nixon’s war now.” We started with a rally at Library Plaza on campus. Several people spoke against the war. President Harold Martin announced classes had been canceled for Friday and issued his own condemnation of Nixon for risking “a deeper and more horrible involvement in Indochina.”
The Concordiensis and The Schenectady Gazette agreed our numbers were between 300 and 400. We formed our march in front of campus at Nott Terrace and Union Street. “All we are saying is give peace a chance” was another of our chants as we marched down Nott Terrace and then State Street. We stood outside the Schenectady County Community College building, the former Van Curler Hotel on Washington Avenue (a campus that had opened the previous September, so those students were as new to the college experience as we freshmen were in the spring of 1970). “Join us! Join us!” we exhorted the community college, trying to drum up support for our next stop, the nearby General Electric plant. Few, if any, SCCC students joined us.
So we marched to GE and sat down, very orderly, at the entrance. I remember no desire to force my way past any guards and storm into the GE grounds. We were demonstrating against what was called the second-largest U.S. Defense Department contractor of the time. A student spokesman, quoted in Concordiensis, said, “We have no gripe with the workers but with the stockholders and managers who make profits from the murder of Asians.” And after all, if we were pleading to “give peace a chance,” our method of protest should be nonviolent. Our message was simple: War was wrong. We wouldn’t fight.
One picture shows a clean-cut, docile crowd of students—no one threatening or gesticulating at the Schenectady police, who weren’t dressed in any riot gear. We waved some signs and chanted in unison.
Another picture shows us all with our right hands raised in the peace sign (what our parents’ generation had known as the V for victory sign). During an open-air debate that lasted half an hour—what should we do next?—Father Jim Murphy argued we should not enter and occupy the property. The conviction of his words carried the day.
Thirty-five years later, Murphy remembers telling us, “It’s not going to be won just by demonstrating today. It’s the long-term effort that matters. It’s organizing. It’s campaigning for candidates like Ed Fox,” a professor at RPI and the anti-war opponent to the longtime Schenectady Congressman, U.S. Rep. Sam Stratton. Murphy, the Catholic chaplain at Union and a parish priest in Schenectady, was Fox’s campaign manager and the leader of the local Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam. Murphy resigned from the priesthood in 1983 to get married.
A May 1970 Vietnam war protest by Union students in downtown Schenectady. Union College magazine spring 2008.
“A march doesn’t go very far. It’s organizing that matters,” Murphy recalled. “I always thought the most powerful expression was saying no. Those decisions were symbolic and extremely dramatic.”
Murphy led some students from the GE plant back downtown to demonstrate at the local Selective Service office on Wall Street, where one protester tried to climb in through a window. The police seized him but let him go after others chanted for his release.
The rest of us marched back to State Street and Erie Boulevard, the heart of downtown, and occupied the intersection. We sat down on the pavement in the hot noonday sun, blocking all traffic. Soon, we were surprised and refreshed, when Saga Foods, the dining hall contractor, sent down sandwiches and water for us from the campus dining hall. The police—not overdressed nor striking any intimidating poses—stood on the fringe and didn’t take any action. I was sitting near the fringe. Some bystander told a cop they should go in and bust some heads, clear out the punks. The cop demurred. After all, he said, they’re not harming anyone. He implied Schenectady was lucky we weren’t being destructive. The bystander didn’t pursue his point.
“We were sandwiched by several police cars and some officers on foot. I was a bit nervous concerning a possible confrontation, but all remained quite peaceful and respectful between both groups,” said Peter Kircher ’73.
Looking back from 40 years what impresses me as much as our youthful idealism— that our demonstrations would have some affect on public policy, or at least would help turn more opinion against the war—was the careful decision-making by city officials on how to respond to our behavior.
All available police officers were on duty, and those whose overnight shift would have ended at 7 a.m. had been ordered to stay at work. City Manager John L. Scott, in the crowd watching us in the intersection, told the Schenectady Gazette, “We thought the best way to handle this is to permit them to demonstrate. The preservation of the public peace, to prevent injuries and damage to property, is of prime concern.”
The Gazette noted his statement was similar to one he had made several months earlier when striking GE workers had blocked entrances to the plant. I wonder how many students that Friday noon remembered, or even had been aware of, the strike that previous fall. We benefited from the experience Schenectady police had gained from controlling rowdier, more hostile crowds of striking electrical workers.
When the International Union of Electrical Workers went on strike against GE Oct. 28, 1969, 12,500 members of Local 301 in Schenectady walked off their jobs. On the first day, more than 20 arrests were reported in Schenectady after eggs were thrown amid pushing and shoving along the picket line, portrayed in a “Strike Scuffle” photograph on the front page of The New York Times. For two weeks, strikers prevented white-collar workers from entering the Schenectady plant, until a federal judge ordered the union workers to clear a path. The strike, with devastating economic impact on Schenectady, lasted 101 days.
Union College magazine. Students march through downtown Schenectady to protest the Vietname War on May 1, 1970. (Photo by Dr. Lester S. Kritzer '73)
The contrast of our placid demonstration that Friday morning in May was clear, and surely a relief to the local authorities. Our nonviolent protest lasted three hours, offering little challenge and no provocations.
“I found the walk liberating. We were a community drawn together to take a stand on something we felt needed to change in America,” said Mark Shugoll ’73.
City Manager Scott said our demonstration “didn’t do anything other than inconvenience people.’’ It was as if, he said to the Gazette, an automobile accident at State Street and Erie Boulevard had blocked traffic.
In Police Chief John Murphy’s view, if police had taken more forceful action it might have resulted “in an all-out riot.” “We tried our best. I think it worked out,” he said.
As smart as the civic leaders were, the Schenectady Gazette had revealed another point of view Friday morning in a two-sentence news brief buried in its local section— below a court report and above a one-sentence announcement of an upcoming meeting of the Hudson Valley Dietetic Association.
“Nixon Sparks/Union Protest,” read the headline. The Gazette reported, “President Nixon caused a protest at Union College last night against sending troops into Cambodia. The students, whose favorite book is How to Avoid the Draft, rallied ’round the flag[pole] and burned Nixon in effigy.”
The worst imaginable outcome happened three days later. Late Monday afternoon on the radio came the news of four dead in Ohio—four Kent State University students shot and killed by National Guard troops during an antiwar demonstration on their campus.
Classes were suspended the next day, May 5, for a series of seminars and a mass rally in the library plaza. But unlike many schools, Union, with six weeks remaining on the academic calendar, did not cancel classes for the rest of the year.
The increased student and faculty activism led to profound changes in College governance. In June 1971, the Board of Trustees voted to add the College president, ex officio, and two faculty members to the board as voting members and two students, elected by the student body, as nonvoting members.
“It was a time when students were willing to assert their own rights and responsibilities. We wanted to be more involved in the governance of the country and the College,” said Mark S. Coven ’72.
George S. Bain ’73 is a copy editor at The Post-Standard in Syracuse, N.Y., treasurer of the Skaneateles chamber music festival, and a longtime Union volunteer
A view from the nation’s capital
By Dick Tito ’69
I didn’t witness the Vietnam War protests in Schenectady in late April and early May of 1970, but I do have some first-hand knowledge of them.
I graduated from Union in 1969, and since my history degree created no opportunities for a draft deferral, I enlisted in the U.S. Army. I was in Officer Candidate School at Ft. Belvoir, Va. in the spring of 1970 and we were very aware of the growing unrest on college campuses, Union included. I had some sporadic contact with my fraternity brothers at Beta Theta Pi and learned that some of them were planning on coming to Washington, D.C., for a protest at the Pentagon.
This was interesting, since all military personnel in the D.C. area were on alert in case additional troops were needed to protect the Pentagon. My fellow officer candidates and I actually drilled to be reserve replacements at the Pentagon. The entire time we were going through that ridiculous preparation, I wondered how I was going to avoid laughing if I saw any of my fraternity brothers across the “battle” lines.
Long story short, the OCS brigade was never called up. I think this was the time when the famous photograph was taken of a young girl putting a flower in the barrel of a soldier’s rifle as they stood across from one another at the Pentagon. It was the most interesting of times, but to the protesters credit, they kept enough of a spotlight on Vietnam that the country finally realized it was time to leave there.
Dick Tito ’69 is a former senior executive for a Pittsburgh-based investment firm in Sewickley, Pa.
Lasting lessons
By Mark S. Coven ’72
In the spring of 1970, I was one of many protesting and showing a willingness to challenge institutions; to do what we believed was morally just and correct. I have carried that basic philosophy forward to a judgeship in Massachusetts, where I am constantly asking the questions, “What is fair? What is just? What is the morally correct approach and decision to be making for the people who come before me?”
The people who appear in my court need of all types of services, whether they are poor or substance abusers or victims of domestic violence. I am still interested in the same issues of how society should be responding to people in need and challenging institutions to respond, much in the same way we did back in 1970.
I worked with College Chaplain Jim Murphy, who was involved in community outreach and anti-war protests. As College chaplain, he was a remarkable person who brought what he thought were the appropriate Judeo-Christian values and ethics in anti-war issues and in issues of poverty and discrimination. He helped us formulate our approaches to war and how best to reach into the community. He helped me formulate my own value system in terms of being able to raise issues of morality and fairness and justice.
It was a time when students were willing to stand up for what they believed was the right thing to do and to challenge rigid institutional practices. We were trying to intervene and take some affirmative actions to help people change their lives and take responsibility for their actions, which is not much different than what I have been trying to do since graduating from Union College.
Mark S. Coven ’72 is a judge in a Massachusetts district court based in Quincy and has served in that role since 1989, and before that served for two years as a deputy attorney in general.
