Posted on Jun 12, 2009

Union boasts one of the highest graduation rates in the country, according to a recent national report.

Eighty-six percent of students at Union graduate within six years of entering, placing the College among the top 10 for “highly competitive” schools. The top schools in the category were Babson College and Mount Holyoke, which graduate 89 percent of their students within six years.

The national average for four-year schools in all categories is 55 percent, according to the report.

“Union students and alumni are deeply grateful for their close working relationships with faculty members, whose dedication is an essential contributing factor to our high graduation rate," said Therese A. McCarty, the Stephen J. and Diane K. Ciesinski Dean of the Faculty and Vice President for Academic Affairs.

“Diplomas and Dropouts” was prepared for the American Enterprise Institute on Public Policy, a conservative Washington think tank.

Graduation rates were based on U.S. Department of Education data for nearly 1.2 million freshmen who entered college in 2001, and the six categories ranging from non-competitive to most competitive were as defined by Barron's Profiles of American Colleges, based on student demographics and admission standards. The study looked at 1,385 four-year colleges.

To read the full report, click here.

Last summer, Business Week took a look at the schools where graduates have the most earning potential and found that Union alumni place among the top colleges in the country. To read the article, click here.

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Posted on Jun 11, 2009

Paul A. Volcker, head of President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, told Union’s newest graduates that “the abrupt downward slide in the economy may be slowing.

"With massive government spending and monetary expansion, we have headed off the kind of deep recession that faced some earlier Union College  graduates. But there still is a long way to go to restore and sustain prosperity,” the former chairman of the Federal Reserve said during the College’s 215th Commencement Sunday. 

More Commencement 2009 coverage: Text of President Stephen C. Ainlay's charge to graduates Text of President Stephen C. Ainlay's baccalaureate remarks Saturday Text of Paul Volcker's remarks to Class of 2009 Martin Perl awarded honorary degree at commencement Valedictorian, salutatorian, student speaker Student Speaker Sean Mulkerne '09: Life is what you make of it Second group of Minerva Fellows prepare to travel the globe Previous Commencement speakers

A professor emeritus of International Economic Policy at Princeton, Volcker, 81, is one of history’s most acclaimed central bankers, widely credited with reining in high inflation in the 1980s with a series of courageous, if sometimes unpopular tactics, including raising interest rates.

He characterized the current big recession as "one big wake-up call. It can and must be the start of a corrective process."  

His prescription fo sustaining prosperity is to "learn to save more, to invest more, to stay on the leading edge of technology. In some ways, we have to challenge ingrained habits of thinking and working… Union College has helped prepare for those changes and get us back on a better track."

Economic news aside, families and friends cheered from their seats in Hull Plaza as some 500 students received their diplomas on the walkway in front of Schaffer Library under a bright blue sky.

Volcker, who encouraged graduates to take "time to experiment, to take a risk,” received an honorary doctor of laws degree from Union Sunday.

The College awarded an honorary doctor of science degree to Martin L. Perl, winner of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1995 for his discovery of a new elementary particle, the tau lepton. Perl was nominated for the honorary degree by Jay Newman, the R. Gordon Gould Professor of Physics, and Michael Vineyard, the Frank and Marie Louise Bailey Professor of Physics. 

 

Volcker, Perl and President Stephen C. Ainlay arrived on campus in a 1914 Duplex Drive Brougham Detroit Electric Automobile once owned by Union Professor and famed electrical engineer Charles Proteus Steinmetz.

In his remarks to the Class of 2009, Ainlay enumerated ways in which students contributed to campus and community life, from athletic and academic accomplishments to raising funds for local and global causes.  

“No matter what you choose to do in the years ahead, remember that your academic lineage is a great one and your lineage beckons you to make a difference,” he said.

His single piece of advice: “Don’t take these relationships or your relationship to this College for granted. Stay in touch with … people who made a difference in your life and who care about what happens to you.”

Class valedictorian was Daniel C. Bailey of Mount Vision, N.Y., a chemistry major who begins work as a chemical development scientist at Roche Carolina Inc.

Salutatorian was Steven M. Herron of Ridgefield, Conn., also a chemistry major. After building homes in West Virginia this summer with Passionist Volunteers, Herron will begin his Ph.D. in chemistry at Stanford University.

The student speaker was Sean D. Mulkerne of Whitesboro, N.Y. A political science major, he will pursue a Masters of Science in global politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science after graduation.

“Union College is exactly what you make of it,” Mulkerne said. “Each individual has the opportunity to shape the College into something that excites and challenges them… Indeed, life is exactly what you make of it.”  

Sunday was particularly special for Leslie H. Bernstein and his family. Fifty-five years after he attended Union, Bernstein joined his granddaughter, Julia ‘09, in receiving his diploma. Bernstein, of New Rochelle, N.Y., left Union before completing his degree to attend the University of Louisville School of Medicine Health Science Center, where he received his medical degree in 1958.

Each year, the College awards bachelor's degrees to alumni whose study at Union was cut short, in many cases because of military service. To be eligible, alumni must have completed at least three years at Union, received an advanced degree and attained distinction in their field, and they must not have a bachelor's from another institution. Since 1990, more than 40 alumni have received their bachelor's degrees through this program.

Bernstein ‘55 attended the ceremony to see his granddaughter graduate, but his son, Leonard (Julia’s father) and other family members surprised him with a cap and gown Sunday so he could receive his long-awaited bachelor of science degree. In addition to Bernstein, a gastroenterologist with Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx, and his granddaughter, Julia, son Paul ’82, and his wife, Tamara DiNolfo ’83, are also members of the Union family.

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Posted on Jun 11, 2009

As many as 21 homeless people died in 2007 in a town in northern Poland during a test of a bird flu vaccine sponsored by a drug company in which subjects were paid by the dosage, according to local reports. A trial involving several health workers accused of testing the homeless without informing them of the nature or the risks of the experiment began in a Warsaw court in April.

With help from a $1 million National Institute of Health grant, Martin Strosberg ’68 is trying to build resistance to such practices with education. Strosberg and others have created a series of distance-learning courses at Union Graduate College that has trained 26 people living in Central and Eastern Europe. Trainees include scientists, clinicians, lawyers, academic bioethicists and philosophers.

“This grant will help create a critical mass of professionals dedicated to implementing international and national guidelines for the protection of human research subjects in the evolving democracies of Central and Eastern Europe,” Strosberg said.

Strosberg leads an online and on-site training program in partnership with Lithuania’s Vilnius University. The program is aimed at building an infrastructure of ethics and human rights that will protect those who participate in drug trials and other experiments.

With the cost of bringing a new drug to market in the United States at more than $800 million, pharmaceutical companies have found savings by taking human testing to Central and Eastern Europe and underdeveloped countries of the world, where drug trials can be carried out more cheaply. Governments in many of those countries have more compliant ethical standards for human testing than in America and Western Europe, a fact which plays a part in some advertisements designed to lure drug companies.

The program at Union Graduate College, called the Advanced Certificate Program in Research Ethics for Central and Eastern Europe, is composed of seven graduate courses developed and taught by teams of American and European faculty. Thus far, students have come from Armenia, Belarus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Romania and Russia.

Former students have so far helped establish a National Center for Bioethics in the Polish Chamber of Physicians and Dentists; published and lectured on research ethics and scientific integrity in Lithuania and Poland; created bioethics positions in government, professional societies and universities in Moldova, Russia and Georgia; and organized conferences and online resources in research ethics in the Czech Republic, Russia and Armenia.

Several students have gone on to join the master’s degree bioethics program run by Union Graduate College and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

Strosberg’s program took shape a decade ago when he and his colleague, Professor Robert Baker, were developing a distance learning master’s degree program in bioethics. At that time, a visiting Fulbright Fellow at Union College, Dr. Eugenijus Gefenas, of the University of Vilnius, introduced Strosberg to his contacts in Eastern Europe. Together, they responded to a request for proposals from the NIH.

“We had all the pieces in place and we decided to go for it,” Strosberg said.

The Union Graduate College program received a $1 million grant from the NIH’s Fogarty International Center in 2004. The NIH recently announced it would renew the grant for another four years. Last year, the institute invited Union Graduate College to present the program to other academic institutions as a model of effective distance learning.

Strosberg earned a bachelor’s degree in political science. He earned his master’s degree in public administration and public health from the University of California, Berkeley. He earned his Ph.D. from the Maxwell School of Syracuse University.

For the past 25 years, Strosberg has been a professor of health policy and management at the Union Graduate College (formerly the Graduate Management Institute of Union College). He is also a professor of bioethics at the Union Graduate College – Mount Sinai School of Medicine Masters Program in Bioethics.

Strosberg is part of a family legacy at Union: his father, Irving ’31, a physician; brother, James ’63, also a physician; and niece, Ruth ’98. His son, Nathaniel ’02, is a planner for the city of Round Rock, Texas, just north of Austin. Father and son were both political science majors who did their senior theses with Professor James Underwood.

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Posted on Jun 11, 2009

BY GEORGE S. BAIN ’73

At 5 foot 7, you can call Jim Tedisco ’72 slight of stature, but never short on ambition or accomplishment.

In three seasons of varsity competition, the Schenectady native turned the campus and community onto Union College basketball, setting every school scoring record as a shooting guard. And he could dunk the basketball.

A Republican elected to the New York State Assembly in 1982, he became Minority Leader in 2005. He’s the longest-serving Republican now in the Assembly. And he was on the receiving end of one of former Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s most famous tirades.

In a special election staged this spring, Tedisco sought to become New York’s newest member of Congress. The House of Representatives vacancy within a Hudson River district that wraps around Albany was created when Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand was appointed to fill Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Senate seat. After weeks of post-election ballot counting showed a 399-vote lead for opponent Scott Murphy, Tedisco conceded.   

“He’s lived the American dream. He’s a symbol of the American dream,” said Gary Walters, the basketball coach for Tedisco’s junior and senior years, remembering that Tedisco grew up in a row house and that his father worked 40 years in a General Electric Co. foundry.

Hoop dreams realized

Tedisco established his basketball reputation at the old Bishop Gibbons High School in Schenectady and spurned scholarship offers from Division I schools Syracuse, St. Bonaventure and Niagara to stay close to home and play at Division III Union for Chris Schmid, who recruited all the players who surrounded Tedisco in a magical two-season span.

“I had the confidence I could play anywhere,” Tedisco said about his decision. “I wanted to excel at a better academic institution, and that was Union.”

“Chris Schmid knew when he got him he’d made a fundamental shift in Union College basketball,” said Jim Bolz ’73, who played those two seasons. Bolz came to Schenectady from New York City, curious about his new teammate’s reputation.

“He was as good as I heard he was,” said Bolz. “He was determined, as competitive as anybody I’ve ever seen.”

In the early 1970s, freshmen still could not play varsity basketball, nor did the three-point shot exist.

So Tedisco set 15 scoring and assist records in three years, over a 65-game career. He graduated as Union’s all-time leading scorer with 1,632 points (now fourth in career points). His career scoring average of 25.0 points a game and his single-game total of 49 (against Utica in 1970) still stand.

His No. 14 jersey was retired before a crowd estimated between 3,500 and 4,000 after his last game in Memorial Field House, Feb. 19, 1972. Tedisco scored 41 points in the 110-79 win over Hamilton that night.

Union had gone five seasons without a winning record when Tedisco first stepped onto the varsity court. Even in his sophomore season, the Dutchmen finished 7-15. Walters arrived the next season. That team finished 18-3.

Tedisco brought to Union the work ethic his father had taught him and said in basketball he developed an understanding of teamwork that has served him throughout his life.

“I learned you have a role to play – on a team, in a family, in a business – you fill your role, you do what you’re best at.”

For him that was the outside jump shot. The summer before his senior year, his daily practices would include 600 to 800 shots “minimally,’’ he said. “Repetition may be boring, but it leads to success.’’

His coaches taught many lessons about achieving success. “They taught us to work toward a goal higher than any individual self.” And he learned how to confront failure: “When you fear failure, you’ll never be able to achieve success. Don’t let failure paralyze you.”

In Tedisco’s senior season, Union set what was then a college record of 19 wins (against three losses), including a record-tying 15-game winning streak. He led the team in points, assists, and scoring average. But he never dunked in a game, as the NCAA didn’t allowing dunking from 1967 to 1976.

Those exploits made him a member of the first class inducted into the Union Athletics Hall of Fame, in 2002.

Early in his time at Union, Larry Swartz ’73 learned of Tedisco’s determination. Swartz was the manager for the freshman team in 1969-70, Tedisco’s first year on varsity. The varsity scrimmaged the freshman team – with recruits like Tom Bacher, Mike Doyle, and Geoff Walker, all Class of 1973 – and lost.

Tedisco came into the locker room and punched a hole through a blackboard, Swartz recalled. “That incident indicated to me that Tedisco, in addition to being an extremely talented player, also had a will to win that extended even to seemingly inconsequential games.”

Swartz remembered “running from my dorm room to Memorial Field House on especially cold game-day nights and being met by hundreds of my fellow students, all momentarily freezing yet soon to be warmed by our team, composed of friends and classmates, who performed so admirably on their, and our, behalf.”                          

In those days before hockey began at Achilles Rink in 1975, sports at Union meant basketball.

“He was a terrific basketball player and a product of the terrific liberal arts education he received at Union,” said Walters, who spent three seasons at Union before going on to head coaching positions at Dartmouth and Providence. He’s been director of athletics at Princeton for 15 years.

The politcial arena

Tedisco received his B.A. in psychology from Union and a graduate degree in special education from the College of Saint Rose, in Albany. From 1973 to 1982, he worked in education, as a guidance counselor, varsity basketball coach and athletic director at what’s now Notre Dame-Bishop Gibbons High School, then as a special education teacher, resource room instructor and varsity basketball coach at Bethlehem Central High School in Delmar.

In1977, at age 27, he became the youngest person at the time elected to the Schenectady City Council. Re-elected four years later, he set his sights on the State Assembly the next year. Incumbent Clark Wemple was retiring. Tedisco beat three other Republicans in the party primary, and later a fellow city council member in the general election.

As a freshman legislator, he was named ranking minority member of the Children and Families Committee and later was appointed chairman of the Assembly Minority Task Force on Missing Children. He championed an animal-protection measure signed into law in 1999 and the pay delay for state legislators when the New York budget is not passed by its mandated April 1 deadline. He also pushed for property tax reform through a tax cap. He was known for establishing the budget clock to chart late budgets (a regular occurrence in New York) and his “Pass the Budget” neckties.

Longtime Albany observer Allan Chartock admired Tedisco’s dedication to his Republican ideals as a minority member of the Assembly, where Democrats have been the majority party since 1975.

When the Republicans elected Tedisco their minority leader in 2005 (Assembly Democrats outnumbered Republicans then, 105 to 42), Chartock, executive publisher of the Legislative Gazette, wrote, “I’ve interviewed him on public radio for what seems like a million years and the thing that’s so great about the guy is that he plays to win.”

Chartock went on: “For all these years, Jimmy Tedisco has been playing politics the way he plays basketball: fearlessly. He takes no prisoners and asks no quarter. … I am certainly not saying that I agree with much the guy has to say, but I am fascinated by how hard he fights for his principles.’’

Every five years, Tedisco and teammates Rein Eichinger ’72 and Bob Pezzano ’72 organize a reunion for that team. Tedisco has hosted the last several events at his home.

“We’re all good close friends,” said Bolz, looking back over the past 37 years. He and many other teammates contributed to Tedisco’s Congressional campaign.

“Every morning at Union, I was excited,” Tedisco said. “I loved the campus, the academics, the professors, the coaches.’’

Walters recalled of those years, “His growth as a person at Union was almost tangible to observe. He came very quiet, very shy, probably intimidated by the academic stature. He shed the skin that concealed his personality. He became comfortable in his skin.”

Bolz still enjoys Tedisco’s sense of humor. In their playing days, he was known for his impersonations of politicians, television personalities, and the coaching staff’s personal habits and pep talks.

As an opposition leader in Albany, Tedisco demonstrated a penchant for publicity and attention.

In late 2007, he led the Republican fight against Spitzer’s plan to grant driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, appearing often on the Lou Dobbs show on CNN and other cable news programs. Spitzer dropped the proposal.

Earlier that year, a Spitzer quote caused an Albany sensation.

Less than one month into his term, Spitzer was quoted in the New York Post as saying, “Listen, I’m a [expletive] steamroller and I’ll roll over you and anybody else,’’ in a phone conversation with Tedisco, who had complained about being ignored in negotiations on a proposed new ethics law. The Post reported that Tedisco told friends that he didn’t respond to Spitzer’s attack, saying in the Post: “I didn’t get as aggressive at that point because I think I still want to give him a little more room.”

Little more than a year later, news broke on a March afternoon that Spitzer was involved with a prostitution ring. Within minutes, Tedisco told the press the governor should resign if the report was true. The next day, he called for Spitzer’s impeachment if he did not resign. The next day, Spitzer resigned.

Athletic highlights

Jim Tedisco ’72 earned numerous honors during his basketball career at Union, including:

·         First Team Academic All-American (1969-70)

·         Second Team UPI “Small” (for players under 5 feet 10) All-American (1969-70)

·         ECAC Division III Player of the Year (1970-71)

·         First Team UPI “Small” All-American (1970-71)

·         First Team New York State College Division Team (1970-71)

·         Third Team AP Player of the Year (1971-72)

·         ECAC Division III Player of the Year (1971-72)

·         New York State Co-Player of the Year (1971-72)

·         First Team New York State College Division Team (1971-72)

·         First Team UPI “Small” All-American (1971-72)

·         NCAA Silver Anniversary Award (1997)

·         National Association of Basketball Coaches Silver Anniversary team (1997)

 

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Posted on Jun 11, 2009

President Ainlay, members of the faculty, parents and friends,

Most particularly, all of you soon to be awarded diplomas of Union College:

This is the most glorious day of any educational institution. I am delighted and honored to be joining those of you about to receive a degree from Union College.

Of course, your degree reflects a reward for years of effort. I’m certain there is joy in genuine accomplishment.

I suspect there may also be a sense of apprehension. You are closing one chapter of your life. You are entering into a world that right now doesn’t seem so economically hospitable. I assure you that sense of apprehension extends to me as well. It is a little presumptuous at this point to add another lecture to your Union College years. So I’ve done a bit of research on both Union and on commencement speeches. These results are reassuring.

Union College has been around a very long time. During those years there have been twenty-four serious recessions and financial crises. Those crises seem to come more frequently these days, and this one, to be sure, is among the more serious. It is, however, far from the worst, and I have confidence that Union College has you well prepared for dealing with the challenges ahead.

So far as my role is concerned, there has been a poll of college students as to the characteristics of great commencement speeches. Three criteria stand out: preparation, relevance, and above all, brevity.

Well, I will try my best. I thought it would be good to test my instincts about a relevant message with others.

I have just been in China, so I put the question to a small group of young and successful Chinese business leaders: “What message should I give to newly minted American college graduates?” The answer cam back instantaneously and forcibly, “Learn Chinese.”

The next day, with an older, more mature group of officials and senior bankers, I repeated the question. “Learn Chinese and come to China,” was the first response. But then there was another more surprising answer: “Go to Africa,” presumably after learning Chinese.

“Why Africa?” I innocently asked. Well, didn’t I understand that, despite the poverty, Sub-Saharan Africa is the fastest growing region in the world. China, far more than either Europe or the United State, is actively investing there, looking for natural resources and future markets.

What these exchanges hammered home to me were two realities in the world you are entering. The first is that the 21^st Century is indeed a world wide open. Chinese trapped into a closed economy only 30 years ago now see their language and their economy as part of a global society. India isn’t far behind, and between them there are two and a half billion people.

The second reality is that the United States cannot and must not assume that it will be able to play so dominant a role, either economically or culturally, as when I was a new college graduate. The opportunities are enormous, not just in economic terms, but this country is going to have to work hard to keep up.

Right now, we are in a crisis largely of our own making. For too many years, as individuals and as a nation, we’ve been spending beyond our means. No doubt, as one small part of the prevailing culture, this campus has been bombarded with pre-approved credit cards. For sure, Washington has been acting on the proposition that the nation’s credit card is unlimited. If the fact that we have, year-by-year, been borrowing hundreds of billion of dollars from abroad sounds dangerous, and long extended, it is.

Taken all together, our collective debts, public and private, have more than doubled relative to the national income since the time you were born. It stands at three and a half times the GDP, an amount that is difficult to carry.

That financial music could not go on, and now we are paying the piper. Unpaid debts have piled up. Millions of homes financed by mortgages that should never have been written face foreclosure. Some of our largest and proudest financial firms have failed or required emergency assistance. Millions of jobs have been lost.

Fortunately, now there are signs the abrupt downward slide in the economy may be slowing. With massive government spending and monetary expansion we have headed off the kind of deep depression that faced some earlier Union College graduates. But there is a long way to go to restore sustainable prosperity. We have to learn to save more, to invest more, to stay on the leading edge of technology. In some ways we have to challenge ingrained habits of thinking and working.

I also think Union College has helped prepare for those changes and will get us back on track.

The past couple of decades have been seen as a triumph of finance – new and more complex financial instruments, a huge growth of financial institutions, enormous compensation for traders, speculators, and finance executives out of line with all previous experience. At one point, profits of financial institutions accounted for 40 percent of all the profits of American corporations, way above any previous relationships.

I think we know now it has been a hollow victory. The real income of average workers barely rose. Chronic deficits in our foreign trade have been the order of the day as our manufacturing became less competitive. In some industries our technological lead has been threatened. Professional analysis bears out what we feel in our daily life: our roads and bridges are decaying; our airports and air control are challenged; our water supply and waste management is threatened.

It seems to me that the current big recession is one big wake up call. It can be and it must be the start of a corrective process. We are forced to reorient our economic priorities, national and personal, reorient them for the better. Right now the priority is to get our private debt under control. Happily, the infrastructure is beginning to get attention.

In the broadest terms, I think we have to move, we are moving, for an emphasis on finance toward science, toward technology, toward engineering – real engineering not the financial engineering that has failed to live up to its promise.

That’s where Union College comes in. It has been unusual for a relatively small college born and steeped in the liberal arts to have placed so much emphasis on maintaining its leading edge in science and the education of engineers.

I’ve sat on the stage of a lot of university commencements in recent years, prestigious universities with strong graduate programs in math and science and engineering. What is so noticeable as they accept their degrees is the number of Ph.D. students from China and India, from Eastern Europe, from Japan – and the relative paucity of Americans. More and more these days, men and women from abroad are going home.

One of this country’s leading venture capitalists suggested to me only half in jest that if we want to retain our lead in technology, we had better staple a green card to their degrees.

Of course, the simple truth is that we can’t depend on others to bail us out. I’ve been impressed, as part of President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, of the emphasis that our business members, our economists, our union leaders alike place on both the challenge and the enormous opportunities this century is bringing to deal with global warming, to find our way to energy efficiency and independence, to lead the green revolution.

It is truly an enormous challenge that can transform our economy and our politics. A respect for science, for experimentation, for hard facts, will be essential. But so will a strong sense of our culture, of what has brought us together as a nation, of how we can weld a new consensus so that we can move together to meet the new priorities.

You have been at the right place to help understand both the hard sciences and the cultural setting.

I won’t let you go without adding a final point.

You may be graduating from college, but your education is not finished – far from it. From some of you it will be the job you want, for some a graduate program, for others perhaps a sense you are at loose ends or in the midst of facing a different kind of school, the school of hard knocks. Let me say to those of you in that category, it could well be a learning experience that turns out to be the most useful of all in discerning what you want in a full life.

Don’t forget, all of you, that you are young. You have time, time to experiment, to take a risk, to sort out what’s best for you.

Go learn Chinese, go to Africa, or stay right at home and join Teach for America or any one of a million things that can provide a sense of reward and satisfaction.

It’s a bigger world, a competitive world, but a world of opportunity.

I trust you make the most of it. Good luck.

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