Family and friends of David S. Kaplan '82 have remembered him by establishing two endowments at the College.
David was shot and killed on June 6, when he apparently interrupted an altercation enroute to his Arlington, Va., apartment.
Mr. and Mrs. Marvin Golding, his aunt and uncle, have endowed the David S. Kaplan '82 Prize for students who want to participate in the College's Term Abroad in France.
The Congressional Quarterly, Inc., where David worked, and some of its employees have created a second endowment fund, with income to be used to support the College's Term in Washington. The Quarterly's tribute said:
“Dave grew up in the Boston suburbs. And despite a college career in upstate New York and a dozen years in Washington, Dave forever considered himself a Bostonian and was a fierce devotee of his hometown Boston Red Sox. Dave transferred that enthusiasm to the softball field, where he became CQ's beloved `Coach K'
“But if baseball was his passion, it never distracted from his consummate devotion to his vocation. Dave was one of the most meticulous, accurate and at times visionary political reporters in the history of CQ. In the pantheon of hardworking CQ people, his pedestal would have to be first.”
Memorial contributions may be directed to either fund.
The College has received a $148,750 grant from the National Science Foundation to create a workstation laboratory for faculty and students conducting research on the design and integration of computer microchip information.
The NSF grant requires the College to provide $122,000 in matching funds. To date, $79,537 of the matching fund has been donated, primarily through the efforts of the Dean's Engineering Council. Lead donors are Frederick D. Hay '66 ($16,000), Allan R Page '69 ($10,000), Walter V. Dixon '69 ($10,000), and Donald C. Loughry '52 ($10,000). Page, the council's vice chair, has led the fundraising effort.
The new laboratory will be devoted to faculty and student research in digital circuit
design, simulation, fabrication, and testing, and to the design, analysis, and simulation of computer network protocols
and distributed algorithms.
In recent months the College has received more than $1.5 million in new commitments for the renovation and expansion of Schaffer Library, raising the total for the project to nearly $7 million.
The new commitments include:
$500,000 from Norton H. Reamer '58 and his wife, Sue;
$500,000 from Raymond V. Gilmartin '63;
$250,000 from Robert F. Cummings, Jr. '71;
an anonymous gift of $250,000;
$50,000 from Henry B. duPont IV '90;
$10,580 from Dr. Robert J. Pletman '50.
The gifts qualify for matching funds through a $575,000 challenge grant made by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
As the new gifts came in, project planning continued with four principal objectives in mind:
The general collection will continue to grow although at a diminished rate as electronic sources of knowledge assume a larger role;
The special collections, home to such treasures as the College's collection of Aubudon prints, must be given a higher standard of preservation, must become more accessible, and must have room to expand;
the infrastructure of the current building must be replaced to accommodate technologically-sophisticated new media;
the College must take advantage of the project to assemble in one place its language laboratory and technological instruction center, together with video distribution systems, computer workstations with access to document delivery services and an expanded CD-ROM collection, and links with libraries and archives of the world through the Internet.
The cost of the expansion and renovation, together with a maintenance and operation endowment, is $14,650,300.
Herbert Freeman graduated from Union back in 1947, but he has never stopped learning. And that's how he has stayed near the top of the computer engineering field for close to half a century.
“A professor's life is one of continuous learning,” says the sixty-nine-year-old former director of the Center
for Computer Aids for Industrial Productivity at Rutgers University, where he still teaches and directs graduate research.
“In high school and college I received a good education and learned how to learn,” he explains. “And it's a good thing I did. The work I do today bears almost no relationship to my work fifteen years ago and has nothing to do with what I was doing thirty years ago.”
Well, that may not be exactly true. After all, since the early fifties, he has been working with computers. That's when he designed the first computer for the Sperry Corporation. The computer was six feet tall, ten feet wide, and far slower than even the bottom-of-the-line personal computers of today. Still, it was a computer.
Freeman began his career at Sperry after earning his master's in electrical engineering from
Columbia University. There, he worked with what were then called
“servomechanisms” machines that could steer a ship automatically or control anti-aircraft guns. It was a task that prepared him for his
job in Sperry's guided missile division. A year later, however, his boss steered him towards a new technology-digital computers-and before he knew it, Freeman was designing the SPEEDAC, the first Sperry digital computer.
“Unfortunately-and it's a sad commentary on humanity-most of the advances in science and technology were motivated by military considerations,” Freeman says. “Ninety-five percent of our work at Sperry was for the military.”
These days Freeman has found a new niche. He is on the cutting edge of computer imaging, teaching computers both to generate pictures and to interpret images. His immediate work involves developing new technology for producing maps with computers in ways that are much faster and yield maps that are more
accurate than those drawn by cartographers.
The technology is already being applied by the Department of Agriculture, which produces hundreds of maps every year detailing forest, slope, and soil characteristics throughout the country.
As for teaching a computer to interpret an image, Freeman says banks are clamoring
for this technology so computers can recognize the handwritten numbers on personal checks. According to Freeman, the Internal Revenue Service is also interested in computers that will be able to read the millions of tax returns it receives every year.
The changes brought about by the computer revolution may seem dramatic, says Freeman, but on the grand scale of scientific advancement throughout history, the invention of the steam engine more than two centuries ago and other advances we now take for granted were perhaps even more monumental.
“The computer has revolutionized civilization,” he explains, “but imagine what it must have been like to live at the time of the invention of the mechanical clock or when the spear was replaced by the bullet.”
Freeman decided at the age of five that he wanted to be an electrical engineer. He says he remembers fixing his mother's kitchen appliances and utensils as a small boy in Germany and admiring a grandfather who was a watchmaker and several uncles who were
“technically oriented.”
“If they had been a generation later, they would have been engineers,” he says.
Fittingly, his life was also touched by perhaps the greatest scientist of the twentieth century-Albert Einstein. Freeman's parents
had emigrated from Germany in 1936 but for some complex reasons, he (aged ten) had been left behind. Obtaining a visa for him dragged on for almost two years and drew the attention of a number of prominent people who tried to help reunite the family. The matter finally came to the attention of Einstein, who wrote a series of letters to the State Department to break the bureaucratic stalemate. A few months later Freeman arrived in America and moved with his family to Waterford, N.Y., just north of Albany.
Today, Freeman lives with his wife
of forty years, Joan, in Cranbury, N.J. They have three children and four grandchildren.
When he isn't preparing for a lecture or working on his research projects, he's telling his students to prepare for the only thing that can be
predicted change.
“I tell my students I have no idea what technology will be like in fifteen years, and anybody who says he does, doesn't know what he is taking about. All I
know is that the technology will be different from what it is today, and most of the predictions will turn out to be wrong.”
Coming from a man who remembers when most computer scientists never dreamed that people would someday own personal computers, this is
the one technological prediction that might turn out to be true.
When Estelle Cooke-Sampson arrived at Union in the fall of 1970, a bright seventeen-year-old out of the southeast quarter of Washington, D.C., she suddenly realized she had a problem that she needed to take care of.
°I could read English quite well,” Cooke-Sampson says today from the office of DC Imaging, her radiology clinic near Howard University Hospital. “But I really couldn't
speak. I grew up and went to a school in an environment where keeping quiet meant staying out of trouble. And that's what I did.”
While other students in her inner-city junior high school raised a ruckus in the classroom, Cooke-Sampson sat quietly in the back doing her work and hoping one day to escape what was quickly becoming a treacherous urban landscape. She thought her chance had arrived when a representative of the ABC education program offered to send her to a prestigious northeastern prep school.
But her mother wasn't ready to let her adopted, half-Korean, half African-American daughter go. So Cooke-Sampson kept quiet, and remained in the D.C. school district. “I realized then that I was going to be responsible for my own education,” she says.
A few years later, she came to Union along with approximately 100 other young women, the first such group to arrive on campus.
In addition to recognizing her speech difficulties, Cooke-Sampson also quickly became aware of how deficient her junior and senior high school education had been. She says that she can't remember having to write a paper before she came to Union,
and that she had “no knowledge of sentence structure.” So she decided that she would take her time, not worry about graduating in four years, and take advantage of the chance Union was giving to catch up to her classmates.
“For me Union was like good, fertile soil,” she says. “There was enough sunshine, enough rain, and enough storm. I learned enough to know how to go about learning in the future. I felt I was in the right place and that eventually I was going to be able to compete in society.”
And compete she has.
During her senior year, she showed up at the admissions office of the Georgetown Medical School during the Christmas break, said she couldn't afford the bus fare to come back, and was granted an interview. She received a public health service scholarship to Georgetown, where she decided on radiology because she was having difficulty communicating with patients. She has painful memories of patients criticizing her speech; radiology offered her the comfort of communicating through her written reports and the occasional forays into primary care procedures.
Nearly two decades later, though, Cooke-Sampson is hardly the kind of radiologist who sits in a back room and studies medical images. As the medical director of DC Imaging, she sees some fifty patients and performs 100 procedures every day, ranging from prenatal sonograms to mammograms and prostate biopsies.
Cooke-Sampson says she doesn't mind that she has to see twenty to thirty percent more patients than her suburban colleagues to generate the same amount of money. And, she says, she likes the added responsibilities of taking a truly active interest in her patients' overall health programs. She sees to it that her office workers make the extra call to remind patients of their appointments and help arrange for transportation if it is needed.
“One must serve in order to get any fulfillment out of life,” she says.
She learned that lesson during high school while working with nurses in the public health services. Today, as a doctor affiliated with the nonprofit Daughters of Charity Providence Hospital and as a member of the DC Army Reserves, she continues to practice and preach the gospel of service. During the conflict with Iraq, she was sent to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to take the place of a radiologist who was sent to the Persian Gulf.
“I feel very fortunate to live in America,” she says. “This is the only country I know of that has laws that regulate civil rights. I was a 'war-baby,' and if I hadn't been lucky enough to get out of Korea, I don't know what would have become of me. So I take my service very seriously.”
Earlier this year, the College awarded her an Eliphalet Nott Medal for her outstanding career achievements.
An antiwar activist at the time of the Vietnam War, he now wears the robes of a state trial court judge in Massachusetts.
Although it might seem ironic that a man with an arrest record ended up behind the judicial bench, Coven sees his progression as nothing more than an extension of the same battle he has been fighting for more than a quarter of a century.
Coven and approximately thirty other students regularly challenged
the Union student body, faculty, and administration to ask the same questions being asked on campuses across the country.
“What was happening was
not just a challenge to government policy, but also a questioning of the values and the type of college we wanted to be,” he says.
Coven helped organize marches, demonstrations, and student strikes in the name of educational freedom and a participatory system of rule; the College created both an all-College senate and appointed a student member to the Board of Trustees.
“For a small school, Union was a very dynamic place in those years,” he says.
Part of what made the school dynamic, he says, was strong conservative opposition from students and faculty to what was seen as liberal causes. It was, Coven says, “conservative opposition in the best sense of the word. There was principled disagreement, rational discourse, arguments, and intellectual challenges. It was not hostile acrimony.”
Today, from his chambers in Somerville, Massachusetts, Coven insists that “there is not a major difference between accepting responsibility by doing civil disobedience to draw attention to issues you feel are important and trying to enhance the moral fabric of the country through your rulings as a judge.”
It is a statement not every antiwar protester could get away with. After all, Jerry Rubin raised more than a few eyebrows as a successful investment banker during the 1980s.
But Coven has more than earned his credibility. His career of service has brought him from the desegregation cases in Georgia in the 1970s to a lawsuit against President Ronald Reagan and the federal
government over social security benefits for the elderly during the 1980s.
In fact, Coven began fighting for
the rights of the less fortunate as a student when he helped organize both a food cooperative and a poverty rights office in Schenectady. He spent his college summers organizing tenants and welfare recipients in Atlanta and returned to Georgia during law school to pick up the desegregation fight. After
a clerkship with the New Hampshire Supreme Court and a stint as the legislative director for New Hampshire Senator John Durkin, Coven returned to Massachusetts, where he
organized a
legal services program for the elderly in Boston and in the Berkshires. “After being in the belly of the beast I wanted
to return to a community and become actively involved,” he says
His work earned him a spot Governor Michael Dukakis's administration as assistant
secretary for human services. In 1986, Coven moved to the attorney general's office, serving as deputy
attorney general,
before becoming a judge in 1989.
He hears both civil and criminal cases
and says he enjoys a diverse caseload that forces him to deal with some of the most serious problems facing the country, such as domestic violence and child abuse.
“There is not a day that goes by that I feel ineffective,” he says. °I love the intellectual challenge, and I also feel I can intervene and help the lives of some very troubled people.”
According to Coven, that kind of intervention is where the spirit of the antiwar movement endures on today's campuses. Just because there isn't a war or an overriding national issue to protest doesn't mean students have become apathetic, he says. “There are lots of outlets for community involvement and students doing all kinds of worthwhile things. There may not be major demonstrations, but I don't think there's any less concern with social action.”
The liberal in Coven, who believes in the government's ability to help people through its dedication to justice, says he tries not to get too disheartened about the recent shift to the political right.
“I'm patient enough to realize that the government has its ebbs and flows and like a pendulum ultimately returns to the center.”
