Union welcomes 25 new faculty members to campus this year. By department, they are:
outdoor classroom
ANTHROPOLOGY: Elizabeth Garland, assistant professor, received her Ph.D. in socio-cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago. She has participated in principal field research in Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Previously, she taught at Dartmouth, Smith, Amherst and Mt. Holyoke colleges. She is fluent in Kiswahili.
Elana Shever, visiting assistant professor, earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, with a dissertation on “Powerful Motors: Kinship, Citizenship and the transformation of the Argentine Oil Industry.” She has taught at Brown and Northeastern Illinois universities and the University of Chicago.
BIOENGINEERING: Jennifer Currey, assistant professor (formerly a visiting assistant professor in Mechanical Engineering at Union), earned her Ph.D. at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in biomedical engineering. As a research assistant in the Biomechanics Laboratory at RPI, she designed an implant system for use in an in vivo implant micromotion study in a mouse.
BIOLOGY: Jennifer Thompson Bishop, visiting assistant professor, received her Ph.D. from North Carolina State University. She has taught courses at Simmons College, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Wake Technical Community College and North Carolina State University. Currently she is working on a project that examines the ecology of the Bahama and Common Yellowthroat.
CHEMISTRY:Andrea Peters, visiting assistant professor, received her Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Alberta and has served as the lead research chemist for the GE Global Research Center in Niskayuna, researching development of electrically and thermally activated chromic coatings for anti-theft technology on optical media. Previously, she taught at Simon Fraser University and the University of Alberta.
CLASSICS: Randall Childree, visiting assistant professor, received his Ph.D. from the University of Florida. His research interests include Roman elegy, Roman rhetorical theory, Epicureanism and Greek lyric. He has experience teaching at Earlham College, Furman University and the University of Florida.
Kristen Gentile, visiting assistant professor, earned her Ph.D. in Greek and Latin from The Ohio State University. Her dissertation was titled, “Reclaiming the Role of the Old Priestess: Ritual Agency and the Post-Menopausal Body in Ancient Greece.” She has experience instructing elementary and intermediate Latin, as well as elementary Greek, Greek literature and classical mythology.
COMPUTER SCIENCE: John Rieffel, assistant professor, earned his Ph.D. in computer science from Brandeis University. He has taught at Tufts and Cornell universities, Brandeis and Swarthmore College. At Tufts, he was engaged in a multidisciplinary effort to understand and model the biomechanics of the tobacco hornworm caterpillar to create a completely soft-bodied robot.
Andrea Tartaro, visiting instructor, received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University. The recipient of numerous awards, she has coordinated activities to promote awareness of participation of women in computer science. She has taught at Northwestern and Brown universities.
ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING:Sara Hooshangi, visiting assistant professor, received her Ph.D. from Princeton University. She has taught “Bioinstrumentation by Design” at George Mason University, as well as “Introduction to Cellular Computing and Synthetic Biology” at the University of Maryland. She has received numerous honors, including the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Fellowship from Princeton.
ENGLISH: Brian Hauser, assistant professor, earned his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University specializing in film and television, popular culture, American literature to 1900, the gothic, detective fiction, trauma studies and narrative theory. He has taught courses at Ohio in film history, reading popular culture, American literature and varying levels of composition.
MATHEMATICS:Jennifer Blue, lecturer, holds a Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she has taught in the departments of Mathematical Sciences, Computer science, and Philosophy, Psychology and Cognitive Science, and in the School of Engineering. She also was an adjunct professor at Union. She has authored and co-authored numerous articles and presented at a number of undergraduate conferences and seminars.
Christopher Hardin, visiting assistant professor, earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from Cornell University. He has taught at Wabash College, Smith College and Cornell University. The author and co-author of articles in numerous publications, he has given talks around the country in his areas of research, which include mathematical logic, theoretical computer science, logics of programs, Kleene algebra and epistemic logic.
Hubert Noussi, visiting assistant professor, received his Ph.D. from New Mexico State University with a dissertation on feedback linearization and stabilization of competition models in the chemostat. He taught algebra, trigonometry, pre-calculus and calculus at the university.
Nott
MECHANICAL ENGINEERING: Stephen Kalista, visiting instructor, has a master’s of science degree from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech). He is working on his Ph.D. in macromolecular science and engineering from the university. He has taught classes in physics and engineering at Washington and Lee University and for the American Chemical Society. One of his major areas of research centers on self-healing of poly(ethylene-co-methacrylic acid) ionomers.
MODERN LANGUAGES: Charles Arndt, visiting assistant professor of Russian, holds a Ph.D. in Russian literature from Brown University with a dissertation on “Dostoevsky’s Engagement of Russian Intellectuals in the Question of Russia and Europe: From Winter Notes on Summer Impressions to The Devils.” He has teaching experience from Rhodes College, Connecticut College and Brown.
Huei-Cheng Lin,visiting instructor of Chinese, taught Chinese as a Heritage/Foreign Language at UC Berkeley Extension. She earned a master’s in anthropology from Rutgers University. She has taught in New York, California and Massachusetts and has worked as an editor and translator.
Hui-Ju Lin, visiting assistant professor of Chinese, earned her Ph.D. from Georgetown University with a major concentration in applied linguistics and a secondary concentration in theoretical linguistics. She taught several levels of Chinese at Georgetown and general English at Chinese Culture University and at Chun-Yuan Christian University in Taipei. She is a native speaker in Mandarin and Taiwanese and has intermediate skills in Japanese.
Graham Ignizio,visiting assistant professor of Spanish, received his Ph.D. in Spanish-American literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he has taught many levels of Spanish classes. His major research interests include contemporary Latin American literature, with a strong focus on Cuban Diasporic literature and a secondary focus on Caribbean, contemporary peninsular and Latino/a literature.
Ashley Passmore, visiting assistant professor of German, earned her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and received the Best Dissertation of the Year Prize by the Austrian Society of Germanists. Her teaching interests include German-Jewish literature and history, religion in literature, Austrian studies, minorities in literature and culture, 19th and early 20th century German literature, and contemporary German literature and film. Previously, she taught at the universities of Nevada, Portland (Ore.) and Chicago.
Stephanie Silvestre,visiting assistant professor of French, received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University. Her teaching and research interests include contemporary French and Francophone literatures and cultures, French and Francophone cinema, Caribbean studies and Black Diaspora studies. She has taught at The Ohio State University and Northwestern University.
PHILOSOPHY: Leonardo Zaibert, associate professor and department chair, earned his Ph.D. at the State University of New York, Buffalo, where he received the Perry Dissertation Award for outstanding doctoral dissertation. He holds a law degree from Universidad Santa Maria in Caracas, Venezuela, where he practiced law. He previously held posts at the University of Wisconsin, Parkside; Grand Valley State University, Michigan; SUNY Buffalo Law School; Universidad Simón Bolivar, Caracas; and Amherst College. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. His research interests are the philosophy of law, ethics and political philosophy, and he has published widely in these areas.
POLITICAL SCIENCE: Phil Nicholas Jr., visiting assistant professor, earned his Ph.D. from Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, University at Albany. His dissertation was titled “The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Shareholder Proposal Rule: Agency Administration, Corporate Influence and Shareholder Power, 1942-1998.” He currently is working on “From Administrative Power to Advocacy Coalition: The SEC and Shareholder Democracy 1942-2008,” which is under contract with Lexington Books. He has taught at Clark University, University of Scranton, University at Albany, Siena College, the State University colleges at Geneseo and at Oneonta, and Saint Michael’s College.
Matthew Scherer, assistant professor, holds a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. He specializes in modern secularism, religion and politics, liberalism, constitutionalism, and political theology. He has taught at Johns Hopkins and the University of California, Berkeley. He is fluent in German and reading competent in French and Ancient Greek. He joins the faculty in January.
PSYCHOLOGY: Florian Fessel, visiting assistant professor, received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana, Champaign, where he has taught a number of courses. He is interested in psychological distance and level of aspiration, counterfactual thinking, propensity effect, hindsight bias and egocentrism, and in the broader realm of social cognition, motivation and comparative judgments.
This seventh annual juried exhibition for emerging artists with disabilities was organized by VSA arts and sponsored by Volkswagen Group of America, Inc. The 15 participating artists were asked to consider the motivations behind their work and the infinite possibilities that creativity provides. They were also encouraged to contemplate the relationship between life, art and disability. Closing reception set for Friday, Sept. 18.
Through Sept. 27
Wikoff Student Gallery
Nott Memorial
A Perfect Press, Printed by Union Students
Featured prints were created in “Printmaking: Etching,” taught by Sandra Wimer in the spring. The pieces employ a variety of techniques: etching, aquatint, soft-ground, pigmented inkjet and polymer photogravure printing. Many of the final prints combine several different techniques to create a single image.
Through September
Schaffer Library Atrium
Union Notables
Union Notables celebrates the great men and women who have studied and worked at the College from its founding in 1795 to the present day. Every six months, a new group of three notables is featured. Currently featured are Chester A. Arthur, Class of 1848 and 21st U.S. president; Philip G. Di Sorbo, Class of 1971 and co-founder of the Foundation for Hospice in Sub-Saharan Africa; and Robert Holland Jr., a member of the Class of 1962 who has made valuable contributions to sustainability in business.
Through Oct. 16
Schaffer Library
Thelma and Kenneth Lally Reading Room
Degas’ Contemporaries
Coinciding with the “Degas & Music” show currently on display at the Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, N.Y., this exhibit features work from Union’s Permanent Collection by peers of famed French impressionist Edgar Degas.
Long Time Standing; Greg Eltringham, Paintings and Drawings; Visual Arts Atrium
Through Nov. 14
Visual Arts Building
Arts Atrium
Greg Eltringham, Paintings and Drawings
This exhibit features the work of Greg Eltringham, professor of painting at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Ga. Gallery talk and reception set for Friday, Sept. 11, at 4 p.m.
Members of the Class of 2013 check in at the Nott.
The Class of 2013 – the most diverse incoming class in Union’s history – officially arrived on campus Sunday with a daylong series of events planned to make a smooth transition for students and their parents. Its 525 members were chosen from 4,825 applicants. These students represent 22 states and 13 countries, with individuals of color comprising 20 percent of the class. Four percent of the class is international students.
The first-year students moved into their residence halls Sunday morning. They then received an official welcome from College leaders in Memorial Chapel, followed by group orientation activities.
Sunday marked the 17th orientation for Kate Schurick, dean of first-year students. She and a staff of nearly 50 people, including dozens of student volunteers, began planning for the big day right after last year’s event ended.
“This is probably the most exciting day of the year for us,” said Schurick. “We want to make sure the students get acclimated to campus and are ready to begin classes.”
Molly MacElroy, director of Residential Life, helped oversee the 36 resident advisors and five resident directors as they assisted students in moving into their new living quarters. Last year’s move-in day was plagued by stormy weather and a prolonged power outage. This year’s class fared much better.
“We could not have asked for a better day,” said MacElroy. “This is a great beginning.”
Ben Wolkon ’13 of Sudbury, Mass., expressed the feelings of most when talking about how excited he was to begin his college career at Union.
“It’s good to be here,” he said. “I’m looking forward to everything – to a great new adventure.”
President Stephen C. Ainlay welcomed students, faculty, staff and parents to campus during Union’s opening convocation in Memorial Chapel Tuesday.
Underscoring Union’s “impressive legacy of educational innovations,” Ainlay spoke of the College as an academic village dedicated to “igniting an intellectual flame that lasts a lifetime.” He called this lifelong love of learning “perhaps the most enduring and prized quality of those who are liberally educated.”
To read the text of President Ainlay’s speech, click here.
The convocation to celebrate the College’s 215th year opened with welcoming remarks from William A. Finlay, College marshal and professor of Theater and Dance; Frank L. Messa ’73, chairman of the Board of Trustees; Mark Walker, John Bigelow Professor of History and chair of the Faculty Executive Committee; and Peter Haviland-Eduah ’10, Student Forum president.
Therese A. McCarty, the Stephen J. and Diane K. Ciesinski Dean of Faculty and Vice President for Academic Affairs, announced the Stillman Prize for Excellence in Teaching. This year’s recipient was William S. Zwicker, the William D. Williams Professor of Mathematics. He has been with Union since 1975.
The prize was created by David I. Stillman ’72, Abbott Stillman ’69 and Allan Stillman in honor of Abraham Stillman, father and grandfather. It is given annually to a faculty member to encourage outstanding teaching.
Convocation 2009, Connie Schmitz
McCarty also recognized the 655 students who made Dean’s List last year. Their names are on a plaque that will be displayed in Reamer Campus Center.
President Ainlay also presented the UNITAS Community-Building Award for demonstration of outstanding leadership in organizing activities such as community service, fundraising or celebration of College history. Landscape Specialist Constance Schmitz won the honor for her role in Octopus’s Garden.
Heidi Ching '10, Convocation 2009
“One of our virtues as a small liberal arts college is that we are a community and, like all communities, we are made stronger by the contributions of our members,” Ainlay said.
Following a piano performance by Heidi Ching ’10, Dean of Engineering Emeritus Lawrence J. Hollander presented Ching with the final award – the Hollander Prize in Music. It is given annually to a musician or ensemble.
The Ode to Ole Union was led by the Class of 2013, with piano accompaniment by Professor of Music Dianne McMullen.
College Marshall Finlay, Board Chair Messa, Faculty Executive Committee Chair Walker, Student Forum President Haviland-Eduah, Dean McCarty, and all members of our Union community: Welcome to the start of the 2009-2010 academic year!
I must begin with a confession of sorts. Last spring, as we were approaching ReUnion and Commencement, I made a pact with the weather gods. I pledged (far too casually as it turns out) that if we could just get good weather for these two events, I wouldn’t ask for anything more during the summer. Well, whoever was listening seems to have taken me at my word, having delivered stunning days for ReUnion and Commencement and an extraordinarily wet rest-of-the-summer for everyone living east of the Mississippi river. I had no idea that my simple request for a couple of nice days would have such an enormous impact on so many people for so long!
President Stephen Ainlay Opening Convocation 2009
First, let me add my greetings to all the new members of our community. I want to welcome the new employees of the College. I hope that you will find Union to be a hospitable community, one that provides you with ample opportunities for fulfillment. I also want to welcome our newest students – members of the Class of 2013. You join a vibrant learning community and I hope that this will be a time of remarkable intellectual growth for you.
I want to congratulate Connie Schmitz once again for being the recipient of the UNITAS Community Award. One of our virtues as a small liberal arts college is that we are a community and, like all communities, we are made stronger by the contributions of our members. Connie has done so much, not just beautifying our historic campus but in cementing relationships. I want to commend Bill Zwicker, this year’s recipient of the Stillman Award for Excellence in Teaching. If you read the September issue of the Union Magazine, with its focus on alumni/ae of the College who are in the film and television world, you will note that every one of them talks about faculty members who made a difference. In presenting Bill with the Stillman Award, we celebrate the difference he has made as well as the difference Union faculty in general make to the experience of our students. Finally, let me thank Heidi Ching, this year’s recipient of the Hollander prize. Heidi is an exceptional talent and I am very grateful to her for the many ways in which she has shared her many gifts with us.
I am now in my fourth year as Union’s President. For those keeping track, I have served longer than Union’s second President, Jonathan Edwards, Jr., longer than Union’s third President, Jonathan Maxcy, longer than Union’s fifth President, Laurens Perseus Hickok (that is, if you don’t count the time he supported Nott’s final years as President), and longer than our 6th President, Charles Augustus Aiken. I am, roughly speaking, “tied” at 3 ½ years with Union’s first President, John Blair Smith and I am approaching the service records of Frank Parker Day and Thomas Bonner. In short, I can no longer lay claim to being Union’s “new” President.
The length of my tenure has been sufficient enough to give me an even clearer sense, than when I first arrived, of where we stand as an institution, in terms of both our strengths and the challenges we face. We are blessed with a historic and beautiful campus and an impressive legacy of educational innovations. Over our 215 years, members of our faculty have distinguished themselves as teachers and scholars, making important discoveries and advancing knowledge in their fields while changing students’ lives. We have and continue to attract some of brightest students entering college. We have a workforce that is dedicated to this College and that demonstrates care in so many ways. And, Union’s alumni have distinguished themselves by their leadership in many areas, including politics, industry, engineering, finance, education, music, energy, law, health care, and popular culture. Thus, we enjoy an enviable position within the academy.
Having said this, if we are to become the institution we want and need to be, I believe we must assert more strongly just who we are, not just to the outside world but to ourselves. We must build more resources in order to better enable and support what we do. We must reorient aspects of our culture that work against our fundamental mission as an academic institution. We must gain a greater sense of our institutional “voice.” We must have greater self-confidence. And, we must share our innovations, our lessons learned, and our expertise, providing guidance to an academy-at-large that is hungry for leadership and eager to hear what we have to say. Perhaps most fundamentally, we need to assert the primacy of our educational mission and re-center our life together around the academic enterprise.
Joseph Jacques Ramee and Eliphalet Nott, like Thomas Jefferson working in Virginia, conceived of this campus in the early days of the 19th century as a sort of “academic village.” It’s large green, surrounded by a horse-shoe configuration of buildings linked by arcades and anchored by a large central rotunda were all intended to facilitate, in today’ language, a “learning community.”
We are right to remember this vision for Union inasmuch as our “identity” today – that image that we hold of ourselves and project to others – should remain that of an academic village and learning community. This may seem self-evident. However, this understanding of Union must shape the way that we think about the College, prioritize our time, energies, and resources, and communicate expectations to prospective new members. All members of our community should understand that we are (as our Mission Statement proclaims), “a scholarly community,” which provides “a broad and deep education.” We are about the life of the mind. We are about igniting an intellectual flame that lasts a lifetime. We are about intellectual growth. We are an academic village. For me, these are not platitudes; they are marching orders.
For one thing, these assertions imply that we must do all that we can to bring the most talented faculty and students together. Dean McCarty reports that we were once again very successful in our departmental searches last year. We recruited wonderful new faculty, many of whom I met at a reception last week, who will undoubtedly add much to our community. I know this doesn’t just happen. I know that hiring well takes time and commitment. I want to commend and thank departments for their successful searches. You have strengthened our village.
Likewise, we have enrolled an extraordinarily talented group of students. Today, you will see students wearing t-shirts with the words to “Ode to Old Union” printed on them. These are members of the Class of 2013. By all accounts, the Class of 2013 is among the strongest classes, academically speaking, that we’ve ever enrolled at Union.
This is good news after a tumultuous year in higher education, prompted by an even more tumultuous year in the global economy. All in all, Union fared well. We had the third most applications in Union’s history, once again hovering around the 5,000 mark. While somewhat fewer students enrolled than our models would have predicted, the class is strong by any academic measure. Over three quarters of the class ranked in the top twenty percent of their high school class; and, the average SAT scores were up 20 points over last year’s record setting numbers, with an average score of 1920 (or 1290 on the 1600 point scale). And, they are the most diverse incoming class in our history: 20% are U.S. students of color and 4% are international students. With this class, our overall student population is also richly diverse from a geographical standpoint, with students representing 38 states and 34 countries.
From a budgetary standpoint, I should add, that we stayed within our financial aid budget and retain contingency funds to deal with any necessary adjustments prompted by changing family circumstances. Thus, when you add the larger than expected number of students in the Class of 2012 and the increased number of transfer students we’ve had, we remain on a solid financial footing going into this year.
As long as the general economy remains volatile, we will undoubtedly see some volatility in our admissions picture. I want to thank Matt Malatesta and his staff for their efforts to ensure the academic quality of our students and for their commitment to diversifying our community. I want to urge everyone to continue to support the Admission Office’s efforts by participating in open houses and more generally assisting them in their outreach to prospective students and their families. They have ambitious goals for increasing the size of the applicant pool (and hence improving selectivity) and further diversifying Union. It is in all of our interests that we support their work. They too are building our village.
In addition to bringing talented faculty and students together, we must make every effort to preserve, indeed enhance, the student-faculty relationship that develops in the classroom, in the lab, and in co-curricular activities. This begins with ensuring that we have a sufficient number of faculty.
To be clear, I believe that we must increase the size of our tenure-track faculty. Thus, we have set this as one of the highest priorities for our expanded Capital Campaign. I am grateful to the departments which submitted proposals for positions. I am also grateful to the members of the Academic Affairs Council who reviewed and advanced proposals. We now have in hand compelling arguments for new endowed faculty positions that will significantly enhance our academic programs, both disciplinary and inter-disciplinary. And, we have already started discussions about these proposals with potential donors.
These new positions will improve our student-faculty ratio, one measure commonly used by ranking systems to determine the quality of institutions. They will also add important new human resources to support what we are already doing as well as new curricular initiatives. In this regard, I am pleased to report that the State has recently approved new majors in Bioengineering, Religious Studies, Asian Studies, and Environmental Science and Environmental Policy. These newly approved majors will provide important and exciting curricular options to our students.
In addition to adding positions, we must continue our efforts to enhance the spaces within which teaching, learning, and research takes place. The Taylor Music building, dedicated during my first year, has proved an enormously successful project. In addition to being a far better home for faculty and students, it has become a popular venue for all sorts of activities. Emerson Hall, within Taylor, has been a most remarkable venue for jazz concerts, senior recitals, classical Indian dance, Japanese drum concerts, and conversations with the likes of Alan Horn, head of Warner Brothers studios. If you haven’t been to anything there, by all means go.
We broke ground late last academic year on the Peter Irving Wold Science and Engineering Center. This LEED Gold building will, when completed, provide us with more than 30,000 square feet of new space, including much needed office, teaching, and research space. It will better integrate our science and engineering complex and its dramatic atrium will provide views of teaching- and research-in-action and provide us with a new venue for academic programming as well as space for informal meetings between students and faculty. I would urge you to take a look at the website focused on this project which details floor plans and provides a virtual “fly through” of the planned structure. We expect to dedicate this new building in September of 2011. We have tested for geothermal wells, moved utilities, and completed significant site preparation work already. And construction is not far away. No new building happens without some disruption and I appreciate the patience of the entire community as we create this new and exciting academic space.
In hopes of minimizing disruptions to the same area, we are planning to complete renovations to our Social Science building, Robert Lippman Hall, during the same time frame. This is one of our most heavily used classroom buildings and the planned renovation follows improvements already made in the lower level classrooms and the building’s air-handling systems. Social Science, constructed as it was in the late 1960s, was certainly ready for renovation. I think students and faculty alike will attest to the difference that was made by the earlier improvements and, when completed, the upper two floors will offer greatly enhanced space. I have personally lived through such disruptions while I was a department chair and know that this project too will demand patience.
opening convocation 2009
This summer marked the beginning of the new deferred maintenance initiative approved by the Board of Trustees. Their creative and ambitious plan has already yielded significant improvements to our campus in general and to academic spaces in particular. You will notice, for example, the much improved façade of the Visual Arts building which had stucco applied to its south side this summer. You may not notice, but we made important structural improvements to the main performance space in Yulman Theatre. We also started renovations to the façade of Bailey Hall and are installing a new environmental control system in the Schaffer Library Archives, providing better protection of some of the College’s archival treasures.
While these new and newly renovated academic spaces will enhance teaching and learning at Union, there is much to be done. Along with new faculty positions, we have also given high priority to additional academic building projects – both new and renovated spaces – as part of the Campaign. I will also ask the Planning and Priorities Committee to give high priority to improving academic space if and when contingency funds that have been set aside to weather the economic storm become available for re-purposing.
This multi-pronged approach to improving academic space will allow us to continue to make both steady and sometimes dramatic progress toward building the kind of educational facilities that a vital academic village requires, even as we continue our work to address holes in our operating budget that have resulted from the global economic downturn.
I need pause and take stock of just where that economic downturn has left us. As you know from my communiqués regarding Union’s own financial picture in the wake of the downturn in the economy, our endowment has suffered. Like all of higher education, we were reminded this past year that endowments are not “rainy day accounts” but rather subsidize the real and current costs of educating men and women. Our endowment has suffered far less than those of many other institutions but it has suffered nonetheless and we have been taking appropriate steps to ensure that the College retains a balanced budget in the years ahead.
As of the end of June 2009, our endowment was down by approximately a quarter of its value a year earlier. We won’t know until October or November what the final value of the endowment was at the end of our last fiscal year but it is clear that 1) our endowment did better than the endowments at many other schools and 2) that our endowment ended in a better position than we would have predicted six months earlier.
I want to commend our Trustee Investment Committee and our advisors. While nobody likes losses, our endowment portfolio has been skillfully managed and our portfolio is appropriate diversified. Unlike many other schools, for example, we had very limited exposure in what are termed “illiquid investments” – highly speculative investments which have by and large suffered huge losses. Correspondingly, we have been able to avoid some of the enormous difficulties faced by other schools. I have great confidence in our Investment Committee and we all owe them a debt of gratitude for their steadfast attention to our investments.
Having said this, we will face consequences as a result of the losses we did sustain. The reduced value of the endowment as of June 30 will result in a smaller infusion of dollars into our operating budget in future years. Thus, as I’ve already informed the community via emails, we’ve taken steps to reduce our expenditures and will continue to identify areas of cost savings in order to ensure that we continue to operate with a balanced budget. Consistent with my assertion that we must hold to our identity as an academic village and learning community, we have made efforts to minimize the effects of our cost-savings efforts on the academic program.
I want to thank all members of the community for your understanding and I appreciate the many words of support you’ve offered and your affirmation of our decision to try and preserve people’s jobs while looking for other cost savings. I especially want to thank members of our Planning and Priorities Committee for all their efforts as well as the efforts of many working groups that have deliberated difficult issues and passed along recommendations to the P and P. We will continue our work to achieve balanced budgets and I will continue to communicate our progress throughout the upcoming year.
Asserting the primacy of the academic experience at Union implies more than adding faculty, attracting academically talented students, improving facilities, and making prudent decisions regarding cost saving moves. We will continue to do all these things and they will help build the infrastructure of an academic village. But asserting the primacy of the academic experience also implies that we dedicate ourselves to being academic villagers. The primacy of the academic experience, in other words, has implications for how we think of ourselves (not just how we think of Union), relate to one another, invest our energies, and spend our time.
As faculty members, we must continue efforts to intellectually engage our students. As I travel the country meeting with alumni of the College, I can’t help but be impressed by the number of people who take time to tell me about the difference a faculty member made in their lives. We must never forget, however, the important role that we play in opening the world of ideas for students, in honing their writing, speaking, and research skills, in enlarging their capacity to think critically about the world around them, in helping them work collaboratively (an increasingly important attribute in the world they will enter), and in helping them find that about which they can be truly passionate.
If we are to ensure that students become academic villagers, as opposed to mere “academic passer-bys,” we must be certain they are engaged. If we are to ensure that students become academic villagers, we must be certain that they are challenged. And if we are to ensure that students become academic villagers, we must ensure that they are well-advised and mentored.
Academic procession at opening convocation 2009
Students-as-academic villagers must commit to thinking of themselves, first and foremost, as learners, engaged in the process of intellectual formation. College life offers many opportunities but you should never forget that your primary status and identity must remain that of a learner. Prioritize your time with that in mind. Seek to get the most out of the classes you take. Relish the opportunities that this College offers – and it does so in great abundance – to listen to visiting speakers and artists who will further enrich you. And, beware the sirens of the party scene. Avoid the self-destructive and community-destructive behavior that inevitably comes from the excessive consumption of alcohol and substance abuse. Such excesses – which have become a sort of epidemic on college and university campuses nationwide – threaten the very notion of an academic village. They certainly sap intellectual energy and such excesses make it impossible to be true academic villagers. And, it is through being true academic villagers that you will develop what is perhaps the most enduring and prized quality of those who are liberally educated: that is, a love of learning that lasts a lifetime.
A love of learning that lasts a lifetime: that should be the quality that manifests itself in all of us who staff this academic village. It is not enough to make the trains run on time. We must always remember why the trains are running in the first place and where they are headed. We must ensure that we communicate this notion of Union as academic village in all that we say in our publications and in our decision-making. And, all of us too should relish the opportunity to be villagers and avail ourselves as well of the many opportunities to confront new ideas, be inspired by works of art and music, and to engage in the exchange of ideas. This is why we should prize working in an academic environment.
If we – faculty, students, staff and administration – commit to these things, Union will be true to the vision of its founders; if we do these things, we will receive support; if we do these things, our academic reputation will be strengthened; if we do these things, our own lives will be immeasurably enriched.
Again, I welcome you all to the start of what promises to be an exciting new academic year. Let it be a year of renewed commitment to our education mission, to our academic village. And, I hope that you will all celebrate our academic village by joining me at the community cookout to be held on Rugby Field immediately following the Convocation.
