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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Posted on Jun 11, 2009

We gather together for this Baccalaureate Ceremony in Memorial Chapel, a beloved space for many graduates of Union College. Memorial Chapel was completed in 1925 and was intended to honor Union alumni who had been killed in wars up to that time, especially the then recent conflict of World War I. Over the ensuing years, it has evolved into a place for remembering the passing of all graduates of the College and other members of the Union community. 

For this reason, each year at the Baccalaureate ceremony, we take time to honor those members of the Union family who died during the preceding year. We do so again today. Their names are listed in the program, and I would ask that you join me in remembering them, their many contributions, and their love of Union with a brief moment of silence.

Well, you are almost there! Within 24 hours, you will be graduates of Union College. No longer a “rising” sophomore, junior, or senior.  Tomorrow, you will receive your diploma from Union, what the words to Ode to Old Union – your school’s alma mater – describe as “a prize as fair as a god may wear.” You’ve probably wondered what a “dip” is when the Dutch Pipers sing those lyrics and thrust their arms forward. Well, you are getting one tomorrow!

The Baccalaureate Ceremony is said to have originated at Oxford University in 1432. Tradition has it that each Oxford graduate was expected to stand and deliver a sermon in Latin. You’ll be relieved to know that Union’s Baccalaureate does not require this. Instead, our Baccalaureate, held as it is each year in Memorial Chapel, is more of an opportunity to pause before you end your studies here and reflect on your time at Union and the future that awaits you.

How appropriate that we hold this Baccalaureate – a remembering ceremony – in Memorial Chapel. President Charles Alexander Richmond, Union’s 10^th president, built this structure to remember alumni who had lost their lives in World War I. The campus saw a good deal of construction during the Richmond administration. During his tenure, he oversaw construction of the Campus Center, Bailey and Butterfield Halls, the College’s main gate – Payne Gate – and Alumni Gymnasium (now Breazzano Fitness Center). But Memorial Chapel must have been particularly special to him for President Richmond had his ashes, along with those of his wife, Sarah, interred here. 

Those of you who gathered for the ceremonial handshake with members of the Class of 1959 in this very place just two weeks ago at ReUnion know what I mean when I say that this is a special place to our alumni as well. For these men (and they were all men in the Class of 1959), they remembered a year full of history. 

The year they received their “dip” from Union, Alaska and Hawaii were admitted as our 49^th and 50^th states, Fidel Castro became premier of Cuba, the Barbie Doll debuted, two monkeys (“Able” and “Miss Baker” were the first two living beings to return successfully from space travel, and, as Don McLean’s song lamented, their graduation year marked the “Day the Music Died” – when Buddy Holly, Ritchie Vallens and the Big Bopper died in a plane crash in Iowa. Memories of all these national and world events undoubtedly came back to them during their ReUnion weekend.

More importantly, memories of their times at Union rushed over them. Many of them recounted their visits to the President’s House, where then President Carter Davidson and his wife, Capitola, hosted parties for their daughter, Cynthia. One alumnus recounted sleeping over at the house after one of these parties, under the piano in the music room. Another could tell me precisely where the key used to wind one of the grandfather clocks was located – having used his height to do the Davidsons a favor. 

They recounted influential faculty who had awakened them to new ideas. They remembered mentors who had the insight and were courageous enough to urge them to change plans. They remembered staff who simply took time to care for them. They recounted games won or nearly won and seasons ended prematurely. They remembered being buffeted by winds around the Nott Memorial on a cold day. And, they remembered sitting on the lawn around the Nott Memorial, warming themselves in the early days of spring. 

They recounted roommates and close friends. They remembered good times and good conversations. They remembered changes that took place over their four years here that led to the person they were at the time of graduation, changes that, in many instances were changes for a lifetime; changes that still inform their approach to life 50 years later.

What will you remember about your time at Union? I suspect you will remember that in your senior year, America elected its first African-American President. I would wager that you will remember that the nation and world endured its worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. You may well remember a men’s hockey season that posted the best record in the history of the program and a women’s volleyball team that posted more wins than any team in Union’s history. 

You may remember long discussions about changing the Student Forum constitution. I think you’ll remember that you helped volunteer at Minerva Games and provided countless hours of tutoring, helping young, impressionable and hungry minds imagine a better future. You’ll also likely remember that you helped build a new and better relationship between the College and the city; that you helped Union make progress toward a more sustainable future; and that, while you were here, Union became a more diverse and inclusive place. 

I am sure that you will remember your roommates and your friends – the close relationships you’ve built and enjoyed, and you will find wonder in the way in which they endured long after graduation. And, I know you will recall faculty and staff who – just as in the case of the Class of 1959 – made a difference in your life.

When prospective students are thinking Union as their college of choice, I tell them that they should consider this: in choosing Union, you are also choosing a lifetime membership. I mean that. Your relationship with Union will change tomorrow; there’s no mistaking or stopping that. But, your relationship with Union and all that it’s been to you need not be lost. Come out to alumni events when you get that card or email. I told you at the Senior dinner that recent classes attend in great numbers and I hope members of the Class of ’09 raise the bar even higher. 

Wherever you locate, find the nearest alumni club and become active. Come back for ReUnions, Homecomings and Alumni Symposia – while you may not feel like sitting in another class today, mark my work you will want to relive that experience in the future. Make the trip to Union when you see that a concert, game or theater performance is coming up that you would simply hate to miss. All these provide you with opportunities to stay connected with each other and with the school.

And when you are back on campus, take the tour, see what changes have been made. And be sure to return to Memorial Chapel. When you do, remember that you sat in this place, on a special weekend in June, and paused consider all that it meant to be a member of the Great Class of 2009.

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Posted on Jun 11, 2009

Could we have asked for a better way to celebrate the accomplishments of the Class of 2009?

I want to thank our honorary degree recipients – Dr. Volcker and Dr. Perl – for being with us today. You both honor us by your presence and we are proud to count you among our own.

I would call your attention to the list of prize recipients, printed in the back pages of the Commencement Program. They received their awards at Prize Day but I would ask you to join me in recognizing them today with your applause.

I would also invite all the members of the Class of 2009 to stand, turn to your family and friends in attendance today, and join me in thanking them with applause for their love and support which prepared you for Union and sustained you the past four years.

Would all of you join me in thanking the members of the Union faculty who have shared their love of learning with you these past four years and especially Linda Almsted who is retiring this year.

I also want to thank Professor William Finlay, our Marshall, the members of the Commencement Committee as well as the entire Union staff for organizing this day, readying this beautiful campus, and preparing food that we will enjoy. They have approached this day as they approach every day, with devotion and care.

I invite all of you – graduates, friends, family members, faculty, staff, and administrators – to join the divisional receptions immediately following this ceremony. These divisional receptions offer a fine opportunity to affirm the bonds that have been forged.

Now please allow me a few words to our graduates. 

At the Senior Dinner on Tuesday evening, I told you that you should be proud of the many things that you’ve accomplished during your time here and proud of the ways in which you’ve inspired others during your four years at Union. You:

• successfully competed on ice, court, field, pool, and water, achieving remarkable success, setting school records and, every bit as importantly, you established a reputation for Union as home to the “student-citizen-athlete”
• were successful in SAE Baja, Model U.N. and other academic competitions
• focused our Greek organizations on the College’s Strategic Plan and, in turn, advanced us toward critical goals
• volunteered in Schenectady and across the region, awakening young minds, providing tax assistance to low income residents, and restoring hope
• raised funds for breast cancer research, victims of domestic violence, and victims of HIV/AIDS in Africa
• ran 5 kilometers – as part of Run, Ribs, and Reggae – to aid the search for a cancer cure
• helped build a Habitat House
• organized Minerva Games and a U-Care carnival
• went to Ethiopia – as Engineers without Borders – and developed plans to restore critical water resources to a village in need
• guided Schenectady students as they participated in the STEP competition, igniting a passion for science, technology, and engineering
• found sustainable solutions, building a green garden shed, developing and testing innovative rubberized sidewalks and hybrid wind turbines, and cultivating a garden that gives real meaning to the phrase “locally grown produce”
• helped victims of domestic violence in Cambodia and addressed the plight of people living in U.S./Mexican border towns
• committed yourselves to being citizens of the world and will go off to the far reaches of the globe as Minerva Fellows, teachers, and in other capacities with one central goal: to make life better for people who need you
• reminded us all of the virtues of religious and spiritual diversity and of the need to continually enlarge the educational table so that all can partake of its bounty
• helped reclaim the memory of Moses Viney, an escaped slave who found a home at Union College
• helped make Union a more inclusive and welcoming place for all members of our community

We are grateful to you for all that you’ve done to support each other and to improve Union and the broader community during your years here.

Hopefully Union has done much for you. We hope that your time here has helped you find your own passion. We hope that you’ve had “ah-ha” moments and now understand the world in new ways. We hope your time at Union has deepened your love of learning and provided you with intellectual and social tools that will allow you to be successful in whatever you choose to be and do. 

And, we hope you carry with you memories, friendships, and commitments that will endure.   One word of advice: don’t take these relationships or your relationship to this College for granted. Work at nurturing and retaining the relationships you’ve developed. Stay in touch with each other. Stay in touch with faculty and staff here – people who made a difference in your life and who care about what happens to you. By staying in touch, you will not only keep relationships alive, you will ensure that Union remains part of your life.

It is impossible to spend four years at Union and not hear of the fabled accomplishments of those who graduated ahead of you. The “Union Notables” posters that now adorn the Library and the walls of College Park Hall, the statues and wall plaques, the portraits that hang across campus – all these should inspire as you contemplate the possibilities for your life.

I would like to close today’s Commencement ceremony and send you on your way, by paraphrasing the charge that Union’s first President, John Blair Smith, gave to Union students over 200 years ago: “as you leave this place, do so ready for a useful life.” 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.

I look forward to welcoming you home to this special place many times in the years ahead. We all wish you the best, you sisters and brothers under the laws of Minerva, you daughters and sons of Union College. 

Godspeed.

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