Question 7:
This nineteenth-century educator was a professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at Union before becoming the president of
Brown University. Two of his textbooks, Moral Science and Elements of Political Economy, were so important in Japanese higher education
in the latter half of the nineteenth century that Chiao University has a university holiday in his honor.
Francis Wayland
Answer 7:
The influential nineteenth-century educator who taught at Union before leading Brown was Francis Wayland, a member of the Class of 1813.
Wayland was elected president of Brown in 1826 and served for twenty-eight years. He introduced science and engineering to the curriculum, allowed some elective courses, and substituted modern languages for some of the classical language requirements.
If this sounds similar to the changes made at Union during that era, it should; Wayland taught at Union under Eliphalet Nott, and the two established a relationship that helped prepare Wayland for a college presidency.
After Japan opened its borders in the 1850s, Fukuzawa Yukichi, a teacher and the founder of Chiao University, traveled to the United States. He returned to Japan in 1867 with many American textbooks, including the two books by Wayland. Yukichi considered both books-one a major work on ethics, the other a standard text on economics-important to the development of Japanese society.
Wayland Day was established at the university in 1957. A Japanese professor visiting Brown University in 1994 told the Brown Daily Herald that “Francis Wayland is more famous at Chiao University than at Brown.”
He could have added Union, for there were relatively few correct answers to this puzzler.
Robert J. Espersen '64, of Pensacola, Fla., noted that the personalities of Union and Brown are intertwined. Nott received his master of arts from Rhode Island College (later to become Brown) and Wayland, of course, taught at Union under Nott. When Wayland became pastor of the First Baptist Church in Boston, “Nicholas Brown arranged with Nott to keep Wayland at Union as professor of mathematics and natural philosophy until December 1826 when Wayland was elected president of Brown.”
Correct answers also came from:
Renato Pomatte '39, Poughkeepsie, N.Y. Frederick Frank '57, Meadville, Penn. Joseph Keane '65, Sparkill, N.Y.
Michael Jackson '91, Trophy Club, Texas
Question 8:
This nineteenth-century alumnus achieved a certain fame – or notoriety – when he wrote a book that contained extensive descriptions of his drug-prompted hallucinations. He also wrote the words to a song
every alumnus knows. Who was he, and what were those two literary
contributions?
Send your answer to Puzzle, Public Relations Office, Union College, Schenectady, N.Y. 12308.
On any given day, Linda Klein '80 can find herself trying a complex civil litigation case in an Atlanta courtroom or enjoying a catfish dinner on the Oconee River while speaking to lawyers from the Ocmulgee Circuit Bar Association.
Such is life for the first female officer of the State Bar of Georgia.
Klein began her climb up the Georgia Bar Association's ladder in 1990 when she was elected to the Board of Governors. “It's just so easy to make a difference,” Klein says of
her work for the state bar.
Four years later, Klein had become accustomed to the feeling of making a difference and wanted to take her work for the bar to the next level. She decided to run for the office of
secretary even though a race for secretary had not been contested in fourteen years and she faced an opponent who declared his candidacy several months after she did.
No matter-Klein won, and won big, taking nearly two-thirds of the vote.
“If you work hard, show you want to help, and
take the time to meet people and listen to their problems, they'll vote for you,” Klein says of last year's campaign. “I'd get in my car at 6 a.m. to make it to a breakfast in Macon with a group of lawyers there, then head to Albany (Ga.) for lunch. Then I'd eat catfish dinner with another group. I'd listen to what they had to say, and even if I didn't agree with them, I'd be honest with them and hope they would respect me for that.”
Georgia has 26,000 practicing lawyers, many with small practices in remote rural areas. Klein has developed programs to encourage lawyers to reach out and help people in their communities.
She also has a keen interest in reform of the juvenile justice system in a state that she says has a shortage of beds for teenage offenders and not enough prevention programs.
“Mostly the state has responded by trying to provide more beds,” she says. “Since we know that preventing truancy is the first step in stopping juvenile crime, we are trying to expand a program that intervenes when kids
start to become truants.”
Despite spending what an estimated 1,500 hours a year on bar-related activities, Klein squeezes as much time as she can into her private practice at the Atlanta law firm of Gambrell and Stolz. It helps that she puts in seven-day work weeks and sixteen-hour workdays. During a typical workday last month, Klein spent nearly eight hours at the executive committee meeting of the state bar. Afterwards, she returned to her office for twenty minutes to work on two client matters, then addressed the Georgia Association of Black Women Lawyers during its conference on legal difficulties for women and children with AIDS. Finally, she arrived at home at 8 p.m. and began several hours worth of work for one of her clients.
“Then I woke up the next morning at 6 a.m. and started all over again,” she says.
Her civil practice includes everything from personal injury cases to complex construction litigation.
After a government-owned A-7 airplane crashed into a suburban Atlanta apartment building in 1988, killing a mother and injuring her daughter, Klein represented the daughter in her suit against the government that also included what she calls a “complex custody battle.”
The government admitted responsibility for the crash but refused to compensate the daughter for her loss. The case settled before going to trial. Though the details of the settlement remain sealed, she says the case was settled “on a satisfactory basis for the little girl.”
Trying to help people is the bottom line, Klein says when asked if there is a common theme that runs through all of her work. “As a lawyer, you have to remember that the most beneficial result for your client isn't always the one that costs the most to get there.”
Klein says she doesn't have any interest in pursuing a political career. °I just want to serve my clients and serve my profession,” she says.
When George Bush started talking about the Thousand Points of Light, he may well have had Patricia McKinley '74 in mind.
McKinley, who graduated with the College's first full-time class of women in 1974, calls herself a professional volunteer.
“I'm fortunate that I don't need to work for money to support my family, and most nonprofit organizations are desperate these
days for good volunteers, people who will take on a responsibility and stick with it,” McKinley says from her home in Cheshire, Conn.
McKinley divides her volunteer time among with the Hartford College for Women (HCW), a 300student school that is now affiliated with the University of Hartford; the United Way; and Hartford's Catholic Archdiocese. In each, she has become a regional leader.
McKinley began her work at the Hartford College for Women twenty-five years ago when she earned an associate degree before transferring to Union for her junior and senior years. After earning her B.A., McKinley returned to the Hartford college to help coordinate extracurricular activities and supervise the more than sixty women who lived on campus.
McKinley went on to earn a master's degree in higher education from Harvard in 1983. Now that she is the chairwoman of the Board of Trustees at HCW as well as a member of the University of Hartford's Board of Regents, she relies on her educational training and her experiences as a student to help foster a sense of community at the school she serves.
“I try to make sure HCW is an equal player with the eight other schools at the University of Hartford,” says McKinley, who also keeps her eye on the financial issues that confront the college and helps make sure HCW remains fiscally sound. “I'm always figuring out how the college can be a strong voice for women's education.”
McKinley also tries to be a strong voice for volunteering. That goal has helped McKinley earn a spot on the board of directors for the United Way
of the Central Naugutuck Valley. It also helped make her the honoree at a recent 300-person United Way dinner, where she was given the Community Volunteer award for the year's outstanding volunteer in the area.
McKinley's work for the United Way has focused on the organization's recent efforts to recruit chief executive officers to organize company-wide fundraising drives. Since her husband
is a doctor, McKinley is responsible for targeting medical professionals in Hartford and other areas of central Connecticut.
For McKinley, volunteering is more than just a nice thing to do with some spare time. As a Catholic Christian, she sees it as a duty and one of the major focuses in her life, especially since fewer people have the time to volunteer these days.
“I think people are more reluctant to take on responsible volunteer positions and help with planning and organization,” she says. “With all the downsizing in business, people are working harder. And women are working more than they used to now, too. President Clinton has encouraged giving for the simple joy of serving, which is great, but it's getting harder and harder to find folks who can take on one more thing in their lives.”
McKinley says she has “had the blessing” of being involved with planning for Hartford's Archdiocese, which includes 223 parishes. She helps organize Small Christian Communities-local groups that foster the development of parishes in small communities and provide a forum for members to discuss the challenges of life and faith.
She has also written several chapters in the book Quest, a discussion-group guidebook put out by the Archdiocese, which helps people bring religion into their everyday lives. The book
provides weekly reflections and comments on the scriptures as well as topics for discussion.
“It doesn't do any good to know about Jesus unless you're going to try to change what you do in life with regards to faith,” McKinley says. “I try to show how you can approach your life in a renewed fashion.”
Long before drugs reach the pharmacy shelf, Melanie Otten Manis '74 is part of a team that develops a picture of how the human body will handle those drugs.
Manis is a research scientist for the Upjohn Company in Kalamazoo, Mich., specializing in drug metabolism. In other words, she studies how the human body will absorb,
distribute, metabolize, and excrete potential new drugs. During the past nine years, she has worked on anxiolytic, antiarthritic, antiarryhythmic, and cholesterol lowering medications.
One part of her job is to select compounds for development that are metabolized slowly, so that the effect extends
for the maximum length of time and patients will have to take the drug less often. She studies drugs recently synthesized by the chemists at Upjohn and selects a fraction of them that look promising.
“Each member of the team-chemist, pharmacologist, toxicologist, and drug metabolism scientist-contributes to the selection of new compounds for development as drugs,” she says. “Our combined information from these different areas of research helps us make better choices. Due to a variety of factors, the success for new compounds is still pretty
low somewhere in the order of 1 in 5,000 to 1 in 10,000.”
She also studies the timecourse of disposition. Colestid, which lowers cholesterol levels in the body, was recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration for two new formulations, in part because of Manis's research.
In 1993, she used radiolabelled Colestid administered to dogs and human subjects to determine how long it took to excrete the drug and to demonstrate that it was not absorbed. The information was used in the application for adding the new formulations, flavored granules and tablets. “These forms of the drugs are easier to take, so patients are more likely to take the full dose needed to help control their cholesterol levels,” she says.
Manis has also been active in applying in vitro methods to studying drug metabolism. Because the liver is the main site for metabolism of drugs and contains a wide range of enzymes, she uses thin slices of liver tissue from laboratory species, adds potential new drugs to the beaker or test tube, and compares the results to studies performed in vivo in the same lab animal species. If this in vitro/in vivo correlation is good, the process can be extended to humans using the liver slice method. The test gives her a picture of how a human will metabolize a new drug prior to administration in the clinic.
“We use this information to correlate the metabolism in lab animals with that in man,” she says. ” If the metabolism in animals is similar to man, then the effects of the drug at a variety of dose levels may be as well.
“Metabolism of these foreign compounds by the body is amazing. You have to expect the unexpected in research and always be open to the new and unusual result. That's what keeps it so exciting.”
Access to human liver tissue for preparing slices enabled Manis to set up a human liver bank-a valuable resource for comparing metabolism of standard compounds to potential new drugs in humans. The results allow her to characterize the pathways the body uses to metabolize a drug and specific enzymes involved-important for the individual who is taking multiple medications. Sometimes these medications can interact because they are metabolized by the same enzyme. The interaction can cause extended pharmacological effects or adverse side effects. Manis says this detective work is fun, and the impact of the results on drug development are very satisfying.
Manis realized she was interested in science as a career at Union where
analytical chemistry and biochemistry piqued her interest. “Dr. Helen Birecka was a great example for me, both personally and professionally. The Chemistry Department was very supportive, encouraged me, and gave me the tools to succeed in graduate school,” Manis remembers.
She studied biochemistry and microbiology before getting a degree in pharmacology from Michigan State University. The Ph.d. was necessary, she says, to gain the flexibility and scientific freedom she wanted. However, no academic degree could have prepared her for the work at Upjohn. “There isn't a university training ground for the work I do,” she says. “You have to work in the industry and learn it. It's a marriage between biochemistry and animal physiology with medicinal chemistry and kinetics.”
In a sense, Manis hasn't gone far from the upstate New York dairy farm where she grew up. She, her husband, and their two young daughters, Rebecka, five, and Sarah, twenty-two months, live on a 150-acre farm outside of Kalamazoo, where her husband raises wheat and corn.
After giving birth to her second daughter, Manis recently returned to work on a part-time basis. “Upjohn
has been very open to changes in my work schedule and has offered me projects that can be done on a part-time basis,” she says. “Right now I am focused on just one aspect of the research scientist's job-writing regulatory documents. As a part-time employee, I have also done development projects involving lab work. Flexibility is key, for both management and employee. The more open one is to change, the more opportunities there are.”
The flexible work schedule has allowed her to achieve a balance in her life between family and career. Now, if she wants to, she can plan a
mid-afternoon country bike ride with her kids. “If you look at my initials,” Melanie Often Manis adds, “I'm really Dr. MOM.”
Despite having qualified for the Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference (ECAC) playoffs in six of the past seven years, it had been twenty-one years since Union's men's lacrosse team had reached the championship game.
This spring, the Dutchmen broke that string when they defeated Rensselaer, 10-9, in double overtime.
The title game was another story, however, as top-seeded Alfred scored nine consecutive goals on its way to an 18-7 win.
The Dutchmen did well with a tough schedule and swept local rivals Skidmore (13-3), Albany (9-4) and Rensselaer (12-6 in the regular season) to
win the Capital Cup for the ninth time in the trophy's ten years.
Junior attackman Scott Porter and senior midfielder Cory Holbrough led the team in scoring with forty-six and forty-two points, respectively. Holbrough, who was the leading scorer for Union's hockey team this year, finished his lacrosse career with seventy goals and 124 points.
Women's Lacrosse
Women's Lacrosse
Molly Pearson set a Union single-season goal-scoring record as she led the Dutchwomen to a 6-7 record. After scoring
forty-two goals last season, she reached forty-five this year to break the record of forty-four set by Holly Howard in 1981.
Union qualified for the state tournament for the first time since 1989, losing to
fourth-seeded Cortland 18-9 in the first round.
Softball
Despite a 3-10 record in one-run games, the softball team went to the state tournament, where it beat Skidmore 4-2 in the first round before losing to eventual champion Brockport, 11-1, in the semifinals. Senior Chrissy Nytransky led the team in hitting with a .467 average.
