Posted on Mar 1, 1995

The College began its third century by establishing a new honor for alumni the Eliphalet Nott Medal.

The medal will be awarded to alumni who have achieved outstanding success in their professional fields. It is named after Union's great nineteenth-century president, Eliphalet Nott, who served the College from 1804 to 1866, the longest tenure of any American college president.

President Roger Hull, who had the idea for the honor, presented medals to six alumni during the Founders Day convocation on February 25. Recipients were:

Baruch S. (Barry) Blumberg '46, Fox Chase Distinguished Scientist at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1976;

Robert I. Chartoff '55, president of Chartoff Productions, a film production company in Santa Monica, Calif.,
and producer of such films as the Rocky series, The Right Stuff, Raging Bull, and others;

A. Lee Fritschler '59, president of Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., and former chairman of the U.S. Postal Rate Commission;

Michael J. Fuchs '67, chairman and chief executive officer of Home Box Office;

Robert A. Laudise '52, adjunct research director for chemistry at AT&T Bell Laboratories;

Kathleen M. White '72, editor-in-chief of Redbook magazine and the former editor of McCall's, Working Woman, Child, and Mademoiselle magazines.

Posted on Mar 1, 1995

William G. Burns '54, a past chairman of the Board of Trustees and a longtime participant in the life of the College, received the Founders Medal at the Founders Day convocation in February.

The Founders Medal, one of the College's highest honors, is awarded on special occasions to recognize unusual and distinguished service to the College.

As an undergraduate, Burns was a member of the Student Council, president of the Newman Club, a member of the track team, and a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

He continued his active role after graduation. Soon after becoming an
alumnus, he was president of the Albany Alumni Club. Later he was a head agent for the Annual Fund, chairman of his class's twenty-fifth ReUnion, president of the Class of 1954, chairman of ReUnion, a member of the Campaign for Union's National Committee, and chairman of the Bicentennial Campaign.

Appointed to the Board of Trustees in 1979, he was vice chairman in 1985 and chairman of the board from 1986 to 1990. Currently, he is a life trustee.

He is retired from NYNEX, where he was vice chairman and a director.

Posted on Mar 1, 1995

As the College neared its 200th birthday on February 25, it was the happy recipient of a flurry of major gifts:

• Gordon Gould '41, the inventor of the laser, gave the College $1.5 million to establish an endowed chair in physics. Although the chair will bear his name, Gould made the gift to honor Professor Frank Studer, who was his mentor.  
• The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded Union a $575,000 challenge grant, one of the largest of thirty grants the foundation made nationwide. When the challenge is met, it will mean nearly $3 million for the renovation and expansion of Schaffer Library. 
• The National Science Foundation made matching grants of nearly $450,000 for three projects that will greatly enhance research opportunities for both students and faculty at the College. 
• The GE Fund awarded $191,000 to the College to create an innovative teacher training center to help mathematics, science, and technology teachers in the Schenectady City School District. 
• Doug Seholm '57 and his wife, Barbara, pledged $250,000 to establish an endowment for the maintenance of Jackson's Garden.

Details about all the gifts will be found in the “Bicentennial Campaign” news section, which begins on page 10.

Posted on Mar 1, 1995

Convocation Remarks delivered on Founders Day, February 25, 1995

Today we celebrate and plan: celebrate an idea and an institution; and plan for a future that, if we apply ourselves courageously and diligently, can reassert the College's leadership role in education and steer the Union ship past education's Scylla and Charybdis.

This day is truly remarkable. It is remarkable in that only seventeen institutions share our longevity; it is remarkable, too, in its similarity to our other major milestones.

At each of our past milestones, we also combined celebration and planning. Although those occasions were marked by somber notes, Union clearly was an institution that moved forward. In 1895, despite the fact that Union's great president, Eliphalet Nott, lamented that he would soon pass from the scene, he had the vision to introduce engineering for the first time at the liberal arts college level (by the way, Nott was wrong; he was to serve Union for another
twenty-one years). In 1895, during the College's centennial, President Andrew Van Vranken Raymond presided over an institution that still had not reemerged from its nadir following the Civil War; yet, Raymond and the College had the vision to bring the great Charles Steinmetz to Union and have him introduce electrical engineering into the curriculum. And, in 1945, at the sesquicentennial Founders Day, Union found itself in a less than celebratory mood, for World War II was still raging and Union's president, Dixon Ryan Fox, had suddenly died a month before; however, Union like other colleges, was planning to welcome the returning veterans to the campus and to join in serving them as they had served the nation.

What we do today will be in keeping with what has transpired before. Well-positioned, but faced with the pressures confronting all of higher education, Union once more has a unique opportunity, an opportunity that, thanks to a generous grant from the General Electric Foundation, will enable the College to develop the engineering curriculum for the 21st century and bring liberal arts and technology together in a way to provide a model for all of higher education.

The institution that we celebrate today is Union. Yet the idea we celebrate had its origin well before 1795. The idea for Union's illustrious history can, like all of American higher education, be traced back to ancient Greece. Indeed, the belief that knowledge is power, and that it can be acquired through effective and logical reasoning, through persistent and hard work, is hardly unique to Union.

What is unique, though, is how this wonderful college came into being. In the midst of the Revolutionary War, in 1779, the townspeople of Schenectady petitioned the State of New York for a college; in 1795, during the presidency of George Washington, they succeeded in obtaining a charter for an institution of higher learning in Schenectady, “the land beyond the pine plains,” thereby marking a departure from what had taken place at the seventeen other colleges that had been chartered before Union. For the first time, a non-denominational institution was born, an institution that was a union of all faiths and that specified in its charter that no person of any religious denomination shall be excluded from the College on account of his particular religion. Moreover, as Union's first president, John Blair Smith, concluded, education should not be the providence only of the elite. In this country, said Smith, where the path to honors and offices had been open to all, so also should higher education, and the dissemination of knowledge; at Union, therefore, the sons of farmers and the sons of patroons would be equally welcome.

Early on, too, Union chose a decidedly different path from its seventeen brethren. Like those institutions, the acquisition and transmission of knowledge was the primary raison d'etre. However, it was the application of that knowledge, and. the recognition that that knowledge is a living entity, that distinguished Union. For those teaching and learning at Union, knowledge grew, changed, had meaningful applications.

Taken separately, the acquisition, transmission, and application of knowledge have relevance; together, though, they have more than relevance, for they have the power to change the world. From its earliest days, Union has recognized and encouraged the dynamic interaction among these three aspects of knowledge, for, as
Eliphalet Nott stated, “in the acquisition of knowledge, you are never to be stationary, but always progressive.”

That approach was evidenced early on and is equally evident today. From the introduction of the modern languages into the curriculum, to the addition of the hard sciences, to the introduction of first a general program in engineering and then in electrical engineering, Union has not shied from the application of knowledge that has been acquired and properly transmitted.

More recently, the spirit is demonstrated in the broad range of international study opportunities, on the emphasis on undergraduate student research (not only in the sciences but also in the arts, humanities, and social sciences), and on a recognition of the need to revamp an engineering curriculum for the 21st century. Yet the real challenge is before us; we must afford students seeking a broad liberal arts education the opportunity to be exposed to technology in a pedagogically sound and non-threatening manner.

Certainly, while most first-rate educational institutions are willing to confine themselves to the acquisition and transmission of knowledge, there are other institutions that have emphasized the application of knowledge. Yet what makes Union distinctive is our belief-a belief that truly can be traced to the very first years of the College-that the three ideas must work together and that they can do so effectively in the intimate setting of a small liberal arts college.

These attributes will serve us well as we face the obvious and many challenges in our third century of service. As important as this philosophical basis is, and as lovely as the beauty of this first planned campus in America is, ultimately it is people who will make the difference. The right people without the right idea and the right setting, and the right idea and setting without the right people, can each provide something of worth. In the final analysis, though, it is the triumvirate of our idea, our setting, and our people that will help propel us into our 21st century.

As we celebrate today, we have reason to feel proud of our history and the future promise of our distinctiveness. It is the strength of that history and distinctiveness that has made the difference in the experiences that so many in the Union family have had, including so many of you, and it is that historic and ongoing distinctiveness that will lead the Union ship safely past the modern-day Scylla and Charybdis.

Roger H. Hull

Posted on Jan 1, 1995

Julie Greifer-Swidler-a lifelong lover of rock-and-roll-thought she had landed her dream job.

She sat in her office at Polygram Records and learned that as assistant general counsel she would coordinate the legal work necessary for the twenty-fifth anniversary celebration of Woodstock.

Today, four months after Woodstock '94, Greifer-Swidler is still sorting through a mountain of legal work. “Looking back,” she says, “it was one of the worst-best things I've ever worked on, and am still working on.”

One week she has to handle a controversy about cleaning up the site; the next week, she has to answer questions about the release of the concert video and album; after that, she must deal with certain vendors who claim that Polygram owes them more money.

Still, Woodstock '94 remains something like the dream job Greifer-Swidler thought it would be. Consider, for example, that she was on stage when Crosby, Stills & Nash performed, and that her concert office was in a trailer just behind one of the two stages with a sound system few offices have ever enjoyed.

Besides, for a woman who had performed as a singer during college and had loved her radio show on WRUC as much as anything else at Union, Woodstock '94 proved to be a good place for a former litigator. In addition to negotiating deals with the three original producers of Woodstock and more than sixty artists, Greifer-Swidler helped negotiate permits from the town of Saugerties and Ulster County and pacified residents terrified that their town was about to be overrun by a mob of out-of-control teenagers.

Then there were the maintenance contracts, the vendor contracts, the pay-per-view contracts, the water contracts, the medical contracts, the helicopter contracts, and. of course, the 2,500 portable toilet contracts. And at the concert itself, Greifer-Swidler had to mediate between sponsors like the Pepsi Corp. and Greenpeace.

If it sounds chaotic, that's because it was.

“I think so many people wanted to re-live 1969,” she says. “That's why they all showed up without tickets, and there's only so long you can keep people out of where they want to be. You'll never be able to convince people that they have to pay for another Woodstock.”

Greifer-Swidler spent her first six years after law school litigating in some of New York's most powerful firms. Still, she couldn't shake the music bug. At one point during her seven-day work weeks at Shea & Gould, she was even invited to host a nationally syndicated radio show in her spare time.

“I wanted to continue my show from WRUC,” she says, “But I realized I had no time.”

At Union, Greifer-Swidler hosted what she describes as a “pretty eclectic” show. “I played everything from Hot Tuna to Bruce Springsteen to old rock-n-roll, and some jazz that was popular at the time, like Chuck Mangione. Not pop, though,” she insists, “and not Barry Manilow. But I'd do Bill Withers, who did R&B but wasn't all that big, and then I'd throw in the Supremes.”

She briefly thought about trying to sing professionally, but “Unless you have a voice like Whitney Houston's or Vanessa Williams, you have to write your own songs, and I'm not a songwriter.”

Her first venture outside the litigation world took her to the advertising firm of J. Walter Thompson, where she occasionally had to rein in the agency's creative team when they would wander into questionable legal territory. “They'd call me into the meeting and ask me just how far over the edge they were going,”
Greifer-Swidler says.

She enjoyed being part of a corporate team. “When you're at a law firm,” she says, “you're on the mountain and you don't get to see the day-to-day operations of the company team.” And, by
handling many of the talent contracts at J. Walter Thompson, Greifer-Swidler began to break into entertainment law.

After the agency underwent a hostile takeover, Greifer-Swidler landed at Polygram. These days, after her adventures at Woodstock and the good fortune of being able to work on a deal involving one of her rock-n-roll heroes, Pete Townsend, and his Psycho Derelict concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Greifer-Swidler isn't headed anywhere else anytime soon.

Except to the maternity ward; her third child is due in February.