Posted on Sep 18, 2008

Friday, Sept. 19, 12:30-2 p.m. /Strauss Unity Center, third floor lounge, Reamer Campus Center / Office of Multicultural Affairs Open House

Friday, Sept. 19, 5-7 p.m. / Breazzano House / Annual Multicultural BBQ

Friday, Sept. 19, 4 p.m. / Humanities Lounge, 2nd floor / Ethics Bowl Team organizational meeting for the Union College Ethics Bowl Team. For more information, contact Professor Mark Wunderlich, Philosophy (wunderlm@union.edu)

Friday, Sept. 19 – Monday, Sept. 22, 8 and 10 p.m. / Reamer Campus Center Auditorium / Film: “Incredible Hulk”

Friday, Sept. 19, 12:30-2 p.m. / Strauss Unity Center, Reamer Campus Center Room 304/ Office of Multicultural Affairs Open House, “Celebrating Diversity@U”

Friday, Sept. 19, 5–9 p.m. / Mandeville Gallery and various downtown sites / Art Night Schenectady

Saturday, Sept. 20, 1 p.m. / Frank Bailey Field / Football vs. Muhlenberg

Saturday, Sept. 20, 1 p.m. / College Park / Field hockey vs. Wheaton

Saturday, Sept. 20, 3 p.m. / Reamer Campus Center Auditorium / Classic film: “North By Northwest”

Monday, Sept. 22, 7:30 p.m. / Visual Arts Building Room 215 / Poetry reading by Ed Pavlic, former professor of English at Union, featuring his new collection of poems, “Winners Have Yet To Be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway” (University of Georgia Press) 

Wednesday, Sept. 24, 6:30 p.m. / Reamer Campus Center Auditorium / David Muller of Mount Sinai Medical Center will address “Caregivers and Care Providers Coping with Death”; co-sponsored with the Community Hospice of Schenectady

Thursday, Sept. 25, 10 a.m.-1:30 p.m. / Lawn between Nott Memorial and Reamer Campus Center / National College Fire Safety Month activities, sponsored by the Union Office of Environmental Health & Safety, New York State Office of Fire Prevention and Control, and Schenectady Fire Department. Events include live mock dorm room burn, fire extinguisher use training, firefighter challenge/dummy drag and more

Thursday, Sept. 25, 6 p.m. / Nott Memorial / "For God and the Queen: Torture, Religion and National Security in Elizabethan England," public talk by Stephen Alford of Cambridge University; sponsored by the departments of History, English, Political Science and Religious Studies

Friday, Sept. 26 – Monday, Sept. 29, 8 and 10 p.m. / Reamer Campus Center Auditorium / Film: “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Crystal Skull”

Friday, Sept. 26, 1 p.m. / Frank Bailey Field / Field hockey vs. St. Lawrence

Friday, Sept. 26, 4 p.m. / College Park / Men’s soccer vs. Vassar (Liberty League contest) 

Saturday, Sept. 27, 1-6 p.m. / Downtown Schenectady / Welcome Back Students Day, featuring Union College and Schenectady County Community College student activities, specials and promotions

Saturday, Sept. 27, noon / Messa Rink / Women’s ice hockey vs. Toronto Junior Aeros

Saturday, Sept. 27, 1 p.m. / Frank Bailey Field / Football vs. Rochester

Saturday, Sept. 27, 2 p.m. / College Park / Men’s soccer vs. RPI (Liberty League contest) 

Saturday, Sept. 27, 2 p.m. / Tennis courts / Women’s tennis vs. SUNY Plattsburgh

Saturday, Sept. 27, 10 p.m. / Old Chapel / UProgram presents Psychic Madman Jim Karol 

Posted on Sep 18, 2008

Through Sept. 19

Mandeville Gallery

Nott Memorial

Outside Information: A Site-Specific Sound Installation by Stephan Moore

Moore, a composer, audio artist and sound designer in New York City, uses the complex acoustics inside the Nott Memorial to transform the building’s interior into a dense wilderness of small, shifting sounds.  

Through Sept. 28

Mandeville Gallery

Nott Memorial

“SNAP! Contemporary Photography”

Features the unconventional photographic treatments and approaches of five contemporary female photographers: Sally Apfelbaum, Nora Herting, Katharine Kreisher, Melinda McDaniel and Lynn Saville.  

Through Oct. 21

Wikoff Student Gallery

Nott Memorial

Optical Union

Photographs by Meghan Haley-Quigley ’08, Rui Fen Huang ’08, Tobias Leeger ’09, Steven Leung’08, Lauren Muske ’07, Jonathan Scheff ’11 and Juneui Soh ’08, taken from final portfolios from spring 2008’s Photography 3 class taught by Professor Martin Benjamin. The focus of each student’s portfolio ranges in subject and style, from documentary images to portraits to abstractions.

Through Dec. 1

Visual Arts Building

Burns Atrium Art Gallery

Knackers Yard

Visiting Assistant Professor of Visual Arts Anthony Cafritz’s recent installation of seemingly disparate materials that “attempts to describe the current state of things.”

Posted on Sep 18, 2008

Three Union students in the Department of Physics and Astronomy were engaged in advanced, hands-on research recently as part of Union’s new membership in the NASA NY Space Grant Program.

“The program gives our students opportunities to participate in research in space-related fields at Union and affiliate institutions and to apply for national Space Grant Consortium internships at NASA centers,” said Rebecca Koopmann, associate professor of physics and astronomy, who is administering grant activities at the College.

NASA NY Space Grant is headquartered at Cornell University under the direction of Yervant Terzian and has 20 affiliate members across New York state.

This summer, John Robens ’09 worked with Koopmann on a project titled “Searching for Optical Counterparts of Galaxies and Tidal Streams Detected by the ALFALFA Survey.”

He analyzed images obtained at Cerro Tololo Observatory in Chile, via the Small and Moderate Aperture Research Telescope System, to search for possible optical matches of galaxies detected at radio wavelengths at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.

“The research I did furthered my understanding in physics and astronomy by leaps and bounds. I came in with some very basic knowledge, and I left with moderate and even some advanced knowledge in the field,” said Robens.

“I learned more than I could have hoped for this summer, not only about physics and astronomy, but also about research in general,” he added. “My work helped to further the overall research goal, and my results were helpful in limiting the brightness of possible optical matches.”

David Barker ’09 and Daniel Barringer ’11 used the Union College Observatory 20-inch telescope in their research with Professor and Observatory Manager Francis Wilkin. 

Barringer’s project, “Searching for Eclipses of Extrasolar Planets,” targets stars known to have planets to search for slight dimming when a planet passes between Earth and the star.

Barker’s project, “CCD Photometry of Variable Stars and Transiting Planets,” is aimed at tracking how the light output of variable sources changes in time. Barker is continuing the search for extrasolar transiting planets as his senior thesis for his major in physics and astronomy.

NASA initiated the National Space Grant College and Fellowship Program, known as Space Grant, in 1989 to expand opportunities for Americans to understand and participate in its aeronautics and space projects by supporting and enhancing science and engineering education, research and public outreach.

Posted on Sep 17, 2008

A WWII remnant found recalls one Union story

A war memorabilia collector in Paris recently sent a letter to Union College asking about Dr. Joseph C. Driscoll ’32, a U.S. Army doctor who earned a Bronze Star in World War II for heroism during a 1944 battle in Belgium.

“I have in my collection two World War II identity cards that once belonged to Capt. Joseph Driscoll,” collector Nicolas Charpentier wrote. “Could you please let me know what you know about him and the units he was a part of during the war?”

Union College magazine corresponded with Charpentier, uncovered details of Driscoll’s war service and obtained images of his U.S. War Department identification card. The ID card is a symbolic remnant of one Union story among many from World War II, which saw a bit more than 3,000 Union graduates serve and 76 die in military action, according to the Encyclopedia of Union College History. About 1,200 of the alumni who served World War II were part of the U.S. Navy’s V-12 officer training program, though Driscoll, who joined the U.S. Army in 1942 at age 32—nine years after his Union graduation— was not in that program.

After graduating from Union, Driscoll earned a degree from Albany Medical College. In 1938, after a residency at Greenwich (Conn.) Hospital and another surgical residency at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, he returned to private practice in Schenectady. In December 1942, Driscoll became one of the first physicians in the city to join the war effort after voluntarily enlisting.

After completing a training course in chemical warfare and working as an instructor at Camp McCain in Mississippi, he was drafted to lead a medical corps unit which later saw action during the Battle of the Bulge, according to Schenectady-area newspaper accounts from the mid-1940s.

In mid-December 1944 the German army sent about 200,000 troops into a swath of the Ardennes Forest covering parts of Belgium, Luxembourg and France in a last-ditch attempt to regain control of the war, which had slipped away in the months following the D-Day invasion. The counteroffensive led by U.S. Army Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr. became known as the Battle of the Bulge. It lasted through mid-January 1945 and marked a costly but critical victory leading up the German surrender in May 1945, according to the U.S. Army Center of Military History.

The Bronze Star citation issued by the U.S. Army, reads in part: “Capt. Joseph C. Driscoll distinguished himself by meritorious achievement in … operations against the enemy on Dec. 29, 1944 in the area of La Roche, Belgium. During fierce battle action, Capt. Driscoll braved heavy enemy action to supervise the operations of his medical company. When overwhelming pressure on our defense made it necessary to withdraw, he led his men in the movement of 75 wounded to safety.”

The citation was issued by the 7th Armored Division but, while at Camp McCain, Driscoll was assigned to the 87th Infantry Division, 312th Medical Battalion.

Driscoll returned from the war in January 1946 and resumed his private medical practice in Schenectady. He ran that practice for 38 years from his home and office at 1109 Union St., about a half mile from campus. He remained in private practice until 1978, when he became an examining physician for the Workers Compensation Board in Albany.

A year prior to enlisting in the U.S. Army, Driscoll married Dr. Mary Blackmer, a graduate of Mt. Holyoke College and Albany Medical Center. In the early 1940s, Blackmer was psychiatrist at the Marshall Sanitarium in Troy, N.Y. and later worked at Albany Veterans Hospital. The couple had no children.

Blackmer died in August 2000 and Driscoll a few months later on Dec. 30, 2000. Driscoll left a $1.5 million bequest to the College. The bequest today funds the Joseph C. Driscoll Professor of Sociology and Marine Policy, now occupied by Ilene M. Kaplan, who is also the chair of College’s Sociology Department and a guest investigator at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Cape Cod.  

Posted on Sep 17, 2008

Find Web links cited in the Summer 2008 Union College magazine below.

In Memoriam

• For a short biography of the late Dr. Theodore W. Fox '37, click here.

Africa in focus

• Nancy Borowick '07 aids a village in Ghana, click here.
• Daniella Marquis '01 aids Ethiopian orphans, click here.
• Elissa Hecker '95 aids the women of the Congo, click here.

A dip from our alma mater

Commencement caps for years of hard work 

• For complete Commencement 2008 coverage, click here.

Making the case for engineering as a liberal art

 

Founders Medal, standing ovation for man in the wings

• For a complete list of upcoming Chamber Concer Series events, click here.

 

Eight graduates making their mark in the world

• For a link to blogs by the Minerva Fellows, click here.

 

Kara Lightman '09: 'Peace scholar' helps women in Cambodia

• For more on Lightman's project, click here

 

Burton payne '41 'A good education'

• For more on giving to Union, click here

 

 Galleries at the Nott

• For more on art galleries at the Nott, click here.

 

 

 

 

 

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