Curtis, also a professor of music and chair of the Music Department at Union, needed a bassoonist for the College's woodwind quartet.
“I had just started 11th grade, recalls Michael DiPietro '70, M.D. “Every Friday afternoon during my junior and senior years, I would find a ride to campus and rehearse. “
“That evening phone call was a chance happening that turned into a lifelong opportunity for me.”
Opportunity-at Union, in his chosen career and at the University of Michigan, where he practices medicine and plays music-was the subject of a talk recently by DiPietro upon being named the first John F. Holt Collegiate Professor of Radiology at the university's medical school.
A pediatric radiologist there for 23 years, DiPietro is recognized as a pioneer in the use of sonography for the diagnosis of spinal cord anomalies in children. He spoke on “Chance and Opportunity: A Michigan Story,” at his investiture ceremony. Union (which, coincidentally, produced the first president of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Henry Philip Tappan, Class of 1825) is a big part of that story.
Music and Science
It was Professor Curtis who encouraged DiPietro to apply to Union, where he studied science.
With Curtis' recommendation, DiPietro went on to win the Elmer Tidmarsh Scholarship in music. At Union, he also was influenced by John Girdner, professor of psychology, “who taught me how to carefully observe and document behavior in children,” and Carl George, professor of biology, “who taught me how to write lab reports carefully and concisely.”
He traveled to Austria with Fred Klemm, professor of German, on the College's inaugural term abroad in Vienna in 1969, “the first time I had ever been on an airplane,” DiPietro recalled. “That experience broadened my life, and I am forever grateful to Professor Klemm and to Union for providing me with that opportunity.”
DiPietro also enjoyed singing in the Union College Glee Club and Madrigals, led by Professor of Music Hugh Allen Wilson.
Music still a Force
Today, DiPietro lives in Ann Arbor with his wife, librarian and archivist Alice Fishman; their son, Corey, is a graduate student. Co-director of the Musculoskeletal Ultrasound Society, DiPietro has appeared in the Best Doctors in America and has received numerous professional awards and appointments.
Still playing his bassoon, DiPietro is a member of the University of Michigan's Life Sciences Orchestra (LSO), which he helped found five years ago. He is also in his 16th year with the Campus Symphony Orchestra (CSO).
Union reconnection
It was through the CSO that Dr. DiPietro rekindled an old friendship. He and Richard A. Lewis '70, M.D., played together in the Union orchestra in the late 1960s.
“When Rich moved to Michigan to join the faculty at Wayne State University School of Medicine as associate professor of neurology, we were reunited in the CSO-30 years after we had played together at Union,” DiPietro said.
If success can be defined as “loving what you do and doing what you love,” as DiPietro believes, then balancing a life in medicine with a love of music makes him a very successful man, indeed.
Not a typical academic resume. But Vitek ’79 is no typical academic. The professor of philosophy and ethics at Clarkson University (and frequent visiting professor at Union) has just released his fourth CD, a collection of standards and originals titled “A Fine Line.” His collaborator, bassist Dan Gagliardi, is a professor of mathematics at St. Lawrence University.
In the late ’70s at Union, Vitek hauled his heavy Fender Rhodes keyboard up and down the stairs of South College to gig with a rock band called Jupiter Hollow that evolved into a jazz group.
He took a jazz improvisation class at Union with the late baritone sax great Nick Brignola, a reluctant grader who at the end of the course asked the students to assign themselves a grade. The self-critical Vitek, on the verge of becoming a professional musician, gave himself a B+.
In a literature course, Vitek convinced the late Prof. Hans Freund to excuse him from a written paper and allow him to compose a jazz piece based on the text of the Medieval French epic Song of Roland. Freund turned him loose at a grand piano in his office above the Rathskeller, and Vitek rewarded the professor with musical progress reports and a final concert that brought the house down.
“Union provided me the creative time and space for playing and composing and thinking of myself as a musician,” he said. “I was encouraged enough by these experiences to think I could pursue music professionally.” For several years after graduation, the Schenectady native continued to study with Frank Stagnitta and made a living playing jazz in the Capital Region with Doc Scanlon’s Rhythm Boys and a number of other groups. He cut expenses by sharing an apartment in Albany, “rolled in the dough” during the summers, and patched together gigs during the winter while working at a bookstore and giving private lessons. “I’m sure I was panicked back then,” he said. “But looking back, it was fun and easy.”
(Among his students at the time was a promising six-year-old, Max Heinegg-also profiled this issue-son of Prof. Peter Heinegg. Max’s mother, Rosie, helped arrange a teaching job for Vitek at Brown School. Vitek later married Max’s aunt, Maria.)
It didn’t take long for Vitek to notice that except for a select few at the top, professional musicians do “a whole lot of weddings and bar mitzvahs.” His parents, who had long encouraged his music, were also practical about the long-term prospects for a jazz musician in upstate New York.
So Vitek announced that he would pursue a career as a professor of philosophy. “Talk about jumping from the frying pan to the fire,” he recalls. Even while a professional musician, he kept a strong interest in philosophy, collaborating with Professors Fred Elliston and Bob Baker on their book, Philosophy and Sex. He was awarded a scholarship to City University of New York, and his parents were “at least happy that I was in something structured.”
At Clarkson since 1987, Vitek specializes in environmental ethics, civic philosophy and community studies. He is director of the Clarkson Ethics Institute, coordinating programs that focus on ethics and the professions. He has three books to his credit, a number of articles, a string of grants and several awards for outstanding teaching. And he keeps alive a passion for jazz.
Vitek had been playing with a jazz trio throughout the North Country for 10 years when in 2003 he met Gagliardi, himself a former pro who had played with Tom Harrell, Bruce Barth and Steve Hobbs. The two got together, liked what they heard and began “playing out” at any venue that would have them.
Vitek, whose thoughtful and spare playing is like that of jazz legend Bill Evans, considers himself an accompanist to Gagliardi’s bass, which he says is “like a massage.” Their current 13-tune CD contains standards like a measured and thoughtful “My Foolish Heart,” which features Gagliardi’s swooning bass, and a bouncy “Bye Bye Blackbird,” which turns Vitek loose. There are two originals-the duo’s “Blue State Blues” (inspired by the last presidential election) and Vitek’s “AICEtektonic” (based on blues riffs he composed for each of his children – Andrew, Ian, Carolyn and Elizabeth). The title of the CD-A Fine Line-refers to the “fine line” of a catchy melody as well as the balance they achieve as academics and musicians.
Performing as a jazz artist and teaching have a lot in common, according to Vitek. Both require a connection with the audience, a high level of competency and the ability to improvise.
“For me,” says Vitek, “it’s the connecting. When a student says they get it, that’s very rewarding. The same goes for an audience who gets it.”
Vitek cites the old show biz standard: “We’re having a lot of fun, but we won’t quit our day jobs.”
And he’s grateful for his time at Union. “A good liberal arts education encourages people to do not just one thing,” he said. “We should think about what we do in our spare time.
Living in Fort Launderdale, Fla., Steve Klinger '81 missed the change of seasons. So, he turned to Union's “web cam” to see the weather on campus. “As time went by, I ended up capturing snowstorms, thunderstorms, sunsets and everything else in between,” he said, adding that his collection had grown to 142 pictures. “Most of the shots…were saved at random times on individual days. However, when my boredom happened to coincide with Union experiencing a storm, I would save a sequence of shots depicting the event and place them in a separate folder.” The project was also a good diversion when he was entertaining his energetic six-year-old niece, he admits. “Hopefully, 10 years from now they will reappear from the depths of her memory and persuade her to attend Union,” he said.
The Burns Arts Atrium Galley was transformed this fall by an exhibit of the sculpture and drawings of two extraordinary artists-Jack Howard-Potter '97 and Chet Urban '93. Like all art, these works help us reshape and rediscover the familiar. The works are different yet complementary. Among their shared qualities: Union served as a compass in both artists' journeys of discovery.
The exhibition combined the large and yet somehow delicate steel figures that have become Howard-Potter's signature work, and Urban's restrained abstract drawings, paintings, and wood sculptures with simple lines. Chris Duncan, associate professor of visual arts, organized the show. “I wanted to give them a chance for an official showing at a college art gallery. It's a nice credential to have. And I wanted people to know that Union turns out artists like Jack and Chet.”
Duncan taught both artists when they were Union undergraduates.
Says Duncan, “They're different in outlook, but somehow their work blended well in the show. With Chet you get a sense of searching for the next thing-to some extent, his path has been nonlinear; while Jack has been focused on art for as long as he can remember.”
At the artists' reception, it was gratifying for Duncan to watch them speak with students and other visitors as confident, professional, successful artists. “I hope it made an impression on the students that they, too, have the option to do this kind of thing.”
External and Internal Journeys
As Urban's adviser, Duncan noticed, “Chet was more intense, engaged, thoughtful than most students. He expected more. As a non-art major, he wasn't supposed to have a show, but I managed to wangle one for him. Working in wood, he created austere kinds of sculpture. And he just stayed interested. Chet was one of my ‘successes.' His work has a meditative quality I admire-he leaves out a lot.”
Urban grew up on a horse farm in Saratoga County. At Union, he was captain of the rugby team, a serious sculptor and a history major. He had also participated in two terms abroad-one to Barbados (doing ethnographic research with Professor of Anthropology George Gmelch) and the other to several European countries (studying national health systems with Professor of Philosophy Robert B. Baker). “In Barbados, I lived in a boat-building community,” he recalls. “My independent study focused on the occupational subculture of two fishing communities. I went out with local fishermen on Halfmoon Bay, working on the fishing boats and doing my research.” After the Barbados term, he and a friend hopped a freighter that had just come in from Caracas, and traveled on to St.Vincent and the Grenadines. The travel bug bit hard. As did the lure of the sea.
Art
Graduating with a studio art minor, Chet found not the most encouraging job market. He was looking for an alternative to the 9-to-5 existence. Of his two loves-the mountains and the ocean-he was leaning toward the former, planning a move to Colorado, “when the Maritime College surfaced on my radar. It was a quick decision to apply-and three weeks later, I was there.” Almost on a whim, he entered a dual program at the State University of New York Maritime College in the Bronx, where he pursued an M.Sc. in transportation management, and a third-mate's license in the Merchant Marine. “I wanted to continue to travel, and also to have blocks of time off to work on art projects.”
As part of his studies at Maritime, Urban got to visit ports in Puerto Rico, Dublin, Copenhagen, Athens, and Tenerife. He also shipped on a liquid natural gas tanker between Indonesia and Japan, seeing Acheh in Sumatra and East Kalimantan (Borneo) in Indonesia. After graduation, he worked on small vessels, supplying the offshore oil industry in the Gulf of Mexico. “I delivered a 135-foot aluminum crew boat from Moran City, Louisiana, to Trinidad, Brazil, Ivory Coast, Nigeria.” He stayed on in Nigeria as a resident alien, finding Nigeria “more open, like the Wild West-and better than working the Gulf of Mexico! It was more than just a job.”
Later, Urban joined the Mobil Oil Company, sailing out of London on a 300,000-ton ship, The Raven, bound for the Arabian Gulf, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore.
Taking six months off, he enrolled in painting and drawing classes at Skidmore College. That fall he moved to Brooklyn and enrolled at the School of Visual Arts, studying drawing, metal sculpture, and woodworking techniques with traditional hand tools.
Urban, whose most recent posting at sea was as chief officer on an LNG tanker, received his master mariner's license earlier this year. And in September he began teaching in the Marine Transportation Department at the Maritime College. This term he is teaching LNG tanker operations, a navigation seminar, and a course in nautical operations. He finds himself working alongside some of the same professors he studied with not long ago.
Although he hasn't had a lot of time to pursue his art these days, he is looking for other venues where he can show his work. And there are lots of art projects he'd like to undertake. “I work a lot in wood. I've picked up influences from my travels, for example, from Japanese joinery (the Japanese don't separate art from craft). I like the form and geometry.” Some of his sculptures have a nautical feel, and many drawings show the influence of East Asia and Africa.
“Even physical structures of ships come into my work. This manmade environment is natural to me. There are interesting volumes, shapes, defining spaces on a ship.”
“I'd like to go back to Japan. But I'm primarily interested in staying put and making more art. I have lots of projects in mind. I've done a lot of physical travel-now I want to do mental and artistic traveling.”
It was art from the beginning
Jack Howard-Potter grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, walking distance from many of New York City's most famous museums, including the Guggenheim and the Metropolitan. As a child, he found himself thinking, “I want to be in one of those someday.”
Attending the Pomfret School, in northeastern Connecticut, he began exploring media such as pottery, photography, sculpture, and stone carving. These initial experiences led him to Union where, as an undergraduate, “I ran through all the arts and art history courses, and then, in senior year, I asked Chris Duncan if I could do an independent study.”
Says Duncan, “We got him set up in the empty garage behind North Colonnade, where ceramics had been.” The resulting show was a compilation of 15 figurative steel sculptures created during Howard-Potter's final six months in school, and brought a good deal of critical acclaim. During this time, it became clear that welded steel had become his medium of choice. “I sold my first sculpture out of that show, for $300-that was really exciting,” he says.
“Being free to consult whenever I needed to with Chris and Walter [Walter Hatke, May I. Baker Professor of Visual Arts] is one of the things that made Union special,” adds Howard-Potter, who graduated from Union with a combined degree in studio art and art history. His senior show set a course for future work. After graduation, he moved to Colorado and worked with a blacksmith, making furniture and learning about metalworking. Returning to New York, he had a one-person show of sculpture at the Wally Findlay Gallery in Easthampton, giving him his formal introduction to the New York City art scene. This led to a display of sculpture in Battery Park at a concert given by MTV in conjunction with the Tribeca Film Festival to help revitalize the area. Jack's figures were seen onstage, backstage, and all around the audience and park.
Still not satisfied with his skills as a figurative artist, he enrolled in classes at the Art Students League and became assistant to instructor Anthony Palumbo. He also taught at Martin Luther King Jr. High School, in the Lincoln Center area, designing and implementing an after-school arts program and projects for inner-city students, placing student work in public and private exhibitions, and leading museum and gallery field trips.
Says Howard-Potter of his art, “I try to capture movement in steel-an inherently rigid material.” He sculpts life-sized figures, inspired by the movements of dancers. The steel takes on the form of flesh and blood, capturing the body in motion, during the split second when gravity challenges and just before it wins.
Two years ago, he returned to the Capital District, with his new wife, Erica (Isaacson) Howard-Potter '97, a poet and creative writer, now in her third year at Albany Law School. They live in a small house on a large lot in New Scotland.
Howard-Potter is a seventh-generation Union legacy. He counts among his ancestors Alonzo Potter (professor, college president, ordained minister, and Eliphalet Nott's son-in-law), Edward Tuckerman Potter (designer of the Nott Memorial), Eliphalet Nott Potter (seventh president of Union College), and trustee Clarkson Nott Potter and his brother Howard, head of the alumni association. In the corner of Howard-Potter's simple dining room sits “Dr. Nott's clock,” an antique grandfather's clock, dating back to the 1700s, and belonging to Eliphalet Nott. “It still keeps perfect time.”
A two-car garage serves as Howard-Potter's studio, and the deep front lawn is the perfect setting for his outdoor sculpture gallery. Motorists passing by on County Route 203 often pull over to enjoy the view.
Howard-Potter is also exhibiting at the Southern Vermont Arts Center, in Manchester, Vermont; the Big Rock Garden Park in Bellingham, Washington and the City of Coral Springs in Coral Springs, Florida, which recently purchased a sculpture for its public collection.
These days, he's working on a monumental 25-foot figure for a public commission in Florida. Scattered around his garage studio are parts of this work-huge steel legs, arms, torso, in varying degrees of completion. With only weeks till his deadline, he seems not worried but challenged. Every sculpture is for him a learning process. Especially this one: “Because of the size and weight, I've had to consult with an engineer.” He also had to rent heavy equipment-a tractor with a forklift and a 35-foot arm, and a cherry picker. “The Muse” is to be installed at a cultural arts center which hasn't yet been built. He himself will be delivering the huge figure in a very large U-Haul truck for the “sky-breaking” (pre-ground-breaking). “I paid the price of a new car to buy materials and rent equipment to make this sculpture.” He's creating it with the money from his last sale, and hoping for a benefactor, which means this piece is being done on consignment, not on commission. Jack is clearly a man who doesn't mind taking risks.
So, what's next? Not surprisingly, he answers, “Something bigger!”
Philosophy Professor Linda Patrik is collaborating with Tenzin Namdak, a Tibetan monk and scholar, to digitally encode ancient Tibetan texts and their English translations so they can be made accessible and searched on line. The project brings together Union's East Asian Studies Program and two international scholarly organizations, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and Nitartha International.
“Tenzin and I prepared for the work last summer by attending a training workshop at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia,” Patrik explains. “From a digitizing center in Katmandu, he is publishing ancient Tibetan texts as books but also intends to publish these texts as web pages and in CD form.” He and Patrik are working on encoding the English translations in this East Asian Studies/Freeman-funded project. (The Freeman Grant has now been extended for a fourth year at Union.)
TEI establishes an international and interdisciplinary standard that allows libraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholars to share research, teachings, and preservation efforts.
The undertaking formally began at the Nitartha Institute, which meets every summer in Canada. “Here,” says Patrik,”we meet for close collaboration one month a year, and for the other eleven months, Nitartha's translators work on English translations and its editors work on transcripts of Buddhist teachings. So each year, new texts are being made accessible.”
The Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, the Tibetan teacher who heads the Nitartha Institute, is also called “the computer lama.” Tenzin Namdak, his assistant, manages the Katmandu center for Nitartha International, a New York non-profit educational corporation founded by The Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche to digitally preserve Tibetan texts and support the Tibetan educational system.
When these monks were forced to leave Tibet for India, they found that it wasn't practical to reproduce their sacred traditional texts in print, so they decided to digitize instead. So far, they've digitized 300 to 500 meditation, philosophy and ritual texts from the Nyingma and Kagyu traditions. (Texts from other traditions-for example, the Dalai Lama's Gelugpa tradition-are currently being translated in a parallel project at the University of Virginia.)
“At Nitartha” says Patrik, “we are working together to digitize, translate, teach, and preserve, using the technology of the West.” The Union College TEI team has learned enough to encode a 90-page document, “which I use in my upper-level Zen and Buddhism course. It's now in the last stages of being debugged; it will then be posted on the web.”
There is one more major step after that-to get the documents online in Tibetan script. This will take time, explains Patrik, “since Tibetan script itself is not yet in Unicode.” (Unicode is the universal character encoding standard which allows processing, storage, and interchange of text data, no matter what the platform, the program, or the language.)
“Tibetan has a very complicated script,” Patrik explains. “For example, there are no spaces between words, and sometimes words stack up five characters high.”
“In two years, we should be able to put text into Unicode, and then into TEI. It will then be possible to link translations in all other languages to the Tibetan text, paragraph by paragraph. TEI can also make texts searchable. Up to now, only Tibetans and a few other scholars and graduate students have seen the books.”
The living meaning of the teachings is preserved in debate and oral discussion between students and teachers. Patrik team-taught a course on Buddhist logic and debate at the Nitartha Institute during her stay. As she explains it, “The Tibetan way of strengthening the intellect is to allow the mind to concoct certain beliefs (that is, to make up its mind) and then watch itself deconstruct these beliefs (often in collaboration/debate with others), until the mind is empty of all beliefs. The Tibetans aren't so much interested in the mind as a thoroughfare for all thoughts, so much as a clearer space for accurate thoughts. They still do believe in ultimate truth. It's very un-postmodern of them.”
The teachings help develop a certain kind of capability called “analytical meditation,” which involves meditating on a philosophical passage instead of on a mantra or a candle flame. “It's a form of insight meditation, in which you use reasoning and conceptual thought to expose and examine your biases and presumptions. It is also taken up in formal Tibetan debates, which tend to be about philosophical notions of reality. This is different from Zen Buddhism's koan study, which is designed to frustrate the logical mind. In Tibetan analytical meditation, you're supposed to be logical, but you're supposed to carry it through till the conceptual mind exhausts itself.” Adds Patrik, “We Westerners tend to be conceptual, discursive-so this method takes this tendency and pushes it hard- and then in the silence of exhaustion comes an opening for something to happen.”
Topics of debate range from whether enlightenment is permanent or impermanent to causality (cause and effect). As she explains it, “It's a process of pulling out all the consequences of a belief until it collapses into absurdity, contradiction-and hopefully clears the way to a seeing that can't be done with the conceptual mind. It's a way not of learning, but of unlearning.”
Patrik says she came to enjoy debate the Tibetan way and has actually been teaching it in her courses at Union, at first in a feminism course in 2000. “It helps give women students a voice. They love the debating. When the monks who were here last spring engaged in a debate, the students loved that too.”
Patrik, on sabbatical this year, is working on a book on Buddhist feminism, focusing on contemporary issues, which women who are studying Buddhism might be interested in-including abortion, stem-cell research, and what it means to bow to a teacher-and to be a woman in a highly patriarchal religion.
New IDEAS
In another converging technologies initiative, Patrik's students are publishing the research of philosophy undergraduates in an electronic journal, called IDEAS.
The idea for IDEAS was born in late 2003, when Patrik and a group of students began designing an electronic journal in Asian Studies, and put out a call for papers, posting it on listserves, and distributing flyers at academic conferences. They hired a graphic artist to design web pages.
“The students and I make up the editorial board, deciding which articles to accept. For each article, the contributing student's professor has to sign off on the authenticity of the work. Submissions have come in from all across America and Europe. Two editorial board members send comments back to the author for revision. Students are now working on ways to publicize the e-journal, including sending postcards to Asian Studies programs (which these days means most colleges). Articles for the second issue are due in January 2006.”
Patrik believes this is the first electronic journal that publishes research articles by undergraduates in Asian Studies. “Interestingly,” she adds, “this generation is finding online publishing more valid than appearing in print.”
The IDEAS journal is at http://www.ideas.union.edu.
