Family fun, food and football will be front and center as alumni, students and faculty celebrate Homecoming and Family Weekend Friday through Sunday, Oct. 28-30.
More than 2,000 people are expected for this year’s event.
“Homecoming is a special time at Union College,” said Tammy Messercola, director of Alumni Relations. “This year, we are excited to showcase our newest campus additions, the Wold Building and Lippman Hall. The weekend is filled with events for everyone, and we’re happy to welcome more than 2,000 alumni, family and friends to campus.”
Among the highlights is a formal dedication ceremony for Lippman Hall at noon on Saturday. A $3 million gift from Jim Lippman ’79 and his wife, Linda, supported a major renovation of the former Social Sciences building, one of the most heavily used academic buildings on campus. The building, which opened in 1967, has been renamed in honor of Jim Lippman’s father, Robert G. Lippman ’50. To learn more about the dedication, click here.
The 50th anniversary of Schaffer Library will be celebrated throughout the weekend with “Mrs. Perkins’ Union College”, a guided campus tour based on the recent gift to Union of more than 700 letters written between 1896 and 1904 by beloved campus figure Anne Dunbar Potts Perkins. The wife of Chemistry Professor Maurice Perkins, she established Mrs. Perkins’ Garden.
An ongoing exhibit, “Union’s Library: A Home of its Own,” in the Thelma and Kenneth Lally Reading Room, will also be open. The exhibit features a collection of historic photographs, rare books and manuscripts dating to the College’s founding in 1795. Also on display will be a print from one of the library’s most prized possessions, John James Audubon’s “Birds of America.”
Union’s football team takes on RPI Saturday at 1:30 p.m. at Frank Bailey Field. Union holds a 79-25-4 edge in the series, the oldest collegiate football rivalry in New York state. Union teams also compete in men’s and women’s ice hockey, men’s soccer and field hockey, over the weekend.
Other highlights include an alumni symposium, “Representing and Creating the Human Body.” The two-day symposium will engage aesthetic, ethical and anthropological issues and controversies related to the human body.
On Sunday at 10:30 a.m. in the Nott Memorial, Stephen Berk, the Henry and Sally Schaffer Professor of Holocaust and Jewish Studies, presents his annual Hillel lecture. This year’s topic is “Obama: Good for the Jews or Bad for the Jews?”