Union in the Media

Union's Ethics Across the Curriculum program was recently featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education. A reporter and a photographer visited campus to learn about the program.

At many colleges and universities, faculty in the philosophy department typically teach students about ethics. Since 2006, Union’s approach has been to make ethics a staple of classroom discussion across the board in more than 50 courses, from physics to photography. It is modeled after a pilot project that introduced ethics into the economics curriculum.

The article includes comments from Robert Baker, chair of the Rapaport Ethics Across the Curriculum and the William D. Williams Professor of Philosophy. The program was also featured in the Spring 2009 issue of “Teaching Ethics,” the academic journal of the Society for Ethics across the Curriculum.

The seed for a broad-based ethics module at Union was planted by Michael S. Rapaport ’59, a real estate lawyer in White Plains, N.Y. Distressed at the lack of ethical awareness of those caught up in the Enron scandal and other ethical lapses, Rapaport decided to fund the College’s program.

To read the article in the Chronicle, click here (subscription may be required).

Urban planner Mia Birk was the final speaker in the Minerva oil lecture series. Before her talk, Birk was interviewed by WAMC, Northeast Public Radio. Northeast Public Radio is a member of National Public Radio serving parts of seven northeastern states. These include New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, New Jersey, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania.

IBM is donating one of its Intelligent Cluster computing solutions to Union College, providing the school with the greatest computing capability of any undergraduate liberal arts college in the nation.

The announcement was made Saturday at the dedication of the College's new Peter Irving Wold Center. The $22 million, three-story, 35,000-square-foot building housing interdisciplinary research facilities, classroom space and an advanced computing lab is the latest milestone in Union's long history of integrating engineering with the traditional liberal arts and sciences.

The announcement was picked up by dozens of media outlets, including the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal and others.

To read the item in the Times Union (including a photo gallery), click here.

In 1961, Schaffer Library opened its doors on the Union campus, the first permanent home for the College’s vast collection of books, periodicals and treasured documents. Before that, the library shared space in the Nott Memorial and other places on campus.

To help celebrate the 50th anniversary, library staff is planning a series of events for the remainder of the year.

Bob Soules, director of the Becker Career Center, was interviewed recently by the Times Union about job prospects for graduates in the semiconductor industry.

A sediment core from a South American lake revealed a steady, sharp drop in crucial monsoon rainfall since 1900, leading to the driest conditions in 1,000 years as of 2007 and threatening tropical populations with water shortages, according to a team of researchers, which includes Donald Rodbell, chair of the Geology Department.

A 2,300-year climate record University of Pittsburgh researchers recovered from an Andes Mountains lake reveals that as temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere rise, the planet’s densely populated tropical regions will most likely experience severe water shortages as the crucial summer monsoons become drier. The Pitt team found that equatorial regions of South America already are receiving less rainfall than at any point in the past millennium.

The researchers report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences(PNAS) that a nearly 6-foot-long sediment core from Laguna Pumacocha in Peru contains the most detailed geochemical record of tropical climate fluctuations yet uncovered. The core shows pronounced dry and wet phases of the South American summer monsoons and corresponds with existing geological data of precipitation changes in the surrounding regions.

Rodbell was the co-designer of the study.

To read the full story in Science Daily, click here.

The Daily Gazette recently profiled Schuyler Smith, an 18-year-old homeschooler who has attended classes at Union since the seventh grade.

Smith was named a U.S. Presidential Scholar - an honor given to two seniors from each state who excel academically.

The article mentions the influence two Union professors had on Smith while here - William Zwicker and Rebecca Koopman.

Union recently received a $500,000 gift from Goldman Sachs Gives, which when combined with a previous gift of $1 million brings total support by Goldman Sachs Gives for need-based scholarships to $1.5 million over the past 12 months.

Goldman Sachs Gives is a donor-advised fund. The firm’s partners make recommendations to Goldman Sachs Gives that support non-profit and charitable organizations around the world.

The donation was made at the recommendation of David Viniar '76 and his wife, Susan. David is the chief financial officer of Goldman Sachs and a member of the College's Board of Trustees.

Read about the gift in the Business Review (registration may be required).

Union College has entered into an agreement with the private conservation group Protect the Adirondacks! (PROTECT) to purchase a building complex in nearby Niskayuna that includes the former home of the noted Adirondack conservationist Paul Schaefer (1908-1996) and a modern addition that houses the Adirondack Research Library.

To read a story in the Times Union, click here.

For the second straight year, Union is included among the country’s most environmentally responsible colleges, according to The Princeton Review’s 2011 “Guide to Green Colleges.” The free guide, produced in partnership with the U.S. Green Building Council, includes schools that have “demonstrated an above average commitment to sustainability in terms of campus infrastructure, activities and initiatives.”