Newsbriefs (spring 2002)
Read about:
- Alumni join Board of Trustees
- Students organize Black History Month events
- Improvements turn Granger Field into athletic hub
- SARC hosts district conference
- Faculty grants and awards
Alumni join Board of Trustees
Fred Anton '68 and Michael Leffell '81 were recently appointed to the University's Board of Trustees. Each will serve on the board for a six-year term, beginning July 1.
Anton is CEO of Warner Bros. Publications in Miami, Fla., the printed music subsidiary of the Warner Music Group. This is one of several key executive positions he has held at AOL Time Warner throughout his career. Prior to heading Warner Bros. Publications, Anton had served as executive director of taxes for Warner Communications, vice president of finance for the Warner Music Group and executive vice president and COO of Warner Vision Entertainment.
Anton is also an advocate for music education. Warner Bros. Publications has supported Clark's music program by donating cases of sheet music. Anton has also supported Clark as a member of the Jonas Clark Fellows, the University's leading group of annual donors, and looks forward to contributing to Clark as a trustee.
"I hope to use my commercial business background to help the University spread its message about the Clark experience, especially to those students who would be the best fit for Clark," Anton says. "If I can help Clark achieve this goal, I would consider my tenure on the board a success."
Anton is a member of the advisory board of the Miami-Dade Community College School of Music Technologies and the board of directors of the Music Publishers Association, and is active in many other industry and professional organizations.
Leffell, who earned a law degree from Columbia Law School, is general partner at Davidson Kemper Partners, an investment firm in New York City. An active alumnus, Leffell has served on his Reunion Gift Committee and on the Alumni Planned Giving Advisory Committee. He often returns to Clark for the annual alumni hockey game.
In addition, Leffell and his wife Lisa Klein '82 Leffell have supported Clark as members of the Jonas Clark Fellows and by establishing several endowed scholarship funds and undergraduate prize funds. The Leffells were also involved with the University's Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies in its formative stages and remain committed to the Center's mission. Michael Leffell considers his term as a trustee as another way to give back to his alma mater.
"I am very indebted to Clark for the education I received," says Leffell, who has maintained close relationships with several of his professors over the years. He looks forward to contributing to Clark's "further development as a world-class institution."
Students organize Black History Month events
Black History Month was commemorated at Clark with a wide array of special events organized by the Caribbean African Student Association and Black Student Union. Many of the events were also co-sponsored by the Higgins School of Humanities.
Among the highlights was a performance by Abiodun Oyewole, an original member of the Last Poets (see story page 36). Members of the Clark community also gathered throughout February for film screenings, lectures and roundtable discussions about issues related to Black history and contemporary race relations. Other Black History Month highlights included:
- A forum on Martin Luther King Jr. and how his words apply to today's society.
- A screening of the film "Glory" with a discussion led by Nelson Ambush, the grandson of a member of the 54th Regiment of Cambridge, Mass.
- A lecture by Randall Kennedy, Harvard law professor and author of the book 'Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word.'
- "A Musical Retrospective: From Spirituals to the Blues," featuring a cappella singing, poems and spoken word performances presented by Clark students, faculty and staff.
- "The Red and the Black: The African-American and Native-American Connection in New England," a lecture by Thomas Doughton of the College of the Holy Cross.
- A screening of the film "A Separate Place: The Schools P.S. DuPont Built" with a discussion led by filmmaker Jeanne Nutter, professor of communications at Bloomfield College.
- The History Department's Bland-Lee Lecture Series, presented by David Blight, the Class of 1959 Professor of History and Black Studies at Amherst College. Blight gave lectures on "Historians, the Civil War and the Riddle of Collective Memory" and "Race and Reunion: the Problem of Slavery and the Civil War in African-American Memory."
- ' Still Lifting, Still Climbing: Contemporizing Black Activism,' a lecture by Alex Deschamps of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Improvements turn Granger Field into athletic hub
Granger Field on Beaver Street will soon become a second hub for athletic activity on campus thanks to a $7.8-million plan to improve Clark's athletic facilities. The project includes the construction of a $5-million field house and the reconfiguration and reconstruction of the existing soccer/lacrosse, field hockey and baseball fields, as well as the Corash tennis courts.
Construction is scheduled to begin as soon as the spring season is complete. The field hockey/baseball field as well as the Corash tennis courts are expected to be ready by September 2002. The soccer/lacrosse field and field house will be completed by Spring 2003.
"Significantly improving our outdoor space and increasing our indoor space will greatly enhance Clark's athletic and recreational programs," says Athletic Director Linda Moulton. "Current and future student-athletes will positively benefit from our new facilities and the opportunities that will be provided. There is tremendous excitement about what these new facilities will do for the campus and the extended Clark community."
The new field house, named in honor of Clark's Senior Vice President Tom Dolan '62 and his wife Joan '60, will relieve the overlapping demands on the Kneller Athletic Center. The building will serve as the support facility for fall and spring teams, complementing the new outdoor spaces. Space will also be available for some intramural activities, club sports and other recreational and neighborhood programs.
The upgrade of the fields will provide Clark with first-class competitive venues for the varsity programs while providing multi-purpose spaces for a variety of other programs and activities. The field hockey/baseball field will be synthetic turf, while the soccer/lacrosse field will be grass or synthetic turf.
Fundraising for the project will take place while construction is in progress. If you would like additional information or would like to help in the fundraising effort, please contact Wally Halas '73 at 508-793-8859 or wphalas@aol.com.
SARC hosts district conference
Clark's Student Alumni Relations Committee (SARC) hosted the annual Association of Student Advancement Programs District I Conference, held Feb. 22 through 24. Clark also hosted this conference in 1992.
More than 250 students from colleges and universities throughout New England and Canada attended the conference, which featured workshops and panel discussions about the participants' strongest student-alumni relations programs. Participants shared their best tips on building strong membership, on- and off-campus public relations, special programs and projects and leadership.
Michael Ross '93, a current Boston city councilor, gave the conference keynote address. At Clark, Ross was a founder of the Clark Cable Network and a member of the crew team.
A new twist on Valentine's Day
This year, Clark marked Valentine's Day with performances of Eve Ensler's "The Vagina Monologues." Approximately 1,100 tickets were sold for the three performances, which were held as part of the V-Day worldwide campaign to stop violence against women. Produced by women's studies graduate student Tess Pierce, the all-female student production raised $6,300 to support Worcester's Rape Crisis Center and Daybreak Shelter for Women, the Clark student group Choices and several V-Day organizations. Funds donated to the Rape Crisis Center specifically support its Spanish-language sexual assault hotline.
Clark's V-Day activities also included panel discussions and workshops on self-defense and domestic violence, and a benefit concert featuring Clark's Counterpoints and feminist artists Kate Schutt and Antara. In addition, the Rape Crisis Center, Planned Parenthood, Daybreak and other organizations distributed information in the Higgins University Center throughout the day.
Visiting scholar subject of award-winning news segment
Holocaust rescuer and scholar Marion Pritchard was the subject of a television news segment that recently won a Gracie Allen Award from the American Women in Radio and Television foundation. The segment was produced by New England Cable News and was filmed at Clark's Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
Pritchard is the Cohen-Lasry Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Stassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. She has team-taught a course at Clark with Rose Professor Debórah Dwork every year since 1997 and will return to Clark for the fall 2002 semester.
Faculty Grants & Awards:
Departments
CHEMISTRY: Daeg Brenner was awarded $140,000 in supplemental funding from the Department of Energy for his 'Nuclear Structure Research.'
EDUCATION:arah Michaels entered an agreement of $18,627 with the University of Pittsburgh to support her work to develop a CD-ROM titled "Accountable Talk: Classroom Conversations that Work." The CD-ROM will be used by teachers across the United States to help them promote rigorous, coherent and equitable classroom conversations. Tom Del Prete was awarded funds, again this year, from the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education to run the Hiatt Center K-16 Curriculum and Knowing Summer Institute Project. He received $27,000 for the project. Del Prete was also awarded a five-year grant totaling $250,000 from the Health Foundation of Central Massachusetts to support the Worcester Education Partnership Youth Development Initiative. This award is part of the matching funds for the $8 million Carnegie grant awarded to the Worcester Educational Partnership, of which Clark is a member.
GEOGRAPHY: Stan Herwitz was awarded $320,000 in supplemental funds from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), to complete his research for the current year on "Coffee Harvest Optimization Using UAV Platforms for the Acquisition of High Spatial Resolution Real-time Multi-spectral Imagery." The full amount of the original award from NASA is $3.76 million.
MANAGEMENT: Under the direction of Larry Marsh, the Small Business Development Center was awarded $340,000 in annual program funds from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
MATH AND COMPUTER SCIENCE: Natalia Sternberg entered an agreement of approximately $75,000 with the U.S. Air Force to conduct research during her sabbatical on 'New High-fidelity Physics Models for High-temperature Plasma Phenomena' for the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, Center of Excellence for Computational Sciences, based in Ohio.
PSYCHOLOGY: Michael Addis was awarded $85,312 in additional support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for his research on "Panic Control Therapy in a Managed Care Setting."
Research Centers
GEORGE PERKINS MARSH INSTITUTE: Rob Goble was awarded $234,913 in renewal funds from the NIH for his research on 'Nuclear Risk Management for Native Communities.' David Angel was awarded a grant of $105,718 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for "'Research on Energy and Pollution Intensity of Investment in the Cement Industry." This award involves international activities in three Asian economies: China, Malaysia and Thailand. Billie Lee Turner was awarded $65,000 in supplemental funding from the NSF, subcontract from Harvard University, for his continuing research on "Systems of Integrated Research Assessment and Decision Support for Global Environmental Change." Turner was also awarded a $7,000 subcontract from Montana State University (funded by NASA) for graduate student support for "Case Study Research on Land Use Change Around Nature Reserves, to Determine Consequences for Biodiversity, and to Evaluate Future Monitoring Strategies." David Major entered an agreement of $7,000 with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to compile the "Writings and Contributions of Harry E. Schwarz," former professor emeritus in environmental science and policy and geography at Clark.
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Diagram of Granger Field
Members of Clark's Student Alumni Relations Committee (SARC)