Empire State College
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- Bu səhifədəki naviqasiya:
- Innovative Alumni From Stately Stables to the Great White Way 2005 Donors Report
- Hope Ferguson
- Hugh Hammett
- W R I T E R S
- P R O D U C T I O N Jerry Cronin
- UPFRONT (continued on page 6) UPFRONT
- Steering Clear of the Norm
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Empire State College Empire State College ALUMNI
STUDENT
NEWS
VOLUME
31 • NUMBER
2 • SPRING
2006
Innovative Alumni From Stately Stables to the Great White Way 2005 Donors Report Joseph Moore President Kirk Starczewski Director of College Relations Publisher
Director of Alumni and Student Relations Managing Editor
Community Relations Associate Editor
Director of Publications/Designer Debra Park Secretary, Offi ce of College Relations Alumni News and Copy Editor
Assistant Director of Alumni and Student Relations
Vice President for External Affairs Jeremy Jones Executive Director, Empire State College Foundation
Director of Advancement Services Alta Schallen Director of Gift Planning Renelle Shampeny Director of Marketing Toby Tobrocke Director of Annual Giving
Hope Ferguson Suzie Ferrero Elaine Handley P H O T O G R A P H Y Cover: Luc Van Muylem Robert Mischka Stock Studios All other photos courtesy of our alumni, students and staff P R O D U C T I O N Jerry Cronin Director of Management Service Ron Kosiba Print Shop Supervisor Janet Jones Keyboard Specialist College Print Shop Central Services Empire State College Alumni and Student News is published by the Offi ce of College Relations at Empire State College One Union Avenue Saratoga Springs, NY 12866-4391 518 587-2100 ext. 2250 • www.esc.edu C o n t e n t s FEATURES
Upfront . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 An Innovative Marriage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Steering Clear of the Norm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Oh … It’s Magical . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Defi ning Her Life as a Producer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 AROUND
EMPIRE
STATE
COLLEGE
College News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Center News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Alumni News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Back to You . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Empire State College ALUMNI
AND
STUDENT
NEWS
VOLUME
31 • NUMBER
2 • SPRING
2006 C om e t o S a ra t o ga thi s Su mme r! Join us for Empire State College’s annual Day at the Races August 4, 2006. See inside back cover for details. E M P I R E 1 E mily Dickinson began a poem with the line “I dwell in Possibility.” I think it beautifully sums up the privilege, joy and challenge of teaching and learning – especially when it comes to the creative possibilities.
Part of our work as academics is to help students enhance their critical thinking skills, skills that enable us to truly become lifelong learners. So we focus on developing our students’ higher order thinking skills: the ability to apply, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate ideas, to borrow from Benjamin Bloom’s taxonomy. But I think critical thinking is not enough – we must demand of ourselves and instruct our students to be creative thinkers as well. The crucial and complicated issues we now face as a global community demand creative, constructive thinking. Edward de Bono, a pre-eminent thinker about thinking, has written about the “intelligence trap” to which educated people are particularly susceptible. Those who feel overly confi dent about their knowledge only defend what they know, and do not look for alternatives or listen to discover other perspectives. Therefore, they don’t fully engage their faculties, and their minds become trapped and limited. As subject matter experts we academics need to guard against this phenomenon in ourselves and work not to engender it in students. One way to do this is to encourage and engage students in alternate thinking, or what de Bono calls “lateral thinking,” which goes beyond what we traditionally think of as creative to mean “the ability to change perception and keep on changing perception.” Creativity of this kind engages both our intelligence and our imagination – and asks us to reject compla- cency and to pay continuing attention to an evolving reality. I think it asks us to be fully alive. It is born of curiosity and enthusiasm and often results in innovative and surprising ideas and connections. Students often need only permission and a little encouragement to engage in divergent thinking – especially adult students, who have rich life experience from which to draw. What keeps many of us from being creative is convention and training. We are used to thinking in certain ways about certain things. We get comfortable with the mental equations we’ve made, the bona- fi de traditional and accepted ways of thinking about a subject. The American Management Association recently conducted a survey of CEOs, of which 81 percent said innovation is what is required for busi- nesses to be successful in the future. Highly creative students develop into highly motivated, independent thinkers and risk takers, who embrace complexity and understand the value of working through a process. I think of them as true
are emancipating themselves from what is expected, easy, predictable. These are people who often bring ideas together from different fi elds and make meaning in unconventional ways. Just such people work in bionics, a fi eld of engineering where products for human use are taken from structures in the natural world. For instance, the segmented facets of bee eyes that fi lter polarized light were the inspiration for infrared photography. You will meet four such people in this issue of Empire State College Alumni and Student News: entrepreneur Gloria Austin, Broadway producer Jennifer Manocherian, composer Deddy Tzur and businesswoman Beth Gallmeyer.
Breaking Out By Elaine Handley, faculty mentor, English, Northeast Center UPFRONT 2 E M P I R E N ext
time you
go to a grocery store and are standing in the checkout line, take a moment to look at the wire racks the plastic bags are stored on. And then thank Empire State College alumna Beth Gallmeyer’s company, founded by her husband Ed, for the convenience.
“We do not sell widgets,” she explains. Instead, Gallmeyer describes what ESG Associates does as marrying a company to a process.
So when an executive from Mobil Chemical wanted to make plastic bags to replace the paper then widely in use in 1981, he turned to Ed Gallmeyer during a golf game, and said, “Tell me about your company.” He went on to explain, “This is what we want to do.” Mobil Chemical hoped to manufacture plastic bags and make them de rigueur in the country’s retail stores, and he wondered if Ed knew someone who could get the job done.
“And of course you know the rest of the story, as they are in every store – both retail and hardware, carousel and free standing, yard holders and restaurant sorter racks,” says Gallmeyer. Working with a wire manufacturer, ESG Associates “married the two companies together,” designing a prototype wire rack for the ease of storing the bags and slipping them off the racks to customers.
As a retired vice president of manufacturing at Bausch & Lomb, and president of his own fi rm, ESG Associates, Ed was always looking for ways to bring two companies together in unusual ways. He brought the automation capa- bility of Kodak to Bausch & Lomb, when the companies worked together for the fi rst time in 104 years of operation, to devise a way to automate the system for fi nding and discarding defective contact lenses. Prior to this, company workers had to “manually eyeball and pull out defective contact lenses,” said Gallmeyer.
Gallmeyer was part of her husband’s company when he developed “a very sophisticated” fi lament (lighted wire device) for copiers, which activated toner, baking it onto the paper to create the printed words as the paper moved from start to fi nish – at the push of the ON button. The company also “married” a German company that manufactured frac- tional (very small) horse power motors to Xerox – which allowed smaller copiers to be made.
Beth Gallmeyer has traveled through a variety of inter- esting careers, after getting her fi rst job at AT&T in 1957. She and Ed met at Drexel University, where she earned an associate degree before going into telecommunications. She entered government service in New York after their marriage, then took time off to raise three children (one of whom, Scott, is now president of the couple’s company). She’s been a model and a cover girl (she’d model petite sizes on her lunch break for Casual Corner and Sibley’s) and worked in a top-secret job at an agency that made the tracking vans for the fi rst space shots. In 1986, Ed brought Beth on board with ESG Associates as vice president and treasurer.
Since her son Scott took over the fi rm, ESG Associates has developed a special material, nanotherm™, which protects electronic equipment’s printed circuit boards from overheating without the use of heat sink fans. And, although she can’t say too much about it yet, the company is working on a medical device that could be “a revolutionary item used for post-breast cancer and other diffi cult surgeries which require a lengthy healing process.”
The couple, who founded the company in Rochester, now lives in Florida. Since they’ve turned the day-to-day reins of the company over to their son (Ed is chairman of the board), Beth Gallmeyer stays busy as a chapter regent – or president – of the Daughters of the American Revolution; plays golf at their country club (they live on the 15th hole), and is a senior consultant with Mary Kay Corp.
Her second degree – earned from Empire State College in 1996 after she retired, in business management, with a concentration in marketing and economics – “was just for fun, to see if my brain was still working.” m An Innovative Marriage Alumna Beth Gallmeyer ’96 and husband Ed marry companies to processes E M P I R E 3 G loria Austin ’75 has been riding since she was a girl growing up in upstate New York, but it wasn’t until she retired from Paychex, a company founded by her former husband, Thomas Golisano, that she bought herself a horse and took up riding again.
However, after she was thrown from a horse, she began looking for a gentler way to ride. “One of the reasons I got into carriage riding is age,” Austin said with a laugh.
After seeing some people “sitting in what looked like a comfortable chair” driven by horses, Austin became a carriage-driving enthusiast. So she founded an associa- tion for the sport – Austin Horse Park, home to her Continental Acres Equine Resort and the Austin Carriage Museum, located in Weirsdale, Florida. She also administers the Austin Foundation, which operates the Carriage Museum and Education Center, whose mission is “providing educational, cultural, historic and scientifi c activities devoted to preserving an understanding of the role of the horse and horse-drawn wheeled transportation.”
Carriage driving provides pageantry, with its period clothing and stylish hats, as well as an authentic experience that replicates a time when carriages were used for transportation, warfare and the transport of goods, Austin said. Those devoted to the sport belong to specialized clubs, and host competitions, which are generally held up and down the east coast and in Canada. Austin belongs to two clubs devoted to carriage driving and she holds championship titles, including North American Four- in-Hand and Coaching Champion. One of those clubs, which she helped to found, is solely for women and now has 21 members in the U.S. and Great Britain. All of them own their own coaches and horses.
Austin compares enthusiasts to those who collect, restore and drive antique cars. Because of the expense of the sport, the fraternity of carriage driving enthusiasts comprises, by nature, those who can afford the horses, the carriages, the trailers, Steering Clear of the Norm Gloria Austin ’75 takes the reins of her girlhood passion for horses Gloria Austin mastering the art of handling horse and carriage.
4 E M P I R E Steering Clear
trucks, transportation and the travel, which includes jaunts to Europe. They are lawyers, lobbyists, descendants of America’s “families of fortune,” and smaller independent business owners.
Although women dominate the world of horses – Austin says that 85 percent of horse owners are female – the sport of carriage driving, especially with four horses to a carriage, is dominated by men. “For a woman, it’s particularly satisfying,” she says of the four- in-hand driving. “I take pride in doing something that was histori- cally reserved for men only – and garnering respect in the fellowship of men.” She
described the feeling of guiding 6,000 pounds of horse (the average horse weighs in at 1,500 pounds) with one hand wrapped around the reins. “It’s unusual to see a four-in-hand carriage, but to see a woman [driving one] is even more rare.”
An outgrowth of her interest in carriage driving is her carriage museum and education center, where she displays 135 of the 170 antique carriages that she owns, and visitors are assisted by 92 volunteer docents. Most of the carriages on display have been restored to their former glory. Of the people who visit the museum – senior citizens on day trips, 4-H-ers and the occasional school group – few have particular knowledge of horses.
disabilities, began her career in the nonprofi t fi eld, coordinating services for the mentally disabled for an agency in Rochester, at a time when agencies were working to deinstitutionalize patients and integrate them into their communities. Austin views this transformation as an unqualifi ed success. Her son now lives quasi-independently in a private home, assisted by a family who oversees his care. She also has a daughter who lives in Florida, as well as six grandchildren.
Austin earned her degree at Empire State College in community psychology in 1975, and went on to earn a master’s degree at SUNY Brockport. She chose Empire State College for her under- graduate work because she was in the midst of raising her family and she was able to use her community and agency experience, along with her certifi cates and credentialing, toward her degree. She liked that she was able to raise her family, work, and earn her degree at the same time. “I’ve always prided myself on doing things independently,” she explains. “One of the great things Empire State College does is recognize one’s independence. You really get validated by the college and faculty.” Her mentor “was absolutely fabulous. He was very supportive. You felt that he was your ally.”
However, Austin did not remain in the fi eld of human services. She was soon off to New York to help open downstate offi ces of Paychex, a payroll-processing fi rm founded by Golisano in 1971, and now valued at more than $10 billion. She established an operating center in New Jersey and Long Island, and opened sales offi ces in both places, as well as New York City, Westchester County and Connecticut. Combined, these centers served the entire New York metropolitan area.
Even though Austin no longer works in human services, she still feels strongly about giving back. She founded Horses Help Humanity, LLC, a division of the foundation that raises monies to support the use of the horse as a therapeutic tool to help people with emotional and devel- opmental handicapping conditions.
Today, Austin says she keeps busy with her love of travel and of learning. Besides running her foundation and horse park, she travels for demonstrations and competitions, keeping two horses in Europe, where she travels twice a year. She also takes off two times a year to Asia. It fascinates her to learn how horse and wheel transportation played a major role in the rise and fall of civilizations, she said.
She credits some of this love of learning to pursuing the independent studies of her undergraduate experience. “It helps you fi nd what your real passion is and encourages you to pursue your passion in a way that involves you in the world. Empire State College helped me to do that.” m Austin at her carriage museum where the fi nery of former days is on display. E M P I R E 5 W hen composer Deddy Tzur ’97 was reached recently at his Venice, California studio, he was hard at work on a “cue” – music for a battle scene for a new video game, which is becoming the new hot area for commercial composers. For the Israeli-bred son of a diplomat, games are just one more channel for his adventuresome, thoroughly modern, global style that includes jazz, rock and roll, pop, Big Band, symphony orchestra and chamber music. His international, sophisticated approach to music is coupled with personal graciousness and charm, apparent even over the phone lines – which can’t hurt as he navigates the competitive and sometimes cut-throat environment of Hollywood. Tzur comes from a family that shares an appreciation and aptitude for music – his mother and two brothers both have musical talent, he said, but he is the only one to turn professional. He began taking classical piano lessons at age fi ve – “apparently I asked for the lessons; I insisted,” he says. He then moved on to guitar – playing in rock and roll and funk bands, in addition to “a lot of jazz guitar.” At the age of 16, while playing in a Big Band, and trying his hand at arranging music, Tzur found his true calling: composing. Like most young Israeli adults, Tzur served in the army. But after boot camp and basic training, he was allowed to devote most of his time to the Israeli Air Orchestra, which served as accompaniment for a host of world-class international performers. Early in his career as a performer, he toured Europe, Asia, South America and North America, where he was exposed to “a lot of different musical styles and experiences,” which helped him to defi ne and refi ne his musical style and his own composing, he said. In 1996, upon the recommendation of one of his professors in Israel, he decided to travel to New York, and enroll in Empire State College. Because of his years of professional experience, he knew he was only a year or two away from a degree. At the same time, he wanted to experience America, its educational system, and study both the arts and liberal arts. “I think it was very valuable. I wanted to be in New York and to broaden my education, even on the musical side, even though I was fairly experienced by then,” he explained.
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