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photo by Ben Barnhart
You gotta love it: from left, Seymour, Seppala, Partee
MICHAEL SEPPALA '83G LAUGHS MISCHIEVOUSLY
as he says that he sometimes thinks of his current project as
"The `In Spite Of' Campaign." Going around campus enlisting
faculty and staff for their special part of Campaign UMass, he's
repeatedly reminded how, in a huge, dynamic place like this one,
everybody's got a beef. Yet in spite of whatever the beef is,
"Person after person goes on to say to me, `But you know,
I love this place!'" Seppala, who is associate director
of development, appears here with his campaign cochairs, faculty
members Harry Seymour '64G of communications disorders and Barbara
Partee of linguistics, in the W.E.B. Du Bois Library courtyard.
Turned into a garden this year by campus volunteers, the courtyard
is one emblem of a faculty-staff campaign that will include some
special campus projects.
DURATION: 1996-2001 GOALS: Raising $125 million
Engaging advocates
Strengthening imageLOGO: Old Chapel and the W.E.B. Du Bois Library THEME: "To dream, to act, to lead." INSPIRATION: "We know where competitiveness comes from. It comes from an institution's people but only people who are free to dream, to risk, free to act." Jack Welch '57, CEO, General Electric Company CASE FOR GIVING: BABY BOOM: UMass faced the baby boom thirty years ago, burgeoning into one of the biggest, best respected, most dynamic public universities in the nation.
COMPETITION FOR STATE FUNDS: In the '90s, competing demands hamper the Commonwealth's efforts to preserve the high quality of a UMass education. Only 36 percent of the current operating budget comes from the legislature.
STRATEGIC ACTION: As a first step in both shoring up the budget and reimagining our land-grant mission, the campus has initiated a sweeping strategic plan that will prepare it to thrive in the next century.
CALL FOR ACTION: Campaign UMass will rally our extended family to help finance the strategic plan and a margin of excellence for the university.
SHAPING THE FUTURE: Through Campaign UMass, for the first time in the 135-year history of the campus, donors can and will take a direct hand in shaping the future of the university.
Well,
now, that's a good question," said Dean George Marston in his courteous
way, one afternoon this fall, when asked how he decided to make a $100,000
bequest to the College of Engineering that he might very well have directed
elsewhere.
"It was a hard decision to make, in a
way," said Marston, bending forward, as he tends to do even
when seated, as if to reduce the difference between his six-foot-five-inches
and the lesser stature of most visitors. At age ninety he retains
most of the original wiry height that until recently was freqently
to be noted on his walks through the engineering quadrangle,
and he's still living comfortably on his own in the East Pleasant
Street house that he built with his late wife, Grace, in 1952.
"I got my degree from Worcester Polytechnic,
you know," said Marston. "That comes as a little surprise
to people. They assume I'm a UMass grad." A Montague City
native, Marston was hired by the Department of Mathematics and
Civil Engineering "a strange combination," he observes
at the then-Massachusetts State College in 1933, soon after completing
graduate work at the Unversity of Iowa. When the head of the
engineering division retired, Marston took over his courses.
"I guess at that time I was the engineering department,"
he told the Greenfield Recorder-Gazette on the occasion
of his own retirement in 1963. After three years in the Navy
during World War II, he returned to MSC just as a tsunami of
fellow veterans, a lot of them interested in technical training,
was descending on the campus.
"President Van Meter called me in and
said, `George, I wish that you would take and try to build an
engineering school,' recalls Marston. "He knew something
had to be done for all those men on the G.I. Bill! All I could
say was, `Well, I'll try.'
"So I started getting people and hiring
people and writing around. I wrote all over the country, saying
here is a developing engineering school in a little Northeast
community just starting." In those days, said Marston, Amherst
and New England were significant words. (Outlanders can attest
that they still are.) "That helped us," he said.
Fifty-one years later, Marston sat in his
living room on an autumn afternoon and picked up from his coffee
table a copy of this year's rankings of American graduate schools
by U.S. News and World Report. A blue Post-it marked the
appearance of UMass engineering as forty-fifth in the nation.
Marston said he wouldn't mind seeing a list including the several
hundred other programs that didn't make the top fifty. That would
really dramatize the progress made at UMass. "Forty-fifth
among all the schools of engineering in the country," he
said. "That's a pretty high rating for such a young school."
Marston sorted through the publications on
the coffee table and came up with another list that makes him
proud a list of all the donors to the College of Engineering
over the years.
"Look at all the names that are here!"
he exclaimed. "I was utterly amazed to see this, to see
how many people had contributed to this school of engineering
to this young school."
Which is how we got talking about his contribution.
As he said, it wasn't an easy choice. He felt connected to Worcester
Polytechnic, too.
"But this is the way I felt about it,"
said Marston. "I thought, I got my education there; my undergraduate
education. But I had spent my career here. Thirty years; seventeen
as dean.
"I'm proud of the engineers," he
said. "They're a special breed, and I feel they are a successful
organization, and I think that's borne out by the contributions
that others have made through the years. So that's how I decided."
-Patricia Wright
.