Briefly

Alumni unit to honor Rath, Tokasz
New York State Sen. Mary Lou Rath and Assemblyman Paul A. Tokasz will be honored for their consistent support of higher education, the State University of New York and UB at a breakfast to be held at 8 a.m. on Thursday, Oct. 23, in the Center for Tomorrow, North Campus.

The breakfast will be sponsored by the Legislative Action Committee of the UB Alumni Association.

Rath's and Tokasz's hard work has benefited many UB programs, including the Governance Project, the Institute for Local Governance and Regional Growth and efforts to construct apartment-style student housing on the North Campus.

Fall Open House set for prospective students
UB will hold its first "Discover UB!" fall undergraduate open house, featuring workshops, tours and special presentations, from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 18.

Registration will be in the Alumni Arena lobby, followed by a program at 9:30 a.m. in the Mainstage in the Center for the Arts, North Campus.

The open house will feature walking tours of the North Campus, a bus tour of the South Campus and tours of residence halls in Ellicott Complex on the North Campus. Information sessions on admissions, financial aid and academic advising will be held every 45 minutes from 10 a.m. until 1 p.m.

Prospective students and their families will be the university's guests at the football game between UB and the University of Massachusetts at 1:30 p.m. in University Stadium.

Information about the open house or admission to UB may be obtained at 645-6648 or toll-free at 1-888-UB-ADMIT.

Milbrath receives APSA's lifetime achievement award
Lester Milbrath, professor emeritus in the departments of Political Science and Sociology, and a noted environmental futurist, has received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Political Science Association.

The award was presented, said an APSA spokesperson, in recognition of Milbrath's "distinguished lifetime achievement in scholarship, teaching and advancement of the field of ecological and transformational politics."

Milbrath has established an international reputation as a scholar and activist in environmental issues.

Anthology dedicated to Spanish-American women playwrights
The first anthology in English dedicated exclusively to Spanish-American women playwrights has been produced by two Buffalo professors. Maria Vargas and Teresa Cajiao Salas are the editors of "Women Writing Women," an anthology of award-winning Spanish-American woman playwrights of the 1980s that has been praised for the quality and scope of its translations.

Vargas, a member of the UB faculty since 1985, is associate professor of Spanish in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. Salas is emeritus professor of Spanish at Buffalo State College.

The book was published by the State University of New York Press in the series "Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture." It includes eight plays by authors of national and international acclaim, including Chile's Isadora Aguirre, Argentina's Diana Raznovich and Beatriz Seibel, and Puerto Rico's Teresa Marichal and Myrna Casas. Mexican playwrights Maruxa Vilalta and Sabina Berman, and Venezuela's Mariela Romero also are included. The writers speak to such concerns as social injustice, identity, the role of art and the power of writing.

New WLI program to focus on Hindi language, culture
UB's World Languages Institute has introduced a new program in Hindi language and culture this fall as a result of student and community demand.

The program offers three years of supervised self-instruction and, at the fourth-year level, independent study, as well as opportunities to study abroad. Most, but not all, of the students enrolled in the program to date are students of Indian extraction interested in their cultural heritage.

For more information, call Mark Ashwill, 645-2292, ext. 1452, or go to the institute's Web site at http://wings.buffalo.edu/academic/department/AandL/worldlanguages

UUP contract ratified
The long-delayed United University Professions contract was overwhelmingly approved last week in what union officials are calling the largest member response to a ratification vote in UUP history.

According to William Scheuerman, UUP president, 93.4 percent of those voting favored ratification of the new contract. Of 9,602 valid votes, 8,969 were for ratification, 626 were against, six were blank and one was void. The vote represents 61.4 percent of UUP members eligible to vote.

The new contract covers the period from July 2, 1995, to July 1, 1999, and provides an across-the-board salary increase of 3.5 percent in each of the last two years of the agreement.

The contract also includes a lump-sum payment of $1,250 for full-time employees, prorated for part-time employees. It also calls for an additional lump-sum payment of approximately $500 per person, also prorated for part-time employees, to be added onto employees' base pay and retroactive to either July or September 1996.

Discretionary pay increases of 1 percent for each of the last three years of the agreement also are part of the pact.

The new contract offers protections against contracting in and contracting out, as well as full restoration of the UUP Benefit Trust Fund, with retroactive reimbursement of all dental and vision claims incurred during the fund's suspension.

For more details on the contract, visit UUP's Web site at http://www.uupinfo.org.

Cultural warrior Larry Levine to give Capen Lecture Sept. 30
Larry Levine, major historian, public intellectual and cultural provocateur, will present the 1997 Capen Lecture in the Humanities at UB on Sept. 30. The lecture, "The Search for American Identity," will take place at 4 p.m. in the Drama Theatre in the Center for the Arts. Sponsored by the Samuel P. Capen Chair in American Culture (Bruce Jackson) and the Faculty of Arts and Letters, it will be free and open to the public.

Levine is the author of "The Opening of the American Mind" (1996), a politically powerful history of the university in American society. It was written in response to the spate of right-wing books published in recent years that attack the contemporary university and blame educators for a pernicious decline in American culture.

In his book, Levine offers what many critics have called the first reasoned exploration of the explosive conflicts over the university, the canon, and, fundamentally, the meaning of being "American" that have come to be called "the culture wars."

Levine is a professor of history and cultural studies at George Mason University in Virginia and Margaret Byrne Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. A MacArthur Fellow and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he has received many professional and academic awards.

It's civil, structural and environmental engineering now
Changes in the profession of civil engineering have led the Department of Civil Engineering at UB to change its name to the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering.

Andrei Reinhorn, chair of the department, said that the new name reflects the traditional professional concerns with society's infrastructure, as well as a new understanding that everything humans construct-from bridges to computer chips-is a structure and that those structures must be sustainable and environmentally responsible.

He noted that the new name more accurately reflects the department's affiliated research centers: the National Center for Earthquake Engineering Research, the New York State Center for Hazardous Waste Management and the Great Lakes Program. More information on the department is at http://www.civil.buffalo.edu.

English faculty members author new publications
Recent publications by members of the Department of English have included books and special publications.

George Hochfield, professor emeritus, has published a translation of "The Officers' Camp" by Giampiero Carocci. In his book, Carocci, a former Italian army officer, writes of his 1943-45 incarceration in a German concentration camp.

Thomas E. Connolly, professor emeritus and noted James Joyce scholar, has had a collection of his previously published pieces on Joyce published by the Edwin Mellen Press. The articles offer a look at the UB Libraries' exceptional collection of Joyce manuscripts, photos, memorabilia and personal effects.

The University of Idaho at Moscow has devoted an entire issue of its literary magazine, FUGUE, to the work and life of Raymond Federman, a SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of English and Melodia Jones Chair in French. Federman, whose works have been widely translated, is considered to be one of the most influential authors of the postmodern age.

The June 19 issue of the London Review of Books featured an essay by Susan Eilenberg, associate professor, on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, procrastination and failure.

Minority grad school conference is Oct. 11
Julian M. Earls, deputy director for operations at NASA's Lewis Research Center in Cleveland and a nationally recognized author, scholar and humanitarian, will be keynote speaker at a luncheon to be held at noon on Oct. 11 as part of the first annual Minority Student Graduate School Awareness Conference.

The conference, which will be held from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the University Inn and Conference Center, 2401 N. Forest Road, Amherst, will provide minority students with information about the possibilities and opportunities associated with attending graduate school.

Reservation deadline for the conference, which is free of charge, is Oct. 1. For more information or reservations, call 645-2234 or 645-2002.

J. Bradley Aust named Distinguished Medical Alumnus
J. Bradley Aust, Dorn Distinguished Professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, will be honored as Distinguished Medical Alumnus by the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at a dinner in his honor today in The Buffalo Club.

A 1949 graduate of the UB medical school, Aust was the first chair of the Department of Surgery at the San Antonio center, a position he held for 30 years until stepping down in 1996.

Aust's research has centered on endotoxin shock, cancer and immune tolerance to transplantation. He has published nearly 200 papers and book chapters and is the author of two books. Clinically, he has concentrated on major cancer surgery and chemotherapy.

Aust, who was first vice president of the American College of Surgeons and the American Surgical Society, also has served as chairman of the American College of Surgeons Board of Governors and director of the American Board of Surgery.

MFC opens InfoSite, new service center in Capen Hall
Millard Fillmore College (MFC) has opened a new service outpost called InfoSite, located on the ground floor of Capen Hall.

InfoSite operates as a convenience center, providing a North Campus location where MFC students can drop off and pick up forms, ask general questions about courses and programs and consult with a graduate advisor.

InfoSite hours are 4-7 p.m. Monday through Thursday.

Three graduate students win Fulbright Foundation grants
Three graduate students have received full Fulbright Foundation grants of $15,000 each to support their doctoral dissertation research in the 1997-98 academic year. They are Gerald Carr, a doctoral student in anthropology and ethnopoetics in the Department of Anthropology, and Douglas Welle and John Leonard, both doctoral students in Roman archaeology in the Department of Classics.

Carr is studying with anthropologist Barbara Tedlock and serves as assistant editor of American Anthropologist, a journal of the American Anthropological Association.

His grant will fund dissertation research on the conceptual structure of northern Athapaska poetics.

Leonard 's research interests include nautical archaeology, Roman archaeology, harbor archaeology, Cypriot archaeology and near eastern archaeology. His grant will fund dissertation research on Roman harbors and trade in Cyprus.

Welle's principal areas of study are the art and archaeology of Italy, Greece and North Africa, archaeological theory, and the social history of Italy and North Africa.

His grant will fund dissertation research on Roman trade routes in Tunisia.