Novel History Features Kennedy and Smith
ByVinny Reda
Novelists who confront history are rarely confronted by actual historians - and then given a chance to argue back. However, Mark C. Carnes provides that opportunity in his new book, Novel History - and allows University at Albany representatives to get in on both sides of the discussion.

One of the 20 novels chosen is Quinn’s Book, the 1988 work of Professor of English William Kennedy; anthropologist Michael E. Smith offers the historical perspective on Gary Jennings’ 1980 blockbuster, Aztec. The UAlbany faculty are unique among the 38 novelists and historians featured in Novel History: Kennedy’s work gets appraised by the editor himself. And Smith is the one historian who receives no direct novelist feedback; Jennings died in 1999 before seeing Smith’s essay.

Quinn’s Book, said Carnes, epitomized the novelist’s ability to invest the actual past with meaning invariably more revelatory than the social historian’s selection and juxtaposition of thousands of items in the historical record. One of Kennedy’s chief “literary devices” to accomplish his aim, wrote Carnes, is mythology, which at times raises the events of 19th-century Albany to Homeric heights, and invests several of Kennedy’s characters with miraculous capabilities.

That the Quinn’s Book populace seems accepting of such strange and miraculous events is borne out by history - but not history uncovered by historians before 1988. “Kennedy’s insight about the common man of that time is remarkable in that he happened upon it several years in advance of the historians,” wrote Carnes. “The weird, surreal, extraordinary world of Quinn’s Book is, if literally inconceivable, not historically unrealistic.”

Part of the fun and drama of Novel History is seeing how the writers respond to the assessments - and sometimes criticisms - of the historians. In his response, Kennedy wrote that he is “grateful” to Carnes for finding Quinn’s Book “not historically unrealistic” and “for my affirmation of my intent on this and other matters.” However, he tempers Carnes’ assertion that the novel is bathed in “magical surrealism.” “It always struck me that these seemingly magical occurrences were part of the real world - the unpredictability of it all. One of the basic principles of my work is a resistance to determinism. A resistance to fate is part of this. I find predictable writing boring,” said Kennedy.

Kennedy, whose new novel Roscoe is due out early next year, says he is always guided by his instincts in dealing with history: “I believe in the way writers know things and intuit elements of the past through their immersion in records, photographs, history books, interviews of people, and memoirs. I looked through a lot of them in doing research for Quinn’s Book. A novelist can then synthesize and imagine, where an historian does not have that imaginative leeway.

“I remember Bernard Malamud telling me that in the course of writing one of his novels he discovered a truth and authenticity that he didn’t know was truth until long after he had finished.” Kennedy smiled. “I guess you can say I believe in the ability of the unconscious to imagine what you can’t imagine consciously.”

Michael Smith confronted the power of Jennings’ imagination when he first read Aztec as a graduate student. Before he was halfway through that novel, he wrote in Novel History, he had begun to confuse historical facts with Jennings’ “plausible details.”

“I was lecturing to a class of undergraduates about Aztec religion and was about to state that Aztec commoners were afraid of priests, when I realized I didn’t know whether that idea was from the historical sources or whether it was Jennings’ invention. To avoid confusing myself further, I stopped reading the book.”

After 20 years of his own research, Smith believes Jennings’ assertion regarding commoners and priests “makes perfect sense.” The same holds true in Aztec, he wrote, in several other cases. And, as with Kennedy in Quinn’s Book, novelist Jennings occasionally outraced historians to fact. “This refusal to be limited by the available sources led Gary Jennings to propose an economic practice that archaeologists didn’t find evidence for until after publication of the novel in 1980,” wrote Smith. Smith also found a host of “minor errors” in Aztec. Two significant ones concerned writing - long written messages were not possible with Aztec writing, yet people do so in the book - and the treatment of sex. “Moderation in sex and other affairs was an important and fundamental Aztec virtue,” wrote Smith. “Much of the sexual behavior in the novel, however, is bizarre.”

Smith was never to receive Jennings’ explanations or arguments on these points. “I was disappointed,” he said. “I was impressed with his work, and I was happy that he was not constrained with only stating the known facts. Scholars have to be more cautious; we’re not allowed to extrapolate.”

Inspired to some degree by Aztec, what Smith did in his 1996 history The Aztecs was to invent fictional characters as visitors to two 15th-century Aztec cities. “Frankly, I thought my colleagues would be critical of my use of even that fiction, but they were not,” he said. “And I think that it gave a true sense for the reader of how life went on.”

Student News
By Greta Petry

UAlbany Students Succeed in Sales and Community Service
Kevin O’Neill admits he was “a little intimidated” when he heard about a marketing course in which the students had to go out and sell.

“When I first heard about this course, I was thinking about taking another course that was more textbook-oriented. Then I realized people do this for a living. A big part of it is, you bite the bullet, do the class, and get a great experience,” said O’Neill, a Buffalo native who graduated in May with a bachelor’s degree.

The course, BMKT430Z, Sales Management, which is only offered in the spring, was taught by adjunct professor Scott Ellsworth, who is the vice president for sales and marketing for MVP. Another section of BMKT430Z was taught by Mark Patten, also an adjunct professor. The two were filling in for marketing professor Paul Schurr, who was on sabbatical in the spring.

William Danko, chair of the marketing program in the School of Business, gave Patten and Ellsworth the syllabi from previous courses.

“Scott approached me with the United Way idea, and I agreed. To be clear, I said ‘yes,’ but Scott and his students did the work,” Danko said.

“My goal was to make the class REAL WORLD,” said Ellsworth, “I want these students to have a leg up on everyone else if they go for a sales job in the future. United Way was the perfect product given my business to business sales background and the ‘good will’ opportunity for UAlbany.”

Students were “selling” United Way pledge campaigns to businesses. According to O’Neill, each team on the average made about 100 “cold calls,” to businesses, seeking to land an appointment so that it could bring in a United Way representative to meet with the management and “close” the deal. Of every 100 calls, some 50 resulted in the students making contact. Out of those 50 contacts, students succeeded in landing five appointments and closing one deal.

“I would say the hardest part was simply doing the cold calling,” said O’Neill, who was a Presidential Scholar, president of the Golden Key National Honor Society, and a member of Delta Sigma Pi business fraternity. Students had to work up the courage to make another cold call after being rejected. “As time goes on you realize you can’t take it personally and you are helping the community.”

While some donations were collected, many of the contributions were in the form of agreeing to run pledge campaigns that will be conducted this fall.

“Once you get that appointment, you feel so great - and when you close, you feel like a million bucks,” O’Neill said. “I brought in $300 for United Way. Some of the students brought in as much as $4,000. You definitely need a certain mentality in sales. You have to be very confident and go in wanting to make the close.”

The class combined business skills with being engaged with the Capital Region community.

“You want to talk about community service? To be able to say, ‘I brought in a couple of thousand dollars as part of a class, now that is unique,” said O’Neill, a business major with a concentration in marketing.

Ellsworth motivated the students by dividing them into teams.

“If the students really wanted to learn about sales and sales management, then they needed to sell. The class was broken into six teams with four students per team and one manager per team. This created competition among the students and the necessary pressure to perform. The incentive plan leveraged what they desired most - a good grade - using team and individual sales results as the measure of success. I also developed a ‘bonus’ plan for them to earn extra credit by hitting high activity standards. As a result, they had incentives for both activity and results,” Ellsworth said.

O’Neill said the top sales group received an A, with 40 percent of the grade being based on the sales project. There were other incentives as well. After the final class of the semester, Ellsworth treated the students to a night at Friday’s restaurant.

“I stressed the importance of celebrating your success in sales,” Ellsworth said. “This group of students really accomplished something special, and they needed that extra ‘thank you’ from myself for a job well done.”

Perhaps the biggest part of the learning experience for O’Neill was the way his confidence increased over the semester. Among the companies he called on were TransWorld and Pension Consultants. And while the students did not close in every case, part of the experience involved starting a relationship with a company and looking over the options for pledge campaigns with that company.

Ellsworth noted, “We spent a lot of time breaking down the sales process, talking about each step, and doing endless role play. I spent time in each class during the second half of the semester reviewing sales calls with each student. I think this helped them gain more confidence to overcome objections and the rejection associated with all sales jobs.”

After graduation, O’Neill headed to Washington, D.C., and Baltimore to look for a job in marketing, political consulting, or advertising.

“Wherever we go, we’ll know how sales works. I felt really good about the product. And I’ve always been involved with community service,” he said.

Millionaire Next Door Co-Author Honors Parents
ByVinny Reda
The writer who told people how to get rich is rewarding those who give back.

University at Albany marketing professor William Danko, co-author of The New York Times No. 1 bestseller The Millionaire Next Door, has established the Milton & Mary M. Danko Golden Rule Award. It is a fully endowed scholarship given to a junior-year business student who, in Danko’s words, “has demonstrated a basic pattern of giving his or her most precious resource to others - and that, of course, is time.”

The endowment, administered by the University at Albany Foundation, generates $1,500 annually, and honors Danko’s parents - “two people who had a history of giving to others when it seemed there was nothing left to give.” The first recipient, Kathryn Leahy, who last fall performed more than 125 hours of volunteer service at Ronald McDonald House, was honored in May.

Leahy’s concentration is marketing and management information systems. “She also has an impressive GPA,” said Danko, “but more importantly, she has a history of giving her time to others in need.”

That, for Danko, is what makes living - and wealth - worthwhile. He says, “While The Millionaire Next Door reveals traits and behavioral habits of the wealthy, I tell my students, and all others who will listen, to keep money in perspective. It is not an end in itself.

“In the book, we show how ‘steady as you go’ can build a fortune. Eighty percent of the millionaires in this country are first-generation millionaires. What this means is that many people carry with them a value system that embraces hard work and perseverance. Further, some millionaires are incredibly generous with their wealth, recognizing that they are merely temporary stewards of these resources.”

Danko applies generosity to his own field of expertise. “Marketing is a very powerful tool. Essentially, it looks at the question, ‘What do we have to do to extract money from people?’ But, as I emphasize to my students, don’t confuse making a living through marketing with the totality of who we are as human beings. I truly believe that we are all obligated to help the dispossessed - the truly needy, the alienated.”

In his presentations done for not-for-profit groups that need marketing guidance, Danko includes maxims, Biblical passages, and factoids that instruct fundraisers on what motivates people to donate - beyond tax purposes, that is. He often includes a quote from the thrifty Ben Franklin - “I would rather have it said ‘He lived usefully’ than ‘He died rich’” - and even one from the industrious Andrew Carnegie: “There is no idol more debasing than the worship of money.”

He also adds for his students an example of generosity close to home: the comments of Edward and Frances Gildea George, who in 1997 donated $1 million to the University at Albany - the institution at which they met in 1934. Explaining their philanthropy, Frances Gildea George noted that the gift would go further than a swimming pool or a Rolls Royce. Edward George added, “This is the time to give; there are no pockets in burial shrouds.”

Danko found a host of other people and businesses that think similarly, and through their generous support the endowment became a reality in less than a year. In addition to the $750 given to the philanthropic student’s education expenses, a matching amount of $750 is given each year to a not-for-profit organization chosen by the student that focuses on the needs of the hungry and the homeless. This year, Kathryn Leahy designated the matching amount of $750 to benefit the Hunger Action Network of New York.

“Business Matters” debuts on WRGB
A weekly University at Albany TV show, “Business Matters” will debut Sunday, Sept. 2, at 11 a.m. on Channel 6, WRGB. Richard Highfield, dean of the School of Business, will host the show, which follows “Face the Nation.” “Business Matters” celebrates doing business in the Capital Region and New York State.

This half-hour show will be devoted to highlighting UAlbany’s experts in the School of Business, showcasing the University as a community resource and business partner, and drawing attention to its role as a major contributor to regional economic development.

Highfield will introduce the show’s theme. Guests will be featured from the business community with expertise related to that theme. Special topics on regional business and economic news will be featured. In addition, the show will focus on successful businesses that contribute to the economy.

The target audience for the show is made up of CEOs, business and government leaders, entrepreneurs, small business owners, and other opinion makers in the Capital Region.

“Business Matters” is a project of The University at Albany Foundation’s Council for Economic Outreach. The show will be funded by corporate marketing sponsorships. For more information, call Dennis Kennedy at (518) 437-4956.

Survey Finds High Degree of Parent Satisfaction with Commencement
By Greta Petry and Carol Olechowski
Parents and students alike gave a resounding “thumbs up” to the May 2001 University at Albany commencement ceremonies. According to the results of a survey conducted by the Office of Advancement Events, 98 percent of the parents responding said they found the entire commencement weekend to be enjoyable.

The survey, which was created with the assistance of Director of Institutional Research Wendell Lorang, was sent to more than 1,600 parents of undergraduate students. More than 450 responded to the survey within six weeks. Mary Beth Nelligan-Goodman and a work-study student helped tabulate and enter the data from the survey.

“We were extremely surprised and very pleased that so many parents responded,” said Academic Events Coordinator Christy DeLaMater. “It was obvious that parents took the time to think about their answers and many gave detailed feedback that has already helped us gauge the success of the weekend.”

This past May 19 and 20, for the first time in a decade, UAlbany hosted all commencement events on campus. Some 900 master’s and doctoral degree candidates graduated May 19 at the Recreation and Convocation Center. Jerome L. Friedman, Nobel Laureate in physics and an honorary degree recipient, was the guest speaker. On May 20, more than 1,700 undergraduates assembled for their commencement exercises. The undergraduate ceremony took place on the lawn behind the new library.

One new feature of Commencement 2001 was the addition of several dozen individual graduation ceremonies sponsored by various schools, departments, and programs. Linda Wheeler, director of Academic Events in the Office of Advancement Events, said the survey showed time and again that those who were pleased with the amount of recognition shown to students at the individual ceremonies were also happy with the entire commencement weekend.

A full 96 percent of parents found there was a good balance between formality and festivity in the undergraduate ceremony; 95 percent were pleased with the decision to move the ceremony back to campus. Some 94 percent of parents thought the picnic added value to the weekend experience; 79 percent thought the same of Torch Night. Overall, 94 percent of parents left the campus feeling like members of the UAlbany family.

Wheeler said the survey results show that the volunteers who turned out for the ceremonies succeeded in spreading the feeling that the UAlbany campus is a warm and friendly place.

“Volunteers were absolutely essential to the success of this weekend and there were nearly 200 of them,” Wheeler said. And in fact, Wheeler is already hoping for 50 to 100 more volunteers to help out in May 2002.

While commencement is over in one quick weekend, it is easy to forget that the work of the Commencement Task Force began a full year ago, and the work of the Commencement Committee went on throughout the year. Wheeler said, “The president’s task force sat down and hammered out what commencement needed to be in order to be memorable for students and their families. What they came up with was right on target. They deserve a lot of credit for going out on a limb and saying, ‘This is what needs to be done.’ ”

Wheeler noted the task force, which was made up of faculty, staff, administrators and students, and chaired by Professor Ronald Bosco of the English Department, met during the summer of 2000 to research and work through the pros and cons of moving commencement back to campus.

“Hats off to the task force for what they did,” said Wheeler. “This wonderful weekend would not have happened without their foresight and the vision of President Hitchcock.”

There will be another change at the end of the fall semester. Instead of an informal recognition ceremony in December, there will be an official University commencement ceremony with conferral of undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral degrees. The ceremony will be held in the RACC on Sunday, Dec. 9.

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