Campus Champion

Christa Chatfield, associate professor of biological sciences, teaches her students about bacteria and research in a Bowers Hall microbiology lab. Along with teaching microbiology lecture and lab classes, Professor Chatfield focuses her undergraduate research students — 17 to date — on research investigating the biology of Legionella pneumophila, the causative agent of Legionnaire’s disease. Stepping into the role of moderator to participate in the College’s celebration of Women’s History Month, Christa has invited colleagues, including an economist, a mathematician and a biologist, to discuss “Women of STEM and Beyond: Stories of Personal Heroes.” Join them at 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 7, in Corey Union Fireplace Lounge.

Kyle Richard hears the same line over and over from his coaches on the football field during practice.

“Don’t be a bystander. Step up.”

Richard, a junior linebacker and varsity team captain at SUNY Cortland, has taken that lesson to heart. Last year, he helped stop an attack on a young woman even though it nearly cost him his life.

During the summer of 2017, Richard and a friend were at a party on Long Island and interrupted a sexual assault in progress. Richard pursued the assailant, who drew a gun and shot Richard twice, hitting him once in each leg. The bullets missed major arteries and bones by millimeters, allowing Richard to recover in time for football season.

On Saturday, March 10, Richard’s courage will be recognized when he is presented with a Next Generation Award at the Kristin’s Fund gala at Turning Stone Casino and Resort. Kristin’s Fund was established in memory of Kristin Palumbo Longo, who was murdered by her husband in 2009 in Deerfield, Oneida County, N.Y. The charity aims to end domestic violence through prevention, education and awareness campaigns.

Richard is appreciative of this award and those who have labeled him a hero, although he’s not comfortable with that label. He said he is sharing his story in the hopes that others are inspired to step up should they encounter sexual or domestic violence happening around them.

“It’s not hard to be somebody who takes action. All it takes is the first action,” Richard said. “All it takes is for you to say something. Words do matter and sometimes all it takes is a word or two. You don’t have to do full-on what I did, but you could say something. That’s not being a bystander.”

The instinct to act for Richard comes partly from his football experience and also from his mother, Sandra Richard, a sergeant with the Nassau County Police Department and a 30-year veteran in law enforcement. She has always encouraged Richard to take charge in tough situations.

Richard and friends had gathered at a private residence for the party. When a group of strangers from a different party showed up to the location, Richard and a friend decided to go home for the night. Yet as they were walking out the door, they heard screaming coming from inside a bathroom.

That was the moment they decided to investigate. They were able to break through the door and separate the victim and the attacker. As Richard was attempting to speak with the victim, the assailant escaped outside and Richard followed in order to confront him. Before Richard could reach him, the attacker began to shoot, hitting him in each leg. Richard said he heard a final shot, which missed, sail past his left ear.

“I had to say something,” Richard said. “If I didn’t confront that kid, I couldn’t live with myself. There’s no way I wouldn’t do it again. It’s in my blood. I can’t not try to step up.”

Richard spent 20 hours in the hospital and then went to work rehabbing from his injuries as soon as he could. He connected with physical therapist Mike Camp and SUNY Cortland alumnus Jonathan Amato ’03 from Bethpage Physical Therapy. Early sessions with Amato focused on repairing the tissue around the wounds and then Richard shifted to strength training to rebuild his muscle mass.

SUNY Cortland Athletic Trainer Pat Donnelly and former athletic training major Kayla Simpson ’17 helped Richard get back into playing shape once he arrived on campus for training camp. Richard, a kinesiology major who is planning on a career as a strength and conditioning coach, sat out the season-opener against Augustana (Ill.), played briefly in the next game at Framingham (Mass.) State and started each of the next nine games. He finished the season with 75 tackles, three sacks and a pair of fumble recoveries.

“The three words that come to mind are hero, highlight and hardship,” said SUNY Cortland head football coach Dan MacNeill ’79. “He was a hero and that certainly is a real highlight in anybody’s life. And he went through tremendous hardship because of that, too, by getting shot twice. I’ve never in my career had a player return to preseason camp with a bullet wound trying to recover. It says all the right things about the young man in terms of what the circumstances were as they unraveled.”

Richard was named SUNY Cortland Athlete of the Week for his contributions — a career-high 13 tackles — in a 20-17 overtime victory against Alfred University on Oct. 14. That award and the others he’s won in his career at Malverne High School in Lakeview, N.Y. and in the classroom all pale in comparison to the Next Generation Award, he said. He calls this a “life award” and urges others to follow his example and speak up and act on behalf of those suffering from domestic or sexual abuse.

“I just knew this story would help people,” Richard said. “I wouldn’t change it for anything. I got shot twice and I’d get shot twice again doing the same thing. I hope other people would feel the same way.”

As a hard-nosed linebacker, those instincts have served Richard well on the football field. His physical style of play and humble demeanor led his teammates to vote him team captain before his junior season. By stopping a sexual assault, Richard proved himself to be the same type of person off the field.

“I think any time a young man steps up to hero status, it’s always a pleasant surprise,” MacNeill said. “I think everybody wonders what they would do in the same circumstance. Here was a guy who ran straight to help. The situation was an odd one, many people would have backed away, not wanting to draw any attention to it. He broke the door down to help this girl.”

In the months since, Richard has received plenty of praise and support from teammates and friends at SUNY Cortland. There is one phrase he has a hard time hearing.

“I feel it every time someone calls me a hero,” Richard said. “Hero is a strong word.”

He heard the calls for help from a stranger in need and he did what he could to help. Richard hopes that other students follow his lead and do what they can to prevent and stop domestic violence and sexual assault. Say something. Reach out to police or other authorities. Don’t be a bystander.

“I shouldn’t have to be looked at as a hero. This shouldn’t be happening all the time,” he said. “This should be something normal. People should be stopping this sort of stuff all the time. It should be embedded in society that we step up in these situations as men.”

SUNY Cortland’s 150-year history contains boundless numbers of stories, intriguing mysteries and events of cultural significance.

Randi Storch, professor and History Department chair, is working with students to bring this past into the present for the College’s Sesquicentennial with the creation of a comprehensive digital timeline of the College.

“People should always care about their history,” said student Henry Drew, who works with Storch on the project. “We stand on the shoulders of giants, but we don’t realize these foundations.”

Sesquicentennial celebrations will begin this July with Alumni Reunion 2018 and continue through Reunion 2019.

The timeline is a multimedia project that will have its own web page ,separate from the College’s, scheduled to be activated in July 2018. The project will consist of approximately 150 historical points, give or take, from 1868 to 2018, which will vary in focus between academics, arts, athletics and infrastructure. Storch is working with Loren Leonard, the web operations specialist of Systems Administration and Web Services (SAWS) to create an aesthetically pleasing and functional web page. The History Department also is working with Fran Elia, director of sports information, in order to compile a comprehensive history of campus athletics.

The Communication Studies Department is also heavily involved. Professor and Department Chair Paul van der Veur and his students are working to construct comprehensive, three-dimensional digital models of six campus buildings. These high-definition replicas will be incorporated into the timeline in order to give users a more interactive experience. There are also tentative plans to install a permanent exhibition of the timeline with an interactive screen in a building on campus.

A number of History Department student interns started gathering information for the timeline from Cortland College: An Illustrated History by the late Professor Emeritus of History Leonard Ralston during the fall 2017 semester. That provided the students with a general overview. As their research got more specific, the students turned to the archives in the Memorial Library as well as past student yearbooks and issues of the Cortland Standard newspaper.

Coinciding with the Sesquicentennial, Storch and Kevin Sheets, an associate professor of history, are working on an updated edition of the original Ralston book, which covered events through the end of the 1980s.

“It’s an ‘all hands on deck’ kind of thing,” Storch said of the updated book, which is tentatively planned for release in July. “I’m part of it, but there’s a larger team making this happen.”

Members of the student team collaborating with Storch on the timeline understand how much work goes into capturing past events accurately.

“One hundred and fifty years is a lot of history, a lot of generations and a lot of different time periods,” said Drew, a history and adolescence education in social studies major from Baldwin, N.Y. “You have a plethora of information and you have to condense it.”

“I had no clue what I was signing up for,” he said. “I was just asked, and I wanted the opportunity to do research in my field. I love doing research, figuring out the puzzle pieces.”

Junior Kaycie Haller, a history and adolescence education in social studies major working on the timeline, said that her passion for history was ignited by an interest in ancient Egypt when she was younger.

“I always liked the stories that history told,” said Haller, a native of Wantagh, N.Y. “It’s been a ton of fun and totally exciting. I like the mystery of figuring it all out.”

Drew and Haller encountered several such mysteries in their research, including a hunt for the cornerstone of the original Cortland Normal School building, which was located in downtown Cortland on Church Street before burning to the ground in 1919. The stone was eventually found in storage in Old Main, and Storch and her students are hopeful that it will finally get the exhibition it deserves.

“Having a historical sense of place is important because history helps us understand who we are today,” Storch said.

The College’s current campus was opened in 1923 with the completion of Old Main. Ten years later the Red Dragon became the College’s official mascot. In 1948, Cortland State Teachers College became one of the charter members of the State University of New York, and in 1963 new arts and sciences programs were introduced to the curriculum.

Another sought-after artifact of the College is the Wickwire Cup, a trophy once awarded to fraternities and sororities for the highest GPA before it went missing without a trace. The College’s past is rife with such interesting stories, and the students were particularly intrigued by events that took place in the 1960s under the administration of President Ken Young.

Between 1967 and 1968, the Miller Building was constructed in front of Old Main’s courtyard, which once served as the grand entrance to the school. According to Ralston, the placement of Miller at the time represented a brewing conflict between faculty and administration during the College’s transition from strictly a normal school to a school incorporating liberal arts.

“There’s a story behind every decision that was made, and those past decisions shape the choices that are available to us today,” Storch said.

Drew and Haller were also impressed with the number of iconic musicians who performed at SUNY Cortland before their careers took off, including Billy Joel, the Grateful Dead, and Simon & Garfunkel.

Sonia Socha, then a graduate student at the University at Albany who was serving as assistant director of student activities at SUNY Cortland, shared with Storch and the students her personal account of organizing Joel’s performance in the Moffett Center gymnasium. Socha cites it as a significant leadership experience. The concert’s opening act had performed so well, Socha said, that Joel was actually nervous to go onstage and needed her words of encouragement.

For Storch and her students, it is stories of this kind that make learning about the past important.

“How do we understand what we’ve become today?” Storch said. “Who are the people, places and events who have taken us on this arc? Hopefully, everyone on campus will see on this timeline a little piece of their Cortland experience.”

Haller agrees. “We’re only here for four years and we all have our own Cortland experience,” she said. “I feel like our history is really special and it’s important to know. There’s a lot of Cortland pride, and it’s important to know where that comes from.”

For more information on the College’s Sesquicentennial celebrations, contact planning committee co-chairs Mary Kate Boland ’06, associate director of campus activities for leadership and community or Erin Boylan, executive director of alumni engagement.

Prepared by Communications Office writing intern Ben Mayberry

The work of more than 20 of New York state’s most outstanding artists will be displayed at SUNY Cortland’s Dowd Fine Arts Gallery for more than a month starting on Monday, March 5.

The traveling exhibition, “Artists as Innovators: Celebrating Three Decades of New York State Council on the Arts/New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships,” will be shown at the gallery in the Dowd Fine Arts Center through April 13.

Racism, gender inequality, sexual orientation, immigration, globalization and other provocative topics are explored by the featured works.  A series of presentations and workshops by notable Central New York artists are planned as part of the exhibit.

All events are free and open to the public. Regular gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday.

An opening reception will take place from 4 to 6 p.m. on Thursday, March 8.

The NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship Program has supported more than 4,000 artists over the last 30 years in various fields such as visual arts, literature and the performing arts. Curated by Judith K. Brodsky and David C. Terry, with assistance from Madeline Scholl, the exhibition features work by more than 20 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellows who have gone on to record significant achievements in their artistic careers.

The participating NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellows are: Elia Alba, Ida Applebroog, Dawoud Bey, Sanford Biggers, Ross Blecker, Wendell Castle, Tara Donovan, Carroll Dunham, Chitra Ganesh, The Guerrilla Girls, Barbara Kruger, Christian Marclay, Marilyn Minter, Lori Nix, Tony Oursler, Faith Ringgold, Martha Rosler, Dread Scott, Andres Serrano, Shinique Smith, Carmelita Tropicana and Fred Wilson.

As part of the exhibition tour, artists from Central New York will present complimentary programming, including NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellows Peter Beasecker, Sharif Bey, Ariana Gerstein, Dusty Herbig and Monteith McCollum in the Hallway Gallery and the Critique Space.

Beasecker, professor of studio arts at Syracuse University, will host a master workshop, “Generating an Idea,” from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Wednesday, March 28.

Gerstein, associate professor of cinema at Binghamton University, and McCollum, assistant professor of cinema at Binghamton University, will present “Performance (Performance with Performance for Perfection)” and hold a question-and-answer session at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, April 3.

Herbig, associate professor of art at Syracuse University, will begin an artist talk at 5 p.m. on Thursday, April 5, and Bey, associate professor of art education at Syracuse University, will give an artist talk at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, April 10.

A concurrent film series will screen selections in Sperry Center, Room 104.

“At Sea,” directed by Peter B. Hutton, will be shown from 6 to 7 p.m. on Tuesday, March 20.

Barbara Kopple’s “Harlan County” will be screened from 6 to 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 29.

“Nobody's Business,” directed by Alan Berliner, shows from 6 to 7 p.m. on Wednesday, April 4.

Raplh Arlyck's “Following Sean” will be screened from 6 to 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 11.

The exhibit, previously shown at SUNY New Paltz’s Dorsky Museum, in the future will travel to Alfred University and SUNY Fredonia.

Writing is often thought of as a means to an end but it is a crucial tool in the teaching process, a medium through which teachers and students engage with each other.

The Seven Valleys Writing Project (7VWP), a National Writing Project site at SUNY Cortland, hopes to drive home this message with its upcoming conference, Writing Matters V: Creating a Culture of Writing.

“Writing has a deep relationship with learning in all subject areas,” said David Franke, professor of English and professional writing at SUNY Cortland and director of the 7VWP. “As a matter of fact, we consider writing a method of learning, a learning practice.”

The conference will take place from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, March 10 in Corey Union Exhibition Lounge.

Kelly Wissman, associate professor of literacy teaching and learning at the University at Albany, will deliver the keynote speech titled “Cultivating a ‘Beloved Community’: Collaborative Composing with Words and Images.”

Franke will present with SUNY Cortland English Department faculty Heather Bartlett, lecturer, and Laura Davies, associate professor and Writing Programs director.

During the Writing Matters conference, educators present their original proposals for teaching strategies, placing the emphasis on how writing can be utilized in the classroom for all academic subjects and grade levels. These proposals were submitted to the 7VWP in February and are selected for inclusion based upon criteria such as creativity, originality, incorporation of new media, scale and collaboration between content areas. Faculty and graduate students may register to attend the conference on the Writing Matters website.

“The best writing teachers are teachers who write,” Franke said. “Teachers are way too busy to write a novel, but that doesn’t mean they can’t get firsthand experience as writers that helps them understand what their students go through.”

 7VWP workshops introduce teaching strategies designed to bring writing into the classroom across all disciplines. During these workshops, teachers educate each other on the writing process, revision and creating writing prompts and lesson plans. At Writing Matters V, Franke will present on how to write instructions.

“The teachers always give very practical lessons that any instructor can use in the classroom Monday morning,” Franke said.

Writing Matters is just one of the many programs administered by the 7VWP in their mission to bring writing education to Seven Valleys region schools, at all grade levels and across all fields of study. The Seven Valleys region includes school districts as far north as Lake Ontario and as far south as Horseheads.

Based at SUNY Cortland, the 7VWP is one of about 200 sites at universities across the U.S. that provide writing conferences and workshops for educators, both on the College’s campus and in regional schools.

According to Franke, the most significant of the 7VWP’s offerings are the Summer Writing Institute programs, held at SUNY Cortland for two weeks every July. The series of workshops are led by and for teachers, introducing groundbreaking ways of using writing in the classroom. More than 100 of the program’s graduates have gone on to become teaching consultants in Seven Valleys region districts.

“You can always pick out a teacher who’s been through the Summer Institute,” Franke said. “You can pick them out just by walking past the door, because they will be writing along with their students.”

Franke sees writing as an educational tool and a community venture and he is a proponent of using writing to strengthen the relationship between student, family and instructor.

“The one thing that we are most allergic to in the whole world is busy work,” Franke said. “Writing should be authentic, it should be used for learning and it should help the teacher reach their goals.”

For more information, contact the Seven Valleys Writing Project at 607-753-5945.

Prepared by Communications Office writing intern Ben Mayberry

David Stovall, whose initiatives to improve urban education within economically disadvantaged areas has led him to speak out against these injustices to colleges nationwide, will speak on Wednesday, March 7, at SUNY Cortland.

A professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago, where he teaches educational policy and African-American studies, Stovall will discuss “Are We Ready for the Abolition of ‘School’?  Lessons on Community Engaged Struggle for Quality Education,” at 7 p.m. in Sperry Center, Room 204.

His talk continues the College’s year-long “Incllusion” series of lectures, films and common readings planned by SUNY Cortland’s Cultural and Intellectual Climate Committee (CICC) for the 2017-18 academic year.

This year’s series explores the concept that inclusion necessitates the recognition of “The Other,” that is those who are not “like us,” against whom we form our identity and over whom we seek to maintain power or distance. It requires that we think deeply and act inclusively with regard to who “counts” as a human being and who belongs in “our” community. The series, which has at its heart the philosophy of highly acclaimed, provocative New York Times bestseller Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, will focus on inclusion as a fundamental condition for equity and human rights.

All “Incllusion” events are free and open to the public.

A Chicago native, Stovall graduated from Luther High School South in 1990. He completed his undergraduate degree and Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Stovall has spent the last 10 years of his career working with different community organizations and schools to create a broader curriculum that goes beyond reading, writing and arithmetic, in order to further advocate for issues of social justice.

“In terms of the campus talk, I’ve been working on this concept of ‘school’ abolition,” Stovall said. “‘School,’ in this sense, is the system of order and compliance that get us further away from education ¾ the ability to ask questions of our conditions while working to change them.”

His family and community organizations encouraged him to pursue educational work on racial injustice, which became Stovall’s initial motivation for entering such a controversial and complex field, according to his online profile.

Due to the success of his community work, Stovall became a member of the Social Justice High School design team, which ultimately led to his additional work as a volunteer social studies teacher at the Greater Lawndale/Little Village School.

The four major areas that Stovall often addresses and stresses to his audiences are: critical race theory, concepts of social justice in education, the relationship between housing and education and the relationship between schools and community stakeholders.

Along with working as a full-time college professor, volunteer high school teacher and motivational public speaker, Stovall has reached out to college professors in California, Arizona and New York to teach his mission in their high school courses. 

 “I’ve been working with this group for eight years,” Stovall said. “The idea is to provide historically underserved schools with college access through their interactions with us. We’ve been enrolling the students that take classes with us in our respective universities to get early college credit.”

By using a different intellectual theme each year, the CICC committee aims to generate common topics of discussion and to establish traditions of intellectual discourse on SUNY Cortland’s campus. The series encourages faculty and staff to infuse the theme into their course curricula, engage in classroom discussions and debates around the theme, and propose campus events or speakers on related topics.

For more information on CICC events this semester, visit the CICC website or contact CICC co-chairs Brian Barrett at 607-753-2330 or Jena Curtis at 607-753-2979.

Prepared by Communications Office writing intern Hannah Bistocchi

Professor and communications law expert Roy Gutterman is very concerned about the future of the American free press during a time when public rhetoric is commonly used to silence critics simply because other people do not like what they have to say.

“I think in our current state of affairs, politically, freedom of speech and freedom of the press are more important than they have been in recent years,” said Gutterman, an associate professor of communications law and journalism at Syracuse University. “I think it’s really troubling from a democratic standpoint. Politicians aren’t supposed to like the press. They’re supposed to have that adversarial relationship.”

 Gutterman will address “Freedom in the Balance: Free Speech Rights and the Current Global Context,” on Wednesday, March 21, at SUNY Cortland.

His lecture begins at 4:30 p.m. in Moffett Center, Room 2125. A reception will precede the talk at 4 p.m. in the Rozanne M. Brooks Museum, Moffett Center, Room 2126.

The talk continues the 2017-18 Rozanne M. Brooks Lecture Series, which this year takes on the theme of “The Culture of Human Rights and Realities.”

The series is free and open to the public.

Although Gutterman found rewarding careers as both a journalist and an attorney, he said there was something about teaching that was always calling to him.

Before joining Syracuse University, Gutterman was a newspaper reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer in Ohio. Leaving the world of journalism behind to pursue a career in law, Gutterman found he was still missing something in his life.

At Syracuse University, Gutterman established himself in the field of communications law focused on the rights protected under the First Amendment: free speech and free press. He has been honored with the university’s Meredith Teaching Recognition Award.

Due to rapidly evolving societal views on the press and freedom of speech, Gutterman believes it is as important as ever to discuss with students the constant every-day struggle of balancing First Amendment rights with other rights in today’s society.

He asserts that recent attacks on the press and the legal repercussions and challenges that have come with trying to silence people have tarnished the modern-day press.

“I don’t see First Amendment values as a partisan issue in the first place,” Gutterman said. “I believe in opposing viewpoints, political diversity, but we need to be able to have some critical discussions about public issues without things devolving into the criticism leveled against the press.”

The concern is there might be efforts to erode the American right to a free press.

“The chipping away at the institution I worry about: investigations rooting out sources, high profile libel suits, invasion of privacy suits aimed at protecting rights, instead of punishing a critic or silencing a voice.”

Gutterman’s talk has relevance to all American citizens, including the younger generation who may wish to become more politically involved. 

 “I hope people can walk away with a little bit of an understanding of the important role the First Amendment plays in our lives and a little bit of appreciation for it, and that the press should be revered.”

One remaining Brooks talk also will be held in Moffett Center, Room 2125 at 4:30 p.m. on April 11. A reception precedes the event at 4 p.m. in the Rozanne M. Brooks Museum.

Hannah Britton, who leads the Anti-Slavery and Human Trafficking Initiative at the University Kansas, will discuss “Moving Upstream: Preventing Human Trafficking and Exploitation.” A reception will precede the event at 4 p.m. in the Rozanne M. Brooks Museum.

The Brooks Lecture Series honors the late Rozanne Marie Brooks, a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor and SUNY Cortland professor of sociology and anthropology. Brooks was a SUNY Cortland faculty member for 36 years; she passed away in 1997. 

Contact Professor of Sociology/Anthropology Sharon Steadman at 607-753-2308 for more information.

Prepared by Communications Office intern Hannah Bistocchi

Midterms are approaching and Memorial Library’s Research Help is equipped with many resources to assist students through one of the most academically challenging times of the year.

Located adjacent to the Help Center, Research Help offers services such as locating library materials, analyzing database search results and providing students, faculty and staff with one-on-one research sessions. Patrons may simply stop by the desk or make an appointment on MyRedDragon’s library tab in order to work with a librarian.

The library employs 11 research librarians specializing in various disciplines, all of whom are dedicated to saving students’ time and improving their research skills. These librarians are trained in helping students narrow their research topics, develop effective search strategies, cite sources and evaluate search results.

Research Help is available from 10 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Monday through Wednesday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Thursday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Friday, noon to 5 p.m. on Saturday and 1 to 9 p.m. on Sunday. Additionally, a librarian is available 24/7 via an online chat on MyRedDragon.

Prepared by Communications Office writing intern Ben Mayberry

SUNY Cortland email allows employees to communicate in a consistent fashion. Email signature guidelines recently have been updated for all individual email addresses and signatures so that College communications occur in a unified manner and make it easier for people to contact us.

When sending an email on behalf of the College, employees should use an external email signature.  Day-to-day emails between coworkers can be abbreviated.

Here are two examples of external email signatures.

External signature with minimal information

Robert Smith '14
Assistant Men's Lacrosse Coach
SUNY Cortland
Athletics Department
Park Center, Room 1212
607-753-4321

External extended signature with all options

Tajik L. Arun M ’10, Ed.D. (he, him, his - optional)
Vice President, Student Affairs
SUNY Cortland
Division of Student Affairs
Corey Union, Room 407-A
P.O. Box 2000
Cortland, NY 13045-0900
O: 607-753-2011 | F: 607-753-9898 | C: 607-753-1234 
tajik.arun@cortland.edu
cortland.edu

Follow Us: Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram

Confidentiality Note: This email may contain privileged and confidential information that should not be copied or forwarded without consent.

Detailed guidelines and information on how to set up an email signature can be found in the Communication Guide under Email.

Anyone requiring assistance with setting up an email signature should contact The Help Center or call 607-753-2500. 

Erin Boylan could easily pass as a SUNY Cortland graduate.

Boylan, promoted to the position of the College’s executive director for alumni engagement Jan. 1, has spent the last 15 years boosting both the College and its 73,279 living alumni for all she’s worth. Few know the campus and alumni community better than she does.

“I absolutely love this college so it’s a pleasure for me to be able to continue my career here,” she said. “I love the alumni and I love how we help them give access to our students through a lot of different educational experiences.”

SUNY Cortland infused her childhood, according to Boylan, the daughter of two graduates, Edward Hotchkin ’72 and Ann Devery Hotchkin ’75 of Cortland.

“I grew up with a P.E. dad who still remembers the names of all the ligaments and all his days of training here at Cortland,” she said.

“I grew up with SUNY Cortland stories.”

One was of a tree in their backyard, named after the late and legendary nationally recognized soccer coach T. Fred “Prof” Holloway, who was their neighbor on McLean Road in Cortlandville.

“As I became an adult I realized the significance of these stories a little bit more,” Boylan said.

A 2001 SUNY Fredonia alumna with her bachelor’s degree in business marketing, she was a Dean’s List student who won the National Collegiate Business Award. She was the Business Club president, a member of the regional champion Students In Free Enterprise team, and a top student fundraising caller for the Fredonia Foundation Phonathon.

Before joining SUNY Cortland, Boylan also spent a semester as an intern at the Rockefeller Arts Center and also interned with Paul Bunyan Products, Inc., of Preble, N.Y.

Since then Boylan has enthusiastically spent her life in the shade of Old Main.

She has moved ably between the College’s Alumni Engagement and Cortland College Foundation offices within the Division of Institutional Advancement for her entire professional career. Employed by the College, she also reports to the SUNY Cortland Alumni Association Board of Directors.

“I look upon myself as a recruiter of alumni much like admissions may recruit students: finding out ways people can contribute,” Boylan said. “We call this the three ‘T’s: time, talent and treasure.”

In 2003, she first arrived on campus to oversee student fundraising callers (Dragon Dialers), in what is now the Professional Studies Building, while conducting annual appeal writing campaigns to alumni and writing general letters on behalf of the Cortland College Foundation.

In 2005, she made the jump from fundraising to alumni engagement within her own division.

“In my core, I’m drawn to the mission of alumni engagement,” Boylan said. “I really believe in the power of people helping other people. In this case, it’s alumni coming together to help our students and our alumni to give them more opportunities. I’ve seen it play out time and time again, whether it’s giving them access to a really interesting career-shadowing opportunity, or a panel of alumni, or an internship or financial contributions. There just is so much power between people who are willing to help others.”

Appointed assistant director of alumni affairs, as the department was then named, she relocated in 2006 with her division to Brockway Hall, and was promoted to associate director in 2008.

Boylan then served the first of several interim manager positions, starting in 2012 as executive director of alumni engagement. In late 2016, Boylan was tapped to fill another key vacancy as interim director of The Cortland Fund, which she fulfilled for six months. Last summer, she once again came forward to oversee alumni engagement temporarily. Boylan was named permanently to the post in early 2018.

She credits Douglas DeRancy ’75, M ’86 for her career in fostering close alumni ties and cultivating future institutional supporters. DeRancy balanced fundraising with “friend-raising” in his role as the executive director of the alumni operation for 26 years until his retirement in 2012. He later served the College as an executive-level fundraiser.

“I’ve always considered Doug my mentor and feel so fortunate I was able to spend so many years learning from him,” Boylan said. “He always kept developing our core of lifelong relationships with our alumni. And he was never afraid to try something new and exciting.”

She now supervises a staff of nine highly trained outreach associates who organize dozens of alumni events on campus and around the country as well as numerous alumni-student networking and mentoring programs aimed at helping recent graduates develop as professionals and secure their dream careers. They also work diligently to recruit young alumni and to increase the diversity of alumni represented on the board and as participants in events and programs.

“I have the best staff in the world,” Boylan said. “I think having Robin Wheeler Baroni and Nabila Khazzaka, who both have a long history here, has been very helpful to my learning here, coupled with young graduates from the College who have such enthusiasm.”

Boylan’s job also involves overseeing the Lynne Parks ’68 SUNY Cortland Alumni House, an historic local mansion that serves as a working bed and breakfast and a key venue for both alumni and community events, notably weddings, alumni reunion gatherings and major College events like Senior Send-off.

“It’s a phenomenal facility that serves as a home for our alumni,” Boylan said. “It’s a nice mix of modern amenities and technologies with just some beautiful historic elements. It’s filled with College memorabilia so it’s really a showcase of our history. And you couldn’t find more dedicated people than the ones who work there now.”

Programming for alumni around the country continues non-stop with her staff working closely with alumni association volunteers to plan and execute dozens of gatherings both on campus and in key cities.

“With our programming, it’s fun to see that evolve and see what gets people interested,” Boylan said. “Our Cortaca Nation has really grown exponentially from what it started as.”

Boylan refers to a multi-location “event” that tops even Alumni Reunion in participation. Her office helps coordinate and bring off the annual Cortaca Jug game viewing parties in a dozen locations across the nation. In 2017, some 2,500 graduates of all ages gathered to watch the “Best Little Football Game in America” with one another.

“I think regardless of what decade you graduated in there is a strong sense of pride at this college,” Boylan said. “People are really proud to be Red Dragons. They are just so willing to support each other and our current students. I think that a lot of it is attached to our history: education, academic excellence and athletics certainly are a source of pride for us. And that teamwork mentality is really prevalent throughout the decades.”

In her early years, communication with alumni took the form of mailed and electronic invitations, phone calls and the print magazine Columns. However, maintaining a connection with alumni becomes more and more complex. In recent years, alumni have communicated with their classmates directly by various Alumni Engagement-linked social media platforms and by updating their “class notes” and other information directly into the office’s multipurpose information management tool, the Red Dragon Network. Once a month, the online newsletter Moments now attracts a more wired, interactive and overall younger group of graduates. Boylan and a highly trained staff must keep up with constant change and plan the best next move.

“That core of who we are hasn’t changed, but definitely the development of our communication has, as technology rolls out,” Boylan said. “We’re doing more with electronic communications, more with social media, with being in someone’s pocket to be able to spread the good news of the College. That’s definitely grown and evolved over the course of time.”

Alumni Engagement reached out to graduates near Parkland, Fla., following the shooting Feb. 14, and last year to alumni affected by hurricanes in Puerto Rico and Houston, Texas, as well as graduates impacted by wildfires in California. Electronic communication makes it easier to contact alumni who might be affected by a crisis or national tragedy in their locality. According to Boylan, that hasn’t changed her office’s mission.

“We have always at our core believed in developing lifelong relationships with alumni,” Boylan explained. “So within that context, we try to respect alumni wherever they are at in their lives. In a lot of ways, we get to celebrate, and that’s really fun and a joy to be a part of. But we also try to do what we can to be there in their time of need. It can be just reaching out letting them know that there is this large group of Red Dragons that always stand behind each other.”

Boylan often hits the road to make alumni events happen.

“It’s really in big waves,” she said. “This month, it’s in New York City and then in Florida. Then I may not travel for a while and it’s more about holding campus events. It really just depends on what’s going on at the time.”

When she and her staff aren’t arranging July’s annual Alumni Reunion, or athletic events, or what she calls “mini-reunions” of special groups, they work on supporting current students in various ways, including career development.

“We have the alumni speaker panels we organize on campus in different disciplines,” Boylan said. “We have a program we’re doing in March called “Doing Business in New York City,” where our students can develop their connections before they look for work. We’ve done this before, but we will have six sites this year.”

Thanks to generous alumni association volunteers, some 90 current students will split up to visit a site of their choice, including Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Foresters Financial Services, Inc., Viacom Media Networks, New York Mets and The Moviri Group. Another 40 or so students will take part in a networking reception that night in New York.

“Any way that we can connect and share the good news about the College and alums,” Boylan observed.

She married Jeremy Boylan 13 years ago and the couple are raising two young children together in Homer, N.Y.

“It’s funny because I went to a sorority meeting about a reunion one time and one of the sisters said, ‘Hey, do you have relatives in the Corning area?’” Boylan said. “I said, ‘My husband does.’ She had actually taught in Corning under Jeremy’s great-grandmother, who was a 1920s Cortland grad, and talked about how she was inspired by her teaching. She actually shared this with me in letters. It was such a neat connection.

“I feel so very blessed to be part of the campus community,” Boylan said. “It does so much for other people and it means so much to me. To be able to continue my career here is truly wonderful.”