Champions Again
hat a difference a year can make. Last March,
the women's hockey program had reached an all-time low, recording its first-ever
losing season and then learning it was slated for demotion from varsity
to club status. One year later, the players stood at the pinnacle of their
sport, capturing the unofficial national collegiate championship on their
home ice.
The Eastern College Athletic Conference title, sealed with a 32 victory over New Hampshire at Matthews Arena on March 16, was the Huskies' third in school history and first since 1989. The championship performance-indeed, the past year-was a model for overcoming obstacles and adversity.
It began with the players, coaches, and alumni mounting an aggressive letter-writing campaign to convince athletics officials to keep the program a varsity sport. Then the team battled numerous injuries and illnesses throughout the season. And en route to capturing the ECAC title, the Huskies had to dispense of top-ranked and tournament favorite Brown University.
"This whole season has really showed the character of these players," coach Heather Linstad said. "And it was great to win it at home in front of a lot of people who were there for us when the program was in jeopardy."
The team, which finished the season with a school-record twenty-seven wins, doesn't plan to rest on its laurels. It returns twenty players from this year's championship team next winter, including freshman Hilary Witt, the ECAC Tournament Most Valuable Player. "I guess you could say things are looking up," Linstad said.
Finding Ways to Renew N.U.
omputers stay on-unused-all weekend. Lights
brighten empty rooms. Recruiters earn the same salary whether they bring
in 1,000 hot young prospects or 100. Researchers keep the same percentage
of grant money whether they lure $1 million or $1.
Where could there be a company so lacking in efficiency and profit motives? Right here on campus, business professor Harlan Platt recently told an audience of 100 during the thirty-third annual Robert D. Klein University Lecture.
Platt, a professor of finance, has made a career out of devising paths for rejuvenating companies, a process known as corporate renewal. He used the March 6 lecture to teach the basics of corporate renewal and to train his sights on a "company" his colleagues know intimately: Northeastern.
"The best can renew just as well as the worst," Platt said.
Like any good company that wants to be even better, Platt argued, the university can improve itself by trimming waste and offering incentives to employees. Bucking popular opinion, Platt said a corporate titan like Disney's Michael Eisner deserves to earn $200 million if he makes billions for the shareholders.
Platt challenged the university to let faculty members keep more of their grant money if they raise larger sums and to give undergraduate admissions staffers a bonus of twenty-five percent of their base salary if they can increase average SAT scores by five percent and enrollments by ten percent.
"No one is suffering, but God forbid anybody here makes any money," he said.
Platt devoted much of his talk to explaining the fundamentals of corporate renewal, which he acknowledged many equate with '90s "slash and burn" layoffs. But he said the realities are more nuanced: companies transforming themselves by assessing their strengths and weaknesses; turnaround managers identifying problems and fixing them, sometimes by purging executives; and crisis managers rebuilding companies on the brink of bankruptcy.
Four Vie for Athletics Director Post
resident Freeland this month is expected to
name his choice for a new athletics director to succeed Barry Gallup, who
is stepping down to concentrate full-time on his football coaching duties.
Four candidates, whose names were forwarded to Freeland by a twelve-member
search committee, are vying for the post. They are Thomas Brennan, director
of intercollegiate athletics at San Jose State University; Vivian Fuller,
director of intercollegiate athletics at Northeastern Illinois University;
Ian McCaw, senior associate athletics director at Tulane University; and
Frank McLaughlin, athletics director at Fordham University. Three internal
candidates-special assistant to the president Irwin Cohen, senior associate
athletics director Terry Condon, and business administrator Robert "Bo"
Lyons-failed to make the slate of finalists.
Update (5-13-97): Ian McCaw has been named the new athletics director. See story from May 15 Northeastern Voice.
To Russia, with Accounting Tips
eeking to transform the way Russia does business,
Northeastern has created at Moscow State University a clone of its nationally
recognized graduate accounting program. The project brings together the
universities and the Russian offices of the so-called Big Six American
accounting firms.
From "Accounting Problems I" in the first quarter to "Operations Management" in the fourth, the programs of study in Boston and Moscow are virtually identical. William Kelly, director of the Graduate School of Professional Accounting, said Northeastern has shared reading lists, financial aid know-how, and an extensive network of Big Six contacts in the United States and abroad. "We were the behind-the-scenes consultant to this whole thing," Kelly said.
Twenty-two students enrolled in the new Moscow program last fall. Northeastern's Russia experiment dates to 1990, when a university delegation traveled to Moscow State University to establish an exchange agreement. Associate professor of human resources management Sheila Puffer, who was part of the delegation and has written extensively on Russian business, said a half-dozen Russian students have since earned graduate degrees at Northeastern. However, Puffer said, a lack of Russian skills and a fear of Moscow crime have so far deterred Northeastern business students from reciprocating.
Sacco Named to Enowed Chair
lbert Sacco, E'73, the chemical engineer who
rose from Northeastern undergraduate to payload specialist on the space
shuttle Columbia two decades later, is returning to his alma mater as the
George A. Snell distinguished chair in engineering.
Sacco, chair of the chemical engineering department at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, is scheduled to join the N.U. faculty June 1. "I can't wait," Sacco said of his new position, endowed in part by a gift from Snell, one of Northeastern's biggest benefactors. "It's like a coming-home party for me."
Sacco, who has received large NASA research grants as a WPI professor, said he plans to form a major research lab linking Northeastern science departments, NASA, and private companies. "All of this is in the embryonic stage," he said. "It's very exciting. It's an opportunity for Northeastern to emerge as the commercial/technical center in the Northeast."
A forty-seven-year-old father of four, Sacco is a renowned researcher on carbon filament growth and the growth of zeolite crystals, whose many industrial applications include the extraction of gasoline from crude oil.
He lifted off aboard Columbia in October 1995 after two years of grueling training and six aborted takeoff attempts (see "The Happiest Astronaut on Earth," January 1996). His outlook was forever changed. "It's a very humbling experience," he said.
Freeland Charts New Course
eclaring that the university stands on strong
financial footing, President Freeland, in a February report to the university,
called on faculty and staff to join him in taking advantage of that fiscal
security to capitalize on Northeastern's strengths.
"We have the opportunity, for the first time in some years, to set institutional goals we wish actively to pursue rather than seek ways to survive the next crisis," he said in the address to 900 faculty, staff, and students.
Freeland said the university's fiscal 1998 budget will feature an $8.3 million hike in student financial aid next year-one of the largest increases in several years. The new financial aid dollars, coupled with a significantly higher tuition increase for freshmen than upperclassmen, is intended to sustain aid levels throughout a student's undergraduate career in an attempt to improve retention.
"This is the prudent thing to do, and it is also the right thing to do," Freeland said.
In an effort to increase the quality of the entering student body and to provide better services for those who matriculate, Freeland announced a plan to reduce the number of freshman enrollees, despite a growing applicant pool. In contrast to a freshman class of 2,975 this year, Freeland said he will target an entering class of 2,800 for next fall.
To accomplish this, Freeland said enrollments in engineering and business would be targeted for growth, while enrollments would slow in nursing, Bouvé College, criminal justice, and arts and sciences.
This "intensification strategy," he added, presents the university with three challenges: enrolling and graduating a student body appropriate to its mission and character; redesigning its educational offerings to reflect its purposes as a practice-oriented university; and focusing its scholarly work on technical and social progress.
Take a Bow
Denis Sullivan, a professor of political science and an expert on the Middle East, has been appointed a special assistant to President Freeland. In his new role, Sullivan, who has taught at Northeastern since 1987, will be in charge of policy issues, agenda items, and a wide array of special projects in the president's office. Sullivan most recently served as special assistant to the vice provost for undergraduate education, where he coordinated implementation of the Academic Common Experience.
Elias Manolakos, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of the Communications and Digital Signal Processing Center for Research and Graduate Studies, was elected a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the world's largest technical professional society.
Peter Enrich, a veteran social activist and associate professor of law, was elected to the Lexington, Massachusetts, Board of Selectmen, edging out three other contenders for an open seat. He joins Richard Canale, associate professor of cooperative education, who moonlights as chairman of the Lexington Planning Board.
Bjorn Hansen, a senior international business student, was named a first-team GTE Academic All-America after leading the Husky soccer team in scoring while maintaining a 3.85 grade-point average in the classroom. A native of Denmark, Hansen was the only New England athlete selected to the fifteen-member team.
Richard Lapchick, director of Northeastern's Center for the Study of Sport in Society, was named winner of the Aetna Foundation Voice of Conscience Award and will be honored at a luncheon in New York City in June. The award, which carries a $25,000 prize to be given to the charity of the recipient's choice, is given annually to the person whose ideals best exemplify those of Arthur Ashe, the late tennis star and social activist.
William Kneeland, the university's comptroller for the past fifteen years, was promoted to interim senior vice president by President Freeland last month. He succeeds Robert Culver, who left Northeastern in April for a job in the private sector. Kneeland will oversee all budget and financial operations, human resources management, information services, and building services.
A group of N.U. undergraduate business administration students, coached by professor Raymond Kinnunen, won the inaugural Beanpot competition for business schools in February. Team members were Benas Adomavicius, Patience Bowden, Heather Cockroft, Pablo d'Anglade, Dennis Ruggere, and Patricia Nestved.
