on this page:

• In Memoriam: Trustee Emeritus and Interim President Marvin Wachman
• Alice: “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

In Memoriam: Trustee Emeritus and Interim
President Marvin Wachman

Marvin Wachman, who served as interim president of Albright College from June 1991 to June 1992, died Dec. 23 at his home in Philadelphia. He was 90 years old.

Wachman also served the College as a trustee emeritus, and was awarded an honorary
doctorate from Albright in 1991.

In addition to serving Albright, he was a professor of American history, served as president of both Lincoln and Temple Universities and as interim president at the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science, now Philadelphia University.

He became president of Lincoln, the nation’s oldest college established to educate blacks, in 1961, after teaching for 13 years at Colgate University and spending two years as director of the Salzburg Seminar in Austria.

Wachman officially retired from Temple in 1983 and became honorary chancellor. He was also president of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia from 1983 to 1989.

He led both the Pennsylvania Association of Colleges and Universities and the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency, which distributes scholarships.

Wachman earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history from Northwestern University and a doctorate in history from the University of Illinois.

His memoir, The Education of a University President, was published in 2005 by Temple University Press.

President's Column
Alice: “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

Cheshire Cat: “That depends a good deal on where you want to go.”
Alice: “It doesn’t much matter where.”
Cheshire Cat: “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go!”
- Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll

I was having lunch recently with an alumnus who quite unintentionally gave me a moment of real shock. It served as a good reminder that just because we are absorbed by a pressing objective, there is no guarantee that others will share our passion.

The topic was the College’s pressing need for new and expanded facilities to support our historically strong and well-regarded science programs. I was expressing my hope to this alumnus that he might consider helping us to meet the growing costs of this project with a generous gift. His response was to admit that he wasn’t convinced that this was very important to our future. It was a bit of a cold shower, but it was a good lesson.

That revelation reminded me of Alice’s conversation with the Cheshire Cat, cited above—mainly because we regard the new science center as a fork in the road for Albright College. Unlike Alice, we have used strategic planning to determine quite clearly where we want to go and what will be required to get there. I am quite certain that we will look back in a decade and see the construction of our new science building as a watershed moment in the life of Albright.

In short, the new facility is simply imperative. There is no higher facilities need for us at this moment. Currently, we are enjoying an all-time high enrollment, but the square footage allotted to the sciences has not grown since the addition to Merner-Pfeiffer Hall in 1965. We currently have about 37,000 square feet of classroom, laboratories, offices and support spaces. The average size of such facilities at our peer and competitor colleges with similar enrollments is more than twice that figure.

We continue to attract very bright and capable prospective students who are interested in the sciences and medicine, but we lose many of them simply because of our facilities. They are impressed by our friendly students, our talented and committed faculty, our charming campus, and our new stadium and Schumo Center for Fitness and Well-Being.

When they have completed the tour of the science building, however, it’s evident that we’ve got work to do. They have been visiting schools with renovated, expanded or completely new science buildings. Although visiting alumni find themselves right at home in Merner-Pfeiffer, whether they graduated in 1995 or 1949, this facility is not a strategic advantage for our students of the future.

We know that the new facility will help us strengthen our proud heritage of undergraduate science education and will play a key role in our ability to attract more intellectually capable students across the board. It’s a happy fact that many of our best students come to us thinking they are going to be science or pre-med majors and after hitting a wall in biology or chemistry, they discover other gifts and other interests.

It’s also important to remember that the new science building is not just for science majors; every Albright student must take at least one laboratorybased course in the natural sciences. It is essential in doing our part to insure a measure of scientific literacy among every Albright graduate.

The good news is that the Board of Trustees has approved a feasible plan for building this much needed new facility and that construction will begin later this spring. The not-so-good news is that the building will cost more than we had hoped. Although we have been fortunate to receive more than $12 million in gifts for this essential project, we will continue to seek additional gifts throughout the construction phase over the next two years.

My job is to tell the story of this strategic priority. It is my hope that by the time we celebrate the completion of the new science building in fall 2010, we will have convinced my lunch partner and many more alumni that the new science building is the key to a new era of strength at Albright. If you’ve not yet participated in this important project, I would be delighted to speak with you about the opportunity to play a role in this critical strategic priority.

To those who have given already, I am deeply grateful. Go Lions!

Lex O. McMillan III, Ph.D.
President