FUND FOR REUNION/PRINCETON GALA
P.O. Box 1481, Princeton, New Jersey 08542
| NEWS FROM THE FUND FOR REUNION/PRINCETON GALA P.O. Box 1481, Princeton, New Jersey 08542 |
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| Volume XIV, No. 2 | February, 2001 |
Those of you following the progress of our endowment may have been holding your breath these past few months as the bio-tech industry has suffered significant setbacks in the stock market. Not to be caught unawares, Brandon Fradd ‘83, the manager of our endowment, has hedged our positions significantly. We have lost some ground, but we are still doing quite well. At press time, the endowment is valued about $625,000.
Clearly the extraordinary gains of the past few years should be regarded as past, but we do not doubt that Fradd will continue with his excellent stewardship, providing us with respectable results in the coming year.
Well, the endowment isn't $1 million yet, but the FFR Board is forming a working committee for exploring the best ways to use the endowment. The Endowment Exploratory Committee (EEC) is tasked with generating ideas for the endowment, discussing them, and analyzing them. Ultimately, the EEC will present a report with recommendations to the Board on the best uses of the money and how to proceed.
Care to join in? We want a wide membership - FFR members and board members are welcome, as well as other alumni at large, students, and especially faculty and staff presently at Princeton. The first goal of the initial members of the committee will be identifying and recruiting key Princeton administration, faculty, and alumni to join the exploratory committee, so that we can also identify what is most likely to engage and interest Princeton University.
I have been asked by the Board to chair this committee. Most of the work will be accomplished via e-mail in the form of a listserv, so you can participate regardless of where you are located. As chair I'll be coordinating the effort, which is designed to be a working committee where all members contribute actively. If you'd like to help out, and/or know of others who might be invited to join (especially persons presently working at Princeton), please send me your/their name and contact information, including e-mail. It would be helpful if you could respond before the end of March. You can write me at tye@alumni.princeton.edu.
The LGBT Coordinator left the University midterm this year. For the remainder of the academic year, undergraduate and former Pride Alliance President Dan Weitz ‘01 will fill in. This early departure highlighted for the University that changes need to be made. Currently the position is billed as an internship and set for 9 months of the year, with a maximum of two terms. The office of the Dean of the Chapel has informed us that Janet Dickerson, the new Vice President for Campus Life, is currently considering making the position a full time/12 month regular position with a likely term of 2 to 5 years.
FFR is very pleased to hear of this development. Removing the internship categorization will give Princeton the ability to hire individuals more experienced and ready for their multiple responsibilities to the University and the students. Increasing the tenure and switching to a 12 month calendar will make it easier for FFR to maintain good contact with the coordinator. This will help the Coordinator better appreciate the need to be in touch with the alumni or with FFR, and reduce the number of missed opportunities. We look forward to the positive changes being made by Dickerson.
Also news is the anticipated relocation of the office of the Pride Alliance (the current moniker for the LGBT student organization). Currently in 306 Aaron Burr Hall, the office, along with other non-academic tenants in the building, is being kicked out to allow the anthropology department to expand. The new location has yet to be determined.
The Pride Alliance has asked FFR to help them buy items for the new office. With our help, they have bought a TV/VCR and are going to buy a new computer this coming week.
Queer Articulations, the Pride Alliance annual LGBT film festival will be held from March 8th through March 10th.
Films will be screened from 8pm until Midnight in McCosh 10 on Thursday and Friday and in Betts Auditorium on Saturday.
Following the films on the 8th will be an Intercollegiate social. Alums are encouraged to attend any of the events!
Check out the Pride Alliance web site for further details: http://www.princeton.edu/~pride/home.html
We have so many great LGBT alums and we wanted to give you an opportunity to get to know some of them. For this newsletter we begin what we hope will become a regular item in our newsletter, profiling Princeton LGBT alumni, starting with Jeff Napoleon '89.
Name: Jeff Napoleon ‘89
Birthdate: 02/03/1967
Princeton Major: Architecture
Beyond Ol' Nassau: 1995 J.D., Rutgers University
Princeton Activities: Class of '89 Class President: Freshman and Sophomore Years, Honor Committee, Ivy Club, Crew Team
Activities Now: Reading, attending Princeton varsity men's basketball games with his season's tickets!
Involvement with FFR: Jeff is currently co-hosting our upcoming social in Philadelphia. In this capacity he is assisting the event’s coordinator Frances Pabón ‘87 in getting the word out about the event and collecting RSVPs.
FFR thanks Jeff for sharing this profile and feels fortunate to have him with us. Please contact us if you know someone you would like to see profiled in a coming newsletter!
All right, we tried in the last newsletter but most of you haven’t gotten around to reminding us that we’re important to you! We are faced with increasing requests from Princeton for assistance by the student group, students doing LGBT research, and students looking for LGB-related internships. Your dues support all of these services.
Again, whatever pleases you most about us:
All of these are supported out of our operating budget which is funded by your contributions. To make it easier this time, we’ve included those nifty little envelopes you all know and love. Act now and renew your membership with a contribution! For those of you who made contributions in the past year, acknowledgements will go out shortly for your year 2000 tax filings. Remember - your contributions to FFR are tax-deductible!
FFR/Princeton GALA invites you to join us for drinks and hors d’oeuvres at our first Philadelphia gathering!
An Inter-Ivy Social in the City of Brotherly Love
DATE: Saturday, March 31st
TIME: 6:00 p.m.
PLACE: William Way Center, 1315 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA
Suggested contribution: $20 (for professionals) $5 (for students and young alumni)
Contact Frances M. Pabón '87, telephone: 215-327-1239, e-mail fmpabon@alumni.princeton.edu or Jeff Napoleon '89, 215-337-9262, e-mail JefNp@aol.com to RSVP or for more information
Also, see the articles below for more about Bob Schoenberg and what is happening at the University of Pennsylvania!
Already way ahead of the curve, Penn’s LGBT Center is getting ready to move to their own building. A $2 million gift by Penn alums David Goodhand '85 and Vincent Griski '85 is the impetus behind the move. Goodhand and Griski met while undergraduates at Penn.
A $5 million campaign has begun to raise the rest of the money needed to restore the Carriage House and to endow the programs of the Center.
Approaching it’s 20th anniversary, Penn’s LGBT Center, led by Bob Schoenberg, engages in outreach, education, advocacy and networking for the Penn LGBT community. It has been a model for many similar centers.
The refurbished Carriage House will provide study and meeting space; a multi-media classroom for guest speakers, film screenings and classes; a research library focused on gay issues and themes; office space; student conference rooms; and multi-purpose spaces for the LGBT community.
"Penn's is one of a handful of LGBT centers nationally to have the range of services and programs that we do," Schoenberg says. "A building dedicated to the LGBT community puts us in a class of our own."
Robert Schoenberg has been the director of the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Center at the University of Pennsylvania, one of the most advanced programs of its kind in the nation, since its founding in 1982.
Bob was hired by Penn to be a two-day a week point person for lesbian/gay students when he began work on his doctoral dissertation in 1982. By 1989, he was the full-time director of a program serving University students, faculty, and staff. Later, that program became a center and moved from Houston Hall to its present home on Locust Walk, providing a wide range of programs and services.
Bob has volunteered and served on the boards of several LGBT and HIV/AIDS organizations. He teaches a social work course for MSW students, edited the collection Homosexuality and Social Work and is working on a book about starting and maintaining campus LGBT resource centers.
Bob currently serves as Chair of the National Consortium of Directors of Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resources in Higher Education.
Bob has been helpful to Princeton in staffing their LGBT coordinator position and previously recommended that the position be upgraded from its internship level to a professional level position. When told that this was possibly in the works he said that it was “wonderful news.”
At the March 31st reception, Bob is looking forward to sharing his experiences at Penn and answering questions.
The Alumni Council has gone to great lengths to try to better accommodate Princeton’s affiliated groups. This has included permanent positions on the Alumni Council, and most recently recognition at Alumni Day. In the past, alumni were invariably seated by class.
This year, for the first time, alumni can request to be seated with their respective affiliate groups. This means that there will be an area for LGBT alumni under FFR’s auspices. Similarly there will be a section for black alumni, latino alumni, and Asian alumni.
It remains to be seen whether alumni will be more inclined to sit by class or by affiliation, but it is a fine gesture nonetheless. For those of us whose friends span many classes, this is a opportunity to not be restricted to your immediate class. The other side of the coin is the potential for feeling ghettoized.
We hope that this will prove to be a useful step, nonetheless, and that enough of us will find it appealing to have made it worth while. In the meantime, we thank the Alumni Council for continuing to be willing to try new things and not be bound by the way things have been done in the past.
The Alumni Council’s decision to include affiliate seating at Alumni Day once again raised the issue of the appropriateness of our rather obscure moniker, the Fund for Reunion, Inc. Alumni were invited to choose to between their class, The Asian American Alumni Association of Princeton, The Association of Black Princeton Alumni, the Latino Caucus, and the Fund for Reunion. For Princeton alumni not in the know, the name Fund for Reunion is certain to draw a blank....
How did we come to be called Fund for Reunion? In 1986 when the organization was conceived, a large group of alums of many classes congregated to discuss the formation. Many names were bandied about. Invariably they were unacceptable - many were uncomfortable using the word gay or lesbian, others indicated that if we included gay and lesbian then we should also include bisexual, some suggested adding transgendered (at the time referred to as transsexual). For each suggestion there was an equal number of people who were uncomfortable with the identification or lack of identification.
Remember this was the 80s.... The alphabet soup issue was real and very threatening to many people for many different reasons. When someone suggested Fund for Reunion (I don’t know that the individual who suggested it wants to take credit at this point), there was silence. No one was quite sure what to make of it, but it certainly did not offend or make anyone nervous. We were trying to raise money to bring LGBT alumni back to Princeton, so a fund for reunion had a certain relevance while still being something people could write on a check without getting nervous about what their bank would think.
Needless to say, times have changed. At one point we had a fair list of alumni who were not even comfortable with Fund for Reunion being printed on the envelopes we mailed to them. This list has dwindled away. Today’s newer alums are far less uncomfortable using terms like gay, lesbian, bisexual, or even transgendered. Though some are still uncomfortable being pigeonholed, the fear factor has diminished tremendously. Even the older alums are no longer as sensitive as they once were. Now are biggest problem is because we don’t say what we are, many LGBT alums still are not aware of our existence. Opportunities like getting our name plastered on an Alumni Council mailing are wasted to a certain degree without better recognition. Perhaps it’s time to put LGBT in our name and spell out who we are. Or maybe we should go for a colorful alternative to the alphabet soup and chose something like Pride Alumni, as did the student organizations when they recently changed their name to the Pride Alliance.
What do you think?
Contacting Us: We can be reached at:
Fund for Reunion/Princeton BTGALA, P. O. Box 1481, Princeton, NJ 08542
For faster response, send e-mail to
Fund for Reunion
You can sign up for FFR/Princeton BTGALA using our mail form.
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Solely the Fund For Reunion is responsible for the content on this page. Although we make every effort to keep this information accurate and up to date, we cannot guarantee it. This page is maintained by Shawn Cowls '87 FSA MAAA.
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alums, students, faculty, and staff. For more information, visit our
website at
http://alumni.princeton.edu/~ffr-gala/
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