By Alex Christodoulides
It was a homecoming for some of the speakers at Queens College's commencement ceremony last Thursday and a beginning for others. After all, commencement means "beginning."
The college lauded two alumni, Russell and Alice Artzt, and former Professor Adam Heller with honorary degrees on the campus quad in Flushing under clear, bright skies. The keynote speaker, Gail Marquis, a St. Albans native now working on Wall Street, was a 1976 alumna of Queens College who went on to earn a Silver Medal with the 1976 women's Olympic basketball team.
"This is a real honor for Alice and me," Russell Artzt said. "Forty years ago, we were out on the quad graduating in the class of '68."
The couple met at Queens College, which they recounted in their speeches.
"On the first day of my advanced calculus class, I walked in and saw this beautiful girl," he said, and the audience cheered.
"Can any of you guess what his opening line was?" Alice Artzt asked the audience. "'Did you do your homework?' "
The audience of about 2,000 degree candidates laughed, but it did the trick.
They married. Russell Artzt co-founded information technology management firm Computer Associates (now CA), where he is now vice chairman. Alice Artzt joined Queens College's Secondary Education and Youth Services Department and founded an innovative math education program called TIME 2000 to encourage careers in teaching.
Heller, an authority on chemically modified enzymes and the chemistry of electronic materials, taught graduate courses in physical chemistry at Queens College in the late 1960s. He spoke about the energy crisis and his hopes that science could triumph over politics to produce renewable power domestically using already available technology.
"What will be the compromises we make to maintain our standard of living and help others maintain their standard of living, while keeping the planet clean?" he asked the graduates.
Marquis came to Queens College determined to play basketball while earning her bachelor's, and kept setting her sights higher each year.
She was selected for the 1976 team, the year women's basketball debuted in the Olympics, but said the enormity of her accomplishment did not register until that year's opening ceremony in Montreal, Canada.
"I looked up at the box with the prime minister of Canada, and there next to him in a pink suit and a pink hat was the queen of England doing her queen of England wave," she said.
For commencement speaker Lauren Talerman, the ceremony was a beginning as she completed college and set out to make her way in the world.
"We are a transnational generation, online and offline," she told the black-gowned graduates and their families who wore suits, their Sunday best, saris and traditional African dress. "Most of us don't think twice about the rainbow of people in our social circles, and that's as it should be."
To the graduates, Russell Artzt had three words of advice: "Remember, appreciate, return."
