Alan Nolet's jersey was retired after he scored the most points- 83 goals and 133 assists-
in a lacrosse career at Clarkson. And Clarkson's women's hockey team ended its season with
nine consecutive wins.
Togetherness, 1,968 Strong.
During the "Spring Thing" on April 30, nearly 2,000 Clarkson
and Potsdam State students formed what they had hoped would be the "World's Largest
Unsupported Circle" on the lawn in front of Hamlin Powers Dormitory, breaking the previous
record of 1,817 held by a California high school.
Guy Arnold, coordinator of recreational services at Clarkson, organized the effort with
help from students Mike Gisondi and Chuck Dittmar. However, a letter from the
Guinness
Book of Records
revealed that Clarkson had not broken the record after all; that record was held
by a circle of 3,333 military cadets at some unnamed institution.
New Faculty.
Among the 45 new staff members joining Clarkson in fall 1977 were David
Craig, humanities; W. Lawrence Glasser, mathematics; Richard McCluskey, chemical
engineering; Thomas Young, civil engineering; Paul McGrath, electrical engineering; Sonmez
Atesoglu, economics; Charles Mosier, management; Geoffrey Brown, admissions; and Michael
Fetcie, bursar. All have stayed to serve Clarkson well.
HII.
In response to a faculty consensus to encourage and reward student intellectual
independence, President Plane proposed that Clarkson adopt a program to challenge the
students to show those qualities. In March, the Faculty Senate approved a program called "High
Initiative and Inde- pendence," with the following guiding principles:
All courses at Clarkson encourage and call for individual initiative and independence.
To this end, every course requires students to master some material not presented by the
professor. Furthermore, a select number of courses in each department, plus exceptional non-
academic credit activities, such as Entrepreneurship, are especially designed to develop
independence and require from students the ability to define and solve problems. These
particular "challenge" courses and activities calling for-
High
Initiative
and
Independence
will
be approved as such and designated with the symbolic abbreviation, HII, in the appropriate
college listings and publications. Every student is encouraged to participate broadly in these
programs. Every student is required to successfully complete two, one of which must be
extracurricular. A student's extracurricular activity must be approved in advance by a college-
wide committee and subsequently certified.
This requirement appeared in the
College Regulations
(VI-B,1h) as:
For graduation, each student must demonstrate individual initiative and intellectual
independence within each of the courses offered by the College and within the major field.
The principal objective of HII was to encourage students to take responsibility for their
own education. Thus, the faculty was expected to foster both an attitude and an ability in each
student to contribute to his/her own instruction. To that end, faculty were expected to view HII
as characteristic of an entire course, and not merely as a single aspect of a given course, not
