Hartwick College alumni are flocking to their old stomping grounds from Friday, Sept. 19 to Sunday, Sept. 21, as they return for True Blue weekend.
Hartwick College President James Mullen said that the weekend includes about 40 different events, including formal events and opportunities for friends to get together and “share stories of their time here and their lives since.”
A “Commander in Chief or Constitutional Overreach?” talk Friday, an alumni art show Saturday, Sept. 19 and the Pine Lake festival Sunday are planned for the weekend of homecoming.
Close to 500 people had registered for the weekend as of Friday afternoon. Kimberly Hastings, Hartwick director of alumni, parent and family relations, said close to 800 people total are expected to attend.
“It reminds me that magic has happened on this hill, throughout a couple of centuries,” Mullen said. “That’s energizing for me and for all of us because we see the difference this place has made in so many lives. It’s a sense of intergenerational connection, one generation to the next saying what Hartwick means to them.”
“It means a lot to our students to see distinguished alumni come back and share their love of the place,” he continued.
While he will not be able to be at every event for the entire time, Mullen said he would try to make an appearance everything. There will be opportunities to recognize alumni who have made a difference and for former students to enjoy each other’s company, he added.
When alumni return to campus, Mullen said it reminds them of the friendships they curated during their time as Hartwick students and of the professors who taught them.
Geoffrey Corn, the George R. Killam Jr. Chair of Criminal Law and director of the Center for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech University School of Law, was set to deliver the Constitution Day address at 5 p.m. Friday, titled “Commander-in-Chief or Constitutional Overreach?” in the Shineman Celebration Room in the Shineman Chapel House.
Corn, a class of 1983 alum, said he would be diving into the “methodology that national security lawyers use when assessing the scope and limits of presidential power over national security challenges.” He said President Donald Trump is “invoking extraordinary authorities.”
“It seems to me that he’s gotten to a point where his favorite tool now is the military, so every problem starts to look like a nail,” Corn said. “When you’re favorite tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. We have Congress that is for whatever reason not in any way interested in even questioning these assertions of authority which is just an invitation for more and more of it.”
He said after he began teaching law he stared reconnecting with the school, and it was nice to be back on campus for the homecoming event.
Duncan MacDonald, class of 1978, said he came to the school with a soccer scholarship in 1974 and was on the team that won the national Division I soccer title in 1977, his senior year. Originally from England, Duncan said Hartwick was one of the top D1 soccer schools in the country at the time, giving the college a lot of national exposure.
After graduation, MacDonald played professionally for a few years. He was drafted by the Tulsa Roughnecks in the North American Soccer League and also was the first pick in the American Soccer League.
He said he began working at Hartwick again in 2003, spending most of the years as the alumni relations director, before leaving in 2016.
“Just coming back to this campus makes you feel good,” he said.
James Green, class of 2000, who majored in sociology, said he met a lot of great people in college, including his wife Jen Paulo, class of 2002. He now owns his own company, Green Search Partners, a career coaching firm that places professionals. He said “the study of mass groups of people actually paid off.”
Falon Treis, class of 2020, said she remains close to a lot of the people she met at Hartwick, adding that the school helped her to “find her path in life.”
While she didn’t start college wanting to study geology, she was able to experiment with different courses of study during the course of her time there. She now works professionally in geology with the state Department of Environmental Conservation.
Treis recalled a memory where she and her friends ordered Dominoes at a friend’s house off campus before walking back to Saxton Hall in the snow one night.
“Honestly, that was when I knew I made really good friends,” Treis said.
For more information about the weekend, visit www.hartwick.edu/alumni-and-friends/true-blue-weekend.