THE VALUE OF A LIBERAL ARTS DEGREE:
14 OF RAMAPO'S MOST SUCCESSFUL ALUMNI SHARE THEIR STORIES
By Chris Hann
When Peter P. Mercer was formally installed as president of Ramapo College in May 2006, he chose as the subject of his inaugural address a subject dear to his academic heart: the value of a liberal arts education.
The topic made sense. President Mercer began his life in higher education as a student at Huron College in Canada, a small liberal arts school affiliated with the University of Western Ontario. President Mercer studied English and philosophy at Huron, and he later returned to Western Ontario as a faculty member and administrator. Coming to Ramapo, he says, felt like completing a circle of sorts.
“I wanted to go back to my roots in a smaller college, which focused on undergraduate education, particularly in what might be described as the liberal arts, because that’s where I started, and I thought it was particularly valuable,” President Mercer recalls. “And the reason why I think it’s particularly valuable—it may even be more valuable today than it was when I started in 1971—is that in the intervening generation, an undergraduate degree has become almost an entry-level credential.”
Today, President Mercer says, more and more students who graduate with a bachelor’s degree pursue some additional form of education, whether it’s graduate work, professional training or something entirely different. “But given that the undergraduate degree is now seen as the first of successive degrees, I think it makes particular sense to think of a liberal arts education as training for a very broad range of disciplines,” President Mercer says. “So what we try to focus on here are what might be described as the basic precepts for advanced education, and that is the ability to digest a lot of material relatively quickly, to extract from it what’s important, to be able to analyze the problems that it throws up and then come to solutions.”
In fact, says Anthony Padovano, a liberal arts education can itself provide solutions— in life and at work. Padovano, a distinguished professor of literature and philosophy and a founding faculty member at Ramapo, also teaches theology at Fordham University in New York City and the College of St. Elizabeth in New Jersey.
“A liberal arts education contributes so much to a person’s ability to evaluate what it means to be human,” Padovano says. “By making you sensitive to that, it makes you for the rest of your life a better worker and a stronger colleague, because it helps you sort out some of the essential issues of the human experience from the trivializing or myopic issues that actually sap our energy.”
“The liberal arts education, I think, is invaluable in terms of building flexibility, being open to ideas, embracing a diverse society and organization.” FRANCES K. HACKETT |
The liberal arts, Padovano says, can even help make us happier. “Its point is to bring us to terms with the human equation in the way that leads to happiness,” he says. “The more we come to terms with ourselves, the more we are not in conflict with ourselves, the more tranquility we have. Because we start to act more naturally, if you will, more in accord with our nature.”
The distinguished alumni profiled who follow represent a head-spinning variety of professions and speak volumes to Ramapo’s success as New Jersey’s designated state college for the liberal arts. We asked them about their experiences at Ramapo and the ways in which the College helped prepare them for their careers.
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Kim Albano, ‘82As a gifted young pianist, Kim Albano enrolled in Ramapo’s School of Contemporary Arts with a concentration in music. As it turns out, Albano entered the business world—today she’s vice president of customer operations for ESPN—but she says even her music-based education at Ramapo taught her lessons that she applies on the job. “The stuff that I learned and the skills that I figured out have enabled me to transfer industries,” says Albano, who has also worked at Nestle and McCaw Cellular/AT&T Wireless. “It wasn’t like going to a music school. I really got a broad flavor for things I never would have learned in another place.” |
Cathy Benko, ’85Cathy Benko has started a business, earned an MBA from Harvard and written two books. As chief talent officer for the U.S. firm of Deloitte & Touche, she oversees a campaign to help employees balance their work and private lives. Yet when she graduated high school, Benko never even considered college. She had a full-time job when she enrolled in Ramapo’s weekend program in 1980. “These people were really taking it on the chin to do this,” Benko recalls of her classmates. “And I give Ramapo a lot of credit for having an open door for those kinds of people. Who would have thought, two years later, I would be accepted into Harvard Business School?” |
Anthony DeCarlo, ’77Anthony DeCarlo had already dropped out of another college when he enrolled at Ramapo, determined to succeed on his second go-round at higher education. “I was in a situation where I needed to get straight A’s,” DeCarlo recalls. “I got one B.” After earning a veterinary medicine degree from the University of Pennsylvania, DeCarlo cofounded the Red Bank Veterinary Hospital, today the nation’s largest, privately owned facility. He’s quick to credit the Ramapo faculty. “They just wanted people to learn and be successful in their careers, and I owe those guys a lot,” he says. “They did the right thing by me. They gave me that second chance.” |
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Mary Falvey, ’82Mary Falvey believes the semester she spent abroad in Ireland directly influenced her rise through the corporate ranks. “I brought my bicycle, I hitchhiked around the country, I took the bus to go to the post office to call my parents once a week,” she says. “It really made me very independent.” Today Falvey is executive vice president and chief human resources officer at Wyndham Worldwide. An English Literature major, she says she had no particular career plans while at Ramapo. “I just thought a good liberal arts education—and I tell my son to this day—will help you in any field,” she says. “I thought it was a great basis for a springboard to a career in human resources.” |
James Gibson, ’77Enrolling at Ramapo after spending a year at another college and a year off from school, James Gibson found his new classes “rekindled my spark of just loving to learn.” At first Gibson thought he might pursue a career in the sciences. But after taking his first accounting class, he switched to economics. Today he embraces both worlds as executive vice president and chief financial officer at Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina, the nation’s second largest independent nonprofit research organization. “At Ramapo you came of age to absorb viewpoints and to learn how to think differently,” he says. “I didn’t fully understand it then, but over the years a liberal arts education was really important for the foundation for what I would later do.” |
Joseph Gilligan, ’92Like many Ramapo students, Joseph Gilligan worked full-time while attending night classes. Soon after graduating he took a job with Sony, and two years later he launched his own business. Today Gilligan is chief executive officer of Akadema Inc., a maker of baseball gloves, bats and apparel, and Pro Player Academy, a baseball teaching facility in Hawthorne, New Jersey. He started both businesses with his brother, Lawrence. Another brother, Dan, runs the baseball academy. “What I got out of Ramapo was a good broad background of different things,” Gilligan says. “I was in communications, so I learned a lot through the marketing classes I took. I think what Ramapo College gave me was that excitement to strive to be better.” |
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Shelley Gray, ’77Although Shelley Gray earned a fine arts degree from Ramapo, she made sure to take a business course each semester, believing someday they would come in handy. It was a prescient move. Since 1986 Gray and her husband, Roger (Ramapo class of ’76), have run Center Line Studios in upstate New York, building stage designs for the likes of Lincoln Center, the New York City Opera and Broadway plays. “You have to market yourself,” Gray says, recalling those business classes. “You have to keep your accounting.” Ramapo stoked her entrepreneurial spirit, Gray says, particularly theater instructor John Jay Moore, who routinely took students to see plays in New York City. “Jay taking us to those shows and taking us backstage,” she says, ‘you just felt, ‘I can do this.” |
Frances K. Hackett, '80Fran Hackett has moved up the corporate ladder since her graduation from Ramapo nearly three decades ago. Today she’s a vice president at Prudential, and she credits her time at Ramapo for teaching her how to take on a variety of tasks within the organization. It’s a lesson she tries to impart to Ramapo students in her role as chairwoman of the alumni advisory board at the Anisfield School of Business. “The liberal arts education, I think, is invaluable in terms of building flexibility, being open to ideas, embracing a diverse society and organization,” Hackett says. “I never got pigeonholed in my career. I credit a lot of those opportunities to the benefit of the liberal arts nature of the education at Ramapo.” |
Donald La Greca, ’92Not long after arriving on campus, Donald La Greca turned his focus to Ramapo’s campus radio station, WRPR. He never looked back, working as news director and sports director and hosting a heavy-metal music show. He hasn’t slowed down. Today La Greca is a mainstay on ESPN Radio in New York. He’s a co-host of the Michael Kay Show and host of pre and post-game shows for the New York Jets and New York Rangers. “I didn’t want to spend half of my education waiting for the opportunity to do stuff,” La Greca says of his early experience at WRPR. “And I felt Ramapo gave me the opportunity to do that.” |
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Pat Thomas, ’80It would be difficult to overstate the connection between Pat Thomas’s education at Ramapo and his career at the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Bronx Zoo. After all, he started at the zoo on an internship. “I absolutely fell in love with it,” Thomas says, “and ended up never leaving.” Today he’s the zoo’s general curator. Having earned a Ph.D. in biology from Fordham, he’s also an adjunct professor at Columbia University. In the 1990s he taught as an adjunct at Ramapo. Thomas says he always knew he wanted to work with animals. “Ramapo kind of met all of my needs,” he says, “in terms of offering a program to provide me with an education to get me started in my field.” |
Carolyn Merkel, ’78As a chemistry major at Ramapo, Carolyn Merkel says she learned to consider the sciences through the prism of a liberal arts education. “There was much more of a philosophical underpinning to the understanding of science,” she says. Merkel worked as a scientist for Pepsi-Cola and for McNeil Nutritionals LLC, a Johnson & Johnson company, before cofounding Mariner Analytical, which provides scientific consulting for businesses and government agencies. “My work life was pretty nontraditional for a scientist,” she says. “I spent a lot of time working with people in sales, marketing and quality assurance, and I was always comfortable translating my background and experience because of the knowledge I had that this did all interrelate.” |
Glenn Micalizio, ’96“My story highlights the ability to move on to high powered academic institutions from Ramapo and still be able to compete,” says Glenn Micalizio. Does it ever. Micalizio earned a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, moved to Harvard on a fellowship, then taught in Yale’s chemistry department. Today he’s an associate professor at Scripps Florida, a biomedical research institute. As a chemistry undergrad at Ramapo, Micalizio worked full-time to pay his own way, including a job as an analytical chemist at Ceiba-Geigy, arranged with the help of Ramapo professor Dr. Kwesi Aggrey. “That’s what really turned me on, having the opportunity to work with Ph.D.’s, ”Micalizio says. “They set me along the right path.” |
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Dr. Shakti Ramkissoon, ’99Dr. Shakti Ramkissoon, whose father, Sieudial, is the assistant chief of Public Safety at Ramapo, is a resident in the Pathology Department at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Although he was a double major at Ramapo— chemistry and physics —the close-knit nature of the campus enabled him to make friends with many biology professors as well. When he applied for medical school, some of them wrote letters of recommendation. “They’re really good letters because they really know you as a person,” Ramkissoon says. “One true thing about a small liberal arts college that often goes unsaid is how much interaction you have with the faculty and how much interest they take in your life and your career.” |
Laura Wellington, ’87“Everything that I do every day, all day long, is attributed back to some form of marketing,” says Laura Wellington. The former Ramapo marketing major has plenty on her professional plate these days. Wellington runs financial and consulting firms that she started with her late husband, Dean, and these days she’s busy with her newest creation, “The Wumblers,” an animated TV series that imparts lessons about social responsibility to a pre-school audience. She says the marketing lessons she learned at Ramapo still apply. “That’s where the liberal arts education comes in,” she says. “You’re not locked into thinking in one way. All day long we brainstorm, we create, we strategize. How quickly we’ve grown is a testament to how well we do that.” |
