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SIS Recalls ’57 groundbreaking
BY SALLY ACHARYA
Photo by Bill Petros
From left, Professor Abdul Aziz Said, Brig. Gen. Carl Reddel, Interim Provost Ivy Broder, University Chaplain Joe Eldridge, and Dean Louis Goodman at the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the 1957 SIS groundbreaking ceremony. |
On June 9, 1957, the president of the United States stood on the AU quad, where nothing but grass marked the spot of what is now the largest school of international service in the country.
The waging of peace demands the best we have, Dwight Eisenhower told the Cold War crowd, the best young men and women that we can find to put in this great effort which must go on around the world all the time.
Then he thrust his shovel into the ground where AUs School of International Service (SIS) would rise.
Fifty years later, the school marked the occasion with a ceremony that recalled the past and anticipated another groundbreaking in the near future. Ground is expected to broken for the new SIS building this fall.
Members of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Commission, faculty, and administrators were at the commemoration and reception, along with a number of alumni.
We were very tight knit, said John Litchfield, SIS/BA 67. We literally knew all the faculty, and they knew us. Sylvia von Bostel, SIS/BA 68, and Carla Seaquest, SIS/BA 67, recalled the SIS of the mid-60s. It really expanded my horizons, said Seaquest, who had never traveled overseas before coming to SIS.
The ceremony also was a time to reminisce for Henry Fossung, SIS/MA 68, a diplomat from Cameroon when he attended AU, and George Divine, SIS/MA 57, who earned his graduate degree in international relations from AUs downtown campus while serving in Eisenhowers White House.
SIS had its genesis in a suggestion by Eisenhower at a White House dinner that a school of international service be founded that would focus not on conflict but on peace.
I can imagine how special it would be to Eisenhower to see the memorialization of his legacy in SIS, retired Brigadier General Carl Reddell told the crowd. Reddel, executive
director of the Eisenhower Memorial Commission, and Susan Harris, WCL/JD 79, also a member of the commission, represented the family of President Eisenhower at the ceremony.
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