UM News

William W. ‘Bill’ Sandler, Jr.

CORAL GABLES, Fla. (August 10, 2017)—Former Dean of Students William W. Sandler, Jr., an epic figure at the University of Miami who counseled, mentored, and befriended four generations of students during his 43 years at the U, passed away August 6 at his Key Biscayne home. He was 83.

Sandler, who began his career at the University in 1962 as a counselor for men in the old Dean of Men’s Office, continuously rose through the administrative ranks, serving as dean of student personnel or dean of students for a quarter century, until his retirement in July 2006.

Sandler always considered himself first and foremost an advocate for students. He was instrumental in shifting the Division of Student Affairs’ focus to giving students a role in University governance and a voice in issues that mattered to them. During his time, that included fewer regulations on their personal lives, representation on the Board of Trustees, a rathskeller on campus, overseas conflicts, and the plight of black students on campus.

As he put it, “We learned to work more closely with students. We became student advocates rather than university administrators.”

Pat Whitely, vice president for student affairs, who considered Sandler a mentor, said he had a profound impact on countless students and student affairs administrators like herself.

“He was known for his kindness, patience, and unflappable manner, regardless of the student challenges facing him,” Whitely said. “It was such a privilege to work closely with him.”

Over his tenure, Sandler advised fraternities and sororities, developed the Student Discipline System, instituted a student-run honor code, oversaw the Campus Chaplain’s Association, and cofounded the Center for Alcohol and Other Drug Education, which today bears his name.

Arriving at the U in the days when Interstate-95 didn’t exist, stop signs halted traffic on US 1, and campus life was disrupted by student unrest and major hurricanes, Sandler witnessed many transformative changes in the community, the student body, and the campus. He and his wife, Anita, started their own family in Building 29, one of the old World War II-era apartments on Walsh Avenue that were torn down to make way for what is now the Watsco Center. He and his daughters, Lisa Zingler and Kristine Sandler, who attended the U, were often seen walking around Lake Osceola, feeding the ducks and watching the mullet jump.

“I’ve seen a lot of changes since ’62,” Sandler said before his retirement. “They’ve all been great things. The University has become great and well respected in those years.”

Originally from Sunbury, Penn., Sandler attended Mansfield University and Pennsylvania State University, where he studied education and counseling psychology. He met his future boss and mentor, Dean Noble Hendrix, at an education convention in Philadelphia and was delighted to learn the young university had three dean openings. He immediately applied for a vacancy, anxious to take his young bride from the cold to the tropics.

He left the U briefly in the mid-1960s to become dean of students elsewhere but quickly returned because he had sand in his shoes—and the growing reputation and promise of the U in his heart. “If I go anywhere…with a U on my shirt I get all kinds of people talking to me,” he proudly noted. “It really is great to be a ’Cane.’’

Inducted into the Iron Arrow Honor Society in 1974, Sandler had many other honors over his lifetime, including the Lambda Chi Alpha Order of Merit, the Panhellenic Council’s Administrator of the Year Award, and the National Lambda Chi Alpha Award for Distinguished Service.

In addition to his wife of 55 years and his daughters, he is survived by grandchildren Lauren Zingler Davis, Shawn Zingler, Ricky Saborido, and William Saborido.

A celebration of his life  will be held at 4 p.m. on Sunday, September 17, at the Newman Alumni Center. Donations in his memory can be made to The Sandler Center For Alcohol and Other Drug Education, 1306 Stanford Drive, UC #2250, Coral Gables, FL 33146.

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Liz Rothlein

Educator Liz Rothlein, who taught at the School of Education and Human Development for a quarter- century, including 13 years as associate dean, passed away on January 6 in her home in Warne, North Carolina, where she lived after retirement and volunteered for Meals on Wheels. She was 80.

Schooled in Ohio, Rothlein, who earned a doctoral degree in education from Ball State University, moved to Miami in 1976, authoring or co-authoring approximately 30 teacher education books for children, numerous journal articles, and presenting at many local, state, and national conferences.

Some of her noted credits and recognitions include Teacher of the Year, official listing as an outstanding Teacher of America, and teaching plaudits from the Bahamas and Oxford, England, summer exchange student visitation programs.

She is survived by her husband of more than 40 years, Ash Rothlein; two daughters, Terri Wild and Kimberly Brandt from a previous marriage to Floren Christman; two step-sons, Jay and Steve Rothlein; four grandchildren, Amanda, Jason, Tyler, and Sophie; sister Linda Foley; and brothers Jim and John Brandt.

A celebration of her life will be held in the Hurricane 100 Room at the University of Miami Watsco Center on Saturday, February 4 between 3 and 6 p.m. For more information, call Marilyn DeNarvaez at 305-284-3711. For directions check the website www6.miami.edu/hurricane100/ .

David Kraslow
Photo by Patrick Farrell / The Miami Herald

UM News

CORAL GABLES, Fla. (January 13, 2017)—David Kraslow, a University of Miami alumnus and longtime senior member of the Board of Trustees whose “impeccable moral compass” guided a brilliant newspaper career and relentless compassion for others, passed away January 9, at age 90.

The former publisher of The Miami News’s own words, written for the afternoon daily’s final issue in 1988 and quoted by The Miami Herald last week, laid out the foundation for his remarkable life, and the profound mark he left.

“I have written books. And magazine articles. And countless tens of thousands of words for newspapers datelined from Washington and places in this country and the world over,” Kraslow, A.B. ’48, said in his final News column. “But it all began professionally here—so many years ago—with The Miami News as a sports writer during my senior year at the University of Miami.”

A year after his 1977 rise to publisher of the News, Kraslow joined UM’s Board of Trustees. He was elected a senior trustee in 2009 and over the decades served on numerous committees, sharing his cherished insights and advice with veterans and newcomers alike.

“When he spoke it was important to listen,” longtime UM trustee Leonard Abess, who served as board chair from 2007-2011, told the Herald. “He was passionate. And he spoke from knowledge, experience and most of all from the heart. His counsel to me was priceless. David had an impeccable moral compass.”

Added Trustee Emeritus Frank Scruggs, “David was a giant. He cared about the downtrodden, oppressed, and needy. Miamians across a broad spectrum have lost a good friend.”

Calling him “a vibrant member of the University of Miami family,” UM President Julio Frenk said, “David Kraslow was a highly respected community leader who was deeply involved in the life of his alma mater and provided sage counsel to several of my predecessors as a member of the Board of Trustees.”

A member of the Iron Arrow Honor Society, a former member of the UM Citizens Board, and a former trustee of the Jackson Health System Public Health Trust, Kraslow was an ardent Hurricanes fan whose generosity helped establish The Bernice Kraslow Ovarian Cancer Research Fund at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, named for his beloved late wife.

A Nieman Fellow of Harvard University and a member of the Gridiron Club in Washington, D.C., he earned many prestigious journalism awards, climbing the ranks of the competitive industry and collecting many admirers along the way. Joining The Miami News as a sports writer in 1947, he later joined the Herald staff, moving from sports writer to reporter to Washington correspondent. He also was assistant managing editor of the Washington Star-News and the Washington bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times and Cox Newspapers.

Born in the Bronx, Kraslow served in the U.S. Army Air Corps from 1944 to 1946 and in Miami on the Orange Bowl Committee and the Greater Miami Jewish Federation. He was a former director of the International Oceanographic Foundation and founding president of the Center for Fine Arts, now the Perez Art Museum Miami.

He is survived by his daughters Ellen Jennings, Karen Spellman, and Susan Dandes; grandchildren Laura, Casey, Samantha, Ryan, Spencer, and Erin; and two great-grandchildren. Services were held last week.

Donations in Kraslow’s name can be made to the University of Miami Child Protection Team, P.O. Box 025388, Miami, Florida, 33102.

Read more about Kraslow’s life, career, and impact in The Miami Herald obituary.

Susan “Sue” Miller, the matriarch of a family whose business and philanthropic enterprise has left an indelible mark on South Florida and, in particular, improved medical care, student life, and the study of Judaism at the University of Miami, died Thursday after a battle with cancer. She was 81.

“Sue Miller was an inspirational force in our community,” said UM President Julio Frenk. “Her tireless and passionate advocacy for educational opportunities helped lift and shape young minds. Her legacy, in particular through the Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine, will endure in the many lives touched by her generosity. The University of Miami family mourns her loss, and our hearts go out to her children Stuart, Leslie, Jeffrey, and the entire Miller family.”

Flags on the University of Miami campuses were lowered to half-staff Thursday to honor the legacy of Sue Miller.

The widow of the late Leonard M. Miller, former chair of UM’s Board of Trustees who built a prominent homebuilding company with an investment of his own capital, Sue Miller had become the torch bearer of her family’s boundless generosity after her husband passed away in 2002.

At the 2004 ceremony where the Millers announced their landmark $100 million gift to UM’s medical school, it was Sue Miller, in a moving speech, who paid tribute to her husband, recognized the many physicians, caretakers, and researchers for their commitment to humanity and the value they place on life, and urged the youngest members of her family to continue its tradition of philanthropy.

“We in this family know that the measure of one’s success is not the wealth accumulated,” she said. “It has nothing to do with shrines erected, nor records broken; it is the inner strength we build each day through hard work, through integrity, and the respect for our fellow man.”

The landmark gift, which renamed the school in Leonard Miller’s honor and was the largest ever to the University at the time, transformed Florida’s oldest medical school, helping it to achieve unprecedented levels of excellence in clinical care, biomedical research, and medical education.

“It would be hard to overstate the impact Sue Miller had on this campus and in this community,” said Laurence B. Gardner, M.D., MACP, interim dean of the Miller School of Medicine. “She was a wonderful friend of the Miller School, as was Leonard, and we are forever grateful for their support. Their efforts will resound for generations to come through our students, as well as the thousands of patients who come to the University of Miami for care.”

Steven M. Altschuler, M.D., senior vice president for health affairs at the University of Miami and chief executive officer of UHealth – the University of Miami Health System, described her as “a matriarch of her family.”

“Sue Miller provided a shining example of service and commitment to our community, and she instilled that into everyone around her,” Altschuler said. “She will be deeply missed.”

In 1998, Sue Miller and her husband donated $5 million to establish the Sue and Leonard Miller Center for Contemporary Judaic Studies. Located on the Coral Gables campus, it is the first academic and research center in the United States that focuses on the issues that have affected the Jewish people in the 20th century and the challenges they face in the future.

At the 2003 dedication ceremony for the center’s new home in UM’s Merrick Building, Sue Miller called the center a vital component of UM’s campus tapestry. “Students must be armed intellectually against the backdrop of Holocaust denial, racists, bigots, and neo-Nazis,” she said. “We must keep our young students informed so they can help build an uplifting society.”

Longtime South Florida residents, the Millers came to Miami in 1954 as newlyweds following Leonard Miller’s graduation from Harvard. Both had grown up in Massachusetts. Soon after the young couple arrived in Miami, Leonard invested $10,000 into a small construction company that ultimately became Lennar Corporation, one of the nation’s leading homebuilders and providers of residential financial services.

Over more than four decades, Sue and Leonard Miller built a distinctive style of philanthropy, inspiring many others to join them in making powerful commitments to improve the community. One of their most passionate causes was the South Florida Annenberg Challenge, now known as the Council for Educational Change, which works to raise the level of student achievement in public schools. Sue Miller served as a trustee of the council and chaired its Educational Advancement Committee.

A dedicated community advocate, she had always believed in fostering the spirit of giving, chairing the Miami Beach Community Campaign to benefit the United Way in her early days as a volunteer for the nonprofit charitable organization. Over time, she played an instrumental role in shaping the United Way of Miami-Dade’s leadership giving program. She was a founding member of the Tocqueville Society, established in 1991 to honor individuals who give $10,000 or more annually.

Sue Miller also founded United Way of Miami-Dade’s Women’s Leadership program, which has raised millions of dollars since its inception while mentoring young women as community leaders. Her work in the women’s leadership arena carried over to the national and international levels, as she once spearheaded and sponsored a leadership exchange between United Way of Miami-Dade and United Way of Jamaica. Her work on the education front, and specifically early education with United Way of Miami-Dade, took her to Washington, D.C. to advocate for increased funding for quality early education.

But it is Sue Miller and her family’s generosity toward UM that is arguably the hallmark of their philanthropic efforts. Among her family’s other notable gifts to the institution: In 2014, The Lennar Foundation, the Lennar Corporation’s charitable arm established by Sue Miller and her husband, gave a lead gift of $50 million to name The Lennar Foundation Medical Center, a state-of-the-art facility that brings the University of Miami Health System to UM’s Coral Gables campus. It will open in December.

The donation was one of the signature gifts of UM’s Momentum2 campaign. Last year, the Miller family propelled UM past the campaign’s $1.6 billion fundraising goal with a $55 million gift, the bulk of which—$50 million—is being used to build the new Miller School of Medicine Center for Medical Education. A ceremonial groundbreaking for the state-of-the-art facility was held earlier this year during a pre-inaugural ceremony for Frenk. During that event, her son, Stuart Miller, lauded his mother as a “primary driver of philanthropy” in his family.

“Both my mother and my father were extraordinary examples of how important it is to give, so a community can build,” he said.

The remaining $5 million of that $55 million gift was donated to the University’s Phillip and Patricia Frost School of Music.

The Miller family’s generosity during the Momentum2 campaign also included a naming gift for the Braman Miller Center for Jewish Student Life for UM Hillel.

In all, Sue Miller and her family have given more than $200 million to the University, primarily to the Miller School of Medicine, the Miller Center for Contemporary Judaic Studies, the School of Law, the Frost School of Music, and the Intercollegiate Athletics Program.

Sue Miller is survived by her three children—Stuart Miller (J.D. ’82), who followed in his father’s footsteps as chair of the UM Board of Trustees; Jeffrey Miller; and Leslie Miller Saiontz—11 grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren.

Darby Bannard was committed to color-based and expressionist abstraction for over six decades.

A leading figure in the development of color field painting in the late 1950s and an important American abstract painter, Walter Darby Bannard, professor and head of the painting program in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Art and Art History, passed away on October 2. He was 82.

“Darby’s contributions to the art world will be remembered by his peers, collectors, and critics, and most importantly, by the hundreds of students whom he inspired by his work, his teaching, and his mentoring,” said Perri Lee Roberts, art history professor and chair of the Department of Art and Art History.

During his undergraduate years at Princeton University, Bannard joined fellow students, the painter Frank Stella, and the critic and art historian Michael Fried in conversations that expanded aesthetic definitions and led to an emphasis on opticality as the defining feature of pictorial art.

Bannard continued to explore attributes of color, paint, and surface through innovative methods, striving throughout his career for vital and original expressive means. He was also an important writer on formalist issues in art, serving as an editor for Artforum and a contributor to Art International. His extensive publications date from the 1960s to the present. He joined the University of Miami faculty in 1989 to become chair of the art department.

Bannard was born in 1934 in New Haven, Connecticut. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy and in 1956 graduated from Princeton University. Bannard, who made drawings and watercolors throughout his youth, was self-taught as a painter. He derived inspiration for his earliest paintings from the art of William Baziotes, Theodoros Stamos, and Clyfford Still. In a 2015 interview with UM alumnus Franklin Einspruch for Artcritical.com, Bannard states, “That’s how it is with abstract painting, it just takes you over. I remember looking at one of these little intellectual magazines when I was 16 and I saw a de Kooning painting, and thought, ‘Wow, that’s really cool.’” By the late 1950s, he abandoned the sensitivity inherent in the expressionistic style, instead creating austere minimal paintings characterized by large areas of contrasting color.

In the next decade, he was one of the first artists to blend artist’s materials with commercially produced tinted alkyd resin house paints in a search for greater color options. In a 2015 Artforum review of his second solo exhibition at Berry Campbell, Phyllis Tuchman discusses these early paintings: “The bands, circles, and rectangles tend to be shiny and reflect light, while the other parts of these canvases are covered with matte paint. Bannard mixed pinks and beiges as well as light blues and greens with lots of white. These colors are still radiant. And the artist’s pale palette is as uniquely personal today as it was 50 years ago. You can’t even apply a name to his hues.”

In 1964, Bannard was included in the landmark exhibition Post-Painterly Abstraction, organized by Clement Greenberg and held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. His first solo exhibitions were in 1965, at Kasim Gallery, London; Richard Feigen Gallery, Chicago; and Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. He was also included that year in the Museum of Modern Art’s “The Responsive Eye.” In 1968, Bannard received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and a National Foundation of the Arts Award.

Around 1970, Bannard’s focus shifted to an exploration of the liquid quality of paint. Drawn to the new acrylic media that was becoming available, he began working on the floor using thick gel surfaces and color suspended in magna or polymer. At the time, he “thought of color as a liquid, flowing over and settling on a roughened surface, changing as it mixed and dried.” His method involved stapling his canvases to slightly raised wooden platforms. After tightly sizing his canvases, he scraped on colored gel with squeegee-like tools. When the surface was dry, he poured colored polymer over it in layers, allowing the paint to find its place. He was drawn at the time to close-valued rather than strong colors and often allowed his pale warm grounds to serve as colors in their own right rather than acting as supports for other colors.

Stated Karen Wilkin in Color as Field (2007): “Bannard probed just how subtle chromatic nuances could be before they became unbroken expanse. In these pictures, even composition could be reduced to a kind of near-negative, an echo of something no longer there.” In the late 1970s, Bannard was instrumental in the retrospective exhibition of the work of Hans Hofmann. He curated the 1976-77 exhibition and wrote the catalogue that accompanied it.

During a painting workshop in Saskatchewan, Canada, in 1981, Bannard developed a kind of gel “drawing” on canvas, in which he applied his paint on large sheets of fiberglass. By the middle of the decade, he had returned to a slower, more subtle system of marking his gel, while also returning to pouring colored polymer. He also reincorporated expressionist methods in his art. In 1987, he began his “brush and cut” paintings, consisting of large scale canvases in which he applied transparent tinted gel with large street brooms and industrial floor squeegees to make painted “drawings” featuring vigorous brushwork and three-dimensional illusions. After moving to Miami, he incorporated more color into his large paintings, while producing small mixed-media landscapes on paper, inspired by the flat land and water and the lowering sun of the Florida Everglades.

Recently, Bannard increased the intensity and juxtoposition of color. The more neutral backgrounds of the past have shifted to all-over color. The surfaces of the paintings are flat and three-dimensional all at once: hot pink and fluorescent green geometric shapes appear to float above and protrude from the flat canvas. These circles reference earlier days, but added now are hard-edge trapezoids. Flat areas of color are spiked by splatters of sparkly gels and raised areas of large sweeping brush-work creating a dance across the surface.  Methods and techniques from earlier paintings are combined and used in unison in these dynamic compositions.  In 2015 and 2016, Bannard continued to paint with increase vigor creating large-scale paintings up to thirteen feet wide.

Throughout his career, Bannard moved between the poles of expressionism and color field painting, resulting in a body of art that constantly evolved as the artist forthrightly faced the situations that his art presented, reacting to them with rigor and intuition.

In 1983, Bannard held an Invitational Residency at the National Endowment for the Arts.  In addition to his position at the University of Miami, he taught at many art schools, including the School of Visual Art, New York. Over the course of his career, Bannard had almost 100 solo exhibitions and had been included in an even greater number of group shows. In 2016, noted art historian Barbara Rose curated a major exhibition for Roberto Polo Gallery in Brussels, Belgium, entitled, Post-Painterly Abstraction: Belgium-USA, featuring paintings by 16 U.S. and Belgian artists including Bannard, Ed Moses, and Larry Poons.

Bannard is represented in public collections across the country as well as abroad.  A selection of his museum collections include Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio; Baltimore Museum, Maryland; Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas, Austin; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Cleveland Museum, Ohio; Dallas Museum of Fine Art, Texas; Dayton Art Institute, Ohio; Edmonton Art Gallery, Alberta, Canada; Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Honolulu Museum, Hawaii; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana; Kenyon College Art Gallery, Ohio; Larry Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut; Lowe Art Museum, Coral Gables, Florida; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Victoria, Australia; New Jersey State Museum, Trenton; Newark Museum, New Jersey; Portland Art Museum, Oregon; Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York; the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts.