Melanie Blumberg’s legacy stays bright with the Sunshine Award
Courtney Cochran was certain of her career goals as a sophomore at California University of Pennsylvania. After obtaining her bachelor’s degree, she planned to go to law school to become an international attorney, with no emphasis on politics, per se. Then, she met “force of nature” and political science professor Melanie Blumberg.
Dr. B, as students called her, encouraged her during that first class to attend a political conference with a few other students. She reluctantly agreed to go, expecting it would be her last political event.
She was almost comically mistaken.
Several political rallies and courses later, Ms. Cochran finished her bachelor’s degree in political science. Shortly after graduation, Dr. B encouraged her to come back to Cal U for a master’s degree in law and public policy and work as a graduate assistant. Dr. B, who was responsible for sending a handful of students to the Democratic and Republican National Conventions every four years since her professorship began in 2001, sweetened the pitch with a spot at the 2012 DNC. Her speech ended, “So, I’m setting up the next yearand-a-half of your life, and you just have to say yes.”
Stories like this are common among Dr. B’s former students. When the beloved professor died in June 2020, the university’s President’s Commission on the Status of Women named an award in her honor, the Mel Blumberg Sunshine Award, which cites her “commitment to both formal and informal mentorship and to ‘spreading sunshine’ by lifting up those around her.” As a prelude to the first in what is planned to be an annual award, about 50 colleagues, family and former students, including Ms. Cochran, gathered remotely on March 11 to share their favorite memories of Dr. B.
She was an interior designer before earning a doctorate in political science in her 50s. But her designer’s eye came along for the ride. Her colleague and personal friend Laura Tuennerman describes her as “impeccably dressed” — always in a skirt suit with pantyhose — and says she had the “most perfect handwriting you’d ever seen,” scrolled with her favorite Tull pens.
She took every opportunity to thank, congratulate or encourage someone doing well, even if she had to create those chances from thin air. Because she traveled from her home in Youngstown, Ohio, to Cal U each day, she’d wake early in the morning and email articles
— at 3 or 4 a.m. — to friends and colleagues to spark a thought or to show she was thinking of them. Any call for award nominations for students or colleagues she met with a “Who are we nominating this year?” and she took care of it.
Her husband, Fred, died before her. Biologically, she was not a mother. But she always said she had many children, and a look around her campus office proved it. Framed photos of Cal U students at political conventions and momentous trips lined her desk — perfectly spaced and in chronological order. The dog lover even kept photos of her students’ pups, adopting those as her own, too.
She had such reverence for her area of study — political parties and elections — that students never knew her personal political affiliation. She was behind the university’s involvement with the American Democracy Project, which encourages voter registration. As a result, Cal U was named a Voter Friendly Campus for the third time last month. She was a longtime member of the Frederick Douglass Institute and extended her interest in mentorship particularly to incoming minority faculty members.
The President’s Commission
awards committee considered all these qualities as they selected the first winnersof the Sunshine Award.
Faculty winner Holiday Adair, of Mt. Lebanon, holds adoctorate in counseling psychology and is Dr. B-like for her interest in connecting students and new faculty with the university’s resources, even including such information within her psychologydepartment courses.
Staff winner Carrie Schubert, director of the peer mentoring program, connects incoming freshmen with upperclassmen and is the primary contact for parents. The Mt. Lebanon resident never passes the buck, and in one case, it may have saved a life. When a student asked for directions to the campus Counseling Center, Ms. Schubert didn’t just wave her off in the right direction: She struck up a conversation and walked her there personally. Ms. Schubert learned the student was in emotional crisis and didn’t leave her side until there was adequate help.
Student winner Sierra Snyder, of Washington, Pa., has a habit of mentoring younger students, first as a peer mentor and now as an employee in the Office of Academic Success while completing graduate work in psychology.
The award’s impetus is mostly chronology, taking the first opportunity to honor Dr. B since her death last summer. But for Bridgett Nobili, award committee chairperson and assistant director of the Career and Professional Development Center, its meaning is amplified by the distance imposed by COVID-19 restrictions and the subsequent strain on relationships. “If you’re not physically somewhere, it’s easy to let relationships slip away,” she said. “But these are people that, despite everything, whether they were remote or whatever, focused on them as much as ever.”
Award creators hope it will perpetuate Dr. B’s commitment to the betterment of those around her, which has already created a lineage of mentorship (and sunshine).
Ms. Cochran, 31, earned a role at a national nonprofit focused on nonpartisan election work. When she became fellowship director for the organization, she had one thought: “‘I have to tell Dr. B, and I have to get a fellow at Cal U’ because that’s exactly whatshe would have done.’”