ON C AMPUS
Two Alumni Join Trustees
JOHN DESMARAIS ’85 and JAMES MOTHERWAY ’83 are the newest members of Manhattan College’s board of trustees. Desmarais is the founding partner of Desmarais LLP, a New York intellectual property law firm focused on litigation of complex, technology-driven disputes. He is also a founding member of Round Rock Research, LLC and SoundView Innovations, LLC, patent-holding companies he formed to license the technology they own. With more than 25 years of experience in patent law and intellectual property litigation, Desmarais has been recognized for several significant trademark and patent dispute wins, including one of the largest jury verdicts of all time — a $1.53 billion award for Alcatel-Lucent vs. Microsoft in 2007. He earned his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Manhattan College, where he graduated magna cum laude and earned the chemical engineering medal. He received his J.D. from New York University School of Law in 1988. Motherway is a managing director and global head of audit at BlackRock, Inc., a global investment management firm based in New York City. Founded in 1988 initially as a risk management and fixed income institutional asset manager, BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager, with more than $4.5 trillion in assets under management. Prior to joining BlackRock in 2011, Motherway spent six years with Bank of America as senior vice president and general auditor. He graduated magna cum laude from Manhattan College with a bachelor’s degree in accounting and went on to earn an MBA in finance from Columbia Business School in 1990. A certified public accountant, he currently serves on the Manhattan College School of Business advisory board and is a business mentor for students.
12 N fall 2016
Oh Captain, My Captain A CENTURY AND A HALF AGO, a group of cerebral students established the College’s first cultural society, the De La Salle Literary Club. Membership was awarded to seriousminded scholars admitted on literary merit, which eventually earned the club a reputation as the most aristocratic of the literary societies. Ponderously academic and intellectually curious, these erudite young men created a periodical, “which they might not be ashamed to hand down to posterity, and in which too, they might sharpen their wits and whet their pens for the future benefit of society” (Meeting Minutes, 1865). The Album was published in script, not print, and featured contemplative essays, nuanced poems and thoughtful compositions submitted anonymously under creative pseudonyms such as Nemo, Lover of Nature, and Delineator. By the 1880s, the club adopted the name St. Joseph Literary Union and the Jaspers Literary Union, and continued to publish The Album until 1884, when it was disbanded.
The College’s first cultural society, the De La Salle Literary Club, pictured here in 1873, had a reputation for being the most aristocratic of literary societies due to its strict policy of only admitting serious-minded scholars with literary distinctions.