Growing up on a family farm in Jarratt, Virginia, Melvin “Mel” T. Stith was one of 10 siblings. It was on this farm he learned—through his daily chores and obligations in a large family—that “leadership is [about] being responsible for things.”

 

Following high school, Stith attended Norfolk State University (NSU), a historically black institution, where he majored in sociology. Since NSU was initially a land-grant school, ROTC was mandatory for all males during their first two years in college. By his junior year, however, Stith received an Army ROTC scholarship. He graduated two years later in 1968 and received his commission in the U.S. Army as a military intelligence officer.

 

Melvin T. Stith notably served in the U.S. Army Intelligence Command at a time in our history when there were few military officers of color. After learning Vietnamese from the Defense Language Institute (Southwest Branch) in El Paso, TX, Stith deployed to Vietnam. Stith made the rank of captain while there, but one day, while in the jungle near the Cambodian border, he received a Teletype from Syracuse University offering him a scholarship for graduate school. With the encouragement of his wife, he hitched a ride out of the warzone the following day and made his way to SU. By 1973, Stith had earned an MBA and, four years later, a Ph.D. in marketing.

 

Since 1977, Dr. Stith has been a professor of business and marketing. Stith unsurprisingly rose through the academic ranks too, as he was named the marketing department chair of Florida State University’s (FSU) College of Business in 1985. In 1991, he was named Dean of the College of Business and Jim Moran Professor of Business Administration and served in that role for another 13 years. Under his leadership, the FSU College of Business was consistently ranked as one of the top 50 undergraduate programs in the country.

 

Luckily for us, Dr. Melvin Stith returned to his alma mater to become the 16^th Dean of the Martin J. Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University in 2005. Dr. Stith recounts this opportunity as a fortunate accident. While on campus, Stith was mistaken as the new dean, when he made a visit with his son. “I’m just here to bring my son,” he had insisted as he toured the departments and visited old professors. A few weeks from that visit, the original candidate for Dean turned down the position and it was extended to Stith. With the support of his family and colleagues, Stith accepted the position and began molding the school into one focused on supporting diversity and veterans’ affairs.

 

The opportunity to develop the relationship between the Whitman School and the veterans community was evident when approached by the Institute of Veterans and Military Families’ (IVMF) founder, Dr. Mike Haynie. Stith needed little convincing in Haynie’s initial idea of creating an entrepreneurship boot camp for veterans with disabilities (EBV), since it so clearly fulfilled the vision of Martin J. Whitman, a veteran himself, and SU’s long historical tradition of supporting veterans. Stith recalls, “You always wish you’d have a signature program in your career, and for me, that’s it.” The EBV program and the IVMF are certainly two cornerstones of Stith’s legacy.

 

After nine years as the Whitman School Dean, Stith retired, though he remains active as Dean Emeritus and in The PhD Project, a national foundation that he founded and that works to recruit black, Hispanic, and American Indian students to the business school professoriate. In 2011, Stith endowed the Stith Graduate Student Fund at SU to provide financial aid to full-time minority doctoral students. The next year, Stith was invited to attend the White House Summit on Entrepreneurship for Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Minority Serving Institutions. In 2013, Stith, alongside his wife, received Syracuse University’s Orange Circle Award, which recognized their philanthropic work in the community.

 

Well-known in Syracuse, Stith remains dedicated to his academic, local, regional, and national communities and organizations, which include United Way, Vera House, Crouse Hospital, and The PhD Project. He also serves on the IVMF Board of Advisors, AFLAC Inc. Board of Directors, and nonprofit boards of the Jim Moran Foundation, Crouse Hospital Foundation, Syracuse Stage and his first collegiate alma mater, Norfolk State University. When asked of his greatest success, Stith said, “I think I’m a pretty good spouse, a pretty good dad, and a pretty good friend…and professionally, it’s not about being liked [though he was], it’s about being respected”—two successful deanships undoubtedly qualify.

 

Melvin T. Stith is an alumnus of Syracuse University and a veteran of the U.S. military. You should know his story.

Samuel V. Goekjian is a remarkable individual who set forth on a business-driven path well before immigrating to the U.S. on a 4-year scholarship to Syracuse University. Born from Armenian parents who escaped the Turkish massacres at the end of WWI, Goekjian grew up in Ethiopia where his family found refuge. Goekjian, inspired by his father’s resilience to hardship, was encouraged by the prospects of moving to America.

During his college years at Syracuse University, Goekjian was actively involved in numerous leadership roles, having been elected president of his junior class, the debate society, and the men’s student government in his senior year. He also belonged to the Phi Kappa Alpha Honor Society, the Orange Key, and Phi Beta Kappa. He graduated magna cum laude in 1952 with a bachelor’s degree in history. The following year, however, he joined the U.S. Army as a mortar gunner and served for two years during the height of the Korean War. Following his combat service, Goekjian attended Harvard Law School and graduated in 1957.

 

Mr. Goekjian has spent well over a half century working as a successful attorney and business executive. Goekjian launched his professional career as an attorney with the Washington, D.C.-based firm Surrey & Morse, for whom he served nearly 25 years and ran the firm’s Beirut and Paris offices. Fluent in seven languages and having lived on four continents, Goekjian brought a wealth of expertise and impact on U.S.-Egypt business relations, African law, and international development. He also lectured as an adjunct law professor at the Georgetown University and George Washington University law schools.

 

In 1983, Goekjian moved to New York City to take over as Chairman and CEO of Consolidated Westway Group, Inc., North America’s largest manufacturer and distributor of liquid feed supplements for the livestock industry. Beyond his remarkable accomplishments in international law and business, Mr. Goekjian’s entrepreneurial spirit stood out six year later in 1989 when he founded Old Line Bank, a Maryland state chartered banking association established. Goekjian later joined the international consulting firm Intracon Associates, LLC, as Chairman and CEO in 1995. He remains the managing partner of the Washington law firm of Kile Goekjian Reed & McManus PLLC, which specializes in intellectual property, internet technology, and international trade. Mr. Goekjian also serves as a senior consultant to various agencies of the United Nations and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

 

In spite of his humility, Syracuse University has honored Mr. Goekjian for his various accomplishments on several occasions. The first honor came in 1996, when Goekjian received a Letter Winner of Distinction from the Varsity Club of Syracuse University for Soccer, Track & Tennis. Later, in 2005, Goekjian received the Maxwell School Horizon Award, established to recognize wise, inspirational, volunteer leadership combined with exceptional philanthropic commitment. Finally, in 2009, Goekjian was honored with the university’s highest alumni award, the George Arents Pioneer Medal, for his excellence in international business and law. Samuel V. Goekjian remains a Syracuse University Life Trustee on both Student Affairs and Academic Affairs committees. Mr. Goekjian continues to be a beneficiary to numerous SU funds to include the NEH endowment, athletics, and Maxwell School, where he established a major endowment fund for its Global Affairs Institute.

 

As Goekjian once put it, “…I learned not only about the rights of citizenship, but also of the obligations that accompany that citizenship.” With this mindset and will to succeed, Samuel V. Goekjian not only accomplished his goals of obtaining a first-class education, becoming a lawyer, and becoming a U.S. citizen, but also made a real difference in world affairs.

 

Samuel V. Goekjian is an alumnus of Syracuse University and a veteran of the U.S. military. You should know his story.

David M. Crane is an alumnus of Syracuse University, and also a military veteran. You should know his story, because it’s a Syracuse University story—one that speaks to our past, our present, and our future.

Born in Santa Monica, California, it’s unlikely David Crane immediately envisioned becoming a paratrooper, world-renowned jurist, international prosecutor, or honorary Paramount Chief among the civil society organizations of Sierra Leone.

 

David Crane launched his reputable career at Ohio University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in history, summa cum laude, and master’s degree in African Studies. While studying at Ohio University, Crane met his wife, Judi, his college sweetheart to whom he proposed six months later.

 

Following college, David Crane built quite an impressive resume serving as a U.S. Army officer and later Department of Defense (DoD) civil servant. His Army career spanned more than two decades, in which he starting out as a paratrooper and special operations officer. While serving, Crane later returned to school to earn a law degree from the Syracuse University College of Law and continued his military service in the U.S. Army JAG Corps. Following his military retirement, he worked another decade a senior DoD intelligence officer and held positions including Director of the Office of Intelligence Review, Assistant General Counsel of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Waldemar A. Solf Professor of International Law at the U.S. Army Judge Advocate Generals School.

 

While in federal service, Crane received an unexpected phone call leading to his nomination, and then appointment, by Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan to became the founding Chief Prosecutor of the Special Court of Sierra Leone, an international war crimes tribunal, from 2002 to 2005. He is accredited for indicting, among others, the former President of Liberia, Charles Taylor, the first African head of state in history to be held accountable for war crimes. David Crane was the first American since Justice Robert H. Jackson at Nuremberg in ‘45 to become Chief Prosecutor at an international war crimes tribunal. It is said that his greatest achievement with this trial was his assistance in securing the arrest of Charles Taylor. David Crane witnessed justice after a grueling 10 year case, when former president Charles Taylor was sentenced to 50 years in prison for crimes of terror, murder, and rape committed during the civil war in Sierra Leone during the 1990s, a testament that, in his words, the “rule of the law trumps the power of the gun.”

 

In 2006, David Crane became a Professor of Practice at Syracuse University College of Law, teaching international criminal law, international law, national security law, and the law of armed conflict. David Crane is on the Board of Advisors for the American Bar Association’s International Criminal Court Project (ABA-ICC Project), which implements American Bar Association’s policies on international criminal justice. In addition to his role on the College of Law faculty, Crane is a faculty member of SU’s Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism and currently serves as a co-chair on the sections International Criminal Court Task Force. With the support of more than 50 Syracuse law students to date, Crane also launched Impunity Watch, an online publication that informs the world of human rights violations in real-time, as well as the Syria Accountability Project (SAP), which provides impartial analysis of open source materials for future, open and fair prosecution of Syrian war crimes under the Geneva Conventions, the Rome Statute, and Syrian Penal Law. He also founded the “I am Syria” campaign in 2012 to help raise awareness of the atrocities perpetrated in the Syrian civil war.

 

For his service and distinguished accomplishments, David Crane has received multiple honors for his accomplishments, including the SU College of Law Distinguished Service Award (2005) and the university’s highest alumni honor, the George Arents Pioneer Medal (2006). David Crane is also an honorary Doctor of Laws recipient from Case Western Reserve University in Ohio.

 

“Life is a challenge, and you have to deal with it as it comes,” said Crane. His life has certainly followed this axiom. A span of more than 30 years in service to his nation, his continual support and involvement in projects within SU’s College of Law, and work in international law, exemplify his boundless commitment to justice—not only for his nation, but also for humanity.

 

David M. Crane is an alumnus of Syracuse University and a veteran of the U.S. military. You should know his story.

At 98, Don Waful ’37, G’39 is one of Syracuse University’s oldest surviving military veterans. Here Waful reflects on his World War II service, meeting the loves of his life and why he has been a dedicated Syracuse football fan since 1933.

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