Scholarship honors Honduras RPCV Roger Cooper, killed in freak accident
Scholarship honors man in rock slide
May 24, 2005
Bangor Daily News
It's been nearly a year since a freak accident turned a celebratory high-school reunion trip up Mount Katahdin into a tragedy.
Last June, 51-year-old Roger Cooper, a Bangor Hydro-Electric employee, and three friends from the 1971 graduating class of Noble High School in Berwick were scaling the rugged Cathedral Trail near Chimney Pond when a rock slide above them made the earth rumble. Cooper died when he was pinned under a 500-pound boulder and a fellow climber was injured when he was struck by another massive falling rock.
Cooper will be honored on June 17 when a college scholarship in his memory is introduced at a ceremony at the Buchanan Alumni House at the University of Maine in Orono. The Roger D. Cooper Scholarship was established by Bangor Hydro-Electric Co., where he worked as an electricity-sales forecaster, and by a professor at the University of Maine Department of Resource Economics and Policy, where Cooper received his master's degree in 1985.
The scholarship, said its originators, will be used to help assist undergraduate students in the newly created International Concentration of the Resource and Agribusiness Management bachelor's degree program, which aims to enhance basic economics and business studies with a focus on international environmental policy.
"Roger was in the Peace Corps [as a forester in Honduras] and was a recruiter on campus, so he always was a huge proponent of international travel and language study as a way of allowing people to understand one another better," Professor George Criner said of the friend he'd worked with often over the last 20 years. "He believed that travel helped to reduce prejudice among people, so I know this scholarship would please him."
That same kind of global vision, Criner said, could be invaluable to those University of Maine students who will one day embark on careers in the business of natural resources that are increasingly tied to international markets.
"Maine is a heavily resource-dependent state, with industries such as agriculture, aquaculture, forestry and fishing, and also tourism," Criner said. "But so many resources and environmental issues are global now, from the Kyoto Accord dealing with climate change to the blueberries and the lobsters that we share with Canada. Domtar, for example, has a pulp and paper mill in Baileyville and owns millions of acres in Maine, but it's based in Montreal and does business around the world. And China is also becoming a much bigger trade partner with Maine."
As Maine's economy becomes ever more competitive, as evidenced in part by the loss of much of its traditional manufacturing base in recent years, Criner believes that students must be better equipped to look far beyond their own borders and to understand the growing role of world markets in the state's future as well as their own.
"The international aspect is big," he said. "Our students are already getting jobs when they graduate, but adding an international component to their studies will take them to a much higher level."
The Roger D. Cooper Scholarship fund, which will amount to at least $25,000 in the first year, will be used primarily to assist about three students a year, preferably those in their first year of study. Students who choose to pursue the program's international concentration major will take at least two years of a foreign language of their choice along with the usual courses in applied economics and business management focusing on natural resources. In their fourth year, students may do an internship in a foreign country, where they are able to combine their new language skills with further international studies and job training.
Criner said that of the four students enrolled in the new program, which began last year, one is learning to speak Thai, one is studying Japanese, one is taking French and another will finish the school year in Austria.
"We want more people in Maine to know what resource economics is all about," Criner said, "and to recognize that this is a degree that can really open doors to them. International trade is rising faster than economic growth, like it or not, and this can position students better for career opportunities. They can think of this as studying three years in Orono and one in Paris."
Anyone interested in contributing to the Roger D. Cooper Scholarship fund, or who would like more information about the field of study it will benefit, should contact Professor George Criner by e-mail at George.Criner@umit.maine.edu, or by phone at -581-3151.
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