Four alumni named to Board of Trustees

Four alumni have been appointed to Bates’ Board of Trustees.

Victoria Aghababian Wicks ’74 of Westfield, N.J., was elected by trustees to a lifetime appointment on the Board of Fellows.

Elected by the Alumni Association to five-year terms on the Board of Overseers were David L. Foster ’77 of New York; and Beatrijs Stikkers-Muller ’81, who  lives in Wachtberg-Adendorf, Germany.

Earlier this year, David W. Parmelee ’64 of West Hartford, Conn., was elected by trustees to the Board of Overseers, filling a vacant position whose term expires in 1997.

The Board of Trustees also voted recently to award emeritus status to three retiring members of the Board of Fellows and expressed appreciation to three departing members of the Board of Overseers.

Named trustees emeriti were:

  • Weston L. Bonney ’50 of Portland, Maine; former chairman of Peoples Heritage Financial Group.
  • Lincoln F. Ladd of Wayne, Maine; a retired teacher and a director of the Lincoln and Therese Filene Foundation and the Helen and George Ladd Charitable Corp.
  • Frank P. Wendt of Southport, Conn.; former chief executive officer of the investment firm John Nuveen & Co.

Concluding their service with the Board of Overseers were:

  • Kathleen M. Fisher ’76 of Brooklyn, N.Y.; a vice president at the banking firm J.P. Morgan.
  • Linda E. Rawlings ’76 of Oakland, Calif.; president of Otis Spunkmeyer Inc.
  • Sarah M. McGinty ’67 of Upper Montclair, N.J.; preceptor at Harvard University.

Bates’ Board of Trustees consists of fellows, who hold lifetime appointments, and overseers, who serve five-year terms.

Wicks, who was a member of the Board of Overseers from 1989 to 1994, is president and chief executive officer of HIP Health Plan of New Jersey in North Brunswick, N.J. She was appointed to her current position in 1991, having previously held executive posts with the Health Insurance Plan of Greater New York.

She has taught courses in health-care management at New York University. In 1993 Jim Florio, then governor of New Jersey, appointed her to an oversight committee on health care, of which she later was chair.

Wicks was the president of her Bates class and has been active in the Alumni-in-Admissions and Career Discovery Internship programs. She holds a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Massachusetts.

Foster is president of the Institute of Management and Administration, a New York electronic and newsletter publishing company he founded in 1982. He has been active in professional organizations, is president-elect of the Newsletter Publishers Association and served as a director of volunteers for Planned Parenthood of New York.

He has served as president of Bates’ Alumni Council and of the New York Bates Club, and has worked for the Alumni-in-Admissions program. Currently he is secretary of his class, a class agent for the Annual Alumni Fund and a regional vice chair for Bates’ capital campaign.

After graduating from Bates, Foster earned a master’s degree at the University of Wyoming. He is a doctoral candidate at the University of Colorado.

Stikkers-Muller, a native of the Netherlands, graduated cum laude from Bates and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She earned a master’s degree at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University in 1984 and went on to work in corporate finance with the banking firm J.P. Morgan. She then moved into the field of development finance, serving on the supervisory boards of development banks in Zimbabwe and Botswana, among others.

While living in Prague she was president of the city’s International Women’s Club and initiated several community-service projects. She also held the title of external admissions adviser at the Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education.

She has been an active volunteer in Bates’ Alumni-in-Admissions program.

Parmelee has spent 26 years in banking with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Connecticut Bank and Trust Co. and Fleet Financial Group. He has held leadership positions in the credit, investment, operations and administrative areas of commercial banking.

He is currently executive vice president in charge of the national banking department at Fleet National Bank of Connecticut.

Parmelee serves as a director of the One Thousand Corp. and the Greater Hartford Easter Seal Rehabilitation Center, and is a trustee of several foundations. He chairs Bates’ Annual Alumni Fund and is a member of the finance committee of the Hartford Symphony Orchestra and of the Hartford Chamber of Commerce Citizens’ Committee for Effective Government.

After graduating from Bates, Parmelee earned a master’s degree in business administration at Boston University.