Students Receive Richard Siegfried Student Award for Excellent GPA

Seventy-four SUNY Oneonta students received the Richard Siegfried Student Award in the fall 2025 semester for earning a total GPA of 3.9 or higher. To be eligible for the award, a student who meets the GPA requirement must either be a full-time first-year or transfer student.

Students received the award on Nov. 20 following the annual Richard Siegfried Junior Faculty Prize for Academic Excellence Lecture, titled "In the Shadow of Giants: What animal fossils reveal about human origins," at the Morris Conference Center on campus.

The Siegfried Junior Faculty Prize for Academic Excellence is named in memory of Richard K. Siegfried, SUNY Oneonta Professor of Theatre (1958-1995). Professor Siegfried (or Sieg, as generations of students fondly called him) epitomized excellence in his academic life, through imagination, meticulous scholarship and discipline, and through his expectation of the same pursuit of excellence in his students and colleagues. His dedication brought excellence to his work in such historical theater worlds as Aristophanes, Moliere, Ibsen, or Chekhov, to his rigorous study of the skills of voice and movement, and to his leadership in the imaginative creativity of improvisation.

In the latter half of his professional career, Sieg embarked in a new direction, devoting his research to working directly with theater artists who were testing the limits of theatrical creativity, so that he might enrich his work with his own students. This new study led to special enthusiasm for artists whose work merged theater goals with humanitarian goals. Soon, more and more of his own productions, whether of the classics or the avant garde, came to embody his commitment to humanitarian causes.

Sieg, with his wife Alice, began to apply theatrical skills, both traditional ones and those newly acquired, to the area of social change. Students and community members alike soon joined him in bringing this new theater to the streets to raise public awareness, most memorable in the huge puppets he designed to dominate Oneonta's landscape in peace rallies or on Hiroshima Day. Sieg was himself instrumental in establishing a sister city relationship between Oneonta and Dipilto, Nicarague, encouraging community members to join him in helping rebuild that city. Indeed, Richard Siegfried's devotion to academic excellence and to humanitarian integrity merged in him, until he became a conscience for our community, a voice backed by action, moving against injustice and violations of human dignity at home and abroad.