Living in outer space? Physicist Gerard O’Neill ’50 predicts it will be possible before the end of this century. More than that—he believes it is imperative. By Nancy Smith In a modest office suite over an optom­ etrist’s shop on Nassau Street in Prince­ ton, a small group of very bright people is planning your future. This is the home of the Space Studies Institute, a nonprofit corporation estab­ lished in 1977 to fund projects in space research without drawing on government money. The institute is the creation of Gerard K. O’Neill ’50, a professor of physics at Princeton University and au­ thor of The High Frontier and 2081: A Hopeful View o f the Human Future. O’Neill has blazed into prominence in the field of national and international space planning within the past fifteen years, notably because of his advocacy of the feasibility of space colonies. “We can colonize space, and do so without robbing or harming anyone or polluting anything,” says O’Neill. “The technology is available now, and if work is begun soon, nearly all our industrial activity could be moved away from the Earth’s fragile biosphere within less than a century.” But putting humans in spate is only the means to more ambitious goals. O’Neill believes that the migration of people and industry into space will en­ courage self-sufficiency, small-scale gov­ ernmental units, cultural diversity, and a high degree of independence. These are themes he returns to again and again in his writings and his conversation. Island One, ” which has a circumference o f about one mile, would house agricultural areas and industries. Mirrors reflect sunshine into the habitat. MARCH, 1983 The walls of the Space Studies Insti­ tute are decorated with large poster-like paintings of proposed colonies and man­ ufacturing facilities—“Island One,” an advanced-stage colony, looking rather like a gigantic sparkplug, surrounded by farming pods and solar mirrors; delicate filigree structures stretching thousands of meters out from a central capsule-shaped habitat; stacks of donut-like glass struc­ tures containing fields or other agricul­ tural systems. Any reader of science fiction will recognize the style. But this is not science fiction. These are serious scientific blueprints for places in which people can live and work in outer space, and the staff of SSI is going to help us get there if we want to go. The primary objective of SSI, says O’Neill, is to conduct and support “lead­ ing-edge research essential to opening the resources of space for human benefit within this century. Research supported by SSI has shown theoretically that there can be material trapped in the Earth’s orbit around the sun, material that would be easy to retrieve and mine.” Another SSI grant (of $100,000 to Rockwell In­ ternational, builders of the NASA shuttle) supported the chemistry research for designing a chemical processing plant for space. This plant would separate lunar soil into oxygen, aluminum, and silicon —and the silicon could be used for solar cells in a sun-powered satellite. Still another grant is sponsoring construction of a prototype mass-driver, an electro­ magnetic launch device. Future massdrivers could project materials from the moon into space, haul freight between orbits, or retrieve mineral-rich asteroids. Not only is all of this possible, it is financially within our grasp. “Our re­ search has shown,” says O’Neill, “that we can reach, benefit from, and settle the High Frontier for an investment cost no greater than that of such private ventures as the Alaska pipeline.” The concept of space colonization is not new, and O’Neill directs the curious to the inspired work of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Robert Goddard, J. D. Bernal, and Dandridge Cole as the most “accurately prophetic.” But serious work on human habitation in space, he notes, could not have begun earlier than 1969, when the first Apollo samples of lunar soil were returned to the Earth and their possibilities determined. In that same year» and purely as a classroom exercise, O’Neill asked the students in his elementary physics class the question: “Is a planetary surface really the best place for an expanding technological civilization?” After exten­ sive review, the pupils concluded that the answer might be “no,” and that an ideal solution pointed to extraterrestrial manu­ facturing facilities—or space colonies. For several years thereafter, O’Neill pursued this line of research on his own. The more he looked, the more the facts and figures kept falling into place. “You start working on something, expecting the numbers to shoot it down, and instead the numbers keep coming up right.” By 1974, O’Neill was convinced that workers operating from a space colony could construct solar satellite power stations using materials obtained from lunar soil, soil which could be removed at a relatively low cost by a mass-driver based on the moon. The power stations could then be located in orbit and could supply energy for the Earth through low-density microwave beams. O’Neill’s work took a giant step for­ ward when the first conference on space manufacturing was held at Princeton in 1974. In that same year he published an article called “The Colonization of Space” in Physics Today—the first technical article on the subject, and one which had an explosive effect on the scientific com­ munity and the general public. A door was opened which could never again be closed. In 1975 government support for the research began, a much larger conference was held at Princeton, and a serious summer study program was initiated, sponsored by NASA, Stanford Uni­ versity, and the American Society for Engineering Education. All O’Neill’s find­ ings from his six years of calculation at Princeton were given to the summer study for examination. The participants in the study concluded with a unanimous endorsement of the basic concept of space colonization, and recommended that concrete projects be initiated. With the establishment of the Space Studies Institute, work on projects such as the mass-driver and the chemical processing plant got under way. O’Neill and his colleagues hope to have a model of the mass-driver ready to display to the next space manufacturing conference in May. While the primary rationale for space colonies is economic—the need for profit­ able earnings and for clean energy sources on Earth—much of the popular interest in them is based on a fascination with the Earthlike possibilities for the colonies and on their implications for human development and progress. In 1977 O’Neill published The High Frontier, “the space colonists’ Bible” (re­ issued in 1982, with new preface and appendices). In it, he outlined what we might expect to see in our own lifetimes. The prototypical colony could be shaped like a sphere; it will spin to create an artificial sense of gravity, rotating every twenty to sixty seconds. Inside the colony there will be “valleys” containing houses, soil, streams, forests, village clusters, and gardens. The constant sunlight of space can be let in for a day-length chosen by the colonists, following a 24-hour cycle. Baseball-sized payloads o f lunar minerals leave the mass-driver to be caught at manufacturing stations in space. Simply by varying the day-length, the weather and climate can be varied; one colony may be balmy and tropical, an­ other crisp and Alpine; eventually, scien­ tists should be able to create Earthlike clouds and rainstorms. The first establishment will be a mas­ sive laboratory, a jumping-off stage for further building and development. This will be a “small” unit, housing about 2,000 pioneers and technicians, and would be located in a high circular orbit between the Earth and the moon. As much bigger colonies would be more expensive per acre, later colonies will remain village-size, or at least expand to no more than 20,000 to 50,000 inhabit­ ants. It is absolutely fundamental to O’Neill’s thinking that space colonies remain manageable, even intimate. While he is meticulous and precise about scientific details, he is cautious in making predictions—or suggestions— about life styles. “I’m very careful not to specify anything about the details of how people will choose to live. That’s up to them. I’m trying to provide a techno­ logical option which people can use in order to develop their own ways of living.” In addition to the initial laboratory satellite, there would be a small outpost on the moon itself. Samples of lunar soil brought back to Earth have contained more than 12 percent aluminum, along with iron, magnesium, and other metals. Lunar soil is also rich in oxygen, which could be combined with hydrogen to make water or simply used for breathing. Once the labor force is in place, con­ tinued construction in space will be ex­ pensive. Zero gravity and the availability of limitless sunlight which is directly convertible to electricity will greatly re­ duce the costs and ease the work. Silicon, needed for solar cells, is very expensive and rare on earth, but plentiful on the moon. Electrical energy provided by the first working solar satellite will allow the project to begin paying for itself. The lynchpin in the plan for mining moondust is the mass-driver. It is a computer-designed array of drive coils forming an accelerator 250 meters long. It accelerates moving coils called “buck­ ets,” and the buckets carry baseball-size payloads of sintered lunar soil. When each bucket reaches a velocity of l x/i miles per second, its load is released to continue soaring alone on its way. The moon minerals are then caught, separated into components, and used to construct the solar satellite. “Only the initial colonies would use lunar materials,” says O’Neill. “After that the colonists could chip away at the asteroids which are rich in iron, nickel, carbon, nitrogen, and hydrogen.” With the eventual mining of the asteroids, he sees an almost unlimited future for man’s expansion into the universe. Though Senator William Proxmire sniped at O’Neill, saying, “Not one penny SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN for this nutty fantasy!” O’Neill’s NASA funding for the work continued until he decided, in 1980, that following the twists and turns of government policy was too constraining for research. Hence SSI. O’Neill’s projections have captured the imagination of a large band of enthu­ siasts. Since the publication of his first paper he has been carried along on a wave of public awareness and interest. He is a sought-after speaker at colleges and universities, has appeared on TV and spoken on the radio, and has been written up in scores of newspapers and maga­ zines. In addition to his regular academic work at Princeton and the time he puts in as president of SSI, O’Neill clocks about twenty hours flying time each month, piloting his own Cherokee Arrow to and from personal appearances around the country. He has a Diamond Badge for his ex­ ploits in gliding, including soaring 500 kilometers during an eight-hour flight. As a child, he was fascinated by aviation. “I loved planes, as lots of kids do, and at the same time I was very taken by the science fiction movies of the ’40s—the Buck Rogers era. You must remember that for someone of my age—I graduated from high school in 1944—my formative years were tremendously affected by the Second World War. I joined the Navy on my seventeenth birthday.” In the Navy he was trained as a radar technician. Later he studied physics at Swarthmore, and was introduced to the pleasures of as­ tronomy by Peter van de Kamp. “After the war, information started coming out about the V-2 rockets; it was obvious that someone would soon go into orbit.” Today O’Neill is internationally known not only as a designer of space systems but also for his research in one of the most productive areas of physics—that in which beams of high energy particles are fired head-on at one another. Among his accomplishments is the development of storage rings for high energy particle accelerators—devices that produce the highest energy particle collisions ever achieved by man. During the ’60s O’Neill became in­ trigued by the opportunities of space. When NASA was expanding its Apollo project to include personnel who were not military test pilots, he applied (along with about 1,000 others) to be a scientistastronaut. He reached the short list in 1967 but the entire program was severely cut by Congress just one month later. O’Neill is not a man to waste time on regrets: “I don’t think any of the things I could have done as an astronaut would have made nearly as much of a contri­ bution as I can hope to make with the humanization of space.” The space colony concept is not with­ out its critics. Aside from those who simply think the idea won’t ever get off the ground, there are others who believe that O’Neill is far too optimistic in his cost estimates, or that he has not thor­ oughly evaluated all the problems of trying to create a completely controlled ecology. But for O’Neill the idea is not a whim or a luxury. It is a process which must take place to prevent the catastro­ phe of the “steady-state” society, a world threatened by limited resources, energy shortages, famine, police states, and mili­ tary disaster. But he isn’t offering a Utopia. “Many people are excited by space colonies because they feel that somehow the personal ills of humankind will fall away when we can live in them. I’m afraid I see no reason why that should be true. People in space will be going through the same sorts of personal problems that they have here. “But the space-colony concept does address the big issues: two major sources of conflict here on the surface of the Earth. One of them is territoriality and the other is scale. “Territoriality first. If you read African Genesis, or look at history, or read a daily newspaper, you see examples of military conflict based on territoriality. No nation on Earth can enlarge its land area without crossing a border and going to war, and it’s an insoluble problem because land cannot be expanded, moved, or changed. But space colonies are creatable. If you become cramped, you can build a new colony, make new territory, without going to war. “And I think the question of scale is a very important one. The evidence is that human beings can get along with each other perfectly well when they are in community-size units, when they sense This drawing depicts a residential area in the “Crystal Palace, ”a maximum sunlit agricultural habitat. The Swarthmore College Bulletin (USPS 530-620), of which this is Volume LXXX, number 4, is pub­ lished in September, November, December, March, May, and August by Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA 19081. Second class postage paid at Swarthmore, PA and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to Swarthmore College Bulletin, Swarthmore, PA 19081. MARCH, 1983 3 that real power is in their own hands and not elsewhere. I think that a lot of the serious problems of government—of the remoteness of government, of disinterest of the governing in the governed—are problems of scale.” When corresponding with an illustrator for one of his publications, O’Neill urged the artist to “keep the scale small and human. The whole idea is not to be monumental. The shops should be small —boutiques, bookshops, tiny restau­ rants. . . . ” O’Neill, who is probably weary of hearing himself described as trim and youthful-looking, is a trim and youthful- looking man of great presence. He is not particularly tall, but gives the impression of height and dominance. He is patient and quiet-voiced, yet leaves his listeners a little breathless, as though a whirlwind has passed close by. There is nothing of the zealot about him, but his calm con­ viction conveys its own dynamic. “The truth is,” he says, “that technology has great power, power which can be used either for good or for bad—and that means you have a correspondingly great responsibility for what you do with it. If you have a powerful tool that can be used in two ways, you have the responsibility not to misuse it for ill, and the respon­ sibility not to fail to use it properly by neglect.” In the 1970s, according to O’Neill, our great sins were the sins of omission— things we could and should have done but didn’t. Such as? Magnetic flight, for one thing, a high speed transportation system based on magnetic levitation that could carry people at 1,000 m.p.h. It does not require air around it for flight, so it can operate almost without drag. It is a system that would burn no oil, create no pollution, and have twenty times the energy efficiency of a jet plane. “For ten years we did absolutely nothing in this field while the Germans and the Japanese Dear Brian and Nancy: I can understand that you want to hear from someone who’s working and living in space before deciding whether to make the commitment yourselves. According to your letter, you’ve reached the “finals” in the selection process now. The next step will be the admission interview. After that, if you get an offer, you’ll have to decide whether to go for the sixmonths’ training. Then there’s the big step of the first space flight, the three-weeks’ stay in low orbit. By now the flight itself is quite routine; you’ll find that the single-stage shuttle interior is much like that of one of the smaller commercial jets; therell be 150 of you traveling together. The gforces will be higher than in commercial aviation, but still nothing to worry you. The trip into orbit will take only about twenty minutes, and then you’ll experi­ ence something really new: zero gravity. You may feel queasy at first—as if you were on a ship at sea. The purpose of the three-week trial period is to sort out cases of severe space-sickness and to find out whether you are among those who can adapt to commuting each day between normal gravity and zero. That’s impor­ tant because our homes are in gravity obtained by rotation—here in the colony we are held to the ground by centrifugal force, which pulls us to the outer shell of the habitat. But many of us work in the construction industry, which is conducted outside the habitat where there is no gravity at all. Those who can adapt to rapid change qualify for higher-paying jobs. The trial period also gives a person the chance to decide “this is not for me.” After the three weeks, you’ll be ready to transfer to one of the “liners” on its next trip in. In the colony orbit, the biggest things you’ll see will be the solar satellite power stations being assembled to supply energy for the earth. Those power stations are about ten times as big as the colonies themselves. You won’t see much detail from the outside of the colonies because they’re shielded against cosmic rays, solar flares and meteoroids by a thick layer of material, mainly slag, which occurs as a waste product from the processing of lunar soil to obtain construction mater­ ials. All the habitats are variations of basic sphere, cylinder, or ring shapes. We live in Bernal Alpha, a sphere about 500 meters in diameter whose inside circum­ ference is nearly a mile at its “equator.” We have track races and bicycle races that use the ring pathway. That path wanders all the way round, generally following the equator, and near it is our little river. Bernal Alpha rotates once every 32 seconds, so there is earth gravity at the equator. The land forms a big curving valley, rising from the equator to 45-degree “lines of latitude” on each side. The land area is mostly covered with lowrise, terraced apartments, shopping walk­ ways, and small parks. Many services, light industries, and shops are located underground or in a central low-gravity sphere, or are steeply terraced, because we like to preserve most of our land area for grass and parks. Our sunshine comes in at an angle near 45 degrees, rather like midmorning or midafternoon on earth. The day-length, and therefore the climate, are set by our choice of when to admit sunlight. We keep Canaveral time, but two other colonies near us are on differ­ ent times. All the colonies serve the same industries, so the production operations run twenty-four hours a day, three shifts, but since the workers are on different times, no one has to work the night shift. Alpha has a Hawaiian climate, so we lead an indoor-outdoor life all year. Our apartment is about the same size as our 4 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN plunged ahead. If we do something with magnetic flight in this country, it’s going to be with imported technology.” In 2081: A Hopeful View o f the Human Future O’Neill discusses magnetic flight and a great many other delights and conveniences to come: robots in our homes and our factories, bionic medicine, centralized computer services, cities with controlled climates, holographic visits by telephone, and, of course, space colonies containing all the finest pleasures of life on Earth. But above all, O’Neill paints a picture of a world filled with possibilities, in which technology can be used both to widen our horizons and to reduce our institutions to a more human scale. In 2081, as in all of O’Neill’s projects, “hopeful” is the important word. “I was led to start thinking about space colonies originally by reflecting on the predictions of the Club of Rome—the idea of the limits of growth and the necessity of giving up personal freedom in order to live within a supposed rigorous set of physical laws. It seemed to me that the whole point of opening up the resources of space is to escape from that set of consequences.” O’Neill is impressed by the numbers of young people who speak to him after his lectures and tell him the same thing: His lectures, and the reading they have done on space colonies, have given them new hope, new zest, new enthusiasm. “Where people are involved,” says O’Neill, “there is always the potential for good and for evil, but there seems a good chance that opening the door into space could improve the human condition on Earth. Relieved even a little from the drive to squabble with other nations for the diminishing resources of our planet, we could hope for a more peaceful future than will otherwise be our lot. I think there is reason to hope that the opening of the new High Frontier will challenge the best that is in us.” old house on earth, and it has a garden Alpha was one of the first colonies to b' built, so our trees have had time to grow to a good size. You’ll notice immediately the small scale of things, but for a town of 10,000 people, we’re in rather good shape for entertainment: four small cinemas, quite a few good small restaurants and many amateur theatrical and musical groups. It takes only a few minutes to travel over to the neighboring colonies, so we visit them often for movies, concerts or just a change of climate. There are ballet pro­ ductions on the big stage out in the lowgravity recreational complex that serves all the colonies. Ballet in one-tenth gravity is beautiful to watch: dreamlike, and very graceful. You’ve seen it on TV, but the reality is even better. Of course, right here in Alpha we have our own low-gravity swimming pools, and our clubrooms for human-powered flight. (You’d reallyenjoy riding a “bicycle” with flapping wings instead of wheels.) Quite often Jenny and I like to climb the path to the “North Pole” and pedal out along the zerogravity axis of the sphere for half an hour or so, especially after sunset, when we can see the soft lights from the pathways below. To go on with our situation, it’s a comfortable life here. Fresh vegetables and fruit are in season all the time, because there are agricultural cylinders for each month of the year, each with its own day-length. We grow avocados and papayas in our own garden and never need to use insecticide sprays. You asked whether we feel isolated. Some of us do get “island fever” to some degree, probably because we’re really first-generation immigrants; it never seems to bother the kids that were born here. When you sign your contract there are clauses that help quite a bit, though. One is the provision for free telephone and videophone time to the earth. An­ other sets up free transportation to earth and return on a space-available basis. Jenny and I took a six months’ leave after our first three years here. Our visit was luxurious, because our salaries are paid in part in earth currency; we’re both employed, Jenny as a turbine blade in­ spector and I in precision assembly. Our housing, food, clothing, and the rest are purchased in colony currency, so our earth salaries just accumulate in the bank. When we went back we had a lot of money to spend, and even on a luxury basis we couldn’t go through it in six months. We found something, though, that may help to answer your basic question: By the time the vacation was nearly over, we were very ready to come back here. We missed our own place. Jenny is an enthusiastic gardener, and though other people were living in our apartment here and taking care of the greenery, she wanted to be at home to enjoy it herself. And I missed the friends I’d been working with. I can best describe the other thing that drew us back by saying that the space habitats are exciting places to be. They’re growing and changing so fast that if you’re away for six months you’ve missed a lot. Of the people who came with us, more than half intend to stay after their five-year contract is up. I understand that the settlement of Alaska since its acquisition has had about the same kind of “stay ratio.” Now we’re beginning to ask ourselves: Will we want to retire to earth or not? We don’t have to face that for another twenty years, but we can see already that it won’t be an easy decision. Some of us who are handy with tools have formed a club to design and build our own spacecraft— rather like the home-built aircraft clubs on earth. We’re thinking of homestead­ ing one of the smaller asteroids, and the numbers look reasonable. Especially if our daughter and son-in-law decide to come along, with the grandchildren, I think we’re more likely to move farther out than to go back. If you do decide to come out, let us know what flight you’ll be on and we’ll meet you at the docks. We’d like you to come to our place for supper, and we’ll be glad to help you to get settled. MARCH, 1983 Bernal^lpha/Eolony 6 /2 4 /0 3 ^ * -' (Reprinted with permission from The High Frontier by Gerard K. O’Neill.) 5 Astronaut Sally Ride prepares for a simulated ejection during a training exercise at the survival training school at Vance Air Force Base in Oklahoma. (Photos courtesy of NASA.) W hen the space shuttle flies in A pril, astronaut Sally R id e ’72 will be on e o f th e crew. rom the Delaware County Daily Times of November 21,1969: “Sally Ride, an 18-year-old sophomore at Swarthmore College, may one day be the first woman astronaut but for the moment she is the number one woman college tennis player in the East.” Those words were prophetic indeed. When NASA’s space shuttle “Challenger” makes its second flight in late April, Sally Ride ’72 will become the first American woman in space. (The Russians sent up the first woman astronaut, Valentina Tereshkova, nearly twenty years ago.) The native Southern Californian came to Swarthmore as a physics major in 1968 and quickly made a name for herself by winning back-to-back crowns in the Invi­ tational Eastern Women’s Intercollegiate Tennis Championships in her freshman and sophomore years. As it turned out, she played well enough to consider be­ coming a professional tennis player, re­ turned to California (“where tennis was easier to play”), and transferred to Stan­ ford University. It was there that she received two bachelor’s degrees, in Eng­ lish and physics, and her master’s and doctor’s degrees in physics. Her break into the astronaut program came in 1978, when she saw an article in the Stanford student newspaper in which NASA was reported to be looking for shuttle astronauts. More than 8,000 hope­ fuls applied, including 1,544 women. Thirty-five were selected to join NASA’s eighth class, six of them women, one of them Ride. She completed her training, worked jn Toronto with Canadian scientists who developed a “remote arm” for the space shuttle, and traveled to Australia to visit tracking stations there. She served as a capsule communicator for shuttle flights number two and three, that is, as the go-between astronaut who communicates with the shuttle from Mis­ sion Control in Houston, relaying mes­ sages from various ground personnel. It was during the second flight that Ride asked the men in space, “When do I get my turn?” F MARCH, 1983 She’s getting her turn fairly early. Some of the seventy-nine active astro­ nauts, including her husband, Steve Haw­ ley, have been waiting more than ten years to go into space. Is Steve jealous that she’s going first? “No,” Ride said. “The space program has been funded through the decade of the ’80s and will include more missions beyond the space shuttle. He’ll get his turn.” Commanding her mission will be Navy Captain Robert Crippen, who flew on the maiden flight of the first shuttle, “Columbia,” nearly two years ago. Ride’s job title will be mission specialist, as will that of the third astronaut, Air Force Lt. Col. John M. Fabian. Among other tasks, the pair will put three satellites into orbit: two communications satellites and one to be used for a “rendevous” test. “We will release the satellite, let it float free, orbit around it, and use the shuttle’s mechanical arm to bring it back on board.” This, she said, will be the first demonstration that the shuttle has the capability to retrieve payloads in orbit for servicing, etc. Her specialities as an astrophysicist are X-ray stars (stars which give off high levels of X-ray radiation) and the manner in which those rays are absorbed by clouds in space. These stars are difficult to study from earth where the rays are blocked by the atmosphere, so Ride and other X-ray astronomers usually rely on space satellites and space-born telescopes for their raw data. In the future the space shuttle program is expected to carry into orbit a large telescope that will be perfect for studying X-ray stars. Ride said she had not given much thought to being a role model as a woman until her recent selection for the shuttle program and the ensuing public relations tours, talks with youngsters at schools, and press conferences. “I’ve al­ ways followed the space program closely,” she said. “I could tell you exactly where I was when John Glenn went into space and when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. I was interested in space but it wasn’t anything I built a career around. & r 1 v ,r „ V "" - / J •T"* YX:; Instead I planned to go into research in physics. I wouldn’t have known how to prepare for a career as an astronaut even if it had occurred to me to try, since women weren’t involved in the space program at the time.” Times change, and her years in the astronaut program and her advice for anyone hoping to join the program carry no hint of sexism. “Pick a field you like. NASA has no requirements that you be in superb physical shape or great at anything. There’s no ‘best’field of study, since the program uses a wide range of the sciences—physics, biology, geology, medicine.” She added she hoped she was not picked because she was a woman but because she was a scientist. Commander Crippen put those doubts to rest in a recent interview. “She’s being treated no differently from any other astronaut. She was chosen for the mis­ sion because she’s good.” By Maralyn Orbison Gillespie ’49 THEY PLAYED SKY HIGH The little team that shouldn't proved it could HWh SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN “This year we should have been a very weak team,” said Coach Tom Lapinski, remembering the 31-12 loss against Trenton State in a preseason scrimmage. “We had five seniors out for pre­ season practice,” recalls Tri-captain Ed Pinney ’83. “Three were starters in ’81. We had lost fifteen men, all but one defensive lineman, a quarterback, and a halfback. Eighteen freshmen came out.” “Initially we thought the problem was going to be the defensive line,” said Tri­ captain Jim Sanderson ’83. “All of the defensive line was supposed to return, but we lost one to an injury, one went to Rice as an exchange student for a semes­ ter, and two transferred to other insti­ tutions.” “Last year we had better players,” said Jim Weber ’84, “but this year we were 8 and 1.” “The coaches made the most of what we had,” said Jeff Leiser ’86. “We needed a tight end so they made one out of a freshman halfback. Another freshman, a high school fullback, was converted to an offensive guard. Where they needed size, they moved a 222-pound defensive tackle to the offense and a 232-pound guard to tackle. A reserve tackle became a center. Two quarterbacks became wide receivers, while a starting wide receiver was con­ verted to a right halfback.” With none of the obvious advantages going for them, the players agreed early in the season, “Let’s play one game at a time.” All but the freshmen remembered the astonishing 7-2 record of the year before, with losses to only Lebanon Valley and the Middle Atlantic Division III champion, Widener—Swarthmore’s first winning season since 1966. The ’82 squad was reminiscent in numbers of the ’81 squad but not in MARCH, 1983 experience and ability (according to the players’ own evaluation). They played Game No. 1 to a 2-0 win over Moravian, scoring a safety in the last twenty-eight seconds of play. As Phoenix reporter Jeff Gutkowski ’86 saw Freshman Jeff Leiser’s break through the Moravian line to smother a punt, his “exertion on that one play was symbolic of the entire Swarthmore defensive effort of the game. If the stellar defense continues to play solidly,” he wrote, “it’s only a matter of time until Swarthmore’s ‘self-destruct’ offense gets on track.” In Game 2 the defense continued to buy time for the inexperienced offense, as the defense held Lebanon Valley to 10 yards total scoreless offense and beat them 14-0. In Game 3 both offense and defense worked together to down Johns Hopkins 28-10. The inexperienced offen­ sive line had begun to operate as a cohesive unit. By October 9, when Swarthmore beat Dickinson 14-0, Jim Weber’s front page article in the Phoenix told the story of the best football record for the partial season since 1916,4-0; of the defense which held its opponent to negative rushing yardage for the second time in the season and to 83 yards total offense; and of the team tied for first place in its MAC Division. Weber pointed out: “The defense (1) has not given up a touchdown this year; in fact, it has been 27 quarters since any team has scored a touchdown on the defense; (2) has not given up a rushing touchdown in 45 quarters of play. . . ; (3) has over the past ten games allowed an Was winning an embarrassment at Swarthmore? Not fo r the plucky players, nor the cheering fans who filled the stands, nor a young admirer o f Coach Lapinski. average of just 4.9 points per game to its opponents (consider that Swarthmore’s offense averaged 18.2 over the same period).” The Gettysburg win the following week was a big one. “We played sky high,” said Jim Weber, to an emotional 29-7 victory over the team that had beaten Widener the week before. The Garnet made it a 6-0 season by defeating Upsala 23-3. The Phoenix sum­ marized (on the back page this time): “Well, the morals of this story are (a) Swarthmore isn’t a fairy tale team and (b) they aren’t to be fooled with.” By the time the Garnet beat Ursinus 28-14 for its seventh straight win to make it the first 7-0 team in the 104-year history of football at Swarthmore (in the two for­ mer best years, 1939 and 1966, the records were 6-0-1), the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Times had something to say about the team and the College. The Garnet had won too many games, the media said, causing embarrassment to some people at the academically proud institution. “I get the feeling,” Co-captain Sand­ erson was quoted in the Inquirer as saying, “that this campus resents us hav­ ing a winning team.” The Inquirer con­ tinued: “Members of the football team say that, for the last two years, students and faculty members have been publicly critical of the team, feeling that athletic success detracts from the school’s aca­ demic reputation. Some players say they are openly insulted and snubbed. Head Coach Tom Lapinski says that his team’s success has spawned anti-football senti­ ment so strong that he might be fired.” The Inquirer article also reported on a student-faculty committee that was formed a year ago “to investigate ‘ten­ sions’ between athletes and non-athletes on campus.” The New York Times, in a six-column story headlined “Swarthmore’s Shake­ spearean Cast and Other Tales,” shored up its opening premise that “things are close to normal at Swarthmore these days” with this paragraph: “Normality in Swarthmore football has many mean­ ings: It is the current coach, Tom Lapin­ ski, being under fire amid a 7-0 start as were his predecessors during a 34-game losing streak a decade ago; it is a 39player roster whose college board scores were around the mid 1200’s and whose bodies averaged around 190 pounds and under 6 feet.” Then it broke the story on Kevin Lagasse, who had just finished his second game under his real name; because his parents did not want him to play football, he had played the first four games under the pseudonym “Rockwell Thisbe.” Lagasse performed the role of Thisbe when his Shakespeare class was studying A Midsummer Night’s Dream and had borrowed the name. Four days later the Associated Press picked up the story that was to find its way all across the country and as far as Paris and Johannesburg. The lead was: “The undefeated Swarthmore College football team, angered by a review of athletics at the school, refuses to wear the College insignia on its helmets.” The story of Swarthmore’s football success had become “cute,”as Announcer Douglas Kiker described it, after NBCTV News sent him to the campus to investigate. His report appeared on Fri­ day, November 12, at 6:30 P.M. EST. Saturday at noon CBS-TV Sports fea­ tured the team and the institution on a three-minute segment of a half-hour show in which football at Swarthmore was contrasted to football at Arizona State, scheduled to come off probation in De­ cember. The Philadelphia Daily News reported Kiker as saying after his visit to the campus: “Swarthmore is such a center of Quaker intellectualism. They’re taught to examine everything. That’s why they examined the football team and its suc- SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN cess. We were stopping students at ran­ dom in front of the cafeteria, asking them what they thought of the football team. One told me: ‘It’s like Jean Paul Sartre said, . . .’ and he rattled off some quote. It’s not often you find that happening.” His counterpart at CBS, Bob Mansbach, after talking to students, faculty, administrators, coaches, and players, was reported by the Daily News to have said: “All we’re missing is the alumni— and James Michener wasn’t available this week. Nor the Governor of Massa­ chusetts, the three Nobel winners, nor the Senator from Michigan.” Swarthmore helped fill the void in the media created by the strike in the Na­ tional Football League, and as the Bal­ timore Sun commented: “Who needs the NFL? Send Swarthmore to the Super Bowl.” The media’s stories were “cute,” occa­ sionally inaccurate, frequently distorted; but they almost all made these telling points: Swarthmore is a prestigious aca­ demic institution; its football players average college board scores in the 1200’s; all of the nine team members who gradu­ ated last year are now in law, dental, or business schools, or plan to attend in September, 1983; Swarthmore football players, none on athletic scholarships, play for the fun of it; and the team (when MARCH, 1983 Widener was favored “by a nose”to win the M AC Championship, and squad size and depth did overwhelm the Garnet’s emotional edge (whipped up by Lapinski at half time) to a 24-7 defeat in the mud. “Go Swat,"even a banner in Greek and a cheer beginning “Sophocles, Pericles, Peloponnesian Wars; X 2, Y2, H2 SO 4 , ”added to a half-time contemplative moment fo r Eddie Meehan, could not hold back Widener in the battle fo r the Middle Atlantic Conference Championship. the articles appeared) was 7 and 0. (For a presentation of some of the controversial and philosophical issues involved in football at Swarthmore, please read the second part of this foot­ ball feature, “Will Success Spoil Swarth­ more?” on page fourteen.) As the media exploited “normality” at Swarthmore, the Garnet continued to win. It took a 25-yard field goal with just 1:45 left in the game to beat Western Maryland 12-10. Perhaps the team had been caught thinking ahead to the fol­ lowing week when it would face Widener in a showdown for the conference cham- A supportive father comforts Ed Meehan ’84 after Ursinus. Later Halfback Meehan and four teammates were named to the first All-Conference team: Ed Pinney ’83 OT, Dom Lepone ’85 LB, Jim Sanderson ’83 DB, and John Walsh ’83 DE. Lapinski was voted MAC (south) Coach o f the Year. 12 pionship. The Delaware County Daily Times billed the game as the Battle of Route 320. On November 13 chartered busloads of the College community crowded into the Widener stands. In eight games Swarthmore had given up only two touchdowns to its oppo­ nents’offense; it had not beaten Widener since 1969 when Widener was PMC. “We’re not the better team on paper,” said Lapinski. “Widener is. We’re actu­ ally weaker this year than last year on paper. Emotionally we’re higher than last year. Emotion has made the difference.” “It was the game we were waiting for,” said Jeff Selverian, freshman defensive tackle, knowing it would probably be the last football game the two institutions would play because of a MAC realign­ ment scheduled for the fall of 1983. When the last mud-splattered play was run, Academia’s Team lost 24-7; the impossible dream had ended. As Lapinski commented after the game: “The numbers wore us down. . . . They were just too big for us, too many for us.” “We never expected to achieve what we did,” said Sean Crowley ’85 in retro­ spect. “We won six games in a row last year,” said Jeff Seagraves ’84. “I sat down with the schedule and asked myself how in hell we were going to do it again this year, and we won eight games in a row.” The answer to how the outnumbered, outsized team with its many inexperi­ enced players, playing out of position, did it, they say, is the coach and his staff. Lapinski is lauded by the players for his play-making astuteness and his abil­ ity to motivate the team. “He’s a brilliant offensive play-caller,” says one member of the offense. “We would get six to seven brand new offensive plays each week.” “The coaching staff would totally re­ vise our blocking schemes each week, with twenty new pages of plays to add to our play book, which was thick to start with.” “No one in the league has as compli­ cated and intricate an offense and de­ fense.” The team had the plays, and it also had the drive to win, attributable also, the players said, to the coach. “He gets the adrenalin flowing so much you can’t help but get excited.” “He’s inspiring. I look at how much he puts into it, and I want to give all I have. He’s in his office all hours going over films and scouting reports, working out the next game’s strategies.” Lapinski, who played a half dozen positions on the University of Delaware team 1962-66, is a full-time biology teacher in a Wilmington, Delaware, high school. He was given the job of bringing the Swarthmore football program out of an eight-year slump that included a 29game losing streak. His first seasons were 1-7 and 1-7-1. By 1977 he was 4-4-1, then 4-5, 4-4-1, 4-5, and in 1981 7-2. During the first twenty-one games he coached, he was 2-17-2; during the most recent games he coached, he has been 18-5, and four of those losses were to nationally-ranked teams. With an average of fewer than forty players out for the team year after year, success, explains Lapinski, “depends up­ on not getting injured. In ’81 and ’82 we’ve had two back-to-back seasons in which injuries have been minimal.” Lapinski’s weekly Sunday schedule highlights his coaching methods. Before noon he is at his desk doing the routine paper work of reports, statistics, and records, and his three assistants begin looking at yesterday’s game films. By four o’clock staff members get together to work until midnight planning strate­ gies for tackling the next opponent. “First we look at personnel. How big are SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN PHOTOGRAPHS BY STEVE GOLDBLATT ’67 AND MARTIN NATV1G. they and how fast? Where can you create a mismatch (one-on-one where you can beat them on a certain play)? We try to figure out every adjustment they can make to any formation we use. We will devise 16 to 25 formations for each game. Most of our opponents play personnel football; Widener, for example, uses only four formations.” Lapinski sums it up: “If you can gather what your opponents are doing with their personnel and predict where they are going to be, give them the bait, and let them buy it, then you can take it away MARCH, 1983 and catch them with their pants down.” The computer is an essential tool to the coaches, and 25- to 30-foot-long print­ outs of data, much of it secured by scouts, enable them to predict regularly with 70 percent success (they claim 96 percent against Upsala in ’79 when Swarthmore pulled an unexpected 14-3 win). Swarthmore also scouts itself, an un­ common practice. “Using data from film and charting sheets (every play, defensive and offensive, is charted the way it was run), we put ourselves through the com­ puter in an attempt to find out what our offensive tendencies were. We hope that our opponent does the same thing. Then we try to deviate from those tendencies.” Lapinski further documents the ef­ fectiveness of his scouts with this ex­ ample: Three years ago Villanova, as part of a study of its scouting procedures, asked to borrow Swarthmore’s scouting reports, along with those from the Uni­ versity of Pittsburgh and the University of Wisconsin. When Villanova returned the reports to Lapinski, he was told that Swarthmore’s were the most thorough of the three. Commenting on his players’ affirma­ tions that he was the reason for their Rocky-like season, Lapinski said: “Char­ acter is caught, not taught. If you teach in a disciplined fashion, you will get a disciplined team. Some people call it conservatism: The rules are set; here is your assignment.” His players, and his MAC colleagues who named him Coach of the Year, call it first-class coaching. The ’82 season is one the players and many other Swarthmoreans are going to remember the rest of their lives. Never has the media paid so much attention to a Swarthmore team. An alumnus in New York reported that early Monday morn­ ing conversations in his law office would start off: “Well, how’d Swarthmore do Saturday?” College administrators’ mail was thick with letters from alumni asking what was going on. Alumni sent coach and captains their congratulations. Even people on campus became accustomed to reporters with cameras or pads and pen­ cils wandering around Parrish and the Field House interviewing athlete and non-athlete. At the end of it all, Jeff Seagraves could still say: “It’s great to play football at Swarthmore. There’s no high pressure. It’s still fun to go out and play where the emphasis is on doing the best you can— winning will follow.” he headlines told a strange story: “Football surge hurting Swarth­ more’s image,”“College shuns win­ ning,” “Winning riles folks at Swarth­ more,” “Winning tarnishes academic re­ putation.” A myth has been created and we seem to be stuck with it. Swarthmore may forever be the college which didn’t want to have a winning football team. For a brief time, the story was a hot item on sports pages and in syndicated columns across the country. Even in the funnies: For five days Tank McNamara, the so-called Doonesbury of sports car­ toons, narrated the dilemma of the staff and students of Swinburne University— “an exclusive private institution”—who were deeply embarrassed by their foot­ ball team’s undefeated season. All of this unexpected publicity was entertaining—up to a point. On campus, reaction took the form of startled amuse­ ment. But many alumni, distressed by reports of lack of support for the team, wrote and telephoned to voice their con­ cern. The general burden of their com­ ment was: “What’s wrong with you peo­ ple? We applaud excellence on the part of Swarthmore students in any endeavor! ” Presumably the media would have paid less attention to Swarthmore had it not been for the NFL strike. As it was, the reporters and camera crews descended in force, ravenous for copy and desperate for “color.” Lured initially by the Gar­ net’s second miracle season, they stayed to elaborate on the “man-bites-dog” theme of the college which felt a winning football team was incompatible with its academic reputation. Does the Swarthmore community really disapprove of winning football games? Of course not! The crowd of students, faculty, staff, and parents brav­ ing icy wind and muddy grounds at Widener University on November 13th certainly weren’t there to see the Little Quakers lose! But recent committee studies and reports concerning athletics —specifically, perceived tensions between some athletes and the general college community—have focused attention on the relationship between sports and the rest of the curriculum. These tensions (now generally acknowledged to be a thing of the past) were seized upon by the media and magnified to crisis propor­ tions. One example, nationally publicized, was the matter of the “SC” logo on the football team’s helmets. According to the press, the members of the team were so dismayed by lack of support from the T 14 Will Success Spoil Swarthmore? Last fall the glare of national publicity revealed that not all the clashes took place on the field. By Nancy Smith College community that they refused to affix the insignia, declaring they weren’t playing for Swarthmore but for them­ selves and their coach. In fact, the insig­ nia has not been used for at least two seasons, a point easily proven by photo­ graphs of the team in action in ’80 and ’81. The players said the letters kept slipping awry or peeling off and that they weren’t attractive; there was no malice involved in not wearing them. After this season’s brouhaha about helmet insignia, some team members are enjoying design­ ing an altogether new logo for future use. Football team members were them­ selves among the first to refute the media mythology. Interviewed on campus, de­ fensive end Jeff Seagraves ’84 said, “The Inquirer made us look like a bunch of cry babies. There may have been problems with the College community in the past, but that’s over. We’re making real prog­ ress now.” Sean Crowley ’85, offensive lineman, declared, ‘’You can’t ask for more support than we had from the kids this year.” Eddie Meehan ’84 summed it up: “We’re pretty fed up with this con­ troversy. We just want to go out and enjoy the respect of the community and represent the College. If the insignia means so much to people, 111 wear it on my forehead.” On November 1, 1982, the Philadel­ phia Inquirer carried an article by columSWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN Garnet players celebrate scoring a safety which gave them a 12-10 edge in the game against Western Maryland. nist Chuck Newman which was particu­ larly irresponsible in its representation of faculty members as critical of the team and the coach and unsupportive of their efforts. Associate Professor of History Robert S. DuPlessis and Thomas Finholt ’83, both of whom were misquoted in the article, wrote a three-page letter to the newspaper protesting that the quotations attributed to them “were taken out of context or truncated.” The letter, which was never printed, concluded with the following: “Students at Swarthmore will continue to play football well, dance well, study well, and even take a break now and then. But none will expect that their particular interests and activities qualify her or him for special adulation. There’s an interesting story to be written about how Swarthmore students manage to combine an extraordinary range of activi­ ties with academic excellence, without expecting any special attention. We thought this was the story we were giving Mr. Newman.” The newspaper did publish a letter from senior Suellen Heath: “The issue on our campus is not that there is no support for our team or that there is not enough support, but that the media have come in and focused on the few people who are indifferent to football rather than the majority who think our winning streak is pretty fantastic and lots of fun to be a part of.” A hand-made banner which hung in the locker room on the day of the Widener game said it best: “To beat or not to beat. There is no question.” But the myth dies hard, and the in­ sistence even now that Swarthmore is either about to give up football, fire the coach, or both, continues to haunt the College community. The relationship of athletics, andfcoi the football program in particular, to the rest of the College has been a topic for philosophic consideration on campus for a long time. “Football has been asso­ ciated throughout its history at Swarth­ more with debates about what sort of college we wanted to have,” observes Robert C. Bannister, professor of his­ tory. “This is not a new issue. If you look at the College at the time of the intro­ duction of the Honors Program in the early twenties, and look at it again a decade later, you can see that the biggest change isn’t so much in Honors as in the MARCH, 1983 football schedule.” sides. It was alleged too that football Recently, some members of the Col­ figured prominently (though not exclu­ lege community have been critical of sively) in a separate and unconstructive, what they perceive to be a new era of even destructive, campus subculture. professionalism and intensity in athletics There was general agreement that the at Swarthmore, an escalation of recruit­ pressures and practices of recruitment ment activities, particularly in football. for football contributed critically to this To use a popular expression, there is