SmKTHMORE

College Bulletin • November 1989

PAEAN
W ho have tools,
will travel
through sleet and snow
and dark of night?
The skilled staff will
(though boxed among
the bathroom tiles
of dorms all summer
fixing pipes
and people’s domiciles
is more their style),
making every
wire, wall, and window
what it ought to be
so Swarthmore minds
can see
'
just how the cosmos
came to be
or reading “Ludlow Fair”
as effortlessly as air.
oblivious to awl
and ball-peen hammer,
dibble, file, jackscrcw.
clamp, or tamper.
Who will take a four-inch
brush or puncheon
to Tarble’s stones
in time for luncheon?
the skilled staff will.

COLLEGE BULLETIN • NOVEMBER 1989

2
Try Cleveland and Milwaukee for Opera and Theater
In Cleveland, David Bamberger ’•62 helps raise the curtain on a
powerful, innovative opera; in Milwaukee, Sara O ’Connor ’54
stages sophisticated, successful regional theater.
By Maralyn Orbison Gillespie ’49

and

Damien Jaques

4
Old MacDonald Sings a New Tune
Substantial changes in agriculture make American farming more
productive but less fam iliar to most Americans.
By Grant Heilman ’41

10
The Bottom Line
Four retiring professors offer candid appraisals o f Swarthmore
over three decades.
Editor:
Maralyn Orbison Gillespie ’49
Managing Editor:
Roger Williams
Assistant Managing Editor:
Kate Downing
Editor for Copy and Class Notes:
Nancy Curran
Assistant Copy Editor:
Ann D. Geer
Designer: Bob Wood
Cover: From mountain to meadow
to arid prairie, Herefords, originally
an English breed of beef cattle, are
successfully raised. Photo by Grant
Heilman ’41.

15
j Squatters’ Rights
A College tryst and a tale o f two hoveb.
By D on Mitchell ’69

18
Through Soviet Eyes

f;iHPj^ H L;

The first two exchange students to spend a year at Swarthmore
voice their opinions and observations.
By Linda Feldmann

DEPARTMENTS
The Swarthmore College Bulletin (ISSN
0888-2126), o f which this is volume
LXXXVI, number 7, is published in
September, twice in November, and in
February, May, and August by Swarth­
more 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.

■ fitti

21 The College

J S !K S w S S 9 li 25 Letters to the Editor
26 Alumni Directory Errata
^ B 3 J S Z $ jh

30 Class Notes
35 Deaths

ö l W

i f i H

50 Recent Books by Alumni

For extraordinary sophistication and innovation in opera and theater

Try Cleveland
and
M ilwaukee

D

avid Bamberger
’62joins the leader o f the rock g
Police to stage a unique and eagerly awaited opera, Holy
Blood & Crescent Moon, at Cleveland Opera

David Bamberger’s 25-year career in grand
opera may be said to have begun on stage
in Pearson Theatre in 1961 in an evening of
four one-acts. In the opening Tevya, Bam­
berger had the starring role and made
Swarthmore theater history by being the
first actor to appear in the first production
staged in Pearson. One campus critic trum­
peted, “It was the best student acting I have
seen.”
It was not as an actor, however, but as a
director of an opera that the evening was to
be prescient for Bamberger. He directed the

S

by Maralyn Orbison Gillespie ’49

seminar break.”
It was many miles and 14 years before
this Phi Beta Kappa history major made it
to his current stage home, Cleveland Opera,
where he is general director and where in the
fall his production of another new opera,
Holy Blood & Crescent Moon, was creating
a sensation in the music world. Bamberger’s
production on Oct. 10-15,1989, was noticed
by “the eyes (Continued on page 56)
*Score by Francis Taber Ashton ’53, libretto
by Philip N. Price ’52

ara O ’Connor ’54 has been instrumental in shaping the
growth o f regional theater in the United States through her
work at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater

When a lengthy newspaper profile of Sara
O’Connor, managing director of the Mil­
waukee Repertory Theater, was published
two years ago, her friends and associates
were amazed by one revelation. Until she
was in her late 20s, O’Connor used the
nickname Sally.
It was as Sally Andrews that O’Connor
attended Swarthmore College, graduating in
1954 with High Honors in art history. But
to many local folks, the woman who has
played a key role in Milwaukee’s downtown
development and run a major regional the­
ater for 15 years didn’t fit their stereotype of
a Sally.
NOVEMBER 1989

fourth one-act of the night, an opera
called The Seminar.* Of this first opera he
ever directed, Bamberger remembers the
interesting possibilities posed by the asym­
metrical shape of Pearson Stage. “I staged
the opera from all angles so that wherever
you sat, the actors were playing to you.” He
remembers also, “One of my great coups
was to get Kerry Kelly ’64, Gene Kelly’s
daughter, to stage the production number
[“The Gavotte over the Teacups”] at the

Her cool efficiency, indefatigable appetite
for hard work, and ability to play hard ball
with national real estate developers make
Sara seem a much more appropriate name.
And in many of Milwaukee’s most impor­
tant and influential circles, Sara is the only
name you need to use in referring to
O’Connor. Simply say “Sara,” and people
will know about whom you are speaking.
O’Connor is one of the best known and
most respected arts administrators in the
country. Since becoming the person respon­
sible for the Milwaukee Rep’s business affairs

by Damien Jaques

in 1974, she has been instrumental in shaping
the growth of the entire regional theater
movement in the U.S.
She is the only person to serve as president
of both the Theater Communications Group,
a national service organization to theaters,
and the League of Resident Theaters, a
collective bargaining association of more
than 70 not-for-profit professional theaters.
(Last year the Theater Communications
Group honored her for service in adminis­
tration to nonprofit theater in the U.S.) In
Milwaukee, O’Connor spearheaded the ef­
fort for the most expensive redevelopment
project (Continued on page 28)
3

Sings A N ew Tune
Change on the farm is profound,
but farms themselves still
represent the images many
o f us identify as “America”
Text and photos by Grant Heilman ’41

E ditor’s note: Grant Heilman ’41 did his
Swarthmore Honors thesis on the agricul­
tural colony founded in Alaska by the New
Deal in 1936, living with a fam ily during the
summer o f his junior year. A s an under­
graduate working fo r the College’s News
Office, he photographed Stan Cope ’42,
subject o f an article about a farm boy who
made good in Eastern college athletics, fo r
Country Gentleman magazine.
He has been recording and reporting on
farm ing ever since. His organization o f
eight people provides photographs to pub­
lishers and advertisers all over the world
from its expanding file o f some 250,000
photographs. His most recent book, Farm
(Abbeville Press, 1988), is the inspiration
and source fo r this article. Heilman and his
wife, Barbara Whipple ’43, live in the
mountains o f Colorado.
or most Swarthmoreans, life on the
farm is something savored only from
the pages of a book, from tearjerkers on
television, or possibly from the sometimes
boring reminiscences of grandparents
brought up way back when.
To that extent Swarthmore is little differ­
ent from much of the rest of the country. A
hundred years ago, almost half of the popu­
lation of the United States lived on farms.

F

Farm numbers today have plummeted to a
little more than 2 percent of the total popu­
lation. Thus we’ve been evolving rapidly
from a rural to an urban society, and with
that, knowledge of farm life has been dwin­
dling.
There are three main reasons for this
great change from rural to urban living.
First, technological advances in farming
have allowed fewer farmers to produce
more, with less manual labor. Reminiscen­
ces of old-timers almost always include
something like, “I walked 22 miles a day in
the furrows behind those damned mules;
god, it was hard work.”
An hour of farm labor today produces
more than 16 times the food it did 80 years
ago. The back side of this is, of course, that
the increase in use of machinery requires
great amounts of power inputs, mostly pe­
troleum products, and increased capital.
As a result of soaring productive capa­
bility by each farmer, farms are larger.
Average farm size went from 252 acres in
1954 to 455 acres in 1986. The family farm
50 years ago had a few chickens, a pig or
two, maybe a handful of dairy cattle. It
raised most of the feed for the animals and
food for the farm family, with maybe a little
extra left over to sell. But as farms have
gotten larger, crop specialization has in-

il
B

Involvement o f the federal government hastens change on the farm

creased. A 10,000-acre spread of nothing
but wheat is common in Wyoming or Colo­
rado, but I rarely see home-baked bread on
the farm table.
Midwest farmers typically talk only of
corn and soybeans. In fact, they are often
referred to as “C S & F” farmers—corn,
soybeans, and Florida—for without animals
on the place, they have few winter respon­
sibilities. But if wheat, corn, and soybeans
are specialties, artichokes may be the ulti­
mate in regional specialization. Practically
all of them grown in the United States are
grown within a few miles of Castroville,
Calif.
Second, this shift from manual labor to
mechanized labor, from small diversified
farms to large specialized farms, has been
partly the result of the availability of outside

E^IJ
I;
capital to make the change. A wheat com­
bine with a 30-foot header costs far above
$100,000, and, yes, it is likely to come with
tilt-wheel steering, air conditioning, and a
stereo tape deck.
Funding for agriculture became a giant
business with Roosevelt’s New Deal in the
’30s, and while government money moved
in, private capital sources continued to grow
too. Money flowed easily—far too easily as
it turned out. I recall a farmer who said to
me: “They’re almost forcing money on me,
told me to build a swimming pool if I
couldn’t think of anything else. I bought
more land instead.”
Sure enough, the biggest result of the

availability of capital, particularly in the
1970s, was rising land prices. Farmers took
the borrowed money and bought out neigh­
bors, and as a result many borrowers ended
up with an unbearable debt load. While
there was some “corporate farming” moving
in, most of the expansion that occurred was
individual farmers gobbling up each other’s
land.
While so-called corporate farming is im­
portant, it needs to be taken in perspective,
and the perspective isn’t simple. Nonfamilyowned corporate farms account for less than
one-half of 1 percent of the total number of
farms, but of course account for a much
larger percentage of the land. The usual
figure is that the top 1 percent of the owners
account for 30 percent of the land, but these
“biggies” aren’t necessarily impersonal cor­
porations—a 10,000-acre wheat farm is
likely to be a family-owned operation.
There have been a number of attempts to
cut down on corporate ownership of farms,
to save the “family farm,” mostly through
state laws. The need for (and effectiveness
of) these actions is still pretty vague, and
because of the drastic drop in land values
through the early ’80s, many corporate farm
owners (actually real estate investors) wish
they had put their money elsewhere.
The much talked about foreign ownership
of farm land, incidentally, doesn’t amount to
a great deal, about 1 percent of the acres;
most of this is forest land owned by nearby
Canadian corporations. The Japanese are
beginning to nibble at American beef pro­
duction, likely with the knowledge that

increasingly they will be able to export beef
from the United States to their own country,
which Americans have long had political
difficulty doing.
Vertical integration, a peculiar term, has
created giant business enterprises that rank
among the Fortune 500; whether they should
be classified as farms is debatable. The
biggest area of vertical integration is in the
poultry industry, where firms like Perdue
and Holly Farms start with chicks and feed
and end up with frozen drumsticks ready for
the microwave. The big firms control the
entire process, but the birds are largely
grown by small, often part-time, growers
who are entrepreneurs, not company em­
ployees, but whose operations are heavily
supervised by legions of company veteri­
narians and cost accountants. Poultry has
been the innovator of vertical integration.
Now beef is beginning to fall in line, and
hogs are about to sniff at the trough.
The third major factor in farm change has
been government policy. The federal gov­
ernment is, and has been, far more involved
in farming than in any other industry except
defense. Farming is where the votes once
were, when half of us were farmers, and the
government’s anxiety over the cliché of “the
small farm as a way of life” has led to the
expenditure of a lot of your money. It has
gone from the Morrill Act, signed by Abra­
ham Lincoln establishing the land-grant
colleges specifically to teach agriculture,
through the 1887 Hatch Act, which started
federally funded ag research, through the
Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, which
began the process of trying to restore farm
prosperity by curtailing farm production
and raising prices. And it’s carried on
through huge expenditures of federal funds

Right: In the Rockies cattle and sheep graze
on pasture, some privately owned, some owned
by the government. The land is seldom man­
aged. Left: In highly mechanized peanut
production, a digger lifts the roots with the
peanuts from under the ground, and a har­
vester separates peanuts from roots. Above:
“Although pigs are very ordinary creatures, ”
says Heilman, “everyone goes wild over photo­
graphs o f them. ” For years his company has
published a popular calendar o f pigs.
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

1

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FARM FACTS
★ Average farm size climbed from
252 acres in 1954 to 455 acres
in 1986
★ The number of farms dropped by
almost 60 percent from 1950 to
1982, but total acreage dropped
only 15 percent
★ An acre of corn produced 72
bushels in 1970; in 1984, 106
bushels
★ The average cow produced about
10,000 pounds of milk a year in
1970; in 1984, nearly 13,000
★ In 1900 one farm worker sup­
ported himself and one city
dweller. Today one farm worker
supports more than 80 city
dwellers

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.atClockwise, top to bottom: Lettuce
is a risky crop, with great price
fluctuations, and is highly laborintensive • In contrast to chick­
ens and hogs, sheep live almost
entirely outdoors • It takes a
strong arm and back to cut cab­
bages from the stalk, trim them,
and put them onto a collector belt
• The average cow in the U.S.
produces 13,000 pounds o f milk
a year; California cows, 16,000.

Farmers can solve production problems; can politicians deliver?

continuing to try to restore farm prosperity,
largely by the same actions begun with the
New Deal. Whether prosperity has come to
farmers depends on whom you ask, but
certainly the Congress and the Department
of Agriculture don’t think so, for they keep
paying out massive amounts of money to
keep th£ farmers going.
There is a peculiarity in this; the problem
seems largely based on the fact that farm
economics don’t work in the same way as
other capitalist economics! As farm prices
drop because of overproduction, the poorest
producers seemingly should be forced out of
production, and the decreased supply should
force prices back up. It’s true that these
weaker producers often are forced off the
farm; they pack their belongings and go to
town, either in retirement or in search of a
new career. But they can afford to go
because their neighbors have bought their
land, and most importantly, the new owners
keep the land in production. When I wander
the back roads of farm country, I keep
hearing farmers say, “I’m going to buy that
place up the road; I really need that land.”
While the number of farms dropped by
almost 60 percent from 1950 to 1982, the
total acreage in farms dropped by only 15
percent, and that was mostly the result of
urban intrusion, cities swallowing farmland.
Meanwhile productivity per acre has soared.
An acre of corn produced 72 bushels in
1970, but that had soared to 106 bushels by
1984. The average cow produced about
10,000 pounds of milk a year in 1970; by
1984 it was close to 13,000 pounds.
The federal effort therefore has been,
through government controls, to overcome
low prices brought on by surplus production
with the thought that prices would then rise
and farmers could then make a living. But
this has had to be coupled with the political
desirability of seeing that few farmers are
forced off their land in the meantime. The
technique has thus been to pay farmers in
various ways not to farm land, and artifi­
cially to support prices. Presently, for exam­
ple, the Conservation Reserve Program aims
to rent erosion-prone land from farmers for
10 years, putting it into grass or trees. The
goal is 40 million acres, more than 10 per­
cent of the total land farmed.
NOVEMBER 1989

These government programs have gradu­
ally come to cost quite a bit of money, even
for the federal government. Depending on
whose figures you accept, the Department of
Agriculture spent about $25 billion in 1987
(true, this comes to only $100 per person in
the United States, but still...).
Farmers have spent a lot of time figuring
how to make the most from this largesse,
which is natural, but they have frequently
done this while decrying the whole process
and talking about “getting the government
off our backs.” At this point I don’t really
think that most of them believe they can
afford to get the government out. They’ll

e’ve been fight­
ing surpluses for
more than 50 years,
still are, and will
be for a long time.”

W

settle for their business run more to their
liking.
The political effort now is to get govern­
mental expenditures for farming back down
to livable amounts while getting farmers on
an even-enough financial keel to keep them
solvent. For the moment both these goals
seem possible. The urban consumer has
complained very little about the cost of food;
there’s some justification to the bumper
sticker that has made the rounds in farm
country: “Don’t criticize the farmer with
your mouth full!”
Exports—and more than half of some of
our crops have gone to the export market—
are beginning to look better, partly thanks to
a livable exchange rate. The trauma of farm
bankruptcies seems to have crested. The
Farm Credit System is showing a hint of
profits. The despair of the drought of 1988
and to some extent 1989 has had its bright
side in reducing crop “carryover” from one
year to the next and been mitigated by—of
course—federal payments.

What of the future? I see more of the same
programs, maybe dressed up with new
names and, I hope, with smaller dollars. The
number of farms will continue to decrease,
but the major drop is surely over. In the long
term, the least-cost producers will be the
ones who stay. High-tech innovations, such
as genetic and chemical improvements, will
more than offset the production losses caused
by increasing environmental restrictions.
American farming will continue to consume
immense amounts of energy; if it isn’t avail­
able, American farming is in trouble. I don’t
know any farmers who will voluntarily go
back to pitchforking hay or milking by
hand.
Chances are the farmer will be, for a time
at least, less dependent on government pay­
ments, more dependent on the market, but
I can’t see a real “free market” for agricul­
tural products. There are some innovative
ideas floating around Washington, such as
“decoupling,” which in some versions would
guarantee the farmer a certain income, letting
his crops bring what they would on a free
market. This makes interesting political ar­
guments, but I can’t see anything that differ­
ent being adopted.
Will we starve? The idea has been widely
publicized, and obviously the answer de­
pends on the time frame we are looking at.
The United States shouldn’t go hungry in the
foreseeable future, but some Third World
countries may if their populations continue
to soar. Can the United States prevent this
starvation? For the near future at least, with
incentives we can produce enough food for
ourselves and everyone likely to starve.
The dire predictions of mass starvation
that kept surfacing 15 to 20 years ago
haven’t proved true, and it is vitally impor­
tant not to underestimate our farmers’ ability
to produce. We’ve been fighting surpluses
for more than 50 years, still are, and will be
for a long time.
But even if we can produce enough food
to avoid world starvation, getting the food
to those who are starving, both here and
abroad, may be beyond us if we can’t solve
the political problems of food welfare pro­
grams. Our farmers, if not too badly hobbled
by restrictions, can solve the production
problems; our politicians may not be able to.
9

The Bottom Line
Four retiringfaculty members calculate the gains
and losses fo r Swarthmore over three decades

M usic
Peter Gram Swing
What kind of a place was Swarthmore in
1955 for a musician? I held the first full-time
appointment in music at the College at that
time. Until then, Swarthmore’s music fac­
ulty, a very distinguished one, was shared
with Haverford. Alfred Swan, whom I
adored and to whom I apprenticed myself as
a teaching assistant in his Russian music
course, was chairman at Haverford as well
as at Swarthmore. William Reese also taught
at both Haverford and Swarthmore.
I was hired initially to conduct the chorus
and the orchestra and to teach a course in
music. I’m not an orchestral conductor by
profession, so I talked Bill Reese into trading
the intro music course he was teaching for

the orchestra, and I ended up teaching two
courses in music and conducting the chorus,
which I have done for 34 years without
interruption. I’m rather proud of that, be­
cause both the Haverford and Bryn Mawr
choruses collapsed during the student revo­
lution, but our chorus didn’t. In fact, at Bryn
Mawr the Music Department eventually
collapsed; Bryn Mawr doesn’t have one any­
more.
But there was a lot of music going on at

n a sense the Lang
Music Building is a
marvelous symbol of
where we have finally
come.”

I

Swarthmore before I came. Alfred Swan
was a most extraordinary musician himself.
I can’t imagine a small liberal arts college,
or for that matter a large university, putting
on a Rimsky-Korsakov opera, and playing
Vaughan Williams, as Alfred did. He was
doing Monteverdi’s madrigals before Nadia
Boulanger ever thought of recording them.
Arnold Dresden was still a living legend,
though he had stopped running those fantas­
tic chamber music parties at his house. Jim
Sorber was, of course, conducting the
chorus; Peter van de Kamp was conducting
the orchestra. I tried to build some kind of
departmental power base by insisting that all
musical activities be the responsibility of the
Music Department. We ended up coaching
chamber music and giving lessons, as well as
teaching courses and directing large ensem­
bles.
In 1964 Boyd Barnard ’17 startled Court­
ney Smith by giving the College $100,000
for the advancement of music at Swarth­
more, thereby generating an annual income
of $5,000. That went a long way in 1964.
We did all kinds of marvelous things, such
as bringing people like Gilbert Kalish, Hon.
’86, and Paul Zukovsky to Swarthmore to
give chamber music concerts and to coach.
At a certain point we couldn’t afford them
anymore, but we had them for eight years as
associates in performance.
So things have flourished as far as the
department is concerned. We now have four
full-time appointments in music, and we all
hold doctorates. This was not the case when
I came. I suppose I was trying desperately to
establish a certain kind of intellectual cachet
for music here. And it was not easy. People
like Mary Albertson would say in faculty
meetings, “Look, anybody who wants to
major in Honors in history better not minor
in music.” It was a long battle, but it helped
when I received a belated doctorate, and it
helped even more when Jim Freeman earned
his doctorate. Then we hired Jerry Levinson
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

and Ann McNamee, who held doctorates.
But the person who will succeed me is still
working on his. He’s a very exciting, young
scholar [Michael Marissen], one of only
three Americans invited to give a paper at
the International Bach Gesellschaft meeting
in Leipzig this year. This is a guy who hasn’t
finished his dissertation yet!
Over the years we have been trying to put
all parts of music together: performance,
thinking about music, playing music, singing
music, participating in music. Students can
come here now and get academic credit for
studying the violin or voice or singing in the
chorus. There’s still the 20-course rule, so
purity of a liberal education has not been
compromised in any way, I can assure you!
We’re not running anything’ that resembles
a conservatory. But it’s nice for students to
be able to say, “Look, Mom and Dad, I’m
going to take violin lessons this year; I can
get some credit for it, and the department
will even help pay for the lessons.”
In a sense the Lang Music Building is a
marvelous symbol of where we finally have
come. We had outgrown every facility and
were scattered all over the place. Lang has
provided a marvelous area for musicians to
gravitate to, and dancers as well, since Jim
Freeman invited dance to get out of Physical
Education and thereby put it into the arts,
where it properly belongs. When I walk into
Lang and see dancers on the upper lobby
practicing, it’s really very moving in a way—
I mean that both figuratively and literally. I
still like to think that I’m in a Department
of Music, rather than in the Department of
Music and Dance, but that’s all right; that’s
partly my age and partly the fact that I still
fancy myself a card-carrying musicologist,
as well as a choral conductor.

Engineering
David L. Bowler
Peter brought you the view from the western
side of the campus; my view is from the
northeastern corner, where we engineers
hang out. Speaking as a teacher of electrical
engineering, the kinds of things that interest
us engineers are the kinds of things you can
put your hands on: a transistor or resistor or
a motor or an integrated circuit. We like to
know how to put them together and how to
do something useful with them. But we may
not think very hard about the cosmic impli­
cations of putting a million transistors—and
NOVEMBER 1989

ne thing that
remains con­
stant over the years
—and this is college­
wide—is the com­
mitment to good
teaching.”

O

this is true—on a piece of silicon about onethird of an inch by two-thirds of an inch. So
I see myself more as a reporter than as an
interpreter.
One of the more interesting aspects of our
department in my 32 years has been the
curricular changes. When I came here in
1957, there were three separate engineering
departments: civil, electrical, and mechani­
cal. Each had its own chairman; each had
four members. Courtney Smith thought it
might be a little more convenient to deal
with one chairman, and he proposed in
1963 that we combine the three departments.
Those of us who were then the younger
members of the faculty saw the strength of
our disciplines going down the drain, and we
objected strenuously, staving off the merger
for one year. But in 1964 those departments
were merged, and with the merger came a
change in the curriculum, which, I think
looking back on it, has been a significant
development in the Swarthmore engineering
education.
Because of the 20-course rule, our stu­
dents may take only 12 courses in the
department. Of them, six are courses that we
regard as essential for all engineers; the other
six they may choose as they wish to point
themselves toward their particular interest.
As a result it’s now not so easy to look at any
one student program and say, “He’s an
electrical engineer, she’s a mechanical engi­
neer.” The content of each program is
unique, and, so far as we know, there’s no
other institution with a curriculum like ours.
In the middle ’70s we brought in the
concept of the senior project. Our students
have an opportunity to work either by
themselves or in a small group on a major
(for undergraduates) development or re­
search activity, about which they write a
substantial report and give an oral presenta­
tion. That has been quite successful.
Over these 32 years, I’ve seen our curricu­
lum go from a relatively strong, single­
discipline arrangement to a multidisciplinary
arrangement, from which students emerge a
little more broadly educated. I think, on the
whole, that is a very good change.
One thing that remains constant over the
years—and this is college-wide, not just
department-wide—is the commitment to
good teaching. It’s quite clear that this is still
a fundamental criterion for long-term mem­
bership in the Swarthmore faculty, and I
hope that fact never changes.
One of the significant changes in the
student body is the presence of a great many
11

women in engineering. Of the 15 graduates
in the Class o f’89, seven are women. There’s
been a large increase also in the number of
foreign students in the Engineering Depart­
ment. In my Digital Systems class this term,
five or six out of nine students are foreign.
We have always had a heavy interest in
graduate school among our students, and
approximately a third of them go on. During
the Vietnam War, the figure rose, as students
avoided the draft. But this year 13 of our 15
seniors have applied to graduate schools,
and as far as we know, they have all been
admitted to at least one.
I see significant change on the faculty side
of things. When I was at Princeton working
on my Ph.D., Ed Stabler ’51 was there get­
ting his Ph.D. I said to him one day, “Ed,
how hard is it to get a teaching job at
Swarthmore?” He replied, “Well, I just
wrote them a letter and turned one down.”
So I wrote a letter on April 1,1957, and on
April 101 was hired. I didn’t write a resume.
Now that I’m retiring we have 364 applicants
to fill my slot. They carry with them resumes
of anywhere from two to 20 pages.
The faculty in our department and
throughout the College has become more
professional. In the late ’50s very little re­
search was being done in the Science and
Engineering Departments, but it’s now more
common than not for faculty members to be
engaged in research, much of it oriented to
involve students. In our department this
summer, there are seven students working
with faculty members on research projects
of one kind or another, many of them
supported from inside the College, but a lot
of them from outside as well.
The higher emphasis on research has its
downside in that it tends to make faculty
members concentrate more on their own
affairs than on wider College interests. There
are disadvantages to that. You will hear
around the campus that we aren’t a commu­
nity anymore. Many more administrators
exist than once did per faculty member, and
the informal interchange that we used to
have is, I’d say, not what it used to be. Now
the faculty seems to sit by itself in its offices
and talk to students, and the administration
sits by itself in Parrish Hall and talks to itself.
I think the College is now more managed
than led. We seem to be in the hands of
professional managers who tend to look at
the College as an economic activity rather
than as an educational one and who some­
times seem to have their priorities wrong.
But in summary, I’d say the College is
12

strong and that in another 125 years Swarth­
more will still be here. I hope it will still be
number one.

Religion
P Linwood Urban, Jr.

HARRY KALISH

ize, age, and
pluralism are
three things that I
think have something
to do with the fact
that the College com­
munity is not as
united or cohesive
as it was.”

S

I want to pick up a theme mentioned by
David Bowler with a quotation from Robert
Bellah’s book Habits o f the Heart. Bellah
wonders if the community is disappearing
and a kind of individualism taking its place.
And so he says, “Though the processes of
separation and individuation were necessary
to free us from the tyrannical structures of
the past, they must be balanced by a renewal
of commitment and community if they are
not to end in self-destruction or to turn into
their own opposites. Such a renewal is
indeed a world waiting to be born if only we
have the courage to see to it.”
With that heady quotation, I asked some
of my colleagues to comment on what I
should say this evening. One member of the
Music Department gave me one of the best
answers. She thought it was just wonderful
and affirming that we men had hired so
many more women faculty, but she didn’t
cook and therefore she felt that her contri­
butions to community were somewhat
abated (when she has a seminar, she sends
for Chinese take-out).
I think this says something. It says some­
thing about two-career families, and among
the faculty there are now a great many more
two-career families. The spouse, whether
male or female, is not sitting at home to
welcome students. She also said something
else that strikes another note. “I am more
involved with my department and with the
Women’s Study Group than I am with the
College as a whole.” It wasn’t individualism
she was talking about so much as a kind of
pluralism. That is to say that even though
there is less of a sense of the College as a
community, there are more individual
groups on the campus taking the place of
that larger community.
When I first came to Swarthmore, there
was one major religious group on campus.
Even that was frowned upon by some
members of the administration who thought
it might be divisive. But now we have a
Jewish group, two Protestant groups, and a
Roman Catholic group. From time to time
we’ve had a Christian Science group, a
Unitarian group, and several others.
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

The faculty used to meet in the Board of
Managers room. We had three to four
meetings a semester, and almost everybody
was there. Now we have a much larger
faculty; we meet only once or twice a
semester, and not all the faculty members
come. We used to have a faculty picnic in
the fall, and most of the faculty and their
spouses and families appeared. But then we
merged that picnic with the students, and
now we have this huge, gigantic affair that
nobody goes to, as far as I see, except the
students.
We’ve already talked about the size of the
administration increasing. The size of the
faculty has also increased rather dramati­
cally, even though the size of the student
body has not, and I find myself not as closely
associated with the faculty as I once did.
Colleagues say that I’m just getting old. That
may have something to do with it, but we
don’t see the same need for fellowship that
we did.
So, size, age, and pluralism are three
things that I think have something to do with
the fact that the College community is not
quite as united or cohesive as it was.
Now I want to talk about something a
little different, and this is something that
Peter will appreciate. When we came to the
College, there was a distribution requirement
that heavily favored the social sciences, the
natural sciences, and standbys like history
and English literature. Then there was one
group of things (an older alumnus called
them “soffft” courses) that were off in a
corner—music, fine arts, religion, and Clas­
sics. Well, I want to remind everyone that all
of those disciplines have taken off since then,
and the Music Department has increased
dramatically in size and in courses offered.
Fine arts did the same, adding studio arts.
Classics held its own, and religion also
flourished. When I came, we had one or two
majors a year, and if we had 75 students a
semester, we felt we were doing really well.
Last year we enrolled about 15 majors from
the sophomore class, and we have over 200
students a semester.
I find it fascinating that this increase in
pluralism occurs at the same time we have
an increase in people taking courses like
religion. I’m not sure I can explain this
phenomenon. Perhaps people want to know
what makes people different in ways that
they didn’t before. But all the “culture
courses” have increased dramatically in size.
Perhaps students have concluded that they
cannot live by the natural sciences or the
NOVEMBER 1989

social sciences alone.
What are the continuities? There are
several. Students are still looking for answers;
they’re still exploring options. Swarthmore
still has a very intelligent student body. The
faculty is still strong. Swarthmore is still very
active in social concerns, and many of the
same issues keep coming up again and again
over the years. To conclude, there are two
things I have to say: One is that culture is
here to stay, and the other is that pluralism
is now the order of the day.

Political Science
Charles E. Gilbert

HARRY KALISH

ome of my ablest
students want a
career in public
service, and more
people are beginning
to think about going
into the academy.”

S

HUM
o '* " "

ij§§|§

One change we’ve heard a lot about is
community and pluralism. Community is a
chronic problem in institutions like this.
Even when I came here, faculty yearned for
“the community of yore,” but it’s out of
reach, and that’s probably like most things in
life. And it’s a more pluralistic institution, no
question about it. Mostly, I suspect, for the
better.
We’ve achieved now the kind of respect­
ability that I suppose we’ve been looking for
all along: We’ve got a first-class parking
problem. We have a fairly large administra­
tive operation. Quite a lot of that we really
need. A lot is engaged in shaking you down
for money, and that’s one of the few oper­
ations in the College that probably pays for
itself.
Sure, I think the administration’s more
remote, there’s more hierarchy, and I think
we function less well institutionally. We
have that in common, I think, with the rest
of the world: If there are any institutions in
this society that are working better than they
did 20 years ago, I’d like to know about
them.
The faculty is larger, and there’s a good
deal more professionalism in it. It follows
that faculty members have less time for this
place, because they’re more research-con­
scious. By and large that’s been a good thing
because it feeds right into teaching and
many students get involved in much of that
research. But it’s a different faculty: It’s more
preoccupied, and there’s not a lot of time
around the water cooler.
Let’s say something about student inter­
ests. When I started teaching here, many of
the students I taught were headed for gradu­
ate school. I was sort of making people in
my own image. As it turned out, of course,
13

beginning in the mid-1960s those academic
jobs began to dry up, the culture changed
anyway, and students had different interests.
When I returned to teaching in the early ’70s
from working as provost in Parrish Hall,
hardly anybody was going to graduate
school. And indeed people in my department
pretty much counseled students out of it,
because, they said, “There just ain’t any jobs
out there.”
In the period called the 1960s (most of
which happened in the early 1970s), large
numbers of students were disinclined to go
into any kind of conventional endeavor.
Then suddenly among the people I had
taught there were nothing but M.B.A.s and
a few law degrees. That continued to be the
case until just last year. Now some of my
ablest students want a career in public
service, and more people are beginning to
think about going into the academy.
When I first came here, students worked
awfully hard. They also bitched a lot about
it. My sister went to college here. When I
visited her from Haverford, where I thought
I was working pretty hard, I realized I
wasn’t working hard at all, that the 14 hours
a day or whatever it was I was doing was not
it at all. I used to hear horror stories about
people setting off for the movies at night,
seeing all the library lights on, and turning
around and going back into the library to do
another night’s work. It sounded dreary and
sad, and they sounded depressed. When I
came here to teach, I felt students did work
hard, and you could pile on the work and
expect a lot of people to do most of it; I never
expected anybody to do all of it.
That stopped in the late ’60s to early ’70s.
When I started teaching again full time after
serving as provost, I noticed people didn’t
work half as hard, and half as hard is about
the right factor. Now the work ethic is
coming back, and it’s coming back in a good
balance. I’ve got a seminar going now that’s
the most gratifying seminar I’ve had in seven
or eight years, and I’m told there are more
right behind these folks.
Finally, I’ll make a point about change,
and the range of the academic program. The
range is obviously wider; we do a lot of
things we didn’t do before. That’s a constant
problem for us, as well as a constant oppor­
tunity and benefit. There are questions: Can
we do this many things well in very small (or
new) departments? Will we ever be able to
afford larger departments? At what cost to
core things is progress coming?”
It’s right that we should have to face those

questions. It’s a richer curriculum by far; it
has to be. If we weren’t motivated to do it,
we would be driven competitively to do it,
in the same way we have to compete with
the number of administrators. For instance,
there are now deans within deans within
deans; there are deaning specialties that we
never knew existed. But every other college
faces this kind of thing, and parents are not
going to pay the Swarthmore tuition unless
we can provide that kind of specialized TLC
that everybody else does.
Now, where did these things come from?
The world turns and changes, and much
results from this thing called the 1960s. I
think I have lived academically through a
kind of a culture shock that doesn’t come
along in every generation. The degree of
distance between me and my junior col­
leagues as compared with my distance from
Roland Pennock [’27], my mentor when I
came here, is immensely greater. In my field,
people just think differently about the field.
Of course, it’s a field that’s given to those
kind of ideological differences. I don’t sus­
pect mathematics has changed all that much
in those respects.
And then, of course, there’s the govern­
ment, and all the social reform that goes with
it. There are all the forms to fill out, in
triplicate at least. In common with all the
better colleges, our tuition has outrun infla­
tion every year. Students and parents, there­
fore, expect more for their dollars: more in
the way of administration, deaning, psychi­
atric services, curriculum, physical educa­
tion, plant, and more people to take care of
all those conditions.
Finally, I think we’ve lost some institu­
tional distinctiveness. My guess is we’re
more like other institutions and less special
than we were. We are in part because
younger faculty members come here to
teach with a standardized notion of what the
teaching and scholarship trades are like.
To conclude on a note of optimism, the
two main elements in the College—the two
ends of the log—remain the faculty and
students. They’re both very strong. If that
continues to be the case, everything will be
good.
This article was adapted from a transcript
made o f an informal presentation to the
Alum ni Council, March 1989, by fo u r pro­
fessors who retired in June: DavidL. Bowler,
electrical engineering; Charles E. Gilbert,
political science; Peter Gram Swing, music;
and P. Linwood Urban, Jr., religion.

by Don M itchell ’69

Squatters’ Rights
A college tryst and a tale o f two hovels

rwvi

A

NOVEMBER 1989

A couple of decades ago at college, I found
myself assigned to share a dormitory room
with a young man who took offense when
I suggested he get lost from time to time so
my girlfriend and I could enjoy sexual
congress. Without delving into the merits of
his case— or mine—let me say we recognized
our incompatibility and together begged the
dean to move one of us out. He couldn’t,
though: The dorms were full. And so, in a
classic demonstration of the spirit of the late
’60s, my girlfriend and I borrowed a shovel
from a sympathetic professor and set forth
into the College arboretum to build ourselves
a house.
Or a hovel, at any rate. We walked far off
the beaten paths, crossed a turbid creek on
a fallen log, and eventually found ourselves
following a long-abandoned road that mean­
dered through a hardwood forest half a mile
from the main campus. Downhill from the
dirt road, in the side of an embankment rife
with shrubs and bushes, we began to dig a
hole. When the hole was 8 feet square and
3 to 4 feet deep—some few days later—we
borrowed a car and brought in six sheets of
plywood to line the dirt walls and top the
hole with a thin, flat roof. Then we backfilled
the site, using dirt and twigs and leaves to
camouflage our construction so thoroughly
that one could stroll right past it and scarcely
have a clue.
That was in September. We lived in that
rude hut for the next three months—or we
slept there, anyway—feathering our nest
with paisley fabrics to cover the waist-high
walls, a Coleman lantern to illuminate the
odd textbook, and a Coleman stove for
heating and cooking. As fall frosts began to
denude the trees, however, the leading edge
of our underground rabbit hutch began to
emerge from the smooth lines of the sur­
rounding landscape. Looking out the bur­
row’s trapdoor, we were gradually able to
see the ample, well-kept house and grounds
of Swarthmore’s vice president—barely 200
yards away from us, albeit on the opposite

bank of the sluggish creek. But if we could
peer out and see that stern administrator,
wouldn’t he eventually peer out and see us?
Then, come December, the creek froze
solid; kids from the local village came out
afternoons to skate. No matter what we tried
to do with leaves and sticks and branches,
the entrance to our underground house
seemed to poke quite prominently from the
frozen earth. Sure enough, over Christmas
break, our home was violated—utterly
trashed, in fact—by juvenile delinquents
with no trace of respect for other people’s
property. They burned holes in our sleeping
bag, smeared fecal matter on our Coleman
stove, and tore the plywood trapdoor right
off its hinges. There was not much left worth
saving.
Taking stock, my sweetheart and I saw no
choice but to leave the forest. For three
idyllic months, we had illegally squatted on
the College’s private land. But as squatters
whose home had been uncovered—and
robbed, and ruined—where could we turn
for justice? Nowhere. The plain fact was, we
were lucky not to have been apprehended.
We moved back into our respective College
dormitories; six months later there was only
the faintest depression in the ground marking
the spot where we had lain as man and wife.
A couple of years later, I married the
intrepid young woman who had risked
going into the woods with me. A couple of
years after that, it seemed to make sense for
us to purchase 150 run-down acres in Ver­
mont, convert a sagging barn there into a
house, and try to pose as New Age farmers.
It’s hard to reconstruct the state of mind that
fostered those decisions, but the thought of
making ourselves legal squatters—landowners—no doubt exerted some subliminal
influence.
On the day a real estate agent first showed
us our dream kingdom, threatening skies
prevented us from taking an extensive walk.
But he placed a Federal Land Bank map in
our hands, and back in his office we studied
15

16

STEVEN GOLDBLATT '67

it with mounting interest. Toward the back
of the farm’s long, somewhat narrow val­
ley—just where the map showed a scruffy
meadow fading into an unkempt woodlot—
a pair of dotted lines marched faintly across
the page to mark an old, abandoned road.
“Is that road still there today?” asked
Cheryl.
“Well, you couldn’t drive it,” said the
agent. “Just two dirt tracks going through
the woods, you know. Snowmobiles still like
to use it, though, in wintertime. You could
ski along it, maybe.”
“Where does that road go?”
“Nowhere, anymore. Used to be a town
road—used to go to Middlebury. There’s
even an old-timer—name of Morris Norton,
down at Hawkins Mills—who claims he
used to plow that road. With a team, I
gather. That was 60 years ago, though. After
a while, the town just threw it up.”
“I beg your pardon,” I said, a little
startled. I realized that New England towns
possessed outlandish powers, but I had never
heard that vomiting was one of them.
“Throwing up a road means the town
won’t plow it anymore. Or bring in fresh
gravel, or grade it, or clean the culverts—
nothing. They just throw it up, you see?
Why should the taxpayers maintain a road
someplace where no one wants to live?”
“I can’t think of any reason,” I assured the
agent.
“Right. So it comes before the town
meeting, and they vote to throw it up. Goes
right in the minutes.”
“So, like now that road would be a part
of the farm?” asked Cheryl.
“Sure—but it won’t take you anywhere,
you understand? Now, sometimes you will
find an old town road that hasn’t been
thrown up. Or not thrown up all legally and
proper. It may be abandoned—it may even
be all overgrown—but if it’s a town road
and you build a year-round house along it,
you can make the taxpayers put it back in
shape for you. Even if it’s miles off the
nearest highway, you can make them fix it
so a school bus can get in and out. Even in
the wintertime—and so they have to plow it
too, you see? So that’s some deal, huh?”
I nodded. “That must be incredibly ex­
pensive.”

Don and Cheryl Warfield Mitchell once lived together in a Crum Creek hideaway
as romantic partners. Twenty years later they now enjoy life on a Vermont farm.

“Oh, I guess. And so a smart town gets
its roads thrown when they’re no longer
used. So—you buy that Donaldson place
over there, you’ll be moving to a smart
town.”
We did decide to buy the Donaldson
place. And, on the autumn day when we
took possession, we made a joyous and
unhurried ramble to assess the dimensions of
our new domain. At first, the old town road
seemed unaccountably familiar; then I
realized that it evoked much of the essence
of that other unused road through the farflung reaches of the Swarthmore arboretum.
It, too, climbed gradually through a hard­
wood grove; it, too, had given up portions of
its right-of-way to eager, grasping saplings.
My heart near to bursting, I slipped my hand
around my young wife’s: Maybe our aban­
doned road went nowhere, but it took us
back. Walking it recalled—indelibly—the
half-forgotten episode of our autumn in the
woods.
Over time the road grew worse, though.
Snowmobilers didn’t help it; neither did
rotting elms that kept collapsing onto it of
their own considerable accord. Saplings,
too, gradually metamorphosed into trees; in
places it became hard to discern where once
a road had been. I felt a little bad, at first,

to witness this decay without lifting a finger.
But there were numerous demands on my
time, and the project of preserving the old
town road in a state adequate to nurture
personal nostalgia could not be assigned a
high priority in my new, demanding agrarian
life. The road was disappearing before my
eyes, but all I could do was let it slip away.
Property owners, I feel sure, are prone to
certain classic nightmares. Chief of those
must be the dream in which one learns that
one does not own exactly what one thought
one did; I confess I used to have that bad
dream quite routinely, till our lives became
settled here. Having children helped, I think.
But I also used to have another, less common
nightmare; in it, I would chance to find
illegal squatters on my land—living in some
shack or cabin virtually under my unsus­
pecting nose. Accosting them, I would learn
that they didn’t give a damn about me.
Eloquent nihilists, they would rail emotion­
ally against the absurdity of real estate own­
ership.
My special problem was that, deep in my
heart of hearts, I thought the squatters were
right: From the point of view of cosmic
justice, how could it be fair that my family
should “own” this little valley? Sure, we
were shelling out a lot of money—mortgage
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

“Would I now turn cop and bust them? I took a deep reflective breath.”

payments, interest, taxes—to earn the legal
“Question number one is, where’s their
right to call this farm our home. But in one lodge?” He scanned the middle distance and
of my former lives, I had been a squatter, then pointed it out for me, a brown igloo
too. I understood perfectly what personal poking out from the frozen landscape no less
exigencies might bring otherwise decent prominently than had our ancient hut in the
individuals to throw up a dwelling on land College arboretum—after the leaves had
they did not own, and for them to scoff at fallen. “There,” he said, nodding. “Question
any concept of ownership that outlawed number two is, where’s their dam?”
such behavior, especially When the land ap­
We took a little walk, and soon enough
peared to be unused. Like my unmanaged he found it: The beavers had thrown an
forests here—all 60-odd acres of them.
intricate and graceful weir across the big,
I needed to overcome this disturbing expensive soil-conservation ditch, so that its
nightmare. One fruitful strategy seemed to final couple hundred feet would now hold
be asserting greater control over all corners water permanently—defeating, no doubt,
of my Ponderosa. To that end, five years ago the government’s carefully engineered pur­
I signed up with the government to create a pose in digging it. “Gee, I’m not sure if I like
conservation plan for the entire farm and this,” I said. “And I know darn well the
gradually implement it. Part of this glorious government’s not going to like it.”
plan required bulldozing diversion ditches
“Squatters’ rights,” the forester told me
into various meadows, at no small cost to affably. “They were looking for a house site,
both myself and the nation’s generous tax­ and I guess you gave them one.”
payers. One of those ditches was dug with
We walked across the frozen pond the
its terminus parallel to the sad remains of the beavers had ambitiously created, and we
old town road. That, I thought, would ut­ stood right next to their cunning lodge of
terly destroy the romantic power once mud and sticks. Those little architects were
evoked by that soft path—but what adult right inside, I knew—no doubt sitting stock­
has not cashiered the odd ideal for a better still and listening to our every word. I even
night’s sleep? And after all, progress is thought I knew just what it must be like
progress. The dozers came and dug and inside there: no paisley fabrics, but I knew
went, and after that I , found myself con­ how such a space could feel. “So how do I
sciously avoiding the old town road each get the buggers out?” I asked.
time I set out to walk the farm.
“Dynamite. You blow their dam up, they
Until very recently. A local lumberjack may go find someplace else to live. But then
admired some trees up in our woodlot last again, they might rebuild it. Even higher
November while out deer hunting. On his maybe.”
advice I engaged a private forester to cruise
“HigherT’
my woods and let me know what timber
“Oh, beavers have been known to flood
might be smart to harvest. This expert and quite a little bit of land.”
I set out on a wintry day to tour the back 40,
I looked back to the old town road—now
and halfway through our tramp we crossed marvelously manicured in consequence of
a section of the old town road. It was broad the timber harvest to create this backwoods
and neat, and darn-near totally cleared of Venice—and I thought, simultaneously, of
both young trees and worthless deadfalls. the fine print in one of my several contracts
While I was swallowing my utter astonish­ with the U.S. Soils Conservation Service. /
ment, the affable forester remarked, “I see agree to maintain this practicefo r at least ten
you’ve got some beavers.”
years. . . I agree to refund all or part o f the
“Huh?” I asked.
cost-share assistance paid to me if before the
“You mean you didn’t know?”
expiration o f the practice lifespan specified,
“I . . . how? Where?”
I (a) destroy the practice installed, or (b)
“Look at those stumps,” he said, kicking relinquish.. ..
with his boot at one or two out of hundreds
But I snapped out of this legal reverie and
of gnawed-off trees.
looked around with appropriate wonder.
“This is news to me,” I told him.
Squatters had—at long last—come to build
NOVEMBER 1989

their hovel on my land, and the scale of their
dreams was awe-inspiring. Would I now
turn cop and bust them? I took a deep,
reflective breath. “As far as I’m concerned,”
I said, “these critters are allowed to stay.”
Nowadays, whenever Cheryl or I can find
a spare half hour, we’ll walk back with our
kids to check up on the beavers. Not that any
one of us has seen them—yet—but it feels
as though we have. Things change back
there constantly. Presumably working in the
dead of night, the beavers fell tree after tree
and buck them into useful lengths. Once
transported to the construction zone, the
sticks are mortared in place with sticky,
well-packed mud. The dam has ably with­
stood several torrents caused by melting
snow; unsatisfied, its furry engineers con­
tinue to shore it up further. Ultimately, who
knows what these conservation partners
have in mind for my land? All I know is,
anytime I want to feel indolent, I have only
to go review their progress.
One recent evening, in the library of our
farmhouse, the kids were doing further re­
search on our welcome squatters. “Beavers
live on bark,” my son informed me, r ering
up from behind one thick book or a? other.
“And they use their tails to support them­
selves when gnawing trees. And tbr y raise
their babies together for the first two years,
then send them out to go build dams and
lodges of their own.”
I tell him I think that’s just amazing—
every bit of it.
And then my daughter, who has learned
to study books herself now, reads me some­
thing else. She says, “Some wildlife biologists
think beavers tend to mate for life.”
“Gee,” I say, “I think I like that.” I say,
“What a nice idea!” I tell her I like to think
that I have, too.

Originally published in Don M itchell’s
monthly column, “RFD,” fo r The Boston
Magazine. Reprinted with permission o f the
author. Don ’69 and Cheryl Warfield Mitch­
ell ’71 and their two children continue to
admire the energetic craft o f their tenant
beavers, while Don awaits confirmation o f
a publisher fo r his latest novel, Second
Nature.
17

Two exchange students look beyond dating
and denim in a revealing year-long visit
by Linda Feldmann
When Mikhail (Misha) Chkhenkeli and
Nadezhda (Nadya) Olshannikova first ar­
rived at Swarthmore last fall, they found
chaos.
It was at the local drugstore, where, for no
apparent reason, there were at least 12 differ­
ent varieties of toothpaste for sale and at 12
different prices. And there it was again, in
the College catalogue. Take two courses in
your major, they had been told, and any two
others in subjects outside your major. Note
that some are offered only in the fall, some
only in the spring, some have prerequisites,
and some won’t be available this year at
all.. . .
“Misha and Nadya seemed to come from
a different consciousness,” said Nadya’s
roommate, Bonnie Chen ’90. To the Soviets,
reportedly, such a range of choices is usually
unavailable and often held to be fatuous and
excessive.
And to top it off, Nadya didn’t speak
much English.
But for all the challenges they faced,
Misha and Nadya were ground-breakers.
They were part of the first group of Soviet
undergraduates to spend an entire academic
year, unchaperoned, at an American college.
In all, 56 students from all over the Soviet
Union studied at 26 Eastern liberal arts
colleges this past year under the American
Collegiate Consortium for East-West Cul­
tural and Academic Exchange. The beauty
of this new program is that it goes beyond
the usual two-week friendship fest, in which
U.S. and Soviet youth exchange trinkets and
discover common interests in rock music,
dating, and denim. A nine-month experience
allows for a fuller exploration—and there­
fore greater understanding—of the differ­
ences.
Nadya, a 20-year-old computer science
major from the Russian city of Voronezh,
almost didn’t make it to Swarthmore at all.
She was off on a student work expedition
near Sochi last August, when the word came
that she had been selected for the program.
She had already missed the orientation in
18

Moscow and had only a few days to go
home, pack, and get to Middlebury, Vt., for
the second two weeks of the three-week
American orientation.
“After day one I was ready to send Nadya
home; she couldn’t communicate!” said con­
sortium director Raymond Benson. “But she
was the only one from Voronezh, so we let
her stay. I’m glad that we did.”
Although many Soviet students speak
English, the powers-that-be at Voronezh
State University evidently had other criteria.
No doubt it was her specialty in compu­
ters—in which the Soviets are a good 10
years behind the United States—and her
loyalty to her country that made her an at­
tractive candidate.
Nadya proved to be a fighter. She got A’s
and B’s in her courses, mastered tennis, and
by spring semester was getting along fine in
English. But the real jaw-dropper came
during winter break: Nadya took the better
part of her monthly $150 stipend and bought

wanted to see real
life, to get to see real
America and be by
myself.. . . ”

1

a student-rate, round-trip, cross-country Grey­
hound bus ticket.
“I wanted to see real life, to get to see real
America and be by myself, touch everything
by my own hands,” she explained as she
traced her odyssey on a map of the United
States: from Philadelphia to San Francisco,
hitting Pittsburgh, Columbus, Indianapolis,
St. Louis, Oklahoma City, Amarillo, Albu­
querque, Phoenix, and Los Angeles along
the way. The return trip followed the same
route, but with day and night purposely
reversed, so the sights (such as the Grand
Canyon) were new.

“On the bus I met two young women
who were going to Hollywood with some
strange purpose, to become actresses or
something. They were before in New York.
One was from Pennsylvania. They were
pretty. Also, there was a woman with a baby
and an old lady.”
Misha, a 20-year-old mathematics whiz
from Tbilisi, Georgia, did a little traveling
himself—to Waitsfield, Vt., for skiing, to
Boston, and to New York. In January the
whole group of Soviet students converged in
Washington, D.C., for sightseeing and a
little pep talk at the Soviet Embassy. (“You’re
being followed, and your rooms are bugged,”
one student said they were told by a KGB
man.)
But like a good Swarthmore student,
Misha’s priority was clearly his studies. In
fact, his experience demonstrated how diffi­
cult it can be to mesh two completely
different systems of higher education.
The Soviets, who have no concept called
“liberal arts college,” say that their five-year
undergraduate program, in which students
focus almost exclusively on their majors,
provides the equivalent of an American
master’s degree. So Misha, who had already
completed three years at Georgia State Uni­
versity, had a hard time finding advancedenough courses at Swarthmore. In the end,
he wound up spending one day a week at the
University of Pennsylvania taking a graduate
research class in dimension theory. At
Swarthmore, he studied abstract algebra,
topology, combinatorics, German, and En­
glish (which he already spoke very well
when he arrived).
When Misha returned to Tbilisi, it wasn’t
clear if he would get credit at home for his
work. But somehow it seemed he had little
to worry about. He had gotten A-pluses in
his math courses, including the one at Penn,
and A’s in English and German. He also had
some articles on mathematics published.
“Math is an art,” he explained late one
evening in the lounge on his hall in Wharton
dormitory. “Everyone has his own style and
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

Soviet students Mikhail Chkhenkeli
(left) and Nadezhda Olshannikova
found both the expected and the
surprising in their year-long
exchange at Swarthmore.

SPECIAL TO THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER/BOB WILLIAMS

approach. It’s like a musician playing Bach.”
Misha found major differences in the way
Americans and Soviets teach math. Here, he
says, there is more student participation and
not as much lecturing by the professor.
“That’s a good idea. When you participate
in the procedure of explanation, you have a
better feel for the subject.” But he prefers the
Soviet style of exams, which are given orally
and therefore involve interaction with the
professor, who can “evaluate your thought
process.”
After figuring out the Swarthmore cata­
logue, Misha concluded that he likes the
idea of students planning their own pro­
grams. And he decided that his university at
home could improve conditions for inde­
pendent research in several ways—for ex­
ample, by obtaining better computers. When
NOVEMBER 1989

he returned to Tbilisi, he planned to offer his
observations to the curriculum council, of
which he is a student member (a perestroikaera innovation).
Although the consortium had assigned
Misha and Nadya to Swarthmore almost
randomly, it seemed a reasonable match.
When asked to describe the College to a
first-time visitor, Misha confirmed the ste­
reotypes: “Everybody here is very .con­
cerned, extremely concerned about studies.
Without exception, everyone is doing their
best. They worry about their future. I guess
they have high professional expectations.”
What about the frat scene? “I’ve heard
there are fraternities, but I haven’t been to
one,” he said. “I don’t do much drinking or
watch much TV. There are parties, but I
can’t say it’s a party school.”
Some of the Soviet students at other
colleges decided that frat parties were an
ideal way to learn about youth culture—and
in the process also learned what it feels like
to get an F in America. Some of the other
Soviets also had a hard time living on their
$150-a-month stipend—especially those
who had a high budget for beer and ci­
garettes and a desire to fly to other cities. The
Soviet government forbade their students
from earning any extra money here. But
Nadya and Misha had no complaints. They
had come to study. One thing Nadya did
spring for, besides her bus trip, was an $80
pair of contact lenses, which are hard to get
at home. She also bought three pairs of
white sneakers.

For Misha, books and movies were the
favored form of relaxation. His author of
choice is Isaac Asimov, who, he said, is
translated into Georgian. Whenever a film
was showing on campus, Misha would try
to go, as part of his “cultural education.”
On a Saturday night, Nadya was just as
likely to be found buried in her studies as
anywhere else. In one of her computer
courses, she asked the teacher for tougher
problems and extra reading. Although
Nadya had already completed three years at
Voronezh State, she took an introductory
course in computer science so she could
learn about American computers, such as
the Vax, Macintosh, and Sun, which she
called “very friendly.”
And she too echoed the stereotypes of
Swarthmore “grinds.” At the computer cen­
ter, for example, she described students who
would sit there for so long that they would
start laughing at their screens for no apparent
reason. “What is there to laugh about on a
computer?” she asked.
Nadya also picked up on a more positive
Swarthmore tradition: “In Russia we all
know about American business, but the
volunteering movement—this side of Ameri­
can life is new for me.”
Nadya, in particular, seemed to many a
study in strong ideas and opinions; she
expressed also an increasingly exuberant
and outgoing pleasure in life at Swarthmore.
She was often reluctant to concede that any
part of the Soviet system—academic or
otherwise—might merit some change. For
example, in the case of Soviet tennis star
Natalya Zvereva, who has caused an uproar
by requesting to keep a sizeable portion of
her earnings, Nadya’s opinion came down
squarely on the side of the government:
After all, she argued, the state made it
possible for Zvereva to win by providing a
lifetime of free lessons and equipment. And
when I mentioned how easy I found the
work at Moscow’s Pushkin Institute when I
studied there in 1980, she jumped to correct
me: “That’s not possible,” said Nadya, who
has never studied in Moscow. “All institutes
in Moscow are very demanding.”
Interestingly, however, Nadya could be
equally loyal about Swarthmore. In a dis­
cussion about the College’s Russian curricu­
lum, another Swarthmore student said that
the program was stronger in literature than
in language. Nadya immediately chimed in
with an explanation: “It is the policy of
Swarthmore to make people think and not
just memorize verbs.” Both she and Misha
20

were proud that Swarthmore had been
named No. 1 by U.S. News '& World Report
and that Michael Dukakis was a graduate.
Associate Dean Eva Travers, who came to
know Nadya quite well, says that her grow­
ing English skills allowed her to become
more herself. “She just bloomed in the
second semester and became warm, charm­
ing, and accessible.”
But when it came to discussing Soviet
shortcomings, Misha was easier going. The
difference could probably be explained in
part by their backgrounds. Misha comes
from what some might call an intellectual
Georgian family—his father is a German
professor, his mother an English professor—
in a major non-Russian city that has little
love for Russian domination. Nadya comes
from what might be termed a more bluecollar family. Her father is a worker in a
motor factory. Her mother is an economist.

hile Misha was
at Swarthmore,
his native Tbilisi
exploded with
nationalist unrest.

W

ate studies, pursue graduate work in com­
puter science, and become a computer sci­
entist.
The question of romance was a delicate
one for both Nadya and Misha. Nadya
sighed with a bit of exasperation when
asked discreetly about her love life—an
area, she reminded me, that Soviet journalists
simply don’t inquire about. But she re­
sponded anyway: She has been true to her
boyfriend at home, Igor. “Russians are very
faithful people with their sympathies,” she
said, a remark that seemed to extend beyond
the subject at hand. Misha, for his part, also
pledged loyalty to the girl back home, a
Georgian literature student named Nino.
When it came to discussing other people’s
sexual preferences, Nadya was less reticent.
While giving me a tour of the campus one
Saturday afternoon, she stopped in the lobby
of the computer center and just pointed at a
poster on the wall which read: “Revealing
the Unspoken—Gay and Lesbian Studies in
Academia,” a symposium sponsored by
ASIS, Alternative Sexualities Integrated at
Swarthmore.
In the Soviet Union, male homosexuality
is hidden, illegal, and certainly not a subject
of academic inquiry. Lesbianism is not
against the law, but is still taboo. After all
these months in America, Nadya said, she
simply could not get used to the idea of open
homosexuality nor could she understand it.
She stood there, staring at the poster, shaking
her head. Her reaction was typical of other
Soviet students who were attending colleges
with active gay communities.
It is by no means a sign of failure that, in
the end, some aspects of American society
proved beyond comprehension for the visit­
ing Soviets. In some ways, says consortium
director Benson, it is appropriate that these
students kept one foot firmly in their own
traditions and values. After all, they did have
to go home at the end of the year. But one
can be sure that long after Misha Chkhenkeli
and Nadya Olshannikova have settled back
into their old routines, their American expe­
riences will continue to reverberate in their
lives.

And she’s from a Russian city that is not
especially cosmopolitan (like Moscow or
Leningrad) during a time when Great Rus­
sian nationalism is expressed increasingly
openly.
In fact, while Misha was at Swarthmore,
his native Tbilisi exploded with nationalist
unrest, which was put down by tanks and
poison gas. He was distressed by the news,
and he professed sympathy for the demands
of the demonstrators but added that he did
not plan to get involved in politics when he
returned home.
“I agree that Georgia should have much
greater autonomy—for the economy, cul­
ture, language—but I disagree that it should
be a separate nation,” he said. “I am an in­
ternationalist.”
Linda Feldmann is a sta ff correspondentfo r
Misha’s career plans go in a scholarly The Christian Science Monitor in Washing­
direction. He wants to attend graduate ton and writes frequently on the Soviet
school—maybe in Tbilisi, maybe at Moscow Union. In the 1989-90 academic year, while
State University, the premier Soviet univer­ juniors Scott Evans and David Gehrenbeck
sity, maybe back here in the United States. study in the Soviet Union under the auspices
Then he plans to do research and teach. o f this program, Swarthmore will host two
Nadya intends to complete her undergradu­ more Soviet students.
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

ï

COLLEGE

Night Vision
Astronomy Professor Wulff
Heintz has taken the old
Roman prescription for
achievement literally—ad
astra per aspera, to the stars
through difficulty.
For more than 16 years he
labored, often through long,
difficult nights, to prove the
existence of the much-sought
“brown dw arf’ stars, consid­
ered by astronomers to be the
missing link between stars and
planets.
Professor Heintz revealed
the important discovery in the
journal Astronomy and Astro­
physics (June 1989), describ­
ing research on a faint object
in the constellation Virgo
known as Wolf 424 (originally
cataloged by astronomer Max
Wolf). The object, 14 light
years from earth, actually con­

sists of two tiny bodies that
take 16 years to revolve
around each other.
The sun and other stars
produce light from nuclear
energy. But a star needs to
have at least 8 percent of the
sun’s mass to reach a tempera­
ture that begins the process of
nuclear fusion, according to
Heintz. Smaller masses, called
substellar masses or brown
dwarfs (invisible substellar
masses are known as black
dwarfs), may live for a little
while using the energy they
gain by contracting, until they
fade into darkness.
The proof, which required
that he make observations at
both the Sproul Observatory
on campus and the Cerro
Tololo Observatory in Chile,
may help reveal the formative
causes of stars and planets and

Professor o f Astronomy Wulff Heintz in Sproul Observatory.
NOVEMBER 1989

OOTES

BIG
DIPPER

Professor Heintz discovered two types o f objects in the constellation
Virgo: a brown dwarf, known as Wolf424, and a black dwarf, D T Vir.

may cause scientists to recon­
sider theories describing the
origin of stars and the out­
come of the universe.
Heintz announced in 1972
that the binary system Wolf
424 might be a substellar
mass, after measuring photo­
graphic records collected at
Sproul Observatory since
1938. Subsequently from data
spanning 50 years, Heintz
found that the two small
objects have 5 and 6 percent
of the sun’s mass. The energy
they produce can last only
about 100 million years or
1 percent of the life of a
normal star.
The conclusive proof that
brown dwarfs exist raises an­
other question for scientists:
Are they a significant portion
of the so-called “lost mass” in
the universe? (Some scientists
believe that only about 10 per­
cent of the universe’s mass has
been detected to date.)
If they are, or if scientists
can detect something else that
makes up a significant portion
of this mass, then they could
theorize a gradual slowing of
bodies in the universe as a
result of gravity. Objects in the
universe would then begin
falling back on themselves,
eventually ending in what
some call the “Big Crunch.”
According to Professor
Heintz, most objects fairly
close to the sun have been
thoroughly studied, and it

remains unlikely that many
other brown dwarfs will be
discovered. “We have now
only this one case of a browndwarf pair and none with
good evidence for black or
planetary companions. There
are also theoretical reasons to
expect that all of these objects
may be quite rare.”
Heintz monitors more than
1,000 stars to study their
properties; in his 35 years of
research (20 at the College),
he has discovered and re­
corded more than 450 binary
systems.

Russell Meiggs dies
Russell Meiggs, Hon. ’71,
visiting professor of Classics in
1960, 1970, 1974, and 1978,
died June 24 at his home in
Oxford, England. He was 86.
Renowned in the academic
world as one of the few schol­
ars of ancient history equally
at home in the study of
Greece and Rome, Meiggs
authored many books and
articles, including three signifi­
cant works written in part at
Swarthmore: Roman Ostia,
The Athenian Empire, and
Trees and Timber in the
Ancient Mediterranean World,
a work that in itself created a
field of study.
A passionate gardener and
environmentalist, he encour­
aged students at Swarthmore
to learn the Latin or Christian
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C

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names of all flowers and trees
on campus. And in 1960, dur­
ing a winter of unusually
heavy snow, he endeared him­
self to heartier students by
introducing the sport of snow­
bathing.
A cedar of Lebanon planted
near Sharpies in his honor in
1985 accompanies a plaque
with an inscription from
Horace: “Crescit occulto velut
arbor aevo fama”—Like a tree
his reputation grows with the
silent passage of time.

College celebrates
Martin Biological
Laboratory
In a 50th anniversary celebra­
tion of one of the most useful
and versatile academic build­
ings on campus, members of
the College community,
alumni, and friends gathered
in June to honor the founders
and creators of the Edward
Martin Biological Laboratory.
The building was first con­
ceived in 1929 by its donor,
Fred M. Kirby, whose life had
been saved by Dr. Edward
Martin, Class of 1878, Hon.
’20 (Kirby’s portrait hangs in
the central entrance hall).
Martin, who had taught
chemistry, physiology, and
French at Swarthmore before
becoming a medical doctor,

Admiring a collection o f Biology Department memorabilia are Anne Matthews Rawson ’50, man­
ager o f Martin laboratories, Mark Jacobs, professor o f biology, and Virginia Perkins Carter ’55.

had refused to accept remu­
neration from his friend Kirby
and suggested instead a gift to
the College.
According to a history of
Martin Laboratory written by
Anne Matthews Rawson ’50,
manager of the Martin Lab,
Kirby generously embraced
the idea, and the building was
actually ready for use in the

Rachel Merz (center), assistant professor o f biology, answers questions
about the invertebrate animals in the Meinkoth Marine Laboratory.

22

fall of 1937 (his grandson,
Fred M. Kirby II, heading the
F.M. Kirby Foundation,
created the Kirby Lecture Hall
in 1983). An inscription near
Kirby’s portrait describing the
building reads, “an enduring
tribute to a lasting friendship.”
The day-long celebration
included tours of the labs,
exhibits of old and new tech­
nologies, presentations on past
and future goals, and occa­
sionally surprising informa­
tion: In the first 30 years of
the century, for example,
human anatomy was taught at
the College. One exhibit in­
cluded a photo album show­
ing women dissecting a
cadaver.
“The Biology Department
has always been unusually
collegial, a place where faculty
and students really enjoy
being together,” Anne Rawson said, noting that people
who had studied in each of
the five decades returned for
the amicable event.
In his comments to the
guests, Kenneth Rawson ’50,
a former biology professor at

Swarthmore and now a
builder and carpenter, de­
scribed the exceptionally for­
ward-looking design of Martin
as “almost unique.” Indicating
that the building was struc­
tured with reinforced concrete
similar to post-and-beam con­
struction, he explained, “The
great value of this construction
is that internal walls in partic­
ular can be removed and re­
built easily to accommodate
changes in the functional
requirements of those using
the building.”
Rawson revealed that in
addition to containing the nor­
mal two electric panejs for
wiring needs, each floor was

Martin Biological Laboratory nearing
completion in 1937 (Phoenix photo).
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

L
provided with two additional
panel boxes carrying conduits
that radiate out to various
rooms. The “unknown de­
signer” of this system allowed
its future users great flexibility
in adopting new technologies,
Rawson explained.
Other special attributes of
the building include 3/4-inch
steel threaded nuts mounted in
the concrete ceilings, for use
in hanging such heavy objects
as ventilation fans and water
distillation equipment, and a
foundation so strong that
probably it could support the
construction of a third floor
should the College require
such an addition.
“One need only search for
similar examples in other
buildings to appreciate the
unique design of the Martin
building,” said Rawson.

H. Thomas Hallowell, Jr. ’29

Former Board member
Hallowell dead at 81
H. Thomas Hallowell, Jr., ’29,
Hon. ’69, member emeritus of
the Board of Managers, inter­
national industrialist, and
world-class amateur photog­
rapher, died Aug. 7 at his
home in Rydal, Pa.
Working for six decades at
Standard Pressed Steel (now
SPS Technologies), the
world’s largest manufacturer
of aerospace fasteners, Hallo­
well began his career as a
machine operator the day after
his graduation from Swarthmore and steadily moved up
the ranks until he was named
president in 1951. He served
NOVEMBER 1989

jointly as president and chair­
man from 1963 to 1971 and
then continued as chairman
until 1986.
Along with his efforts in
expanding SPS into the inter­
national market, Hallowell
spent a great deal of his energy
on philanthropic and civic
activities. He was a member
of the College’s Board of
Managers for 30 years and a
trustee of Penn State Univer­
sity for 36 years. He served
also on the boards of William
Penn Charter School, the
Franklin Institute, and Abington Memorial Hospital.
A well-known photog­
rapher, he published Life with
a Leica, a book featuring pic­
tures of his world travels.
Hallowed’s major hobby
was landscape design, result­
ing in the development of
Deerfield, his 50-acre estate,
cited by horticulturists as one
of the world’s most beautiful
gardens. In 1986 he collabo­
rated with photojournalist
Derek Fell on the book
Deerfield: An American Gar­
den Through Four Seasons.
He is survived by his wife,
Dorothy Willits Hallowell,
sons Howard T. Ill ’56 and
Merritt W. ’61, and daughter
Anne Willits Hallowell Miller.

The good fight
When this year’s 318 freshmen
arrived on campus in Septem­
ber, each of them had some­
thing very specific in com­
mon— The Battle for Human
Nature.
The book by psychology
Professor Barry Schwartz was
required reading for each of
the students, selected and sent
to them without charge be­
cause it could provide a basis
for a year-long discussion of
ethics. “We wanted students
to read something in common
that would enrich their orien­
tation and engage them in
intellectual discussion,” says
Dean Janet Dickerson.
“We’ve chosen ethics as a
theme for all our students this

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year, and we’ll be offering
them films and workshops on
the subject throughout the
year.”
Professor Schwartz sug­
gested that readers keep in
mind certain questions: What
is human nature? Is it vari­
able? If people are impelled to
act in certain ways, what does
that suggest about moral re­
sponsibility? To what extent
are we slaves of biology, and
to what extent creatures of
society? Is it human nature to
be selfish?
According to Schwartz, a
battle is taking place between
“traditional moral conceptions
and modern scientific concep­
tions of what it means to be a
human being.” He says that by
calling selfishness a natural
and instinctive response to the
world, people have allowed
the corrosion of morality,
ethics, and democracy.
It is not true, he argues, that
human beings are born greedy
and selfish.

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years at Penn Mutual Life
Insurance Company, rising to
the position of executive vice
president.
In announcing Spock’s ap­
pointment, President Fraser
said: “The College is wonder­
fully fortunate to have at­
tracted to the vice presidency
a person of Bill Spock’s com­
bined qualities of business
skill, personal integrity, and
appreciation of top-quality
education. He has been a
Manager of the College since
1982 and, since 1986, the sec­
retary of the Board. Last year
he assumed the chairmanship
of the newly formed Audit
Subcommittee of the Board’s
Finance Committee. This year
he was named to an ad hoc
committee to review the func­
tioning of the Board of Man­
agers.”
After graduating from
Swarthmore with Honors in
mathematics and physics (as
well as the Ivy Award and the
Kwink Trophy), Spock served
with the U.S. Army in Korea
before beginning his career as
an actuary.
He serves on the boards of
the Friends Boarding Home in
West Chester and KendalCrosslands in Kennett Square
and is a former board member
of Riddle Memorial Hospital
and the Helen Kate Furness
Library. In 1965 Spock
started the Nether Providence
Township soccer program. He
also has served on local school
board committees.

Spock named new
business vice president
William T. Spock ’51, de­
scribed by President David
Fraser as “a man with a de­
tailed understanding of the
organization and culture of
Swarthmore,” last month as­
sumed the post of vice presi­
dent for business and finance
for the College.
Formerly senior vice presi­
dent of Corroon and Black/
Noyes Services in Media,
Spock previously spent 30

William T. Spock ’51

23

L

L

E

ENCORE! Swarthmore
named tops again

Art Department
hires curator
The Art Department has hired
a slide curator to organize and
file its extensive collection of
110,000 slides, valued at ap­
proximately $1 million and
currently kept in metal filing
cabinets unprotected from
dampness and dust.
“This is an incredible col­
lection for a college this size,”
observes William Bishop, the
new curator. “The computer
cataloging and filing of these,
modifying a system used at
Harvard and at the University
of Texas, is just a part of the
College’s larger plan to im­
prove the facilities in this
department.”
Some improvements,
according to Bishop, will
include the creation of a cli­
mate-controlled environment
for the slides, the use of filing
cabinets specifically designed
for such collections, and new
and more extensive light
tables.
“Already you can see fun­
gus attaching itself to some of
the slides,” reveals Bishop.
“You just can’t prevent that in
this kind of environment.
We’ll be able to stop that, and
24

we’ll try to make the slides
more accessible to the faculty
and students who use them.”
Bishop, who holds a master
of library science degree from
the University of Texas at Aus­
tin and a master of fine arts in
painting from the University
of Cincinnati, will create a
single coherent system of filing
that will free professors from
spending hours finding and
then refiling slides for their
lectures.
In recent years, especially,
says Bishop, the use of slides
in lectures and seminars has
become both extensive and
crucial to the process of art
education.
“This will very likely take
at least three or four years to
get caught up,” he explains.
“It’s possible in the future, too,
that we may be able to offer
services and access through
other libraries on campus.”
In addition to instituting the
new system, Bishop has taken
over copy stand work for pro­
fessors who require the photo­
graphing of slides from book
illustrations. “In some collec­
tions,” he notes, “40 or 50
percent of the slides come
from books.”

Swarthmore College has been
named the number one liberal
arts college in the United
States for the second year in a
row by U.S. News & World
Report magazine.
The magazine’s assessment
of the nation’s best national
and regional universities and
colleges, titled “America’s Best
Colleges,” was released in the
Oct. 16, 1989, issue. Yale
received number one status
among universities.
According to the magazine,
its refined ranking system de­
pended primarily on objective
data provided by the colleges
to assess five key areas: quality
of student body as determined
by selectivity; strength of fac­
ulty; financial resources;
ability to retain and graduate
students; reputation for aca­
demic excellence.
To determine academic
reputation, U.S. News sur­
veyed the opinions of 3,879
college presidents, academic
deans, and admissions officers
at 1,294 institutions, receiving
a response of some 60 percent.
The survey noted that most
experts agree on three major
components of successful col­
leges: student selectivity, in­
structional quality, and aca-

3
4
5
5
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17

G

E

demic reputation. Thus
percentile scores for these
attributes were weighted twice
as heavily in the overall totals
as were scores for student
retention rates and financial
resources.
Scores for each of the five
categories were converted to
percentiles, and the highest
raw score, achieved by
Swarthmore in the category
for national liberal arts col­
leges, was assigned a 100 per­
cent value. Other scores were
determined as a percentage of
that score.
Describing the category for
national liberal arts colleges,
the magazine reported: “The
141 schools in this category
are the most selective liberal
arts colleges in the country.
They also award more than
half their degrees in the liberal
arts.”
President David Fraser,
reacting to the announcement,
noted that the distinction
showed “uncommonly good
sense,” on the part of U.S.
News & World Report. “But in
fact it’s impossible to capture
the essence of good education
in five such categories,” he
added. “Even though the
methodology may have been
flawed, I’m glad they got the
answer right.”

Overall
score
Swarthmore College (Pa.)
100.0
Amherst College (Mass.)
99.0
Williams College (Mass.)
96.5
Pomona College (Calif.)
90.7
Bryn Mawr College (Pa.)
89.0
Wellesley College (Mass.)
89.0
Smith College (Mass.)
88.1
Wesleyan University (Conn.)
87.6
Oberlin College (Ohio)
86.8
Grinnell College (Iowa)
85.6
Haverford College (Pa.)
85.3
Middlebury College (Vt.)
84.9
Bowdoin College (Maine)
84.5
Carleton College (Minn.)
82.7
Davidson College (N.C.)
80.5
Colgate University (N.Y.)
79.0
Mount Holyoke College (Mass.) 78.9
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

LETTERS
CH ILD R EN ’S ISSUES
TO THE EDITOR:
I was misquoted in the article on home
schooling in the August issue—I never said
[physicist] Richard Feynman was home
schooled.
As I reflected upon this error, however, I
realized there is a sense in which what was
written is true. If one understands “home
schooling” in the most general sense to be a
state of mind in which one takes responsi­
bility for one*s own learning, whether one be
adult or child, and not the issue of whether
one has or hasn’t attended school—then
Richard Feynman does indeed satisfy (his
father taught him math as a toddler, and he
went on to learn calculus by himself, to give
one example).
What we are above all trying to do with
our son, Nicholas, is to teach him to follow
his curiosity, to help him find the selfdiscipline to do what he wants to do. In this
way he is “learning how to learn.” To us that
is the essence of home schooling.
ROBERT EARLY 73
Kittanning, Pa.
TO THE EDITOR:
When the August special issue on children
arrived for my husband (James D. Keighton
’60), I immediately read all the articles with
great interest. I am a teacher at Carolina
Friends School and would like to thank you
for addressing this timely issue by sharing
the knowledge and expertise of Swarthmore
alumni with so many others. We should all
pay closer attention to what is happening to
“our” children.
ALICE S. KEIGHTON
Durham, N.C.
TO THE EDITOR:
I read with interest and with huge frustra­
tion the August special issue of the Bulletin,
“Putting Our Children’s House in Order.”
My talks with hundreds of divorcing
women in Maryland have convinced me that
the inequities of present divorce laws actually
underlie the very problems that are featured
in your series of published articles. ,
I have also found that the law is an
encapsulated discipline. In order to establish
credibility I therefore acquired a law degree.
Like those women your magazine describes,
I have devoted my life to the “Just Do It”
School. I have spent eight years of exhausting
(and fruitless) effort in the area of divorce
NOVEMBER 1989

reform. This is half of a child’s life.
I am happy that the alumnae on pages 1821 are “doing more than just talking about”
many of these problems, but I believe they
are trying to wipe away the pus without ex­
tracting the thorn. I believe that legal atti­
tudes about divorce, and their consequential
economic tragedy, are the real problem. I
now think that the whole subject of divorce
is so offensive that it is impossible to get
anyone to print anything about it. Thus,
while I am not able to get anyone even to
“talk about the problems” of divorce itself,
the very problems that you discuss—our
children as future adults, poverty, ineffi­
ciency in the courts, day care—continue to
flow directly from attitudes toward divorce.
JILL MORREL COLEMAN ’52
Owings Mills, Md.

that issue is a disgracefully sexist piece.
When will we (as women and men, and
as a nation) stop assuming that child care is
primarily a mother’s responsibility? Where
are the fathers in all this? Why is it that we
worry whether mothers are “sacrificing the
good of the children for their own benefit,”
and not worrying the same about working
fathers?
Until we can honestly say that child care
is the responsibility of families and commu­
nities, and not of individual mothers, women
will never be free from discrimination in the
workplace. And until discrimination in the
workplace is gone, we shall never be free.
Perhaps that is the worst legacy we leave to
our children.
ANN CUDD ’82
Lawrence, Kan.

TO THE EDITOR:
Congratulations on your special issue,
August 1989! You have performed a great
service in presenting information about ef­
forts to improve children’s lives.
ESTHER HICKS EMORY ’24
Westbury, N.Y.

TO THE EDITOR:
As a parent and a parish minister, I very
much appreciated your August edition on
“Putting Our Children’s House in Order.” I
admired the writers’ involvement and in­
sights in what I agree is a major social issue
for our country, and I benefited from them.
The article on “Mothers vs. Children” by
Sandra Hofferth, however, troubled me
deeply. Yes, there is a conflict of interest
between mothers and children, but a discus­
sion about this conflict needs to include two
other major dimensions that Ms. Hofferth
did not mention. First, at the same time that
women are trying to pursue career options
outside the home, many men are discovering
that they would like to play larger roles in
the home and family. We need not speak
only of “maternal care” but of “parental
care,” and, in fact, researchers and writers,
such as Lillian Rubin in Intimate Strangers,
advocate a better balance of maternal and
paternal care not just for the sake of the
parents but for the sake of the emotional
health of the children.
Second, a major shift in attitudes about
careers and the workplace is the only way to
ensure that such a healthy shift in family
patterns could occur. The workplace needs
to become considerably more flexible, offer­
ing much more in the way of shared jobs and
part-time jobs with the potential for con­
tinuing career advancement. As long as most
positions require a minimum of 40 hours
and often up to 70 hours a week for pro­
fessional workers, families will find it im­
possible to develop a way of life that truly
shares all the dimensions of life.
As Sara Lawrence Lightfoot [’66] said in
her commencement talk, quoted in the same
edition of the Bulletin, “Nurturing and sus­
taining relationships in families—the de­
mands of intimacy—are far more compli-

TO THE EDITOR:
Two things: first, a response to the August
issue’s letters about “A Day at the Races”
[April 1989 issue]. Both letters express dis­
may that Swarthmore students are paying
attention to race—one calls it “complicated
psychologizing”; the other rhymes, “I don’t
like the implication/ Of allegiance to an
origin, continent, or nation.”
It may be that one day we will all be
respectful and comfortable and just with
each other—and able to forget race—but in
the meantime, if racism is to be overcome,
we need to recognize and talk about the
ways race affects our perceptions and expe­
riences.
Second, the August issue’s “Mothers ver­
sus Children: The Real Child Care Debate”
neglected the role that fathers, and our un­
derstandings of work and family, play in the
child care dilemma. Hofferth offers analyses
and “solutions” that pit mothers against
children and leave the rest of society free to
go about its business. Is this a fair or accurate
way to cast the debate?
JENNIE ULEMAN ’87
Philadelphia, Pa.
TO THE EDITOR:
In the August 1989 issue of the Bulletin,
I read in the Letters to the Editor that you
were taken to task for sexism in an earlier
issue. I’m afraid that you have not learned
your lesson. The article “Mothers versus
Children: The Real Child Care Debate” in

25

cated than the controlled responsibilities of
career.” The problem of how to raise healthy
children cannot be reduced to a conflict
between mothers and children or to the cost
of good child care, but needs to be addressed
and worked on together by all of us: women
and men, employers and employees, and the
country as a whole.
HELEN LUTTON COHEN ’65
Lexington, Mass.

JEOPARDY!

TO THE EDITOR:
That was a good story in the April issue
of the Bulletin on our own Jeopardy! cham­
pion— I wish him well in the Tournament
of Champions.
But, while the article implied that Cigus
Vanni [’72] is unique in the annals of the old
Garnet & White, Swarthmore has produced
at least one other five-time Jeopardy! win­
ner.
REPLY
Me.
TO THE EDITOR:
In June 1971 I became the 95th unde­
I regret that I gave the impression that feated champion, winning five consecutive
fathers were not part of the picture. Research games and achieving my Andy-Warhol-15shows that about 15 percent of child care is minutes-of-fame. Unhappily, that’s about all
provided by the father while the mother I got out of it. In comparison with today’s
works outside the home, a small but signifi­ upscale winnings in the tens of thousands of
cant contribution. In one of ten full-time dollars, the payoffs on the old Art Fleming
employed dual-earner couples with children, Jeopardy! were in gentlemanly $100 incre­
the parents worked entirely different hours. ments, and the highest amount you could
While the decision to stay home or be em­ win with one correct question was $200
ployed when children are young is a family (not counting Daily Doubles). My winnings
decision, it is one with more serious impli­ amounted to $4,200; not too shabby—but
cations for the mother than for the father. If even allowing for inflation, that’s chicken
she and her husband should divorce (this feed when you see the $30,000 to $40,000
risk is about 50 percent), she will be less cash prizes awarded by Alex Trebek today.
well-off had she stayed home than if she had
Unhappily, I did not fare as well in the
been employed. Therefore, while a joint de­ 1972 Tournament of Champions. (They had
cision, it is one of considerably more poten­ leftover winners from 1970, and so it wasn’t
tial consequence to the mother than to the until the next year that I got back to New
father.
York for the playoffs.) I started out all right,
I want to raise for argument a question taking a fast lead, and then stumbled on the
that is implicit in several of the letters. What classic Jeopardy! pitfall—I blew a question
is the extent of societal responsibility for its in my prime category, Shakespeare. I totally
young? Parents generally have been consid­ blanked on the name of the play in which
ered responsible for their children, and soci­ Audrey and Touchstone cavort in the Forest
ety has been reluctant to interfere. We are of Arden. “Uh, er, u m . . . , ” I stammered for
beginning to reconsider this assumption for what seemed like forever, until the bright
several reasons. First, not all families are middle-aged woman next to me, Paula, got
able to invest as much as desirable to pro­ the nod and cheerfully answered, “What is
duce healthy, high-quality children. Some, A s You Like If!” Then Paula was off and
through severe economic stress, simply can­ running, and I never got the lead again. I
not afford the health care, basic shelter, and finished a lame second to her, with a takeattention their children need. Others, through home total of $550 or so, and Paula went on
drug use or mental problems, mistreat or to become the grand champion in the final
abandon their children altogether. I shudder rounds, winning oodles of money and a
to think of the animosity and resentment that three-week trip to Greece—“another won­
such children may harbor as they grow up. derful vacation in a totalitarian country,” as
The social welfare system is overburdened. the assistant producer wryly remarked to the
It can neither protect children in their homes assembled contestants before the taping.
nor remove them.
Interestingly enough, speaking of national
Second, investments in children are im­ fame, I was walking along the main street of
portant for society. We need children who Keene, N.H., (where I lived at the time)
can read and write and who will grow up to shortly after my undefeated series was aired,
participate productively in the society. What and a driver in a Maryland car stopped and
society’s responsibility is to these children is asked directions. I advised him, he thanked
likely to be the subject of strong debate as me, and, as he prepared to drive off, said, “I
the demographic characteristics of our soci­ enjoyed you on Jeopardy! Congratulations!”
ety change from a youthful to an elderly I was dumbfounded.
population.
PHILIP N. PRICE ’52
SANDRA L. HOFFERTH ’67
Brooks, Maine
Takoma Park, Md.
26

Dear Swarthmoreans:
We hope many of you have
already used your 1989 Alumni
Directory, the recent gift from
the College, to stay in touch
with your Swarthmore friends.
Naturally we wanted it to be
100 percent accurate, and we
tried hard to make it so; but
you have alerted us to a num­
ber of errata in your listings,
and we have found a few on
our own. Two of our more con­
spicuous bloopers occur under
the geographical listing: the
inexcusable substitution for
West Germany of the name
German Democratic Republic
and the omission of the state
of Alabama.
We think we have apolo­
gized in writing to all alumni
who told us about errors in
their listings. On this page we
hereby apologize to any alumni
whom we do not know we
have wronged. If you will write
us our sin of omission or com­
mission in regard to yourself,
we will be happy to run an ad­
dendum to the list below in the
next issue of the Bulletin.
Please check the list of errata
for your friends and make any
necessary changes in your
directory.
Sincerely,
Kendall Landis ’48
Vice President

We goofed! See below for Alumni Directory errata
Careers
Name:
Constance Loeb Cohn ’52

Printed incorrectly
in directory as:
Prefers to be listed as:
physician
health practitioner

Cecily Langdale Davis ’61

merchant

art dealer

John DePauw ’59

armed forces
member

professor/researcher

Hilda Findley-Knier ’43
Robert Freedman ’58

retired
writer

literary agent

Jane Hicks Haycox ’55

practical nurse

nurse practitioner

Susan Inman ’71

undergraduate

registered dance/
movement therapist

Mary Janson Leslie ’58

practical nurse

nurse practitioner

Dorothy Shoemaker
McDiarmid ’29

retired

elected official

Gail O’ConnellBabcock ’65

homemaker

psychologist

James A. Perkins ’34

administrator,
retired

administrator

Peter Pompetti ’77

computer
programmer

architect

Beverley Bond Potter ’55
Harriet Holran Schley ’56

salesperson

rare-book dealer

accountant

secretary

Thomas D. Sharpies ’40

engineer
technician

engineer

Harriet Shorr ’60

teacher

artist

David Steinmuller ’56

physician

professor/researcher

Names

professor

Sins of Commission
Name:
Isaac Hallowed
Clothier, Hon.

Printed incorrectly
in directory as:
LL.D., 1903
M.A., 1918

Should be listed as:
M.A., 1903
LL.D., 1918

Elizabeth Schauffler Apartment 14-B
Lyman ’47
350 East 57th Street
Richard Lyman ’47 New York, NY 10022

56 Pearce Mitchell
Place
Stanford, CA 94305

Glenna Bovee
McKnight ’50

325 Farmington Lane
Vernon Hills, IL 60061

10 Church Street
Foxboro, MA 02035

German Democratic
Republic (East
Germany)

Federal Republic of
Germany (West
Germany)

W. Duke Weatherford, Jr.
’81 (spouse of Anne Smith
Weatherford ’51)

Willis D.
Weatherford, Jr.,
H’81

Sins of Omission

Correct name:
Ann McCaghey Bartunek ’62

Printed incorrectly
in directory as:
Ann Drake, in maiden name
listing

Kennette Benedict (wife
of Jonathan Casper ’64)

Kennette Benedict Casper

Mary Lois Broomell Eberle ’40

Mary Lois Broomell

Jane-Carol GlendinningJohnson ’66

Jane Carol Glendinning Johnson

Arthur T. Groome ’20

in “ 1920 deceased” as Arthur T.
Gramme

Helen Vogdes Macartney ’20

in “ 1920 deceased” as Helen
Macartney Vogdes

Gretchen Howe Miller ’44

Howe Miller, Gretchen, under H

Philip Anthony Cavalier ’89
161 West 54th Street
New York, NY 10019

omitted from undergraduate listing

Douglas Lee Gramiak ’89
218 Ridgewood Road
Springfield, PA 19064

omitted from undergraduate listing

Jane Plummer Leimbach ’45
15 Forest Lane
Swarthmore, PA 19081
Homemaker

omitted from alphabetical and
geographical listings

Henry Churchill Skinner ’89
9 Harding Lane
Marblehead, MA 01945

omitted from undergraduate listing

Kelly Werhane ’87
940 Cedar Street, Apt. #4
El Segundo, CA 90245
Assistant Media Planner

omitted from alphabetical and
geographical listings

The following residents of Alabama were omitted
from the geographical listing:
Auburn:
Huntsville:
John H. Hand ’62
Richard E. Cordray ’48
Cynthia Donahue Reinke ’72
George B. Doane III ’53
Winslow Cooke Shoemaker NV
Birmingham:
Hugh Cort III ’73
Leeds:
John R. Durant ’52
Anne G. Miller ’62
Joseph F. Gaskill, Jr. ’52
Madison:
Joan Maddy Harris ’40
Drew Dee Reynolds ’74
Frederick S. Keller ’64
Mobile:
Wilson Radding ’65
P. William Curreri ’58
Franklin P. Stow, Jr. ’50
Jean
Elliott Golden ’55
F. Allyn Walker ’45
Elizabeth Malcolm Murray ’41
Mary Elliott Woodrow ’67

Harvey S. Shipley Miller ’70

Harvey Shipley-Miller

Gail O’Connell-Babcock ’65

Gail Babcock

Gladys Seaman Pell ’20

in “ 1920 deceased” as Gladys
Pell Seaman

Jane Miller Pompetti ’77

Jane Sherman Pompetti

Robert H. Woodrow III ’67

Walter Thorwald
Skallerup III ’78

Walter Thorwalt Skallerup III

Cuba:
Sara Guthrie Geers ’56

Marian Young ’72

Marian Stone Young

Fairhope:
Aileen Riley Matthews ’22

Point Clear:
Anna Beran Hankins ’51
Charles G. Hankins III ’52

Florence:
Elizabeth Bomar Wallace ’55

Tuscaloosa:
Lucinda Lee Roff ’71

Montgomery:
Virginia Venable Mickey ’35

Milwaukee

Continued from page 3

in the city’s history.
manager. The theater staged 10 shows in 10
The Milwaukee Center, which cost more weeks. “To this day I don t like American
than $ 100 million, redeveloped two down- cheese sandwiches because of that summer,”
town blocks. O’Connor’s theater company she says, smiling.
was the catalyst for the project, as it renoMore acting at Swarthmore and one more
vated a historic brick electric power gener- summer spent with a theater company at
ating plant for its new home. The plant and Tufts University convinced O Connor that
several adjacent buildings were donated to she preferred directing to acting. “I was just
the Rep by the Wisconsin Electric Power an OK actress,” she admits. “I absolutely
Co
loved directing.”
The Trammell Crow Co., the largest real
After graduating from Swarthmore,
estate developer in the country, joined the O’Connor went back to Tufts, where she
project, building an office tower, hotel, and received a master’s degree in directing. (She
underground parking garage.
was recently awarded an honorary doctorate
It was quite an accomplishment for the of humane letters by Milwaukee’s Mount
woman who feared she was in over her head Mary College.) With her former husband,
during her first two years at Swarthmore Boardman O’Connor, she moved to San
College. “I was going to school on a schol- Diego, where Sara stage-managed at the
arship, and I was afraid I would fail,” respected Old Globe Theater and directed a
O’Connor candidly recalls.
children’s troupe called the San Diego Junior
But she succeeded in her studies in a Theater,
fashion that would presage her later successes
When Boardman took a job in Chicago,
in the arts. “Swarthmore genuinely changed Sara started directing a group of theater
my life,” she says. “I think what Swarthmore people there in a room above a restaurant,
taught me was that I could find out anything That endeavor led to the formation of the
if I was willing to look, to ask. That is a Company of the Four, a professional troupe
wonderful skill. Many people are ashamed that favored intellectual pieces and was
that they don’t know something, and they
won’t ask.”
That willingness to ask questions is how
she learned the complicated world of down­
town redevelopment and real estate deal­
making. O’Connor had honed her theater
and management skills at several jobs, but
being a primary player in a project that
included several levels of government, large
sums of private investment money, and major
construction work was a new experience.
“When I didn’t know something, I asked,”
she explains.
O’Connor’s stage career began with the
Little Theater Club at Swarthmore. “An
actress friend dragged me along to an audi­
tion for moral support,” she remembers. “I
got cast, and she didn’t. I didn’t know
anything about acting, and I was immedi­
ately smitten.”
That led to a summer with a theater
company in Rome, N.Y., where she earned
Sara O ’Connor ’54
$15 a week as a character actress and stage
28

decades ahead of the times in its multiracial
casting policy. Besides directing many of the
shows, Sara found herself running the theater
company’s business affairs. “I was at home
with a typewriter, a telephone, and two
small children,” she recalls. “I was avail­
able.”
A return to Boston for the O’Connor
family led to Sara’s appointment as a general
manager and associate producer of the The­
ater Company of Boston. After a brief move
to New Orleans, Sara and her two sons
returned to Boston, where she became pro­
ducer for her old troupe. Among the young,
unknown actors who performed at the The­
ater Company of Boston during O’Connor’s
tenure were Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voigt,
and Robert De Niro.
O’Connor left Boston in 1971 to manage
the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, a
regional theater struggling under a $600,000
debt. In three years, she led the company
into the black. “Getting rid of that $600,000
obligation took every ounce of energy and
ingenuity I had,” she says.
With that task accomplished, O’Connor
decided to leave Cincinnati. She applied for
the position of managing director with the
Milwaukee Repertory Theater, a company
that had known only one other manager
during its existence. She got the job.
Although O’Connor hasn’t acted or di­
rected a play in years, she has maintained a
creative influence on her company and
American theater with her translations of
French plays. The translations have been
staged in Milwaukee and elsewhere. A bla­
tant Francophile who reads Marcel Proust in
French for fun, she has translated both
classic and contemporary pieces and makes
frequent trips to Paris to scout new plays for
the American stage.
Why does O’Connor take on so many
lu projects? “That is her entertainment,” ex1 plains Susan Medak, the young managing
| director at the Northlight Theater in Evang ston, 111. Medak once worked for O’Connor
9 in Milwaukee and considers the older wom1 an her mentor. “Sara doesn’t distinguish
between work and recreation.”
Jk
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

Just What D oes the Alumni
Council Do?

Mail to: Elinor Meyer Haupt
Alumni Office, Swarthmore College
Swarthmore, PA 19081

TT "W T ith this issue we begin a column about organized alumni
V w activities conducted by the Swarthmore College Alumni AsT T sociation and its instrument for action, the Alumni Council.
The 52-person Alumni Council does not set College policy or hire
presidents; nor is it responsible for fiscal solvency. The Board of Man­
agers does these things. The Alumni Council, however, does have an
important role to play in the life of the College; through this column
we will keep you up to date on the concerns and actions of the Alumni
Council. In turn we urge you to use the tear-out forms that will appear
with the column to alert us to your interests regarding organized alumni
activity. We hope you will want to get involved either by running for
a seat on Council yourself or suggesting candidates for Council, the
Nominating Committee, and the two positions open each year for
Alumni Managers.
“I find this objectionable___ ”
Some half dozen of you respond each year on the ballot for Alumni
Council members, “I find this objectionable.” You refer to the practice
authorized in the by-laws of the Alumni Association of voting for one
man and one woman in your zone. “Sexist,” you say. We have replied
in the past that we felt the result of having a Council equally balanced
between men and women made up for any sexist overtones in the
procedure.
The Alumni Council briefly discussed election procedures at its
March and June meetings. No consensus was reached, and an ad hoc
committee, on nominating and election procedures was established at
Council’s October meeting. Nancy Fitts Donaldson ’46 will chair the
committee.
Several options have been identified to date:
• Have the Nominating Committee present on the ballot a single slate
of one man and one woman in each zone so that we have no candidates
who are nominated but not elected.
• Amend the by-laws to eliminate the restriction to vote for one man
and one woman.
• Reduce the number of candidates in each zone from six to four.
What’s your reaction? Let us hear from you in the space provided
on the form to the right.
We also urge you to use the form to send us suggestions for
candidates for the Alumni Council.
Elinor Meyer Haupt ’55
President, Swarthmore College Alumni Association

B & B, Swarthmore Style

■

■

In regard to election procedures for Alumni Council, I think
Council should consider_______________________________

I favor option

I think these people would make great candidates for:
Alumni Council____________________________
Alumni Manager.

Nominating Committee (must be able to attend two meetings a
year on campus)__________ __________________________

I wish Council would do something about

Signed: name and class
address______

■

■
i

any travelers try bed-and-breakfast establishments and like
them. The Alumni Council wants to know whether Swarthmoreans would like to have their own B & B system.
If enough Swarthmoreans indicate they would like to accommodate
traveling alumni and parents in their homes, the Alumni Council will
publish a directory.
Travelers would make arrangements directly with hosts and pay the
host a fee significantly below commercial rates. The host would
forward all or part of the fee to the Alumni Fund.
Hosts could set any house rules they might wish, including no pets,
no alcohol, or no children, and they would have the right to refuse any
request for accommodations at any time.
Council now needs a rough idea of the number of people willing to
be hosts. If you are interested, please fill out the form to the right and
mail it to the address indicated. With a significant show of support by
potential hosts, the Council will proceed to publish the Directory for
Traveling Swarthmoreans.

M

.

I am interested in being host to traveling Swarthmoreans. I
understand that returning this form is not a commitment and that
the program will allow me to set conditions for guests and to
accept guests only when convenient for me.

i

PLEASE PRINT
Name
Street address
Town or city _
State_______
Phone numbers:
W ork________
Hom e________

L

ZIP
Mail to: Swarthmore Travel
c/o Christopher Kennedy
Bristol Road
HC 61, Box 124
Damariscotta, Maine 04543

_l

Cleveland
Continued from page 3

of the world,” as the opera company’s
subscription promotion billed it, because for
the first time since Gershwin wrote Porgy
and Bess, a major figure from the world of
popular music has written a grand opera.
Bamberger’s composer for the production
is Stewart Copeland, founder and percus­
sionist of the rock group The Police. Cope­
land is known also as the composer of films
such as Wall Street and creator of the score
for TV’s The Equalizer. “We have been
working together for four years,” says Bam­
berger. “There were times when I would say,
‘You can’t do that,’ or he would say, ‘How
about doing it this way?’ He brings his
expertise as a musician, and I bring my
expertise on how to make things work on
stage.”
For both men, Holy Blood is a radical
departure from their usual milieu; and as
Anthony Tommasini wrote in The New
York Times Magazine (September 24), it
represents “a career risk for everyone in­
volved, especially David Bamberger.” Tom­
masini notes that Bamberger’s ability to get
support for the project from his board and
private foundations “is a testimony to their
trust in his judgment as well as his entrepre­
neurial savvy.”
Bamberger heard Copeland mention dur­
ing a television interview that he might write
an opera. When Bamberger contacted him,
an artistic partnership formed in which
opera and pop music talk to each other. “It
is not a rock opera,” says Bamberger, “but
the music shows the influence of the popular
idiom.”
Scarcely 13 years ago, Cleveland Opera
existed only in the minds of Bamberger and
Cleveland attorney John D. Heavenrich.
Heavenrich had seen Bamberger’s work
while the young artist was director of the
Oberlin Music Theater (1972-75). He was
interested in bringing opera to Cleveland,
and he sent his card backstage to Bamberger.
When Bamberger decided to leave Oberlin,
he contacted Heavenrich, and the two men
agreed that Bamberger should research the
feasibility of starting an opera company in
Cleveland. He spent the next six months
interviewing movers and shakers in the
Cleveland music and business worlds, living
off his savings.
When the two men made the decision to
try it out, Carola Bamberger, David’s wife,
says, “It was one of those moments. The die
56

was cast, but David said he wasn’t going to
spend another cent of his own money, so
Heavenrich paid the $25 incorporation fee.”
Bamberger likens this critical moment in his
life to the Jewish story that says Moses was
stopped at the Red Sea and nothing hap­
pened until one man of faith took a step into
the sea and the waves parted.
Six months later, in 1976, Cleveland
Opera opened in a junior high school audi­
torium in the Cleveland suburbs. The sell­
out season included two operas for $10,
Madame Butterfly and The Barber o f Seville.
“In our 13th season,” notes Cirola Bam­
berger, the associate director of the com­
pany, “we have an annual budget approach­

ing $3 million and a permanent staff of 24.
We operate in the black, and we mount five
productions a year. In terms of audience, we
are the 10th largest opera company in the
United States.”
A junior high school was not the best
place for staging opera, so when The Cleve­
land Foundation, the nation’s oldest com­
munity foundation, approached Bamberger
and asked what needed to be done to give
the city a world-class theater, he was eager
to advise on acoustics, size of stage, and sight
lines. The end result of this liaison is “the
greatest stage west of metropolitan New
York,” says Bamberger. The theater is lo­
cated in downtown Cleveland in a remodeled
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

PHOTOS BY ANASTASIA PANTSIOS

Clockwise, top to bottom: A s gen­
eral director o f Cleveland Opera,
David Bamberger ’62 attends a
black-tie fund-raiser, directs the
Cleveland Opera cast in La
Boheme, visits with children after
a production o f Naughty Mari­
etta, and consults with Stewart
Copeland, composer, and Imre
Pallo, guest orchestra conductor
fo r Holy Blood & Crescent Moon.

1920s music palace that had been on the
verge of being demolished.
One key to the success of Cleveland
Opera stems from Bamberger’s conception
of opera as a form of music theater. “It is
exciting and should be entertaining. In cast­
ing we want people to look their roles. Tosca
should look as if she might have two men
lusting after her.” Quality is not sacrificed
for appearance, and Bamberger is proud that
three people who sang for Cleveland Opera
were debut artists of the year for Beverly
Sills of the New York City Opera Company.
Cleveland Opera’s success may be attrib­
uted also in part to its imaginative outreach
program with students in the schools. Bam­
berger refers to the company as “populist,”
and its outreach program is both messianic
and practical in broadening the base of
support for opera and the company itself.
“We know that education is most mean­
ingful when it is hands on,” says Bamberger,
“but how can kids put on an opera and learn
standard repertoire?” The company found a
way. It created condensed versions of
NOVEMBER 1989

Carmen, The Elixir o f Love, and The M i­
kado, one-half hour to 40 minutes long. A
singer went into a fourth-grade classroom
and staged the children. The music teacher
in the school rehearsed them with the help
of a tape provided by the company. The art
teacher and her classes made the scenery.
For The Mikado, the whole school im­
mersed itself in oriental history. The kitchen
served oriental food. When all was in readi­
ness for the production, the original singer
returned with two others and performed
with the children.
The company has reworked this basic
pattern in some 60 schools, public and
private, half of them in the inner city. “Not
only does it expose kids to opera,” says
Bamberger, “it also can transform kids. We
never have a discipline problem. They know
they will be performing in front of their
peers, and they don’t want to.embarrass
themselves. The cultural world becomes
part of their lives. Their parents are in tears.”
When the company works with older
children, it uses other creative approaches.

In one case Cleveland Opera’s entire opera­
tion was replicated in the school to give
seventh- and eighth-graders a “hands on”
business experience and practical uses for
writing and mathematics in such areas as
marketing, public relations, budgeting, and
fund-raising. The Cleveland Foundation
again provided needed funds with a grant of
$5,000—but a grant that was handled in a
special way. Two hundred fifty dollars of it
was held back until the kids wrote and
presented their own proposal, under the
guidance of their teachers and the company
staff.
Bamberger himself began his love of the
theater as a child, attending plays in his
hometown, New York City, and going to
acting school. His headmaster recommended
Swarthmore to him, and when he got off the
train in Swarthmore on an initial visit and
saw the campus, “I fell in love with it,” he
says. During his undergraduate years, his
interest in the theater thrived. “We didn’t
know in those days that you only did things
for credit. We did a tremendous amount of
theater, new works and old, under the
directing of Barbara Lange [’31]. She was
wonderful in giving us a chance to develop
all of our skills.” Bamberger also found time
to study in Paris for a semester as a Peaslee
scholar.
His path to Oberlin’s Music Theater from
Swarthmore led to the Yale Drama School
and directing jobs at the Academy of Vocal
Arts and the Walnut Street Theater in Phila­
delphia, the New York City Opera Com­
pany, Lincoln Center and Kennedy Center,
Santiago, Chile, and Tel Aviv, Israel.
Bamberger’s son, Steven, thinks his fa­
ther’s greatest achievement is not in opera
but in writing a two-volume history of the
Jews for children, based on Abba Eban’s
History o f the Jews, because those books
were banned in the Soviet Union. He has
since written two more books for children
about Jewish history. (Bamberger thinks his
greatest achievement is his fine family and
his son, Steven, a junior at Duke Univer­
sity.)
Bamberger says he learned to write and
do research at Swarthmore, where “a liberal
arts education did for me just exactly what
it is supposed to do. Dr. Rhys [Hedley H.
Rhys, professor emeritus of art history]
really taught me to see, and I use what he
taught me all the time.”