SWARTHMORE College Bulletin Football at Swarthmore: A question of values December 1998 S W A R T H M COLLEGE BULLETIN DECEMBER 1998 Features On the Line 10 Football at Swarthmore is a question of values. By Garret Keizer Searching for Xanadu 16 Hypertext guru Ted Nelson ’59 scorns the World Wide Web. By William Saletan ’87 10 Fast Plants 20 A little plant brings big ideas to Chester-Upland classrooms. By Chad Glover Departments Letters 3 Your views on our pages. 20 Collection 4 News of Swarthmore today. Alumni Digest 24 Your College events connection. Class Notes 26 The lives of Swarthmoreans. Deaths 30 Swarthmore remembers. In My Life 52 42 Reflections on “the good life.” By Niki Giloane Sebastian ’65 Books & Authors 52 An expanded look at alumni books. Our Back Pages 64 Wish you were here. 4 On the cover: New head coach Peter Alvanos wants the Garnet Tide to “play with one heartbeat.” Photograph by Jim Graham. O R E 64 Alumni Profiles An apple for the teacher 37 Ed Clark ’49 helps honor great teaching. By Audree Penner Designs of the times 45 Dorothy Twining Globus ’69 knows clothes. By Audree Penner Calling Bangladesh 50 Iqbal Quadir ’81 knits together villages. By Carol Brévart 50 16 24 Parlor Talk I n a recent issue of Glamour magazine, Vassar alumna Victoria Balfour complained that her college magazine’s Class Notes are nothing but “bubbly laundry lists of accomplishment” that portray lives in which “everyone has the spouse of their dreams, a job they adore, perfect children, and enough money to refurbish old Victorian houses.” She argued that alumni magazines should give Class Notes a shot of reality by including more of the challenges and struggles of everyday life, such as career problems, illness, depression, difficulties with children, or the loneliness of old age. Though Swarthmore’s Class Notes aren’t just the rosy recitations of accomplishments that Balfour decries, she does have a point: the notes do tend to paint generally positive pictures of our lives. But that’s not because the personal experiences she wishes to Not everyone’s a CEO, see in print have been excised by cheerful class secretaries or a computer genius, or Pollyanna editors. They are a teacher of the year. less frequently submitted in the first place—a fact that may And not everyone be even more significant than changes the world. Balfour’s initial complaint. Any discussion of the verisimilitude of Class Notes raises a larger question: How can the Bulletin best fulfill its communications and public relations mission for Swarthmore and at the same time be honest and true for its readers? Our first responsibility, of course, is to tell you the story of the College, to bring you the student experience, the research, the debates, and the educational challenges that are the lifeblood of Swarthmore. Second, from its vantage point on campus, the Bulletin looks outward, bringing you stories of alumni who engage and sometimes change the world with their ideas and deeds. But not everyone’s a CEO, a computer genius, or a teacher of the year. Not everyone changes the world. We’ve long had an idea on our story list called “Ordinary Lives.” As we conceived it, such an article would affirm and celebrate alumni who get up in the morning, put on their shoes, and go forth to deal with jobs, kids, money, traffic, grocery shopping, relationships—the stuff of everyday life. But “Ordinary Lives” has yet to appear, and I’m beginning to think it never will. That’s because it’s impossible to identify anyone who’s truly an exemplar of the ordinary. One of the values that Swarthmore imparts is the simple Quaker idea that each person is truly extraordinary. Thus, a third, almost paramount goal emerges for those of us who edit the Bulletin: to relate all of the ideas, accomplishments, challenges, and struggles that are Swarthmore College to the lives of our readers. To help meet this need, we have launched a new section of the Bulletin called “In My Life,” which we hope will give individual voice to the authentic experiences of living. See page 42 for the inaugural essay. We trust that you read this magazine not out of some sense of obligation to the alma mater but because you find in it something that adds value to your own experience, something that stimulates your thinking, illuminates your journey, and, once in a while, touches your heart. —J.L. 2 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN Editor: Jeffrey Lott Managing Editor: Nancy Lehman ’87 Class Notes Editor: Andrea Hammer News Editor: Cathleen McCarthy Desktop Publishing: Audree Penner Designer: Bob Wood Intern: Jim Harker ’99 Editor Emerita: Maralyn Orbison Gillespie ’49 Associate Vice President for External Affairs: Barbara Haddad Ryan ’59 Changes of Address: Send address label along with new address to: Alumni Records Office Swarthmore College 500 College Avenue Swarthmore PA 19081-1397 Phone: (610) 328-8435. Or e-mail: alumnirecords@swarthmore.edu. Contacting Swarthmore College: College Operator: (610) 328-8000 www.swarthmore.edu Admissions: (610) 328-8300 admissions@swarthmore.edu Alumni Relations: (610) 328-8402 alumni@swarthmore.edu Publications: (610) 328-8568 bulletin@swarthmore.edu Registrar: (610) 328-8297 registrar@swarthmore.edu The Swarthmore College Bulletin (ISSN 08882126), of which this is volume XCVI, number 3, is published in August, September, December, March, and June by Swarthmore College, 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore PA 19081-1397. Periodicals postage paid at Swarthmore PA and additional mailing offices. Permit No. 0530-620. Postmaster: Send address changes to Swarthmore College Bulletin, 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore PA 19081-1397. ©1998 Swarthmore College Printed in U.S.A. on recycled paper Letters THE GIRLS OF WILLETS To the Editor: I very much enjoyed the article “The Campus That Never Was” [September 1998]. However, for those of us who don’t get back to the campus very much, it would have been a plus to have included some of the buildings that did get built. Willets, for example, was being built in 1959, the year I graduated. My group of friends didn’t like the look of it at all and felt that the campus was being ruined. I remember a derogatory rhyme that began “_____ like saucepans, heads like skillets, we’re the girls who live in Willets.” Does anyone remember the entire rhyme? SUSAN BARKER GUTTERMAN ’59 New York SAVED BY THE DEPRESSION To the Editor: For those of us who lived through it, the Great Depression has to be considered a dismal experience. Yet from “The Campus That Never Was,” it appears that it may have unknowingly saved Swarthmore’s beautiful campus. We should all be most grateful for that—as well as for the subsequent appearance of architect Vincent Kling. Imagine Parrish Hall without its Mansard roof! J.C. BENNETT ’45 Morris Plains, N.J. BEST OF THE BEST To the Editor: In reading “The Campus That Never Was,” I was particularly struck by the mention of a supposed congruent style among Swarthmore’s buildings. For my part, I’ve often boasted that one can tour several times and places simply by walking the campus. In short order, one can visit a: • Victorian mansion (Parrish Hall) DECEMBER 1998 • Medieval fortress (McCabe Library) • Modern Swiss ski lodge (Sharples Dining Hall) • Site of ancient muster and moot (Scott Amphitheater) • Timeless European inn (Worth and Bond) • Holiday Inn of indistinguishable locale (Willets) • Gothic cathedral complete with cloister (Clothier Hall) • Formally disciplined, utterly exuberant garden Actually, I was referring to the rose garden there, but it does describe the precious best-of-the-best that I got in my brief years at Swarthmore. KARELLYNNE WERTHEIMER WATKINS ’74 Denver FRAUGHT WITH NAUGHT To the Editor: We are surprised that Louise Zimmerman Forscher ’44 objects to Associate Dean Joy Charlton’s use of the word “fraught” to describe the student environment at Swarthmore. The Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary (1987) gives, as meaning 4, the definition “distressed; distressing,” and it cites, along with a Dick Francis novel, the Spectator of 1966: “All that had gone before led me to expect an end more fraught.” We have encountered many linguistic innovations at Swarthmore—some of them quite distressing— but this is not one of them. ELLEN MAGENHEIM Department of Economics WILLIAM TURPIN Department of Classics DIRTY MONEY? To the Editor: I read with interest the recent article in The Garnet Letter (summer/fall 1998) announcing the establishment of a scholarship fund in the name of Edward L. Dobbins ’39. This fund, which I have learned was established with the help of $50,000 in matching funds from the General Electric Co. (GE), is intended for “a student from Massachusetts, with preference to a Berkshire County resident, who is deeply committed to the betterment of society and exhibits such dedication through community or environmental activism.” There’s a great irony here because in Berkshire County, GE is widely regarded as a toxic polluter. The company’s Large Transformer Divison in Pittsfield dumped tons of PCBs onto the ground and into the Housatonic River. Heads like skillets? Susan Barker Gutterman ’59 remembers a rhyme about the girls of Willets Hall. Above: Willets ca. 1960. Polluted properties have become worthless, parks and playgrounds have been fenced off, and Pittsfield is now dominated by a huge abandoned industrial site that’s infested with PCBs. GE has fought for years to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from declaring the area a Superfund site and has gone so far as to run full-page ads in the Berkshire Eagle, claiming no danger from PCB exposure. Yet recent studies show that exposure to even minute amounts of PCBs can cause endocrine disruption, leading to birth defects, learning disorders, and other health problems. Does Swarthmore really feel OK about taking scholarship money from a defiant toxic polluter? I hope the College will think twice about taking dirty money. ANDY GORDON ’71 Lenox, Mass. Editor’s Note: In September, a consent agreement was announced between the EPA and General Electric. The company has promised to remove PCBs from 1.5 miles of the Housatonic River bottom, help with economic redevelopment in Berkshire County, seek greater public participation in decisions about the cleanup, and contribute $25 million to natural resources restoration in Massachusetts and Connecticut. WRITE TO US The Bulletin welcomes letters concerning the contents of the magazine or issues relating to the College. All letters must be signed and may be edited for clarity and space. Address your letters to: Editor, Swarthmore College Bulletin, 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore PA 19081-1397, or send by e-mail to bulletin@swarthmore.edu. 3 COLLECTION TODAY PHOTOS BY ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS S WA RT H M O R E Hundreds rallied after an incident at the College’s Intercultural Center. Students protest after apparent vandalism A crowd estimated at between 300 and 400 gathered at the Parrish Hall steps on Nov. 12 to protest an apparent defilement of the College’s Intercultural Center (IC). Late on Nov. 7, a student had discovered piles of what first appeared to be feces, vomit, and candy sprinkles around the main room of the IC. When a large group of students gathered Nov. 8 to organize a protest, campus public safety officers were still investigating whether the incident represented a hate crime or merely a drunken splurge. The apparent “feces” later turned out to be cake, but Janine Gent ’99, the student who discovered the mess, said that the placement of the piles looked intentional, and a flyer distributed at the rally related the incident to “other events … this semester contributing to a feeling of lack of safety among students.” Faculty, staff, and students came to the rally to express support for the IC, which provides office and meeting space in the Clothier Hall Cloisters for groups representing Hispanic, Asian, and queer students. The apparent vandalism occurred in the former Board of Managers room, which serves as a common space for the groups. Students carried signs and chanted the slogan: “Respect, Safety, Unity.” Leaders of the IC, including its director, Assistant Dean Anna Maria Cobo, were joined on the podium by 4 students representing the Black Cultural Center, which has separate quarters in Robinson House. “It doesn’t end with a rally like this,” Maurice Eldridge ’61, vice president for college and community relations and executive assistant to President Alfred H. Bloom, told the crowd. “If I know anything about my life—and I have been black all of it—it’s that it’s a struggle that goes on and on.” After the rally, he added: “What I admire most about Swarthmore is that it’s one of the few places I know of where we can work on those issues because we genuinely want to— and believe we can—make it a better place.” Just weeks before, many of the students at the rally had attended a much quieter protest against intolerance—a candlelight vigil held on Oct. 20, following the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming freshman. The earlier gathering was more like a Quaker meeting than a call to action. Organizer Tim Stewart-Winter ’01 spoke briefly about Shepard and gay youth, followed by a long, silent meditation. Gay students read poems, shared their fears, and told personal stories of social persecution. The vigil ended with several verses of “We Are a Gentle Angry People” and “We Shall Overcome.” Afterward, several students lingered under the tower and quietly hugged. “It was probably the most intense public mourning I’ve ever experienced,” said Talia Young ’01. “I still feel a little physically ill thinking about it.” SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN n easy A? No such thing at Swarthmore. That claim is becoming a rare distinction; few colleges can make it any more. Grade inflation is climbing steadily at other top-ranked schools, according to a recent article in the U.S. News & World Report, which placed the College No. 2 among liberal arts colleges in the country. Swarthmore was identified as one of the few schools that still make students work hard for A’s and B’s. Swarthmore grads had a collective grade-point average (GPA) of 3.24 last year. “A B-plus is pretty good at Swarthmore,” the article reported, “but still a notch or two below the average at many other elite schools.” By contrast, GPAs at other schools—including Ivy League schools such as Princeton, Harvard, Yale, and Penn—have increased significantly, said U.S. News. In a 1993 survey of 150 colleges, 26 percent of students’ grades were A-minus or higher compared with 19 percent in 1976. At Princeton, a two-year study released last February found that the median GPA of its graduating class had increased from 3.08 in 1973 to 3.42 last year. “Faculty, especially teaching assistants and younger professors, are caving in” to complaints from students about “marks they consider too low,” said U.S. News. “At Princeton, the number of grades that have been ‘readjusted’ has increased every year during the 1990s.” Other schools that have avoided grade inflation include Class of 2002 ... Women outnumber men by 21 in Swarthmore’s new 369member first-year class. More freshmen are from New York (57) than any other state, including Pennsylvania, which follows at 42. Twenty-eight class members are from other countries. Of 4,585 original applicants for the Class of 2002, only 19 percent were offered admission. The median combined SAT-I score for the class is 1,440—an increase of 10 points over last year. Seventy members scored a perfect 800 on the verbal portion, 33 on the mathematics. Engineering was the most popular choice among the 35 percent who chose majors, followed by biology and political science. Great debate ... In its first annual Novice Invitational Tournament, Oct. 2 and 3, the College’s Amos J. Peaslee Debate Society hosted 30 debate teams from eight colleges. The Swarthmore team of John Dolan ’01 and Karla Gilbride ’02 placed second behind the winning Princeton University team. Dolan and Gilbride also placed second and seventh, respectively, in individual competition. On the following day, the Swarthmore College Bowl team hosted 16 DECEMBER 1998 © SCOTT GOLDSMITH A Grade inflation—everywhere else The College is still all undergraduate, but grad schools know that Swarthmore grades more rigorously than many other schools. Johns Hopkins University, Reed College, St. John’s College, and the University of the South. When applying to graduate schools, students from these colleges need not fear losing out to students with higher GPAs, however. Graduate and professional programs are aware of the inflation trend, said U.S. News, and have begun to focus less on GPAs than on standardized tests, essays, interviews, and recommendations. MIT, for example, does not use GPAs as part of its graduate admissions process but seeks self-starters who show research and problemsolving abilities. bia University, and then returned to Swarthmore to teach French classes from 1957 to 1995. P E O P L E teams of first- and second-year students at a quiz bowl tournament. Swarthmore took second place behind the University of South Carolina. Peter Austin ’02 and Rhett Buttermore ’01 were fourth and fifth highest-scoring individuals out of about 60 contestants. Lauded professors ... Co-author Aimee S.A. Johnson, assistant professor of mathematics, was awarded the Mathematical Association of America’s George Pólya Award for “Putting the Pieces Together: Understanding Robinson’s Nonperiodic Tilings,” an article published earlier this year in the College Mathematic Journal. This month, Jean Ashmead Perkins ’49, Susan W. Lippincott Professor Emerita of French, will receive the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages Award for Distinguished Service in the Profession. Perkins received an M.A. and a Ph.D. at Colum- Shooting star ... Rush Holt, a former Swarthmore physics professor and erstwhile Honors examiner, won a congressional seat in New Jersey’s 12th District last month. Holt’s victory may have been helped along by a ditty sung on the floor of the House of Representatives by Michael Pappas, the district’s conservative Republican incumbent. In an advertisement broadcast repeatedly in the final weeks of a close campaign, Democrat candidate Holt used a recording of Pappas singing the praises of Whitewater Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr. Against an antiStarr voice-over, Pappas was shown on the floor of the House singing: Twinkle, twinkle, Kenneth Starr, Now we see how brave you are. We could not see which way to go If you did not lead us so. The ads proved effective as the Monica Lewinsky affair dragged on and public opinion of Starr soured. Holt, whose last job was assistant director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, has never held elected office. 5 COLLECTION Birth of a stereotype MUSEUM OF MODERN ART N obody gets over seeing Birth of a Nation for the first time,” visiting film scholar Quinn Eli told black studies students who had just seen the 1915 silent film in November. Hollywood’s first blockbuster, the three-hour Birth of a Nation, made director D.W. Griffith a legend and set the standard for cinematography for a generation to come. But the film also glorified the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)— and, some say, led to the KKK’s resurgence in the 1920s— and introduced negative black stereotypes that persist in filmmaking today. Several of the students, all African American, confessed to laughing through much of Birth of a Nation. The film shows black men leering at white women and baring their feet in a Reconstruction-era state legislature, before a dignified and—according to film captions—“helpless white minority.” “It was so outrageous, it was funny,” one student said. Many of the film’s “Negroes” were obviously white actors in blackface. “It’s just disturbing,” said another, “to think it was a regular movie, like Superman.” “It was not a ‘regular movie’ then,” Eli countered, “but it defined what regular movies would become.” At a time when most movies were 5-cent one-reelers, the epic 12-reel Birth of a Nation wowed audiences and launched the “plantation melodrama” as one of film’s most popular genres— and, Eli would add, myths. Some 75 movies set in the Old South followed, littered with mammies and Uncle Toms, and “nearly all were huge successes,” Eli said. “Birth of a Nation didn’t invent black stereotypes, but it brought them to a much broader, more absorbent audience.” Eli is an assistant professor of English at Community College of Philadelphia and a doctoral candidate at Temple University. Among the stereotypes established in the film, he said, “The Ku Klux Klan used Birth of a Nation as a recruiting film well into the 1960s,” film scholar Quinn Eli told black studies students of D.W. Griffith’s 1915 silent film. were “coons, toms, bucks, mulattoes, and mammies.” Asked to define these terms, students responded knowingly. Coons are “bumbling and idiotic,” toms are “sellouts”— the rewarded, faithful companions to white masters, and bucks are dark-skinned, hulking sexual predators. “The buck was created whole cloth out of Birth of a Nation,” Eli said. “The KKK was invented to protect white womanhood from the buck.” Students were warned to be wary of the subtle perpetuation of these roles in current cinema—even in crowd pleasers such as The Color Purple and Lethal Weapon, in which Danny Glover plays a classic tom, Eli said. After a scathing analysis of Gone With the Wind—another blockbuster whose charming Old-South appeal revolved around stereotypes established in Birth of a Nation—his claim that Ghost was essentially “the same movie” (with Whoopi Goldberg presumably a female tom) met with laughter and good-natured protests. “Oh, I’ll never be able watch a movie the same way,” one student groaned. “That’s the point,” Eli replied. Sap rising— Can’t you feel it, Anna? Even now, in the autumn dusk— Even now, with the wild leaves flying.... T hus goes the libretto of The Black Swan, a collaboration between Nathalie Anderson, professor of English literature, and Thomas Whitman, assistant professor of music. Their opera so interested Sarah Caldwell, artistic director of the Boston Opera Company and legend of the music world, that she agreed to direct the premiere at the Lang Performing Arts Center in September. Based on Thomas Mann’s 1953 novella Die Betrogene, the opera tells the story of a widow who falls in love 6 with her son’s tutor and believes that love has made her young again. Whitman composed the opera, working closely with Anderson, who wrote the libretto. Baritone David Kravitz ’86 played the male lead. Anderson, a poet, was just beginning her year’s leave as a Pew Fellow in the Arts when Orchestra 2001 Artistic Director James Freeman introduced her to Whitman five years ago. “Mann’s story seemed to me to offer an intriguing opportunity to explore a woman’s rediscovery and reaffirmation of her own self-love, as she allows herself to sidestep societal assumptions, expectations, and proprieties and open herself to love for a younger man,” says Anderson. DENG-JENG LEE Professors collaborate on love story David Kravitz ’86 (left, with soprano Freda Herseth) sang the male lead in the premiere of The Black Swan, an opera written by professors Nat Anderson and Tom Whitman. SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN the reasons indicated in U.S. News ratings. True, we have many quantifiable resources, including an incredibly low student–faculty ratio. These are the sorts of things a college can purchase, however, if it is fortunate enough to rue to its faintly medieval architecture, Swarthmore have sufficient funds. What really sets Swarthmore apart is may be considered a kind of monastic cloister where its institutional seriousness of purpose, what President students, faculty, and administration are very disciAlfred Bloom often refers to as a commitment to “ethical plined—or at least place a high value on the appearance of intelligence.” hard work. Many of us don’t get out much into the so-called A commitment to ethical intelligence inevitably leads to real world. Although we don’t have a written list of monasa sense of discomfort. By asking hard questions and then tic rules, some are nonetheless communicated and folusing our academic and intellectual skills to search for lowed. For example, unless you work in the higher reaches answers, we risk upsetting our belief systems. We also open of the administration, being well dressed is frowned upon. opportunities to dispel erroneous stereotypes we may have It’s fascinating to observe how first-year students and new taken for granted. faculty gradually assume uniform habits of moderate Comfort has to do with the known, and it easily leads to grunginess. stasis and hardening. Ethical intelligence, on the other Over the nine years that I’ve been teaching here, I’ve seen hand, accepts continual forays into the unknown. A liberal a subtle but similar hardening of avowed ideas at Swartharts education ought to liberate, not ossify. It ought to more, especially, I think, since the Colmake students uncomfortable. lege was designated No. 1 a couple of The notion of a liberal arts education years in a row by U.S. News & World originated in the ancient world where Report. One aspect of that hardening can there were seven “liberal arts”—the be seen in campus attitudes toward reliverbal arts of grammar, rhetoric, and gious faith. I wonder why, considering logic, and the mathematical arts of academia’s current climate of respect for arithmetic, geometry, music, and cultural diversity, it is still considered astronomy. The liberal arts (from liber, acceptable to scoff at religious faith and meaning “free”) were carried on by free its practitioners. Why is it that Budcitizens, as opposed to the mechanical dhists, Christians, Jews, and Muslims are arts, such as carpentry, which were so often assumed to be unintelligent or rendered by slaves. psychologically unstable? From what I’ve That solidification and maintenance observed in faculty and classroom disof class distinctions doesn’t apply at cussions, and from students’ written Swarthmore because we’re able to work, this widespread attitude results afford a financial-aid policy that allows from ignorance, intellectual laziness, or students to be admitted regardless of outright prejudice. social class. Yet are our students truly At a faculty lunch last year, the Colfree? lege’s Roman-Catholic, Jewish, and Michael Marissen is associate professor of When I say that I hope students will music. His book Lutheranism, AntiProtestant religious advisers gave an eyebe uncomfortable at Swarthmore, I Judaism, and Bach’s St. John Passion opening report on religious life on cammean that I hope they will not expect was published this year, along with pus. It turns out that about half our stutheir education simply to affirm their dents make use of the Office of Religious An Introduction to Bach Studies, which existing identities and commitments. he co-wrote with Daniel R. Melamed of Advisers on campus, usually in their first This sort of individual or group egoism, or second year. It’s also not commonly Yale University, and an edited volume of in my view, is neither ethical nor intelliessays, Creative Reponses to Bach known that a significant number of gent. I also hope that Swarthmore will from Mozart to Hindemith. tenured Swarthmore professors are do more than inspire questions about deeply committed Jewish or Christian individuals’ identities and commitbelievers. ments. If a liberal arts education can affirm one’s gender, It is not unusual in academic work to see scholars and race, color, age, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, there is no students struggling to explain such things as the revolution reason why it should work against one’s faith. in 18th-century France or the predominantly liturgical creIn studying the sciences and “humanities” at Swarthative output of J.S. Bach. Historians often assume that peomore (I prefer the corresponding German notion of Geisple must have socioeconomic motivations for their behavteswissenschaften—literally, “spiritual/intellectual knowlior, but is it so difficult to imagine that intelligent, psychoedges”), I hope students will feel challenged and compelled logically stable people might actually do things that are to examine many things beyond what is comfortable and against their social or economic interests? That in some the immediately perceivable. I expect this will help in best instances their behavior might be inspired by genuine relirealizing the College’s stated purpose: “to make its students gious beliefs? You don’t have to agree with the religious more valuable human beings and more useful members of beliefs to appreciate their potential explanatory power in society.” historical research. This essay was adapted from Professor Marissen’s talk at Swarthmore may well be among the top two or three libFirst Collection, welcoming the Class of 2002 to Swarthmore. eral arts colleges, but if so, I don’t believe it’s because of Faculty view: Is religious faith incompatible with academic life? ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS T DECEMBER 1998 7 COLLECTION A s electronic media slowly take over paper, the fascination with hand-crafted books grows. Nowhere is this dichotomy more obvious than at Swarthmore. The McCabe Library, for example, is becoming increasingly computer dependent even as its historic special collections continue to expand. Book art has dominated both McCabe’s lobby and the College’s List Gallery this semester, and an art books program is being launched in the Art Department. The program reflects a major trend in the art world. Though many artists are exploring computer-generated art, others are delving into the ancient bookmaking traditions of papermaking and printmaking, binding, illustration, and calligraphy. Swarthmore has been treated to a rich sampling of art books this fall. The library kicked off the semester with “Art of Visualizing Poetry,” an exhibit of the work of nine book artists, followed by an October show of books by Shirley Jones, a Welsh artist and poet. In October, the List Gallery opened “Challenging Forms: Books, Poetry, and the Visual Arts,” with a lecture by David Bunn, a conceptual artist who makes art and poetry from the card catalogs that many libraries are discarding these days. Bunn’s Los Angeles studio is crammed with more than 500 boxes of musty card catalogs, which he sees as “a present-day ruin.” Bunn’s were the only unillustrated books in the exhibit. Other examples were elegant, sometimes cerebral celebrations of paper and ink by a variety of artists, including painters, printmakers, photographers, and poets. Books ranged from minimalist silk prints to large rice paper accordions with transparent windows. Some books were collaborations between artists and poets; others were artists’ interpretations of the classics. Painter Sean Scully brooded on James Joyce, and Lesley Dill created mixed-media interpretations of Emily Dickinson’s poetry with photo collage and stitched figures. “This show is not meant to be a comprehensive survey but a provocative sampling of creative strategies, influences, and themes,” says List Gallery Director Andrea Packard ’85. “In concert with the library, we want to provide an opportunity for campus dialogue.” Randall Exon, chair of the Art Department, hopes that dialogue will lead to a major interdisciplinary book arts program. This semester, students from the department’s Advanced Works on Paper class collaborated with the English Department’s Advanced Poetry Workshop to create their own illustrated books. The results were shown at McCabe Library at the end of November. Exon hopes to see art students collaborating with philosophy and even math classes in the future. “We’re one of the few liberal arts colleges making a serious attempt to establish a book arts program,” he says. “One thing that unites everyone on campus is an interest in books. So this project brings everyone together. It’s a perfect fit.” 8 Bound in Japanese cloth, Twelve Prints and Poems, an accordion book by artist/poet Peter Nadin, features poetry, etchings, and chine collé (Chinese collage). The book was shown at the List Gallery in October. Philosophy professor dies Morrison Moore, John professor emeritus of philosophy and religion and longtime registrar of the College, died on Sept. 26 at age 94. Moore received a bachelor of divinity from the Union Theological Seminary, a master’s degree from Harvard, and a doctorate in philosophy from Columbia. After teaching at Hamilton College for 10 years, Moore came to Swarthmore in 1943 as associate professor of philosophy. He served as associate dean of men from 1945 to 1950, as registrar from 1948 to 1971, and as acting director of the Friends Historical Library from 1971 to 1973. He was an active member of the Swarthmore Monthly Meeting, served on the boards of Pendle Hill and the Friends Historical Association and as executive director of the Society for Values in Higher Education. Professor Moore wrote the influential book Theories of Religious Experience and a book on the history of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. He was also an editor of the Journal of Quaker History. Moore is survived by his wife of 68 years, Margaret Whiteside Moore, two daughters, five grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren. SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS Ink + Paper = Book Art outstanding seasons. Co-captain Brian Bell ’99 led the team in receiving with 33 catches for 481 yards. Bell finished second in the Centennial in catches per game (4.13), third in receiving yards per game (60.1), fifth in kickoff return averhe women’s field hockey team appeared in the postage (19.6), and sixth in all-purpose yards average (86.3). season for the third consecutive season, as they On defense, the Tide was led by a freshman trio of linereached the semifinals of the ECAC Mid-Atlantic backers dubbed “the smurfs” because all are under six feet Championship. The Garnet finished the 1998 campaign with tall. Joe Corso made 69 tackles and led the squad with seven a 13-7 mark and second place in the Centennial Conference, tackles for loss. Jon Bartner recorded 66 tackles and a teamwhere they posted a 7-2 record. high of three forced fumbles, and Axel Neff made 57 tackles. Holly Baker ’99 and Donna Griffin ’99 paced the squad on Defensive lineman Tony Skiadas ’99 recorded 40 tackles—6.5 offense. Baker scored a conference-best 17 goals and seven for loss, forced three fumbles, and received a Centennial assists for 41 points, while Griffin led the Centennial with 11 honorable mention. assists. Both athletes were named First Team All-Centennial The men’s soccer team struggled to a 3-17 overall mark Conference and First-Team Regional All-American and were and posted an 0-7 conference record. Scott Samels ’99 led selected to play in the National Field the Garnet offensive attack with a Hockey Coaches Association Divicareer-high five goals and one assist. sion III North/South Senior All-Star Midfielder Mike Schall ’99 scored one Game. goal on the season and was named Defensive leader Jen Hagan ’99 Second Team All-Centennial. scored four goals and two assists The women’s soccer team recorded and was named Second Team Alla 6-12 mark overall and went 2-7 in Centennial and Second Team conference action. Forward Sarah Regional All-American. The Garnet Nusser ’02 led the offense with eight was ranked 12th nationally and fifth goals and received a Centennial Conin the South Atlantic region. ference honorable mention. The team Under the direction of first-year defense improved under first-year head coach Luci Rosalia, the head coach Shawn Ferris, as the Garwomen’s cross-country team placed net allowed just 24 goals compared third at the Centennial Conference with 54 in 1997. Goalkeeper Sari championships and seventh at the Altschuler ’01 recorded five shutouts NCAA Division III Mid-East Regional. and 1.97 goals against average. Jokotade Agunloye ’01 placed The men’s tennis team sent two fourth in both races, earning Allmembers to the National Rolex ChamCentennial Conference and Allpionships for the second consecutive Mideast Regional honors and qualiseason. Greg Emkey ’99 captured the fying for the NCAA championships. singles portion of the ITA Division III Agunloye is the third Garnet harrier East Championships to advance to the to reach the championships in as National Finals, then teamed with many years. Peter Schilla ’01 to capture the douAt the regionals, captain Karen bles title. At the Nationals, Emkey finLloyd ’00 ran a personal-best time of ished seventh in singles and, with 20:28.9 to place 43rd, while Amalia Schilla, placed seventh in doubles. Jerison ’00 finished 69th. The Garnet The women’s tennis team posted a posted a 3-1 record in dual meets 1-3 fall season mark but closed on a Regional All-American ... Jokotade Agunloye, a high note as they swept all six singles this season. sophomore cross-country runner from New York The men’s cross-country squad brackets to capture the Capital Classic City, earned regional All-American honors with earned sixth place at the Centennial at Catholic University. No. 1 singles fourth-place finishes in both the Centennial championships and ninth at the player Jen Pao ’01 led the Garnet with Conference championships and the Mideast Mideast Regionals. Marc Jeuland ’01 an 8-1 mark on the season. Regionals. She finished 81st in a field of 183 at placed 24th at the Regionals and With just two seniors on the squad, the national meet at Dickinson College. was named to the All-Mideast the young Garnet volleyball team Regional team. Captain Gordon struggled, posting an 0-16 mark. FirstRoble ’99 placed 51st—second for the Garnet—while Sam year Elisa Matula led the squad in kills, and sophomore BonEvans ’01 finished 53rd. At the Centennial championships, nie French led in assists. Jeuland finished in 10th place to earn Second Team All-CenHaverford leads the battle for the Hood Trophy after the tennial honors. fall season, 5-1. The lone Garnet victory came in field hockey New enthusiasm infused the football team this season as Swarthmore blanked the Fords 4-0. In their final home with the hiring of first-year head coach Pete Alvanos. Unforcontest, seniors Donna Griffin, Holly Baker, and Lurah Hess tunately, the results were the same. The Garnet Tide finscored goals to top Haverford, and Julie Finnegan ’00 also ished its third consecutive winless season with an 0-8 scored. record. Despite the dismal record, several individuals had —Mark Duzenski Field hockey in postseason play for third consecutive season MARK DUZENSKI T DECEMBER 1998 9 S WA R T H M O R E ON THE LINE OF SCRIMMAGE To discuss football at Swarthmore is to engage in a discussion of what makes up a liberal arts education. By Garret Keizer PHOTOGRAPHS BY JIM GRAHAM R oughly 500 miles lie between my home in ball team’s existence. This last sounds like an exagnortheastern Vermont and the campus of geration, of course, but exaggerated reports hold Swarthmore College, where I’m driving to some of the allure of far-off places. report on the rebuilding of its football program. The distance seems inconsequential, in part warthmore is no longer a Quaker college in because the College has provided me with a much much the same way as the Parthenon is no better car than the one I usually drive, and in part longer a Greek temple: You don’t need to because I’m traveling a good deal farther than that stand for very long in either place to know where from my own experience. I’m coming for a glimpse you are or to know where, some years back, you of two cultures about which I know very little: the would have been. There’s a certain aura. culture of intercollegiate athletics and the culture At Swarthmore, the aura has to do with the likeof small liberal arts colleges. I tell friends I’m not lihood of hearing the word “Quaker” in an intergoing as a writer; I’m going as an anthropologist. view, with a vestigial belief in every person’s inner This is what I know: After two light—with what one professor seasons of not winning a single calls “our exquisite sensitivity” to football game—and of being badly differences of background and beaten more than once—Swarthpoint of view. An outsider comes more College has made a well-pubto feel that he will not be dislicized decision to rebuild its promissed out of hand here, and pergram. The decision has come at haps also that if he’s not careful to least partly in response to the frusremain on the paths laid out here, trations of players, seven of whom he risks stepping on a rare plant quit the squad in midseason last or a raw nerve. year. The decision has included Above all, the aura has to do with removing the former coach, Karl New head coach Peter Alvanos. a concern for values. “To me, that’s Miran, then a tenured faculty memwhat makes the discussion of footber of the College, and hiring Peter Alvanos, 33, forball intellectually interesting,” says John Caskey, mer defensive coordinator for the University of economics professor and chair of a committee that last year examined Swarthmore’s athletic program. Chicago and one of 125 applicants for the Swarth“Economists love to talk about fighting over more job. In addition, the College has added to the resources, but the trade-offs here are of values, not coaching staff and to the recruitment budget. of money.” To discuss the presence of football at a I am told that not all members of the College community support these developments. I am also place like Swarthmore is to engage almost inevitably in a discussion of what makes up a libtold that some other members are probably not eral arts education—even of what makes an action aware of these developments, or of the football successful or an experience meaningful. team’s losing streak, or, in some cases, of the foot- 10 S SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN Where there seems to be the clearest consensus is on the importance of winning. Everyone from Athletic Director Bob Williams to President Alfred H. Bloom asserts that a successful team need not be defined by a winning season. No surprises there. All are equally in agreement, however, that some wins and, more important, some reasonable assurance that winning is possible are essential for students to feel they have had a meaningful experience. And that’s where one starts to hear about tradeoffs. To field a football team capable of winning at least some of the time requires a critical number of talented players, probably around 60. The present squad numbers 37, with roughly 20 first-year students. Small teams like this one can be rendered noncompetitive by a handful of injuries. And small teams are also more likely to have injuries because the same players constantly take the field. The “depth” problem takes one to issues of admission and even deeper into a discussion of values. If one thinks of a college administrative building as a single cell, the admissions office is where the DNA is. It’s where one finds the codes for what a college values most. Everyone knows that Swarthmore prizes and attracts academic excellence. Last year, the Swarthmore Admissions Office turned down more than 200 applicants with SAT verbal scores of 800. Needless to say, the College values other attributes besides those required to earn a perfect SAT score. Among these values are racial, cultural, and regional diversity as well as talents that correspond to the many offerings of an institution like Swarthmore. Dean of Admissions Robin Mamlet says that admissions work here is a matter of “how you meet 2,000 needs with a class of 360 students.” At present, one of those needs is football. “Could the fact that an applicant is talented in football weigh into an admissions decision? Absolutely.” Having said that, Mamlet goes on to debunk the “reductive” notion that admissions at Swarthmore can be summarized as a search for the “first best kid” at a given school and that recruiting football players or, for that matter, dancers or engineering students is a matter of setting aside a “first best kid” in order to admit a “second best” or a “third best” who meets a given recruitment need. “We just don’t look at people that way,” she says. “As an admissions person, I believe that my job is to bring into the College the kinds of students that our faculty wants to teach. So if the kids who can play football are not the kinds of kids our faculty wants to teach, I don’t want to do it. But I can think of specific kids who play football, who love football, and who wouldn’t choose a college that DECEMBER 1998 11 F ootball at Swarthmore is a complex issue—like every other issue here. Complexity is the darling of the intellectual temperament. 12 didn’t have football, who are so perfect for this place. I can think of their names, I can think of their stories, and I know there are others out there.” The problem is that other schools also know they’re out there and want them just as much as Swarthmore does. Even among Division III schools, the scramble to attract athletically gifted and academically qualified students is an ever-escalating competition that more than one person at Swarthmore likens to an arms race. “I’m a big sports fan,” says Economics Professor Rob Hollister, “but I think that for these liberal arts colleges, it’s out of control. There are a bunch of adults down in the field house spending 80 percent of their time kissing up to a bunch of kids and their parents to recruit them. This is not what grown-up people should be doing.” Along with questions of the values at stake in recruiting football players, one also hears questions surrounding the values at stake in building them into an effective team with an effective base of support. These discussions are also bound up with questions about the attitudes that the players themselves bring to campus. Associate Provost Barry Schwartz, who teaches in the Psychology Department says, “The history of football at Swarthmore in the time I’ve been at Swarthmore—which is 28 years—has been vexed almost the entire time. For most of that time, we had a bad team. And when we had a good team, the price we paid was sub-rosa warfare between the football team and the rest of campus. We had a lot of working-class kids playing football. We were successful in recruiting these kids. But Swarthmore was like outer space to these kids.... Here are these athletes who’ve been stars in high school ... discovering that on this campus people have disdain or contempt for football players.” Referring to “a set of values definitely related to the fact that we were founded by Quakers,” Robin Mamlet says, “This is not a place, historically, that has valued display of prowess. We’ve only recently become stronger in the arts, for instance. I think what lives on here is an ethos that doesn’t always neatly intersect with a spectator sport.” It is precisely at this point of dubious intersection that some would make their strongest arguments in favor of the school’s commitment to football and its latest efforts to rebuild the program. In a nutshell, football becomes an issue of diversity. Characterizing this side of the argument, John Caskey says, “The football players frequently come from central Pennsylvania, tend to be more politiSWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN cally conservative, more business oriented. Do you want Swarthmore to be all tree-hugging liberal eggheads?” College Provost Jennie Keith apparently does not. “A pitfall of a place like Swarthmore is a disdain for things that are not intellectual. Our students need to learn not to disdain other parts of human experience. I think that’s part of our educational mission.” She goes on to note that “football is attractive because it cuts very widely across society. We have other sports here that are perhaps more regional or that are experienced by people of more privileged backgrounds.” “It keeps us from becoming precious,” says Tom Blackburn, an English professor and longtime faculty adviser to the team. He is one of several who note that the kind of discipline and collective effort expected of the men on the team enrich a college culture where individual achievement and small classes are the norm. No one makes these points more emphatically than the players themselves. “We not only bring diversity,” says Mason Tootell ’99, “we bring aggressive attitudes. We bring the lessons we learn from the field into the classroom.” Tim Malarkey ’89, who majored in physics and exudes the confidence of a man capable of running for Congress at a moment’s notice, says that playing football “did more for my selfesteem than any other experience.” Co-captain J.P. Harris ’99 concurs. “I learned more about myself by not quitting football last year than I learned in any classroom.” All of this is to say that football at Swarthmore is a complex issue—which may be no more than to say that football is like every other issue here. As I’m told repeatedly, Swarthmore is a “highly intellectual place,” and complexity is the darling of the intellectual temperament. In the field of action, however, simplicity still characterizes most decisions, where, essentially, you either do, or you don’t. As quarterback Ford O’Connell ’99 says, “If you’re in a class, a professor can give you a problem that you can take home, that you can rationalize, that you can internalize. On the football field, you have three seconds to make a decision.” Though Swarthmore may have taken longer than three seconds, the College did choose to act: decisively, unequivocally, and, in dismissing its former coach, some would say rashly. Without denying the complexity of the issues, without ignoring the inescapable question cited by John Caskey— “Is there some limit to the number of things you can be excellent in and stay a small college?”—this small college chose one course of action and rejected several others, not the kind of move for DECEMBER 1998 which tree-hugging liberal eggheads are generally renowned. H ead football coach Peter Alvanos could dress up like a firefighter, and you would still know he was a football coach. Something about the way he cocked his helmet, or shouted his orders, or described carrying children through the door of a burning building as “just my job”—something would give it away that he’s doing what he was born to do. Maybe his eyes most of all. “When we interviewed him, we saw that spark in his eyes,” says J.P. Harris. I hear the same observation from several other teammates. “He’s a fiery coach,” says Ansa Yiadom ’01, “and that’s what we needed here.” What nearly every returning player seems to think the team needed most of all was a higher standard of discipline. “And fortunately or unfortunately,” says Peter Alvanos, “that’s what I’m all about.” On his first day of summer training, Alvanos greeted his new charges by saying, “Take off your hats and sit up straight.” Then, in the stunned silence that followed, he said, “Welcome to football camp.” This regimented approach might soon wear thin were it not coupled with good doses of humor (Alvanos likes to refer to the rigors of summer training as “Club Med”—plenty of food, sunshine, etc.), active listening (Alvanos met individually with every player who finished the previous season before designing his plan for this one), and a work ethic that exceeds anything he requires from the team. “It’s the same drive that I would hope any professor has,” says Alvanos, who’s fond of referring to himself and his staff as “professors of football.” Reviewing a summer training schedule that begins with “dawn patrol” and ends with roundthe-campus bed checks from 11 p.m. till after midnight, one has to marvel at the professors he must have known! One also has to wonder at the personal cost of this routine for a man who responds to a question about his “other interests” by saying, “Mostly I just want to be with my family. Just to push the kids on their swings if that’s what they want—that’s enough for me. I’m a pretty simple guy.” His assistant coach and friend, John Keady, who came with Alvanos from Chicago, agrees with the self-assessment. “If you talked to Pete, if you sat down and had a beer with him, you’d find out that what you see is what you get. He’s going to be honest with you.” I did talk with Pete, and I did have a “I’ve been playing football since I was in fourth grade,” says co-captain Brian Bell (top), “and as far as I’m concerned, football is not a cerebral game. Thinking happens off the field.... Once you step on the field, it’s reaction, it’s emotion, it’s intensity, it’s desire—it’s camaraderie.” Opposite page: Elliot Lee ’02 and Chris Conaway ’02. Above: Jay Schembs ’01 works out. 13 Alvanos seems intent to identify the football team with the College community rather than to define it against the College community. He talks with cocaptain Brian Bell (above) while Paul Willenberg ’00 gets help with stretching. Opposite page: offensive lineman Carlo Fitti ’00. 14 beer with him, and what I found along with honesty was an almost soldierly refusal to be tempted by any insinuation of a grievance or, if you will, a football player’s refusal to set himself apart in any way from the rest of “the team.” “The program’s under a microscope here; I’m not going to deny that. Is it fair? Well, Swarthmore has to be doing something right if it’s always ranked the first or second best liberal arts school in the country. So in our own little worlds, we’re probably all under a microscope.” Translate that attitude to coaching, and you’ll have a statement like this: “You’re always going to have a star here and there, but as I tell the kids, on every play you’re going to have 11 winners or 11 losers. That’s what makes football special.” Alvanos seems intent to identify this esprit de corps with the College community rather than to define it against the College community. He tells his players that if they wish to see spectators at games, then they too must be spectators at other athletic and cultural events on campus. He has invited professors and administrators to serve as “guest coaches” at games, “to see what it is we do.” But what he can do as a recruiter is likely to interest them most of all. If Alvanos emphasizes anything to me in several hours of conversation, it’s that he knows he can find qualified student athletes and that “we’re not going to lower our academic standards to get this thing done.” After a while, his stress on the latter is almost poignant. Actually, there seems to be no lack of official faith in his sincerity or ability on this point. Describing him as “indefatigable and full of infectious enthusiasm,” Provost Jennie Keith says: “Quakers don’t have missionaries, but I think Peter will be a missionary for Swarthmore.” Presumably, they don’t have sacrificial lambs either, but it’s hard to consider his task and not wonder. Even Keith is quick to add, “He’s got a great challenge ahead of him.” W hen Peter Alvanos talks of the Swarthmore community—usually with a deference that marks him as a relative newcomer—he speaks of “the hill.” So do a number of his players. He’s referring to a geography that no attentive visitor to the College can miss. Most of the campus lies on the crest and slopes of a hill; the field house lies at its base, quite literally on the other side of the tracks. For Swarthmore coaches and athletes, going to the gym is always a descent. Going anywhere else on campus always means a climb. Do this often enough, and you begin to think of Sisyphus rolling his stone up a hill, or of the Furies, enshrined and presumably pacified underneath one. On my second day at Swarthmore, I head down to watch the team do one of its summer practices. It’s morning and already hot; players are sweating even as they assemble, helmets in hands, on the sidelines of the practice field. The trainers stand in readiness with ice packs and bandages. Beside the observation tower, one young man is down on his knee, holding his face in his hand. Good grief, I think to myself, they haven’t even started yet, and already one of them has gotten bopped in the head. Then the man crosses himself discreetly and rises to his feet. Out on the field, the entire coaching staff is milling and scuffing over the turf as though mounted on horses. Alvanos paces among them, garnet cap turned backward on his head, laminated charts stuffed into the front waistband of his shorts. Once or twice I’ve heard him refer to his “football family”; now he seems to stand in an unposed photograph of all its men: several jocular uncles, an earnest older brother, even a soft-spoken grandfather. See the tall one grinning in the middle, young enough to horse around and fierce enough to bring you up short—that’s the head coach. That’s the Dad. The practice begins almost without ceremony, though all of its parts are clearly orchestrated. First, the players traverse the width of the field in a variety of movements, bounding like two-legged antelopes, then grasping alternate knees at alternate strides and returning slowly, then loosely goose-stepping back the other way. They clap and yell; strapping on their helmets, they do jumping jacks. One of Alvanos’ slogans for the team is “one heartbeat.” The choreography of practice almost seems an attempt to render that idea through interpretive dance. Talking with some players after practice, I find that all of them approve of the direction Alvanos has charted for the team. All of them are enthusiastic about their coach; a few of the upperclassmen make a point of putting in a respectful mention of their previous coach. When I ask these older players what it’s like to be a football player “on the hill,” I receive a variety of answers. Ford O’Connell remarks that “Swarthmore is very liberal in its thinking but very conservative in its protection of that.” In his view, this conservatism often carries a prejudice against football SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN and those who play it. He recounts a conversation in which a fellow student had questioned whether football belonged at an “academic” school like Swarthmore. O’Connell challenged him: “So what you’re saying is that it belongs at a place like Florida State.” When the student answered that, yes, that was what he was saying, O’Connell shot back: “What a snobbish thing to say! What you’re implying is that ‘academics’ don’t belong at Florida State.” Co-captain Brian Bell ’99 notes the same bias as O’Connell, though he blames some of it on the lack of “a reciprocal relationship” between the team and the rest of the College community. “And Coach has stressed that if we want them to support us, we have to support them.” In a separate interview, Mason Tootell speaks in a similar vein about “us and them” and goes one step further: “I think a lot of us reject the Swarthmore culture and put ourselves on an island. And in past years, football has done some things to discredit itself.” He cites an incident of violent behavior by a former teammate. This is where J.P. Harris interjects, “When that incident happened, this person was playing on the basketball team. But he was labeled ‘a football player.’” Harris, an Honors political science major, says that some of his classmates have been surprised to learn that the same label applies to him. Two things become clear to me as a result of these conversations. The first is that although these athletes may soon be able to “play with one heartbeat,” they certainly do not think with one brain. The second takes longer for me to acknowledge; it comes strangely to one who has never had much interest in sports. I want these guys to win. I f Alvanos emphasizes anything, it’s that “we’re not going to lower our academic standards to get this thing done.” S warthmore President Alfred Bloom could put on a football uniform, and your best guess would be that he was a college president. In a world where almost anything is possible, I suppose there’s a chance of his surprising me with some nostalgic reminiscences about those great days out on the 40-yard line with old Bud so-and-so who does foreign policy up at BU these days and still drops by the lake once a year to watch the Super Bowl . . . but I don’t think so. When I tell him that I don’t have an athletic bone in my body, he laughs Please turn to page 60 DECEMBER 1998 15 SEARCHING FOR By William Saletan ’87 I t’s one o’clock in the morning, and Theodor Holm Nelson ’59 is explaining in a blizzard of mindbending metaphors how he conceived the origins of what is now the World Wide Web. Nelson, widely regarded as the founding prophet of interactive media, is speaking to me by phone from the other side of the world. It’s midday at Keio University in Japan, where Nelson teaches, writes, and designs software, but he’s exhausted. He works at night and sleeps during the day. “Mine is a parallel universe,” he explains on his home page on the Web. “I share the physical universe with other people, but it seems I see it very differently. So my world is the same but different.” And how. Everything about Ted Nelson is upside down. While others study how things work, Nelson imagines how they could work differently. While others adapt to systems, Nelson adapts systems to people. While others plan forward from the status quo, Nelson plans backward from perfection. That’s why he foresaw the age of cyberspace four decades ago and why he is so dissatisfied with it today. The first inklings of interactive media came to Nelson in childhood. When he was 5 years old, he contemplated how florists sent flowers by wire. “What did they do to the flower,” he wondered, “so that they could send it down the wire and rebuild it at the other end?” His parents’ show business careers also inspired his imagination. His mother, Celeste Holm, starred in more than a dozen movies and won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress (for her role in Gentlemen’s Agreement) when Nelson was 10. His father, Ralph Nel- 16 son, directed 11 films and won an Emmy for directing the television production of Requiem for a Heavyweight in 1956. “When I was 12 years old, bang, here came this thing called television,” Nelson recalls. “So the notion of one medium succeeding another was plain to me, as was the notion of men at work in front of cathode ray tubes. I sat behind my father [in the studio]. These bright, intelligent guys sitting at screens with absolutely captive intensity in the control rooms—that seemed to me the way it ought to be.” Y ou’d think Ted Nelson’59 would be happy to claim the World Wide Web as his brainchild, but he isn’t. When the Japanese film Rasho-mon came out in 1949, Nelson saw it three times. Its portrayals of a jointly witnessed story intrigued him. Film and literature, he realized, could be presented not merely in a preordained sequence but in “multiple parallel versions.” Nelson arrived at Swarthmore allergic to orthodoxy of all kinds. “I majored in extracurriculars,” he says. He challenged the College’s restrictions on fraternization between male and female students. “In the 1957 student affairs committees, sitting there with Dean Susan Cobbs, who hated my guts and tried to get me expelled, I was arguing for sexual freedom— before anybody else dared open their yaps about it,” he recalls. Nelson was also an incorrigible prankster. One time, as Nelson remembers it, Dean W.C.H. Prentice gave a Collection speech exhorting students to turn in “troublemakers” in their midst. “The following Monday, in everyone’s mailbox there was a typeset confession blank, saying that because the deans did not wish to maintain an elaborate police system, ‘Your cooperation is expected.’” Below the words, “I have recently committed the following offenses,” the form listed various categories and a line for the student’s signature. “There was a firestorm of protest,” Nelson laughs. “A couple of hundred people sent them in.” In the classroom, Nelson criticized theoretical constructs, arguing that they oversimplified reality. He didn’t even like the paper they were printed on. Ideas were connected in multiple dimensions, he reasoned. So trying to represent them on paper, much less edit them, was intrinsically crude. “There was no way, with paper, to represent the changes and structures and connections,” he explains. “You can represent the changes with arrows, but after a certain point, you have to retype it.” This led Nelson to the idea of hypertext. “David Rose [’60] told me that I laid out the whole hypertext idea to him when we were undergraduates together.” Nelson’s ideas crystallized a year after graduation, when he enrolled in a computer course at Harvard. He started with the idea of word processing. As Nelson saw it, word processing (which was yet to be invented) would SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN Asked what he was wearing in this photo, Nelson said, “A tuxedo. Also a Xybernaut wearable computer with a head-mounted display.” But why the tuxedo? The inventor of hypertext feels that in the future, wearable computers will be not be “just for the factory floor,” but will become “a standard part of a thoughtful person’s social ensemble.” might choose, with a mouse click, to veer away from the College’s history and explore a tangent string of literature about the Crum. On this path, you might come across a reference to Spiro Agnew’s description of Swarthmore as “the Kremlin on the Crum.” Whereupon you might choose to go off on a tangent about Agnew, and so on. A hypertext system needed digital addresses for documents, so users could find them through links. But Nelson wanted much more. He wanted users to be able to create links in documents written by others. Nelson also wanted the system to track every change in each document and automatically to reorganize the links accordingly, which was immensely more difficult. Nelson was seeking nothing less than a universal, selfupdating library. He called it Project Xanadu. SYLVIA OTTE F allow the writer to revise each draft. Nelson wanted a program that would also link each section of the new draft to the same section of previous drafts—as far back as the original notes. By backtracking through these links, the writer could compare serial versions of each section and could recombine current and previous versions of the various sections into a new draft. The program remained DECEMBER 1998 unfinished, but Nelson’s dream of linked literature grew. In 1965, he gave it a name: “hypertext.” Hypertext, as Nelson conceived it, would not be limited to fixed sequences—as paper required—but would allow readers to move within a text, or between texts, in whatever sequence they fancied. Suppose that while reading a history of Swarthmore, you came across a reference to Crum Creek. You or more than a decade, Nelson’s Swarthmore connections helped nurture the project. Because his ideas were radical, “The conventional computer establishment locked me out,” he says. “At Swarthmore, there were people who could help.” Nelson visited the campus frequently from 1970 to 1972, drawing on the advice of faculty friends and the assistance of two of Swarthmore’s first computer science students. In 1976, the College invited Nelson back to teach courses in interactive software and hypermedia. Nelson’s courses brought him new disciples, and in the summer of 1979, he summoned his followers from around the country to Swarthmore to complete the Xanadu project. He was no longer teaching on campus, but he enjoyed the atmosphere and maintained an apartment nearby. His disciples rented a house and redesigned the entire system from scratch. “We were pushing the envelope of practi17 cability on every side,” says Nelson. “We were writing a program that was bigger than compilers could handle.” Eventually, the programmers ran out of money, and Nelson and his group joined a software company in Texas. Xanadu was put on hold. The “Swarthmore summer,” as Wired magazine referred to it years later, was “Xanadu’s golden age.” But while Xanadu lay dormant, its seeds took root. In 1987, Apple introduced HyperCard, a program that allowed users to construct webs of links within their personal computers. The program’s name and concept transparently derived from Nelson’s work. “HyperCard apparently came out of the talk I gave at the hackers’ conference in 1984,” he says. “I was invited to fly to Apple in ’86 or ’87 for a chat with [Apple CEO] John Scully.... I think he wanted to take my measure and see whether I would object to the word ‘HyperCard’ being used for what they were about to release.” When the program came out, Nelson recalls, “Everybody said, ‘Oh, my god, Nelson, this is what you’ve been talking about!’” Not really, says Nelson. The problem with HyperCard was that it was stuck inside a single machine. Nelson’s dream required a network so that users could link to documents on other people’s computers. The Internet solved this problem. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a physicist and former software developer, began to build a system for reading and writing hypertext on the Internet. He called it the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee “dropped by my office in ’92 when the [Web] was in alpha or beta,” says Nelson. “He wanted to show it to me because he had just heard about my work.” Nelson, it turned out, had been the source of many of the words and ideas that had filtered down through the software world and were now coming to life on the Web: links, a digital registry of document addresses (uniform resource locators, or URLs), a “hypertext transfer protocol” (HTTP), and a “hypertext markup language” (HTML). Nelson also influenced the transformation of the Web into a mass medium. In 1989, he presented his Xanadu design to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NSCA) at the University of Illinois. Larry 18 Smarr, NSCA’s director, was sufficiently impressed that he expressed interest in joining the Xanadu project. Later, Smarr told Nelson he had begun a new project of his own. That turned out to be Mosaic, the first consumeroriented Web browser, which was produced by Smarr’s lieutenant, Marc Andreessen, and released in November 1993. Six months later, Andreessen left NCSA to found T he conventional wisdom in the computer industry is that Nelson’s Project Xanadu failed and that he and his ideas are relics. Nelson returns this condescension by dismissing the World Wide Web as irretrievably mediocre. Netscape Communications, which turned the Web from a communications tool of scientists into a popular interactive medium. Y ou’d think Nelson would be happy to claim the Web as his brainchild, but he isn’t. While others celebrate what it can do, he dwells on what it can’t do. You can’t write notes on somebody else’s document or overlay them on the original. You also can’t quote significant parts of somebody else’s document without violating copyright law. And when you read one document that quotes another, you can’t see the original context without finding your way to the quoted document. Nelson has always thought to solve these problems with an idea he first named “transclusion,” but now calls “hypersharing.” Every document would be linked intimately to every other document that quotes it or refers to it, so that the reader could see them simultaneously. Suppose Nelson wanted to criticize the writings of Dean Cobbs. While reading Cobbs’ work, you could see Nelson’s comments alongside the original. And conversely, while reading Nelson’s comments, you could see Cobbs’ words, so Nelson wouldn’t get away with taking them out of context. Nelson goes back to the premise of his student days: Computers should improve on paper. “What they’re giving us now is so much less than paper, it’s pathetic,” he complains. “One of the things you can’t do on a computer screen is flip. With a book or stack of cards, you can flip through at great speed, and your eye sees things. Opening a file on a computer is like prying open a wooden crate. It’s absurd.” The more Nelson talks, the more you realize that what’s nutty isn’t his analogy, but the fact that you’ve never noticed the ways in which your computer is inferior to the stuff your parents wrote on. For example, he observes, “Paper is compatible.” Furthermore, “if I buy a CD-ROM, I’m not allowed to write in the margins. What the hell is that about?” Defenders of the Web, CD-ROMs, and other imperfect technologies say they’ve engineered real progress while Nelson has held out for idealistic “vaporware”—software that is promised but never delivered. Some think Xanadu expressed the radical political ambitions of the 1960s and 1970s and ultimately collapsed for the same reasons. Nelson always envisioned technology that would promote equal access to information and freedom of the press. Even his metaphors are populist and countercultural. In a recent essay on piracy and copyright law, he argued: “There is a hunger for the reuse of media. If we can find a legitimate way to feed this hunger, then perhaps the stealing will not be necessary.” He calls his latest software “the sexual revolution brought to the spreadsheet. Spreadsheets require that a cell have an up connection, a down connection, a left connection, and a right connection. In my system, each cell’s connections are its own business.” Much of the criticism of Nelson’s ideas echoes criticisms of the political left. One reviewer has called Xanadu a “weird, semialtruistic/semifascistic vision” of a world in which “all inforSWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN Computers should improve on paper, says Nelson. But today’s machines are “pathetic.... Opening a file on a computer is like prying open a wooden crate.” SYLVIA OTTE totally explorable, customizable, userreconfigurable, and shareable world.” But in a such a world, wouldn’t people get lost? Skeptics use Nelson’s personal life to illustrate the point. He is notoriously disorganized, blessed and cursed with a brain whose rapidly branching trains of thought defy conventional notions of coherence. His chaotic books and manual filing systems are legendary. When I interviewed him, his unrelenting tangents and objections to the premises of my questions made a hash of the outline I had prepared. “My world is not organized around your outline,” he later tells me. Nelson concedes that many computer users prefer the comfort of dictated structure to the responsibility that comes with total freedom. “I’m not interested in that trade,” he replies nonchalantly. “I’m not interested in pandering. I want to make people aware of the necessity of freedom.” Structure is useful, he argues, but only if it’s “permeable” and open to change by the user. “I believe in creating elegant environments that help and encourage people to create the structure they want. But that doesn’t mean it has to be some particular restrictive structure that the dweebs created in the last 20 years.” As to the notion that total freedom is scary, Nelson brushes it off with his favorite analogy: “It’s like a blank piece of paper.” The conventional wisdom in the computer industry is that Xanadu failed, that more practical software makers succeeded, and that Nelson and his ideas are relics. Nelson returns this condescension by dis- mation is irrevocably networked.” Others have portrayed Nelson as naïve for supposedly postulating a “communal database administered, of course, from above.” These skeptics prefer the Web and its free-market patchwork, in which you can revise or remove anything you’ve written without being monitored and without concern for others who may have linked their work to yours. It’s better to let individuals work out these occasional breakdowns, goes this argument, than to hold out for a perfect system. Nelson’s rejoinder, in turn, echoes criticisms of the political right. If the Web’s defenders think the cybermarketplace is truly free, they’re deluding themselves, he suggests. “All information is already irrevocably linked,” says Nelson, “but the connections are currently hidden. Some people want to keep things hidden; I don’t.” The opposite case against Nelson’s vision is that it’s too anarchic. He derides “regularity chauvinists” and rejects traditional software concepts such as “files,” “icons,” and even “metaphors.” Instead, he proposes “a DECEMBER 1998 missing the Web as irretrievably mediocre. “I don’t think you can put wings on a child’s wagon,” he scoffs. But beneath this posture, Nelson has quietly reconsidered his past and his future. “To me, binding the whole thing together into an indivisible structure was always the center. Being a monist made it hard to break it down into tactical goals. And that’s a fundamental failing that’s left me where I am. If I were a company man or somebody able to do small things in a small way, it would have been much more effective.” Accordingly, Nelson has changed approach. He has divided Xanadu into pieces that can be grafted onto the Web. “Now that we have a dispersed Web under dispersed ownership and management, we have to create systems that can be marketed on that Web,” he explains. One piece is a “micropayment” system under which each author would automatically receive a small royalty—a one-time electronic debit—from anyone who accessed her work on the Web. Another piece is “transcopyright”—an emerging legal doctrine under which the author may permit readers to quote her work as long as they accessed it from her site. A third piece is a program that would let the reader see the original document side by side with documents that quote it. Don’t think for a minute that Ted Nelson has given up more radical plans for transforming cyberspace. He’s got projects under way to redesign word processing and the construction of interactive media. It seems a long way from his college days of pen and paper, but it isn’t. “Swarthmore is a place where ideas are honored,” says Nelson. And all he ever wanted was “a magic paper that allows those ideas to be expressed and understood in their full glory.” William Saletan ’87 is a senior writer for Slate (www.slate.com). His book on the politics of abortion rights is forthcoming from the University of California Press. Saletan serves as a member of this magazine’s advisory committee. 19 FAST PLANTS Planting the seeds of science in Chester By Chad Glover T here are too many kids in Wayne Johnson’s seventhgrade class. Thirty-eight children cluster around a maze of heavy black desks. A girl sits with her back to a door that is open onto a courtyard. Another is crowded into the class’s entrance, almost sitting in the hallway. Thirty children would have been better. Twenty-five is the state average. With 38 children— mostly black but more than a few white—even the sound of their breathing creates a dull roar. This is Chester-Upland School District in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, a district consistently at the bottom of statewide rankings. It has soldiered through mergers, takeovers, and a waning tax base. But still there Brassica rapa, small members of the mustard family, have a short life cycle that allows students to observe new features every day. 20 are sparks of hope, places where children’s eyes light up with the excitement of learning. John Anderson ’50, a former professor of anatomy and family medicine at the University of Wisconsin– Madison, is responsible for having fanned at least a few of those sparks. Working with Wayne Johnson and other teachers in the Chester-Upland schools, Anderson introduced a science curriculum called “Fast Plants,” which endeavors to teach kids basic science skills at very low cost. The plants referred to are Brassica rapa, small members of the mustard family that were bred by University of Wisconsin Professor Paul Williams to have a seed-to-seed life cycle of 35 days. The short life cycle allows students to observe new features every day: germination visible within two days, flowers by two weeks, pollination by hand with “bee sticks,” and seeds harvested at five weeks. The plant thrives in fluorescent light and is resilient enough to withstand even the rough hands of young botanists. The Fast Plants curriculum uses the cooperative learning approach to introduce students to the basic skills of doing science: making and recording accurate observations, including drawing; using the observations to generate and solve problems; and communicating the results. Team members rotate daily through four roles: leader, attendant, recorder, and evaluator. In that way, each student gains a familiarity with each role. In addition to learning the cornerstones of the scientific method, students learn to work together. But getting everyone else to work together to bring Fast Plants to Chester-Upland wasn’t so easy. SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN DECEMBER 1998 A nderson says that institutions test volunteers’ commitment. “Hang around long enough, vault enough hurdles, and the powers that be begin to listen.” After the first workshops, the teachers expected him to disappear, leaving them with no guidance, no resources, and no hope. They were wrong. Anderson became a fixture in their classes, finding materials and answering their questions. “Eventually, when I kept coming around—and after we received a $10,000 grant to cover their salaries for workshops (the teachers were working without a contract and weren’t real eager to volunteer)—they began to relax. I had gained their trust,” says Anderson. But there were still more hurdles to jump on the way to bringing Fast Plants into the classrooms. After the first year, Anderson was sure that he had gained a commitment from the district, only to have some administrators “swear blind” that they had given him no such thing. It was back to the beginning. “He was here for three years,” says Wayne Johnson, a 29-year veteran— and alumnus—of the Chester-Upland schools, “donating his time and his expertise.” One of John Anderson’s goals was to recruit strong leadership, PHOTOGRAPHS BY ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS A founder of the Institute for Multicultural Science Education at the University of Wisconsin, John Anderson had been involved with building more equitable education opportunities for more than 30 years. In 1990, after retiring from his faculty position, Anderson moved from Madison back to the Swarthmore area to become dean of programs at the nearby Quaker retreat Pendle Hill. “I was contemplating leaving Pendle Hill in 1993, when I attended a Fall Weekend presentation at the College on the Chester–Swarthmore College Community Coalition,” said Anderson. The coalition had been formed between the College and community leaders in Chester to give structure to Swarthmore’s long-standing commitment to Chester. Discussions began in 1991 to address two principal concerns: how Swarthmore College could contribute to long-term, positive change in Chester; and how direct interaction with urban poverty could enhance curricular study so that solutions conceived in Swarthmore’s classrooms might be tested in a real setting. Although impressed with the enthusiasm of the people involved in forging these ties with the city, Anderson was struck by the lack of involvement with Chester schools. He wanted to bring the principles of the Institute for Multicultural Science Education to bear on the educational problems in Chester. “There isn’t the room or the budget at Chester-Upland for something big,” Anderson says, “But I saw that I could start a small program there. And, if it could work there, then it could work anywhere.” Anderson received an unpaid appointment at the College as an entré, and then, armed with the Fast Plants program and his own scientific expertise, he marched into ChesterUpland—and met failure after failure. “I think they’d had their fill of dogooders coming in with ideas, conducting a workshop or two, but then not seeing things through to the end,” says Anderson. “People were suspicious. We’re talking about people who already had their plates overfilled. They didn’t need anyone taking up their time—and not necessarily doing any good.” Seventh-grade teacher Wayne Johnson uses the cooperative learning approach to introduce students to the basic skills of doing science: making and recording accurate observations, including drawing; using the observations to generate and solve problems; and communicating the results. 21 22 ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS so that the program would continue to blossom after he was no longer involved. Johnson directs the program at the classroom level, and Jean di Sabatino, the curriculum coordinator, has provided central administrative support. Anderson also brought with him a sense of excitement that was infectious; it remains the driving force behind Fast Plants today. “The teachers have to be excited to teach it,” says Johnson. “I’m excited by it. The kids can feel it. They can tell. Teachers aren’t assigned; it has to be something that they choose to be a part of or it won’t work.” Increasing numbers of teachers are choosing to be part of the Fast Plants team. By the end of this school year, the curriculum will have been used in 30 classrooms in the Chester-Upland School District, with variations at the fourth, seventh, and 10th grades. Wayne Johnson expects to see the program implemented in 60 classrooms next year. It was the cost of the program that enabled Fast Plants to take root in the Chester-Upland School District. The start-up cost per classroom was $200, mostly for the lamps. Maintenance of the program, though, is only about $35 a year, maybe less as teachers find ways to cut costs. Most of the materials are recyclable. “Potting soil is extremely cheap,” said Johnson, “and it goes a long way. The bee sticks are literally the thorax of a bee affixed to a toothpick—we buy dried bees as a safety measure. Regular pollinating sticks might be a little cheaper, but the kids just get so excited by the bee sticks. The seeds we harvest from the experiments are then used the following year.” Maurice Eldridge ’61, vice president for College and community relations and co-chair of the Chester–Swarthmore College Community Coalition, insists that they’re harvesting more than seeds: “John Anderson went into the Chester-Upland schools and found teachers who were burned out and angry, and you just can’t teach effectively like that. In working with them to develop this program, John gave teachers the ability to manage their classrooms in new ways. Fast Plants is getting teachers to look at teaching and learning differently, and that spills over into every other subject. Finding a new way to interact with kids gives teachers a new tool, and it’s the kind of tool that can be shared and used to effect change at the systemic level.” I t’s 9 a.m., and a chill still grips the air in Wayne Johnson’s classroom. Through the windows, you can see other children in other classes peacefully dozing. In this room, however, there is too much going on to sleep. Too much excitement. “What is this?” Johnson asks, pointing at a simple chalk diagram on the blackboard. It’s a seed just beginning to sprout, the crude shape of a comma. A child shouts, “A cotyledon!” Mr. Johnson shakes his head, “Not yet.” Bouncing up and down in his seat, the boy’s next attempt comes before Johnson has finished speaking: “They’re radicles.” “That’s right. And this?...” “It’s a ... it’s a ...” A girl in the center of the classroom pats her binder. She F ast Plants is getting teachers to look at teaching and learning differently, and that spills over into every other subject. ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS MEGAN BATTEY John Anderson ’50 (below) spent three years getting the Fast Plants curriculum established in Chester-Upland schools. Now it’s being taught in 30 classrooms at three grade levels. knows the answer. They have been discussing it for the past week, so it might even be staring up at her from the pages of her notes. There is a tense race going on throughout the class. Who can form the words first? “Hypo— hypocotyl,” she finally blurts. And then someone in the back, someone who was a bit slower on the draw, says, “Stop calling out.” After the review, the class breaks into teams. One student from each group walks to the front of the class to grab materials: a magnifying glass, an eye dropper, and the seed pot. Though the plants were selected for their rapid maturation, they were only planted yesterday. The not-yet plants sit in white Styrofoam cubes, each marked with the names of the members of the group on masking tape. To the untrained eye, it looks like nothing more than dirt. The students pick and probe the dirt for any signs of life. Taking turns with the magnifying glass, each makes an observation. “I don’t see a thing yet,” says one boy. His face is curiously scrunched as he looks. After turning the pot around in his hands, he passes it on. The next student has better luck. “I see a seed,” she says. She brushes her finger across the top of the soil, careful not to touch the seed. It’s so small, you might not notice it. “This one,” she adds, pointing at something that it appears only she can see, “looks like it split open.” A third student, a tall 13-year-old boy, lays the magnifying glass on the table, and cranes his nose down to the container. “The one thing I notice about it,” he said with an exaggerated sniff, “this stuff stinks!” Although not exactly the type of information one might find in a textbook, it is a statement that exemplifies one of the strengths of the program. “It’s really what makes Fast Plants so unique,” says Johnson. “The children share with each other, and in doing so they learn to respect what each of them has to offer. By the end, after the six weeks have passed, some of the students who might have been too shy or too afraid to speak out in class are volunteering answers. They’re getting involved.” Through the work of John Anderson, Wayne Johnson, and others, science education is improving in Chester-Upland at many levels: Students in elementary, middle, and high schools are learning science by mastering the fundamentals of doing science rather than simply by memorization—under the guidance of teachers who understand and practice the difference. To accomplish this, the traditional one-shot “in-service” training for teachers has been replaced by high-level, intense professional development, with appropriate follow-up and support. The students in Fast Plants will pollinate their own plants. As they snap the delicate thoraxes off bees to make bee sticks, discussion might turn toward the anatomy of insects. They’ll probably talk and giggle. The class walks a fine line between discovery and chaos. “If you go around, though, and listen to what they’re talking about, you’ll find they’re learning about the plants,” said Johnson. “There is no such thing as a quiet classroom with Fast Plants.” ! Chad Glover is a reporter for the Philadelphia Tribune. 23 Alumni Digest Upcoming Events Garnet Sages: Vince Boyer ’39 invites alumni who graduated before 1949 to the annual Highland Park Club gathering in Lake Wales, Fla., from Thursday, Jan. 28, to Monday, Feb. 1. Cathy Tak, who met with alumni and prospective students at the home of Judy Levine Feldman ’65. Alida ’92 and Patrick Zweidler-McKay ’89 planned a fall hike to Middlesex Fells. Chicago: Alumni and prospective students mingled at a gathering with Admissions Counselor Betsy Geiger ’96 at the home of Lois Polatnick ’74. Miami: President and Mrs. Alfred H. Bloom met with alumni, parents, and friends of the College at the Miami City Club, thanks to the hospitality of David Gold ’75. Mark Shapiro ’88 invited Swarthmoreans to the All Ivy Holiday Happy Hour. Boston: Connection events include a Philadelphia: The Connection visit to the Boston Aquarium, a conreturned to the Dock Street Brewing cert at the New England Conservatory Company for a behind-the-scenes tour Metro DC/Baltimore: Regina Maisog of Music, and a Red Sox game at Fen’89, special proj- by Head Brewer Eric Savage, son of way Park. Bob Savage, Isaac H. Clothier Jr. Proects coordinaSanda Balaban tor for the Balti- fessor Emeritus of Biology. ’94 has initiated a Residents of Kendall and Crossmore Ravens, book group modlands retirement communities enhosted a tour eled after the joyed a performance by the Alumni of the new NFL Metro DC/BaltiGospel Choir. stadium at more groups (see On campus, alumni athletes Camden Yards below). Members returned to play Ultimate and field and a visit to will read works on hockey and to compete in the alumni the ESPN Zone. the “Asian Diaspocross-country race. Swarthmore The book ra” assigned by groups began a Warders of Imaginative Literature English Depart(SWIL) celebrated the organization’s Seattle alumni visited and learned more about second year, ment faculty 20th year with a weekend reunion. sharing a curWashington state’s largest land swamp. member Frank K. San Francisco: The Connection welSaragosa, who will A land-exchange analyst explained the threat riculum with the Boston comed new chairs Neal Finkelstein ’86 of highway expansion through the forest. present a lecture Connection and Becky Johnson ’86. Alumni sociolin the spring. (see above). Carrie Schum ’88 hosted ogists had dinner with sociology faculDenver: Bill Pichardo ’71 and Maria a wine-tasting in Arlington, Va., and ty members Joy Charlton, Braulio Klemperer Aweida ’56 will co-host a the Alumni Gospel Choir performed at Muñoz, and Sarah Willie during the reception featuring Sara Hiebert ’79, the church of Wilma Lewis ’78. annual meeting of the American Socioassistant professor of biology, on Sunlogical Association. Metro NYC: The day, Jan. 10. Connection pubSeattle: Peter Metro NYC: Debbie Branker Harrod lished its second Morrison ’40 ’89 is coordinating the second annual semiannual Artist invited Connecorganic vegetarian brunch. Newsletter, listing tion members Philadelphia: Women basketball play- performances and to explore San exhibitions by ers will gather for an alumnae game Juan Island and Swarthmore peron Saturday, Feb. 6. Young alumni are camp on his 30 invited to cocktail receptions for grad- forming and visuacres of land in al artists in the uates of liberal arts schools. Friday Harbor. Big Apple. Artists George Stein ’67 is organizing a Regional included the stuseries of alumni panels to be presentSwarthmore dent a cappella ed on campus in the spring. events are run group Sixteen From the Class of ’98, Dylan Humphrey, Lynn by volunteers. If Feet, who perRecent Events Chosiad, Sonja Downing, and George Matula you would like formed holiday reunited at a reception hosted by President Austin: Neil Austrian Jr. ’87 hosted to organize an songs at RockeBloom in San Francisco in October. Director of Admissions Jim Bock ’90, event in your feller Center. alumni, and prospective students at area, please Jim DiFalco ’82 his home. Cathy Horwitz ’96 helped contact Katie Bowman ’94, assistant organized a repeat evening with the organize a tri-college potluck lunch. director of alumni relations, at kbowFestival Chamber Music Society, man1@swarthmore.edu or (610) 328including dinner at Federico’s. Boston: Donald Swearer, Charles and 8404. Look for the latest information on Alumni visited Symphony Space for Harriett Cox McDowell Professor of upcoming alumni events and activities Religion, was welcomed by alumni at a a performance of KA-TAP!, a blend of around the country and abroad on the East Indian Kathak and American tap gallery directed by Sabrina Moyle ’96. Alumni Office home page: www.swarthdance, conceived, choreographed, The Connection hosted another Colmore.edu/home/alumni. and directed by Janaki Patrik ’66. lege visitor, Admissions Counselor 24 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN Keep in touch with Swarthmore’s Internet listservs T Class president elections occur in reunion years he Alumni Office now supports nine listservs—electronic discussion groups in which your e-mail message is distributed to everyone on the list. For instructions on joining the following listservs or creating a new one, visit the World Wide Web site http://www.swarthmore.edu/Home/ Alumni/services/listservs.html, or email webeditor@swarthmore.edu. • Boston Connection • Chicago Connection • DC/Baltimore Connection • Metro NYC Connection • Philadelphia Connection • Connection Volunteers • Folk Festivals • Class of 1963 • Class of 1994 I N 1999 CAMPUS EVENTS CALENDAR Black Alumni Weekend March 19–21 Alumni Council Meeting March 19–21 Parents Weekend April 16–18 Alumni Weekend June 4–6 Alumni College Abroad: Prague to Berlin June 13–24 For events information, please call the Alumni Office at (610) 328-8402, or e-mail alumni@swarthmore.edu. B R I E F Free Recordings ... The Alumni Relations Office has inherited some recordings made in March 1965 by the Swarthmore College Chorus and College Singers. The late Peter Gram Swing conducted the performance, which was recorded at a joint concert with the Columbia University Chorus in New York City. The program includes 17th-century motets by Schein and Schuetz, works by Debussy and Des Prez, and “After Spring Sunset” by Peter Schickele ’57. Alumni who would like one of these historic LPs sent to them free of charge may contact the Alumni Office. A lumni in classes with reunions next June will have an opportunity in 1999 to nominate and elect new class presidents. This is part of a process that the College and the Alumni Council’s Executive Committee initiated in 1997 and refined this year. The purpose is to provide a mechanism for classes that wish to consider new leadership or for class presidents who wish to step down as well as to extend the terms of incumbents. Nomination forms will be included in copies of the March Bulletin that are mailed to alumni in class years ending in 4 and 9. (Forms also will be sent to members of the Class of 1968 because its president resigned after the process had been completed for that group of reunion classes.) Those making nominations should ask the potential nominees whether they are willing to serve. The names of nominees, if any, will be made available to their classes during Alumni Weekend, June 4–6, so that those attending the reunion can discuss their preferences. Ballots will be sent in the fall to classes with nominees other than the current presidents. Externship Program ... Alumni Council members are working with the Career Planning and Placement Office to coordinate student externships and housing over the winter and spring breaks. Local contacts are Steve Gessner ’66 (Baltimore), Roberta Chicos ’77 (Boston), Ike Schambelan ’61 (New York City), Elizabeth Killackey ’86 (Philadelphia), and Gretchen Gayle Ellsworth ’61 (Washington, D.C.). The Student View ... Generations of students have read The Phoenix, which continues to be published weekly. The student newspaper currently includes news, features, editorials, letters to the editor, and arts and sports sections. Alumni can call (610) 328-7362 or e-mail phoenix@ swarthmore.edu for off-campus rates and information. The Daily Gazette, a free e-mail publication sent out five days a week, offers timely reporting on campus news, sports, and events as well as world news summaries and weather. Alumni can subscribe by sending an e-mail to requests@student-publications.swarthmore.edu with the words “subscribe daily” as the subject of the message. Black Alumni Newsletter ... Do you have something you’d like to share with your classmates for the first edition of a black alumni newsletter? Send them by U.S. mail to Danielle Moss Lee ’91, 788 Columbus Avenue #17R, New York NY 10025 or by e-mail to danielle68@aol.com. DECEMBER 1998 Arabella Carter Award winners— and the right ones this time. Stokes ’51 and Mary Jane Winde Gentry ’53 were awarded the Alumni Association’s 1998 Arabella Carter Community Service Award at last June’s Alumni Weekend. In presenting the award, Alumni Council President Jack Riggs ’64 described how the Gentrys’ “moral commitment and organizing skills came together when they led the founding of the only nonprofit life care retirement community in Vermont.” The wrong photo appeared in the September Bulletin. 25 BOB WOOD CLASS NOTES Alumni Profile An Apple for the Teacher Ed Clark ’49 helps honor great teaching in his Florida community. F GOLDEN GATE GAZETTE, NAPLES, FLA. or a classroom teacher, returned to the College to being the recipient of a finish his education, hoping Golden Apple award is comto go on to earn a graduate parable with receiving a visit degree in education. But he from the Publisher’s Clearwas also newly married to inghouse prize patrol and Janet MacLellan Clark ’48, winning one of the film and they were expecting world’s Oscars. In surprise their first child. So Ed Clark classroom presentations, a put aside his dream of being golden apple (well, OK, it’s a teacher and entered the bronze, but it’s very shiny) insurance industry, where is given to five educators in he had a successful 42-year Collier County, Fla., for outcareer. standing teaching. Later, the Susan McManus, executeachers are guests at an eletive director of the Collier gant awards ceremony and County Education Foundadinner. Ed Clark ’49 sits on tion, says Clark is “a comthe selection committee of passionate and committed the Collier County Education volunteer.” Many people, Foundation that determines after they retire, do not get Collier County math teacher and 1997 Golden Apple winner Tom the winners. involved in their retirement Groce receives a hug from colleague and previous winner Jory Collier County’s Golden communities,” McManus Westberry as Ed Clark ’49 (left) looks on with enthusiasm. Apple Teacher Recognition says. “But Ed not only sits receive cash awards during surprise Program began eight years ago and is classroom presentations. The selection on the selection committee, he volunbased on the trademarked Golden teers in our schools. He’s a real asset to committee then spends approximately Apple Teacher Recognition Program in the community and a wonderful exam500 hours observing and discussing to neighboring Lee County, Fla., that was ple.” determine the top five winners. started 12 years ago. Clark, who has The Collier County community heavThe five Golden Apple awardees been on the selection committee for ily supports the program through busireceive the engraved golden apple, a three years, describes a detailed and ness sponsorships and media cover14-carat golden apple pin, a cash award confidential process of applications, age. The local McDonalds restaurants of more than $2,000, and several other recommendations, and classroom even print placemats with pictures of gifts from local businesses. At the dinobservations that screen potential winthe 40 Teachers of Distinction. The ner in their honor, held at the elegant ners based on numerous aspects of banquet, which is televised live in conRitz-Carlton hotel, the teachers also their teaching, including the ability to junction with Lee County’s award proreceive membership in the Golden create a comfortable atmosphere for gram, shows video clips of teachers Apple Academy of Teachers—an ongostudents, to challenge them to reach instructing their students in the classing element of the program that allows high standards, and to involve families room and then gives each honoree an teachers to give their input on key in the educational process. The selecopportunity to make an acceptance educational issues both locally and tion committee is made up of educaspeech. The evening’s festivities also nationally. tors and business and community give teachers and community business Clark says all the attention is warleaders. leaders an opportunity to come togethranted: “Teaching is often looked upon The applicant pool is whittled to 100 as a second-class profession. Educating er and talk. teachers, each of whom is observed by Clark encourages other communiour children is one of the most impormembers of the Golden Apple Core, ties to follow Collier County’s example, tant jobs there is. I benefited from a comprising former educators, parents, citing the recent formation of a Golden good public education and was able to students, and former selection commit- go to a good college.” Apple program in his former home of tee members. Springfield, Mass., and other places Part of Clark’s enthusiasm for the Clark says the program “puts a spot- Golden Apple program comes from his around the country. “Everything about light on good teaching and shows that the program is done first class and with unfulfilled desire to have been a teachthe education system is working. It the highest quality,” says Darlene er himself. He remembers reading encourages young people to become Grossman, president of the Foundation Houston Peterson’s book Great Teacheducators and encourages teachers, for Lee County Public Schools, ers: Portrayed by Those Who Studied who can see that they are honored and Under Them while a student at Swarth“because we believe that’s the way respected.” The Core narrows the field teachers should be honored.” more in the late 1940s. Clark had to 40 Teachers of Distinction who —Audree Penner served in World War II and had DECEMBER 1998 37 In My Life Reflections on “The Good Life” By Niki Giloane Sebastian ’65 42 NIKI SEBASTIAN N earing the double nickel, with no retirement benefits, a minimal IRA, and currently no full-time job nor immediate plans for one, I look out the floor-to-ceiling windows of my New Mexico living room at my horses grazing in the adjacent pasture, and I reflect. The most I have earned in any year since graduating from Swarthmore in 1965 was just under $32,000, which I made in 1990 when I was an upperechelon administrator in an agency of New Mexico’s state government. I hold a master’s degree, yet I consistently earn less than the median income for high school graduates. I will never have the funds for Swarthmore Alumni College Abroad. Indeed I don’t have the funds for vacation travel, which is why I choose to live my vacation on site, in a home of less than 1,000 square feet situated in an area overflowing with history and nontraditional culture, with huge painterly skies of evanescent color, and where the Great Plains lap up against the Rockies. The unemployment rate in my county has not been below 10 percent for many years, so most people survive by “a bit of this and that.” When I prepared to move to northern New Mexico in 1972, I was told to “expect to do whatever it takes to survive for at least a year, until you can make connections and get established in your field.” I did—and have continued to do so every year since, “my field” becoming the exceptional versatility of thought and ceaseless interest in new learning that Swarthmore encouraged, and that life experience has led me to accept as central to the “me” of me. I am within two years of paying off my home and four acres of land, and I have all the possessions I can use. I support myself, my husband (who has been severely ill), and a plethora of animals. I volunteer as co-chair of the local AIDS alliance and as a member of the Foster Grandparent/Senior Companion Advisory Board, and I am a “getaway” parentsubstitute for foreign students attending the United World College in nearby “I don’t have the funds for vacation travel, which is why I choose to live my vacation on site,” writes Niki Sebastian. She lives simply in northern New Mexico, “where the Great Plains lap up against the Rockies [and] the unemployment rate has not been below 10 percent for many years.” Montezuma. At present, my income dribbles in from counseling (I am a licensed mental health practitioner), writing (essays, features, and short fiction), reviewing case records for a home health agency (I headed the agency when I was willing to put in 60-hour work weeks), and baking bread (hand-kneaded loaves for weekly customers). Occasionally, I get contracts to provide training in communications, AIDS issues, or aspects of personal development. How else does one survive when one’s advanced degree is in language pathology, a specialty not recognized as existing—let alone necessary—within the New Mexico educational system? One of the great appeals for me of settling in northern New Mexico a quarter-century ago is that it was—and in Editor’s Note In My Life is a new department of the Bulletin that features first-person essays. Readers interested in submitting an essay for publication should first write for editorial guidelines. Address: Editor, Swarthmore College Bulletin, 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore PA 19081-1397, or send e-mail to bulletin@swarthmore.edu. many ways still is—more like living in a foreign country than in the United States. I have always felt more at home learning another new-to-me culture than I have when trying to fit into the predominant American one, which was never mine in the first place. Although I am singularly white of skin, I was raised by immigrant Jewish parents who spoke Hebrew and German at home in addition to English—with half of my raising taking place in Vietnam and France. My family placed great emphasis on learning for its own sake: for the stretching and the excitement of mastery. Perhaps to make sense of the cultural variety I experienced so early, I fell in love with exploring the interconnectedness that underlies the world’s peoples and ideas. I was fortunate to have good teachers—culminating in the sheer delight of my first weeks at Swarthmore, where I found myself in the company of intellectual peers, where debates begun in the classroom did not terminate with the end of a period but spilled down the walks and into the dining hall and dorms. My delight lasted through the full four years, through the original, traditional Honors program, and right up through my last oral exam in philosophy, which turned out to be an hourlong philosophical exploration of my personal values. “A coherent system, cohesive, with substantive content,” the examiner decided. My feet did not touch SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN ground again until well after graduation. Many of those four years of classroom, dining room, and dormitory debates involved aspects of what each of us would ultimately incorporate into our concepts of “living the good life.” What was never in question was our implicit understanding that ideas not translated into action had little value. I don’t know that anyone openly acknowledged how Swarthmore’s Quaker underpinnings were showing in that assumption. We often debated how best to demonstrate our beliefs—never whether to demonstrate them. Manifesting one’s beliefs doesn’t come easily, especially if one chooses a nontraditional path. I remember Dean Susan Cobb meeting during senior year with those of us not immediately headed for graduate school. She warned us that we—especially the women—would find it difficult to integrate ourselves into the mundane workplace after the intellectual freedom and respect we had experienced at Swarthmore. She advised us to be ready to be considered less employable than technical school graduates who had good secretarial skills. She was right. In New Mexico, after waiting tables, cutting and selling firewood, and learning to build houses from adobe brick and used mining timbers, I did find employment more in line with my training—in state government and eventually teaching psychology for the College of Santa Fe. It was still nontraditional, however, because my students were maximum-security prisoners in the state penitentiary. I was there for the 1980 riot, leaving the facility just a few hours before the violence erupted. Later, counseling survivors, I learned of plans the students had made to protect me should the trouble have started while I was still inside. In the aftermath of what has been termed the bloodiest prison riot in U.S. history, I again experienced the price exacted for living my version of the good life, with its obligation to know— and act from—one’s ethical beliefs. I was invited to speak at a symposium on the causes of the riot. In Quakerly fashion, I spoke truth to power and was promptly blacklisted. Back to waitressing, to building a private counseling practice, to writing, and eventually to working as a paralegal for the team defending prisoners accused of riot-related crimes. As I entered yet DECEMBER 1998 W ouldn’t it be appropriate for Swarthmore to award an occasional honorary Master of Mastery? another new area of learning, there was a flash of remembrance: I had scored well on the law boards but never applied to law school. I thought at the time that my approach to living the good life was more philosophical than legal, and nothing in my exposure to our court and corrections systems has altered my conviction that truth and justice find little expression in them. But there are a sprinkling of well-intentioned people working within each system, trying to make improvements against virtually overwhelming odds. In a recent call for nominations for honorary degrees, the College said it was seeking to honor a person “on the ascent of his or her career or at the peak of achievement” who had shown “distinction, leadership, or originality in a significant field.” Living the good life is not limited to such people, not unless negotiating life from a basis of principle, manifesting those principles when it counts, and serving one’s fellows along the way constitutes a career in a significant field. Is there such a thing as a master’s degree in mastery? Wouldn’t it be appropriate for Swarthmore to award an occasional honorary Master of Mastery? Is there any more “significant field” than living life fully, ethically, and well? Many of the people I have encountered throughout my variegated yet still significantly unified experience deserve honorary degrees. I’m thinking of an elderly lady whom I assisted in hospice care. She was dying of a most painful form of bone cancer, yet her gentleness, patience, and determination to savor every moment of her few remaining weeks helped ease her grandson out of a crisis of identity and past the lure of gangs. I propose a degree for the prison lifer who enrolled in my classes to relieve boredom and opened up to his own creativity, writing a fascinating science fiction adventure based on the premise that how we relate to the world depends on whether we spend our earliest months on our backs (in a crib, European mode) or tied upright in carrying cloths or cradle boards (in the African and Native American mode). What about an award for a local Spanish-speaking couple, now in their late 70s, neither of whom went beyond sixth grade, whose five children (three of them daughters) hold a total of 10 advanced degrees and work as president of a community college, owner of a travel agency, nursing administrator of a hospice, and co-owners of a busy truck stop and restaurant. So wherein lies the asserted unity in my experience, I hear you asking? Certainly not in area of employment, nor even in the constancy of its change. No, my experience of living a unity—the good life—lies not in the what of life but in the how and why. I seek to allow the Quakerly “that of God” to manifest fully in others, as in myself. I make room for a centered awareness that is far more than intellectual and emotional expression, and without which intellectual and emotional expression have no resonance. I focus on enjoying the rich diversity around me, the varied ways in which truth and integrity manifest themselves, the spiritual experience often referred to as beingness. I reap therefrom that settled feeling of home, which a poet once tellingly described as “the place you don’t have to deserve,” where one accepts oneself and is, therefore, at ease. No Alumni College Abroad? Minimal contributions to the Alumni Fund— even though I appreciate what Swarthmore offers and would like to support it? So be it. Like Popeye, I am what I am. ! Niki Giloane Sebastian ’65 is a counselor, home health worker, bread baker—and writer—in Sapello, New Mexico. 43 Alumni Profile Designs of the times Dorothy Twining Globus ’69 creates fashion exhibits to educate and enjoy. orothy Twining Globus ’69 has one of the biggest closets in the world. As director of the Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York, she is responsible for a collection of more than 50,000 costume pieces and more than 30,000 textiles. Globus oversees all aspects of mounting the museum’s exhibitions, from budgeting and grant writing to the development of themes, the use of physical space, and publicity. Each exhibition can take years to bring to the public—and to the 11,000 students of FIT, who study art and design, business, and technology at the school’s Seventh Avenue campus. “Clothes are vessels of memory,” says Globus of her exhibitions. “People love to look at fashion. Clothing evokes associations with times past. Just about any woman can tell you what she was wearing on the important occasions of her life. It’s an interesting phenomenon.” A recent example is an exhibition of the work of clothing designer Claire McCardell, whom Globus describes as a “revolutionary designer of the 1940s and 1950s. McCardell made an American lifestyle practical, wearable, and affordable. Her innovative construction and materials have inspired many a contemporary fashion designer. “When word went out that this exhibition was being produced, we had numerous phone calls from women who had held onto their own Claire McCardell garments and wanted to offer them for the show. From these unsolicited calls, we ended up taking in a dozen more outfits.” At FIT, Globus mounts four to six major exhibitions each year, along with an annual student exhibition that showcases around 2,000 pieces from the school’s art and design division. FIT’s curriculum ranges well beyond fashion DECEMBER 1998 Globus has been intrigued by museum work since serving as a student intern at the Smithsonian in the 1960s. After graduating from Swarthmore with a degree in art history, she went to work full time for the Smithsonian, where she met her husband, Stephen Globus, now a venture capitalist. She moved to New York in 1972, when she was appointed curator of exhibitions of the CooperHewitt Museum—the national design museum of the Smithsonian Institution. Globus joined FIT in 1993. Her predecessor there was another Swarthmorean, Richard Martin ’67, who is now curator of the Costume Institute at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The FIT museum looks back, but it also looks forward. Globus recently completed a show with three professors from Central-Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. Titled “C’AD Infinitum: Textiles, Techniques, and Technologies” it showed how computer technology has changed the design and production of textiles. “People think you would lose a lot of the handwork that goes into creating designs for fabric,” she says, “but actually computers have aided in timesaving ways. “Computer technology is important, but there’s nothing like seeing and touching the real objects,” she said. “I think that’s the future of museums— contextualizing things and understanding how they fit into the world. That’s what the FIT museum does as it adds to its collections. It makes fashion and textiles accessible for study by students, scholars, and industry.” “You can look at a photograph alone, or you can look at the actual item, which will tell you far more about the garment, how it was made, and even reflect what was going on in the world at the time.” —Audree Penner Photos by Irving Solero, Courtesy of the Museum at FIT, New York D Clothes are “vessels of memory” according to Dorothy Globus, who creates exhibitions at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology. An example is the recent retrospective of the work of designer Claire McCardell (top), whose postwar work Globus calls “revolutionary.” and includes such subjects as advertising design, cosmetics and fragrance marketing, interior design, packaging, fabric restoration, and toy design. With 12,000 square feet of gallery space and two floors for storage, Globus has developed exhibitions on everything from linen (a fiber used not only for garments but for such purposes as mummy wrappings and making fire hoses) to the innovative contemporary clothing designs of Isabel and Ruben Toledo, a young Cuban-American couple. 45 Alumni Profile Calling Bangladesh With cell phones, Iqbal Quadir ’81 knits together a nation. I n 1971, Bangladesh’s war for independence forced some city dwellers to flee to remote villages. One day, Iqbal Quadir ’81, the 13-year-old son of one such family, was sent from the village, where they had taken refuge, to another village to get medical supplies. The two motorboats that had supplied efficient transportation between the villages had suspended their service because of the war, so the boy had to make the 10-kilometer journey on foot. After walking all morning, he arrived to find that the person he sought was not at home. Young Quadir spent the afternoon trekking home. When the boat service later resumed, life in the villages improved dramatically—farmers and fishermen, again able to transport their products more easily, earned more; necessities became available again. The young Quadir was struck by the importance of being connected and the disadvantage of being isolated. Some years later, armed with a degree from Swarthmore and an M.A. and M.B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, Quadir went to work briefly at Security Pacific Merchant Bank. Then he joined Atrium Capital Corporation, a small New York City investment firm. In 1993, memories of Quadir’s childhood experience were rekindled when a computer link in his office broke down. He said: “I remembered the wasted day in 1971. Connectivity was productivity, be it in a modern office or an underdeveloped village.” Research on telecommunication in Bangladesh revealed two phones for every 1,000 people and virtually none in the rural areas, home to 100 million of the nation’s inhabitants. “I wondered how much human energy was being wasted in such an unconnected nation of 120 million,” Quadir said, “and I found it particularly disturbing at a time when new forms of connectivity such as the Internet and e-mail were transforming even such mature economies as in the United States.” Research showed him that a significant contribution to economic progress comes from telecommunications and that a poor economy like Bangladesh would gain $5,000 annually in gross national product by installing just one 50 Putting Iqbal Quadir’s (right) idea into practice, a rural Bangladeshi woman sells phone services to her fellow villagers. She bought the cellular phone with a Grameen Bank loan. $1,000 phone. “Furthermore,” Quadir said, “the prices of telecommunication links are declining continually. Because India, with comparable economic conditions to Bangladesh, had five times as many phones per capita, it was clear to me that the culprit was poverty in initiative, not economics.” He decided to take the initiative. After a year of investigation, Quadir concluded that the main obstacles to telecommunication in Bangladesh were deficient infrastructures such as roads to facilitate servicing a telephone network, records to enable credit checks, and banks for collecting bills. Seeking a bright spot in the gloomy situation, Quadir approached Grameen Bank, which had initiated a revolutionary microcredit system, making small loans to the very poor. Grameen was already operating in 35,000 villages with 1,100 branches and 12,000 workers. Quadir said, “Its workers were obviously making good credit decisions, as 97 percent of its two million borrowers—mostly women—were paying back their loans.” Typically a woman borrows $100 to $200 without collateral from Grameen to start a small business. For example, she uses the money to purchase a cow. The woman then sells milk to her neighbors, makes a living, and pays off the loan. She becomes self-sufficient. “Connectivity can play a similar role,” argued Quadir. “Just as credit obviates dependence on middlemen, a telephone connects the woman to customers and suppliers without intermediaries. Moreover, a telephone can be a ‘cow’ as well.” A woman could borrow $200 from Grameen, buy a cellular phone, and sell communication services to fellow villagers. By 1994, Quadir convinced Grameen that a telephone network would work to its advantage, and that the bank’s widespread experience could compensate for the lack of roads, billing systems, and credit checks. “This was the proverbial 1 percent, the inspiration,” said Quadir, “with the remaining 99 percent, the perspiration, to follow.” He persuaded Telenor AS, the state-owned telephone company in Norway (which in 1995 had more cellular telephones per 1,000 people than any other country in the world), to support his initiative. “After much effort by Grameen’s management,” Quadir says, “today we have GrameenPhone in Bangladesh, a commercial operation that already has 25,000 customers in Dhaka alone and is rapidly expanding into other areas.” A pilot program involving 150 Bangladeshi villages has confirmed that each village operator makes an average of $2 a day after expenses, or $750 a year, which represents more than twice the country’s per capita income. Hundreds more villages will soon be part of the network too. “I believe,” Quadir says, “that the digital revolution has no reason to be confined to advanced countries but can become a revolution in economic development as well.” —Carol Brévart SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN Books & Authors Rejoicing in nature Barbara Gawthrop Hallowell ’46, Mountain Year: A Nature Notebook, John F. Blair, 1998. N to say nice things about yet another tree-hugging alum enthusing over the beauties of nature, about which he or she knew little. But this book is so informative, accurate, and just plain fun reading that I am going to buy copies as presents for friends and relations. —Timothy Williams ’64 Professor of Biology A wish come true Molly McGarry and Fred Wasserman ’78, Becoming Visible: An Illustrated History of Lesbian and Gay Life in TwentiethCentury America, New York Public Library/Penguin Studio, 1998. I BARBARA HALLOWELL orth America has a rich heritage of naturalist writers—Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, and Henry Thoreau just for starters. Barbara Hallowell’s [’46] collection of essays on the life and times of nature in the southern Appalachians can be added to that list. In the manner of Edwin Way Teal, Hallowell organizes her thoughts as a yearlong calendar of 85 one- to two-page sketches about natural events. In winter, she covers winter weather and how birds keep from freezing; in spring it is flowers, trees, and ferns; summer brings insects, toads, and salamanders; and in autumn, she explains how pollution has altered the famous blue haze of the Smoky Mountains and tells us why leaves fall. Despite my training as a field biologist and naturalist, I learned a thing or two myself: the derivation of the name “Wake Robin,” that toads like to be tickled, that ragweed is an important food source for birds, and the difference between rime ice and hoarfrost. Hallowell rejoices in nature and is at her best describing the joys of snake watching or defending unappreciated animals such as earthworms, black- birds, or vultures. The book packs a lot of science into short essays, although I could tell when she wrote about things she had read about rather than having experienced them herself. Occasionally, the reader is slowed by taxonomic discussions that pertain only to her region of the country, but most of the writing is witty and sprightly, emphasizing appreciation of nature rather than its description. Almost anyone who enjoys the woods will learn something in this book, but it will hold a special interest for those who know the Appalachians— especially the southern half of that range. Hallowell’s interests are so broad that she will give most readers a new appreciation of some aspect of the natural world, such as her explanations of how to make sumac tea, what a simple hand lens reveals, and how to follow the tracks of leaf miners in green leaves. The book is thoughtfully designed with many fine color photographs by the author and others. There is both an index and a references section, which might better have been called recommended reading. (One surprising omission from the latter is the excellent three-volume series on bird behavior by the author’s fellow alumnus Donald Stokes ’69 and his wife, Lillian.) I was a bit apprehensive when asked to do this review. I feared I would have Barbara Hallowell’s photograph of a millipede appears in Mountain Year. She lived for 23 years in the mountains of North Carolina, where she combined her interests in natural history, writing, and photography in newspaper columns, nature education, and three books—including, with daughter Anne Hallowell Reich, the popular guide Fern Finder. She and husband Tom ’37 now reside in Kennett Square, Pa. 52 n June 1994, more than a million queer people from around the world descended on New York City to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, which many see as the beginning of the modern gay rights movement. One of the most astonishing sights that summer was the enormous banner proclaiming an exhibition titled “Becoming Visible: The Legacy of Stonewall” that dominated the Fifth Avenue facade of the New York Public Library. The Stonewall Inn, a well-known Greenwich Village gay bar, was raided by the New York City police on June 28, 1969. The vice squad—and the queer patrons themselves—were surprised when the routine raid turned into a riot as bar patrons and other gays, fed up with official harassment of homosexuals, fought back. Inside the library, visitors were treated to a series of rich sensory experiences that made visible a history of New York’s lesbians, gays, and bisexuals, both individuals and communities, in the 20th century. Artifacts—including musical recordings—from each decade of the century documented private and public lives, diverse communities, movements, and public cultures. From lesbian pulps to physique art, no aspect of queer life went unexamined. The exhibition drew primarily on materials acquired by the library in the 1980s, but it was rounded out by objects recovered through the tenacious efforts of its intrepid curators, Fred Wasserman ’78, Molly McGarry, and Mimi Bowling. SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN Attention authors The Bulletin welcomes review copies of books, compact disks, and other works by alumni. (No magazine or journal articles, please.) The editors choose featured books for review, and others receive capsule reviews. All works are then donated to the Swarthmoreana section of McCabe Library. Send your work to Books & Authors, Swarthmore College Bulletin, 500 College Ave., Swarthmore PA 19081-1397. DECEMBER 1998 reference in follow-on case courses and after graduation. Also appropriate as an undergraduate introductory text for exceptional students, this book may be used when the introductory course is taught over two terms. THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY Visitors left the library visibly moved, and many returned repeatedly, commenting that they wished the show might travel to their hometown. With the publication of Becoming Visible: An Illustrated History of Lesbian and Gay Life in Twentieth-Century America by McGarry and Wasserman, they will finally see their wish realized. This superb book instantly takes its place as the best available illustrated history of queer people in the United States. The authors have managed to reproduce all the virtues of the exhibition, while expanding the story to include a fuller account of personalities, communities, and events in other parts of the United States. In four sections titled “Stonewall”; “Sodomites, Perverts, and Queers”; “Social Worlds”; and “Organizing,” they summarize the historical literature in these fields, illustrating it with more than 300 exquisite reproductions of photographs, documents, and objects from The New York Public Library’s collections. These illustrations draw the reader into hitherto invisible realms that narrate a full range of experience from the intensely private to the blatantly public. The pioneering efforts of community historians have only recently produced these historical narratives for us; now this book makes them tangibly real for the first time. Becoming Visible is far more than a fascinating photographic record. Its authors have drawn intelligently from the available historical literature, offering a written text that takes its place among the best general syntheses of 20th-century lesbian and gay American history. —Pieter Judson ’78 Associate Professor of History Fred Wasserman ’78, co-author of Becoming Visible, is currently director of curatorial administration at The Jewish Museum in New York. He was one of the principal curators of the Ellis Island Immigration Museum. The poster above is from 1978. Other recent books Brian L. Hawkins and Patricia Meyer Battin ’51 (eds.), The Mirage of Continuity: Reconfiguring Academic Information Resources for the 21st Century, Council on Library and Information Resources and Association of American Universities, 1998. This collection of essays addresses the changes in technology and their impact on ways academic communities will provide information resources in the 21st century. Peter Bloom ’65, The Life of Berlioz, Cambridge University Press, 1998. As part of a series providing accounts of the lives of major composers, this book about Berlioz places the French musician in the periods of the Bourbon Restoration, July Monarchy, Second Republic, and Second Empire in which he lived and worked as composer, conductor, concert manager, and writer. Michelangelo Celli ’95, Words Are Dogs Barking at Windmills, Vantage Press, 1998. Winner of the “Editor’s Choice Award” in the National Library of Poetry’s New Poets Competition, Celli evokes humor, intrigue, and wisdom in this volume of unique verse. Eugene F. Brigham, Louis C. Gapenski, and Michael C. Ehrhardt ’77, Financial Management: Theory and Practice, 9th ed., Dryden Press, 1999. This textbook in corporate finance is designed primarily for M.B.A. programs and then as a Margot Gayle and Carol Gayle ’58, CastIron Architecture in America: The Significance of James Bogardus, W.W. Norton & Company, 1998. The first book on the life and work of James Bogardus, a pioneer of cast-iron architecture in America, describes the refacing of American cities in the mid-19th century. Janet Letts ’52, Legendary Lives in La Princesse de Clèves, Rockwood Press, 1998. This study arose from Letts’ curiosity about the internal narratives of La Princesse de Clèves, providing glimpses of 16th-century history. Richard Martin ’67, The Ceaseless Century: 300 Years of Eighteenth-Century Costume, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998. Martin, curator of The Costume Institute at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, analyzes fashions of the 18th to 20th centuries. Elizabeth (Sutherland) Martínez ’46, De Colores Means All of Us, South End Press, 1998. In these essays, Martínez chronicles Chicana/o history and presents a radical Latina perspective on race, liberation, and identity. Yopie Prins ’81 and Maeera Shreiber, Dwelling in Possibility, Cornell University Press, 1997. This collection, which interweaves feminist critical essays and poetic meditations on genre and gender, cuts across conventional boundaries between critics and poets—suggesting new ways of thinking about history and identity. Mary Roelofs Stott ’40, Mary’s World, International University Press, 1997. In a foreword by husband Gilmore Stott, this posthumously published volume of collected essays is described as expression of intensely private thought, which evokes universal recognition in people from all walks of life. Mara Taub ’60, Juries: Conscience of the Community, Chardon Press, 1998. These readings for students and prospective jurors on the realities of the police, court, and penal code provide a guide for understanding our criminal justice system. 53 ON THE LINE Continued from page 15 and says, “Neither do I.” Nevertheless, it is very clear to me—and to other, better-placed observers—that in deciding to rebuild Swarthmore’s football program, Alfred Bloom was acting on the basis of something deeply felt, and perhaps newly felt. Even so outspoken a critic of his decision as Professor Barry Schwartz, who says, “I think we should have bitten the bullet and kissed it [football] good-bye,” also says, “I think that Al was moved by the football team’s arguments that this was a significant part of their lives, and that an institution that is as committed as we claim to be to allowing people to flourish in the various ways that people flourish ought to include this.” I confess to being moved at Bloom’s being moved, and I confess to some surprise. I’m invited to Bloom’s office on the day I’m scheduled to spend with the team, and I’m eager to get back down the hill. I expect to hear little more than the official position on “the contribution that football makes to our educational program in general,” which is, in fact, what I do hear. But when Bloom describes the times he has spent talking and, on at least one occasion, traveling with football players, The Garnet emerge I feel as though I may be as close as I’ll get to the through the gates culture of this institution. What I sense is not to be onto Clothier Field found in any guarded quotation so much as in the for the Homecoming unguarded expression on his face. He has been game against Ursiengaged by an issue, he has heard from those with nus College. Defena perspective that “my own background did not sive lineman Ben provide,” he has modified his views as a result— Merkel ’02 (above) and he’s as visibly delighted by that entire process watches from the as a man who’s made his first batch of homemade sidelines as wine and can’t resist taking you into the basement Swarthmore goes on for a sip. offense. Sophomore quarterback Scott Murray (opposite) gets caught behind the line of scrimmage by an Ursinus rush. Swarthmore lost 21–13. 60 E veryone on hand to see Swarthmore play its October 3 homecoming game against Ursinus feels the home team can win. And win is what everyone seems intent on telling Peter Alvanos he will do, as I tag along beside him on my second visit to Swarthmore. No virgin groom ever had this many handshakes and winks at the expec- tation of imminent performance. I cannot help but wonder if there’s any place else he’d rather be. He’ll be here a while, regardless. His day began at 6 a.m. with a solitary run around the track and a review of play charts that anyone who didn’t know better might assume were the flight plans for a space mission. He joins his team for breakfast at 9:30. The players eat shoulder to shoulder at several packed tables in the center of Sharples Dining Hall, their coaches in white shirts and ties, and the overhead beams and black chandeliers adding a certain Arthurian ambience to the meal’s subdued mood. At its last game, against Gettysburg, the team was behind 21–0 at the half. Swarthmore came back to score 20 points, losing 27–20. This time, the players promise one another, they’re going to play “a whole football game.” The team from Ursinus arrives early. Coming off their bus, they put one in mind of that old circus routine where 10 clowns get out of a Volkswagen, except there are 70 or 80 of these guys. During warm-ups, they look even more numerous. They roar when they shout; the Swarthmore players on the other end of the field shout just as loudly, but their combined volume is less. Passing by on the track with her mother, one of Alvanos’ daughters calls out “There’s Daddy!” Whether or not he hears her, I don’t know. I think I know what the rule is, however: Focus, nothing but focus. Mother says a gentle “shh” and ushers the girls into the stands. Robin Mamlet is on the sidelines, this day’s “guest coach.” Bob Williams is here. Alfred and Peggi Bloom are here. The stands are at least threequarters full. “This is incredible for us,” Mamlet says. Back in the locker room, the team begins the ritual transformation of pressure into fighting spirit. Someone shouts defiantly, “Nobody comes into our house and walks out with a win!” I hear the summoning of a primal emotion, or maybe it’s only the rumble of Quakers rolling in their graves. Alvanos finally addresses the players. “Take a moment for yourselves,” he says quietly. All are silent. His pregame speech lasts less than a minute. He tells them, “To believe is to be strong,” and they take the field. In the tense minutes that ensue, Bob Williams will make an offhand remark to me that stays on my mind till the very end of the game. “It’s a funnyshaped ball, isn’t it?” The teams are tied 7–7 at the half. Swarthmore takes the lead 13–7 on the first play of the third quarter, but Ursinus soon manages to even the score. I remember that the Swarthmore team is SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN known as “The Garnet Tide” as players on the sideline sweep me along in an advancing wave beside their comrades on the field. I also remember something that Assistant Coach John Keady said to me in the summer: “My job is to keep Peter’s blood pressure down.” At the end of the third quarter, when Ursinus once again moves ahead 19–13, and then 21–13, Keady’s job is all but a lost cause—though the game is still not. In sport, as in other kinds of labor, coaching has to be one of the quintessential experiences of human helplessness; there are any number of things you can do besides watch, but in the end, you watch. Alvanos watches bent over, hands on his knees, as if some unprecedented ruling might give the former linebacker leave, just once, to charge onto the field and play. Others show the same anguish. At one point, Mason Tootell, seemingly exasperated from cheering on the team, turns to the fans and exhorts them to rally with his fist raised over his head. “Come on!” he shouts. In another moment, I could expect him or one of his fellows to call the same thing to the gods. No one scores in the last quarter, though almost to the end, Swarthmore seems on the verge of a touchdown. Then Ursinus takes possession of the ball—and the clock, as always, takes possession of the rest. The scene in the locker room after the game is like a death. None of the players will so much as make eye contact. It’s a raw October day, so the sound of so many full throats and noses may owe to nothing but the weather. If that’s the case, Alvanos, too, is affected by the cold. “I don’t know if there’s anything I can say right now that will help. But I know one thing—you guys fought your asses off from beginning to end. Dadgumit, this football team deserves to win! You have to understand something, men. They’re not going to feel sorry for us. Just like we’re not going to feel sorry for ourselves.... But the next time we get tired, I want you to think back to what it feels like right now to be sitting in this locker room. The great thing about football is, you get another opportunity. I think of something my mother always used to say to me, ‘This too shall pass.’ We’ll come back on Tuesday, full of piss and vinegar. We have to get this one more notch up.” It’s hard to imagine a fuller range of emotion in a DECEMBER 1998 C oaching has to be one of the quintessential experiences of human helplessness. There are any number of things you can do besides watch, but in the end, you just watch. 61 single paragraph of impromptu rhetoric: grief, praise, resignation, sentimentality, hope. Maybe love. I think of two things Brian Bell said to me during my last visit. “He cares for us, he feels, he’s an emotional guy. It motivates me when I see my coach going through the same emotions that I go through on the field.” For Bell, those emotions are not extraneous to the sport. “I’ve been playing football since I was in fourth grade, and as far as I’m concerned, football is not a cerebral game. Thinking happens off the field, it happens in preparation, in offices. Once you step on the field, it’s reaction, it’s emotion, it’s intensity, it’s desire—it’s camaraderie.” When Alvanos says, “On your captains,” all hands go on Bell and Harris so that together they look like a living maypole around which spent dancers and garnet sashes have all been wound together in one bruised heap. As Bell begins to address his teammates, too quietly for me to hear many of his words but in a tone that is almost maternal, I find myself wondering how many other experiences in his education or in his whole life will match the intensity of what he must be feeling now. B Co-captain J.P. Harris ’99 (top) quarterbacks the team against Franklin & Marshall. Defensive back Elliot Lee sustains an injury as the game winds down to Swarthmore’s final drive. Freshman Justin Pagliei’s prayers aren’t heard as Swarthmore falls short, losing 21–17. 62 ack in his office, Peter Alvanos is still struggling to master his own intense emotions; it seems in poor taste to play the reporter with him. “We’re so close, we’re so close! I feel bad for these seniors who haven’t won a football game in the last two years. They’re the ones who’ve made the commitment. Yes, the College has made a commitment, but they’re the ones who endured over the past two years. I want to win for them.” I press him to respond more personally. “Professionally am I satisfied? No. Now it’s 0 and 3 on my record.... My personal stake boils down to wins and losses. That’s what a football coach is.” He breathes a very deep sigh and murmurs, “Oh, man.” Then he looks up, fully composed, intrepid, the missionary. “So there it is, my friend.” There it is indeed: what no one at this school will ever say, what Peter Alvanos himself might not have said in a cooler moment. “Wins and losses. That’s what a football coach is.” Aristotle referred to it as “anagnorisis” or “recognition,” the point at which the tragic hero recognizes his predicament in a way that dignifies even as it clarifies his fate. I don’t mean to suggest that Peter Alvanos is destined to be a tragic figure—I’m willing to wager that he’s destined to become one of the best-loved and most successful coaches in Swarthmore’s history—I only mean to suggest that if he were to be tragic, he has what it takes to carry the part. The robed choristers can chant all they want to about divine necessity and mortal hubris and the role of athletics at a liberal arts institution; standing in the midst of them, even towering above them, Peter Alvanos knows the score. O n my first trip to Swarthmore, I missed a turn. I was very close to the College, and I knew I was close not only by the map but also by the architecture of the houses and the landscaping around them. Within several disorienting moments, however, I found myself moving down a street of modest homes set close together in blocks of flat terrain. “I have a feeling this isn’t Swarthmore,” I said to myself. I doubled back and found the College on the hill. “You were probably in Chester,” someone said, when I explained my delay. Now I wonder whether in missing my turn I had actually found my story, even before I had a clear idea of what that story was about. I had found that “significant part of our culture” that Ed Steiner ’59, former captain of the team, told me would be forfeited if his alma mater ever gave up football. I had found that place where boys of athletic aptitude still prefer making a touchdown to paddling a kayak. Perhaps I had found something like that place where Peter Alvanos, age 6, announced to his father and mother that he was going to be a football coach when he grew up. All of this occurs to me on my way from Swarthmore, after I finally exit the New Jersey Turnpike and begin to wind my way through a small working-class suburb where the lawns are stuck with red, white, and blue election signs—Italian, Polish, and Latino surnames rocking in the wind beside cement statues of saints. I know this neighborhood fairly well, having driven through it every day for four years on my commute to college. It’s one town over from where I’ll sleep tonight at my in-laws’ house, one town over from where I was born. When you screw up in places like these, nobody writes an affecting little memoir called Remembering Denny about what a shame it was. Nobody wants to remember. When you go to college, or to the ball field, you’re expected to make good. That expectation is the first of two reasons given by Swarthmore Economics Professor Rob Hollister for the noteworthy fact that so many footSWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN ball players major in economics. Parents of football players, he says, “tend to have a business orientation.” Noting the similarity between the schematics of football plays and economic models, he adds, “It may also be that kids who like football like the systematic elements of the subject.” I want very much to believe in a third reason, that somewhere in the formative experiences of these highly disciplined and highly intelligent young men is an elemental understanding that it is economics that determines where Chester ends and Swarthmore begins, economics that proves the sincerity of our convictions—that puts the proverbial money where the proverbial mouth is— economics that will show, ultimately, whether words like “diversity” and “inclusion” are clarion calls for social justice or merely the latest feints of privilege. And perhaps these young men also sense that what Alfred Bloom calls “the congruence of a commitment to serious analytic thought and the use of that thought to bring about a better world”—the congruence he sees “at the center of what Swarthmore is about”—is not always made of controlled experiments or polite discussions. Sometimes a better analysis, not to mention a better world, derives from going helmet to helmet on the line of scrimmage. These thoughts are interrupted on a dark side street when a boy suddenly steps into the far range of my headlights. I touch my brakes in apprehension. It is late, and the dim streetlights barely show through the trees. I slow down even more when I notice a second figure poised in the shadows beside my car. Then the first boy cocks back his arm, and I come almost to a stop. A football sails over my car, over my head, as the boy at the curb charges red-lit across my rearview mirror and into the direction of Swarthmore, already more than 100 miles behind me. ! Garret Keizer is the author of No Place But Here: A Teacher’s Vocation in a Rural Community, and A Dresser of Sycamore Trees: The Finding of a Ministry. The Garnet Tide ended its 1998 season 0–8. A fter the loss, Alvanos struggles to master his own intense emotions.... “We’re so close, we’re so close!” DECEMBER 1998 63 Our Back Pages Top: The Strath Haven Inn, ca. 1930. Generations of parents stayed here while visiting Swarthmore. Below: The Ville before Michael’s College Pharmacy. The building on the right still stands. . . . e r e h e r e w u o Wish y B efore e-mail, before CNN, before low-priced long-distance phone calls, there was the humble postcard. It took just a minute to write one and just a penny to send one. The back of one card reads: “ Come to see me soon, and I’ ll tell you how I came here.” Another says: “ Have been very busy, but not too occupied to think of you.” Thanks to Keith Lockhart of Ridley Park, Pa., for sharing with us a few examples from his collection. Left: The windowless Book and Key “crypt” held many mysteries on Elm Avenue. 64 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN Clockwise from top left: • The Mary Lyon School, part of which is still a College residence hall. • A view of the College from the Ville, with the railroad station in the foreground. Note the stationmaster’s laundry hanging out. • The “New Library,” later the Tarble Social Center. Only part of this building still stands after the fire of 1983. • Wharton Hall, with its center section unbuilt, and a row of cabbages growing where the tennis courts now stand. • Magill Walk when the trees were younger. DECEMBER 1998 © SCOTT GOLDSMITH y! d a e r rs are i a h c Your t ke c i t r u o Y to I N M U L A D N E K WEE 9 19•9 JUNE 4–6 The reunion spotlight in June will be on Swarthmore alumni who are members of classes ending in 4 and 9. Planning is already under way to offer a variety of opportunities to help alumni get reacquainted with the College and each other. Watch for the complete schedule in your mailbox next spring.