Thinking Big with astronomer Sandra Moore Faber ’66 Features Anselm’s Question 16 Astronomer Sandra Moore Faber ’66 has built her career on thinking big. At Swarthmore, there are lots of ways to be an individual. 22 3 Collection 4 Campus beat Connections 36 Class Notes 38 Alumni events and more By Eliz a b e t h R e d d e n ’ 0 5 Learning at Home Letters Alumni notes By Dan a M a c ke n z i e ’7 9 Shake It Out De p a r t m e n t s 26 The number of homeschooled students attending Swarthmore is on the rise. Friends’ jobs and travels 45 In My Life 60 Preserving a Family Legacy By Ang e l a D o o d y B y D e n ise Dennis ’72 Devils in the Details 30 Kurt Eichenwald ’83 is dedicated to accuracy in uncovering corporate crime. B o o ks & A r t s 72 A Day in the Life 80 Movie review and other pearls Professor of Physics Amy Bug juggles teaching, research, and family. By Sas h a I s s e n b e r g ’ 0 2 B y C a r ol Brévart-Demm Brothers Fraternities work to find a new role on campus. 32 By Son i a S c h e r r ’ 0 1 Playing Gershwin’s Tunes Inspired by one of the masters, John Child ’37 still teaches students how to play piano. “Mother Gazela” TO THE MILKY WAY—AND THE ONLY ONE VISIBLE FROM EARTH WITH THE NAKED EYE. PHOTOGRAPH BY BILL SCHOENING, VANESSA HARVEY/REU PROGRAM/NOAO/AURA/NSF. STORY ON PAGE 16. CONTENTS: ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ELIZABETH BOLTON TAKES ADVANTAGE OF A SUNNY DAY IN APRIL TO TEACH HER CLASS ON ROMANTIC LITERATURE IN THE SCOTT AMPHITHEATER. PHOTOGRAPH BY JIM GRAHAM. 56 Gay Burgiel’s [’61] work on Philadelphia’s tall ship is never done. By Angela Doody The Art of Cooking 64 Giuliano Hazan ’81 shares the secrets of his mouthwatering recipes. By Andrea Hammer Philly’s 76 Quirkiest Paper Matt Schwartz ’01 is editor of the Philadelphia Independent. By Deborah Bolling ON THE COVER: THE ANDROMEDA GALAXY (M31) IS THE NEAREST GALAXY 42 By Tricia Maloney Deaths Community condolences Profiles PA R L O R TA L K I spent a good part of the recent war in bed. I wish I could say I did it in protest, like John and Yoko in Amsterdam, 1969, but it was pneumonia that had me down. It started as bronchitis; after ordering a chest X ray, the doctor said, “Let’s switch to the big guns.” He meant a more powerful antibiotic, but, during the first week of April, it was an appropriate metaphor. I’ll always equate the Iraq War with this pneumonia—and with the BBC news that runs all night on National Public Radio. When the program comes on at midnight, it’s already 5 a.m. GMT; dawn, it seems, is already breaking in the Middle East. Those clipped, competent British voices made it easier to pass the restless nights of coughing and fever that accompanied my illness. In a little more than a week, I rode quite deliriously from Basra to Baghdad with my embedded BBC buddies and their trusty NPR allies. Thanks to the “big guns,” I recovered from pneumonia—an illness that once killed great numbers. And the U.S.-led coalition conquered Iraq with fewer than 200 American and British soldiers killed. By the time the looting started, I was back in the office working on this issue of the Bulletin. You won’t find much about the war in this issue of the magazine. America’s modern wars tend to come and go too quickly for a quarterly magazine. By the time we report on the debate leading up to war, the whole thing is over. Yet there was a grim sense of inevitably surrounding the campus debate in the weeks leading up to the invasion. The colloquy between journalists Leon Wieseltier and Mark Danner (page 11) was the most public example of the intense conversations that occurred all winter in classrooms, residence halls, and the student press. Although most students and faculty members seemed to be opposed to the war, others argued that the evil represented by Saddam Hussein—and the weapons he was said to have—justified the use of military force. Some organized or joined in antiwar protests, including the temporary (and clandestine) replacement on March 21 of the American flag atop Parrish Hall with a black banner; others proudly displayed the stars and stripes and sponsored collection boxes for personal items to send to the troops. After the fighting stopped, several students organized a two-week program of “peace initiatives” that directed attention to the human cost of war. One of these initiatives was the visit of an Iraqi artist, who led a workshop that promoted cross-cultural understanding and produced visualizations of peace. As the semester ended, I was feeling a lot better, and the campus conversation had turned at last to how people of intelligence and good will might prevent the sickness of war from happening again. —Jeffrey Lott S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N There was a grim sense of inevitability surrounding the campus debate in the weeks leading up to the war. 2 Swarthmore COLLEGE BULLETIN Editor: Jeffrey Lott Managing Editor: Andrea Hammer Class Notes Editor: Carol Brévart-Demm Assistant Editor: Angela Doody Staff Writer: Alisa Giardinelli Desktop Publishing: Audree Penner Art Director: Suzanne DeMott Gaadt, Gaadt Perspectives LLC Administrative Assistant: Janice Merrill-Rossi Intern: Elizabeth Redden ’05 Editor Emerita: Maralyn Orbison Gillespie ’49 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 World Wide Web www.swarthmore.edu Changes of Address Send address label along with new address to: Alumni Records Office Swarthmore College 500 College Avenue Swarthmore PA 19081-1390 Phone: (610) 328-8435. Or e-mail: alumnirecords@swarthmore.edu. The Swarthmore College Bulletin (ISSN 0888-2126), of which this is volume C, number 5, is published in August, September, December, March, and June by Swarthmore College, 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore PA 19081-1390. 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 19081-1390. ©2003 Swarthmore College Printed in U.S.A. AFFIRMATIVE ACTION FOR CONSERVATIVES Associate Dean Darryl Smaw’s essay “Does Diversity Include Me?” (March Bulletin) graphically illustrates multiculturalism’s fatal flaw. Although he generously supported having [conservative author] David Horowitz speak on campus, the clear and overwhelming focus of his attention is melanin, as if the accident of skin color— not the content of one’s character and the quality of one’s intellect—were the primary distinguishing characteristic of a human being. To illustrate my point: All else being equal, if there were only one slot left to fill in the freshman class, would diversity at Swarthmore be enhanced by recruiting (1) the private school–educated African American daughter of a wealthy New York City psychiatrist or (2) the white son of an illiterate Appalachian coal miner? The answer, of course, is 2, but would— could?—a professional multiculturalist agree? I sincerely doubt it. Dean Smaw’s efforts to foster true intellectual diversity should start with the acknowledgment that conservatives have always been overtly discriminated against Having a Ball The Folk-Dance Tradition Continues at Swarthmore College. That being the case, it is only fair that conservatives should be aggressively recruited as faculty members, administrators, and students— and, further, that practicing conservatives be given special preference over all other similarly situated candidates. In this regard, I speak from painful personal experience. As a young man, I came out of the closet at Swarthmore, proudly and publicly proclaiming that I love Edmund Burke, Irving Babbitt, and Russell Kirk. Thirty years later, how many students—let alone faculty—can correctly identify all three of these illustrious conservative philosophers? One in 10? One in 1,000? One? Until everyone on campus knows who these men were and what they thought, Swarthmore will only be whistling diversity. THEODORE HANNON ’74 Kailua, Hawaii UNDIMMED ENJOYMENT Many thanks for your story on folk dancing at Swarthmore (“Stepping and Shifting,” March Bulletin). My Scottish countrydancing spouse and children were amazed to identify with the activity shown on the cover of the magazine. The article caused me to reflect on the many gifts I received from my four years at Swarthmore. There was, of course, a stretching and polishing of my intellect. But more important was the development of a respect for my own mind and those of others—and of a wide-ranging, persistent curiosity. There was a spiritual awakening, which has led me to become a Quaker. There was the foundation of some deep and lasting friendships. And then there was folk dancing, which convinced me that I was not irretrievably inept physically and socially. Since graduation, I have continued Scottish country dancing in various countries with undimmed enjoyment. This activity has brought me my husband (a Scottish dance teacher, whom I met at a dance workshop), has provided my major source of recreational exercise, and continues to be the primary influence on my social activity. I owe a great deal to Swarthmore—and much to the folk-dance activities. I trust they will long continue to flourish. BERTHA FUCHSMAN SMALL ’72 Ste. Anne de Bellevue, Quebec NO SPACE FOR FOLK DANCE In the 1960s, long before there was a Department of Music and Dance at Swarthmore, all dance programs—folk, modern, and water ballet—shared space with the Women’s Athletics Program in the old Hall Gym. When it was torn down [in 1988] for the construction of the Lang Performing Arts Center (LPAC), the College repeatedly assured all users of the gym that accommodations would be made for their programs. Since then, programs with full-time faculty have prospered, either in the new LPAC or in the athletics facilities. But Irene Moll of the Athletics Department—the faculty member for folk dance—was not replaced after her retirement [in 1978], and folk dance was never given its own designated space. Although Professor of Dance Sharon Friedler’s statement that the LPAC studios were constructed for the curricular Dance Program is correct, it suggests—I believe incorrectly—that other dance programs at the College were to be excluded. In the early days of the LPAC, all dancers could use the studios, but as the Dance Program greatly expanded in the 1990s, folk dance was denied their use. As Elizabeth Redden ’05 so ably described in her fine report, folk dancing has a very long and significant history at Swarthmore. It would be sad indeed if it P l e a s e t u r n to page 78 JUNE 2003 I was pleased to read about the Learning for Life Program at the College (“Learning for Life,” March Bulletin). It sounds wonderful and much needed. Swarthmore couldn’t run without all its staff, and they deserve the same respect and appreciation given members of the faculty. Students who want to make a difference in the world should not overlook what needs to be changed in their own back yard—and in their own dining room, dormitory bathroom, etc. Why do some Swarthmore employees have to work two jobs to make ends meet? I can think of nothing more important for the welfare of the Swarthmore community—and the education of Swarthmore students—than making sure that all Swarthmore employees are paid a livable wage. I would be eager to contribute toward a significant raise for the Swarthmore employees who are now working two jobs to make ends meet, and I am sure many other alumni feel the same way. BETH FERHOLT ’93 La Jolla, Calif. LETTERS LEARNING FOR LIFE 3 COLLECTION Board gives green light to dorm AT ITS MAY MEETING, THE BOARD OF MANAGERS AUTHORIZED CONSTRUCTION OF A NEW RESIDENCE HALL, part of the master plan of WILLIAM RAWN ASSOCIATES INC. The Meaning of Swarthmore, the College’s ongoing capital campaign. Ground will be broken this summer for the 75-bed dormitory, which will be located along Route 320 near the train station. It is the first new dormitory for Swarthmore since the construction of Mertz Hall in 1981. Construction of the $15.9 million dormitory will pave the way for a significant renovation of Parrish Hall, a project that cannot begin until 60 students displaced by the renovation of Parrish are accommodated elsewhere. Beginning in 2004, Parrish will see an upgrade to its mechanical and safety systems, the addition of elevators, and complete renovation of the central “core” of the historic building. The Parrish project is budgeted at $13 million. The budget for both projects includes endowment funds for future operating expenses. The Meaning of Swarthmore has raised $133 million of its $230 S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N DEBATERS FOURTH IN COUNTRY 4 Swarthmore’s parliamentary debate team of Sara Drescher and Rob Peterson, both seniors, was ranked fourth in the country after going 3–3 during April’s national championship meet at Brandeis University. The pair had previously won tournaments at the University of Virginia and George Washington University. —Adapted from The Daily Gazette, April 15 MOVING ON UP The following faculty members were recently promoted from the rank of assistant professor to associate professor with tenure: JeanVincent Blanchard, French; Kathleen Howard, Chemistry; Carolyn Lesjak, English Literature; Colin Purrington, Biology; million goal. More than half of the total is earmarked for physical plant improvements, including a new science center. Parts of the science center, scheduled for completion in June 2004, have already been occupied. The campaign is scheduled to end in December 2006. When first planned, the residence hall and Parrish projects were larger in scope. But according to Dan West, vice president for alumni, development, and public relations, they were scaled back to “reflect the current economic posture of the country and the need for prudence by the College.” He said that the College will continue to raise funds over the course of the campaign in hopes of completing the original plans, but that renovation of Parrish Hall’s access, mechanical, and safety systems was “so urgent that it had to be done immediately and at a reduced cost.” In addition to the building projects, The Meaning of Swarthmore includes endowment for scholarships; new faculty positions in chemistry, computer science, education, political science, and Islamic studies; an expanded program in film and media studies; initiatives to expand faculty sabbaticals and enhance the diversity of the faculty and staff; support for the Honors Program; and expansion of career services for students and alumni. For more information on The Meaning of Swarthmore, go to http://www.swarthmore.edu/support. —Jeffrey Lott SWARTHMORE’S NEW DORMITORY, DESIGNED BY WILLIAM RAWN ASSOCIATES OF BOSTON, WILL BE LOCATED BETWEEN MERTZ HALL AND ROUTE 320, FACING THE COLLEGE’S SOUTH LAWN. IT IS BEING DESIGNED FOR 75 STUDENTS, BUT INFRASTRUCTURE WILL BE PUT IN PLACE TO ALLOW FOR FUTURE EXPANSION TO TWICE THAT NUMBER. and Andrew Ward, Psychology. Part-time assistant professors of dance Kim Arrow and Sally Hess were also promoted to associate professor. Full professorship was awarded to associate professors Alan Berkowitz, Chinese; Amy Bug, Physics and Astronomy; Michael Marissen, Music and Dance; Kathy Siwicki, Biology; and Janet Talvacchia, Mathematics and Statistics. —Carol Brévart-Demm CRUNCHING THE NUMBERS: THE CLASS OF 2007 Swarthmore accepted 902 students into next year’s freshman class—23 percent of the approximately 4,000 who applied. The College expects about 375 students to accept the offer of admission. The admitted class represents six continents, 41 countries, and 47 U.S. states in addition to the District of Columbia, Guam, and the Virgin Islands. Sixteen percent of the admitted class is from New York, making it the most heavily represented state. California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland, Florida, Texas, Illinois, and Ohio follow New York in percentage representation, and South Korea is the most highly represented foreign nation. Thirty-five percent of the admitted students are valedictorians and salutatorians, 57 percent are in the top 2 percent of their high school class, and 94 percent are in the top decile. Forty-four percent identify themselves as American students of color. —Elizabeth Redden ’05 Reaching Consensus SUAL DECISION MAKING WERE HIGH ON THE AGENDA in early March as the Board of Managers discussed a report by an ad hoc committee that studied how the Board makes its decisions. The study “Consensual Decision Making by the Swarthmore College Board of Managers” was presented by a task group appointed in spring 2002 by Alumni Association President Richard Truitt ’66. The project grew out of meetings between President Alfred H. Bloom, representatives of the Board, and members of Mind the Light, a dissident alumni group that formed after the Board’s December 2000 decision to drop football and wrestling from the Athletics Program. The task group, chaired by Federal District Court Judge Jed Rakoff ’64, examined several past decisions faced by the Board, including opposition to the Blue Route, divestiture from South Africa, and debate over the future of the Honors Program. It concluded that “consensual decision making has yielded favorable results in many situations where it initially appeared that no consensus was achievable.” Although the Board’s bylaws do not prohibit voting, the task group found that with the exception of occasional “straw votes” designed to determine “whether or to what extent a committee or the Board was divided,” the Managers have traditionally not voted when making decisions. The report said that significant challenges to reaching consensus are the time required to achieve a sense of the meeting and the “possibility that an unyielding group will take advantage of the process to prevent any change.” Although the task group report did not comment on the merits of the December 2000 athletics decision, it said that the nature of the issue “seemed to tax the ability of participants to be receptive to changing their own strongly held views.” The ad hoc Athletics Review Committee—unable to reach consensus itself—brought both majority and minority views to the Board. And, at a critical moment, the Board unanimously agreed that because of the sion had been reached by a majority vote … was not only itself a departure from past practice but also added to the challenges that this difficult situation presented.” The task group offered “some modest suggestions … to minimize the impact of such challenges in the future.” It urged the Board to “expressly affirm its commitment to the principles of consensual decision making.” In a minute adopted on March 1, the Board did just that, committing itself to “developing practices that will enhance the effectiveness of the An ad hoc committee urged the Board of Managers to affirm its commitment to consensus. On March 1, the Board did just that. potential impact on athletes being recruited for the following year’s freshman class, the athletics decision could not be postponed. “Facing this self-imposed deadline,” the report stated, “the Board [then] agreed unanimously to accept a preliminary straw vote as final. That vote— 21 to 8— … evidenced that, while there was a substantial majority for the decision taken, there was not a substantive consensus.” After noting that the Board had reconsidered and reaffirmed the December decision by consensus and without a vote at a special meeting in January 2001, the task group concluded: “The fact that the effective deci- consensual decision-making process.” Other suggestions by the task group include greater attention to orientation and training of Managers, increasing opportunities for Managers to have informal discussions of important issues before their formal meetings, and a presumption against “premature action” driven by time pressures. In a letter posted on the College Web site on March 4, Board Chairman J. Lawrence Shane ’56 thanked the task group for taking on “an important task for the good of the College.” He promised that the Board—and especially its Nominating and Governance Committee—would “review [the report] carefully and take it fully into account as we work on future decisions and activities.” Mind the Light member Diana Judd Stevens ’63, who participated in conversations that led to the formation of the task group, said that “the report reaffirms my belief and commitment to consensus. Making decisions by consensus takes a lot of time. The result, however, is better decisions. I hope that the Board will apply what has been learned.” President Bloom said that he was “deeply grateful to Rich Truitt, the task group, and Jed Rakoff for the care, thought, and balance they invested in the report. I very much hope that the report will serve to renew confidence in the College among those alumni who were unsettled by the athletics decision. We must be united in ensuring the extraordinary future of our treasured institution.” Jed Rakoff summed up the task group’s work as follows: “Part of our enthusiasm for consensual decision making stems from the fact that the more we studied it, the more we made use of it in our own extended deliberations—and it worked marvelously. Of course, one reason it worked so well was that I was blessed with a committee of extraordinarily conscientious, diligent, and perceptive people—but what else would you expect of Swarthmore alumni?” —Jeffrey Lott The committee’s full report is on the Web at www.swarthmore.edu/alumni/consensus.html. Printed copies are available from the College’s Office of News and Information: (610) 328-8533. JUNE 2003 QUAKER PROCESS AND CONSEN- 5 IN CLASS Learning to Be Wise HOW DO YOU FEEL WHEN A FRIEND BORapproach the topic without making your friend feel like you’re a creep? What does your friend’s behavior say about how thoughtful he is with respect to you? You face the dilemma of either saying nothing and having your friend’s oversight fester or saying something and having your friend think you small. How do you know what is the “right” thing to do? Trivial as it may seem, this example contains all the ingredients to illustrate the importance of being able to make a “right” decision in a difficult and complicated situation. This semester, the skills needed to make decisions like this one are being discussed in a new course called Practical Wisdom. Guided by Dorwin P. Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action Barry Schwartz and William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Political Science Ken Sharpe, students analyze the concept of practical wisdom— the ability to make “right” judgments, driven by qualities such as compassion, honesty, empathy, responsibility, or commitment—in any given situation. They investigate its ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS ROWS A SMALL AMOUNT OF MONEY AND DOESN’T PAY IT BACK? How can you HOW DO YOU KNOW THE RIGHT THING TO DO? A NEW COURSE CALLED PRACTICAL WISDOM ADDRESSES THE ABILITY TO MAKE GOOD JUDGEMENTS BASED ON VALUES, NOT RULES. THE COURSE TOOK LONGTIME FRIENDS AND COLLEAGUES KEN SHARPE (LEFT) AND BARRY SCHWARTZ MORE THAN THREE YEARS TO PLAN—AND A LIFETIME TO ARRIVE AT. necessity in life, the means to acquire it, the social forces that threaten it, and the consequences for society in its absence. And they learn the difference between independently acquired practical wisdom and dependence on predetermined codes or rules for “moral” behavior. In sessions devoted to theoretical topics, concepts like moral imagination and moral emotion, limits of utilitarianism, and progression from perception to deliberation to action are examined. The choice to begin by investigating the area of friendship was, Schwartz says, “a stroke of accidental Shane to retire from Board chairmanship 6 ANNOUNCED that he will retire STEVEN GOLDBLATT ʼ67 S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N J. LAWRENCE SHANE ’56 HAS LARRY SHANE HAS SERVED SEVEN YEARS AS CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD OF MANAGERS. from the chairmanship of the Board of Managers in December. Shane, former vice chairman of the Scott Paper Co., was first elected to the Board in 1970. During his tenure, he served as treasurer, chair of the investment committee, chair of the finance committee, and genius” because the students can so easily relate to it. The 25-student class meets for four-anda-half hours on Monday evenings and in small groups for a minimum of one hour during the week. Required reading includes works by Aristotle, Charles Dickens, Martha C. Nussbaum, and Mark Johnson as well as articles relating to the weekly topics. COLLEAGUES AND COLLABORATORS FOR 25 YEARS, Schwartz and Sharpe wanted to teach about character and virtue as a kind of response to contemporary moral and politi- vice chair. He is a longtime resident of Swarthmore, where his father, Joseph Shane ’25, served as the College’s vice president for development from 1950 to 1972. President Alfred H. Bloom said, “Larry has been an exceptional chair, as he is an exceptional human being. He understands the continuity and future of the College, enjoys the deepest respect of the Managers and of all the faculty, staff, and students who know him. He stays one step ahead of every issue with clear, nuanced, and wise judgment and prudent and humane response. He has led the College through both favorable and difficult times with consummate integrity, skill, vision, tireless energy, and loving care.” “One of the special privileges of the job,” said Shane, “was to work with and to get to know Al Bloom. He’s a great leader who has a clear vision of Swarthmore’s defining role in liberal arts education.” Shane also praised his fellow Board members as “an extremely dedicated, talented, and generous group of people.” Shane plans to remain on the Board after leaving the chairmanship. The Board will select his successor from among its members. A nomination will be brought to the Board by its Nominating and Governance Committee. Lillian Kraemer ’61, chair of the committee, said that before making a recommenda- wisdom is the central element of virtue and character. None of the traits identified as virtues would get you anywhere unless you had wisdom. You’d be better off with rules.” SEVERAL WEEKS INTO THE COURSE, SAILOR SENTENCED A sailor initially charged with raping a Swarthmore student in December 2001 was sentenced in April to a lesser charge of indecent assault and indecent exposure. Benjamin Ramsayer, 20, was briefly reported AWOL from the Navy before reporting to Delaware County Prison to serve a minimum of six weeks. He also faces Navy discipline. Although the victim went to the College health center the morning after the incident, a condom that might have become evidence in the trial was discarded when she first decided not to press charges. She went to the police in January 2002 after returning from winter break. “I thought I could just forget about it, but I couldn’t,” she told the jury in the Media courthouse. —Jeffrey Lott the class prepares to discuss the use of practical wisdom in medicine. “Knowing what practical wisdom is really doesn’t tell you what to do,” Schwartz tells the class. The leap from moral understanding to moral conduct is difficult to see. Fifteen short readings offer concrete situations as starting points for the evening’s discussion. One student presents an interaction between an oncologist who must tell a patient that she has ovarian cancer. Someone says: “In deciding what to tell a patient, it’s crucial for the doctor to know something about the patient and then to mold the truth to make it bearable.” “What then about the virtue of honesty?” asks another student. Another wonders whether an expert doctor with hundreds of patients—about whom he knows nothing but their clinical symptoms—is preferable to a less skilled family physician who sees fewer patients but knows them better. The expert is technically more competent, but the family physician shows more compassion. “Which tion, members of the committee one would care “will have conversations with enough to send every Board member about the you elsewhere, if qualities and characteristics that he didn’t know the the new chair should possess answer?” he asks. and will also seek views on indiSharpe acvidual potential nominees.” knowledges that Kraemer added that the commitrisks are involved tee will be “working hard over in using judgthe course of the summer to colment. “If your late and assess these views so practical wisdom that we can make an initial is bad,” he says, report to the whole Board in “or if there’s none September.” to be had, as in —Jeffrey Lott places where there is no pattern to follow, you use rules.” He asks whether it is possible to teach doctors to ask “caring” questions or whether only certain individuals are able to do this: “How is being a virtuous person essential to being a good doctor?” AFTER FOUR-AND-A-HALF HOURS OF SUCH TALK, the students are still vigorously engaged. Discussion is more important than reaching conclusions. “We’re thrilled with the course so far,” says Schwartz. So, it seems, are the students. “I love this course,” says Celia Paris ’05. “The first few weeks of the semester, I felt like I couldn’t escape from it. Every decision in my life suddenly seemed to be a morally laden choice requiring indefinable practical wisdom. The course helped me understand the fundamental process of human decision making and how the decisions have implications for character. And I like the focus on how institutions shape and are shaped by certain moral perspectives.” Sydney Beveridge ’03, a political science major, says: “This is a great experience. What sets this course apart is its emphasis on personal, community, and professional life.” One of the goals of the course is for the students to learn to appreciate the importance of becoming wise. “We’d like them to develop certain strengths that will enable them to become wise and compassionate decision makers,” Schwartz says. In affirmation of this, Lillian Ray ’05 says, “I feel like I now have a concept of virtue that I can work with and use to think about decision making.” —Carol Brévart-Demm JUNE 2003 cal trends, which they oppose. During the past two years—including Sharpe’s sabbatical leave last year—the two spent an incalculable number of hours studying individually and “about 1,000 hours” working together to develop the syllabus. “Conservatives,” says Schwartz, “had sort of cornered the market on virtue talk. Liberals don’t talk about what it means to be good or do good, while all these right-wing people talk about how the liberals are destroying any notion of character and morality.” Sharpe adds that the conservative notion of good character not only excludes important virtues like compassion, empathy, honesty, commitment, and justice but also implies that virtue can be taught according to certain rules. “For us,” says Sharpe, “the crucial notion of a good character isn’t simply to be a good rule follower but to possess the practical wisdom to decide what it means to do the right thing in the right place at the right time. This notion of practical wisdom— which is an ancient one—just wasn’t part of the current discussion.“ In addition, Schwartz and Sharpe both regard the capitalist marketplace, acclaimed by conservatives as the solution to social ills, as corrosive to character and a principal factor in spawning the very character flaws that conservatives seem to abhor. Meanwhile, liberals rarely apply their critiques to character. “So,” says Schwartz, “we feel that our idea speaks to both of the two major currents of thinking in America—and that it is critical of both of them. We came to see that 7 RETIREMENTS THINKER FOR SCHEUER FAMILY PROFESSOR OF HUMANI- S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N TIES AND PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY HUGH LACEY, the end of this academic year marks 8 the completion of a 31-year career at Swarthmore. After one year as an instructor from 1965 to 1966, he joined the faculty of the Philosophy Department in 1972. He has also served as chair of the College’s Peace and Conflict Studies and of Latin American Studies programs. Recipient of many accolades, he was a Eugene M. Lang Research Professor from 1992 to 1996 and a Lindback Distinguished Teaching honoree in 1999 to 2000. He is the author of about 100 articles and six books, including his major work Is Science Value Free? Values and Scientific Understanding, which was translated into Russian. His research focuses on the philosophy of science, particularly the interaction of science and values as well as ethical issues relating to biotechnology and its alternatives in agriculture; the philosophies of psychology and mathematics; space and time; liberation theology; community building; and service learning. Speaking fondly of Swarthmore, Lacey says: “The College provided me with an environment of extremely talented students, making the classroom a constant challenge and, at times, a source of new insight. Through its leave program, I also enjoyed opportunities to engage in my scholarship in an ongoing and systematic way.” In return, Lacey has consistently tried to integrate scholarship and teaching, so that his students are “constantly involved in the ongoing production of thinking.” Through a long association with the University of São Paulo in Brazil, including three years as a professor collaborador, he has developed what he calls a “multicultural agenda,” enabling him to introduce a variety of perspectives into his teaching at Swarthmore. In March, the Philosophy Department and the Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium presented a conference “Science, Values, and Society” in Lacey’s honor, featuring scholars from both North and South America. During retirement, Lacey and his Brazilian wife, Maria Inês, will remain in their home in Swarthmore, but Lacey anticipates spending one semester a year teaching graduate students in São Paulo. The completion of writing projects is also on his agenda as well as time to play with granddaughter Paige (in photo above). “My wife and I are both quite taken with her,” he says. FRIEND ON DEC. 31, AFTER 30 YEARS AT SWARTHMORE, Howard M. and Charles F. Jenkins Professor of Quaker History and Research and Director of the Friends Historical Library Jerry Frost retired, after being feted by colleagues, students, and friends. Founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program and its chair for a total of seven years, he has taught courses on American Religious History, Quakerism, War and Peace, American Family in Historical Perspective, Issues in Arms Control and Disarmament, Religion and Society, Religion and the Human Experience, and Introduction to Peace Studies. Author of many books, dozens of book chapters, articles, and book reviews, Frost has received several fellowships, including two Eugene M. Lang Faculty fellowships. While at Swarthmore, Frost worked hard to keep the College aware that its Quaker tradition was still relevant. He says, “I was successful in that we used that to create the Peace and Conflict Studies Program and also that we were able to build up both the staff and the endowment of the Friends Historical Library and the Peace Collection. They are superb collections.” The creation of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program, Frost says, encouraged use of the resources of the Peace Collection. “I think [the program] enriched the curriculum JIM GRAHAM LACEY ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS Four New Professors Emeriti FROST by linking it beyond the Religion Department to one of the significant testimonies of the Society of Friends,” he says. Frost’s retirement activities include finalizing a book manuscript, “Religions, War, and Peace: A History of Moral Perspectives”; editing a book of papers to be presented at the George Fox Conference, to be published in spring 2004 in a special double issue of Quaker History; and other research projects. He is enjoying retirement living—winters in Holmes Beach, Fla., and summers in Chestertown on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in an 1859 farmhouse, restored by his wife and surrounded by soybean and corn fields. “It’s marvelous,” Frost says. Occasionally, he misses academic life. “I think I was singularly blessed to be allowed to teach at Swarthmore, and I hope that I was as good for Swarthmore as it was for me.” STUDENT DIES IN ACCIDENT On March 8, Katie Stauffer ’05 was killed in an automobile accident on Interstate 95 in southern Georgia, while she, Jeff Schneider ’05, and Marty Griffith ’05 were en route to Florida for spring break. Schneider, the driver of the car, underwent surgery for his injuries, which included a cracked vertebra. Griffith suffered minor injuries. Stauffer, 19, was a graduate of Quakertown [Pa.] Community High School in Pennsylvania and at Swarthmore was studying psychobiology and premed. She was a top sprint freestyler and breaststroker for the College swim team, a polevaulter for the spring track team, and an active member of the Swarthmore Protestant Community. —Elizabeth Redden ’05 OF THEATER LEE DEVIN, who retired CAROL BREVART-DEMM on Dec. 31, came to Swarthmore in 1970, no curricular attention was given to art of any kind except the study of art history. “The idea of giving credit for courses in acting was pretty revolutionary,” he says. Based initially in the English Department, he started with a 0.5 credit course, Ensemble I, which ran from Sunday to Thursday from 7 to 10 p.m. The course, instead of emphasizing performance, concentrated on acting skills, using scripts, improvisation, physical carriage, and manners. “It was brutally hard—both physically and intellectually demanding,” says Devin. The English Department was impressed and, gradually, so was the rest of the campus. “Their acceptance of the idea of a theater and one that was unique to Swarthmore was really a thrill,” says Devin. Several years into his mission, Devin realized that the students he was educating were quite different from those of his colleagues at other institutions, who were training students to be actors. Rather than aiming at stardom, they realized that skills like the ability to focus, making improvisational choices, and living with the results are valuable life skills. “I began to see,” says Devin, “that teaching theater as a liberal arts major is almost [perfectly] suited to fulfill the goals of a college.” Thirty years later, the College has some of the best facilities for theater and the other fine arts on the East Coast. In February, a symposium, “The Invisible Art: Dramaturgy in American Theater,” was held in Devin’s honor. An actor, director, playwright, and consulting dramaturge at The People’s Light and Theater Company in Malvern, Pa., Devin will keep busy. In May, he and former student and professor of technology and operations management at Harvard Business School Robert Austin ’84 published Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work. “It’s been spectacular to work with Lee,” Austin says. “He’s really good at collaboration because he’s been doing it all his life.” THE COLLEGE, Daniel Underhill Professor of Music James Freeman retires this year. He has taught FREEMAN courses including Opera, Lieder, Contemporary American Music, Conducting and Orchestration, and 19th-century music. His wife and colleague, Dorothy Freeman, an associate in music performance and department concert manager, will retire with him. Freeman says that his tenure at Swarthmore has been highlighted by “working with great colleagues, beginning with Swarthmore’s first full-time professor of music, Peter Gram Swing, and continuing today with a tremendously lively department of superb performing artists, composers, and scholars.” His colleague Jane Lang Professor of Music Gerald Levinson says: “If Peter Gram Swing was the founding father of our program, Jim is at least equally important to how we got to where we are.” “Jim is a marvel,” adds Assistant Professor of Music Tom Whitman ’82. “His enthusiasm for all kinds of music combined with his vast knowledge of the repertoire and his boundless energy made an indelible impression on me, when I was a student at Swarthmore more than 20 years ago.… [As a colleague,] he’s a wonderful role model.” In 1988, Freeman founded the Philadelphia contemporary music chamber orchestra and ensemble Orchestra 2001, the College’s resident ensemble. He has served since then as its artistic director and conductor. Dorothy, an oboist and English horn player with the orchestra, also performs with the Philly Pops and the Opera Company of Philadelphia. As a conductor, Freeman has commissioned and given the first performances of numerous new works by American composers. Levinson says: “His service to the cause of new music is a perfect embodiment of both his sense of adventure and his nondoctrinaire attitude.” Freeman plans to expand Orchestra 2001’s season and scope. He is thinking, he says, “about several projected European tours and a whole slew of recordings.” Freeman looks forward to “some piano playing and recording that I’ve been putting off for years.” And, he adds, “There are a couple of books to be written as well as some marathons to be run and some mountains to climb.” —Carol Brévart-Demm Maria Alvarez ’04, Janell Kapoor, Morgan Simon ’04, Harris Kornstein ’06, Chloe Le Pichon ’05, and Tika Young ’03 (left to right) tread a mixture of clay, sand, and straw to make adobe bricks for a Wall of Peace to be built in the Crum Woods below Dana and Hallowell dormitories. The project—one of several events held during two weeks of campus peace initiatives in April—was conceived by Le Pichon, who belongs to a campus meditation group, and Alex Edleson ’04, who has recently learned about natural building. “We thought we should dedicate the space to a building of peace—with nature, ourselves, and our community. It expresses our long vision for peace, where each little brick is adding to the vision,” says Le Pichon. With its undulating contours, the wall will descend from a height of 6 feet at one end to ground level at the other. “It is a wall that includes, encircles, and does not divide,” Le Pichon adds. Self-described “avid mud mama” Janell Kapoor, founder of Kleiwerks (www.kleiwerks.com), an international grassroots natural building organization, guided the group. Several other members of the campus community participated. —Carol Brévart-Demm Mud for Peace JUNE 2003 MUSICIAN AFTER 37 YEARS AT ERNST DEMM DEVIN STEVEN GOLDBLATT ʼ67 THESPIAN WHEN PROFESSOR 9 ON A CORNER BULLETIN BOARD IN PARRISH, the Animal Rights Coalition (ARC) posts pamphlets about killing minks for fur coats. Fabien Tepper ’03, the group’s president, In addition, ARC distributes free “Vegetarian Starter Kits,” which include vegan recipes and products, nutrition information, and articles on raising vegan children. ARC also sponsors a vegetarian night in Sharples each semester in conjunction with Dining Services (see sidebar), organizes fund-raisers, and coordinates letter writing and surveys. “A survey we conducted two years ago showed that about 37 percent of the student body was vegetarian, and 5 percent was vegan—numbers that I believe have risen since then,” Tepper says. “I am a vegetarian and a vegan as well; I don’t eat or wear any animal products.” Vegans do not consume any animal food or dairy products. They also do not use animal products such as leather. “This year, we are working with the Committee for Socially Responsible Investing to persuade the College’s Investments Committee to vote affirmatively on shareholder For the Animals formed the ARC with seniors Kristina Alayan and Emily Chavez in fall 2000. “I co-founded ARC because I felt the Swarthmore community needed a source for information about the issues affecting a group … ignored by American policy makers ... that receives almost no legal protection from the industries that torture, kill, and exploit its members for profit,” she says. ARC has nine active members this year. Updates are sent to an e-mail list of more than 50, some of whom post flyers without attending meetings. Educational campaigns focus on the puppy mill industry, the meat industry’s impact on environmental and natural resources, cosmetics testing practices, and ethical issues. ballot initiatives relating to animal welfare issues that are brought against large corporations such as Procter & Gamble and McDonald’s,” she adds. “This semester, we are working to convince the College to cosign an initiative, asking Procter & Gamble to reduce the number of live subjects used to test their cosmetics—competitors such as Avon, Mary Kay, Paul Mitchell, Revlon, and dozens of others have tested their products using ‘cruelty-free’ methods for years—and to establish and enforce minimum animal welfare standards for animals they do use.” Tepper plans to give lifelong support to animal rights. “I’ve decided to spend the summer and fall working on organic farms in Austria and Switzerland,” she says. “Our views are far from widely held, however, and our campaigns meet with both praise and hostility,” Tepper says. “The greatest challenge for me is developing a depth of understanding for other people that enables me to discuss these issues always with a listening ear.” —Andrea Hamme “MY GOAL FOR ARC IS TO LET PEOPLE UNDERSTAND HOW GROUND BEEF ARRIVES IN THE PACKAGE,” SAYS CO-FOUNDER FABIEN TEPPER (RIGHT). IN APRIL, DAVIDE BERRETTA (LEFT) JOINED TEPPER IN SHARPLES DINING HALL, WHERE THEY ENJOYED VEGETARIAN FOOD SUCH AS RATATOUILLE, PIEROGI ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS WITH ONIONS AND SOUR CREAM, COUSCOUS, AND SWEET POTATO WHIP. S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N ONE THIRD OF STUDENTS ARE VEGETARIANS 10 “MEETING THE NEEDS OF OUR VEGETARIAN POPULATION IS A WORK IN PROGRESS,” says Linda McDougall, director of Dining Services. Sharples offers vegan and vegetarian options at all meals, including soy and rice milk, veggie burgers, and vegan refried beans. In addition, vegan-specific desserts such as sorbet, tofutti, apple crisp, and tofu tarts are served three nights a week. According to McDougall, Dining Services uses approximately 200 pounds of tofu weekly. “One of our biggest challenges is meeting the dessert needs of vegans because almost all desserts include eggs or egg whites. As far as entrees, they are not necessarily a challenge for our cooks; the challenge, as in all meal planning, is keeping it interesting and tasty,” she says. Vegetarian and vegan meals are a little more expensive than regular entrées. Products such as vegan cheeses and frozen tofutti, which is a vegan ice cream, are twice the cost of regular cheese and ice cream,” she says. “There is only one wholesale distributor in this area, and products are often out of stock.” McDougall estimates that 30 percent of students are vegetarians—slightly fewer than the ARC survey results but in the same range. She also has observed a 10 percent increase in recent years. “It seems that even students who consider themselves carnivores partake of the vegetarian line several times a week,” she says. “In an attempt to understand the vegetarian/vegan lifestyle better, Director of Purchasing Janet Kassab chose this [diet] for the Lenten season last year. We take the need for interesting vegetarian dishes very seriously here at Swarthmore. Because of the diverse student population, we know we [also] need to offer many ethnic selections.” Davide Berretta ’05, the newest ARC member and a “rookie” vegetarian says: “I think the College does a great job in addressing these needs. The dining hall always offers many alternatives for vegetarians, and even a vegan can easily get all that he needs in more than three to four alternatives.” —Andrea Hammer MULATTO NATION In March, installation artist Lesley Saar reconfigured Swarthmore’s List Gallery as “The Mulattoville Museum.” Posing as a guest curator and professor of Mulatto studies, Saar wrote wall texts identifying her large portraits and dioramas as artifacts embodying the cultural history of a Mulatto Nation—and often parodying American history. In “Mulattos at War” (above), half-black and half-white dolls ride 5-foot warships into the “Battle of Halfway.” Curator Andrea Packard ’85 writes: “Colorful, kitschy, and in-your-face, Saar’s dioramas violate social and aesthetic norms and cause us to examine our assumptions about art, history, and race.” —Jeffrey Lott THE ART OF SCIENCE When Audrey Chan ’04 headed outside with her classmates to paint landscapes in an art class last fall, the studio art major was immediately drawn to the concrete slabs and steel beams of the College’s emerging science center. “Every week, we headed outside to paint, but I was less interested in the sky and trees than I was in the monolithic structure emerging outside Beardsley [Hall] that I passed on the way to class. The interlocking beams and slabs of the building fascinated me.… I wanted to take on the challenge of painting the complex architectural form emerging out of—and almost dwarfing—nature.” Her construction site series was shown at the Kitao Student Art Gallery. —Angela Doody JUNE 2003 ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS COURTESY OF CBS NEWS JUST DAYS BEFORE BOMBS FELL ON BAGHDAD, journalists Mark Danner and Leon Wieseltier debated the brewing war in Iraq before a crowd of hundreds in the Pearson-Hall Theatre. The two spoke for nearly two-and-a-half hours on everything from past American policy in the Middle East to future plans for democratizing Iraq. Danner, a journalism professor at the University of California– Berkeley and a staff writer for The New Yorker, argued against war. He told the audience that Iraq, “a miserable country of 23 million,” posed no real threat to the United States, but that a war there would “bring more terrorism to our shores.” He also disparaged the Bush administration’s plan to create a democracy in postwar Iraq, saying that such plans were too ambitious to be realistic. Wieseltier, author and editor at The New Republic, defended the oncoming war by distinguishing between the Bush administration’s rationale for military intervention, saying that he was not a supporter of the government’s justification but believed that a war should happen nonetheless. He called the situation in Iraq an “international emergency,” requiring intervenA DEBATE BETWEEN LEON WIESELTIER (LEFT) AND tion by the global MARK DANNER WAS ONE OF MANY CAMPUS CONcommunity to reVERSATIONS ABOUT THE IRAQ WAR THIS SPRING. spond to crimes against humanity such as genocide and the use of weapons of mass destruction. He asserted that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was guilty of both. One major point of contention was whether past American policy toward Iraq should be used to evaluate current efforts. Also hotly debated was the efficacy of U.N. weapons inspections. Finally, the two speakers clashed on the issue of whether Iraq could realistically be democratized following a military conflict. Danner raised questions about whether comparisons between postwar Germany and Japan were accurate, saying that, unlike Iraq, those countries had ethnically homogenous populations, existing political societies that were amenable to the development of democracy. His opponent countered this argument by noting that a “social basis for democratization” already was present in Iraq in the form of a relatively substantial middle class. Following the one-on-one debate, the floor was opened up to comment, and the speakers fielded questions about President Bush’s capacity to lead the rebuilding of Iraq, the consequences of war for neighboring Middle Eastern nations, and the role of history in the analysis of the current scenario, among others. —Jeremy Schifeling ’03 Adapted from The Daily Gazette, March 6, 2003 AGUST AGUSTSSON Writers Debate Iraq War 11 SPORTS Williams Steps Down as Athletics Director Hertz, associate athletics director for two years, has been named the College’s new athletics director. In announcing the moves, Swarthmore President Alfred H. Bloom praised Williams for his contributions to Swarthmore athletics. “Bob has brought a profound understanding and appreciation of the role physical education and athletics can play in enhancing the mission of fine liberal arts education and devoted 16 years of wise, tireless, and distinguished leadership to Swarthmore’s accomplishment of that goal,” Bloom said. In addition to continuing as the chair of the Physical Education Department, Williams will serve as the faculty athletics representative to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and will undertake an examination of the role and administration of club sports at Swarthmore. Williams has served on numerous NCAA committees, including a three-year term on the NCAA Council. Since coming to Swarthmore in 1987, Williams has been athletics director and department chair. In addition, he coached track and field—as head coach initially and later on a more informal basis—until 2000. Before his tenure at Swarthmore, Williams was head track-and-field coach and director of physical education at Amherst College. Hertz, whose appointment as athletics director is effective immediately, came to Swarthmore in 2001 after serving five years JIM GRAHAM ROBERT WILLIAMS, DIRECTOR OF ATHLETICS FOR THE PAST 16 YEARS, IS STEPPING DOWN from the post. Adam BOB WILLIAMS (RIGHT), ATHLETICS DIRECTOR FOR 16 YEARS, HAS RESIGNED THE POST. HIS SUCCESSOR, ADAM HERTZ (LEFT), HAS BEEN ASSOCIATE ATHLETICS DIRECTOR SINCE 2001. WILLIAMS WILL REMAIN A MEMBER OF THE DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICAL EDUCATION AND ATHLETICS. as athletics director at Alvernia College in Reading, Pa. Hertz also coached men’s soccer and golf at Alvernia. In addition, he has held coaching and administrative posts at Arcadia University (formerly Beaver College) and Spring Garden College in Philadelphia. He serves on the NCAA Division III Men’s Soccer Committee. “Adam has a remarkable ability to work with and inspire others, quickly earns their trust for his fairness and integrity, loves sports, values excellence, brings high energy and good humor, and understands the ways in which athletics can maximally support and contribute to fine liberal arts education,” Bloom said. “We look forward to the exceptional leadership he will provide in ensuring the high quality of physical education and athletics at Swarthmore.” The College currently fields 22 varsity sports and is a member of the NCAA Division III and the Centennial Conference. —Tom Krattenmaker 12 “Swarthmore is a highly demanding place intellectually and academically, where everybody knows one another,” writes Women’s Wear Daily (WWD) in a May 1 story on America’s most fashionable colleges. “The uniform [comprises] jeans (no fancy labels) and a T-shirt or perhaps a funky top. For some students, the uniform is an outward expression of an aversion to markings of social class and capitalism. Others admit they toe the line to avoid being viewed as too interested in appearance and not interested enough in their schoolwork.” Unlike some other national magazine rankings, Swarthmore did not make Women’s Wear Daily’s top 10. —Jeffrey Lott SUSANNA VOLPE ’05 (RIGHT) WEARS IT IN THE COSBY COURTYARD. BOB KRIST S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N THE UNIFORM JUNIOR ANJANI REDDY WENT 23–7 IN SINGLES MATCHES THIS SEASON, EARNING HER SECOND TRIP TO THE NCAA SINGLES TOURNAMENT. Murphy had 15 goals and 14 assists on the season, finishing eighth on the career points and career goals lists with 142 and 83, respectively. Court finished 13th on the career assist list. Attacker Joseph DeSimone ’04 led all scorers with 27 goals and nine JOHN FERKO Led by first singles player Anjani Reddy ’04 (23–7), the women’s tennis team boasted a perfect Centennial Conference (CC) record, winning the regular season team title for the third time. The Garnet also won titles in 1995 and 2001. Ranked 17th nationally for most of the season, the team’s regular season wins over No. 23 Mary Washington and No. 26 University of the South propelled the Garnet into the 2003 NCAA Division III women’s tennis tournament, the program’s first bid for the team nationals. Facing a rematch of their season opener against Mary Washington in the first round, the Garnet dominated, winning all points to advance to Sunday’s play against the No. 2 team in the nation, Washington and Lee, before bowing out 8–1 to the Generals. Several Garnet players were unbeaten in conference play, including No. 3 singles, Caroline Celano ’04; No. 4, Ellie Suzuki ’06; No. 5, Emily Townsend ’06; No. 6, Sonia Vallabh ’06. The No. 3 doubles team of Meghan Speare ’05 and Katherine Voll ’03 also boasted a perfect record. Men’s tennis (7–7) Ranked No. 20, the Garnet earned their 24th consecutive bid for the NCAA Division III men’s tennis tournament. With a training trip to Japan sandwiched between the two halves of the season, the Garnet toppled No. 14, Washington & Lee; and No. 19, Rhodes en route to a No. 3 ranking in the Atlantic South Region. Women’s lacrosse (6–11, 1–7) After graduating seven starters, the Garnet rebuilt around returning starting co-captains Meg Woodworth ’03 and Kate Nelson-Lee ’03 on defense. Attacker Jackie Kahn ’04 was asked to step into the void left by CC leading career scorer Katie Tarr ’02 and led the team with 59 goals, good for sixth place in the conference. Kahn received All-CC honorable mention recognition. On the defensive end, Sam Uslan ’03 dominated the cage, earning first team All-CC honors. With a .596 save percentage, Uslan is ranked 15th in Division III. Men’s lacrosse (8–7, 4–4) The Garnet finished just shy of the CC playoffs, finishing fifth in the conference. Led by senior cocaptains Than Court ’03 and John Murphy ’03, the team received a bid to the 2003 ECAC Southern Region championships. MARK DUZENSKI Women’s tennis (14–4, 10–0) SENIOR MIDFIELDER JOHN MURPHY LED THE GARNET TO TWO APPEARANCES IN THE ECAC TOURNAMENT DURING HIS SWARTHMORE CAREER. assists, finishing 10th in the conference in goals per game. Softball (6–23, 4–12) At 6–23, the Garnet posted its most wins since 1998. Sophomore Val Marone and first-year Val Maulbeck both led the team with a .342 batting average, good for 13th best in the CC. Firstyear pitcher Emily Remus recorded a 5–7 record. Baseball (5–22, 4–14) The young Garnet scrapped out five wins on the season. Junior Ryan Pannorfi hit a team best .340 and led the team in hits (34), runs (29), and stolen bases (10 of 10). Junior Matt Goldstein hit .303 and put up solid pitching numbers. The lefty recorded a 3–4 record in seven starts with a 3.21 ERA, which was eighth best in the CC. Goldstein held opposing batters to a .209 batting average, which was fifth best in the league and ranked fourth in strikeouts, punching out 50 batters in 56 innings. Women’s track and field Swarthmore placed eighth at the CC Championship. Claire Hoverman ’03 won a silver medal in the 800 meters, and Njideka Akunyili ’04 captured a bronze medal in the 400 meters. The duo teamed up with Elizabeth Gardner ’05 and Emily Wistar ’06 to win a silver in the 4 x 800-meter relay. Gardner set a school record in the 800-meter run of 2:13.50. Both Akunyili and Gardner competed at the NCAA championships. Men’s track and field The Garnet placed seventh at the CC Championship. Sophomore James Golden lived up to his name as he won the 5,000-meter run in a time of 15:02.78. Junior Lang Reynolds finished in third place in the 10,000-meter run in 32:13.57, and sophomore Garrett Ash finished in fourth place in both events. Golf (6–4) The Garnet placed seventh at the CC Championship held at Eagles Landing Golf Course in Berlin, Md. The team posted a three-day total of 1,033, finishing 97 strokes off the lead. Sophomore Matt Draper carded a team-best 250 total to finish in 21st place. Draper fired a career-low round of 78 on the final day of the tournament on the par 72 course. This year’s Hood Trophy went to Haverford College by a score of 12.5 to 5.5. Swarthmore last won the trophy in 1996. —Kate Nelson-Lee ’03 and Mark Duzenski JUNE 2003 W o m e n ’s Te n n i s W i n s C o n f e r e n c e 13 Seeking Justice in Sierra Leone S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N 14 SWARTHMORE CAMPUS to and from their classes last semester, Mark Hanis was helping to restore peace in war-torn Sierra Leone. The 20-year-old junior spent five months as an intern in the Special Court in Sierra Leone, an independent country in western Africa that has been racked by years of civil war and horrific war crimes committed against its people. The decade-long civil war between Sierra Leone’s government and the Revolutionary United Front resulted in tens of thousands of deaths until a peace agreement was achieved in 2001. The independent court was created through an agreement between the United Nations and Sierra Leonean government and is similar to international criminal tribunals in Rwanda and Yugoslavia. Its mandate is to prosecute those who bear the greatest responsibility for crimes against humanity, which include vicious murders, sexual violence, human sacrifice, and mutilations. On June 4, Charles Taylor, the president of neighboring Liberia, was charged by the Special Court. The indictment accused Taylor of “bearing the greatest responsibility for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and serious violations of international humanitarian law within the territory of Sierra Leone.” Taylor has also been involved in the long-running civil war in his own country. Hanis, who arrived in Sierra Leone in February, told Richter Professor of Political Science Raymond Hopkins about his interest in Africa last year. He was introduced to Michael Pan ’97, a political adviser to the special court’s prosecutor in Freetown, the country’s capital, and Pan successfully lobbied his superiors to accept Hanis as the court’s only college intern. “Mark [made] Swarthmore proud. He’s bright, hardworking and deeply committed to the court’s work. He really made a difference out here, and I was glad to have a fellow Swarthmorean as a colleague,” Pan said, adding that Hanis’ internship was an exceptional opportunity for a college student. Hanis’ job at the court required him to do anything from conducting a background check on a journalist to gathering information for investigators. When he was not working, he experienced the realities of life in one of the most underdeveloped countries in the world. Although the Quito, Ecuador, native said he was used to seeing poverty in his own country, the sights in Sierra Leone were “shocking.” For starters, only 36 percent of the country is literate, and the average life expectancy for a man is 43 years. In addition, twothirds of the country’s working population survives by subsistence agriculture, according to The World Factbook 2002. “People are struggling. There’s no electricity [in most of the homes]. Literally, much of the light at night comes from the headlights of the wealthy driving by. There are lines of people walking on the sides of the roads, trying to avoid the cars and the piles of trash,” he said. The lack of electricity and running water prompted Hanis to finish any personal reading before 7 p.m. and take bucket showers. COURTESY OF MARK HANIS WHILE MOST OF HIS CLASSMATES WERE TRAVERSING THE TRANQUIL MARK HANIS ’04 (ABOVE) SPENT A SEMESTER IN SIERRA LEONE AS THE ONLY COLLEGE-AGED INTERN AT THE U.N.-BACKED SPECIAL COURT THAT IS INVESTIGATING WAR CRIMES THERE DURING A 10-YEAR CIVIL WAR THAT ENDED IN 2001. MICHAEL PAN ’97, WHO IS POLITICAL ADVISER TO THE COURT’S PROSECUTOR, ARRANGED FOR THE UNUSUAL INTERNSHIP. But with all the difficult experiences, there were also many positive ones. He was quick to point out that the Sierra Leonean people are warm and welcoming, and the country’s mountains and white-sand beaches are some of the most beautiful he’s ever seen. Even more memorable for the political science major was witnessing the court issue its first indictments against seven people accused of crimes against humanity and violations of international law. “This is such a great opportunity and such a unique court. This historic event was too good to miss,” said Hanis, who wants to attend law school and work on economic development issues one day. “When I return [to campus], I’ll be more grateful for even the small things, like fresh drinking water. You tend to lose sight of what’s important when you’re inside the ‘Swarthmore Bubble,’” Hanis maintained. “I certainly don’t think I’ll look at tests, finals, or life the same way again.” —Angela Doody The 21st-century Blackboard feedback is delivered on how IT WILL SOON BE AS COMMON well students understand the ON CAMPUS AS E-MAIL AND THE material. WEB—OR MAYBE EVEN CHALK. But faculty members are not Blackboard, a Web-based course the only ones to benefit. “Stumanagement system, made its dents like going to one place for Swarthmore debut only two all their courses and being able years ago. In that time, its use to view their grades on-line,” has jumped exponentially, from Evans says. “And for class disjust a few faculty members who cussions and exchanging docufirst used it on a trial basis to ments, students use it in the more than 80 in this semester middle of the night.” alone. “We also use it in Informa“Close to 100 percent of the tion Technology Services as a students have at least one forum for training student workcourse on Blackboard right ers, holding discussions, and now,” says Elizabeth Evans, A BLACKBOARD WEB SITE, SUCH AS THE ORGANISMAL AND POPULATION posting information sheets,” an academic computing coordiEvans says. “The Business Office nator who has worked almost BIOLOGY COURSE HOME PAGE (ABOVE) IS MORE THAN A SYLLABUS—IT’S A and library use it that way too. I exclusively on Blackboard for PLACE FOR COURSE MATERIALS, VISUAL RESOURCES, AND COMMUNICATION. expect that aspect of its use to the last year. INCREASING NUMBERS OF SWARTHMORE PROFESSORS ARE USING THE SOFTgrow.” The range of classes supportWARE TO EXTEND THE CLASSROOM EXPERIENCE. In a scant two years, Blacked by Blackboard spans the Colboard has shifted from a small lege’s offerings, from teamsystem project to a program that runs on never replace face-to-face teaching at taught biology classes to seminars in art Oracle and is hosted on two servers. “It’s Swarthmore, but faculty members are beginhistory. Faculty members use it to post becoming as ‘mission critical’ as Banner, the ning to see several of its tools as useful course material their students can access College’s database software, and requires a classroom support.” on-line. big commitment of resources on our part to Diagnostic quizzes are one of those tools. “A system like Blackboard is designed to train users, maintain the data, and run the Students can submit their answers on-line, provide on-line course materials and commusystem,” Evans says. nications tools and can be used as a distance and Blackboard grades them and enters the —Alisa Giardinelli results into a grade book. The result—instant learning environment,” Evans says. “It will SWARTHMORE LIBRARIANS ARE NOW FORMALLY PREPARED for the day a government agent marches in asking for information on a patron who has looked up “suspicious” data. A special library task force has recently written official policy for employees and student workers who may be approached by lawenforcement agents seeking such private information. The policy was created in response to the U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act enacted by Congress after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Librarians have always been staunch supporters of the First Amendment and the right to privacy, and patrons should not be nervous that their actions are being monitored now, said Linda Hunt, an access-and-lending-services specialist who headed the task force. She is quick to point out that nothing is different in the library’s day-to-day operations. “Quite frankly, our policies haven’t changed. We’ve always put our patrons’ privacy first, and we still do,” Hunt said. “The questions you ask and the books you take out—that’s still not anyone’s business but yours.” The U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act is an acronym for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism. According to library officials, the federal act is not an easy piece of legislation to read or understand because it amends 15 different statutes, updates wiretap and surveillance laws, and gives law-enforcement officers greater authority to conduct property searches. The library’s new policy outlines the procedures that library staff and student employees are to follow if approached by a lawenforcement officer. The policy states that students should never give out information but immediately contact a staff member. Staff members are instructed to contact College Librarian Peggy Seiden, who will deal with the inquiry. Also in accordance with the law, students and staff members are forbidden to disclose that they were approached or that the incident occurred. In addition, at least one staff member is always working now when the library is open, so that the student workers won’t have to field questions from police or federal agents alone. “Here at Swarthmore, we’re still upholding the same privacy laws we’ve always upheld, but now we have something in print,” Hunt said. —Angela Doody JUNE 2003 LIBRARY SETS P.A.T.R.I.O.T. POLICY 15 R.R. JONES/UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA–SANTA CRUZ ANSELM’S QUESTION LAST YEAR, DISCOVER MAGAZINE NAMED ASTRONOMER SANDRA MOORE FABER (RIGHT) ONE OF THE 50 MOST INFLUENTIAL WOMEN IN SCIENCE. TWO SWARTHMOREANS WERE ON THE LIST. THE OTHER, MAXINE FRANK SINGER ’52, RECENT- S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N LY RETIRED AS HEAD OF THE 16 CARNEGIE INSTITUTION OF WASHINGTON, D.C., WHERE FABER BEGAN HER SCIENTIFIC CAREER. By D a n a M a c ke n z i e ’ 7 9 JUNE 2003 W hat is the biggest thing you can think of? The Earth? The Sun? The Milky Way galaxy? Over the centuries, humans have gradually expanded their conception of “big,” as they have come to realize the awesome distances that our universe encompasses. Back in the 11th century, St. Anselm proposed one answer. God, he wrote, was “that being than which nothing greater can be conceived.” But if you disqualify God (not a physical entity) or the universe itself (too tautologous) as answers, it may seem as if there cannot be a largest object in the universe. Whatever you nominate, the Next Big Thing will come along to top it. But astronomer Sandra Faber has an answer that she says you can’t beat. In 1986, she helped discover what is still the largest structure known to man: the Great Attractor, a massive supercluster of galaxies (that is, a cluster of galaxy clusters) spanning some 450 million light years in the southern sky. There is good reason to believe we will never discover anything larger because the Great Attractor’s dimensions were set by the primordial fluctuations of matter density in the universe, shortly after the Big Bang. Although its components are not gravitationally bound (and, therefore, will someday fly apart), it became a distinct structure during the early universe because it did not expand as much as similar-sized regions of average density. “Clustering proceeds only as long as the density of the universe approaches closure density,” Faber says, > ASTRONOMER referring to the idea that the expanding universe could reverse direction and collapse if there were enough mat- SANDRA MOORE FABER ’66 ter to allow gravity to stop or “close” the expansion. “Once you fall below that density, you’re stuck with HAS BUILT HER CAREER whatever structures have already formed—nothing more can form. We now think that we’re in a universe that had ON THINKING BIG. close to closure density a long time ago but which is entering a phase where repulsive gravity is blowing everything apart. There’s been a shutdown of clustering as a result— that’s why we think we’ve found the end of greatness.” For many astronomers, the discovery of the Great Attractor might have been the crowning moment of a career. But for Faber, it is only the beginning of a list of equally impressive accomplishments, which led to her recognition last year as one of Discover Magazine’s 50 most influential women of science. She helped plan the Keck telescope in Hawaii, with its revolutionary design that integrates 36 separate mirrors into one smoothly functioning device. She designed the Deep Extragalactic Imaging Multi-Object Spectrograph (DEIMOS), an attachment to the Keck telescope that lets astronomers gather high-quality spectra from more than 100 galaxies at a time. And in 1990, she helped to craft a plan to repair the troubled Hubble Space Telescope with a rebuilt widefield camera that has since taken so many stunning pictures of the deep universe. According to her colleague Joel Primack of the University of California at Santa Cruz, it’s difficult to fit Faber’s work into a sound bite because she has done so many things so well. “There are three areas that an astronomer can work in. Sandy is one of the extremely rare group who’s a leader in all three,” Primack says. “The first is theory, and she wrote a really influential paper on cold dark matter. The second is observation, which is what she’s most known for. The third is building major instruments, and she has now built one of the premier instruments in astronomy, which gives us the data in one night that we used to be able to collect in three years.” 17 © DAVID MALIN IMAGES THE SOMBRERO GALAXY (M104, NGC4594, ABOVE) SHOWS PROMINENT DUST LANES. SOME COSMOLOGISTS BELIEVE THAT THERE IS A HUGE AMOUNT OF UNSEEN MATTER IN THE UNIVERSE, RANGING FROM DUST TO SUBATOMIC PARTICLES. “SPACE IS FULL OF THIS STUFF,” SAYS FABER. S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N W 18 hen Faber arrived at Swarthmore 41 years ago, she says, it felt vard was a “big letdown” for the budding scientist. Fortunately, she like coming home. “Even though I went to an excellent high didn’t have to stay there for long because Andrew moved to Washschool, I was a science nerd,” she says. “It was even worse for me ington, D.C., and she went with him. She managed her way into the because I was a girl.” But at Swarthmore, she Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, a laboratory instantly felt as if she fit in. “It had a big effect at the Carnegie Institute of Washington that, on my personality right away. I met my husband despite its name, did all sorts of astronomical at Swarthmore. I went from feeling negative research. That was where Faber embarked on her > THE SEARCH FOR about the human race to feeling positive. It life’s work, the study of galaxies. “It was the obvitaught me to like my peers.” DIRECT EVIDENCE OF ous choice,” she says. “Astronomers had spent the Swarthmore also gave her a flying start on her previous 20 or 30 years figuring out how stars career in astronomy. She majored in physics and DARK MATTER IS worked. Galaxies were the next step up on the scale worked at the Sproul Observatory, which had a of the cosmos.” long tradition of research. (In fact, she and During the next decade, first at Carnegie and CONDUCTED TODAY IN Andrew Faber ’67 were married at the Friends then at UC–Santa Cruz (the first and only postMeetinghouse by the campus’s night watchman. PARTICLE COLLIDERS doctoral job she has had), Faber built a reputation How did she come to know him? “When you’re as an expert on elliptical galaxies. These galaxies in astronomy, you’re up a lot at night,” she are somewhat less photogenic than spirals such as ON EARTH, BUT IT explains.) She grew especially close to Professor the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy. Faber of Astronomy Peter Van de Kamp, who invited describes them as “big, fluffy balls of stars.” But BEGAN WITH her into his home and once asked her to take because they are less highly structured, she care of his ailing wife when he was out of town. thought they might also be simpler to understand. OBSERVATIONS OF And, as chair of the student-run colloquium And, in fact, Faber discovered the first empirical committee, she also got the chance to meet top laws about them, such as the “Faber-Jackson law” GALAXIES. researchers in physics and astronomy. “It was (named after herself and co-author/graduate stuShangri-La for me,” she says. dent Robert Jackson). It says that stars orbit faster After Swarthmore, graduate school at Harin larger, brighter elliptical galaxies because, even SPACE TELESCOPE SCIENCE INSTITUTE E NASA//MARSHALL SPACE FLIGHT CENTER Samurai”) discovered that the “Hubble flow” was not uniform. Instead, the flow matched what you would expect if the cluster of galaxies that the Milky Way belongs to (the Local Cluster) was just a suburb of an immense megalopolis, which they named the Great Attractor. It turned out that all of the galaxies in our neighborhood are being pulled toward the Great Attractor, and the ones that are closer to it are being pulled faster. It was a discovery whose importance far outstripped the problem it was originally intended to solve. It did tidy up the Faber-Jackson relation because the inaccurate distances had created a corresponding inaccuracy in the inferred luminosity of the galaxies. But what grabbed the headlines was that Edwin Hubble’s picture of uniform expansion was wrong— even at the coarsest scale. The universe has ripples in it. In the early 1990s, these ripples were first seen by the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, which succeeded in making an image of fluctuations in the cosmic ver since Edwin Hubble dismicrowave background radiacovered in the 1920s that tion that fills the sky. (The the universe was expanding, COBE project was led by John astronomers have used that fact Mather ’68.) This uneven—or as a convenient way to measure “anisotropic”—radiation is a distances. According to Hubsnapshot of how the universe ble, the expansion of the unilooked when space first became verse was uniform, so that distransparent, some 300,000 tant galaxies are moving away years after the Big Bang. THE FIRST IMAGES FROM THE HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE WERE BLURRY from us faster than nearby This year, results from the (GALAXY M100, BOTTOM LEFT). FABER AND FORMER STUDENT JON HOLTZMAN galaxies. Surprisingly, this Wilkinson Microwave AnisoDIAGNOSED THE PROBLEM—A FLAW IN THE SCOPE’S MIRROR. ANOTHER speed of recession is one of the tropy Probe provided a much FORMER STUDENT, TOD LAUER, DEVISED SOFTWARE THAT SHARPENED easiest things to measure in a more detailed “baby picture” of THE TELESCOPE’S VISION (BOTTOM RIGHT) UNTIL SHUTTLE ASTRONAUTS distant object because it prothe early universe. COULD REPAIR IT IN 1993 (TOP). duces a “redshift,” a displaceThe size of the ripples has ment of the entire spectrum of provided crucial evidence for the galaxy toward longer (and redder) wavelengths. Over the years, one of the most provocative theories in modern cosmology—that therefore, astronomers had unconsciously come to use redshift as a there is a huge amount of matter in the universe that we cannot see, proxy for distance. called “dark matter.” This idea is not one that Faber came up with But for nearby galaxies—those within 100 million light years of herself (it was first proposed by Fritz Zwicky, a cosmologist at Calus—Faber and her colleagues (who became known as the “Seven tech, in 1931), but she played a large role in making it respectable. JUNE 2003 though the net rotation of the system is small, such galaxies are, says Faber, “clouds of stars that orbit every which way.” However, there was a problem with the Faber-Jackson law. The relation wasn’t tight— there was still quite a bit of variation in the rotational velocities that couldn’t be explained by the galaxy’s luminosity. In the roundabout, illogical way that is typical of science, this discrepancy led to the completely unexpected discovery of the Great Attractor. Thinking that the problem was a simple lack of data (because only a couple dozen elliptical galaxies had been studied), Faber assembled a team of seven astronomers in the early 1980s to do a systematic galaxy survey. They set out to measure every conceivable parameter—mass, luminosity, size, “metallicity” (the proportion of elements heavier than helium)—in 300 galaxies. As the data came in, they bumped over and over into an inconsistency that took them years to identify: The distances to the galaxies were wrong. 19 ©ROGER RESSMEYER/CORBIS S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N 20 W.M. KECK TELESCOPE SITS ATOP MAUNA KEA IN HAWAII, 13,800 FEET COMBINE DATA FROM THE TWO INSTRUMENTS. “GREAT TELESCOPES LIKE THE ABOVE SEA LEVEL. ITS 36 HEXAGONAL SEGMENTS FUNCTION AS A SINGLE KECKS ALLOW US TO EXPLORE THE RIVER OF TIME BACK TOWARD ITS 10-METER MIRROR. IT IS ONE OF TWO IDENTICAL INSTRUMENTS, EACH OF SOURCE,” SAYS FABER. “THE KECKS ALLOW US, LIKE NO OTHER TELESCOPE WHICH IS THE LARGEST IN THE WORLD. ASTRONOMERS ARE PLANNING TO IN HISTORY, TO VIEW THE EVOLVING UNIVERSE THAT GAVE US BIRTH.” S ince her days with the Seven Samurai, Faber has been drawn more and more into “big science,” with her involvement in the Hubble Space Telescope and Keck Telescope projects. The Space Telescope experience especially taught her the importance of questioning assumptions. One month after its launch in April 1990, it became apparent that something was wrong with the Space Telescope. It had trouble tracking stars, and measurements of its optical quality were so bad they were off the charts. Faber and former student Jon Holtzman suspected that the problem was spherical aberration, the simplest flaw a telescope can have. “I didn’t know anything about optics, and yet the world’s greatest optical experts were staring at the images and couldn’t make head or tail of them,” she says. “Why? Because they were so horrible. They were looking for some very deep and very fancy reason, and it was right there in front of their eyes.” Ultimately, Faber and Holtzman did convince the experts by producing simulated images with spherical aberration that matched exactly what they were seeing through the telescope. Meanwhile, another former student, Tod Lauer (whom Faber calls “the savior of the space telescope”) was working out how to compensate for the spherical aberration by reprocessing the images in the computer. “It was like having two telescopes in one,” Faber says. “Fifteen percent of the light was good old sharp space telescope, and 85 percent was like looking through the shower door. The trick was to glom onto the 15 percent that was OK and synthesize almost perfect images.” Lauer’s workaround bought time and maintained public support for the Hubble, allowing it to work effectively until astronauts could install corrective optics during a repair mission in 1993. Faber learned a lasting lesson from the experience, which has helped her in other large-scale projects. “I am convinced that the only way you can get a good product is to have proper collaboration between scientists and engineers,” she says. “Each mentality by itself is doomed to failure. If you leave scientists in charge of construction, they will try to understand every anomaly, and you will never get done. By the same token, if you leave engineers in charge, they will never get to the bottom of important discrepancies. The project will be on time and under budget, but it won’t work. The fail- FABER (WAVING AT REAR) AND HER TEAM DESIGNED THE DEEP EXTRAGALACTIC IMAGING MULTI-OBJECT SPECTROGRAPH (DEIMOS). THE INSTRUMENT ALLOWS ASTRONOMERS TO OBTAIN HIGH-QUALITY SPECTRA FROM MORE THAN 100 GALAXIES AT A TIME. THE TEAM CELEBRATED JUST BEFORE THE DEIMOS WAS SHIPPED TO THE KECK OBSERVATORY IN HAWAII IN DECEMBER 2001. ure [of the Hubble Space Telescope] was a failure of the engineering mentality to question.” But she also faults NASA’s management style in the 1980s. “It was a shoot-the-messenger culture—you couldn’t tell the truth,” she says. “There were optical people who strongly suspected the spherical aberration at the time and didn’t say anything.” A lthough she enjoyed her forays into the theory of cold dark matter on one hand and basic applied optics on the other, Faber says she has remained first and foremost an observer. The completion of the DEIMOS in Hawaii has allowed her to get back to the work she began her career with, studying the evolution of elliptical galaxies. But she seems just as pleased about the way DEIMOS has facilitated other astronomers’ projects. “This is a workhorse, the single most productive instrument on the Keck telescope,” she says. That is no accident because before DEIMOS was even built, she assembled a “scientific case” for it that included six possible applications. “There are two philosophies of observing, analogous to two philosophies of cooking,” says Faber, who, incidentally, is an enthusiastic cook. “One is to go to a cookbook, find a recipe, go to the supermarket, and get exactly what you need. The other is to stock up the pantry with an array of quality ingredients and only then ask, what can I cook?” Faber’s career in the kitchen of science has followed the second philosophy. “I like a well-stocked pantry with fundamental observations and good data,” she says. Using all the ingredients and tools at her disposal, she has served up a career full of delicious ideas. T A former mathematics professor, Dana Mackenzie is now a freelance science journalist whose work appears in such publications as Science, Discover Magazine, and New Scientist. His first book, The Big Splat, or How Our Moon Came to Be, was published by Wiley in April 2003. JUNE 2003 What is dark matter? It can’t be seen because it is impervious to light, and it AT ALL THREE ASPECTS can’t be touched because OF ASTRONOMY: THEORY, it doesn’t interact perceptibly with ordinary matter. The only thing it does OBSERVATION, AND is gravitate, and that—for now—is the only reason INSTRUMENT DESIGN. we know it exists. And yet, as Faber says, “Space is full of this stuff.” Making a small rectangle with her fingers, she says, “If you look right here, there could be dozens of these things [particles of dark matter, or “weakly interacting massive particles,” as physicists call them] passing through here in a second. And it’s not ‘out there’—it’s right here.” The search for direct evidence of dark matter continues today in particle colliders on Earth, but it began with observations of galaxies. © UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA OBSERVATORIES > FABER HAS EXCELLED 21 jumatatu shake it out At Swarthmore, there are lots of ways to be an S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N individual. Hair is one. 22 S warthmore College: You, Your Friends, and a Bunch of Freaks.” So read one of the senior class T-shirts last year. We all laughed because it was true. Swarthmore students love to think of their school as a haven for weirdos, while at the same time asserting their own elevation above this standard of strangeness. What takes time to accept is that just about everyone here is strange in some way—and if just about everyone is, chances are you are too. A little weirdness is a good thing here—it’s embraced, accepted as the norm. We’re all individuals here. Some of us are dancers or painters or athletes or writers, but all of us maintain our sense of individuality, our pride in the idea that we are who we are and that no one else is quite like us. We might complain about keeping constant company with so many other staunch individualists, but, the fact is, we all chose to be here— and most of us would never have chosen any other way. Swarthmore students express their individuality here in many different ways. Some like to wear capes and hold annual pterodactyl hunts. We call them “Swillies,” after their campus organization SWIL (Swarthmore Warders of Imaginative Literature). Yet people from all over campus join in that pterodactyl hunt. Those of us chloe who might objectively be classified as more “normal” jump at the chance to run around campus in the dark and bop one another with foam bats. Some hide their strangeness a little bit better than others, but it’s still there, barely beneath the surface, just waiting for someone to shake it out of us. Some of us conceal our individuality just slightly, choosing to express it in subtle, quiet ways—through our academics, our artistic endeavors, our physical exertions. And then there are those who wear it right out there on their sleeves. Or their heads. They’re maybe a little better off than the rest of us. What’s inside all of us is, for them, outside for all to see—the potential to be individualistic, unclassifiable, young, free, and unimaginably beautiful. ethan JUNE 2003 By Elizab e th R e dd e n ’ 0 5 Phot ogra p hs b y J i m G r a ha m 23 J U M ATAT U P O E ’ 0 4 It’s never hard to tell when Jumatatu Poe has rolled out of bed late. “Sometimes I’ll blow-dry it straight, sometimes I'll have it cornrowed, sometimes I’ll have it in an Afro. And when I don’t feel like doing anything, you’ll know—because I'll have my hat on.” Poe started growing his hair long freshman year and can now hardly imagine his life without it. “Oh, God, I wouldn’t have any friends.” He pauses, thinking for a moment. “But I only halfway believe that.” S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N ED STEHLIK ‘05 “I guess it really just sort of exploded a couple of months ago,” Ed Stehlik ’05 says of his newly forming blond dreads. They are, he says, taking on a life of their own. “Whatever happens, happens.” His hair has yielded a huge increase in attention—he estimates about 35 prospective students asked him about it during admitted student visitation in April—and two followed him around nonstop. “I feel like I’m something of a babe magnet now,” he says with a smile. 24 CHLOE LE PICHON ’05 “This was sort of an exercise in showing that it doesn’t matter what you look like, as long as you have deep human interactions,” says Chloe Le Pichon of her decision to shave her head. Others have wondered why. Le Pichon responds, why not? “It’s really liberating to have short hair or no hair, and it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a particular person or part of a particular group. Why can’t women just have shaved hair?” ETHAN JUCOVY ’06 First impressions are key—even when they involve “people laughing hysterically and telling me I looked like Sonic the Hedgehog.” That’s how Ethan Jucovy describes the initial reactions to his once electric blue hair, which he colored in early February. The hysterical responses faded along with his hair color, which Jucovy says now is just “a God-awful grayish blue.” He does have one friend, though, who hasn’t yet tired of the subject. “He tells me every day that the colors are gradually getting worse and worse.” ed tanya SUZANNE WU ’03 “I feel like every time I go through a minor crisis in my life, I need to change something dramatically.” That’s how Suzanne Wu explains why she has not seen her natural hair color since sophomore year of high school. She’s gone through many colors: hot pink, for one. Yet, for the last nine months, Wu has kept her hair platinum blonde. Its constancy is, she says, “a testament to my stability.” T suzanne JUNE 2003 TA N YA G O N Z A L E S ’ 0 6 Tanya Gonzales has colored her hair coppery orange and red, “Egyptian Plum,” and even blue, red, and green all at once. Her current blue streaks, though, have been there since this past summer. “I really just like blue. My bed’s blue, my jacket’s blue, and it was a nice contrast with my dark hair,” Gonzales says. “Most people would tell me, ‘Oh, you can’t do that,’ but I just said, ‘Watch me, I can.’” 25 Learning at Home THE NUMBER OF HOMESCHOOLED STUDENTS AT T E N D I N G S WA R T H M O R E I S O N T H E R I S E . By Angela Doody 26 ment of Education, an estimated 850,000 children—or 1.7 percent of children ages 5 to 17—received their education at home in 1999. Brian Ray, president and founder of the National Home Education Research Institute, believes the numbers may be about twice that amount. MEDIA BAKERY S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N W hen Bernadette Baird-Zars observed a fourth-grade class in a Chester, Pa., school as part of an Introduction to Education course last semester, the 19-yearold freshman was surprised by what she saw. “There was a lot of time spent on discipline and learning things like how to wait your turn at the drinking fountain. One of the kids I thought was really bright got in trouble for yelling out the answer, and the teacher constantly told the kids, ‘Don’t ask questions’; ‘sit up’; ‘pay attention.’ “There are a lot of things you have to know in traditional school. You don’t want to talk about your ideas with another student because then you’re disruptive. Don’t raise your hand too much, or you’re the teacher’s pet,” claims Baird-Zars, who admits that many of the rules— both written and understood—in a public elementary school classroom are foreign to her. That’s because Baird-Zars is one of a handful of Swarthmore students—and a growing number of students throughout the country—whose parents elected to teach them at home before they entered college. According to a study by the U.S. Depart- In addition, the number of parents electing to homeschool their children is growing by 5 to 15 percent a year, according to Cafi Cohen, author of Homeschoolers’ College Admissions Handbook (Prima Publishing, 2000). This increase has forced college administrators throughout the country to develop flexible admissions procedures to evaluate the homespun, nontraditional curricula and wide range of educational experiences that these children receive. The National Association of College Admissions Counselors reported in 1999 that 51 percent of institutions responding to a survey now have official homeschooling policies. Cohen, whose book is a guide for college-bound homeschoolers, also claims that “despite a few problems, it appears that homeschooling presents no significant barriers to admission to more than 95 percent of the colleges and universities in the United States.” The typical homeschooler is likely to have more than one sibling and both parents in the house but only one parent working outside the home, reports a 1999 U.S. Department of Education survey. Most homeschoolers are non-Hispanic whites, and homeschooling parents are, on average, better educated than other parents, although their income is about the same. The report also noted that the most common reason for homeschooling was the parents’ belief that they could give their children a better education at home, either for religious reasons or because of a poor learning environment at school. A new comprehensive federal homeschooling study will be completed this year. “Homeschooling can prepare you better for college because you’ re used to doing things on your own.” mother, Belle Zars, a former Bthe aird-Zars’ teacher turned freelance writer, made decision to homeschool her daughter “BEING HOMESCHOOLED LEADS TO CLOSER TIES WITH YOUR FAMILY, BUT IT CAN ALSO GO THE OTHER WAY TOO,” SAYS JOANNA PERNICK, A CLASSICS MAJOR. “YOU CAN REALLY GET ON EACH OTHER’S NERVES.” schooling world in their area. “My mom decided to [homeschool me] in the ’80s, when it wasn’t popular. She did it because she wanted to teach her own kids,” said Cooper-Fenske, whose mother, Jody Cooper, was a former elementary school teacher. “Everyone then had an opinion about homeschooling, and it was usually negative. When you said you homeschooled, everyone thought you were doing homeschooling (Princeton University Press, 2001), refutes the widely held idea that homeschoolers won’t learn to interact with others, that they’re sheltered from children who are not like them, or that they won’t receive a “well-rounded” education because their parents fail to teach certain subjects. “There’s usually a laundry list of concerns that I’ve seen in the media,” says Stevens, “but in my research, I’ve seen no evidence that homeschooling disadvantages students academically or developmentally.” In his interviews with hundreds of homeschoolers, Stevens—who maintains he is not necessarily a homeschooling advocate— said he’s found they are active in their local communities and more likely to be politically involved and to participate in extracurricular activities such as music and sports. “What homeschooling makes possible is a more varied set of relationships in [the students’] school career. They can work part time or pursue a particular passion. These kids can pursue their passions to the nth degree and have extraordinary areas of accomplishment in some endeavors. “We sort of presume that [traditional] school is a good place for youth development, and in some ways it’s worth challenging that notion,” Stevens said. JUNE 2003 biology major Carrie CooperSherenior Fenske, from Fairfield, Ohio, considers mother a bit of a pioneer in the home- itchell Stevens, associate professor of M sociology at Hamilton College and author of Kingdom of Children, a history of ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS when she was a toddler. The family had moved several times and ended up in an isolated area of West Virginia. When her daughter started reading at age 4 and appeared to be an eager learner, Zars decided to try homeschooling. “We couldn’t afford an expensive private school, and I decided we could do it better than anyone else I could afford,” said Zars, who maintains there are as many reasons for homeschooling as there are homeschoolers. “I think every kid has a natural inclination and passion for learning, and our job, often, is to get out of the way. I never met a kid who wasn’t hungry to learn. You need to put them into areas where they can follow their interests,” Zars said. She pointed out that traditional school can often be viewed as burdensome to a child—“almost like it’s the kid’s job.” Some of Baird-Zars’ schooling included writing a weekly neighborhood newspaper called The Zephyr when she was 9 years old; planning a neighbor’s garden, complete with soil testing; and spearheading a petition for a library and a playground in her hometown in Logan, W.Va. Now, Baird-Zars is involved in an almost unbelievable number of activities at the College, including the Cricket League, the Good-Schools Pennsylvania Committee, Living Wage Committee, and the Peace and Social Concerns Committee at the Swarthmore Friends Meeting. She studies Kathak dance, plays marimba in the College’s wind ensemble, and is a Spanish translator for the Friends of Farmworkers in Philadelphia. In addition, she and a friend are organizing a fall conference at the College on the India-Pakistan conflict over Kashmir. “There’s so much opportunity [at Swarthmore]. It’s like trying to drink from a fire hydrant,” she said. it because of conservative Christian ideas.” Cooper-Fenske has vivid memories of playing with neighborhood kids in the morning at the school bus stop. When the bus came, she and her two younger brothers and sister would simply walk home and start their school day in the family’s living room, which had been converted into a classroom with a long brown table, chairs, dry-erase boards on the walls and book cases lining the walls. As a high school senior, she was accepted at all seven colleges to which she applied. She chose Swarthmore for its focus on liberal arts, variety of cultural dance offerings, beauty, and small size. After graduation this spring, she plans to attend medical school at the Ohio State University. 27 JIM GRAHAM It was tough adjusting to studying several topics: “I wanted to focus on one thing at a time. I wanted a project.” “I REALIZED THERE WAS A LOT I WASN’T PREPARED FOR. I HAD MISSED LITTLE-GIRL S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N FRIENDSHIPS,” SAYS LOUISA STROUSE BOIMAN. 28 However, he also noted that homeschooling may not be the right choice for children who need a more structured environment or for parents who are not adequately motivated. Sophomore Joanna Pernick agrees. “There are people who think homeschooling is good for everyone, but I don’t,” said Pernick, who was homeschooled by her parents in Haskell, N.J., primarily for religious reasons. “It requires a certain willingness from both the students and the parents. You have to be self-motivated and fairly disciplined. “Being homeschooled leads to closer ties with your family, but it can go the other way too. You can really get on each other’s nerves. There are also sacrifices the family has to make, like there’s not much time to devote to cleaning.” Pernick, a 20-year-old classics major, noted that there were also some extra-curricular disadvantages when she was in high school. For instance, she wanted to participate in a local mock trial competition but couldn’t because her homeschooling group couldn’t get enough students to enter. She also would have liked to participate in sports during high school but couldn’t because homeschooled children were not then permitted to join school teams. An increasing number of organizations and networks have made possible a broader range of experiences for homeschooled children. “People who homeschool now have it easier,” says Pernick. “When I was in high school, I didn’t know that many people who homeschooled locally. My friends were more spread out. But my 15year-old brother has tons of local friends, and now, homeschooled kids can play sports on local town teams.” Now that she’s in college, Pernick said she’s grateful for her homeschool background. “I think homeschooling can prepare you better for college because you’re used to doing things on your own. Since coming to college, I’ve become very thankful for my parents,” Pernick said. Strouse Boiman, a 21-year-old junLmuchouisa ior from northeast Philadelphia, spent of her childhood preparing to be a professional violinist. However, she transferred to Swarthmore after one year at the Manhattan School of Music, when she realized she wanted a broader liberal arts education. She is now a political science major. Strouse Boiman says her homeschooling experience is a big part of who she is today and, although she was glad she was homeschooled, she did have some problems when she started at Swarthmore. “My mother always said that if I’d been shy, she would have put me in school. As a child, I do remember being terrified of kids my own age because I didn’t have the same experiences as them. But I never had a problem interacting with adults. “At Swarthmore, I realized there was a lot I wasn’t prepared for. I had missed littlegirl friendships,” she said. As a result, she said that during her first semester at the College, she kept to herself. In her second semester, she says she had a lot of “psychodramas” with friends. “I didn’t have the perspective that everything wasn’t a very big deal.” Academically, Strouse Boiman also had some difficulty adjusting to a class schedule “When you said you homeschooled, everyone thought you were doing it because of conser vative Christian ideas.” AS A HOMESCHOOLED HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR, CARRIE COOPER-FENSKE WAS ACCEPTED AT ALL SEVEN COLLEGES TO WHICH SHE APPLIED. sive to me as an individual, and that was why it worked,” she says. Strouse Boiman is currently on leave from the College, working as a volunteer coordinator and a paralegal for the American Civil Liberties Union. She’ll start classes again as a senior this fall, planning to attend law school and work in immigration or labor law. ean of Admissions Jim Bock ’90 says DAdmissions that when he started working in the Office eight years ago, the College received only two or three homeschoolers’ applications each year. This year, there were 25 applications (up from 17 last year), and he said the number is steadily rising. A recent Swarthmore directive to homeschoolers and their parents states: “Every year—and in increasing numbers—we receive very strong applications from students who have been homeschooled for a significant period of time, if not all their lives. As one might expect, each application looks different, making it fruitless to set specific, rigid standards for homeschoolers in the admissions process.” Swarthmore requires the same testing (SAT I or ACT and three SAT II exams) and information for homeschoolers as it does for traditionally schooled students. Homeschoolers are asked for transcripts from any formal classes they have taken at community colleges, arts centers, or summer programs and for a special descriptive listing of their “homegrown” classes. The College also asks for examples of special research projects or BERNADETTE BAIRD-ZARS WAS HOMESCHOOLED IN TEXAS AND WEST VIRGINIA. AT SWARTHMORE, SHE’S INVOLVED IN MANY ACTIVITIES. internships and extensive travel experiences as well as a list of extracurricular activities and written recommendations from advisers, coaches, members of the clergy, and others. In addition, an on-campus interview is strongly encouraged, so that admissions deans can evaluate whether homeschoolers are “engaged learners” who will fit in well in the classroom, Bock said. Swarthmore typically admits one in four homeschooled applicants—the same ratio as the traditionally schooled students who are offered places at the College each year, says Kennon Dick, associate dean of admissions. Curiously, all of the current homeschooled students at Swarthmore are women, although the U.S. Department of Education reports that about equal numbers of boys and girls are homeschooled. Bock said that his view on homeschoolers has changed over the years: “I’ve become more open to the varieties and types of students who choose homeschooling as an option.” Although he’s interviewed homeschoolers who are weak in certain academic areas, he contends that many will do well at Swarthmore because they are independent, analytic thinkers and passionate learners. “They give a different perspective, and they add something to the social and intellectual life of the College,” Bock said. “They’re a good fit for us.” T JUNE 2003 JIM GRAHAM that had her simultaneously studying several topics for different professors. “I wanted to focus on one thing at a time. I wanted a project. I guess I wanted to go to graduate school,” she laughed. “I resented the time and assignment constraints that didn’t allow me to go into the material in the depth I would have liked.” Strouse Boiman contends that a successful homeschooling experience depends not only on the motivation of the students but on the responsiveness of the parents who teach. “I think my parents were very respon- JIM GRAHAM “There’ s so much opportunity at Swarthmore. It’ s like trying to drink from a fire hydrant.” 29 Devils in the Details K U R T E I C H E N WA L D ’ 8 3 I S D E D I C AT E D T O U N C O V E R I N G C O R P O R AT E C R I M E . B y S a s h a I s s e nberg ’02 S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N I 30 n fall 2001, when the dissolution of Enron became big news, Kurt Eichenwald of The New York Times—like most of the press who came to Houston to cover the story—knew nothing about special-purpose entity accounting. While the rest of his peers set off to chase the drops of news trickling out each hour, Eichenwald stepped back and relied on a well-honed method for learning about the knotty accounting procedures that ultimately undid the energy company. He organized a three-day seminar for himself, collecting papers from scholarly journals and relying on a stable of go-to experts who were willing to explain things to him patiently. After the crash course, Eichenwald—whose formal economics education consists of just two courses at Swarthmore, which he says gave him his worst grades ever—had the knowledge and confidence to take on Enron’s numbers on the front page of one of the country’s most influential newspapers. “I am not afraid to reach a conclusion. Most things are simple in concept; you just have to be willing to deal with the details,” Eichenwald says. “Once you learn the concept, it’s not that hard.” For 15 years as an investigative business reporter, Eichenwald, 41, has been taking complex stories and, through a combination of intellectual immersion and investigative drive, slowly and deliberately unraveling them for readers. Before Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, Global Crossing, and others, Eichenwald was covering corporate crime, with subjects that now seem distant and quaint: PrudentialBache Securities, Archers Daniels Midland (ADM), Columbia/ HCA. For his work, he has won two George Polk Awards—the journalistic equivalent of a Golden Globe—and has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His ability to be a quick study in complicated material is perhaps his greatest skill. While recently cleaning out his office, he came across an old, unlabeled tape. “It was two people talking about arcane financing and things regarding a hospital, and it struck me as totally bizarre,” Eichenwald says. “Then I realized one of the people was me. Apparently, at the time, I knew what I was talking about. Now, it made no sense.” After graduating from Swarthmore as a political science major, Eichenwald worked in various jobs in media and politics, including a speechwriting position for Walter Mondale’s campaign, where he handled remarks to elderly groups. He applied for a job on the clerical staff of The New York Times, a pool from which the paper rarely hires reporters. Part of the clerk program includes a one-month assignment to a news desk, and Eichenwald was sent to the business department. The month was October 1987, and after 10 days, the stock market crashed. Eichenwald was thrust into covering Wall Street. “If you ask where I learned about Wall Street—on the job, which I think freaked them out a bit,” he says. He started writing about the market frauds of Ivan Boesky and Michael Milliken and slowly started expanding his range into health care, accounting, patents, and other areas of commerce. “Business is the only thing that’s really great to write about any more,” Eichenwald says. “It is the last area of society where there is power that can affect people’s lives for better or worse and can be largely unchecked. You’re not going to have another Nixon or see “Business is the only thing that’s really great to write about any more,” Eichenwald says. the CIA run amok. Lots of people learned a lot from the ’60s and ’70s.” The complexity of the business world has presented barriers to entry, Eichenwald says; often, this is “either because people don’t understand it or because people don’t pay attention.” He says he is “not reflexively anti-business, but anti-crime,” and that he is driven, in part, by knowledge that massive corporate crime has little victims: the elderly investors who lost all because of Prudential-Bache’s fraud in the 1980s or the struggling farmers who had to pay higher prices for feed additives because of ADM’s price-fixing schemes. That last matter—and the multiyear investigation by the FBI that ultimately led to a guilty plea by the “supermarket to the world”—was the subject of The Informant: A True Story (Broadway Books, 2001), a mesmerizing book that grew out of Eichenwald’s reporting for the Times, in which he was able to treat the typically labyrinthine business narrative elegantly with a novelistic style. (The book is now being made into a film by director Steven Soderbergh, and the title role—an ADM executive who volunteers to wear an FBI wire to ensnare his colleagues—will be played by Matt Damon.) Eichenwald worked on that story for a good part of four years and has not yet been able to let go. He gets regular calls from the GLEN ELLMAN AT HIS HOME OFFICE IN DALLAS, KURT EICHENWALD STORES THE DOCUMENTS THAT UNDERPIN HIS WORK AS A REPORTER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES. ready to work. The book is scheduled for publication next year, and Eichenwald does not plan on taking a leave from the Times to complete his manuscript. He has already written about all these subjects already for the newspaper, but he says, “it’s more demanding and takes a lot longer” to do the reporting necessary to reconstruct events as part of a narrative. He has little doubt that he will be able to fill those new filing cabinets to his satisfaction. “I never sit and fret about my ability to get hold of a document,” he says. “With a lot of luck, I have managed to get every document I have set my mind to get. There isn’t a central piece of information that cannot be obtained.” Among other journalists, the verve for chasing corporate malfeasance has subsided slightly, but Eichenwald is still on the beat. After Sept. 11, he spent a few months working on Osama bin Laden’s finances, and he worked briefly on the paper’s team investigating NASA after the explosion of the Columbia space shuttle. But, regardless of the subject matter, Eichenwald still has the luxury of time. “I don’t pull the trigger until the gun is loaded,” he says. Several years ago, an editor told Eichenwald, after reading a story the reporter had submitted, “I’m not going to accuse one of the top-five accounting firms of engaging in fraud without knowing precisely what our proof is.” Eichenwald went through the story, highlighting his evidence and explaining his case. “‘OK,’” the editor said. “‘We’ve got ’em. We’ll run it tomorrow.’” T Sasha Issenberg is a staff writer at Philadelphia Magazine. JUNE 2003 film’s writers, requesting his help with matters of verisimilitude. On these occasions, he opens up one of the 40 file boxes he has filled with ADM materials and finds himself digging through the papers once again—through the wiretap transcripts, financial statements, confidential corporate memos, and the FBI field reports known as 302s—trying to make sure the details are right. Eichenwald recently relocated to Dallas, his hometown, with his wife and three children, and his only regret in leaving the paper’s Manhattan newsroom was that he had to give up an unusual perk: his own storage room, to handle all the paper he accumulated in the course of his investigations. Now, those boxes clutter his new home, where he works. Eichenwald recently agreed to prepare a book for Random House’s Broadway Books imprint on the recent frenzy of corporate scandals. He will write about Enron, Arthur Andersen, WorldCom, and Harvey Pitt’s U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, among others. “It’s not a history of Enron or anything like that,” Eichenwald says. “It’s about a period of time—a period of absolute euphoria in the marketplace and absolute despair.” His narrative will isolate certain individuals and track them through the period, hoping that their experiences will illuminate the larger changes then occurring on Wall Street, in Washington, and in corporate America. “I’m not really interested in how institutions develop,” Eichenwald says. “I am interested in how individuals deal with specific circumstances.” After signing the book contract, Eichenwald skipped the champagne and went straight to the important business: He expanded his storage capability. “They love me at Staples,” he says after new filing cabinets were delivered. Eichenwald had successfully expanded his filing space by 50 percent, which meant he was, more or less, 31 B R O T F R AT E R N I T I E S WO R K TO F I N D A N E W R O L E O N C A M P U S . By Sonia Scherr ’01 THE CAMPUS WAS MOSTLY QUIET AROUND S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N MIDNIGHT on a Thursday during fall semester, with only a few 32 students waiting for the shuttle outside McCabe Library or walking to their dorms along the paths that cross Parrish lawn. But just west of Sharples Dining Hall, inside a small stone house, INXS’ “Need You Tonight” blared from speakers while four students played Beirut—a drinking game. A dozen others talked in small groups. Affixed to one wall was a moose head; a disco ball dangled nearby. It was Late Night at Phi Psi, one of Swarthmore’s two remaining fraternities. Swarthmore does not have a big frat scene. That’s evident from the numbers: About 70 men—fewer than 10 percent of male students—belong to one of the College’s two remaining houses. Many of Swarthmore’s peer institutions—including Amherst, Bowdoin, Middlebury, and Williams colleges—have eliminated their Greek organizations. Only three of the U.S. News & World Report’s top 10 national liberal arts colleges—Swarthmore, Davidson, and Pomona—still have fraternities. Why? The answer lies in the particular nature of Swarthmore and its fraternities, according to administrators and members of Delta Upsilon and Phi Psi. “Our Greek system—if you want to call it that—doesn’t dominate the social life of the College like it can at some campuses,” says Tedd Goundie, associate dean of the College for student life and adviser to DU. Students don’t build their identities around their Greek membership because Swarthmore’s fraternities aren’t residential. Only one person generally lives in each of the two 1920s-era lodges that DU and Phi Psi lease from the College for about $7,000 annually. Fraternities at Swarthmore are “not a way that a group of people can isolate themselves from the rest of campus by eating and living in their house,” says Dean of the College Bob Gross ’62, adding that residential fraternities often have a higher rate of binge drinking. Instead, students who belong to fraternities are scattered through the dorms and eat at Sharples Dining Hall. “They’re Swatties first and fraternity members second,” says Gross. THE BROTHERS OF DELTA UPSILON (LEFT) ARE MEMBERS OF ONE OF TWO FRATERNITIES REMAINING ON CAMPUS. H E R S Only three of the U.S. News & World Report’s top 10 national liberal arts colleges— Swarthmore, Davidson, and Pomona—still have fraternities. S warthmore has debated the role of its Greek organizations several times since they first came to Swarthmore in 1888, nearly 25 years after the College’s founding. The early 1900s saw the growing influence of the College’s 10 fraternities and sororities, which listed new members each fall in The Phoenix. Women voted to abolish sororities in 1933—a move supported by then president Frank Aydelotte, who thought they were dominating campus social life. At that time, roughly four out of five women on campus belonged to a sorority, according to Richard Walton’s Swarthmore College: An Informal History. But Molly Yard Garrett ’33, a longtime activist, says discrimination against Jewish students was the driving force behind the campaign she helped lead to end the sorority system. (For more on the abolition of sororities, go to www.swarthmore.edu/bulletin/june03/frats.) Although the influence of fraternities declined in the 1930s, the question of whether they belong on campus was raised again in 1951, when a student petition led to a Student Council referendum on abolishing fraternities. Some thought that the College’s five fraternities were divisive and discriminatory, and the issue generated heated debate at public meetings. In the end, the student body voted to allow fraternities to stay. But they also favored doing away with discrimination in fraternities—a position supported by many fraternity members, according to Walton. The number of fraternities on campus has since dwindled to two: DU and Phi Psi. Perhaps the biggest reason they have survived is pragmatic: They haven’t been a major problem, administrators and fraternity members say. “We don’t see a compelling reason to take any action against them, and they do contribute something positive to campus social life,” Gross says. JUNE 2003 JIM GRAHAM 33 S S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N tudents who belong to DU or Phi Psi don’t fit the predominant stereotype of the beer-guzzling, closed-minded slacker, fraternity members say. “These are kinder, gentler fraternities, and I think that has partly to do with the school,” says Josh Loeffler ’03, president of Phi Psi. “We have a unique population of students, so we’re going to have a unique population of fraternity brothers.... You get very intelligent kids who want to have some fun, too.” Like many brothers, David Murphy ’03 says he didn’t anticipate joining a fraternity when he arrived at Swarthmore. “I probably wouldn’t be in a fraternity at any other school or if it weren’t Phi Psi,” he says. For Murphy, like many other brothers, the fraternities offer an opportunity to let loose. But he says he doesn’t feel pressure to drink; he has spent time at Phi Psi without picking up a beer and one semester chose not to drink at all. “It’s a lot of fun. It’s a haven where work doesn’t really get talked about,” he says. “At the same time, it’s a stable community of people who have helped me get through some really rough times .” Not everyone who has the opportunity chooses to join, however. Ben Saller ’06 said members of DU encouraged him to become a member, but he was involved in other campus activities and didn’t want to go through the pledging process. “I don’t have anything against people who do decide to pledge,” he adds. The fraternity leaders say they want people who aren’t part of their groups to feel comfortable socializing at their houses. Although students at many schools might not be able to attend a fraternity party without knowing someone who’s a member, that’s not the case at DU or Phi Psi, members say. “We pretty much have an open-door policy. We try not to be exclusive,” Loeffler says. Yet many Swarthmore students who don’t attend DU or Phi Psi functions say they view fraternities as exclusive clubs devoted to drinking. “The less I know about them the better,” said one student 34 who didn’t want to be named. That attitude isn’t lost on fraternity members. “When people think of fraternities, they think of Animal House,” says DU President Christopher Morello ’03, a political science major and philosophy minor. “It’s hard to get over the stereotypes.” But fraternity members say they’d like people to have a better understanding of what they do. “We’re trying to branch out and show them that we’re about more than partying,” Loeffler says. “That’s really important to us.” I n addition to social alternatives, Greek organizations provide students with leadership opportunities, friendships, and support, says Darryl Smaw, associate dean for multicultural affairs and Phi Psi’s new adviser. “I’ve watched some students enter a fraternity or sorority and emerge having had a very positive experience, and I’ve seen it happen time and time again,” says Smaw, who came to Swarthmore after doing similar work with students at another small college in New England. Those bonds are what DU and Phi Psi leaders emphasize when they talk about their fraternities. “We take care of each other more than I think a lot of the groups do,” says Morello. For instance, DU members will help a brother who’s struggling in class or make sure that someone who’s been drinking at a bar has a safe ride home. DU, which is affiliated with Delta Upsilon International, requires its pledges to learn about the 108-year history of the Swarthmore chapter and, according to Morello, advocates “advancement of justice, diffusion of liberal culture, development of character, [and] promotion of friendship.” The fraternity has a strong alumni base that provides guidance and mentoring to its 35 student members (see www.swarthmore.edu/bulletin/jun03/frats). It sponsors community service activities such as a spring blood drive and an annual cleanup at a wildlife preserve. “We do more than throw parties on Saturday night,” says Morello, who is also president of Sixteen Feet and co-chair of the Student Activities Committee. DU—once mainly a football fraternity—suffered a blow in December 2000 when Swarthmore eliminated its football team, prompting several members to transfer or take time off. Fraternity membership was nearly cut in half, says Morello. But an effort to recruit new members has paid off, he adds. “We are as strong now as we were before football was cut— maybe even stronger.” Swarthmore’s Phi Psi chapter, founded in the late 1800s, has been autonomous since 1963, when it broke away from its national organization in a dispute over discrimination against black and Jewish students, members say. “In a lot of ways, I see them as the antifraternity fraternity,” Dean Goundie says. “My sense is that they don’t want a lot of structure.” FRIENDS HISTORICAL LIBRARY Goundie concurred: “I think the schools that did get rid of them didn’t do it so much for philosophical reasons but because it was out of control.” Doing away with fraternities without justification would not sit well with students or alumni, he added. FRATERNITIES HAVE A LONG HERITAGE AT SWARTHMORE. MEMBERS OF DELTA UPSILON POSE FOR A FORMAL PICTURE ABOUT 1904. IN THE MID-1960S, PENDLETON BLOUSES AND MADRAS SHORTS—AND A KEG OF CIDER—WERE THE FASHION OF THE DAY. Phi Psi draws many of its members from the lacrosse and basketball teams, although Loeffler said the group includes a fairly wide range of students. The fraternity faced declining membership several years ago but has since increased its enrollment to about 35 members. DU members pay dues of $500 annually; Phi Psi members pay $350. A dministrators say that fraternities generally do a good job with the campuswide parties they throw several times a year. Since they have experience hosting those events, they know how to avoid certain problems—such as alcohol abuse—and what to do if problems arise. They also have an incentive to make sure their parties are well run, says Goundie: “They have a house, and if there’s a problem, we can say, ‘You don’t have a house anymore.’” Nonetheless, Swarthmore’s fraternities haven’t been immune from some of the problems associated with fraternities elsewhere. The College revoked DU’s charter in 1983 following conflict between the fraternity and other campus groups that led to vandalism and an offensive newsletter. The fraternity was reinstated two years later under conditions that included a four-year probationary period, responsible use of alcohol, and outreach to other college organizations. The deans placed DU on probation in fall 1999, after 27 partygoers were arrested and charged with underage drinking during a police raid of the annual “Margaritaville” bash held the previous spring. The fraternity was placed on probation again for the remainder of the 2000–2001 academic year after a student drank too much at a pledging event and had to be taken to the hospital. Phi Psi and its individual members were placed on probation for the year in spring 2002 following a scavenger hunt that involved vandalism and theft on the Haverford College campus. The group was also asked to find both an alumni and faculty adviser. “In general, I think they have a good sense of their limits, but sometimes they don’t use the best judgment,” Gross says of both fraternities. The potential for problems with alcohol are a constant worry, however. “It’s really up to them to monitor their behavior, and some incidents that we’ve seen gave us reason for concern.” According to Morello, DU increased security at its social events after the “Margaritaville fiasco.” The fraternity now checks IDs at its parties, making sure that partygoers are Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, or Haverford students or their guests. Everyone allowed to enter the party is given a DU hand stamp and those of legal drinking age (21 in Pennsylvania) are given wristbands. “We became the first—and to my knowledge the only—campus group to do this,” says Morello. “At first, it seemed to annoy students. But after a while, it became known that DU was going to ID everyone entering a party.” Goundie sees other areas for improvement. “I think there are always ways they could make more of a positive contribution than they do. I think they’re working on that, though.” Smaw, Phi Psi’s adviser, believes fraternities enhance campus diversity. “One of the challenges is getting them to decide how they want to define themselves within the framework of a diverse community,” he says. “Fraternities need to think about going beyond the expected social events; more specifically, they should sponsor programs and speakers that contribute to the educational experience at Swarthmore as well as the social life of the campus.” Fraternity leaders agree with the deans’ assessment. “I think, in the past few years, we’ve focused mainly on social activities, and it definitely should be more than that,” Loeffler says. “I think we’re going to branch out and do some positive things other than social [activities].... That’s the spirit of a fraternity. It’s not just about you. It’s about helping other people.” For instance, Phi Psi recently helped raise money for a tutoring program, and Loeffler wants to see the fraternity become involved in more community service activities. Morello says DU is trying to strengthen its connection with the Swarthmore African-American Students Society and is also working on formalizing its relationship with Phi Psi so that the fraternities can jointly sponsor speakers on such issues as sexual health and alcohol. Despite the need for change in some areas, Loeffler believes fraternities have a future at Swarthmore. “I think this is a school that’s really diverse, and a school that’s really diverse can be accepting of a fraternity [as well as] some organization that’s the exact opposite.” T Sonia Scherr is a reporter for the Valley News in White River Junction, Vt. JUNE 2003 FRIENDS HISTORICAL LIBRARY DU—once mainly a football fraternity—suffered a blow when Swarthmore eliminated its football team. But an effort to recruit new members has paid off. 35 CONNECTIONS Connection Chair Marilee Roberg ’73 has been very busy planning summer events. Jeff Jabco, director of grounds and coordinator of horticulture for the Scott Arboretum, will join the Connection on the weekend of July 19 and 20 for a visit to the Chicago Botanic Garden. Watch your mail for an invitation. Also in the planning stages is a Chicago River architectural tour, an evening at Ravinia, and an afternoon at the Oriental Institute. Please contact Marilee at mroberg@ameritech.net or (847) 853-1208 if you are interested in participating in a Chicago Connection book group. London: Lucy Rickman Baruch ’42 hosted Alumni Weekend British style with a trip to Swarthmoor Hall in the Lake District from June 6 to 8, when we were celebrating Alumni Weekend stateside. The London Connection is gearing up for some fall activities. If you would like to suggest an event, contact Connection Chair Abby Honeywell ’85 at abby.honeywell@btinternet.com. Metro DC/Baltimore: 36 PATRICIA MALONEY S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N Sue Willis Ruff ’60 reports that Richard Johnson ’59, the Lucia, Ruth, and Elizabeth MacGregor Professor of LONDON CONNECTION REPRESENTATIVE LUCY BARUCH ’42 VISITS WITH LOS ANGELES CONNECTION CHAIR DAVID LANG ’54 AT THE SPRING ALUMNI COUNCIL MEETING. CONNECTION CHAIRS FROM ACROSS THE COUNTRY AND AROUND THE WORLD ATTENDED THE SPRING MEETING. English Literature at Mount Holyoke College, is compiling a reading list for the book group and is willing to provide discussion questions and give lecture(s). If you are interested in joining this very active, successful book group, contact THE CHICAGO CONNECTION WILL VISIT THE CITY’S BOTANIC GARDEN. sueruff@aol.com. for all the events she has arranged over the New York: We are delighted to welcome Jodi past 10 years. Furr ’97 and Lisa Ginsburg ’97 as New York Deb is in the process of passing the Connection co-chairs. After many years of baton to a new Seattle Connection chair service, Sanda Balaban ’94 and Deborah who will be announced shortly. Branker Harrod ’89 recently retired from this post, although Sanda still remains active in the New York book group. We WHAT ABOUT MY CITY? thank them both for their service to the Col- You can start a new Connection in your lege and look forward to working with Jodi city or host a one-time get-together. Call and Lisa. If you want to reach Jodi or Lisa Patricia Maloney, assistant director of with Connection ideas, or if you are willing alumni relations, at (610) 328-8404, or to help, e-mail jodifurr@hotmail.com or e-mail pmalone1@swarthmore.edu for lisaginsburg@juno.com. more information. Philadelphia: This very active Connection toured the Degas exhibit at The Philadelphia Art Museum in May. More than 45 alumni and their guests enjoyed the exhibit. Pittsburgh: This Connection toured The Mattress Factory, a contemporary art museum, in April. Third Thursday luncheons continue at the HYP Club. Kindly R.S.V.P. to Connection Chair Barbara Sieck Taylor ’75 at b.taylor43@verizon.net, or call (412) 2438307 if you can attend. Seattle: After 10 years of service to the SeatALISON FOX ‘80 AND SPOUSE MARK REINGANUM, tle Connection, Deborah Read ’87 is retiring. As a last hurrah, Deb arranged for an KEYNOTE SPEAKER FOR THE LAX CONFERENCE ON event by Patrick Awuah ’89, who started the ENTREPRENEURSHIP, VISIT WITH PRESIDENT first liberal arts college in Ghana. It was a ALFRED H. BLOOM AND DANIEL REINGANUM ‘06 multifaceted event with Ghanaian food, artiBEFORE THE START OF THE CONFERENCE IN APRIL facts, art, and music as well as a slide pres(LEFT TO RIGHT). entation. We thank Deb for this event and PATRICIA MALONEY Chicago: WILLIAM BIDERBOST/CHICAGO BOTANIC GARDEN CHICAGO Alumni are encouraged to nominate candidates for honorary degrees awarded at Commencement. Please submit background information, including your own reasons for choosing this individual, by Friday, Oct. 3, to the Honorary Degree Committee, Vice President’s Office, Swarthmore College, 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore PA 19081-1390, or e-mail Vice President Maurice Eldridge ’61 at meldrid1@swarthmore.edu. All nominations will be kept confidential; please do not inform the nominee. The committee will forward its recommendations to the faculty in mid-November. Criteria used by the Honorary Degree Committee include the following: • Distinction, leadership, or originality in a significant field of human endeavor • Someone in the ascent or at the peak of distinction, with preference to the less honored over those who have received multiple degrees ipate in activities sponsored by council; the first implementation of recognition for service contributions in the fall 2002 Report of Gifts; and additional efforts toward reconciliation. These efforts include the completion of the Task Group Report on Consensual Decision Making (see page 4), support of the initiative to strengthen the Athletics Program, and outreach to alumni still estranged from the College after the decision on athletics. At the conclusion of the plenary session, Susan Rico Connolly ’78 and Tom Francis, associate director of the Career Services Office, made a special presentation to Cynthia Graae ’62 for completing her dedicated service as national extern coordinator. Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning were spent in working group meetings. In addition, there were meetings of ad hoc groups working on a communications plan for council, exploring ways to enhance events and management of Connections and considering ways to further enhance the efforts of extern coordinators. On Saturday evening, council members participated in a career networking dinner with students, council members, and other alumni from the Philadelphia area. At the final plenary session, council received reports from each of the working groups on their outcomes and recommendations. Truitt reported actions taken by the executive committee during the weekend. A summary of each of these reports can be found on the Web at http://www.swarthmore.edu/alumni/images/spring_2002_council_update.pdf. Also available on the Web at http://www.swarthmore.edu/alumni/alumni_council.html is the current version of the annual work plan of Alumni Council for 2002–2003, which indicates the status of all initiatives of council for this year. —Rich Truitt ’66, President, Alumni Association • Ability to serve as a role model for graduating seniors, speaking to them on a major occasion in their lives • Preference (but not a requirement) for individuals who have an existing affiliation with or some connection to Swarthmore. The committee seeks to balance choices over the years from a variety of categories such as careers, gender, academic discipline, race, ethnicity, and public service. LISTSERVS IMPROVED Many alumni enjoy staying in touch on Internet listservs set up for their class, local Connection, or special-interest group. In an effort to improve the performance of the College listservs, we have converted to a new system called Mailman. The system has features such as archiving messages and password-protected access to lists and information. If you are not signed up for a listserv that you wish to be on, visit http://alumnioffice.swarthmore.edu/mailman/listinfo. EXTERNSHIP PROGRAM SALUTES CYNTHIA GRAAE ’62 Associate Director of Career Services Tom Francis (left) and Alumni Council Member Susan Rico Connolly ’78 (right) congratulate Cynthia Graae ’62 (center) for her stewardship of the Externship Program, which has grown considerably under her watch. Cynthia will be succeeded by Nanine Meiklejohn ’68. If you wish to offer a student an externship during winter break or can house a student, please contact extern@swarthmore.edu. JUNE 2003 NOMINATIONS SOUGHT STEVEN GOLDBLATT ʼ67 he spring meeting of Alumni Council (AC) began with dinner and a panel presentation of students and alumni involved in this year’s Extern Program. Moderated by National Extern Coordinators Nanine Meiklejohn ’68 and Cynthia Graae ’62, the panel included Blair Cochran ’03, Megan Speare ’05, David Bamberger ’62 (sponsor), and Sharon Seyfarth Garner ’89 (host). RICH TRUITT ’66 Council members heard from Lisa Lee ’81, director of alumni relations, and Alumni Managers Kenn Wynn ’74 and Cynthia Graae ’62. Kenn reported on the Board of Managers’ reception of the Task Group Report on Consensual Decision Making. Cynthia provided an update on other activities of the Board, including the capital campaign and budgetary challenges caused by current economic conditions. President Alfred H. Bloom gave an upbeat report on the current challenges faced by the College and actions being taken to meet them. Topics included the status of admissions, meeting the challenges of the campaign in the current economic climate, the living wage initiative, the affirmative action lawsuit before the Supreme Court, proposed curriculum changes, faculty retirements, and the selection of Adam Hertz as the College’s new athletics director. Carol Finneburgh Lorber ’63, a member of the AC Scholarship Committee, reported that members have pledged a total in excess of $60,000 for the scholarship and that the College has selected Catherine Danh ’04 as its first recipient. Truitt then provided an update on other council initiatives. These included efforts to expand opportunities for alumni to partic- PATRICIA MALONEY T Alumni Council Update 37 BOB KRIST CLASS NOTES the meaning of S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N s w a r t h mor e 38 Swarthmore has been a touchstone throughout my adult life—a source of pride, one of life’s high points, a standard of excellence, a challenge to preserve and extend my accomplishments, a foundation to build on, and an object of my affection. —Richard Kurz ’75 INSPIRED BY ONE OF THE MASTERS, JOHN CHILD ’37 STILL TEACHES STUDENTS. I n December 1936, the Philadelphia “coming out” season was in full swing. John Child ’37 was in an anteroom of the ballroom of the Warwick Hotel waiting to go to a party. The hotel social manager and another man were also in the anteroom. Child was well acquainted with the social manager, as he had attended numerous parties at the hotel. The other man, not an invited guest, looked familiar to Child—in fact, a bit like George Gershwin. “The social manager was very busy, and he asked me to kindly tell the man to leave the anteroom because it was a private party,” Child said. Before Child could deliver the message, the man sat down at the baby-grand piano and began to play. “Then I said to myself, ‘that has to be George Gershwin, and I am not going to ask him to leave.’” Instead, Child sat near the piano. “Hi, young fellow,” Gershwin said, without missing a note; he could talk and play at the same time. “I’m just going to play a few pieces while I wait for my train.” Gershwin played for an hour. Child listened and watched, intently memorizing exactly how he played each tune. The songs were familiar to Child but were being played somewhat differently. “That is not the way you published that [song], and that’s not the way anybody plays it,” Child remarked. Gershwin answered, “I never play a piece the same way twice.” He then asked Child if he was a pianist. “Yes,” Child replied, “but don’t ask me to play!” After he finished playing, Gershwin left to catch the train. He died nine months later of a brain tumor. To this day, Child can play the songs exactly as Gershwin did that wintry night in 1936. Music is one of many passions in Child’s life. In 1900, his grandfather bought a Steinway baby-grand piano for $600. From the age of 5, Child was “entranced.” That piano is in his living room today. Child never had a piano teacher; he taught himself to play by ear. He says it is in his genes. STEVEN GOLDBLATT ʼ67 ALUMNI PROFILE S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N 42 Playing Gershwin’s Tunes JOHN CHILD ’37 PLAYED THE ALMA MATER AT COLLECTION DURING ALUMNI WEEKEND 2002. Child graduated with a degree in economics and worked in the insurance industry for many years. When he retired in 1973, he reinvented himself and became a piano teacher—with a twist. He teaches many of his students to play by ear, without ever having to learn a note of music. The system he developed is based on a music system discovered by Pythagoras. The Greeks thought people should learn to play by ear; they did not have any musical notation at all. “I think it is important for people to play by ear, and I have a developed a system of writing music that makes it unnecessary to learn to read music,” Child said. “I have developed about 650 to 700 pages of instructions on many songs from the period of 1920 to 1960, a period of remarkable excellence in music composition.” At the age of 87, Child teaches 55 students per week in their homes after school. He estimates that he has taught 1,500 students in his second career. In his 30s, Child eventually did master reading music, so he can teach both methods to his students. Some do better with the more traditional method of reading music, and others excel in playing by ear. In addition to teaching piano, Child has an even greater passion for the study of history. In his home in Chestnut Hill, which he shares with his wife, Beatrice, Child has all of his family records dating back to 1810 but can trace his family to 1682 when they lived in Plumstead Township on 1,600 acres granted by William Penn. While at Swarthmore, Child took every history course offered by the College. “The approach to teaching history was very different at Swarthmore,” Child said. “They tried to instill in us the ability to think; it was expected that we knew the facts.” Child visits the campus regularly. He and Beatrice are active Quakers and are often on campus for the Quarterly meeting. Last spring, he played the alma mater at Collection on Alumni Weekend. The College supplied the music, but he already knew the tune and was able to play it by ear, of course. —Patricia Maloney G AY B U R G I E L’ S [ ’ 6 1 ] W O R K O N P H I L A D E L P H I A’ S TA L L S H I P I S N E V E R D O N E . A s Gay Burgiel walks the deck of Pier 40 in Philadelphia, she’s prepared to retrieve anything from nuts and bolts to Chinese food for the crew of the tall ship Gazela. As the historic ship’s volunteer coordinator and a devoted sailor, no job is too small for the 62-year-old Califon, N.J., resident who is affectionately called “Mother Gazela” by her fellow shipmates. “Gay’s our ‘just-in-timer,’” said Gazela shipwright Patrick Flynn. “We can count on her for whatever we need.” “She’s an old-fashioned person like I am. She doesn’t whine. She just gets it done. She’s like the mom here,” agreed the Gazela’s lead shipwright Stephen DeCatur, a fulltime carpenter who helps maintain the ship’s wooden hull during the winter months. “I’m listed as ‘volunteer coordinator,’ but we’ve never figured out what that means,” Burgiel laughs, noting that on any given day, her duties may include training inexperienced volunteers, painting, sanding a deck, or running to Home Depot for supplies. “Part of my training was being a parent for 20 years,” said Burgiel, who travels from her home in northern New Jersey to Philadelphia several days a week throughout the year. In the months when she’s not sailing on the ship, she helps with the extensive maintenance of the 120-year-old vessel. She even sleeps in a cabin on board on the days when she’s in Philadelphia. The Gazela was built in Portugal and is considered the oldest and largest wooden square-rigged ship sailing today. As late as 1969, the vessel was manned by up to 40 sailors who fished off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. The ship is now owned and operated by the Philadelphia Ship Preservation Guild and serves as an international goodwill ambassador for the Port of Philadelphia and Camden. During the spring, summer, and fall, the ship and its volunteer crew sail to various ports throughout the Atlantic for events and festivals. The Gazela has also been used in several movies, including Interview With the Vampire and The Widow of St. Pierre. But in the winter months, the ship is GAZELA: PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER/RON TARVER. BURGIEL: COURTESY OF GAY BURGIEL ALUMNI PROFILE S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N 56 “Mother Gazela” GAY BURGIEL (RIGHT) IS AT HOME ON THE DECKS OF THE TALL SHIP GAZELA, WHICH IS BASED IN PHILADELPHIA (ABOVE). down rigged, and many hours are spent preserving the wooden structure from the elements. In addition, because volunteers come and go, a new crew has to be trained each season before it returns to the open water, sometime in May or June. “It’s a year-round job to keep this boat afloat,” said Burgiel, who was attracted to the ship because of its rare square sails that remind her of historic whaling vessels. “I guess I keep coming back partly because I feel needed and because there’s always something to do.” Burgiel grew up near Cape Cod, Mass. “with one foot in a boat,” in a family where sailing was second nature. She later taught sailing, rowing, and canoeing in high school and was on Swarthmore’s now-defunct sailing team. She took a hiatus from the sport in the years after college because her now ex-husband was not crazy about the water. Furthermore, there was not much time or money to devote to her passion when she was raising her two children, Heidi and Stanley ’92. In 1994, one day after her divorce was final, Burgiel found a lump in her breast. True to her steady, adventurous personality, she didn’t say anything but went on with her plans to bicycle across the Alps with friends. When she returned to the United States, she concentrated on her illness and the future. “[My illness] kind of made me think about what I wanted to do with my life. Did I really want to sit and write ads for text books?” said Burgiel, who retired in 1996 as a project manager in a publishing company. “I also realized something was calling me back to boats.” She is now cancer free and is “busier than ever” since her retirement. Besides her work on the Gazela, she also square dances and is an avid cyclist who has pedaled through France, Greece, Turkey, China, Australia, Morocco, South Africa, Peru, Argentina, and Chile. Now on most weekends throughout the year, you can find her directing up to 20 volunteers who show up to maintain the Gazela. But her favorite place is out in the open water on the ship’s deck, watching the stars with land nowhere in sight. Then, all the long hours of work are behind her, and there’s smooth sailing ahead. —Angela Doody IN MY LIFE Preserving a Family Legacy THE DENNIS FARM By Denise Dennis ’72 I AM 5 OR 6 YEARS OLD AND WALKING UP A HILL ON THE FARM, WITH MY FATHER . It is summer. We are surrounded by trees, which shade and S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N keep us cool and are in a clearing, making it easier for us to climb. My father holds my hand; a carved wooden walking stick is in his free hand. We stop. He points to a low stone wall among the leaves and moss and tells me this is where our people lived when they came to Pennsylvania from New England. I know, from the tone of his bass voice, that what he is telling me is important and that I must remember. We continue up the hill, navigating stones in the rocky soil; sunlight flickers between green leaves. At the hilltop, we come to a cemetery enclosed by a stone wall and, at the entrance, an iron gate, curved like the gates of heaven. Daddy looks into the cemetery, then back to me, and explains that our ancestors are buried here. I sense, even more deeply, that Daddy is sharing something significant and sacred with me. I watch and listen. Daddy is telling me who I am; I am more than myself. I began with those who lived and died here. I will not forget. 60 Everyone should have someone in her life as inspiring as my aunt, Hope Dennis. We are true “kindred spirits,” close in heart and mind. She is the standard to which I aspire. A high school guidance counselor and alumna of Northwestern and University of Michigan, she advised me to apply to Swarthmore. Now, Aunt Hope has made possible the most rewarding work of my life. In 2001, we founded the Dennis Farm Charitable Land Trust (DFCLT) for the historic and environmental preservation of the more than 100-acre Pennsylvania farm, in Susquehanna County, where our free black ancestors settled approximately 200 years ago. Among our partners are the Endless Mountains Heritage Region and Preservation Pennsylvania. Swarthmore students will be involved in the educational component. I serve as DFCLT president. “I don’t want the farm to go out of the family on my watch,” Aunt Hope told me. As sole owner, she sought a feasible plan for preserving it. The site includes a vernacular, federal-style farmhouse, originally constructed around 1825, modernized in the 1930s, and in need of restoration; the Perkins-Dennis Cemetery, where the family, including a Revolutionary War veteran, are buried; and the grounds, crowned by a deep forest. The cemetery, at the forest hilltop, is surrounded by an elegant wall of stone quarried from the property and built by our forebears around 1800. The countryside property—with preserved hardwood trees, wildflowers, and a pristine creek—has not been a working farm since the early 20th century but remained a family summer home. As I researched a plan, I outlined our concerns and goals for the site. Besides security and preservation of the cemetery, the house, books, and documents (dating back to the mid-19th century), photographs, and the land, Aunt Hope wanted to ensure that the property would retain “The Dennis Farm” name and that its significance as land owned by generations of an African American family would not be lost. My first step was to call the Historic Preservation Department at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Fine Arts (GFSA), where, as a communications officer in the 1980s, I had written about preservation projects. They directed me to the state historic preservation officer in Harrisburg, who led me to Elizabeth Watson, a nationally renowned planning consultant, specialist in heritage development, and co-author of Saving America’s Countryside. Ms. Watson was familiar with the farm through her work with the Endless Mountains Heritage Region, was aware of the site’s potential, and contributed invaluable services. We have worked together over the past six years. My Aunt Edith Dennis owned and “kept watch” over the farm until her death in 1980, when it passed to her youngest and only remaining sibling, Hope. Born in 1899 and an alumna of the University of Pennsylvania, Aunt Edith was a distinguished, loving influence in my life. My dear, dear Denise, Your letter was so welcomed and too very interesting. I do hope that you are finding great satisfaction in your work, surroundings, and associations there at Swarthmore. I was quite flattered to receive your letter during what I’m sure was a busy time—adjustments, etc. I heard and saw your president a few Sundays ago on television—rather impressive.... Perhaps I’m, shall I say, rather “square” with a couple generation gaps.… I do hope that through all your experiences you will remain true to your best judgments—remember the farewell speech of Polonius to his son Laertes—“To thine ownself be true and thence must follow as night the day, thou canst be false to no man.” Aunt Hope called me Saturday. All is well with her. She is to attend a conference held at Indiana University…. Your visit here was most enjoyable—short though. Come again. Write me soon and remember I’m a good listener and very simpatico.... FARM HOUSE, VIEWED FROM THE DRIVEWAY, CA. 1939 TOP LEFT: DENISE AND NORMAN DENNIS ON THE FARM CENTER: IN 2001, DFCLT FOUNDERS HOPE AND DENISE DENNIS VISITED A CEMETERY NEAR FORTY-FORT, PA., WHERE THOSE WHO DIED IN THE 20TH CENTURY ARE RESTING. BELOW: MARY KINSLOW DENNIS (FAR LEFT), WITH GRANDDAUGHTERS, GUESTS, AND DARRYL GORE ʼ79 DAUGHTER EDITH (SEATED FAR RIGHT) ON THE FARM IN THE PHOTOS COURTESY OF HOPE AND DENISE DENNIS LATE 1940S My best love to you and sincere wishes for your success in all your endeavors. Love, Aunt Edith Education has always been a priority in our family, and we want the Trust to serve an educational purpose. Our goal is to develop a body of research on themes relevant to the farm and to build a library/ museum on the beautiful site to host scholars and conferences and annual symposia. M ore than 50 years before the Civil War, our ancestors came to northeastern Pennsylvania from New England—as free African Americans—and purchased their own property. My great- great-great-great grandparents, Judith and Prince Perkins (1750– 1839) came from Connecticut in 1792. At that time, black people were one-quarter of the American population, but a mere 10 percent were free. Among the first settlers in the area, the family is fully documented in the Susquehanna County Historical Society. This continuous documentation of an African American family is rare. In a 1988 article, historian and former Kent State professor Curtis Stone wrote: “[These] pioneers arrived in the Brooklyn, Pa., area in 1793, led by Prince Perkins. The Perkins family formed the nucleus of pioneer blacks moving in and out of the region for the next century … these early settlers were free men and women, were accepted in the larger community, and appear to have been the basis of anti-slavery sentiment in the community and county.” In his book, The Underground Railroad in Pennsylvania, Charles Blockson writes that the farm served as a stop on the daring route to freedom. The Perkins-Dennis Cemetery served as the cemetery for black people in the region. One family member buried there was a veteran of the American Revolution, having enlisted in the Connecticut Line in 1777 and served under Washington. His military record is in the National Archives. On April 24, 1852, Angeline Perkins, Prince Perkins’ granddaughter, married Henry Dennis, who was born in Vermont and whose family—originally from Massachusetts—came to Pennsylvania in the early 19th century. Henry and Angeline combined their properties and had three surviving children; the youngest was my great-grandfather, Sumner Dennis (1866–1950), named for Charles Sumner, the senator from Massachusetts who led passage of the Civil Rights Bill of June 1866. Sumner moved to Wilkes-Barre, Pa., in 1886; in 1895, he married Mary Kinslow, and they had five surviving children: Norman, Edith, Marion, Carl, and Hope. Norman Dennis married Harriette Payne in 1926, and they had two daughters, Margaret, who is my mother, and Edith. My “grand”parents, Norman and Harriette Dennis, reared me from infancy and, in 1962, legally adopted me—protecting me with the nom de famille. Margaret is also the mother of Darryl Gore ’79, and has one granddaughter. Edith has one son, Lonnie Moore, and three grandchildren. In pursuing guidance for the Trust’s educational component, I contacted Swarthmore. In the past year, several key faculty members and administrators have encouraged me in the project, including Associate Professor of History Allison Dorsey, Cooley Curator of the Swarthmore Peace Collection Wendy Chmielewski, and Curator of the Friends Historical Library Christopher Densmore. Everything in my life seems to have prepared me for this challenging work. I am une femme d’un certain age, and I am on the farm with our partners. They are examining the flora and fauna, and someone just showed me an asparagus plant, asking whether or not my ancestors grew asparagus. They also discovered, beneath the tall grass, markings indicating a well near the old barn wall. They look at the ground; I am looking up the hill. The light falling down the hillside is golden and radiant, and it fills my spirit. More than light, I feel the warm presence of all their spirits looking down— all my loved ones. They are smiling; they know we have not forgotten. T Denise Dennis, author of A Century of Greatness and Black History for Beginners, may be reached at Dennisfarmtrust@aol.com. JUNE 2003 OPPOSITE PAGE: THE 61 G I U L I A N O H A Z A N ’ 8 1 S H A R E S T H E S E C R E T S O F H I S M O U T H WAT E R I N G R E C I P E S . A t Villa Giona, a 12-acre country residence and cooking school in Verona, students start the day sipping cappuccino and eating fresh pastries while viewing a lush garden. Joining Giuliano Hazan in the kitchen, they follow his simple, easy-to-prepare recipes such as pasta with wild mushrooms and tomatoes or salmon fillets with capers and anchovy sauce. Later—after chopping and grating, salting and stirring—the small class savors the aromatic meals they create together while sampling full-bodied wines, like La Poja, harvested in the Allegrini vineyards nearby. Hazan started cooking at his mother’s side as a small boy. By spending time in the kitchen with his parents, he developed a reverence for food. Focusing on simplicity, with an emphasis on flavor and love, Hazan’s parents taught him that food is an expression of caring. “I am passing on the traditions and lessons I have inherited by continuing to teach about the genuine and true flavors of Italian cooking,” he says. “In doing so, however, I am using my own approach, my own palate, and my own style of cooking, so that my work and my mother’s, although similar, are inevitably different and unique.” Hazan is a member of the “first family of Italian food” (Gazette Telegraph, July 5, 1995). His mother, Marcella, “nearly single-handedly introduced classic Italian cuisine to Americans through her best-selling The Classic Italian Cookbook in 1973.” His father, Victor, wrote the “bible” Italian Wine in 1982. While a student at Swarthmore, Hazan occasionally called his mother for advice about cooking. During summer 1980, at age 17, he served as a tour guide and interpreter at his parent’s School of Classic Italian Cooking in Bologna. He worked his way up from assistant to teacher and director. Hazan, a French literature major, also developed an interest in theater on campus. “In a way, I have never stopped acting and directing because my cooking classes and the courses I teach in Italy are ‘performances’ for an audience,” he says. Hazan has taught for 15 years, including four years of teaching a course at the Hotel Cipriani in Venice. MARY MCCULLEY ALUMNI PROFILE S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N 64 The Art of Cooking GIULIANO HAZAN IS THE AUTHOR OF BEST-SELLING COOKBOOKS. HIS WORK WAS FEATURED IN THE APRIL ISSUE OF SOUTHERN LIVING. Hazan also teaches regularly across the United States. In January, he held classes at Casa Italia in his hometown of Sarasota, Fla.; in February, he was in Marlton, N.J., and Houston. In March, Hazan gave demonstrations at Sur La Table in Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, and Portland. In April, he was in Tampa. “Swarthmore certainly helped me learn how to express myself as a writer and organize my thoughts,” he says. “Swarthmore also had an important influence in developing my imagination and creativity, qualities that are very important in my work.” After graduation, Hazan attended the Trinity Repertory Conservatory in Providence, R.I. In 1988, he opened Giuliano Hazan’s Gastronomia, a takout shop for Italian cuisine in Providence. Hazan’s The Classic Pasta Cookbook (Dorling Kindersley, 1993) was an international best-seller, with a half-million copies in print in 16 countries. Nominated for a James Beard Cookbook Award in 1994, the work has been translated into 12 languages. His second book, Every Night Italian (Scribner, 2000), won the World Cookbook Award for best Italian cookbook in the English language. “I would be thrilled to have a Swarthmore alumnus attend my school in Italy,” says Hazan. Gardens and vineyards surround the 12-acre residence and school, built in the 16th century on Lake Garda. Opened in 2000 with co-host and wife Lael, the school also offers wine tours and discussions with distinguished red-wine producer Marilisa Allegrini. Wine samples complement meals resulting from hands-on classes making homemade pasta, risotto, meats, fish, vegetables, and desserts. Hazan teaches in English and guides field trips in the Veneto region and beyond. For more details, see http://giulianohazan.com. “The best feeling of all is when students tell me that I have changed their lives because of the way they prepare and share food at home with their family,” Hazan says. —Andrea Hammer BOOKS & ARTS S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N 72 Invitation to a Soirée KRISTIN SIMS LEVINE ’97 CO-WRITES AND CO-DIRECTS A FARCE. Kristin Levine ’97 and Matt McNevin, co-directors, Soirée, 2003 Y ou need to start somewhere. With neighborhood blockbusters costing $100 million or more to produce, it helps to remember that the lifeblood of creativity in film is often found in the “indies.” Young writers/directors, passionate about their art, somehow manage to leap over the hurdles and get their independently produced pictures on the screen. Joining their ranks is Kristin Levine who graduated from Swarthmore in 1997 with a major in German. Her day job is teaching German in a suburban Washington, D.C., high school, but, with an M.F.A. in film and electronic media from American University and an adjunct appointment there teaching screenwriting, it is clear where her heart lies. And now, along with cowriter/director Matt McNevin, Levine has her own indie film, Soirée, which opened in March in at least one theater in suburban Washington. Although many indie filmmakers pride themselves on doing a film for a few hundred thousand, Soirée cost only $40,000— a tad more than the cost of a year at certain colleges. Levine’s liberal arts background apparently gave her the confidence to tackle an adult comedy about the marital challenges of two 40-something couples. Cindy (Anne Flosnick) and David (David James) are planning a party to celebrate their 20th anniversary. In the opening line of the film, however, Cindy is on the phone to her suicidal therapist, Dr. Sherman (Greg Coale): “Should I leave the so-and-so, or invite my friends to the soirée?” They decide to go ahead with the party, and among the guests are Roberta (Kate Revelle), a divorce lawyer, and Greg (Neil Conway), a wannabe novelist who has settled for writing fortunecookie wisdom. Greg and David were best friends in college, and David went out with The independent film Soirée cost only $40,000—a tad more than the cost of a year at certain colleges. RELEASED AT SELECTED THEATERS IN MARCH, THE INDEPENDENT COMEDY SOIREE INVOLVES TWO MARRIED COUPLES WHO GET TOGETHER FOR A LONG WEEKEND IN WASHINGTON, D.C. Roberta until he dumped her to marry Cindy; then, Roberta married Greg on the rebound. Despite Roberta’s reluctance, she and Greg decide to spend the night with David and Cindy, and, to boot, they bring along their misbehaving 16-year-old daughter, Jessica (Lauren Adelman). Complications ensue. David has the hots for Roberta again, Greg has the hots for Cindy, and Jessica has the hots for David. Doors are slammed. People hide in closets. David’s precious baseball with Roberto Clemente’s autograph is thrown out the window, and the autograph is washed off. And, like a Greek chorus, Cindy’s intermittent phone calls to Dr. Sherman, seeking reassurance, keep interrupting his suicide attempts. Striking an odd blow for the effectiveness of therapy, Dr. Sherman’s arrival at Cindy and David’s house, gun in hand, precipitates the denouement. Soirée aims for a kind of retro innocence. Despite some sexual innuendo, the dialogue and the situations are more PG. Levine and McNevin have an obvious affection for the characters they have created, and the cast runs through the farce with a sense of fun. Of course, $40,000 doesn’t buy a lot of production value these days. The film was shot on location in Levine’s parents’ house; unless you’ve seen dinner theater in the DC area, you are unlikely to recognize any of the cast. One senses that Levine and McNevin were trying for something like the wit of Nora Ephron in the dialogue and the zaniness of early Woody Allen. Ephron and Allen don’t have to move over just yet, but it is exciting to see Levine and McNevin taking them on. I look forward to the next efforts of these talented young filmmakers. —Robert Gross ’62 Dean of the College ADAM HASLETT ’92 RECEIVED THE L.L. WINSHIP/ PEN NEW ENGLAND AWARD, NAMED FOR A FORMER EDITOR OF THE BOSTON GLOBE AND HONORING A BOOK ABOUT NEW ENGLAND OR BY A NEW ENGLAND AUTHOR. THE AWARD WAS PRESENTED IN APRIL AT THE JOHN F. KENNEDY LIBRARY AND MUSEUM. YOU ARE NOT A STRANGER HERE (DOUBLEDAY, 2002) WAS ALSO NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD AND WON A NEW YORK MAGAZINE AWARD FOR FICTION. BOOKS T. Alexander Aleinikoff ’74, Semblances of Sovereignty: The Constitution, the State, and American Citizenship, Harvard University Press, 2002. Attuned to the demands of a new century, the author argues for abandonment of plenary power cases and for more flexible conceptions of sovereignty and citizenship. Philip Ashley Fanning ’57, Mark Twain and Orion Clemens: Brothers, Partners, Strangers, The University of Alabama Press, 2003. This account of Twain’s relationship with his older brother draws on extensive archival sources, unpublished letters between the brothers, and the Mark Twain papers at the University of California– Berkeley. Jan Feldman ’76, Lubavitchers as Citizens: A Paradox of Liberal Democracy, Cornell University Press, 2003. The author, an associate professor of political science at the University of Vermont, illuminates a fascinating group and explores the relationship between liberal and democratic values. James Fritts ’60, Essentials of Illinois School Finance: A Guide to Techniques, Issues and Resources, Illinois Association of School Boards, 2002. Originally designed as a training manual and desktop reference for school business managers and budget mak- Michael Alexander ’68, The Case for the Prosecution in the Ciceronian Era,University of Michigan Press, 2002. This work reconstructs the prosecution’s case in 11 criminal trials held in the late Roman Republic. “THE RANDOM HOUSE BALLANTINE PUBLISHING GROUP [NOW OFFICIALLY THE RANDOM HOUSE PUBLISHING GROUP] NAMED DANIEL MENAKER [’63] THE NEW EDITOR-IN-CHIEF OF ITS RANDOM HOUSE SIDE, ENDING ONE OF THE MOST CLOSELY WATCHED JOB SEARCHES IN RECENT PUBLISHING HISTORY. MENAKER, AN EXECUTIVE EDITOR AT HARPERCOLLINS WHO ALSO DID A SIX-YEAR TURN AT RANDOM HOUSE, IS BEST-KNOWN FOR HIS 25 YEARS AT THE NEW YORKER, MANY OF WHICH HE SPENT EDITING FICTION AND NONFICTION.” ers, this book is also a reference for anyone who needs to understand “the essentials of Illinois school finance.” Randy Holland ’69, The Delaware State Constitution: A Reference Guide, Greenwood Press, 2002. State Supreme Court Justice Randy Holland divides this detailed work into two parts: “The Constitutional History of Delaware” and “Delaware Constitution and Commentary.” Joseph Horowitz ’70, Dvorák in America: In Search of the New World, Cricket Books, 2003. In this account of Dvorák’s 1890s stay in America, the author follows the musical and cultural influences that inpired the New World Symphony. Bernard Beitman ’64, Barton Blinder, Michael Thase, Michelle Riba, and Debra Safer, Integrating Psychotherapy and Pharmacotherapy: Dissolving the Mind-Brain Barrier, W.W. Norton, 2003. This book covers topics such as research in combined treatments, pharmacotherapy during psychotherapy, and the neurobiology of psychotherapy. Edmund Bowles ’49, Timpani: A History in Pictures and Documents, Pendragon Press, 2002. The author, an expert musicologist and iconographer, provides a comprehensive ACCORDING TO PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (MARCH 3), Clark Kerr ’32, The Gold and the Blue: A Personal Memoir of the University of California, 1949–1967, vol. 2: Political Turmoil. University of California Press, 2003. This second of two volumes continues the story of one of the last century’s most influential figures in higher education. CAROLYN M C CONNELL CO-EDITED MAKING PEACE: HEALING A VIOLENT WORLD. Dana Mackenzie ’79, The Big Splat, or How Our Moon Came to Be, John Wiley & Sons, 2003. For a general audience, this book JUNE 2003 PUBLSIHERS WEEKLY (MARCH 5) REPORTED THAT T. Alan Broughton ’62, Suicidal Tendencies, Center for Literary Publishing and University Press of Colorado, 2003. The author of several novels and poetry collections explores themes such as revolutionary activities in Italy and America. © SARA BARRETT JOANNA E. MORRISSEY, 2002 compendium of historical documents and photographs. 73 BOOKS & ARTS sion, has more than 30 experiments to learn the secrets behind amazing bubble tricks. Marcus Noland ’81 and Howard Pack, Industrial Policy in an Era of Globalization: Lessons From Asia, Institute for International Economics, 2003. This work focuses on globalization as a description of economic transformation and its many meanings. Gwinn Owens ’47, Carpenter’s Heaven, Xlibris, 2002. In this book, a brilliant and cantankerous microbiologist seemingly achieves the ultimate—a dietary supplement that controls the aging process. AN AVID BIKER, J.P. PARTLAND’S WORK HAS APPEARED ON NUMEROUS WEB SITES AND IN MORE THAN 50 CYCLING-SPECIFIC AND GENERALINTEREST MAGAZINES, INCLUDING BICYCLING, WOMEN’S SPORTS AND FITNESS, AND HOOKED ON THE OUTDOORS AND OUTSIDE. relates how lunar scientists arrived at a theory of the Moon’s birth. Carolyn McConnell ’93 and Sarah Ruth van Gelder, eds., Making Peace: Healing a Violent World, Positive Futures Network, 2003. These stories, including “The Language of Nonviolence” and “Restorative Justice,” from YES! A Journal of Positive Futures, support peaceful alternatives in the media, schools, and international affairs. S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N Sandra ’68 and David McLanahan ’63, Surgery and Its Alternatives: How to Make the Right Choices for Your Health, Kensington Publishing, 2002. Siblings Sandra McLanahan, a family practice physician on the East Coast, and David McLanahan, a general surgeon on the West Coast, provide useful information about the surgical experience—and how to avoid it. 74 Charles Miller ’59, Ship of State: The Nautical Metaphors of Thomas Jefferson, With Numerous Examples by Other Writers From Classical Antiquity to the Present, University Press of America, 2003. Organized in two parts, an essay and an anthology, this book gathers and examines approximately 100 nautical metaphors. Jim Moskowitz ’88, Bubbleology, innovative KIDS®, 2003. This hands-on science kit, for children to use with adult supervi- J.P. Partland ’90 and John Gibson, photographer, Mountain Bike Madness, MBI Publishing, 2003. This account of mountain biking’s beginnings describes its culture, style, and global appeal. Eric Sievers ’92, The Post-Soviet Decline of Central Asia, RoutledgeCurzon, 2002. This work explains the economic decline of the post–Soviet Central Asian states, presenting a challenge to development agencies, scholars, and human rights organizations. Maryhelen (Hintz) Snyder ’53, No Hole in the Flame: A Story of Love and Loss in Prose and Poetry, The Wildflower Press, 2003. After her husband, Ross Snyder Jr. ’52, died suddenly in 1996, the author chronicled her experience with grief and her reflections on their 40-year marriage. Daniel Styer ’77, The Strange World of Quantum Mechanics, Cambridge University Press, 2000. “Dedicated to two extraordinary teachers of quantum mechanics: John R. Boccio and N. David Mermin,” this introductory work is suitable for use as a course text and will appeal to other readers “seeking intellectual adventure.” JIM MOSKOWITZ, THE “ASK THE SCIENTIST” EXPERT AND SCIENCE-EXHIBIT CREATOR AT THE FRANKLIN INSTITUTE SCIENCE MUSEUM IN PHILADELPHIA, WROTE BUBBLEOLOGY FOR CHILDREN AGES 7 AND OLDER. FOR MORE DETAILS, SEE WWW.INNOVATIVEKIDS.COM. Stephen Ross and John Yinger ’69, The Color of Credit: Mortgage Discrimination, Research Methodology, and Fair-Lending Enforcement, MIT Press, 2002. The authors discuss mortgage-lending discrimination in recent years by reanalyzing existing loan-approval and -performance data and devising new tests for detecting discrimination in contemporary mortgage markets. COMPACT DISK Adam Grabois ’84 and John Nauman, Beethoven, Debussy, Rachmaninov, Reflex Editions, 2002. With an introduction, “Recording as Performance,” by William R. Kenan Jr., Professor Emerita of Art History T. Kaori Kitao, this CD features music that Grabois has performed and produced. Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Paul Waldman ’90, The Press Effect, Oxford University Press, 2003. This book reveals how media coverage in America determines what we know and don’t know about politics. E. Roy Weintraub ’64, ed., The Future of the History of Economics—Annual Supplement to Volume 34: History of Political Economy, Duke University Press, 2002. Divided into five parts, this book covers topics such as North American and international issues, publication and research, the next generation, and heterodox traditions. CELLIST ADAM GRABOIS (RIGHT) PRODUCED A NEW CD. HE PLAYS WITH PIANIST JOHN NAUMAN. M AT T S C H WA R T Z ’ 0 1 I S E D I T O R O F T H E P H I L A D E L P H I A I N D E P E N D E N T . T he long, wooden staircase leading to the second-floor offices of the Philadelphia Independent is being painted bright green. Brushes and open paint cans obstruct the narrow entranceway. After squeezing past partially erected displays of eclectic artwork in the center of Lost Highways, the art gallery/museum occupying most of the floor, one finds the nascent publication nestled in the back—with a mere 150 square feet and just three computers in its newsroom. In January, founder, editor, and publisher Matt Schwartz and his committed team of news folk—including Mark Lotto ’00, Jonathan Shainin ’00, and Benjamin Tiven ’01— celebrated the one-year anniversary of the broadest broadsheet in town. “Too big to read on the subway” is just one of the mottos emblazoning the newspaper, which measures about 1 1/2 by 2 feet. The paper, most notable for its old-fashioned layout and design, is the brainchild of Schwartz, an honors graduate in philosophy with a short but impressive list of mainstream newspaper credentials. (He was a Pulliam Fellow at the Indianapolis Star, an editorial assistant with the Associated Press, and an intern with Gannett.) Schwartz and his dedicated team of 20-somethings— most unpaid—have embarked on an inkfilled labor of love. “We think that Philly needs to read about itself,” Schwartz says. “Our stories are about where the city has been and where it’s going. We’re taking a trans-historical look to develop an urban consciousness.” In the past year, the Independent, which sells for 50 cents in Philly and $1 beyond the city limits, has published nine editions. Printing approximately 10,000 copies per edition, Schwartz says the paper is now publishing a 20- to 30-page paper the first Friday of every month. The paper is currently sold at 75 outlets throughout greater Philadelphia—distributed in hand-painted, refurbished honor boxes that have become one of the paper’s trademarks. In March, the paper published an extra war edition, spreading 12,000 copies across Philadelphia; New York City; and Washington, D.C. A Web site is also on the horizon. BENJAMIN TIVEN ʼ01 ALUMNI PROFILE S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N 76 Philly’s Quirkiest Newspaper “TOO BIG TO READ ON THE SUBWAY” IS JUST ONE OF THE MOTTOS EMBLAZONING THE PHILADELPHIA INDEPENDENT. MATT SCHWARTZ FOUNDED THE ONE-YEAR OLD BROADSHEET. “I work anywhere from 90 to 100 hours a week,” Schwartz says. “Selling ads takes up most of my time because most of our money comes from ads. I’m not a born salesman, but I really believe in the paper. Right now, it’s just about breaking even, and it’s pretty much hand-to-mouth. But from issue one to issue eight, our ad revenue increased by a factor of 10.” For the most part, articles in the Independent are written in the first person, laid out using a wide assortment of curlicue fonts and hand-drawn art. Schwartz says he doesn’t view the city weeklies (The Philadelphia Weekly and Philadelphia City Paper) as competition; he says the Independent has its own separate space with readers. “We’re trying to imitate what newspapers used to be like in the 18th and 19th centuries,” Schwartz says. A staff of the devoted mans the publication, which cost less than $3,000 to start. “We don’t pay our writers yet, but we want to eventually,” he explains. “Instead, we give them free advertising for their own projects.” Independent Art Director Jacob Weinstein, whose elaborate headers add an unmistakable touch of class to the broadsheet, says that he’s been contributing his own comics to the paper since the first issue. “With me and other cartoonists, we get an opportunity to do bigger strips than other papers allow,” says the 23-year-old Haverford College fine arts major. “Here, artists have an entire page.” “The best thing, my favorite thing about the whole paper,” Weinstein says, “is finding really talented writers and artists and being the very first person to say to them, ‘You can have as much space as you want, to write what you want,’ and then watching their eyes light up. That feels great.” —Deborah Bolling Adapted with permission from the March 13–19 edition of Philadelphia City Paper. CLASS NOTES S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N 78 while. Rich Aleong will join everyone soon, after he receives an M.S. in electrical engineering and starts work at Accenture. In Atlanta, Fran Smith works for an environmental engineering consulting firm and is soon to become a volleyball coach at a local high school. Dimitriy Levin is finishing up his first year of med school at U. of Colorado and will spend this summer performing clinical research in pediatric cardiology. Adam Rogers is finishing up his first year of med school at the U. of Michigan, and Mark Samols is finishing his second year of med school at Case Western Reserve U. He finds life in Cleveland boring. Tim Stewart-Winter began a Ph.D. in U.S. history at the U. of Chicago. Jesse Wells became engaged recently to Allison Floyd. At Yale, Kait Hutchinson is in the school of nursing and plans to spend some time in Nicaragua this summer. Arianna Freeman will possibly join her this fall, but at the law school. Aileen Miller works on an island west of San Francisco studying marine birds, which she will continue to do this summer in Glacier Bay, Alaska. Annie Willman and Eli Silk will travel to Australia this summer and return to the U. of Pittsburgh for med school and a doctoral program in education, respectively. CJ Riley will soon obtain a master’s in structural engineering and is headed to work for the Bridge Design Group at the Wyoming Dept. of Transportation in Cheyenne, Wyo. Road trippers are welcome to stop by. He is headed to London this summer to visit Darren Wood and Mark Dingfield. In the international arena, Marc Jeuland is still with the Peace Corps in Mali, where construction has begun for a natural wastewater treatment lagoon system. Antoinette Graefin zu Eltz is in Frankfurt but is soon returning to the United States for business school. Katie Surrence is currently in Madrid but may be elsewhere by the time you read this. Gabe Turzo is liv- ing life the right way in Melbourne, Australia, and, in December, he will complete a master’s. Clara Fuchsman is on an oceanography research trip in the Black Sea. Otherwise, she lives with Hilary Clay in Seattle. Hilary is going to grad school for microbiology and often sees Emily Wilkins, who is applying to psychology graduate programs. Josh Lindsey is also in Seattle and continues to work for Microsoft. Hilary recently went to New York and saw Clarissa Nobile and Chris Woodrell. Clarissa is auditioning as a dancer for Broadway plays. Chris works hard with Lynne Desilva-Johnson to discover creative outlets on the local stage. Lynne is leaving grad school for a year to run a business in downtown Manhattan and teaches photography. The coolest story of them all, and I only know because I saw it with my own eyes, is Evan Gregory’s. After spending the fall working on grassroots politics with Hugh Weber ’00 and Alex Lundry ’99, he spent his holidays entangled in a lengthy American Idol audition. That’s right, BoHee Yoon and I saw him on TV. He now lives in NYC, three blocks away from Andrew Breitenberg, who is lost from the world. Julie Levin Russo lives in Brooklyn and works at the infamous Mac shop Tekserve but is starting a Ph.D. in modern culture and media at Brown this fall. Becca Howes-Mischel is moving to NYC to start an anthropology graduate program at NYU. BoHee Yoon is still in NYC, although she often visits in DC with Shreena Gandhi. She recently hung out with Jared Solomon, Horatiu Stefan, and Jordan Brackett. She and Shreena will be spending their lovely summer in Acapulco along with Katie Holscher, Lucy Lang ’03, and Ariana Lindermayer ’03. Then Shreena is headed to the U. of Florida for a Ph.D. in American religions and will become the hostess of many sunny vacations to come. Letters... c o n t i n u e d f ro m p a g e 3 could not continue because the College fails to provide suitable space. The problem, in my view, is primarily internal politics. As a low-budget, informal program with instructors who are paid much less than Music and Dance Department faculty members, it lacks strong advocates other than the alumni. I urge other folk-dance alumni to add their voices to the effort to find a permanent home for folk dance at Swarthmore. TIMOTHY WILLIAMS ’64 Professor Emeritus of Biology Franconia, N.H. REALLY SWELL TEACHER I greatly enjoyed the article about folk dancing, but there was one serious omission. Alice Gates, physical education teacher, started a folk-dance group some years before Irene Moll took it over. At that time, membership was by invitation only; I was delighted to be selected (having already taken Alice’s modern-dance class) and even more delighted that I could get gym credit for so much fun. Also, it was at that time the only coeducational “sport”—and, because most of the male students were off to war, a welcome source of dates. After college, I kept up with the English Country Dance Society in Manhattan; my husband and I also did square and contra dancing. Now a widow in a retirement community, I still go dancing twice a month. It’s my most enjoyable activity. I owe a great debt to Alice Gates, who was a really swell teacher. LOUISE ZIMMERMAN FORSCHER ’44 Exeter, N.H. DANCE CONTINUUM As a former folk dancer at Swarthmore, I appreciated your recent article on folk dancing in the College Bulletin. I would like to take issue with Sharon Friedler's assertion that “folk” dance is separate from the realm of performance art. These separations are better likened to a continuum. Scottish dancing in particular has a vibrant performance branch. There are jigs, hornpipes, step dances, and sword dances (to name a few), which are performed and in which competitions are held in national and international arenas. Ragtime dances can be performed in highly choreographed settings or danced as “social dancing." Scandinavian dancing also has both ends of the spectrum. Having danced, performed, and competed on both ends of this spectrum in these dance forms and more, I am hard-pressed to see why the “performance" end of the continuum is more deserving than the “social." In many ways, they are not separable. Nurturing one enriches the other. I hope that the college can find both respect and physical space for “social dancing.” It is not, and never was, a lesser form of dance. KATE MCINTOSH ’89 Honor, Mich. A GREAT GIFT The article “Frank Aydelotte: Architect of Distinction” (March Bulletin) brought a rush of recognition and renewed memories of exhilarating encounters. As a member of the Class of 1943, my association with President Aydelotte disqualified from the football championship because Coach Frank Aydelotte had entered the game as a player. Aydelotte remarked that he only entered the game after the coach of the opponents had done so. During my senior year, I was in Aydelotte’s office for an interview when he was interrupted for a telephone call. After an extensive, urgent conversation, Aydelotte apparently received the caller’s agreement to serve in some capacity. Upon hanging up the phone, he remarked to me, “The main part of my job is getting people to do what they think they can’t or don’t want to do.” THOMAS SPENCER ’37 St. Augustine, Fla. THE PRESIDENT’S JOB AYDELOTTE AND CONSENSUS The interesting article on Frank Aydelotte brought back some memories. A friend of my father’s once told me he was a member of the committee that selected Aydelotte as one of the first Rhodes Scholars. My late classmate Joseph Selligman ’37 showed me a clipping from a historical feature, stating that Louisville’s Male High School had been Many thanks to Vice President Dan West for his article on Frank Aydelotte, the “defining president” of Swarthmore College. Aydelotte and his successors, John Nason and Courtney Smith, were strong supporters of consensual decision making and of athletics. As West points out, Aydelotte’s vision of TWO-TIERED SWARTHMORE How different a school Swarthmore was when Frank Aydelotte instituted the Honors Program than it is now. In Aydelotte’s day, there were clearly two tiers of students: a majority that one might call “average” (the “red-blooded men and women” from the letter to The Phoenix) and a minority of intellectual high(er) achievers (the “greasy grinds”). The two-tiered honors and course system made a lot of sense with such a divided constituency and, most likely, was instrumental in allowing Swarthmore to jump from a regional school to one of the top small colleges in the nation. Swarthmore today is a very different place. The school has its pick of some of the best students in the country, and I am sure that most, if not all, of today’s Swarthmore students would have been condemned as greasy grinds by the dyspeptic Phoenix correspondent of 1925. Given this, I wonder what Aydelotte would think of the twotiered system today? Would he want it to remain in place simply because it has attained “signature” status? JON LORSCH ’90 Towson, Md. athletics was to have all students participating rather than being spectators. In fact, during Aydelotte’s tenure, Swarthmore reached a point where 84 percent of the male students participated in sports. (Biographer Frances Blanshard did not have figures for participation by women.) Aydelotte’s governance style strongly embraced Quaker tradition, and he had the wisdom to allow the time required to explore all possible options fully and to reach a consensus before important decisions were made. Congratulations also to the Task Group on Consensual Decision Making for their excellent report [see page 4]. It provides a very clear discussion of the importance of consensual decision making to Swarthmore, both in the past and the future. It does a good job of trying to understand how the [December 2000] athletics decision was made—and how it departed from Swarthmore’s tradition. It offers excellent suggestions on how to enhance understanding of and commitment to consensual decision making. Finally, it speaks to a real commitment by the Board to continue Swarthmore’s tradition of consensus. BILL ROBINSON ’60 Westlake Village, Calif. LAX CONFERENCE THANKS On behalf of my family, I would like to publicly thank the College’s Career Services and Alumni Relations offices for organizing this year's Lax Conference on Entrepreneurship, which was held on campus on April 6. Organizing the conference took time and great effort. Its success can be directly attributed to the staff members in these two offices, along with the enthusiastic support of President Alfred H. Bloom. I know that students and alumni enjoyed the keynote address by [stock market expert] Marc Reinganum and the several panel discussions that followed. We look forward to next year’s conference. ANDREW LAX ’77 San Francisco FOR THE RECORD In the March 2003 article on Congressman Chris Van Hollen Jr. ’83, a quote attributed to Lois Oblender Stoner should have been attributed to Esther Ridpath Delaplaine ’44. In addition, the class year given for Stoner was incorrect; she graduated in 1951. JUNE 2003 was brief, yet his scholarly legacy and personal kindnesses would remain indelible. With the advent of World War II, I transferred to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to accelerate my engineering studies. After graduation, I joined Pratt and Whitney as a safety engineer investigating the causes of airplane crashes. I had a draft deferment because of this job but became restless when many of my friends left for active service. Having a strong Quaker heritage, I joined the Merchant Marine, where I could actively serve without carrying arms. Days at sea afforded many hours for study, so I took up the great literature my engineering education had slighted. After a shipwreck, our vessel was towed to Falmouth, England, for repairs. During this downtime, I participated in an informal program at Oxford University for members of the Armed Services on leave. There, I was befriended by English scholars who knew Aydelotte. He was highly respected at the university, and it was suggested that he could be very helpful should I have any future interest in attending Oxford. I sent Aydelotte a letter describing my seafaring experiences and scholastic endeavors. His reply was immediate. As soon as my ship docked in Hoboken, N.J., he sent his secretary to pick me up and bring me to Princeton, where he discussed with me what I was reading. Whenever my ship returned to New York, he helped me explore—one on one—the great ideas of mankind. He even took me to member teas at the Institute for Advanced Study, where I met Einstein and other great thinkers. And after the war, he paved the way for me to return to Oxford for further study. Frank Aydelotte’s interest, kindness, and the great gift of his undivided attention are memories that I have treasured throughout my life. EDWIN MOORE ’43 Underhill Center, Vt. 79 A DAY I N THE LIFE Mommy Being a Scientist S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N “M-o-m-m-y!” “Yes, Momo?” “Can you come h-e-e-e-re?” “What do you need, Momo?” “I need my Yu-Gi-Oh cards.” “Mo, it’s only five after seven.” 80 JIM GRAHAM By C a r o l B r é va r t - D e m m AMY BUG IS CHAIR OF THE PHYSICS AND ASTRONOMY DEPARTMENT, WHERE SHE SPECIALIZES IN COMPUTATIONAL CHEMICAL PHYSICS. SHE ALSO ENJOYS THIS WAKE-UP RITUAL BETWEEN AMY BUG, professor of physics and TEACHING A SEMINAR ON GENDER AND SCIENCE. chair of the Physics Department, and 6-year-old son Moses heralds the start of a new day in her household. Juggling family time, classes, appointments with the provost, meetings about the women’s studies capstone seminar, preparation for a physics colloquium in Virginia, and planning her older son’s bar mitzvah, she hardly has time to squeeze in an interview. “I recognize that I’m a slave to my children,” says Bug, laughing, although these days 13-year-old Murphy makes fewer demands. No longer interested in breakfast, his early-morning presence is manifested by teeth brushing or the sound of the television, as he waits to run out to the school bus. “What’s the plan this afternoon?” his mother calls. “Jazz band. I’ll be home on the late bus,” he answers. The door bangs. Murphy is on his way, as is Bug’s husband, Bill. “He’s a biologist and senior systems analyst at Drexel University,” she says. “He takes the train into Philadelphia.” He knows she can cope. “Amy is the best physicist, mother, social activist, and pedagogue I could ever imagine in one package,” Bill says. Bug helps Momo to dress, not because he needs it but because he likes her to be there. She likes it too. She offers him pants. “No, not those. The cool ones,” he says. They search the clean laundry for cool pants. While Moses eats toast and cream cheese with juice, Bug dresses. Petite, slender, with tumbling dark hair, blue jeans, and a loose flowered cotton shirt, she could easily pass for a student herself. After dropping her son off at the Swarthmore-Rutledge School, where he currently attends first grade, Bug drives to her office in the DuPont Science Building, wishing that she could stop in Kohlberg Hall Coffee Bar, where some of her Physics Department colleagues and other faculty members meet for morning coffee and chats. “I’d love to join them more often,” she says. Bug spends the morning reading scientific papers, preparing talks and classes, and dealing with the numerous issues that a department chair must field. Within her field of computational chemical physics, she specializes in the simulation of absorbed species in solids. “It’s exciting and deeply interesting,” she says, “to try and understand how a solid environment modifies the properties of something like a hydrogen molecule, which is used in fuel technology, or a positron, which is used in medical diagnostics.” Her recent publications include articles written in collaboration with Peter Hastings ’01; Lisa Larrimore ’02; and Melaku Muluneh ’03, an honors student. “Doing mainstream research in physics and astronomy with our students is something that we value greatly in our department,” she says. “It’s hard, and sometimes, you might have to make a choice between doing something that’s truly cutting edge and bringing the student along.” “It’s usually on days when I have a critical project due,” she says, “that the phone will ring, and it’ll be the school nurse, saying, ‘Mo doesn’t feel well. You need to come and get him.’” Smiling, she adds, “I can’t deny that this provokes an amusing blend of maternal love and impotent rage.” For years, Bug has been doing research and lecturing in physics; more recently, she has also been researching and speaking on gender and science at colleges and universities nationwide. She feels lucky to be at Swarthmore, enjoying the support of “wonderful colleagues,” and where she says the administration “is knowledgeable and responsive about issues of gender and ethnicity.” This semester, Bug is holding a three-hour, weekly seminar on gender and physical science as well as co-coordinating the women’s studies capstone seminar. The physics seminar has a vast syllabus, including topics on the historical view of science; science as a world without women; the question of whether our minds have a sex; female-friendly science; and feminist contributions to physics and nonphysical sciences. For the capstone seminar, she leads a unit on feminism and science. She uses a drawing by Moses called “Mommy Being a Scientist” as a point of discussion about young children’s perceptions of what constitutes a scientist. Bug’s most recent article on the topic—titled “Has Feminism Changed Physics?”—appeared this spring in Signs. Bug says: “Those individuals who choose nontraditional careers, such as men who are social workers or women who are neurosurgeons (or physicists), have to find a way to transcend naive, culturally ratified gender categories. “You have to be creative about your sense of self,” she says, “if you really want to see yourself doing [that kind of] job.” FOR HOMEWORK AND FAMILY FUN. AFTER LISTENING TO MURPHY’S BASS GUITAR LESSONS, AMY STARTED STUDYING THE BASS HERSELF. Speaking of the kinds of discrimination that female scientists can experience, she mentions dissertation advisers failing to encourage female doctoral candidates to publish papers or not introducing them to visiting scientists. She describes a case where a male science professor misses a departmental meeting to take his daughter to a ballet class and is labeled “a great guy, great scholar, wonderful father,” whereas a female professor, called away from work to take her child to the doctor, is “not serious about her job.” Although she rarely finds herself in similar situations, she says: “The pressures are intensified by race. For example, African American physicists, regardless of gender, typically have a very hard time surviving in the mainstream.” There are too few hours in the day for Professor of Physics Amy Bug. Noon approaches—and passes. Bug almost never goes to lunch. “I have a healthy candy bar in my backpack,” she says. “It’s rare that I interrupt the flow between morning and the day care dash. You become intent on using every single moment profitably.” It’s almost 1:15 p.m., and Gender and Science is due to begin. Students drift into DuPont 142B. Encouraging them to run the seminar, Bug sits among them rather than up front. A couple of male students write on the blackboards. They spend the first 20 minutes finishing up a topic from the previous week. Words like “cutthroat, exclusive, competitive, passion, arrogance, pettiness, us-them, male dominated” appear. The lists grow as others contribute. The students examine the words as definitive of the culture of science and ways in which it compares with other cultures. “Science is uninterested in defining its own culture, leaving others to examine it,” someone says. Bug suggests a “culture of no culture.” “Is it similar to any other culture, of cutthroats, for example?” someone else asks. “How about athletics or politics?” another student answers. They move on, discussing differences in social or “soft” sciences and physical “hard” sciences “Mom?” “Yes, Murphy.” “Mom, you’re gonna do your homework in here, right?” “Yes, Murphy, I’m going to do it in here.” “Good.” It’s 9:45 p.m. Bug lies down on the floor of her children’s room, covers herself with a blanket, and opens up whatever she needs to prepare for the next day. She reads, squinting in the low beam from the nightlight, aware that she has three hours of work ahead of her and knowing that she’ll only last 15 minutes. She falls asleep on the floor. T JUNE 2003 ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS BUG AND HER SONS, MOSES AND MURPHY, GET TOGETHER IN THE EVENINGS and the crossover areas like biology. Of the 11 students present, some speak more than others, but most participate. They end with more questions than answers. Later, they work on solving physics problems, such as whether the amount of mass energy in a pea surpasses that produced by a power plant. It does. Students teach the class, presenting their solutions, listening to variations from their classmates, and finding each others’ answers “cool.” Occasionally, Bug makes a suggestion, guiding them quietly and unobtrusively. Three hours fly. Senior Robin Smith, an honors physics major and founder of Swarthmore Women in Astronomy and Physics says: “I’m committed to encouraging prospective female physics majors and find that Amy’s seminar gives me new tools for mentoring and supporting these fellow Swatties.” In Gender and Science, “I give huge amounts of reading,” Bug says. “The material excites me. It’s completely involving, both emotionally and intellectually. The students are lovely.” She contrasts teaching a physics course for majors, saying: “It’s a totally different experience. One teaches differently to a group of people for whom the class is required and/or who want to acquire the skills of a physicist. There’s a whole different vibe in that class.” Bug’s day on campus draws to an end. “I wish I could take the College dance classes,” she says, “but I just don’t have the three hours.” She does, however, make time for playing her electric bass. “When you’re a professor,” she says, “it’s mentally healthy to find a way to put yourself in the student’s chair once in a while.” Currently in search of a band, she most recently performed at Murphy’s bar mitzvah, playing Weird Al Yankovich’s “Pretty Fly for a Rabbi.” “I kicked butt,” she says conspiratorially. It’s dinnertime, and the family is enjoying a roast—Bug has uncharacteristically taken a few minutes in the afternoon to rush home and slip it into the oven. “If we could get to the supermarket more often,” she says, “we wouldn’t need to have so many dinners from Renato Pizza.” During the evening, Bug sits and works beside her children as they watch television or read. Murphy says: “Mom comes home every night and tells us about the problems she has to deal with as chair, but then she’s just able to have fun with us. She always wears a smile. I can’t imagine how she can do that. I love it how she’s never sad.” At bedtime, both parents read to the children. Amy reads The Pig’s At Home, followed by Bill with The Prince and the Pauper. Then, it’s time to sleep. L L S I F E LONG EARNING AT WARTHMORE ALL 2003 F What is Lifelong Learning? Swarthmore’s top faculty members offer on-campus noncredit courses to Swarthmore’s alumni, families, and friends. Classes begin the week of Sept. 15 and end before Thanksgiving. Tuition is $375 a course plus course materials. To register or for more information, contact the Lifelong Learning Program at (610) 328-8106, or visit the Web site www.swarthmore.edu/alumni/life_learning.html. Registration deadline is Monday, Sept. 8. Empire and America (LLS 108) Saturdays, 10 a.m.–noon Trotter Hall 301 Americans have normally thought of themselves as a democratic republic, but, in many respects, we have become an imperial power. This course examines the relationship between the “empire” and America. Claude C. Smith Professor of Political Science James Kurth teaches courses on international politics, defense policy, and the American Empire. His recent publications have examined the interrelations among the global economy, cultural conflicts, and American military strategy. The Athenian Golden Age (LLS 109) Mondays, 7–9 p.m. Trotter Hall 301 Authors: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus, Thucydides, Aristophanes, and Plato Susan Lippincott Professor Emeritus of Modern and Classical Languages Gil Rose has been at Swarthmore for 36 years and has often taught honors seminars on Greek tragedy, Homer, and Greek philosophy. He recently taught “Homeric Models of Heroism” in the Lifelong Learning Program.