A Natural
Choice

Features
9

Special Report

Education Without Compromise:
How Swarthmore’s values are
reflected in the College’s budget
By And rea J a rre ll

14

The Swattie
Dating Game
A world of extremes where neutral
territory is difficult to find.
By El iza be t h Re d de n ’ 05

18

T h e Va l u e of
Liberal Education
It’s worth its high cost and should be
available to all.
By Pau l C o ur a nt ’ 6 8

24

Dignity
and Destiny
Former President Courtney Smith’s life and
death helped shape Swarthmore’s history.

De p a r t m e n t s
3

Letters

Readers react

4

Collection

Campus beat

Profiles

36

62

Connections

Alumni gatherings

“Bring Me a
Great Case”

38

Associate U.S. Attorney James
Sheehan ’74 loves courtroom combat.

Class Notes

Classmates’ stories

By Carol Brévart- Demm

45

67

Deaths

Friends remembered

Burnout
Cure

46

Janet Erlick ’88 keeps creativity
alive in children’s theater.

B o o ks & A r t s

By J on Van Til ’6 1

Bearing Right by Will Saletan ’87
reviewed by David Smith

26

A Dream
Deferred

72

Being Black in Africa

Joe Gangemi ’92 breaks through
as a novelist and screenwriter.

The Bartol Foundation was ahead of
its time—and Swarthmore’s.

By Vincent Jones ’99

By Elizabeth R edden ’05

By Al isa G i a rd inell i

80

77

32

Sharon Friedler’s mode is motion
and her motto “Onward!”

A Natural
Choice
Nurse-midwives recognize that birth is
not an illness but a normal process.
By Beth Lu ce
COVER ILLUSTRATION: ©2004 MARLENE RUDGINSKY/
WATER SPIDER DESIGNS, HTTP://WWW.WATERSPIDER.NET
INSIDE COVER PHOTO: BOB KRIST

In My Life

Q + A

B y A li sa Giardinel l i

By An drea Ham mer

70

Storyteller

Nature’s Lessons
Sierra Curtis-McLane ’02
promotes thinking by doing.
By Colleen Gall aghe r

PA R L O R TA L K

W

hen my wife and I were in our early 30s and ready to start a family, one of our last
acts of youthful rebellion was to decide to have our babies with midwives. No, she
didn’t give birth on the floor of a tepee or anything. We merely thought that the
big hospital in our community, which saw about 6,000 births a year, wasn’t suited to the
kind of experience we wanted. So, for the birth of our two children, we chose a freestanding birth center staffed with certified nurse-midwives and medical backup nearby should
there be a problem.
There weren’t any problems. Our firstborn, now 22, was the product of a long labor
that took its course without unnecessary intervention. Allowing our child and his mother’s
body to decide when he would make his entrance forced us to wait patiently—though not
always comfortably—until he was ready to be born. It was a good first lesson to us as parents: to accept his natural ways of becoming and being.
Our second child was 10 days overdue, a situation that often prompts obstetricians to
induce labor. But again, with the watchful support of our midwife, we waited until nature
took its course. Once labor began, this baby
seemed impatient with it, demanding to be
born less than an hour after we rushed to the
birth center.
Swarthmore-educated midwives (page 32)
have joined a historic profession that combines medical expertise with an almost spiritual commitment to mother and child—plus
no small amount of advocacy for a better way
of birthing in a society that has turned childbirth from a natural process into a medical
condition.
From the joy of childbirth to the sadness
of death, you will find the whole sweep of life
in this magazine. The College lost four great
staff members this winter (page 9) and one of
its greatest living alumni, Clark Kerr ’32 (page 7). But nowhere is the sweep of life more
evident than in Class Notes. If you read the magazine from back to front, the notes provide a natural history of Swarthmoreans from young adulthood to old age—and death.
Like a family or a church congregation, a small college offers the benefit of aging in
community. At Swarthmore, you gain more than a credential, more than an education, and
more than classmates and friends. In learning here, you are held in the light of the whole
college, not just by your peers and teachers, but by everyone involved in the enterprise of
liberal arts education, including members of the staff such as Pauline Allen, Judy Lord,
Caroline Shero, and Pat Trinder. They and other members of the staff—from the dishwashers to the deans— were as much a part of creating the Swarthmore experience as the
student body and the faculty. It was fitting that the Class of 1997 asked Pat to be its Last
Collection speaker and that the Class of 2002 planted a yellow magnolia near Sharples
Dining Hall in honor of the entire staff. The plaque says, “Thanks for all you do.”
All of us at Swarthmore focus our energy and resources on liberally educating young
people so that they will be humane, thoughtful adults who remain open to new ideas, are
able to solve challenging new problems, and can find fulfillment in their lives. As Paul
Courant ’68 writes in “The Value of Liberal Education” (page 18), “Liberal learning is
good for the old because it keeps us young… [it] allows us to make our own luck.”
—Jeffrey Lott

From the joy of

childbirth to the

sadness of death,
you will find the

whole sweep of life

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

in this magazine.

2

Swarthmore
COLLEGE BULLETIN

Editor: Jeffrey Lott
Managing Editor: Andrea Hammer
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The Swarthmore College Bulletin (ISSN
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number 4, is published in August, September, December, March, and June by
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© 2004 Swarthmore College
Printed in U.S.A.

The article about John Wister and the
Scott Arboretum (“Visitors Welcome,”
December 2003 Bulletin) brought back
memories. From 1959 to 1961, our family
lived in Thomas House, a nine-bedroom
monstrosity designed by Stanford White
and located south of the football field,
across from the fieldhouse. John Wister’s
cottage was adjacent along Harvard Avenue.
Wister kept the special plantings
around the cottage irrigated with a massive
sprinkler system that ran day and night (or
so it seemed), adding more humidity to the
already humid Swarthmore summer. As a
result, mold thrived at Thomas House,
which did not concern John as long as his
plants were taken care of.
When John and Gertrude [Smith] got
married, they eloped to a small town far
from Swarthmore. The reason for this,
according to John (who was then 73), was
that he did not want his mother to find out
about the marriage.
Thomas House was torn down sometime after we left.
IRVING DAYTON ’48
Corvallis, Ore.
BITTER RAIN

It is a bit of a stretch to claim (as does the
caption in “Visitors Welcome”) that the
Scott Outdoor Amphitheater “has been the
site of every college commencement” since
1942. As the article points out, my class
marched there from our rain location in
the Lamb-Miller Field House on graduation day. But, once there, we sat in the
chairs for just a minute or two while President David Fraser said a few words, including those typically used to confer degrees.
It wasn’t raining that day, but it had
rained overnight, and the amphitheater
was muddy. Officials told us that they didn’t want our guests to get their shoes
muddy.
Except for Faculty Marshal Paul Mangelsdorf [’49], there were no guests or faculty in the amphitheater with us, and nothing else happened there. We got up and
marched back to the Field House, where
1
the entire 3⁄
2 -hour graduation ceremony
took place. So, while one could argue that

“technically” we had our degrees conferred
upon us in the amphitheater, (and “technically" we graduated twice because they
were conferred on us again in the Field
House), no one from the Class of 1983
would consider the amphitheater to have
been the site of our commencement.
Could I still be bitter after all these
years? Naturally, we complained a lot, and
the next year—when it really rained—they
held graduation in the amphitheater.
DEBRA FELIX ’83
Kensington, Md.
REMEMBERING PAT TRINDER

I worked with Patricia Trinder in the Athletics Department from 1979 to 1986. Her
death (see “College Loses Four Great
Friends, “ page 9) is such a loss to everyone at the College whom she touched—
and that would include almost everyone on
the campus from 1979 to 2004, so broad
was this 4-foot-9-inch–woman’s reach.
Pat was serious but always smiling or
laughing; accomplished, efficient, and dedicated but always with time to listen; passionate in cheering on “her boys and girls”
on the team but always warm, open, and
helpful to our opponents; supportive of
and loyal to her colleagues but always considerately critical as well.
Too good to be true? No—but Pat was a
women to whom everyone at Swarthmore
could point and say with pride, “She works
with me at Swarthmore.”Never has it been
more true that life is unfair, nor that we are
lucky to have known her. We will all miss
Pat very much.
DAVID SMOYER
Jamaica Plain, Mass.
COUNTING THE VOTE

Congratulations to the Swarthmore students who re-posted the Diebold Corporation’s e-mail memos concerning problems
with their electronic voting machines
(“Students Win Net Fight,” December Bulletin). This information is critical to the
survival of real democracy in the United
States, and I am so pleased that young people are taking an interest in it.
CAROLINE RIDER
Red Hook, N.Y.

HERE COMES THE SUN

Could you please publish some information
about what appears to be a sundial in the
photograph on the inside cover of the
December Bulletin?
LOUIS WISLOCKI ’54
Dedham, Mass.
Asked and answered: The sundial on Kohlberg Hall (opened in 1996) is beautiful—
but a bit mysterious. Its notched brass
gnomon (the element of a sundial that casts
the shadow) extends in triangular fashion
from the side of a stone tower on the southwest corner of the building. The hours are
marked by strips of bluish granite set into
the side of the tower, which is faced with
Wissahickon schist from the same quarry as
the stone of Parrish Hall. Noon is indicated
by the long vertical line below the gnomon.
To tell time with this instrument, one
visually extends the line on the smooth side
of the triangular shadow (see why they are
different?) to the hour markers below. Thus,
in the photo above, it is shortly after 2 p.m.
standard time. During daylight time, one
must compensate one hour to the west. The
small marker peeking in from the bottom
left of this picture—and, by extension, its
companion in the ranks of hour markers
above—represents noon during the summer months.
—Jeffrey Lott
FOR THE RECORD

Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun wrote in the
14th century, not the 13th, as reported in
“Finding Common Ground,” December
Bulletin. Photographs on pages 17 (top) and
42 of that issue were taken by Harry Kalish.

MARCH 2004

WISTFUL

DENG-JENG LEE

LETTERS

3

COLLECTION
Too
mAny
cHoicEs

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

4

Dorwin P. Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social
Action, says this is largely due
to the paralyzing effects of a
marketplace that offers a bewildering and ultimately debilitating array of choices.
“Unlimited choice, I
believe, can produce genuine
suffering,” says Schwartz,
whose work explores the social
and psychological effects of
free-market economic institutions on moral, social, and
civic concerns. “Here we are,
living at the pinnacle of
human possibility, awash in
material abundance. As a society, we have achieved what our
ancestors could only dream
about. But it has come at a
great price.”
In his new book, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
(Ecco Press, January 2004),
Schwartz finds that many
modern Americans feel tyrannized by choice.
“With so much choice
available, anything less than
perfection feels like failure,”
he says. “And when we do,
inevitably, fail to achieve perfection, we have only ourselves
to blame.”
In contrast, Schwartz says
the most important factor in
providing happiness is close
social relations. “People who
are married, who have good

© ADAM NICKLEWICZ

CONSUMERS OFTEN FEEL
DEPRESSED, ANXIOUS, AND
STRESSED. Barry Schwartz, the

friends, and who are close to
their families are happier than
those who are not,” he says.
“Being connected to others
seems to be much more important to subjective well-being
than being rich.”
Ironically, Schwartz says,
social ties actually decrease
freedom, choice, and autonomy—but in good ways. “Counterintuitive as it may appear,”

he says, “what seems to contribute most to happiness
binds us rather than liberates
us.”
Schwartz is also the author
of The Costs of Living: How Market Freedom Erodes the Best
Things in Life (1994).
Schwartz’s new book has
caught the attention of both
critics and consumers—and of
the marketing world. Articles

have appeared in USA Today,
The Chronicle of Higher Education, Psychology Today, The
Christian Science Monitor, The
New York Times, and The New
Yorker. (For links to some of
this press coverage, see the
electronic version of this
article at www.swarthmore.edu/news/text/schwartz3.html)
—Alisa Giardinelli

“BE FULLY HUMAN”
“No more war! We’ve had our damned
war!” said 1976 Nobel Peace Prize co-recipient Máiread Corrigan Maguire to a full
house at the Lang Performing Arts Center
on Jan. 22. Delivering an urgent plea for
resolving conflict by peaceful means,
Maguire was the first speaker in the winter
series of weekly forums called Walking the
Way of Peace, sponsored by the Pendle Hill
Quaker Center, the Lang Center for Civic
and Social Responsibility, and the College’s

“The girl in front of me shrieked and said she felt something on her
leg. And then I felt it,” says Jantz. She describes the eel as about a
foot and a half long, blackish gray, and fast moving—“It moved very
much like a snake.”
Participants on the other two walks didn’t encounter any eels, as
rainstorms increased water turbidity. Yet Jen Johnson ’05, Earthlust
member and organizer of its Walk in the Woods series—which included a daytime Crum Creek exploration with Professor of Biology Rachel
Merz and an ornithology walk with Assistant Professor of Biology
Julie Hagelin—says she thinks people still had a good time. Wearing nearly hip-high, often leaky waders, most participants relished
the experience of being in the cool creek water at night, eels or no
eels, Johnson says.
“It’s a really weird experience to be in the woods at night and
realize there’s a whole host of organisms who go about their business
while we’re sleeping or holed up in Cornell or McCabe,” she says.
“It’s a positively magical feeling to be in the woods at night.”
—Elizabeth Redden ’05

Program in Peace and Conflict Studies.
Maguire founded the Community of
Peace People in 1976, after three young relatives were killed by an Irish Republican
Army getaway car when its driver was shot
by a British soldier in Northern Ireland.
Since then, she has dedicated her life to
bringing nonviolent action to bear against
injustice and inequality, both in her own
country and around the world.
Noting that “you can’t build a house
from the roof down,” she said that individuals must set an example: “In the end, it
comes back to ourselves—to be peaceful,
kind, just, honest, and humane. Be the
change you want to see.”
PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY LEE SMITHEY (LEFT)

ERNST DEMM

INVITED MÁIREAD CORRIGAN MAGUIRE TO SPEAK
AT THE COLLEGE, WHERE SHE AND LIFELONG
PEACE ACTIVIST THEODORE “TED” HERMAN ’35
(RIGHT) WERE ABLE TO CHAT FOR A WHILE.

Speaking with both passion and compassion, she blamed fear as the main cause
of violence—fear of losing civil liberties,
fear of speaking out against injustice, and
fear instilled into people by government
policies. “The real war is inside your own
heart,” she said. “Fear will prevent us from
moving forward if we don’t conquer it. Work
hard to overcome the fear of standing up to
politicians who take the country to war.”
Maguire urged listeners to examine the
roots of social and political problems, seeking accommodation with their opponents
rather than hostilities. In a vehement condemnation of U.S. foreign policy in Iraq,
she said: “America has to have the humility
to say, ‘No one country can solve the problems alone.’ Extreme nationalism is very
dangerous. Someone shows us a flag, and it
becomes the most important thing, blinding us to our common humanity. Be what
you want to be, but be fully human.”
—Carol Brévart-Demm

MARCH 2004

Their flashlights poised a foot above water, a group of students is
wading through the waist-deep Crum Creek when one slips. She goes
facedown and is nearly submerged. A few others start jumping. Like
dolphins in the drizzly dark, they leap forward, laughing, loving the
novelty of being in the creek at 10:30 on a dark November night.
They regroup, recover their seriousness, and conceal their smiles
with expressions of intense concentration. They wouldn’t want to
scare the eels away.
Yes, eels. North American Atlantic eels call inland creeks such as
the Crum home during parts of their 7- to 30-year life span, says Tom
Valente, laboratory instructor in biology. Valente led November’s
series of three eel walks, which were sponsored by Earthlust, a campus environmental action organization.
North American eels grow up in streams such as the Crum, where
they mature to full size—about 3 to 4 feet long, on average, Valente
explains. Then, they begin a migration for which there are few natural analogies. Migrating to the Sargasso Sea, a lens of warm, still
water near Bermuda, eels go through irreversible physiological
changes as they hit salt water. Formerly asexual, eels develop reproductive organs and lose their ability to eat.
Their larvae [leptocephali] then return to small freshwater streams
like those their parents left behind. Once they reach the Sargasso,
the eels spawn and die. Unlike salmon, which famously swim
upstream to die where they were born, North American eels “are
going into waters they’ve never been in,” Valente says.
Kathryn Jantz ’05 went on the eel walks, hoping to catch a
glimpse of the mature adult eels as they made their way downstream.

DOUG STAMM/STAMMPHOTO.COM

FEEL THE EEL

5

SPEED KILLS WOMEN
AND THE ELDERLY
According to a study published
last year in Economics Letters by
Assistant Professor of Economics
Thomas Dee ’90 and Rebecca Sela
’02, recent U.S. highway speed
limit increases have raised traffic
deaths among women and the
elderly but not among men. The
federally mandated speed limit,
which went from 55 to 65 mph
in 1987, was repealed entirely in
1995, resulting in 70 mph or
higher limits in 29 states.
Using U.S. Department of
Transportation data, Dee and Sela
tracked traffic-related fatalities
from 1982 to 1999. Dee says,
“Although some recent research
suggests that higher speed limits
may actually promote overall
traffic safety and reduce total
fatalities, our study shows those
improvements obscure some
unfortunate trade-offs.” Speed
limits of 70 mph or higher led to
about 10 percent more fatalities
among women and 13 percent
more among the elderly but had
no significant effect among men.
Dee joined the faculty in
1999. His work frequently examines social and political problems
with an economist’s perspective.
—Alisa Giardinelli

FOUR JOIN BOARD
OF MANAGERS

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

AT THE DECEMBER MEETING OF
THE COLLEGE BOARD OF MANAGERS, four new Board members

6

were elected. David Gelber ’63
and Elizabeth Scheuer ’75 are
term managers, and Jed Rakoff
’64 and América Rodriguez ’78
are alumni managers. All will
serve four-year terms.
Gelber is an executive producer for CBS News, responsible for 60 Minutes and 60 Minutes II segments. His accolades
include a DuPont Award for a
report on prison labor conditions in China and a Peabody

COOL MUSIC MAN

CONDUCTOR DANIEL WACHS (TOP CENTER) AND SIX MEMBERS OF THE COLLEGE
ORCHESTRA POSED FOR A PUBLICITY PHOTO IN THE FALL. THE ORCHESTRA IS
REHEARSING AARON COPLAND’S APPALACHIAN SPRING AND SCHUMANN’S
PIANO CONCERTO WITH SOLOIST MACKENZIE CARLSON ’04 FOR A CONCERT IN
MID-APRIL. IN ADDITION TO HIS DUTIES AT SWARTHMORE, WACHS—WHO HAS
DEGREES FROM THE CURTIS INSTITUTE AND THE JULLIARD SCHOOL—HAS BEEN
NAMED A 2004 ARTIST IN RESIDENCE AT THE NEW YORK CITY BALLET.

Award for his investigation of
the AIDS pandemic in Africa. In
1997, Time magazine selected his
production Ed Bradley on Assignment: Town Under Siege as one of
the 10 best shows of the year;
and during a stint as a producer
for Peter Jennings Reports, he produced two Emmy-winning
reports from Bosnia, where he
was on assignment from 1993 to
1995.
Rakoff, a judge of the U.S.
District Court in Manhattan,
attracted attention in 2002
when he pronounced the federal
death penalty unconstitutional,
citing increasingly frequent

exoneration of death row
inmates through DNA testing
and other evidence. A former
criminal defense lawyer and federal prosecutor, Rakoff is the
author of three books, more
than 100 articles, and columns
for the New York Law Journal. He
is an adjunct law professor at
Columbia University.
Rodriguez is an associate
professor in the College of
Communication at the University of Texas; she worked earlier as
a journalist, including a stint as
a Los Angeles–based correspondent for National Public Radio.
Author of the 1999 book Mak-

LIFELONG LEARNING
OFFERS MORE COURSES
The College’s innovative Lifelong
Learning Program continues this
spring with two courses for adult
learners.
William R. Kenan Jr. Professor
of Political Science Kenneth
Sharpe is teaching Moral Reasoning and Human Happiness: Doing
the Right Thing. The course
explores moral choices and what
Sharpe calls “practical wisdom”
gleaned through life experience
(see “Collection,” June 2003
Bulletin).
Professor of Music Michael
Marissen is offering Bach: Music,
Politics, Religion, which explores
how Johann Sebastian Bach’s
music expresses religious and
other ideas. Marissen is the
author of two books, including
Lutheranism, Anti-Judaism, and
Bach’s St. John Passion.
Lifelong Learning, the brainchild of Susan Lippincott Professor Emeritus of Modern and Classical Languages Gil Rose, is in its
fifth semester. Its small, seminarstyle courses are taught by senior
or emeriti faculty members.
More information is available
at www.swarthmore.edu/alumni/life_learning.html.
—Jeffrey Lott

ing Latino News: Race, Language,
and Class, she has written many
articles on U.S. journalism and
U.S. Spanish-language media.
Scheuer, an attorney specializing in divorce mediation, was
formerly a staff attorney and
coordinator of the Pro Bono
Matrimonial Program of the
Association of the Bar of the
City of New York as well as staff
attorney in the legal services
division of the Jewish Board of
Family and Children’s Services.
From 1998 to 2002, Scheuer
served as an alumni manager.
—Carol Brévart-Demm

SWARTHMORE JOINS CENTER FOR STUDY OF PLASMA PHYSICS
TRACE/STANFORD-LOCKHEED INSTITUTE

SWARTHMORE SPHEROMAK EXPERIMENT

tion. Its goal is to provide
Swarthmore has joined a new
opportunities for collaboration
center for the study of magamong experimental physicists,
netic self-organization in
astrophysicists, and computer
plasmas. The other academic
modelers to further the underinstitutions included are the
standing of plasma both in the
University of Chicago, Princelab and the cosmos.
ton University, and the Uni“It's an honor for Swarthversity of Wisconsin.
more to be associated with
“We're trying to undersuch excellent research institustand the formation of largetions,” says Brown, an authoriscale objects in the universe,” COMPARISON OF A COMPOSITE IMAGE OF DATA FROM THE SWARTHMORE
SPHEROMAK EXPERIMENT (LEFT) SHOWS SIMILAR STRUCTURE TO AN ACTUAL
ty on experimental plasma
says Associate Professor of
physics who helped form the
Physics Michael Brown. “We
SOLAR FLARE (RIGHT). SWARTHMORE IS THE ONLY LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGE IN
center. “It really demonstrates
make miniature versions of
A NEW RESEARCH CONSORTIUM THAT WILL STUDY SOLAR PLASMA.
the high level of work our stuthese structures in our lab,
dents are capable of doing.”
The Center for Magnetic Self-Organizathen members of the center will use comBrown’s research has received almost
tion in Laboratory and Astrophysical Plasputer simulations to model our experiments
$1.7 million in external funding since 1995.
and the astrophysical objects to try to gain
mas is funded over five years with $11.25
—Tom Krattenmaker
million from the National Science Foundasome common understanding.”

CLARK KERR ’32

PEG SKORPINSKI

ON DEC. 1, RENOWNED PUBLIC EDUCATOR, former president of the
University of California, and longtime Swarthmore College Board
member Clark Kerr died, at age 92, at his home in El Cerrito, Calif.
A member of the College’s Board of Managers from 1968 to 1980
and emeritus member since 1981, Kerr will be missed not only by the
Swarthmore College community but also by university communities
around the country.
As president of the University of California from 1958 to 1967,
Kerr was confronted with the challenge of accommodating many
college-age baby boomers and conceived a plan to organize the
state’s expanding network of public colleges. He designed a multicampus university system, with three tiers of education, to serve the
most varied educational needs. At the University of California, the
elite research institution, places
were guaranteed for the top oneeighth of the state’s students; the
top one-third could attend schools
in the California State University
system; and all others wishing to
pursue higher education had access
to state community colleges. The
plan promised tuition-free education. In 1960, the California Legislature enacted it into law.
Kerr believed that every student,
regardless of financial status,
CLARK KERR’S DESIGN FOR
should have the opportunity of a
college education. His fierce lobby- CALIFORNIA’S HIGHER
ing on behalf of this belief resulted EDUCATION SYSTEM BECAME A
in the Basic Educational Opportu- MODEL FOR THE NATION.
nity Grants, later to become Pell

Grants, created by Congress in 1972. Kerr’s plan for California
became a blueprint for higher education throughout the country.
As a young man, Kerr became a Quaker and peace activist, participating in summer “peace caravans” to California with fellow students and learning firsthand of the nation’s economic hardships.
After graduating from Swarthmore with high honors in political science and international relations, he obtained a master’s degree from
Stanford University and a Ph.D. in economics from the University
of California at Berkeley. He taught labor economics at Antioch College in Ohio, Stanford, and the University of Washington, later
becoming a labor negotiator.
His tenure at the University of California began in 1945, when he
was appointed to head Berkeley’s new Institute of Industrial Relations. In 1952, he assumed the newly created position of Berkeley’s
chancellor and, in 1958, became president of the whole California
system.
When the 1964 free speech movement spawned a long series of
anti-establishment demonstrations on the Berkeley campus, followed by protests against a ban on certain public political activities,
Kerr was reluctant to halt them, acting against the wishes of the
university administration. Three years later, the California Board of
Regents, headed by newly elected Gov. Ronald Reagan—whose
gubernatorial campaign had promised to halt the protests—voted
to fire Kerr. Although pained by the dismissal, Kerr said that he left
the presidency as he had entered it—“fired with enthusiasm.”
Kerr continued to influence national education policy as chairman of the Carnegie Commission on Education. In 2001 and 2003,
Kerr published the first two volumes of The Gold and the Blue: A Personal Memoir of the University of California, 1949–1967 (Nancy
Bekavac ’69 reviewed Volume 1, Academic Triumphs in the March
2002 Bulletin).
—Carol Brévart-Demm

MARCH 2004

Legendary educator

7

TO INCORPORATE ISLAMIC CULTURAL STUDIES BETTER ACROSS THE CURRICULUM, the Sociology and Anthropology Department has created a
new tenure-track position for an Islam specialist. Farha Ghannam,
previously a nontenured assistant professor of anthropology, has
moved into the job.
The position was made possible by eliminating leave-replacements in the department, a sacrifice that Associate Professor of
Anthropology and Chair Miguel Díaz-Barriga says the faculty was
happy to make to keep Ghannam—who teaches Middle Eastern culture, globalization, ethnography, comparative perspectives on the
body, and Islam—on board.
Ghannam completed her undergraduate and master’s degrees in
Jordan and received a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin. She completed her early field research in
Jordan but has more recently switched her focus to the Islamic city.
Her 2002 book, Remaking the Modern, explores urban and domestic
space and politics in a working-class Cairo neighborhood. The book
received an honorable mention from the Middle East Studies Association of North America and has received accolades from peers.
Ghannam’s appointment marks the latest step in an effort to
expand opportunities for students to study what Assistant Professor
of Religion Scott Kugle ’91 calls “Islamic cultural studies.” Kugle,
whose research focuses on Islamic ethics, mysticism, and law, was
hired as a tenure-track professor after Sept. 11, after about a 10-year
campaign by Religion Department faculty members to add Islam to
the department’s courses about Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism,
and other world religions.
“There had been a long curricular planning process through the
latter part of the ’90s, looking at the areas in which we wanted to
expand the curriculum,” Provost Constance Cain Hungerford

JIM GRAHAM

Islam Specialist
G e t s N e w Te n u r e t r a c k Po s i t i o n

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR FARHA GHANNAM, WHO RECEIVED A DOCTORATE IN
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN,
SPECIALIZES IN MIDDLE EASTERN CULTURE.

explains. Three of the stated goals of The Meaning of Swarthmore
were to expand coverage of Islamic civilization as well as film and
media and cognitive studies.
“What changed with Sept. 11 was the urgency,” Hungerford says.
Kugle says he and Ghannam will be “a two-pronged anchor” to
guide students better in exploring their interest in Islamic religion
and culture through Swarthmore classes and study abroad. With
first- and second-year Arabic classes, which Visiting Instructor in
Religion Barbara Romaine began teaching last fall, and with what
Hungerford describes as a “smattering of courses” offered in Islamic
cultural studies by other departments, both say it’s too early to think
about creating an interdisciplinary minor. “Students always look for
the label of an interdisciplinary major or minor, but just having the
courses here—that’s what’s important.”
“What I’m struck by at Swarthmore is just how open the students are and how interested they are to study this area,” Ghannam
says. “It’s refreshing.”
—Elizabeth Redden’05

10 4 10 3
S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

IN THE EYES OF OTHERS

8

Americans seem to love rankings—especially
of colleges and universities. The annual college rankings issue of U.S. News & World
Report sells almost twice as many newsstand
copies as other issues of the (No. 3) newsmagazine. It’s no wonder that other national
publications are getting in the game. In
recent months, Swarthmore was ranked:
• No. 10 in The Wall Street Journal’s list
of the “Top 50 Feeder Schools” for graduate
admissions to elite business, law, and medical schools. The feeder list was led by Harvard, Yale, and Princeton; two other liberal
arts colleges—Williams and Amherst—made
the top 10.

• No. 4 among Kiplinger’s Personal Finance
magazine’s list of the “best values” in private colleges. Swarthmore was bracketed by
Williams and Amherst, which also offer generous financial aid. CalTech was first, followed by Rice University.
• No. 10 in the first of an annual ranking
of selectivity by The Atlantic, which considered the percentage of applicants admitted,
as well as the SAT scores and high school
class rank of matriculating students. The
magazine rated four-year colleges and universities together, with MIT leading the pack.
Swarthmore was first among liberal arts colleges, with Amherst, Pomona, and Williams
also in the top 20.

• And, in the Super Bowl of rankings, No.
3 in the U.S. News list of national liberal arts
colleges. Also in the top three? You guessed
it: Williams followed by Amherst.
Swarthmore’s Director of Public Relations
Tom Krattenmaker says that although he
thinks the process of ranking colleges has its
flaws, the lists give liberal arts colleges
important visibility alongside better-known
universities such as Harvard, Stanford, or
Princeton. “This information is especially
important for international students,” Krattenmaker said, “who are less familiar with
higher education in America and tend to rely
fairly heavily on rankings such as U.S. News.”
—Jeffrey Lott

Loses Four Great Friends

WITH WISDOM, AFFECTION,
AND EQUITY: JUDY LORD
The sudden death on Feb. 6 of Music and
Dance Department Administrative Coordinator Judy Lord, 67, shocked and saddened
the campus community. Starting her College
career in 1977 in the stenography pool, she
was appointed administrative assistant in
the Music Department in 1979. According
to Assistant Professor of Music Tom Whitman ’82, Lord, who was promoted to
administrative coordinator in 1999, was
“the center of this department.”
Always an advocate for crossing boundaries, building and strengthening community, and fostering diversity, Lord was active in
several groups such as the Cooper Founda-

LAUGHTER AND AN OPEN DOOR:
CAROLINE SHERO ’39
CAROLINE SHERO DIED ON JAN. 29 at age 84.
Born into the Swarthmore community, she
served it for more than 40 years, first as a
member of the administrative staff, advising
faculty on matters including housing, hospitalization, and retirement accounts and
managing many
aspects of the business operations of
the College. In
1978, she was
appointed controller.
She was the
daughter of the
late Lucius Shero, a
professor of Greek
LIFELONG SWARTHMORand former chair of
EAN CAROLINE SHERO
the Classics
Department, and
sister of Frances Shero ’41, a secretary in the
Engineering Department.
Shero graduated from Swarthmore with
a degree in economics and from the Wharton School with an M.B.A., joining the College staff in 1940. In 1959, she, her father,
and her sister were joint recipients of the
College’s John W. Nason Award, in recognition of their “distinctive contribution,

beyond the scope of their normal duties, to
the life of the College community.” She
retired in 1982.
At her retirement ceremony, a Minute of
Appreciation from the Board of Managers
was read by Chairman Charles Price ’34, recognizing Shero as a “major source of
strength for the College, loyal employee, and
faithful alumna.” She was further honored
by the establishment of the Caroline Shero
Scholarship Fund, to be used to “assist further generations of Swarthmore students.”

A RESUME OF CARING:
PAT TRINDER
The College community mourns the loss of
Recruitment Manager and Assistant Director of Career Services Pat Trinder, who died,
at age 60, on Feb. 6, after 26 years at
Swarthmore.
With patience and a sense of humor,
Trinder guided, counseled, and encouraged
both students and
alumni during the
intimidating
process of career
planning.
In 1997, when
Trinder was chosen
by vote of the senior class to speak at
their Last Collection, Class PresiCAREER COUNSELOR
dent Duleesha
Kulasooriya said:
PAT TRINDER
“She motivates us
to persist in our search and reminds us to
take it easy, when we are pulling our hair
out. She answers questions ranging from
‘What color tie do I wear?’ to how to negotiate a salary. She has a personal stake in our
future.”
“Enjoy what you do. Stay excited. Just go
out there and do stuff,” Trinder urged the
class during her talk.
In 2001, a group of alumni established
the Pat Trinder Endowment to help support
alumni mentors in the programs developed
by the Career Services Office.
Director of Career Services Nancy Burkett said: “Pat lived for her alumni and students—her spirit will stay alive in all of
those who loved and respected her.”
—Carol Brévart-Demm

MARCH 2004

THE COLLEGE COMMUNITY WAS DEEPLY SADDENED by the Nov. 13 death from breast
cancer of Pauline Allen, campus Protestant
adviser since 1992. She was 54.
Allen offered comfort, support, wisdom,
and inspiration to Swarthmore students
and other College community members of
all faiths. To provide students and faculty
with an opportunity for interfaith education and dialogue, she founded the Interfaith Center. A religion scholar and Quaker
with degrees from
Cornell and Harvard, Allen was
described in a
Phoenix article last
year as being there
for students “not
just as religious
adviser but also as
psychiatrist, personal mentor, and
PROTESTANT ADVISER
surrogate mother.”
In an unpubPAULINE ALLEN
lished essay written during her illness, “Ministry to Medicine: A Quaker Way” (see www.swarthmore.edu/bulletin/mar04/index.html),
Allen, a recipient of medical care for years,
encourages healing instead of criticizing the
medical system. “Helping people to fulfill
their call—asking them what they need,
entering their lives—is a path that … uplifts
both giver and receiver,” she wrote.

tion Committee,
Winter Institute,
Staff Advisory
Council, Women in
Sync, and First
Monday Committee.
To students, she
was a mother figure
who “called us all
‘honey,’ made sure
MUSIC AND DANCE
we didn’t work away
our vacations, and
DEPARTMENT COORDshowed a genuine
INATOR JUDY LORD
interest in our safety and well-being,” said Emily Shrader ’04
in the Feb. 11 Daily Gazette.
In a tribute to Lord, Associate Provost
Emeritus and Special Assistant to the President Gilmore Stott wrote: “Wisdom, affection, equity, skills to decorate the world’s
importunate e-mails, never too tired as not
to be wise…. We shall miss her terribly.”

JIM GRAHAM

MINISTER AND FRIEND:
PAULINE ALLEN

COURTESY OF THE LORD FAMILY

Staff

9

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

Turning a
Corner

10

fourth at the Centennial Conference
Championship
Meet with 536
points, behind
Franklin & Marshall (810), Gettysburg (730), and
Dickinson (558).
Andrew Koczo ’07
paced the Garnet
with a silver and
three bronze
medals. He earned
a silver medal in the
100 breaststroke
with a time of
1:00.15 and
grabbed a bronze
in the 200 breaststroke, at 2:13.78.
Koczo also won
bronze medals on
the 200 and 400
medley relays with
Jason Horwitz ’07,
MATT GUSTAFSON ’05 LED THE MEN’S BASKETBALL TEAM TO ITS BEST RECORD
Mike Auerbach ’05,
SINCE 1997, ONE WIN SHORT OF A CONFERENCE PLAY-OFF BERTH.
and Anders Taylor
’07, with times of 1:38.71 and 3:37.69, respec- points. Garrett Ash ’05 was the team’s top
tively. The 800 freestyle relay team of Auer- performer earning two silver medals. Ash set
the school record in the 3,000 meter run
bach, Taylor, Eric Shang ’04, and Horwitz
with a time of 8:40.40, eclipsing his own
placed third with a time of 7:15.57. Shang
record set two weeks earlier. Ash also capwon a silver medal in the 200 breaststroke,
tured silver in the 5,000, covering the disclocking 2:13.47.
Women’s swimming (6–4, 3–4) also fin- tance in 15:23.94.
Women’s indoor track finished ninth in
ished fourth at the championship meet with
the conference championship. Haverford
463.5 points, behind Franklin & Marshall
won the championship with 149.5 points.
(748), Gettysburg (562.5), and Dickinson
Njideka Akunyili ’04 was the Garnet’s top
(497). Tara Trout ’04 was the Garnet’s lone
performer, finishing second in the 800 in
individual medal winner, touching the wall
2:20.74 and sixth in the 1,500 (4:57.14).
in 18:12.52 and capturing the bronze in the
Badminton (6–1) tied for first place
1,650 freestyle. Martyna Pospieszalska ’06,
with Bryn Mawr in the PAIAW. At the
Leah Davis ’04, Melanie Johncilla ’05, and
Northeast Collegiate Championships,
Patricia Funk ’06 took bronze in the 400
freestyle relay in 3:41.79; and Katherine Reid Swarthmore posted a second-place team finish. Anjali Aggarwal ’06 and Candice Cherk
’05 joined Pospieszalska, Johncilla, and
Funk to do the same in the 800 freestyle, in ’07 reached the semifinals of the women’s
a time of 8:02.10.
doubles, earning a trip to this year’s NationMen’s indoor track tied for sixth place
al Badminton Championship.
with Ursinus with both squads compiling 37
—Mark Duzenski

JOHN FERKO

AT 12–13 OVERALL AND 9–9 IN THE CENTENNIAL CONFERENCE, the men’s basketball team
posted its best record since the 1997 season,
falling one game short of a play-off berth.
Leading the Garnet attack, junior forward
Matt Gustafson averaged 19.5 points per
game, finishing second in conference in
scoring and becoming only the second Garnet player to earn First-Team All-Centennial
Conference honors since Colin Convey ’97
in 1997. Gustafson became the 15th player in
school history to eclipse the 1,000-point
mark and is now in sixth place with 1,231
career points. Senior point guard Jacob
Letendre closed out his career as Swarthmore’s all-time leader with 394 assists and
156 steals. Letendre led the Centennial with
an assist/turnover ratio of 2.75. Senior forward Chris Loeffler set a school record with
44 career drawn charges and closed out his
career with 500 rebounds, finishing 10th on
the all-time list. Loeffler averaged 9.9 points
and 6.1 rebounds per game. Freshman center Jeff Maxim finished third in the conference in rebounding, averaging 7.4 per game.
He also averaged 9.9 points per game,
recording six double-doubles.
The women’s basketball team (16–9,
11–7) fell one game short of its fifth-straight
Centennial Conference play-off nod, finishing fifth in the conference. Senior guard
Katie Robinson led the Garnet in scoring at
16.2 points per game, becoming just the
sixth person in conference history to earn
First-Team All-Centennial honors three
times. Robinson also earned Kodak AllRegion honors for the third consecutive season. Closing her career as Swarthmore’s
leader in career steals (420) and free throw
percentage (86.7), hitting 247 of 285,
Robinson also finished second in field-goal
percentage (48.2), third in assists (281) and
scoring (1,652), fourth in 3-point field goals
(57), and fifth in rebounds (728). Robinson
holds the Centennial record for career
steals; and she ranks fourth in scoring, 12th
in career assists, and 16th in career
rebounding. Her 420 steals record ranks
13th in NCAA Division III history.
Men’s swimming (4–6, 3–3) finished

BY AUGUST 2004, if all goes
according to plan, the Swarthmore Co-op will be able to put
the oo back into “food.” After
10 years of planning and consulting, ground was broken on
Dec. 11 for a new co-op building, which will replace the village’s popular but dilapidated
grocery market, whose store
sign has been missing an o for
quite a while.
About 60 people braved
freezing temperatures to watch
helmet-clad dignitaries—
among them College Vice Pres-

ERNST DEMM

COLLEGE SUPPORTS
EXTREME MAKEOVER
OF CO-OP

SWARTHMORE’S “DOWNTOWN” GROCERY IS BEING REBUILT ON A NEW SITE.

ident of Community Relations
Maurice Eldridge ’61—wield
shovels. To the delight of those
present, Eldridge unexpectedly
announced an additional
$25,000 gift to the project
from the College, which fol-

lowed $25,000 donated earlier
during a drive to sell co-op
shares to community members.
Eldridge said that the second
gift was an indication of the
College’s support for the revitalization plan for downtown

Swarthmore, in which a new
co-op is regarded as central.
Located adjacent to the current co-op’s site and twice its
size, the new store will offer
more organic foods, a greater
selection of fish, and produce
supplied by local farmers. It
will also feature a sidewalk
dining patio.
When the new co-op is
completed, its forerunner will
be razed to make room for a
new street, Lafayette Court,
which will connect Dartmouth
and Myers avenues to ease
downtown traffic congestion.
—Carol Brévart-Demm

IN JANUARY, THE ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON PHYSICAL EDUCATION AND
ATHLETICS (ACPEA) submitted its report on the College’s Intercollegiate Athletics Program for the 2002–2003 academic year. The committee also devised a blueprint for future annual assessments.
The ACPEA, consisting of faculty members, students, and
administrators, closely examined four aspects of the Athletics Program: the quality of play, participating students’ perceptions and
experience, campus culture and support, and recruiting and admissions. Their report was two years in the making.
“We tried very hard to remain independent and allow the facts to
speak for themselves,” says Morris L. Clothier Professor of Physics
Peter Collings, who succeeded Associate Professor of Economics
Amanda Bayer as chair of the ACPEA this year. “Now, we hope people read the report, think about the findings and recommendations,
offer comments, and even take action if warranted.”
Some of the report’s findings follow:

the College’s intercollegiate teams. This includes the almost 15
percent of students for whom admissions consideration was
given for their athletic talent, in addition to those who were
admitted without that consideration. The committee’s report
suggested that, over time, the number of student-athletes at
the College will be sufficient to fill team rosters, although
some coaches believe the athletic ability of some of those students “must increase for some programs to become competitive.”
• Although the percentage of Asian American student-athletes
recruited for 2002–2003 was only slightly less than the percentage of Asian Americans in the class as a whole, the same
cannot be said for other minority groups. The percentages of
African American, Hispanic, and Native American studentathletes recruited for 2002–2003 were “significantly below”
their percentages in the class as a whole.

• Most student-athletes say their participation in athletics
is important to them and that their experience has been
positive.
• The average winning percentage of Swarthmore teams has
been greater than 50 percent for two of the past 10 years—and
for only one year in Centennial Conference play. In the last
three years, some improvement has occurred in average winning percentage overall but not within the conference.
• Most student-athletes think that members of the College
community feel “neutral to negative” about intercollegiate athletics; however, survey responses from faculty and students
who do not participate in intercollegiate athletics are “not
nearly as negative about athletics as the student-athletes
think.”
• Student-athletes in the incoming 2002–2003 class made up
almost a quarter of the numbers necessary to fill the rosters of

“It’s a very thorough and objective compilation,” says Director of
Athletics and ACPEA member Adam Hertz. “I think it demonstrates
the current state of the program with reasonable accuracy and provides a basis for future assessment.”
“I’m hoping the report, especially the findings on the culture,
will become known on campus and that everyone will have an
opportunity to see the important role that sports plays,” says
Dulany Ogden Bennett ’67, chair of the Athletics Review Committee
(ARC) of the Board of Managers. “I also hope that alums will see
that even though teams don’t always win, they’re doing pretty well
and that the students are enjoying themselves.”
Bennett says the report will be the main topic of discussion at
the ARC’s meeting in March. A copy of the report may be obtained
by e-mailing apace1@swarthmore.edu or calling the College’s News
and Information Office at (610) 328-8533.
—Alisa Giardinelli

MARCH 2004

R e p o r t S e t s “B a s e l i n e” f o r A t h l e t i c s R e v i e w

11

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

12

ASK JANET TALVACCHIA to talk about the significance of her
fields of interest—symplectic and differential geometry—and you’ll
get her talking about a lot of things. You’ll get her talking about the
limitations of Euclidean geometry for conveying the full potential
of spatial modeling; about how innovations in mathematics
sparked the Industrial Revolution; about skew symmetric forms,
geodesics, and the shape of space-time; and about Complexity One
Hamiltonian Torus Orbifolds, which were the focus of work she did
last year on a sabbatical at the Institute for Advanced Study. And
you’ll get her talking about video games.
“Think about Newton,” she says, using some historical context
to get to her point. “Calculus was abstract in 1699. People would
say, ‘Who cares about this?’ Now today, the things that Newton
understood are the basis for video games, or at least they were
when I was playing them. At some point, playing Pong, I realized
that it was all force equals mass times acceleration, all the angle of
incidence is the same as the angle of reflection. Today, kids have an
intuitive understanding of what to expect in a video game because
as a culture we have incorporated into our subconscious a sense of
geometry and, with it, an expectation of what will happen. In a couple of hundred years, we may be doing that with symplectic geometry.”
Beyond the partial differential equations and linear models and
differential topology, it’s that notion of getting students to become
aware of how mathematics undergirds their very existence that’s
most important to Talvacchia. In her view, to learn math is to learn
something that contributes to a greater understanding of the way
the world works and puts you in touch with what it means to be
human. “Forget about any specific computations,” she says. “Math
is organizing information according to a certain aesthetic to get
into a deeper understanding of phenomena in the world around us.
Why do you teach math or great music or literature or art? It’s
about the transmission of culture—you’re creating a society, and
this is the fabric of it.”
A big part of facilitating that transmission of culture is staying
current in the developments in her field that are shaping it, and the
support Talvacchia gets from the College for her research is one of
the chief reasons she’s at Swarthmore and not someplace else.
Since joining the faculty in 1989, she has had three leaves, including her most recent one last year at the Institute for Advanced
Study, where her work involved characterizing different classes of
space, exploring how they occur and behave. It’s work that may
have applications in many fields, including physics.
Doing research is intellectually invigorating, keeping her
immersed in the latest developments in her field, and it has benefits for her teaching as well. “Being actively engaged in research and
struggling with a current problem makes a big difference in the
classroom dynamic,” she says. “You need to position students to
live in their time—not 20 years ago, when you were a grad student.
And also, when you’re stuck on your own problem, it makes you
more sympathetic when students are struggling.”

JIM GRAHAM

Go
Figure

“BEING ACTIVELY ENGAGED IN RESEARCH AND STRUGGLING WITH A
CURRENT PROBLEM MAKES A BIG DIFFERENCE IN THE CLASSROOM
DYNAMIC,” SAYS PROFESSOR OF MATHEMATICS JANET TALVACCHIA.
“YOU NEED TO POSITION STUDENTS TO LIVE IN THEIR TIME—NOT 20
YEARS AGO, WHEN YOU WERE A GRAD STUDENT.”

Sometimes those struggles have less to do with intellect than with
drive, and teaching has more to do with being a motivator than
with explaining spatial principles. Talvacchia recalls meeting
recently with a young woman who was a good student but who had
a tendency to underachieve. “She came to me and said, ‘Why are
you guys so harsh? Someplace else I’d get an A.’ I said, ‘I know you
can get the A, and I really want you to get the A—why don’t you
just do it?’” The student went away angry but later came back and
thanked her professor for pushing her. “You have to help them take
themselves seriously and reach their potential,” Talvacchia says.
“You need to help them see the mechanism for improving and find
it in themselves.”
Talvacchia has enjoyed seeing her students go on to successful
careers in academia, economics, biology, cognitive science, physics,
engineering, and other fields. But more than watching them go
down any particular career path, what she likes most is seeing how
what they learned about mathematics relates to their understanding of themselves and their purpose in life. “One of Swarthmore’s
strengths,” she says, “is that we’re helping students connect to
themselves as human beings. As opposed to just pushing content at
them, there’s a seriousness of intellectual mission connected to
some broader purpose and connected to our existence as humans.
It’s part of the framework of the College.”
—Rick Bader

A MODEL OF STUDENT
ARTIST JAKE BECKMAN’S
HUMAN TENSION WAS
EXHIBITED ON CAMPUS
LAST FALL. HE WON—THEN
LOST—A COMMISSION TO
ERECT A 60-FOOT–LONG
VERSION IN DOWNTOWN

JAKE BECKMAN ʼ04

CLEVELAND.

FIRST THE GOOD NEWS: Art major Jake Beckman ’04 won a commission for a new public
artwork in a prominent location near Cleveland’s City Hall. His proposal for Human
Tension—a 60-foot–long sculpture of a
human figure trying to pull a large white
cube—was chosen by a jury of Cleveland
arts professionals and city leaders in October from a national field of more than 80
submissions.
Then the bad: In January, Beckman learned his design would cost too
much to implement. Originally seen as a
$100,000 project, the estimated cost eventually more than doubled, largely because it
would require, among other materials, several tons of steel. The planned location atop
an underground parking garage further
complicated the project.
“That new budget as well as the
logistical obstacles led the committee and
eventually me to decide that the project was

GO LOOK IT UP
Focus groups of Swarthmore
students will be sitting down
this spring with the developers of a revolutionary way to
search for books on any subject in libraries around the
world, without having to leave
the comfort of McCabe. The College participated in a pilot study
last fall of the Internet booksearch service RedLightGreen,
which aims to help users find
books most relevant to their
research and those most widely
held in academic collections.

no longer feasible,” says Beckman, a Cleveland Heights native. “But on the flip side, I
get to come back to school this semester.”
Beckman had originally planned to be home
during construction, missing the spring
semester of his senior year.
Beckman’s previous work consists
largely of pieces he has displayed on campus, including an oversized pair of red hightop sneakers hung from a dorm window and
a large “on” light switch affixed to the exterior of McCabe Library. He also built the
oversize Adirondack chair that delights students and visitors alike in front of Parrish
Hall. But Human Tension would have been by
far his most ambitious project.
“This was a learning experience
for Jake and for us,” says Cleveland Public
Art official Melanie Fioritto. “But nothing
takes away from the fact that he beat out
seasoned artists with years of experience
and won this competition hands down.”
—Alisa Giardinelli

From any computer
on campus, students, and faculty
and staff members
can tap into the
free service to
locate books on
millions of research topics.
“If a book appears in dozens
of libraries’ collections, it’s a
good bet that the book is considered an important source of
information in its subject area,”
McCabe’s fall newsletter
explained.
Even without formal results of

“ANTI-FEDERALIST REVOLUTION”
Oct. 5 marked the 50th anniversary of the
induction of Earl Warren as chief justice of
the United States, and the legacy of the Warren court remains one of the most influential
of the 20th century. But Carol Nackenoff,
professor of political science and an expert
on constitutional law, says that the “antifederalist revolution” of the current Rehnquist court threatens many of the landmark
decisions of the Warren era, which include
civil rights, press freedom, and privacy
rights. These decisions were often based on a
broad interpretation of the Constitution’s
commerce clause, says Nackenoff. Recent
Supreme Court decisions have narrowed the
commerce clause, limiting the reach of the
federal government. Warren excelled at
obtaining consensus in important cases, but
today’s court—like today’s body politic—is
“more fractured and divided, which often
makes its decisions less powerful.”
—Alisa Giardinelli

the pilot, it already seems that
students find it particularly helpful in identifying specific foreign-language editions of works,
Head of Reference Services and
Humanities Librarian Anne Garrison said. Of 608 “visitors” to the
site during the fall semester, at
least one was pleased enough to
drop an anonymous note in
McCabe’s suggestion box: “Thank
you for bringing the RedLightGreen demo! My research has
been forever changed for the
better!”
Flaws remain to be ironed

out, Garrison said. The feature
that ranks books by relevancy to
the topic sometimes inexplicably
rates critical texts as less relevant, she said. In response to
feedback, RedLightGreen has
also modified its search technique to drop nonessential words
from book titles to speed up
searches, she said.
Columbia University, New York
University, and the University of
Minnesota also piloted the project. Its Web site is www.redlightgreen.com.
—Colleen Gallagher

MARCH 2004

BITTERSWEET ART LESSON

13

THE
S WAT T I E
D AT I N G
GAME
IT’S A WORLD OF EXTREMES
WHERE NEUTRAL TERRITORY
IS DIFFICULT TO FIND.
B y Elizabeth R e dden ’ 05

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

P h oto graph s b y Ji m G raha m

14

are pulsing in Philadelphia; the
Center City restaurants are serving
up their most splendid dishes—
and everyone is still here, on
campus, a good 20-minute,
$3.75 train ride away from
where the excitement lies.
Those who are “single”
are perhaps in their rooms;
women are trying on halter
tops for a night out at a
Paces party or nuking some
popcorn for a low-key night
of movies with friends. The
couples, though, are doing
much of the same—borrowing videos from McCabe
Library—or hanging out with
larger groups in their hall
lounges or dorm rooms. Some
might have wanted to go out to
dinner earlier, but the Ville,
they say, doesn’t offer much in
terms of culinary excellence.
Without a car, few options
remain. As for the train to Philadelphia? Ross Messing ’04 says with a
scoff, “$7.50 for a date?” His friends
laugh. They agree. The $7.50, they point
out, is for only transportation, for one
person; $15 for two—plus dinner,
entertainment, the works. It’s just
easier (and cheaper) to stay on campus. Besides, who has time for that
kind of excursion?
“Going off campus? That’s, like, an
adventure. That’s like going cross-country,” says Lauren Sippel ’05.
Such is the state of traditional dating at
Swarthmore. During an informal discussion
over pizza in the Mary Lyon breakfast room
last summer, students repeatedly cited the
reasons for its near disappearance: no time;
no money; and, perhaps most interestingly,
no need.
“As close together as we are, we have
coed dorms, coed halls, so we’re constantly
interacting with one another. We don’t have
to go on dates to interact,” says Tom Winner ’05. Proximity, he says, allows the close
relationships students crave with the
bonus—or drawback, depending on your
viewpoint—of making the intermediary
step of dating unnecessary.

“It’s possible that just the physical environment of today’s college campuses makes
it difficult to have a traditional dating culture,” says Associate Professor of Psychology Andrew Ward. Citing the close, coed
quarters in which college students live and
study as making more official off-campus
dates unnecessary, Ward says this perceived
lack of dating is not limited to Swarthmore
but seems to be fairly universal among college students. “As we always say in social
psychology, situations matter, and often
they matter more than you think.”
Yet, as Ward points out, as important as
the situation is, it sometimes matters even
less than how it is perceived. He suggests
there is at least a possibility that more dating goes on here than people suggest, that
perhaps there is a “silent majority” that is
actually quite content with their dating life
here, and they simply go unnoticed as students search for confirming evidence of the
stereotype that people don’t date at Swarthmore: “People look for confirming evidence
for existing stereotypes and ignore information that doesn’t confirm,” Ward says. It’s a
process social psychologists call biased
assimilation.

T

rue or not, the dearth of dating is a
stereotype that students can’t seem to
sufficiently disprove. As Kristin Richardson,
campus program manager for the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), suggests, traditional one-on-one dating is generally overlooked, as students opt to get to know one
another in group settings instead.
“I think the friendship culture has supplanted the dating culture because the getting-to-know-you phase can be supplied by

THE CLOSE, COED QUARTERS
MAKE OFF-CAMPUS DATES
UNNECESSARY. NEW COUPLES AT
SWARTHMORE TEND TO SKIP THE
GETTING-TO-KNOW-YOU PHASE
THAT DATING FOSTERS. IN A
SHORT TIME, THEY BEGIN TO BE
KNOWN AROUND CAMPUS AS
“MARRIED COUPLES.”

the coed atmosphere that we all have. Back
in the day, boys weren’t allowed in girls’
halls, so you had to get to know them in a
planned environment,” Katie Davenport ’05
says. People who aren’t “dating” someone
hang out in large groups, “pre-partying”
with their sports teams before campuswide
parties on Saturday nights, cooking dinners
on nights off from Sharples with their a
cappella groups, or chilling in their hall
lounges with their roommates and the kids
from upstairs.
Particularly for freshmen, coed halls—
found in every dorm except Parrish and,
most recently, Dana’s third floor—serve as
lively social centers: Hall mates are easily
accessible partners for dinner and a
movie—on campus, with about six other
hall mates. (Dating among hall mates sometimes happens but is generally taboo: Resident advisers regularly warn freshmen to
avoid “hall-cest” right along with the
“freshman 15.”)
Lesley Goodman ’06 takes issue with the
idea that students don’t go on one-on-one
dates—the idea that they just hang out in
groups with their sports teams or musical
cast mates, beginning to “couple” only after
either a prolonged group-based friendship
or a drunken sexual encounter. “Maybe I
have had different experiences from [other]
people here, but I have gone out on several
casual dates with people at Swarthmore,
and it wasn’t a big deal,” she says.
“Did you go into Philly or what? Where
can you go on casual dates?” Messing asks.
“I have a car,” Goodman responds.
“Ohhhh.” A hush falls over the crowd.
That makes some sense.

I

f traditional dating is either unusual or
merely underground, what is expected
and joked about by students is a social scene
of extremes—a contrast between the casual
“hookup” and “joined-at-the-hip” dating.
The most common complaint is that few
opportunities exist in the middle.
“What happened to that middle ground
between being married and being friends? It
seems that with a lot of couples at Swat, if
you are a couple, you’re attached at the hip.
There are people I’ve only seen with their
significant other—I’ve never even seen
them alone,” says Sippel.
The situation is similar for queer students, says William Tran ’03, author of a

MARCH 2004

It’s Friday night at
Swarthmore. The clubs

15

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

16

popular Phoenix sex advice column last
spring: “Some people do the traditional dinner and a movie thing, whereas others
might be part of the hookup scene. As for
the complaints, I would have to say that
[those of gay students] are similar to the
straight Swatties’ complaints. Except I think
the queer Swatties’ complaints are much
more legitimate because their options are
even more limited. If you think a few hundred potential dates [might be] limiting, try
20, if even that.”
Yet for both straight and queer students,
Tran points out that some people still manage always to be dating someone. “You’re
really a Swattie if you know what an SMF is:
serial monogamy fiend.... They’re the people
who just always have to be dating someone.
For them, life at Swat would be utterly
meaningless if they weren’t in a relationship,” Tran wrote in a column last April. In
an article that had heads spinning and people talking, Tran wondered about those students who bounce from one “committed,”
monogamous relationship to another with
no more than what he calls a restful “dating
Sabbath” in between. These students, Tran
suggested, date in the same way that they
prepare for their classes—conscientiously
and constantly.
“It’s like they took an honors seminar on
relationships and now have it down to a
social science,” Tran wrote.

SOME FEMALE STUDENTS
SEE COMMITMENT-FREE
ENCOUNTERS AS EMPOWERING,
BUT A STUDY SUGGESTS
THEY RESULT IN A SKEWED
POWER STRUCTURE.

T

he perception that some people are constantly with their significant other might
come from the fact that, at a school the size
of Swarthmore, the opportunities to be
together are greater. Constant proximity
mandates that newly forming couples don’t
just see each other twice a week for movies
and milkshakes; instead, even relatively new
couples at Swarthmore tend to skip that getting-to-know-you phase that dating fosters.
They eat meals together in Sharples, spend
many of their evenings studying or watching movies together, and sleep in one another’s dorm rooms. In a short time, these new
couples begin to be known around campus
as “married couples.”
Eric Shang ’04, in a relationship with
Krista Gigone ’04 since February of their
freshman year, agrees that college relationships—particularly at a small school—are
almost forced to move at a faster pace. “It’s
definitely weird to not be able to avoid
someone,” he says. “That’s a terrible way to
put it, but it does make things progress
more quickly.”
He and Gigone say they used a summer

apart after freshman year as a time to get to
know one another as friends, something
they were not able to do as a new couple at
Swarthmore. Although they hated their
forced separation at the time, looking back
on it, they think it helped their relationship
reach a comfortable point. Now, like many
Swarthmore couples, they spend much of
their time together, although not off campus. “Dates off campus? That’s a good one,”
Shang says with a laugh. Instead, they
watch movies, study together, and fall asleep
over math problems.
“Basically, during the week, we just hang
out in each other’s rooms and study,” Gigone says.
“She kicks me when I fall asleep,” says
Shang.
“I don’t kick you. I poke you.”
“It’s hard to tell the difference when
you’re asleep.”

A

t the other extreme are the “hookups.”
“Hooking Up, Hanging Out, and Hoping for Mr. Right,” a national study of the
dating and sex habits of 1,000 college
women commissioned by the IWF, defines
“hooking up” as a physical encounter ranging from kissing to sex without emotional
commitment. Tom Wolfe describes the
process in his 2000 book, Hooking Up, a
New Journalism-style depiction of this and
other millennial phenomena: “In junior
high school, high school, and college, girls
headed out in packs in the evening, and

ture wherein females are left either dodging
their partners on campus to avoid awkwardness or instead waiting by the phone, hoping the hookup will result in something
more lasting—often a false hope.
“This is sort of where the sexual revolution took a wrong turn in that a lot of people see this free, noncommitment hookup as
being empowering or liberating. But the
emotional differences exist,” Richardson
says, suggesting that women often want
more than just a hookup when they enter
into these types of situations.
What’s more, the results of the study
indicate that those men who don’t play the
“hookup game,” and actually want to pursue
more lasting and meaningful relationships,
are often looked down on: “In several cases,
it appeared that ‘nice guys’ who tried to follow women’s stated wishes by asking them
on traditional dates were less interesting to

some women than men who interacted with
women in other ways,” the study reports.
Shang says he never thought that he
could comfortably ask a girl out on a date
freshman year. “It’s the culture of this campus,” he says.
“Eric said it seemed like if you asked a
girl out on a date, she would think you were
committing to much more than that,” says
Gigone.
“Aren’t first dates just for getting to
know people you would like to get to know
better?” he asks plaintively.

S

ome students think that hookups do
sometimes lead to the same result, particularly when alcohol helps them feel uninhibited enough to introduce themselves to
someone new. “Alcohol makes it possible to
approach someone,” Sippel says.
Julia Pompetti ’05 agrees:
“I know several people who
have gotten into long-term
relationships with people
that they hooked up with
when they weren’t sober.”
“I think that if you are
two consenting adults and
you want to hook up, I have
no problem with that,” says
Assistant Dean and Gender
Education Adviser Karen
Henry ’86, who serves as a

mentor for the Women’s Resource Center
and as a main College support resource for
sexual assault victims. “But anytime there’s
alcohol involved, there’s a possibility someone’s intentions can be misconstrued.”
Cases of sexual assault, she says, can result
from a hookup that goes too far while under
the influence of alcohol—but she’s careful
to lay the blame on the alcohol rather than
the act of hooking up itself.
The problem then seems to lie not in the
actual hookups but in expectations clashing—either in how far to go tonight or
where the hookup is going tomorrow. “I
think that if anyone goes into a situation
where they’re hooking up with someone and
they’re hoping it will turn into something
more, they’re going to be really sad,” says
Goodman. “I just don’t think throwing
yourself at someone sexually is the best way
to win their heart.”
“Call me old-fashioned.”

I

n this world of extremes, is the shortage
of traditional dating actually a drawback?
Assistant Professor of German Sunka
Simon, who has taught Introduction to
Women’s Studies and the Women’s Studies
capstone seminar, points out that traditional dating is not always balanced either. “The
whole dating culture based on male initiative keeps the woman ever ready. It also
keeps her sexually available because she’s in
the position of getting called on,” she says.
“It’s definitely this meat-market feeling.”
So if women are subject to derogation in
hookups and dating alike, how can they
win? The answer depends, in large part, on
what they are interested in winning: sexual
gratification, temporary companionship, or
a long-term relationship and potentially
marriage?
The “Mrs. Degree” is an anachronism—
and perhaps it always was for women at a
college such as Swarthmore. Many students
would reject the suggestion that one of their
primary college goals is to find a life partner; nevertheless, it is a wish some students
wistfully and almost shamefully express. Yet,
at the same time, many students are disillusioned with the institution of marriage. In
this era of divorce, they are skeptical that
they’ll ever find marital bliss. “I think a lot
of us expect to be married several times, to
declare our undying loves till death do us
Please turn to page 79

MARCH 2004

boys headed out in packs, hoping to meet
each other fortuitously. If they met and
some girl liked the looks of some boy, she
would give him the nod, or he would give
her the nod, and the two of them would
retire to a halfway-private room and ‘hook
up.’”
College hookups, says the IWF study, are
almost always connected with the alcohol
culture: Alcohol-induced encounters at parties lead to trips back to one person’s dorm
room, followed by what students like to call
“the walk of shame” back to one’s own room
the next morning. The IWF’s Richardson
says the study found this pervasive hookup
culture to be detrimental to female selfesteem. Although Richardson concedes that
some female students call such commitment-free encounters empowering, she says
they actually result in a skewed power struc-

17

THE

Va l u e

OF

Liberal
Education
LIBERAL LEARNING
IS WORTH ITS HIGH
COST—AND SHOULD
B E AVA I L A B L E T O A L L .

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

B y Pa u l C o u ra n t ’ 6 8
P h o to g ra p h s by B o b K r i s t

18

R
ep. Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-Calif.) believes
that because increases in college tuition in the
the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the federal government should begin to monitor those prices and
eventually penalize institutions that fail to control
them. McKeon’s Affordability in Higher Education
Act, introduced in October as part of the quadrennial reauthorization of the Higher Education Act,
would cut eligibility for federal student aid and
other federal grants to any college whose tuition
increased at more than twice the rate of inflation
for two years in a row.
McKeon’s bill is the latest evidence of the public concern that higher education is being priced
out of the reach of most American households.
Although it’s true that tuition increases have consistently exceeded the CPI, I believe that much of
the recent public discussion of higher education is
fundamentally wrongheaded. By emphasizing cost
rather than value, the public debate puts the cart
before the horse. Something can be expensive and
yet well worth the price—as is the case (for me at
least) with a good fountain pen. By the same
token, many things are inexpensive and still not
worth the price. Just think of some of the cheap
gadgets pitched on late-night television. Any serious discussion of whether higher education is
overpriced should start with a discussion on the
merits of its value.
Politicians and editorial writers have somehow
skipped over the question of what colleges and
universities provide. At the same time, substantial
evidence indicates that the public debate is scaring
people away; the publicity has led to widespread
public belief that college is more expensive than it
really is. A recent survey of high school students
and their parents shows that the median estimate
of college tuition was more than 60 percent higher than actual college tuition. And almost none of
the public discussion mentions the extensive
financial aid that most of the best institutions
provide to ensure access.
The relationship between higher education and
the larger society is increasingly troubled. Higher
education is called on to be “accountable” to society in a way that automobile companies, toy manufacturers, law firms, physicians, newspaper publishers, and retail establishments are not. Generally, when prices of goods and services in most
of the economy rise, it is expected that market
forces will sort things out. Were higher education
given the same status as the rest of the economy,
we would be subject to market discipline and
would be free to take our chances when raising

prices in response to increases in costs. Indeed,
there is no question that the market would allow
higher tuition rates; Swarthmore and other selective institutions turn away many students whose
families are fully willing to pay the “sticker price.”
Higher education is subject to greater scrutiny
than providers of other goods and services for two
main reasons. The first, which applies to the University of Michigan more than it does to Swarthmore, derives from the considerable contributions
that taxpayers make to colleges and universities.
The contribution is larger for public institutions;
however, with few exceptions, even private institutions benefit from a variety of governmental supports, including favorable tax treatment, scholarship programs, and grants and contracts. Taxpayers have a right
to expect that
their money is
spent prudently
and wisely.
A second
reason is that
college is a ticket to material
and personal
success, and a
social obligation exists to
ensure that it is
available to all
who can benefit
from it. This
latter goal can
be achieved by
various methods, including the combination of
high tuition and need-based financial aid. This
goal is consistently articulated by the leaders of
colleges and universities, yet, in the public debate,
the goal of access is often conflated with a single
mechanism of achieving it—low tuition. This is
an error in logic that has potentially disastrous
consequences. However the debate about accountability is configured, there is no question that
American higher education meets the market test;
the world literally beats a path to our door.
Three fundamental questions should be
answered before we conclude that the system is
broken: (1) Is higher education as currently provided at America’s best (and most expensive) institutions worth the cost? (2) Why is it so expensive?
(3) How can society ensure that the best education
stays within the reach of all who can benefit from it?

In the public debate,
the goal of access is
often conflated with
a single mechanism
of achieving it—low
tuition. This is an
error in logic.

MARCH 2004

UNITED STATES HAVE CONSISTENTLY OUTPACED

19

Higher education
cannot use
technology to
increase
productivity
because technology
does not change
the essential
process of
intellectual
engagement.

Four Good
Reasons For
Liberal Learning
Although these points extend naturally to
graduate and professional education, the
following four related reasons explain why
undergraduate education in the liberal arts
is valuable. All four derive from developing
habits of inquiry and enthusiasm for following the logic of one’s own thoughts and
knowledge. They are also related in the

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

mechanism that undergirds them.

20

Liberal learning is challenging work. Its
fundamental requirement is intellectual
honesty, and it cannot be practiced without
continual questioning that tests both body
and soul. Students and teachers have to be
open-minded and willing to explore that
which puzzles and troubles and interests
them—and to question each other. Liberal
education imposes great demands on all
who practice it, and meeting those demands
requires a set of abilities and inclinations
that are of enormous value in solving problems and living an examined and fulfilling life.
Liberal education is practical. The general
case for the practicality of liberal education
derives from the utility of intellectual honesty, rigorous work, and openness to new
ideas. An interesting and instructive example of this practicality emerged during the
recent Supreme Court case involving affirmative action at the University of Michigan.
Dozens of major U.S. corporations filed
amicus curiae briefs. Here is General
Motors’ (GM’s) explanation about why it
supported the University of Michigan’s position regarding diversity:
In doing research on whether GM
should involve itself in this lawsuit,
we have been impressed with a growing body of research that concludes
that college students who experience
the most racial and ethnic diversity in
classrooms and during interactions
on campus become better learners
and more effective citizens. Those are

exactly the types of persons we want
running our global business—better
learners and more effective citizens.
Michigan’s argument for diversity was
based, in no small part, on our conception
of liberal education. It is striking that GM’s
argument closely mirrors our own. The logic
of our case for affirmative action derives
from a definition of liberal education in
which difference—and openness to difference and the willingness to engage with difference—is vital to learning.
It is no surprise to experienced schoolteachers that difference is essential to learning and to productive activity. More surprising, the public debate over affirmative
action was a battle that divided the front
and editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal.
It cares about profit on the front page; if you
read between the lines, you see that corporate America has come to the correct conclusion that diversity and liberal learning are
good for the bottom line.
We don’t know what the next problem is
going to be. Dan Klionsky, a member of the
biology faculty at the University of Michigan, recently suggested that this argument
applies to basic research. I’ll go one step further and assert that it’s the best one-line
justification for both basic research and liberal education. If you don’t know what the
next problem is going to be, but you do

know that it will be important, at least the
following two capacities will be valuable:
First is the capacity to make sense of the
unfamiliar—a capacity that is at the heart of
liberal learning. Second is the social capacity
that derives from there being someone out
there who knows at least something about
the newly emerging problem. Basic research
increases this likelihood, and without the
habits of mind that come from liberal learning, who would take the time and energy to
engage in something so impractical—except
when it is vital?
Liberal learning is the best way to construct
interesting and fulfilling lives. There is nothing
like puzzling through an issue; understanding it; or “getting” a literary passage, painting, differential equation, folding of a protein, or the exquisite dissonance and consonance of a musical passage. The text, symbol, or sustained argument transports the
problem solver.
Liberal learning is good for the old
because it keeps us young; the young are
wired to learn. As we get older, we reacquire
the taste if we are lucky—or if we are liberally educated, something that allows us to
make our own luck. The continued joy of
learning is a value not well measured in dollars, although I can say as a parent that I
would pay a lot to assure that my children
have it.
This value was well expressed in an edi-

Why does college
cost so much?
Anything of value—and I trust that I have
made the case that liberal education is of
great value—will be even more valuable if it
can be provided at lower cost. So why is liberal education so costly, and what can we do
about it?
There is no doubt that college is expensive. The stated tuition at America’s best private colleges and universities generally
exceeds $25,000 per academic year. At
Swarthmore, tuition this year is $28,500—
and with room, board, books, supplies, and
other expenses, the College estimates the
total “cost of attendance” at $39,616. That’s
approaching the national median household
income, which was $42,409 per year in

2002, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
But does this mean that every student
wishing to attend college must pay this
price? According to U.S. News & World
Report, only 6 percent of U.S. undergraduates pay more than $24,000 in tuition and
fees, four out of five college students attend
public institutions, and about 40 percent of
undergraduates pay less than $4,000 in
tuition annually.
At many high-priced institutions, merit
scholarships and need-based financial aid
close the affordability gap. Swarthmore,
which continues to admit talented students
regardless of their need for aid, provides
about half of its students with a “discount”
on the published price based entirely on
family circumstances and ability to pay. The
average aid package last year, including
scholarships, loans, and work-study income,
was $26,013. Yet even full-paying students
received another sort of discount because
the real cost of educating a Swarthmore
student (excluding financial aid) was
$67,028. This hidden subsidy exists at all of
the best schools—in fact, it is what makes
them the best because their endowments
and other sources of income (largely resulting from philanthropy) provide more
courses, smaller classes, better faculty, superior facilities and technology, and enough
financial aid to admit the best possible student body.
On the surface, however, critics of higher education have a point. Tuition at
Swarthmore is six times what it was in
1979–1980. During the same period, consumer prices rose by a factor of almost 2.5,
and disposable personal income today is
about 4.2 times what it was 24 years ago.
Disposable personal income is a better
norm than consumer prices for evaluating
the cost of higher education (or anything
else), in that the ability of households to
pay for goods and services is largely determined by the available income. Even so,
had Swarthmore tuition risen at the same
rate as disposable income since 1979, it
would be approximately $19,740—30 percent lower than it is today.
Swarthmore is not alone. Its rate of
growth of tuition over the period is about
average for four-year institutions. At the
University of Michigan, tuition is lower but
has risen somewhat faster; it is now 6.6
times what it was in 1979–1980. In summary, college is expensive and becoming ever

more so. And remember, tuition does not
fully cover costs.
Two fundamental reasons drive this bad
news. The first is something that economists call Baumol’s disease, after William
Baumol, who first identified it in work he
did (with William Bowen) on the economics
of theater.
The essential mechanism that produces
rising standards of living is growth in productivity. When intellectual and technical
advances allow us to produce more goods
and services per hour of work, wages can
and do rise faster than prices—with the
positive outcome that an hour of work buys
more goods and services and the general
standard of living rises. Competition in the
labor market requires that workers with a
given set of skills and abilities be paid about
the same for anything that they do that
requires the same amount of effort. (Dis-

We are—and must
be—museums as
well as laboratories,
conservators as well
as innovators. There
is more to know
today than there was
yesterday, and there
will be yet more to
know tomorrow.
crimination, monopoly, and other phenomena temper the general applicability of this,
sometimes with great significance, but the
basic principle still holds.) Thus, as wages
rise in general, so too will the wages paid to
actors and schoolteachers, roughly preserving their position in the income hierarchy
unless great social change occurs.
But the technical advances that lead to
productivity increases don’t actually do
much for theater or higher education. You

MARCH 2004

torial published in the Ohio State Journal of
1870, at the time that The Ohio State University was founded: “The lawyer who
knows nothing but law, the physician who
knows nothing but medicine, and the
farmer who knows nothing but farming are
on a par with each other. They are all alike,
starved and indigent in the requirements of
true culture.”
Speaking of accountability, I claim that
colleges and universities should be held
accountable for providing a liberal education and an environment that supports it.
In the words of Stanley Fish, dean of the
College of Liberal Arts at the University of
Illinois at Chicago, “If colleges and universities are to be held ‘accountable’ to anyone or
anything, it should be to … academic values—dedicated and responsible teaching,
rigorous and honest research.” Although the
practical and vocational arguments matter,
and the economic value of innovations that
derive from university-based research are of
great social value, it is essential not to stake
all of the arguments for liberal education on
practical economics. If we sell ourselves as
being only practical, we risk being pushed
into accountability for only the measurable.
We could lose the ability to pursue the life of
the mind or even research and teaching in
domains that do not have an easily foreseeable payoff.

21

still need two actors—one to play Romeo
and one to play Juliet—just as you did 400
years ago. Their wages grow at the rate of
growth of wages in general, but their productivity hardly grows at all; the result is
that the cost of putting on the play, when
compared with goods and services on average, rises year after year.
The same applies to college teaching.
Higher education uses extensive modern
technology, but—except in the payroll office
and other business operations—we cannot

We must not
compromise on the
mission; we must
not do less than
what is required to
give our students—
and our world—
the best chance of
creating values,
solving new and
surprising problems,
and living
fulfilling lives.

arises.

in the last two years. As state support falls,
we hear increasing calls to privatize public
institutions. A fundamental shift in values
is needed to reverse this trend.
Private schools such as Swarthmore,
which receive little direct government funding, will continue to rely on philanthropic
support from individuals and foundations
to maintain the quality of their programs.
The smaller the alumni base (Swarthmore
has just 18,000 living alumni), the more
important it is that individuals take responsibility for the future of these precious institutions.
We must not compromise on the mission; we must not do less than what is
required to give our students—and our
world—the best chance of creating values,
solving new and surprising problems, and
living fulfilling lives. We owe it to benefactors and taxpayers alike to be as prudent
with resources and as businesslike as possible, but we should recognize and vigorously
articulate that some of the time it’s not possible to run an institution of higher learning
as one would a business.
The analogy to theater is instructive and
cautionary. Over time, as the performing
arts have become more expensive, they have
become less accessible to the general public.
Like theater and opera, liberal education
requires resources well in excess of tuition
(or ticket sales) to cover costs. I can think of
no ethical basis for limiting access to a
superb liberal education to those who happen to be blessed with families who are willing and able to cover much of its cost. And I
can think of no ethical basis for diluting the
quality of the education we provide. We are
a rich society. We have developed a set of
institutions of higher education that are
unparalleled in quality. We must articulate
that quality and its value, manage our
resources wisely, and continue to make
accessible—as Swarthmore always has—
outstanding education independent of students’ economic resources.
None of this is easy. But then, neither is
liberal education. T

State support as a share of the cost of
public colleges and universities has dropped
steadily for decades and more sharply during the past several years, forcing tuition
increases. At Michigan, state appropriation
has fallen by more than $1,400 per student

Paul Courant is the provost and executive vice
president for academic affairs at the University
of Michigan, where he is also professor of economics and public policy. This article is an
expanded version of his Alumni Collection talk
in June 2003.

the particular ways in which ideas and
objects are studied, but they do not make
either learning or teaching any more efficient. Good liberal education can and does
soak up all of the energy that we can give
it—and that, happily, is unlikely to change.
The other reason that the cost of a college education keeps increasing is that the
scope of the enterprise grows without
bounds. At Michigan, I often assert with
only slight hyperbole, we are responsible for
understanding—or at least chronicling and
making accessible—the total of human
knowledge and creative expression throughout all of history. As knowledge and interpretation change and grow, we in higher
education are responsible for both the new
and old. GM does not need to keep the tools
for 1957 Chevys and would have a difficult
time making one today. But at Michigan and
Swarthmore, we study Latin and Greek as
well as historical and current thought. We
are—and must be—museums as well as laboratories, conservators as well as innovators. We can do some compacting, but our
mission grows every year. There is more to
know today than there was yesterday, and
there will be yet more to know tomorrow.

What Can We Do?
Thus far, American higher education has
survived in the face of great economic and
political pressure because we have persuaded parents and legislatures, boards and
foundations, and alumni and other friends

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

to keep supporting this expensive set of

22

use it to increase productivity because it
does not change the essential process of
intellectual engagement. The ratio of students to teachers at Swarthmore hasn’t
changed much since I was a student, but the
wages of the faculty and staff have risen
with wages for highly skilled labor in the
economy as a whole.
The work of engaging with others
around ideas and knowledge has been little
changed by the Internet or, for that matter,
by movable type. Both inventions changed

activities. We must continue to provide that
support—and even increase it as the need

Dignity &

Destiny

C

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

L I F E A N D D E AT H H E L P E D S H A P E
S WA R T H M O R E ’ S H I S T O R Y.
Review by Jon Van T il ’61

the end of the 1968–1969 academic year, he would resign his presidency to lead Markle.
The Stapletons tell their story ably and in considerable detail.
They recall Smith’s efforts to regulate the scale and informality of
ourtney Smith, president of Swarthmore College from 1953 the Swarthmore folk festival, leading his critics to see him as someto 1969, lived and died in challenging times. In a new biog- one who believed it was all right to listen to Pete Seeger but not to
raphy, Darwin Stapleton, director of the Rockefeller Archive wear jeans while doing so (see March 1997 Bulletin). He pursued his
interest in proper dress with memorable statements such as that
Center, and Donna Stapleton, historian and social worker, tell
men should not renounce the “burden of a coat and tie.” Eventually
Smith’s story in a fair and often compelling fashion.
he
came to acknowledge that growing a beard might be understandAcademe is especially difficult for social scientists to compreable
and “to understand that the slovenly appearance [of students]
hend, which is why most of the best writing on academic life is
had
fallen
into ‘a patterned expression of conformity’ to a bohemidone by novelists—and then usually with an eye toward cynicism
an
code.”
and irony. The Stapletons avoid those traps and write as vivid a
The Stapletons depict the real Courtney (everyone spoke of him
study of academic life as this reader has ever encountered.
by
his
first name, if not always to his face) by describing one of his
The Stapletons base their study on some 50 interviews with famfavorite
recreations: arriving and seating himself for the enjoyment
ily and associates of Courtney Smith as well as on examination of
of
a
home
football game. The “decorum and distance” he exhibited
both his professional and personal papers. They document a life of
there
“was
metaphorically representative of his general relationship
53 years, which included a series of accomplishments, many known
to
students.
He had a formality and intentionality about himself
at least in outline to students of that time and faculty colleagues
and
had
always
been particular about his own dress, speech, and
within the College community. Before Smith came to Swarthmore’s
social
habits.
He
strongly believed that decorum was essential if one
presidency at the age of 37, his résumé included undergraduate and
was
to
be
taken
seriously
and to be influential.”
doctoral degrees in English literature from Harvard; a Rhodes
I
knew
Courtney
Smith
both as a student and, later, when I
Scholarship; service in the Naval Reserve during World War II,
joined
the
Sociology and Anthropology
working with black sailors; a stint on the
Department,
as my boss. I respected him (one
Princeton faculty and head of the Woodrow
had
to!),
and
I lived through his last days as a
Wilson Fellowship Program; and appointment as
faculty
member
at Swarthmore. His sudden death
American Secretary of the Rhodes Scholarship
was
a
shocking
experience.
Even then, how one
Program.
reacted
to
Courtney
said
at
least as much about
At Swarthmore, his accomplishments includoneself as it did about him.
ed articulating the special educational mission of
When the character of Courtney, son of
the small liberal arts college; recruiting and
Aydelotte, was described by the character Judas in
retaining a high-quality faculty; spearheading the
the 1967 Hamburg Show, his riff went: “The sysCollege’s opposition to the loyalty oath required
tem is evil, evil is bad, what is bad must be
of recipients of federal loans provided by the
destroyed. Courtney is part of the system, thereNational Defense Education Act; securing the
fore Courtney must be evil. Hold it—I’ve seen
financial base of the College through the buildhim, he ain’t bad, he talks nice, dresses nice—
ing of an endowment and alumni giving; preservnope we gotta get rid of him—there’s a lot to
ing the viability of the campus, particularly
think about … such a sweet face, such shiny sanagainst the long-threatened encroachment of the
dals, ooh and such impeccable sackcloth … he
highway known as the Blue Route; and providing THE NEW BIOGRAPHY OF PRESIDENT
really isn’t wrong often; but then people who
counsel and guidance to a generation of students COURTNEY SMITH IS AVAILABLE
speak only in analytic statements aren’t wrong
committed to social justice and political activism. AT THE SWARTHMORE COLLEGE
too often.”
He also served on the boards of many education- BOOKSTORE. CALL (610) 328-7756
al, civic, philanthropic, and economic developI am grateful to the Stapletons for explaining
OR VISIT HTTP://BOOKSTORE.SWARTHment organizations, including the Markle
why it was that this son of a Winterset, Iowa,
MORE.EDU.
Foundation. Smith announced in 1968 that at
lawyer and banker—who died when Courtney
Dignity, Discourse, and Destiny: The Life of Courtney C. Smith by
Darwin Stapleton ’69 and Donna Stapleton (Newark: University of
Delaware Press, 2004)

24

FORMER PRESIDENT COURTNEY SMITH’S

ACCORDING TO HIS BIOGRAPHERS, PRESIDENT
COURTNEY SMITH, WHO DIED IN OFFICE IN 1969 AT
AGE 53, “STRONGLY BELIEVED THAT DECORUM WAS
ESSENTIAL IF ONE WAS TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY AND

longer able to sustain him, a response the Stapletons identify as “self-sacrificial, … without any
appeal to metaphor.”
When Swarthmore presidents are recalled by the
Stapletons, Frank Aydelotte and the Honors
Program get their two pages, and John Nason merits
equal space for his consolidating leadership. Smith
brought to his term the task of imprinting the elite
social and academic traditions of Harvard and
Princeton on the life of the College. Faculty hiring—and, I would add, promotion and tenure as
well—was guided by these genteel values, as Smith’s
notes on a candidate interviewed in 1962 reveal: “I
was very favorably impressed by him. He is composed, strong, attractive, and I think quite able. I
liked his values, and the way he talked.”
The Stapletons document Smith’s remarkable
acceptance by the Philadelphia corporate elite, particularly in their eagerness to secure his services as
executive of the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society
when it appeared he was heading on to the Markle
Foundation. And nothing presented by the authors
indicates that Courtney did not foresee what was
coming when he resigned the presidency of
Swarthmore in 1968 for the comforts of doing at
Markle what he enjoyed and did well in the
Woodrow Wilson and Rhodes processes: selecting
promising young persons for establishment careers.
It seemed to me then, and still does now, that
Courtney knew that his time had passed at
Swarthmore, and that the College required a new
FRIENDS HISTORICAL LIBRARY
style of leadership that would be less distressed by
the acting out of the passions of young, and especially black,
was 13—really did need to wear those pinstripes. I was edified to
Americans.
learn of the (always so decorous but so remarkably manifold) ways
This book will be read eagerly by thousands of alumni who know
in which Courtney’s elitist values helped him advance toward the
that their lives have been touched, and even shaped, by Courtney
center of the educational, philanthropic, and even corporate estabSmith in the time they shared at Swarthmore. His successors find
lishment. These classic themes in American upward mobility—
themselves able to pursue such missions as global education with
dressing well, asking for a better job, complaining directly about
inadequate pay, serving rich mentors as a “fine young man,” marry- the confidence that Swarthmore College, benefiting from the life
and times and leadership of Courtney Smith, is remarkably posiing well, and planning carefully his path toward a Rhodes
tioned to advance in directions of its own choosing at such speeds
Scholarship—have usually been left to novelists to explore.
as it may also dictate. T
The Stapletons strike repeatedly at the heart of Courtney’s
search for acceptance by those in power. And the tale that they tell is
of a classic tragedy—for, finally, his rebellious charges at
Jon Van Til, who was an assistant professor of sociology at the College
Swarthmore, occupying the Admissions Office of his beloved
when Courtney Smith died, is a professor of urban studies at Rutgers
College, disappointed him so severely that his arteries were no
University–Camden.

MARCH 2004

TO BE INFLUENTIAL.”

25

A Dream Deferred
W H E N I T C A M E TO C O N D U C T I N G S C I E N T I F I C R E S E A R C H AT A N
U N D E R G R A D UAT E C O L L E G E , T H E BA R TO L R E S E A R C H
F O U N D AT I O N WA S A H E A D O F I T S T I M E — A N D S WA R T H M O R E ’ S .
By A lis a G ia rd i n e l li

Today, science education relies as much on close interaction and
joint research projects between students and faculty members as it
does on more traditional teaching methods. Not long ago, this
would have been almost unheard of; the chance for undergraduates
to conduct their own research, especially at a small college, would
have been rare.
At Swarthmore, the opposite is now true, and the College’s
participation in a new research center funded by the National
Science Foundation (“Collection,” p. 7) is the latest example.
But joining teaching and research is not a new idea. While
president of Swarthmore, Frank Aydelotte envisioned such
collaboration decades before it was a key feature of the country’s
top undergraduate science programs. Had it succeeded, his plan
would have been just as transformative to the institution as his
Honors Program. For a short time, it almost was.
PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE ARCHIVES OF
THE BARTOL INSTITUTE, UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE,
AND FRIENDS HISTORICAL LIBRARY

D

Bartol’s second director, Martin Pomerantz,
(left) often flew balloons from Bartol’s
roof for his cosmic ray experiments. He
expanded this work at the South Pole,
where the National Science Foundation
later named an observatory in his honor.

Except for some
wood paneling
and a derelict telescope on the roof,
there is no trace
that Bartol and
Swarthmore were
linked for 50 years.
In exchange for constructing a building
on Swarthmore’s campus with its own
funds in 1927, Bartol would pay the
College $1 a year for the land. The lease
also allowed the building to revert to the
College free of charge after 50 years. The
inscription over the door was covered
when the building was renamed Papazian
Hall in 1977.

Swarthmore’s campus and to pay the College $1 a year in rent for the land. The 50year lease stipulated that if either party
wanted to sever the relationship, it was
required to give three years’ written notice
of its intentions. Otherwise, the lease would
automatically be renewed in 25-year increments. If the relationship were to end,
Swarthmore would be able to acquire the
building for free.
For the next five decades, Bartol scientists employed Swarthmore students in various capacities, taught classes at the College,
and collaborated with faculty members. The
foundation also produced a host of scientists who made major contributions to their
fields, a feat made even more impressive
given its small size. Yet Bartol never became
an integral part of the College and, even
among the College’s science faculty, was
known well by only a few. When Bartol’s
lease came up for review in the 1970s, the
College ended its relationship with the
foundation and took possession of its
building. Renamed for Hapet Papazian,
whose son Paul Restall ’43 funded its renovation in his honor, it now houses the Philosophy and Psychology departments.
Except for some wood paneling, the

empty built-in shelves of the foundation’s
library, and a derelict telescope on the roof,
no tangible trace shows that Bartol was ever
here. Most people on campus have never
heard of it nor of the grand plans many
once believed would put Swarthmore at the
forefront of undergraduate research. What
went wrong?

H

enry Bartol made his fortune as a
Philadelphia sugar refiner. On his
death in 1918, he left more than $2
million to the Franklin Institute, where he
was a member, to establish an institute of
scientific study. W.F.G. Swann, now best
known for his pioneering work on cosmic
rays and high-energy physics, signed on as
its first director. In 1929, the year Bartol’s
facility opened, Swann received an honorary
degree from the College. In his citation,
Aydelotte noted the “eminence that has
brought [Swann] to the head of the great
research laboratory which we are happy to
welcome” to campus.
After Aydelotte left Swarthmore in 1939
for Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study,
the faculty published a treatise in honor of
his presidency. In it, Bartol is described as a
“tangible expression” of Aydelotte’s desire
to bring both students and faculty into
“intimate contact with active research
work.” They also stated their hope that in
the future, Bartol’s work “will play an
increasingly important role in the training
of undergraduates … and in the research
activities of faculty members.”
As the United States became more

MARCH 2004

uring Founders Day ceremonies
in October 1927, President
Frank Aydelotte welcomed the
arrival on campus of a new
organization devoted to scientific research, the Bartol Research Foundation.
Afterward, he and the Board of Managers
feted a dozen board members from Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute, which was affiliated with the organization, at a formal reception in the president’s home. Aydelotte later
wrote to Howard McClenahan, the institute’s head: “I hope that one result of the
presence of the Bartol Foundation here will
be many occasions of this kind.”
Aydelotte had good reason to be excited.
Although only a few years old, the Bartol
Research Foundation was already making a
name for itself in the study of the physical
sciences, and its dynamic and gifted director
presided over the efforts of more than a
dozen postdoctoral fellows involved in cutting-edge research. Aydelotte described its
move as the year’s “most important event in
the intellectual life of the College.”
He was not alone in this belief. In both
public statements and private correspondence, all of the principals involved in
securing the deal expressed their hope for a
fruitful and mutually beneficial relationship
between Bartol and the College. From the
beginning, those hopes included the expectation that Swarthmore undergraduates
would gain valuable research experience at
Bartol, and that the College’s science faculty
would benefit from their proximity to Bartol’s labs and their anticipated associations
with its researchers.
In return, Bartol scientists were expected
to benefit from their association with a college community and access to a college
library. They also hoped to enjoy a pastoral
setting more suitable for conducting
research than their cramped and noisy
Philadelphia location. Although several area
institutions were interested, McClenahan
said he chose Swarthmore because of Aydelotte’s “prompt and enthusiastic advocacy”
for the arrangement.
This arrangement allowed Bartol to erect
with its own funds a research facility on

27

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

28

involved in World War II, Bartol immersed
itself in government contract work, much of
it classified. In the early 1940s, the foundation was selected as one of two annexes of
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) Radiation Lab; the other was at
Columbia University.
“Everyone knew we were doing something,” Martin Pomerantz, a principal director of the program, says. “You didn’t need
clearance to know I was traveling to Boston.
But information about the nature of our
work was a well-kept secret.”
Despite its sensitive nature, the work
provided an opportunity for the kind of
relationships between Bartol and the College that Aydelotte had envisioned. Two
members of the Physics Department,
William Elmore and Ralph Shutt, were
among the first faculty members to work
closely with Bartol researchers. Both maintained close contact with the College while
conducting research in connection with
Bartol’s government work pertaining to the
war.
“Most of the people at Bartol had to
work for the service in one way or another,
or they’d be drafted,” says Swann’s son
Charles, also a Bartol physicist. “We did a
lot of work with magnetron cathodes [that
power radar]. I doubt it was known widely
on campus. Bill Elmore knew, and maybe
some members in engineering.”
Students also were recruited to Bartol.
“There were quite a few students who went
to work at Bartol when they had wartime
contracts,” says Morris L. Clothier Professor
Emeritus of Physics Paul Mangelsdorf Jr.
’49. “I was good friends with Dan Goldwater
’43, an engineering major, who worked a
number of years there during and after the
war.”
As a result of their success, Bartol came
out of the war bursting at the seams. However, relations were not as close between
those at the top as they had been under
Aydelotte. It is not clear exactly when they
began to deteriorate, but a precipitating
event set the tone for years to come.
In 1948, Bartol received a grant from the
Office of Naval Research to build a Van de
Graaff accelerator, which was used in the
then-burgeoning field of nuclear physics for
the study of atomic nuclei and subatomic
particles. At the time, such devices required
huge magnet rings, which, in turn, required
considerable space.

In 1931, a student took a candid photo of
the group that brought Bartol to Swarthmore on the steps of the Friends Meetinghouse the day the eminent physicist Sir
James Jeans spoke on campus. President
Frank Aydelotte sent copies to everyone.
From left: Howard McClenahan, secretary of
the Franklin Institute; James Jeans; John
Miller, director of the Sproul Observatory;
Aydelotte, and W.F.G. Swann, director of
the Bartol Research Foundation.

“I was put in charge of building this
thing, and we needed somewhere to put it,”
Charles Swann says. “We approached the
College, thinking we could do it across
Whittier Drive.”
It almost worked. Board minutes and
correspondence between Swann père and
President John Nason show the College
approved a site for the new lab directly
across Whittier from Bartol’s original building. Nason even suggested, and Swann
agreed, to have the College’s consulting
architect design the facility. But when it
came time to write the lease agreement, the
plan fell apart.
“They would not extend the lease beyond
the terms of the old building,” Swann says.
“Well, that threw the flag up. It sounded like
someone didn’t want us already.”
One Sunday, around the time of the
lease negotiations, Charles Swann met
Claude Smith ’14, then vice president of the
Board of Managers, as Smith came out of
the Friends Meetinghouse. Swann knew
Smith’s family and played golf with his son
Richard ’41. They had a “short but intense”
exchange.
“I was upset and tried to find out why
the College was objecting to the lease,” he
says. “He says he knew nothing about it. Of
course, that wasn’t true.”
Instead, Bartol bought 4 acres on Balti-

A prominent Philadelphia lawyer, Claude
Smith exerted enormous influence during
his 47-year tenure on Swarthmore’s Board.
He also acted as the American Friends
Service Committee’s legal counsel when it
issued an open letter to President Kennedy
that described nuclear weapons testing as
“utterly tragic” and “an affront to God.”

more Pike for the new lab and applied to
Springfield Township for approval. The zoning board ultimately approved the building
(on a spot now the site of a supermarket)
but not before reading at the hearing a letter
objecting to the plan. The letter’s author?
Claude Smith.
“I think his objection was tied to his
views on anything having to do with nuclear
devices and nuclear physics,” Swann says.
“Smith was a Quaker. I think he felt that
energy was used for bombs and was the
wrong way to go.”
Bartol built its lab, but the damage had
been done. Communication between Director Swann and President Nason all but
dried up, as did any efforts at that level to
establish collaborations between Bartol and
the College.

O

n his 75th birthday in 1959, Swann
retired. Succeeding him was Martin
Pomerantz, who came to Bartol in the
late 1930s as a Penn graduate student and
later pioneered astronomy and astrophysics
research in Antarctica.
“It was getting increasingly clear the
relationship with the College was not good,”
he says. “I had a different approach to relations with the College than Swann. I tried
to turn it around.”

Bartol physicist Don Kent (far
left) taught several classes in
the College’s Physics Department
and recruited students to work
at the foundation’s South Pole
station.

One of his efforts involved an NSF program for student research. Roman Jackiw
’61, a theoretical physicist at MIT, spent
more than a year in the program. “It was a
wonderful experience,” he says. “Except for
Bill Elmore, people at Bartol were the only
ones on campus who were active research
physicists. Being exposed to that was a very
profitable and stimulating experience.”
Jackiw’s experiences were almost a textbook example of the original goals behind
bringing Bartol to Swarthmore. “I had
tremendous interaction with the Bartol
researchers,” he says. “They were a great
encouragement to me. In fact, I published
my first paper, or presentation, with Bartol
people. I was a senior at the time, and that
delighted me.”
Instead of being the exception, experiences like Jackiw’s are far more common
today. In the last five years, students in the
sciences have published their work in several respected journals, and two, both in
physics, were named Rhodes Scholars. “Science is a living, breathing thing, and we
really want to impart that to students,” Professor of Physics Michael Brown says. “Getting them into a working lab to address a
problem that no human knows the answer
to—there’s no substitute.”
Pomerantz also made inroads with
Swarthmore’s next president, Courtney
Smith. “We were two new people with no
background in the problem and became
friends,” he says. “We hit it off and liked
each other. He did want to work somehow
with Bartol and encouraged it through the
honors seminar.”

Indeed, Pomerantz taught seminars in
the Astronomy Department at various times
throughout the 1960s. He was good friends
with Professor of Astronomy Peter Van de
Kamp, who occasionally conducted work at
Bartol, furthering the exchange. “I’m very
proud of my students,” Pomerantz says. “A
number of them are very well known scientists.”
One of them is University of California
Professor of Astronomy Sandra Moore
Faber ’66, who studied with Pomerantz as a
sophomore (see “Anselm’s Question,” June
2003 Bulletin). “The seminar with Martin
was one of the high points of my Swarthmore experience,” she says. “He was a lively

In the 1960s, a
steady train of
young Swarthmore
graduates worked
at Bartol’s Antarctic
research station.
and inspiring teacher, and he invited some
of the senior scientists at Bartol to talk with
us and enliven the class.”
NASA astrophysicist John Mather ’68
(see “In the Beginning,” August 1994 Bulletin) also recalls fondly his time with the
Bartol director. “I enjoyed his seminar quite
a lot,” he says. “I remember Martin had us
over for dinner one night. While we were
there, he got a call from Antarctica. They

had to do it using ham operators. It was
pretty cool.”
Pomerantz was not the only Bartol scientist to teach at the College. “They would
sometimes come to Bartol in sheer panic,”
retired Bartol physicist Don Kent says.
“Someone needed a sabbatical very quickly,
usually to take advantage of a research
grant. I was the youngest on the Bartol faculty, so I would go [substitute for the
Swarthmore professor]. I taught several
times at several levels. It was wonderful.”
In addition to running Bartol’s summer
program for students, Kent also oversaw its
South Pole Program and recruited several
Swarthmore graduates to their station there
to maintain the equipment used in Bartol’s
research in cosmic ray physics. “I replaced a
Swarthmore engineering grad when I went
there, and, when I left the South Pole station, another grad replaced me,” Doug
Thompson ’62 says. “It was almost a tradition coming out of the Engineering Department. There was a real train of us.” That
train continued to supply the South Pole
station with Swarthmore graduates well into
the next decade.
Interaction with College faculty members
also increased. Bartol joined Swarthmore’s
Sigma Xi chapter and held its own weekly
seminars on topics such as cosmic rays,
nuclear physics, and their Antarctica studies. “I rarely missed one, they were so interesting,” retired Physics Professor OleksaMyron Bilaniuk says. “Often, I went to Penn
but still felt I had all I needed right on campus. So, even though we were a small college
here, we had the atmosphere of a big
research university because of Bartol.”
Of the College’s physics faculty in the
1960s, Bilaniuk benefited the most from his

MARCH 2004

A product of the classical
British academic tradition with
a flair for the dramatic, W.F.G.
Swann (left) cut a unique figure
on Swarthmore’s campus as
Bartol’s first director. Martin
Pomerantz, his successor
(right), tried to improve
relations between Bartol and
the College.

29

proximity to Bartol. He frequented its
library and worked closely for a time with
Bartol scientist Stephen Shafroth, who also
taught a classical mechanics course at the
College. They even published a paper
together on radioactive sources of isotopes.
But Bilaniuk was the exception. Two
other members of the Physics Department
who did work at Bartol did not receive
tenure. And to professors such as John Boccio, who joined the physics faculty in 1967,
Bartol and the College seemed like two different worlds. “I knew them all, but they
pretty much operated in their own little
sphere,” he says. “They did work in fields
that didn’t overlap much with the work we
were doing and were able to spend all their
time doing research. We couldn’t do that.”

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

D

30

espite the steady, albeit still limited,
interaction with students and faculty
under its new director, Bartol’s relationship with the College was not improving the way Pomerantz had hoped. Perhaps
worst of all, most Swarthmore students still
never got the chance to participate in
research. Since the College occasionally
awarded master’s degrees (including 12 in
astronomy by that time alone), he had a
bold idea.
“It became clear to me early on that
research institutions need to have graduate
students,” Pomerantz says. “So I talked with
Courtney about setting up a doctorate in
physics.”
As it happened, the College was in the
midst of conducting a self-study, published
in late 1967, commissioned by President
Smith. Although the College’s accreditation
review was approaching, Morris L. Clothier
Professor Emeritus of Physics Mark Heald,
who served on the commission, says the
report was also triggered by a “groundswell
of faculty unrest,” mainly in the social sciences, over the teaching load and subsequent lack of opportunities for research.
“So, much of the thrust was how can
Swarthmore support more faculty scholarship,” he says. “That question ultimately
grew to include the physical sciences. Here’s
Bartol—can’t we enlarge the scope?”
In the course of the review, Smith asked
the commission to consider Bartol’s doctoral
proposal. Although it did not make any formal recommendations, the group “urge[d]
that the program be seriously and sympathetically considered.”

Top from left: Martin Pomerantz, Doug
Thompson ’62, and James Salisbury ’64
at Bartol’s cosmic ray observatory.
Bartol physicist Charles Swann (right),
son of the founding director, suspects
that some members of the Board of
Managers objected to Bartol’s presence
because of its nuclear physics program.

At the same time, Pomerantz forged a
relationship with Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia that effectively made
Bartol the site of Jefferson’s graduate
physics program. President Smith had earlier described to the Board of Managers the
“friendly and productive associations” that
had existed between Bartol and the College
in recent years—and Bartol’s hope to establish a doctoral program. In March 1968, he
told them he thought Bartol’s new affiliation
with Jefferson “would be beneficial to
Swarthmore.”
Less than a year later, President Smith
died. “The culture of the College changed
tremendously after Courtney’s death,” Heald
says. “The whole country was changing at
that time. Suddenly, faculty were involved in
sit-ins and public policy issues as opposed
to worrying over lesser campus issues.”
Pomerantz received the news of Smith’s
death by a cable telegram in Antarctica. “I
walked for hours on the ice literally crying,”
he says. “I’m not ashamed of that. He was a
wonderful man, and it broke my heart.”
“There must have been informal discussions about Bartol—gee, it looks like we
could do something, couldn’t we find a way
to make it happen?” says Heald, then chair
of the Physics Pepartment. “I was too busy
to be more creative than I was otherwise. It
was a time of tremendous social unrest and
upset. What led to the [self-study] was no
longer on the front burner.”

Needless to say, Swarthmore never
agreed to Bartol’s proposal. “I think the
main concern was that those guys were just
in a different business [from] Swarthmore,”
says Provost Emeritus Charles Gilbert, who
chaired the self-study commission. “There
was a concern about the detraction and distraction from undergraduate teaching. It
would have been a graduate program of
interest to only one or a few departments—
Physics, maybe Engineering and Chemistry—[which] would have raised the question of balance [among] departments.”
Gilbert says the commission was also
aware that Bartol’s future relationship with
the College was not a given. “That was
largely a question of real estate,” he says.
“We would have had to get into a whole set
of logistical issues about the space needs of
the College. I don’t think we wanted to publish on that.”
Indeed, the College was experiencing a
space crunch. Psychology and Biology were
both cramped in Martin, the science library
wanted to expand, and there was a desire by
the Board to free up faculty offices in Parrish’s north wing for income-generating
dorm rooms.
Within months of Smith’s death, the
Board’s Property Committee determined
that the College should not renew Bartol’s
lease. The Board as a whole agreed and
decided in October 1971 to inform Bartol
officially.

“The decision wasn’t something in which
I was actively involved,” Gilbert says. “Looking back, I don’t know why not. It looks now
perhaps like a lost opportunity. If people
had worked at it harder, if there had been
some kind of catalyst, if the College had
‘married’ Bartol, maybe it would have
worked. My sense is not enough people in
the College cared and wanted to make it
work.”
It is not clear whether, if Smith had
lived, the College would have acted differently. He had already made known his
intention to resign at the end of the
1968–1969 academic year. But his death
did rob Bartol of an important voice of
support.
“A tradition had built up around this bad
relationship between Swann and [Claude]
Smith,” Pomerantz says. “Somehow it perpetuated, and I never understood it. At the
end, mortar and stone—the building—
became more important than anything else
on campus.”

A

lthough the Board’s decision was
years in the making, it still came as a
shock to many on campus. “I knew
the 50-year period was coming up, but I was
really doing my own thing and didn’t know
any of the details,” says Howard N. and Ada
J. Eavenson Professor Emeritus of Electrical
Engineering David Bowler, who recommended students to Don Kent for the South

Pole. “When we found out, I and lots of
other people were very upset.”
“I am not aware that anybody in our
department knew that plans were being
finalized to not renew Bartol’s lease,” Bilaniuk says. “Among ourselves, we sort of
agreed that for the College as a whole it was
a convenient way to get a new building for
its disposal. Yet we felt very disappointed.”
The decision received front-page coverage in The Phoenix, which described the
administration’s belief that Bartol contributed little to “day-to-day education” at
the College. “We would have needed to
interact with them hourly for there to be a
change,” Boccio says. “They would have to
have been integrated into our department.”
“We always thought there should be
something there,” Heald says. “I knew there
was a great deal of frustration, especially for
Martin Pomerantz, on why the College wasn’t more forthcoming with its support. I felt
sorry we couldn’t figure out how to do it.”
Jackiw, who had been invited back to
Bartol to give a colloquium to an audience
that included Swarthmore students, regretted the decision. “Here was an opportunity
to have not superbig science but a chance to
do science on a level that small colleges
don’t usually hit,” he says. “And it disappeared.”
Professor Emerita of Astronomy Sarah
Lee Lippincott (M.A. ’50), then director of
the Sproul Observatory, knew Pomerantz
well. “I went over on the last day he would
be there to say a formal good-bye,” she says.
“It was a sad occasion for both of us. The
next day, he was gone.”
Word of Bartol’s impending departure
from Swarthmore quickly spread beyond
campus. “We were invited to every campus
in the area, including Haverford and Bryn
Mawr,” Pomerantz says. “They knew Bartol
better than Swarthmore. It was amazing.”

Pomerantz found a seemingly ideal
match in Bryn Mawr, which already had a
doctoral program in physics. Plans for a new
building were drawn. But the move never
happened. “At the last minute,” he says, “the
Franklin Institute ‘appropriated’ [Bartol’s
building fund] to try to save its rapidly sinking applied research laboratory in Philadelphia.”
“The accusation that the institute took
money from Bartol to cover expenses at the
[research lab] was raised all the time, and
there is a kernel of truth to it,” says Joel
Bloom, president emeritus of the institute
and a former division chief at its research
lab. “Marty felt he was being cheated, and
he was right. But it’s a matter of judgment.
Bartol did achieve a measure of what they
wanted but not what he dreamed of.”
The foundation eventually found a new
home at the University of Delaware. It has
been there ever since as the Bartol Research
Institute.
“Would we let them go so easily now?
No,” Boccio says. “With hindsight, if they
were the same department as exists now, we
would have interacted with them more.
They’re a world-renowned organization and
were in the 1950s and 1960s. The College
needed space, and I think that was the driving force.”
In an ironic bookend, Pomerantz
received an honorary doctorate from the
College before his departure, just as his
predecessor had on his arrival. “David
Bowler said, ‘We’re kicking you out of here
and giving you this honor,’” Pomerantz
says. “Swann got a degree when it started, I
got it when we finished. I think that’s wonderful.”
Was the relationship between a foundation devoted to research in the midst of a
campus devoted to teaching doomed from
the start? Was it just ahead of its time? If
the personalities of those key to the partnership’s success did not mesh, would the timing have even mattered? Although those
questions remain unanswered, one thing is
certain—teaching and research are now
inseparable in the sciences. But that trend
came too late to save what had been one of
Aydelotte’s grand plans for the College.
“Not too many students interacted with
Bartol,” Sandra Faber says. “It might as well
have been on Mars. That was a failure on
both sides. People don’t miss opportunities
like that anymore.” T

MARCH 2004

When the lease
ran out in 1977,
Swarthmore said
it needed the space
and claimed the
Bartol building.

31

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

A Natural

32

I

Choice

f you met a nurse-midwife and started a conversation, you’d
probably discover that the second-oldest profession is not what
you thought. Your new midwife friend could set you straight on
some common misconceptions.
Yes, a midwife’s job is primarily delivering babies—but she also
handles routine gynecologic and menopausal care.
No, she doesn’t insist on natural childbirth—but she makes sure
her patients are well informed of their options.
Yes, some midwife-assisted births are at home—but less than 1
percent. Almost all happen in hospitals, with less than 2 percent
occurring in out-of-hospital birth centers.
No, she doesn’t hate doctors—she appreciates what doctors do
but takes a stand against what she considers overmedicalizing a natural process.

N U R S E - M I D W I V E S R E C O G N I Z E T H AT
P R E G N A N C Y, B I R T H , A N D M E N O PAU S E A R E
NOT ILLNESSES BUT NORMAL PROCESSES.
By Be th L uce
I llus trations by Ma r len e Ru dginsky

If she’s an alumna—like Nancy Niemczyk ’88, who studied religion; Anne Vaillant ’89, an English literature major; or Robyn
Churchill ’88, who developed her own Latin American study program—she started in one direction, then took a turn into midwifery.
All three love their work: helping women do what comes naturally.
Every woman's experience of childbirth is different, but
Niemczyk often hears the same story. “Women tell me that when
they had their babies, they wanted to have natural childbirth, but
they just couldn’t do it without an epidural [anesthetic]. My
response to that is always: Was there a Jacuzzi for you to soak in?
Was there someone with you all the time who was helping you with
your breathing? And relaxation? And guided imagery? And putting
you on the birth ball, and helping you with positions, and getting
out the heating pad and cold packs, and taking you for walks, and

massaging you, and doing Reiki and therapeutic touch, and standing in the shower with you? And did they let you eat and drink to
keep your strength up? Were you surrounded by all the people
whom you wanted to be there?”
Usually, amazed that such a litany of possibilities even exists,
they answer, “Well, no.” Niemczyk tells them, “You didn’t even get a
fair shot at natural childbirth."
Niemczyk is clinical director and one of four midwives at the
Midwife Center for Birth and Women’s Health, a freestanding
birthing center in Pittsburgh. “We attract women who are interested in having their babies somewhere other than the hospital, in a
warm, homelike environment," she says. "Most births don’t require
doctors and hospitalization—and we're very good at knowing when
they do and transferring women to medical care when necessary.”
She also attends births in hospitals for women who
have higher risk factors or who just feel more comfortable there. She does prenatal care, attends the
labor, and does postpartum and newborn care
as well as routine gynecologic care.

sizes prenatal care and the education of the mother, empowering
her to make her own decisions about how she wishes to give birth.
Often, the difference between midwifery and physician care is a
matter of time and attention.
The medical part of a prenatal visit—checking blood pressure,
listening to the baby’s heartbeat, and measuring the growth of the
uterus, among other tasks—can be accomplished in about 4 minutes. Several studies show that doctor visits for all patients average
8 or 9 minutes. A routine prenatal visit with a midwife lasts 20 to
30 minutes. Most of that time is spent talking, answering questions, and alleviating fears.
“A woman will say, ‘I’m feeling this. Is this normal? I’m scared
about labor. Should we circumcise our baby? Why do I look so
huge?’ We’re a resource, and the woman gets a chance to pick our
brains,” says Churchill, who works with eight midwives at
Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Mass., where
they attend about 350 deliveries a year.
Niemczyk says that midwives encourage natural childbirth, but the decision whether to have
an epidural is up to the mother. “Lots of
women know they want to do that, and we’re
supportive of the individual woman’s choice.
But she also has the option to do all these
other things.”
Vaillant says, “We encourage women to
labor in as many positions as they can
because often that will help babies to rotate
and have an easier and faster labor, but once
you have an epidural—once you’re anesthetized—you can’t avail yourself of those
things because your legs don’t work.”
Vaillant is one of 11 midwives who deliver about
800 babies a year at Cambridge Hospital and the nearby
birth center. She thinks she has the best of both worlds: a
small, community-minded hospital that is affiliated with Harvard
University. Her practice enjoys “a pipeline to a lot of intelligence
and access to resources,” Vaillant says.

A growing
number of babies,
I
U
S
, around 90 percent of
mothers deliver babies on their backs,
whose births are
propped up from behind. According to the
National Center for Health Statistics,
attended by nursemost are attached to monitors limiting
their movement. A February 2003 article
midwives, are coming
in USA Today reports that at least half
receive an epidural, an anesthetic that
into this world in
numbs the body from the waist down and
voids the sensation of giving birth. The
a different
chance of having an episiotomy, a surgical slice
through delicate perineum tissue, is around 35 permanner.
cent. And typically, they won’t see much of their docNITED TATES

tors during the long hours of labor leading up to birth,
according to a recent study conducted by American Baby magazine.
But a growing number of babies, whose births are attended by
nurse-midwives, are coming into the world in a different manner.
The mothers move around freely during labor. They may choose to
have epidural anesthesia, but with better preparation and help,
they're less likely to need it. And midwives are usually with the
mother or close by for the entire labor process.
According to a recent study released by the Maternity Center
Association, women who had continuous care in labor by a nonhospital caretaker were 26 percent less likely than women who didn't
have such attention to give birth by cesarean section (C-section), 41
percent less likely to give birth with vacuum extraction or forceps,
28 percent less likely to use any analgesia or anesthesia, and 36 percent less likely to be dissatisfied with their birth experience.
Other studies show that women who receive continuous support
have shorter labors and their babies have higher Apgar scores (a 5category method of evaluating neonatal health). And those women
are far more satisfied with the birth experience, according to the
American College of Nurse-Midwives (ACNM), the certifying
organization for nurse-midwives.
One of the hallmarks of a nurse-midwife, as defined by ACNM,
is the recognition that pregnancy, birth, and menopause are not illnesses, but normal processes. A nurse-midwife’s practice empha-

MOST MIDWIVES WORK PRIMARILY WITH NORMAL, low-risk pregnancies.
To illustrate this to medical students at Mount Auburn Hospital, a
teaching facility affiliated with the Harvard Medical School,
Churchill shows them a huge obstetrics textbook, noting that 90
percent of the book is about the complications of pregnancy and
birth. Then, she shows them a midwifery textbook, which is just as
big but focuses on normal pregnancy and delivery, which make up
80 to 85 percent of all births.
The birth center does not take mothers bearing twins, over a certain weight, or who have had previous C-sections or known health
problems such as high blood pressure or diabetes. Those deliveries
are done at the hospital and co-managed by an obstetrician.
All ACNM-certified nurse-midwives in the United States work
with consulting physicians, who are available for consultation about
medical concerns and are on call if something goes wrong. At the
Cambridge Birth Center, which stands next to Mt. Auburn
Hospital, emergency help is a phone call away. “You call a special
number, and a river of people in blue scrubs comes across the parking lot,” Vaillant says. She called recently when a baby’s head was

MARCH 2004

N THE

33

out but the shoulders were caught. It took 40 seconds for help to
arrive.
The birth center has no surgical facilities, so if surgery or hightech equipment is needed, “We put her on a stretcher and run,”
Vaillant says. That takes 4 minutes in drills, although she’s never
had to do it. “You try to anticipate problems and head them off at
the pass,” she says. “If something is heading in the wrong direction, I won’t wait for it to become an emergency.”
Vaillant says that 27 percent of women who start out laboring at
the Cambridge Birth Center are transferred to the hospital before
the birth, although she notes that the midwives there are very cautious. After delivery, 6 percent are transferred to the hospital.

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

UNTIL THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY, most births occurred at home. Not

34

until the mid-1930s did most U.S. births occur in hospitals.
Although physicians often attended home births for those who
could afford them, midwives typically worked with underserved
populations—rural and urban women who had little or no access
to medical care. They still do. According to the ACNM, 70 percent
of clients nationally are considered “vulnerable” because of age,
socioeconomic status, education, ethnicity, or place of residence.
At Cambridge Hospital, which is located in a diverse immigrant
community, all the midwives speak a second language, says
Vaillant, who speaks Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. They’re
helped by 17 doulas, (Greek for “woman’s servant”) who provide
constant support throughout labor. Doulas are not clinically
trained but must take a three-day certification course. At
Cambridge Hospital, the doulas speak 10 languages and represent
about 20 cultures from Brazil, Central America, Haiti, and India.
In the Allston health center where Churchill spends half her
time, clients come from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Ireland,
Vietnam, and Thailand. Churchill says studying Spanish was one of
the best decisions she made at Swarthmore. “I’m on a listserv with
midwives from all over the country, and they’re all saying, ‘Spanish,
Spanish, Spanish.’”
A smaller portion of midwife clients—30 percent nationally—
are educated, upper-middle-class women like those at the
Lexington, Mass., office where Churchill also works. While building her midwife practice there, Churchill does mostly gynecologic
care, including contraception, Pap smears, annual exams, menopausal care, and teen sex counseling.
Niemczyk’s patients at the freestanding center in Pittsburgh are
largely women in their mid-30s with college degrees, who want to
be treated as equal partners in their own childbirth experiences.
The family-centered attitude attracts fathers, partners, and kids
who want to be involved in the birth. “We get a lot of people who
just feel like they don’t fit in anywhere else,” she says. “A lot of
interracial and lesbian couples, black Muslims—people who feel
like they’d be judged in a more traditional health care setting.”
Some are evangelical Christians who believe that midwifery is more
“biblical.”
Niemczyk’s practice also offers free services once a week, called
With Woman Friday. The Old English word midwif means “with
woman.”

NURSE-MIDWIFERY TRAINING WAS INTRODUCED in the United States in
the 1920s. But the profession boomed in the 1970s and 1980s,

when women’s liberation and social trends moved toward more
natural birth. In 1975, midwives attended 0.6 percent of all births
in the United States. By 2001, that number had grown to 7.5 percent of all births (10 percent of spontaneous vaginal births).
The number of people going into the profession is increasing,
too, at the rate of 14 percent a year. Yet despite the growth and popularity of midwifery services, the pendulum has swung away from
natural childbirth, with at least half of mothers receiving epidurals.
Midwives and doulas are alarmed at the increasing numbers of
induced labor and C-sections in the United States. The latest numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics show that 26.1
percent of births end in cesareans, a percentage that is steadily rising. Some fear the United States is heading in the same direction
as Brazil, where the rate of C-sections is about 30 percent for the
general population and as high as 90 percent in private hospitals.
Vaillant’s clients from Brazil used to be shocked when she suggested vaginal delivery. “Nobody in their families had ever had a
natural birth. Everybody had a C-section. They couldn’t believe we
would be so brutal as to suggest it,” Vaillant says.
Katie Hutchinson ’01, a student in the nurse-midwifery program
at Yale, plans to conduct research in Brazil this summer for her thesis on elective C-sections. Later, she’ll continue her research in
North America. Hutchinson notes that the decision to have an elective C-section is complicated and highly personal.
“I’m anticipating that women are looking for control—of time,
of the end result, of knowing what their birth experience will be, of
pain, of their bodies,” she says. “I think that women are also scared
into thinking that C-sections are safer for them and their babies—
that they eliminate potential complications of vaginal birth—when
that couldn’t be further from the truth.
“We’re at a point with reproduction and birth in this country
where we have technological intervention at every step of the
process—from fertilization onward—and it is not so great a leap to
make toward technologizing birth itself.”
Pioneering childbirth educator Penny Payson Simkin ’59, cofounder of Doulas of North America, is well known to midwives in
the United States. With a background in physical therapy, she is
also the author of classic books on childbirth and the inventor of
several devices to help difficult deliveries. She’s deeply concerned.

“Maternity care is in such an awful state in this country,” says
Simkin, citing a skyrocketing 69 percent epidural rate—80 to 90
percent in urban areas. “We have an epidemic of induction of labor
for social reasons. The cesarean rate is higher than it’s ever been
and is spiraling upward as fast as it can go. And there’s no medical
justification for this.”
Simkin says there is a growing tendency to induce labor for the
convenience of either the mother or doctor. “The more we learn
about the physiology of birth, the more we realize that it’s
the baby who should be deciding when labor will
start. When we interrupt that cycle, we may be cutting the baby off from a few valuable days or
weeks that may be important to that baby
developmentally.” Simkin noted that for
first-time mothers having induction for
nonmedical reasons, the rate of C-sections
is two to four times higher than for firsttime mothers going into spontaneous
labor. After C-sections, women face
increased risks of infertility and complications in placental implantation, a condition in which the baby is attached to the
wall of the uterus, as well as double the risk
of stillbirth, she says.
“I think we’re fiddling with a process that
is showing us more and more that it really
shouldn’t be fiddled with, except where there is a
clear indication that something is going wrong.”

pital based, to become like residents, to see as many patients as
possible and keep pushing people through. And that pushes your
epidural rate up and your C-section rate up and creates more of a
factory model,” Vaillant says. “I like this practice because I feel that
it’s one of the last bastions of midwifery as I understood it and
went into it to do.”
The Midwife Center for Birth and Women’s Health, where
Niemczyk works, has gone through its own birth pangs in the
last few years. It was originally built as a part of
Pittsburgh's Allegheny General Hospital. But when
Allegheny went bankrupt and was bought by
another hospital, administrators planned to
close the center. After clients protested and
delayed the closing, the midwives and clients
formed a nonprofit organization and
reopened last August as a completely independent, freestanding birth center. For
their efforts in keeping the birth center
alive, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette named
three of the center’s midwives among the
“dozen people who made this region a better place to live in 2003.”
On the insurance front, a recently
passed law in Pennsylvania gives midwives—along with obstetricians and other
high-risk specialists—some relief from malpractice costs. Laws in 33 states mandate that private insurance companies must cover midwife services, and Medicare is accepted for midwifery in every
state. The amounts for both private insurance and Medicare
are not yet equal to what obstetricians are paid (Medicare pays
midwives 65 percent of what it pays doctors for a typical delivery),
but inroads are being made. Some health insurance companies are
beginning to see the cost-savings of using midwives and doulas,
which result in fewer expensive interventions.
Vaillant thinks that midwives are beginning to understand how
to organize for political change. “We’re starting to learn that, and
there are ways in which we’re trying to affect legislation,” she says.
Vaillant, Niemczyk, and Churchill see changes in the demographics of midwives. “For a decade, most new nurse-midwives had
previously been labor and delivery nurses,” Niemczyk says. “A
recent trend is for people like me and Robyn and Anne, who have
another degree and have worked at some other career, to then make
a conscious decision to become nurse-midwives. I think that’s
adding some people with valuable skills to the profession.”
Churchill adds: “It’s fun to watch all these women’s studies
majors, or feminists, or medical anthropologists coming in to midwifery. It’s really broadening our profession and giving it a different
slant.”
Hutchinson shares the passion that led her fellow Swarthmoreans into childbirth careers. “There are so many things that
are exciting about this profession to me—the greatest of which is
the chance to be with women and their families at a transformative
and intense time in their lives,” she says. “To be able to share in
that excitement and facilitate it feels absolutely wonderful.” T

IN RECENT YEARS, MIDWIVES HAVE FACED sharply rising malpractice insurance costs and lack of support from the medical system. “I have to admit that midwives are not as seamlessly integrated into the health care system as I thought they were before becoming one,” Niemczyk says.
“Birth centers across the country close with regularity because
either their insurance is too high or the obstetricians refuse to back
them up,” Vaillant says. “Hospital-based birth centers are particularly vulnerable because there are a lot of people within the hierarchy who don’t particularly like us. If anything bad happens, they
don’t necessarily give us a second chance.
“There’s a lot of pressure on midwives, particularly if you’re hos-

Beth Luce is a freelance writer living in Port Orchard, Wash.

MARCH 2004

“Maternity
care is in such an
awful state in this
country. We have an
epidemic of induction of
labor for social reasons.
The cesarian rate is
higher than it’s
ever been.”

35

La Boom on Feb 26. Watch your e-mail and
snail mail for additional information on
Connection events and monthly happy
hours. Contact Ted Chan ’02 at tchan@chathampartners.net or (781) 856-8686.
London: Associate Professor and Chair of
the Biology Department Amy Cheng
Vollmer recently addressed members of the
London Connection regarding her research
at Swarthmore. Connection Chair Abby
Honeywell ’85 and Lucy Rickman Baruch ’42
organized this event.
New York: Barry Schwartz, Dorwin P.
Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and
Social Action, presented “Too Many Choices: Who Suffers and Why” to the New York
Connection in February. Connection
Chairs Lisa Ginsburg ’97 and Jodi Furr ’97
made the arrangements for this event,
which nearly 100 alumni attended.
Philadelphia:

Bruce Gould ’54, who has
served faithfully and extremely energetically
as Philadelphia Connection chair for many
years, has decided to step down. Bruce has

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

WELCOME NEW
CONNECTION CHAIRS

36

NATIONAL CONNECTION CHAIR Barbara
Sieck Taylor ’75 recently welcomed several new Connections chairs. David
Wright ’69 and Ted Chan ’02 are taking the helm in Boston, Trang Pham
’01 and Jacqueline Easley ’96 will energize the Metro DC /Baltimore Connection, and Chirag Chotalia ’03 and
Sonal Bhatia ’02 will start up a new
Atlanta Connection. The new San
Francisco Connection co-chairs are
Ruth Lieu ’94, Holland Bender ’93, and
Andy Wong ’02. If you live in these
areas, watch your mail and e-mail for
events.
Interested in starting a Connection
in your area? Contact the Alumni
Office at (610) 328-8404 or
pmalone1@swarthmore.edu.

coordinated countless events and helped
launch the Philadelphia Young Alumni
group. We thank him for his years of service.
Bruce is not going far away; he is chair of
his 50th reunion this year.
Jim Moskowitz ’88, who was co-chair of
the Connection for several years, will be the
new Connection chair. He will be aided by a
planning committee of alumni volunteers. If
you are interested in joining the planning
committee, contact pmalone1@swarthmore.edu.
John Randolph ’97 has energized
Philadelphia young alumni with a monthly
happy hour, which is drawing rave reviews.
More than 50 young alumni attended the
December event.
On Friday, May 26, the Philadelphia
Connection will attend the exhibition of
Manet and the Sea at the Philadelphia Museum of Art at 6 p.m. Tickets cost $20 for
adults and $17 for seniors (age 62 and
older). To reserve a ticket, contact Bruce
Gould ’54 at brucegould54@hotmail.com,
or call (215) 575-9320 by April 15.
Watch your e-mail for the location of
other upcoming events. Make sure you are
signed up for the Philadelphia listserv by
visiting http://alumni-office.swarthmore.edu/mailman/listinfo.

PHILADELPHIA

NEW YORK
COURTESY MIN LEE

Boston: A Mardi Gras party was held at Club

PATRICIA MALONEY

COURTESY JOHN RANDOLPH

CONNECTIONS

HONG KONG
TOP: LIZA DADONE ’97, KIM DULANEY ’94, WILL
DULANEY ’97, CHRIS JAHNKE ’98, JOHN RANDOLPH ’97, CHRIS ROSE DUBB ’97, AND JACLYN
JAHNKE ’99 (LEFT TO RIGHT) ATTENDED A YOUNG
ALUMNI GATHERING IN PHILADELPHIA.

Seattle and Portland: Kenneth Sharpe,

William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Political
Science, recently visited Portland and Seattle, where he discussed “Practical Wisdom”
with alumni. Despite a delay in Portland for
an ice storm, more than 100 alums in both
cities enjoyed these events. Many thanks to
Peter Jacobs ’95 and Seattle Connection CoChair James Schembs ’01 for making these
events possible.
Tucson, Ariz.:

New Connection Chair Laura
Markowitz ’85 was host to Swarthmore College Bulletin Editor Jeffrey Lott for an event
in January.

CENTER: PROFESSOR—AND BEST-SELLING
AUTHOR—BARRY SCHWARTZ (LEFT) SPOKE AT THE
NEW YORK CONNECTION ABOUT HIS BOOK, THE
PARADOX OF CHOICE. HE IS JOINED BY CONNECTIONS CO-CHAIRS JODI FURR ’97 (CENTER) AND
LISA GINSBURG ’97.

BOTTOM: SIX ALUMNI REPRESENTED SWARTHMORE
AT A COLLEGE FAIR IN HONG KONG LAST OCTOBER: FROM LEFT: CYNDI LEGER ’03, BRUCE HAN
’86, MIN LEE ’00, TERRY GRAHAM ’94, AHNA
DEWAN ’96, AND MICHAEL YU ’88.

WHAT MAKES A FAMILY?
This year’s annual Sager Symposium, to be held on March 26–27,
will focus on queer families in
their many forms: social, political, and legal. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender families
have tremendous significance in
our current political climate and
demand active engagement. The
symposium will bring together
gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons to offer their perspectives.
Speakers are Ruth Vanita of
the University of Montana, who
will speak on her current work,
tentatively titled Love's Rite:
Same-Sex Marriage and Its
Antecedents in India and the
West; S. Bear Bergman, creator of
Ex Post Papa: Life As A Freelance
Dyke Dad; performance artist and
activist Ingrid Rivera; and David
Tseng, recently named executive

UPCOMING EVENTS
Sager Symposium ................................March 26–27
What Makes a Family?
Alumni College on Campus..........................June 2–4
Teach Your Children Well: Reflections on the ’60s
Alumni Weekend ......................................June 4–6
Reunions and More for Alumni of All Ages
Alumni College Abroad....................September 12–16
“The Hidden Ireland” with Professor Helen North
director of Parents and Friends of
Lesbians and Gays. For more
information, contact Sarah Kelly
’05 at skelly1@-swarthmore.edu.

SIGN UP FOR LISTSERVS
The College has listservs for Connections, classes, and many
special-interest groups. To sign
up for a listserv, visit http://alumni-office.swarthmore.edu/mailman/listinfo. Listservs for

upcoming reunions are automatically populated with e-mail
addresses in the College’s data
base. However, if you are interested in receiving Connection emails, sign up and keep your
address current. Listservs are
especially helpful when events
develop quickly, as they often
do, and we don’t have time for
a traditional mailing. Stay connected!

VOTE FOR COUNCIL
Alumni Council ballots will be
mailed in March. Please take a
few moments to review the ballot
and vote for your representatives
to the council. You also may vote
on-line at http://alumniballot.com. The Web site will be active
after the ballot is mailed.

THE HIDDEN IRELAND
Explore Ireland with Professor
Emerita of Classics Helen North
during this year’s Alumni College
Abroad, Sept. 12–16. Participants
will visit parts of western and
northern Ireland that Swarthmore
travelers have never seen together. They will also return to some
favorite sites like Dingle Peninsula, the Burren, and Dublin City.
For a complete itinerary and registration, visit www.swarthmore.edu/alumni_abroad.html or phone
Edda Ehrke at (800) 451-4321.

Entrepreneurs Gather on Campus

MARCH 2004

COURTESY OF RANDALL LARRIMORE ʼ69

elists on a topic of interest to them, such as
RANDALL LARRIMORE ’69, retired president and
financing
start-up companies, operating family
CEO of United Stationers, was the keynote
businesses,
and pursuing entrepreneurship
speaker at the 2004 Lax Conference on Entrewithin
the
corporate
setting.
preneurship on Sunday, March 21. His address
Three
panel
discussions
completed the after“Taking the Crum to the Board Room” focused
noon
program.
on value-driven leadership in the business
Margaret Helfand ’69, architect and founder
world.
of
Helfand Architecture; Margaret Redmon ’79,
Before his time with United Stationers,
president of Honey Locust Valley Farms; and
North America’s largest wholesale distributor
Dick Senn ’56, an entrepreneur with an emphaof business products and a Fortune 500 comsis on real estate development, addressed envipany, Larrimore held top management posironmental issues they see in their businesses.
tions at companies including MasterBrand
Roger Holstein ’74, president and CEO of
Industries, Master Lock Co., Moen, Beatrice
WebMD, and Arthur Obermayer ’52, president of
Home Specialties, and Pepsico. Currently, LarriMoleculon Research Corp., discussed strategies
more is chairman of the board of Olin Corp.,
for
Internet businesses.
where he has been a director since 1998. He is
RANDY LARRIMORE ’69 WAS KEYNOTE
The
third panel focused on international busion the boards of Campbell Soup Co. and
SPEAKER FOR THE FIFTH ANNUAL LAX
ness. Panelists included Stephen Schwartz ’84,
Evanston Northwestern Healthcare, serves as
CONFERENCE ON ENTREPRENEURSHIP.
president and COO of Lion Apparel; Susan
an advisory partner with Wind Point Partners,
Levine ’78, managing partner at Quince Hill
and is a trustee of Lake Forest Academy.
Partners; and Adrian Merryman ’80, former CEO of London-based
The conference, held in the Eugene M. and Theresa Lang PerScreen PLC.
forming Arts Center, began with Larrimore’s address and ended
The conference, now in its fifth year, is funded by an endowwith a reception. Topical roundtables, a new component of this
year’s program, allowed time for student and alumni participants
ment created by the estate of Jonathan Lax ’71. It was jointly
to speak informally with each other and with the conference panorganized by the Alumni and Career Services offices.

37

CLASS NOTES

More than

I ever
thought
possible

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

BOB KRIST

“I know that I am not
alone in believing that
Swarthmore helped me
achieve more than I ever
thought possible when
I was at the College.
When I am asked why,
my response goes like this:
‘At Swarthmore, I felt I
had to run to keep up with
everyone else. After I left
Swarthmore, I kept the
same pace and discovered
I was running faster than
just about everyone else.’
I am grateful.”

38

—Mary Murphy Schroeder '62

the meaning of

s w a r t h m or e

BOOKS & ARTS
Won the Battle,
Lost the War?
William Saletan ’87, Bearing Right—How
Conservatives Won the Abortion War,
University of California Press, 2003

I

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

NARAL PRO-CHOICE AMERICA FOUNDATION

have often been awakened from a dogmatic slumber by a Swarthmore student but
seldom as profitably as by William Saletan’s
Bearing Right. Despite my happy memory of
Saletan at Swarthmore, I was not looking
forward to reviewing his book, thinking that
the topic of abortion had grown stale. Yet the
publisher’s advance sheet contained lavish
praise from Charles Krauthammer and E.J.
Dionne. Plaudits from pundits as widely separated politically as these two correctly suggests that Bearing Right contributes fresh
material worth reading by both liberals and
conservative hot-button themes to build a
conservatives.
To
save
Roe
v.
Wade,
coalition and avoids wedge issues that
The subtitle, How Conservatives Won the
might
divide pro-choice groups. Also
Abortion War, anticipates Saletan’s thesis.
pro-choice
liberals
notable
are the hardball tactics. The video
Writing much like an observer embedded
was
sprung
at the last moment to defeat an
with abortion rights activists, he tells how
abandoned
women’s
rights
amendment
that dealt with only governpro-choice defenders of Roe v. Wade adapted
ment
funding
for abortions, not the right as
their strategy and message to win over
in
favor
of
conservative
such.
“swing voters” but lost the larger battle and
According to Saletan, “the most impormuch of their own integrity. Whether proanti-government
themes—
tant
turning point” in abortion politics
choice liberals “blew it” or were beaten by a
since
Roe v. Wade was the “political marstronger and more effective opponent is one
and
lost
their
souls
riage”
of Kate Michelman, the idealistic,
of several important questions for the reader
feminist
leader of the National Abortion
to decide after reading the book.
in
the
bargain.
Rights
Action
League (NARAL), and HarriThe historical narrative begins in 1986,
son Hickman, a pragmatic craftsman of winin Gov. Bill Clinton’s Arkansas. A pollster is
ning political messages. Both of them had observed the Arkansas
using focus groups of men and women to explore attitudes about
campaign and similar efforts in other states, and both shared a view
abortion, hoping to build a pro-choice coalition and forestall a state
that the pro-choice cause needed to build a “mainstream” coalition
constitutional amendment that would ban public funding for aborby emphasizing themes more acceptable to conservatives. The fight
tions. The research revealed marked differences in female and male
over Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987 also
views of freedom. Women were concerned about individual rights
moved the abortion rights cause away from “women’s rights”
to make reproductive choices. Men saw freedom as the absence of
toward anti-government themes such as “privacy.”
any outside interference—especially by the government—in one’s
The new message became “Who Decides? You or Them?” It was
family, business, school, or community. A second major finding was
calculated to energize activists and to work on the street as well.
the sensitivity of the abortion issue to circumstances such as
This formulation appealed to conservatives by abandoning women’s
parental consent, funding by taxpayers, or the presence of rape or
rights for an anti-government theme; however, as Saletan points
incest.
out, it left open the content of what would be decided and who
A television video developed from these themes helped defeat
would be included in “you” and “them.” Is the issue the bare right
the referendum. In this video, a teenage girl, books in arm, walks
home from school. Imagine, says the video, your own “sweet daughto an abortion? The right itself can be narrowly interpreted and
ter … raped and pregnant,” and the government saying that “you,
“them” (parents, husbands, doctors, or ministers) moved over into
your doctor, your daughter [have] no say in this matter.” The ad hits
the “you” column. Pro-lifers quickly picked up on this opening,

46

A Fortuitous ’78 Reunion

interpreting “you” to include persons other than the pregnant
female. They won a series of legislative victories on collateral
issues, such as parental notification and consent, restrictions on
reproductive counseling, and elimination of public funding for
abortions.
NARAL’s efforts to cultivate pro-choice conservatives achieved
success of a sort with the 1989 election of Douglas Wilder as governor of Virginia. Michelman declared it a harbinger of a “new
mainstream,” a majority pro-choice coalition. In fact, Wilder did
set a trend: of pro-choice conservatives winning by loudly defending a right to abortion where rape or incest were involved and with
family and others participating in the decision. This restricted right
typically went along with various other conservative planks such as
anti-tax measures, right-to-work legislation, and support for the
death penalty. With this kind of formula—to mention only two
examples—Zell Miller defeated Andrew Young in the Georgia
Democratic primary, and George W. Bush beat Ann Richards in the
Texas gubernatorial election, raising a serious question of whether
NARAL was winning or losing with their “mainstream” strategy.
After Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1991)—which established the
less protective “undue burden” test—and the Republican electoral
victories of 1994, both sides in the abortion controversy moved
toward a partial accommodation. Abortion rights advocates more
or less accepted the conservative pro-choice formulation of preserving a narrow constitutional right to an abortion with limitations such as parental consent and restrictions on governmental
funding. For their part, pro-lifers moved away from their frontal
assault on Roe toward less direct—though not necessarily less
effective—ways of protecting the fetus: defending the woman’s
right to have her child; extending health benefits or tort protection
to the unborn child; outlawing “partial birth” abortions or use of

fetal material for experimental purposes. These moves served the
pro-life cause by other means: winning small victories, wearing
down opponents, and occupying strategic positions.
Chapter 8, “The Right to Choose Life,” deals with women being
pressured—even coerced—by families, employers, judges, probation officers, and social workers to have abortions or practice contraception. It provides an unusual perspective on the abortion
struggle, shows how pervasive such practices have become, and
speaks volumes about the additional ways in which women can be
manipulated and denied choice because of an agenda that is not
their own.
Saletan carries his narrative through the election of 2002, in
which Republicans won eight of the nine Senate seats that NARAL
had targeted. Of NARAL and the abortion rights activists, he says,
“Thirty years after Roe v. Wade and 16 years after the dark days of
Arkansas, they had come nearly half circle. They had saved Roe, but
in the streets and in their souls, they had lost the struggle to define
it.”
Bearing Right ends abruptly, without one of those chapters distilling wisdom and offering advice. Perhaps that is best. It is a
thoughtful and deeply unsettling book that brings to mind many
questions but most important: Why did NARAL and the abortion
rights activists lose the larger battle for a woman's right to exclusive
control of her own body? And what does that loss say about the
American political system and our attitudes toward women, especially the young and the poor? Saletan didn’t set out to answer
those questions but rather to describe what happened and to make
the reader think about the consequences. He fulfills that objective
superbly.
—David Smith
Richter Professor Emeritus of Political Science

MARCH 2004

Two classmates who had not seen each other
for years found themselves working together
last year on a project for New York’s Jewish
Museum. Jeffrey Shandler ’78, an assistant
professor in the Department of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University co-wrote with J.
Hoberman Entertaining America, examining
the relationship between American Jews and
the entertainment media. The book accompanied an exhibit at the museum, for which
Shandler was a guest co-curator working
alongside the museum’s associate curator
and project director Fred Wasserman ’78.
For another museum exhibit, Wasserman
co-edited with Esther da Costa Meyer the
catalog Schoenberg, Kandinsky, and the Blue
Rider. The book’s five essays—including one
by Wasserman—explore in vibrant detail the
friendship between the painter and the musician and the inspiration they drew from each
other during an era of extraordinary artistic
synergy.

47

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

48

Paul Golub ’84 directed Celle qui courait
après la peur, a collaboratively created play,
which is loosely based on the Grimms’ tales
and toured throughout France in 2003.
Golub’s latest project, Corneille’s L'Illusion
Comique, was presented from March 3 to 27
at the Théâtre Firmin Gémier in Anthony,
close to Paris.

Tom Grubb ’66, The Mind of the Trout: A
Cognitive Ecology for Biologists and Anglers,
University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. For
cognitive ecologists, fish biologists, animal
behaviorists, and inquiring anglers, this
book answers questions including the following: How and why do trout think? Why
can trout smell better than humans but not
remember as well?

BRET MORGAN

Leo Braudy ’63, From Chivalry to Terrorism:
War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity,
Alfred Knopf, 2003. This history of masculinity—and its metamorphosis—argues
against the assumption of innate sexual
behavior by stressing human changeability
and responsiveness to circumstances.
Tamar Chansky ’84 (author) and Phillip
Stern ’84 (illustrator), Freeing Your Child
From Anxiety: Powerful, Practical Solutions to
Overcome Your Child’s Fears, Worries and
Phobias, Broadway Books, 2004. This practical step-by-step guide equips parents
with a new understanding of how anxiety
works and innovative strategies for
addressing this most prevalent and pressing mental health challenge facing our
youth today.

Kirsten Silva Gruesz ’86, Ambassadors of
Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino
Writing, Princeton University Press, 2002.
Documenting Spanish-language cultural
activity in the 19th century, this literary
history argues that Latinos are not newcomers to the United States.
Gerard Helferich ’76, Humboldt’s Cosmos,
Gotham Books, 2004. The author recounts
the journey of German naturalist and
adventurer Alexander Von Humboldt
through the Amazon and over the Andes
from 1799 to 1804, the first extensive scientific exploration of Latin America.
Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell
Hochschild ’62 (eds.), Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New
Economy, Metropolitan Books, 2002. This
collection of 15 essays reveals a new era in
which the main goods extracted from the
Third World are no longer natural
resources and agricultural products but
female labor and love.
Chris Laszlo ’80, The Sustainable Company:
How to Create Lasting Value Through Social
and Environmental Performance, Island
Press, 2003. This book shows how stakeholders—from employees to local communities and nongovernmental organizations—are a fast-growing source of business innovation.
Michael McClintock, Pamela Miller Ness
’72, and Jim Kacian (eds.), the tanka anthology, Red Moon Press, 2003. Nearly 70
international poets, who are practitioners
of the ancient and modern genre of tanka,
provide more than 800 poems in this compendium.
Marcus Noland ’81, Korea After Kim Jong-il,
Institute for International Economics,
2004. This policy analysis examines possible successor regimes and their various
implications for South Korea.
John Picker ’92, Victorian Soundscapes,
Oxford University Press, 2003. The author,
an assistant professor of English at Harvard University, draws on literary and scientific works to recapture the sense of
aural discovery during the Victorian era.
Jonathan Raymond ’94, The Half-Life,
Bloomsbury, 2004. This debut novel is
about two friendships that are separated by
generations but connected through a mystery in the Pacific Northwest.

Roy Parvin ’79 was recently awarded a 2004
National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship
Grant in Prose Literature. He has also won
the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction,
and his work was included in Best American
Short Stories 2001. Parvin is the author of
The Loneliest Road in America, a collection of
stories, and In The Snow Forest, a book of
three novellas.

©JONATHAN BLAKE

Other Books

In his new novel, The Nature Notebooks (University Press of New England, 2004),
Don Mitchell ’69 reveals the attitudes of
three Vermont women in a writing class
whose good intentions lead to environmental
terrorism and tragedy. Mitchell, who teaches
creative writing at Middlebury College, has
published three other novels, a screenplay,
three essay collections, and A Guide to Vermont. He and Cheryl Warfield Mitchell ’71
operate a sheep farm in New Haven, Vt.

How to Succeed in Life:
Writing Impressive Class Notes for the Alumni Magazine
The following is adapted with permission from Zack Arnstein and Larry
Arnstein ’67, The Dog Ate My Resumé, Santa Monica Press, 2004.
Larry writes for TV in Santa Monica, Calif.; Zack recently graduated
from Pitzer College. Look for Larry’s work at www.ironictimes.com, a
weekly satirical Web zine.

Your name here is immersed in a
comparative cultural anthropology
fieldwork study, comparing belief systems and social interactions of various
ethnic groups and subgroups in contemporary your geographical area
here.

Your name here designed and built his own cliffside home in
the Amazon rain forest, which was featured simultaneously in
Beautiful Homes Magazine and Architectural Digest. As soon as it
was finished, he and his wife (the former Miss
Brazil) moved in and wrote a memoir of their
travels together as goodwill ambassadors for the
United Nations and erotic dancers, which won
the prestigious Christopher Columbus Award for
Literature in Portuguese (over the strenuous
objections of the Catholic Church). He hopes
any classmates who happen to be traveling in
the Amazon rain forest will drop by.

A good thing to keep in mind is that in
writing these notes, less is more. Let your classmates begin to wonder what happened to you
before checking in with:

THE MAIN THING IS TO
KEEP YOUR ACHIEVEMENTS
S U F F I C I E N T LY FA R R E M OV E D
FROM PLACES YOUR
C L A S S M AT E S A R E L I K E LY
TO L I V E I N O R K N OW A B O U T.

Although your classmates don’t really
need (or want) to hear about your progress every year, it’s a good
idea to keep them posted every five, or at the most 10 years, lest
they forget how successful you are, and by comparison, what inferior lives they are leading. After a suitable interval, you might check
in with:
Your name here was married last spring to made up name
here two weeks after she represented Brazil in the Miss South
America Contest, which she won. She will have to postpone
work on her Ph.D. thesis in biochemistry at the University of
São Paulo in order to fulfill her obligation as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations. Your name here will also be putting his career as a professional soccer player and psychotherapist on hold in order to support his new bride during her
ambassadorial travels and erotic dance performances.

After a bidding war broke out among the larger
publishing houses for Adventures in the Amazon
Rain Forest, the sequel to their first book, your
name here and his wife, the former Miss Brazil,
were able to retire, giving the bulk of their
advance to the indigenous peoples of the rain
forest. He was then invited to an unnamed
South Pacific island to start their space program, rekindling a childhood interest in rocketry. The launch of their first communications
satellite was successful, rescuing the island
from the threat of poverty, for which he was
made the first honorary member of the Royal
Family. He regrets he cannot reveal the location
of this island, as its miles of unspoiled beaches
and its beautiful, healthy and fun-loving native
population could suffer adverse consequences if
discovered by Western tourists.

That should keep them in the proper state of
envy, until it’s time for:

Your name here writes that his son, your name
here Jr., has just graduated magna cum laude
from Harvard, and is choosing between a Rhodes and a Fulbright Scholarship. His daughter, made up name here, was
elected Governor of Jalisco, Mexico, the youngest governor of
Jalisco on record and the first woman governor.

The main thing is to keep your achievements sufficiently far
removed from places your classmates are likely to live in or know
about so that your achievements remain credible.
Summary for students: The whole point of the Class Notes section in your alumni magazine is to engender an intense sense of
envy in your classmates, and, if at all possible, an even more
intense sense of self-loathing as well.
Summary for parents: It’s never too late to make your classmates
hate themselves as they contemplate your superior life. If you
haven’t managed to do this with your own or your children’s lives,
you still have your grandchildren’s lives. T

MARCH 2004

IN LIFE, AS IN COLLEGE, YOUR SUCCESS AND
SATISFACTION are measured not by what
you actually manage to achieve, but by
the spin you are able to put on them. In
other words, what you write in the Class
Notes section of your alumni magazine.
Because you have only just graduated,
your first entries won’t have to be terribly impressive. But it’s never too soon to
begin to embellish whatever it is you’re
doing so that you’ll seem to be successful, and more important, your friends
and classmates, by comparison, will
seem to be failures.
Let us imagine that instead of moving swiftly into that first great job and
career triumph, you’ve spent the better
part of year one, postgrad, sponging off
your family and various friends and possibly friends of friends. This is no reason
not to submit a note to your class secretary for publication in the Bulletin. It
might read:

You can let that sink in for quite a few years, but sooner or laterit will be time for another installment:

49

PROFILE
“Bring Me a
G reat Case ”
A S S O C I AT E U . S . AT TO R N E Y
JAMES SHEEHAN ’74 ENJOYS
T H E C H A L L E N G E O F C O M BAT I N G H E A LT H F R AU D .

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

62

young man, subsidizing the cost of his
Swarthmore education as a cabbie while at
home in Florida on break, picks up a fare. Chatting with his customer, the young man describes
his current dilemma of whether to pursue an
uncertain career in journalism or attend one of
the law schools to which he has been accepted:
Florida State University, where he would receive
a full scholarship; Temple, where as the son of
Pennsylvania residents he would pay reduced
tuition; or Harvard. The customer listens to the
young man, then looks at him and says, “Son, go
to Harvard.” The client is a former governor of
California. The cabbie is James Sheehan.
Following his rider’s advice, Sheehan,
who graduated with distinction in economics from Swarthmore, attended Harvard Law
School and, during summer breaks, worked
15-week stints as an intern for legal services,
a law firm, and the state of New York. On
one occasion, as the member of a six-man
team, he helped compile a case concerning
Medicaid reimbursement, representing the
Hospital Association of New York against
the state and federal governments. Sheehan
says: “We stayed up 24 hours in a row, put
together a great package, and I got to watch
the arguments. Our guy did an excellent job;
the judge listened and was responsive.” After
the state assistant attorney general had
given a less impressive performance, Sheehan’s team was optimistic. “Then, the assistant U.S. attorney general got up and spoke
for 15 minutes, at the end of which our case
was nowhere.” He adds, “That’s when I
knew I wanted to be the person who comes
in and says, ‘I represent the United States.’”
Sheehan realized his dream. He has been
serving as a federal prosecutor in the U.S.
Attorney’s Office in Philadelphia for 24
years, 16 of them as chief of the department’s civil division. Last year, he was promoted to associate U.S. attorney for civil

ED MURRAY/THE STAR LEDGER

A

SHEEHAN’S ASSISTANT, KIM COLLINS, SAYS OF HER BOSS: “HE’S A KIND, BRILLIANT, AND WONDERFUL
MAN, IN HIS ELEMENT TALKING TO PEOPLE, AND REALLY GOOD AT ENGAGING AN AUDIENCE.”

programs, a position that will lighten his
load of administrative duties and allow him
to focus on big cases. Thirteen floors above
Independence Mall, from an office whose
spectacular view of the city and the Delaware
River might distract anyone less focused
than Sheehan, he has personally handled
more than 500 health care fraud cases,
including a complaint against pharmaceutical giant SmithKline Beecham for fraudulent
billing practices in 1997. Sheehan’s team
recovered more than $330 million for the
U.S. government.
He gives about 75 public speeches a year
on fraud prevention. Aiming to attract
“whistle-blowers,” whose trust he has
gained over the years and whose testimony
is critical to his cases, he encourages his
audiences to take action when confronted
with unethical conduct in the workplace.
Sheehan stresses the risks taken by whistle-blowers and their lawyers. “We invite
people in,” he says, “and describe the problems they are likely to face—how their company, if it finds out who they are, will dig up
every bad thing they ever did in their lives.”
Because, he explains, “If a company has no
defense, then its only defense is turning the
whistle-blower into the bad guy.” Although,
as a salaried employee of the Department of
Justice, Sheehan receives none of the settlement money awarded to whistle-blowers

and their lawyers after a successful case, he
is thrilled by the opportunity to serve as an
advocate for the public interest. “Bring me a
great case,” he says, “let’s work on it together, tell me the truth, what you know and
what you don’t know, and, if there’s illegal
conduct involved, let’s go after it.”
Currently, Sheehan is leading a case
against Medco Health Solutions for alleged
misconduct. The organization is charged
with destroying prescriptions to avoid
penalties for delayed turnaround requirements, mailing fewer pills to patients than
prescribed but charging them or their health
plans for the full amount, creating false
records about calls to physicians, giving false
information to patients, and switching
patients’ drugs without authorization from
their physicians. Sheehan has been working
on the case since 1999, after his office was
alerted to Medco’s alleged misconduct by
two whistle-blowers. The complaint was
filed in September, and the case is scheduled
to come to trial in 2005.
After 24 years in office, Sheehan says:
“It’s a great job. I really enjoy dealing with
lawyers who are skilled, knowledgeable, and
experienced, and the people you come up
against on the other side are among some of
the smartest in the business. That makes the
challenge so much greater.”
—Carol Brévart-Demm

PROFILE
Burnout Cure
JA N E T E R L I C K ’ 8 8 , E X E C U T I V E
A R T I S T I C D I R E C TO R O F F O R T
COURTESY OF FORT LAUDERDALE CHILDREN'S THEATRE

L AU D E R DA L E C H I L D R E N ’ S T H E AT R E ,
K E E P S C R E AT I V I T Y A L I V E .

A

ERLICK SHARES A SUCCESSFUL PRODUCTION OF SNOW WHITE WITH TWO STUDENT ACTORS. TO LEARN
MORE ABOUT THE FORT LAUDERDALE CHILDREN’S THEATRE, VISIT HTTP://FLCT.ORG.

full time, developing a community outreach
program. This involvement continued until
1999, when she became the executive artistic
director.
“No two days are ever alike, nor have they
been in the 14 years that I have been with
the theater,” said Erlick. She is a board
member of the Florida Association of Theatre Education and Justice for Children and
Families, member of Broward County’s Artsin-Education Committee and Cultural Executives’ Committee, chair of the Multicultural
Infusion Cultural Enrichment Language
Advisory Council for the School Board of
Broward County, and a Kennedy Center
trained workshop presenter nationally.
“One of my favorite programs that I
developed and facilitate, primarily throughout Florida, is an arts-infusion program for
classroom teachers that works with entire
schools to infuse the arts across the academic curriculum,” she said.
As part of her work with the public
school system, Erlick developed A Bridge
From Me to You, which is a classroom residency, video, and production program. Adult
teaching artists on staff at the Fort Lauderdale Children’s Theatre are facilitators.
“Most gratifying would definitely be
working directly with our students, many of
whom consider the theater their second

home and stay with us for up to 15 years,”
she said. “The sense of belonging, community, and connection is a powerful force
here, and our students explore who they are
and who they wish to be in a creative and
nurturing environment. It is also gratifying
to know that our work influences the future
of the art form of live theater—both artistically and through audience development—
in an increasingly fragmented and technologically driven society.”
Erlick oversees nine full- and six parttime staff members as well as independent
contractors. She also handles the artistic
direction of all programming, including
class curricula for four locations with students who are ages 3 to 18, a full season of
productions by and for young people, and a
comprehensive community outreach strategy. The theater’s programs, such as the recently staged Romeo & Juliet and the forthcoming production of The Hobbit in May,
serve approximately 70,000 people per year.
“I have the opportunity to be creative and
innovative every day and feel no boundaries
or limitations to the scope or breadth of our
work here. To me, people are responsible for
their own burnout, and when the work is no
longer inspiring or interesting, create different work!”
—Andrea Hammer

MARCH 2004

s one of Swarthmore’s first graduates
with a theater major—and the first to
complete the entire theater degree program—Janet Erlick still draws on the
resourcefulness she developed on campus.
“The magnificent performing arts facility
on campus was built after I graduated, so we
performed wherever we could erect a stage,
including the basements,” she said. Erlick
acted in productions at Swarthmore, including several “truly wonderful student-directed pieces.” She also managed costume and
prop storage, when it was still housed in
Pearson.
“I graduated with a double major in theater and psychology,” Erlick said, “and I
would be hard pressed to determine which
skills I use more. The flexibility and individualized instruction inherent to Swarthmore’s teaching philosophy encouraged me
to develop a learning program that was
meaningful and practical to me. Senior year,
for example, I created an independent study
with support from the Theater and Education departments and actually implemented
an arts-infusion program in a local elementary school. That was my first taste of what
would be a career in arts education.”
Through Professor Emeritus of Theater
Lee Devin and former Visiting Theater Lecturer Abigail Adams, Erlick auditioned and
was accepted as a member of the People’s
Light and Theatre Company in Malvern, Pa.,
where she studied for two years after graduation. In 1990, she moved to Fort Lauderdale,
Fla.—with no job or place to live.
“I wanted to go somewhere that I didn’t
know the roads or the radio stations, having
grown up in Philadelphia,” she said.
While acting in plays and working in college community relations, Erlick met the
then director of Fort Lauderdale Children’s
Theatre and was hired to teach acting four
hours a week. In 1991, she was hired to teach

67

PROFILE
Storytelle r
JOE GANGEMI ’92 BREAKS
THROUGH AS A NOVELIST
AND SCREENWRITER.

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

70

f you want fast, easy money, Joe Gangemi
’92 suggests you look into becoming a
surgeon—just make sure you avoid writing.
Gangemi says it took him about five or
six years of writing screenplays after college
before he finally got one accepted. “I’m convinced it takes 10 years,” Gangemi says of
the process of becoming a successful and
established writer. “It just takes time to figure out what you have to say and develop
your craft so you have the ability to say it.”
Today, Gangemi is at last in a position
many aspiring writers would envy: His first
book, Inamorata: A Novel, was released by
Viking in February, and his original screenplay, Eliza Graves, has been bought by Mel
Gibson’s Icon Productions. It is scheduled to
be directed by Academy Award–winning
director Mike Van Diem in 2004.
“Hopefully, the way my career will work
out, I’ll have a book come out every two
years or so, and in between write screenplays,” Gangemi says. Unusual in the field
for concentrating on both screenplays and
novels simultaneously, Gangemi says: “It
doesn’t really matter what medium you write
in. My novel writing has made me a better
screenwriter, and my screenwriting has
made me a better novel writer.” One type of
writing, he says, feeds into another, and academic and real-life experience only further
feed into the writing process.
A psychology major, Gangemi took the
occasional writing workshop and still kept
his eye on a career as a writer, but mainly he
focused on taking psychology and psychobiology classes. Inamorata even briefly mentions a psychology professor, “Professor
Schneider,” and his lab rats—a nod to
Swarthmore’s Eugene M. Lang Research
Professor of Psychology Allen Schneider.
All his books and screenplays, Gangemi
says, include within them “some medical or
scientific wrinkle. That’s part of my trademark.” Many of his characters are doctors,

© 2004 ERIC BEAUREGARD

I

JOE GANGEMI RECENTLY PUBLISHED HIS FIRST BOOK, INAMORATA: A NOVEL, AND SOLD HIS ORIGINAL
SCREENPLAY ELIZA GRAVES.

medical students, or psychologists. Eliza
Graves, based loosely on Edgar Allen Poe’s
little-known short story “The System of
Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” imagines
an island asylum in which the lunatics take
control. A young doctor sent to the island
must deal with the takeover at the same time
that he realizes his love for young Eliza
Graves, a woman wrongly committed when
her husband deemed her an unfit wife. “It’s
all very dark and comedic and Gothic and
Romantic,” Gangemi says.
Inamorata is more mystical in theme, a
novel Gangemi describes as “a kind of black
comedy and coming-of-age tale.” Set in the
1920s, it is based on a real event: a contest
held by Scientific American that awarded
$5,000 to the first spirit medium who could
provide conclusive evidence of the existence
of a spiritual realm. The narrator, a young
Harvard graduate student, travels to Philadelphia to investigate one of the finalists
—a beautiful society psychic named Mina
Crawley.
Gangemi says his love of storytelling first
sprang from his voracious reading as a child.
In particular, he says his father used to read
him science fiction stories as he was growing up, and he cites this father-son bonding
time as a main influence on his original goal
to become a science fiction writer. He wrote

science fiction stories as a high school student in Wilmington, Del., and even attended
the famous Clarion Writers’ Workshop in
Michigan. This early fascination with science fiction, though, was soon replaced by a
more general love of literature, as Gangemi
began to focus his writing more on “mainstream” works.
He began writing seriously during his
sophomore year at Swarthmore, then after
graduation “hopscotched among a number
of jobs,” including waiting tables, writing
grants, and translating Russian contracts.
Gangemi then worked as a communications
consultant for five years with DuPont and
Conoco before “retiring” in 1998 to write
full time. He sold his first script, a neverproduced feature, to New Line Cinema, and
followed that by writing an adapted screenplay of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, also never
produced—all part of the business.
Most recently, Gangemi completed a new
screenplay for Tobey Maguire’s production
company, Maguire Entertainment, and
SONY—a CIA thriller set in the 1970s.
Gangemi now has settled down in his Center City Philadelphia home to begin
researching his next novel, a characterdriven narrative inspired by the actual disappearance of a New Jersey woman in the 1940s.
—Elizabeth Redden ’05

IN

MY LIFE

Black in
Africa
VINCENT JONES ’98 VISITS THE
MOTHERLAND—AND DISCOVERS THERE
T H AT H E ’ S T R U LY A N A M E R I C A N .
By V in ce nt J on e s

The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a
veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American
world—a world which yields him no true
self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself
through the revelation of the other world. It is a
peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this
sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes
of others.
—W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folks

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

T

72

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANSU GEBEH

he heat, like the rush of the crowd, was unavoidable and
overwhelming. Although it was about 9 p.m. when I arrived,
Dakar was smoldering. I had experienced many hot days as a
child growing up in Los Angeles, but nothing prepared me for this.
The heat seemed to extract the essence of everything and anything.
The smell of pungent, yet inoffensive, body odor emanating from
several passengers hit me first. The metal railing on the staircase
leading to the blacktop felt sweaty and emitted its own metallic
scent. The odor of smoke from wood-burning stoves filled the air.
Few airports titillate the senses, but when I finally took in what
lay before me, I could not help but be underwhelmed. I definitely
was not moved to kiss the ground as a part of me thought I might.
The rush of people disembarking, bolting down the stairs to the tarmac, and clamoring for a spot on the first shuttle to the terminal
made such a display impossible—even if I had been so inclined.
Setting foot on the soil that might have been my home but for
the enslavement of my ancestors, I flashed back to the airline customer service representative asking me: “Why would anyone want to
go to Africa?”
Shocked does not begin to describe my reaction to her question.
Befuddled would be more apropos. Part of me wanted to ask for her
supervisor and see to it that she got fired or, at least, severely reprimanded. The other part of me was dumbfounded because the voice
on the other end of the phone came from a face that was undeniably
black. Call it blackdar, but I was certain she was of African descent.
After a deafening silence, she explained herself by citing armed
conflicts, epidemics, and weather conditions to be wary of if I decided to proceed with my journey to the motherland despite her warn-

ing. She also tried to justify her comment by declaring what I
already knew: that she was a black American.
Ever the fighter, I engaged her in a dialogue, as I was determined
to explain to her why my trip was a decade in the making and to
demonstrate her ignorance in the process. But now that I finally had
arrived in the motherland, I could only wonder: Why had I come to
Africa?
The answer did not become clear to me until I began interacting
with locals. I had so many questions that everyone was willing, if
not eager, to answer. The taxi driver in Dakar, Senegal’s capital city;
family members of my travel companion in Sierra Leone; grave diggers at a beachfront cemetery in Gambia; the bribe-seeking customs
worker in Guinea—all of them and more—wanted to indulge my
interest in understanding their country, their continent. Locals
understood that I, as a black American, needed to understand how
life in Africa was lived. They realized that walking where my ancestors might have walked not only helped me to understand myself,
but it also enabled me to comprehend more fully my place in the
social order of the world.
Warts and all, America is my country, but I have never truly felt of
it. I and, I imagine, many other descendants of slaves in the United
States feel like Uncle Sam’s adopted child: The love is there, but its
depth is called into question from time to time.
And, like many adopted children, I had unanswered questions
about my family tree. What ethnic group does my bloodline stem
from? Could my long and narrow features, deep-set eyes, and complexion mean that I descended from the areas we know now as
Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea? Yet, I am also tall and lanky like the
Fulani, prevalent in West Africa, the region where most slaves
brought to the Americas came from. Perhaps I have some connection to them.
Undoubtedly then, the quest to understand the culture that
begot me brought me to Africa. What I found, however, is that I am

Africa still resonates in a special
place in my heart, only now the
motherland is less intertwined
with my conceptions of my identity.
(LEFT) VINCENT JONES VISITED RIVER NO. 2 BEACH
OUTSIDE OF FREETOWN, SIERRA LEONE. JONES IS A POLITICAL
CONSULTANT AND WRITER AS WELL AS THE FOUNDER AND
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION
OF BLACK STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS.
(RIGHT) JONES MET SEVERAL CHILDREN ON GOREE ISLAND, THE

more American than I had thought.
Physically, I bear much resemblance to the people I encountered
during my African sojourn. I saw myself as a child in a young boy I
met at Sierra Leone’s otherworldly beautiful River No. 2 Beach. I
conversed with men who reminded me of myself while walking
through Dakar’s Independence Plaza.
I noticed cultural similarities as well. Women in these countries
wore vibrant colors and sported distinctive hairdos like many black
women in the United States. Conversations among locals were animated affairs, sometimes laced with neck twirling by the women and
the men adopting hip-hop-style posturing, as is often the case stateside.
Yet my interactions made it clear that I was not and could not be
perceived as authentically African in any of the countries I visited.
Sure, I could grow accustomed to living in Senegal or Sierra Leone.
But if my accent, mannerisms, and culinary preferences did not set
me apart, my Western values definitely would.
The one thing that binds us together culturally is slavery, which
left indelible, albeit different, marks on African and black American
culture. But the peculiar institution of slavery is not the only thing
that has shaped our respective worldviews. Both cultures have had
several generations to develop under vastly different conditions
resulting in distinctly different societies. So naturally, Africans hold
many beliefs that stand in stark contrast to my own. I grew up in
America. The circumstances of my upbringing produced who I am
today—and Africa, as it is lived, did not figure prominently in that
milieu in any concrete way.
Just as I noted fundamental differences between the culture I
was reared in and those that I experienced in West Africa, so did the
people I befriended. Family members of my travel companion found
it odd that I wanted to visit a few of Sierra Leone’s breathtaking
beaches. Locals rarely went to them. My disdain for bathing with a
bucket of hot water and my tendency to speak my mind rather freely

were often sources of laughter. In essence, that which made me different piqued their curiosity.
Perhaps this is why many people believe that Africans look down
on black Americans. I did not get this impression. People on the
street, when not badgering me to buy something, would ask if I was
enjoying Africa. Merchants told me that they were happy to see a
black American because most tourists they encountered were of
other races. Young men barraged me with questions about slain rappers Tupac and Biggie. Nelly and Kelly’s duet “Dilemma” was in
constant rotation. I spotted as many young men wearing the popular urban brand names FUBU and Sean John almost as frequently as
I saw them wearing traditional garb. Women read Essence and Ebony
magazines.
It appeared to me as if most Africans held black Americans in
high regard, although many do believe that we could do more to
facilitate Africa’s development. But we do not do more, I posit,
because black Americans, in general, do not feel as strong a bond
with Africans as they profess. We accept the second-sight referred to
by W.E.B. Du Bois. We make the most of our predicament in the
same way we transformed the lowest-quality ingredients into a tasty
American cuisine: soul food. Black people have built a distinct
American subculture around that double-consciousness. Perhaps a
century ago, the African influences were more apparent, but that is
not the case today. Much has changed since the first Africans were
brought here.
Similarly, much has changed for me as a result of this trip. Africa
still resonates in a special place in my heart, only now the motherland is less intertwined with my conceptions of my identity. That I
owe much of my physical appearance to my African ancestors is
indisputable. My culture, however, is distinctly American—albeit
shaped by my gender and racial background, among other factors.
One thing that did not change while I was in Africa, unfortunately, was the heat. T

MARCH 2004

FORMER SLAVE-TRADE CENTER OFF THE COAST OF DAKAR, SENEGAL.

73

PROFILE
Nat ure’s
C la ss ro om
SIERRA CURTIS-MCLANE ’02
GUIDES YOUNG PEOPLE IN A
P R O G R A M T H AT P R O M OT E S
THINKING BY DOING.

CURTIS-MCLANE AND FELLOW TEACHERS TEND TO THE WOOLMAN CAMPUS’S 13 SHEEP, TWO COWS, 15
CHICKENS, AND THREE LLAMAS, ONE OF WHOM IS ALSO NAMED SIERRA.

becomes an exercise in harvesting the forest
in a sustainable fashion. Weeding the vegetable garden becomes an intergenerational
learning opportunity as students interact
with the broader campus community of 25
people, including spouses, young children,
and senior citizens. “A student carrying an
11-month-old on his back while he works in
the garden will learn from that, just as he
will from talking to an 81-year-old about
how they used to can vegetables,” CurtisMcLane said.
And for two weeks, they will take their
roughened hands and raised consciousnesses down to Mexico to help build an orphanage.
“It’s a way of putting our values into
practice,” she said.
Curtis-McLane intends to deliver a rigorous scientific curriculum, and—surrounded
as she is by a splendid variety of natural
habitats—lead the students in extensive
fieldwork. She majored in biological anthropology at the College, and her scientific
curiosity draws her deep into the solitude of
study and research.
“But when I go there, I feel lonely,” she
confessed. “I really thrive on community.”
Community and the call of the wild, that
is. At the College, she spent a semester
abroad doing fieldwork in Costa Rica and
returned there on a James H. Scheuer ’42
grant to conduct research for her senior thesis. For three months, she lived in an indigenous village with a Bribri family, studying

agricultural problems faced by their Talamanca Valley community.
Perhaps it was inevitable that a young
woman named for the Sierra mountains
would find herself drawn to work there. The
mix of gorgeous terrain, great people, and a
gratifying opportunity to share her enthusiasm for science has her thinking she might
stay at the Woolman Semester longer than
her one-year contract requires.
“When I was younger, I swore up and
down that I would never be a teacher,” Curtis-McLane said with a laugh. She had seen
her parents, Kate and Bruce Curtis-McLane,
both of whom teach at Hanover High School
in Hanover, N.H., work so hard and
encounter many obstacles. “I was fearful of
burning out.”
But twice in high school, she herself had
been enrolled at specialty boarding semester
programs in Maine and New York City. Her
enthusiasm for the concept, now about 20
years old, hasn’t diminished.
“I think what made the most sense to me
… was making life and education the same—
using my heart and using my head and using
my hands on a daily basis in my studies and
having that line between life and my studies
blurred,” she said.
“I would like to provide that same experience for the next group of scientists—or
even in nonscientific people who have a very
deeply rooted feel for nature, whatever they
do in their lives.”
—Colleen Gallagher

MARCH 2004

dip in the elevation here, a steep climb
there, and the rugged foothills of the
Sierra Nevada change yet again: Scrubby
blue oaks open onto the California brush
that yields to great Ponderosa pines high
above.
At these busy intersections of ecological
adaptation, Sierra Curtis-McLane finds rich
material to help her students appreciate the
handiwork of altitude. “You can just imagine
the transformation continuing as you go
uphill and downhill,” she said.
“The transition between one ecosystem
and another happens so quickly as you rise
from zero feet above sea level to 10,000.”
Curtis-McLane is scaling all kinds of
steep challenges these days. Through the
winter, she has split firewood, patched roofs,
and tended sheep on 230 hilly acres outside
Nevada City, Calif., in preparation for the
arrival this spring of a small group of high
school students from as far away as England.
They are all pioneers, students and faculty alike: This is the inaugural season of the
Woolman Semester, an intensive boarding
program created under the auspices of the
Sierra Friends Center. On the rustic campus
that housed the former John Woolman
School, a small Quaker boarding facility cofounded by the late William Scott ’37, the
high school juniors and seniors take morning classes in world problem solving, peace
studies, environmental science—“That’s
where I come in,” Curtis-McLane said—and
humanities and ethics.
“The program is about using the Quaker
testimonies of simplicity and service,
integrity and community to pursue change
in the world,” she said.
Afternoons are devoted to building up
calluses, muscles, and camaraderie by pitching in with the chores. Gathering firewood

TOM WERNIGG

A

77

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 17
part to several people at some point in our
lives,” says Davenport.
Yet the nagging feeling still exists that
perhaps now is the time to meet one’s life
partner—something many students’ parents did in college. “[My parents] met in
college, but they didn’t start dating until
afterward. It does strike me that I have this
idea that college is the place where you meet
the person you’re supposed to spend the rest
of your life with,” says Nick Ward ’05.
Richardson says this expectation is actually quite common, particularly among
women, putting the hookup culture at odds
with stated romantic goals. “Eighty-three
percent of our respondents said they wanted
to meet their spouses in college, but at the
same time, they weren’t entering into longterm commitments,” she says. “I think that’s
where you’re getting a problem with the
hookup culture—it’s sort of an oxymoron.”
Yet, for most Swarthmore students, graduate school or careers await. Other priorities—schoolwork, athletics, extracurricular
activities—often get top priority, and finding a partner is relegated to somewhere in
between making lunches for the homeless in
Philadelphia and studying for Monday’s
organic chemistry exam. According to a survey Ward distributed to 89 students from
his Introduction to Psychology class in
spring 2003, women said their ideal age of
marriage was 27; men said age 28. Ward’s
survey reflects an opinion held by many
Swarthmore students: Marriage is increas-

ALTHOUGH MOST STUDENTS
WOULD REJECT THE SUGGESTION
THAT A PRIMARY COLLEGE GOAL
IS TO FIND A LIFE PARTNER,
IT IS A WISH THAT SOME
WISTFULLY—AND ALMOST
SHAMEFULLY—EXPRESS.
ingly an issue for tomorrow, a life goal that
should temporarily be kept in a drawer.
“I’m not thinking, OK, I have to get
ready for marriage,” says Lisa Spitalewitz
’ 05. “I have studying; I have hanging out
with friends; I have marriage preparation—
no.”

W

hether marriage is the ultimate goal,
more immediate concerns exist for
couples at Swarthmore. One is the rumor
mill, that obnoxious factory of gossip that
seems to plague schools the size of Swarthmore. “On that note—the small community
thing—as soon as there’s a sign that two
people have looked at each other, the person
who sits next to you in biology knows about
it, and someone has called your mom,” says
Spitalewitz.
Longtime couple Gigone and Shang
agree, saying the rumor mill might be one
reason people resist exploratory dates here:

Bulletin intern Elizabeth Redden needed a little
break from the dating scene at Swarthmore, so
she flew away to study in South America for the
semester.

MARCH 2004

DATING GAME

If a relationship is going to be only casual,
why risk stirring up a bunch of rumors that
both partners may have to deal with long
after the date is over? “I think the small
environment has a lot to do with it because
once you ask someone on a date, everyone
knows,” Gigone says. She says if everyone’s
going to find out about it anyway, there may
as well be a serious relationship for them to
talk about.
The need to make every relationship
worthwhile and purposeful, whether to satisfy the rumor mill or fulfill some individual
purpose, is something that Swarthmore students can’t shake easily. Their love lives, like
their academic goals, seem to reach for some
greater aim. “Will this relationship get me
into med school?” Davenport asks. Unlikely.
“A lot of people here are really goal oriented,” says Goodman. “If they’re in a relationship and they know it’s not really going
to last that long, they say, ‘What is the point
of it?’” In the absence of intense, emotional
relationships that seem to have a point—
that seem to be going somewhere—hookups
are an efficient substitute, a way to release
sexual tension and satisfy a need for intimacy while ensuring that little time is wasted
with a person who might not be one’s soul
mate. The next morning, both partners can
return to life—and work—as usual. “If
everyone agrees that hooking up is an
option to get what one wants without sacrificing honor or image,” says Simon, “it
becomes the lingua franca of sexual conduct. Thus, you can continue to work, play,
and study with those you’ve hooked up
with, and sexual license does not fracture
the fragile emotional infrastructure of the
small campus.”
In a school so small that students
must perform the infamous “Swarthmore
swivel”—a quick glance in various directions—before revealing any potentially sensitive information in the dining hall or
library, the general acceptance of hookups
ensures that Saturday night’s fling results in
minimal fallout when it comes time for lab,
orchestra, or the next meal at Sharples.
Leave it to Swarthmore students to
streamline their romantic lives as well. T

79

Q + A

Why Can’t She Stop
S H A R O N F R I E D L E R H A S W E L C O M E D S WA R T H M O R E S T U D E N T S T O D A N C E F O R A L M O S T 2 0 Y E A R S .

By Alisa Giardinelli

How does your teaching in Ghana differ
from your teaching at Swarthmore?

Because, since her arrival in 1985, Friedler
has helped expand dance from a program
begun in physical education to a full-fledged
program with a major and minor—capable of
preparing students for professional lives in
the field.

In each situation, students bring their own
perspective, whatever that is, so my teaching
reflects that reality. For instance, my students in Ghana have really strong connections to traditional community dance practices before they enter a dance composition
course because they’ve danced at life-cycle
events and festivals. In the United States,
some students have a developed understanding of technique or composition;
others may not be versed in dance but bring
different disciplinary perspectives, whether
it’s theater, music, or sociology and anthropology. For example, I once had the captain
of the women’s soccer team in composition
class, and she employed ideas regarding how
groups work together that she’d gained on
the soccer field.

Because she has been instrumental in creating study abroad opportunities for dance
students in Poland and Ghana.
Because she dares to ask, “What if?”
Because, as director, she oversees a program
that offers 25 to 30 courses a year to more
than 300 students each semester. Because
techniques in those classes include African,
ballet, flamenco, Kathak, modern, tap, and
yoga.
Because she says if she ever “can’t stand
up,” she’ll turn to studying the Indian hand
gestures known as mudras.
Because whether teaching dance writing in
Poland, composition in Ghana, or dance and
drum techniques at Swarthmore, her goal is
the same: to bring students to an awareness
of how they use their bodies and to encourage them to work with others.

What is a constant, no matter where
you teach?
Dance is a discipline taught and learned in
community. It’s about understanding your
place in a group and creating a cooperative
ensemble. That’s one significant thing that
draws people to dance and why dance is
useful in peacemaking. I incorporate ensemble work in every class to get students to see
their differences and then build bridges
across those differences.... Otherwise, you
can’t dance together.

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

What dance traditions would you still
like to learn?

80

I hope I have enough time to learn hula. I
want to explore more Native American practices, and I’m very interested in a whole host
of Asian dances such as Japanese Kabuki
and classical Balinese dances. I’d also like to
explore Maori dance and see what it may
share with some of the African traditions
with which I am familiar. Among social
dances, I’d love to be a more fluid salsa
dancer. That’s a definite goal.

What is your idea of earthly happiness?
To live simply in harmony with the environment and in a community that is both stimulating, challenging, and supportive. That
can be anywhere. I’ve been deliriously happy
in some ridiculous places.

What do you regard as the lowest
depths of misery?
To be out of touch, either with myself or
with the community.

When do you feel most indulgent?
When I don’t get up really early in the
morning.

Who are your real-life heroes?
Martin Luther King Jr., Ghanaian musicologist Kwabena Nketia, Harriet Tubman, Kofi
Anan, my great-aunt Alta Jones, Sara
Lawrence-Lightfoot ’66 and her mother
Margaret Morgan Lawrence, some of my former students, and a number of my colleagues.

What are the qualities you most admire?
Integrity and kindness.

Is there an overrated virtue?
Maybe “goodness.”

What is a talent you’d like to have?
I would love to sing. I really wish I had a
voice that could knock your socks off.

What are your most marked
characteristics?
Optimism, enthusiasm, and determination.

What is one thing you would change about
yourself?
I would remind myself to always be in the
moment, in order to really stop and listen.

What is your greatest regret?
That I wasn’t raised bilingually.

What is your motto?
My students will tell you: “Onward!”

What do you say to beginning students
who have never danced before?
We say welcome. This is where you belong.

Moving?

Sharon Friedler is
Stephen Lang Professor
of Performing Arts and
director of the Dance
Program.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS

JIM GRAHAM

Join us!
2004
A l u m n i We e ke n d

J u n e 4– 6
WE’LL BE LOOKING FOR YOU ….

The campus is awash in the colors of spring. The scent of roses
drifts on the breeze. What could be better? You are surrounded
by your classmates reminiscing about the “good old days” and
catching up on the new.
Join us for Alumni Weekend at Swarthmore—we’ll be looking for you.

Alumni
College

J u n e 2– 4
TEACH YOUR CHILDREN WELL:
REFLECTIONS ON THE SIXTIES FOR
O U R S E LV E S A N D O U R C H I L D R E N

“The Sixties”—a phrase that conjures memories of
protests and political upheavals, of the Vietnam War
and the War on Poverty, of wild clothing and the
lifestyles that went with it, of consciousness-raising
and civil rights. Join us as we explore that tumultuous and transformative time and the lessons
learned for ourselves and our children. The Alumni
College program will include speakers and panels on
student activism, civil rights, music and culture,
Vietnam, and much more. Whether you were a student in the Sixties, had already graduated, or were
not yet born, there will be something for you at this
Sixties reunion.
Visit our Web site at http://alumnicollege.swarthmore.edu
for more information.