Features 14 Parrish Reborn The College’s historical anchor is undergoing a major renovation. B y Jeffrey L ot t De p a r t m e n t s 18 3 A Profitable Education Many Swarthmoreans choose careers in business. But is the College preparing them for its challenges? B y Pet er C o h a n ’ 79 2 4 Wo m e n C a r v i n g Their Own Paths Self-employed alumnae build economically independent and creatively fulfilling lives. B y An drea H a mme r 32 Ta c k l i n g To r t u re Torture isn’t just morally unjustified—it doesn’t even work, says Darius Rejali ’81. B y El iz a be t h R ed de n ’0 5 36 D v o r̆ ák i n America: The NotSo-Distant Mirror Letters Readers’ reactions 4 Collection The campus this spring 46 Connections The Alumni Office is moving. 48 Class Notes Story exchange 55 Deaths Sorrowfully reported losses 66 B o o ks & A r t s Profiles 59 Marschak’s Opus Dorothy Marschak ’51 helps bring better music education to DC schoolchildren. By El iza be th R e dde n ’0 5 61 The Meaning of Retirement Roger Youman ’53 has served as both teacher and editor—most recently of The Meaning of Swarthmore, a collection of powerful alumni essays. Patricia White reviews Down and Dirty By Je ff r ey Lo tt Pictures, Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film by Peter 72 Biskind ’62. Hearts and Minds A Sequence of Miscalculations D.D. Smith Hilke ’73 will bring a child’s-eye view to Salt Lake City’s new museum. An unusual project looks at American music—and history—through a different discoverer of the New World. By Arnold Kling ’75 By Co ll e en Ga ll ag h e r 88 79 B y Dav id Wr i gh t ’ 69 Professor Barry Schwartz’s own lifestyle has inadvertently become a piece of best-selling research. Computer scientist Joan Differding Walton ’85 helps unravel the mysteries of Mars. By Carol Brévart-Demm By Ca rol Br é var t- De mm 42 Disobedient Love In San Francisco, three same-sex Swarthmore couples say, “I do.” B y Laura M a rko witz ’8 5 74 In My Life Q+A Lunch at 11 O’Clock Mars Time COVER: THIS WARHOLESQUE IMAGE OF SWARTHMOREʼS ADIRONDACK CHAIRS FIRST APPEARED ON THE FRONT PAGE OF THE APRIL 15 PHOENIX , WHICH IS OFFERING FULL-COLOR GLOSSY PRINTS STARTING AT $10. FOR INFORMATION, E-MAIL PHOENIX@SWARTHMORE.EDU. INSIDE COVER PHOTO BY STEVEN GOLDBLATT ʼ67 PA R L O R TA L K T here are few things more pleasurable than giving your attention to something you love doing, yet modern life affords few chances to concentrate on much of anything. We celebrate multitasking, and, although it’s true that the pace of our economy demands this skill, there’s a price to be paid—and it’s not merely the health risks associated with stress or the spiritual confusion we sometimes feel in the midst of chaos. The erosion of opportunities to concentrate—to “attend” to life—is making it more difficult to both appreciate its joys and solve its problems. The 20th century gave us two new terms. Attention span (often modified by “short”) entered the language in the 1930s, signaling a concern about something that was apparently not an issue until the 20th century. And, less than 50 years later, we first heard the clinical term attention deficit disorder, a learning problem that one recent study says is exacerbated by watching television in the toddler years. But attention deficit isn’t just a learning issue, it’s an everyday challenge. In our office, reading a manuscript without interruption is a rare event, and time to write is often stolen by insistent e-mails, faxes, and FedExes. We carry on simultaneous “conversations” in several media with co-workers down the hall, suppliers across the country, and alumni around the world. People rarely sit to talk. They lean in the door and drop a few words, hurrying on to the next task; or they leave a voice mail—“call me back on my cell”; or they send electronic messages that would better be delivered in person to add face, voice, and body language to their words. It’s no wonder that we need to escape the office to give concerted attention to reading or writing—the two basic jobs of the editor. (In fact, I’m writing this at home, sitting quietly in my living room, late at night. ) It’s the opportunity to focus that I miss, the chance to do one thing, and one thing only, for hours. The satisfaction that we find in recreation—for me, a morning spent gardening, an afternoon umpiring a kids’ baseball game, or a clear night at my telescope— comes not so much from the activity itself but because it can be pursued without distraction. This is what I also crave in my work—time to allow the best in us to rise above the noise of life. Ironically (for a person who works on a college campus), the most precious opportunities that Swarthmore provides are the ones to pay attention—to listen, observe, read, write, think, and dream. For a few years at the beginning of adulthood, students may read one book for a whole afternoon, watch a play and talk about it for the rest of the evening, play a game with energy and passion, make a commitment to a cause and follow through on it, eat all their meals with friends and lovers, think about the meaning of life, and—the one I miss the most—write all night. Do they know what they have? Probably not. Are these privileges wasted on the young? No again: Who better to dream today so that they may lead tomorrow? —Jeffrey Lott S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N The erosion of opportunities to concentrate—to “attend” to life— is making it more difficult to both appreciate its joys and solve its problems. 2 Swarthmore COLLEGE BULLETIN Editor: Jeffrey Lott Managing Editor: Andrea Hammer Class Notes Editor: Carol Brévart-Demm Assistant Editor: Colleen Gallagher Staff Writer: Alisa Giardinelli Desktop Publishing: Audree Penner Art Director: Suzanne DeMott Gaadt, Gaadt Perspectives LLC Administrative Assistant: Janice Merrill-Rossi Intern: Elizabeth Redden ’05 Editor Emerita: Maralyn Orbison Gillespie ’49 Contacting Swarthmore College College Operator: (610) 328-8000 www.swarthmore.edu Admissions: (610) 328-8300 admissions@swarthmore.edu Alumni Relations: (610) 328-8402 alumni@swarthmore.edu Publications: (610) 328-8568 bulletin@swarthmore.edu Registrar: (610) 328-8297 registrar@swarthmore.edu World Wide Web www.swarthmore.edu Changes of Address Send address label along with new address to: Alumni Records Office Swarthmore College 500 College Avenue Swarthmore PA 19081-1390 Phone: (610) 328-8435. Or e-mail: alumnirecords@swarthmore.edu. The Swarthmore College Bulletin (ISSN 0888-2126), of which this is volume CI, number 5, is published in August, September, December, March, and June by Swarthmore College, 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore PA 19081-1390. Periodicals postage paid at Swarthmore PA and additional mailing offices. Permit No. 0530-620. Postmaster: Send address changes to Swarthmore College Bulletin, 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore PA 19081-1390. © 2004 Swarthmore College Printed in U.S.A. LETTERS The rising cost of higher education has become a national issue. Especially in this context, Paul Courant’s [’68] article “The Value of a Liberal Education” (March Bulletin) is as trivial and muddle-headed as any I’ve ever read. Rather than examine the many possibilities for controlling the costs of education, he justifies outrageous increases by declaiming that liberal education is worth any cost. And, he says, the great demand for high-priced education proves it is worth the cost. Little recognition is given to the fact that our class-conscious society includes many people who are willing to pay these high costs because they expect that prestige and better job opportunities will result. As to the intrinsic value (whatever that is), how many parents truly assess it before making or agreeing to a college choice? Courant cites Baumol’s Law as justification for the lack of improvement in teacher productivity despite the fact that anachronistic rigidities abound, that tenured faculty hold sinecures they zealously protect, and that possibilities for enhanced learning at lower cost are rarely examined with impartial objectivity. It is no wonder that legislators, taxpayers, and parents question the cost increases so smugly justified by academics like Courant. RICHARD KIRSCHNER ’49 Albuquerque, N.M. ACCEPTANCE WAS THE REAL SEXUAL REVOLUTION “The Swattie Dating Game” (March 2004 Bulletin) is astute and thorough but would have benefited from a more accurate version of the history of sexuality. Author Elizabeth Redden ’05 cites popular journalism and recent surveys by the Independent Woman’s Forum (IWF) to demonstrate that a “hookup culture” is widely accepted among college students. The fact that casual sex has become tolerated leads her to imply that such sexual behavior is a “millennial” development; she even quotes an IWF spokesperson who describes it as “where the sexual revolution took a wrong turn.” Popular media images in the 1940s and 1950s showed tidy marriages and squeakyclean young people, but the history of sexual morals is not the same as the history of sexual practice. The fact that casual sex was stigmatized and frequently kept hidden does not mean it didn’t happen—or even that it wasn’t discussed. As early as World War II, the sexual culture of American servicemen attracted considerable attention from journalists, public health officials, and both religious and secular moralists. In the decades before the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, venereal disease was frequently the subject of public moralizing. The Kinsey Reports of 1948 and 1953 were scandalous best-sellers largely because they blew the lid off America’s “Ozzie and Harriet” facade, bringing to light just how many millions of Americans failed to live up to the dominant sexual ideals. It is crucial to remember that in the 1950s, obtaining birth control was very difficult even for married couples, and young pregnant women faced few options apart from hurried, often unhappy marriages or dangerous, illegal abortions. Things were especially bad for gays and lesbians, for whom casual sex often posed the risk of being arrested, blackmailed, fired, or subjected to needless and destructive medical “treatment.” But even for heterosexuals, sex was fraught with serious dangers made worse by severe shame and stigma. The “sexual revolution” was at least as much a revolution in acceptance as in behavior, and it brought about major improvements in American life, ranging from gays and lesbians coming out of the closet to birth control becoming widely available. TIMOTHY STEWART-WINTER ’01 Chicago PARTNERS IN MINISTRY SUPPORTED PAULINE ALLEN Although the March issue of the Swarthmore College Bulletin paid a glowing tribute to the late religious adviser Pauline Allen for her remarkable contribution to the spiritual lives of students—and indeed to the College at large—the Bulletin neglected to make clear that Pauline was not an employee of the College. Every penny of her salary was paid by Partners in Ministry, a consortium of five local Protestant congregations and the Swarthmore Friends Meeting as well as by a significant body of alumni, members of the faculty and staff, and individuals from the local community. The College has been the beneficiary of these Partners’ dedication and commitment to providing a Protestant presence on campus, to nurturing and supporting students in their spiritual quests, and making available to them a positive account of the Gospel message. P. LINWOOD URBAN Swarthmore, Pa. Editor’s Note: Linwood Urban is professor emeritus of religion and chair of the board of Partners in Ministry. Alumni interested in supporting this and other religious advising efforts on campus should contact Dan West, vice president for alumni, development, and public relations. AT 20, SECOND CHANCE The article “A Dream Deferred” (March Bulletin), which told the story of Swarthmore’s relationship with the Bartol Research Foundation, brought back memories of my undergraduate days and particularly my own limitations as a 20 year old. In the 1960s, as the article points out, a procession of Swarthmore engineering graduates signed up to work at Bartol’s Antarctic research station, principally to P l e a s e t u r n t o page 87 JUNE 2004 CONTROLLING COSTS IS KEY 3 COLLECTION S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N 4 THE COLLEGE’S AD HOC COMMITTEE ON THE LIVING WAGE issued its report in February. The recommendations have been the subject of broad campus conversations this spring, and the Board of Managers is expected to discuss formally the committee’s proposals and other options in the fall. The committee, co-chaired by Melanie Young, associate vice president for human resources, and Barry Schwartz, Dorwin P. Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action, and comprising representatives from the staff, faculty, and student body, began meeting in fall 2002. Its report contained both majority and minority recommendations that, if implemented, could add an estimated $750,000 to $2 million to the College’s annual personnel expenses. Among the majority recommendations: • The Swarthmore minimum wage should be $10.72 per hour (minority recommendation: $13.89). • Swarthmore should introduce a new child care subsidy benefit of up to $550 per month for preschool-age children and $325 per month for elementary school–age children. The College would pay the actual costs of child care, up to these maxima (minority recommendation: subsidy capped at $5,000 per employee). • Swarthmore should modify its current health insurance benefits such that lowest-paid employees receive full HMO coverage for their families at no cost to them. • Both the child care benefit and the health insurance supplement should be means tested; that is, a family’s entire income, not just that of a single employee, would determine eligibility. The committee recommends that employees who desire these new benefits submit a copy of their federal tax return each year. The return will be used to determine where on the sliding scale they fit. Perhaps the most vexing concern facing the committee was wage compression. If the minimum hourly wage is raised from $9 to $13 per hour, for example, then staff members already making $13 per hour would find themselves earning only slightly more than people they had previously outearned by a substantial amount. The committee decided that some wage compression was inevitable, but that something should be done to preserve wage differentials in the interest of staff morale. It, therefore, suggested that wage increases should be provided for employees earning more than the College minimum, according to a scale detailed in the report. Members purposely did not address how their suggestions might be financed because, as noted in the report, “statements about where the money could come from would be statements about what Swarthmore College’s institutional priorities should be. This is an extremely important, indeed unavoidable, matter, but not one to be decided by an ad hoc committee.” A series of campus meetings was organized this spring by a JIM GRAHAM Living Wage Committee Reports: Community Examines Options MEMBERS OF THE LIVING WAGE AND DEMOCRACY CAMPAIGN, A CAMPUS GROUP THAT ADVOCATES WAGE AND BENEFIT INCREASES FOR THE COLLEGE’S LOWESTPAID STAFF MEMBERS, HUNG BANNERS ON PARRISH PORCH DURING THE SPRING MEETING OF THE BOARD OF MANAGERS. THE BOARD IS EXPECTED TO CONSIDER THE LIVING WAGE ISSUE IN THE FALL. group chaired by Maurice Eldridge ’61, vice president for college and community relations and assistant to President Alfred H. Bloom. At those meetings, members of the committee explained their proposals and the reasons that they thought Swarthmore should be a leader in providing a living wage for its employees. Several alternative proposals were floated at those meetings, but the debate centered on the committee’s recommendation of $10.72 and the problem of wage compression. Vice President for Finance and Treasurer Suzanne Welsh reported to the faculty in April that the College’s budget could not currently accommodate either the majority or minority recommendation without reducing expenditures in other areas. The College has already reduced its operating budget by $1.5 million over the past two fiscal years, so Welsh said that there were “only a few areas that might provide significant sources of funds without serious erosion of the program.” Dan West, vice president for alumni, development, and public relations, told a staff gathering that it would be difficult for the College to raise additional funds to endow staff compensation. He said the College would need to raise about $20 million posals and steps the College might take to address them. He wondered “what the College can afford without compromising other aspects of its educational mission and community.” Bloom offered a compromise proposal when he pointed out that “because of steps the College has already taken, the lowest wage at the College will be $9.70 per hour next year, only $1 short of the $10.72 that the committee determined to be a living wage for this region.” (Upon the recommendation of a staff committee that examined the College’s entire compensation program, the College’s minimum wage was raised from $6.66 to $9 in 2002; this base amount has continued to grow incrementally through compensation pool increases.) Bloom also said the College’s benefits plan offers a cash option equivalent to an additional $1 per hour: “So if the College were to fund these benefits separately, we would already be, in salary terms, at what the majority of the committee judged to be a living wage.” The key issue, then, is “whether, and to what extent, the College should supplement health—and perhaps child care—benefits for our lowest paid employees,” said Bloom. At the end of his remarks, the president invited staff members who were “still convinced STRADDLING PARK AND CHESTER AVENUES AT THE HEART OF THE BOROUGH, Michael’s College Pharmacy has anchored Swarthmore for 70 years. So when owner Jack McDonnell, 67, announced in March that he had sold Michael’s to CVS—which did not move into the Swarthmore building but only assumed existing customers’ prescriptions—he sent shock waves through the community. McDonnell has owned the pharmacy since 1985 and worked there as the pharmacist since 1968. McDonnell planned to work as a CVS pharmacy manager during a monthlong transition to the store at the 755 S. Chester Road location. As owner of the Michael’s building, McDonnell said that he hasn’t even had time to find a tenant yet. “This decision was the hardest one in my life,” McDonnell said, after reluctantly admitting that his legs were “giving out.” He realized that the demands of a 70-hour workweek were too taxing. Even though some faithful employees worked at Michael’s for more than 20 years, McDonnell was the one to arrive at 7:30 a.m., pulling in newspaper bundles in time for rush-hour commuters to grab before racing to the train station just across the street. Before McDonnell owned the pharmacy, a soda fountain filled half of the store— drawing College students on study breaks 1947 HALCYON THE END OF AN ERA that we should pursue the full original proposal” to contact him. “Absent strong support ... I suggest we move toward revising it into one that focuses specifically on benefits for our lowest-paid staff—and that would therefore be much more affordable.” Before taking questions from the staff, Bloom expressed the hope that “working together, we can find an approach to this difficult and important issue that the broad community believes is right for Swarthmore.” —Alisa Giardinelli and Jeffrey Lott To download a copy of the full committee report, visit http://www.swarthmore.edu/Admin/reports/LWReport7.Feb04.pdf. and dates. “One couple became engaged here,” McDonnell said. Over time, he noticed more young children coming into the store and watched many of them grow up. He said that one mother always felt that her three sons were safe going to the pharmacy with their nickels. “Michael’s has meant everything to me,” McDonnell said. As the news reverberated through the borough, thank-you notes and cards addressing this “difficult time” poured into Michael’s. Many paid particular tribute to McDonnell’s patience in answering questions about prescriptions and his compassion during others’ bouts with illness. Even after a recent fall, which left him with a bruised eye and made walking up the steps behind the pharmacy counter difficult, he unfailingly said that he was fine—instead focusing his kind eyes on customers and warming them with his ever-present smile. Despite the impending void, clusters of birds still perched on Michael’s bell-shaped roof—clinging to their daily lookout post— as the winds of change sent a March chill through Swarthmore. —Andrea Hammer TOP: IN THE 1930S AND 1940S, A SODA FOUNTAIN AND JUKEBOX MADE MICHAEL’S PHARMACY A POPULAR HANGOUT. BOTTOM: MICHAEL’S WAS SOLD IN MARCH, SADDENING THE COMMUNITY. JUNE 2004 in new endowment to finance a $750,000 annual increase in wage and benefit costs. The Meaning of Swarthmore has raised about $160 million of its $230 million goal, some of which is earmarked for staff development and diversity initiatives. In May, President Bloom spoke to both the faculty and staff about the issue. Bloom began by saying that “there are few issues, if any, as critical to our society and world as providing basic conditions of nutrition, health care, and opportunity to all human beings.” Bloom acknowledged that there are differences of opinion concerning the living wage pro- 5 S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N 6 IT’S A FRIDAY AFTERNOON IN MARCH, AND SEVEN STUDENTS are watching movies in class. Led by Associate Professor of English Literature and Chair of the Film and Media Studies Program Patricia White, members of the course Film Theory and Culture are watching Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1973 film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, comparing it with Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1954) and Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven (2002). The students, most of them special majors and minors in film and media studies, have previously seen the films in their entirety, but now, they are shown brief clips. Pinpointing varying techniques for creating melodramatic effect, they examine the actors’ gestures, facial expressions, gazes, and body language. They analyze the roles of color, sound, lighting, location of action, and the camera’s and other characters’ perspectives. They discuss the framing of the actors by scenery, furniture, and other actors. After the class, senior Jeffrey Scheible, a film and media studies special major says: “This is probably my favorite class ever. We watch great, important movies and read great, important articles, both about the movies and about specific issues. What I especially love is the way the class combines theoretical and intellectual approaches with the quirkiness of our varying degrees of being film buffs. Patty enthusiastically encourages these perspectives.” The study of film at Swarthmore has its roots in the 1970s, when William R. Kenan Jr., Professor Emerita of Art History Kaori Kitao taught the first film class in the Department of Art History. Film classes at Swarthmore have spawned several pro- JIM GRAHAM A “ M e d i a t e d ” Wo r l d gressive filmmakers, including the late Robert Kramer ’62, a significant political film director of his generation, and film author Peter Biskind ’62, whose Down and Dirty Pictures won international acclaim this year (see review on p. 66). The formal program, which was approved by the faculty in 1999, now offers students the option to pursue a special major, minor, or Honors minor. Its curriculum includes an introductory course, a video production workshop taught by Visiting Assistant Professor Nandini Sikan, the theory and culture course, and independent study opportunities. Next fall, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Manishita Dass will offer a new course on Indian cinema. Although the program emphasizes film theory, history, and analysis, White stresses the importance of these disciplines for media producers. Recent graduates are currently enrolled in top graduate programs in cinema studies at the University of California at Los Angeles, New York University, and the University of Chicago. Besides White and Dass, the program’s faculty includes Professor of Sociology and Anthropology Miguel Díaz-Barriga, Professor of German Marion Faber, Associate Professor of German Sunka Simon, Associate Professor of Chinese Haili Kong, Professor of English Literature Craig Williamson, and Assistant Professor of French Carina Yervasi. White says: “Our interdisciplinary faculty is increasingly drawn from people who have had academic training in film— students can take courses in African, French, German, Japanese, Soviet, and Spanish cinema as well as in visual ethnography.” According to Scheible, film and media studies at Swarthmore is “the ultimate liberal arts subject.” He says: “I’ve taken classes with top-notch professors in the English, Sociology and Anthropology, Modern Languages and Literatures, Art, and Psychology departments that all count toward my major. All ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE AND FILM STUDIES PATRICIA WHITE HEADS THE COLLEGE’S BURGEONING FILM AND MEDIA STUDIES PROGRAM, WHICH MAY BE TAKEN AS AN HONORS MINOR, A COURSE MINOR, OR A SPECIAL MAJOR. these departments are in dialogue with each other via the Film and Media Studies Program.” White, who recently coauthored (with Timothy Corrigan of the University of Pennsylvania) The Film Experience, an introductory film textbook, considers it vital to educate both viewers and future producers who are critical of, knowledgeable about, and appreciative of the potential of film and media. “Our world is ‘mediated,’” she says. “Our government, our wars, our pleasures all play out on the screen. It is important to be not only negative about this situation but also to see in it the potential for change.” —Carol Brévart-Demm BOARD APPROVES 4.5 PERCENT INCREASE IN STUDENT CHARGES At its February meeting, the Board of Managers approved a 4.5 percent increase in comprehensive student charges for 2004– 2005. The budget approved by the Board calls for tuition of $29,782 for the upcoming academic year. Room, board, and the student activity fee will bring the total to $39,408. “Like many colleges and universities, Swarthmore is operating in a challenging fiscal environment,” Board Chair Barbara Weber Mather ’65 said. “The pressures are particularly acute at Swarthmore because we deliberately maintain a small student population while offering a broad range of courses typical of bigger institutions.” The College’s financial aid policies will continue to ensure access for students of all economic backgrounds. Slightly more than half of students receive financial aid, most of it as grants rather than loans. Swarthmore CINEMATOGRAPHER STEVE KAZMIERSKI AND SOUND TECHNICIAN PETER MILLER CAPTURE SOME DIALOGUE IN THE TARBLE STUDENT CENTER DURING THE FILMING OF A NEW ADMISSIONS VIDEO FOR THE COLLEGE. will continue to admit applicants without regard for their ability to pay, meeting the full financial need of all admitted students. To balance the budget, the board approved a freeze on departmental operating budgets for the third straight year in addition to a $200,000 cut in operating costs. Over the past three years, the College has reduced operating costs by $1.4 million, said Suzanne Welsh, vice president for finance and treasurer. The College’s current capital campaign, The Meaning of Swarthmore, is set to raise $230 million by the end of 2006. Funds from the campaign are financing new construction and additions to the curriculum, reducing the burden of those expenses on the operating budget. The campaign is also helping build the endowment, income that provides almost half of the annual operating budget. “We know that tuition increases are never welcome news for our students and their families,” Welsh said, “but they can be assured that we are taking all responsible steps to contain costs while continuing to offer the extraordinary education for which Swarthmore has long been known.” —Tom Krattenmaker FACULTY ON THE RISE Of eight faculty promotions this year, associate professorship with tenure was awarded to Assistant Professors Eric Jensen, Physics and Astronomy; Bruce Maxwell, Engineering; Sunka Simon, Modern Languages and Literatures; and Thomas Whitman, Music and Dance. The following faculty members were promoted from associate to full professor: Miguel Díaz-Barriga, Sociology and Anthropology; Pieter Judson, History; Amy Vollmer, Biology; and Hansjakob Werlen, Modern Languages and Literatures. —Carol Brévart-Demm JUNE 2004 SWARTHMORE BECAME A MECCA FOR DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKERS this spring. Renowned documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman visited campus in April to lecture at the close of a series of screenings of his films. The documentaries Meat, Ballet, and Titicut Follies were shown on three successive nights. Another famous documentarian, Albert Maysles (Gimme Shelter, Grey Gardens, and Monterey Pop), came to campus in April to shoot footage for a film he is making on anti-Semitism. Maysles asked Professor of History Robert Weinberg to assemble a group of about 20 students for a filmed discussion. In March, the College itself got in the act when it brought in a trio of all-star film crews to capture on digital video the essence of student life at Swarthmore. Producers Jon Huberth and Vern Oakley brought in Buddy Squires, who has worked with the famed documentary filmmaker Ken Burns; Steve Kazmierski, who directed photography for the critically acclaimed feature film You Can Count on Me; and Anthony Savini, who worked on the television series Crime and Punishment and The Freshman Diaries. The goal was to follow a selected group of students for 3 days and nights as they navigated their Swarthmore experience. From the classroom to the dorm room, the dining hall to the rugby field, the Philly club scene to the famed on-campus party “Screw Your Roommate,” the crews shot some 35 hours of digital video. One innovative feature of the filming was a series of “self-interviews,” where students sat alone with a camera in the abandoned “ballroom” of Parrish Hall and talked directly about the College. Excerpts from these interviews may be seen in “Swarthmore Unscripted,” a new feature on the College’s Web site (www.swarthmore.edu/unscripted/). The rest of the footage will be edited into a video for use by the Admissions Office. —Tom Krattenmaker and Jeffrey Lott ANTHONY SAVINI S wa r t h m o re i n Fo c u s 7 THE COLLEGE NEEDS TO BE MORE ACTIVELY involved in the management and preservation of the Crum Woods, according to an independent report issued in December. The College’s ad hoc Crum Woods Stewardship Committee (CWSC) commissioned the study from two firms, Natural Lands Trust and Continental Conservation, as part of its goal to “create a protection, restoration, and stewardship plan for Crum Woods.” The authors concluded that “basic stewardship tasks,” including trash removal and trail maintenance, have been neglected in the past. Just one afternoon of cleanup in April by a dozen students and faculty members yielded 12 tires, two smashed bikes, two smashed computers, and approximately 75 cubic feet of trash. To protect the woods’ boundaries and resources against further loss and degradation, the report contains recommendations for two new positions at the College: a full-time manager, who would coordinate all parties with an interest in the woods, and a faculty member who would oversee proposals for new uses. Other suggestions include the adoption of “a ‘no net loss’ policy on the total area of unfragmented forest” and the beginning of a number of processes to improve wildlife and stormwater management. “Some of the recommendations we agree with; some we don’t,” says CWSC chair and Henry C. and J. Archer Turner Professor of Engineering Arthur McGarity. “This report will stimulate some thought on what structure to put in place. It’s too soon to say how that will happen, but at the minimum, we have an evaluation that will guide future decisions.” After reviewing the study, the CWSC plans to make its own recommendations at the end of this semester. The woods, consisting of more than 200 acres of forest and 30 acres of swamps, marshes, and floodplains, contain the best examples of mature, native forest in Delaware County. “There are threats,” McGarity says. “It’s clear the woods will be threatened over time, if we don’t pay attention to them.” —Alisa Giardinelli 8 THE COLLEGE COMMUNITY MOURNS the March 5 death of Professor Emeritus of German George Avery, 77. A faculty member since 1959, he was chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures from 1975 to 1980, retiring in 1994. “George had a deep love for German literature and culture, and he responded to it not only as the meticulous and erudite scholar that he was but also as a passionately engaged reader. This fundamental connection was expressed in his teaching, inspiring so many of our stu- COURTESY OF THE AVERY FAMILY S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N AUF WIEDERSEHEN GEORGE AVERY dents to develop their own powerful responses to the literature he loved,” said his colleague Professor of German Marion Faber. Crum TERRY WILD STUDIOS Caring for the THE CRUM WOODS ARE BOTH AN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCE FOR THE COLLEGE AND A NATURAL RESOURCE FOR THE COMMUNITY. THREATS TO THE WOODS ARE BEING EVALUATED BY A COLLEGE STEWARDSHIP COMMITTEE. Born in Philadelphia, Avery served in the military in Germany, followed by postwar relief work in Finland and Greece. Later, he obtained bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees at the University of Pennsylvania. An expert on Viennese satirical writer Karl Kraus and his milieu, Avery produced an abundance of scholarly writing, including a 2003 publication that examines the correspondence between Kraus and writer and publisher Herwarth Walden. Internationally recognized for his pioneering work on the Swiss modernist author Robert Walser, Avery was the recipient of several prestigious scholarships. Following the motto Mens sana in corpore sano, Avery was a frequent visitor to the Mullan Tennis Center. Retired baseball coach Ernie Prudente, who was often Avery’s partner in tennis matches, said: “Since his retirement, George was always at the athletics facilities working out, playing tennis, and kibitzing with the rest of us. George was someone who loved the College and who was liked by everyone here who knew him.” —Carol Brévart-Demm ONE IN FOUR ACCEPTED The College received 3,753 applications for the Class of 2008 and accepted roughly a quarter of those who applied. Of the 885 students accepted, 142 were notified during the early-decision period. Based on previous admissions patterns, Dean of Admissions Jim Bock ’90 expected to enroll a class of about 370 in the fall. Of the admitted students from high schools that report class rank, 27 percent are ALEKSEI AND ANNA BUDEYEV, WITH WHOM DAVID HARRISON (LEFT) VISITED LAST YEAR, ARE TWO OF THE LAST SPEAKERS OF THE MIDDLE CHULYM LANGUAGE. “because they are traditionally subsistence hunter-gatherers and fishermen.” They also have a rich oral tradition of religious beliefs, stories, and songs. Harrison found that only 35 members of the community of 426—and none under the age of 52—could speak the language fluently, so it is now considered moribund. “As the existing speakers grow older,” Harrison says, “they are not replaced in the population. Therefore, it is almost certain the language will disappear”—and, with it, the highly specialized knowledge of the Chulym people. In an effort to document Chulym, Harrison plans to construct a grammar of the language and a children’s storybook. He says that standard techniques (such as those taught at Swarthmore in the linguistics course Field Methods) can be applied to help understand previously valedictorians or salutatorians. Fifty percent are in the top 2 percent of their high school class and 91 percent in the top decile. —Tom Krattenmaker LIFELONG LEARNING PROGRAM EXPANDS The College’s Lifelong Learning Program, which has offered noncredit courses to alumni, parents, and friends in the Philadelphia area, is expanding in the fall to include two courses to be unknown linguistic structures. “For the grammar book,” he says, “I found one speaker in the community who had devised his own homemade writing system, and I plan to use it, with minor modifications, to publish the first book ever in the language.” Locating and confirming the existence of the language and possibly preventing its disappearance, “was a great feeling,” Harrison says, “sort of like the feeling I imagine a zoologist might have upon documenting a new species.” To learn more about Chulym, view a slideshow, hear the language spoken, and see a preview of Vanishing Voices, a film about Harrison’s work on Chulym in Siberia, visit http://www.swarthmore.edu/news/releases/04/harrison.html. —Carol Brévart-Demm taught in New York City. Two eight-week courses will be offered at the Cornell Club at 6 East 44th Street: Homeric Models of Heroism, taught by Gilbert Rose, Susan W. Lippincott Professor Emeritus of Modern and Classical Languages; and Science, Objectivity, and Values, taught by Hugh Lacey, Scheuer Family Professor Emeritus of Philosophy. Three other courses will be offered at the College: The New Embryology: the Science Behind the Headlines, taught by Scott Gilbert, Howard A. Schneiderman Professor of Biology; America at War, taught by James Kurth, Claude C. Smith Professor of Political Science; and Shakespeare taught by Craig Williamson, Professor of English Literature. For more information on schedules, fees, and registration, call (610) 328-8696, or visit www.swarthmore.edu/alumni/life_learning.html. —Jeffrey Lott JUNE 2004 WHEN VISITING ASSISTANT PROFESSOR of Linguistics K. David Harrison arrived last July at Mikhail Skobelin’s house in a remote village in Central Siberia, he found the elderly man hard of hearing. “I literally had to shout in his ear. I asked him in Russian if he could say something in his native language. He said: ‘I am Mikhail Skobelin, I was born here in 1931, and I’ve lived here all my life.’” This was the first sentence that Harrison heard in Chulym, a language he had been searching for and whose existence had been only briefly mentioned and incorrectly categorized in the literature of the linguistic scientific community. “Fortunately, my film crew had their cameras rolling, so we caught it on tape. I have a big smile on my face—it was an exciting moment,” he says. The Chulym people are an indigenous community inhabiting six small, isolated villages among a mostly Russian population. Their language, with its unique numeric and grammatical systems, is unrelated to Russian or other Slavic languages and has existed solely through oral tradition. “They never had writing and had no written documentation,” Harrison says. Of particular interest to linguists is the language’s detailed system for classifying plants, especially those with medicinal uses that are local to the area, as well as a large vocabulary pertaining to fish, parts of fish, and fishing lures and traps. “This makes sense,” Harrison says, GREGORY ANDERSON Va n i s h i n g Vo i c e s 9 “ R E G R E T T H AT O U R T I M E S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N TOGETHER IS OVER” 10 A month before retiring, Don Swearer, the Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor of Religion, pondered the changes he’s witnessed during more than 30 years on campus. He joined the College’s Department of Religion in September 1970. “One of the big changes at Swarthmore since I arrived has been the development of the Department of Religion,” he says. “Religion became a department in 1968 with the appointment of Patrick Henry, a Christian church historian. Lin Urban, a philosopher of religion, was the chair—having taught in the Department of Philosophy. I was appointed to teach the religions of Asia.” The department now includes five tenured or tenure-track faculty positions, including one shared appointment. Swearer has taught courses and seminars including The Buddhist Traditions of Asia, Religious Belief and Moral Action, and Comparative Religious Mysticism. “Swarthmore’s faculty overall has grown in numbers as established fields of study have changed and new fields have emerged; furthermore, the faculty has become considerably more diverse in terms of gender and ethnicity. This diversity is also seen in the composition of the student body. The presence of a larger number of students from abroad and the increased opportunity for students to study in countries throughout the globe has also added to the cultural and educational richness of the campus,” Swearer says. “Professors expect a lot of their students, and, likewise, most students expect a lot of their professors. It is this climate of mutual high expectation that makes Swarthmore such a special educational institution and gives the College its distinctive atmosphere of intellectual intensity,” he adds. “The relatively small class size, honors seminars, and Swarthmore’s inquisitive intellectual climate contribute not only to the uniqueness of the College as an educational institution but to the rich and often lasting relationships that develop among students and between students and professors. These relationships often stand the test of time and last well beyond the Swarthmore years and perhaps for a lifetime.” Students who studied Asian reliDON SWEARER gions with Swearer are now professors at Cornell, Oberlin, Bowdin, Bates, and other institutions or in graduate school. But others who have followed different paths also stay in touch—if not regularly, then on special occasions from holidays to the birth of a child. Reflecting on his impending retirement, Swearer says: “What I’ll miss most are those memorable classes and seminars where—for whatever reasons—everything seemed to click; virtually every student is interested, engaged, and contributing; the class or seminar time never seems to be quite sufficient; and at the end of the semester, there’s nearuniversal regret that our time together is over. These classes and seminars are intellectually rewarding, to be sure, but they are much more. They touch all aspects of our being—affective and moral—as well.” Swearer will not leave teaching completely. He will begin a three-year visiting professorship of Buddhist studies at Harvard Divinity School and will serve as director of the Center for the Study of World Religions. Swearer plans to continue his research and writing in Asian and comparative religions. Two of his books, Becoming the Buddha: The Ritual of Image Consecration in Thai- ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS Glancing Forward and Back land (Princeton) and The Sacred Mountains of Northern Thailand and Their Legends (Silkwork/University of Washington Press), were released this spring. “I’ll also remain actively engaged in the fields of religion and the environment and religious pluralism in America,” he says. H O W T H E T R E E S H AV E G R O W N Judy Voet, James H. Hammons Professor of Chemistry, has taught at Swarthmore for 25 years. “During that time, I’ve watched the weeping cherries near Beardsley grow to be beautiful, mature graceful trees while I’ve gone from a young mother with a new career to a grandmother trying to juggle ever-increasing professional and personal time commitments,” she says. “My students at one time could baby-sit for my children. Now, the new assistant professors are my children’s age or younger. I used to have to fight my students for authority. Now, I wish they did not view me as such an authority figure. But age aside, the students are still the same, ever inquisitive, intense, and with a love of learning JUDY VOET JEFFREY LOTT nal, contributing to the development of a biochemistry and molecular biology digital library, and serving on professional committees and advisory boards. “In addition, I hope to have enough time to play an important role in the upbringing of my grandchildren,” she says. JUBILADA Amy Morrison, associate College librarian until the end of March, worked at Swarthmore for nearly 25 years. During her time at the College, Morrison found the changes in the physical plan “most exciting.” She says that the elimination of the road dissecting the campus “created a more cohesive community.” Morrison also witnessed the 1980s construction of Cornell Science Library and McCabe Library renovations during the last few years as well as the building of Mertz, the Lang Performing Arts Center, Kohlberg, the rebirth of Trotter, and the new science center. “I took a leadership role in the automation of the library’s card catalog and in the development of the tricollege library consortium of Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore,” she says. “I also reorganized the Technical Services Department in McCabe Library from a function-based organization to one based on format. In that process, I was gratified to enable staff in that department to enhance their responsibilities and to make their jobs more interesting and rewarding. I consider my legacy and my greatest pleasure the development of the artists’ book collection in Special Collections in McCabe.” Morrison already misses working with “intelligent, talented, wonderful people— whose values I both respect and share.” Although she still returns to campus for Pilates classes and other events, Morrison regrets not seeing the campus on a daily basis. “To allay that loss and to pay back my debt to the pleasure the arboretum has given me every day, I have signed on as a Scott Arboretum volunteer and look forward to making new friends and to learning something about horticulture,” she says—ever mindful of Cicero’s maxim, “If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” “I will miss the students,” Morrison adds, noting the welcome increase in diver- AMY MORRISON sity during her tenure. “They taught me to understand better my own children and to participate in a more meaningful way in their adult lives.” She thinks that, in comparison with other colleges and universities, Swarthmore students, faculty, and staff “develop a lasting sense of connection to the community and a strong commitment to worthwhile ideals.” As Morrison explained at her retirement party, she dislikes the word “retired.” “It sounds so out to pasture-ish—so put ‘on the shelf,’” she says. “The Spanish say it so much better—jubilada—like joy, jubilation,” which has a more uplifting ring. “I am worried that when I am retired, people may expect me to act my age. I have no intention of doing that. I expect to be very active in this Indian summer of my life. I believe in life changes and renewal. I am looking forward to my ‘Third Age,’ as the French call it, as something challenging, exciting, and unknown—an adventure.” Morrison intends to “reinvent” herself, “to become who I am and to do what I really want to do—whatever that may be. I want to explore the book arts—from the other side—and to try my own hand at letterpress printing and maybe even book making. There will now be time to read, to listen to music, to work out, to garden, to go canoeing, to take classes, and to travel—or rather to spend long enough in other places and countries to make a genuine connection with the people there.” She and her husband are considering a volunteer opportunity at a state park in Hawaii next winter and another one at a reading center in a villa near Bologna, Italy. “Those who are already retired know how busy and rich that life can be—and those who are not yet there, well, what can I say? Eat your heart out.” —Andrea Hammer JUNE 2004 JIM GRAHAM that I seldom see elsewhere.” Voet has taught courses and seminars, including Modern Instrumental Methods in Chemistry and Biochemistry, Biological Chemistry, and Topics in Biochemistry, respectively. She co-authored the best-selling Biochemistry (2nd ed., 1995), with husband Donald, an associate professor of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. With Charolotte Pratt, they wrote Fundamentals of Biochemistry (John Wiley & Sons, 1999). Voet’s research has included “determining the rates at which benzenesulfonylfluoride and phenylmethanesulfonylfluoride inactivate wild type and mutant acetylcholinesterases from several sources” and using “computer modeling techniques in order to understand how differences in enzyme structure can account for these differences in reactivity.” At the end of the spring semester, Voet will go on permanent sabbatical leave. “I will no longer teach, but I will maintain an office and continue with all of my other professional responsibilities, including writing biochemistry textbooks, editing a biochemistry and molecular biology education jour- 11 12 ED GOLDSTEIN ‘07 SHOT A 1-OVER-PAR 73 TO LEAD AFTER THE FIRST ROUND OF THE CENTENNIAL CONFERENCE GOLF CHAMPIONSHIPS IN APRIL. goal list with 103. DeSimone ranks eighth on the career scoring list with 139 points. Junior midfielder Tim Chryssikos also added four goals and two assists and led the team in scoring with 25 goals and 24 assists for 49 points. Chryssikos finished ninth in the CC in scoring and sixth in assists, earning all-conference honorable mention. Women’s lacrosse (8–8, 2–7) Jackie Kahn ’04 led the offensive attack, scoring a team-best 54 goals and 10 assists for 64 points. The midfielder finished second in the CC in goals and eighth in points per game, earning all–CC first-team honors. Kahn finished her career with 146 goals, 27 assists, and 173 points, ranking seventh on Swarthmore’s career goals and points lists. Cara Tigue ’06, the team’s top defender, earned all-conference honorable mention. Jenn Hart ’04 closed her career in net with 569 saves to finish third on the career list. Softball (10–22, 3–13) Centerfielder Mary Mintel ’05 posted a team-high .281 batting average and .371 slugging percentage, hitting the Garnet’s lone home run in a 3–2 victory over Washington College. Fellow outfielder Samantha Brody ’05 led the team in hits (27), runs (17), at bats (97), and stolen bases (9); and infielder Danielle Miller ’06 led the squad with 19 runs batted in and was second in runs scored (16), tying with Mintel. Catcher Christina Procacci ’06 drew the most walks in the CC (23), posting a .439 on-base percentage. Pitcher Marianne Klingaman ’07 led the team with six wins, a 3.10 earned run average, and finished ninth in the CC with 51 strikeouts. Emily Remus ’06 fanned 57 to place sev- CARL WOLF STUDIOS Baseball (5–20, 4–14) Jared Leiderman ’05 earned all-conference honorable mention for leading the Garnet pitching staff. In 13 appearances, Leiderman recorded a 4–6 record with four complete games. The workhorse right-hander finished fifth in the league with 50 strikeouts in 57.1 innings. Catcher Cliff Sosin ’04 led the team with a .277 batting average and Ryan Pannorfi ’04 placed second, hitting .266, collecting the Garnet’s most hits (21) and triples (4). Matt Goldstein ’04 posted a .517 slugging percentage; almost half of his 15 hits went for extra bases with two doubles, two triples, and a team best three home runs, including two blasts in a 4–1 victory over Haverford. Golf (13–6, fifth at Centennial Conference [CC] Championship) Swarthmore’s golf team had one of its most successful seasons in recent memory. The squad equaled its best finish at the CC Championships, placing fifth with a school-best three-day total of 957. The score beat Swarthmore’s previous best three-day total by 76 strokes. On the opening day of the CC Championships, the Garnet fired its best single round in school history, carding a 308. Ed Goldstein ’07 shot a careerbest 73 on the par 72 Eagles Landing course to pace the Garnet, Zach Moody ’07 and Matt Draper ’05 posted 78s, and Mike Cullinan ’06 added a 79. Draper finished in 11th place with 238; Goldstein carded 242 for a 14th-place finish. Men’s lacrosse (6–9, 3–5) Despite its 6–9 record, the men’s lacrosse team closed out the season on a high note with a 15–4 thrashing of Haverford. In that game, senior attacker Joe DeSimone scored four goals, collected his 100th career goal, and moved into fourth place on the Garnet’s all-time MARK DUZENSKI S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N Tennis and G olf: Strong Seasons ANJANI REDDY ’04 CLOSED OUT HER SWARTHMORE TENNIS CAREER WITH A STUNNING 50–0 RECORD IN SINGLES MATCHES. SHE WAS CENTENNIAL CONFERENCE PLAYER OF THE YEAR FOR FOUR SEASONS. enth on the CC list. The team’s 10 wins were the most since the 1998 season. Men’s tennis (9–8) The Garnet ranked 19th in Division III and advanced to the NCAA Tournament for the 28th time in 29 years. In the first round of the tournament, the Garnet rallied from a 3–2 deficit to defeat Washington College 4–3. Jon Reiss ’07 and Justin Durand ’05 pulled out victories to advance Swarthmore. In round two, the team fell to the No. 8 ranked host, Mary Washington, 4–2. The men took an early lead, winning the doubles point, and Zac Rodd ’06 picked up the other point at first singles. Rodd and the doubles team of Mike Noreika ’04 and Frank Visciano ’04 were selected to play in the NCAA Division III Individual Championships. Women’s tennis (15–3, 9–1) Anjani Reddy ’04 became the first woman in CC history to earn four Player of the Year Awards, as she won her third CC singles title. Reddy finished her CC career with a 50–0 mark in singles play. The Garnet was ranked No. 16 in Division III and made the NCAA Division III Tournament for the second consecutive season. Swarthmore dispatched Salisbury, 7–1 in the first round of the tourney but fell to the No. 2 team in the country, Washington & Lee, 7–2 in round two. Reddy qualified for the NCAA Individual Tournament for the third time. She also teamed with Sonya Reynolds ’07 to earn all- J u s t To p s WHEN SOCCER ENTHUSIAST RYAN KUKER ’06 heard a disabled child bemoan his exclusion from participation in a recreational sports league, he decided to take action. He was directed to The Outreach Program for Soccer (TOPSoccer), a branch of the United States Youth Soccer Association that, according to the program’s mission statement, allows disabled children “to play soccer and have fun in a supportive, caring coaching environment.” After coaching with the TOPSoccer Program in New Jersey last summer, Kuker teamed up with fellow student Rhiannon Graybill ’06 and, with support and guidance from the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, the Athletics Department, and the Ridley United Soccer Club, started an 8-week program in early March. Currently working with 40 student volunteer coaches and 31 athletes, ages 8 to 13, Kuker says, “My vision for Swarthmore TOPSoccer is that it becomes a self-sustaining program, which expands in both athlete and volunteer participation.” TIM BREVART conference honors in doubles. Men’s track and field (eighth at CC Championship) Matt Williams ’04 won a silver medal in the 110 hurdles in a time of 15:48 and placed fourth in the 400 hurdles in 57.54 to pace the Garnet to an eighthplace finish at the 2004 CC Championships, hosted by Swarthmore. The 4x800 relay team of Dillon McGrew ’07, Duncan Gromko ’07, Keefe Keeley ’06, and Vernon Chaplin ’07 finished third in 7:51.28 to win a bronze medal. Garrett Ash ’05 ran fourth in the 10,000 with a time of 32:18.26. Women’s track and field (eighth at CC Championship) Njideka Akunyili ’04 won gold and bronze medals in front of a home crowd at the 2004 CC Championship to pace the Garnet to an eighth-place finish. Akunyili teamed up with Sarah Hobbs ’06, Emily Wistar ’06, and Lauren Fety ’06 for an exciting victory in the 4x800 relay, crossing the finish line in 9:31.37. She earned a bronze medal in the 800, finishing in 2:19.30. Jen Stevenson ’06 won a silver medal in the long jump with a leap of 16 feet 5.25 inches. —Mark Duzenski HEAD TOPSOCCER COACH RYAN KUKER SAYS: “SWARTHMORE TOPSOCCER PROVIDES ATHLETES AN OPPORTUNITY TO LEARN A GREAT GAME AND HAVE FUN WHILE BUILDING IMPORTANT CHARACTER TRAITS SUCH AS SELF-CONFIDENCE AND TEAMWORK.” Initially motivated by Kuker’s persuasive description of the program, Graybill says: “TOPSoccer didn’t become real for me until the first session, when I saw all the kids running around with giant smiles on their faces. Then, I understood what the program was really about.” —Carol Brévart-Demm JIM GRAHAM DID YOU KNOW: • In these technological and culturally trendy times, English literature remains a top choice of majors for Swarthmore students? • In 2003, the College’s first dance major graduated? ROBIN SHORES • In 1993—for the first time—more women were enrolled in the College than men, a phenomenon that has continued ever since? Sifting through statistics from the College’s Institutional Research Office can produce some fun facts, but interpreting these data is not a spectator sport. Take this topical tidbit, plucked at random from enrollment statistics tracked for the last couple of decades: Enrollment of students from all races and ethnic categories has risen except for non-Hispanic whites. Although a trend might be discernible, says Institutional Research Director Robin Huntington Shores, individual numbers regarding race and ethnicity aren’t always reliable. In years past, state govern- ment agencies seeking race and ethnicity data didn’t provide for those who identified themselves as belonging to more than one category, without one being predominant, or for those who chose no race category. So those who checked more than one box, or none, might have been lumped in with white. Now, the option, “unknown race,” is being chosen by increasing numbers of students. However, the new category creates what one might call the Ralph Nader effect: How many of those “unknowns” would have described themselves as “African American” or “Asian” or “white” in the past? And what implication does that have for prior statistics? Informed, scientific interpretation is serious business to Shores. She puts her work at every College employee’s fingertips through the annual Fact Book and its on-line version at www.swarthmore.edu/Admin/in stitutional_research/factbook2.html. Since the office was established in 1999, much of Shores’ time has been spent satisfying the requirements of government agencies and educational consortia and responding to frequent requests from publishers of college guide books. But she relishes her other role: conducting research for in-house use. Administrators and faculty members clamor for her constant snapshots of College life. “It’s to see if our thoughts and ideas about ourselves are accurate before we go about making changes,” Shores says. —Colleen Gallagher JUNE 2004 Sticking to the facts 13 Parrish Reborn A S PA R R I S H H A L L G E T S S E T F O R R E N E WA L , c. 1870 M O R E O F I T S H I S TO R Y C O M E S TO L I G H T. By J e f f r e y L o t t 14 FRIENDS HISTORICAL LIBRARY The mixed-use nature of Parrish will be maintained. First-floor administrative offices will be primarily those that provide student services, such as the Dean’s Office, Financial Aid, Registrar, and Career Services. A new central stairway (see page 16) will welcome visitors to the Admissions Office and will also lead to administrative offices on the east and west wings of the second floor. The third and fourth floors will remain student residence halls, with 112 beds instead of the current 162. The project is being funded by contributions to The Meaning of Swarthmore, the College’s $230 million capital campaign. A pledge of $10 million by Jerome Kohlberg ’46 provided leadership for the Parrish renovations. 1881 FRIENDS HISTORICAL LIBRARY S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N F or 135 years, Parrish Hall has stood watch atop its hill, while one of the nation’s great colleges grew around it. Now, it is about to undergo a $13.6 million renovation, which will add modern safety systems and remake the building’s central core into inviting spaces suited for its next century as Swarthmore’s symbolic center. Opened in 1869 as Swarthmore welcomed its first students, the “College,” as it was called then, housed the entire institution—all of its classrooms, labs, student rooms, dining room, and common spaces. After a September 1881 fire gutted the building’s interior, it was rebuilt with even greater energy and optimism than had surrounded the founding of the College in 1864. The Phoenix, founded in 1881, was named to symbolize Swarthmore’s rebirth from the ashes. That was more than 120 years ago, and although Parrish Hall has been gradually modernized over the last century, it has, like Swarthmore, held onto its Quaker heritage. Yet, in a building constructed before the introduction of electric lights—not to mention fiber optic networks—modernity is a relative term. A major goal of The Meaning of Swarthmore, the College’s current $230 million comprehensive campaign, is to bring Parrish into the 21st century. The exterior of the building will not be changed, and interior redesign will respect the character of the 19th-century structure. This is not a “historic preservation” project says Larry Schall ’75, vice president for administration. This would imply an exacting restoration of original building details. Instead, Schall says, “The project is more properly termed an ‘adaptive reuse.’ Parrish has never been restored—it has always evolved.” The project architect is Ayers/Saint/Gross of Baltimore, a firm specializing in buildings for colleges and universities. “The renovation of Parrish is not proposed as a re-gilding of the past, but rather a step forward,” the architects wrote in a planning document. “The final product should be a building that appears unchanged on the exterior with a well-planned interior that appropriately expresses the building’s Quaker history.” The work begun in early June will concentrate first on life-safety systems within the building. A fire sprinkler system will be installed throughout the five-story structure, and exit stairways will be reconfigured to terminate outside the building. The central core of the building will be functionally reconfigured and modernized. Elevators will be installed; a new stairway will lead visitors to the Admissions Office on the second floor; a new post office and student lounge will be created in the former Admissions Office space, and central air-conditioning will be installed in renovated offices and common spaces in the central section of the building. When it opened in 1869, the “College Building” housed all of the functions of the new school. It was gutted by fire in 1881 but rebuilt within months. The total cost of rebuilding Parrish Hall after the 1881 fire was $ 225, 293.74. R e n o v at i o n s begun recently will cost an estimated $13.6 million. A SURPRISING DISCOVERY L ast summer, the Parrish project triggered a surprising discovery in a basement storage vault. In anticipation of the renovations, Suzanne Welsh, vice president for finance and treasurer, and two staff members ventured deep into Parrish’s basement rooms, through two locked doors, to assess decades of financial records stored there. Lori Johnson, assistant treasurer, says they never go there alone: “If the door locked behind you, you might never be found.” High above a block of filing cabinets, they spotted a metal box stuffed between the joists of the floor above. Lettered on its side were the words: This box, which contained a complete financial record of the rebuilding of Parrish Hall after fire destroyed the building in 1881, was found last year in the building’s basement. “BILLS,VOUCHERS &c Re-Building Committee SWARTHMORE COLLEGE After the Fire, 9th Mo.25th.1881.” Treasury Operations Assistant Carmen Duffy (“She’s the tallest,” Welsh says) stood on a chair to wiggle the box out from between the boards. Inside the dusty box, which weighed about 10 pounds, were records kept by Edward Ogden, chairman of the building committee of the Board of Managers—the complete financial record of the rebuilding, including catalogs, business cards, correspondence, estimates, contracts, invoices, ledgers, payroll records, and check stubs. As the persons who write the checks today, Welsh and her staff were particularly interested in the final audited report of the committee, showing that rebuilding costs had totaled $225,293.74. To the penny. “That’s less than the cost of one elevator installed today,” Welsh says. During fall 2003, students in Visiting Lecturer Thomas Morton’s (left) course The Architect and summer. Morton used campus buildings and Philadelphia architecture to introduce students to the study of architecture. JUNE 2004 PHOTOGRAPHS BY JIM GRAHAM History examined the documents found last 15 Parrish 2005 T S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N his rendering shows, in cutaway view, the major elements of the renovation of Parrish Hall, which began earlier this month. A new 75-bed residence hall, nearing completion at the foot of the campus, will house most of the students displaced by the construction and reconfiguration of Parrish. When the project is complete, the number of student beds in Parrish will be reduced from 162 to 112. The Parrish renovations, which include a fire sprinkler system for the entire building, will be completed by September 2005. 16 Parrish Parlors will continue as a popular place for meeting, studying, and socializing. They will retain their 19th-century ambience, but with modern lighting and Internet connections. Dra w i n g b y A l ex F o r b e s Two new elevators will make seven stops at all of the building’s floors and half-floors. Exit stairways will be brought into compliance with modern fire codes. The Admissions Office will The College Post Office will be moved to relocate to the second floor, the space currently occupied by the using a renovated Parrish Admissions Office. It will provide 1,400 Commons as a reception and individual mailboxes and a student lounge meeting area for groups of with computer hookups. prospective students. Parrish Hall’s reconfigured first floor will be A broad staircase will welcome visi- including the Dean’s Office, Registrar, Financial tors and take them up to the Aid, Career Services, and the credit union. Admissions Office, which will be relocated to the second floor. JUNE 2004 dedicated to student services and activities, 17 SUZANNE GAADT S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N 18 B y Pe t e r C o h a n ’ 7 9 W hat does the typical Swarthmore graduate do? The accepted wisdom about Swarthmore is that its alumni are professors, teachers, doctors, lawyers, government workers, journalists—or crusaders. The statistics, however, don’t bear out this view. A recent analysis of Swarthmore’s alumni data showed that although 41 percent of the College’s alumni are employed by nonprofit organizations—largely in education, research, social service, and government—an almost equal proportion work in for-profit businesses or are self-employed. It comes as no surprise—and no accident—that many Swarthmoreans find work in the nonprofit world. Swarthmore’s combination of a broad liberal arts curriculum with its emphasis on using one’s education to create a better world often leads graduates into academic and social service professions. Yet that same education also seems to have prepared—almost by accident—nearly half of the alumni for work in business. The College has no business major and only a handful of courses that touch on the practical skills needed in a business career, but alumni in the for-profit world largely agree M A N Y S WA R T H M O R E A N S CHOOSE CAREERS I N B U S I N E S S. BUT IS THE COLLEGE PREPARING THEM F O R I T S C H A L L E N G E S? that Swarthmore did prepare them for the leadership challenges of business and entrepreneurship. They also wonder whether it could do more. Joy Hulse Wyatt ’80 began a new job as senior vice president and director of human resources (HR) for Fiduciary Trust just three months after the firm had lost 87 employees in the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center. Wyatt, a music major at Swarthmore who says she honed her organizational skills as a pit orchestra conductor for a musical production, found Fiduciary Trust laden with emotion at every level. She struggled with how best to handle the situation and, during a period of roughly two years, she and her HR team helped to rebuild the firm’s organization and successfully integrated it with Franklin Resources, which had acquired Fiduciary Trust six months before the disaster. According to Wyatt, “I met with each member of the management committee as well as the HR team and acknowledged the sensitivities and sense of loss. I said, ‘I am here to do a particular job. This is what the job looks like, and it is a different job from the one my predecessor had to do.’” As testament to Wyatt’s skill, a longstanding senior leader told her as she changed jobs at Fiduciary earlier this year, “You were essential to putting this place back together.” Wyatt says that the intellectual training and experiences she gained at Swarthmore prepared her for the challenges she faced at Fiduciary Trust. Yet she sometimes feels a nagging sense that her choice of a business career was not wholly respected by her Swarthmore peers. Wyatt thinks that Swarthmore needs to define business in a different way: “Business could be a respectable academic discipline if it was called organizational dynamics. It might be an interdisciplinary major of economics, political science, and history.” Wyatt’s feelings about Swarthmore and business were shared by many of the alumni interviewed for this article, who were asked to construct a hierarchy of career options encouraged by the College. The resulting list is not surprising: academia, followed by medicine, law, government, social service, journalism, and—last—business. Adrian Merryman ’80, a former investment banker who lived in England for many years, thinks that, along with its Oxfordstyle Honors Program, Swarthmore may also have adopted what we observed to be the historic British attitude toward wealth: that creating it is distasteful but inheriting it enables the upper classes to pursue more dignified callings. Merryman explains: “Although the British initiated the industrial revolution, they developed a negative atti- JUNE 2004 A Profitable Education 19 JOY HULSE WYATT SAYS SWARTHMORE GAVE HER THE INTELLECTUAL TOOLS TO BE SUCCESSFUL IN THE BUSINESS WORLD BUT HAS A NAGGING SENSE THAT HER CAREER CHOICE WAS WAS NOT ALWAYS RESPECTED BY HER SWARTHMORE PEERS. DIANE BONDAREFF/FIDUCIARY TRUST tude toward those professions that resulted in the creation of wealth. Generations subsequent to that which created the wealth have preferred to focus on social position and cultural sophistication.” He says, however, that the British attitude is changing: “Even Oxford and Cambridge, which until the last two decades limited their association with the business community, both now have graduate business schools.” Robinson Hollister Jr., Joseph Wharton Professor of Economics, suspects Swarthmore’s attitude toward business comes from its Quaker roots. “In the 19th and early 20th centuries,“ he says, “Quakers were big businessmen, including Wharton, cofounder of Bethlehem Steel and a Swarthmore donor. Their social consciousness didn’t stop them from making a profit.” But Hollister says: “In the 1930s, there came to be less of an emphasis among Quakers on business and more on public service. This may have been a reaction to the Great Depression. This shift coincided with the rise of the Honors Program, introduced by President Frank Aydelotte, who used the highly intellectual Oxford model.” Barry Schwartz, Dorwin P. Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social warm bodies to process the deals. Suddenly Wall Street became a desirable place to go. Students highly rated in terms of academic performance were going to investment banking. It was the money. It became the socially cool thing to do,” Hollister says. Still, recent graduates who have gone into business suggest that the campus attitude toward business remains cool. Gaurav tion is an excellent preparation for a business career. The ability to deconstruct problems and articulate effective solutions translates well in the boardroom.” He praised efforts such as the annual Lax Conference on Entrepreneurship (see page 22), the revival of a student Swarthmore Business Association, and the support of the Career Services Office for students and alumni exploring business careers. But he lamented that although “the top graduate schools are aware of Swarthmore’s reputation, human resources personnel at larger corporations are often not.” P erhaps they should be. According to Associate Professor of Economics Philip Jefferson, “Swarthmore’s purpose is to help students process new ideas. There is a natural realization that ideas are useful in a variety of situations, and there’s no reason to exclude business. If a student says, ‘I’m interested in business,’ I 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 view of one professor of economics, profit is the reward you get for solving problems that matter to society. 20 Action, who has been on the faculty since 1971, says this bias can still be found among some members of Swarthmore’s faculty. “I think the common attitude here is that business is what you do if you’re not intellectually serious. It said, ‘You don’t need to be smart to go into business, so why are we wasting our time teaching you?’ Even the economists were disappointed if a student went into business,” Schwartz says. But Hollister thinks that Swarthmore became more of a springboard to business during the 1980s boom in investment banking. “In the late ’80s, investment banking firms were paying an incredible amount of money. In a major merger transaction, the bankers’ 0.5 percent commission was so small proportionately that no one would notice. The firms doing deals could afford the fee, and the investment banks needed Seth ’98, a vice president at investment banking giant Goldman Sachs, says, “People ask me why I would go into business. The Swarthmore mentality is saving the world, working for the greater good. Swarthmore believes that business is wasting the intellect. ‘What is the point of making money?’ they ask. While this may be a worthy mindset, the reality is that some of us have to care about economics and do want to live comfortably.” Randy Goldstein ’05 echoed Seth’s view in his April 8 Phoenix column. “Among the student body and in certain classrooms,“ he wrote, “business careers are stigmatized. They are looked down upon as anti-intellectual and contrary to Swarthmore values.” In his column, Goldstein, who aspires to earn an M.B.A. or a graduate degree in economics, affirmed that a “liberal arts educa- don’t try to dissuade him or her. What are the problems in business? How will they solve them? If they develop solutions to these problems, there is no moral issue in making money.” In his view, profit is the reward you get for solving problems that matter to society. Jefferson thinks that a Swarthmore education, with its emphasis on independent thinking and risk taking, may be better preparation for an entrepreneurial career than for a position in a Fortune 100 firm. “This kind of education helps students understand different real-world situations and to see opportunity in different forms,” he says. “Students at Swarthmore are entrepreneurs without knowing it. They start a club; they protest a policy; they ask the faculty to make a change in the curriculum. These are all entrepreneurial activities. They MEGHAN KRIEGEL ʼ97 FOLLOWING A SUCCESSFUL CAREER IN INVESTMENT BANKING, ADRIAN MERRYMAN AND HIS WIFE, JENNIFER, HAVE TURNED THEIR ATTENTION TO MICROLENDING AS A WAY OF LIFTING PEOPLE IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES OUT OF POVERTY. a different focus on the act of learning relative to other colleges. Swarthmore’s seminars encourage students to work together to solve problems. I enjoy the sheer pursuit of trying to solve complex problems in a team environment. You keep asking questions. This prepares you well for Goldman.” I n addition to the intellectual and experiential tools for success, Swarthmore alumni also take with them a set of fundamental values that not only influence their choice of jobs but inform the way they conduct their business. Kyle says, “After graduation and service in the Army, I wanted to work for a company that made a tangible contribution to society. My first employer, Richardson-Vicks, was an ethical and over-the-counter pharmaceutical company that fit my criteria.” Seth also sees harmony between Swarthmore’s emphasis on giving back to society JOHN MONTGOMERY’S BRIDGEWAY CAPITAL MANAGEMENT GIVES HALF OF ITS PROFITS TO NONPROFITS THAT FOCUS ON HUMAN RIGHTS AND EDUCATION. AT BRIDGEWAY, THE TOP PAY CAN BE NO MORE THAN SEVEN TIMES THAT OF THE LOWESTPAID EMPLOYEE. and the value that Goldman Sachs places on community service. According to Seth, “Goldman has an initiative called Community Teamworks, which encourages every employee to take a day off from the job for community service. In the past, I worked in the inner city at Patterson, N.J. We built a play area.” Merryman and his wife, Jennifer, were disturbed by the fact that half the world’s population lives on less than $2 per day and 20 percent on less than $1 per day. They saw microlending as an approach that effectively transforms the lives of the disenfranchised at the economic, social, and spiritual levels; as a result, they have become committed to its more extensive and effective implementation. “It is amazing,” says Merryman, “that as little as $200 provided in the form of a loan can actually transform the life of a family in despair by catalyzing a business that provides food and education for the children. And when you get the loan repaid (roughly 98 percent payback rate on uncollateralized lending to the world’s poorest), you can lend it to the next family where the cycle begins again. Opportunity International, the Christian faith-based global leader in microfinance, has set a goal reaching 10 percent of the world’s poorest over the next 20 years with this transformational approach. That’s something worth getting behind.” Bridgeway Capital Management offers another thought-provoking approach to implementing social values through business policies. Founded and managed by John Montgomery ’77, Bridgeway operates according to very specific principles. “We give half of our profits to nonprofit organizations that focus on areas such as human rights and education,“ says Montgomery. “There are no job titles at Bridgeway and a minimum of organizational hierarchy. And the top-compensated person here can earn no more than seven times the lowest compensated individual.” Bridgeway’s financial success has attracted several suitors interested in acquiring the company. But so far, Montgomery’s discussions with potential buyers have stumbled when discussion turned to maintaining Bridgeway’s policy of giving half its profits to charity. “I would guess that I receive expressions of interest 10 times a year,” Montgomery says. “But when I tell them JUNE 2004 COURTESY OF BRIDGEWAY CAPITAL MANAGEMENT are seeing a need and filling a void.” Fred Kyle ’54, a member of the Board of Managers, echoes Jefferson’s view: “When we were seniors, my wife and I ran the snack bar in Commons. It was our risk and our business. We had 20 to 25 employees and it provided a real-life business education.” Kyle, who went on to run the commercial operations of pharmaceutical giant SmithKline Beecham (now GlaxoSmithKline), believes his experience running the Swarthmore snack bar proved valuable to his early business career. “I think our experience at Swarthmore running our own business was, in some ways, equivalent to business school.” Entrepreneurial students still have such opportunities, running the Paces café and other services for students. Swarthmore’s emphasis on smart students working in teams also helps prepare alumni for business. Seth noted, “Being at Goldman Sachs is like being at Swarthmore. It can be intimidating because everyone here is highly motivated and generally very smart. They were at the top of their class. It can be humbling.” Seth emphasizes the importance of teamwork at Goldman: “A sure way to be unsuccessful at Goldman is to promote yourself at the expense of the team. Goldman does a great job of promoting the right values: ‘not just for yourself—the team approach.’” And Seth says that Swarthmore prepared him well to work in teams: “Swarthmore has 21 “Y o u c a n take the Crum to the b o a r d r o o m. ” S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N I 22 n his keynote address on March 21 at the College’s annual Lax Conference on Entrepreneurship, Randall Larrimore ’69 told more than 100 students and alumni that today’s most successful businesses—and business leaders—embody the values important to Swarthmore students. Despite recent corporate scandals that tarnished the image of business, he asserted that “the values we Swarthmoreans hold so dear are the same values that can make you successful in the business world.” “THOSE OF YOU WHO GO Larrimore, who closed his business INTO BUSINESS WILL FIND career as president and CEO of United MANY WAYS TO MAKE A Stationers, a company with about $4 bilDIFFERENCE,” SAID RANlion in sales and more than 6,000 DALL LARRIMORE AT THIS employees, said that “the stories of YEAR’S LAX CONFERENCE Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, Health South, and others would lead one to believe ON ENTREPRENEURSHIP. that all companies have scoundrels at the top and only make money by cheating.” He cited studies showing that “companies that are successful over the long term have an ingrained belief in playing by the rules and have strong positive cultures grounded in deeply held values and a sound vision.” Larrimore said that “capitalism is based on profits, and any time higher profits can be aligned with doing the right thing, we have a win–win for the company and for society.” “At Swarthmore,” he said, “we learn to value people for who they are and how they think, not by what they look like or what their backgrounds are. We value independent thinking. We learn to be empathetic. We learn to care for people. I contend that successful business leaders do the same.” In his business career, Larrimore said he learned that success comes from a formula that combines strategy and execution, with the emphasis on the latter. “While a great strategy is terrific,” he said, “It’s the execution that makes something happen.” Good execution depends on employees understanding the company’s goals and having “organization ownership” of them—something that becomes possible when “business leaders care about their people and realize that they are more than just a machine; they are a critical asset of the company.” It is vital, he said, for “individuals to surrender their self-interest for the greater good” to both own and implement the strategy. Speaking directly to the students in attendance, Larrimore said: “I contend that Swarthmore students are well equipped to be tomorrow’s leaders. You’ve learned to be tolerant and to respect others’ views. You can become passionate about something and inspire others to action. You’ve witnessed the value of individual attention and the free exchange of ideas. You’ve learned to relate with senior professors and students from assorted backgrounds with diverse ideas. You’ve learned that power is derived from the soundness of your ideas and the way you relate to others, not from physical strength or intimidation.” He urged the students to “be true to yourself … don’t ever lose the principles you now cherish.” Speaking of his own experience, he said that his education at Swarthmore and later at the Harvard Business School had given him the confidence to take risks, knowing that “I could always find another job…. This allowed me to express my point of view and make those tough decisions that weren’t conventional thinking. It allowed me to argue with people and stand up for what I believed.” “Those of you who go into business,” he concluded, “will find many ways to make a difference, particularly as you move into higher levels of responsibility. You can make sure that your company is ethical. You can strive to make the products you sell perform as promised. You can help to make the work environment safe. You can insist that people treat other people with dignity and respect. You can push for diversity and equal opportunity. You can help your employees balance their work and personal lives. And you can create an environment where employees can contribute with their minds as well as with their hands, where they can experience personal and professional growth. Other participants at this year’s conference included Margaret Helfand ’69, architect and founder of Helfand Architecture; Margaret Thomas Redmon ’79, president of Honey Locust Valley Farms; Dick Senn ’56, a real estate developer; Roger Holstein ’74, president and CEO of WebMD; Arthur Obermayer ’52, president of Moleculon Research Corp.; Stephen Schwartz ’84, president and COO of Lion Apparel; Susan Levine ’78, managing partner at Quince Hill Partners; and Adrian Merryman ’80, former CEO of London-based Screen PLC. —Jeffrey Lott ABOUT THE LAX CONFERENCE The 2004 Lax Conference on Entrepreneurship included roundtable discussions on topics ranging from finding venture capital to nurturing the “entrepreneurial personality,” panel discussions on “Internet Prophets Talk Net Profits” and “Working Green: Business and Environmental Responsibility,” and a closing session on “Business Without Borders.” The conference, now in its sixth year, is supported by a bequest from the late Jonathan Lax ’71, a business executive, noted social activist, and founder of the Philadelphia-based market research and consulting company The Marketing Audit. For more information on this year’s conference—including a list of all current and past speakers and panelists—go to www.swarthmore.edu/lax. The full text of Randall Larrimore’s keynote address is posted with this article at the Bulletin Web site, at www.swarthmore.edu/bulletin/june04/business.php. “We teach our students how to learn what they need at any specific time, not a set of skills that go out of date.” PHILIP JEFFERSON, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS, SAYS HE DOESN’T DISCOURAGE STUDENTS WHO ARE INTERESTED IN BUSINESS CAREERS. ROBINSON HOLLISTER, WHO HAS TAUGHT IN THE ECONOMICS DEPARTMENT SINCE 1971, HAS SEEN A GRADUAL SHIFT IN ATTITUDES TOWARD BUSINESS AT SWARTHMORE, BUT HE WARNS AGAINST ADDING BUSINESS COURSES TO THE CURRICULUM. Kohlberg turned his attention to giving back, contributing to Swarthmore in many ways. He seems most proud of his ongoing contribution to Swarthmore’s student body through the Evans Scholars Program. “I named it after my Swarthmore roommate, Phil Evans; he was a selfless, dedicated doctor, who died prematurely,” says Kohlberg. “Every April, we grant scholarships to about eight students.” (For more on the Evans Scholars Program, see “The Promise of Leadership,” December 2003 Bulletin, or go to www.philipevansscholars.org.) Despite Swarthmore’s record of success in preparing alumni for business careers— and the positive contributions they are making to society and to the College—questions remain about campus attitudes toward business-oriented students. Some alumni have suggested that the College offer a minor in business administration. “If Swarthmore is to train the leaders of the future, we need to focus on providing them with a tool kit that is relevant to this age and the age to come,” says Mer- ryman. “Business is one of the primary levers for creating change in today’s world, and the contributions made can have a profoundly positive impact. Furthermore, even those students who don’t enter the business world need many of the underlying skills to succeed in today’s more competitive academic, medical, and legal environments.” Hollister warns against adding “practical” business courses to the curriculum. “My experience of small colleges is that if they don’t resist the pressure to introduce business courses, the organization gets overwhelmed,” he says. “It becomes all business. If you get a good command of microeconomics, macroeconomics, and statistics, you have the tools to do the other stuff and can pick it up.” Provost and Mari S. Michener Professor of Art History Connie Hungerford agrees. She says that educating for specific business skills may not last a lifetime, but the critical thinking taught at Swarthmore is useful in every endeavor (see “Women Carving Their Own Paths” on page 24): “We teach our students how to learn what they need to learn at any specific time, not a set of skills that is likely to go out of date. Swarthmore alumni can do what a job requires, but they think beyond the task at hand. They can’t do a job—any job—without considering how it might be done better or what the consequences might be. “A liberal arts education gives people competence in a wide range of areas and the confidence that, if they come across a problem—whether it be in business, medicine, law, or in their community—they have the ability to work on a solution.” T Peter Cohan is president of Peter S. Cohan & Associates (http://petercohan.com), a management consulting and venture capital firm. He is the author of seven books, including Value Leadership: The Seven Principles That Drive Corporate Value in Any Economy (JosseyBass, 2003). JUNE 2004 S warthmore alumni who have had success in business support many causes and organizations— including the College itself. The business career and philanthropy of Jerome Kohlberg ’46, an emeritus member of the Board of Managers, is a prime example. Kohlberg was co-founder of the leveraged buyout specialist Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR) and is now special limited principal of Kohlberg & Co. His business success began with the simple yet powerful notion that it was better to risk one’s own capital than to be an intermediary. “One of my friend’s fathers was a merchant banker,’ he recalls. “He didn’t act for commissions. He stood and fell on his own investments, which he put beside those of other clients. I realized that being a principal was what I wanted.” This insight drew Kohlberg into investment banking. “I went to Bear Stearns, where we invented buyouts. They were called bootstraps,” he says. In bootstraps, investors purchase control of companies financed largely through bank loans, while giving managers a significant equity stake to link their personal wealth to the companies’ financial results. The managers streamline operations and sell the company at a profit within 5 to 7 years. “I insisted on [Bear Stearns] management having a piece of the equity,” says Kohlberg. “I brought up the idea of longterm investments in these bootstraps to the Bear Stearns partners. My proposal was overruled.” This led Kohlberg to start his own company. “After 21 years at Bear Stearns, I left to start KKR. I was like other Swarthmore students who are used to independence.” In 1987, Kohlberg went out on his own again, starting Kohlberg & Co. with his son, and retired as a limited partner in 1992. PHOTOS BY ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS that my goal is to give away $100 million a year when I retire, this squashes the discussion.” 23 WOMEN CARVING THEIR OWN PATHS SELF-EMPLOYED ALUMNAE B U I L D E C O N O M I C A L LY INDEPENDENT AND C R E AT I V E LY F U L F I L L I N G L I V E S . EVE LYMAN R eflecting trends in the business world, Swarthmore-educated women have increasingly entered the workforce during the last few decades. As they have explored options from leadership positions in major corporations (see “A Profitable Education” on page 18) to independent start-ups, they have consistently relied on analytic and communications skills developed at the College. According to the College’s database, approximately 500 female entrepreneurs have opted to work independently as self-employed architects, financial analysts, translators, landscape designers, Web consultants, and gallery and bookshop owners—just to name a few. In their book Kitchen Table Entrepreneurs: How Eleven Women Escaped Poverty and Became Their Own Bosses (Westview Press, 2002), Martha Shirk ’73 and Anna Wadia focus on women who have started their own businesses. In the foreword to the revised paperback edition (published this spring), presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) thinks that this work shows us “the possibilities of empowering low-income women through entrepreneurship.” He also notes the emergence of women as a force in the business sector: “Since 1985, when I first joined the U.S. Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, the number of womenowned businesses has doubled. Today, there are over 10.1 million women-owned firms generating $2.32 trillion in sales. One in seven American workers is employed by a woman-owned company, and the latest statistics show that women-owned businesses are outpacing other companies in overall growth, in number of firms, employment, and sales.” Throughout her 30-year career as a journalist, Shirk has specialized in poverty-related issues. Her previous book, Lives on the Line (Westview Press, 1999), addressed the challenges of raising a family below the poverty line. “The topic of Kitchen Table Entrepreneurs—entrepreneurship as one route out of poverty—struck me as a natural sequel,” Shirk “MUCH OF MY WORK IS ALONG THE LINES OF BUILT-IN BOOKCASES,” SAID JANE KOSTICK FROM HER MEDFORD, MASS., WOODSHOP, WHERE SHE ALSO DESIGNS MULTIDIMENSIONAL JEWELRY BOXES. SEE HER STORY ON PAGE 30. said. “After years of writing about problems, I liked the idea of writing about a solution. Starting a small business, or becoming selfemployed, isn’t the right choice for everyone struggling to get by below the poverty line, but for many, it can be a viable option.” “I also wanted to get people thinking about the meaning of the word ‘entrepreneur,’” Shirk added. “I have always been impressed by the entrepreneurial streak I’ve seen in many low-income people. People who work in low-wage jobs have always run little businesses on the side, as a means of survival. However, hardly anyone thinks of them as entrepreneurs.” Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (10th ed.) defines this word as “one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise” and self-employed as “earning income directly from one’s own business, trade, or profession rather than as a specified salary or wages from an employer.” Since 1991, the Ms. Foundation for Women has administered the Collaborative Fund for Women’s Economic Development, a multifoundation effort that has given $10 million to community organizations supporting low-income female entrepreneurs throughout the United States. In the mid-1990s, after reading Shirk’s Lives on the Line and receiving a grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Ms. Foundation staff recruited her to research and write a book about the impact of microenterprise on low-income U.S. women. Anna Wadia, a program director for the Ms. Foundation, collaborated on the policy-related chapters. “Research has shown that often what makes the difference between a successful small business and one that fails is the amount of preparation that goes into starting it as well as the availability of ongoing support,” Shirk said. “The foundation asked that I feature women who benefited from some form of assistance from a community-based organization dedicated to promoting microenterprise as a poverty alleviation strategy.” The 11 entrepreneurs are diverse in race, age, ethnicity, community, and businesses. Depending on the individual and the community organization, the assistance provided ranged from modest (a workshop about how to start a business) to intensive (one-on-one technical assistance) to ongoing (participation in a production network). Some JUNE 2004 B y Andrea Hammer 25 CHRISTINE KRIEG “YOU HAVE TO HAVE AN APPETITE FOR RISK TO GIVE UP A JOB IN ORDER TO GO OUT ON YOUR OWN,” SAYS MARTHA SHIRK, A JOURNALIST WHO HAS RECEIVED MANY AWARDS. IN 1997, SHE WAS A KNIGHT INTERNATIONAL PRESS FELLOW IN CHINA. HER RECENT BOOK, ON THEIR OWN S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N (WESTVIEW PRESS, 2004), FOCUSES ON FOSTER CARE CHILDREN. 26 women received microloans for the purchase of such incomegenerating equipment as a sewing or electronic knitting machine or a commercial freezer. Meeting the women affected Shirk’s outlook on life. “Seeing the impact of these women’s businesses on their lives helped me rethink the notion of success,” Shirk said. For instance, Roselyn Spotted Eagle, a gifted beadwork artist and quilt maker who lives on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in Kyle, S.D., wouldn’t be considered a successful business owner by most people’s standards. Her bead and quilt business brings in $10,000 a year at the most. However, the income from that business has enabled her to move her family from a two-room shack without running water to a comfortable three-bedroom mobile home. Her business has made a huge difference in her family’s quality of life.” Many women who start businesses want to improve their economic status and gain more control over their lives. Although all of the subjects in this book started their businesses with the goal of earning more money for their families, an important factor in nearly every case was the desire to lead a different life. “To my surprise, this project helped me clarify what I value most about being self-employed,” Shirk said. “After 21 years of working for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, I made the leap to self-employment seven years ago; just about every year since, I have debated with myself about whether to become someone’s employee again.” But meeting the women profiled in her book helped Shirk, now a full-time freelance writer, realize that “what I value about being self-employed is not just the freedom to choose my topics but also to decide myself how to carve up the time in the day. Being my own boss allows me to reserve time in my week for other activities that I enjoy, including community activism, which simply wouldn’t be possible if I were still working as a newspaper reporter.” Shirk thinks that “having an entrepreneurial streak isn’t enough to guarantee success as a business owner. It takes a good idea but also a lot of planning and hard work,” she said. “You also have to have an appetite for risk to give up a job in order to go out on your own. When you’re employed, those paychecks keep coming in, even if you’re having a bad spell at work. When you work for yourself, your income depends upon your effort, and even major effort doesn’t guarantee it. If you think you have a great idea for a business, and nobody else thinks so, you’ve got a failed business. Approximately half of all small businesses fail within five years, so starting a business is a risky proposition.” Here are the stories of four alumnae who have taken this bold step to design and market laptop cases to clients including Apple and Sony, create a Kathak dance company, develop a woodworking business, and fund legislative lobbying through antiques dealing. Although all have faced challenges in their enterprises, their fulfilling work and freedom of lifestyle remain the common threads. EMILY MCHUGH ’90 Casauri® Laptop Cases EAST ORANGE, N.J. T o raise “seed capital” for designing and marketing stylish laptop cases at her company Casauri, Emily McHugh played violin in subway stations for the Music Under New York Program. “I used practically everything I had toward my business,” said McHugh, who first envisioned Casauri in a business plan that she wrote for the course Managing New Ventures at Columbia Business School. “I was depressed by my ugly and boring laptop case, which I refused to carry. My sister Helena, who went to the Fashion Institute of Technology, made me a case that people started to admire.” Casauri (stemming from the French word caméléon and reptilefamily sauria, as in “dino-saur”) was born—or at least on the verge of coming to life. “The summer after graduating from business school, I worked part time to help pay for samples and basic expenses. I played my violin in the sweltering subways of New York and used to play Irish fiddle on St. Patrick’s Day at the World Trade Center,” she said. One winter, her sister even sewed fleece scarves and hats, which McHugh sold on the sidewalk of Times Square. She also worked as a sales associate at a Coach handbag and accessory shop to learn the business. McHugh then did library research to identify additional resources, which eventually led to a microloan sponsored by the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) and guidance from SCORE counselors. The SCORE Association (see http://www.score.org), a resource partner with the SBA, has served more than 6 million entrepreneurs since 1964 and currently advises nearly 400,000 entrepreneurs annually. “But my first real step was to go into the marketplace and check the pulse of what was going on. I visited practically every boutique and luggage store from Prada to Gucci and realized that I had an opportunity to explore because none of them were meeting the need in the marketplace that I had identified—that is, stylish, functional, and affordable cases for technology products, especially laptops,” she said. In business since 1999, Casauri has faced “endless challenges— every day presents new ones,” McHugh said. “However, as we overcome each challenge, we make quantum leaps forward.” ing, but I had no idea what. Swarthmore was like an intellectual playhouse that allowed me to pursue all my eclectic interests. I couldn't decide on a major, so I created one,” McHugh said. “At Swarthmore, we were constantly pushed beyond our perceived limits, always asked to do more and to test our stamina— both physical and intellectual. There was no room for complacency and absolute intolerance for mediocrity. We were trained to set high standards, high goals, and ultimately figure out a way to achieve them…. Swarthmore will be happy to know that I have most definitely found the outlet—it took a while, but I found it.” Before attending business school, she worked at the Banque Nationale de Paris (BNP) in New York and in Mexico City. “[Entrepreneurship] is not for everyone, and it might take a while to come to the realization that it is something you truly want EMILY M C HUGH HAS CLIENTS INCLUDING APPLE, SONY STYLE, MERRILL LYNCH, AND FLIGHT 001 AT HENRI BENDEL. TO LEARN MORE ABOUT CASAURI LAPTOP CASES, FEATURED IN THE JUNE 7 BUSINESSWEEK, VISIT WWW.CASAURI.COM. to pursue. For me, it was a lifelong series of events that culminated in that moment of decision. In addition, it took me a few months of waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat to accept that starting my own business was the appropriate step for me to take. Talk to people, do research, and assess your own temperament. Are you comfortable with total uncertainty—or at least can learn to be—are you obsessed with a driving force to execute your vision, are you convinced that the world will definitely be a better place with what you have to offer?” said McHugh, a 2002 Lax Conference panelist. “We have evolved beyond just being perceived as a product that meets a need to becoming an entity to which people have established emotional attachments. We receive e-mails from people all over the world who tell us that they have been looking for what we offer for years and that they want more,” McHugh said. “Our goal is to continue to build Casauri into an international brand that designs innovative products and resonates with consumers for decades to come.” Casauri’s first-quarter sales this year were at least four times the figures, for the same period, in 2003. This summer, McHugh and her sister also plan to hire two other internal workers. They currently have at least 20 contract employees as well as another 100 in a factory in China making Casauri bags. “The marketplace has gradually woken up to realize that without women entrepreneurs our economy would be nowhere,” McHugh said. “With so many companies and government agencies eager to interact with women businesses, this could possibly be considered the dawn of the golden age of women entrepreneurship. I personally am thrilled to be part of it.” JUNE 2004 “It is very exciting to be an entrepreneur. This excitement is fueled by a driving passion and obsessive focus.” DANIEL MARRACINO The first major issue was getting design samples made; the next was to convince stores to take Casauri products based on rough first versions. To make headway in the marketplace, McHugh had to find a reputable overseas manufacturer, which took about two years. Ongoing challenges include inventory controls, distribution, quality control, pricing, forecasting, marketing, financing growth, and international expansion. “We are masters at outsourcing—at least this is our goal. The strategizing, planning, designing, and conceptualizing take place ‘in house,’ but more and more of our execution take place elsewhere,” McHugh said. “The people we work with are all over the country and overseas. In fact, we work with independent contractors, many of whom are stay-at-home moms.” She added: “In the beginning, we did everything ourselves. We still do a lot, but it has gotten much better. However, being exposed to all aspects of one’s business really makes the difference in actually knowing and understanding your business. So when it comes time to delegate, you know exactly what’s going on or what to expect. Delegating does not mean you do not still need to be aware of what is happening; it means you don’t have to do all the day-today tasks yourself, but you are still responsible for the results.” Some of Casauri’s outsourced areas include graphic design, Web programming, accounting/bookkeeping, manufacturing, and distribution. Emily is directly involved in product development, marketing, and sales. Helena does product design, sourcing, and “remains the steady voice of wisdom and insight,” her sister said. “She is great at summing up situations and people—in other words, saving time.” At the College, McHugh majored in linguistics, French, and Spanish. “Swarthmore was excellent, if not ideal, for shaping me for the role of entrepreneur. I didn’t know it then, but I certainly see it now. I knew Swarthmore was shaping me for something interest- 27 JANAKI PATRIK ’66 Kathak Ensemble & Friends/CARAVAN Inc. NEW YORK ast year, Janaki Patrik (Wendy Hughes) celebrated the 25th anniversary of her company with several “beloved” classmates, who attended her ensemble’s performances. “I have a dance company whose core repertoire and inspiration for creating new choreography is Kathak, the classical dance style from North India,” Patrik said. “I saw my guru, Pandit Birju Maharaj, in 1963, when he and his company performed at Swarthmore as part of his first United States tour. When I saw him perform and heard him speak about his art in Parrish Commons after the performance, I decided to go to India to study with him.” After graduating from Swarthmore, Patrik trained with Maharaji in 1967, 1969, and during “many subsequent trips in the intervening 37 years,” she said. Awarded a Merce Cunningham Studio Scholarship in 1971, she studied the renowned dancer’s technique, repertory, and choreography from 1971 to 1978. Remaining committed to Kathak, though, she said: “The first step was to go to India to learn the dance and its cultural context. This is like [being born] for a second time and learning a whole new language, both physically and metaphysically.” Patrik was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship for study in India during 1988 to 1989. She researched poetry of the Kathak repertoire. Katha means “story,” and the roots of this dance style are found in storytelling in village temples. Today, rhythmic footwork accented by ankle bells, spins, and themes from Persian and Urdu poetry as well as Hindu mythology characterize this dance. “Then, I began performing—almost exclusively with live music. Becoming part of the network so that people know you exist and invite you to perform is a large part of the challenge of launching such a business because traditional advertisement is not the primary way of getting jobs.” The company, formed in 1978 and incorporated as a not-forprofit arts and education organization in 1997, performs both Patrik’s choreography and traditional Kathak. Residencies are offered through CARAVAN, the company’s arts-in-education section. Some challenges that Patrik has faced as an artist include “funding, booking, dealing with issues of ‘authenticity’ in a field defined incorrectly as ‘ethnic’ rather than ‘classical,’ filling out tax forms, and doing all the administrative work.” The most fulfilling aspect of Patrik’s work involves “collaborations—working with dedicated fellow artists in performance,” she said. “Working with children—particularly with those who respond to the power and physical expertise of a performing artist, when they may have closed down the traditional access channels for learning—is some of the most gratifying work my art has allowed me to experience.” Patrik has employed hundreds of dancers, musicians, lighting and set designers, composers, stage managers, and graphic design- JULIE LEMBERGER L ers on a freelance and per-project basis during the 25-year history of her dance company. “I could not run a dance company without employing these people. The scope of my work has grown, but I do not measure growth according to the size of each production. Some productions are necessarily small because the vision dictates this; some productions are large. The concept rules the number of people who will collaborate with me—both artists and technical support staff,” she said. “As an artist, I want to communicate, and I am utterly convinced of the beauty and power of this particular art form— whether alone in its purely classical form or in dialogue with other art forms such as tap dance, modern dance, jazz, and contemporary music. I am grateful that Kathak has given me a powerful medium through which I meet and work with other artists who are dedicated to excellence,” Patrik added. “I enjoy communicating with a very broad range of students and audience members who hunger for beauty and positivity and who search for answers in this difficult world through means other than emotionless words and facts.” A Russian language and literature major, Patrik said: “Swarthmore did not prepare me for becoming an entrepreneur. It prepared me to think independently and persevere in fulfilling my visions— whether academic or artistic. Swarthmore exalted the life of the mind, and it provided circumscribed and achievable examples of defining a project, exploring and researching, then presenting the result in an acceptable format…. I believe that part of Swarthmore is about vision, reaching for ideals and not thinking only in practical terms. If I thought of my art in entrepreneurial terms, I would have given up long ago.” Patrik emphasized the need for artists to persevere in fulfilling their creative dreams. “Don't give up before you begin, just because it seems impractical. Creativity does not take place primarily in the mundane. It is born in the mind and heart and imagination,” she said. “My business is not based on any sound economic strategy. America has abhorrent policies toward its arts and artists. For S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N “If I thought of my art in entrepreneurial terms, I would have given up long ago.” 28 S WA R T H M O R E D E V E L O P S E N T R E P R E N E U R I A L S P I R I T Being an entrepreneur requires a kind of confidence and courage that many students learn—or further develop—here,” Professor of Economics Ellen Magenheim said. “They learn new ideas, explore challenges, follow hunches; they learn to develop and defend an argument and learn how to listen to what others have to say. All of these characteristics are important in being an entrepreneur because they develop the abilities to think creatively, plan rationally, and then to have the confidence to move ahead—even when others are skeptical about your plans.” Magenheim touches on entrepreneurship in her course and seminar on industrial organization. “In a much more down-to-earth way, we teach them many of the tools that they will need when they are self-employed, whether it is the math and accounting needed to do the financial planning aspects of their work or the ability to express themselves clearly and persuasively in marketing materials,” she said. “I would also expect that Swarthmore graduates who become entrepreneurs or self-employed are more likely to think responsibly about their relationships to their ‘community’—that is, their suppliers, employees, and customers.” Magenheim has “tremendous respect for entrepreneurs,” she said. “The scariest aspect to me is that you can do everything right and still fail—you have a great idea, you prepare a good business plan, get sufficient financial backing, hire good employees. But then there is terrible weather, a national crisis, a change in tastes—all of which can send your business into failure.” She doesn’t think a particular major is the key aspect of entrepreneurial preparation, but a need exists for “quantitative literacy” and effective written and oral communication skills. To participate in international trade, Magenheim recommends learning the language, history, and politics of the region. “But I certainly don’t think there is one path to preparation for life as an entrepreneur—nor do I think you need an economics major, although I imagine that would be the first major people might think of,” she said. “I also encourage students to find entrepreneurs—both successful and less successful—to talk about their experiences: what they enjoy and what they don't like about their work, what they would do differently if they were starting now,” Magenheim added. She also thinks that a partnership might ease the stress of many critical business decisions. “It would be both a greater pleasure and possibly a greater success to be able to work through all the challenges with a partner you respect and who possibly has skills that complement your own—I do think it is a challenge for one person to embody all of the talents required.” When considering the scope of entrepreneurial paths, Magenheim said that social entrepreneurs may develop nonprofit businesses. Examples include training the previously unemployed to enter the labor market, providing job opportunities for people who might otherwise find it difficult, or starting social and cultural programs. “I think these people are also entrepreneurs—even if they are not running a for-profit business—and I think this may be a model that is particularly appealing to Swarthmore graduates,” she said. —A.H. JUNE 2004 FRAMK GIMPAYA example, what I am paid now by Young Audiences to teach 30 students—$67 per 45-minute class—is barely $2 more than what I was paid in 1980. No health benefits or retirement plan add on to this criminally low wage for a teacher entrusted with nurturing creativity and inspiring a cohesive and sensitive reaction by students to cultures other than their own. When America does bother to think about the arts, or arts-ineducation, it generally wants artists to justify themselves in terms of ‘real economic value,’ by teaching to the curriculum,” Patrik said. “Art can do that, but it can do so much more, and to ask an artist to justify herself in entrepreneurial terms—or according to some abstract standard of economic accountability—is a travesty, a waste, a crime against creativity.” During the evolution of her company, Patrik has realized a greater fulfillment of her artistic vision, “both in execution and in the creative process,” she said. Her goals for future development are to “continue to create in real time and real space the musical and choreographic visions that engross my mind. Along the way, I envision continuing to work with fellow artists and with students in the most humane and ethical and creative ways possible.” Daughter Lela ’04, a mathematics and sociology/anthropology double major, is a resident assistant in Mertz Hall. She has sung in four productions of the Swarthmore chorus, with a cappella jazz group Oscar & Emily for three years, and as a Swarthmore College Jazz TOP LEFT: IN N E W Y O R K D E L H I MI X Band vocal soloist for (NOVEMBER 2001 PRODUCTION), seven semesters. Lela also THE KATHAK ENSEMBLE IS SHOWN IN dances with the SwarthJOYFUL MOVEMENT DURING ANOTHER more African Repertory GET TOGETHER. TO LEARN MORE group and Rhythm & Motion; a work-study was ABOUT PATRIK (ABOVE) AND HER at the Djoniba Dance and COMPANY, VISIT WWW.KATHAKDrum Center, the African ENSEMBLE.COM. dance studio in New York, where she continues to take classes. To learn more about Lela, see her Web site at www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/04/lkp/index.html. “Be very careful that you treat your fellow women as seriously and respectfully as you have wished to be treated,” Patrik said. “We can be our own worst enemies, particularly as we age and see our beauty, mental acuity, and physical stamina giving way to the next generation. Revel in the success of your female colleagues. In the end, that is what we have left—a sense of a life lived fully and decently and generously.” 29 “I do see myself more as self-employed than as an entrepreneur. Success in business for me is about making my life work.” JANE GREENBERG KOSTICK ’88 Custom Woodworking MEDFORD, MASS. S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N I 30 pursued this line of work straight out of College because woodworking had always been something I enjoyed,” Jane Kostick said. “In junior high and high school, I loved my woodshop classes, and then during my senior year at Swarthmore, I loved the woodshop that I used in my sculpture course with Professor [of Studio Art] Brian Meunier. I majored in math at Swarthmore, and the independent research I did for my senior paper was about tiling patterns, which, for me, was about two-dimensional art. That’s when I first learned about the work of M.C. Escher.” Kostick now sees herself as a math artist who creates furniture, cabinetry, and puzzles. She particularly relishes creating wooden objects that “people can play with” and gifts such as multidimensional jewelry boxes. “This interest in art and mathematics has led to so much in my life today. In 1992, [Albert and Edna Pownall Buffington Professor of Mathematics] Gene Klotz notified me about an art and mathematics conference at State University of New York–Albany. There, I met people from all over the world with this common math/art interest.” At this conference, Kostick was particularly inspired by and learned from Professor Koos Verhoeff of Holland, who knew Escher from decades earlier. “We went on to do some collaborative work, and I began learning about polyhedrons and spatial lattices, threedimensional art,” she said. “I’m particularly grateful to have met the late Professor Arthur Loeb of Harvard’s Design Science Department,” Kostick added. He ran a lecture series at Harvard called the Philomorphs. It was at one of those lectures the following year that I met my husband, John, who shares this interest in geometry and also happens to work as a carpenter.” After an informal apprenticeship with a fine furniture maker in Cambridge for a year, Kostick rented space in a Boston woodshop EVE LYMAN DEAN POWELL to design and build her own furniture and artwork in wood. “I sold work through art galleries in the beginning, and I still do occasionally,” she said, “but I’ve always found it to be an unreliable way to make money. For several years, I worked other part-time jobs to pay bills. I earned enough to keep doing what I love, and gradually I acquired enough tools and machinery to set up my own woodshop, which is in a Tufts-owned industrial building in Medford. Most of the renters in the building are also woodworkers, so there are a lot of skilled people around to learn from.” A self-employed woodworker for 14 years, Kostick said, “The biggest challenge was how to make the artwork be profitable.” To achieve that goal, she expanded her business into other types of woodworking besides mathematical art. “This was a natural result of my husband being in the residential remodeling business. So I learned how to design and build custom cabinetry, which there seems to be an endless demand for in this area. That’s about half of my business now. I still do the geometric woodworking, and I enjoy it more when there’s no pressure to make money doing it,” she said. Kostick thinks that self-discipline is critical for self-employed workers. In her 20s, she learned to live on a small income—not needing much to maintain her lifestyle. “The most gratifying thing about my work is that it balances IN 1994, KOSTICK’S TREFOIL KNOT with the rest of my life. For the TABLE (ABOVE)—DESIGNED BY most part, woodworking is soliKOOS VERHOEFF OF THE NETHERtary and peaceful, just the kind LANDS—WAS DISPLAYED IN of energy I need in my life so I can take care of what's most SWARTHMORE’S ADMISSIONS important to me, which is my OFFICE. HER WORK HAS GROWN IN family. John and I have two sons, OTHER DIRECTIONS NOW; SHE IS and being self-employed has CURRENTLY BUILDING THE LOGO enabled me to have a flexible FOR OUTSITE NETWORKS (SEE schedule. I didn’t plan it this WWW.OUTSITENETWORKS.COM). way, but it couldn’t have worked out better.” SARA DUSTIN ’59 Dustbin Antiques HOPKINTON, N.H. A “I have acquired a life that provides highly varied satisfactions.” Dustin finds the line between leisure and work increasingly blurred. In many ways, her antiquing is recreational, even though it provides her income. “I spent a number of years trucking the stuff down to New York City one weekend a month to set up at the fabulous outdoor weekend antique markets in the parking lots of Manhattan’s garment district,” she said. For a week each during May, July, and September in Brimfield, Mass.—home to one of the largest outdoor antiques shows in New England with more than 5,000 dealers—Dustin also has set up and manned a booth 90 feet long by 10 feet wide every year for the last 18. “I perform this feat in partnership with my long-term significant other, John Moore,” she said. But these days, at 66, I am gradually retrenching. I have stocked a small booth in the most reputable group shop on Northwood New Hampshire's famous Antique Alley with the very best things I can find cheap, priced as high as I can imagine them selling— and, to my astonishment and delight, like my magic show boxes, it produces this magic money." Dustin refers to “magic" because the contents of a box and a half (or less) sell regularly for a dependable $400. A political science major at Swarthmore, Dustin said that she SARA DUSTIN SOLD ANTIQUES IN A BOOTH AT BRIMFIELD, MASS., ON A WARM MAY MORNING ABOUT 10 YEARS AGO (ABOVE). DUSTIN BEGAN LOBBYING THE NEW HAMPSHIRE LEGISLATURE 20 YEARS AGO. valued the self-confidence and ability to think critically that the College first instilled—and that has continued to inform her work. For example, she now has the eye to spot pieces for first-rank venues. “Two summers ago, I discovered a first-period Van Briggle Jardiniere in a peach basket full of flower pots under a table in a local estate sale for 50 cents and ‘flipped it,’ as we say in the trade, two days later, for $1,500 to a colleague with better selling connections than I. And this fall, a battered turn-of-the-century watercolor I rescued from a yard sale shed last summer for $25 went for $2,300 at auction at Skinners in Boston,” Dustin said. “So you see, I have acquired a life that provides highly varied satisfactions. During the week, I jump into my little suit and my nylons and go down to the legislature to practice a very active kind of political science representing the interests of the poor,” Dustin said. “On the weekend, I play around with [antiques] in my sweat pants and joggers, getting up at 5 a.m. to beat the competition to my neighbors' lawns and, up to very lately, camping out in vans to sell it. High fun and low fun.” T F O R M O R E I N F O R M AT I O N The following Web sites provide information about opportunities and support structures available to women business owners: The National Association of Women Business Owners (http://www.nawbo.org) The Women’s Programs Office (http://www.apa.org/pi/wpo) Women Impacting Public Policy (http://www.wipp.org) The National Association for Female Executives (http://nafe.com) JUNE 2004 “kitchen table business,” Sara Dustin said of her Dustbin Antiques, “certainly defines mine.... It’s just something I developed so I could earn enough money, in my spare time on the weekends, to do the mostly unpaid Quakerly work I really wanted to do during the week—lobbying the New Hampshire legislature; the state administrative structure; and, occasionally, Congress, on behalf of poor children and their single-parent mothers.” In 1996, the Board of Directors of Southern New Hampshire Services honored Dustin for her “tireless effort on behalf of New Hampshire’s Women and Children.” From 1983 to 1997, she also served as executive director of Parents for Justice, an advocacy group for low-income single parents in New Hampshire. Dustin continues to volunteer for Families for Justice, which supports humane operations of the state’s child protection agency. “After doing good all week, on the weekend I turn into a shark, prowling the yard sales, flea markets, and estate auctions of my neighborhood in New Hampshire for undervalued treasures, which could be cleaned up, restored, and marked up mercilessly for sale on the antique and collectibles market,” Dustin said. “Marketing the stuff has been a source of much adventure.” 31 STEPHAN DAIGLE/CORBIS S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N 32 Are there c i r c u m s ta n c e s t h at j u s t i f y torture in the name of n at i o n a l security? S ay the word “torture,” and images of dank dungeons, disembowelments, and rusting medieval instruments come to mind. It seems, at first mention, an archaic concern—a plague against human dignity that has been all but eradicated. Yet, the news reports of recent weeks have brought to light evidence of gruesome deeds, a flashback to another time beamed into the 21st century via video and Internet technology— images of what Darius Rejali ’81, associate professor of political science at Reed College and an expert on modern torture, says is clearly evidence of torture as practiced by modern democracies. Since the May release of the now famous photos depicting such torture techniques as forced standing, electrocution, and humiliation in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, the nation has been absorbed in a debate about torture, prisoner’s rights, and national security. The national press attention is new; the problem, Rejali says, is not. What he saw from Abu Ghraib simply reflects the exposure of contemporary torture procedures practiced for the very reason their capture on camera is so ironic: These methods leave no marks and thus maintain an appearance of democracy while soldiers and guards use decidedly undemocratic interrogation techniques. “Tyranny,” Rejali quotes the Greeks, “always wears a mask.” Rejali defines torture as “the systematic exercise of physical torment on detained individuals by state officials in their public capacity for confession, interrogation, or intimidation.” Three techniques once approved by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)—choking with water, sweating, and forced standing—all rely on physical torment of prisoners: “We had no problem calling these approved techniques torture when other countries did them,” he says. These techniques depend on surreptitiousness. The famous picture of the hood- Ta c k l i n g To r t u r e TO R T U R E I S N ’ T J U S T M O R A L LY U N J U S T I F I E D — I T D O E S N ’ T E V E N WO R K , SAY S DA R I U S R E JA L I ’ 8 1 . ed prisoner forced to stand with electrical wires attached to his extremities is an example of a nonscarring technique that causes ex-treme temporary pain. According to Rejali, a 1956 CIA investigation of the technique revealed that forced standing leads to the swelling of ankles and feet to twice the normal size within 24 hours; the development of blisters; and, eventually, an increase in heart rate and kidney failure. The physical torture in Abu Ghraib was combined with what Rejali called “cultural torture” in a May 20 Time Magazine “Viewpoint” article he wrote in response to the photos. The nakedness and forcing of prisoners to adopt sexual positions with one another was, Rejali wrote, evidence of the use of cultural and religious knowledge to find and employ techniques that would most destroy the prisoners’ egos. As Rejali wrote in his article, Muhammad’s son Ali famously spared the life of an adversary when his nakedness was exposed, and this respect for the sanctity of the naked body has persevered in Islamic tradition into modern times. The stacking of naked prisoners, one on top of the other, is a type of torture because U.S. guards have the cultural knowledge “to kick ’em where it hurts.” Americans have been reluctant to call all of this torture, though, and the T word, as Rejali calls it, is just not one we’re all that comfortable with. Abuse, though, as the Abu Ghraib scandal has been termed on the nightly news programs, is not a technical one and is a concept entirely absent from descriptions of torture and ill treatment as found in the Geneva Conventions. It is, Rejali says, “a fiction of the American media” and evidence of how quickly we can and will look the other way. “We live in an age in which I think tor- ture is coming back,” Rejali says. “We live in a society where people are either too terrified or too uncaring to notice these things, and torture is usually used on people we don’t like, so we don’t care.” And it’s not just in Iraq. Almost a year and a half before The Washington Post released the Abu Ghraib photos, it printed an article describing the “stress and duress” interrogation techniques allegedly employed by CIA officials at the American air base in Bagram, Afghanistan. Suspected Al-Qaeda and Taliban members were forced to kneel or stand for hours in black hoods or spraypainted goggles; were bound in awkward, painful positions; were deprived of sleep; and were held under 24-hour lighting. One U.S. official was quoted in the Dec. 26, 2002, Post as saying, “If you don’t violate someone’s human rights some of the time, you probably aren’t doing your job.” Such statements have prompted indignant responses from human rights organizations, including Amnesty International. In its 2003 annual report, Secretary General Irene Khan challenged the assertion that civil liberties can be curtailed in times of high-security concerns. “Governments are not entitled to respond to terror with terror,” Khan wrote. “Human rights are not a luxury for good times.” R ejali has become a key figure in this debate. His expertise has been in demand in the aftermath of Sept. 11, as reporters often ask him for a definitive answer to the question of whether torture is ever justified in the name of international security. It is a debate that Rejali says lacks relevance at its core. Torture, he says, is a largely inefficient method of information gathering. As Rejali explains, pain tolerance varies greatly among individuals, undermining the notion of a universal threshold at which information can be extracted, thus ensuring that torture remains unscientific and imprecise. Torture, he says, is time-consuming, hard work, which is not suited for emergencies. It often leads to false information that then must be subject to a verification process, wasting valuable intelligence resources. “The gist of it is, there is little social, scientific, or historical evidence that suggests that torture works in the way people say it does when they pose the question, ‘Can we torture for national security?’ And if, as I argue, torture does not work in any of the ways often claimed, then there is no point asking for a moral justification,” Rejali says. Furthermore, Rejali claims that torture not only doesn’t work; it can actually destroy intelligence-building efforts. During a May 18 CNN Newsnight appearance, Rejali went head-to-head with Harvard Law professor and author of America on Trial Alan Dershowitz, when Dershowitz claimed torture is justified for that small percentage of time it might actually work. Without using informants, Rejali argued, the probability of actually identifying the correct crime suspect falls to less than 10 percent, and so the real key to gaining information on terrorist plots lies in attaining public trust and securing informant links. “[The] more you torture, the less you’re going to get informants and the less you get public cooperation,” Rejali said. “It will actually reduce the ability of any government to win a war.” Especially, Rejali wrote in a recent op-ed, in a war whose premise is the establishment of transparency, democracy, and respect for individual human freedoms. JUNE 2004 By Elizab et h R e d d e n ’ 0 5 33 ANDREI KOSTIN/CORBIS S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N Y 34 et Dershowitz is not the only one who is unconvinced that democracy can be maintained without the stripping of freedoms from a few threatening individuals. Fear breeds violence; in the insecurity of a post–Sept. 11 world, Rejali’s stance on the ineffectiveness of torture is one that has found opponents among those searching for fail-proof interrogation techniques. In the October 2003 Atlantic Monthly cover story “The Dark Art of Interrogation,” author Mark Bowden argues that although coercive methods should be officially banned, they should nevertheless be practiced quietly when they are seen as effective in garnering necessary security information. “It is wise of the president to reiterate U.S. support for international agreements banning torture, and it is wise for American interrogators to employ whatever coercive methods work. It is also smart not to discuss the matter with anyone,” Bowden concludes. Rejali says that Bowden essentially creates a “civil disobedience” argument for the justification of torture on a limited scale: “Torture should be illegal but may some- times be moral. In this respect, torture is like civil disobedience; you do it, and then you pay the consequences,” Rejali summarizes Bowden’s argument. Momentarily putting aside the question of whether torture works, Rejali says this argument, although attractive in its appeal to liberals and conservatives alike, contains a key flaw. It is unlikely, he argues, that torture can be exposed to the same kind of public scrutiny necessary for any act of civil disobedience to be an effective moral alternative. “Most disobedient protesters submit to public scrutiny by courts and newspapers. Modern torturers, on the other hand, specialize in techniques that leave no marks and operate in secrecy. Courts and bureaucrats can’t evaluate this process. And the historical evidence suggests that this secrecy is cancerous. Organizations that torture splinter; secrecy and police competitiveness drive a downward spiral of inefficiency and corruption. The practice also spreads quickly from security policing to normal domestic policing. Even the Soviets and Chinese knew this. They depended far more heavily on informers than torture. “Civil disobedience strengthens the law, but ‘morally justified’ torture sets into motion a process that undermines not only the rule of law but the very state structures Bowden claims this practice is supporting,” Rejali says. S ince the release of the Abu Ghraib photos, Rejali’s articles have appeared in Time and Salon, and his name shows up across the media as a key source in prison scandal coverage. NBC and CNN tried to book him for the same time, PBS wanted him for the NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, and it seems to him that as long as the Iraq war continues, he must make room for a larger media presence in his life. It will be difficult in a life that is already so full. Rejali’s favorite moment of the media DARIUS REJALI (RIGHT) LEFT HIS NATIVE IRAN IN 1977 TO ATTEND SWARTHMORE. IN 2001, HE AND HIS MOTHER, SALLIE ANN YARBROUGH REJALI ’56, RETURNED TO IRAN. THEY HOPE TO GO AGAIN SOON. R e j a l i s ay s t h at t o r t u r e w i l l a c t u a l l y reduce the ability to win a war whose premise i s t h e e s ta b l i s h m e n t o f d e m o c r a c y a n d r e s p e c t f o r i n d i v i d u a l f r e e d o m s. playful God of Beginnings, because I was starting a new phase in my life. It was enormously moving. I had a wonderful time,” he says. A world traveler, speaker of five foreign languages, and avid musician—“a big-time campfire accordion player in Oregon,” who says he’s also learning the Santur, a hammered dulcimer traditional in Persian music—Rejali is a man of many passions. Yet he is never more passionate than when he is speaking of the resurgence of torture, which he has documented in his first two books, Torture and Modernity: Self, Society, and State in Modern Iran (1994) and Torture and Democracy (forthcoming 2005). Having recently received a $100,000 Scholar of Vision grant from the Carnegie Scholars Program, he is working on a third book, Approaches to Violence: A Citizen’s Toolkit. It aims to provide citizens with the means and discourses through which they can think and speak clearly about violence. “The idea behind it, a broader one, is that if you live in a society where people can’t really talk truthfully about cruelty, we often become unaware of certain kinds of violence that are not part of the approved roster of kinds of violence we should care about,” he says. “If people can’t speak thoughtfully about cruelty, if the only thing that they can do is imitate academics or politicians, they’re not going to be able to identify new or hidden forms of violence in society.” T Elizabeth Redden ’05 first interviewed Darius Rejali in summer 2003. She expanded this article in recent weeks after returning from a semester in Ecuador. JUNE 2004 activities. For a man who’s spent much of his career studying torture, Rejali is surprisingly high on life. “The easiest way to tell you who I am is just to tell you the story of the last summer,” he says. Having always dreamed of seeing the midnight sun, the first thing he did when he went on leave from his job at Reed was travel to Fairbanks, Ala., and then to the Arctic Circle. He followed that with a trip to New Zealand, where he, a surfer of five years, “drove 1,000 kilometers in search of a good wave.” He then went to a sociology conference in Australia, did torture and human rights research in Cambodia, and returned to the United States to create a 17-foot statue of the Hindu elephant god Ganesha—which he then burned as part of the Burning Man Festival, an annual arts festival held in the desert of northern Nevada that is devoted to creating and then destroying beautiful works of art. “I’ve always wanted to build something for that, so I offered the Ganesha, the CORKY MILLER frenzy wasn’t about Iraq at all, but was, he says, when he got an e-mail from an old Swarthmore friend asking him if he was still writing poetry. “This is what college friends are for—they pull you back to who you are and not who the rest of the world wants you to be,” he says. In response, he says he is still writing poetry these days—among so many other 35 GEORGE CATLIN (1796–1872), BIG BEND ON THE UPPER MISSOURI, 1900 MILES ABOVE ST. LOUIS., 1832, SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM,WASHINGTON, D.C./ART RESOURCE, N.Y. S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N D v o ř á k i n A m e r i c a : The Not-So-Distant Mirror 36 An unusual education project looks at American music— and history—through a different discoverer of the New World. By David Wright ‘69 Nelahozeves had overcome all distinctions of nation or class and risen to Europe’s highest artistic circles by composing superb concert music with a strong Czech flavor. In 1892, a wealthy American arts patron, Jeannette Thurber, had the idea of bringing him to New York to head her seven-year old conservatory, with the explicit aim of developing an American nationalist style of music. That raised the question: What is American? Dvořák already had some acquaintance with American culture, having read (in translation) Longfellow’s world-renowned poem The Song of Hiawatha and considered setting it as an opera. Once in the States, with the encouragement of various flacks and “yellow journalists,” he became the proverbial Man from Mars, observing his new environment: the hubbub of New York; the old plantation songs of his African American assistant Harry Burleigh; Chicago’s Columbian Exposition (with its intimations of future American empire and racist anthropological displays); and the frontier community of Spillville, Iowa, where he met real Indians and heard their music. His conclusion, drafted for him and cabled worldwide by a famous yellow journalist named James Creelman, was: “In the Negro melodies of America, I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.” As Creelman was well aware, that was a controversial thing to say in 1893. (If you want to know how right Dvořák was, NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC T he “board room” of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra (NJSO) in downtown Newark is a little short on wood paneling and crystal chandeliers. It is a nearly windowless, fluorescent-lit room, just large enough to hold a functional white table and enough chairs for the directors to all sit down at the same time. On a frigid night in December 2003, a handful of journalists and orchestra publicists have gathered around the table to hear Joseph Horowitz ’70 talk about his latest brainchild. Horowitz is a music critic, social historian, and orchestra adviser with a reputation for organizing music festivals that aren’t just music festivals. A Horowitz event combines authoritative performances with interdisciplinary lectures, panels, and publications. One veteran concert presenter recently said of him, not without a touch of awe: “Joe’s like a puppy with a slipper when he gets hold of one of these projects.” Horowitz’s latest slipper is something new for him: not just concerts and lectures but an entire curriculum in middle and high school American history and social studies—based on, of all things, classical music. And the composer at the center of it all is not even an American but a Czech, Antonín Dvořák. Nevertheless, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Ford Foundation, among others, are on board. On this December evening, the program is headed for a test with real students. Meeting with the journalists in the board room, Horowitz is hardly a stereotypical supersalesman. His longish dark hair, white beard, and round eyeglasses give him a rabbinical look. His manner is soft-spoken, almost diffident. But the historical facts pile up, and they are compelling. As most classical music fans know, Dvořák is revered in his home country as its musical ambassador to the world, a composer as Czech as Tchaikovsky was Russian; Grieg, Norwegian; and Sibelius, Finnish. Unlike those others, his career path brought him, in person, to America. This butcher’s son from the village of ask George Gershwin. Or Duke Ellington. Or Marvin Gaye.) That same year, the Wall Street Panic of 1893—an event as devastating to American society as the better-remembered Crash of 1929—dried up the funding for Dvořák ‘s conservatory, and he returned to Prague two years later. Is that enough American history for you? In the board room, Horowitz rests his case: If you want to know America, you had better know Dvořák in America. A STRING QUARTET OF PLAYERS FROM THE NEW JERSEY SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA (RIGHT) VISITED WESTERN AMERICAN LANDSCAPE AND BY AFRICAN-AMERICAN SONGS. JUNE 2004 POSER ANTONIN DVOŘÁK (TOP) INSPIRED BY THE WILLIAM MAY SCHOOLS AND PLAYED MUSIC BY THE CZECH COM- 37 H S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N YALE COLLECTION OF WESTERN AMERICANA, BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY orowitz’s effort, designated a video cameras and notebooks, National Education Project by determined to document every the NEH, is founded on a piece of sniffle and sneeze of the project American musical bedrock. Last from the first phone call to the year, in a listener poll conducted by last student report card. the New York classical-music station ack in the board room, the WQXR, Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 in critics listen politely to E minor (From the New World) was Horowitz and jot a few notes. ranked No. 7 on the all-time favorite Only Paul Somers, formerly of list of classical works, right behind the Newark Star-Ledger and now Beethoven’s Emperor Piano Concerto editor of the biweekly Classical and Symphony No. 7 and ahead of New Jersey Society Journal, seems such perennials as Rachmaninoff’s to match Horowitz in missionary Second Piano Concerto and Puccini’s zeal, speaking up often with opera La Bohème. This year, Chicaquestions and anecdotes. go’s Ravinia Festival selected the After an hour, the press moves New World as the featured work in on—without, amazingly, touchtheir “One Score, One Chicago” ing the sandwiches and vegetaproject, the musical equivalent of bles with dip that had been laid the citywide book clubs that have out for them—and another meetsprung up in many cities. Few would ing begins for school teachers, dispute Horowitz’s claim that the orchestra musicians, and staff. New World is “still the most famous Horowitz is moving fast now, symphonic work ever conceived on flipping through a well-thumbed American soil.” spiral notebook and firing quesThe black- and Indian-influtions around the table, trying to enced melodies of the New World are confirm every detail of the the background music for the many school-visits schedule. social, political, and biographical “I’ve got five visits in each threads that Joseph Horowitz draws WHILE TOURING THE WESTERN UNITED STATES, DVOŘÁK SAW THIS school,” he says. “That’s a lot.” together in his book Dvořák in Amer- “INDIAN MEDICINE SHOW,” WHICH OFFERED SONG, DANCE, ACROBATICS, AND MAGIC TRICKS. AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSICIANS WERE OFTEN Three well-known Dvořák scholica: In Search of the New World, pubars, Horowitz himself, and a lished early this year by Cricket INCLUDED IN SUCH SHOWS. string quartet of NJSO players Books. Although billed as a historihave all got to meet with the right class at cal novel for young readers, this illustrated, people who knew Dvořák in Iowa; and 150-page book depicts well-documented watch video essays on immigration to Amer- the right time. David, the video man from the NEH, swivels constantly to catch the people and events; its main fictional feature ica and how history is written. rapid-fire dialogue on scheduling. Once in a is some imagined dialogue between the Late last year, after more than two years characters. in development, these materials were finally while, somebody tries to squeeze by him and get a sandwich, stumbling over his cables. The other cornerstone of the new ready for their test run. (Well, almost; the “Sorry,” he says, and tapes that event too. Dvořák curriculum is the interactive DVD by DVD was still pretty buggy.) The location: A petite, elderly woman who has been lismusicologist Robert Winter of the Universi- classrooms, board rooms, auditoriums, and tening quietly at one end of the table is ty of California–Los Angeles and programconcert halls of Newark and its suburbs introduced as Grace Blackwell, the greatmer Peter Bogdanoff—a gold mine of letMaplewood and South Orange. The occaniece of Harry Burleigh. She has some photers, newspaper articles, pictures, and music sion: the 100th anniversary of the death of tos of Burleigh as she knew him: a dapper relating to the Dvořák story. Users can lisDvořák, which was to be commemorated ten to the New World while following the from Jan. 7 to Jan. 24, 2004, by the New Jer- older gentleman in a three-piece suit and homburg hat, carrying an ivory-tipped walkscore or reading a commentary on what’s sey Symphony Orchestra with a Horowitzing stick. She confirms that she is available happening in the music; take a tour of the planned festival, “The Dvořák Centenary: to visit the schools herself. The others in the 1893 Columbian Exposition; see views of Inspiring America.” The testers: about 100 room listen respectfully, a little awe-struck New York City then and now; gaze into the middle and high school students, who to be in the presence of a person directly American landscape paintings of Frederic would have presentations in their classconnected to one of the book’s historical Church, George Catlin, Frederic Remington, rooms and attend festival events, culminatcharacters. and others (and also Remington’s illustraing in the performance of the New World at Then, it’s the teachers’ turn. Jay Gavitt, a tions to The Song of Hiawatha); hear Harry Newark’s New Jersey Performing Arts Center Burleigh himself singing “Go Down, on Jan. 24. The referees: a team of evaluators graying, no-nonsense type who chairs the Moses”; hear oral history interviews with from the NEH Office in Atlanta, armed with Social Studies Department at Columbia 38 B HARRY BURLEIGH (LEFT, WITH HIS BROTHER AND GRANDFATHER, A FORMER SLAVE) BECAME DVOŘÁK’S ASSISTANT AND PROVIDED THE COMPOSER WITH A DIRECT LINK TO AFRICAN AMERICAN SONGS AND SPIRITUALS, MUSIC THAT DVOŘÁK FAMOUSLY SAID WOULD BECOME THE BASIS OF AMERICA’S NATIONAL MUSIC. entry on Schubert in the authoritative New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians—is Horowitz’s opposite in looks and temperament: tall and skinny, with wild hair and a Mephisto beard, he enjoys playing the role of Professor Dynamic, lovable rogue. He and Horowitz have a Laurel-and-Hardy relationship—Winter teasing and exasperating, and Horowitz rising to the bait every time. The 5-minute break stretches to 20, as Winter shmoozes and trolls the room for more content for his DVD from the teachers, evalua- tors, even onlookers. Horowitz: “Robert, it’s late....” Winter: “Just a second—almost done here.” Horowitz: “Robert, please!” As a preamble, Winter says he comes from a family of teachers; praises all the teachers present, expressing appreciation for their long hours, sacrifices, and dedication to our nation’s most precious resource; and stresses the need for efficient teaching tools on a daily basis. BILY CLOCKS MUSEUM, SPILLVILLE, IOWA generate,” says one. “Drafts, notes, lesson plans, e-mails, papers, tests, everything.” David the cameraman adds, “And you will tape all your classes, won’t you?” Eyes roll. Horowitz declares a short break before the main event: the special guest, just in from The Coast, will put his new DVD through its paces. Robert Winter—a worldrenowned musicologist, author of four books on Beethoven and of the massive Horowitz says, “Robert, start the program.” Winter says, “That’s what I like about Joe; he keeps me on schedule. You know, 10 years of working with Joe on various projects have taught me, among many other things, what a fine composer Dvořák really is, and how little we really know about—” Horowitz: “Come on, Robert!” The show begins. Winter and his coauthor Bogdanoff have previously created several commercially successful CD-ROM programs about classical music, but this one still has bugs. Text appears with nonsense characters, and some displays run irretrievably off the screen. Still, some things work well, such as links from a musical analysis to related historical material or a follow-the-bouncingball trip through the symphony’s score while the music plays. Winter says his 16-year-old daughter loves the program. As if on cue, his cell phone rings. He answers it. “Hello, sweetheart. I can’t talk right now, I’m doing a presentation.” He holds up the phone. “This is my daughter. Everybody say, ‘Hello, Kelly.’” “HELLO, KELLY!” “I’ll call you in an hour, sweetie. Love you. Bye.” DVOŘÁK SPENT THE SUMMER OF 1893 IN SPILLVILLE, IOWA (LEFT), WHERE HE COMPOSED THE AMERICAN STRING QUARTET. “I WOULD LIKE TO SPEND THE REST OF MY DAYS THERE,” HE CONFIDED TO A FRIEND UPON RETURNING TO NEW YORK. JUNE 2004 “I was amazed at how controversial Dvořák’s idea was—that the so-called Negro music would become the classical music of America,” Horowitz says. HARRY BURLEIGH FAMILY ARCHIVE/JEAN ENGLISH High School in Maplewood, lays out an ambitious program of research in primary sources on the theme of “exploration, encounter, exchange” leading to Dvořákrelated essays, to be entered in the National History Day contest in May. Hassan Williams, the humorous, charismatic band teacher of Malcolm X Shabazz High School in Newark, has a more musical project in mind: to have the students consult a collection of spirituals by Harry Burleigh and arrange some of them for band. Williams, who has won regional competitions with the Shabazz school band and dreams of taking it to the Rose Parade some day, said the job would have to be done right: “We’ll study the words of the song, discuss what they mean, and then make the arrangement.” This is the cue for the NEH evaluators to make their appeal. “We want everything you 39 WILLIAM MAY “So interesting”: Joseph Horowitz ’70 I n 1987, Joseph Horowitz was interviewed about his book Understanding Toscanini on the noon talk show of New York’s public radio station WNYC. For almost an hour, Horowitz calmly explained the artistic, social, political, and journalistic implications of the American career of the Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini. At the end of the interview, the show’s host, Leonard Lopate, blurted out: “I didn’t expect this subject to be so interesting.” Pianist and author Joe Horowitz has been making classical music “so interesting” at least since he and I used to debate the merits of Beethoven sonata recordings by Vladimir Horowitz (no relation) while lifting weights in the Lamb-Miller Field House. After Swarthmore, Horowitz earned a master’s in journalism at the University of California–Berkeley, then worked for two years as a general reporter at a small East Bay daily. Returning to his native New York, he put in four years as a music critic for The S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N W 40 ith its tall tower, 1920s Academic Gothic architecture and wide hallways accented with decorative tile, Columbia High School looks the part of a school you’d move to a New Jersey suburb to send your kids to. In Jay Gavitt’s American History classroom, there are no neat rows of desks, but tables and chairs that can slide into various configurations. This afternoon, the 18 students mostly sit facing the front of the room because they’re about to hear from the author of the book they just read. About two-thirds of the students are African American. A couple of the school’s music teachers observe from the back, along with New York Times before becoming the concert program editor of the 92nd Street YMYWHA, an Upper East Side institution known for its generous offerings of concerts and lectures. The widely discussed Understanding Toscanini, Horowitz’s second book (the first was a profile of the Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau), put him on the cultural map as a social historian who comes to the subject through classical music. His subsequent books, The Ivory Trade: Piano Competitions and the Business of Music and Wagner Nights: An American History, shed still more light on Americans’ collective attitude toward themselves and the arts. In 1992, to differentiate itself from “general” symphony orchestras like the New York Philharmonic, the Brooklyn Philharmonic named Horowitz its executive director and embarked on five years of a mini-festival approach to programming, which, as one critic wrote, “redefines the symphony orchestra from purveyor of the canon to community center for music and musical knowledge.” After what he calls “five years of fundraising, budgeting, marketing, and costcutting—a hands-on education in arts administration,” Horowitz moved on from Brooklyn to advise other orchestras and mount festivals for them. He also teaches at music conservatories, gives lectures in the United States and abroad, and contributes articles to reference works and journals He has recently completed his magnum opus, Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall, published by Norton in March. —D.W. the ubiquitous video man, David. Horowitz sits on a table, swinging his legs. “Well, you’ve read the book,” he says softly. “Is there anything you want to ask me about it?” Nobody wants to go first, but finally a boy raises his hand. “Why’d you write the book?” he says. “I was amazed at how controversial Dvořák s idea was—that the so-called Negro music would become the classical music of America,” Horowitz says. He talks frankly to the class about the old blackface minstrel shows and the low opinion most white people had of blacks at that time. “I came to Dvořák through Anton Seidl,” Horowitz continues. “You remember him from the book? He was Dvořák’s friend and the conductor of the New York Philharmonic. He brought good music to as many people as possible. I wrote a book about him called Wagner Nights. He’s my hero. “And I liked reading about Creelman, the yellow journalist, in Michael Beckerman’s book about Dvořák.” Beckerman, a professor at NYU, sometime intermission lecturer on PBS concert telecasts and author of New Worlds of Dvořák, is considered this country’s leading authority on the composer. Horowitz adds, “Mike’s coming here, to the school, next month.” A student asks, “Did Mike go to Prague himself?” “Oh, Mike’s been to Prague many times.” “Did you go?” Horowitz grins. “I didn’t do any research for this book! It’s all based on other books. But I did a lot of research for Wagner Nights. I went to Seidl’s archives at Columbia University, and I held his diaries and letters in my own hands. I discovered his handwritten copy of the speech he gave on music at one of his concerts in Brighton Beach, in Brooklyn. That was exciting.” “What was your favorite thing about this book?” asks another student. “My favorite part was writing the dialogue. My publisher said teachers won’t buy fiction. I had to fight for it! Even then, in those scenes in Fleischmann’s Café where Dvořák and Seidl are talking about music, they made me simplify the dialogue.” Horowitz talks about his choice to use the story of Harry Burleigh, the grandson of former slaves, as a frame for his story of Dvořák (“That was hard to write—I think it’s a little dry”), about the different attitudes toward race in Boston and New York during Dvořák’s time (worse racism in Boston, even among intellectuals—“it’s mind-boggling!”), and about Dvořák ‘s happy family life (“He was a good guy”). Near the end of the 48-minute class, a boy asks, “Why is it that we have all learned about Mozart and Beethoven but were never told about Dvořák?” Horowitz nearly jumps off the table. “That’s a great question! A lot of people in this country just assumed that music was better in Europe than it was here. When Dvořák wanted to encourage Americans to be themselves, other people were colonizing them with Mozart.” A little standoffish at first, the students now seem won over by Horowitz’s warmth and candor. After class, many of them line up at the front of the room to have him autograph their books. In the hallway afterward, Horowitz is still elated about the last question. “That was perfect! He really got it. Why haven’t we heard about Dvořák! That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?” ONE STUDENT’S PAPER READ, “DVOŘÁK SAID THAT THE BASIS OF AMERICAN MUSIC WOULD BE AFRICAN AMERICAN TUNES—AND, IN THIS SENSE, RAGTIME, JAZZ, BLUES, AND HIP-HOP ALL ORIGINATED IN SOME WAY FROM HIS WORK.” THE PROJECT CULMINATED IN A PERFORMANCE OF FROM THE NEW WORLD BY THE NEWARK SYMPHONY. the audience that the prevailing melancholy of the New World has less to do with the national-park grandeur of some of those paintings than with the vast emptiness seen in others; Dvořák, the visitor from fully-set- A boy asks, “Why is it that we have all learned about Mozart and Beethoven but were never told about Dvořák?” Horowitz nearly jumps off the table. tled Europe, wrote that the desolate landscape around the tiny farm community of Spillville impressed him as “very wild ... sometimes very sad, sad to despair.” Around noon on Saturday, Jay Gavitt’s class gathers at Columbia High and piles into an ancient school bus, with rock-hard seats, for the mercifully short trip from leafy Maplewood to downtown Newark. It’s Dvořák day, the goal of all their preparations and visits by experts. In the afternoon, the students attend an “Interplay” event in the museum auditorium, consisting of performances of Dvořák’s American piano and chamber music; a panel discussion; questions from the audience; and Michael Beckerman’s rendition of his Hiawatha Melodrama for speaker and orchestra, in which he dramatizes such episodes from the poem as the “Death of Minnehaha” and “The Hunting of Pau-Puk-Keewis” by chanting Longfellow’s lines in tom-tom rhythm, syn- this concert, the audience is sticking with Skrowaczewski the whole way, quiet and attentive, in contrast with the foot-shufflers of Lincoln Center or the high-decibel coughers of the Academy of Music. And when, at last, he drives the finale to its fierce conclusion, they reward him and the orchestra with a heartfelt ovation. In the lobby, Joe Horowitz is ecstatic. “What passion! What freedom!” he exclaims. “It was Brucknerian!” The students are happy, too. The concert is over. They climb into the bus, chattering about gym class, boyfriends, the ski trip— anything but music. The headline of Paul Somers’ review of the concert will have the last word (for now) on Dvořák: “A great American, if ever so briefly.” T David Wright is a music journalist who lives in Wellesley, Mass. JUNE 2004 he NJSO’s Dvořák festival is under way. Horowitz’s spiral notebook has done its work, and every event has come off more or less as planned. Prudential Hall, the glittering horseshoe-shaped auditorium of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, resounds with a new orchestral program every weekend, each centered on one of Dvořák’s last three symphonies and juxtaposing his American works with the Prague ones he wrote before and after, pointing up the former’s African and Indian influences. The New York press gives the festival only glancing attention, the New Jersey media little more, but Paul Somers, ever the missionary for classical music in his biweekly newsletter, is attending every concert and lecture and writing them up. “The concert itself had trajectory,” he writes of the Jan. 16 orchestral performance under Vassily Sinaisky, which includes Dvořák ‘s Violin Concerto, “from its watery launch through its spectacularly rising violin flight. What put the concert into unforgettable orbit was the performance of the Symphony No. 8.” Not all the performances fully please Horowitz, but he is eager to hear the veteran Polish conductor Stanislaw Skrowaczewski lead the NJSO in the New World. “Many of the musicians admire Skrowaczewski,” he says. “He has the capacity to really inspire them.” This is a treat for a part-time band that must operate in the shadow of more famous orchestras in New York and Philadelphia. The other festival events offer fresh angles. On the last Friday evening of the festival, in the auditorium of the Newark Museum, Tim Barringer, an authority on American landscape painting from Yale University, interprets a slide show of landscapes by Frederic Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt and Indian portraits by George Catlin. (Some of the originals can be seen upstairs in that same museum.) Horowitz reminds WILLIAM MAY T chronized with recorded excerpts of the New World. Horowitz says afterward, “Mike has convinced me. I absolutely believe that the New World is Dvořák’s Hiawatha symphony.” Now it’s time for the festival’s climactic concert: Dvořák’s late tone poem, The Wood Dove, his early Piano Concerto, and finally the New World Symphony. Skrowaczewski takes enormous liberties with the symphony, speeding up and slowing down at will, and taking the already broad slow movement—Dvořák called it andante, but Seidl insisted on adagio—at a glacial pace. But hear this, New York or Philly sophisticates who disparage New Jersey as hicksville: At 41 DISOBEDIENT LO VE SA M E - S E X C O U P L E S SAY, “ I D O. ” By Laura M a r ko wi t z ’ 8 5 42 M any of America’s greatest social movements were successful because of a bold act by an individual. Rosa Parks defied segregation and took a seat at the front of the bus. Suffragist Alice Paul, Class of 1905, went on a hunger strike in prison to protest the unequal treatment of women. And on Valentine's Day 2004, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom challenged California’s ban on same-sex marriage by ordering his administration to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. For three exhilarating weeks, gay and lesbian couples from around the country raced to City Hall to marry before the courts shut the doors again. Busloads of schoolchildren on field trips, tourists from around the world, and family and friends of brides and grooms witnessed 3,955 same-sex weddings in San Francisco from Feb. 14 to March 11 and another 2,288 around the country. Following Newsom’s courageous act of civil disobedience, officials in Multnomah County, Ore.; New Paltz, N.Y.; Asbury Park, N.J.; and Sandoval County, N.M., AT THEIR SAN FRANCISCO JAMES HARKER AND PAUL FESTA WEDDING, JAMES HARKER ’99 (RIGHT) AND PAUL FESTA (LEFT) ATTRACTED MEDIA IN ON US, WE WERE FEELING GOOD,” also began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Newlyweds beamed for the television cameras and newspaper photographers; the mayor of New Paltz was put in jail; lawyers scrambled to file suits on both sides of the issue. The legal validity of the 6,243 same-sex marriages of 2004 are going to be debated for some time, but whichever way the courts decide, no one can deny that history has been made. Like the sit-ins at Southern lunch counters in the 1960s, the same-sex wedding phenomenon started a national debate. Some say it is the beginning of a groundswell of mainstream support to end discrimination against America’s last legally oppressed minority group. And that’s what three Swarthmoreans hoped when they and their partners took vows to be “spouses for life” in the rotunda of San Francisco’s stately City Hall. Against the backdrop of a mob of delighted supporters, James Harker ’99 and his partner, Paul Festa; David Augustine ’96 and his partner, Rob DePew; and my partner, Mary Kay LeFevour, and I committed our acts of love and civil disobedience. MARTIN HOFFMAN HARKER SAID. didn’t wake up that day thinking I would be getting legally married. It was a cool and sunny afternoon in San Francisco, and I met Paul in the Mission District for lunch. “Do you want to get married?” Paul asked. “Sure!” I said automatically, but I gave him a confused look. I had not yet heard the news that Mayor Newsom had ordered the city to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Paul brought me up to speed, and then we let the idea sink in over a burrito in Dolores Park. We felt an urgency to run to City Hall right away and do it. What was happening in San Francisco was groundbreaking, and who knew how long it would last? We didn't want to miss our chance. But if we got married today, no friends or family could join us. We decided to go to City Hall and see what the scene was like. City Hall, which is only two blocks from our apartment, was packed with hastily assembled brides and grooms waiting to be married, dressed in their jeans and business suits. It was late afternoon, and Paul and I realized we would have to wait until the next day. I was somewhat thankful because it meant we had an evening to prepare. We went home and called our loved ones and rounded up a small party for the next day, consisting of two friends and Paul’s mother. On Friday morning, Feb. 13, at 7:45 a.m., we walked over to City Hall, expecting to be the first on line. When I saw a crowd, I hesitated. Were they protestors? Paul recognized that they were couples waiting to be married. My first reaction, still, I realized, was to expect people to be against us. But as we joined the line of more than 100 people, my morose thoughts vanished. Everyone was ebullient and cheered as each newly married couple passed the line with their freshly minted marriage license. Many, like us, had invited family and friends, had dressed in special clothes, or had brought flowers. Many were with their children—“born out of wedlock,” as the day’s joke went. After 2 hours of waiting, we made it to the front of the line. During our 5-minute ceremony, I had the distinct awareness of time passing slowly, the flush on my face, a combination of giddiness and embarrassment that grew increasingly comfortable. I was concentrating hard on Paul's face, trying to will a vivid memory, and he looked so happy. By 11:30 a.m., we were the 185th JUNE 2004 I ATTENTION. “AS THE CAMERAS ZOOMED 43 “We felt an urgency to run to City Hall right away and do it. What was happening in San Francisco was groundbreaking, and who knew how long it would last?” “WE WERE MARRIED BY MABEL TENG, THE ASSESSOR/RECORDER FOR SAN FRANCISCO,” SAYS HARKER (LEFT). “SHE WAS EXTREMELY KIND TO US, AND WHEN SHE READ THE WORDS OF THE CEREMONY, SHE BECAME SERIOUS AND EARNEST. IT HELPED US FOCUS ON THE IMPORTANCE OF WHAT WE WERE DOING.” S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N loving relationships. Although the political significance of gay men marrying each other was important to us, I don’t think Paul and I would want to call our marriage wholly rebellious. Neither was it ordinary. Every day teaches us that our life together is a bit of each. We wouldn’t want it any other way. 44 same-sex couple to be married in the rotunda of San Francisco’s City Hall. For another week, as celebrations continued, the threat of an injunction made the line for marriage licenses swell to unprecedented proportions. By Sunday, hundreds circled City Hall, waiting outside all night in the rain and hoping to get licenses on Monday morning—before the afternoon hearing that threatened to stop the marriages. Since Paul and I live nearby, we made several trips to City Hall to offer coffee, doughnuts, whiskey, umbrellas, and blankets to those camping out. We talked to people of all ages and backgrounds. Paul and I, at 33 and 26, respectively, were among the youngest to be married. It was a sad reflection on a happy day to realize that many people in line had lived together for years with little or no recognition or protection of their relationships. Paul and I, by fortune of our generation, were able to marry as soon as we would have wanted to, although our marriage might be controversial and legally ambiguous for some time. The 26 days of same-sex weddings were politically rebellious. Paradoxically, that rebellion took the form of asserting our ordinariness. After all, gays and lesbians want the same rights as heterosexuals: legal recognition and support for our committed, DAVID AUGUSTINE AND ROB DEPEW R ob and I decided to get married a few days after Mayor Newsom’s surprise announcement. To my pessimistic mind, the issuance of marriage licenses was almost certainly going to be overruled by a judge as soon as the machinery of the courts could be engaged, so Rob and I decided to act fast. We rearranged our work schedules, made a few calls to our families, and showed up at City Hall at 9 a.m. on Friday morning, Feb. 13, prepared to take our vows. I was a wreck—but not in the way you might think. I was not a nervous groom. Rob and I had already committed to spending our lives together and had merged our worldly belongings. But I wasn’t certain that the city would act fast enough to get us all married before the courts forced them to stop issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. When we arrived, the line was not yet out the door, and I was amazed to see that City Hall had been transformed into a marriage factory. Licenses that usually took 10 days to issue were printed in minutes. Scores of clerks had been deputized to conduct marriages. The line to obtain a license was long, but there was a feeling of celebration as we waited. I was struck by how many couples with children and older couples had come. News cameras panned up and down the line, reporters searching for people who were not from San Francisco, perhaps to rescue the story from being only a local-news piece. We met our friends Doug and Eric in line. They had their adorable 3-month-old twin girls strapped to their chests. I admit, we (somewhat guiltily) tagged along when a sympathetic clerk invited the new fathers to move to the front. After getting our marriage license, we stood in another line in the magnificent City Hall rotunda, waiting to have our ceremony. It was an incredible scene: a dozen small clusters of people dotted the grand staircase under the dome, and applause and hoots periodically erupted as couples were wed. A group of city employees were busy unloading flowering potted plants on the edges of the staircase. The city recorder, who signs all marriage licenses, paced up and down the line, informing everybody that we would all be able to get married that day because City Hall would stay open as late as needed to accommodate everyone. The day was not without its comical moments. I had invited my mom; when she finally found me in the crowd, I was standing at the front of the marriage line waiting for Rob to bring the completed license. The SINCE THE CEREMONY, I HAVEN’T REFERRED TO ROB AS MY ‘HUSBAND,’” SAYS AUGUSTINE (LEFT). “I STILL CALL HIM ‘PARTNER,’ BUT SINCE WE’RE BOTH LAWYERS, THAT CAN LEAD TO CONFUSION.” “I held Rob’s hand, and we shared a deep smile. It seemed so simple, then, so elemental.” LAURA MARKOWITZ AND MARY KAY LEFEVOUR A week after Valentine’s Day, I called Mary Kay at work and asked her to marry me. She laughed and asked, “What? Again?” We had already had a big wedding in 1999, with all of our family and friends gathered around us. It took her a minute to realize I meant a legal wedding in San Francisco, and then she said, “Yes!” Even though we live in Tucson, and Arizona does not honor same-sex unions, we wanted to go to San Francisco and take part in this exciting moment in history—to stand up and be counted. We called my parents, who were delighted with the news. A few minutes after we hung up, my father called back and asked if they could come and be our witnesses. We were moved by their offer—it’s a long trip from New York to San Francisco. After we made our travel plans, we start- ed hearing rumors from friends in San Francisco that we would need an appointment at City Hall to get married, but the phone number to call to make the reservation kept changing. For two days, I wore out the keypad on my cell phone trying to get through to the right place and finally reached a friendly clerk in the Mayor’s Office of Community Relations, who made our appointment. Relieved, we then had to face the really difficult question: What It was as romantic as applying for a passport. We took a number, waited to fill out forms, and then signed over a check for $88. I was glad my parents were there, but it sure didn’t feel like a wedding day. It felt like a Tuesday morning in a bustling office building. But when the clerk handed over our marriage license, I saw for the first time our families officially joined on the page. Her mother and father, my mother and father, everyone’s birthdays and maiden names. “Later, we could call it an act of political defiance against a homophobic, heterosexist society, but in that moment, it was all about love.” should we wear? We decided to bring the same clothes we wore to our first wedding. I liked the symmetry. During the flight to San Francisco, I had a big, goofy smile on my face. Despite our protestations that this wedding was about making a political statement, despite the familiarity of two people who have lived together for 16 years, I was thrilled to be marrying her again. My parents arrived with bouquets, champagne, and chocolates. All four of us looked around the airport, wondering where were all the brides and grooms we had been seeing on the news? San Francisco didn’t look like a city in the throes of an act of mass public disobedience. But the next morning, the hotel receptionists cheered when we came downstairs with our flowers, and they even thanked us for sharing our “special day.” Strangers yelled “Congratulations” out their car windows as they drove by us. There was no line, and no crowd at City Hall when we arrived. The early injunctions to halt our marriages had failed, and so same-sex weddings had settled into a new routine. I noted that after 3 weeks of queer weddings, the city staff seemed inured to the spectacle of another lesbian couple coming in to be married. I would have felt sad if I had known then that in 2 days, the courts would stop the city from issuing licenses. It was odd to walk through City Hall’s metal detector in our wedding clothes. Four or five couples were waiting for their marriage licenses, and one camera crew was filming the wedding of the guys behind us. I was surprised to see a straight couple on line. LAURA MARKOWITZ (RIGHT) AND MARY KAY L E FEVOUR WANTED TO “STAND UP AND BE COUNTED.” MARKOWITZ SAID, “A TOURIST FROM ARGENTINA ASKED TO TAKE OUR PHOTO AFTER THIS ONE, AND ELEMENTARY SCHOOL CHILDREN WATCHED. And there we were. The state of California declared that we were one big family now. A retired gay teacher was waiting in the rotunda to perform our ceremony. He was wide-eyed with wonder at all he had seen in the past few weeks and seemed sincerely happy for us. Mary Kay took my hand, and my heart started to lift. She looked me deep in the eyes and repeated the words, “love, honor, and cherish.” I felt suffused with love for her and gratitude for the moment. My discomfort melted away. I was marrying my beloved, and she was marrying me. Later, we could call it an act of political defiance against a homophobic, heterosexist society, but in that moment, it was all about love. T Laura Markowitz, editor and publisher of In the Family Magazine, lives in Tucson, Ariz. JUNE 2004 clerk—demonstrating apparent open-mindedness (or absent-mindedness)—looked at my 70-year-old mother and me, asking us if we were ready to go! When it was our turn to be married, I found myself suddenly feeling picky about who would perform our ceremony. Doug and Eric had just been married, in front of a gaggle of television cameras, by an officiant who mispronounced them “husband and wife and life partners.” Although I was grateful to the scores of young clerks who had volunteered to read couples their vows, I wanted someone more dignified. Fortunately, a silver-haired gay man with a booming voice straight out of Central Casting, waved us over. I suddenly felt giddy. Rob and I held hands; the marriage commissioner proceeded to read our vows. I didn’t know how I’d feel when the moment actually came. I’d been so busy in the rush, armed with a clutch of papers and thinking only of the administrative hurdles in front of us. I hadn’t had much time to consider that I was about to marry the man I love. I held Rob’s hand, and we shared a deep smile. It seemed so simple, then, so elemental. We told each other that we would love and care for each other for the rest of our lives. We re-exchanged the rings we had just removed and were pronounced partners for life. We kissed, and then we hugged for a long moment. We were married. 45 CONNECTIONS Boston: The newly rejuvenated Boston Connection—under the leadership of David Wright ’69 and Ted Chan ’02 and with help from Michele Hacker ’95—is in the process of planning events for alumni in the Boston area. Watch your e-mail and snail mail for upcoming announcements. Chicago: Chicago Connection Chair Marilee Roberg ’73 is arranging for a tour of the Garfield Park Conservatory in Chicago. Jeff Jabco, horticultural coordinator of the Scott Arboretum, will lead this tour. Watch your mail for an invitation. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Connection Chair Jim Moskowitz ’88 arranged interesting activities this spring. More than 30 alumni, family, and friends visited the National Constitution Center in April, accompanied by Associate Professor of His- tory Bruce Dorsey. Later in the month, alumni toured the Glencairn Museum of Religious History with Professor of Art History and Art Coordinator Michael Cothren. Finally, in May, Bruce Gould ’54 arranged for a trip to the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Manet and the Sea exhibition. List Gallery Director Andrea Packard ’85 accompanied the group. The Philadelphia Young Alumni group scheduled two more happy hours in the spring at Tangerine and the Suede Lounge. Watch your e-mail for upcoming happyhour locations and dates. Metro DC/Baltimore: New Connection Chairs Jacqueline Morais Easley ’96 and Trang Pham ’01 are off to a great start this spring with activities for the DC Connection. Young alumni had a happy hour in April, followed by all-alumni trips to the Torpedo Factory Art Center in May and a pot-luck picnic in June. Watch your mail for upcoming events. If you would like to help organize an event or have a suggestion for an event, contact Jacqueline at jacqeasley@yahoo.com or Trang at trang_pham2001@yahoo.com. New York: Once again, this busy Connection participated in New York Cares Spring Clean-Up Day. The NYC Swarthmore Connection joined 3,500 caring New Yorkers to revitalize parks and community gardens, social service agencies, and public schools throughout NYC. Many thanks to Jennifer Hayoun ’97 and Keith Pieck ’97 for arranging a young alumni happy hour in New York in April. Alumni Relations Office Moving to Sproul Observatory Building 46 PHILIP STERN ʼ84 S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N T THE ALUMNI RELATIONS OFFICE, HUB OF ACTIVITY DURING ALUMNI WEEKEND AND NUMEROUS OTHER CAMPUS EVENTS, WILL RELOCATE THIS SUMMER TO THE SPROUL OBSERVATORY BUILDING. THE OLDEST SECTION OF THE BUILDING (RIGHT) WAS THE FIRST COLLEGE PRESIDENT’S HOUSE. MOST RECENTLY, THE BUILDING HOUSED THE COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT, WHICH MOVED IN JUNE TO THE NEW SCIENCE CENTER. HE RENOVATION OF PARRISH HALL began in earnest at the end of the spring semester (see article on page 14). As part of the renovation project, Swarthmore will have its first Alumni House. The staff of the Alumni Relations Office, along with colleagues in the Publications and News and Information offices, will relocate to the Sproul Observatory Building. These staff members will join the Alumni and Gift Records Office, which is already located in Sproul. The building will house a library with archives of old yearbooks and alumni magazines. A new entrance will include a patio space for small gatherings. According to the current schedule, the Alumni Relations Office will be relocating to its new home by summer’s end. So, if you are looking for us, please visit our new digs on the first floor of Sproul. We’ll have a housewarming during Alumni Weekend 2005—and we look forward to celebrating our new location with you then. —Lisa Lee ’81 Director of Alumni Relations WILL BROOKS The Faces of Alumni Council LEFT TO RIGHT, STANDING: LISA JENKINS ’02, MARCIA SATTERTHWAITE ’71, DAVID VINJAMURI ’86, COLETTE MULL ’84, PAUL BOOTH ’64, MICHAEL DREYER ’84, ANN STUART ’65, DAVID WRIGHT ’69, G. STEPHEN LLOYD ’57, GEE GEE ROBINSON ’50, JANE LATTES-SWISLOCKI ’57; SITTING: MARTHA LOUISE SPANNINGER ’76, MINNA NEWMAN NATHANSON ’57, VINCENT JONES ’98, MEGHAN TAYLOR KRIEGEL ’97, DOUGLAS THOMPSON ’62, SUSAN SCHULTZ TAPSCOTT ’72, KEITH BENTRUP ’01 (NONCOUNCIL MEMBER). HONORARY DEGREE NOMINATIONS SOUGHT WOULD YOU LIKE TO NOMINATE SOMEONE TO receive an honorary degree from Swarthmore? We’d like to have your recommendations of individuals who might join illustrious past award recipients such as astrobiologist and public policy analyst Christopher Chyba ’82; former head of the U.N. Humanitarian Program in Iraq Denis Halliday; bioethicist and civil rights advocate Adrienne Asch ’69; and Josef Joffe ’65, publisher and editor of Die Zeit. The Honorary Degree Committee used these criteria in choosing recipients: • Distinction, leadership, or originality in significant human endeavor • Someone in the ascent or at the peak of distinction, with a preference to the less honored over those who have received multiple degrees • Ability to serve as a role model for seniors, speaking to them at Commencement • Preference (but not a requirement) for individuals who have an existing affiliation with or some connection to Swarthmore In addition, the committee seeks to balance choices over the years from a variety of categories such as careers, gender, academic discipline, race, ethnicity, and public service. If you know a worthy candidate, please submit background information, including your own reasons for choosing this individual, by Friday, Oct. 1, to the Honorary Degree Committee, Vice President’s Office, Swarthmore College, 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore PA 190811390; or e-mail Vice President Maurice Eldridge ’61 at meldrid1@swarthmore.edu. All nominations are confidential; please do not inform the nominee. The committee will forward its recommendations to the faculty in mid-November. JUNE 2004 T wice a year, the Alumni Council convenes on campus for a weekend of work on ever-changing issues. Council members come from near and far to share their expertise and opinions with the College. Council members are elected for threeyear terms, during which they represent alumni in given geographic areas. The work of the council is broken into three areas: the Alumni Support Working Group works on issues that directly affect alumni such as Connections; the Student Support Working Group focuses on providing alumni support to students through programs such as the Externship Program, and the College Advisory Support Working Group reviews College policies and practices related to alumni. Each council member brings his or her special brand of Swarthmore experience to the council, making the group vibrant and driven to produce meaningful results. The work of Council does not end after the weekend does. Members continue working on projects throughout the year and, in many cases, long after the council term ends. The College is grateful to Alumni Council members—past and present—and looks forward to our continuing partnership. —Patricia Maloney Assistant Director of Alumni Relations 47 CLAIRE SAWYERS CLASS NOTES “Swarthmore is a place where the Quaker tradition inspires diverse people to reach for the most humane approaches to living. It insists that students and faculty alike work that amazing tool, the mind, to its utmost. It encourages arguments with the world, testing it, insisting that it be what it really ought to be." S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N —Chris King '68 48 the meaning of s w a r t h mor e Marschak’s Opus D O R OT H Y M A R S C H A K ’ 5 1 H E L P S B R I N G B E T T E R M U S I C E D U C AT I O N TO D C S C H O O L C H I L D R E N . eborah Renée Marschak was born in Paris in 1958, and her mother, Dorothy Marschak, says she never let anyone forget it: “Her siblings were born in Oakland, and she used to lord it over them.” Inheriting some of her birth nation’s reputation for high culture, Deborah Renée was a talented young musician, a piano and violin player who loved to write and dance. The death of Deborah Renée in an accident in 1968 sent Marschak on a dizzying detour from academia to a life of community service. Now the founder, president, and organizer of CHIME (Community Help in Music Education), Marschak’s ambition to improve the quality of music education in the inner city of Washington, D.C., is just the most recent of many expressions of her long-standing commitment to community welfare. “The original CHIME started in Berkeley, California,” Marschak says of a smallerscale music education effort she spearheaded in the late 1960s in the aftermath of her daughter’s death. “It was a memorial to her, and, in some ways, what I’m doing now, in my mind at least, still is.” In Berkeley, Marschak organized a group of musicians to provide volunteer instruction. Her own involvement with the effort lasted only a year because she was unable to secure lasting funding. Yet, her interest in her career teaching statistics was starting to dwindle with respect to her growing sense of civic responsibility. She attributes this development to her daughter’s death as well as the Zen explorations she undertook in its aftermath. Always more interested in helping her students curb math anxiety than in academic research, Marschak remained engaged in Berkeley community issues until 1984, when an emerging interest in Third World development brought her to Washington, D.C., to coordinate an international research project COURTESY OF DOROTHY MARSCHAK D AS THE ORGANIZER OF CHIME, MARSCHAK, WHO BELIEVES THAT MUSIC PROMOTES LEARNING, HEADS A VARIETY OF INITIATIVES. THESE INCLUDE A SERIES OF FREE CULTURAL MUSIC PERFORMANCES HELD IN WASHINGTON, D.C., PUBLIC LIBRARIES. ONE OF THE PROJECTS, THE EDUCATIONAL PERFORMANCE SERIES “MUSIC AROUND THE WORLD” HAS BEEN MOVED AND NOW BRINGS MULTICULTURAL CONCERTS DIRECTLY INTO THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS. concerning the impact of the Green Revolution. With her community ethos unaffected by the move, Marschak became involved in a variety of projects before forming the Washington, D.C., version of CHIME. She directed a reading and writing project at a homeless clinic, initiated a social studies program for adults who were seeking to obtain their GEDs, ran a singing and reading program for the chronically mentally ill, and tutored children in the schools. While serving as a docent for the National Symphony in 1995, Marschak revived her passion for the community issue that has absorbed her life now for more than seven years. In the course of visits to poorer inner-city schools to prepare the students for a free field trip to the symphony, Marschak was struck by what she found: “I discovered two things: One was how little music education there was in the schools. It was appalling. The other thing I noticed was how very responsive the students were to learning about music. It seemed to me that maybe this might be the time to see if we could mobilize the community to create some kind of volunteer support for school music programs.” A pianist since the age of 7, Marschak loves to play chamber music and says music is a key component of a full and balanced life: “First of all, it just belongs in education. It’s a basic part of every culture, and people who aren’t exposed to it are missing a part of themselves.” Aside from the well-established scientific links between music and academic performance and the self-esteem benefits associated with learning musical skills, music is valuable in and of itself, Marschak insists. “Music is a mode of communication that speaks directly to the emotions,” she says. “It also promotes learning. How many poems do you know by heart? Probably not many. But you probably know hundreds of songs.” Projects initiated by CHIME include volunteer music instruction in the schools and after-school programs; instrument donation drives; a Music Around the World educational performance series that brings multicultural concerts directly into DC public schools; professional teacher training workshops on incorporating music instruction into the curriculum using recorders and other simple instruments; and an advocacy campaign to require music education in the curriculum. At the present time, Marschak devotes more than 40 hours a week to organizing CHIME’s many initiatives because the organization has no paid staff members— this is a primary goal of current fund-raising efforts. She longs to be able to devote more time to the many other causes she has been involved with since she was first stirred to service. “Even in terms of my social involvement, I’d like to broaden right now,” Marschak says. She hopes that CHIME will soon have the finances to enable her to turn the daily administrative duties over to a successor. “Oh, yes, there is always too much to do,” she says with a laugh. —Elizabeth Redden ’05 JUNE 2004 PROFILE 59 PROFILE The Meaning of Retirement ROGER YOUMAN ’53 OFFERS PRO-BONO EDITORIAL ADVICE—AND EDITS A B O O K F O R S WA R T H M O R E . ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS W ROGER YOUMAN VOLUNTEERED TO EDIT THE BOOK THE MEANING OF SWARTHMORE. IT’S ONE OF MANY POSTRETIREMENT PROJECTS FOR THE FORMER EDITOR OF TV GUIDE. Youman did more than “impersonate” a magazine editor. After military service from 1953 to 1955, he took a job with a magazine he says he had “never read”—a fledgling publication about a new medium: TV Guide. And, as many editors know, this little weekly became the most successful (and profitable) magazine in history. “Television was the universal entertainment,” he says of TV Guide’s heyday. “We catered to the intense interest in both the programs on TV and how they were produced. At the time, newspapers looked down their noses at TV and didn’t write much about it. That was helpful—we had no competition.” At TV Guide, Youman says: “We worked to make the magazine better than the subject it covered. We hired the best writers, illustrators, and photographers.” Although he says publisher Walter Annenberg ran the magazine as “an autocracy,” it was still “a place where people were happy to work. Many stayed for a long time.” Youman worked four decades there, rising from a program editor to regional editor in Houston and Memphis, Tenn., and up the ladder through managing editor to the top position, co-editor, which he held from 1981 to 1990. He retired in 1996, seven years after the magazine was sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Retirement isn’t all work, says Youman: “None of my volunteer projects or pleasures can compare with the joys of being with our four children—who have managed to become exemplary citizens despite the lack of a Swarthmore education—and seven grandchildren.” Youman and his wife, who is director of the Information and Referral Service at the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia, travel as much as possible, returning often to Italy, with which they fell in love during daughter Laura’s five years of living there. His self-published Tuscan Notes: An Opinionated Guide for Travelers to Florence, Tuscany, and Umbria is invaluable for visitors. Of Swarthmore, he says: “During my visits to campus, I rejoice at seeing what the College and its student body have become. The whole world is represented there now, in all of its glorious diversity. I have gotten to know some of these kids and, in this grim time when human rights and democratic values are being undermined in the name of antiterrorism, they give me hope for the future.” —Jeffrey Lott To read essays from The Meaning of Swarthmore book, visit http://www.swarthmore.edu/news/meaning/index.html. Alumni wishing a copy of Youman’s Tuscany guide may e-mail him at ryouman@worldnet.att.net. JUNE 2004 hen I retired in 1996, after impersonating a magazine editor for 40 years, I announced that I was going to give myself some time to figure out how retirement works,” says Roger Youman. “I’m still trying to figure it out.” It’s not as though he’s sitting in a rocker, pondering what to do with his golden years. “For me,” he says, “retirement means hopping from one project to the next—doing some writing, editing, consulting, and teaching (currently as an adjunct professor at the Columbia School of Journalism), but mostly providing pro-bono editorial services to the nonprofit world.” Among the beneficiaries of his expertise have been HIAS and Council Migration Service of Philadelphia, which provides resettlement services to refugees; the Community Violence Prevention Network of Chester County; the Executive Service Corps of the Delaware Valley, which helps nonprofits with management, marketing, and fundraising; and his alma mater, for which he volunteered to edit the recently published book The Meaning of Swarthmore. (Swarthmore is also alma mater to his wife, Lillian “Lily Ann” Frank Youman ’57.) When the idea for the book came along in 2001—and after Mark Pattis ’75 and The Pattis Family Foundation offered to underwrite the project—it took Youman and the Publications Office staff about 18 months to prepare the final manuscript for printing. “This project gave me a lot of satisfaction,” he says. “I’ve enjoyed helping the College—and especially the contact I’ve had with a lot of interesting people.” The book’s 48 alumni essayists span nearly seven decades at the College, from the Classes of 1933 to 1996. In a 40-year career with TV Guide, 61 BOOKS & ARTS Sex, Lies, and Independent Film Peter Biskind ’62, Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film, Simon & Schuster, 2004 S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N 66 ndependent film is a baggy category, signifying everything from slickly engineered Oscar-bait like Shakespeare in Love (2001) to short experimental films and social-issue documentaries that are lucky to get an airdate on PBS affiliates. The concept is used as much to market films as “edgy” as to describe their makers’ autonomy from studio formulas and funds. The 1990s was the decade of the so-called indies. Every moment of this bumpy ride—from the debut of Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape at Robert Redford’s U.S. (later Sundance) Film Festival in Park City, Utah, in 1989 to Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 Pulp Fiction with its unprecedented $100 million gross to the 2002 controversy over the Academy’s attempt to ban “screeners” (the DVDs sent out to Oscar voters that constitute independent filmmakers’ only shot at having their films noticed) is chronicled in Peter Biskind’s juicy new book. Down and Dirty Pictures is a follow-up of sorts to Biskind’s acclaimed and riveting Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, which tells the story of how, as the subtitle has it, “the sex-drugs-and rock ’n’ roll generation saved Hollywood.” The movie mavericks it glorifies—“film school brats” like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Brian De Palma—were weaned on Hollywood genre and European art films and made “auteur theory” as American as apple pie in films that spoke a new language to new audiences. Down and Dirty Pictures tells a less heroic narrative. Its antagonistic main characters are a pair of bad-tempered, foul-mouthed brothers from Queens, Harvey and Bob Weinstein, who cooperated with Biskind on the book, and Redford, the Golden Boy of ’70s Hollywood, the Sundance Kid himself, who didn’t. Dirt is dished by the truckload, but because of the author’s insight into the art, history, and business of film—he’s a former editor of PHOTOFEST I STEVEN SODERBERGH’S SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE KICKED OFF A DECADE OF INDEPENDENT FILMS. THE ENSEMBLE CAST INCLUDED (FROM LEFT) PETER GALLAGHER, LAURA SAN GIACOMO, ANDIE MCDOWELL, AND JAMES SPADER. Ultimately, Biskind’s taste, politics, and even tact make this gossipy journey much more substantial than a guilty pleasure. Premiere, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, and the author of a book on 1950s Hollywood as well—one emerges feeling relatively unashamed of one’s prurience, if disappointed by the smudged face cinema presents at the dawn of its second century. The Weinstein brothers’ distribution company, Miramax, is probably best known for its vigorous and, until last year, fruitful Oscar campaigns for such “small” films as My Left Foot, The English Patient, and Chicago. Miramax changed the way independent films were marketed, especially after an influx of cash from Disney, which bought the company in 1993. In the words of one insider, “Harvey molded art film into smart film.” But their success formula came at a high price—the co-chairman’s meddling with films he’d acquired and bullying their directors earned him the nickname Harvey Scissorhands, and creative accounting and physical threats against filmmakers and staffers left a trail of tears that Biskind enthusiastically follows. Meanwhile, Bob Weinstein’s Dimension division locked into a money-making formula with the Scream franchise and never looked back. Back in the day, Soderbergh’s success with sex, lies, and videotape, produced by Bobby Newmyer ’78 and released by Miramax, encouraged young filmmakers to dream of going west—not to Hollywood but to Utah, where the festival and filmmaking labs sponsored by Redford’s Sundance Institute arose in opposition to the studio model. Redford remains a remote, inscrutable presence in Biskind’s book and is, in fact, described as a remote, fickle presence by most of the many associates whom Biskind does interview. Far from the benevolent father of indie film, Redford comes off as arrogant, moody, and a poor manager, not as Other Books Frank Ackerman ’67 and Lisa Heinzerling, Priceless: On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing, The New Press, 2004. Debunking cost-benefit analysis and related economic theories, this book challenges the Bush administration’s approach to health, environmental protection, and conservation. Nell Duke ’93 and Susan Bennett-Armistead, Reading & Writing Informational Text in the Primary Grades: Research-Based Practices, Scholastic, 2003. Based on their work in the Early Literacy Project, the authors offer classroom-tested strategies for helping children become creators and wise consumers of informational text. Phillip Daves, Michael Ehrhardt ’77, and Ronald Shrieves, Corporate Valuation: A Guide for Managers and Investors, SouthWestern/Thomson Corp., 2004. Divided into four parts, this book includes chapters on “Financial Statements and Free Cash Flow,” “Multiyear Projections and Valuation,” and “Top-Down Analysis.” Peter Friedman ’58, Ideal Marriage, The Permanent Press, 2004. Like many 1950s teenagers fascinated by the book Ideal Marriage, written by the Dutch gynecologist Theodoor Hendrik Van de Velde and translated into more than 40 languages, Friedman explores a boy’s journey into manhood. Heather Goff, “Poison in My Coffee,”in Kevin Takakuwa, Nick Rubashkin, and Karen Herzig (eds.), What I Learned in Medical School: Personal Stories of Young Doctors, University of California Press, 2004. In this collection of medical students’ stories, Goff introduces her tale about obsessive-compulsive disorder with, “It all started shortly after college, when I began believing that my coffee was poisoned.” Jeffrey Hart ’69, Technology, Television and Competition: The Politics of Digital TV, Cambridge University Press, 2004. Focusing on how nationalism and regionalism combined with digitalism to produce three different DTV standards, this book adds to our understanding of relations between business and government and competition among the world’s great economic powers. Stephen Henighan ’84, The Streets of Winter, Thistledown Press, 2004. This novel about life in modern urban Canada, filled with Montreal’s cultural details, explores the opportunity to reinvent oneself. Jeffrey Miron ’79, Drug War Crimes: The Consequences of Prohibition, The Independent Institute, 2004. Examining the alternatives to drug prohibition, the author—a professor of economics at Boston University—analyzes the costs, benefits, and consequences of the Drug War. Jennifer Patrick ’88, The Night She Died, Soho Press, 2004. In this novel, a smalltown murder in Georgia will particularly resonate with readers who have struggled to survive difficult personal experiences. Dorothy Espelage and Susan Swearer '87 (eds.), Bullying in American Schools: A SocialEcological Perspective on Prevention and Intervention, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004. This edited volume of 17 chapters by leading researchers across the United States on bullying and victimization in schoolaged youth reflects a social-ecological perspective on this ubiquitous phenomenon. Peter Friedman, author of the novel Ideal Marriage, graduated from Harvard Law school, studied East German law on a Fulbright grant, and was counsel to former New York City mayor Robert Wagner in the New York State Constitutional Convention. His fiction, articles, and humor have appeared in Harper’s, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Saturday Review, and many newspapers. Frank Ackerman, co-author with Lisa Heinzerling of Priceless, is an economist at the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University, the author of Why Do We Recycle?, and contributing author to the 2001 Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He has served as a consultant to the Environmental Protection Agency, state agencies, and environmental groups. Stephen Henighan, author of the novel The Streets of Winter, has also written When Words Deny the World, The Places Where Names Vanish, and Nights in the Yungas. Henighan teaches Spanish American Literature in the School of Languages and Literatures at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. His work has been published in eight countries. JUNE 2004 assured in his taste as the Weinsteins but not above taking over young filmmakers’ projects either. The downside of the book’s focus on the institutions that fostered the independent film movement is that the abundance of articulate, passionate filmmakers who put themselves and their visions out there are heard sounding mostly sour notes. Soderbergh himself, who tangled with Weinstein and Redford and followed his auspicious debut with a series of flops, does come out a winner, with a string of critical and popular successes as writer/director and a growing list of producer credits on a new crop of noteworthy independents. Ultimately, Biskind’s taste, politics, and even tact make this gossipy journey much more substantial than a guilty pleasure. Knowledgeable about such predecessors as Jean-Luc Godard and John Cassavetes, who inform the spirit and the formal visions of indie filmmakers, he sticks to his story: The film school brats of the 1970s made movies the video store brats of the 1990s—beneficiaries of the democraticization of the medium—might never match. —Patricia White Associate professor of English literature and film studies 67 PROFILE Hearts and Minds D.D. SMITH HILKE ’73 WILL BRING A C H I L D ’ S - E Y E V I E W TO SA LT L A K E CITY’S NEW MUSEUM. S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N 72 .D. Smith Hilke still feels the awe of stumbling across the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum in London: “I had touched something real that there’s only one of in the universe.” Yet long before her doctorate in the psychology of language had sensitized her to the sanctity of such an object—when she was a little girl in Philadelphia wandering wide-eyed through the Franklin Institute— Hilke experienced her first museum shocker. The surprise has carried meaning for her life’s work. “I was about 5, and I walked through the heart—and I have never forgotten it,” Hilke says. The Franklin Institute’s giant human heart exhibit, complete with stairs linking the chambers, has thumped thunderously in the ears and imaginations of generations of visitors. “I remember thinking, ‘I bet my heart doesn’t have stairs!’’’ As executive director of the Children’s Museum of Utah, Hilke cherishes institutions that satisfy an adult’s reverence for cultural treasures and especially those that indulge a child’s urge to plunge right into an exhibit and experience it bodily. “The way children learn naturally is exploration and play,” Hilke says. The Franklin Institute’s heart excites the senses as it promotes spatial perception— methods of learning that modern children’s museums employ with phenomenal success today: The Association of Children’s Museums calls these family meccas the fastestgrowing type of cultural institution in America, with an estimated 250 to 300 nationwide and another 80 cities planning ones of their own. Since 1990, the association says, 100 children’s museums have opened. Salt Lake City is among those with children’s museums on the drawing board, with Hilke in the vanguard of the effort. Last March, the County Council agreed to issue ©LANCE CLAYTON/ UTAH BUSINESS D HILKE HELPED BUILD PUBLIC SUPPORT IN SALT LAKE CITY FOR A LARGER CHILDREN'S MUSEUM. AROUND THE COUNTRY, CITIES HAVE BUILT THESE FAMILY-ORIENTED ATTRACTIONS AS CENTERPIECES TO DOWNTOWN REVITALIZATION EFFORTS. $15 million in bonds to pay for a new building to replace the small discovery center that serves the region after county voters had approved the bond sale by a wide margin. The first phase of the total $34.5 million project is to be finished in fall 2006, with the full 75,000-square-foot facility to be complete a year later. The popularity of such museums in cities large and small—the 2002 Winter Olympics delayed Salt Lake City’s boarding the bandwagon—can be explained by the huge cultural shifts of the past several decades, Hilke notes. “Children aren’t just out there roaming around in the woods across the street,” says Hilke, formerly a visitor advocate for the Smithsonian Institution. “I mean, they’re being carted in their car across asphalt to their program, and these programs are finetuned to one age group. Or they’re sitting in front of a computer, and they’re living more virtually. “What a children’s museum really does is allow the kid out into the community and into experiences that are hard to find today,” she says. Not only do parents feel uncomfortable today letting their children roam, but technology entices children away from hands-on play, and families find they have few hours to have fun together. And when they do have a special day together or when they’re visiting a new city—violà!—the museum beckons. While planning the children’s museum for Salt Lake City—where she lives with her husband, John ’73—or while spending time with her 2 1⁄2-year-old granddaughter, Hilke carries in her mind another childhood museum memory. The recollection is something of a cautionary tale for her profession and a reminder of how museums can leave lasting impressions on a child. Hilke remembers eagerly approaching a glass case that held a model of a boat with a big paddle wheel. On a button was the tantalizing word Press. “It didn’t work.” —Colleen Gallagher IN MY LIFE A Sequence of miscalculations OR HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS BY L E A R N I N G T H E H A R D WAY S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N By A r n o l d K l i n g ’ 7 5 74 MY CAREER AS AN ENTREPRENEUR BEGAN as I approached my 40th birthday. You might say that for my midlife crisis, instead of going for a sports car and a younger woman, I chose to quit my job at mortgage giant Freddie Mac to start an Internet business. This was in April 1994. Although, five years later, it seemed that almost everyone was thinking about starting an Internet business, when I founded Homefair.com, the World Wide Web consisted of only about 1,000 sites, and most of those were maintained by universities. This was well before Amazon or eBay or Google. I had no business plan. I had never heard of the “elevator pitch,” which is a short speech that an entrepreneur is supposed to give to a venture capitalist. In fact, it never occurred to me to seek funding for the business. The idea of Homefair was to bring mortgage and real estate information to the Web. I thought that those industries, with their quaint business practices and high fees, were ripe for disintermediation. I would never have guessed that 10 years later most home buyers would still be using real estate agents and mortgage brokers. I neglected to ask two questions that would have occurred to anyone who had attended business school: What sorts of consumers were using the Web? What sorts of businesses were making money on the Internet? Had I asked those questions, I would have discovered that of the 20 million Internet users in 1994, only about 500,000 had software for browsing the Web. The rest were using e-mail as well as text-based information services that have since been superseded. I personally could not figure out how to install the software needed for Web access in those days. It took an evening visit from the founder of my Internet service provider to get me set up. Even worse than the low numbers was the fact that most Web surfers were still in college. As Jay Minkoff, a publisher of New Homes Guides in the Philadelphia area, put it, “What you’ve got is an apartment market.” The businesses that were making money on the Internet, at the time, were providing connectivity and consulting services. Nobody had figured out how to make money by providing information on the Web, which is what I was attempting to do. I misjudged the money-making potential of micropayments and CURTIS PARKER/CORBIS “I NEGLECTED TO ASK TWO QUESTIONS THAT WOULD HAVE OCCURRED TO ANYONE WHO HAD ATTENDED BUSINESS SCHOOL: WHAT SORTS OF CONSUMERS WERE USING THE WEB? WHAT SORTS OF BUSINESSES WERE MAKING MONEY ON THE INTERNET?” KLING SAYS IN RETROSPECT. banner ads. Micropayments are transactions in small amounts, such as paying a few pennies to download an article. I thought that this would be a successful model. I thought that banner ads were a stupid idea and that they would be the least effective way to fund Internet content. Today, most content sites seem to be supported by advertising, and micropayments are rare. After Homefair’s first year, I was quite depressed. My accountant told me that the business in which I had sunk about $50,000 (in addition to the “opportunity cost” of leaving my job) was now worth about $20,000. The only reason that I did not abandon Homefair was that my wife counseled me to keep going. In 2002, when I participated in Swarthmore’s Lax Conference on Entrepreneurship (see “A Profitable Education” in this issue), someone asked where an entrepreneur should seek high-quality professional advice. My response was, “Your spouse.” I worried that America Online (AOL), which had the user base with the demographic characteristics that Homefair needed, might never choose to give its customers Web access because that would devalue AOL’s own proprietary content areas. However, in August 1995, AOL did offer Web browsing; instead of hurting itself, this launched AOL on a huge growth spurt. Summer 1995 was a turning point in other ways as well. I made a cold call to Rich Ganley, the owner of a small relocation service business in Scottsdale, Ariz. They had developed for more than 300 cities the Cost of Living Report, a sheet of useful information for employees considering relocation. Ganley said that he would gladly fax people free cost-of-living reports in order to obtain their contact information to solicit their relocation business. Faxing the reports was a disaster. It was time-consuming for Ganley’s company, and the relocation leads were not particularly helpful to Ganley’s business. Fortunately, we came up with a better approach. We changed the paper-based Cost of Living Report to an interactive “salary calculator” that allowed you to adjust job offers in various cities for differences in the cost of living. We then created a more sophisticated way to connect consumers to real estate agents and other service providers. Ganley and I formed a partnership. Impressed by my Ph.D., he nicknamed me “Doc.” He had only a high school equivalency diploma, but he had the combination of drive and charm that makes a great salesman. My role in the partnership was to maintain the Web site. I chose Netscape’s server software, which I expected would make it easier to develop the sort of interactive applications that were successful for us. The good news is that the applications were easy to develop. The bad news is that the server was a bug-ridden nightmare, which crashed whenever it became heavily taxed. Soon, Homefair was going down every few minutes. It took several agonizing weeks to convert our Web site to a more stable environment. In 1997, after Homefair had been profitable for more than a year, we were bought by Central Newspapers, Arizona’s largest newspaper chain. In what is called an “earn-out” arrangement, the terms of sale would be determined by our profits over the next three years. Central Newspapers was seeking to expand its Internet properties. We looked at www.mapquest.com, which was in trouble at the time, but decided that the price tag of $30 million was too much. About a year later, MapQuest was sold for $1 billion to AOL. On the other hand, we did suggest that our parent company purchase a site called www.theschoolreport.com (now www.homefair.com/sr_home.html), which offered school information in different cities and used business models that were similar to ours. I thought that the similarity of our two businesses would mean that integration of our software would be easy. Instead, rewriting their software to make it work with ours wound up costing much more than developing their software in the first place. Back in 1995, when Netscape became the first Internet company to sell stock to the public, I thought that the Internet frenzy on Wall Street would be over in a year or two. However, in 1999, the dot-com mania was still in full swing. When one of our competitors, www.homestore.com, went public, we decided that it would be better to join them than to try to beat them. They bought our family of companies (Homefair, TheSchoolReport, and Ganley’s relocation company) for $85 million in cash and stock. My share of the total was quite diluted by this point, but a couple percentages of $85 million is still real money, particularly considering the sequence of mistakes, miscalculations, misjudgments, and erroneous forecasts that led to it. Since 1999, I have drifted back toward my academic roots. I teach math part time on a volunteer basis at a local private high school. I write essays for a Web journal called www.techcentralstation.com, and I maintain an economics-focused Weblog at http://econlog.econlib.org. I published a book, Under the Radar, about Internet businesses operating without venture capital. I am working on another book, tentatively called Learning Economics, which is an introduction to economics that shifts the emphasis from how an economy allocates to how an economy learns. My own experience with trial-and-error learning as an entrepreneur influenced me to adopt this perspective. It was because I made the “mistake” of jumping into the Internet arena too soon that I was able to learn enough to neutralize later competitors who came in with more money and business competence. By 1998 and 1999, the Homefair partners could laugh at new rivals who were attempting tactics that we had discarded years earlier. After my appearance at the Lax Conference, I joked that discussing business with Swarthmore students is like trying to talk about death with teenagers. They know it’s out there, but they prefer not to think about it. But if you love to learn, then business can be a challenging and educational experience. And if you want to have good luck in business, it pays to be eager to learn. T Arnold Kling lives in Silver Spring, Md. JUNE 2004 Someone asked where an entrepreneur should seek high-quality professional advice. My response was, “Your spouse.” 75 PROFILE Lunch at 11 o’clock, Mars Time C O M P U T E R S C I E N T I S T J OA N COURTESY OF JOAN WALTON D I F F E R D I N G WA LTO N ’ 8 5 H E L P S U N R AV E L T H E M Y S T E R I E S O F M A R S . amed after the Roman god of war and source of inspiration for a sinister musical composition by Gustav Holst, the mysterious “red planet” has begun to reveal its secrets—thanks, in significant part, to Joan Walton. Walton, a physics major at Swarthmore and daughter of Jane Bassett Differding ’59, is the lead computer scientist for the Computational Science Division’s Information Design Group at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. With NASA since 1996, for the past three years, she has been heading the team that developed and customized an information system called the Mars Exploration Rovers Collaborative Information Portal (CIP). The Web-based tool allows mission engineers and scientists to access data and images downloaded from the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity; read mission schedules, reports, and papers; see clocks in the various time zones where mission workers are located (including the two rover landing sites on Mars); and send and receive broadcast announcements. After initial brainstorming with experts from the 1997 Mars Pathfinder and the Mars Exploration Rover missions, Walton’s team created a system that both integrates the massive amounts of mission information and incoming data and also coordinates schedules for the 240 mission members working on three shifts spanning the Martian day. “Our program enables users to search, sort, and browse and be notified when new data comes in,” Walton says. Careful daily planning is crucial to the mission because the rovers use solar energy and can perform tasks only during sunlight hours on Mars. Following commands from mission control, they collect data, which are WALTON AND STEVE SQUYRES, PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR ON THE MARS EXPLORATION ROVERS MISSION AND A PROFESSOR OF ASTRONOMY AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY, LOOK AT THE CIP LOG-IN WINDOW IN THE MISSION SCIENCE ASSESSMENT AREA AT NASA’S JET PROPULSION LABORATORY IN PASADENA, CALIF. beamed via satellite to Earth and translated by engineers into digital images and other types of data files. Based on their analyses of the data, scientists formulate the rover’s tasks for the following day and then pass their observations and recommendations back to the engineers. After evaluating the rovers’ capacity to perform the new tasks, the engineers translate them into commands that the rovers can interpret and send them back to Mars. “We’re running the mission on Mars time,” Walton says, “so one of their most serious needs is for scheduling. A Mars day is 40 minutes longer than on Earth, so every day, people have to show up for work 40 minutes later than the day before. Just knowing that something’s happening at 8 o’clock Mars time—when the workday begins—you have to know what time that is on Earth, today, tomorrow, and the day after that. So the schedules are really critical. Walton considers the scheduling system one of the most important aspects of CIP because previously mission team members had disseminated the schedules by printing or e-mailing them. “With our system,” Walton says, “you log in and get any of the 250 or so different schedules pertaining to the mission, including staffing schedules, satellite communication schedules, or standard event schedules for each day. They’re all integrated so you can put them up on your screen at the same time, query them, or obtain certain parts [of them].” Because the Mars Exploration Rover mission has been so unlike previous missions, creating the CIP was quite a challenge, Walton says. So she is delighted with the feedback that she and her team have received. Mission team members describe the program as “indispensable” and themselves as “helpless without it.” Nonetheless, Walton is already considering improvements such as building a more interactive level into the scheduling tool to allow users not only to view and query the pages but also to edit them. She would also like to enhance the system that monitors changes in the huge data repository so that users can be notified more quickly that their files have arrived. Now, Walton and her team are gearing up for upcoming missions including the Mars Science Laboratory, planned to launch in 2009 and last for several years. Using a more powerful rover that does not rely solely on solar energy and is equipped with additional scientific instruments and a laboratory, it will be possible to conduct more complex experiments on the planet, including chemical analyses of Martian substances. In the meantime, Walton continues to keep the Mars Exploration Rover crew working—and eating—on time. She says, “One of the most popular reasons for processing the schedules was to figure out when lunch was. People posted signs: ‘Lunch is at 11 o’clock, Mars time. Check CIP to find out when that is.’” —Carol Brévart-Demm JUNE 2004 N 79 NYC to complete a master’s in health policy and management at Columbia. Emily Clough is moving to Berkeley, Calif., after a stint at international peacebuilding organization Search for Common Ground. Joanne Gaskell is a research assistant for the International Food Policy Research Institute. Although Sanya Carley enjoyed consulting for the World Bank, this fall will likely find her in Madison, Wis., studying urban and regional planning. Akira Irie is a paralegal in Virginia, Todd Gillette is working for a small Web-programming firm in Alexandria, Va., and taking Brazilian jiujitzu, and David O’Steen is in an engineering Ph.D program in Florida. Carrie Cooper-Fenske (in medical school) and Toby Sanan (in a chemistry Ph.D. program) are both attending The Ohio State U., Laura Barker is in a Ph.D. program in biology at UC–San Francisco, Kirstin Bass is doing an M.D/Ph.D. at Mount Sinai, Joan Javier is working on a new voter’s project for the state PIRGS in New Mexico, and Sarah Stanton and Than Court are in Seattle. David Whitehead misses his Carib but loves Ann Arbor as a programming analyst for the U. of Michigan, building a national service for earthquake engineers. Ursula Whitcher is doting on her cats and her cooking while doing a math Ph.D. at the U. of Washington. Emily Almberg is tracking wolves in the beautiful Yellowstone Northern Range, dotted with bison, hot springs, and fallen snow. In sunny California, Heather Fleharty is in medical school at Stanford. The enterprising Swattie of the year award goes to Becca Van Fleet, who opened her own gallery in New Hampshire: Becca Van Fleet Pottery (www.beccavanfleetpottery.com). Well, that’s enough to make us all feel proud and inadequate at the same time. Do write. I love hearing from you! LETTERS Continued from page 3 keep the foundation’s cosmic ray detectors up and running. Doug Thompson ’62 was one of the most enthusiastic of that group. Just after his return from the Antarctic, I attended his slide show at the Bartol building and was enthralled by his rugged man-versus-nature tales, his evocations of pristine beauty in what is arguably the least hospitable spot on earth, the drinking and movie-watching parties with Soviet scientists camped across several miles of icy desert, and so on. So enthralled that, in fact, I applied for a stint myself. It was only a few months later—when an offer of a 13month job arrived—that I had second thoughts. In the sobering light of day, I was astonished that I had even contemplated such a rash move. I was just a few years out of India’s 110-degree summers, and I could hardly tolerate the winters in Pennsylvania—but I had, without thinking, considered living in the barren wastes of the Antarctic for 13 months! Sheepishly, I declined the offer. Every time I think of this incident, I remind myself that, at 20, not all decisions are sound and that young people must always be given a second chance to back out. GEORGE THOMA ’65 Bethesda, Md. The Bulletin welcomes letters (and poems!) to the editor concerning the contents of the magazine and issues relating to the College. Letters must be signed and may be edited for clarity and space. Address your letters to Editor, Swarthmore College Bulletin, 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore PA 19081 or bulletin@swarthmore.edu. R.I.P. Requiem, In Peace Don Mizell ’71, who served as chairman of the Swarthmore African American Students Society from 1969 to 1971, submitted the following poem in response to the review by Jon Van Til ’61 of Dignity, Discourse, and Destiny: The Life of Courtney C. Smith (March Bulletin). To speak undaunted To vaunted power Was never joy, Not even staunch Atop some learned chair Far out / Beyond the pale. An unarmed call To inner light Bore an awful price: Framed poster boys Of sudden death / By fame / like that / In a flash / / A snapshot / Not by Godot But by God. No fade to black As stark relief From icy breaths and fires beneath / No sane retreat From boundless love Or mercy sweet As yet we beseech: To seek to keep The fallen dream From sleep so deep There is no wake. The flame we pass Burns in us all / We march / we weep For justice sake Perhaps if blame Was not so game Our rest’d find Requiem, in Peace. © 2004 by Don Mizell JUNE 2004 UPenn. Carolynn Laurenza is working in the UPenn School of Medicine’s Dept. of Psychiatry, studying addictions and living in West Philly with Alyssa Bell (a paralegal at Community Legal Services) and Ilana Luft (who works as Professor of Education Ann Renninger’s research assistant at Swarthmore). They live around the corner from Matt Rubin (teaching some long days in southwest Philly), Aaron Goldman, and Joel Blecher ’04, whose awesome band The Perfection!sts draws in huge Swat crowds. In New York, Andrew Fefferman invites anyone nearby to check out his new Ithaca house. Nearby, Mike Smith eagerly awaits law school acceptances after a year learning the true meaning of relaxation. Rashelle Isip is home in NYC, eating enviable home-cooked food, departing on au pair stints to Paris and Milan, and having a wonderful time. Tanya Chotibut is postponing the real world in a psychology graduate program at Columbia. Kara Levy and Ted Alexander are leaving Prague for NYC, where Kara will earn an M.F.A. in fiction at Columbia. Alicia Munoz has just finished up her first year at Cornell, and Ben Hamilton is working in a genetics lab there. In Boston, Mark Romanowsky (studying physics at Harvard) and Laura Fox (a research assistant in the MIT Brain & Cognitive Sciences Dept.) team up to tackle the Haymarket fruit and veggie market on Saturdays. Down the coast in DC, Kuzman Ganchev is researching natural language processing for StreamSage and plans to study the same at UPenn this fall. With fond memories of European breads and spreads, Ben Galynker is working as an LSAT instructor in Baltimore. Chris Keary is a behavioral therapist for two young autistic boys in an after-school A.B.A. program and applying to med school this spring. Dan Dan is interning with the U.S. State Dept. this summer and then heads back to 87 Q + A Something About Barry P R O F E S S O R B A R R Y S C H WA R T Z ’ S O W N L I F E S T Y L E H A S I N A D V E R T E N T LY B E C O M E A P I E C E O F BEST-SELLING RESEARCH. S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N By Carol Brévart-Demm 88 Barry Schwartz is tired of talking about his jeans. In his 2004 book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, he uses a jeans-shopping experience—having to choose one pair from myriad different styles—to illustrate the bewilderment and paralysis that beset members of a consumer society faced with virtually unlimited choice. He explores the psychological and sociological effects of such overabundance of options, suggesting how to avoid falling prey to it. Following his own advice, Schwartz, 57, is still happily married to his junior high school sweetheart; he applied to only two graduate schools; and he applied for only one job. The book is being translated into six languages, and Schwartz has become a public intellectual whose thoughts and ideas are being taken seriously worldwide. Invited to speak to the British Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, he offered advice to Tony Blair (who wasn’t there in person), and, according to the London Guardian, everyone at Downing Street, No. 10, is “reading one book.” Schwartz, Dorwin P. Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action, is one of Swarthmore’s most popular teachers. Did this book affect your own decisions? What question did the media fail to ask? What public intellectuals do you admire? The only thing that’s been disappointing is that often the focus of the conversation is on my jeans, toothpaste, or cereal. I wish it were more routine for people to think about and ask me about the research’s broader implications for social, economic, and political policy. It’s a radical departure from the way we think about almost everything, and if it were to be taken seriously, it would have widespread effects, so we should at least be talking about them. When they have to squeeze a 10-minute interview down to 5 minutes, that’s the part that gets cut. What brand of jeans did you finally choose? Gap relaxed fit. It’s made me a more extreme version of what I was. I can’t tell you, though, how many people have told me that it has completely altered the way they make decisions— for the better. I never anticipated that it would have any practical effect on people’s lives. What was your most important decision? The most important decisions I’ve had to make didn’t feel like decisions—who to marry, where to go to graduate school, whether to take this job—they were nobrainers, but they were very consequential. How did it feel offering advice to Tony Blair? Wonderful. Flattering. It was extraordinary because there’s nothing like the Strategy Unit in the States. There’s this group of young, highly educated social science types; their mission is to get the right answer to policy questions. There’s no politics at all. They figure something out, then it starts to wend its way through the system and get spun in the way it needs to—or it gets abandoned if the politics are wrong—but at least they start out as if the best answer to every question could be implemented. The philosophers Alasdair McIntyre and Martha Nussbaum, the late historian Christopher Lasch, a welfare economist and 1998 Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen, and the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who also won a Nobel Prize in 2002 for his integration of psychological research into social science. If you were president, which five Swarthmore colleagues would you choose as cabinet members? I’d make Rob Hollister secretary of the treasury, Ken Sharpe secretary of state, Jim Kurth secretary of defense, Tom Bradley secretary of labor, and Rich Schuldenfrei secretary of education. (What’s the good of power if you can’t hire your friends?) What’s your favorite book, and why? I think it’s Social Limits to Growth by the economist Fred Hirsch. It completely changed the way I understand social institutions, more specifically, the economy. That one book changed the work I do. What’s the best lesson you ever learned from a Swarthmore student? A Swarthmore student changed the course of my professional career by teaching me to view the sort of narrow, empirical research I did in a much broader perspective. That’s what got me interested in economics and sociology. I used to think that I could figure out the answers to questions by putting the questions in the laboratory, and I learned from this student that that was not true—at least, not of the questions I cared about. Which three words describe you? Curious. Organized. Grateful. Which three words would your children use? Compulsively organized. Even tempered. Affectionate. Are you a religious person? No, although I’m a member of a congregation I helped found, but it was for political more than spiritual reasons. The Mishkan Shalom congregation was the product of divergent opinions in a former congregation I belonged to, and we founded it in the spirit of commitment to the public pursuit of social justice. I was very active for many years, but in recent years, my participation has dwindled. What do you do for fun on weekends? Mostly, we inhabit the Ritz cinema. That’s why I moved to Society Hill, so I could walk. Where do you see yourself 10 years from now? Well, my plan is to be right where I am now. BARRY SCHWARTZ BELIEVES THAT EXPANDING FREEDOM OF CHOICE, PARADOXICALLY, CAUSES INCREASING DISSATISFACTION AND ANXIETY IN OUR WESTERN CONSUMER SOCIETY. TIM SHAFFER Swarthmore College On-Line Alumni Community First launched in 1999, the Swarthmore OnLine Alumni Community has been improved to reflect the changing needs of Swarthmore alumni. ARE YOU • Trying to locate the guy named Smith who lived on the first floor in Willets when you were a junior? • Considering graduate school and wanting to compare notes with alumni who have already been there? • Looking for a job and trying to contact alumni in your field? DO YOU • Want to see Class Notes on-line? • Want permanent e-mail addresses that identify Swarthmore alumni? • Want up-to-the-minute information about Swarthmore Connection events on-line? If you have answered yes to these questions, then the Swarthmore On-Line Community is for you. 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