Standing Up Against Genocide swarthmore swarthmore college bulletin | october 2009 campus view Raindrops and sunlight swim in autumn air along Elm Avenue, just outside the Class of 1909 gates. PHOTO BY ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS parlor talk Behind almost every educational, social justice, or community venture launched at or from Swarthmore College for the past decade, you’re likely to find Maurice Eldridge’s quiet, steady presence. Upland School of the Arts (CUSA) opened. I was there on the first day of school, and the spirit in that old building was amazing— all sunshine and smiles and a lot of well deserved “we did its” for the volunteers and school-district officials who had shepherded Alston’s dream into existence. Another inspirational person celebrating with Alston that day was Maurice Eldridge ’61, who has served Swarthmore as vice president for college and community relations and executive assistant to the president since 1998, and who—as a private citizen—chairs the board of The Chester Fund for Education and the Arts, the private philanthropic side of the innovative public-private partnership that created and runs the school. swarthmore college bulletin ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS ONE OF THE THINGS I LIKE ABOUT SWARTHMORE is the number of people here who inspire me. After a hectic week of deadlines, there’s nothing better than watching Associate Professor of Music John Alston lead the Chester Children’s Chorus (CCC) rehearsals on Saturday morning. I usually take my camera so it looks like I have a reason for being there, but my words and pictures (see “Strong Voices, Strong Minds, Strong Spirits” in the April Bulletin) don’t tell the full story of what Alston does each Saturday for more than 100 Chester, Pa., children and teens. Almost from the founding of the chorus in 1994, Alston talked about the greater educational needs of children in poverty-stricken Chester. He dreamed of starting a school there that would reach far more children than the chorus, and, a year ago, the Chester This month, the CCC, for which he also serves as an ex officio board member, honored Eldridge at its 15th-anniversary gala. In fact, behind the curtain at almost every educational, social justice, or community venture launched at or from Swarthmore College for the past decade, you’re likely to find Maurice Eldridge’s quiet, steady presence. Countless Swarthmore students with ideas for educational or social-justice projects have “gone to Maurice” for advice, encouragement, and sometimes a little start-up money. Just ask Mark Hanis ’05, co-founder of the Genocide Intervention Network (on this issue’s cover, with the story on p. 16) about how they started the group while at Swarthmore. On opening day at CUSA, again toting my camera, I met first-grade teacher Sara Posey ’04—the only Swarthmore graduate teaching at the school. Through her work with the CCC both as a student and as a young alumna, she too had been inspired by John Alston. I thought I would visit her class, interview her, and write a short magazine story about her and the school. It wasn’t that simple; the story became a yearlong project with several visits and four interviews, resulting in one of the longest pieces I have written for the Bulletin (“It’s Getting Better All the Time,” p. 26). Plus, it added one more person to my list of inspiring Swarthmoreans. —Jeffrey Lott editor Jeffrey Lott associate editor Carol Brévart-Demm class notes editor Susan Cousins Breen art director Suzanne DeMott Gaadt, Gaadt Perspectives llc staff photographer Eleftherios Kostans desktop publishing specialist Audree Penner publications intern Katie Becker ’10 administrative assistant Janice Merrill-Rossi editor emerita Maralyn Orbison Gillespie ’49 contacting swarthmore college college operator (610) 328-8000 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 CVII, number 2, is published in August, October, January, April, and July 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. ©2009 Swarthmore College. Printed in U.S.A. ON THE COVER Mark Hanis ’05, co-founder of the Genocide Intervention Network. Photograph by Tony Deifell for the interactive art project “Why Do You Do What You Do?” (www.wdydwyd.com). Used with permission of the Echoing Green Foundation. Story on page 16. 2 swarthmore college bulletin in this issue features 32 16 26 16: In the Face of Genocide Called to action by death in Darfur, the Genocide Intervention Network, led by Mark Hanis ’05, stands up against genocide around the world. By Katie Becker ’10 20: Breaking Down Barriers In Ecuador’s highlands, an education project aims to “create a new fluidity and class mobility,” says founder Katie Chamblee ’07. By Elizabeth Redden ’05 24: Beyond the Emotional Turmoil Gay psychiatrist Bertram Schaffner ’32 brings compassion and dignity to his homosexual patients. By Susan Cousins Breen 26: It’s Getting Better All the Time Sara Posey ’04 wanted to teach in an urban school where the kids needed her attention. But it wasn’t an easy start for her or the ambitious new Chester-Upland School of the Arts. By Jeffrey Lott 24 20 october 2009 34 32: Now That’s Intertainment! Television is so 20th century! The advent of Internet video has opened entirely new channels for send-up acts such as God’s Pottery and The Gregory Brothers, each of which offers its own take on the music, media, and mores of our day. By Sara Shay ’92 and Paul Wachter ’97 3 in this issue departments profiles 5: LETTERS Readers voice their opinions. 52: Completing the Bard’s Canon Julian Lopez-Morillas ’68 has played in or directed every one of Shakespeare’s plays. By Ken Bullock 40: CLASS NOTES As the world turns—Swarthmore-style 46: IN MEMORIAM Farewell to cherished friends and classmates 58: IN MY LIFE My Layer-Cake Life By Malka Kramer Schaps ’69 (formerly Mary Elizabeth Kramer) 62: BOOKS + ARTS Uncertain Suffering: Racial Health Care Disparities and Sickle Cell Disease By Carolyn Moxely Rouse ’87 Reviewed by Sarah Willie-LeBreton 72: Q + A Happily Hooked on China: Alan Berkowitz By Carol Brévart-Demm on the web Swarthmore College Bulletin on the Web: This issue and more than 10 years of archives are at www.swarthmore.edu/bulletin. Also on the College Web site, you will find: President Rebecca Chopp’s Listening Tour Blog: Keep pace with the president as she takes to the road to talk about what makes Swarthmore special and to discuss the College’s future with alumni, parents, and friends of the College at http://bit.ly/chopp_tour. Noted economist Alice Rivlin H’76 examined the policy challenge of addressing capitalism’s downsides without destroying the productivity of the market-based economy in this year’s Bernie Saffran Lecture. Listen at http://bit.ly/rivlin_lecture. Watch Taiko: See Associate Professor of Dance Kim Arrow and his students perform what he calls a “perfect marriage of dance and drumming” at http://bit.ly/dance_drum. Sing a Song of Science: Members of the Chester Children’s Chorus learn to think like scientists in a summer program started by Swarthmore professors and friends at http://bit.ly/CCC_science. 2 52 contributors Entrepreneur and media maker Tony Deifell, who shot this issue’s cover image, is president of Q Media Labs. His book Seeing Beyond Sight features photographs made by blind teenagers whom he taught. Deifell’s “wdydwyd?” project (www.wdydwyd.org) has led to collaboration with artists worldwide. He lives on a houseboat in San Francisco. CLAUDIA SALAZAR 37: CONNECTIONS Alumni around the country are invited to meet President Chopp, and Garnet Sages get to see Xi’an’s terra cotta warriors. 66: Innovative Thinking Valerie Casey ’94 created the Designers Accord and initiated a movement to help industries become more sustainable. By Audree Penner ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS 14 14: FACULTY EXPERT Preventing Teen Depression A program based on cognitive behavioral therapy gives adolescents some tools to stave off depression. By Jane Gillham 58 MARDIE OAKES 7: COLLECTION First there was Collection—then there was First Collection. Enjoy a collection of stories about Swarthmore today. Sara Shay ’92 is a freelance writer and editor in the Philadelphia area whose recent clients include MIT’s Technology Review, the Center for Reproductive Rights, the Coalition for the International Criminal Court, and the parenting Web site BabyZone.com. She has a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University. “Altar Egos” is her first article for the Bulletin. Juan Víctor Fajardo ’09, a native of Caracas, Venezuela, majored in philosophy and minored in Latin American studies. While at Swarthmore, he studied photography with Jessica Todd Harper and Ron Tarver. He spent the summer in Ecuador, where he worked as program coordinator and photographer for the Village Education Project, and is currently in Caracas preparing applications for graduate school in investigative journalism. swarthmore college bulletin letters WHAT MAKES A GOOD TEACHER? Following primary and secondary school, undergraduate education, graduate study, and more than 20 years as a university faculty member, you might think I could provide a simple answer to the question “What makes a good teacher?” A sequence of physics courses during my sophomore year at Swarthmore illustrates the problem. By the end of that year, I thought Mark Heald was the best teacher I had ever had and that Paul Mangelsdorf ’49 was the worst. [Both Heald and Mangelsdorf are Morris L. Clothier Professors Emeritus of Physics.] I held onto that opinion until halfway through graduate school, when I decided that Heald wasn’t very good and Mangelsdorf was terrific. I think almost all of us hated that class; with a problem on a Monday, he would start in Boston and work his way to Chicago via Atlanta. On Tuesday, examining the same problem, he’d start out in Seattle and work his way to Chicago via Dallas. By Wednesday, he would start out in Miami and work his way to Chicago via Denver. I think almost all of us hated that class; in fact, I think Mangelsdorf overheard our complaints about it. The following spring, he invited me to sit in on the same class and make suggestions to him on how he could teach it better. It was only years later that I realized how much that helped me master the material and, to this day, I cannot decide if his request for my “assistance” was merely clever psychology to get me to sit in on the class or whether my learning was just a byproduct of his desire to improve his teaching. In graduate school, I found that research was much more in keeping with Mangelsdorf ’s approach. Good results never came from going the shortest, most elegant distance from A to B—and so my admiration of Mangelsdorf overtook my high opinion of Heald. Since then, I have flip-flopped occasionally, but I eventually settled on the view that Mark Heald taught me the ideal to which scientists aspire—that a problem is not solved and understood until you can condense it to its essence or until you’ve found the shortest, cleanest path from A to B. But if you really want to understand how to play the game, watching highlight films won’t work. You have to do the dirty, inefficient work of practice—and Paul Mangelsdorf was allowing us to see him at practice. Mark Milanick ’77 Columbia, Mo. in fact, I think Mangelsdorf overheard THANKS, KYLE our complaints about it.The following spring, he invited me to sit in on the same class and make suggestions to him on how he could teach it better. Heald was always prepared and organized. He distilled each problem to its essentials and provided elegant, concise solutions. He made the physics enjoyable. By contrast, if you went to Mangelsdorf ’s office for help october 2009 The Bulletin’s coverage of Swarthmore’s adoption of the Phoenix as the College mascot (“Swarthmore Hatches a Big Red Bird,” July 2008) was enjoyable to read, yet one important fact was missing: Kyle White ’07, mentioned briefly in the article as an emcee of the competition to pick a person to wear the costume, was the driving force behind the mascot from the very beginning. As the president of the Garnet Club, created in 2004 to promote school spirit, Kyle approached the Student Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC) with his idea for a mascot. SAAC From the beginning to the end, Kyle White’s work was the reason we now have the Phoenix as our mascot. encouraged Kyle and convened a subcommittee that included Kyle, SAAC members, and faculty. From that committee came a variety of mascot ideas, which were then voted on by the student body. From the beginning to the end of the process, Kyle’s work was the reason we now have the Phoenix as our mascot. He should be commended for his efforts. Gavin Nurick ’07 Stamford, Conn. Editor’s Note: In photos of the Phoenix on the cover and within that issue of the Bulletin, the mascot costume is inhabited by none other than Kyle White ’07, who indeed deserves great credit for the existence and popularity of Swarthmore’s mascot. PRIVILEGED TO EXPRESS OUR OPINIONS When he writes of Ted Nelson’s [’59] singing on the porch of Parrish Hall as an act of daring (“Our Own Mario Savio, ” Letters, July Bulletin), I think that my friend Peter Gessner ’61 is misrepresenting the culture of the College in the late 1950s. Yes, “The Rules” seemed onerous to us and were strictly enforced. But I do not remember ever being afraid to voice an opinion, think a thought, write a sentence—or sing a song. On the contrary, we were privileged to express our serious opinions along with our sophomoric illusions all day long to our great benefit and joy. Jeanette Strasser Falk ’60 Carrboro, N.C. A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE A letter from Jim Weber ’84 in the July Bulletin expressed his opinion about President Alfred H. Bloom’s role in the elimination of the football program. I have a somewhat different perspective. From 1982 to 1989, I was a member of the Board of Managers, serving as chair of the audit committee, vice chair of finance, and Board secretary. In 1989, I joined the College administration as vice president for business 5 letters and finance. I worked for Al Bloom from 1991 until my retirement in 1995 and admired his efforts to engage all stakeholders on controversial subjects and to listen carefully in the Friends’ sense of seeking consensus. The place of football at Swarthmore had been a subject of discussion for many years by the Board, faculty, staff, students, administration, and alumni. As I neared retirement, that discussion seemed to be trending toward the difficult decision to eliminate the program. Conditions were changing. Swarthmore had not grown in size as many small colleges had when they became coed schools, freshmen committed to the sport coming out of high school were not all participating as seniors, study abroad was impacting athletes, and specialization was making it more difficult to attract multisport students. It is not my purpose here to cover all the pros and cons of this discussion, but despite the evolving difficulties in fielding a team, there remained a number of very strong voices among the alumni who opposed discontinuing the program. After I retired, the decision was made to begin a trial period of enhancements to the football program with a new coach, increased recruiting, and financial support. I know that Al Bloom anguished over doing this, but with alumni pressure acting as critical catalyst, the decision was not his alone. Although some success resulted from the changes, it became clear that, in the long run, a viable football program consistent with Swarthmore’s drive for excellence in all The decision was made to begin a trial period of enhancements to the football program. Although some success resulted from the changes, it became clear that, in the long run, a viable football program consistent with Swarthmore’s drive for not been heard. They were indeed heard, but their position was not convincing. Once again, ending the football program was clearly not the decision of a single person. I have always been a strong supporter of athletics at Swarthmore. I was a starter in baseball, basketball, and soccer, and received the Quink trophy in 1951. I believe it is necessary to maintain a strong role for athletics at the College. However, conditions change, and the ability to make adjustments must be a basic principle for a successful Swarthmore. William Spock ’51 Brunswick, Maine excellence in all endeavors would LETTERS POLICY not be feasible. I believe that a mistake was made in beginning such a trial but that at all points there was full consultation. endeavors would not be feasible. In 2000, the trial was ended, which unfortunately meant that there were coaches and students who could not continue on paths they had expected. Again, there was broad consultation. With this background, I believe that a mistake was made in beginning such a trial but that at all points there was full consultation. Sometimes, time does not allow for complete consensus or even a “sense of the meeting,” which is a better phrase—and more appropriate in some situations. In this case, some alumni felt strongly that they had The Bulletin welcomes letters to the editor addressing topics covered in the magazine or issues relating to the College. There is no guarantee that all letters received will be published. Some letters may be published on only the Bulletin Web site, especially if there are numerous letters addressing a single topic. The suggested maximum length for letters is 300 words and letters may be edited for clarity and space. All letters must be signed. The Bulletin will publish letters responding to an article or issue and, in one subsequent edition, letters responding to those letters. After two issues, however, the editors may choose to end the debate on any topic. Letters from the same person will not be published more often than once every two years. Letters may be mailed to Editor, Swarthmore College Bulletin, 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore PA 19081-1390 or sent by e-mail to bulletin@swarthmore.edu. STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT, AND CIRCULATION 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Publication title: Swarthmore College Bulletin Publication number: 0888-2126 Filing date: Oct. 12, 2009 Issue frequency: August, October, January, April, July Number of issues published annually: 5 Annual subscription price: none Office of publication: 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore PA 19081-1390 8. General business office: 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore PA 19081-1390 9. Publisher: Swarthmore College, 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore PA 19081-1390. Editor: Jeffrey Lott, 500 College Ave., Swarthmore PA 19081-1390 Managing editor: none 10. Owner: Swarthmore College, 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore PA 19081-1390 6 11. Known bondholders, mortgagees, or other security holders holding one percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities: none 12. The purpose, function, and nonprofit status of this organization has not changed during the preceding 12 months. 14. Issue date for circulation data: July 2009 15. a. Total number of copies (net press run): 24,896 b. (1) Paid or requested mail subscriptions: 22,236 b. (4) Other classes mailed: 1,291 (ISAL) c. Total paid and/or requested circulation: 23,527 d. (3) Free distribution by mail: 60 e. Free distribution outside the mail: 1,265 f. Total free distribution: 1,325 g. Total distribution: 24,852. h. Copies not distributed: 44 i. Total: 24,896 j. Percent paid and/or requested circulation: 94.5% swarthmore college bulletin collection Awe , Joy, and an Intense, Rewarding Adventure ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS In her first public speech of the new academic year—and her newborn presidency— President Rebecca Chopp (above) asserted Swarthmore’s Quaker heritage and told members of the Class of 2013 at their First Collection that “Our founders believed that everyone should tend his/her own conscience, to ‘mind the light’ within oneself. Tonight, we induct you into the Swarthmorean tradition of minding the light: Critical thinking, questioning your own judgment and that of others, being skeptical but not cynical, taking risks in your exploration of the arts, sciences, humanities, and social sciences, and participating vigorously in this intensely scholarly community.” Chopp, who is a scholar of American religious movements, has steeped herself in College history since arriving on campus in July. She told the first-year students about one of Swarthmore’s famous founders: “She was 4 feet, 11 inches tall and weighed not quite 90 pounds. Over the course of her lifetime october 2009 (1793–1880), Lucretia Mott would not only help found Swarthmore College but also shelter runaway slaves in her home, co-found with her husband the Pennsylvania AntiSlavery Society, advocate for peace rather than war, and sign the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiment at the first women’s rights convention, which she and Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized in 1848.” Chopp read Walt Whitman’s poem “Beginning My Studies” from Leaves of Grass (1872): Beginning my studies, the first step pleas’d me so much, The mere fact, consciousness—these forms—the power of motion, The least insect or animal—the senses— eyesight—love; The first step, I say, aw’d me and pleas’d me so much, I have hardly gone, and hardly wish’d to go, any farther, But stop and loiter all the time, to sing it in extatic songs. The new president concluded: “I hope you share with the faculty, students, staff, and alumni the awe and joy in the midst of the intense and rewarding adventure that awaits you. May your first step please you so much.” First Collection has evolved in recent years into a quiet ceremony held at dusk in the Scott Amphitheater. (See page 8.) Following President Chopp’s remarks, Reid Wilkening ’10 welcomed the new class on behalf of the student body; Associate Professor of Sociology Sarah Willie-LeBreton spoke for the faculty; and Garakai Campbell ’90, acting dean of students and associate professor of mathematics, presided over the closing ceremony—a symbolic passing of the light, candle to candle, until each member of the entering class held his or her own light as darkness spread under the canopy of trees. Listen to all First Collection speeches at http://bit.ly/first_collection09. 7 collection First There Was Collection—N BOARD LOWERS BUDGET ADJUSTMENT TARGET TO $8 MILLION At its Sept. 26 meeting, the College’s Board of Managers took new steps in an ongoing effort to bring Swarthmore’s future spending in line with expectations of future income. Although the College will still need to reduce its overall budget significantly, the message from the Board —shared with the campus community in an e-mail from President Rebecca Chopp— indicated that the impact of the decline in its endowment may be ameliorated as the economy and equity markets recover. The Board agreed on an $8 million adjustment—little more than half the $15 million projected at the end of last year—to be implemented in a phased combination of spending cuts and revenue increases during the next few fiscal years. “It’s a testament to our investment office and the investment and finance committees of the Board that we have recovered so well in this economy,” said Chopp, noting that many of the College’s peers have suffered endowment losses of up to 30 percent. Swarthmore’s endowment was down 16.8 percent from its peak of $1.441 billion in summer 2007 to $1.129 billion at the end of June 2009. In December 2008, when the scale of the global economic downturn became evident, the Board had assumed that a 30 percent decline in the value of the College’s endowment, when coupled with an anticipated increase in financial aid needs, would require a budget adjustment of $15 million. 8 An Ad Hoc Financial Planning Group, comprising faculty, staff, senior administrators, and Board members, began to develop a series of recommendations to revise the College’s future budgets accordingly. In the immediate first phase of reductions, they trimmed the 2009–2010 budget by freezing faculty and staff salaries, cutting most departmental operating budgets, and deferring capital building projects. The Board gave the Ad Hoc group one year to develop a plan, guided by principles designed to protect the College’s core values, including maintaining academic excellence and concern for the Read President Chopp’s entire message to the campus community at http://bit.ly/college_finan ces. Learn more about the work of the Ad Hoc Financial Planning Group and contribute your suggestions at http://- well-being of each member of the community. The Ad Hoc group has encouraged suggestions during open meetings and through its Web site. Every College administrative and academic department scrutinized expenditures, and new revenue-generating ideas, including targeted fundraising for such fundamental programs as financial aid, have been included in the planning process. Acknowledging the significant contributions of the oncampus community, Chopp said, “Careful spending of de- partmental budgets, widespread participation in the financial planning process; and faculty, staff, and student acceptance of salary and payrate freezes have all been crucial elements in the first phase of our response to these challenges.” Chopp continued, “If the positive economic environment persists, we hope to lift the salary freeze for next year, and we also hope to continue to avoid layoffs.” The new $8 million goal “will allow us to continue to implement what is necessary to balance the budget while sustaining the academic excellence that is the heart of our mission,” Chopp wrote. The $8 million in budget adjustments will be reflected in the plan being developed by the Ad Hoc Group in consultation with all campus stakeholders at a series of meetings this fall. The group’s plan will be flexible enough to adapt up or down, depending on external market conditions. Recognizing the instability of equity markets, the group will also append the more comprehensive $15 million plan to its December report to the Board. Of her first three months of work with the College community, Chopp said: “It has been tremendously gratifying to witness firsthand the graceful way that this community works collaboratively and vigorously to maintain its core values. And we are all, of course, indebted to the ongoing support of our alumni, parents, and friends. We have never needed their support more.” —Nancy Nowicki Nicely On Aug. 26, members of the Class of 2013 gathered at dusk in the Scott Amphitheater for an assembly that has become a rite of initiation for all Swarthmore freshmen for the past 15 years—the First Collection. In the late 1940s, campus life included a weekly mandatory Collection, held in Clothier Hall. Students were seated alphabetically, so that absences could be easily noted. First Collection in its current form was introduced in 1994 by Andrew Feldman ’96, now senior policy adviser in the office of Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle. As the student leader of freshman orientation, Feldman borrowed the idea of passing candlelight from an event he had experienced earlier as a camp counselor. With the support of then-Dean for Student Life Tedd Goundie— who told Feldman, “I’ll support you on this, but please don’t burn the school down”— Feldman designed the ceremony that has become a fully-fledged tradition. “Swarthmore students can take their own meaning from the candle-lighting ceremony that concludes First Collection,” Feldman says. “To me, the candles are a symbol of solidarity among the incoming class, but also a symbolic reference to the College’s Quaker roots—to the concept of ‘inner light,’—and the unique set of beliefs that each individual brings to the College.” Although passing of candlelight at First Collection is relatively new, the notion of “Collection” at Swarthmore is decades old. According to Christopher Densmore, curator of Friends Historical Library, the Annual Catalog of 1870–1871 mentions a form of assembly at the end of each day for worship, swarthmore college bulletin —Now There’s First Collection october 2009 Meet the Class of 2013 [A DEFINITION OF DIVERSITY] NIGEL HOLMES at which readings from Scripture were followed by a period of silence. Later catalog entries mention daily meetings for religious exercises and the “imparting of moral lessons as circumstances seem to require.” By 1933, these assemblies took place at 9 a.m., Monday through Friday. A “Collection” was held every Wednesday in Clothier Memorial Hall. This 15-minute meeting, at which student attendance was required, comprised speakers and music, preceded by a period of silence in accordance with Quaker practice. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, a voluntary collection occurred in Friends Meeting House. The 1949 catalog, under the heading “Religious Life,” described a weekly mandatory Collection at 10 a.m. every Thursday in Clothier Hall, which lasted from “one-half to three-quarters of an hour and included occasional musical, dramatic, and other programs.” Vice President for College and Community Relations and Executive Assistant to the President Maurice Eldridge ’61 recalls “almost weekly meetings that we had to attend. There was always a speaker. Sometimes, someone would come up with a prank in an attempt to disturb the meeting, bringing in chickens or cows, and there was quite a lot of reading of The New York Times.” By 1970–1971, the traditional gatherings had been cut back to three times a semester. The length and style of the program remained the same, but attendance was no longer mandatory. A year later, the catalog referred to a Collection that was “held at a regular hour several times a term for addresses or special events. Attendance is voluntary.” It went on to say that “in 1971–1972, a series of talks by College faculty members on topics in their fields of professional interest and from their own work … is planned as the principal focus of Collection…. The president will address the first Collection each semester, and there will be an opportunity in each semester for programs sponsored by the Student Council.” No reference was made to any type of religious exercises at these later meetings. Currently, all-campus meetings, still called Collections, occasionally occur at no fixed intervals, taking the form of meetings to discuss current issues relevant to the whole College community. Attendance is voluntary. —Carol Brévart-Demm 9 collection weight identification bands on their legs to allow them to be tracked in summers to come. The data collected by Miniet and the children contributes to a long-term research project to detect trends in lay and hatch dates and whether more eggs hatch in Alaska’s rising summer temperatures. Her data and those collected during previous years by Daisy Yuhas ’09 “showed a significant trend that’s taken place across the years, where lay date seems to occur earlier and earlier in the season.” says Miniet, whose internship was funded by Howard Hughes Medical Institute. According to Miniet, the rate at which swallows are beginning to lay earlier in the arctic is about 10 times that of the lower 48 states. Furthermore, birds that nest the earliest tend to result in failed nests. There is some indirect evidence that earlier laying is related to increasing global temperatures. Now the task is to determine why early nests are more likely to be unsuccessful. “I inputted the data I collected into the computer and refined Daisy’s data, updated her graphs, and added to the paper she’d started. It’s a work in progress,” Miniet says. Swallows Tree swallows are not rare birds. In fact, they’re quite common across North America, reaching farther north than any other swallow to nest and breed in Alaska. That’s where two Swarthmore students studied them this summer, performing separate but overlapping research projects near Fairbanks with Assistant Professor of Biology Julie Hagelin. Hagelin, an expert in avian behavioral ecology, invited Ashley Miniet and Meredyth Duncan to assist her in collecting data on the behavior of the swallow, which finds Alaska a particularly good place to raise its young. “The birds can take advantage of the long days and bug-filled air,” says Hagelin. “The abundance and accessibility of tree swallows in Alaska also make them an ideal species to examine closely.” 10 Miniet, a senior biology major, worked with the Alaska Bird Observatory (ABO), at Creamer’s Field Migratory Waterfowl Refuge in Fairbanks, on a nest-box monitoring study that has been underway for more than a decade. She also directed the ABO’s summer program for elementary through high-school students, leading the children and teens on data-collecting expeditions, noting the location and orientation of about 100 boxes as well as gathering information on the nests and tree swallow breeding behavior. Later, they reported on such observations, including how many chicks had hatched and whether the chicks had fledged (taken flight out of the nest) successfully. Miniet also taught her junior ornithologists how to measure the tiny chicks and place light- WHATBIRD.CO./MITCH WAITE a Summer With the Duncan, who had just completed her freshman year, aided Hagelin in her ongoing research into the ability of birds to react to scents and whether they can learn and remember scents. Her work was funded by a summer stipend from Swarthmore’s Natural Science and Engineering Division. “Olfaction in birds is a sensory modality long overlooked by ornithologists and a subject that is yielding new insights into avian behavior,” Hagelin says. “Birds like swallows don’t have well-developed olfactory bulbs, so not a lot of research has been done on whether they can and do smell,” Duncan adds. Using the nest boxes as testing locations, they experimentally created some mintyscented nest boxes by hanging a small test tube of mint-oil inside. This exposed eggs and hatchlings to a known odor. Other nest boxes, such as those nearby at the Alaska Bird Observatory, contained no odors and so were ideal for use as controls. More on Hagelin’s summer research with Miniet and Duncan at http://bit.ly/summer_swallows swarthmore college bulletin MEREDYTH DUNCAN ’12 Money Might Buy You Grades, But… We know from the old Beatles song that money can’t buy us love, but might it buy better attendance and grades in school? According to some school officials in cities such as Washington, D.C.; Chicago; and New York, paying students for higher performance motivates them to increase their effort and stay in school. Not everyone agrees. In an opinion piece in the July 2, 2007 New York Times, Dorwin P. Cartwright Professor of Social Action and Social Theory Barry Schwartz wrote: “The assumption that underlines the project is simple: People respond to incentives. If you want people to do something, you have to make it worth their while. This assumption drives virtually all of economic theory.” However, Schwartz believes that although students may perform academically at higher levels in return for cash incentives at first, it will be counterproductive to success in school in the long run—when the money runs out, for example. And instead of acting as a second motivation alongside those of curiosity, mastery of a subject, or love of accumulating knowledge, he says, the cash incentive is likely to compete with and diminish the appeal of the inherent rewards of learning for its own sake. “What I find so troubling about cash incentives in education is that the only question being asked is ‘Do they work?’” Schwartz says in an interview. “If the answer is ‘Yes,’ then the question is ‘Can we afford it?’ This approach simply ignores the possibility that cash incentives could make things worse by changing both why students do their work and how they do their work. Thirty-five years of research in psychology makes it clear that this is not an idle concern. If by ‘work’ we mean improve performance on big tests, then, sure, incentives might work. If, however, we mean ‘become an enthusiastic learner for life,’ then there is good reason to think they will be counterproductive.” Associate Professor of Economics Thomas Dee ’90 has been examining a quite different approach: Instead of offering cash rewards to keep children in school, what happens when you reduce welfare payments to the families of children who do not attend? Dee recently completed a research paper based on a random-assignment evaluation among welfare recipients in 10 Wisconsin counties during the Learnfare experiment, an initiative created and implemented statewide in the 1980s. The experiment included a reduction in welfare funding of families whose children were habitually absent from school. Evaluations of the experiment at the time concluded that it had not been successful, showing little evidence that school attendance had improved. However, Dee recently uncovered flawed data that had skewed the results of the study. Stressing the impor- ISTOCKPHOTO.COM “When the chicks were about nine days old, we took them out of their nests and held them carefully while puffing different odors [including mint] into their nares (nostrils),” Duncan says. “We wanted to see whether the chicks reacted differently to [odors] at either of the two sites.” The project’s two goals are to show whether: (1) nestlings have the capacity to distinguish between different types of odors, and (2) exposure to odors (like mint) early in development can alter a bird’s reaction later in life. The team already has evidence of the former—despite vanishingly small olfactory anatomy, young swallows reacted differently to different odor types. There is also some evidence of the latter— birds that were exposed to mint odor early in life exhibited different reactions to scents than control birds. If early odor learning plays a role in young birds, it may be that those returning to breed at their natal site, following a long migratory trip from the southern reaches of the continent, might preferentially prefer to nest in minty-smelling boxes. Such a result would suggest that other “natural” odors that birds are exposed to as young in the nest impact breeding decisions later in life. Duncan adds, “We are working toward a paper” based on the exciting findings from the summer. But “the return rate for swallows is about only five percent, so… the research might take years and involve many more sites of swallow nesting” to reveal the intriguing details of how early odor learning may impact adult breeding behavior. —Carol Brevart-Demm tance of implementation quality, he says: “Learnfare did not have its intended effects in Milwaukee County, where poor data systems limited the accuracy of the school attendance data, but it did have its intended effects in the other nine counties. Following Wisconsin’s example, most states subsequently adopted Learnfare policies.” Twenty years after Learnfare, Dee sees aspects of the program that might be of use to current experimental programs using cash rewards to boost school attendance. In keeping with current psychological thought on cash incentives, Dee believes that such a program’s value lies in compensating for behavior rather than test scores; tapping into the human instinct to avoid loss rather than seek gain by imposing sanctions; and involving the student’s whole family rather than merely the individual. Schwartz concurs: “In the case of Learnfare,” he says, “they are targeting attendance, not school performance, and the incentives operate on the parents. Though of course, the parents can pressure the kids, it seems to be that this indirect approach can only help prevent the negative effects I worry about.” —Carol Brévart-Demm Ashley Miniet examines a chick. october 2009 11 collection COURTESY OF SCOTT GILBERT While attending festivities in Cambridge, England, in honor of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday, Scott Gilbert was able to share a bench with the great man himself, rendered in bronze as a Cambridge undergrad in the 1830s pondering his still uncertain future. Earlier in the year, Gilbert was also invited to speak at a Vatican conference on evolution. Evolution Evolves “It’s been a big year for Darwin!” says Howard A. Schneiderman Professor of Biology Scott Gilbert. And it hasn’t been too bad for Gilbert either. He has become a spokesperson for “evolutionary developmental biology,” a new discipline that studies how changes in embryonic development can create new anatomical structures that can be selected. In March, in honor of the 200th birthday of the naturalist whose 19th-century theory of natural selection revolutionized biological science, a papal conference, organized by the Pontifical Gregorian University in collaboration with Indiana’s University of Notre Dame, was held at the Vatican. Titled “Biological Evolution, Facts and Theories: A Critical Appraisal 150 Years After The Origin of Species,” the conference assembled an illustrious collection of scientists, philosophers, A Boost for Swarthmore ENGINEERS Swarthmore has received a welcome boost from the George I. Alden Trust in the form of a challenge grant to purchase stateof-the art equipment for the Department of Engineering’s instructional laboratories. 12 and theologians, with the aim of promoting a fair and productive relationship between the three disciplines. Gilbert, one of the invited speakers, talked about “Evolutionary Developmental Biology: Evolution by Epigenesis.” “This was a very worthwhile meeting,” Gilbert says. “It focused on two problems, the first of which is concerned with the relative roles of competition and cooperation for the creation of a new species…. While competition is critical for the survival of the fittest, the arrival of the fittest, i.e., the mechanisms by which such species are generated, may have more to do with cooperation than competition. The second problem concerned whether there was any trait or character that is strictly human and not found in at least a rudimentary stage in nonhuman primates. This was the challenge given to the physical anthropologists [at the conference]. I came away thinking that one thing that character- The Alden Trust will match every $2 raised by Swarthmore with $1 of its own up to $100,000. The terms of the challenge stipulate that matching funds come from gifts made after the date of the grant offer, May 20, 2009. Since then, Swarthmore has realized $75,000 toward the Alden challenge, leaving $125,000 still to be raised. ized humans to the exclusion of other apes is that they told and enjoyed good stories.” In July, Gilbert was invited to the four-day “Darwin 2009: A Festival,” held at Cambridge University, England, where Darwin’s greatgreat-granddaughter Ruth Padel, a poet, was also present. In a session titled “The Changing Views of Evolution,” Gilbert, with six other scholars from around the world, explored the role of organisms that, having been selected by natural forces for survival and reproduction, must continue to evolve and produce descendants. Their goal was to assess how current evolutionary theory can explain organisms’ mate choices, adaptability, and their ability to further evolve. Besides pontificating in Rome and partying in Cambridge this summer, Gilbert has received good reviews for the December 2008 book Ecological Developmental Biology: Integrating Epigenetics, Medicine, and Evolution that he co-authored with David Epel, a developmental biology professor at Stanford University. Recognized as world experts in the emerging field of “eco-devo,” the authors discuss ways in which the environment affects the origin and evolution of organisms, presenting an all-inclusive view of biology that illustrates the inter-connectedness of ecology, development, health science, molecular genetics, and evolution. Gilbert’s most recent study with Judy Cebra-Thomas, a developmental biologist at Millersville University, resulted in the discovery of a genetic link in the evolution of the heart from three chambers to four chambers, illuminating part of the puzzle of how birds and mammals became warm-blooded. The research garnered them a cover story in Nature magazine. —Carol Brévart-Demm Prior to the challenge, Swarthmore had received another $40,700 in donations for new engineering equipment. Swarthmore’s new equipment is designed to enhance the classroom, laboratory, and research experience for both engineering and nonengineering majors. A total of 22 pieces of equipment will be installed in five laboratories: mechanical and structural testing, soils and construction, thermal energy, electronics, and materials. The Alden Trust was founded in 1912 by George I. Alden, an engineer, inventor, and educator. Its grant-making focuses on independent undergraduate educational institutions and their capital needs. —Susan Clarey swarthmore college bulletin Meeting Off-Campus Study Needs ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS Students returning to campus this fall found that the Foreign Study Office has undergone several changes. In addition to relocating to Cunningham House, the office has been renamed. Now known as the Off-Campus Study Office, it meets needs for all study opportunities abroad. Patricia Martin became the new director of off-campus study in July. With 25 years experience working in international education, Martin will work with faculty members and students on planning off-campus opportunities and ensuring the health, safety, and security of students in studyabroad programs. “I know first-hand how important off-campus studies can be to the academic and personal lives of students,” says Martin. “As a first-generation college student at Williams College, I had the opportunity to study in the Soviet Union. That opportunity opened up the world to me.” Sharon Friedler, Stephen Lang Professor of Performing Arts and director of the Dance Program, has taken on the role of faculty adviser for off-campus study. A faculty member since 1985, she is familiar with a variety of cultural norms because of the collaboration and travel involved with her own research. She has worked for years with Professor october 2009 of Anthropology Steven Piker, the first faculty adviser for Foreign Study, and Rosa Bernard, who is now assistant director for off-campus study. Friedler played a major role in setting up the College’s foreign study program in Ghana, where students can enroll in regular courses at the University of Ghana as well as study independently. She was also involved in launching and maintaining the Swarthmore program in Poland and has become increasingly involved with the Northern Ireland Program. “I’m passionate about enabling global citizens, and this job seems like a very good way to encourage that in our students,” Friedler says. International students at Swarthmore will also see some changes this year, following the unexpected death of International Student Adviser Gloria Evans last December, after 50 years of service to the College. Jennifer Marks-Gold, an international student adviser at Cabrini College for 16 years, has been named the full-time adviser to international students and scholars. She also has assisted many area educational institutions as a consultant on U.S. Citizenship and Immigration regulations. —Susan Cousins Breen The staff of the relocated Off-Campus Study Office—(left to right) Assistant Director Rosa Bernard, Director Patricia Martin, Assistant Diana Malick, and Faculty Adviser Sharon Friedler—enjoy their idyllic new digs. Arabic at Swarthmore: Gateway to the Middle East Jane Abell ’11 began learning ’ammiyah the moment she landed in Damascus. After all, it was one reason why she came. “At Swarthmore, we learn fus’ha, or Modern Standard Arabic, the dialect most frequently used in literary texts, media, and academia,” Abell says. Colloquial’ Arabic—’ammiyah—refers to the many different dialects of spoken Arabic in the Middle East. ’Ammiyah is the language most often used in film, music, and daily life. “If I truly want to learn to speak Arabic,” she continues, “I need to be immersed—to read signs in Arabic, order food in Arabic, to hear Arabic and only Arabic for hours on end.” Abell has joined the growing ranks of Swarthmore students who broaden their study of Arabic by spending a semester in the Middle East—in Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and other countries. Their numbers reflect a burgeoning interest in Arabic language instruction. Introduced in 2006, the program has expanded from a first-year and a small intermediate class to four years of study. Invigorated since 9/11 and the Iraq War by a personal need to try to comprehend the sources of friction between the West and the Arab World, Abell says, “My interest in Arabic stems from my belief that mutual understanding and appreciation will be the building blocks of a more cooperative and peaceful global society.” Walid Hamarneh, assistant professor of Arabic, has been instrumental in developing the program. Last year, Hamarneh invited Mahdi Alosh, associate dean for international relations at West Point and former professor of Arabic at Ohio State University, to conduct oral proficiency interviews of 14 randomly-selected first-year students at the end of their second semester. Fully 50 percent “exceeded expectations, showing aspects of advanced-level performance,” Alosh concluded. Outside the classroom, Arabic is supported by a growing multimedia library (including the only complete collection of Arabic-language Sesame Street DVDs in the United States). Students can watch movies in Arabic, chat with native speakers, and meet weekly in Sharples Dining Hall to hone their language skills over lunch. Both institutional and individual donors have made Arabic language instruction possible. The program was launched with the help of a $2 million gift from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, made in 2005 to the Tri-College Consortium. In 2006, Swarthmore was awarded a $600,000, four-to-one challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create an endowment for the teaching of Arabic. Thanks to significant gifts from alumni and parents, the College met the challenge, raising $2.4 million. Abell is looking ahead to a graduate degree in Middle Eastern Studies. “My career will undoubtedly require Arabic,” she said, adding “insha’allah”—“if God wills it”—the Arabic phrase Muslims use whenever they plan for the future. —Susan Clarey 13 faculty expert preventing teen depression A PROGRAM BASED ON COGNITIVE BEHAVIORAL THERAPY GIVES ADOLESCENTS SOME TOOLS TO STAVE OFF DEPRESSION. ISTOCKPHOTO.COM By Jane Gillham Associate Professor of Psychology 14 DEPRESSION IS ONE OF THE MOST PREVALENT psychological disorders and, as such, it is an important target for prevention efforts. Recent research has identified several risk factors for depression, including genetic vulnerabilities, family conflict, traumatic life experiences, pessimistic cognitive styles, and elevated depressive symptoms, which has paved the way for a wide range of prevention programs. Most of these are based on cognitive-behavioral treatments of depression that teach clients skills for coping with stress and for challenging negative beliefs. Adolescence is a particularly important period for depression prevention efforts. Rates of depression increase dramatically during adolescence, beginning at about age 13. In fact, by high school, depression is one of the most common public health problems affecting approximately 5 to 10 percent of adolescents each year. Even more adolescents suffer from high but sub-clinical levels of symptoms, and these symptoms cause great distress and interfere with functioning. In addition, depression is often recurrent, with first episodes occurring most often during adolescence. Thus, prevention of depression during adolescence may help to prevent suffering across a person’s lifespan. Early adolescents deal with a number of physical, cognitive, social, and environmental changes that often occur together and may increase their risk for emotional and behavioral problems. Most children go through puberty at this time. Social relationships become far more complex. Peer relationships become more important, and vulnerability to peer pressure increases. The transition from elementary to middle school is marked by increased academic demands and often by a decrease in the individualized attention students receive from their teachers. These changes may increase risk for a variety of difficulties, including eating disorders, conduct problems, substance abuse, and underachievement as well as depression. During this same period, abstract reasoning and perspective-taking abilities increase. As compared with younger children, early adolescents are better able to reflect on their beliefs and to engage in hypothesis testing by examining evidence and considering alternatives. These meta-cognitive skills are at the heart of cognitive-behavioral therapy, currently one of the most widely researched and empirically supported treatments for depression. Although effective treatments are available, it would be much better to prevent depression from occurring in the first place. Depression is associated with considerable suffering and increased risk for substance abuse, academic failure, and other serious problems. Depression is underdetected and undertreated. Research suggests that most adolescents who are suffering from depression do not receive appropriate care. Much of our research team’s work focuses on developing prevention programs that target the early adolescent developmental period. We hope to give young teens the cognitive skills and mental resiliency they may need to resist the onset of depression just a few years later. Our Penn Resiliency Program (PRP) is a group intervention designed to teach a variety of cognitive and behavioral skills that are relevant to the wide range of challenges and stressors that are common during the teen years. Using a group format and a structured curriculum, the PRP can be implemented in schools, after-school programs, clinics, and other community settings. The PRP includes approximately 18 to 24 hours of content, usually delivered in twelve 90- to 120-minute lessons. The program is typically delivered to small groups—about eight to 14 students—by teachers, counselors, and clinicians who have received training in the intervention. In the PRP, students first learn about Albert Ellis’s ABC model, which states that beliefs and interpretations of events have powerful effects on our emotions and behaviors. In Ellis’s model, there is an Activating event or Adversity, swarthmore college bulletin which prompts an automatic Belief or interpretation of the situation; this in turn leads to an emotional and/or behavioral Consequence. The model states that the Belief mediates the relationship between the event and the resulting Consequence. The sessions begin with a discussion of the Adversities of adolescence—students make lists of the problems they encounter— which prompts them to think about those problems that are a normal part of life. The next step is to establish the role of Beliefs through skits that introduce the concept of internal dialogue, or “self-talk.” The goal here is to help students understand that “self-talk” is a normal process and to encourage them to be aware of their underlying beliefs. The third step is to ensure that students are able to label and describe emotional experiences —one type of “C” in the ABC model. Initially, the conversation focuses on the most basic emotions—happiness, sadness, and anger— and then progresses to more complex emotions such as shame and guilt. Students explore emotional intensity, sharing experiences and describing how intense they were on a scale of one to 10. The leader then teaches students about the causal influence of cognition. Through role plays and discussions, students learn how self-talk can produce emotions and behaviors. Students learn that different people often experience different emotions in response to the same activating event—and they are encouraged to consider the sources of these different reactions. Students learn about “self-fulfilling prophecies,” or how pessimistic beliefs (“I’m stupid”) can lead to behaviors (stop studying) that lead to new activating events or adversities (fail an exam) that seem to confirm the initial beliefs (“See. I knew I was stupid.”). Students learn to identify and challenge pessimistic beliefs by examining evidence and generating more realistic alternatives. Thus, the program encourages students to think accurately and flexibly about the problems they encounter. In addition to these cognitive skills, the PRP teaches skills for solving problems, coping with uncontrollable stressors, and being comfortable with a full range of emotions. Students also learn assertiveness, negotiation, and relaxation techniques as well as skills for overcoming procrastination. (See box.) october 2009 Two components of the Penn Resiliency Program aim to prevent depression by teaching cognitive and behavioral skills before students encounter the challenges associated with the transition from childhood to adolescence. Cognitive Component The ABC Model Recognizing Cognitive (“Thinking”) Styles Cognitive Restructuring—Avoiding Erroneous Beliefs Decatastrophizing—Putting it in Perspective The Hot Seat—Challenging Negative Thoughts Social-Problem-Solving Component Assertiveness Relaxation Problem Solving THE PRP HAS BEEN EVALUATED IN AT LEAST 19 controlled studies, making it one of the most extensively evaluated depression-prevention programs. These studies have included a total of approximately 2,500 children from a variety of socio-economic and cultural backgrounds. A recent meta-analytic review of PRP studies found that PRP significantly reduces and prevents symptoms of depression. In some studies, its effects have been large. For example, the first study of the PRP found the intervention halved the rates of moderate to severe symptoms two years after the program ended. The program is less Read more about Gillham’s work in U.S.News & World Report at http://bit.ly/gillham_ usnews. Learn more about the PRP at http://bit.ly/teendepression. effective when group leaders receive minimal training or do not cover the intervention content adequately. Current work on the program focuses on expanding and strengthening the intervention and achieving effective dissemination. Studies are evaluating booster sessions for students and a parallel intervention for parents that teaches them to use the PRP skills in their own lives, so that they can model resilience for their children. Research on the effectiveness of the parent program is ongoing, but results from a pilot study indicated that combining PRP with parent training may more powerfully prevent symptoms of depression and anxiety Although initially developed to prevent depression, the PRP is currently conceptualized as a program that teaches valuable life skills. These skills are relevant to a variety of academic, social, and family situations, and are helpful to most children. This view of PRP is supported by studies that evaluate effects on outcomes. For example, several studies have documented beneficial effects on anxiety, behavioral problems, cognitive styles, and hopelessness. Further evaluations of PRP’s effects on positive emotions and achievement that are currently underway may help enrich our understanding of the power of providing young people with cognitive coping skills that not only protect them from depression, but lead them to develop positive life skills that are not otherwise part of their expected education. Jane Gillham’s research and clinical interests are at the intersection of clinical psychology, developmental psychology, and education. She developed the Penn Resiliency Program with Karen Reivich and Lisa Jaycox when they were graduate students working with Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania. Since that time, she has collaborated extensively with Reivich and Seligman on several evaluations of the PRP, funded by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health. She is co-director of the Positive Psychology for Youth Project, a joint project between WallingfordSwarthmore School District and research teams at Swarthmore and Penn, which is evaluating this curriculum with funding from the U.S. Department of Education She received a B.A. from Princeton University and a Ph.D. from Penn. 15 In the Face of CALLED TO ACTION BY DEATH IN DARFUR, THE GENOCIDE INTERVENTION NETWORK, LED BY MARK HANIS ’05, STANDS UP AGAINST GENOCIDE AROUND THE WORLD. By Katie Becker ’10 THE GRANDCHILD OF FOUR HOLOCAUST survivors, Mark Hanis ’05 grew up in Quito, Ecuador, where he attended synagogue—the only one in the country—in a community that included other survivors. Showing the numbers tattooed on their arms, the elders told the temple’s children to never forget and never let the atrocities of genocide happen again. Hanis took them at their word and has held firm to their injunctions ever since. When he was a student at Swarthmore, the edicts of his elders, combined with the notion of ethical intelligence that imbues campus life, compelled Hanis to spend spring semester 2003 in Sierra Leone, where he helped the Special Court there indict Charles Taylor, warlord and former president of Liberia, for crimes against humanity during the Liberian civil wars. Back on campus, one evening, Hanis read about the genocide in Darfur. Already familiar with mass killing and its consequences, Hanis says he could not sit passively by and let it happen again, no matter how far away these atrocities were occurring. “If you saw a 6-year-old on your block fall or be pushed and need assistance, you’d run for help, you’d call 911. No one would question you for that, and if you didn’t help, people would say, ‘What’s wrong with you? How could you stand there and do nothing?’ To me, the same motivation should apply to helping people in the face of genocide and mass atrocities,” Hanis explains. That night in 2003 marked the birth of the organization that was to become the Genocide Intervention Network, whose influence is now felt worldwide. Hanis and a group of friends, including Andrew Sniderman ’07 and Sam Bell ’05, spent many hours in McCabe Library, skipping classes to research Darfur. They discovered Samantha Power’s book A Problem from Hell: America 16 and the Age of Genocide and came away with two goals: to raise money to protect civilians and to organize politically. With a phone line arranged for by Maurice Eldridge ’61, ducttaped computers from ITS, and space in the basement of the train station—then being used by the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility—the group started the Genocide Intervention Fund. Fueled by an urgency that overshadowed graduation requirements, they skipped more classes to go to Boston and enlist Power, a professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of “We flooded the White House with phone calls.” Anyone can call the anti-genocide hotline (1800-GENOCIDE), enter a zip code, and connect to the office of state or nationally elected officials for free. In 2005, when GI-NET wanted Indiana Senator Richard Lugar, then chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to recommend the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act for consideration by the House, they looked up his donor list and contacted every church or school group in his district to ask these constituents to flood his office with calls. Two weeks after the calling began, Lugar placed it on the Senate’s agenda. They made a similar effort after President Obama took office. “We flooded the White House with phone calls demanding that he nominate a special envoy to Sudan so there was a point person in his administration whose job—24/7—would be to stop the genocide in Sudan,” Hanis says. He attributes Obama’s speedy appointment of General Scott Gration to the pressure created by the hotline conjoined with efforts by other advocacy groups. —K.B. HANIS: TONY DEIFELL / OPPOSITE PAGE: HELENE CAUX Genocide Mark Hanis (above) answered the question “Why do you do what you do?" on his hand as part of the "wdydwyd? Project," a worldwide participatory art project. You can answer for yourself at www.wdydwyd.org. The Darfur disaster (right) inspired Hanis and others to organize against genocide while they were students. Government, as a resource. At one point, Hanis accidentally guessed Bill Gates’s personal e-mail address while searching for a notable sponsor to lend credibility to an oped piece he wanted to publish. That led to Microsoft contacting Swarthmore to find out how Hanis had hacked into their system. Their efforts proved beneficial as the group steadily raised a quarter million dollars for civilian protection in Darfur. With the first goal—fundraising—well underway, Hanis and three other members of the group moved to Washington, D.C., after graduation. Fund became Network, and they kept running with the momentum they had generated. Hanis says of the transition, “We were already a registered nonprofit, 501(c3) company—so the move to D.C. wasn’t that tough.” Although some doubted the inexperienced group’s abilities, Hanis recalls the many experts they attracted as a result of their novel approach to abolishing genocide. “We had an advisory board that included John Prendergast and Gayle Smith—both of them had worked at the National Security Council for Clinton—and the first ambassador for war crimes David Scheffer. As we developed expertise, we were guided by the members of a high-caliber advisory board swarthmore college bulletin /// “Genocide “isn’t a natural disaster, where we have to brace for a hurricane or a tsunami. We can proactively stop the people from being killed, tortured, and gang-raped. We can stop them from being displaced from their homes.” who were eager to help us.” The students’ entrepreneurial approach attracted influential donors as well, including the Omidyar Foundation, a charitable agency started by the wife of the founder of eBay. In 2004, Omidyar made a generous contribution that allowed what was now called GINET to obtain office space, hire a staff, and launch programs. “A lot of people who would normally just put us in the same bucket as another do-good charity really stopped to take a closer look at what we were doing and offer support,” Hanis says. In 2006, Hanis was awarded Echoing Green and Draper Foundation fellowships october 2009 that provided funding, training, and access to networks of social leaders. In 2008, he was named an Ashoka Fellow, and, in early 2009, the World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader. “The fellowships have been amazing resources in various ways. Each has a professional staff that is always there to mentor or advise, so I didn’t have to start from scratch,” Hanis says. Hanis finds himself fueled by what he calls the “two-sided coin” of genocide. “It’s the urgency of the despair—people are being systematically exterminated for who they are. I find that to be an extremely compelling reason to give my time and attention. On the other side, what keeps me going is the possibility that we can end genocide. It’s an extremely empowering feeling to think that we can abolish genocide.” With the goal of politicizing the movement against genocide, the GI-NET team began to develop consequences for inaction. They launched DarfurScores.org, an online scorecard that tracks politicians’ actions in response to genocide, such as sponsoring legislation or visiting Darfur. To facilitate communication between citizens and their representatives, the team recruited Sherry Bellamy ’74 and Gerrit Hall ’04 to create 1-800GENOCIDE, “the 911 of stopping genocide,” 17 Darfur: The War Since the “Firestorm” of 2003–2004 according to Hanis. These tools help “democratize the fight to end genocide,” Hanis says, by providing pertinent information and making political accountability accessible. To further extend advocacy and education, GI-NET merged with STAND (Students Taking Action Now–Darfur) and expanded the organization from 200 chapters to now more than 800 chapters on college and high school campuses across the country. After start-up years marked by rapid success, GI-NET has reached its stride and is maturing as an organization. This year, GI-NET launched the inaugural class of a training program —the Carl Wilkens Fellowship Program. “I think people saw us in the first couple years as just recruiting, training, and organizing students,” Hanis says, “So the big step in 2009 is to expand the demographic we’ve been organizing to include non-students.” The fellowships provide training in areas such as volunteer recruitment, conflict history, and legislative policy, and the program aims to create a network of grassroots activists. The inaugural class has 20 fellows, but their goal is to have one fellow in each of the 435 congressional districts. (One such fellow has already helped with the passage of a contract prohibition bill in Georgia.) In May, GI-NET launched the Conflict Risk Network (CRN) to educate investors on the corporate practices of companies in which they invest. The CRN broadens GI-NET’s divestment campaign in Sudan, which has already successfully influenced divestments by 60 colleges or universities and 27 states. Additionally, 12 companies have pulled out or altered Learn more about GI-NET’s work, and find out how you can help stop and prevent genocide at www.genocideintervention.net. 18 their behavior. Hanis notes the relative rapidity of success in this area: “The divestment campaign against apartheid in South Africa took decades. We’re seeing a lot more movement in the speed and depth of our divestment program in Sudan.” The launch of the CRN reflects GINET’s transition over the years from an organization that focuses solely on Darfur to one that keeps watch over multiple areas of conflict. Hanis and GI-NET’s director of protection, Chad Hazlett, penned an op-ed in The Washington Post on July 18, highlighting American responsibility in Iraq if ethnic violence re-emerges. In the end, Hanis and GI-NET are moving to “get people to go beyond being Darfur advocates and really become anti-genocide advocates,” he says. The truly innovative twist to GINET’s mission lies in its perspective on genocide. Hanis points out that genocide “isn’t a natural disaster, where we have to brace for a hurricane or a tsunami. We can proactively stop the people from being killed, tortured, and gang-raped. We can stop them from being displaced from their homes.” GI-NET is firmly committed to protecting civilians by funding programs that have the specific goal of protection, rather than channeling the money they raise to food or medical aid. One such project in Burma provides villages with radios and training so that villagers can receive advance warning of imminent attacks and use that time to flee. Hanis combines this perspective with an eye for technological innovation. “We’re surrounded by Web 2.0 and many innovative technologies, and we embrace them,” he says. The latest project involves a surprising way to donate: text messaging. The donation appears on the sender’s cell phone bill at the end of the month. “People will literally, while I’m describing it, take out their phones, text ‘protect’ to 90999, and before I’ve finished talking about what people can do, the majority of the audience has The nature of the conflict in Darfur has changed dramatically since Hanis first read about it in 2003. As Julie Flint and Alex de Waal write in their book Darfur: A New History of a Long War (Zed Books, 2008), the first two years of the conflict were “firestorm” years. During this time, Janjawiid militias, composed of disaffected Darfur Arab tribes fueled by an Arab-supremacist ideology, raided the villages of African tribes with the help of government military intelligence and the air force. Though the African tribes in Darfur are Muslim, the Arab tribes traditionally live nomadic lifestyles as animal herders, and they migrate during the year through land occupied by the African tribes. The government and the Janjawiid targeted civilians of these tribes as potential supporters of rebel groups that were fighting the government. The attacks eliminated the possibility of living in these villages. The raids displaced millions of civilians and led to long treks to displacement camps, during which refugees were in danger of further attacks in addition to suffering from hunger, thirst, and lack of medical care. At the internally displaced persons (IDP) camps, the government used bureaucratic means to impede foreign aid, and Janjawiid prevented the IDPs from collecting food or firewood. An estimated 200,000 civilians were killed in 2003–2004. The photographs on these pages by Hélène Caux depict some of the results of these attacks. On page 17, Chadian inhabitants from Djawara village cover the remains of villagers who were killed during an attack perpetrated by Janjawiid in April 2006. More than 100 men were murdered and thousands of cattle stolen. In 2004, internally displaced children in the Abu Zar camp (opposite) drew what was happening in their daily lives on the wall of one of the school buildings. This drawing depicts United Nations World Food Programme planes air-dropping food near the school. According to Hanis, the U.S. government currently leads the international community in humanitarian assistance and peacekeeping. Such unprecedented response is undoubtedly due to the public pressure GI-NET and other humanitarian agencies have been able to incite. Yet at least 2.5 million Darfurian civilians remain displaced and the cumulative death toll is estimated to be between 300,000 and 400,000. Peace agreements and ceasefires have consistently failed or been broken by both the rebels and the government. Though the United Nations (UN) traditionally does not send in a peacekeeping force until a peace agreement has been established, a UN-led hybrid force in conjunction with the African Union was authorized in July 2007. Despite an authorized force of 26,000 peacekeepers, as of May, the force has only reached 16,000 due to bureaucratic difficulties. In March, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for President Omar al-Bashir. He responded by expelling all of the humanitarian aid agencies operating in the country. Aid is slowly being restored but has yet to reach its previous level of operations. —K.B. swarthmore college bulletin /// In the end, Hanis and GI-NET are moving to “get people to go beyond being Darfur advocates and really become anti-genocide advocates,” he says. already donated $5,” Hanis says. Hanis hopes that GI-NET will eventually be able to shift its focus to preventing genocide before it happens. He intends to remain with GI-NET, building and maintaining a permanent anti-genocide constituency, until genocide is abolished. “This is a huge gap that needs to be filled,” as he says. “Hopefully, this will happen sooner rather than later, and if we can help check off that box, then that will be a time when I’ll see what else I can do.” With detailed information about genocide and mass atrocities in eight areas of the world at his fingertips, Hanis can readily make suggestions on how every citizen can become involved in stopping those acts. In fact, he spends three weeks out of every october 2009 month doing just that, traveling around the country, speaking to potential donors and engaging the media with GI-NET’s mission and latest accomplishments. Hanis’s answers have the practiced polish of a veteran public speaker, and the gravity with which he speaks reflects the urgency of his topic. His tone changes only briefly from its steady instruction, when speaking about himself. “I spend many more than 80 hours a week working to advance our mission,” he says with a laugh that quickly subsides. Though Hanis, who currently serves as president of the organization, works almost every waking moment, he has friends by his side to make sure he goes out every once in a while. “I’ve been fortunate that a lot of my colleagues—like Sam Bell, GI-NET executive HELENE CAUX director—are my closest friends,” Hanis says. “I certainly recognize that there might be a better work-life balance for myself.” Despite the many hours that Hanis devotes to GI-NET, he emphasizes that fighting genocide does not need to be a full-time job for everyone. “Literally, for five minutes every day, people could dramatically change the way the United States responds to preventing genocide,” Hanis points out. “They could do it without even having to stand up. You’ve got 1-800-GENOCIDE, you can text ‘protect,’ and if everyone did that—there’s no question—we would abolish genocide in our lifetime.” Katie Becker is a senior psychology major and Bulletin intern. 19 breaking down Barriers IN ECUADOR’S HIGHLANDS, AN EDUCATION PROJECT AIMS TO “CREATE A NEW FLUIDITY AND CLASS MOBILITY,” SAYS FOUNDER KATIE CHAMBLEE ’07. 20 swarthmore college bulletin By Elizabeth Redden ’05 Photographs by Juan Victor Fajardo ’09 The Village Education Project was built on a simple premise. “What we’re sponsoring is the opportunity to go to high school,” says Kendal Rinko ’09, the nonprofit’s young director of development. Founded in 2005 by Katie Chamblee ’07, the Village Education Project (VEP) covers the costs of a high school education, on average about $200 per year, for students from six Ecuadorean villages. Here, in the largely indigenous villages outside Otavalo— a colorful market town about 50 miles north of Quito that is frequented by tourists— schools cling to the sides of mountains. Against the soft green creases of the Andes, snow-capped Volcán Cayambe looms. Here, fathers work mainly as day laborers, farming the surrounding haciendas; large families live on little. Here, “Our work focuses not on creating new opportunities but on eliminating the barriers that exist already in Ecuador,” Chamblee explains in an essay for the online magazine Policy Innovations. “Using the villages, schools, and curricula that are already in place, we create a new fluidity and class mobility.” Chamblee started the VEP while at Swarthmore, after a summer volunteering in Ecuador through Global Vision International. Her then-host father, Gilberto Cifuentes —a school principal and fellow founder— manages the program’s in-country operations; a volunteer staff of Swarthmore students handles tasks like fundraising and recruiting volunteers; and Chamblee, now a first-year student at Yale Law School, serves as a liaison between the two. “It’s challenging. I’m working with two staffs that I rarely see, one in Swarthmore and another in Ecuador,” Chamblee says in an interview. The project also employs a year-round tutor to support the students on scholarship. Despite the virtual way it does business, the VEP is, indeed, based on a village-wide or community-wide ethos. Its stated mission is “to empower underprivileged villages in UPenn student Becca Rosen ’12 (top left) teaches a young Ecuadorean girl as a participant in the Village Education Project, founded 2005 by Katie Chamblee ’07. The Project helps provide children from six Ecuadorian villages not far from Otavalo—a market town 50 miles from Quito—with the opportunity to attend high school. october 2009 Ecuador by making education an accessible and sustainable resource in community life.” Scholarships covering matriculation fees, books, and uniforms through the six years of secondary school are available to any and all students from the six villages under the project’s sponsorship. In order to qualify for scholarships, students must pass an intensive summer course in math and English, taught mainly by American volunteers. “It’s not really that hard to pass the course. We make the course a prerequisite because we don’t want to send people on who are under-prepared. We want our students to do well,” Chamblee explains. “As [summer] program coordinator, I have the privilege of dealing with parents. “The parents understand that the cost of having a child at home working instead of at school is something no one can afford.” The first few weeks were somewhat overwhelming in that respect. We had lines of parents at the office with questions about the program and wondering if their child could enroll,” says Juan Victor Fajardo ’09, who managed this summer’s program after graduating with a major in philosophy and a minor in Latin American Studies. “Parenthood in rural, indigenous communities is nothing like parenthood in the city or in the ‘western’ world. The people who inhabit this part of the world have a unique and millenary connection with the land. It manifests itself not only in their history, in the way they look, in their language and identity, but also in their livelihoods. When a young child is old enough to work in the field or at home, that’s exactly what they do. “In the past months, however, I have met parents that are legitimately interested in their son or daughter’s education. They understand that the cost of having their child at home working instead of at school is 21 something no one can afford, no matter where you’re from. I specifically remember one conversation I had with a father who was in his early thirties. He had come to check up on his daughter to find out how she was doing. His daughter is one of the best students at one of the schools and that was not surprising at all. It became obvious to me The project is contemplating building a high school of its own—that is, the villages’ own. Now, the students walk up to an hour from their villages to attend one of five colegios in Otavalo. that part of the reason why she was doing so well was because of the support she was receiving at home. Her dream of going to high school was one that she shared with her whole family. After our conversation was over, I remember thinking, ‘This is exactly why I took this job.’” Fajardo says. “The motivated students were very motivated,” says Anna Phillips ’09, who taught in summer 2008 at a school called Mojandita, in the village of Mojanda, a 15-minute drive from Otavalo. “It feels much further away, because it’s a 15-minute drive straight up the side of a mountain,” says Phillips. Phillips remembers the case of a 15-yearold student: “He was the oldest by far of the students we were teaching, who were mostly 10- to 13-year-olds. Even though he lacked the academic skills of most of the students— and he really wanted to be the cool older one—he realized this was his last chance at an education. This is a huge motivator for these kids. A lot of them want to be able to provide more for their families. They want to live somewhere with running water.” In addition to teaching, Phillips—a physics major at Swarthmore with minors in education and math—carved out a role as curriculum developer for the VEP, traveling 22 to Ecuador on a separate visit to interview educators about the skills students lacked and would most need in high school. “Until last summer, volunteers had just been making it up as they went. I didn’t want to let that happen anymore,” Phillips says. The summer English curriculum starts from scratch—“with the alphabet, hello, my name is, can I do that, door, pencil—absolute basics,” Phillips says. The summer math curriculum begins with fractions and decimals, shifts to geometry and basic shapes, and ends with negative numbers. “These things are conceptually difficult. It’s really important that they see them and at least get comfortable with them, even if they don’t completely understand them before they get to high school,” Phillips says. Of her own students’ readiness for secondary school at summer’s end, Phillips continues, “I knew it would be hard for some students, and I actually told them that I think it’s going to be very hard for you to be in high school, but if you get help—we provide a year-round tutor for the students—and you work hard, you can do it. There were also students who I knew would be fine, the ones who got 20 out of 20 on every quiz in the summer program. On the whole, I think that most students were ready for the challenge, even if they weren’t as academically ready as they would be in an ideal world.” “My role as a curriculum developer,” Phillips adds, “has focused on making the service we provide to the kids as valuable as it can be and on making the project a sustainable one that improves every year. I’m really convinced that there’s a forward momentum now.” The momentum has been propelled in part by a three-year, $25,000 grant from Project Pericles, a nonprofit founded by Eugene Lang ’38 to support initiatives relatLea rn m ore about the VEP and view additional photos at www.swarthmore. edu/news/learning. ing to social responsibility and participatory citizenship on college campuses. In addition to formalizing its summer curriculum, the VEP has increased the number of villages under its sponsorship, from four to six, and the number of scholarships awarded, from 48 in 2006–2007 to an estimated 150 in the current school year. The project is also contemplating building a high school of its own—that is, the villages’ own. As of now, the students walk up to an hour from their rural villages to attend one of five colegios in Otavalo. “We still have a lot of details to work out, but our idea is that the children who we swarthmore college bulletin sponsor to go to high school, instead of going to different schools all over Otavalo, will go to our school and stay together for three years. This will make it a lot easier for us to keep track of our kids’ progress and will centralize our support of them,” says Amber Wantman ’10, who researched the cost of building a school while volunteering as a teacher this summer. “I think we’re really ready to do it,” Chamblee says, reflecting on the growth of the organization. “You have to show people that you’re working with what already exists. You’re not out to change the community, and when you do make changes, you want to do them very incrementally. You want to grow at a rate that can be incorporated into a community. We started with a few kids, and now people know that those kids have successfully gone on to high school.” With many development organizations focused on scaling up, Chamblee believes that VEP should instead focus on scaling in, building on the existing program and exploring how to improve it.” While speaking with a father interested in his daughter’s progress, program coordinator Juan Victor Fajardo realized that part of the reason she was doing well was because her dream of attending high school was one she shared with her whole family. “This is why I took this job,” Farjardo says. Clockwise from top left: VEP founder Katie Chamblee spends time with students in the classroom; Harvard student Jocelyn Karlan ’12 works one-on-one with a young boy on his math paper; VEP students take their lessons very seriously; yet there’s still time for having fun; Swarthmore’s Jake Ban ’10 leans in to offer some gentle assistance. Elizabeth Redden ’05, a former reporter with Inside Higher Ed in Washington, D.C., studied abroad in Ecuador while at Swarthmore. She is currently in the first year of Columbia University’s MFA program in nonfiction writing. october 2009 23 Beyond the Emotional Turmoil GAY PSYCHIATRIST BERTRAM SCHAFFNER ’32 BRINGS COMPASSION AND DIGNITY TO HIS HOMOSEXUAL PATIENTS. The need to know what makes a person gay and to understand how to live as a gay man without suffering emotional turmoil has been a driving force in psychiatrist Bertram Schaffner’s life. For the past 60 years, the renowned physician has been in the forefront of historic developments for gays and lesbians. In 2001, the Journal of Gay and Lesbian Psychotherapy recognized him as a leader in the field who has made a major impact on the treatment of homosexuals and the work of gay therapists. Schaffner’s world is small now—confined by illness and age to his art-filled home overlooking New York’s Central Park. Comfortably ensconced on a small couch in his living room—where a phone, calendar, paper and pens, and a glass of cranberry juice are within easy reach—he still sees two patients and graciously welcomes visitors to the thirdfloor apartment in which he has lived for 63 years. Clad in a pale green cotton robe and pajamas, he is eager, after a moment’s hesita24 tion (born of a lifelong need for caution), to talk about his life. For most of his 97 years, Bertram Schaffner felt compelled to lead a closeted life, never—until his 60s—voluntarily revealing that he is gay. The self-imposed isolation and admitted internalized homophobia led him to the field of psychotherapy with the desire to improve the lives of other gay people. The Erie, Pa., native knew before entering grade school that he was gay. “Somewhere between the ages of 3 and 5,” he began to think of himself as homosexual and remembers being very comfortable with his feelings for other boys. In an interview with psychotherapist Stephen Goldman (“The Difficulty of Being a Gay Psychoanalyst during the Last 50 Years” in the 1995 book Disorienting Sexuality), Schaffner described his feelings: “I never thought of it as pathological. Rather, I always felt my feelings to be natural, ‘normal,’ and an intrinsic part of me.” Normal, that is, until the parents of a COURTESY OF BERTRAM SCHAFFNER ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS By Susan Cousins Breen Born in 1912, just after Woodrow Wilson was elected president, Bertram Schaffner grew up haunted by internalized homophobia. He transferred from Harvard to Swarthmore in 1929, thinking that being at a coed college might “cure” his homosexuality. Schaffner later became a psychiatrist, mentor to other gay therapists, and an avid collector of East Indian art. As an Army lieutenant during World War II, Schaffner screened draftees for psychiatric fitness, appointing himself protector and caretaker of other young gay men faced with military service. swarthmore college bulletin playmate found notes that their son and Schaffner had exchanged about their interest in sex. “His parents forbade us to ever see each other again,” Schaffner says, “and I lost a friend forever.” “When my parents learned of my activities,” he explained to Goldman, “I was made to feel wicked. I grew up feeling that I was someone to be avoided. I became fearful of being exposed as gay.” Although his father came to accept his son’s sexual orientation in the latter part of his life, his mother—living at a time when mothers were blamed for their sons’ homosexuality—was “morally shocked” and never fully accepted his sexual orientation. “My isolation [as a child] was compounded by the fact that I was promoted three years ahead of my age group,” Schaffner says, “and sat in classes with 12-year-old children who would have nothing to do with a boy of only nine.” Later, as a freshman at Harvard, the age difference still set him apart from the other students, and the rejection intensified when fellow students began to suspect that he was gay. Convinced that he could “cure” his homosexuality at a coed institution, Schaffner transferred to Swarthmore in his sophomore year. He found the College to be friendly and warm, but he socialized little for fear of revealing his homosexuality. One encounter at the College, however, changed his life. During his junior year, President Frank Aydelotte invited him to a tea honoring Rhodes Scholars and introduced him to a Central American physician who was working at a nearby pharmaceutical firm. Not only did the physician suggest that the English literature and philosophy major would make an excellent doctor, but the two—mentor and student—fell in love and had a relationship that lasted until the older man returned to his homeland two years later. “The cure did not take,” Schaffner remarks ruefully. As a young physician, Schaffner had his first opportunity to help other gay men when he was drafted into the Army in October 1940. He feared being an enlisted man. “I did not know how I would manage living so close to other men,” he says. “Would I be accepted?” However by the time he was called to active duty upon completion of his october 2009 residency in April 1941, Army regulations had changed so that enlistees with medical degrees automatically entered as officers. Lt. Schaffner, assigned to a base on Governor’s Island in New York Harbor, had the task of screening draftees for psychiatric fitness and appointed himself protector and caretaker of other young gay men faced with military service. It was clear, he recalls, that the Army wanted homosexuals identified and excluded from military service. “If a gay draftee was reluctant to serve in the army,” he says of the 60-some recruits that he examined each day, “or if I did not feel confident in his ability to do so, I would find a way to disqualify him from active duty without revealing his homosexuality. Also, when I encountered gay men who specifically wished to serve in the Army, I helped them to achieve that goal.” After World War II, Schaffner found his homosexuality to be “a major, catastrophic liability” as he pursued his goal of becoming a psychotherapist. Being openly gay in the 1940s, Schaffner recalls, would have made returning to medical school impossible; during his medical training at Johns Hopkins University, he “lived in constant terror of my homosexuality being discovered.” (At the time, the American Psychiatric Association officially classified homosexuality as a mental illness.) In 1949—after being refused admission to both the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and the Columbia Psychoanalytic Institute because of his sexual orientation—he was accepted into the new, unorthodox William Alanson White Institute of Psychoanalysis where he studied under Ralph Crowley, Erich Fromm, and Frieda FrommReichmann. Schaffner “yearned to be at peace with my own gay life and to help others do the same,” and so he dedicated his professional life to that purpose. Haunted by internalized homophobia, he was certain that if he revealed his sexual orientation and built a life with a male partner he would be ostracized socially and professionally. And in fact, early in his career, fellow psychotherapists who suspected he was gay or objected to his treating homosexuals often tended to shun him. Schaffner counseled his patients on dealing with society and worked to improve the self- esteem of both gay patients and other gay therapists. His compassion and commitment inspired several generations of psychoanalysts, according to Goldman, and prompted Schaffner to be founding chairman of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry’s Committee on Human Sexuality; a member of the United Nation’s Expert Committee for Mental Health from 1948–1960; president of the Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists of New York in 1980; and—at age 82—the first openly gay supervising analyst for the William Alanson White Institute in 1994. FROM THE ONSET OF THE AIDS EPIDEMIC, Schaffner, although not infected himself, was on the front lines, caring for gay men and remaining in the forefront of psychiatrists dealing openly with gay and lesbian issues. In 1985, he and colleague Stuart Nichols established bi-weekly support groups for Manhattan physicians with HIV/AIDS; one such group continues to meet to this day in Schaffner’s apartment. News of Schaffner’s approach to therapy—making all of his patients feel accepted and instilling in them the hope of leading a fulfilled life—attracted patients. Colleagues began sending gay patients to him, realizing the potential importance of those patients having a gay therapist. As his career progressed, Schaffner came to be recognized not only as a pioneer in treating homosexual patients but as a leading practitioner in his field, irrespective of sexual orientation. Today, his influence extends well beyond national borders. Schaffner is hesitant to say that he has found a satisfying answer to the question of what makes a person gay and how to live as a gay man. Asked if anything has really changed for homosexuals in the last 60 years, he pauses—disappointment clouding his bespeckled, translucent face—before responding: “Much has changed, but fundamentally it’s still much the same.” Then, reflecting on his observation, he mentions that the American Psychiatric Association’s declassification, in 1973, of homosexuality as a mental illness was a positive change and that the present movement toward gay marriage is a welcome sign of progress. Today, he continues to look forward to even wider acceptance of gay people in society. 25 “I WANTED TO BE IN AN URBAN SCHOOL WHERE THE KIDS NEEDED MY ATTENTION,” SAYS TEACHER SARA POSEY ’04. BUT IT WASN’T AN EASY START FOR HER OR THE AMBITIOUS NEW CHESTER UPLAND SCHOOL OF THE ARTS. Sara Posey (right) teaches first grade at the new artsbased school in Chester, Pa., started by Associate Professor of Music John Alston (above). IT’s GeTTing BeTteR aLL The ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS / INSET: JEFFREY LOTT By Jeffrey Lott IT COULDN’T GET MUCH WORSE. A few weeks into her new job teaching first grade at the Chester Upland School of the Arts (CUSA) in fall 2008, Sara Posey could barely force herself to drive to work. “I felt ill, physically ill. I thought the whole school project that I was so hopeful about and so passionate about was turning into a disaster,” she told me months later. It didn’t turn out to be a disaster, but neither was it easy for Posey, who cares deeply about her teaching. Posey wasn’t some green first-year teacher. After student teaching while at Swarthmore (where she was a music and education major and vocal performer), Posey taught first and second grade for four years at The School in Rose Valley, a private elementary school near Media, Pa. But she had jumped at the chance to work at CUSA during its inaugural year. The school is the brainchild of John Alston, associate professor of music at the College and founder of the Chester Children’s Chorus (CCC). The school—housed in an old but serviceable four-story school building in the heart of Chester, Pa.— was starting its first year with students in pre-kindergarten through grade two. “I knew I would miss my kids at Rose Valley,” Posey said, “but they ultimately would do fine without me. I wanted to be in an urban school where the kids needed my attention. Rose Valley’s a child-centered school with a project-based curriculum, integrated across subject areas—just the sort of approach that the School of the Arts was promising. People have said that won’t work for inner city kids, but I can’t believe that’s true.” The challenges proved to be greater than she imagined—both in and beyond her sunny second-floor classroom. Although a handful of her 20 students could read simple words and sentences, more than half entered first grade not yet knowing their letters. By late September, the predictable chaos of the first day of school—the day that Posey learned that her students had no experience sitting in a circle on a classroom rug—had hardly abated. “My kids were out of control—they couldn’t listen to each other,” she remembers of those weeks in late September when she struggled to make herself go to work. “My classroom assistant had quit, and there was no replacement. I didn’t understand what was happening, and I couldn’t go to my boss [the principal] for help, because it turned out she didn’t know what was happening either. So I felt ill, and I had to tell myself: ‘Okay, you made it to work. You drove all the way here. Good job. Now you just have to make it until [the kids go to] fine arts. Good. It’s 10:30. Congratulations! Now you have to get from lunch to recess. Can you do it? Good. Another day. Now you get to drive home, and you made it, see? You didn’t give up.’” THE CHESTER UPLAND SCHOOL OF THE ARTS—which opened for its second year last month with grades pre-K through three—exists because, like Sara Posey, a whole lot of people didn’t give up. An unusual public-private partnership that is neither independent nor october 2009 time charter school, CUSA began in the imagination of Alston, who founded the Chester Children’s Chorus 15 years ago (see July 2009 Bulletin). Alston saw that the chorus was able to reach a small number of Chester’s children for just a few hours a week. Its Summer Learning Program provided those same children with an intensive five-week artistic and academic experience—but there was a deeper need across Chester for innovative approaches to education. Chester is the poorest city in Pennsylvania. Nearly 30 percent of its 36,000 residents live below the federal poverty line, currently $22,050 for a family of four. After years of declining enrollment and fiscal problems, its public school system, the Chester Upland School District, was taken over in 1994 by the state, which placed several Chester schools under contract with the for-profit Edison Schools in an effort to improve test scores. According to Education.com: “After a number of years, it was determined that Edison was not successful in turning the district around. A number of incidents, including an allegation of sexual misconduct on the part of an Edison employee, and policies such as not allowing students to bring books home, led to the state’s decision to break its contract with Edison.” Despite the fact that it annually spends about the same amount per pupil as the highly rated Wallingford-Swarthmore School District—it continues to score at the very bottom of the state’s rankings. In 2008, just 11 percent of Chester Upland’s high-school juniors were at or above grade-level proficiency in reading and just 3 percent reached proficiency in math. In 2004, Alston recruited a small group of educators, community leaders, and other professionals to help him open a new kind of school in Chester—with the shoot-for-the-stars goal of “preparing Chester students to enter the finest colleges and universities in America.” The proposed school would be arts-intensive, modeled after such successful projects as the 45-year-old Harlem School of the Arts. The group investigated forming a tuition-free independent school or a charter school and found that the former would require daunting sums of money and the latter was fraught with political problems within the school district, where more than half of elementary school students now attend charter schools, draining children and dollars from the traditional public schools. Eventually, the group, with Maurice Eldridge ’61 as chair and Alston as president, formed The Chester Fund for Education and the Arts, a nonprofit corporation that sought a new kind of relationship with the Chester Upland district. The solution—reached only after new district superintendent Gregory Thornton was hired in 2007—was an unusual public-private partnership. CUSA is a public school housed in a district-owned building just two blocks from Chester High School. Children are admitted to the school by lottery on the basis of parental interest. The school’s staff members are district employees, and CUSA receives the same per-pupil funding as any other public school in the district. But The Chester Fund, through a memorandum of understanding that Thornton enthusiastically endorsed, provides additional funding 27 that makes possible smaller class sizes (20 instead of 30 children); an assistant teacher in each classroom; up-to-date instructional technology such as computers and smart boards; and an enhanced arts program that includes music, dance, and visual arts instruction. An extended day program, mandatory for second grade and above, offers small-group tutoring, academic enrichment activities, and specialized arts instruction leading to performance opportunities. After five years of work and planning—and several frustrating trips down blind alleys—CUSA opened in fall 2008 with 200 students in two sections each of five grades (pre-K3, pre-K4, K, one, and two). Opening day was bright and sunny, and Alston was there, beaming and leading all the students in song. Superintendent Thornton and new principal Corinne Ryan were also on hand. It was a dream come true—almost. I SPENT A TUESDAY AFTERNOON IN EARLY November in Posey’s classroom. After the children left for the day, Posey said: “There are things that are going better all the time—a lot is going better. But there are still some things that aren’t great.” There had been the inevitable tensions with the school district that attend the start-up of a new kind of public-private model, and Principal Ryan had departed. An interim principal had been named—not a bad change, to Posey’s mind. (Wendy Emrich, managing director of The Chester Fund, said later: “Everyone involved with the principal selection did the best job they could, but as the weeks and months went by, it just didn’t seem In September, a handful of Posey’s more about music, they experienced an initial waning in their beliefs about their musical competence, and then later a resurgence of this music self-efficacy, all the while exhibiting greater confidence and independence in and out of the choir. Posey and Renninger conclude that “arts-based programs can be organized to provide a complex of developmental opportunities for children...” and that the “goals and expectations of the program [clearly state] that achievement will be hard and also that [chorus members] can and are expected to achieve. This programming provides participants with the kind of counter narrative that promotes identities of achievement and underlies the social mission of the CCC.” 20 students could read simple words and sentences, but more than half had entered first grade not yet knowing their letters. to be a good match for the school or for the candidate.” In spring, a search was undertaken for a new head of school for fall 2009, resulting in the appointment of new principal Janet Baldwin.) Although a new classroom assistant had been hired in late October, Posey had gone weeks without one, and she was visibly tired. We sat on little first-grade chairs, our knees nearly touching our chins, as she showed me a student’s writing folder, citing “concrete improvement.” She was teaching the children to write down the sounds they hear when they pronounce a word: “Say ‘remember’ and write down the sounds that you hear.” Sometimes what they wrote actually looked like “remember,” and Posey saw progress in that. As a Swarthmore student and after college, Posey had spent many hours with John Alston’s Chester Children’s Chorus, helping out at rehearsals during the school year and working as a counselor at the chorus’s Summer Learning Program. As he is for many at the College and in Chester, Alston has been an inspiration to Posey. In 2002–2003, Posey teamed up with Professor of Educational Studies Ann Renninger and others to design and run a research project to investigate children’s feelings of self-efficacy and learning in the CCC. They learned through a series of interviews and sight-reading assessments that chorus members were not only gaining musical knowledge but also social skills and habits of learning. The kids— especially the older ones who had been in the chorus for several years—were learning how to think like musicians. As they learned 28 THERE’S GROWING EVIDENCE THAT COGNITIVE functions and learning can be improved by arts study. In a Dana Foundation study released in 2008, researchers from seven universities examined the question: “Are smart people drawn to the arts, or does arts training make people smarter?” Among the researchers’ findings were: • An interest in a performing art leads to a high state of motivation that produces the sustained attention necessary to improve performance and the training of attention that leads to improvement in other domains of cognition. • Specific links exist between high levels of music training and the ability to manipulate information in both working and long-term memory; these links extend beyond the domain of music training. • Correlations exist between music training and both reading acquisition and sequence learning. One of the central predictors of early literacy, phonological awareness, is correlated with both music training and the development of a specific brain pathway. • Learning to dance by effective observation is closely related to learning by physical practice, both in the level of achievement and also the neural substrates that support the organization of complex actions. Effective observational learning may transfer to other cognitive skills. According to a cautiously optimistic summary written by Michael Gazzaniga, director of the Sage Center for the Study of Mind at the University of California–Santa Barbara, who oversaw the Dana Conswarthmore college bulletin A study last year confirmed for the first time that the brains of low-income kids function differently from the brains of high-income kids. JEFFREY LOTT sortium research, “The preliminary conclusions we have reached may soon lead to trustworthy assumptions about the impact of arts study on the brain.” A significant portion of the report focuses on emerging neuroscientific evidence of correlations between arts study and cognition. Although Gazzaniga emphasizes the differences between correlation and causation—and, further, between “weak” and “strong” evidence of each—the report concludes that with certain kinds of arts training, especially in music and dance, “cognitive improvements can be made to specific mental capacities such as geometric reasoning; that specific pathways in the brain can be identified and potentially changed during training; that sometimes it is not structural brain changes but rather changes in cognitive strategy that help solve a problem; and that early targeted music training may lead to better cognition through an as yet unknown neural mechanism.” BUT AS INSPIRED AND PREPARED AS POSEY WAS, she said she had a lot to learn about the first-graders in her CUSA classroom. The distance between Swarthmore and Chester—or between The School at Rose Valley and CUSA—is very few miles but almost impossible to fathom in other dimensions, and it weighs on her. “I don’t know,” she said. “I worked with the choir, and I hear John’s voice saying, ‘It’s just down the road. It’s just 10 minutes.’ But there’s no comparison between the preparation for school that first-graders have here [in Chester] and the preparation they have in Swarthmore. But there are developmental things that are the same for every child. I’m very sensitive about framing this community in terms of deficit. It comes off as snobbish and classist and maybe even racist. People make a lot of assumptions about children based on race and class.” According to Kids Count, the student population of Chester Upland schools is 80 percent black—but it’s poverty in Chester that seems to have a more significant effect on school readiness. A study last year by neuroscientists at the University of California–Berkeley october 2009 confirmed for the first time that the brains of low-income kids function differently from the brains of high-income kids. Nineand 10-year-old children differing only in socioeconomic status (SES) were found to have detectable differences in the response of their prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that is critical for problem solving and creativity. It had already been established that children from resource-poor environments have more trouble with the kinds of behavioral control that the prefrontal cortex is involved in regulating, but the new study found clear functional differences among low SES kids. “It’s a wake-up call,” said Robert Knight, director of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and the School of Public Health at Berkeley. “It’s not just that these kids are poor and more likely to have health problems, but they might actually not be getting full brain development from the stressful and relatively impoverished environment associated with low socioeconomic status: fewer books, less reading, fewer games, fewer visits to museums.” Pediatrician and psychobiologist Thomas Boyce, who co-authored the study with cognitive psychologist Mark Kishiyama, noted that previous studies have shown that, by age 4, children from poor families hear 30 million fewer words than do kids from middle-class families. “In work that we and others have done,” Boyce explained, “it really looks like something as simple and easily done as talking to your kids” can boost prefrontal cortex performance. THIRTY MILLION WORDS? REMEMBER HOW MANY questions 3- and 4year-olds ask? And if those questions are responded to seriously, children learn to listen too. “Listening is a big thing,” Posey explained, thinking about the school day that had just ended when I next visited CUSA, in February. “At Rose Valley, I could read almost anything and hold the children’s attention. Here, I have to choose more carefully what I read aloud. And then there’s the pouting.” I had noticed this problem too. When a few of the children didn’t get their way—sometimes on matters that seemed wholly inconsequential—there often ensued major pouting and withdrawal from the group. Sometimes the child was angry, sometimes there were tears, but more often it was a demonstration of body language and facial contortions that said, “I’ve been hurt by this disappointment, and I’m not going to participate any more.” To the point, Posey told me, that this behavior was really holding them back. “So I developed a little lesson on pouting,” she said. “I set goals for each of the children. Many of my goals are behavioral—lining up, listening, quieting down. We’re trying to teach how to learn, not to retreat, but to stay engaged. That’s one way I measure success.” Other measures are more concrete and bureaucratic. As in all schools these days, there is lots of testing at CUSA. Posey is philosophical about standardized measurements of the students’—and the school’s—progress. (And, indirectly, her efficacy as a teacher.) The curriculum for each subject in each grade is mandated by the district, and teachers are expected to use the materials provided—what Posey calls “boxed curricula”—such as “Everyday Math” or “Storytown.” Teachers may create their own lessons or projects, but they must 29 think—and document—how each project is intended to achieve district and state standards. They must also reach certain curricular milestones at set times during the school year, before testing occurs. Lisa Smulyan ’76, professor of educational studies and associate provost of the College, who volunteered in Posey’s classroom last spring, said that the advantage of packaged curricula is that “they put it all in one package for you, and they sequence it in a way that seems to reflect what we know about kids’ learning.” But, she said, it’s difficult for the excellent, handpicked teachers such as those at CUSA to create a rich, arts-integrated environment and still meet the curricu- planned for right after lunch, had been postponed to last period of the day. “Cranky time,” said Posey, making another face. (Like most good first-grade teachers, her face communicates almost as powerfully as her voice.) Posey spent a week preparing the children for the musical experience. They learned about how their ears work and how sound is one of their senses. They learned the three important ways that vibrations create sound and music in their ears—the shaped air of voices and wind instruments, the induced vibration of strings, and the deliberate crash of percussion. Making a quizzical face this time, Posey asked Research shows links exist between high levels of music training and the ability to manipulate information in both working and long-term memory. lum demands of the district. “There’s no time in the teachers’ day in this country to do that kind of work,” Smulyan said. “The kind of shared thinking and planning that would allow teachers to take more control over the canned curricula takes time. I think it’s a huge problem everywhere—it prevents teachers from collaborating.” The school day had been busy and complicated. I followed Posey and her class into the CUSA computer room, which was bursting with new Macintosh machines. The computer time was in lieu of outdoor recess on a bitterly cold day, and the first-graders loved it— a Mac for each of them, more evidence of The Chester Fund’s enhancements of the CUSA experience. Later, accompanied by Posey’s new teaching assistant, Michelle Freeman, I walked with about half of Posey’s class to the dance studio, where full-length mirrors, a “sprung” floor, and a great sound system give the school’s fulltime dance instructor, Melisa Putz, the space and tools she needs to teach groups of up to 20 children. There’s also a well-equipped art room and a large music room—an overall set of arts facilities that many public elementary schools in the country, and none in Chester, can boast. Still, as Smulyan points out (and Posey confirms), there’s little time for the arts teachers to interact with the classroom teachers to plan together. CUSA offers a rich program, but can it live up to The Chester Fund’s idealistic description of a school “where all children will sing, dance, and do visual arts every week as integral parts of the academic curriculum and as separate subjects?” AGAIN, POSEY DIDN’T GIVE UP. NO LONGER ILL, NO LONGER FORCING herself to drive to work, she’s beginning to see what CUSA is and what it can become. In late March, she tells me there’s a science unit coming up in Pearson Science, the boxed curriculum, about sound. The lesson teaches the children that sound is actually a vibration in the air. So is music, Posey reasons, and off she goes. On April 16, she and music teacher Helen Hagerty collaborated to team-teach the penultimate lesson in a science unit. It’s not in the district-supplied box; in fact, it’s way outside the box. I was invited, but when I got there, Posey said, frowning, there’s “sort of a problem.” Hagerty’s regular second-floor music room had been commandeered by district officials for a VIP event. So the lesson, which was 30 the children, “What’s the difference between noise and music?” It’s a pretty big question for first graders, but after a few hands were raised, they arrived at the idea that music is organized noise. Then it was time for direct experience with musical instruments that make sound in these ways. Her music room off limits, Hagerty had improvised in CUSA’s “gym,” a large carpeted room in the basement. She created stations around the room, each representing a different kind of sound production, each with a half-dozen instruments for the children to experiment with. Most were sturdy enough for first-grade hands, but a few seemed risky, like Hagerty’s own acoustic guitar and her homemade dulcimer. But she said, “I trust you to take good care of these.” And the children did. Each child—and here was the essence of the science/art lesson— was armed with a clip board and worksheet that asked them to record what they found at each station. What kind of instrument was it? How was its sound produced? What vibrates? How can you change the sound? As the children rushed from instrument to instrument, the teachers and I—a former elementary-school art teacher caught up in the excitement—kept bringing them back to the questions. Since Newton, this has been the scientific method: What do I sense? How did it happen? What does it mean? To wrap the science unit up, the children made their own musical instruments. Cigar boxes, rubber bands, lentils and beans, cans, paper towel tubes, and other recycled materials were fashioned into homemade wind, string, and percussion instruments. At the CUSA spring concert, the first-grade scientists got to play their own instruments in the “orchestra.” View a video of Professor John Alston talking about starting the Chester Upland School of the Arts at http://bit.ly/alston_cusa. Learn more about The Chester Fund and CUSA at www.thechesterfund.org. swarthmore college bulletin JEFFREY LOTT A FEW WEEKS LATER, with the end of CUSA’S first year in sight, Posey came to the College (“it’s just down the road, just 10 minutes”) to speak with Thom Whitman’s [’82] class Music, Learning, and Arts Integration. Comparing her experience at Rose Valley, where many of the students had observed, to CUSA, she said, “At Rose Valley, you have hardly any constraints. You know what you’re responsible for teaching, but you can create anything that is interesting to you and to your students that addresses these standards.” She showed video of A Powerful Potion, an opera written by first- and secondgrade Rose Valley students in collaboration with the music and art teachers. “Teachers need to justify and explain when they do such things,” Posey says. “But this project, centered on the study of opera, had components of language arts, music, art, social skills—even math.” When she talked about CUSA, her frustrations were clear. Her kids weren’t prepared for first grade. The boxed curricula are limiting. And, at the heart of the matter, there’s not enough time to collaborate, to integrate the arts into her teaching. She had hoped for a Without taught them enough. There were still people who couldn’t read well enough, who couldn’t listen well enough. I felt really negative. But now that it’s truly warm, I can say, ‘Okay, we’ll make it.” She seems happy and confident, seasoned by the year behind her. But it won’t be easy. Posey has learned that Michelle Freeman, her “terrific, awesome” classroom assistant who has been her partner since October, has just gone on maternity leave earlier than expected. There’s testing coming up, and the kids will be “testing and testy” because Freeman is not there. “They get so grumpy when their worlds are disrupted. Really, really emotional,” Posey says. “It sounds more judgmental than I mean it, but many of these kids don’t get what they need emotionally. When babies and preschoolers and primary kids get the emotional support they need, they begin to act in a more emotionally mature way.” “Do you feel a sense of accomplishment about this year?” I ask. Here’s where Posey described the problems with the first principal— about barely being able to drive to work and making it through the day one period at a time. But then she says “yes.” “When did things start to get better for you?” The turning point was a teacher-training session with a “really good speaker who said to focus on one thing, not to feel like you have to be excellent at everything. I wasn’t a first-year teacher, but obviously in many ways I was, because I hadn’t worked in an inner city public school. Just having her say that the ‘good teachers of kids in poverty don’t say, Well it should be this way and it should be that way. The good teachers of kids in poverty say, This is what we have. Let’s do something.’ That was freeing. It made me feel less emotional and ill to feel like, okay, this is what it is and we’re going to move forward.” The teaching staff at CUSA have been “awesome, committed, passionate, devoted to the children. I have so much respect for them. Without that team, I personally wouldn't have made it, and the school certainly wouldn't have made it,” Posey says. She also feels very supported by The Chester Fund. “Without that, we wouldn’t have arts. We wouldn’t have assistants. Our classes would be 30 instead of 20. We wouldn’t have had smart boards. I went to CUSA because I wanted to do arts and to be in a place that would support me in treating children like people. I felt pretty secure, knowing John Alston as well as I do, that the children would be respected and that we would be striving for the best in education.” The Chester Fund, “we wouldn’t have arts. We Our classes would be 30 instead of 20,” better-defined commitment to being an arts-based school. But there are good things too. The families of her students have been “wonderful, extremely helpful and supportive.” And every one of the kids who didn’t know his or her letters in September is now reading. We meet again two weeks later. Posey has the worn-out look that teachers get in the spring, as they count down to the end of school, now just six weeks away. “The warm weather makes a big difference in how psychically ready I am for it to be over. That false spring in March was hard. It felt like all of a sudden it was spring, but I hadn’t october 2009 wouldn’t have assistants. Posey says. Sara Posey began her second year of teaching at CUSA on Sept. 8. “The school year has started beautifully,” she reports. “Most of my kids went to kindergarten here, and I keep thanking the kindergarten teachers for preparing them so well. Many of them are reading already.” By adding a new grade level each year, CUSA expects to be a pre-K3 through grade eight school by 2014. To date, The Chester Fund, an independent nonprofit unrelated to Swarthmore College, has raised more than $3 million in support of the school. And the Chester Upland School district hired two new student-support staff members for CUSA this fall. 31 NOW THAT'S INTERTAINMENT! TELEVISION IS SO 20TH CENTURY! THE ADVENT OF INTERNET VIDEO Altar Egos CHANNELS FOR SEND-UP ACTS WILSON HALL ’95 AND KRISTER JOHNSON ’95 SPREAD THE WORD AS A RELIGIOUS COMIC SINGING DUO. SUCH AS GOD'S POTTERY AND by Sara Shay ’92 THE GREGORY BROTHERS, EACH Gideon Lamb is perched on a stool, wide-eyed and smiling, a guitar resting on his lap. His bright orange T-shirt reads “Virginity Rocks!” and his slicked-down bangs are an inch too short. To his left sits Jeremiah Smallchild, feet encased in white socks and leather sandals. He addresses the audience: “If you’ve brought your partici-pants, put ’em on!” Gideon starts strumming the guitar and bobbing his head as Jeremiah launches into one of the pair’s most popular songs, “The Pants Come Off When the Ring Goes On,” an anthem about a nubile “Christian princess,” her hot quarterback boyfriend, and their decision to wait until their wedding night to jump into bed. Jeremiah and Gideon, also known as God’s Pottery, are a Christian acoustic duo whose catchy songs are meant to teach the youth of America how to navigate the tricky waters of temptation. Their playlist includes “Jesus, I Need a Drink,” “Brand New Start with Christ,” and “Team Jesus.” But far, far offstage, Jeremiah is really Wilson Hall ’95 and Gideon is Krister Johnson ’95—information they don’t let slip very often, and never while performing. As God’s Pottery, they’ve toured the United States and performed abroad, and in summer 2008 they appeared on NBC’s Last Comic Standing. This September, they published their first book, What Would God’s Pottery Do? The Ultimate Guide to Surviving Your Teens and/or Being Successful! HAS OPENED ENTIRELY NEW OF WHICH OFFERS ITS OWN TAKE ON THE MUSIC, MEDIA, AND MORES OF OUR DAY. 32 Hall and Johnson inhabit their characters so thoroughly that audiences aren’t always completely sure how much is an act. On their God’s Pottery blog, reactions to their elimination from Last Comic Standing—and there were plenty—represented a mix of “haters” (“You were not even remotely funny.”); Christians who either enjoy them (“We loved that you were able to bring God’s truth to so many …”) or find them insulting (“I, for one, am tired of people mocking my God for a laugh.”); people who suspect that something’s up (“Are you guys really Christian?”); and flat-out fans (“I am completely bummed out that you got eliminated tonight … especially when you killed it!!”). While they do not, in fact, subscribe to the beliefs that their alter egos so earnestly espouse, Johnson and Hall are not out to bash religion. “We have never had any sort of real agenda,” says Johnson. “The truth is, we’re trying to be funny and funny in a smart way…. A lot of evangelicals are big fans. Certainly there are people who are offended, but a lot of them feel that we are doing God’s work even in spite of ourselves because we’re talking about Jesus. Their attitude is, in whatever way and in whatever context you can get people thinking and talking about Jesus, that’s a victory.” Despite their spot-on parody, neither was raised among the Jeremiahs and Gideons of the world, though Hall did go to church every Sunday. “It was and is a very liberal church,” he says. “It wasn’t a very strict Christian upbringing.” Johnson came at religion from a different angle. “I grew up with an informed respect for religion and the Bible, without any of the attendant beliefs,” he says. At Swarthmore, he majored in religion and sociology/anthropology. “The reason I liked those two majors together was that in some ways I was interested in the dogmatic aspect of religion butting up against the realities of daily existence,” he says. “That’s kind of the interswarthmore college bulletin esting paradox that we’re playing with and investigating. What makes a lot of these [Christian] bands ripe for satire is that they try to make these completely impractical ideas cool.” Now they’ve expanded on those impractical ideas to fill a self-help book. What Would God’s Pottery Do? purports to offer faithbased insight on tough teen topics such as drugs and alcohol, peer pressure, caring for the planet, and “pubescence,” all written from the perspective of Jeremiah and Gideon. For example, on avoiding drug users: “You can usually spot marijuana smokers by their jean jackets, maybe with a rock band scarf sewn onto the back panel. Marijuana smokers laugh a lot, but inside they are crying.” On sexuality: “Penis: It’s not a dirty word! However, it is a word that should never be spoken aloud.” And on technology: “The Internet is not inherently ‘good’ or ‘evil.’ It is a tool that can be used for either purpose, like a gun, or the Koran.” Hall and Johnson inhabit their characters so thoroughly that audiences aren’t always completely sure how much is an act. ABOUT 10 YEARS AGO, JOHNSON AND HALL, aspiring actors who had regular office jobs in New York, started exploring different characters and entertaining ideas. “Most of it was absolutely for our own amusement,” says Johnson. “There were certain one-off character things we would do at these small comedy shows, and we started drifting toward the musical aspect of coming up with something funny. We started coming up with fake band names and fake band genres.” Conservation Conversation, for example, was conceived as an eco-friendly two-man drumming circle, and 3way (pronounced “Freeway”) was a raunchy hip-hop group with unprintable song titles. They also created a pair of characters for comedy shows in New York who weren’t Christian and weren’t Jeremiah and Gideon “but were pretty unctuous in the same way,” says Johnson. “It felt like we had something,” says Hall. But what, exactly? That became clearer Wilson Hall (left) and Krister Johnson made it to the finals of the 2008 season of Last Comic Standing with their ingenuous Christian characters, Jeremiah Smallchild and Gideon Lamb. Their book, What Would God's Pottery Do? The Ultimate Guide to Surviving Your Teens and/or Being Successful! was published in September. © SETH OLENICK october 2009 33 when they separately saw the same ad for a Christian music compendium late one night in spring 2003 and both came up with the idea of forming a Christian acoustic duo. They started writing song titles (such as “Christmas Is About the Presence”), but this time the perfect name for their group eluded them. It was a fellow comedian who suggested God’s Pottery. “In my head I wanted something that was indicative enough and sounded enough like it was in the genre,” says Johnson. “The truth is that these real Christian bands would never use the name God in their group names. I thought it was a good combination of letting people know but still enough in the gray area that it left it kind of intriguing.” Hall vacationed in Italy that summer, and after what he describes as a particularly satisfying dinner, he was moved to write opening lines to go with one of their titles, “The Pants Come Off…” “I had chords, lyrics, with two hand-bells,” he says. “It was a very inspired moment. I remember writing in my notebook, ‘This is our next show. This is how we make our money.’” Says Johnson: “A great combination of idealism and cynicism all wrapped up.” God’s Pottery evolved significantly after Hall and Johnson met Olivia Wingate, a British talent agent based in New York, who spotted them in 2005 at an alternative comedy showcase in the East Village. She offered to become their manager. “They made an instant impression,” she wrote in an e-mail message, “and I thought that they needed a larger exposure.” Wingate got them a gig recording their songs for an episode of the British television comedy series The World Stands Up. She also encouraged them to flesh out their material and their characters to sustain an hour-long act, which they took to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world’s largest arts festival, in the summer of 2006. Their originality scored points with the international audience, and they were nominated for the coveted Best Newcomer award. Back home they caught the attention of a co-executive producer of Last Comic Standing, who invited them to audition for the show’s 2008 season. They figured it was a joke. “We thought they wanted us to audition to make fun of us,” says Hall. “We said it’s a shame we’ll never have a shot.” During their run on the show, Johnson and Hall remained in character whenever the cameras were rolling, which didn’t always sit well with their more traditional stand-up competitors. “We were obviously kind of an oddity,” says Johnson. “We got to play by a different set of rules, and although some were fine with it, some resented it. And I understand it. We got to ham it up whenever we wanted, and they were forced to play along or be edited out.” “We are a duo, so we’re automatically different,” says Hall. “People would say, ‘It’s not POTTERY ADVICE FOR SWARTHMORE STUDENTS proper time for your midterms once you start having babies. Jeremiah Smallchild and Gideon Lamb eagerly offered today’s Swarthmore students advice about living a clean, chaste life. Q: Even if they maintain their virginity, college students are going to want to date. Can you suggest some activities that can help them avoid being overcome by their desires while on a date? Gideon: There are literally almost a dozen ways you can distract yourself from your sexual desires when dating. We cover this topic pretty extensively in our book—some of the activities a young couple on a date can do include talking to each other about past temptation and how you overcame it … Jeremiah: You can make butter Q: Why is it important to maintain your virginity as a college student? Jeremiah: It’s actually not important to maintain your virginity as a college student. It’s just important to maintain your virginity until you’re married! Gideon: So if you want to get married before you go to college, that’s fine. Just be warned that you may have difficulty setting aside 34 fair, I’m on my own.’ And with the character aspect, we never really had to expose anything of ourselves.” They made it to the finals, though they were eliminated early. Johnson and Hall say their turn on Last Comic Standing was the biggest thing that has yet happened to them, but they find it much more satisfying to develop hour-long shows that are a piece of theater. “That sounds kind of precious,” says Hall, “but it allows us to put together everything we’ve worked on…. On Last Comic people didn’t get to see the full extent of what we do.” “In the shows, we have funny lines in songs that are punch lines, but it’s really a slow burn, watching the relationship between the characters,” says Johnson. On stage, Jeremiah has appointed himself Gideon’s older brother or father figure, and Gideon is generally happy with this arrangement, though he will occasionally rebel and challenge Jeremiah’s authority. That relationship, rather than the content of the songs or the book, is what keeps God’s Pottery from being a one-joke wonder. “If we didn’t put effort into making the characters real people, it would be easy to dismiss the act as a gimmick taking easy shots at a large target,” says Johnson. “And what we’ve discovered as the act and characters have evolved is that the dynamic between them and their personal peculiarities are much more interesting to us than their religious or sculptures … Gideon: Go looking for stray cats and baptize them … Jeremiah: Meet each other’s pastors … The possibilities are nearly endless! Gideon: Though they generally end at around eleven. Q: Is it OK to hook up with someone if one or both of you have Read Sara Shay’s full Bulletin interview with Gideon and Jeremiah at http://bit.ly/godspottery. Watch God’s Pottery videos, and get your own Virginity Rocks T-shirt at been drinking? Why/why not? Jeremiah: Goodness no! It’s wrong to “hook up” with someone—and it’s wrong to drink! Gideon: This is one of the few times that a double negative does not equal a positive. Jeremiah: Drinking is a really dangerous situation regardless of what behavior you’re engaging in. Gideon: Many of the Youth don’t know this, but alcohol is actually a drug (in liquid form). So Teens, ask yourselves: Would I hook up with someone if I were high on drugs? Jeremiah: The answer, obviously, is no, unless you want to get pregnant and go to jail. And maybe die. Gideon: And then go to Hell. swarthmore college bulletin Tuning Up the News The Gregory Brothers skewer the increasing vapidity of both WATCH OUT, KATIE COURIC. THE GREGORY BROTHERS—INCLUDING EVAN ’01 AND ANDREW ’04—MAKE MASH-UP MUSIC FROM YOUR NEWS. pop music and television news. By Paul Wachter ’97 SINCE ITS RELEASE IN 1997, AUTO-TUNE, audio processing software that is used to correct pitch, has revolutionized the music industry. The tool’s primary use—in studios and on stage—has been as a crutch, to easily and discreetly correct a singer’s off-key notes. Quickly, though, artists began to recognize Auto-Tune’s potential as an instrument in its own right. Cher’s 1998 hit “Believe” widely introduced the distinctive electronica-inflicted Auto-Tunes warble—now a staple of many pop and hip-hop songs—to a wide audience. Recently, the technique even has crept into evening news broadcasts and talk shows, adding a melodious timbre to the voices of Katie Couric and Sean Hannity, among others—although not in their work as originally broadcast. Rather, it’s the tricky—and often hilarious—digital handiwork of the Gregory Brothers, a Brooklyn-based folk and soul quartet that includes Evan Gregory ’01 and Andrew Gregory ’04. Their video mash-ups, Auto-Tune the News, have become Internet sensations—and must be experienced to be completely understood. (If you can’t wait, you’ll find the Auto-Tune series at www.youtube.com/user/schmoyoho. Take a look, then come back and read the rest of this article—or just keep reading and go online later.) The Brothers’ most popular skit, with more than two million page views and Andrew (standing, left) and Evan Gregory (seated, with his wife Sarah) are the Swarthmore half of the Gregory Brothers. Each of the Brooklyn-based “brothers”—including youngest bro’ Michael, with glasses—plays in at least one other band. All are bemused by the success of their side project, Auto-Tune the News. DENNY RENSHAW october 2009 35 counting, begins with a clip from ABC’s Sunday morning news show This Week. As Washington Post reporter Ruth Marcus opines about gay marriage, she’s interrupted by Andrew and Michael Gregory (the youngest brother, who went to Appalachian State University). The brothers have spliced themselves into the round-table discussion. “Boring,” they drone, until Michael snaps his fingers, pulls out an electric synthesizer and begins an Auto-Tuned duet with Marcus, whose voice has now been given a digitally modified singsong lilt: Michael Gregory: You got to do it like this. Shorty—ready, set, go. Ruth Marcus (singing): This is a pretty remarkable week on the gay marriage front. First of all, to have a state like Iowa — Michael (interrupting): What you trying to say about Iowa? Marcus: Not an East Coast state. Michael: (holding up three fingers in a common hip-hop salute to the East Coast): East Coast! Marcus (picking up the beat): Not a Left Coast state. Michael: Left Coast! (Makes an L with his hand.) Marcus: In a decision written by a Republican — Michael: Shorty, now you’re sounding so fine. / Give me your number and we can bump and grind. / Talking about politics online. / Leaving the club in the morning light… The skit continues with other snappy duets, including one pairing Sean Hannity and an angry gorilla (played by a Gregory in a gorilla suit) and another with Andrew Gregory and Katie Couric harmonizing a chorus—“very thin ice/very thin ice”—as Couric reports on global warming. The Gregory Brothers’ fourth member, Evan’s wife Sarah, lends her stirring voice to other installments of the Auto-Tune the News series. The videos succeed on two levels. They’re carried musically by the Gregory Brothers’ original compositions, witty lyrics, and precise vocal arrangements. And, as political parody, they skewer the increasing vapidity of both pop music and television news. 36 Find more press coverage of Auto-Tune the News and links to the Gregory Brothers’ videos at http://bit.ly/gregorybros. “The idea was Michael’s; he came up with it during the presidential campaign,” Evan told me recently over drinks in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. As Michael explained to The New York Observer in April, shortly after the videos went viral, “Some of the vacuous punditry that was going on, I found more funny than even watching, say, Jon Stewart. I thought it’d be fun to make a musical tribute.” “We helped with the music, and it evolved from there,” Evan says. In recent months, the Internet success of Auto-Tune the News has led to television and radio appearances for the Gregory Brothers to discuss their work. “We’ve also had a few TV people approach us to see if we could do something for them,” Evan says. “So far, they haven’t made us any firm offers. It’s more like they say they’re open to any ideas we might have.” THE GREGORY BROTHERS GREW UP IN RADFORD, Va.—not far from Washington, D.C. Their parents, both college professors, “were musical; they played piano and guitar, but they weren’t pros,” says Andrew. Evan, the oldest of the brothers, was a music major at Swarthmore and a pianist. “I wasn’t involved in the band scene at all,” he says. “I was more focused on the classical stuff, and that training was invaluable.” He was, however, in the a cappella group Sixteen Feet, which Andrew also joined when he came to Swarthmore. In college, Andrew taught himself guitar and played in a twoman band alongside Joe Raciti ’05. When he graduated, Evan moved to Brooklyn and began working as a consultant for Accenture, a global management consulting, technology services, and outsourcing company. But he had an early flirtation with musical stardom when he took a road trip to Los Angeles and auditioned for American Idol. He made it before the judges and sang Otis Redding’s “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay.” “Simon [Cowell] said I sang like Rick Astley, which was meant as a compliment —this was way before the ‘Rick Rolled’ phenomenon on YouTube,” Evan says. “I was sent on to Hollywood but cut in the middle of the week, as the semifinalists were being selected. It was Idol’s second season, which featured Ruben Studdard and Clay Aiken.” A few years later, Michael also auditioned for the show, consciously trying to make it onto the blooper roll—a compilation of the worst performances. He succeeded, and in a clip from Season 7, you can see Michael, dressed like a nerdy extra from an 80s geeksversus-jocks film, earnestly belting out “I Wanna Love You,” by the R&B singer Akon. The judges were aghast. Ultimately, Evan’s younger brothers joined him in Williamsburg and found work as SAT-prep tutors. But music is largely the focus of their lives, and each plays in several bands. In July, I saw The Gregory Brothers perform at a club in downtown Manhattan, headlining a show that also featured Sarah and the Stanleys, Sarah Gregory’s band. Their music is very different from their Auto-Tune fare. Though there’s the occasional comic verse, the band fits comfortably in the soul-folk ensemble tradition. “Our Auto-Tune videos have generated some attention for the band, but I think it’s viewed more as a separate thing, both by us and our fans,” Evan says. “It’s very hard to make a living as a band. There are 10,000 other bands out there, trying to make it. Right now, our Auto-Tune work is reaching a wider audience, which is fine.” RECENTLY, THE HIP-HOP ARTIST JAY-Z RELEASED a song called “D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune),” in which he lashed out at fellow hip-hop artists who relied on the audio processor. “I just think in hip-hop, when a trend becomes a gimmick, it’s time to move on,” said the Brooklyn-born superstar, citing a Wendy’s hamburger commercial that satirized the Auto-Tune epidemic. Take it easy, Jay-Z. Auto-Tune likely is too convenient a tool to give up. But perhaps listeners will tire of its over-aggressive use. If so, the Gregory Brothers’ musical ribbing may be remembered among the era’s most notable accomplishments. Paul Wachter is a writer in New York with a silky smooth voice in no need of Auto-Tuning. swarthmore college bulletin connections COURTESY OF NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC GARNET SAGES MEET MEN OF CLAY *Garnet Sage \`gär-net `saj\ n [fr. Tom Hallowell ’29, upon celebrating his 50th class reunion] (1980): a graduate of Swarthmore College who has celebrated his or her 50th class reunion. Join the Garnet Sages at 11 a.m. on Thursday, March 18, 2010 to tour the Terra Cotta Warriors exhibit at the National Geographic Museum in Washington, D.C. Soldiers. Charioteers. Archers. Musicians. Generals. Acrobats. Nearly 2,000 years ago, thousands of life-size clay figures were buried in massive underground pits to accompany China’s first emperor, Qin Shihuangdi, into the afterlife. Their discovery outside the city of Xi’an in 1974 was one of the greatest archaeological finds of the 20th century. Now, Swarthmore Sages can stand face-toface with these terra cotta warriors. The october 2009 Sometimes referred to as “Qin’s Armies,” the terra cotta warriors’ purpose was to help the emperor rule an empire in the afterlife. The Terra Cotta Army excavation comprises three pits, which together are estimated to hold 8,000 soldiers, 130 chariots with 520 horses and 150 cavalry horses. Most are still buried. According to legend, the warriors were real soldiers who were buried with Qin to protect him from dangers in the next world. National Geographic Museum will host Terra Cotta Warriors: Guardians of China’s First Emperor, an exhibition featuring treasures from the tomb complex including 15 life-size figures, weapons, armor, coins, and more. Don’t miss this chance to see the largest collection of significant artifacts from China ever to travel to the United States. All Garnet Sages who have reached their 50th reunion are eligible. If you would like more information, please contact Astrid Devaney at adevane1@swarthmore.edu or (610) 328-8412. UPCOMING EVENTS NOVEMBER 6–8, on campus Fall Alumni Council Meeting 10, Boston Reception, President Rebecca Chopp’s Listening Tour 18, New York City Reception, President Rebecca Chopp’s Listening Tour In early 2010, further stops on President Rebecca Chopp’s Listening Tour are planned for the following areas: Atlanta, Denver, London, Los Angeles, Miami, Portland, and Seattle. For more information, visit http://bit.ly/chopp_tour. 37 connections President Chopp Embarks on a Listening Tour It seemed appropriate that President Rebecca Chopp should host the first event of her Listening Tour series right here on campus on Sept. 16. The event began with alumni, parents, and friends mingling to chat informally with the president over delicious snacks in the foyer of the Lang Performing Arts Center. Later, the gathering moved to the PearsonHall Theatre, where the president spoke briefly to a large audience about her own impressions of Swarthmore and then answered a variety of questions. Watch video of President Chopp’s first listening event, read her blog of impressions gathered at each city, and get the latest tour info at http://bit.ly/chopp_tour/. ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS Five Ways to Volunteer for Swarthmore 1. MAKE A CONNECTION Swarthmore’s regional alumni organizations are called “Connections.” Connection events range from a guided tour to a museum to a family picnic in the park. The Alumni Office seeks volunteers to help organize and staff Connection events. For more information, contact Geoff Semenuk at gsemenu1@swarthmore. edu at (610) 328-8453. 38 2. HAVE A 3. JOIN THE 4. HOST 5. HELP WITH Did you graduate in a year that ends in ’05 or ’10, or in 2008? If you want to make Alumni Weekend 2010 the best ever, volunteer to serve on your class reunion planning committee, planning and coordinating class activities, and—most important— encouraging classmates to attend on June 4-6, 2010. If you are interested in helping, contact Astrid Devaney at adevane1@swarthmore.edu or (610) 328-8412. The Alumni Council, the governing body of the Alumni Association, supports students, alumni, and the College. If you are interested in serving on the Council, or would like to nominate a fellow graduate, contact Lisa Lee, director of alumni relations, at llee2@swarthmore.edu or (610) 328-8403. The Swarthmore Extern Program, held during the last week of winter break, is a five-day job-shadowing program that enables current students to explore career fields of interest. Alumni may volunteer to invite students to their workplaces to learn about their careers, host student externs in their homes, or both. The upcoming extern week is January 11–15, 2010. For more information, contact Laura Sibson at extern@swarthmore.edu or (610) 328-8352. Alumni Admissions Volunteers are a vital part of the Admissions Office’s outreach, recruitment, and yield efforts. Volunteers interview prospective students, represent Swarthmore at college fairs, and serve as resources for prospective and admitted students and their families. For more information, contact Christine Costello ’07 at ccostel1@swarthmore.edu or (610) 328-8307. GREAT REUNION ALUMNI COUNCIL AN EXTERN ADMISSIONS swarthmore college bulletin Welcome to Swarthmore, Class of 2013 In Los Angeles, incoming freshmen gathered at the home of Deborah How ’89 to get to know each other and meet alumni before flying cross-country to begin their first semester of classes at Swarthmore. Send-off receptions were also held in Denver; New York; Seattle; and Washington, D.C. KAREN BERNIER COURTESY OF DEBORAH HOW They’ve been mugged! Tuesday, Aug. 25, was the official move-in day for Swarthmore’s Class of 2013. Our quiet campus quickly came to life with the first-year students finding their way around, settling into their new dorms, listening to speeches, taking swim tests, and beginning to experience what it’s like to be at Swarthmore. A couple of days later, the Alumni Office welcomed the incoming class with its annual “mugging” event. Freshmen stopped by to collect Swarthmore mugs, cool off with some ice cream, and sign up to work in the Alumni Office. Young graduates: Welcome to the city LILY NG ’08 Did you remember your Swarthmore gear? On Sept. 26, high atop a Manhattan skyscraper, George Hang '07, Ken Short '82, Derrick Gibbs '76, and Arpita Das '08 joined more than 100 alumni in New York City and 700 others in 21 other cities worldwide, when Swarthmore's third annual Welcome to the City events took place. Alumni and friends came together at local bars, restaurants, parks, and homes to welcome recently graduated and relocated Swatties, pass on information about their new locales, and socialize and network with other members of the Swarthmore community. Besides well-known hubs such as Philadelphia; Boston; Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles; and San Francisco, volunteers also organized events in such places as Hong Kong, London, Miami, New Haven, New Orleans, and a group of 34 in Madison, Wis. The successful, multi-city event would not have been possible without the many alumni volunteers who coordinated each individual event. october 2009 We want to know! As you travel the world for business or pleasure, snap a photo of yourself in your stylish Swarthmore duds and it may land here in a future issue of the Bulletin. Send digital photos to alumni@swarthmore.edu. Please note who is in the picture and when and where it was taken. Need some Swarthmore gear? Visit the College Bookstore at http://bookstore.-swarthmore.edu. 39 class notes REGINALD “SANDY” FOSTER ’79, MICHAEL WEITHORN ’78, AND ANDREW SCHULTZ ’79 PERFORM DURING THE 1978 HAMBURG SHOW. COURTESY OF THE FRIENDS HISTORICAL LIBRARY. 40 swarthmore college bulletin Alumni Profile “In the practical experience of staging his plays, you get an idea how Shakespeare works, how his plays function in performance. That was ultimately what he was up to,” says Julian Lopez-Morillas ’68. UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO he arrived at Swarthmore, Lopez-Morillas says he “was thinking I was going to be an archaeologist.” He began acting halfway through his sophomore year and decided theater would be his career. At the time, there was no theater major at the College, so, after graduation, he went to Yale, eventually receiving an M.A. in directing at Carnegie Mellon in 1972. Lopez-Morillas soon moved to the Bay Area, where he has lived at various times in San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley. In the 1970s, he began a long association with the Berkeley Shakespeare Festival, now known as the California Shakespeare Theater (CalShakes). “Without being associated with a festival long-term, I never would have picked up all those performances,” he says. During a period as associate artistic director, he directed Coriolanus, Timon of Athens, King John, “knocking off some of the more obscure ones.” “It really thrived in the ’80s,” Lopez-Morillas says of the festival, which eventually built a 545-seat amphitheater in the hills above Berkeley. He remembers a 1991 outdoor performance there of King Lear: “The wind just howls out there and there were both cows and coyotes on the hillside. If I came out as Lear and cried ‘Howl, howl, howl!’ I didn’t know whether I’d be met by yips or moos. I guess the yips were better; they sounded wild.” This spring, Lopez-Morillas played Escalus, Prince of Verona, in Romeo and Juliet at CalShakes, directed by artistic director Jonathan Moscone—his first role with the festival since 2000. “In the meantime, I’ve directed at San Jose State and Solano College and acted at Marin Shakespeare and San Francisco Shakespeare, where I played the Earl of Gloucester in King Lear and Prospero, the ousted Duke of Milan, in The Tempest,” Lopez-Morilla says. “If there’s a role in Shakespeare I really feel proprietary towards, it’s Prospero. I feel I bring something personal, something special to it.” Lopez-Morillas blogs about his theater experiences on PlayShakespeare.com, a Web site created by actor and creative designer Ron Severdia. One piece of correspondence he passed along from Robert Hurwitt, theater critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. “Wouldn’t it be funny,” Hurwitt wrote, “if newspapers, which have predicted the death of theater for so long, went first?’” Completing the Bard’s Canon JULIAN LOPEZ-MORILLAS ’68 HAS PLAYED IN OR DIRECTED EVERY ONE OF SHAKESPEARE’S 38 PLAYS. Julian Lopez-Morillas ’68 has played in or directed every one of the 38 plays that make up William Shakespeare’s canon. He passed the mark in June 2008 with a performance as Cardinal Wolsey in Henry VIII at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival (above left). “I started there in the summer of 1966—my first really professional theater,” Lopez-Morillas says. “I went out to Colorado every summer thereafter for eight or nine years.” By 1984, Lopez-Morillas had done all but three or four of the Bard’s plays. “I thought, why not go the whole hog? By 1988, I’d done Timon of Athens; that left only Henry VIII. It took 20 years to find a production.” Speaking of his accomplishment, the Berkeley, Calif., actor is wry: “It’s interesting that some people make a fuss over it. It is a curiosity. [Actor and Oregon Shakespeare Festival dramaturg] Barry Kraft’s the only other one in my acquaintance who has done it. We had a competition over it for a while; he got there first. I don’t expect people to jump up and down. There’s nothing stellar about it.” Being a little less dismissive, Lopez-Morillas says, “I do believe being in a production of a play gets you to know it, rather than just reading it. In the practical experience of staging his plays, you get an idea how Shakespeare works, how his plays function in performance.” Lopez-Morillas was born in Providence, R.I., where his father, a Spaniard who emigrated just before the Spanish Civil War, founded the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University. When 52 —By Ken Bullock. This article first appeared in The Berkeley Daily Planet. It is reprinted with permission. swarthmore college bulletin in my life My LayerCake Life By Malka Kramer Schaps ’69 (formerly Mary Elizabeth Kramer) 58 What has been pushing my professional life can be summed up in a single sentence: My father was a university professor who did not get tenure and a writer who never published a book. I didn’t quite grasp the significance of all this until I was a 16-year-old honors student about to finish high school and he told me, “Well, of course you will get your Ph.D.” Although that key sentence may describe what I did, I never thought of it as defining my aspirations, which I summed up on request as a 15-year-old: I want to be the sort of person people are happy to have known, and I want to raise my children well. That slant, I am sure, came from my mother. To this day, when my daughters-in-law speak to my mother on the phone, they hang up with the feeling that they have just been talking to me. There is, however, a cream filling between the career layer and the family layer of my cake, which comes from somewhere deep inside. One winter day during my senior year at Swarthmore, I walked into one of the rooms in Bond, wearing a turquoise dress, with my auburn hair down to my waist. The three Swarthmore professors in formal attire, who were interviewing me for a Danforth Fellowship, asked various questions about my hopes of joining my husband David ’67, in graduate school at Harvard, and continuing into university teaching. Then the chair of the committee cleared his throat uncomfortably and the other two fidgeted in their chairs. He leaned forward and asked, “Now, Mary, for the Danforth, we have to ask. Do you have any spiritual leanings or perhaps a commitment to social action?” Everyone hung on my answer. “Oh, yes,” I said brightly. “I recently converted to Orthodox Judaism.” All three members of the committee sank back into their chairs with relief. It shows how things have changed that, for a fellowship originally set up for Episcopalian boys, this was a more than satisfactory answer. This “cream filling” may seem like the most un-Swarthmore-like thing I did at the College, but it actually started in a very Swarthmore-like way—with a search for intellectual honesty. I was raised with a commitment to honesty in all its senses—telling the truth, not stealing or cheating—but as I worked my way through a self-imposed pro- gram of reading one book by each of the great philosophers, I was hard put to find a solid reason for being “good” in modern secular philosophy. I had a lot of Jewish friends, and their religion—even for the most assimilated among them—seemed to have a staying power to which the rather liberal Protestant denomination in which I had been raised did not even aspire. One of them—a fellow female counselor for the girls in a math summer camp—even taught me how to sound out Hebrew and passed on some of the fundamentals of keeping kosher and observing the Sabbath. In my junior year, I asked to speak at College Sunday—the first Sunday of winter break—where college students active in our church’s youth group were invited to address the congregation about their college experiences. This was an unusual request, because most upperclassmen have forgotten their way to the church. After two freshmen had, indeed, explained that religion played no role at all in their college lives, I stood up with my “J’accuse.” We had theoretically been taught about all the major religions. We had visited a Catholic church, a synagogue, and a mosque. However, the subliminal message had been that religion is a crutch, inappropriate for intellectuals. “You have made it impossible,” I claimed, “for us to believe in G-d.” My manifesto had three immediate consequences. The director of religious education resigned, saying that I was absolutely right. The minister resigned, having decided that he would rather be a social worker. And I asked myself, “Who are these people to decide what I can or cannot believe?” My actual decision to convert to Judaism was made during the following spring, which I spent as a foreign student in Germany, in the shadow of the Holocaust. A fancy cake like that, with two layers and a cream filling, ought to have chocolate frosting, right? Here it comes. I had to race through Harvard because my husband had started two years before me, and we wanted to get our Ph.D.’s together, in order to have a better chance of solving the “two-body problem” of getting academic jobs in the same city. We both got jobs in Israel, as we wanted, but, like my father, neither of us got tenure at our first jobs, for reasons which looked to us swarthmore college bulletin october 2009 KPH OTO.COM C ISTO at the time like prejudice. When I finally did get tenure at my second job, I spent the summer writing a novel about prejudice. Over the following decades, I wrote other novels about the kidnapping of our foster baby, about conversion, about a court case to protect a different set of foster children, about arranged marriages, about cultural divides. Most of them, in essence, are about prejudices of various kinds and their effects on people. I publish in a “niche”—the thriving haredi (ultra-Orthodox) publishing industry—and write for no more than one hour in the evening, to protect my mathematical research time. How do I manage my striated life? Mostly by keeping the layers separated in time and space. We live in Bnei Brak, a very religious community across the highway from our university. About 40 women get up at five in the morning to pray in the synagogue down the street (along with 200 men), and sometimes I join them. Many of the ladies don’t know my name, but those who do surely think of me as Rabbanit Schaps rather than Professor Schaps. (A “rabbanit” is a rabbi’s wife. It is an honorific: Raising a Jewish family on high scholarly standards is a project for both husband and wife.) Those who know that I work at the university can’t figure out what I am doing there eight hours a day, five days a week when I actually teach only six hours a week, six months a year. I am also “Rabbanit” to the men in the daily Talmud class that David teaches. Once I cross the highway on the pedestrian bridge, I land among a population equally clueless about my private life. In Israel, you cannot get dressed in the morning without making a political statement, so everyone I meet knows from my long sleeves and the beret I wear over my wig that I am religious. It is, in fact, a religious university, so this is not even scandalous. I teach my classes, give talks in seminars, serve on committees, all without any reference being made to my religiosity. Once someone did ask my husband, “How can you walk into an international conference wearing a black hat and sidelocks?” “Well,” David answered, “first I move my right foot forward, and then my left. Before you know it, I am through the door.” My father passed away more than 30 years This “cream filling” may seem like the most un-Swarthmore-like thing I did at the College, but it actually started in a very Swarthmore-like way—with a search for intellectual honesty. ago. Every year, on the anniversary of his death, I light a 24-hour candle and take out one of the files of his old letters or amusing articles, like the one titled “Why I Won’t Send my Daughter to College.” When I stand on a podium at Hebrew University, introducing former Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers to members of the Harvard Club of Israel, does my father know about it? When, as chair of the Mathematics Department, I opened a new program in financial mathematics, was he somehow aware? Has he “seen” the covers of my novels? I don’t know; but if he does, I’m sure he is pleased, just as he was always pleased when I baked a layer cake for Sunday afternoon tea. Malka Kramer Schaps ’69 earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard in 1972, after which she and her husband David ’67 took university jobs in Israel. They have four children, two of them foster children who remained with their family, and, currently, 12 grandchildren. David was a rabbi in the army reserves and ended his 30 years of service with the rank of captain. In addition to her professional publications, Schaps has published five novels and two nonfiction works on the Holocaust. She is currently a professor and director of the Financial Mathematics Program at BarIlan University, where David is associate professor and chair of the Department of Classical Studies. 59 books + arts An Ethnography of Sickle Cell Disease Carolyn Moxely Rouse ’87 Uncertain Suffering: Racial Health Care Disparities and Sickle Cell Disease, University of California Press, 2009 With good reason, one should hesitate before describing an ethnography about those with an incurable disease—and the broken health care system that attempts to treat them—as “wonderful,” but such is the elegant scholarship of Carolyn Moxely Rouse on the topic of sickle cell, a disease that disproportionately affects African Americans in the United States. Uncertain Suffering is an ethnography—the study of a people. Most of us assume that “a people” are bound together by geographic space or tradition, filial or religious ties. The people of Rouse’s study are bound by their association with sickle cell disease (SCD), whether they have the disease, are related to persons that have it, or treat it. In this study of SCD culture, we learn how people with the disease cope with pain, how they are treated by others, how and why pain is occasionally uncoupled from suffering, what specifically is and is not working for them in the health care system, and how a vulnerable but unpitied group outside of hospital walls is treated when they meet up with the supposedly objective and evidence-based protocols to treat their disease found within hospital walls. Rouse—like the best students I have had at Swarthmore— attempts to accomplish two dozen things at once. She describes the disease, the social location of those who suffer from it, the responses from the professionals who treat them, and how treatment differs when the racial makeup of a treatment center’s professional staff differs. She uses social theory to interrogate taken-for-granted medical concepts such as “evidence-based” and “objective;” offers rich observations and nuanced quotations from her interviewees; and posits recommendations for social philosophers, the federal government, and the SCD community. Precisely because Rouse accomplishes so much in this book, it will have its detractors. Let me anticipate their complaints. The book often reads like a weighty conversation in which quite a bit of background knowledge is assumed. As someone who’s done the background reading, it was a pleasure. That said, I want Uncertain Suffering to be read by policy wonks, physicians, nurses, and nonprofit directors—and it’s pretty dense for a wide audience. Still, it’s crucial 62 reading for anyone in the helping professions. Rouse also takes for granted the intelligence, humor, and insight of the mostly poor, all black, mostly adolescent patients that she got to know during the course of this study. By taking their point of view as a starting point, she treats those at the margins as if they were at the center—reversing, upending, and overturning the paradigms in which we’ve been trained. Rouse lays out her thesis early, and some detractors will assume that she reached her conclusion before she began the research. To the contrary, she brings readers along on her journey, revealing the limitations or errors of her hypotheses along the way. She writes, for example: “In spite of a growing consensus that began in the 1980s that pain, particularly for cancer, should be treated aggressively, almost 30 years later sickle cell patients remain the exception…. Physician discretion still plays a key role in patient access to medications.” Her outrage is clear. But three pages later, she writes, “After switching research field sites, I was forced to challenge my rather two-dimensional perspective….” Rouse comes to learn, she says, that helping patients manage pain is the subject of much disagreement. SCD centers that have majority black staffs have a different approach than those with majority white staffs, but the differing approaches do not correlate with her initial expectations. Increasing quality of life is not necessarily a conclusion that can be reached via statistical analysis—and quality of life, rather than pain eradication only, she learns, informs the approaches of SCD clinics with majority black professional staffs. For all of us struggling to understand how discourses of rationality, fairness, and compassion respectively could lead us to the Iraq War, the response to Hurricane Katrina, or the health care reform debacle, Rouse offers some complicated answers. She reminds us that too often we live with competing contradictions while simultaneously forfeiting power to professionals whose prose confounds us. And when we’re the professionals, we’ve often taken our own professional baptism without remaining suspicious of our socialization and without continuing to question the art and science into which we’ve been socialized. —Sarah Willie-LeBreton, associate professor of sociology and anthropology swarthmore college bulletin MORE BOOKS Rio Akasaka ’09, A History of the Swarthmore Fire Company, lulu.com, 2009. Compiled while the author—a passionate young firefighter with a close attachment to the Borough of Swarthmore—was an undergraduate, this work uses rare pictures, anecdotes, and detailed stories to depict the company’s history. Michael Fairbanks, Marcela EscobariRose ’96,, Malik Fal, and Elizabeth Hooper (editors), In the River They Swim: Essays from Around the World on Enterprise Solutions to Poverty, Templeton Press, 2009. This collection gathers a unique mix of participants who reflect on their experiences portraying the struggle to close the global development and poverty gap. The foreword is by evangelist Rick Warren. Jane Jaquette ’64 (editor), Feminist Agendas and Democracy in Latin America, Duke University Press, 2009. This collection examines the response of Latin American women to the dramatic political, economic, and social changes of the last 20 years. Meredith Anne Skura ’65, Tudor Autobiography: Listening for Inwardness, The University of Chicago Press, 2008. Showing that a writer’s thoughts and feelings can be traced in his or her language, Skura offers a glimpse into a range of lived and imagined experiences that challenge assumptions about life and autobiography in the early modern period. Abbott Small ’67 D, Into the Turquoise: Poems, Dennis Small, 2009. Through images of Nature, fused with human needs, hungers, fears, and joys, this poet of faith transcends the Judaic and Catholic avenues of his spiritual pilgrimage to attain insight into both the terrors and rewards of our common human heritage. Cécile Whiting ’80, Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s, University of California Press, 2006. This award-winning work offers an in-depth examination of Los Angeles as a focus of and inspiration for art, photography, painting, and sculpture. Sarah Stolfa, The Regulars, with an introduction by Jonathan Franzen ’81, Artisan Books, 2009. Franzen provides a dazzling introduction to this book of photographs by a former bartender who found inspiration in the very setting from which she longed to escape. Franzen starts: “I didn’t like these pictures at first sight. They reminded me of several personal defeats that I prefer not to dwell on, particularly my failure to survive in Philadelphia....” Yet, he later continues: “Stolfa’s images have the quality, shared by the city in which they were taken, of rendering the very concept of unsightliness nonsensical.” OTHER MEDIA Ann Buttenwieser ’57, Governor’s Island: The Jewel of New York Harbor, Syracuse University Press, 2009. Using never-before–published photographs, blueprints, architectural plans, and interviews with former residents, the author—an urban planner and waterfront historian—creates a striking portrait of the island. The future of Governor’s Island, which is owned by New York City, is the subject of much debate. OCTOBER 2009 Victor Piñeiro Escoriaza ’00, Second Skin, Liberation Entertainment Inc., 2009. This film takes a fascinating look at computer gamers whose lives have been transformed by the genre of games that allow millions of users worldwide to interact simultaneously in virtual spaces. Bennett Lorber ’64 joined with three other painters to show some new paintings, including little gee 4, in an exhibit titled 4 Artists—New Work in the Muse Gallery in Olde City, Philadelphia, during the month of August. Lorber, the Thomas M. Durant Professor of Medicine and Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Temple University School of Medicine and Hospital, is one of two physicians who exhibited works in the show. Abigail Donovan ’92 completed a large-scale permanent sculptural installation for the University of Oregon’s new HEDCO College of Education building. A public commission for the state of Oregon, the piece is titled The Cloud of Disquiet: Stanza Second. 63 Alumni Profile JEN DESSINGER “When people join the Designers Accord ... they need to have a greater awareness of their design decisions. We don’t have the luxury of ignoring the issues around climate change.” Innovative Thinking VALERIE CASEY ’94 CREATED THE DESIGNERS ACCORD AND INITIATED A MOVEMENT TO HELP INDUSTRIES BECOME SUSTAINABLE Designer and creative director Valerie Casey ’94 has worked with organizations around the world helping them launch new products and services. Recently, she’s been devoting much of her attention to motivating others in the design field to create positive social and environmental impacts. It was out of personal frustration that Casey conceived a “Kyoto Treaty” for the design community, now called the Designers Accord. She sketched out the five-point agreement on sustainability on the back of a notebook during a cross-country flight in 2007. She had just left meetings with executives at two Fortune 50 companies, where she hadn’t brought up the topic of sustainability but knew that she should have. “I didn’t have the language or the knowledge to address the issue. No one in the design community did, although we were all acutely aware of our responsibility to play a role. There was a general sense of frustration and helplessness,” Casey says. The Designers Accord provides a structure for designers, educators, and business leaders to integrate sustainability into their work. Adopters of the Designers Accord commit to five guidelines that provide collective and individual ways to take action. The idea is that by collaborating, creative professionals can more effectively tackle environmental and social issues. The notion of sharing best practices in this way is counter to the traditional model of competition. Casey says that in the design world, the idea of sharing a firm’s knowledge is “unheard of.” Industry professionals are highly protective of their intellectual property. “When people join the Designers Accord, they are agreeing to begin this journey. They don’t have it all figured out, but they do need to 66 have greater awareness of the impact of their design decisions. We don’t have the luxury of ignoring the issues around climate change. We have to apply our different skills to create more innovative solutions.” “I think of design in the broadest sense, where all of us are ‘designers.’ When you wake in the morning, you ‘design’ your day, you ‘design’ what you’re going to wear, how you’re going to present yourself. These are all ‘design’ decisions,” she says. “By recognizing the series of simple and complex choices each of us makes every day, you can begin to think differently about the interventions you can make.” Casey says she is also supportive of new movements being created to tackle climate change because of her own struggle to find common ground in her industry. When she created the Designers Accord, Casey says it wasn’t out of the desire to start a new organization necessarily but rather to use design in a different way. “For me, the truest measure of success of the Designers Accord is the degree to which the sophistication around sustainability has grown in the creative community,” she says. “Designers are truly integrating sustainability as a strategic, critical lens and as a result their work is better and their clients and customers benefit.” The concept has struck a chord and, today, there are almost 200,000 members involved in over 100 countries, representing all design disciplines including industrial design, architecture, graphic design, research, engineering, and strategy. Casey has been recognized as a Fortune magazine “Guru” of the year and a Fast Company “Master of Design” for her innovative thinking on sustainability and problem-solving, but she still recognizes the challenges of fully embracing the principles of sustainability in all aspects of her life. At her home in the San Francisco Bay Area, she and her partner of 15 years, computer scientist Susan Housand often find themselves making choices about sustainability, considering each decision. “But with our 4-year-old twins, Harper and Frederick, sometimes the best answer is a plastic toy!” Casey says. The Designers Accord is a five-year project—the first two years have focused on raising awareness throughout the creative community; in the second two years, the focus will be on education of the next generation of designers and professional development. In the fifth year, priority will be placed on influencing government policy on sustainability issues. There is so much urgency around climate change, Casey believes that designers should achieve the goals of the Designers Accord in that time. “Designers bring great creativity and optimism to the challenges before them. What could be better than focusing our collective energies on the most critical issue of our time?” —Audree Penner L ear n m ore: www.designersaccord.org and www.valcasey.com. swarthmore college bulletin Alumni Achievements Byron Waksman ’40 was recently honored by the Waksman Foundation for Microbiology with a reception at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Mass. The occasion celebrated Waksman’s life’s work in neuroimmunology— in particular his seminal discoveries in autoimmune disease such as multiple sclerosis, his teaching at every level—from medical students to middle school children, and his continuing interest in the public communication of science. In his honor, the Waksman Foundation has created the Byron H. Waksman Award for Excellence in the Public Communication of Microbiology; the inaugural prize was given to the New York Hall of Science. In addition, the MBL has named a fellowship for the distinguished immunologist in its Science Journalism Program. According to his daughter Nan Waksman Schanbacher ’72, her father was surrounded by former students, distinguished colleagues, friends, and family during the reception. John Hopfield ’54 has been honored by the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society with the 2009 Frank Rosenblatt Award. The award recognizes Hopfield’s seminal contributions to the understanding of information processing in biological systems. His work combining neurobiology, physics, and electrical engineering bridged the gap between biological processes and computer technology and serves as a basic paradigm in neuroscience for understanding how the brain carries out its tasks. He is the Howard Prior Professor Emeritus of Molecular Engineering at Princeton University. A fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Physical Society, Hopfield has also received the Dirac Medal from the International Center for Theoretical Physics, California Scientists of the Year Award, a MacArthur Prize, and the Einstein Prize of the World Cultural Council. Susan Cotts Watkins ’60 has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2009. A professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, her work focuses on the role of social networks in large-scale demographic and social change, such as the AIDS epidemic in Africa. “My Guggenheim project, Navigating AIDS in Rural Malawi, draws on a particularly rich set of data about what rural Malawians say about AIDS to their friends, relatives, and neighbors, as they try to understand and respond to the AIDS epidemic,” Watkins says. She is currently a visiting scientist at the California Center for Population Research at UCLA. In 2005, she received the Irene Taeuber Award for exceptionally sound and innovative research from the Population Association of America and has been an elected member of the Sociological Research Association since 1994. Alumni Achievements Cécile Whiting ’80 has been selected to receive the 21st Annual Charles C. Eldredge Prize for distinguished scholarship in American art from the Smithsonian American Art Museum for her 2006 book, Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s. “Through Whiting’s analysis of the city of Los Angeles and its artists, the reader is persuaded that Los Angeles was a natural birthplace of pop art in the United States,” say the jurors who awarded the prize. Since joining the faculty at the University of California–Irvine in 2003, Whiting has served as director of the graduate program in visual studies, associate dean of graduate studies in the School of Humanities, and chair of the Department of Art History. One of her current projects examines the way in which artists, writers, and filmmakers revisited World War II in the 1960s. Her other works include Antifascism in American Art; A Taste for Pop: Pop Art, Gender, and Consumer Culture; and “It’s Only a Paper Moon: The Cyborg Eye of Vija Celmins” for the spring issue of the museum’s journal American Art. Paul Crowell ’86 was recently named a fellow by the American Physical Society (APS). The nomination was made by the topical group on Magnetism and Its Applications, citing Crowell for “the application of elegant optical and transport techniques to the study of spin dynamics and transport.” Crowell is a professor at the University of Minnesota, where his research focuses on spin dynamics and transport in ferromagnets and ferromagnetsemiconductor heterostructures. In the past, he has been a McKnight Presidential fellow and a McKnight Land Grant professor at the University of Minnesota as well as a Sloan Foundation fellow. Joseph Palovick ’90 was inducted into the Ed Romance Chapter of the Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame in March. The annual induction ceremony honors athletes and other individuals who have brought “lasting fame and recognition” to the state of Pennsylvania through their sports-related achievements. A “true scholar-athlete,” Palovick played three varsity sports in high school and graduated valedictorian. During his college football career, he started for two years. Palovick, who has a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, is a principal engineer for Formation, an avionics product company, in Moores-town, N.J., and serves as statistician for the Moorestown High School football team. Alexander Huk ’96 received a National Science Foundation Career award in 2008 for his research on the neural basis of the perception of motion through depth. The award supports junior faculty who exemplify the integration of education and research. Huk’s research seeks to under- stand how the nervous system processes information and how those signals give rise to perceptual and cognitive experiences. The experiments funded by the award aim to identify which pieces of binocular information are used to represent three-dimensional motion. Huk is an assistant professor of neurobiology and psychology at the University of Texas–Austin, where he is also a member of the Center for Perceptual Systems and the Institute for Neuroscience. Previously, he was a senior research fellow at the University of Washington–Seattle. Alumni Achievements Keetje Kuipers ’02 is the 2009 A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize winner for her first collection of poems Beautiful in the Mouth. Her book will be published in March 2010 by BOA Editions Ltd. in the A. Poulin Jr. New Poets of America Series. The same week that Kuipers won the Poulin prize, she learned that she had been selected as a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. In 2007, Kuipers was the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. She used the time to complete work on Beautiful in the Mouth, which contains poems currently published or forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, West Branch, Painted Bride Quarterly, Willow Springs, and AGNI, among others. Kuipers has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Oregon Literary Arts, and Soapstone and awards from Atlanta Review and Nimrod. Her poems have been nominated three years in a row for the Pushcart Prize. Kent Bassett ’04 wrote and directed the short film The Line, which has won the American Society of Cinematographers’ Lazlo Kovacs Heritage Award and the Brooklyn International Film Festival’s Spirit Award. A story about a migrant father and son who run out of water while crossing the desert border, The Line is a narrative exploration of the the people and issues that intrigued Bassett about his home state of Arizona. More recently, Bassett climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, the largest free-standing mountain in the world to make Beyond Limits, a documentary film about Bonner Paddock, a man with celebral palsy, who made the eight-day trek to raise money for charity. “This was an incredible journey in challenging conditions of altitude, freezing temperatures, and no electricity,” Bassett says. He currently lives in Los Angeles, where he works as an assistant editor on Bravo’s Top Chef while he sets up a new project. Sa’ed Atshan ’06 was selected to be a 2008 Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow for New Americans. Hungarian immigrants wishing to assist “young New Americans” in their education established the fellowship in 1997. Atshan was chosen as one of 30 fellows from a pool of 700 applicants. A 2008 graduate of the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, Atshan is now pursuing a joint doctorate in anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard. He lectures in the Peace and Justice Studies Department at Tufts University, and Harvard has recognized his work as a head teaching fellow there with three awards of distinction. Atshan has worked for the American Civil Liberties Union, the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, Human Rights Watch, Seeds of Peace, the Palestinian Negotiations Affairs Department, and the government of Dubai. q+a Happily Hooked on China By Carol Brévart-Demm On the third floor of Kohlberg Hall, the wide-open door to Alan Berkowitz’s office is inviting. It’s hard to miss the newspaper clipping attached to its surface—about Bhutan, the small Himalayan kingdom whose monarchs prefer to measure quality of life in terms of gross national happiness rather than gross national product. It’s an appropriate introduction to the cozy workspace where Berkowitz is happily hooked on China and things Chinese. An air of comfortable, colorful clutter pervades the room. Wide shelves are packed with rows of books standing two-deep, their titles utterly unintelligible to non-initiates of the language; more are piled atop the rows. Stacks of course materials cover flat surfaces. The walls display original Chinese art drawings and calligraphy, many created as gifts for Berkowitz. Rising from a small, clay teapot, the aroma of green tea—brought from Taiwan—scents the air. Although Chinese language has been offered at the College since 1975, Berkowitz, who joined the faculty in 1989, was the first tenured professor in the discipline. His fields are Classical Chinese and Mandarin; he is fluent also in Italian and French and reads several other languages. Instrumental in building the College’s Chinese program within the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and as an integral part of the Asian Studies Program, he is delighted to report that currently more students major and minor in Chinese than in any other language offered at the College. Despite initial anxiety about being interviewed, Berkowitz appears serene and completely in his element. He lifts the teapot, pours the steaming, fragrant liquid into two small cups, and sits back, ready to chat. 72 swarthmore college bulletin What sparked your interest in China? Around 1973, I met a guy in a bar in Vermont, where I was working on Food Stamp advocacy. He was a teacher of Classical Chinese. I’d read a lot about East Asian thought in translation, but he advised me to read it in the original, for it was very different. So I went back to college and studied Classical Chinese with him at the University of Vermont. He was right. That’s how I got into all things Chinese. What’s the most useful language to learn? That depends. There are about a billion speakers of Mandarin Chinese, so for the purpose of communicating with as many people as possible, Mandarin Chinese would be a good one to know. But for literature, there is probably more written in Classical Chinese over the millennia than all else combined—except perhaps e-mail. What’s the most difficult aspect of learning Chinese? There’s no relation between Chinese and IndoEuropean languages—like English—no cognates, no analogous grammar. And writing is usually a stumbling block, because Chinese is not alphabetic, nor is it syllabic. You have to learn thousands of characters. Then, once you’ve mastered the grammar and characters, the language relies on cultural context. Instead of becoming easier the more you know, it becomes increasingly difficult the deeper you go. ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS What level of fluency do Swarthmore students of Chinese attain? It’s pretty high. They can function in China without difficulty. If they study abroad, then they achieve a really high level. Immersion is key, but even without spending time abroad, they usually score high on international proficiency tests. Many go on to use Chinese regularly in their jobs. october 2009 How do you spend your time when you’re in China? I do some research, but I also like to spend time with friends, buy books, eat well, travel, and climb mountains. Mountains are special there, because they often have ancient stairways to the top, cut out of the stone, leading to pavilions, temples, or overlooks. What’s been most fulfilling about your work at the College? To see how Chinese has grown and how Asian Studies has become better represented in the curriculum. Chinese grew slowly, but in the past seven or eight years, it’s been pretty popular. That’s because the crew is so good. You have to have really good teachers at the introductory levels, to get the students hooked. We have that. What do you believe is your best quality? I try to be a good listener. How about your worst? I see too many sides to a situation, so it’s sometimes hard for me to make a quick decision. How do you believe your wife would describe you? Someone who is really into his work; a nice person to hang out with; a person who likes culinary—although vegetarian—adventures; tolerant; open, except to eating meat. What qualities do you value most? Tolerance and humility. What’s your favorite musical instrument? The qin. It’s a seven-string, fretless Chinese zither, about four feet long. It has a deep, resonant, yet not loud sound. I’m a member of the New York Qin Society but don’t play as much as I used to. What’s the wackiest thing you ever did? My wife, Titina Caporale, and I spent several months in the mid-1980s traveling through the Taklamakan Desert by public buses with no glass in the windows, from Lake Kokonor through Qinghai and Xinjiang. From Kashgar, we wanted to continue down the Karakoram Highway into Pakistan, but we missed the weekly bus from Kashgar. So we rented one of the bus company’s long-distance six-wheel-drive buses and drove ourselves. We went to all kinds of crazy places. Sometimes, the only available roads were made of salt, so when it rained, the road would dissolve if driven on. We had to wait for hours until it dried. Alan Berkowitz is the Susan W. Lippincott Professor of Modern and Classical Languages and Chinese. More students major in Chinese than in any other foreign language taught at the College. The Phoenix Gets Its Gear On! Clockwise from right: The Phoenix Your own little Phoenix. Custom-made just for us. Choose from two sizes: about 7 inches tall or about 11 inches tall. $9.99 and $16.99 The Hoodie Imprinted on the front, sleeve, and back (SWAT). 50% cotton/50% polyester. $39.99 Phoenix Ceramic Mugs The Phoenix logo on one side and “SWARTHMORE COLLEGE” on the other. Choose black or garnet. $7.99 Swarthmore Afghan An image of Parrish Hall on a beautiful day woven into a soft 100% cotton afghan/throw. 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