good food, good earth, good ideas swarthmore swarthmore college bulletin | october 2011 campus view Kick your shoes off and pull up two chairs. There’s sun and grass—and autumn’s in the air. PHOTOGRAPH BY ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS departments profiles 5: LETTERS Readers react. 52: A Humanist in Medicine More than a half-century of research and progress and DeWitt Baldwin ’43 still has more to do. By Susan Cousins Breen 76: Playtime With a Snap Woodworking artisans John and Jane Greenberg Kostick ’88 have created Tetraxis, a magnetic geometry puzzle for all ages. By Andrea Hammer 70: Write Out Loud for All to See By a simple public act of compassion, Ruth Sergel ’84 spurred a whole city to action. By Maki Somosot ’12 On the cover: Harvest time at Essex Farm. Photograph by Michael Forster Rothbart ’94. Story on page 18. 6: FROM THE PRESIDENT Stewarding Swarthmore By Rebecca Chopp 8: COLLECTION • A draft plan for the future • A hurricane moves through • The Class of 2015 by the numbers • 9/11 remembered • From Kandahar to the College • Single-stream recycling • A new sustainability coordinator • Is the Quaker matchbox a good idea? • Garnet soccer on the move 47: CONNECTIONS • Relive history along the Danube • New award named for Eugene Lang ’38 • Alumni welcome newbies • Send-offs for new students • Connections and more Connections 50: CLASS NOTES The world according to Swarthmore 55: IN MEMORIAM Farewell to cherished friends 58: BOOKS + ARTS Mara Hvistendahl ’02, Unnatural Selection, PublicAffairs, 2011 Reviewed by Gwynn Kessler, assistant professor of religion 66: IN MY LIFE A Country. Not a War. Forty-three years after being wounded in Vietnam, Bill Ehrhart and his friend and fellow Marine take a nostalgic and eyeopening journey. By W.D. Ehrhart ’73 80: Q+A A Tightly Choreographed Life There’s more to Professor of Political Science Carol Nackenoff than just politics. By Carol Brévart-Demm Below: Tina Johnson is director of a food co-op in a city where fresh, nutritious food is hard to come by. Photograph by Jim Graham. Story on page 26. in this issue features 18: Good Food, Good Earth— Good Ideas Not many are taking “local” and “sustainable” as far as Mark Guenther Kimball’s [’94] Essex Farm. By David Pacchioli 18 32 26: Eat Well, Seek Justice In Chester, Pa., urban prophets and activists are offering good food, building community, and generating social capital at the Chester Co-op. By Mark Wallace 36 31: Hands in the Soil “You shouldn’t eat anything from a farm you don’t like to visit,” says Arthur Upshur ’83. He and Carol Merten Upshur ’83 have a farm worth visiting again and again. By Joan Smith ’76 32: When Eating, Just Eat Jan Chozen Bays ’66 has a mindful prescription for reordering our disordered relationship with food. By Elizabeth Redden ’05 35: The Wine Guy John Fischer ’81 delights clientele with perfect combinations of food and drink— and teaches his students to do the same. By Carol Brévart-Demm 36: The Amazing Swarthmore Network The College’s heart may be located on campus, but its reach is everywhere. Here are 10 ways to plug in. By Susan Cousins Breen, Carol BrévartDemm, and Jeffrey Lott 44: America’s Guarantee: Peace or Promises? German political commentator Josef Joffe ’65 says the United States must resist self-inflicted blows—such as the invasion of Iraq—that will blunder away its supremacy. By Paul Wachter ’97 26 parlor talk In a few weeks, I’m making a conference presentation called “50 Ways to Love Your Magazine—and Make Your Readers Love It Too.” To prepare for my talk, I spent a couple hours perusing the magazine racks at Barnes & Noble (alas, not Borders, which always had a better selection). I was searching for magazines honored by the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) as the best in their categories this year. Overall, the ASME “magazine of the year” is National Geographic, but other titles were honored for excellence as news, food, fashion, literary, business, and lifestyle magazines. I can’t say that I love them all, but I greatly admire what they do to serve their particular readers. As a magazine editor for nearly 25 years, I’ve come to love this medium so much that it makes me cringe to hear people say, “Print is dead.” In fact, although daily newspapers and the weekly newsmagazines have been struggling of late, the magazine industry is healthy and growing. Between 2000 and 2010, the National Directory of Magazines reported a 19.7 percent increase in the number of titles published in the United States. The six fastest growing categories were ethnic, travel, regional, medical, real estate—and college alumni magazines. Among alumni magazines, 127 new titles were added during the decade. Ninety-three percent of adults read magazines, and that figure increases as the audience gets younger: Under 24 years of age, it’s 97 percent. Most successful magazines serve readers who share an interest such as cooking, backpacking, or business. The Bulletin is also a shared-interest magazine, published for Swarthmore alumni, parents on the web of Swarthmore students, and members of the campus community— about 24,000 of us overall. A College community might seem like a cohesive target audience, but consider the challenges of serving a broadly educated readership such as ours. Just as they reside all over the world (we send the Bulletin to 107 countries), their occupations and passions span the intellectual map. And although the median age of alumni is 47, the College has hundreds of alumni in their 90s and, currently, 11 over age 100. You might think these differences create real challenges for the alumni magazine editor who aims to select stories that appeal to all. Yet as a medium, magazines provide such a deft combination of words, images, design, and packaging that they are familiar, accessible, informative, and entertaining to almost everyone. Thus, the Bulletin can be a general-interest magazine for a liberal-arts college audience without worrying that our readers cannot—or will not—want to explore new ideas and learn new things. Ultimately, what pulls Bulletin readers together isn’t the specific people or subjects treated in its pages, but Swarthmore itself. The same common interests that weave together the far-flung Swarthmore community—a shared experience, intellectual outlook, and emotional attachment to a time and place—are the warp and weft of this magazine. Look inside the front cover and you’ll feel it. Find more evidence in the passions of Mark Kimball ’94 (p. 18), the peace of Jan Chozen Bays ’66 (p. 32), the wisdom of Josef Joffe ’65 (p. 44) or the new book by Mara Hvistendahl ’02 (p. 58). Then look for your own connection to this place in “The Amazing Swarthmore Network” (p. 36). Are we National Geographic with Class Notes? Probably not. But I love magazines in more than 50 ways, and apparently, you do too. —Jeffrey Lott contributors This issue and more than 13 years of Bulletin archives are at www.swarthmore. edu/bulletin. Also on the College website: MICHAEL GLUK ’12 Watch: Studio art major Christie DeNizio ‘12 recently installed two large paintings in Sharples. http://bit.ly/denizio Listen: “I think every book of poems tells a story,” says Professor of English Literature Nathalie Anderson, reading from Quiver, her latest collection. http://media.swarthmore.edu/faculty_lectures Watch: Jed Rakoff ‘64 presents the 2011 Constitution Day lecture, “My Neurons Made Me Do It: How Neuroscience is Challenging the Law’s View of Criminal and Moral Responsibility.” http://media.swarthmore.edu/video 4 Bill Ehrhart ’73 is author or editor of 19 books of prose and poetry, most recently a collection of poems, The Bodies Beneath the Table (Adastra Press, 2010). He teaches English and history at the Haverford School and lives in Philadelphia with Anne, his wife of 31 years, who—along with their daughter Leela—is a major inspiration for his poetry. David Pacchioli writes about science, the environment, history, and food from central Pennsylvania, where he lives with his wife and son. His work has appeared in Discover, Runner’s World, Pennsylvania Heritage, and various university magazines. When he’s not at his desk or out with the dog, he is cooking, eating, dozing by the fire, or running long distances very slowly. Joan Smith ’76 is the former books editor of the San Francisco Examiner. Now a freelance writer, her work has appeared in Salon.com, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post Book World, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Vogue, and O: the Oprah Magazine. She lives on Maryland’s Eastern Shore with her husband Richard and Alex the Wonder Poodle. swarthmore college bulletin letters swarthmore college bulletin editor Jeffrey Lott associate editor Carol Brévart-Demm class notes editor Susan Cousins Breen art director Phillip Stern ’84 staff photographer Eleftherios Kostans desktop publishing Audree Penner publications intern Maki Somosot ’12 administrative assistant Janice Merrill-Rossi editor emerita Maralyn Orbison Gillespie ’49 contacting swarthmore college college operator (610) 328-8000 www.swarthmore.edu admissions (610) 328-8300 admissions@swarthmore.edu alumni relations (610) 328-8402 alumni@swarthmore.edu publications (610) 328-8568 bulletin@swarthmore.edu registrar (610) 328-8297 registrar@swarthmore.edu 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 CVIX, 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. 0530620. Postmaster: Send address changes to Swarthmore College Bulletin, 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore PA 19081-1390. ©2011 Swarthmore College. Printed in U.S.A. october 2011 MAKING SWARTHMORE BETTER ONE ISSUE AT A TIME I’d like to raise a toast to Jeff Lott, who steps down in January as editor of the Swarthmore College Bulletin after more than 21 years of service. Under his leadership, this magazine has matured with alumni and with the College, keeping us informed and interconnected. I’ll never forget the day, 14 years ago, when my son was a newborn and I finally found some time to take a nap; but a nearby issue of the Bulletin caught my eye. Soon, thoughts of a 30-hour labor and my son’s worrisome time in the ICU disappeared as I read the issue nearly cover to cover, from the article about the College’s legendary folk festivals in the 1940s and 1950s to the essay by James Michener ’29 on the need for educational reform. When I looked up again, I felt I as if I had just been reading an especially good issue of The New Yorker. I remember thinking—such literary quality in an alumni magazine? A year later, when I came to work at Swarthmore, I was not surprised to learn that the Bulletin had won numerous awards for excellence in content and design. And I was delighted to get to know Jeff, who—even at Swarthmore—stands out as an especially smart, generous, and inspiring colleague. Whereas many college or university periodicals are drab and unabashed marketing tools—not much more than a succession of cheeky photos, advertisements, and sales pitches—under Jeff ’s leadership, the Bulletin has remained relatively free of agenda-driven or sycophantic articles. A sampling of articles from the July 2011 issue offers a glimpse of the Bulletin’s range and civic engagement: “Chernobyl Witness,” described Michael Rothbart’s [’94] documentation of the aftermath of nuclear disaster; “Juvenile Injustice” profiled Edgar Cahn’s [’56] efforts to reduce youth incarceration; “Style and Substance” described some of the challenges faced by Cindi Lieve ’88 as editor in chief of Glamour Magazine; and in a modest news story we learn of the Bulletin’s most recent national award, this time for Best Article of the Year. Such articles reveal much that is worth examining, not just on campus, but in all alumni communities. I think the best way to honor Jeff ’s remarkable career and legacy will be to ensure that the Bulletin remains intellectually free and creative as a vehicle for communal inquiry and engagement. Jeff graduated from Middlebury with a degree in studio art, but he wholeheartedly embraced Swarthmore’s culture, represented it as well as anyone could, and greatly enhanced an appreciation of the importance of the arts here. Under his leadership, the Bulletin has reminded us of Swarthmore’s rich history; described its evolving campus, curriculum, and outlook; and inspired us to broaden our perspectives. Thank you, Jeff, for your creative vision, wisdom, and collaborative spirit. You didn’t sell the College to us; you helped realize a collective vision. In doing so, you made Swarthmore a better community. Andrea Packard ’85 Wallingford, Pa. ARISTOTELIAN WISDOM: VIRTUE FOR THE HAVE-NOTS In an excerpt from their book Practical Wisdom (“The Janitor and the Judge,” April Bulletin), Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe seek to deepen our understanding of ethical choice in contemporary life by combining examples, the social actors’ own reflections, and Aristotelian philosophy. What they actually offer, however, is a warmed-over version of a 19th-century ethic, familiar from Victorian novels and TV movies. It’s the narrative of the magnanimous underling, the wife/mother/servant/Jewess/ slave/poor-but-honest-worker who rises above societal injustice. In that narrative, virtue for the have-nots consists in looking with charitable understanding at the haves; it does not include the strident temptations of socialism, trade unionism, feminism, or demands for racial equality. Pushing the morality of virtuous suffering in today’s America has ideological implications, as workers’ rights shrink and employers’ demands intensify. The authors offer Aristotle as an ethical guide for this America. In assessing the value of such guidance, it’s worth noting Aristotle’s belief that some of us are natural slaves, others natural aristocrats, and that society’s benefits should be distributed accordingly. Jonathan Dewald ’68 Buffalo, N.Y. 5 from the president Stewarding STRATEGIC DIRECTIONS FOR SWARTHMORE COLLEGE REFLECTS THE COLLECTIVE WISDOM FROM OUR YEARLONG CONVERSATIONS AND PRESENTS SOME PRELIMINARY IDEAS MEANT FOR DEEPER AND WIDER CONSULTATION AMONG ALL COMMUNITY MEMBERS. By Rebecca Chopp ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS 6 Swarthmore College—as any Swarthmorean knows—is a very distinct community. We are distinct in the clarity of our mission: We teach only undergraduates, and we believe passionately in the power of ideas. We are also distinct in the clarity of our values, which are held firmly and expressed consistently in our practices: respect for the individual, consensus decision making, simple living, generous giving, the peaceful settlement of disputes, and what our Quaker founders called the amelioration of suffering, or what we now describe as setting the world aright and anew. In 1854, Martha Tyson and Benjamin Hallowell began convincing their fellow Hicksite Quakers of the need to found a college in order to prepare citizens to be both intellectually and practically trained to meet the challenges of that time. This nascent idea prompted a rigorous series of meetings and conversations that ultimately led them to conclude that: “The best interests of our Society demands an institution where our children can receive an education, in its true sense, by the simultaneous cultivation of their intellectual and moral powers.” These words fully express the long legacy inherited by each new class that enters Swarthmore College. Ten years following this landmark statement, Swarthmore was officially chartered in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which means that in 2014 we will be celebrating the College’s 150th anniversary—its sesquicentennial. Such a significant milestone offers us a distinct opportunity to reflect on our rich traditions and most deeply held values. It also affords us the chance to imagine what the future can be and what Swarthmore must do to embrace the challenges before us and before all of higher education in the coming years. Last year, we undertook a communitywide strategic planning exercise. We began by looking carefully at external factors that would play a significant role in determining our future direction—such as trends in technology; changes in the nature of teaching, learning, and research; and the uncertain economic climate we now confront. Throughout the process, we continually returned to one fundamental question: How can we best educate our students to become stewards and citizens dedicated to the pursuit of a more just, civil, and sustainable world? We asked hundreds of students, faculty, staff members, and alumni which values they most closely associate with Swarthmore. The responses were remarkably similar. Our shared values include a commitment to rigorous inquiry and imaginative thinking; providing students the opportunity to learn about self and the world; a moral commitment to make the world a better place; facilitating access to a Swarthmore education; and upholding our historic values. Noted educator Parker Palmer observes that higher education at its best is “centered on knowing the great things of the world.” Swarthmore’s heart and soul is about knowing the great things—large and small— of this world and beyond. Our students may become fascinated by recording a vanishing language. They may discover a gift they didn’t realize in computational physics or organic swarthmore college bulletin Swarthmore Noted educator Parker Palmer observes that higher education at its best is “centered on knowing chemistry. Or perhaps they will awaken a passion for Balinese music or Shakespeare that will be nurtured, encouraged, and honed here. Swarthmore is unabashedly and forthrightly an intellectual community with a deep passion for ideas. Learning, we believe, is intended both for the development of the individual and for the betterment of society. Our motto “Mind the Light” expresses our belief, again, that you must search your conscience, develop your own ideas, and express your own opinions and perspectives. In addition to knowing and discovering great things, we are also drawn to living in great ways together. Since 1864, we have inspired intellectual discovery and growth, and we have also cultivated the moral sense of how to live in a community engaged in the world. Members of our community are asked to listen respectfully and carefully to others and to engage in civil discourse at all times, no matter the vigor of their beliefs or the depth of their passions. We embrace the view that others will help us refine our ideas by expressing perspectives we have never heard before and by questioning deeply held beliefs that have never been challenged before. Here at Swarthmore, we are exposed to an abundance of talents, passions, and worldviews—all within a closeknit community where it’s safe to explore and imagine new ways of looking at and experiencing the world. Another of our most deeply held values is the College’s longstanding commitment to access—to ensure that all admitted young men and women have the opportunity to attend Swarthmore. We value access october 2011 the great things of the world.” Swarthmore’s heart and soul is about knowing the great things—large and small—of this world and beyond. In addition to knowing and discovering great things, we are also drawn to living in great ways together. because it provides the opportunity for individuals to benefit from this distinct college and for all community members to be enriched by the experience of living and learning in an inclusive and engaged community. Whether participating in a course on economic development, creating robots in engineering, or understanding the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, hearing perspectives and questions from a variety of different individuals not only enhances but also —in many ways—defines the liberal arts education. Students flourish here because of the superb learning experiences they have in classes and labs taught by exceptional faculty. In addition, students hear the hopes and dreams, thoughts and questions of people who are different when they participate in a project at the Eugene M. Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, play on the soccer field, organize a social event, direct a play, or have yet another random middle-ofthe night conversation in a dorm. Learning to live with those who are different from ourselves, learning to live in a community that cares for itself and that engages with the world, and learning to live in a sustainable fashion with the earth represent the opportunities we most want to present to our students in order that they become leaders, stewards, and citizens of the world. This fall, we are considering the draft plan presented to the Board of Managers in September. This document, Strategic Directions for Swarthmore College, reflects the collective wisdom from our yearlong conversations and presents some preliminary ideas meant for deeper and wider consultation among all community members. We have also written a briefer report that sumarizes the plan. Each of these drafts seeks to identify strengths, challenges, guiding principles, and initial recommendations intended for further comment. In the last 50 years, there has been no time more challenging to higher education. We must take the opportunity and accept the obligation to make sure we are stewarding Swarthmore in the best possible way. We look forward to vigorous conversation about the proposals in the draft plan. Your input this fall is critical, as we wish to further develop and build upon the good thinking that has occurred so far, with the aim of incorporating it into the strategic plan we present to the Board for its consideration this winter. Read and comment on a summary of the draft plan at http://bit.ly/draftplansummary 7 Even those with no yen for horticulture can’t help but be drawn to Swarthmore’s campus, with its stunning color extravaganza of lovingly tended plant collections and rolling acres of woodland graced by lofty trees. Watered by a meandering river running through it, the verdant campus provides a perfect setting for its staunch stone buildings—both old and new—that nestle among its greenery. No surprise, then, that the campus caught the attention of a group of university architects, campus experts, and students asked by editors of Forbes magazine which schools “turned their heads and why.” Forbes noted not only Swarthmore’s beauty but also the sustainability programs initiated by the College. And, as confirmation, Travel & Leisure magazine included Swarthmore’s campus on its list of “America’s Most Beautiful College Campuses,” citing its “idyllic gardens of hydrangea, lilacs, and tree peonies” and “courtyard devoted to fragrant trees and shrubs” as well as public classes on horticultural topics offered by the Scott Arboretum. PHILLIP STERN ’84 collection “THIS HOUSE WOULD LIGHT A QUAKER MATCH” MARIAM ZAKHARY ’13 In their second straight victory over the Peaslee Debate Society, President Chopp and Dean Braun convinced the audience to “light a Quaker match.” “Successful marriages depend on sharing common values and the couple being able to negotiate peacefully the settlement of disputes,” she said. Peck contended that sharing values would become tiresome. Marrying someone with different values might help Swatties better understand the world. From there, it was Dean Braun’s show. Braun asked Swatties to consider the environmental impact of the Quaker Matchbox. She argued that it is “good for sustainability because it results in a reduction in paper with each couple only getting one copy of the Bulletin, only one of any College october 2011 mailing, and, of course, a reduction in our carbon footprint by creating a built-in carpool to any alumni event.” Peck tried a different tactic. Quaker Matchbox marriages might marginally improve the environment, but didn’t Swatties deserve to marry attractive individuals, and, if so, were the president and dean aware of how rare attractive people are on campus? Chopp responded with the put-down of the night, inquiring whether a non-Swattie would even want to marry Richard Peck. Said Peck: “I don’t really have a problem with Swatties marrying each other. But I do think two Swatties running a household together could be a bit too intense.” Indeed, Peck provided a chilling hypothetical: “A kid growing up with two Swattie parents would have it rough. Imagine if he asked for something from Abercrombie. The response would be something like… ‘No, Athanasius. We are non-conformists in this house. Now pack up your didgeridoo because you have a lesson in a half hour. After that, you have cross-country unicycling practice. But don’t worry, then you get some scheduled free time … during which you will read Joyce, and only Joyce.” As the debate concluded, Peaslee President Linnet Davis-Stermitz ’12 asked audience members to indicate which team they felt had won. A quick vote resulted in the second straight victory for Chopp and Braun in the now-annual event. “Dean Braun and I are humbled by this victory,” said Chopp afterward, “but since neither of us had the opportunity to attend Swarthmore, the real victory goes to the students who may marry a Swarthmore alum someday—even one they may not know currently—and become a Quaker Matchbox couple dedicated to improving the world while having a satisfying marriage.” Peck characterized the outcome differently. “Although we might not have done the best debating, President Chopp did tell me, ‘Richard, I will go to the Outback Steakhouse with you….’ So I would call the debate a win.” —Patrick Ross ’15, Adapted from Daily Gazette, Sept. 8, 2011 COLLEGE HIRES FIRST SUSTAINABILITY COORDINATOR COURTESY OF CLARA FANG Members of Swarthmore’s Amos J. Peaslee Debate Society faced off against President Rebecca Chopp and Dean of Students Elizabeth Braun in early September for their second annual public debate. The proposition was “This house would light a Quaker match” or “Should Swarthmore students marry one another?” Chopp and Braun argued for the Quaker Matchbox; Debate Society members Richard Peck ’12 and David Mok-Lamme ’14 argued against the proposition. Chopp stated that Matchbox couples (defined as two married Swarthmore alums) donate greater amounts to the College on a more consistent basis. Peck and MokLamme responded that Swarthmore grads are more preoccupied with saving the world than making money, and few Swatties pursue lucrative careers. By encouraging the courtship of non-Swatties with “real jobs,” Swarthmore would receive more donations, they argued. Chopp, lightning-quick, pivoted. Clara Changxin Fang has been appointed for the academic year 2011–2012 to serve as the College’s first environmental sustainability coordinator. She will assist in the creation of the College’s climate action plan—a guide to reducing Swarthmore’s greenhouse gas emissions in alignment with the American Colleges and University Presidents Climate ComClara Fang mitment signed by President Rebecca Chopp in May 2010. As a staff member of the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, Fang will work closely with the newly created Climate Action Planning Committee to complete an updated greenhouse-gas inventory that shows Swarthmore’s energy use and carbon emissions in different sectors from 2005 to the present. In addition, Fang will work with the College’s Sustainability Committee on other projects, conduct outreach efforts, and serve as a resource for students and community members interested in environmental issues. The new position is the result of a year’s effort by the Sustainability Committee, the Lang Center, student environmental groups, and other community members to create a more unified and consistent approach to managing sustainability efforts on campus. Before coming to Swarthmore, Fang worked as sustainability coordinator for the City of Albany, N.Y., where she helped to develop the city’s greenhouse gas inventory and climate action plan. She received a master of environmental management from Yale University, where she also worked for the Center for Environmental Law and Policy and the Office of Sustainability. In addition, she has worked for a consulting company that helps businesses and institutions develop renewable energy projects and expand the clean energy market. Fang has a B.A. from Smith College, where she received the Outstanding Student Leader Award for her work on campus sustainability. 9 collection Wide Discussions of Draft Strategic Plan The process of setting strategic directions for the College has Strategic Directions lists several serious challenges to the continued this fall in classic Swarthmore fashion—with lots of Swarthmore model and the liberal arts: “rapidly expanding thought, questions, and discussion. Beginning with a review by the knowledge and changes in teaching and learning, often driven by Board of Managers of a draft plan at its September meeting and technological advances; demographic trends that are changing continuing with a series of conversations the profile of the traditional college-age both on and off campus in October and population; changing attitudes about November, the process is aimed at producing higher education, including concerns about Five Principles for a final document to be considered by the the practical value and cost of a liberal Swarthmore’s Future Board in December. If the plan is approved, arts education; [and] unstable financial the College will then develop an overall conditions in the domestic and global • Swarthmore acts to advance prioritization and implementation plan for economy, resulting in, among other things, uncompromising excellence in the its recommendations. increasing need for financial aid.” These study of the liberal arts, embracing “The Board had a vigorous discussion challenges “underscore the need for critical both rigorous inquiry and of the plan and was enthusiastic about the inquiry, creative thinking, and ethically and imaginative thinking. initiatives proposed,” said Board Chair socially responsible leadership,” the plan says. Barbara Mather ’65 of the Managers’ The summary also provides a set of • Swarthmore cultivates an intentional September meeting. “Board members felt principles and opportunities in five distinct substantive community in order strongly that it was important to preserve but interdependent areas of College life and to shape engaged and thoughtful access to the College and the intense concludes with a section expressing the leaders who will contribute to a interaction with the faculty that is one of importance of lifelong alumni relationships more just, civil, and inclusive world. the hallmarks of a Swarthmore education— with the College. Each of the five principles and to encourage more cross-disciplinary (see box) is followed by a short list of • Swarthmore recognizes that experimentation in the curriculum. There recommendations. The full plan, the faculty is critical to ensuring was also appropriate concern about the need from which the summary is drawn, the excellence of the academic to be careful and deliberate as we implement contains more detail on these program. Our professors should recommendations, given the current recommendations; it is also available be dedicated to teaching financial climate.” at the strategic planning website. undergraduates while pursuing A robust strategic planning website has The draft plan states that Swarthmore’s research, scholarly writing, and encouraged engagement in the process from community “is strengthened considerably creative production in the arts. both near and far. A summary of the current by enduring engagement with our alumni.” draft of Strategic Directions for Swarthmore It proposes to create greater opportunities • Swarthmore strives to enroll College is now on the Web, inviting further for alumni to connect meaningfully with students who will thrive comment from alumni and others. students and proposes a Lives in the Liberal intellectually, socially, and Beginning with a set of core values that Arts Fellows Program that will demonstrate personally while helping enrich our emerged consistently through the planning to students how alumni have put their community. We value access as an process, the draft addresses Swarthmore’s liberal-arts education into practice. individual opportunity for students strengths and the challenges it faces. The In addition, it envisions more and as an institutional responsibility core values, derived from the College’s opportunities for alumni to provide to educate students who— Quaker heritage, are identified as respect “expertise and leadership in areas such as collectively—represent the world. for the individual, decision-making by admissions, career services, development, consensus, simple living, social responsibility and other areas that benefit greatly from • Swarthmore maintains its tradition and justice, generous giving, and peaceful alumni support.” of bold leadership in undergraduate settlement of disputes. The Board of Managers is expected to education in order to create The draft plan describes the College’s key evaluate a final draft during its December practical, visionary solutions to the institutional commitments as “academic meeting. If the plan is approved, next steps most complex issues confronting rigor and creativity; our desire to support will include setting priorities and writing our world. access and opportunity for all students, implementation plans that will include a regardless of their financial circumstances; campus facilities master plan, a financial Read and comment on a our commitment to a diverse and vibrant plan, and a diversity and inclusivity plan. summary of the draft plan at community of students, faculty, staff, alumni, It is anticipated that a capital campaign will http://bit.ly/draftplansummary and parents; [and] our belief that we have a follow. responsibility to improve the world.” —Jeffrey Lott 10 swarthmore college bulletin MAJOR LEAGUE Garnet soccer star Morgan Langley ’11, who was recruited to the Harrisburg City Islanders after graduation, has continued to be a standout even at the professional level. In mid-September, after a successful season with the Islanders, during which he earned 10 starts and scored two goals—including one that clinched a spot in the playoffs for his team—major league soccer team Philadelphia Union signed the midfielder to its roster. In a September interview with the Delaware County Daily Times shortly after his debut with the team, Langley said, “To be standing here in the Union locker room right now, and to just get my first appearance for the Union, is something that, four or five years ago, I don’t think I would’ve ever dreamed.” Watch Morgan Langley talk about how his experiences at Swarthmore prepared him for a life in professional soccer. http://bit.ly/langley11 october 2011 11 collection From Connecticut To Swarthmore—Via Kandahar ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS Even as a young boy growing up in Hamden, Conn., first-year student Thomas Fortuna says he was moved and disturbed by news reports of atrocities occurring in various parts of the world. He began to envision himself as an officer in one or another branch of the Armed Forces, running a special operations group to help combat genocide. Adamantly against killing, he was encouraged and intrigued by reports of new research in the nonlethal weapon development industry, such as that being explored by the Department of Peace Studies at Bradford University, U.K. After five years in a Marine non-combat unit—including service in Afghanistan—Tommy Fortuna is pleased to be at Swarthmore, taking courses on happiness, non-violent conflict resolution, philosophy, and cosmology; playing rugby; and participating in the Dare to Soar program, Model United Nations, and volunteer fire fighting. In 2005, during the summer after Fortuna’s junior year of high school, at a time when reports of mass executions and other acts of violence against the Iraqi civilian population were flooding the national news, the 17-yearold signed up to join the Marine Corps after finishing high school. 12 “I joined up in the hope of becoming a firefighter, helping to save lives and contributing to the stabilization effort,” he says. After enduring three months of boot camp, instead of firefighting, he was assigned to aviation ordnance, for which he spent eight months training, followed by almost two years in Yuma, Ariz., as an ordnance technician upand downloading ammunition to and from aircraft guns and troubleshooting problems with planes. Within his first 18 months of service, he received three merit promotions and attained the rank of corporal. Two years into his five-year stint as a Marine, Fortuna decided to apply to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, but shortly after sending in his application, he was deployed to Kandahar, Afghanistan, where he served as a work center supervisor for a weapons ordnance shop. “I worked 14 hours a day in the center. Sometimes I slept there,” Fortuna says. “Days run into each other—you work, you sleep, that’s all. That’s the life of a support Marine.” He’d been in Afghanistan for only two months before being accepted by the Naval Academy and was sent back to the States early to attend the Academy’s Preparatory School. “By the time I was ready to actually go to the Naval Academy, though, I’d decided to apply for conscientious objector (CO) status,” he says. “It’s a very long process,” he adds, “so, while they dealt with my application, I was sent to Okinawa, Japan.” Fortuna spent a year in Japan, including participation in the tsunami relief effort in Iwakuni. One month before his fiveyear contract with the Marines was up, his CO status was approved. “Thinking back on my decision to join up,” Fortuna says, “I’ve been using the analogy of Don Quixote—someone who believes he’s going to change the world, then slowly realizes that it’s much more complex than he thought. I’m still trying but in a different way.” Seeking an intellectual environment with an emphasis on social and ethical responsibility, Fortuna found his way to Swarthmore, where, he says, he’s had an easy adaptation. “I absolutely love it,” he says. “This is where I should have been from the beginning.” And yes, he’s finally training to be a volunteer firefighter. —Carol Brévart-Demm THE CHESTER FUND PLANS A CHARTER SCHOOL The Chester Fund for Education and the Arts—a private foundation conceived of and funded by members of the Swarthmore community, including John Alston, associate professor of music and director of the Chester Children’s Chorus—has announced plans to open a charter school in Chester, Pa. The charter school will build upon and expand the successful arts-centered program currently offered at the Chester Upland School of the Arts (CUSA), a public elementary school, founded in 2008 through the fund’s partnership with the Chester Upland School District. This year, 281 children in pre-K through 5th grade are enrolled at CUSA. Financial support from foundations, corporations, and individuals enables The Chester Fund to provide arts enrichment programs, technology programming, teaching assistants in every grade, and an after-school program for the upper grades at CUSA. CUSA has achieved an Adequate Yearly Progress rating on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment tests for the past two years. Last year, fourth-graders made 20 percent gains in reading and 15 percent gains in math proficiency—a marked improvement on their performance as third-graders. However, massive state government cutbacks in schooldistrict funding in 2011 have led to reductions in both staffing and educational programs. As a result, administrators of The Chester Fund have decided to terminate the partnership with the school district at the end of June 2012 and apply to swarthmore college bulletin DONORS HONORED IN ELECTRONIC REPORT Generous contributions from alumni, parents, and friends ensure that Swarthmore can continue to offer a world-class liberal arts education—and the opportunity for all qualified students to attend regardless of their financial circumstances. Swarthmore donors and volunteers are recognized each year in the Report of Gifts, now produced electronically to save money and natural resources. If the College has your email address, in the coming weeks, you will receive a message with a link to the July 1, 2010 to June 30, 2011 Report of Gifts on the College website. To protect your privacy, the report will not be accessible to Web search engines. If you’d like to receive the report and the College does not have your email address, please send it to alumnirecords@ swarthmore.edu. To receive a printed copy of the report, please send a request to giftreport@ swarthmore.edu or call (610) 328-8568. —Susan Clarey october 2011 COURTESY OF THE ARTIST open a new charter school in order to protect its teachers and programs. In a press release, Alston said: “We deeply appreciate the partnership we’ve had with the Chester-Upland School District over the last three years, but we also recognize that to continue educating Chester children, we have to be able to design our own programs and hire and keep the best teachers. And the only way to do this is to apply for a charter.” Pending approval of the application, the new school, which will be called the Chester Charter School for the Arts, will open in September 2012. The art of Orit Hofshi—internationally known as a printmaker but whose work also includes paintings, inked and carved woodblocks, and tusche crayon rubbings—is bold, dramatic, and disturbing but simultaneously conciliatory and inspirational. Hofshi grew up in Israel in the kibbutz Matsuva, the daughter of Holocaust survivors who helped to found the kibbutz—one of Israel’s first. Her childhood was shaped by conflicts over territory, ideology, and national boundaries. Director of the College’s List Gallery Andrea Packard ’85, who has known Hofshi since 1986, when they were students at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, was instrumental in bringing the artist’s exhibit Resilience to the gallery from Sept. 8 to Oct. 22. “Hofshi’s haunting vistas of ruins and rugged landscapes respond to both the sublime forces of nature and the consequences of war,” Packard writes in her essay “Realism and Resilience in the Art of Orit Hofshi,” which appears in the catalog accompanying the exhibit. “Through her art, she seeks commonalities of experience that transcend nationalism and sectarianism. Addressing the prevalence of violence and dislocation, she asserts the need for reflection, persistence, and understanding.” Remnant, 2008 (above), one of the exhibited works, is an ink drawing on carved wood panels, 103 x 141.7 inches. —C.B.D. Watch Orit Hofshi discuss her exhibit at http://media.swarthmore.edu/video MOST POPULAR FILMS AT McCABE LIBRARY All-time top circulated films Big Lebowski The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover Chocolat Amadeus Love’s a Bitch (Amores Perros) Love Actually Last Temptation of Christ The Godfather (original) Mulholland Drive Amélie (Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain) Last year’s most circulated films Lion King Up Burn After Reading Mulan Big Lebowski Revolutionary Road Twilight Milk The Godfather (original) Hercules (Disney) Hot new films Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince The Fighter The Prophet (Un Prophète) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows The King’s Speech Top new TV series The Wire Vientos de Agua All-time popular TV series Sex and the City The Sopranos —Linda Hunt, McCabe Library 13 collection 150 Upperclass students were making their way back to the College and first-years just completing their final orientation activities in late August, when Hurricane Irene—ironically, the name of the ancient Greeks’ goddess of peace—blasted in from the South. Roaring with 85 m.p.h. winds through campus, the storm dumped seven inches of rain onto ground already waterlogged after the wettest August on record. Crum Creek spilled out of its banks and transformed Crum Meadow into a lake that almost covered the standing stones of the Henge (see above). To protect the residential area of the campus, College facilities and environmental staff members, in anticipation of the storm, had cleaned gutters, downspouts, and drains to allow maximum runoff and placed sand bags and hay bales at the ready to ward off floodwater. They also cleared the floors of flood-prone indoor areas—such as the College Bookstore storage room—and pumped repeatedly to keep the water at bay. Thanks to the thorough preparations, no buildings suffered major damage. And by Monday morning, with Irene careening northward, leaving brilliant sunshine in her wake, some pools of water on Parrish lawns, masses of various-sized branches and leaves carpeting the ground, and one uprooted catalpa tree were the only visible signs that this Irene—not living up to her name— had come and gone. —C.B.D. RECYCLING MADE SIMPLE To simplify the lives of the College’s community of passionate recyclers, a new single-stream-recycling system has been introduced this year, which enables all recyclable materials to be deposited into the same bins. Recycling containers around campus that were previously limited to receiving only one type of material are now depositories for all paper and cardboard that are not contaminated by food, including envelopes with clear address windows, metal clasps, and string ties; aluminum and bimetallic cans; glass of all 14 colors; and most types of plastics except for types 3, containing vinyl or PVC, and 6, containing polystyrene, all of which may release toxic breakdown products when heated. All recyclable matter is being sent for sorting to Philadelphia-based Blue Mountain Recycling. “Many local municipalities, including the Borough of Swarthmore, are turning to single-stream recycling,” says Jeff Jabco, director of grounds and coordinator of horticulture. —C.B.D. In 1861, the founders of Swarthmore had a plan—and they had a problem. The subscription campaign to raise money for the new school got off to a good start in January. Friends loved the idea. Then came April. The country was at war. In May 1861, the Committee charged with raising subscriptions in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting reported that “Everywhere throughout the country business of all kinds not concerned in the prosecution of the war has suffered greatly, securities have fallen in value and not a few merchants and businessmen are already threatened with the loss of their all. As a consequence, every measure not pertaining to the public security or to the relief of the anticipated suffering has been for the present thrown into the shade. This Committee have therefore with the utmost reluctance postponed the important and interesting work committed to them with the urgent desire that the sorrow and difficulty, which at present environ us and which must claim our thoughts and interest for some time to come, may not wholly obliterate the deep concern for the advancement of [the] moral and intellectual amongst us; and may we not hope that many of those already enclosed in this scheme of a Friends Boarding School may yet aid in its successful establishment after the present unhappy difficulties in our country are at an end.” Fortunately for the founding of the College, this was a bump in the road rather than a full stop. Subscriptions continued to come in, and Friends continued to see the need for a Quaker college. By the end of 1862, the founders would be working even harder to realize their dream. —Christopher Densmore Curator, Friends Historical Library NATIONAL ARCHIVES CRAIG KNAUER 150 YEARS AGO: FRIENDS, WE HAVE A PROBLEM swarthmore college bulletin Post–9/11: A Compassionate World, JIM GRAHAM a More Secure World Ten years after the attacks on the World Trade Center, the College held a series of campus events that commemorated the tragedy and emphasized nonviolent resistance against terrorism. On Sunday, Sept. 11, students, staff, and community members gathered at Friends Meeting House for a period of silent reflection and remembrance in the Quaker tradition. Students from different religious traditions offered Buddhist, Jewish, and Christian prayers that each evoked the central theme of finding peace in times of discord and conflict. Participants decorated and wrote personal reflections of 9/11 on prayer flags, which were later placed in the Shane Lounge in Parrish Hall. Junior Quitterie Gounot described the memorial service as “subdued” and “reflective” but “overwhelmingly positive.” According to Gounot, the Quaker tradition of community was “particularly well suited to the occasion,” encouraging everyone to come together at a vulnerable time when “our values, our sense of collective and individual identity, and our feeling of safety are challenged or threatened.” In her remarks, President Rebecca Chopp spoke about first finding a “discipline of self ” before embarking on a “journey of peace” and healing in today’s post-9/11 age. Associate Professor of Sociology Lee Smithey and Assistant Professor of Statistics Lynne Steuerle Schofield ’99 gave moving speeches that appealed to the vision of a more “equitable” and “compassionate” world. Scholfield’s mother was a passenger on the october 2011 American Airlines flight that crashed into the Pentagon. (The lone casualty among Swarthmore alumni that day was Jonathan Randall ’82, who died on the 95th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center.) Schofield pointed out that the focus on our own victimization has bred even more hatred in the wake of grief and tragedy. “Hatred cannot be an enduring response,” Schofield said, adding that what she will always remember about the dark period following her mother’s death is the “network of rebuilders” that served as her essential emotional and moral support. But even more easily, she recalls the “compassionate response” in the numerous social works that arose around the families of the 9/11 victims. Smithey referred to the “resilience of these families,” enabling them to “channel their grief into programs at a social level.” According to Schofield and Smithey, keeping a sense of social initiative alive helps the community to move on from its collective grief. Instead of building on grief, people should start to refocus their energies toward participating in concrete, empowering social activism for the long-term good of the community. Smithey and Schofield as well as Visiting Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies George Lakey, who is also a research fellow of the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, explored the specific nature and values of this form of activism at a teachin on nonviolent resistance the following day. Focusing on the question of the strategic potential of nonviolent campaigns against Ten years after the attacks on the World Trade Center, the campus community came together to discuss nonviolent conflict resolution and remember the loss of life caused by the terrorist attacks. state terrorism, they pointed out that, statistically, nonviolent campaigns are 53 percent more successful than violent means in achieving their causes. Lakey drew on the example of Norway after its recent terrorist incident, after which Norwegians “reasserted core Norwegian values of openness, democracy, and tolerance” instead of resorting to the violence and paranoia that pervaded post-9/11 American society. “True security comes from making a more compassionate world,” Schofield reasserted, emphasizing that individuals should start from the micro level to contribute to a greater vision of peace in the world community. Other events in honor of the anniversary involved a panel discussion about the lasting impact of media coverage around Sept. 11, and the official launch of Lakey’s Global Nonviolent Action Database. —Maki Somosot ’12 Watch President Chopp lead a panel discussion on the aftermath of 9/11 and the role of government on the global stage: http://media.swarthmore.edu/video. Browse the Global Nonviolent Action Database at http://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu. 15 collection Kicking Around Europe Swarthmore’s women’s and men’s soccer teams went international this summer, crossing the Atlantic to test their skills in a preseason series against European teams. Spending nine days in Germany, Belgium, and The Netherlands in July, the women’s team worked with a Dutch coach from the Royal Dutch Football Association and played a couple of games— first against a German team from Bad Neuenahr, made up of first- and second-division professional players; and then Borussia Mönchengladbach, one of the best women’s professional teams in the country. Although the Garnet lost both games, they managed to score against both teams. Sightseeing trips to the medieval town of Rothenburg ob der Tauber, business hub Frankfurt, picturesque Amsterdam, and the scenic River Rhine provided fascinating down time, but the highlight of the Garnet’s trip was the opportunity to attend the FIFA Women’s World Cup Finals in Frankfurt and cheer on their own national women’s team in a breath-snatching match against Japan. The Garnet men took their turn in August, spending 13 days in Greece, dividing their time between the spectacular island of Crete and the ancient city of Athens, where they played five games, including three against teams from the Greek Superleague—young players with modest professional contracts who undergo full-time intensive training and preparation for participation in the top national team. The Garnet finished up with three wins, one draw, and one loss. Off the field, they visited the ruins of the Minoan palace of Knossos, where legend places Theseus’s defeat of the minotaur; the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion; the Acropolis; and the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. They also participated in community service projects, volunteering at the Institute of Children with Special Needs in Athens and cleaning up trash in a beach park near the city of Marathon. —Carol Brévart-Demm For more on the Garnet women’s soccer Europe trip, go to http://bit.ly/garnetwomen; and for the men in Greece, visit http://bit.ly/garnetmen. PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALYSSA BOWIE ’12 Clockwise from top: There’s no better way to see Amsterdam than by bicycle. Alyssa Bowie ’12 displays an impressive variety of chocolate after a visit to the Lindt Chocolate Factory Outlet near the quaint town of Valkenburg in The Netherlands. Before the Garnet’s first match of the tour, Garnet captain Samantha Song ’12 exchanges pennants with the captain of Soccer Club 07, Neuenahr, Germany. 16 swarthmore college bulletin PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARK ANSKIS Clockwise from top: The Garnet men, visiting the Acropolis in Athens, pose in front of the Parthenon. A young Malia supporter may have switched allegiance after receiving a Garnet soccer scarf from the Swarthmore players and coaching staff. Garnet goalkeepers Peter Maxted ’14, David D’Annunzio ’12, and Jake Tracy ’13 can hardly believe that the sea below the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion could be so blue. october 2011 17 Good Food, Good Earth— Good Ideas THE LOCAL FOOD MOVEMENT HAS TAKEN OFF AROUND THE COUNTRY. BUT NOT MANY ARE TAKING “LOCAL” AS FAR AS MARK GUENTHER KIMBALL’S ESSEX FARM. By David Pacchioli Photographs by Michael Forster Rothbart ’94 swarthmore college bulletin Steering carefully up the rutted driveway, I look to the house for signs of life. It’s just past the dinner hour, a rare moment of pause on a farm in midsummer. The North Country air is cool as I step from the car, and the view is east. Under the blue wash of Vermont’s distant mountains, Essex Farm’s 500 acres spread out lush and green. Before I can turn around, Mark Guenther Kimball ’94 is bounding out to greet me, no room for doubt in his rapid stride. He is 38 but looks younger, a rangy six-foot-four, grizzled with three days’ beard. “Your timing is perfect,” he says brightly, leading me into the house. Not two minutes later, I’m sitting down to the meal he’s placed before me. It’s a simple supper, chicken and greens and a neighbor’s bread, but the freshness of the food, its plain goodness here in the farmhouse kitchen, is almost shocking after the long trip. As I sit and savor the unexpected bounty, Mark attempts to bring me up to speed. It was a wet spring. The wettest ever. Crazy wet, in fact, with flooding so high the bathing beaches on nearby Lake Champlain are still underwater and the ferry to Vermont shut down for a month. The vegetables are weeks behind—“you may have noticed coming in”— and the corn and wheat are a total loss. But things are mostly righted now. A stretch of sunny weather has boosted crops and buoyed spirits, and Essex Farm is gearing up for a big weekend of haying. If the weather holds out, they hope to bring in 3,000 bales. The eating over, Mark proffers bread and fresh-churned butter for my motel breakfast—and he’s on his feet, headed for the barn. “I have to do my evening rounds.” I had recognized that barn from the jacket of Kristin Kimball’s fine 2010 memoir The Dirty Life, which chronicles how she and Mark met and fell in love and survived their first eventful year together here in upstate New York. Though it makes much of her sudden transformation from trendy Manhattan journalist to Carharttwearing farm wife (“From City Girl to Hog Butcher” is the way All Things Considered put it), the book is also a vivid portrait of the deep joys and constant rigors of a particular, and venerable, type of farming. In the book, Kristin describes Essex Farm as “either antique or very modern depending on who you ask.” Or where you look: Though the farmyard is littered with rusting old plows and ironwheeled cultivators, the pasture beyond the barn hosts a large array of solar panels. The latter provide all the farm’s electricity. The former are for hitching up to horses, who supply most of the rest of the horsepower. Sparked by concerns for nutrition, food quality, economics, and the environment, the local food movement has taken off around this country. “Locally sourced” and “locally grown” are all the rage at restaurants. The number of farmers’ markets has tripled in 15 years. Community-supported agriculture organizations, or CSAs, in which members purchase a share in a farm’s production, now number more than 4,000 nationwide, according to the USDA. Not many are taking “local” this far, however. Using organic methods for soil improvement and pest control, relying mostly on The 500-acre farm relies on horsepower for most field work, like raking hay into windrows in preparation for baling. A good haying will yield about 3,000 bales. october 2011 It’s August and tomato season at Essex Farm. On Fridays (“Distribution Day”), members of the community-supported farm can take as much food as they want for the coming week. Members pay one price annually but have no fixed share— and Essex supplies a complete healthy and satisfying diet: beef, chicken, pork, eggs, maple syrup, grains, flours, dried beans, herbs, fruits, and 40 different vegetables. “We get to see what people take, and we can adjust what we’re growing. It’s a self-correcting system,” says Mark Kimball. horses instead of tractors, the Kimballs aspire to nothing less than a whole-diet model of agricultural production. They raise everything, that is, from pastured beef to sunflowers—not just for their family, as their great-grandparents might have done, but for a whole community. Members pay one price annually, around $3,000 per adult, and each week they take whatever and as much as they can eat of “beef, chicken, pork, eggs, maple syrup, grains, flours, dried beans, herbs, fruits, and 40 different vegetables,” as Kristin lists it. “Our goal is to provide everything they need to have a healthy and satisfying diet, year-round.” There are no typical days on a diversified farm. What’s typical is running headlong into the next crisis—and if you’re lucky somehow solving it. That’s one of the things Mark Kimball (he took Kristin’s surname when they married) loves most about farming. “The more I can get my hands on something, figure it out, the more excited I am,” he says. This morning that means puzzling out the west barn electrical panel to replace a faulty breaker. It isn’t that far from the way he was raised. As a boy, Mark explains: “I lived on a homestead with my parents, who had left New York City. They dropped everything and moved to the country. What I’m doing is sort of an extension of that.” He has apparently always been remarkably self-possessed, driven, and sure of himself. Arriving at Swarthmore as a teenager, he remembers: “I became disillusioned very quickly with the cost of education. It wasn’t just Swarthmore— among the liberal arts colleges, Swarthmore is incredible, great—but I saw people still playing with drugs and sex, paying that kind of money—and it seemed really crazy to me. Almost immediately I thought about dropping out.” Supportive deans and a semester working in economically blighted Chester convinced him to stay. By senior year he was class co-president. “Ironically,” Mark reflects, “Swarthmore’s ability to spend large amounts of money is one of the foundations of my entrepreneurial zeal. There were opportunities there to use resources without a lot of oversight other than ‘Spend it well,’” he explains. “So, for instance, I helped a friend start a bike repair shop. I could see the power of what money can do, and that you could make mistakes and still survive. That economics is fascinating to me.” His path into agriculture became clear during junior year via former biology professor Mark Jacobs. “He was so old school,” Mark remembers. “I loved the way he taught. For his crop plants class, he arranged these weekend field trips to innovative farms and places like Linvilla Orchards and the Rodale Institute. And I thought, ‘This is amazing. Hard physical work and cool science!’ And that was it.” Senior year, Kimball bicycled across the country, stopping to work at farms along the way, reporting on each experience. He wrote a thesis: “A nitrogen primer for curious farmers.” After graduating, he pursued apprenticeships, traveled to Venezuela and India, learning all he could about different ways of farming. When it was time, an opportunity arose in central Pennsylvania, and he found himself running a CSA. Before long, however, his frustration with the standard model led him to think bigger. “Don’t get me wrong,” he says. “I love the CSA model. I think it’s absolutely awesome that people are doing anything at all to be more conscious about what they eat—I absolutely love that. But why stop with vegetables? What about meat and eggs and grain? Nobody gets all their calories from a CSA.” The idea of a fixed share also irked him. “Your share comes in a box, you get what the farm is producing, period. But you don’t eat 12 more beets just because the farmer grew more beets that year,” he says. “If it’s really about the food, it shouldn’t be that way.” Instead, “We wanted to do what Kristin calls eating like a farmer: ‘Let’s go out and grab what we want.’ So we set it up like a supermarket, where you take what you want. We get to see what people take, and we can adjust what we’re growing. It’s a selfcorrecting system.” He stops working at the circuit box, flips a switch. There’s a rattling noise overhead— it’s the sound of the conveyor that will carry bales of hay the length of the barn for stacking. He smiles. “That should save us 50 hours this weekend.” a program to defray the costs of organic certification and another that increased spending for organic research. These concessions, embedded for the first time in the legislative document that guides the nation’s food policy, have heartened some supporters of local agriculture, as has Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s voiced commitment to promote local and regional food systems and farm-to-school nutrition programs. In all, however, support for local producers amounts to just a tiny fraction of the total bill, which continues massive subsidies to large-scale grain producers. Even so, in the run-up to the 2012 version, there has been considerable backlash from supporters of conventional agriculture. By the most generous estimates, “local foods” make up only two to three percent of total U.S. food production, according to Brian Snyder, executive director of the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture (PASA). But, “We’re big enough It was Kim Tait, owner of Tait Farm Foods in Centre Hall, Pa., who gave Mark his early chance. Tait’s is a third-generation family farm that includes, in addition to the thriving CSA Mark started, an on-farm processing plant that produces more than 50 organic specialty foods, and a retail store that supports more than 100 regional food producers and artisans. Kim Tait’s recent appearance before the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture is a mark of how far the local food movement has come, and how far it has to go. In hearings preliminary to the drafting of the 2012 Farm Bill, Tait told the Senate committee how her farm had benefited from provisions in the 2008 bill, including If some criticize the local food movement as elitist, the province of “foodies” alone, to Mark that’s a source of frustration. “I would love to find a local food distribution system that doesn’t just market to true believers,” he says. “I’d love to see a good cheeseburger made with local ingredients.” 20 swarthmore college bulletin now to be seen as competition,” Snyder says. With more than 7,000 members from 40 states and seven countries, PASA, based in rural Millheim, Pa., is one of the largest and most influential local food organizations in the country. Founded in 1990, its original educational mission has grown increasingly to include advocacy. “There’s more and more pressure from our members to engage in policy,” Snyder says, “making sure the people who write the laws understand how they’re impacting small farmers.” Some of the issues Snyder works on are region-specific: fertilizer run-off into the Chesapeake Bay and the increasing impact Bring your spoon—it’s time for ice cream—but first Kristin (opposite page) has to milk the cow. Kristin Kimball met Mark Guenther (below, third from left) when she was assigned to write a magazine article about his farm in central Pennsylvania. A year later, they leased 500 acres in the Champlain Valley and founded Essex Farm together. She never wrote the article. october 2011 of Marcellus shale drilling on Pennsylvania’s rural communities. Others are broader in scope. But the single issue that has occupied most of his time over the past two years is one of the hottest battlegrounds in today’s agriculture: food safety. Increasingly frequent, large-scale food contamination incidents—such as a recent nationwide recall of 36 million pounds of ground turkey—have spurred tighter federal regulations aimed at protecting consumers. Unfortunately, Snyder notes, these heightened restrictions disproportionately impact small growers. “There’s an assumption—in industry, in government, and among the general public— that the path to safer food is to bring it all into one place, treat it, and send it back out,” he told a recent interviewer. “The fact that the assumption doesn’t change, even though contamination keeps happening, is scary.” A safer food system, Snyder contends, would take advantage of the diversification and sense of personal responsibility inherent in local and regional operations. “Small farmers can make bad decisions too,” he says, “but when that happens, statistically, the damage is minimal and the cause is quickly clear. On balance, you’re going to get a cleaner product that’s not as widely distributed and whose origins are easier to trace.” Weekday lunch on Essex farm. The smoky tang of frying beef mingles with the lush fragrances of tarragon and basil. By ones and twos they show up at the open-air pavilion, strolling on foot or ditching bicycles—the dozen or so young farmers who make up Mark and Kristin’s current team. Their backgrounds are varied and impressive. Chad, the horseman, studied forestry at nearby Paul Smith’s College and last worked at horse-drawn logging in Virginia. Courtney, the butcher, came to Essex after finishing welding school. (“It was either this or join the pipefitter’s union,” she says.) Racey, in charge of chickens, 21 spends two months a year in Africa on development projects for the World Bank. Asa, the vegetable foreman, is also a stone mason; and Nathan, who runs the dairy, is a seismic engineer. Then there are the short-timers: Mo, a Harvard Ph.D. student in music theory; and Matthew, who teaches high-school in inner-city Chicago. The latter are here just for the summer, but most of the others hope to move on someday to farms of their own. The local-foods movement has galvanized a whole new generation of back-to-thelanders, a vital influx in a country where the average age of a farmer is 57. But the obstacles to starting out are substantial, and access to affordable land is chief among them. Organizations like PASA are beginning to help, with innovative pilot ventures like a land-lease program, says Kristin Leitzel Hoy The farm has grown from seven members in 2004 to 170 today. Members pay about $3,000 per year, with a discount for additional members of the same household—and children under 13 are free. “There’s no better place in the world than behind the team’s willing haunches, smelling the good smell of their sweat, listening to the hypnotic thunk of the big feet,” Kristin wrote in New Farmer Journal in 2005. 22 swarthmore college bulletin ’07: “The idea is to connect aspiring farmers to landowners who want to see their land farmed.” Hoy’s duties at PASA include managing the organization’s showcase event, the annual “Farming for the Future” conference, which draws some 2,000 attendees from around the country. She grew up on a farm five miles from PASA headquarters. “I’ve always had this sense of being connected to my food, that the lamb chop on your plate was the sheep that bowled you over that morning,” she says. “At Swarthmore, I developed a greater awareness of the societal importance of reconnecting to our food supply.” When she returned home to central Pennsylvania after graduating—“because connection to place is very important to me,” she says—“it was really wonderful to find this organization so close by.” In addition to her work for PASA, Hoy is a regional coordinator for “Buy Fresh, Buy Local,” a statewide program aimed at linking local producers with consumers. One of her program partners is Martha Hoffman ’07, who is also in Millheim, on her own local-foods adventure. “Kristin brought me up here for a visit, and I fell in love with this valley,” Hoffman explains. “The sense of community and mutual support made me want to give something back.” In February, she opened a coffeehouse on Main Street, serving food mostly from local providers. Learning on the fly, she has already built up a network of farmers and customers—and an affinity for barter. “It’s been great to see people who have lived here all their lives recognizing the resources that are right around them,” she says. Keefe Keeley ’06 is also part of the broader movement. Keeley was born and raised in the Driftless region of southwest Wisconsin, long an organic hotbed. During his senior year at Swarthmore, he was awarded a Watson fellowship to study international agriculture. Returning home, he started a small orchard on his family’s land. Now he works with friends who are running a CSA and also runs a technical assistance program for small farmers for the state of Wisconsin. In the fall, he’ll start a graduate program in agro-ecology in Madison—close enough, he says, that he can still tend his trees. “It’s important to me to be a part of a community that’s living close to the land.” Essex is certainly an organic farm, from Essex is certainly an organic farm, from the composted manure and cover crops to the labor-intensive weed control. But like a growing number of farms in the local food movement, it is not USDA Certified Organic. Instead, Kristin says, “We can show people everything we’re doing and answer their questions directly.” october 2011 the composted manure and cover crops to the labor-intensive weed control. But like a growing number of farms in the local food movement, it is not USDA Certified Organic. “That’s primarily because of the paperwork and fees involved,” Mark says. “I’m glad [certification] exists, but it’s a federal bureaucracy. It’s very hard to do diversified farming that way.” Instead, he and Kristin, like others, rely on building relationships with their members. “That’s the nice thing about direct marketing,” Kristin says. “We can show people everything we’re doing and answer their questions directly.” Certified or not, the essential commitment is to good food, the best they can produce. Mark and Kristin are both avid and accomplished cooks; their mutual love of eating well, and the desire to share that love, underlies Essex Farm as much as anything else does. Mark was mastering Julia Child in middle school; Kristin prepares sumptuous feasts for the weekly team dinner and has written for Food & Wine magazine. Yet if some criticize the local food movement as elitist, the province of “foodies” alone, to Mark that’s a source of frustration. “I would love to find a local food distribution system that doesn’t just market to true believers,” he says. “I’d love to see a good cheeseburger made with local ingredients.” “Good food should not be out of reach,” agrees PASA’s Snyder. “It should not be a luxury. And often it is.” To Snyder, that’s largely a matter of misplaced priorities, seen in both the increasing regulatory burden placed on small producers and the continuing subsidies for commodity grains. “Take a look at the new USDA nutritional guidelines,” he says. “Shouldn’t we be subsidizing crops the USDA says people should eat?” At its best, it would seem, the return to older ways of farming—and eating—is a way not of separating but of re-connecting to food, to the Earth, and to one another. At Essex Farm, at least, that return is not sobersided or doctrinaire, but a conscious choice. This much becomes clear in the reasons Kristin gives for relying on horsepower instead of diesel. It isn’t a matter of efficiency, although horses are “scalable” and don’t get stuck in the mud. It isn’t even so much environmental friendliness, although horses harvest their own fuel. “The best reason 23 to use horses,” Kristin says, “is if you like horses.” Mark, for his part, may eschew email and even computers generally (“I try to stay away from screens,” he says), but, “There’s nothing inherent about modern ways that I don’t support,” he once told the environmental writer Bill McKibben. “I’m trying to find out ways to increase the quality of my life, and I think, by extension, the lives of those around me.” Friday. Distribution day. The weekend’s haying has started, and out in the far field, a gang of six, led by Mark, works steadily at baling, stacking, and bringing in the loaded wagons. At the barn, 20-year-old Joe, a summer hand from Baltimore, has been slinging the 60-pound bales onto the conveyor all afternoon, and his neck and arms and reddened face are spackled with dust and sweat. “You ought to try this work for a day,” he says, stifling an impish grin. Meanwhile, at the pavilion, Racey is hustling to finish the weekly set up. Crates full of oversized vegetables crowd the rows of wooden tables. The freezer is stocked with freshly killed chickens. Luscious red raspberries, just coming in this week, take their place front and center as the members begin to arrive. Kristin Kimball works at a table in the shade, washing eggs, and a steady stream of members wander back to see her, to chat. One would like a book signed for his sister. Another asks about a barter—family portraits for food? Several offer to come and help with the haying, and each offer is gratefully accepted. The first-year sign-up for Essex Farm’s bounty was seven hardy families. Now in their eighth season, Mark and Kristin are feeding 10 times that—170 people. It’s still early in the rebirth of this once dormant landscape, but already it’s a remarkable achievement. “I was shocked we could come into an area this small with an idea as radical as this farm was and have it succeed,” Kristin says. “The community has been behind us from the start.” More recently, the success of The Dirty Life has bumped up membership substantially—and also drawn flocks of visitors. Promoting the book, she admits, takes her away from the farm—and the Kimballs’ two young children—somewhat more than she would like. Growth means change, and the prospect has her a little wary. “The demand has been strong,” she acknowledges. “But I enjoy it when it’s small. The excitement for me comes from getting better at what we do, rather than bigger. Mark, though…he’s a classic entrepreneur. He loves something new, which right now means expansion.” Indeed, “I could see it growing infinitely,” Mark had told me the day before. “We could feed 800 people on this land, in terms of calories.” He’s working on plans for a new distribution center, including a bakery. “That will solve some of the larger farm problems,” he says confidently. “But this is an issue we’re wrestling with, and we definitely need to resolve it in a way that’s comfortable for both of us.” “There’s nothing inherent about modern ways that I don’t support,” Mark once told the environmental writer Bill McKibben. “I’m trying to find out ways to increase the quality of my life, and I think, by extension, the lives of those around me.” Freelance writer David Pacchioli’s most recent contribution to the Bulletin was “Rock and an Old Place: A Family Farm Rich in History Faces the Relentless March of Natural Gas Drilling” (Oct. 2010). He lives in the mountains of central Pennsylvania. Essex Farm includes two large barns, a stateinspected milk house, a greenhouse, a distribution pavilion, and a butchery. It has three full-time employees, four year-round part-timers, plus seasonal workers and volunteers—especially at haying time. 24 swarthmore college bulletin october 2011 25 Eat Well, Seek Justice IN CHESTER, PA., URBAN PROPHETS AND ACTIVISTS ARE OFFERING GOOD FOOD, BUILDING COMMUNITY, AND GENERATING SOCIAL CAPITAL AT THE CHESTER CO-OP. By Mark Wallace Photographs by Jim Graham “Mark! Do you want these asparagus? If you don’t take them, they’ll go bad,” says Tina Johnson. “Sure,” I reply, knowing that the asparagus had already endured a final round of weekly sales activity and, without refrigeration, probably wouldn’t last another week. It was a year ago, and the end of my Saturday morning volunteer shift as a cashier at the Community Grocery Co-op, a market in Chester, Pa., a downtrodden post-industrial city of 35,000 people. The Co-op is an experiment in food democracy and sustainable living. Tina Johnson, its director, purchases wholesale fruit and vegetables— much of it locally grown—and, at that time, retailed her goods twice weekly in a jazz club in downtown Chester. It’s the only grocery store in Chester open on a daily basis because the supermarket chains have redlined the city as too great a financial risk. In poor, minority communities awash in chronic environmental and health problems, services like the Co-op are a lifeline for residents where fresh, affordable food is not easily found. In these settings, food security—ready access to reasonably priced and nutritious food for healthy living—is a form of environmental justice. Chesterites like Tina Johnson, a longtime community activist, partner with local farmers to support regional food production without relying on the fuel-intensive and land-depleting agriculture that underpins the globalized food economy. The Co-op also increases Chester’s social capital by uniting the city around good eating, but it lacks the financial capital to fully support its mission. Without a steady source of income, the Co-op must purchase foodstuffs one week with the proceeds from what it sold the week before. A year ago, it could not afford the basic trappings of most grocery stores: shelving, signage, carts, even refrigeration. And without refrigeration, a lot of the produce quickly spoiled. So on that spring morning, after a good day of strong sales, I was happy to take home some leftover asparagus at the end of my shift—but also sad that an enterprise so vital to the health of the community is so marginal that it can’t afford to bind over week-to-week its principal product, fresh produce. The lack of access to good food in many inner-city communities is an environmental justice problem embedded within a host of other social and economic issues. Only a holistic analysis of the systemic forces that tie together seemingly disconnected social pathologies can make sense of—and provide solutions for—the eco-crisis in urban communities today. The quest for eco-justice and sustainable living in blighted communities is inextricably linked, for example, to the need for good schools and workforce development. Chester has become a poster child for small U.S. cities that have all the problems of big city life with few of the resources to tackle them. The quest for sustainable eco-justice in Chester—and other inner-city communities—only makes sense in relation to a deeper understanding of the historic, economic, and political forces that have fueled the crisis. In Chester, the “American Dream” has failed struggling individuals and families mired in failing schools; dangerous environmental conditions; and low-paying, dead-end jobs—or no jobs at all. But I and others live in hope that the city’s dire conditions will change. HOPE AMIDST DESPAIR In 2003, I forged a covenant relationship among clergy and activists in Chester and nearby Swarthmore. I’d heard about some of Chester’s urban prophets, and I wanted to be part of the transformation and hope that these agents for change were bringing to the city. Chester is a gritty urban community. Swarthmore is a leafy green college town. My Chester colleagues and I have crossed racial and cultural divisions in order to make our collaboration work. This has not been easy. swarthmore college bulletin ministers infamously told African slaves that the object of Christian hope is not changed conditions in this world but blissful existence in the world beyond. Today as well, many clergy counsel the faithful to avoid large-scale justice movements in favor of personal salvation and morality. But this type of politically indifferent, otherworldly religion has nothing to do with the message of Jesus. At the inauguration of his public ministry in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus quotes the Book of Isaiah, saying, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and to set free all of those who are oppressed” (4:18-19). Remembering Paul’s mandate to have the mind of Christ, the real Christian message is clear: be like Jesus through solidarity with the poor, the incarcerated, the disabled, and all others who are oppressed in any way. This revolutionary social theme is the essential thread that ties together the whole Bible. THE SHREDDED FABRIC OF CHESTER As in many blighted, drug-infested areas, the social and economic fabric of Chester has been shredded by three equally powerful forces: a school-to-prison educational system, ecological violence, and poverty pimping—profiting from the misfortunes of others by appearing to act on their behalf. Chester’s schools are among the worst in Pennsylvania. City residents have the lowest literacy rate in the state, and the school district is consistently ranked 499th or last among the 500 school systems in Pennsylvania according to standardized test scores. During the past two decades, the school district has been managed by At dawn on a summer morning, the Chester Co-op lights up the street with hope. a for-profit “education” vendor that propelled the schools’ downward This year, the organization moved from borrowed space in a local jazz club to a new slide and then later by a politically appointed part-time overseer facility with proper shelving and refrigeration to remain open six days a week. with a track record of financial misconduct and political cronyism. The result is that most students from grades one through 12 cannot Mistakes have been made and misunderstandings have arisen. read at grade level, the high school dropout rate is 50 percent, and The central message of the Christian gospel is straightforward: almost as many high school students commit crimes and become incarcerated as graduate and go to college (about five to six percent in Follow Jesus by committing oneself to radical personal and social both cases). transformation. St. Paul writes in Philippians: “Have the mind of But there is hope amidst the despair. Both the for-profit school Christ, who was in the form of God, but emptied himself, became a servant, and suffered death on a cross—and therefore, God raised manager and the corrupt overseer were thrown out in favor of a him up” (2:5-9). The Christian way is new state-appointed oversight board. The community worked tirelessly to to follow Jesus through self-emptying bring down the previous manager and resurrection hope. Self-emptying Many clergy counsel the faithful to avoid and overseer and is guardedly means abandoning self-gratification in optimistic that the new school board order to serve the interests of others. large-scale justice movements in favor of will move away from the “plantation” Resurrection hope is the confidence management style of the past to fully that God is able to raise up everyday personal salvation and morality. But this type incorporating the voices and interests people to revolutionize systemically distorted structures, no matter of politically indifferent, otherworldly religion of teachers, parents, and children in how hopeless and entrenched these the decision-making process. structures might appear to be. I cannot has nothing to do with the message of Jesus. Chester’s environmental crisis is work in Chester without such hope. a twofold problem that stems from For me, the dysfunction is too deeply chronic poverty. On one hand, food entrenched, the pain and suffering too security looms large in impoverished long-standing to be overcome without it. neighborhoods where groceries must be bought on the cheap. On Yet tragically, Christians are notorious for translating the language the other, the degradation of Chester’s physical environment is now of hope into vapid pie-in-the-sky foolishness. Antebellum white firmly established because its economy is partially dependent upon october 2011 the management of toxic wastes within the city. In economically distressed communities, the waste industry’s assurances of a stabilized tax base and jobs for unemployed residents are impossible to resist. But what is the real cost of such promises? Four waste-treatment facilities now make Chester their home—a sewage treatment plant, a metal-recycling plant, a regional incinerator, and a medicalwaste autoclave (currently not operating). The clustering of waste industries only a few yards from residential areas has brought about an infestation of rodents, noxious odors, hundreds of trucks a day at all hours, and toxic air emissions. Resurrection hope propels me and other area residents to resist the imposition of environmental hazards on Chester. We march in the streets, meet with community officials, and attend regulatory hearings to fight against toxic racism. In recent years, at the urging of local citizens, the state did not approve the siting of a soil treatment plant, a local paper mill was not allowed to burn tires for fuel, a biotech firm that would have increased overall pollution in the area was kept out, and the sewage treatment plant was successfully sued by nearby residents for violating federal and state air and water pollution laws. Finally, Chester boasts a spectacular waterfront along the Delaware River—once home to shipbuilding and manufacturing jobs. But the industrial base collapsed two generations ago, rendering the riverfront a wasteland of empty factories and crumbling infrastructure. Recently, the waterfront has been designated an economic development zone, attracting, among other industries, a Harrah’s casino and major league soccer stadium—which promised to make lots of tax-free money for its developers, since new businesses in development zones have been exempted from property taxes until 2013. Instead of being required to make measurable commitments to workforce development as a prerequisite for setting up shop, the casino, stadium, and other developers are grabbing up valuable riverfront real estate and offering little to local workers in exchange. Community activists and clergy formed the Fair Deal Coalition to pressure city government and new developers (e.g., Harrah’s) to finance the workforce and skills development necessary for Chester’s poor 28 swarthmore college bulletin to compete in the economic boom the new waterfront growth promises. But in light of the city’s broken schools, the economic benefits of the casino and stadium will not flow toward residents without a focused effort to train and employ its underserved population. Unless city officials can be persuaded to fund sustainable economic development for disadvantaged residents, Chester’s new economic order will be built on the backs of low-income, minority residents. The Chester Co-op both is and is not about food. Its mission is to provide fresh nutritious food at affordable prices. But it also helps develop the community’s sense of pride and leadership. A NEW ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEM In recent years, a new environmental problem has confronted communities such as Chester: epidemic levels of obesity and diabetes among both adults and children. At one time, poor diets in urban areas led to underweight residents. Today, poverty and food insecurity mean more Americans are becoming overweight—and suffering from obesity-related diseases—by relying on added high-fat and high-sugar diets. The alarming rise in obesity rates is evident in body mass measurement data since the 1960s. By the year 2000, 65 percent of the U.S. adult population was overweight, and the climb in obesity among children has been even more alarming. Since the 1960s, the rate of obesity among children and adolescents has more than tripled, and the current rate of overweight and obese children is roughly 30 percent. Of even greater concern, 15 percent of preschoolers aged 2 to 5 are overweight. Overweight children can experience low self-esteem, poor body image, and isolation from their peers. And medically, serious lifelong disabilities such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease can be caused by obesity. Indeed, the surge in cases among children and teens of type-2 diabetes is particularly alarming, because type-2 used to be considered primarily an adultonset disease. This form of diabetes is not a congenital condition and is entirely preventable by eating a healthy diet and getting regular exercise. But the very social conditions that make healthy eating and exercise part of a child’s life have rotted away in many urban settings. Adult caregivers feel pressured and distracted; healthy food options are limited and often expensive; and leisure time—especially in neighborhoods with high crime rates where children are at risk of injury—is now more devoted to sedentary indoor pursuits such as watching television or playing video games than to outdoor play and activities. These factors conspire to keep kids hooked on low-quality, high-fat diets of junk calories and fast food that create the false sensation of having one’s hunger satisfied. At first glance, the urban food problem may not seem like an environmental issue. When we think about “environmentalism” we often think about wilderness preservation or battling big polluters in urban settings. But food insecurity, along with the concomitant health problems it spawns, is just as much an environmental problem as saving forests and wetlands or protecting city neighborhoods from polluters. Yes, it is wrong for waste haulers to dump and process trash in disempowered cities that have been hoodwinked by the promotional pitch that the waste industry can revitalize these particular areas. But it is just as wrong for supermarket chains—the primary providers, for good or ill, of basic nutrition for most Americans—to redline a whole city by declaring it off-limits to grocery store investment. In the case of the waste industry and the food industry, the real driving force is obeisance to the god of the market. Market forces dictate what forms of development can and cannot take place in America’s struggling cities. Many believe that the government’s legal apparatus should be pressed into the service of insuring education and health coverage for most citizens—especially for children. But most Americans do not think that clean ecosystems or access to good food is a natural right. For this reason, I think the Opposite: Co-op director Tina Johnson selects fruit at the Philadelphia Wholesale Produce Market. She has also developed relationships with local farms that directly supply the Co-op with meat and produce. Right: Johnson completes her purchases as Jeff Cao ’10, a Co-op intern, looks on. october 2011 29 eco-justice crisis today is twofold: It stems from the dangerous clustering of biohazards in communities already suffering from ill health—and it consists of the total absence, as is the case of Chester, of any viable food sources to nourish city dwellers. The Chester Co-op both is and is not about food. On the one hand, its mission is to provide fresh nutritious produce at affordable prices to local residents by establishing good relations with local farmers to supply the store. But on the other, it helps develop the community’s sense of pride and leadership. Obesity and diabetes haunt urban neighborhoods cut off from mainstream retail stores. Chester has not had a supermarket for more than a decade. Residents have had to travel out of town to shop and many do not have their own transportation for this purpose. The Co-op addresses the problem of food security and the health crisis with an elegantly simple business model: Members own and run the store themselves. This keeps prices low, stops the loss of inventory through theft and spoilage, and generates few administrative overhead costs because “member-owners” contribute to the venture by working in the store three hours per month. The Co-op teaches residents how to manage a for-profit business. The store makes a direct investment in human capital, strengthening urban-rural ties to area farms as well. It develops residents’ life skills and management potential in a convivial, democratic work environment. The Co-op’s oversight board and membership meetings are run by local folk, many of whom have never held positions of responsibility. At a recent meeting, the convener began with the following: “I have never spoken before a group before and want to thank Tina and the rest of you for giving me the opportunity to lead this meeting.” The emerging field of sustainability economics speaks about the “triple bottom line” in successful green businesses for the 21st century. Such enterprises not only produce financial capital but also develop human and environmental capital through just management-employee relations and sustainable relations with the natural world. The Chester Co-op is an eco-justice experiment that has made healthy nutrition a living option for hard-working urban dwellers. As an eco-justice–seeking enterprise, the Chester Co-op market is an exercise in sustainable agriculture. It provides an alternative model of healthy food consumption and just relations with our human and animal neighbors. Its wholegrain bread is produced by a local bakery, its eggplants are harvested down the street through an urban garden project, its peaches and corn come from nearby farms in Adult caregivers feel pressured and distracted; healthy food options are limited and often expensive; and leisure time— especially in neighborhoods with high crime rates—is now more devoted to sedentary indoor pursuits than to outdoor play and activities. Pennsylvania’s Amish country. The Co-op cannot get all of its produce locally, but it continues to strive to offer shoppers positive food choices that are not dependent on the high-fat, high-sugar products the global food system delivers to low-income families, posing health risks that are now reaching epidemic proportions. Today, the Christian gospel has been co-opted by politicians and preachers who trumpet personal morality at the expense of fighting against the structural conditions that lock down America’s underclass in depraved and dehumanizing urban environments. This is a betrayal of the Christian message. The defining feature of Jesus’ ministry was solidarity with the poor and oppressed. To be a revolutionary Christian today is to follow in Jesus’ steps and care for the marginalized and forgotten in a world hell bent on unsustainable agricultural and economic policies. When despair for the world overwhelms me, the problems of Chester and the wider planet seem impossible to overcome. But then I recall Jesus’ life of compassion and liberation, and I am empowered to live to fight another day. Mark Wallace is professor of religion. This essay is adapted from his book Green Christianity: Five Ways to a Sustainable Future, © 2010 by Fortress Press. It is reproduced by permission of Augsburg Fortress Publishers. All rights reserved. Frozen meats are also offered at the Co-op, which is staffed by member-owners who contribute three hours per month of their time. 30 swarthmore college bulletin Hands in the Soil They’ve lived in many places—Europe and Canada, on the West Coast, and in New England—but Arthur and Carol Merten Upshur ’83 have always returned to the southern tip of Virginia’s Eastern Shore, where Upshurs have lived and worked for nearly 400 years. “This is a longtime dream,” says Arthur of the small organic farm he and Carol created four years ago on a neck of land stretching from the town of Machipongo, Va., into the Chesapeake Bay. A 1.5-acre vegetable garden and another 6.5 acres of hay, which they cut and bail for mulch, is the extent of their working farm. But their community supported agriculture (CSA) business now supplies 45 families in the region with fresh, chemical-free produce. They named their business Copper Cricket Farm—a conflation of Arthur’s nickname “Cricket” and the surname of their business partners and neighbors, Bob and Melody Copper. Bob works across the Bay in Virginia Beach during the week, but helps on weekends. Melody is a schoolteacher and works on the farm all summer. To get to Copper Cricket Farm, visitors turn off the main highway and travel to the end of a gravel road called Solitude Trail, where the first thing they see is the red New England–style barn the Upshurs built by hand using their own fallen trees and donated wood and other scrap materials— with lots of neighborly advice. In the foreground is the garden, surrounded by a tall, sturdy fence of wire and wood to keep out deer, rabbits, and other pesky critters. In october 2011 Jennifer Trinh ’11 (left, center), enjoyed working on Copper Cricket Farm (above) with owners Arthur and Carol Merten Upshur last summer. JOAN SMITH By Joan Smith ’76 JOAN SMITH “YOU SHOULDN’T EAT ANYTHING FROM A FARM YOU DON’T LIKE TO VISIT,” SAYS ARTHUR UPSHUR. HE AND CAROL MERTEN UPSHUR HAVE A FARM WORTH VISITING AGAIN AND AGAIN. the background are golden fields of hay. Each week, the farm delivers to their lucky subscribers’ overflowing crates—made by hand from scrap wood and gorgeously arranged—of freshly picked flowers and herbs and every kind of vegetable imaginable. Depending upon the season, there are wild raspberries and blackberries from bushes along the wooded path from the gardens to the Upshur homestead, which overlooks the great mouth of a creek that empties into the Chesapeake. Here, the Upshurs raise oysters and hunt for crabs. With their children Elizabeth ’07, Raleigh, and Mary Alice ’12, the Upshurs have been coming to this place every summer since they bought the house in 1994. “Our kids’ childhood memories are of coming down here and playing on the water,” Arthur says. When an adjacent farm became available, they decided to sell their house in Connecticut and quit their jobs—Carol was a middle-school math teacher; Arthur was what he calls a “corporate handyman,” an executive for the French food products multinational Groupe Danone—to become full-time farmers. “It’s hard to explain to people,” says Arthur, “but growing food is a very satisfying thing,” The couple is passionate about good food. Arthur likes to say “you shouldn’t eat anything from a farm you don’t like to visit.” Jennifer Trinh ’11, who interned on the farm this summer, says the food was so good she was afraid she’d suffer withdrawal when she left for graduate school at the University of Santa Cruz in the fall. Copper Cricket is “more than organic,” Trinh wrote on her blog, The Buff Tree. The Upshurs eschew all pesticides and fertilizers, using instead “just their bare hands to hunt for pests, and they attract beneficial insects (who kill the nasty ones) with flowers and other plants.” Jen and fellow intern Tilly Philbrick (Tufts ’11) spent many a morning stretched out alongside a 50-foot row of tender young plants (Carol says they’ve found that 50 feet is a nice, manageable length for a morning’s weeding or debugging) feeling for bugs, then squishing them—not an easy chore for a confirmed vegetarian. Jen says the work was “hard, but utterly rewarding. It’s a great feeling to see crops go from seeds to plants and finally bear fruit.” It’s the same kind of quiet joy that inspires the Upshurs, who rise every morning at 5, happily planning the day’s work and baking the bread that will serve as the foundation for delectable meals from the day’s harvest. Most days they work until dark. They farm intensively and strategically, practicing crop rotation and companion planting. They compost and use drip irrigation, with taps on timers at the end of each bed. They weed by hand, endlessly. But for all their care, the work of a farmer is vulnerable—to drought and storm, to plagues of insects. Last spring, they lost every squash plant they’d grown to an explosion of squash bugs and cucumber beetles. “The plants were just overwhelmed,” says Arthur ruefully. “But that’s the way it is. We just start new ones. We just keep going.” When Eating, Just Eat JAN CHOZEN BAYS ’66 HAS A MINDFUL PRESCRIPTION FOR REORDERING OUR DISORDERED RELATIONSHIP WITH FOOD. ISTOCKPHOTO.COM By Elizabeth Redden ’05 32 It is not just whether you are hungry, but how. There are seven kinds of hunger, writes Jan Chozen Bays ’66, a pediatrician and Zen teacher, in her recent book, Mindful Eating: A Guide to Rediscovering a Healthy and Joyful Relationship with Food. There is eye hunger, and there is nose hunger, motivated by the visual appeal and aromas of food, respectively; and there is mouth hunger, driven by the tongue’s desire for new sensations or textures. “I call the mouth a cavern of desire,” says Bays. It is never satiated. “Has your tongue ever told you, ‘Stop, stop, I don’t want to eat more?’” There is hunger of the mind, fueled by thoughts about what you should be eating—or should not be eating—and hunger of the heart, fueled by a feeling of loneliness, of emptiness. There is stomach hunger, which everyone recognizes, but there is also a deeper and more profound bodily hunger than that— cellular hunger, a call for specific nutrients that the body needs, which manifests in a desire for red meat, say, if you’re anemic, or orange juice if you have a cold. “If we are to return to a healthy and balanced relationship with food, it is essential that we learn to turn our awareness inward and to hear again what our body is always telling us about its needs and its satisfaction,” Bays writes. “To learn to listen to cellular hunger is the primary skill of mindful eating.” Mindfulness, as Bays defines it, “is the act of paying full, nonjudgmental attention to our moment-to-moment experience…. Through mindful eating we can learn to be present when we eat. It seems so simple, to be aware of what we are eating, but somehow we have lost track of how to do it. Mindful eating is a way to reawaken our pleasure in simply eating, simply drinking.” At the Great Vow Zen Monastery in Clatskanie, Ore., where Bays lives and teaches, at least one meal a day is eaten in accordance with the Zen ritual of oryoki, which translates roughly as “just enough.” The meal is eaten in silence, save for chanting, out of a special set of black bowls of varying sizes that stack together. The biggest bowl is generally reserved for grain such as rice or quinoa; the second contains a bean, egg, or tofu dish; the third holds salad or vegetables; and the fourth is filled with tea. For utensils, there is a lacquer spoon, a pair of chopsticks, and a spatula with a cloth tip that the diners use to clean their individual bowls when they are done. “[Oryoki] includes not just mindful eating but careful attention to all aspects of the meal,” Bays writes. “There is a precise way to lay out the nested swarthmore college bulletin eating bowls, to serve and receive food, to hold the bowls and utensils Bays remains on the staff of the Children’s Hospital at Legacy while eating, to clean the bowls, to dry and wrap them up again.” Emanuel in Portland, Ore., and regularly provides training on Bays began practicing Zen meditation in 1973, during a year recognizing child abuse. But she has largely scaled back her medical in Australia between her pediatric internship and residency. practice, and today, she says, “Pretty much my life is a Zen life.” Immediately, she loved it: “I think the reason I loved it She and her second husband, Laren Hogen Bays, are the is that it reminded me of my childhood. We lived in a co-abbots and were among the founders of the Great rural area when I was growing up, and I would spend Vow Zen Monastery, which they converted from an Saturdays outdoors in the forest by myself, very “When you elementary school in 2002: It sits on 21 acres of land, meditative, trying to be so quiet that the animals encompassing forest and meadow, an organic garden, wouldn’t detect me.” eat, you want to and two 20-by-80–foot greenhouses. The school She grew up mostly in upstate New York, where library is the meditation hall; the classrooms are her father was a professor of library science at turn off the thinking dorm rooms. The music room is now the practice the State University of New York–Albany. (“We space for the monastery’s marimba band. had a house full of overdue library books,” she mode and turn on the The monastery, which has a resident says.) But she had spent her early childhood community ranging from 12 to 25 and hosts years in Alabama, where her father taught at awareness mode and just up to 60 people during retreats, is one of just the historically black Talladega College, and a handful following the Japanese Zen tradition two of her teenage years in Korea. be fully present with in the United States. “One of the reasons we Bays majored in biology at Swarthmore founded it was that Zen Buddhism was becoming and attended medical school at the University the food, without quite popular in the United States, but there’s a of California–San Diego. With her first husband, tendency for it to get diluted,” says Bays. “It’s widely she had two sons before and during medical school anxiety.” accessible, but there’s also a need to anchor the deep respectively and later adopted a daughter from end of spiritual practice.” Vietnam. After working as a general pediatrician, A typical day at Great Vow begins with the wakeshe switched to an exclusive focus on child abuse and, up bell at 3:50 a.m. and includes meditation in both in 1987, helped found the CARES (Child Abuse Response and morning and evening with two work periods and temple cleaning Evaluation Services) Northwest Center, where doctors work in in between—plus five rounds of chanting a day. Six days of each coordination with professionals from law enforcement and child month are spent in silence. As for oryoki, the ancient formal eating protective services. The center sees about 120 patients per month for ceremony, Bays writes that it “has significance both in the mundane suspected abuse or neglect. “To be in the midst of so much human world and the world of mystery that interpenetrates it. In the suffering every day is very tough,” Bays says. “I couldn’t have done it mundane world, it is eminently practical—a way to feed the hundreds if I hadn’t had my meditation practice to help clear my mind of all of or even thousands of monks who gathered in the monasteries of the horrible things I heard during the day.” China and Japan with a minimum of dishes to wash.” Oryoki Recitation: “The first portion is for the Three Treasures. The second is for our teachers and parents. The third is for all nations and all beings. Thus we eat this food with everyone. We eat to stop all harming, to practice serving, and to accomplish the Awakened Way.” WWW.ORDINARYMIND.COM october 2011 33 “We wouldn’t think of eating out of bowls, day after day, that have food and eating” at what she sees as its source—the mind and the never been washed,” Bays writes. “And yet we try to function with a heart. “The mind has two modes—thinking and awareness. When mind that is never washed clean of thoughts. They pile up endlessly you eat, you want to turn off the thinking mode and turn on the upon each other like decaying bits of food, stirred around by each awareness mode and just be fully present with the food, without newly added thought…. In the world of mystery, oryoki reminds us anxiety.” that emptiness is fundamental.” “If you’re really present while eating you’ll enjoy it more, you’ll Mindful Eating represents a fusion of Bays’ backgrounds in have a richer experience, and you’ll probably eat less, if that’s your meditation and medicine. Although she was inspired by the goal. You’ll feel more satisfied. enthusiasm for mindful eating retreats hosted by the monastery, her There’s an old Zen saying, ‘When book is written with a much more general audience in mind. As eating, just eat.’” “We wouldn’t think of she writes in the first chapter: “This book is written for all those who would like to improve their relationship to food. Whether Elizabeth Redden ’05 is eating out of bowls, day you have a moderate tendency to overeat, as many of us do, or a freelance writer and whether you are struggling with obesity, bulimia, anorexia, instructor of undergraduate after day, that have never been or other such problems, this book is for you.” The book is writing at Columbia accompanied by an audio CD with guided exercises on University. washed. And yet we try to function mindful eating and includes many practical tips (see box). with a mind that is never washed clean Above all, Bays wants to take on what she describes as a “serious epidemic of disordered relationships to of thoughts. They pile up endlessly upon each other like decaying bits of MINDFUL EATING PRACTICES food, stirred around by each newly added thought.” • Eat until you are two-thirds full, then take a drink and rest a bit. • Eat slowly, savoring each bite. Find ways of pausing as you eat, such as putting down your fork or spoon between bites. • Chew your food thoroughly. This not only allows you to derive more pleasure from the textures and flavors, it also enhances nutrient absorption. • Above all, know when it is not the body but the heart that is asking to be fed. Give it the nutrition that fills it up—whether that be prayer or exercise, or time with friends, family, or pets. From Mindful Eating: A Guide to Rediscovering a Healthy and Joyful Relationship with Food (Shambhala Publications, Boston, 2009) by Jan Chozen Bays ’66. The book was edited at Shambhala by Eden Steinberg ‘90 and incorporates research done by Jean Kristeller ‘74. “So it was really a collaborative Swarthmore girls’ project,” says Bays (right, with husband Hogen Bays). 34 swarthmore college bulletin The Wine Guy JOHN FISCHER ’81 DELIGHTS CLIENTELE WITH PERFECT COMBINATIONS OF FOOD AND DRINK—AND TEACHES HIS STUDENTS TO DO THE SAME. By Carol Brévart-Demm As the wine guy—“not sommelier, because that’s French”—at the internationally acclaimed Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in Hyde Park, N.Y., John Fischer ’81 is used to hearing enthusiastic and grateful comments from clients who visit any of the institute’s five restaurants. But even he was surprised when a female diner jumped up from her table in the elegant, award-winning Escoffier Room—the CIA’s French restaurant—and hugged him. She’d just finished her meal of duck confit with a sauce incorporating walnuts and currants, accompanied by a Belgian-style Maudite brown ale from a Montreal brewery that Fischer had recommended. “She was not inebriated—just besotted with that combination of food and drink,” says Fischer, adding, “It’s important for me to try to get wine and food together in front of people in a way that they can experience both the way they should be experienced.” Author of three books on table service, bistros and brasseries, and cheese, Fischer insists that he entered the food business quite by accident. His route to the CIA was circuitous, and, although he didn’t realize it at the time, he actually found his direction as a Swarthmore undergraduate. He jokes that his only marketable skill on graduating from the College was the bartending he’d learned while working at events organized by the Office of Alumni Relations or by his fraternity Phi Psi. A psychology major also came in handy. “After all, bartending is counseling and medicating, but using bar stools instead of a couch,” he jokes. After Swarthmore, in the course of a number of what he believed at the time to be stop-gap jobs—“while I looked for a so- october 2011 called real job, possibly in business”—Fischer learned butchering and clam and oyster shucking, continued to tend bar and also served as a waiter. Realizing that he enjoyed this work, he began to envision a “real job” in the field of restaurant management. In 1986, he enrolled in a two-year Associate in Occupational Studies in the Culinary Arts degree program at the CIA— which he refers to as “the mother ship of American food and cooking”—to learn to cook. “Everyone there thought I was nuts to spend two years and a lot of money if I didn’t want to be a professional cook, but I knew that, for me, this experience would unlock the black box of the kitchen, which I thought of as a miraculous place where pieces of paper went in and food came out. It was here that I learned what went on in between,” he says. A field externship at Le Bernardin—a Zagat, Michelin, and New York Times top pick—at the end of his first year and networking during his second year ensured that he had no problem finding work after graduation. He advanced quickly to become wine-and-beverage director or front-ofhouse manager in several high-class New York City restaurants and wine bars. “Being a wine guy in New York City is still one of the favorite parts of my career—being in the wine industry in what is arguably the greatest wine city in the world,” he says. Fischer returned to the CIA in 2000 as an instructor/lecturer. Since then, he has spent time at Camp David, training staff in wine and service. In 2005, he completed an M.S. in education. Now an associate professor of hospitality and service management, he teaches advanced wine and beverage courses One of the restaurants at the CIA is a showcase for exclusively local meats, fish, produce, wines, and beers, also used in the other campus restaurants as far as is practical. In beverage management courses, students learn about local wines, beers, and spirits, often during field trips to wineries, breweries, and micro-distilleries. “Wine in the absence of food is all well and good, but for it to be used to its best effect, it should be with food,” says John Fischer (above). and a freshman experience course. For seven years, he was the “maître d’” instructor in the Escoffier restaurant that—like all CIA eateries—also serves as a classroom for students pursuing a culinary arts degree. “Beverage management is becoming very popular among our graduates as a career choice,” Fischer says. “It’s an almost perfect hybrid of front- and back-of-house tasks. I love it, because you’re involved in both sides of the restaurant. You’re dealing with product and flavor and taste, you’re also in charge of purchasing and maintaining inventory—and you’re on the floor talking to guests, selling wines, and making cocktails. Being the guide, allowing them to enjoy the experience at a greater level than they ever would have without your help is very satisfying— especially when they get up from the table and hug you.” The Amazing Swarthmore Network M S A N D 10 W A Y E S T E T S N U H I T D A D O H O S P L U G Y O U R R I R T R A V E V E L C R E S E L F I N N T A T E I F U N D E Y THE COLLEGE’S HEART MAY BE ON CAMPUS, BUT ITS NETWORK REACHES EVERYWHERE. “In traveling around the world meeting alumni,” says President Rebecca Chopp, “I’ve come to think about them as part of a worldwide Swarthmore network. Its heart may be located on campus, but its reach is everywhere. Swarthmore is as real for alumni in Hong Kong and San Francisco, in New York and New Delhi, in Rwanda and Rio de Janeiro, as it is for those in Swarthmore, Pa.” The strategic plan that is being discussed at the College this fall aims to make this Swarthmore network more visible, more engaged, more connected—and then to use it to foster significantly more engagement between alumni everywhere and people at the College. “I’d love to see alumni think of Swarthmore as a kind of home base—a place to come back to, a place to connect with, a place to engage,” Chopp says. “I’d love to see them use their experiences and knowledge to give us ideas and suggestions about how we can best equip our students with the critical intellectual tools they’ll need to thrive in tomorrow’s world.” Traditionally, alumni have contributed 36 By Susan Cousins Breen, Carol Brévart-Demm, and Jeffrey Lott Illustrations by Jason Marz their ideas and expertise by joining the Alumni Council or the Board of Managers. These remain important avenues of connection—as do the numerous Swarthmore Connection groups in cities around the world. So do the more than 800 alumni interviewers who serve the Admissions Office each year. But there are many other ways for Swarthmore alumni to engage with each other and, importantly, with the College. As envisioned in the plan, fostering this kind of engagement requires three things: First is connecting alumni to what’s going on at the College today—through this magazine and other communications, via the Web and social networking; and by inviting alumni to campus not just for reunions or themed events but to play a greater part in the education of undergraduates. Second is strengthening the College’s far-flung alumni networks, facilitating them both in real time and virtually. “Being in the same room is great, but it’s becoming possible to share the same kind of experiences over the Internet,” Chopp says. The third level is engagement with students, taking advantage of the strong interest that alumni have in students and their shared experience of Swarthmore. “This is one of the real opportunities we have as a liberal arts college,” Chopp says. “Alumni are eager to answer questions, to mentor, and to share common projects with students and younger alumni. We need to do whatever we can to make that an ongoing part of the student experience at Swarthmore. We quite intentionally don’t offer professional-school training like a large university. But what we truly have to offer our students is even better—we have our alumni. “I have not had a single conversation in which more than two or three alumni are in the room that hasn’t been an amazing experience—an intense seminar on whatever topic comes up,” Chopp says. “And I know this happens whether I am there or not. Whenever alumni get together, no matter what the purpose, they enjoy getting connected to one another.” —J.L. swarthmore college bulletin 1 people she’s ever known. “The class has a really nice culture about it,” says Felix. “We get along well, care about each other, and have a lot of memorable shared experiences. Our class motto is ‘Anywhere else, it would have been sun,’ because we arrived [as freshmen] and left as new grads in the rain. But we won the award for percentage of the class giving to the Annual Fund for the first 10 years after we graduated.” —S.C.B. Be True to Your Class PARTY ON, 1983 This year, as most ’83ers turn 50, many have added a new shared experience to their cache of Swarthmore memories. Beginning with a 50th birthday party in the Washington, D.C., area, groups of classmates have been celebrating the half-century mark. Regina Hanlon Barletta proposed the first 50th birthday celebration and, from her home in Pennsylvania, sent out invitations, tracked RSVPs, and arrived in Maryland, says Debra Felix ’83, with an “awesome” cake for the celebration. Meanwhile, Sabina Beg, Anna Reedy Rain, and Felix pulled together food, housing, entertainment, and places to gather during the July 4th weekend. Seventeen classmates arrived from Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin for the three-day party—some with spouses and children. In Boston, another group of ’83ers have held a summer party for years. This year, the July party hosted by Don Twomey; his partner, Michael Davison; and their sons Seth, 11, and Luke, 10, was also a celebration of 50th birthdays. A summer party is “a joyous tradition that seems to have more meaning as time goes on,” says Twomey. “With these friends, we talk about our real lives, our real joys, and our real sufferings,” he adds. “That’s what I love about the Swarthmore that stays with me.” In September, Sue Kost of Delaware, Suellen Heath Riffkin of Utah, Lisa Yahna Shortell of Georgia, and Ellen Singer of Great Britain—four ’83 classmates who lived with or near each other all four years during college—hosted a birthday weekend at the Jersey Shore for more than 15 classmates. “We shared a floor in Worth our senior year,” says Riffkin. “Since then, several of us have seen each other but we’ve not all been together at once,” which is why the four women treated themselves to two days together before the rest of their classmates arrived. Felix has always said that her classmates are the nicest group of 2 Hit The Books JUST NOT FOR CREDIT For 15 years, using the academic year for a calendar and a Swarthmore professor as their guide, alumni in the Washington, D.C., area have come together over books. This year’s theme is “Memoirs of Africa,” with a reading list compiled by Professor of History Timothy Burke, who will visit Washington three times for a fall introductory lecture, a midwinter check-in, and a wrap-up in the spring. This month, the group is reading october 2011 MORE CLASS ACTS... • Even with the growing popularity of social media, Class Notes—the oldest resource for connecting classmates—are still the most read section of the Bulletin. When the Bulletin arrives in mailboxes, alumni can be sure that along with all the other features and College news, they can immerse themselves in news about classmates. • Last spring, Class of ’85 secretaries Tim Kinnel and Maria Tikoff Vargas posted a “desperate plea” on the College’s passwordprotected Online Community (OLC) for news to fill their next Class Notes column. Sixty ’85ers replied in one week, more news than Kinnel and Vargas typically receive in six months and providing enough copy to fill their next column as well. On the OLC, alumni and students can connect and network with fellow Swarthmoreans, create a profile, read and submit Class Notes, post resumes, keep up with friends, and make new ones. Of the 57 classes that have set up discussion groups on the OLC, 30 have more than 200 subscribers— and the 1961 and 1971 discussion groups tally more than 250 postings each. To explore Swarthmore’s Online Community, log onto olc.swarthmore.edu. Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. The list of eight memoirs will wrap up with George Packer’s Village of Waiting in May. Swarthmore book groups are also found in New York (also reading memoirs of Africa with Burke this year), Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Tucson, and Seattle. Although not all have the benefit of a visiting professor, members find that the discussions often recreate the give-and-take of the Swarthmore classroom. Pamela St. John Zurer ’71 has coordinated the Washington book group for the past four years, taking over from Sue Willis Ruff ’60, who got it started in the mid37 1990s when Philip Weinstein, the Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of English Literature, offered a series focused on character development in fiction with Madame Bovary. Today, there are more than 400 potential readers on the email list and up to 150 actually participating in 10 different “discussion sections” that meet monthly in private homes throughout the DC area. Plenary sessions with the professor are often held at Politics and Prose, one of Washington’s best independent bookstores. Zurer says the DC book group has “really cemented my ties with the College.” The success of the Washington group, she says, can be laid squarely on the unusual model developed by Ruff, in which a volunteer professor creates a syllabus that often “introduces us to works that I don’t think we would have discovered on our own,” Zurer says, crediting the professors for “really making it an incredible experience.” “I also love the fact that the book groups are intergenerational,” Zurer says. “They give young alumni a chance to stay connected to their Swarthmore experience when they move to Washington and give us older folks some really fresh approaches to reading.” —J.L. 3 • Keep up with academic life at Swarthmore through one of the Facebook groups that have formed around various disciplines. Three examples: “Swarthmore College English Literature Majors” was started this year by William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English Literature Peter Schmidt. It has about 300 “likes” and contains a running wall of comments about what people are up to English-wise and otherwise. The “Swarthmore Student–Alumni Japan Interest Group” was started by Associate Professor Will Gardner. It’s a “closed” group, but if you have an interest in Japan and Japanese, by all means ask to join. With nearly 100 members, “Swarthmore College Art History” describes itself as “for art history majors and minors— past, present, and future.” Get Down to Business BAY-AREA BUSINESS The idea for a Swarthmore business group in the San Francisco Bay Area took root in fall 2009 during the depths of the recession. In January 2010, more than 75 Swarthmoreans attended its inaugural event at the San Francisco Friends School. Swarthmore College Bay Area Alumni in Business (BAAB) piggybacked its opening meeting on a Swarthmore Connections event, featuring 38 YOUR VIRTUAL CLASSROOM... • No book group where you live? A new blog invites alumni anywhere to take part online in this year’s New York–Washington groups. You’ll find the reading list for “Memoirs of Africa,” introductory remarks by Professor Burke (an inveterate blogger who built the site), notes and discussion suggestions on each of the books—even “further reading!” (This is so Swarthmore that it hurts.) The discussion has already started, so check it out right away at http://blogs.swarthmore.edu/alumni-book-club. Professor of Economics Mark Kuperberg. “Several of us were getting calls for career advice and about job openings,” says Sohail Bengali ’79, “and thought it would be a good idea to have a professional business group in the Bay Area.” He joined Bay Area residents Gus Alverelli ’00, Seth Brenzel ’94, Harold “Koof ” Kalkstein ’78, and Autumn Quinn ’04 in launching the BAAB with the goal of helping alumni grow their professional networks and share ideas, insights, and opportunities from their collective business experiences. With a list of more than 200 interested alumni and the ongoing help of the Alumni Relations Office, the group is preparing for its fourth panel discussion this fall, which will focus on the creative arts and digital media. Previous panel discussions, featuring alumni presenters, have included Asset and Wealth Management—an Insider’s View; Entrepreneurship in Technology; and Life Sciences: Facing the Challenges of Doing Well, While Doing Good. More than 45 alumni attended each event. Interested alumni can contact Bengali at sohailbengali@gmail.com. —S.C.B. CONFERENCE CALLS... • The Lax Conference on Entrepreneurship, supported by a bequest from the late Jonathan Lax ’71, has brought alumni, students, and friends of the College together for a day of panels and roundtable discussions each spring since 1999. Recent conference themes have included Social Entrepreneurship and Sailing in Any Wind: Risk and the Entrepreneur. Co-sponsored by the Offices of Alumni Relations and Career Services, the Lax Conference is free and open to the public. The 2012 Lax Conference will be held on March 18. • Alumni business-interest socialnetworking sites are gaining popularity. H.G. Chissell IV ’96—director of strategic development with Viridity Energy, a smartgrid energy company, and former alumni representative on the Swarthmore Sustainability Committee—initiated the Swarthmore Sustainability Network on LinkedIn. With 133 members currently and still growing, the group discusses general and College-related sustainability issues. Interested in joining? Just search for “Swarthmore sustainability” on LinkedIn. swarthmore college bulletin 4 the West Coast premiere of Borromean Rings, a chamber work by James Matheson ’92, performed by members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Walt Disney Concert Hall. The evening concluded with a meet-up and reception with the composer in the greenroom after the concert. “With eVite, you can see who else is coming, and that’s a big draw—both to attend a great concert and to see your friends and meet new people.” This fall, How was at it again. The second annual Student and Alumni Composers Concert was held on Oct. 29 in Lang Concert Hall. —J.L. Go Online A NETWORK OF NOTE When Deborah How ’89 joined the Alumni Council last year, she wanted a specific project. A professional pianist and teacher in Los Angeles who coaches “competitive piano,” How knows how important it is to have a wide network of professional connections in the music world, so she used her personal Facebook page to start a network of Swarthmore musicians—her friends posting to their friends and their friends … you get the picture—all with an eye toward mounting a campus concert featuring student and alumni performers playing works by Swarthmore composers. It worked. In November 2010, a remarkable event was born: the Student and Alumni Composers Concert. Nearly 30 students and alumni participated—most in person and others via recordings and videos. You can see the resulting performances at the concert website: http://bit.ly/swatmusic2010. This event was followed by a facultystudent composers concert in spring 2011. How says that the networking she’s done has led to other Swarthmore music connections as well. She used the Internet service eVite to organize an alumni group to attend a concert featuring 5 Identify BE WHO YOU ARE For Matt Armstead ’08, being openly gay at college was not such a big deal. He was active in the Swarthmore Queer Union (SQU) throughout his four years at the College. Now, in addition to his work as director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered (LGBT) Center at Princeton, Armstead reaches back to Swarthmore to continue to support the current generation of queer and questioning students. And, increasingly, he is trying to build a larger network of LGBT alumni. So is Seth Brenzel ’94, who attended Swarthmore at a time when openness about october 2011 FIND A FRIEND... • A Facebook group was created for the Class of 1997 by Duleesha Kulasooriya and Kim Killeen last spring when they volunteered to gather news for ’97 class secretaries—and new mothers—Wendy Cadge and Lisa Ginsburg Tazartes. “We received an overwhelming response—nearly 100 lengthy posts in all,” says Kulasooriya. So many responses, in fact, that, when compiled, the Class Notes copy was two times longer than the Bulletin could accommodate in one issue. At least 25 alumni classes have Facebook pages. gender and sexual orientation was expanding the comfort zone for LGBT students. Brenzel, who was president of the Alumni Council in 2008–2009, has also remained in touch with LGBT students since his graduation in 1994. “That’s the easy part,” says Brenzel, “because there have been organizations like SQU all along as part of the Intercultural Center, which was created when I was a student. But it’s often harder to connect with those alums who were either unable to self-identify as queer in college or who did so later in life. They need to have a certain comfort level about the College before they will reach out to other queer alums.” Armstead, who interned in the Alumni Relations Office after graduation, has helped organize the annual LGBT gathering at Alumni Weekend. “There are lots of ways to 39 connect with people at reunions, and this is just one of them,” he says, “but it’s been great to meet people from across generations.” He enjoys hearing “the ways that being gay have played out in our lives” from alumni such as Charles Jackson ’60 and Bill Bradford ’66. “The current student who has been out since middle school and the older alum who came out after a divorce—that’s really different,” Armstead says. “For some, being queer is a large part of their identity; for others, it’s largely tangential.” Tatiana Cozzarelli ’08, now a teacher in Providence, R.I., says that since graduating, she has attended two of the Sager Symposiums—annual campus conferences on 6 LGBT issues—and found “a lot of other alums there.” Some years, she says, there has been an alumni dinner gathering at the symposium. Cozzarelli and Armstead would both like to see LGBT alumni connect more in the cities where they live, doing projects, marching at pride rallies, or merely socializing. He sees Facebook and other social networking tools as a way to make this happen: “I love the fact that I can have an open and exciting conversation with other queer alums. It’s just another of the many shared experiences we have from Swarthmore.” —J.L. Feed Old Passions AND PASS THEM ALONG Acclaimed singer Vaneese Thomas ’74 has come a long way since 1970, her freshman year at Swarthmore, where she says she had a “miserable” time dealing with the racial polarity on campus as well as the College’s legendary academic rigor. Her campus experience was saved, however, by singing. Yet, according to Thomas, neither she nor other black student 40 TEAM SPIRIT... • Were you a student athlete? Many coaches keep former athletes connected through regular newsletters, email “blasts,” invitations to return to campus as instructors for camps and clinics, and annual alumnistudent matches or games in some sports. With the help of an alumna, Lacrosse Coach Karen Borbee is currently constructing a Facebook page for players. Coach Eric Wagner asks soccer alumni in far-flung places to go watch prospective recruits in action and maintains personal relationships with many alumni, even some he never coached. singers at the time were comfortable participating in the College Chorus—and Peter Gram Swing, then chair of the Music Department, saw little value in performing gospel music—so the black singers founded their own choir. Thomas, the late James Batton ’72, and Terrence Hicks ’73 took turns accompanying about 35 singers on the piano. “Anywhere there was a piano, we’d gather and sing,” Thomas says. “We all came from different church backgrounds but were all raised in the gospel tradition. Singing together became our sanctuary. We didn’t need the College Choir, because we had our own—and we needed that bond.” Each semester, the new Gospel Choir performed on campus to a packed house—“standing room only, people in the aisles,” Thomas says. “The campus loved it!” By the time Thomas graduated, the choir was more than 40 strong. With a teaching job in the Philadelphia area, she continued to serve as its accompanist until 1979. In 1986, when the Gospel Choir celebrated its 15th anniversary, Thomas and other former members returned to campus to support the campus choir. “We realized how much we loved and missed it,” Thomas says, “and that’s how the Alumni Gospel Choir was born. We used to come back to perform on campus more than we do now—life gets in the way—but we come at least once a year. And those from areas close by come more often to sing with the campus choir and support them in any way we can.” Even today, Thomas says, black student singers still seek and find refuge and comfort in the Gospel Choir. Next year, the student and alumni gospel choirs will sing together in celebration of their 40th anniversary on campus, and the alumni choir will travel to China in May as part of an international performing arts program sponsored by The Brockman Institute. “We’re looking for folks to join us, if they wish,” says Thomas. Contact her at vaneese@optoline.net. —C.B.D. swarthmore college bulletin DON’T GIVE UP ON THE FUN... • The Swarthmore Warders of Imaginative Literature (SWIL), a science fiction club, has an extensive social network that has been connecting hundreds of alumni since SWIL’s founding in 1978. Electronic channels now keep members informed of online discussions or events. The club organizes group vacations to places including Alaska and Acadia National Park, Maine; as well as working trips such as one to carry out an environmental project in Louisiana. About 40 members publish a monthly group magazine—the most recent, their 336th issue, had 114 pages. In April, they celebrated their 32nd reunion, in honor of which they published a SWIL Alumni Cygnet. Want to know more? Contact Jim Moskowitz at alumni@ jimmosk.com. 7 Keep Up the Good Works SWARTHMORE CARES The inspiration for Swarthmore Cares—an Atlanta Connection outreach program— emerged from a strategic planning conversation about alumni engagement that Atlanta Swarthmoreans had with Alumni Council member Amy Lansky Knowlton ’87 last January. An alumnus’s interest in seeing the Atlanta Connection do something as a group sparked interest in volunteering. “We decided on community service—something that would make an impact—and then to move onto something social afterwards,” says Connection Chair Emily Nolte ’07. This fall, Swarthmore Cares will hold its third community service event, helping with the maintenance of one of the city’s parks. Swarthmore Cares plans to do three projects a year, focusing on healthcare, the Atlanta Community Food Bank, and a green event. In March, the group launched its first project, devoting three hours to sorting supplies for MedShare International, 8 Help a Student SOMETIMES IT’S WHO YOU KNOW Swarthmore’s Extern Program yields more than just a work experience. Thanks to an externship placement, Marty Spanninger ’76, now a producer, writer, and director for october 2011 • Alumni Geoffrey ’71 and Cecily Roberts Selling ’77 both served as chairs of the Folk Dance Club while at Swarthmore. They’re still dancing. The Sellings and many other folk-dance alumni work to sustain the traditional English-Scottish Ball, held for the first time in their senior year and annually—usually in February—since then. Drawing large numbers of area dancers, tri-college alumni, and current students, “It quite fills Tarble-in-Clothier,” Geoffrey Selling says. With the help of dancers from the area, Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, and Haverford alumni have also helped keep alive a Scottish and English dance class for decades, after it was dropped from the Physical Education Department’s regular schedule. It now meets off campus. Contact the Sellings at geoffreys@gfsnet.org. a nonprofit that collects surplus medical supplies and equipment and redistributes them to qualified healthcare facilities in the developing world. Afterwards, the alumni headed to the Brick Store Pub in Decatur, Ga., for food and drink, says Nolte. On July 7, alumni volunteered at the Atlanta Community Food Bank, sorting 5,252 pounds of frozen meat that was used for 3,501 meals. Atlanta Connection co-chair Linda Valleroy ’72 suggested the name Swarthmore Cares for the volunteer service group. “I very much admired an arm of the Penn Alumni Association called Penn Care, in which we did fun and helpful things in Atlanta,” says Valleroy. “Emily ran with the idea, creating a Swarthmore version of the community service program.” “These events have been a lot of fun, an easier way for Atlanta-area alumni to connect, and a very organic Swarthmore thing to do,” says Nolte. “We’re able to give back and enjoy each other’s company. broadcast news and documentaries, palled up with the late actor Christopher Reeve. As a theater major (offered at the time as a concentration in the Department of English Literature) in 1973, Spanninger had signed up for the program—only a year old at the time—in the hope of meeting actual working actors. Spanninger externed with Ike Schambe- Overall, the Atlanta Connection has more active members since we’ve started Swarthmore Cares.” Both Valleroy and Nolte urge other Swarthmore Connections to explore the formation of a Swarthmore Cares in their own cities. “It’s a good way to bring out alumni,” says Nolte. —S.C.B. lan ’61, then a director at the Equity Library Theater on the Upper West Side. While distributing script pages to actors auditioning for one of Schambelan’s productions, she ended up chatting with Reeve, a Cornell graduate who was anxious to supplement his soap opera role with serious theater. Years later, Spanninger, who went on to be a TV news producer, ran into Reeve—by 41 then a celebrity—while working for ABCTV on a special about AIDS. It was after he’d played Superman. In recent years, Spanninger, currently executive producer for the Futuro Media Group, which produces Latino USA for NPR and news and documentary segments for PBS and BBC, has served as a frequent extern host to students interested in broadcasting, but one of her favorite experiences happened when she was helping place Swarthmore externs in other positions in New York City. “One young woman, Amanda Brown-Inz ’06, was interested in writing and theater—a perfect match for New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley ’77. But he wasn’t signed up as an extern host.” Spanninger called him anyway, and he readily offered to talk shop with Brown-Inz Brantley and Spanninger. “Amanda is from Brooklyn, so the three of us have had dinner when she’s been in town,” says Spanninger, who also remains friends with Schambelan. “These kinds of connections could happen all over the place, if people just took a minute to think about it and get engaged and make a phone call,” she says. —C.B.D. over lunch. Although Brown-Inz decided eventually to go to China and learn Chinese, she has remained in touch with both 9 MEET YOUR MATCH... • In its first year (1972), the Extern Program matched about a dozen student externs with hosts in New York City, Boston, and the DC/Baltimore area. In 2011, 184 students were matched with a possible 217 externship opportunities offered by hosts in New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, DC/ Baltimore area, and San Francisco. To host, write to careerservices@swarthmore.edu. Be Generous STEVE LLOYD’S THREE “Cs” Stephen Lloyd ’57 says he “kinda hooks his life into” three things: his church, his community, and his college. He calls them “The Three Cs.” Lloyd, who turns 76 this month, is a retired vice president for a public-management–consulting firm. With his wife, Elizabeth, an ordained Episcopal deacon, he’s involved with the church. He serves his Park Forest, Ill., community as chair of the Board of Fire and Police Commissioners and plays violin in the local community orchestra. And Lloyd has remained connected to Swarthmore through service on the Alumni Council and as class agent for the ’57ers and chair of his class’s 50th reunion fundraising, for which he spearheaded a record effort that enabled his class to set up a scholarship named for the late Associate Provost Emeritus and Associate Dean of the College Gilmore Stott. A regular and generous donor to the Annual Fund, Lloyd’s support of the College includes a scholarship established by Lloyd and his family—including daughter Anne Lloyd ’87— to honor his mother, May Brown Lloyd ’27. Ask Lloyd why he gives so generously to Swarthmore and he talks enthusiastically about his many ties to the College. His mother grew up in the Ville, so, when the time came, she “just walked up the hill to the College,” he says. Almost three decades later, so did he, although from further afield, from his father’s hometown, Joliet, Ill., where Lloyd’s parents settled after May Brown graduated and they married. “I had a lot going for me: I was a legacy, a musician, and an 42 swarthmore college bulletin athlete,” he says, admitting that, as a member of the football, basketball, and baseball teams as well as a violinist in the College Orchestra and a member of Kappa Sigma fraternity, he had trouble maintaining good grades that first year. Dropping football and basketball helped. “I stuck it out, progressed in my studies, and graduated—and I lettered in baseball,” he says, chuckling. Lloyd also continued to play in the orchestra and has fond memories of Stott, a fine violist, who hosted small musical gatherings in his home. “Gil Stott was one of the highlights of my Swarthmore experience,” he says. “It’s not that I’ve modeled my life after him, but he was definitely one of the people who helped me along in life.” “So why do I give? It’s the whole experience—the professors, friends, music, athletics. I’m nowhere close to being a millionaire, but giving to the College—as it is with my other two “Cs”—is a labor of love.” —C.B.D. 10 Go Far Away AND SWARTHMORE’S THERE TOO! Rebekah Yang ’12 and Sophia Pan ’09 met for the first time when they were engineering students—Yang, a freshman, and Pan, a senior—and members of the Swarthmore Christian Fellowship. Two years later, Yang was deciding on a study-abroad program and contacted Pan when she remembered that the recent graduate had spent a semester abroad in South Africa. And, in fact, Pan was back in Cape Town pursuing a master’s degree in civil engineering at the University of Cape Town (UCT). “My connection with Sophia was very valuable in adapting to the country and october 2011 HONOR A FRIEND... • Carolyn Champ, director of the Philip Evans Scholarship Foundation, and Beverley Nalven, program officer, serve not only as advisers to Evans Scholars but also further interaction among them by publishing a triannual newsletter of alumni activities as well as organizing an Outward Bound excursion for incoming first-year scholars; trips to New York City and Washington, D.C.; welcomeback, holiday, and farewell-to-seniors parties; and several study breaks throughout the year. Jerome Kohlberg ’48 initiated the Evans Scholars Program in 1986 to honor his College friend and roommate. • The campus McCabe Scholars Society organizes various campus social events, including the McCabe Lecture and an annual dinner that brings past and current scholars together. Thomas McCabe ’15 endowed the McCabe Achievement Awards in 1952. the program,” says Yang. “Her insight and experience helped me decide to study abroad in South Africa.” In spring 2011, Yang began a semester in Cape Town with a distinct advantage because Pan shared her experience of living communally with the other program participants, gave her advice about where to shop for groceries, explained how the public transportation system worked, and suggested which civil engineering classes to take. As a Chinese American, Yang was also concerned about security issues. “I had heard that previous study-abroad students of similar ethnicities initially felt uncomfortable in Cape Town due to certain cultural perceptions,” says Yang. “Learning about Sophia’s experiences was a great help in preparing to deal with these issues.” During her semester abroad, Yang shared several meals with Pan—braais (barbecues) at her communal home and an Easter lunch at Pan’s apartment. The Off-Campus Study Office helped Yang when she was applying for the program and a study visa and provided her with “a plethora of contact information and support before she departed” for South Africa. When Pan returned to Cape Town for graduate school, she contacted several alumni who offered advice; she found their contact information through Rosa Bernard, assistant director for off-campus study, as well as through the online alumni directory. “Swarthmore alumni and students share a special educational experience, which I think incites a level of loyalty and creates a bond between them,” says Pan. “When I have reached out to other alumni, they are almost always more than happy to offer their advice or assistance.” —S.C.B. INTERNATIONAL FLAVOR... • Named for the form required for a student visa, The I-20 Club establishes a bond among international students from their first day on campus with programs such as iSibs, which links each first-year student with an upperclassman for direct studentto-student support, and weekly dinners in a small room in Sharples Dining Hall. The club also encourages camaraderie with monthly programs such as trips to buy winter coats and pot luck dinners to which each international student invites a faculty member. • The first International Alumni Student Gathering: Employment in the United States for International Students welcomed recent international graduates back to campus last January to share their experiences finding employment in the United States. The program helps international students maximize their work options following graduation and explains hiring complexities, U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services regulations, visa strategies, and the timeline for obtaining Optional Practical Training. 43 1 # On the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, I met Josef Joffe ’65 for lunch at the Grand Elysée, a five-star hotel in the center of Hamburg. Joffe is the editor-publisher of Die Zeit, Germany’s most widely read weekly newspaper, but he’s also a presence in American letters, penning columns and articles on foreign policy for The New Republic, Foreign Policy, and The American Interest. In a few days, he’d be off to teach in Stanford’s political science department, where he is also a senior fellow at the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies and Abramowitz Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Hoover might suggest a political affiliation, at least in foreign policy matters, with the conservatives. But Joffe has also written for the left-leaning New York Review of Books and, in his latest book Überpower: The Imperial Temptation of America (W.W. Norton and Co., Inc, 2006), he faults President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq as “the wrong war in pure realpolitik terms,” which backfired by emboldening the most destructive force in the region: Iran. Even more seismic shifts in the Middle East were ahead. A revolutionary wave swept across the Arab World, toppling authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. As of this writing, the Assad family in Syria is struggling to hold on to power. Osama bin Laden, the charismatic face of al44 America’s Guarantee: Peace or Promises? GERMAN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR JOSEF JOFFE ’65 SAYS THE UNITED STATES MUST RESIST SELF-INFLICTED BLOWS—SUCH AS THE INVASION OF IRAQ—THAT WILL BLUNDER AWAY ITS SUPREMACY. By Paul Wachter ’97 Qaeda, was finally hunted down and killed in Pakistan. But historic as such events were, they barely affected the international balance of power, which, ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, has been a one-man show. So far, Joffe says, the United States has managed to hold onto this historically unique role, even as it remains bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Can you think of any other country that could fight two wars simultaneously and not even raise taxes?” Joffe asks. This new world order, with the United States as a “usually placid elephant,” is the subject of Überpower. Though the title suggests a critique of U.S. foreign policy, the text inside provides only a mild one. Much of the book is spent defending the United States from the long tradition of anti-Americanism that, Joffe demonstrates, began long before George W. Bush assumed the presidency. Joffe, now 67, grew up in Cold War West Berlin, the child of Eastern European Jews who survived World World II. “I grew up in the most adventure-filled playground in the world—bombed out Berlin,” he recalls. “But we also lived in a place where every year, things got better. My daughters, who wouldn’t go where Daddy went, graduating from Stanford and Oxford, can’t count on that anymore.” In high school he had a rebellious streak. “Every semester or so, they threatened to kick me out,” Joffe says. He applied to be an exchange student through a group called Youth for Understanding and landed in Grand Rapids, Mich., in 1961—the year the Berlin Wall was erected. “I was dropped into a middle-class, suburban family, and I still consider them my ‘American parents.’ It was a wondrous experience for a kid from postwar Berlin. Eating meat every day. Taking a shower every day. Washing machines. My first lobster.” But Joffe wasn’t always happy in suburban Michigan with its very strict moral and sexual codes. “It was Calvinist,” he says. “There was very little unsupervised time like you found in the big cities.” Nonetheless, he found a girlfriend, Janice from Detroit, who “was by Western Michigan standards totally cool,” Joffe remembers. “She wore black turtle necks, had a Joan Baez hairdo, played guitar, wrote poetry, and smoked Benson & Hedges cigarettes.” Janice was applying to Swarthmore, and Joffe, who was excited about what he read about the College (“bad football, leftish politics, high-powered academics”) followed suit. But only Joffe was accepted, with a scholarship. “I only had 1220 on the SAT, but perhaps the German quota wasn’t exactly oversubscribed.” Joffe calls his early days at the College a “traumatic encounter with excellence.” At first, he struggled academically and socially. “They put me in Wharton, which was the swarthmore college bulletin october 2011 A U.S. Marine corporal covers the face of a statue of Saddam Hussein with an American flag on April 9, 2003. Moments later, the flag was removed and the statue was pulled down by American troops and Iraqi civilians. AP PHOTO/LAURENT REBOURS jock dorm,” he says. “The first year was tough.” For his first philosophy paper— comparing Descartes and Leibniz—he received a C- from the professor, Richard Brandt. Joffe asked what he had done poorly to deserve such a grade. “Nothing,” Brandt said. “The others were just better.” But then his grades improved. Joffe entered the Honors Program, majoring in political science with a healthy dose of economics and philosophy. “It was natural, coming from Berlin, that I’d be drawn to international politics,” he says. Socially, he was “swept up” in the leftist politics that dominated the campus, joining the Swarthmore Political Action Group. “I can’t quite figure out if we were Stalinists or Trotskyites—probably Trotskyites.” He was also a member of Students for a Democratic Society, and he agitated for civil rights in Chester. “One day, we occupied City Hall,” he recalls. “We all got arrested. Today, if that happened, they’d deport me on the spot. Back then, it wasn’t like that. They just asked for my name and address, not for my passport.” The American student movement was different from the European one, Joffe recalls: “The most brutal and most radicalized student bodies arose in the post-Fascist countries. There was a totalitarian feel to it. In the States, it was politics, sex, grass, and music—civil rights and Vietnam. Here, in Europe, it was revolution. It was a humorless movement and ultimately turned violent in both Germany and Italy.” “Cathy Wilkerson [of the Weather Underground] was in my class,” Joffe continues. “But [it turned out] she didn’t really know how to build a bomb or rob a bank. Unlike European radicals, they didn’t go to these Palestinian Liberation Organization training camps.” The classroom was a more conservative setting. “It was a good balance,” Joffe says. “Yes, you could go protest and go to jail, but inside the classroom, it was ‘Now, let’s take your Marxism and apply bourgeois standards of evidence and logic.’ We were forced to think really hard and appreciate scientific rigor. “Today, in the humanities at least, there is so much identity politics, too many good intentions and not enough ‘how do we know?’ We, too, wanted a better world, but Joffe sees the Iraq invasion as an example of the type of selfinflicted blow that diminishes the United States’ status in the world. “The single-most critical difference between the Afghan War and Iraq II consists of one word: ‘legitimacy.’” we had teachers who kept us intellectually honest.“ After graduating, Joffe earned two advanced degrees—from the College of Europe in Belgium and from Johns Hopkins—and worked for a couple years at a think tank outside Munich. Then, he went to Harvard for a Ph.D., writing a dissertation on the domestic sources of foreign policy, with a focus on West Germany. From here, a career in the academy would have been a logical step, but Joffe thought otherwise: “I wasn’t too happy with the idea of seven years as an assistant professor and the lottery of tenure.” Fortuitously, he bumped into the editor of Die Zeit, who offered Joffe a top writing position at the German weekly in 1976 (30 years after its founding). “That’s how I got into journalism, at the top floor,” Joffe says. “It suited my temperament better. Who reads you when you’re slaving away as an assistant professor? In journalism, the gratification is almost instant.” Though his focus was on Germany’s (mitigated) place in the world—“Germany, rich and big, is more like Sweden now,” he tells me over lunch—it was only natural that in his writings he would move on to the United States. In an influential 1984 article for Foreign Policy, Joffe coined the term “Europe’s pacifier” to describe the United States’ presence in Western Europe. By then, it was apparent that the Soviet Union’s expansionist ambitions (both physical and politicalcultural) were failing, and many in Europe and the United States—including an unlikely alliance of the European Left and American neoconservatives—wanted the United States to disengage from the continent. Joffe disagreed: America’s role in the containment of the Soviet Union is familiar enough. What is widely neglected, however, is the protector’s role as pacifier—as the key agent in the construction of an interstate order in Western Europe that muted, if not removed, ancient conflicts and shaped the conditions for cooperation. 45 The most important condition was the extension of an essentially unilateral American security guarantee to Western Europe. That guarantee is normally seen only as a cornerstone of the global Soviet-American balance, with the United States providing a counterweight to Soviet power that the West Europeans were unable to provide for themselves. Yet by extending its guarantee, the United States removed the prime structural cause of conflict among states—the search for an autonomous defense policy. But even terrorist attacks are unlikely to dislodge the United States from its perch. Meanwhile, China’s rise may be the biggest threat to American hegemony, but it’s a challenge that remains decades ahead. Still, the United States could dislodge itself by alienating the rest of world, many of whose actors, for all their complaints, prefer a strong (if benign) United States to the fractious, balance-of-power politics that came before. Joffe sees the Iraq invasion as an example of the type of self-inflicted blow that diminishes the United States’ status in the world. “The single-most critical difference between the Afghan War and Iraq II consists of one word: ‘legitimacy’,” he writes, continuing: Had Saddam committed aggression against the United States or any other country? No. Did he harbor terrorists as proxies? No, the “Baghdad connection” could never be established. Was he stockpiling, or about to produce, nuclear weapons and other paraphernalia of mass destruction? That assumption was dubious to begin with, given the destructive efficiency of the U.N. inspectors in the aftermath of the first Iraq War, and it proved utterly false once the second was over. Did he defy the U.N. sleuths during the run-up? In a passive-aggressive way, he did, but not systemically enough to be nabbed for obstructing justice. Read Josef Joffe’s address to the Class of WERNER BARTSCH With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States’ dominion now spanned the entire globe, and, like its role in Western Europe, Joffe largely sees this new, larger hegemony as salutary. In Überpower, he approvingly cites President Bill Clinton’s 1996 proclamation, “Because we remain the world’s indispensible nation, we must act and we must lead,” a position that’s been reaffirmed by his successors George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Of course, the rest of the world often takes exception to American hegemony. But in Überpower Joffe demonstrates that the roots of anti-Americanism came long before the country had assumed greatpower status. Often the critique is cultural, 2002 when he received an honorary doctorate portraying the United States as having little of humane letters: http://bit.ly/joffe02 to offer the rest of the world. The French Among conservative ranks—and Joffe diplomat Talleyrand described the country counts himself a conservative—Iraq as having “32 religions and only one dish produced a split. In many ways, Joffe’s view to eat.” (The late historian Tony Judt added, “Talleyrand’s statement of the conflict now resembles President Obama’s, who was against the anticipates ‘two centuries of European commentary.’”) Or as Hitler invasion but, as commander in chief, has followed the path laid down put it, “A single Beethoven symphony contains more culture than all by his predecessor. In a 2008 article for The American Interest (a that America has ever created.” The postwar rise of American “soft magazine largely created by a split over Iraq among the conservative power” has only amplified this criticism. “Look outside,” Joffe tells me contributors to The National Interest), Joffe argues for staying in Iraq: in Hamburg. “Everyone dresses American, talks American, watches “America brought war to Iraq. America should now bring peace to American.” that tortured country.” Often the criticism of the United States is motivated by more Three years later, Iraq is almost an afterthought, and it’s the U.S. pernicious beliefs. In 1915, the German writer Werner Sombart involvement in Afghanistan that’s being questioned—especially with dismissed the United States as a “Jewish land.” Today, the Arab world the killing of Osama bin Laden in a compound not in Afghanistan or is the main font of anti-Semitic conspiracies involving the United the adjoining mountainous environs of Pakistan but in the Pakistani States, including the canard that Jews working in the World Trade city of Abbottabad, possibly with the full knowledge of Pakistan’s Center called in sick on 9/11. leaders. And the Arab Spring has yet to play out to its conclusion. Formal resistance against the United States comes in myriad But for all these new wrinkles, America’s fundamental role in forms, Joffe writes. There are cautionary declarations from reputed the world should not change, Joffe argues. The challenge, then, will allies: “Though America is the sole superpower in this world, be for the United States to not blunder away its supremacy. “With the administration does know that it needs friends and allies,” warned great power comes great responsibility,” Joffe writes in the final German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in the run-up to section of Überpower. “As long as this unbound giant lives up to its the Bush-led invasion of Iraq. Institutional forces also align to responsibility—or enlightened self-interest—envy and resentment take on the United States, which often finds itself isolated on issues will not escalate into fear and loathing.” such as the elimination of land mines and environmental accords. There is also balancing by terror. “The most economic and efficient Paul Wachter is the co-founder (with Phil Ryan ’96) of the discerning attack came from totally unexpected quarters,” Joffe writes, in news aggregator againstdumb.com. reference to al-Qaeda. 46 swarthmore college bulletin connections The Danube River and the Hapsburg Empire WIKIMEDIA COMMONS Alumni College Abroad with Professor of History Pieter Judson ’78—June 14–27, 2012 Travel in the company of Professor of History Pieter Judson ’78, alumni, and friends as we journey through the heart of Central Europe—once the glorious realm of Habsburg empire. Here, in the land of exceptional natural and man-made beauty, soaring Gothic cathedrals tower above medieval cities, ornate Baroque churches look out over peaceful country towns, and the Danube River carves its way through lush hills, valleys, vineyards and forests. Our 2012 itinerary explores six Central European countries and includes visits to six UNESCO World Heritage sites. Enjoy accommodations aboard the M.S. Amadeus Royal and in deluxe hotels while exploring the well-preserved, historic city centers of Vienna, Budapest, Ceský Krumlov, Prague (shown above), and Kraków. For both new and repeat travelers to the Danube valley and Central Europe, this unique itinerary provides a fresh perspective on a region of wonderful cultural riches and diversity. october 2011 Your experience will be enhanced by a comprehensive schedule of exclusive guided excursions, a special lecture on the Habsburg Empire, a private organ concert in Melk and a memorable private music performance in Vienna. Judson, your faculty travel leader, centers his research on the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Germany, and Eastern Europe in the period 1848–1948, and he is the author of four books on the history of East-Central Europe. Contact Swarthmore Alumni College Abroad at (800) 789-9738 or via email at alumni_travel@swarthmore.edu for more information or to register for this wonderful opportunity. Note: Be on the lookout for information about the upcoming African safari in October 2012. The itinerary should be available early next year. NOMINATIONS OPEN FOR EUGENE LANG ‘38 IMPACT AWARD In March, the Alumni Council president Sabrina Martinez ’92 presented Eugene Lang ’38 with its first Impact Award. This award, to be called the Eugene M. Lang ’38 Impact Award, will be presented annually on Alumni Weekend to an alumnus or alumna who, in his or her vocation, has made an impact on society at large. In naming this award for Lang, the Council recognized his impact in both his business career and his philanthropy. The recipients of future awards will be selected by the Executive Committee of the Alumni Association. Over time, they will represent many fields of endeavor and a variety of personal backgrounds. Priority for consideration in any given year goes to candidates who are celebrating a class reunion that year. Alumni are encouraged to nominate candidates for this award by sending the nominee’s name and a brief description of their achievements to alumni@swarthmore. edu. Please do not inform the nominee. 47 Ve r mo n t RECENT EVENTS Philadelphia: How can you defend the honor of your alma mater, put your storehouse of arcane and sometimes useful information to good use, and have a great evening, all at the same time? Quizzo, of course! The combined team of Yale and Swarthmore lost in an extra tiebreak round against Harvard, but a good time was had by all. Tucson, Ariz.: The Tucson Connection Book Group is still going strong. Among recent books under discussion were Joseph Nye’s The Future of Power and Michael Gruber’s The Good Son. For more information, contact Laura Markowitz at lmarkowitz@aol.com. Sh a n gh a i Washington, D.C.: The Swarthmore alumni community in Washington, D.C., invites all area alums to attend a happy hour downstairs at the Laughing Man Tavern at 6 p.m. on the first Friday of every month. The tavern is located at 1306 G Street Northwest, close to the Metro Center. Be sure to spread the word to other alumni and friends of the College, and feel free to contact Wuryati Morris if you have suggestions for alumni events in the future. (See contact information on opposite page.) UPCOMING EVENT Philadelphia: The Philadelphia Connection continues its busy schedule this fall. Associate Professor of Anthropology Farha Ghannam spoke on WELCOME TO THE CITY 2011 This year marked the fifth annual Welcome to the City, an opportunity for alumni to gather on the same day in cities around the world. Designed to welcome those hundreds of young alumni settling in new locations to pursue new jobs or graduate programs, the event drew 800 registrants to 25 participating cities. WTTC spanned three continents and eight decades, with attendees from the classes of 1942 through 2011. This year, traditional locations such as Boston; Chapel Hill, N.C.; Madison, Wisc.; and New York City were joined by Eugene, Ore; Honolulu, Hawaii; Prague, Czech Republic; Sacramento, Calif.; Shanghai, China; and Singapore. London 48 swarthmore college bulletin “Egypt and the Arab Spring,” and the Connection celebrated Halloween with “Terror Behind the Walls,” a visit to Eastern State Penitentiary. At the end of the month, they will joined the campus community for the Student and Alumni Composers Concert organized by Deborah How ’89 (see story on p.39). In mid-November, Connection members are invited to an insiders’ tour of the Brandywine River Museum. Contact Philly Connection chair Jim Moskowitz ’88 for more information. Euge ne , O re . NEW STUDENT SEND-OFFS Last summer, Swarthmore alumni, current students, and parents welcomed entering students and their parents in six cities. They told stories and answered questions as members of the Class of 2015 prepared for their move to campus. More than 100 people participated in the festivities this year. We are grateful to our alumni hosts for their time and hospitality: Susan Corcoran ’72 (Boston); Ellen Daniell ’69 (S.F. Bay Area); Deborah How ’89 (Los Angeles); Lucinda Lewis ’70 and Robert Reynolds P’09 (Washington, D.C.); Horatiu Stefan ’01 (Seoul, Korea); and Daniel Werther ’83 (New York City). swarthmore connection chairs National Chair David Steinmuller ’56 dsteinmul@msn.com Los Angeles Deborah How ’89 dhhow@musette.org Atlanta Emily Nolte ’07 emily.anne.nolte@gmail.com Metro New York City Win Ling Chia ’06 winlchia@gmail.com Linda Ann Valleroy ’72 lav0@cdc.gov Lily Ng ’08 lily.ng7@gmail.com Boston Gina Salcedo ’10 gina.salcedo@gmail.com Minneapolis/St. Paul Rebeka Ndosi ’97 rndosi@gmail.com David Wright ’69 dwrightmusic@earthlink.net Chapel Hill Julia Knerr ’81 juliasknerr@alum.swarthmore. edu George Telford III ’84 gbtelford@gmail.com Chicago Marilee Roberg ’73 mroberg@ameritech.net Paris Anäis Loizillon ’95 swatinparis@gmail.com Philadelphia Jim Moskowitz ’88 jimmosk@alum.swarthmore. edu Metro-DC/Baltimore Wuryati Morris ’04 wmorris@alum.swarthmore.edu Pittsburgh Barbara Sieck Taylor ’75 btaylor@gwpa.org Nina Schichor ’02 ninaschichor@yahoo.com Houston Susan Schultz Tapscott ’72 tapscotts@pdq.net Lester Tran ’04 lester.tran@gmail.com october 2011 Central New Jersey Timothy Johnson III ’07 timothy.johnson.iii@alum. swarthmore.edu Denver Erin Trapp ’92 emtrapp@gmail.com Hilary Rice ’02 hilaryjrice@gmail.com De n ve r New Haven Caitlin Koerber ’08 caitlin.koerber@yale.edu San Francisco Autumn Quinn ’04 autumn@alum.swarthmore.edu Singapore Angelina Seah ’07 angelina.seah@gmail.com Tucson Laura Markowitz ’85 lmarkowitz@aol.com London Abby Honeywell ’85 abbyhoneywell@yahoo.co.uk 49 class notes IT IS FALL 1979, A STONE’S THROW FROM SHARPLES DINING HALL. A STUDENT GLIDES THROUGH THE CRISP AUTUMN AIR AS A COMPANION LOOKS ON. . 50 swarthmore college bulletin Margaret Ball Dellmuth ’33, COURTESY OF NANCY DELLMUTH a member of the Swarthmore College Board of Managers from 1950 to 1952, died on June 10. She would have been 100 on Oct. 28. After graduating with high honors in the humanities, Dellmuth worked with Provident Mutual Life Insurance Company. According to her family, Dellmuth treasured her years as a Manager and, in addition to that role, was happy to take on any campus assignment to assist the College. She was dorm mother for Pittinger Hall for three years in the mid-1940s, served as cochairperson of the suburban Philadelphia area for the 1947–1948 fundraising campaign, and was a member of the Women’s Dormitory Committee during that time. She was a member of the 1935 and 1948 class reunion committees and the Swarthmore Alumni Club of Philadelphia. In the town of Swarthmore, Dellmuth was the grade chairperson for Swarthmore Public Schools, a member of the Brownie Troop Committee, and an active member of the Protestant Episcopal Church. She and her husband, Carl Dellmuth ’31, had two children, Carl and Nancy ’60. october 2011 51 COURTESY OF DEWITT BALDWIN class notes A Humanist in Medicine MORE THAN A HALF-CENTURY OF RESEARCH AND PROGRESS AND DEWITT BALDWIN ’43 STILL HAS MORE TO DO. 52 “I doubt if anyone in my class or on the faculty at Swarthmore would have ever predicted an academic career for me,” says DeWitt “Bud” Baldwin. Yet the work of the pediatrician, family practitioner, and psychiatrist turned medical professor and researcher has garnered him two honorary doctoral degrees and numerous national and international awards for his pioneering and innovative work in medical and interprofessional education and healthcare. Now in his 90th year, Baldwin still works full time as scholar-in-residence at the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education in Chicago, conducting research on the experience of residents in training and what makes a good physician. “Becoming a physician is not just about good scientific and clinical training,” says Baldwin. “It’s also about developing fully as human beings and professionals.” (Baldwin, center in photograph, confers with members of his research team on a structural equation model of the resident working-and-learning environment). He is also a professor emeritus of psychiatry and the behavioral sciences at the University of Nevada School of Medicine and an adjunct professor of clinical psychiatry at Northwestern University School of Medicine. In addition to having served as president of Earlham College, Baldwin has held professorial positions in eight schools of medicine and helped found new medical schools at the universities of Nevada and Connecticut. During a career spanning nearly 60 years, Baldwin has remained dedicated to improving how health professionals are trained and how healthcare is delivered to patients, believing that “As teacher is to student, physician will be to patient.” He was among the first to advocate for the teaching of ethics as well as the social and behavioral sciences in the medical curriculum. In the early 1950s, Baldwin became involved in interprofessional education at the University of Washington, where a team of nine different health professionals in the pediatric clinic each brought their students together to learn and work. In 1972, he introduced an interprofessional health sciences program at the University of Nevada, Reno, in which entering pre-professional students in 11 different health fields were taught swarthmore college bulletin “Becoming a physician is not just about good scientific and clinical training,” says Baldwin. “It’s also about developing fully as human beings and professionals.” in the classroom and in the clinic by a practicing clinical interprofessional faculty team. “From day one, students were exposed to health issues in the community and patient care, learning and working together—and often being graded—as teams, gaining interviewing and patient care skills early, which they later practiced as undergraduates and upper-level health professionals in student teams seeing patients in faculty-supervised clinics,” says Baldwin. A later study of medical students who had participated in the program showed that twice as many went on to become primary-care physicians as did their traditionally trained classmates. Devoted to advocating a humanistic approach in medical training and treatment, Baldwin conducted pioneering empirical research on how medical students and residents were being sub- october 2011 jected to mistreatment and abuse during their education and training. His studies demonstrated the disturbingly high prevalence of sexual harassment, racial discrimination, and psychological and physical abuse of medical students and residents as well as the fact that much of this was considered “just part of the process.” Fortunately, leaders in medical education have acted decisively to redefine the nature of the teacher-learner relationship, and Baldwin’s research over the last two decades has shown consistent reductions in these problems as well as improvements in the learning environments of both undergraduate and graduate medical education. Baldwin’s seminal work in the field of interprofessional education, research, and practice, was recently recognized with a special supple- ment of the international Journal of Interprofessional Care and the creation of the Baldwin Award. His many honors have included the Gienapp Award in Graduate Medical Education, the Pellegrino Medal in Healthcare Ethics, the McGovern Award for Distinguished Service in the Health Sciences, and the Gorin Award for outstanding achievements in rural health. Ironically, despite all he has accomplished in research, Baldwin believes that mentoring has been one of his most significant contributions. “When young people work with me, I try to enlist their interest and passion in the human experience of helping others in need,” says Baldwin. “One of my most treasured comments was by some students who said, ‘Other doctors teach us what to do to patients. You teach us how to be with patients.’” When asked why he continues to work, Baldwin says, “I can’t quit yet. I’ve got too many assignments on my desk and too many stories to tell.” This fall, in fact, he has three book chapters to get out, and expects to complete four more research papers by the end of the year. —Susan Cousins Breen 53 IN MEMORIAM Alumni death notices received by the College from May 13 to Aug. 31, 2011 1933 1934 1935 1937 1938 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1956 1959 1961 1962 1963 1965 1969 1971 1998 october 2011 Margaret Ball Dellmuth Stephen Clark Sarah Smith Sheffey Richard Storr Helen Hornbeck Tanner Virginia Vawter Storr Edward Jakle Louise de Montalvo Jones Otto Pribram Barbara Beckjord Batten Elaine Gerstley Fuld Helen Tomlinson Gibson Robert Walter Thomas Evans Anne Pike B. Sheldon Sprague Barbara Thatcher Cynthia Swarthley Zimmer Elinor Griest Barbara Harrison Melick Natalie Robbins Corbin Frank Johnson Elmer Talcott Jr. John Yost Hiram Budd Stephen Edwards Karl Schmittle Sr. Albert Lengyel Horace Breece Jr. Jean Munn Lowry Virginia Hood Rogers Kenneth Snyder Helen Hill Caughey Jane Gross Corson Thomas Saunders David Stolberg Frank Beldecos Esther Jones Bissell Clare Whittlesey Weigel Arra Garab Christine Meyers Jameson John Reynolds Paul Buerkle Alice Stover Pickering Gail Lankenau Woodward Barbara Starfield Thomas Phelps Jr. Shawna Tropp Peter Sales Richard Fink Daniel Bonbright Robert Hawkinson Michael Hattersley Mabry Chambliss Debuys Tara Schubert June 10, 2011 May 31, 2011 Aug. 7, 2011 April 17, 2011 June 15, 2011 2011 May 20, 2011 June 27, 2011 Aug. 10, 2011 June 9, 2011 June 16, 2011 May 17, 2011 June 21, 2011 June 16, 2011 June 27, 2011 July 20, 2011 May 24, 2011 June 4, 2011 Aug. 4, 2011 July 16, 2011 May 21, 2011 Sept. 13, 2009 July 19, 2011 April 2, 2011 May 25, 2011 Feb. 28, 2006 June 15, 2011 Aug. 9, 2011 July 20, 2007 Dec. 9, 2010 May 6, 2011 July 9, 2011 July 20, 2011 June 10, 2011 Dec. 31, 2010 May 24, 2011 May 23, 2011 May 7, 2011 July 1, 2011 Aug. 22, 2011 July 21, 2011 April 26, 2009 July 28, 2009 June 23, 2011 Aug. 19, 2008 June 10, 2011 July 28, 2011 July 17, 2011 July 28, 2011 June 15, 2011 June 3, 2011 May 22, 2011 May 30, 2011 June 6, 2011 April 4, 2011 55 books + arts 160 Million Women “Gone Missing” Mara Hvistendahl ’02, Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, Public Affairs, New York, 2011. Population control. Masculinization. Communism. Fertility. Human trafficking. Sex selection. Technology. Tradition. Imperialism. Demography. Abortion. Economics. All of these—and more— are brilliantly woven together by Mara Hvistendahl in her compelling exposé about the seemingly disconnected but ultimately intricately interwoven factors that contribute to a world with girls “going missing.” “If 160 million women were missing from the U.S. population, you would notice—160 million is more than the entire female population of the United States,” writes Hvistendahl, who is currently a Beijing-based correspondent for Science magazine. Yet this is the number of potential girls and women who have already gone missing in Asia alone, due in large part, according to Hvistendahl, to the combination of ultrasound and abortion—technologies exported from the West over the past few decades. Hvistendahl notes that a certain amount of gender imbalance appears to be natural; birth ratios historically weigh in at about 105 boys to every 100 girls. An unnatural balance, however, has been on the rise. The book reports that in the 1980s, South Korea, Taiwan, and parts of Singapore registered sex ratios at birth of 109 boys to 100 girls; currently, India has a ratio of 112:100 and China records 121 boys for every 100 girls. Gender imbalance, moreover, is neither a local nor regional problem confined to South and East Asia. It reaches the Caucasus countries and Eastern Europe as well as some populations in the United States. It is a global issue. We are all facing an “epidemic” of gender imbalance, Hvistendahl says. What are the causes of such imbalance? What are the consequences? And who is to blame? These are the questions addressed in Unnatural Selection. Unsatisfied with conventional explanations for the imbalance that attribute it to “deeply-rooted cultural traditions” and “the low status of women in society,” 58 Hvistendahl introduces Unnatural Selection as “a book about information that some had hoped to keep hidden, about misguided theorists focused only on the big picture and scientists with tunnel vision, and about population, technology, and abortion.” The book exposes the incompleteness— even wrongheadedness—of looking only to traditional cultural prejudices for the cause of such imbalance at birth. Hvistendahl writes, “Tradition cannot be the whole explanation for a phenomenon that has only appeared in the past 30 years,” and her research compellingly exposes the links between—and the melding of—tradition and technology left underexposed if not altogether missed in much work on this topic. The book’s three parts introduce the reader to important aspects of the issue through key figures and a narrative style that invites you into the story in a concrete and personal way. Part one, “Everyone Has Boys Now,” illustrates the nature of the problem from multiple angles including demographics, economics, politics, and the personal factors that contribute to “missing girls.” We learn that in many locations a “skewed sex ratio at birth was an outgrowth of economic progress, not backward traditions.” Part two, “A Great Idea,” details the beginnings of sex-selection abortion—the “great idea” that the United States exported to other countries during the 1960s and 1970s, spurred largely by its own fears of overpopulation (and concomitantly Communism). We see the World Bank, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Planned Parenthood Federation of America all playing a part in advancing the dissemination of such technology in the name of “population control.” (Hvistendahl notes the contrast between 1980s American politics and the seeming ease with which sex selection was championed not only for its presumed effectiveness at population control but also as “one of the most rational and ethical methods out there.” Given today’s political climate, her observation that “the list of abortion’s early champions reads like a directory of the Republican Party” is quite striking.) Part three, “The Womanless World,” deals with the consequences of a global surplus of men: The “marriage squeeze” leads to a range of trafficking in women, from international brides for purchase, to prostitution, to forced marriage, to child marriage, etc. Some scholars think that a “masculinized” world may also lead to increased violence and social instability. Here Hvistendahl aptly navigates the rough terrain—well known from the beginnings of feminist theorizing— between essentialist and constructionist stances on gender differences. Unnatural Selection is an eye-opening book, one that paints a vivid portrait of an important global issue. It makes it hard to look at gender, birth, politics, science, and technology—and their global knottiness—in the same way ever again. —Gwynn Kessler Assistant Professor of Religion Watch Mara Hvistendahl discuss her book when she came to campus this fall http://media.swarthmore.edu/video swarthmore college bulletin BOOKS Elizabeth Anderson ’81, The Imperative of Integration, Princeton University Press, 2010. Anderson demonstrates that despite the progress that has been made toward racial equality since 1964, African Americans remain disadvantaged. Through extensive social-science findings and political theory, the author provides a compelling argument in favor of reviving the ideal of racial integration to overcome injustice and inequality, exposing the deficiencies of racial views on both the right and the left, and exploring ways for integration to lead to a more responsive democracy. Diana Bailey Harris ’64, Reflections of a Civil War Locomotive Engineer: A GhostWritten Memoir, CreateSpace, 2011. This true story is based on long-forgotten letters that the author’s father found in a 100-year-old trove he discovered in 1988. From these letters, the author tells the story of John and Francis, brothers who served in the Civil War and went on to become, respectively, a locomotive engineer and a police officer. John recounts the events of their lives to find the secret to Francis’s happiness despite great personal tragedy. october 2011 Peter Bart ’54, Infamous Players: A Tale of Movies, The Mob (And Sex), Weinstein Books, 2011. Daily Variety editor Bart tells the story of his whirlwind experiences at Paramount as a studio executive in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This golden era for the studio also came with plenty of chaos and company turmoil—drugs, sex, runaway budgets, management infighting, and even the Mafia—making Paramount one of the most bizarre studios in all of movie industry history. Tony Holtzman ’55, Axton Landing, Cloud Splitter Press, 2011. In the harsh conditions of the Adirondack Mountains, disease and death stalk the lumberjacks in the winter of 1858. Cyrus Carter and Jared Mason forge a lasting friendship amidst the harsh conditions at their logging camp at Axton Landing. This action-packed novel displays all the dangers of the lumberjack lifestyle as well as the moral dilemma brought on by the arrival of a fugitive slave. Octavio Gonzalez ’97, The Book of Ours, Momotombo Press, 2009. Gonzalez chronicles his early life in the Dominican Republic and his move to New York City through a brave and memorable collection of poems. Using different moods and tones to convey an immigrant’s story, a gay man’s story, a Dominican’s story, a New York story, and many more, the author relates his painful personal history. Michael Seidman ’72, The Victorious Counterrevolution: The Nationalist Effort in the Spanish Civil War, The University of Wisconsin Press, 2011. This book examines how General Francisco Franco maintained a highly repressive and tightly controlled regime that combined with pro-Catholic and anti-Jewish propaganda to manage the Spanish economy and reinforce solidarity in the Nationalist zone. By avoiding inflation and shortages of food and military supplies—and with the support of elites and middleclass Spaniards—the Spanish Nationalists achieved victory over the Spanish Republicans and the revolutionary Left. Justin Powell ’92 and John Richardson, Comparing Special Education: Origins to Contemporary Paradoxes, Stanford University Press, 2011. The authors focus on special and inclusive education in the United States and Europe, showing that the expansion of special education is one of the most significant educational developments of the past century. Jan Hahn ’73, Voices, AuthorHouse, 2010. Physician Hahn has worked in big city emergency rooms, tertiary-care intensive care units, jails, an Indian hospital, a small rural hospital, nursing homes, and a small town medical office, listening to his patients’ stories. These moving poems chronicle the thoughts and feelings of men and women of all walks of life who try to cope with misfortunes and resolve the challenges confronting them, all with the same desire—to be heard. OTHER MEDIA Freebo (Daniel Friedberg) ’66, Something to Believe, Poppabo Music, 2011. The 11 songs in this selection—most by the artist with some co-written with co-producer and engineer Robert Tepper—take listeners along a path that is strewn with profundity, beauty, delight, amusement, and pathos—Freebo at his best. —Capsule reviews by Lauren Weiler 59 in my life A Country. Not a War. FORTY-THREE YEARS AFTER BEING WOUNDED IN VIETNAM, BILL EHRHART AND HIS FRIEND AND FELLOW MARINE TAKE A REWARDING AND EYE-OPENING JOURNEY. 66 COURTESY OF W.D.EHRHART The weapon that got Ken Takenaga and me was an RPG, a rocket-propelled grenade. You’ve probably seen RPGs in news footage of Afghan mujahedeen or Taliban fighters. The launcher is a long thin tube the gunner rests on his shoulder like a bazooka, and the projectile sticks out the front of the tube like a bulbous coneshaped piece of nastiness. We didn’t call them RPGs back then. We called them B-40s. But a rose by any other name still has thorns, and whatever you call it, one B-40 can screw up your whole day. It certainly screwed up ours. Ken got the worst of it: a huge gash in his scalp and a shattered right arm. He was evacuated immediately, first to Da Nang, then to Hawaii. I got some small shrapnel wounds a doctor cleaned out, slept for a few hours, then went back to the war, stone-deaf but otherwise reasonably functional. This was Hue City during the Tet Offensive. If you could walk, see, and shoot, you stayed. There were guys a lot worse off than me. It took me 32 years to find Kenny again. I didn’t even know his real first name (Kazunori) or which country he lived in (Japaneseborn, he was still a Japanese citizen in 1968). He’d come to the United States in the midst of the Vietnam War, as a permanent resident alien was subject to the draft, got drafted, and chose to join the Marines instead, thinking he was joining the Navy. When he got to Parris Island, he asked the drill instructors, “Where are the ships?” But that’s another story. I finally tracked him down in 2000 (yet another story), and, since then, we’ve renewed our friendship as if no time at all had passed. These days, he shuttles between Japan and New York, and we get together several times a year. Ken has spent his entire adult life in the travel and tourism industry, so when he suggested a trip back to Vietnam, he didn’t have to ask twice. This was not my first trip to postwar Vietnam. I’d been back in SACHIKO AKAMA By William Ehrhart ’73 Forty-three years ago, Marines Bill Ehrhart (above, right) and Ken Takenaga, fought together in Vietnam (left) until both were wounded by the same rocketpropelled grenade—Ken so seriously that he had to be evacuated. Their experience forged a bond that has lasted until the present. They returned to a Vietnam rich in memories— but now also filled with beauty, tranquillity, and new life. 1985 and again in 1990. But this trip was special for two reasons: I’d be able to take my wife, Anne, with me this time, to share with her a place she had only—but endlessly—heard about during our 30 years of marriage. And I’d be traveling with my buddy, my comrade, who’d literally been where I’d been and knew what I knew and needed no explanations. Our journey began, however, not in Vietnam, but in Japan. Ken spent the first 15 years of his life in the city of Yatsushiro, Kyushu, where he was raised by his maternal grandparents. Having seen where I grew up in Perkasie, Pa., Ken wanted to show us where he’d come from. We stood on the walls of the ruined feudal castle where Ken had climbed and played as a child. We saw the local jail where Ken’s grandfather had once been locked up for “overspending” on election day (long before Ken was born). Though the house Ken grew up in has been replaced by a newer structure, just across the street is Kangyo-ji, the Buddhist temple where his grandparents’ graves are, and where his will be some day. We spent eight days in Japan, walking across the famous five-arch swarthmore college bulletin Kintai Bridge at Iwakuni (near where I had been stationed postin 43 years—but we found it. Completely renovated and refurbished, Vietnam in 1969), touring magnificent Kumamoto Castle, luxuriating the house is now the business office for the four-star, six-story Duy in a private onsen (hot springs spa) at Tsuetate, making rice paper art Tan Hotel. The yard is a tiled driveway and parking area for the hotel at Shirakawa Spring, enjoying a Shinto wedding we happened upon at with a motor-scooter rental operation and an outdoor coffee shop. Aso Shrine, being decked out in traditional kimonos by a dressmaker Only the configuration of the windows and the location of the house and her two teenaged daughters (the process takes nearly an hour), itself allowed me to be certain we had the right place. dolphin-watching in Hayasaki Strait, walking amidst the awesome Indeed, aside from the ubiquitous cemeteries for the war dead effects of the 1990 volcanic eruption of Mt. Fugendake. and the occasional monument or statue, one has to look hard to find Among the coolest things Ken and I did together was to give a talk any evidence of the American War (as the Vietnamese call it). The about the Vietnam War and its aftermath to population, doubled since 1975, is young, the congregants of Toko-ji Zen Temple in dynamic, and ambitious. There is new Amakusa. Five years ago, at the request of I’d be traveling with my buddy, my construction everywhere. Roads, bridges, Morinobu Okabe, 31st priest of the temple, in the cities, in the countryside, 20-story Ken and I had translated and adapted a poem comrade, who’d literally been where office buildings, single-family homes. by the late Shinmin Sakamura, which OkabeGrass-thatched roofs have been replaced by san makes available free for visiting English I’d been and knew what I knew and ceramic tile. Most farmers plow their paddy speakers. A good 50 people showed up for fields with motorized if primitive tractors. the talk, listening attentively for an hour, and needed no explanations. Roads are paved, cars are commonplace, then we all had a multicourse feast washed and motor scooters and cell phones abound. down with beer, sake, and shochu. The beaches up and down the entire coast of Vietnam are lined with resort hotels. VietBank and PetroVietnam Then it was on to Vietnam. After a night in Saigon—where the are juxtaposed with Hyundai and Sheraton. The gap-toothed bridge street scene can only be described as “motor-scooter madness”—we over the River of Perfumes that the Viet Cong blew up during Tet flew to central Vietnam, the area between Hoi An and the 17th has been rebuilt, and is lit nightly with an array of colored floodlights parallel, where Ken and I had been stationed. We drove over the Hai that makes the lighting on Philadelphia’s Ben Franklin Bridge look Van Pass, a spectacular ride that had been charged with danger the anemic. first time we’d taken it in 1967. We climbed Marble Mountain, where Anne, Ken, and I, together with photographer Sachiko Akama, throughout the war the Viet Cong had maintained a field hospital who traveled with us, visited a fish farm and an aquarium on Hon right under the noses of the Americans at Da Nang. We drove over Mieu, the Cham-built Hindu temples of Po Nagar (the oldest dating the bridge that had once connected the rest of Hieu Nhon District to back to the eighth century), the summer palace of Emperor Tu Duc, the small fishing village of Phuoc Trac, displaced now by a string of and the tomb of emperor Khai Dinh. We went swimming in the luxury beach resorts. turquoise waters of Nha Thang Bay, took a sunset cruise on the Song In Hue City, the old Imperial capital of the Nguyen Dynasty, we Cai, and ate a barbeque of fresh prawns, squid, beef, tomatoes, and visited the Citadel, made famous by the Tet Offensive of 1968, and cucumber on Hon Mun. the Holy Lady Pagoda, where we saw the actual Austin automobile One evening in Hue, we went for a boat ride on the River of that Thich Quang Duc rode to Saigon in before immolating himself Perfumes, accompanied by eight singers and musicians in traditional to protest Ngo Dinh Diem’s suppression of Buddhists in 1963. (The dress performing traditional folk music. One can hardly imagine, car is visible in the iconic photo by Malcolm Browne ’52.) We drove let alone describe, the beauty, the profound tranquility, of such an up to the old DMZ and descended into the tunnels of Vinh Moc, experience—especially for two ex-Marines who had nearly died next where an entire village of 70 families had lived underground for six to that river so many years ago. years to escape U.S. bombardment. Later that night, Ken and I stood on a hotel balcony overlooking But the most amazing experience was finding the very building Hue. We could see the university that had been used as a refugee where Ken and I had been when we were wounded. During the center, the roof of the building we’d been in, now dwarfed by the hotel war, it had been some bigwig’s mansion—the mayor or provincial built around it, the roofs of what had been the MACV compound. governor—a two-and-a-half story house surrounded by a yard and But the streets were crowded with noisy, jostling, energetic people. a wall. The bigwig had skipped town when the shooting started, so The river flowed with colorful tour boats. The bridge glowed yellow, we Marines had moved in and were using it as a battalion command then green, then blue. We did not speak. There was nothing to say. post. We’d spent several days trying to dislodge some North This is what we had come to see. A country. Not a war. Vietnamese from the houses across the street and were just marking time that morning, waiting for flame tanks to come and burn the Bill Ehrhart ’73 teaches at the Haverford School in suburban block down. Ken and I were posted in a second-story bedroom. I was Philadelphia. His latest book is The Bodies Beneath the Table (Adastra making a cup of C-ration coffee, and he was cleaning his rifle when a Press, 2010). To read a fuller account of his trip, with additional photos, North Vietnamese soldier put a B-40 through the window. go to “Ken and Bill’s Excellent Adventure” at www.wdehrhart.com. It took some work to locate the house—a lot can and does change october 2011 67 Robert Odenweller ’59 JUSTIN BAITER was awarded the Royal Philatelic Society London Crawford Medal and the Royal Philatelic Society of New Zealand Collins Award for the book The Postage Stamps of New Zealand, 1855–1873—The Chalon Head Issues, in 2011. Uniquely, he was awarded both in 2005 for the book The Stamps and Postal History of Nineteenth Century Samoa . Odenweller received the world’s highest philatelic honor, signing the Roll of Distinguished Philatelists (RDP) in 1991. Other major awards include the Smithsonian Philatelic Achievement Award, the Alfred F. Lichtenstein Memorial Award, the American Philatelic Society (APS) Luff Award, and both the FIP (Fédération Internationale de Philatélie) Research Medal and its Medal for Service. His exhibits have won both the APS Champion of Champions and the FIP Grand Prix d’Honneur. Odenweller has long been a special overseas representative for the Royal Philatelic Society London, is the society’s first and only Honorary Fellow from the United States, and is a member of the National Postal Museum Council of Philatelists. He edits the prestigious journal The Collectors Club Philatelist. october 2011 61 Terese Loeb Kreuzer’s [’64], COURTESY OF TERESE LOEB KREUZER reporting on the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act and its passage by Congress in December 2010 after eight years of struggle, won Downtown Express, a weekly Manhattan newspaper, an award for political coverage from the New York Press Association. One of the judges said: “I was struck by the deep reporting that went into both the human-interest and procedural coverage of the Zadroga bill. I felt like I was on the bus with the activists who went to DC to lobby for its passage.” Founder of the Travel Arts Syndicate, Kreuzer previously thought of herself primarily as a travel writer—not a political reporter—but said, “I found that my travel writing experience helped me to convey the anxiety, weariness, determination and, finally, the euphoria that gave life to the Zadroga story.” Kreuzer continues to write travel articles and to publish photographs in newspapers, magazines, and books around the world. She is co-author of the book How to Move to Canada: A Primer for Americans (2006). october 2011 63 class notes Roy Weintraub ’64 DUKE UNIVERSITY PHOTOGRAPHY has been named a Distinguished Fellow of the History of Economics Society (HES). Weintraub, a Duke University faculty member since 1970, was nominated for “promoting an awareness of … the larger social and intellectual context in which economics developed.” The award citation notes that his primary research and influential historiographic approach constitute an exceptional lifetime achievement and concludes that “few modern scholars have traversed the terrain from mathematics via economics into the humanities.” Originally a mathematician, Weintraub turned to history and the investigation of how economics evolved into a mathematical science later in his career. He is also one of few economists honored with a National Humanities Center fellowship. Weintraub has published 10 books, including How Economics Became a Mathematical Science (2002), which won best book awards from both the HES and the European Society for the History of Economic Thought. 64 swarthmore college bulletin Connecting Class Notes and Social Media Alongside the growing surge of social media’s popularity, Class Notes are still the most-read section of the Bulletin. Increasingly, however, your class secretaries are finding a valuable connectivity between the two. Some class secretaries are using Facebook and the College’s password-protected online community to gather news about their classmates; others are creating class websites. Alumni with Facebook group pages have found that the venue is a powerful way to reconnect and to support each other. The interplay between Class Notes and social media is also strengthening that bond. Each serves a purpose. Resources such as Facebook keep you and your classmates connected all the time. And yet, when you pull the Bulletin from your mailbox each quarter, you can be sure that along with all the other College news, you will be able to immerse yourself in news about your classmates and the other alumni included in Class Notes. In future issues, we will begin to incorporate the Facebook icon into class headings as your secretaries notify us that they rely on Facebook for news or that your class has a Facebook group page. In their columns, the secretaries are also encouraged to let classmates know that they cull news from the Swarthmore online community. And of course, emails—sent directly to your secretary—are still a welcome way to share news! october 2011 65 class notes Arlene Zarembka ’70 LIFETOUCH is the recipient of the ACLU–Eastern Missouri Civil Liberties Champion Award for defending civil liberties and rights through her law practice. Her many awards include the 1998 Clarence Darrow Public Interest Advocate Award, 2008 ACLU–Eastern Missouri Extraordinary Volunteer Service Award, and 2009 Social Justice Hero Award. Zarembka was one of the leaders of the Privacy Rights Education Project/ PROMO from 1987–2006, drafting and advocating for numerous bills involving privacy rights, LGBT rights, reproductive rights, and hate crimes. She is a member of the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys, ACLU-Eastern Missouri Legal Committee, and Alzheimer’s Association Public Policy Committee. She is a cooperating attorney for ACLU-Eastern Missouri and the National Center for Lesbian Rights. She is author of The Urban Housing Crisis: Social, Economic, and Legal Issues and Proposals (1990) and co-author of To Establish Justice: Citizenship and the Constitution (2004). 68 swarthmore college bulletin Wilma Lewis ’78 TAMI HEILMAN, V.I. DEPT. OF THE INTERIOR has been nominated by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the United States Senate to serve as a federal district court judge in the U.S. Virgin Islands. She is the first woman to serve as a federal judge in the Virgin Islands. This is the fourth presidential appointment for Lewis, who hails from the Virgin Islands. Lewis was the United States Attorney for Washington, D.C., from 1998 to 2001. Since 2009, she has served as the assistant secretary for land and minerals management in the U.S. Department of the Interior. From 1995 to 1998, Lewis was the inspector general for that department, the first African American to hold the position. Her many awards include the Janet Reno Torchbearer Award, Charlotte E. Ray Award, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Dream Keepers Award, Bethune-Dubois Institute Award, and the National Black Prosecutors Association Founders’ Award. In 2003, Lewis was featured in Harvard Law Bulletin as one of 50 female graduates who used their legal education to “take them to extraordinary places.” october 2011 69 ERIC MICHAEL JOHNSON / THE NEW YORK TIMES / REDUX class notes Write Out Loud For All to See BY A SIMPLE PUBLIC ACT OF COMPASSION, RUTH SERGEL ’84 SPURRED A CITY TO ACTION. 70 Nineteen-year old factory worker Beckie Neubauer could have had no idea that she would draw her last breath on March 25, 1911, when fire consumed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Lower East Side, New York City. That day, 146 workers—mostly young, female immigrants— burned alive or jumped to their deaths as firemen scrambled to reach the blazing floor. A hundred years later, Beckie is memorialized in an intricate, pink-and-blue sidewalk chalking, showing her age, address, and death date—adorned with flowers, birds, and hearts—all drawn with a careful, caring hand. It is by chalking that Ruth Sergel (www.streetpictures.org) honors the lives of Beckie and all the other victims of New York City’s deadliest workplace tragedy before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Sergel, a Lower East Side resident and native to the area now known as Tribeca, grew up with stories of the fire, but it was only after reading the book Triangle: The Fire That Changed America that she discovered how many of the victims had once lived close to her home on East Third Street. “I’ve always been interested in how cold, im- personal facts like an address can evoke the most emotional response,” Sergel says. So on the anniversary of the fire in 2004, Sergel and her friends chalked victims’ names, ages, and addresses in front of their former homes all across downtown Manhattan. Since then, this simple act of remembrance has grown into a burgeoning public art project named “Chalk!” “Chalk!” has caught on with everyone— mothers, daughters, teachers, schoolchildren, and even the occasional descendant of a Triangle victim. “Once you chalk a building,” Sergel says. “you identify this building with a life and a death.” Dispelling the misconception that big cities such as New York are anonymous and impersonal, “Chalk!” reveals what has been there all along: a “compassionate” community with a conscience and a long memory. Sergel discovered that people were already “intensely passionate” about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire; “Chalk!” simply provided the outlet. History also played a role. The fire occurred after the 1909 “Uprising of the 20,000,” when young, immigrant shirtwaist workers went on swarthmore college bulletin Sergel is founder of the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition, a national network of more than 250 partners for educational, activist, and artistic actions that commemorate community tragedies. strike against inhumane working conditions until, says Sergel, the “city turned its back on them.” “It was an easily preventable tragedy,” she continues. “It’s heartbreaking that these young strikers were brave enough to come to the United States and work long hours to make life better for themselves and their families. But nobody cared enough to put sprinklers—readily available at the time—in the building.” The fire sparked outrage from the national labor movement, manifested through strikes and sit-ins and the emergence of a new political will for change. Politicians previously indifferent to these issues took them on, improving factory working conditions, including fire safety regulations. But Sergel believes that these “old forms” of dissent—although not necessarily ineffective— need reform. Her passion is to help recreate this october 2011 old stamina for change by providing opportunities through projects such as “Chalk!” “People hunger for constructive civic engagement,” Sergel says. “Going from thoughts and ideas to action is a muscle that must be exercised.” To Sergel’s delight, people continue to flex their civic muscles yearly. Downtown New Yorkers participate in chalking. Community organizers in other cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., have already appropriated the project to remember similar tragedies in their communities. Before starting “Chalk,” Sergel was involved in a people’s video and oral history project called “Voices of 9.11.” In a private video booth, witnesses from New York; Pennsylvania; Washington, D.C.; and the Pentagon recounted their memories, creating a complex narrative and fill- ing gaps in the communal memory. “If one forgot a detail in their testimonial, someone else would fill it in,” Sergel says. Although the actual parallels between 9/11 and the factory fire are few, the cause of death in both cases has an eerie similarity and the act of witnessing and the feeling of helplessness are similar. “Seeing these people coming out of the windows—and the little that we could do at that point—was horrible,” Sergel says. It is a sense of community empowerment and strength in solidarity that unifies both projects. “We can feel very isolated in our political and social beliefs. You learn to censor yourself,” she says. “But when you’re participating in a project like ‘Chalk,’ you’re busting open that taboo. You’re in a very public act, on a city street, writing out loud for everyone to see. Then you realize other people are doing the same thing. “If you make a work of art with other people about something you’re trying to understand, it’s very powerful—a tiny part of a much larger engagement that people need.” —Maki Somosot ’12 71 class notes Darko Tresnjak ’88 ROGER CASTONGUAY has been named the fifth artistic director of Hartford Stage, a theater known for its production of original and classic shows for nearly 50 years. Renowned for his direction of theater and opera, Tresnjak has received awards from the San Diego Theatre Critics Circle for outstanding direction of Cyrano de Bergerac, The Winter’s Tale, and Pericles as well as an award for excellence in artistic direction. This year, he directed a national tour of The Merchant of Venice, featuring F. Murray Abraham as Shylock; and Titus Andronicus at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. Tresnjak’s work has been seen at the Royal Shakespeare Company, The Old Globe, Los Angeles Opera, Joseph Papp Public Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, Huntington Theatre Company, Theatre for a New Audience, and Williamstown Theatre Festival, among others. 72 swarthmore college bulletin Sabrina Martinez ’92 DEBI WALLACE, BARFIELD PHOTOGRAPHY is the recipient of Houston Woman Magazine’s 2011 Broad Shoulders Award, for which she was nominated by AVANCE Houston, an organization that promotes the value of education, better parenting, and health to influence the lives of low-income families. Martinez has been on the AVANCE board since 2009, drawn to the organization because of its commitment to Head Start—an early childhood education program that she was enrolled in as a child. She is the chair of AVANCE’s Human Resources Committee and helped develop diversity, succession, social media, and employee-wellness policies for the organization. She is also senior adviser for global workforce-planning in the Human Resources Department at ConocoPhillips and previously has been involved in vendor management, retiree benefit management, health and welfare benefits design, and recruiting. Martinez is vice chair for the United Way of Texas Gulf Coast Young Leaders Program and past president of Swarthmore’s Alumni Council. october 2011 73 COURTESY OF ARTSPHORIA class notes Playtime with a Snap WOODWORKING ARTISANS JOHN AND JANE GREENBERG KOSTICK ’88 HAVE CREATED TETRAXIS, A MAGNETIC GEOMETRY PUZZLE FOR ALL AGES. 76 Inviting the inner child to re-emerge for playtime, the colorful displays at Toy Fair 2011 in New York enticed industry professionals to play hide-and-seek on three expansive floors. During mid-February, toy creators and merchants at the Jacob Javits Convention Center dazzled potential buyers with eye-catching gimmicks—from an inflatable remote-controlled flying fish to a shiny red, miniature piano and an oversized LEGO-constructed car. In a basementfloor booth, John and Jane Kostick encouraged visitors to play with their magnetic Tetraxis geometry puzzle. (Pictured at left: The Kosticks’ son James plays with the Tetraxis ® toy). “If you put the pieces together in less than one minute, you’ll win a free one,” Jane said to Tom Cutrofello, mechanical puzzle correspondent for Games Magazine. Twelve identically shaped sticks, in four colors, magnetically connect in the Kosticks’ hands-on learning puzzle, which enhances the exploration of symmetry and color combina- tions. The toy increases spatial understanding; problem-solving skills; intellectual and manual dexterity; and intergenerational, interoffice, and intercommunity connections. On the first day of the fair, the crowd around the Kosticks’ table cheered Cutrofello and others, who claimed their prizes after solving the puzzle. Some recalled solving other math-based puzzles and used that experience to handle the Tetraxis challenge. “That’s a fun toy, especially when you get the method down,” says Jon Goehring, who runs Toyworks in Santa Rosa, Calif., with Cristi Ronchelli. The Tetraxis design, first crafted as bronze and wooden sculptures, is just one of the geometric constructions that the Kosticks have created. Their customized furniture, cabinetry, and garden accessories are also based on geometric configurations. “Many of the skills we’ve acquired as builders and craftsmen—to think in details and problem swarthmore college bulletin Twelve identically shaped sticks, in four colors, magnetically connect in the Kosticks’ hands-on learning puzzle, which enhances the exploration of symmetry and color combinations. solve—have been critically important in developing the toy version and overseeing production. But the fabrication process is different, because Tetraxis is manufactured out of injection-molded ABS (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene) plastic, a more high-tech process than we are accustomed to and one we really knew very little about when we began developing the product in 2009,” Jane says. “We could never have done it without the help of the product development firm in Watertown, Mass., called DaTuM3D: Design to Manufacture. We worked closely with the company’s industrial designers and engineers to develop our product.” Designers and woodworking craftsmen with october 2011 an interest in mathematics, the Kosticks officially launched their new company, KO Sticks LLC, in August 2010. A pilot run of 2,000 toys, in the fall, quickly sold out. The next production in Xiamen, China, delivered the second batch in March for distribution in Switzerland and Australia, where the puzzle was displayed at another toy fair. A small community of artists, primarily furniture makers who work in cooperative studios in an old industrial building—where the Kosticks are based in Medford, Mass.—offered input on the package design. Patricia Marx, who gave Tetraxis a top rating in the category “Educational Toy That Could Pass for a Real Toy” wrote in The New Yorker (Dec. 6, 2010): “It’s challenging but not throw-it-acrossthe-room challenging. Bonus points for knowing that the structure is arranged along directions common in nature, similar to carbon or silicon atoms. This factoid also makes for a dandy conversation stopper.” Some game players have even completed the puzzle blindfolded. “Once you learn the puzzle, it gets easier and easier,” says Marx. “It always surprises me when I see people struggle with it at first. Then, when they get good at it, they are surprised they initially found it hard.” “The toy continues to be satisfying to assemble even after it becomes easy,” she says. “One of John’s friends wrote me this morning and said, ‘I keep mine on my kitchen table, and everyone who comes over has to pick it up and put it together again. Yes, it’s like an exercise in life— things fall apart and then you have to build it up again stick by stick. It works. It’s a meditation.” —Andrea Hammer 77 STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT, AND CIRCULATION 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. Publication title: Swarthmore College Bulletin Publication number: 0888-2126 Filing date: Oct. 13, 2011 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 19081-1397 General business office: 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore PA 19081-1397 Publisher: Swarthmore College, 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore PA 19081-1397. Editor: Jeffrey Lott, 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore PA 19081-1397 Managing editor: none Owner: Swarthmore College, 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore PA 19081-1397 Known bondholders, mortgagees, or other security october 2011 holders holding one percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortages, 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 2011 15. a. Total number of copies (net press run): 25,492 b. (1) Paid or requested mail subscriptions: 22,598 b. (4) Other classes mailed: 1,352 (ISAL) c. Total paid and/or requested circulation: 23,950 d. (3) Free distribution by mail: 22 d. (4) Free distribution outside the mail: 1,417 e. Total free distribution: 1,439 f. Total distribution: 25,389 g. Copies not distributed: 103 h. Total: 25,492 i. Percent paid and/or requested circulation: 94.3% 79 q+a A Tightly Choreographed Life By Carol Brévart-Demm The relationship between Carol Nackenoff and her field of scholarship was by no means a case of love at first sight. As an undergraduate at Smith College, she considered a major in English, but her father talked her out of it. She thought about music, history, and French but rejected each. Ultimately, a charismatic professor of political philosophy lured her into the field she has been researching and teaching for the past 19 years at Swarthmore and, before that, on the faculties of Rutgers University and Bard College. Now Richter Professor of Political Science, just completing terms as coordinator of the Environmental Studies Program and division chair for interdisciplinary studies, the vivacious Nackenoff is passionate about her research, which examines late 19th- and early 20th-century phenomena such as the relationship between Americans’ economic and employment experiences and their belief in the American Dream, competing notions of citizenship, and the role organized women played in building the American state. These interests are reflected in Nackenoff ’s publications, which include her book The Fictional Republic: Horatio Alger and American Political Discourse (Oxford, 1994); and Jane Addams and the Practice of Democracy (University of Illinois Press, 2009), for which she was both a contributor and co-editor. Passionate about music, Nackenoff learned piano and violin as a small child, and thanks to the voice lessons she took starting in graduate school, she sings first soprano— both as a soloist and chorist—in operatic, early music, and classical performances. In retirement (for which she has no firm date), she plans to build a harpsichord and fulfill a desire she’s nurtured since sixth grade—to learn to play the oboe. 80 swarthmore college bulletin What appeals to you most about political science? I’m drawn to great questions of political philosophy—such as the relationship of the individual to community—as well as questions of justice and how to design a political system that people willingly consent to. I appreciate that political science attends to history and historical patterning. I want to make sense of political fears and struggles of other eras and love showing how they left ideational and institutional legacies. What are you working on currently? I’m examining Americans’ perceptions of citizenship during the period from 1875 to 1925—a time of intense conflict over inclusion of women, African Americans, Native Americans, and immigrants in the polity. I like to unpack archival materials to try to reconstruct political culture and world views. In this project, activist groups in which women are heavily involved figure in virtually every chapter. After teaching law for so many years, I’ve also been able to incorporate a dimension on court battles and legal struggles into my work. I’ve also been publishing a bit on constitutional law issues in recent years. What is your favorite course to teach? My honors Constitutional Law seminar has become a favorite. I began teaching constitutional law around 1990 and, in the early years, didn’t know much more than what was on the syllabus, but law just kept getting more interesting for me. I also love teaching my newest course Environmental Politics and Policy. That has become a real passion. If you could have had another career, what might it have been? I’d like to run away and join the Metropolitan Opera Chorus. If I didn’t think I were too old to do it, my fantasy would be to sing professionally. If you were given the chance to write someone’s biography, whose would you choose? Probably a biography of Associate Supreme Court Justice David Souter. I found him to be an intriguing, active member of the Court—often one of the few recent justices who thought in ways that made sense to me. I’m sorry he retired. If you were to host a TV show, which would it be? One of the MSNBC news shows. The Rachel Maddow Show would be fun. If you could switch places with any head of state in the world, who would you choose? I’d rather be on the Supreme Court. People believe that chief executives have much more power than they really do. I believe we’ve fallen into making far more political promises than any individual in one branch of government can deliver on. On the Court, you have the chance to think out loud about legal principles and their meaning and to try to reason about the meanings of terms that may be aspirational—like equal protection—while still adhering to bounds set by law and precedent. At age 8, Carol Nackenoff took her first trip west with her family. Quite the cowgirl, she evidently felt comfortable astride this bucking bronco at a Colorado ranch. So what if the bronco isn’t real? What’s the craziest spontaneous action you ever took? I’m less spontaneous than I’d like to be, but some years ago, I had the idea of turning off my upstairs neighbors’ electricity. I lived in an apartment, and their music was too loud and they wouldn’t turn it down, even late at night. I came up with the idea but didn’t have the guts to execute it. My husband did that. And the neighbors didn’t have a key to the room where the circuit breakers were. They had to call the janitor. We did it several times before they realized what was happening (they finally were evicted for nonpayment of rent). I’d like to be more spontaneous, but my life is pretty tightly choreographed. What are some of your other interests? I’m somewhat maniacal about getting my 1,000 lap shirt at the Swarthmore Swim Club every summer. I did it in nine days this year. I also like to make my own herb-wine–based vinegars, bake, read really good novels. I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by Jonathan Franzen. I also love to travel. In July, I visited Central Europe to look at the programs our environmental studies students attend there—in Krakow and a new program in Brno, Czech Republic—and then I stayed on and went to Vienna, Budapest, and Prague on vacation with my husband. I’ve often said that I will travel anywhere where no one is shooting at me. 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