SUMMER 2017 Periodical Postage PAID Philadelphia, PA and Additional Mailing Offices WATER JUSTICE p7 DOGMA p10 RESISTENCIA p65 ISSUE IV 500 College Ave. Swarthmore, PA 19081–1306 www.swarthmore.edu VOLUME CXIV SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN YOUR SCHOOL AWAITS SUMMER 2017 Celebrate what makes Swarthmore special for each of us Garnet Homecoming and Family Weekend: Oct. 6–8 swarthmore.edu/garnetweekend CREDIT Curiosity in this issue 9 M.I.T. TIME Science and Stories Bringing liberal arts flavor to STEM. LAURENCE KESTERSON by Josh Sokol ’11 MOMENT IN TIME Celebrate Commencement in full: bit.ly/SwatCom17. Congrats, Class of 2017! 18 40 45 FEATURES FEATURES CLASS NOTES 24 Ways to Look at a Fish Song of the Heart Alumni News and Events On assessing everything anew through the limitless lens of the liberal arts. Through music, finding harmony with one another—and within. by Elizabeth Slocum by Jonathan Riggs 28 The Space Between 2 by Jonathan Riggs Nathan Graf ’16 Co-taught interdisciplinary courses reveal what Swarthmore’s all about. 32 American Tiger Thousands of captive tigers in the U.S. in private homes and roadside zoos are caged proof of a society gone haywire. by Kate Campbell DIALOGUE Editor’s Column Letters Community Voices Rewind Dick and Gay Sise Grossman ’65 Books Global Thinking Marcela Escobari ’96 9 COMMON GOOD Alicia Wilson ’96 Emily Robbins ’07 72 SPOKEN WORD Eric Jensen and Pam Shropshire WEB EXCLUSIVES BULLETIN.SWARTHMORE.EDU PARTNERSHIP POWER Read interviews with interdisciplinary faculty collaborating to co-teach creative courses. THE RIDDLER Read about Craig Williamson’s thrillingly new Old English translations. FISH TALES Dive into expanded interviews with our ichthyological experts. Swarthmore Stories Learning Curve STRIPES Liberal Arts Lives INVENTION CONVENTION Eleanor Glewwe ’12 ON THE COVER Cleared art and photography by Adam Summers ’86 Profiles Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot ’66 Zack Wiener ’12 Earn yours online with more tiger-riffic extras. Browse a Design & Sculpture in the Digital Age student gallery. SUMMER 2017 / Swarthmore College Bulletin 1 dialogue EDITOR’S COLUMN LETTERS HOW DO YOU LOOK AT A FISH? SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN Editor Jonathan Riggs Managing Editor Kate Campbell Class Notes Editor Elizabeth Slocum Designer Phillip Stern ’84 Photographer Laurence Kesterson Administrative/Editorial Assistant Michelle Crumsho LAURENCE KESTERSON Editorial Assistants Cody McElhinny ’17 Eishna Ranganathan ’20 BLIND OR SIGHTED, artist or engineer, ichthyologist or “icky!” apologist, each of us has a different answer. What unites us all is our ability to do more than look, but instead to see. Empathetic curiosity is the theme of this issue— and, perhaps, the most universal Swarthmorean trait. So let’s swim on together, an endlessly diverse school, looking at our shared world of wonders, fishy and otherwise, to ultimately see ourselves. —JR FROM THE BANKS OF CRUM CREEK: “I see fish, and all Kate animals, as complex, living pieces of art. Fish always look busy, but relaxed.” “A lifelong goal of mine is to see Jonathan the Loch Ness Monster—please let her know.” “My aunt owns a sushi Michelle restaurant in Japan. I grew up watching very fresh fish prepared into sashimi. Sort of sad, sort of delicious.” “As a child I loved Elizabeth The Little Mermaid—I’d bind my ankles with pool rings to swim with a ‘fish tail.’” “Pan-fried trout with pecans Laurence makes a mighty fine meal.” “My first summer job Phillip was shelling shrimp at a restaurant run by the mob. Luckily, I never heard ‘do this or you swim with the fishes.’” Editor Emerita Maralyn Orbison Gillespie ’49 bulletin.swarthmore.edu facebook.com/SwarthmoreBulletin instagram.com/SwarthmoreBulletin Email: bulletin@swarthmore.edu Telephone: 610-328-8533 We welcome letters on subjects covered in the magazine. We reserve the right to edit letters for length, clarity, and style. Views expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or the official views or policies of the College. Send letters and story ideas to bulletin@swarthmore.edu Send address changes to records@swarthmore.edu The Swarthmore College Bulletin (ISSN 0888-2126), of which this is volume CXIV, number IV, is published in October, January, April, and July by Swarthmore College, 500 College Ave., Swarthmore, PA 19081-1390. Periodicals postage paid at Philadelphia, PA and additional mailing offices. Permit No. 0530-620. Postmaster: Send address changes to Alumni Records, 500 College Ave., Swarthmore, PA 19081-1390. i 2 Swarthmore College Bulletin / SUMMER 2017 ly H-UV ks th e nd + WRITE TO US: bulletin@swarthmore.edu Papa Wheelie I can relate to the report on Lynn West Salvo ’71’s cross-country ride (“Life Is Like a Bike,” spring 2017): In 1986, with my 50th birthday approaching, I wanted a novel way to celebrate. When I mentioned that I was considering the big cross-country, two of my kids volunteered to accompany me: Dave ’83 and Brie ’89. (Brie was an undergrad; Dave quit his job at Chess Life magazine to participate.) Starting out from Anacortes, Wash., we had the intent of ad-libbing—we crossed into Canada at Sault Ste. Marie, but soon found the densely traveled two-lane Trans-Canada Highway a serious risk and ducked back into New York. Finishing the ride at Long Beach Island, N.J., we did the traditional dipping of the front wheels into the Atlantic and went to the hospital to have our seats surgically removed. We make no claim to any awards, but treasure the memories. —GENE GERTLER ’57, Prescott, Ariz. WANTED: ORAL HISTORY PROJECT PARTICIPANTS ©2017 Swarthmore College. Printed in USA. e c o-fri “… but what do we see when we look at you?” It thrilled me to read John Whyte ’74 describe the lastingly transformative effect of a 1973 student-run course on homosexuality and affirming presence of a gay movement on campus in the early ’70s (“Heartfelt, Hopeful, Happy,” spring 2017). We are all indebted to Jesse Ford ’73, whose stubborn vision created Swarthmore Gay Liberation. Returning to Swarthmore after working for gay liberation in New York City—Stonewall had happened only three years earlier—she put up signs in Parrish, got a coffee pot, and went to see who would show up. In October we did our first political “zap,” handing out Halloween candy as “gay ghosts” under purple-dyed sheets with eyeholes cut out. One of the first events we organized was a talk by Barbara Gittings, who spoke about her activism on behalf of homosexuals that stretched back to the 1950s. For the course John cites, we owe lasting thanks to Jeanne Marecek, then an untenured assistant professor, who courageously agreed to sponsor it. We drew up a syllabus, surveyed the library’s offerings, and presented them with a list of books we demanded they purchase. You can still find them, I hope, on the shelf—along with what was then the library’s only gay-friendly book, Towards a Quaker View of Sex: An Essay by a Group of Friends (1963). I remain proud and happy that my Swarthmore transcript shows a course credit for “Homosexuality.” I still have a mimeographed copy of the research paper I did on the Stonewall Rebellion for my senior-year class on folk history—gay people were my “folk.” I quoted from that paper last fall when I delivered Dartmouth’s 16th annual Stonewall Lecture. I owe my fluency to the work we did in Swarthmore Gay Liberation, an organization that I hope now may be more fully recalled in the history of LGBTQ life at Swarthmore. —CHRISTINA CROSBY ’74, Middletown, Conn. Printed with agri-based inks. Please recycle after reading. pr inted w A Fish SWARTHMORE GAY LIBERATION in McCabe Library hopes to record interviews with alumni active in the civil rights movement from 1963 to 1967; they also welcome donations of related letters, photos, pamphlets, and memorabilia. Email Digital Collections Librarian Stefanie Ramsay: sramsay1@swarthmore.edu REMEMBERING A FRIEND “We mourn the tragic loss of Sam Jenkins ’19. His professors note his astute, ambitious academic work, as well as his ability to integrate narrative, visual art, performance, animation, and game design in imaginative, compelling ways. A creative, joyful, and gentle individual, he made a lasting impact on our community.” —PRESIDENT VALERIE SMITH + FULL TRIBUTE: bulletin.swarthmore.edu HERE’S TO THE REST OF US I love reading Bulletin articles written by and about amazing, high-achieving grads, but then I think about all the others—the silent majority—who went on to “regular” lives. Disrupters change the world, but could we hear from the ones who keep the world operating? Who are coping? Who are living lives of simplicity? As a member of the silent majority, I would love to see you survey the alumni community for the “average” Swarthmore student. Publishing their stories would be illuminating and inspiring! My Swarthmore education fills my life daily, from deliberating over lettuce purchases (when I was at Swats, we had none because of the boycott), to walking away from a finance job ­dominated by making the rich richer, to leaving a too-­ conservative church. The list is endless. —KATHY PEARCE GLEDHILL ’80, Little Silver, N.J. Thanks, Kathy. Readers, the Bulletin belongs to each of you, regardless of your résumé—it’s our shared song of Swarthmore, and we would like to include as many voices as possible. Talk to us, “silent majority”: bulletin@swarthmore.edu SUMMER 2017 / Swarthmore College Bulletin 3 dialogue COMMUNITY VOICES PETER ARKLE LEADING THE CHARGE I LEARNED about To avoid the worst effects of climate global warming back change, the United Nations agreed in grade school: that the planet must restrict its global With time, global temperature rise to under 2 degrees temperatures would Celsius. To have a reasonable chance increase, seas would of meeting that goal, we must keep rise, storms would intensify—and that more than 84 percent of our fossil fuel would be bad. As a child, I viewed the reserves in the ground. Unfortunately, polar bears’ plight as sorrowful, but there aren’t many politically feasible a problem a later generation would policy options for that kind of swift surely figure out. and deep decarbonization by As a Swarthmore stuof the global economy. dent, I discovered much What to do? more about the ways in Placing a sufficiently which fossil fuels conexpensive price on tribute to human sufferextracting carbon is a ing and death. I learned rare policy solution that about food and water insecurity that can keep those reserves in the ground will become a reality for many regions, while holding bipartisan appeal. If the from extreme permanent drought in tax is high enough, fossil fuels won’t East Africa, the Middle East, and the be able to compete with renewable western United States to submerenergy, and continued extraction won’t sion of agricultural land in Bangladesh be profitable. Even better, in models and the Mekong Delta. I learned about with a dividend to families, lowerocean acidification killing marine life income people come out ahead, since that tens of millions depend on for wealthier people consume more food. I learned about equatorial cities carbon. that will become uninhabitable when Immediately after graduating, I temperatures regularly exceed what started work as Swarthmore’s climate humans can survive and the forced action senior fellow in the Office of migrations and political instability Sustainability to help bring the College that these impacts will engender. and higher education into the national Indeed, the world pays a steep price carbon-pricing dialogue. Swarthmore’s for our extraction of fossil fuels. nascent Carbon Charge program NATHAN GRAF ’16 Senior Fellow “The world pays a steep price for our extraction of fossil fuels.” 4 Swarthmore College Bulletin / SUMMER 2017 provides a platform to educate and engage the community on carbon pricing while incentivizing emissions reductions right here on campus. Beyond Swarthmore, we’re working with other colleges and universities to build awareness and momentum for internal carbon pricing in academia and elsewhere. We’re also working with others to advance carbon pricing on the national stage, including David Gelber ’63, H’17, who co-created the Years of Living Dangerously documentary series on the impacts of climate change. That team partnered with the national advocacy group Our Climate to create the Put a Price on It campaign, which aims to empower students and encourage higher-ed leaders to push for a national price on carbon. President Valerie Smith was the second signatory on their endorsement letter, and she spearheaded efforts to encourage other college presidents to join as well. (David created a video—bit.ly/ SwatCarbon—on our efforts.) Even as one of the most feasible solutions to climate change, enacting carbon pricing is still an uphill battle. To change the political landscape, we need advocates using many strategies from all sectors of society. We need to make it clear to elected officials—and everyone—that the climate is a priority and that carbon pricing is a necessary part of the solution. In many ways, Swarthmore is taking leadership on this issue. You’re a part of that. Visit swarthmore.edu/sustainability to learn more or email sustainability@ swarthmore.edu. NATHAN GRAF ’16 is Swarthmore’s climate action senior fellow. ANNE O’DONNELL Swarthmore enters the carbon-pricing conversation REWIND: GIVING GREEN Supporting Swarthmore while supporting sustainability WE WERE friends for most of our time at the Quaker matchbox, but dated only once. Luckily, we got together at a party before graduation and we recently celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary, a year after our 50th Swarthmore reunion. We’ve been fortunate to build a life and family together, but thinking about our three granddaughters made us wonder: by Will the world in which they grow up be anything like the world we enjoyed? ’65 And so together, we made choices to limit the size of our footprint. We live in a small home with solar panels that make most of our electricity, including for our plug-in Prius. It’s a duplex, which is more efficient than a single-family house, and it is part of an intentional community—Heartwood Cohousing, outside Durango, Colo. We are surrounded by friends (almost like dorm life!) and often borrow from a neighbor if we run short of something. Concerns about climate change, sustainability, and footprint size are very important to us now, but they haven’t always been. We didn’t give a second thought to leaving the heat on and the windows open while at Swarthmore. But we realize that resources are limited and being depleted much faster than they regenerate— the most obvious example being the planet’s ability to deal with greenhouse-gas emissions. We’re in our 70s now and probably won’t live to see many of the consequences of climate change, but we DICK AND GAY SISE GROSSMAN want to make a difference with the time we have left and the resources at our disposal. In addition to living relatively simply, we have been careful with how we invest our money. For years, we have shunned investments in armaments, alcohol, and tobacco. More recently, we divested from all fossil-fuel investments, and we have encouraged our educational institutions, including Swarthmore, to do the same. In fact, we helped distribute the orange squares of cloth (the symbol of divestment) that so many of our fellow alums wore at their reunion. That’s why we were pleased to find that Swarthmore provides donation options that don’t touch fossil fuels and support sustainability—primarily, the President’s Climate Commitment Fund. In addition to sending Swarthmore students to international climatechange panels, it has also been used to hire the College’s first climate action senior fellow, Nathan Graf ’16. Another option is The Swarthmore Fund, where your gift supports this year’s current expenses, so there is no investment in fossil fuels through the endowment. Of course, there is the Fossil FuelFree Fund, established last year by the Board of Managers. Unlike the school’s general endowment, this endowment fund does not invest in fossil fuels. Donors may add to it with a gift of any amount—there is no upper or lower limit. Finally, there are the Office of Sustainability’s student leaders programs, which include two groups: the President’s Sustainability Research Fellows and the Green Advisors. Both groups advance sustainability efforts on campus by helping build protocols and behaviors among students, staff, and faculty that reduce our carbon footprint. We feel very strongly about this cause and will continue our activism. But even though we want to make sure none of our donations go to investments that could spell problems for the future, it’s important to us, too, to support the College that prepared us so well for life—and brought us together. SUMMER 2017 / Swarthmore College Bulletin 5 dialogue BOOK REVIEW AUTHOR Q&A PRESSURE DROP POLITICAL H2O: VERONICA HERRERA ’03 by Joshua Ellow LIFE ON A PEDESTAL is risky, especially for doctors who believe they’re impervious to addiction. In the gripping Free Refills: A Doctor Confronts His Addiction (Hachette Books), Harvard-trained Peter Grinspoon ’88 confronts the prickly truth that, even while healing others, physicians can fall short in recognizing their own vulnerability. What began as a way for Grinspoon to manage academic pressures evolved into a mindset that embraced drug use as a coping strategy. The illness followed him as a husband, father, and primary care physician until a keen-eyed pharmacist alerted the law to the fact that Grinspoon was writing bad scripts. The walls of his secret life collapsed and threatened to devour his family and career. This unsparing, unforgettable autobiography of addiction, denial, and recovery sounds the alarm for clinicians. Inspiringly, Grinspoon describes how he found treatment, legal counsel, and the way back to his life and work, coming to terms with shame and uncertainty in order to heal. In sharing the truths of his story, warts and all, he shows us that transformation is possible, honesty key, and imperfection a constant companion—not an enemy. by Michelle Crumsho While conducting her field research in Mexico, Veronica Herrera ’03 fell in love with the study of water. Tracing its complicated flow through candidates, voters, and a convoluted physical infrastructure, the assistant professor of political science at the University of Connecticut detailed her findings in Water and Politics: Clientelism and Reform in Urban Mexico (University of Michigan Press). JOSHUA ELLOW is Swarthmore’s alcohol and other-drug counselor and educator. How are water and politics linked? Everything is revealed through the development of a country’s water and sanitation sector. You could read a century’s worth of history in the story of water: dictators, reformers, civil society uprising, democratization, vote-buying, struggles for equity and justice. Did you make any surprising discoveries? The extent of the disrepair of water infrastructure and its public health effects throughout many Mexican cities. I saw water pipes that were broken and crisscrossed with sewage pipes. There are similar problems in the U.S., too. What is clientelism? The exchange of material goods and services for the vote. Water utilities can demand that residents produce voter ID cards when having their cisterns filled, or distribute water rations during the week of elections. What’s the takeaway for readers? Water access is determined largely due to political considerations, so there are two major political issues that need to be overcome: creating political support for investing in infrastructure maintenance even if it’s not seen as “sexy,” and creating incentives to move away from clientelistic manipulation of water service to a more universalistic public distribution. Policy solutions, just like infrastructure, need to be maintained over time in order to be effective. + READ HER EXTENDED INTERVIEW bulletin.swarthmore.edu HOT TYPE: NEW BOOKS BY SWARTHMOREANS Abby Hafer ’80 The Not-So-Intelligent Designer Cascade Books 6 Swarthmore College Bulletin / SUMMER 2017 Frustrated by scientists who don’t disprove intelligent design (ID) accessibly and impactfully to the general public, Hafer delivers her best knockout punch in this laugh-out-loud work. Drawing on anatomical design flaws reflecting the messiness of evolution rather than the meticulousness of a Creator—like how men’s testicles hang outside the body, vulnerable, while a frog’s are safely inside the body—she makes her deadly serious point with a smile. “ID is not a theory,” she writes, “it is a political pressure group.” Nancy Weller Dorian ’54 My Name Is Quarnig CreateSpace The love story between Quarnig and Nancy Dorian began with a chance meeting at Grand Central Terminal’s Oyster Bar in 1957; it ended decades later with Nancy, widowed, penning his biography. A testament to their marriage and enduring bond, to the life they built together, and to the survival of the Armenian people, her book tells the story of many through the lens of one: Quarnig, whose real-life journey is more epic than fiction. “It’s an American as well as an Armenian story,” she writes. Jon Raymond ’94 Freebird Graywolf Press On the cusp of losing it all in Los Angeles, the Singer family is struggling. Anne is a city bureaucrat tempted to sell out; Ben is a Navy SEAL suffering from PTSD; Aaron is a teen aching to find himself; and Grandpa Sam is shaped by his experience of the Holocaust. Investing his novel with wry power, Raymond—also the screenwriter of Meek’s Cutoff and HBO’s Mildred Pierce—has authored a dark, moving exploration of the ways we shape each other as part of the human family. Mimi Hanaoka ’02 Authority and Identity in Medieval Islamic Historiography Cambridge University Press Centuries ago, Persianate scholars recorded history by weaving dreams, myths, and invented genealogies. Hanaoka, assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Richmond, interprets these ancient texts with fresh eyes to “examine these rich and mysterious portions of early Islamic historical writing ... and offer a new framework for considering them.” Her rigorous effort transforms imagined histories into reliable sources of identity and rhetoric from the peripheries of Islamic empires. SUMMER 2017 / Swarthmore College Bulletin 7 common good dialogue SHARING SUCCESS AND STORIES OF SWARTHMORE GLOBAL THINKING BEING THE CHANGE She turns humanitarian theory into real-life practice by Amanda Whitbred MARCELA ESCOBARI ’96 wants to eradicate poverty. But after two decades in international development, she knows it’s an ambitious goal. “It will not have one solution,” she says. “There’s no silver bullet.” Escobari has spent her career focused on how to make societies more prosperous, attempting to put theoretical ideas into real-life practice. Her experience reaches back to her time at Swarthmore. “I was always interested in social causes,” she says. As a student, Escobari accepted an internship in her home country of Bolivia working with indigenous communities. “I was shocked at the inefficiency of the nonprofits and multilateral organizations I was working with on the ground,” she says. “Good intentions are often not enough.” That led Escobari to an unusual first job for someone with the ultimate goal of ending poverty: working as an investment banker on Wall Street. “I wanted to know how markets worked and how the most efficient organizations ran,” she says, “so I could bring that rigor to these problems.” Escobari applied her training soon after, working with industries in developing countries and helping them compete globally. Her work took her to coffee farmers in Rwanda, tourism operators in Colombia, and music producers in Jamaica. When Escobari eventually became director of Harvard’s Center for International Development (CID), she worked with some of the leading thinkers in the field, making their academic ideas “action-orientated, practical, and usable.” Under her leadership, the CID expanded from a staff of three to 70 with a fivefold increase in its budget, 8 Swarthmore College Bulletin / SUMMER 2017 becoming one of the top international development think tanks in the world. “In 2016, I got a call out of the blue from the Obama White House,” remembers Escobari. “I have always admired the values of this country and jumped at the opportunity to serve.” Following her Senate confirmation, Escobari was appointed USAID assistant administrator for Latin America and the Caribbean. She took the approach she honed at Harvard— bringing “rigor, data, and practicality” to inform U.S. policy on Latin America and guide her work in 17 countries. Escobari’s approach focused on the root causes of illegal migration—poverty and violence—and building relationships with Central American countries to address them. She was also at the table for major developments in Latin American policy, assisting Colombia in its peace process, providing humanitarian assistance in Haiti after the hurricane, and developing options to confront the political and economic crises in Venezuela. As a political appointee, Escobari stepped down from her USAID role with the change in presidential administrations. After working on the larger organizational level for so long, she’s ON THE WEB MARCELA ESCOBARI ’96 Change-Maker thinking about the ways our everyday decisions can make a difference. “If people see what’s at stake,” she says, “they might be willing to make different choices: how we consume, how we invest, and what we ask our politicians to do.” Now a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, Escobari is weighing her next step. Whatever it might be, she sees her work as a continuation of her Swarthmore experience. “The fervor and action orientation that’s embedded in the culture of Swarthmore—not just thinking good thoughts but rolling up your sleeves and doing something about it,” she says, “that’s what’s needed today more than ever.” BUILD BRIDGES, NOT WALLS Attorney Jonah Eaton ’02 on challenges to immigrant communities. + LISTEN bit.ly/JEaton02 THE WORDS YOU SPEAK BECOME THE HOUSE YOU LIVE IN Peter Schmidt shares a literature professor’s perspective on politics. + LISTEN bit.ly/PSchmidt PROMISE OR PERIL? Professor Emerita Aurora Camacho de Schmidt and others discuss the historical and theological roots of “sanctuary.” + LISTEN bit.ly/SanctuaryForum HELPING HANDS Four graduating Lang Scholars discuss their community projects. + LISTEN bit.ly/4Lang2017 “I have always admired the values of this country and jumped at the opportunity to serve.” POWER OF THREE Science and Stories by Josh Sokol ’11 photography by Laurence Kesterson IN SPRING 2016, Janet Conrad ’85, Michelle Tomasik ’07, and I co-created and co-taught an unorthodox interdisciplinary class in the STEMcentric halls of MIT. With subject matter as broad as physics itself—spanning the smallest subatomic particles to the chains of galaxies that fill the universe at its largest scales—our goal was to help students communicate science to the public sphere with accuracy and verve. You know: typical Swarthmore. + READ ALL ABOUT IT: bulletin.swarthmore.edu SUMMER 2017 / Swarthmore College Bulletin 9 common good SIT. STAY. HEAL. Illuminating Age “Nobody in the past 200 years (or even centuries before that) has ever translated all these things, let alone into poetry,” Professor Craig Williamson says of his new, world-changing work. “Something really unusual has been done here, something faithful and beautiful.” + MORE: bulletin. swarthmore.edu Swarthmore College Bulletin / SUMMER 2017 “AM I OLD YET?” Jeanette Strasser Pfaff ’60 ponders that question and more as a newsletter columnist for the Carol Woods retirement community in Chapel Hill, N.C. Her wry glance falls on the many aspects of getting older and results in musings that are sometimes funny, sometimes wistful, and often illuminating. “My 60th college reunion is not far in the future,” Pfaff notes in one column, featured at bulletin. swarthmore.edu. “The month I finished my freshman year, the Class of 1897 celebrated its 60th Reunion. They were old.” Pfaff says that these writings have helped her find her voice—and her place—in a community that reminds her a lot of Swarthmore. “When you first get to a retirement community, you think you’re fitting into something that is fixed, and that’s the way you feel when you’re a freshman, too,” she says. “And then, gradually, you realize that it’s always changing—and that you’re a part of the change.” —ELIZABETH SLOCUM LAURENCE KESTERSON ALICE HOLLAND Last fall, the Worth Health & Wellness Center adopted a new staffer: Izzy, a cream-colored standard poodle puppy learning new tricks to earn therapy-dog certification. Animal-assisted therapy is an addition to Swarthmore’s comprehensive wellness plan. Students meet with Izzy one-on-one, take her on walks, engage with her publicly, and more—while Izzy lends a floppy ear. “Something as simple as an adorable, soft, fluffy dog can really help the community,” says Cheryl Donnelly, Izzy’s off-campus caretaker and a registered nurse at Worth. “In a culture of rigor and stress, Izzy provides an immediate boost to students’ well-being. She is always happy to see them, as evidenced by her ever-wagging tail.” “Reception across campus has been great,” says Worth director Alice Holland. “Izzy has already been so impactful in such a positive way. It’s incredible to experience the power of a puppy.” —CODY McELHINNY ’17 Izzy engages with pup-arazzo Cody McElhinny ’17 in her first paw-sclusive. 10 CHECK IT OUT Bibliophile Charles Miller ’59 is curating his legacy, book by book. One Tome at a Time I MAGINE a library of the 500 books that mean the most to you. Charles Miller ’59 is creating just such a place, selecting his most cherished books and shipping them from Virginia to a nephew in Arcola, Ill., who will turn a room of his home into a noncirculating library. The “Arcola Collection” will be Miller’s intellectual legacy. He’s drawing from a remarkable wealth of source material that reflects the scope of his own journey— after Swarthmore, Miller studied at Germany’s University of Freiburg on a Fulbright grant. He earned a Ph.D. in government at Harvard and taught at Clark College in Atlanta (now Clark Atlanta University) and Princeton University before landing at Lake Forest College in Illinois, where he spent the majority of his career teaching politics and American studies. His own books in the collection include The Supreme Court and the Uses of History (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969), Jefferson and Nature: An Interpretation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), and Ship of State: The Nautical Metaphors of Thomas Jefferson, with Numerous Examples by Other Writers from Classical Antiquity to the Present (University Press of America, 2003). The Arcola Collection contains many items with connections to Miller’s Swarthmore years, including books by professors J. Roland Pennock ’27 and Franz Mautner. Miller describes Pennock’s seminars in political theory and public law and jurisprudence as “the most influential college courses in my life” and has archived his Democratic Political Theory (Princeton University Press, 1979) for Arcola. From Professor Mautner—who “taught with a gentle humor and a twinkle in his eye”— he has selected the writings of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, a physicist and aphorist who penned such pithy phrases as “It is almost impossible to bear the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody’s beard.” The collection also includes works by Swarthmore friends and classmates, among them Peter Schickele ’57, H’80’s The Definitive Biography of P.D.Q. Bach (Random House, 1976); David Porter ’58’s books and articles on texts from classical antiquity, author Willa Cather, and pianist Eduard Steuermann; The Roman Market Economy (Princeton University Press, 2013) by Miller’s freshman- and senior-year roommate, Peter Temin ’59, an economic historian; and Maurice Eldridge ’61’s baccalaureate address from 2009, which speaks to racial issues at the College. His lifelong love of music is also apparent in his choices. At Swarthmore, Miller wrote the background score for three plays, among them Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, and was a member of the Madrigal Singers. He has archived several folksong books by Ruth Crawford Seeger, a noted composer, stepmother of folk singer Pete Seeger, and Miller’s own childhood piano teacher. Miller, who has prepared notes for about 200 titles so far, does not miss his favorite books after he mails them. “I’m creating a small library. How many people get to do that?” he asks. “More importantly, I get to be with all these books for the rest of my life.” —ELIZABETH REDDEN ’05 SUMMER 2017 / Swarthmore College Bulletin 11 common good Honoring an Inspiration GUIDING LIGHTS 12 Swarthmore College Bulletin / SUMMER 2017 LAURENCE KESTERSON The generosity of Eugene Lang ’38, H’81, shown here in the Dean Bond Rose Garden, flowered on campus and off. “We all need heroes,” says Salem Shuchman ’84, a Board of Managers member who was among the first class of Lang Scholars. “Gene is mine.” grammar school, taught him that “the only human being that merits the dignity of the adjective ‘human’ was one who was creative, someone who added something to the social condition of the community.” In 1996, President Bill Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, saying that “hardly anyone has ever done more personally to give people who didn’t have it, opportunity. ... We are all the beneficiaries of Eugene Lang’s innovative vision.” In 2011, Gene’s philanthropy and legacy to Swarthmore were celebrated on campus in a symposium that addressed social responsibility in the 21st century and artists as agents of social change. Also present were Gene’s children Jane Lang ’67 and Stephen Lang ’73, H’10, as well as Jane’s daughter Jessica Lang ’92 and Stephen’s son Noah Lang ’10. Lang is also survived by son David and six other grandchildren—Lucy Lang ’03, Joanna Lang ’11, Ben, Dan, Grace, and Jacob—and eight great-grandchildren. In 2012, the College announced a gift of $50 million, the largest in its history, from Gene to make possible the planned Biology, Engineering, and Psychology Building. A critical aspect of the College’s strategic plan, the project will help to extend connections between the College’s engineering program and the other disciplines that comprise a liberal arts education. “Higher education in the 21st century will serve its students—and society—best if it focuses on knowledge design, real-world problem solving, and basic research,” he once said. “It is deeply rewarding to be able to steward Swarthmore’s strong commitment to the creation of knowledge and the use of that knowledge to improve the lives of others.” —PRESIDENT VALERIE SMITH + FULL TRIBUTE: bulletin.swarthmore.edu The Onion’s satirical video where a fictional Trump voter questions his support for the president after attending a “gender-fluid nonbinary poetry slam” at Swarthmore (bit.ly/SwatOnion) caught the attention of Marie Rousseau ’12. “As a Swattie, I had to suppress a grin,” laughs Rousseau, the founder of Self-ish, a Parisian open mic for women, trans, and/or non-binary poets and musicians. A year in, Self-ish is going strong—more than 200 people attend the monthly events. “I’m so happy to be able to contribute to the queer feminist scene in my hometown of Paris,” she says. “It often revolves around either activism or nightlife, so it’s nice to have something in between where artists can speak up and put their work out there.” — KATE CAMPBELL LAURENCE KESTERSON SPEAKING OUT E UGENE M. “Gene” Lang ’38, H’81—entrepreneur, philanthropist, and chair emeritus of the College’s Board of Managers—died peacefully at home April 8. A giant in the world of education, a champion of the liberal arts, and an acknowledged force in promoting civic and social responsibility among students, faculty members, and educational institutions, he was 98. “Gene Lang’s gifts to Swarthmore College were transformative, but his legacy is more than financial,” says current Board Chair Tom Spock ’78. “Generations of students, faculty, and staff have been shaped by Gene’s intellect and passion, and that’s a gift without a price.” Gene gave hundreds of millions of dollars to help thousands of students at Swarthmore and around the country; by establishing the “I Have a Dream” Foundation, he inspired even more students to pursue a college degree. At Swarthmore, his decades of support established, matched, or made possible 10 community spaces on campus, including the Eugene and Theresa Lang Performing Arts Center, the Lang Music Building, and the fragrance garden named for Theresa, his beloved wife of 62 years who predeceased him in 2008. He helped sustain the College’s academic excellence by endowing dozens of faculty positions, fellowships, and scholarships. Gene’s Swarthmore legacy is perhaps best represented by the more than 200 current and past Lang Opportunity Scholars who have completed projects, stewarded by the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, in more than 80 cities in 31 countries. Born to Hungarian immigrants in New York City in 1919, Gene recalled that his father, who never finished AT SWARTHMORE’S 145th Commencement on May 21, President Valerie Smith awarded honorary degrees to documentarian David Gelber ’63, philanthropist John Goldman ’71, and actor-playwright Anna Deavere Smith. “I assume most of you aspire to a purpose-driven life,” Gelber told graduates. “One of those can be to help save the planet by finding real-world solutions to our dependence on fossil fuels. Tough assignment. I wish you luck, wisdom, and the strength to keep at it.” “Life is uncomfortable, and life is rife with change,” Goldman said. “I ask you to be brave. I ask you to be bold. I ask you to believe in yourself. And I ask you to relish every step along the path before you.” “Looking at the mission statement of Swarthmore, I think you are, in fact, aware of your connectedness, and of your responsibilities as a citizen,” concluded honoree Smith. “There are no walls between you and the rest of the world, unless you make those walls. You are free to carry love yourself. I hope you will. Godspeed. Agape. Be strong. Be new. Be you. Change stuff.” + EXPERIENCE Commencement and watch all speeches: bit.ly/SwatCom17 SUBMIT YOUR NOMINATIONS FOR 2018 HONORARY DEGREES: news@swarthmore.edu Honorees David Gelber ’63, John Goldman ’71, and Anna Deavere Smith. Into the Grove In 1940, Swarthmore was home to a freshman who would go on to become the country’s leading crusader for artistic freedom. Barney Rosset ’44 fought those battles not as a lawyer, but as a publisher. After buying the tiny operation known as Grove Books in the early 1950s, he published banned books like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, knowing it would cost him dearly through years of litigation to overcome anti-obscenity laws. (“Rosset liberated the [publishing] industry,” read a recent essay in The New Yorker. “He also picked up the check.”) Rosset’s fascination with “obscene” books started when he obtained a bootleg copy of Tropic of Cancer at Swarthmore and earned a B-minus from Professor Robert Spiller on his essay “Henry Miller versus ‘Our Way of Life.’” Grove’s author list included Samuel Beckett, Malcolm X, Ho Chi Minh, and the Beat poets. In 1968, the offices were bombed by anti-Castro Cuban exiles angered Rosset published Che Guevara. Though condemned in the 1960s as a “smut peddler,” Rosset was honored in 2008 by the National Book Foundation as “a tenacious champion for writers struggling to be read in America.” Burdened by debt for years, Rosset finally had to sell a controlling stake in Grove Press in the mid-1980s, and the new owners squeezed him out. The New York Times reported that in 2012, “he died penniless, or close to it.” He left behind an unfinished memoir, which was completed and published last year as Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship (OR Books). In it, he reiterated his “long-held conviction that an author should be free to write whatever he or she pleased, and a publisher free to publish anything. I mean anything.” —MATT ZENCEY ’79 SUMMER 2017 / Swarthmore College Bulletin 13 common good LEARNING CURVE LACROSSE The women’s team won five straight games, its best season start since 2009; the men’s team beat 15th-ranked Gettysburg on April 8 for its first victory over the Bullets since 1985. FANTASY STAR She creates worlds while improving this one by Jonathan Riggs LAURENCE KESTERSON John Larkin ’17 won his 100th career match in singles and doubles April 29 against Johns Hopkins; the women’s team got its first national ranking from the Intercollegiate Tennis Association in a decade. SOFTBALL Accompanied by family and friends, Ernie and Matilda Prudente cut the ribbon. “It feels great to know current and future players will play on such a nice baseball field,” Ernie says. Building for the Future by Roy Greim ’14 Sara Planthaber ’17 hit a home run in her final collegiate game, clinching a dramatic 9–8 win. Kennedy Kings ’20 was named the Centennial Rookie of the Year; Kalli Segel ’20 and Emilie Morse ’20 also received All-Conference recognition. GOLF Soon, PPR Apartments residents can catch a Garnet baseball game from their dorm. The new structure, which joins the Pittenger, Palmer, and Roberts dormitories, will be combined with the Clothier Field fence, allowing for a terrace in leftcenter and a lounge with a field-level view. Also part of a project to enhance the experience for all is a state-of-the-art press box and seating area, constructed and dedicated in honor of Swarthmore coaching legend Ernie Prudente, who recorded a program-best 216 wins on the diamond from 1969 to 1995. The generosity of more than 100 donors contributed to the press box, which houses new broadcasting equipment to provide high-quality video to viewers around the world. “We are in a position to impress potential student-athletes,” head coach Matt Midkiff says, “by giving them an athletic experience equaling the academic one Swarthmore’s offered for over 150 years.” That bright future translates to the present: Garnet baseball finished just 14 Swarthmore College Bulletin / SUMMER 2017 one game shy of making the conference playoffs with a relatively young team—the 35-player roster was composed of 25 underclassmen, including several impressive freshman starters. Pitcher Sawyer Lake ’20, who led the team with a 2.50 ERA, was named the Centennial Conference Rookie of the Year and an All-Conference Honorable Mention. Cole Beeker ’20 also received an Honorable Mention, while Max Grullon ’20, A.J. Liu ’20, Kenji Yoshii ’20, Ryan Warm ’20, and Jared Gillen ’20 saw significant time in the lineup. This season, the classes of 2019 and 2020 combined for 75 percent of the team’s runs and 70 percent of hits, but the leadership of Ryan Burnett ’17, Steven Matos-Torres ’17, and Wesley Fishburn ’17 was vital. “They paved the way for success this year,” says Beeker. “Losing them will be difficult, but it’s time for us younger guys to step up.” At the Centennial Conference Championship (CCC), the team took second. Vamsi Damerla ’19 and Dan Altieri ’19 finished top four. Jim Heller was named Coach of the Year. TRACK & FIELD Andrew Jansen ’18 (hammer) and Maggie O’Neil ’17 (hammer, shotput, javelin) won CCC silvers. Earlier this year, Jansen shattered a 112-year-old College record; his 43.99-meter hurl here broke his earlier record. Athletic or otherwise, did you have a memorable Swarthmore sports experience? Inspiring, funny, emotional, delightful, awful—anything! Please share: bulletin@swarthmore.edu NOT EVEN Eleanor Glewwe ’12’s parents knew how seriously she took a certain hobby until she casually mentioned how far she’d progressed in an Amazon.com novel-writing contest. “I said, ‘There’s a chance I might have to go to Seattle,’” Glewwe remembers with a laugh. Although she didn’t win that contest, she did secure a literary agent while at Swarthmore for her middle-grade fantasy novel Sparkers. The saga of an oppressive society ruled by magicians— and how one non-magical young woman fights back to incite a revolution—Sparkers was published during Glewwe’s second year as a linguistics doctoral student at UCLA to great acclaim, both for its artistic and social merit. “I didn’t set out to create explicit comparisons in the novel, but it makes me humbled to hear readers draw parallels from apartheid in South Africa to the Ferguson protests to Sovietcontrolled Romania,” she says. “Fantasy allows us to work through real-life issues in a secondary world and see things in a different, helpful perspective.” For example, she was able to gain new insight into her scholarly field when conceptual artist Glenn Kaino asked her and a colleague for help with his alternate history project. “He was doing an installation involving a crescent moon automaton that would sing ‘The Internationale,’ the famous socialist anthem, in a new kind of French spoken by the descendants of lunar colonists,” she says. The dialect she co-created (bit.ly/Glewwe) turned out so well that Kaino also asked them to create a Martian English. It’s all in a day’s work for Glewwe, whose second novel in the Sparkers universe, Wildings, came out in November. As she looks forward to life beyond grad school—and her first entrée into the job market—she’s approaching it MARY YEE TENNIS with the same self-composure she uses to tackle any creative challenge, like her recent acquisition of a hammered dulcimer. “I don’t know how to play it,” she says with a smile. “Yet.” “There’s so much more interest now in fantasy exploring diverse voices and creating diverse worlds. I want to be a part of that.” SUMMER 2017 / Swarthmore College Bulletin 15 common good LIBERAL ARTS LIVES SARA LAWRENCELIGHTFOOT ’66 THE ESSENCE OF MAMA BY TOLANI LAWRENCE-LIGHTFOOT “In almost every place I talk about Growing Each Other Up, someone begins weeping,” says Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot ’66. “People recognize themselves in these stories.” LIBERAL ARTS LIVES CONSCIENTIOUS OBSERVER She was inspired by the moment when the teacher becomes the student by Ryan Dougherty 16 Swarthmore College Bulletin / SUMMER 2017 Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot ’66 thought that her 10th book, the aptly named Exit: The Endings That Set Us Free, would be her last. But then a topic that had been “simmering within” became No. 11. “Just about all my work begins—and I think this is true about most social scientists—with some very personal questions, dilemmas, struggles, puzzles that I’ve held on to for a long time,” she says of the spark for Growing Each Other Up: When Our Children Become Our Teachers. The book begins with a conflict she had with her adolescent daughter, from which a friend guided her to a revelation. “As soon as you get to the point of thinking, I get it, as a parent, your children are on to the next developmental moment,” she says. “Parenting requires that we become lifelong learners.” Social scientists have focused on parents “being the ones who transmit the knowledge and wisdom,” says LawrenceLightfoot, a MacArthur prize-winning sociologist. But the empirical, lyrical Growing Each Other Up examines the ways in which children teach their parents, as roles and reciprocity evolve. The book builds upon her pioneering methodology of “portraiture,” which blends art and science to create individual and cultural narratives. Lawrence-Lightfoot credits the College with enhancing her talents as a writer and analyst and for teaching her how to ask good questions. She continues to hone these skills as a public intellectual and writer, the Emily Hargroves Fisher Professor of Education at Harvard, a witness and activist, and—of course—a mom. So will book 11 be her last? “I imagine there will be something else that bubbles up within me that I’ll decide I’m curious about and want to explore,” she says. ELENA JACKENDOFF Sociologist “It feels so important to say a Jewish student adviser at Swarthmore—Rabbi Jacob Lieberman at the time—was really helpful for a kid who didn’t think he was really that Jewish,” says Zack Wiener ’12. INTUITION SPIKES Faithfully, he found his way by Amanda Whitbred WORKING on a master’s toward an education Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia, Zack Wiener ’12 thought he’d figured out what he wanted to do with his life. “But I had this sense of disturbance,” he says, and the academic work wasn’t as fulfilling as he’d hoped. Feeling adrift after the death of a friend, Danny Cramer ’12, and a move from Malaysia—where he’d been a Fulbright teaching assistant—Wiener turned to “the one way that I knew how to feel connected to things” by attending morning services at a Vancouver synagogue. “I had stepped away from religion for a long time,” he says. “It was the way I grew up, but it wasn’t necessarily anything I wanted to do.” Those synagogue visits eventually became part of Wiener’s fieldwork examining how individuals form religious identities through developing prayer literacies. While there under the guise of conducting qualitative research, he says, “I wasn’t going to stand in the room and not pray—that’s not what you do.” The more time he spent in prayer at services, the more he felt a deeper resonance. There were early clues—what Wiener calls “intuition spikes”—that his relationship to Judaism was changing. While in Malaysia, Wiener and his roommate traveled 18 hours by bus to Singapore where, while fasting all day in 95-degree heat, they attended progressive Yom Kippur services. Wiener’s suggestion to attend had been, he thought, for the benefit of his roommate. And yet, “I remember thinking to myself, I didn’t know I wanted this.” When he graduated from Swarthmore, Wiener thought the “rich, vibrant, intellectual experience” he valued could only happen by getting a Ph.D. and becoming a scholar in the academy. Now entering his third year at Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, Wiener has embarked on a more fulfilling path. “I’m pretty joyous,” he says, “to have gotten yanked out of academia by my dumb intuition.” ZACK WIENER ’12 Rabbinical Student SUMMER 2017 / Swarthmore College Bulletin 17 se ssi ng f th s e li al be TO LOOK AT as w On ane g in ev e r yth through the lim lens itle o s r ar t s 18 Swarthmore College Bulletin / SUMMER 2017 SUMMER 2017 / Swarthmore College Bulletin LAURENCE KESTERSON by Jonathan Riggs 19 S IX BLIND MEN, so the story goes, sought to define by touch what an elephant was. Each offered a different interpretation based on the body part he felt: trunk, side, ear, leg, tusk, tail. All were right, yet all were wrong. Elephant-touchers all, we would do well to remember this parable’s wisdom. According to the following community members, we can never be too curious about the world around us; we should never take anything in it for granted, no matter how seemingly mundane. It’s an excellent reminder of the power of a place like Swarthmore, where there are as many ways to look at something—an elephant, a problem, the future, a fish—as there are Swarthmoreans. After all: The way we look at a fish says little about the animal … but everything about us. ix blind elephants, so a better story goes, sought to S define by touch what a man was. “Flat,” they agreed. 1 20 Swarthmore College Bulletin / SUMMER 2017 4 “I respect fish enough not to eat them—the way and conditions in which they are farmed in America are pretty horrendous, and I’m not optimistic about how they are treated across the world, either,” says animal-rights activist and vegetarian Daniel Paz ’17. “How can anyone think it’s humane to pierce a fish with a hook, yank it out of the water, then either kill it, wait for it to asphyxiate, or toss it back?” 2 3 Charles Harris ’59 coined “Like a fish without a bicycle” (bit.ly/CHarris59). Why a fish? HARRIS: Why a bicycle? What do fish mean to you? HARRIS: Dinner. “Have you ever tried one of those little plastic fortunetelling fish that you put in the palm of your hand to tell if you’re passionate or a ‘cold fish’?” laughs Russian Professor Sibelan Forrester. “In fortune-telling, astrology, tarot, dream interpretation, anything, the fish has a ton of symbolism.” Beyond literary and religious associations—she describes a scene from the 19th-century Polish novel Quo Vadis in which a character in ancient Rome secretly communicates her Christianity by drawing a fish in the sand—Forrester sees fish swimming through humanity’s collective unconsciousness. “In tarot, fish may suggest a new relationship, new feelings, something new—possibly a child or the idea of conception,” she says. “It’s no surprise we see so much meaning in fish, especially with fish being in the water and water often standing in for the flow of the subconscious or of the emotions.” 5 LIEVAN VAN LATHEM, THE ENTOMBMENT, THE J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM, LOS ANGELES; CARTOON: ELIZABETH VOGDES “In the study of faith, Jacob Neusner says everyone is ‘part fish and part ichthyologist.’ That should be true for all of our studies,” says Rabbi Helen Plotkin ’77, director of Swarthmore’s Beit Midrash. “While you’re studying something from an objective standpoint, you’re also studying yourself.” As a scholar of classical Jewish texts, she points to the ultimate religious fish story: the tale of Jonah, who spent three days in the belly of a giant marine creature. “There’s a passage in the Zohar—a foundational text of Jewish mysticism from the 13th century—that asks, ‘What did Jonah experience inside that fish and how did it transform him?’” she says. “It reminds me of the first time I saw a color TV as a child and they were showing a Jacques Cousteau special. What transformed Jonah—what transforms us—is seeing the complexity and beauty of the undersea world, hidden from all, through the crystal eyes of a fish.” Only by getting beneath the surface can anyone become completely engaged in their faith, their studies, their humanity, she adds, an approach that exemplifies the ideal Swarthmore seminar approach she’s aiming for with the Beit Midrash. “If the text is a fish, I want us to look at it together with fresh eyes, full of questions, searching both outward and inward,” she says. “There’s a line in the Talmud that is the key to looking at a fish, looking at a text, looking at ourselves: ‘Turn it over, turn it over, everything is in it.’” “I had never seen a tidepool before,” says Grace Farley ’17, who completed a summer research project on anemone behavior. “Observing so many different critters living in them was magical.” Fascinated by marine biology since the fourth grade, Farley wants to continue her studies. “People’s lives and entire economies rely on our relationship to fish and aquatic creatures,” she says. “Better understanding them and the whole cycle of how the ocean works is crucial to appreciating and protecting it.” 6 “We’ve kept a tank for about 18 years,” say Rowena Yeung ’88 and Thomas Bouquet ’88. “About five years ago, we restarted it with live coral, so it’s always changing.” SUMMER 2017 / Swarthmore College Bulletin 21 “I didn’t think of The L ­ ittle ­Mermaid,” says Linguistics Professor Donna Jo Napoli, co­author with David Wiesner of the graphic novel Fish Girl. “We see the sea as infinite, a place of enormous freedom and privilege, so to have a mermaid— that glorious hybrid between fish and woman—like ours trapped in a glass box, what could be worse? “This is not the s­ tory of a girl rescued through romance. This is the story of a sea creature finding—and fighting for—her identity.” 10 LAURENCE KESTERSON 7 Powerful, odd, appealing: Fish symbolism swims through Swarthmore’s Peace Collection. 9 “I’ve always been a fish guy,” says biomechanist Adam Summers ’86. “I’ve had an aquarium since I was 4 and spent all my summers in the woods, fishing.” As associate director of the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Laboratories and Pixar’s go-to ichthyologic consultant on Finding Nemo and Finding Dory, Summers constantly looks to aquatic animals for bio-inspired design. He explores that intersection of art and science for his visual series Cleared, where he photographs chemically bleached and stained fish specimens. (Exhibited at the Seattle Aquarium and around the world, Cleared images are featured above and on this issue’s cover.) “I see unbelievably breathtaking beauty in the skeletal anatomy of fishes,” he says, “with dozens of symmetric vertebrae, ribs, and spines.” Fish business is family business—while Summers works to digitize the more than 25,000 fish species, his 10-year-old daughter leads tours of his lab’s 50 sea tables. (The showstopper is when she gets the hagfish to make slime.) And, ultimately, fish are family. “We are all fish. There’s two big radiations—rayfinned fishes, the Actinopterygians, and lobe-finned fishes, the Sarcopterygians,” he says. “In that latter group are the tetrapods: amphibians, reptiles, birds, and, of course, mammals. You are a lobe-finned fish.” “Fish are yucky!” says Patrick, 3, son of Swarthmore senior writer/editor Ryan Dougherty, although he named this one “Meemo.” 22 Swarthmore College Bulletin / SUMMER 2017 STICKER: © 1985 DONNELLY/COLT PROGRESSIVE RESOURCES; SUMMERS: KATHY BALLARD COWELL; ART FROM FISH GIRL BY DAVID WIESNER AND DONNA JO NAPOLI. © 2017 BY DAVID WIESNER. USED BY PERMISSION OF HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 8 “I named my fish Lola after the Kinks song,” says soon-to-be-science-teacher Amit Schwalb ’17 of his male betta, “because I wanted her to be trans so I could relate to her.” His mother’s hasty replacement for a pet fish she accidentally killed— “She forgot I’d notice Pablo was blue and Lola was red”—Lola slowly swam into Schwalb’s heart. He played guitar and sang to her in the dorm; she accompanied him to class, to Sharples, and even on road trips in a travel container. “Ultimately, we’re all just pro- 11 jecting onto our pets, and I would laugh and think, This is almost performance art,” Schwalb says. “But I genuinely developed an emotional connection with her.” In front of her “diva” fish bowl decoration and beneath posters of Madonna, Emma Goldman, and Angela Davis, Lola bore witness to some of Schwalb’s most formative years; when she died, he buried her in the northwest corner of West Philadelphia’s Clark Park. “She was a big part of my life,” he says. “A little fish named Lola was worth caring about. We all are.” SUMMER 2017 / Swarthmore College Bulletin 23 “I was just showing my makeup class a YouTube tutorial where women use fishnet stockings to paint face scales,” says Tara Webb ’94, manager of Swarthmore’s costume shop. “How it feels, looks, sounds to breathe and move underwater—there’s no end to the artistic inspiration fish provide.” High on her list: Esther Williams’s water ballets; scifi characters like Hellboy’s merman Abe Sapien; the many-tentacled charms of Cthulhu. She and the Media Center’s Jeremy Polk hope to create a “Whale Garden”: a 360-degree undersea projection experience in the Theresa Lang Fragrance Garden. “Visitors will be able to create clicks and songs,” Webb says. “We want to allow people to become whales and swim around on campus.” “We’re also hoping to stream the experience,” Polk adds, “so TriCo students can hear Swarthmore’s whale songs and sing their own back.” In love with the ocean since he was a kid reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Island of the Blue Dolphins, Polk volunteers as a weekend diver at Camden, N.J.’s Adventure Aquarium and hopes to launch a Swarthmore scuba certification program. “It’s a great recreational activity, a potential professional credential, and an immersive way to transform people’s perspectives on conservation,” he says. “The ocean sustains all life on earth. When you see it and the world from a fish’s eye view, it changes the way you look at everything.” LAURENCE KESTERSON 12 For April Fool’s Day—punning on the French “poisson d’avril” tradition— librarians Pam Harris, Maria Aghazarian, and Kate Carter filled McCabe with microfiche “microfish.” “We all know each other here so this was a metaphor,” Harris laughs. “Swarthmore is a fishbowl.” 24 Swarthmore College Bulletin / SUMMER 2017 17 Russell Fernald ’63 studies brain changes that occur when one animal prevails over another. He discovered complex social structures among African cichlids, where nondominant male fish gain access to food resources controlled by dominant males—by pretending to be female. 18 DEVIKA BANSAL 13 “The night sky is like the ocean: deep, dark, and mysterious. So it’s no surprise we named Neptune and Pisces,” says Astronomy Professor David Cohen, citing the prominence of fish across our culture, our emojis, and maybe even our universe. “Instead of picturing English-speaking Star Trek villains, it’s a good exercise in openmindedness to think about what other forms of life we might find beyond Earth,” he adds. “Physicist Freeman Dyson famously suggested that we should look for freeze-dried fish in orbit around Jupiter.” What Dyson meant, Cohen explains, concerns one of Jupiter’s many moons. Europa has ice-covered saltwater oceans—maybe double the amount of Earth’s water—and chemical energy, all the prerequisites for “fishy sort of life.” (Princeton astrobiologist Christopher Chyba ’82, H’03 is perhaps the world’s expert on the icy moon.) If an asteroid or meteor hit the surface of Europa—a not-unlikely occurrence due to Jupiter’s strong gravitational pull—it could send water into orbit, which could theoretically be spectroscopically analyzed. “I’m not sure how serious Dyson was, but I think there’s something to it,” says Cohen. “It’s also a nice way to look at fish in the astronomical context: as cosmic messengers of life.” 16 14 “I’m mesmerized by fish fins because I’ve been building robots for six years based on them,” says Jeff Kahn ’10, who followed his interest in fluid dynamics all the way to a Ph.D. “It’s surprising how much fish can actively control the flexibility of their fins and bodies. We’ll need underwater technologies inspired by the movements of fish to survey ocean environments and safely transport cargo and people.” URANIA’S MIRROR, 1824 15 “Sushi is a beautiful art of fine details,” says Henry Han ’20. “It takes practice and precision.” Arriving on campus with some sushi-chef training, Han teamed with Natasha Markov-Riss ’20 to open Late Nite, an immensely popular after-hours Swarthmore sushi dorm-delivery service. (Max Katz-Balmes ’20, left, helps with deliveries; Han made sure to secure a food handler’s license.) “Sushi also brings to mind overfishing—ahi tuna could be extinct in 20 years,” he says. “Maybe my thing will be innovating sustainable ways to make sushi.” SUMMER 2017 / Swarthmore College Bulletin 25 A cone snail sting changed Kasie Groom Regnier ’07’s life. Then a doctoral student in Oahu researching neuropeptides in sex-changing fish, she spent her hospital stay recovering from temporary paralysis—and reconsidering her direction. “Initially, I just wanted to play with fish and hated chemistry, but I realized how everything in my work traced back to water itself,” she says. “Fish take water for granted—and, too often, so do we.” Now the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s water quality manager, Regnier loves her work—chemistry and all. “In a tank or in the wild, when you look at a fish, think about the intricate balance between it and its environment—and us,” she says. “We’re all more interconnected than you might realize.” “Fishing can connect us to each other and to the outdoors,” says Joel Johnson ’96, left, a lifelong angler and the former chief marketing officer of Trout Unlimited. “My father gave me my love of the natural world when he taught me how to fish.” Growing up in a large family, at times “minutes from welfare,” Johnson remembers how rich they felt whenever his father would bring home enough perch for a fish fry, and how fishing has remained his own constant escape, comfort, and inspiration. “Fish don’t care about your politics, your race, your gender—anything,” he says. “Trying to catch them connects us to our wilder side. You can find out so much about yourself and the world through a fish. “For example, two summers ago, I guided a group of young black men from a leadership charter school here in D.C. They were loud, obnoxious, funny, annoying— you know, teenagers,” he remembers. “But when they started catching fish, you should’ve heard them scream—it was this scream of pure joy that a child would make, and it was wonderful.” It’s a reminder he believes we all share— especially here. “Almost everybody at Swarthmore—all these different people with all these different views, talents, and interests—has a connection to the Crum,” he says. “Crum Creek has native fish that have been here long before the College ever was. I would imagine nearly every Swarthmore student has stood on the edge of that bank, looked down into the water, and spotted a fish. “That moment changes us,” he says. “That little thrill of discovery you get when you see a fish connects you to your younger, best self, when you were fascinated by the world and everything it.” 19 20 Inspired by pop star Katy Perry’s surfside ­Super Bowl halftime show, he tasked students to write a program making her Internet sensation “Left Shark” dance, dance, dance. In addition to sharks’ sweet moves, Waterman remains fascinated by their ability to sense and process electrical fields. “Sharks are basically swimming computers,” he says. 26 Swarthmore College Bulletin / SUMMER 2017 21 “SAMAK MASHWI” A poem by Nader Helmy ’17 I talk a really good game but to be frank, I didn’t really care for Finding Nemo (unpopular opinion can topple a whole metropolis) I suppose that’s my inability to empathize with a loss that resolves itself too quickly (I needed a sequel toward some burdened light) I am swimming in the Red Sea before I can count and my whole world are the critters kissing my ankles (there is no suffering here, just me and the crew) We all gotta eat so eventually, we depart from the coast course correct to the feast, family eating the crew (from afar the market sets up a circus in the nostrils) Before we sit down, our critter friends wait for us on the table, half a crispy brown sheen glistening (half charred skin blackened flakes like shingles) Eyes gouged out, mouth agape, skeleton intact I get it when we squeeze the lemon on top (greens from the earth, meat from the sea, the elements) Still me daydreaming about the friends I’ve yet to meet deep sea monsters, wading, one with the still blackness (me kissing their ankles / the closest analogue on their body) Spiky horns, lizard lions, cyclops squids, animated coral all part of the sea, married to the ocean like us (we the lost children of diaspora dumped by the mainland) We have always been an agile species, darting through the water, surviving despite the odds against us (depriving this infant evolution of the oxygen it needs) And so there is calm and light amidst the constant thunder our people giving proper honors for the struggle of the crew (blackened scales, flaking abyss with hollow eyes bone-in) LAURENCE KESTERSON “​As a computer scientist, I am intrigued by how fish school,” says professor Jason Waterman, now at Vassar. “This fish ­behavior has been the basis for b ­ iologically ­inspired ­comput­ing used in designing ­certain ­algorithms.” Waterman created an unforgettable lab at Swarthmore in 2015. 23 As a student at Swarthmore, the late Eugene Lang ’38, H’81 ran a youth club at a settlement house in Philadelphia. Inspired by a freshman bio lab, he engaged his charges with a guided dissection of a dogfish. Five years later, he received word from one young man informing him that the dogfish experience had inspired him to earn a scholarship to med school. “I can never forget that,” Lang said. 22 24 Yours: bulletin@swarthmore.edu SUMMER 2017 / Swarthmore College Bulletin 27 O THE SPACE BETWEEN Co-taught interdisciplinary courses reveal what Swarthmore’s all about by Jonathan Riggs N THE WORKTABLE, the tiny wooden model rests light and lovely: the size of an exquisite sculpture to fit an artistic mouse’s gallery. In the hands of Mariam Bahmane ’19 and Wendy Wu ’19, however, it takes on weight and character and dimension. “This is a very special space,” Bahmane says, looking at the model but seeing instead what could be. “It’s a refuge in the Crum Woods for students.” “We’ve been trying out different design elements in each model,” adds Wu, using her fingers to follow the design’s flow—the sweep of a circular Japanese-inspired window, the space left open in the center for an interior garden. As biology major Wu and and engineering major Bahmane take turns describing it, their shared vision reveals itself: Here is where you could sit or sleep or soak up a sunny College day; here is a solution to a real issue students see on campus; here is an exciting idea born of the push-and-pull that happens when smart people cross disciplines and differences to create collaboratively. That synergy—between students, between subjects, between professors—inspired the creation of this course, Design & Sculpture in the Digital Age. Created and taught by Logan Grider (studio art) and Matt Zucker (engineering), the course has 16 students who represent all four class years and all three TriCo institutions; they work in pairs that rotate with each new project. “They have to compromise and communicate,” says Grider. “Building in that collaboration has been exciting— they’re so engaged in the projects and with each other.” “Our original vision was artists pushing engineers creatively and engineers pushing artists technically, but the roles proved much blurrier,” says Zucker. “Everybody is doing everything, and that’s how it should be.” This year alone at Swarthmore, there have been— or will be—several co-taught, interdisciplinary courses, including Art, Chemistry, and Conservation, co-taught by Patricia Reilly (art history) and Ginger Heck (chemistry); A Transnational Study of Graphic Fictions, co-taught by William Gardner (Japanese) and Alexandra Gueydan-Turek (French/Francophone studies); and Intro to Environmental Studies, co-taught by Betsy Bolton (English literature) and Christopher Graves (chemistry). “It’s the 21st century—we need to rethink the essence of the liberal arts education,” says Haili Kong, chair of the Chinese program, who co-taught Water Policies, Water Issues: Shenzhen/Hong Kong/Taiwan and the U.S. last semester with Richter Professor of Political Science Carol Nackenoff; Liliya Yatsunyk (chemistry) and Art McGarity (engineering/environmental studies) gave guest lectures. photography by Laurence Kesterson 28 Swarthmore College Bulletin / SUMMER 2017 SUMMER 2017 / Swarthmore College Bulletin 29 Enjoy a gallery of the students’ projects: bulletin.swarthmore.edu 30 Swarthmore College Bulletin / SUMMER 2017 Mainly funded by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation’s Initiative on Asian Studies and the Environment, the course included an experiential component where Kong, Nackenoff, and Yatsunyk traveled with students to Asia to conduct field research. In many ways, it echoed the course Kong co-taught with the late Chinese Professor Alan Berkowitz exploring tea from agricultural, economic, cultural, political, and chemical perspectives. “It’s exciting to see students engaging with topics on many levels,” Kong adds. “Courses like these help students look at the world in new ways. They’ve helped me to do that, too.” Although co-taught interdisciplinary classes have provided some of the College’s most interesting and dynamic course offerings in recent history, they’re still more the exception than the rule. “I’d like to see co-teaching become more routine—I’ve been at the College for 16 years and only got to do it for the first time last year,” says David Harrison, linguistics professor and associate provost for academic programs. “I’m giving us the challenge: How can we do more? How can we create space for unusual and unexpected collaborations?” “Connecting the liberal arts, across departments and disciplines, opens up new frontiers of learning and discovery,” says President Valerie Smith. “These experiences foster creativity and critical thinking, thus preparing students to adapt to a rapidly changing world.” That necessary enthusiasm exists across campus: To make Grider and Zucker’s course happen, the facilities department converted a Willets Hall storage space into a workroom; employees from the engineering shop, Information Technology Services, and the Media Center signed on to help students master the College’s 3-D printer and laser cutter. Dividing their time between learning computer-aided design and drafting software in a Hicks lab and creating handmade prototypes in the Willets workspace, Zucker and Grider’s students crafted multiple creations inspired by poem-worthy prompts: Create a form that rhymes with something found on campus; design a box that holds something you would not want to forget; improve on-campus life in an aesthetically pleasing way. At one end of the room, Emily Cai ’18 and Stephen Sekula ’17 demonstrate redesigned campus beehives—hexagonal, honeycomb-inspired boxes with ingenious sliding shelves. At the other, Maisie Luo ’19 and Grace Newman-Lapinski (Bryn Mawr ’19) finalize the clay-and-aluminum-tape details of a swirling interactive metal sculpture inspired by the Dean Bond Rose Garden’s distinctive gates, large enough for dozens of students to loll on, under, or around. It’s thrilling to feel the excitement, the possibility, the creativity at play in this place of making where plasticine figurines, Gorilla Glue tubes, and scribbled-on blueprints battle for desk space with laptops and Legos. Students are drafting, Michael Lutzker ’19 and Isabella Fiorante ’20 receive a desk crit from professors Matt Zucker and Logan Grider. refining, and remaking models as varied as an LED lamp that elegantly reflects how crowded Sharples is and a revamped Crumhenge fire pit with sculptures that draw attention to invasive Crum Woods vine species. The through line of it all is a shared sense of adventure in a supportive place where it’s not just OK to stretch yourself, even if you fall short—it’s encouraged. “My apprehension in teaching this class is that I’m an analog guy. I know nothing about digital anything—I can barely open my email—and Matt is an expert,” laughs Grider. “But this works because the students know that we’re collaborating to learn the way that they’re collaborating to learn.” “Working within that framework from the beginning has really helped students feel willing to explore other possibilities, rather than sticking to what they’re already comfortable with,” adds Zucker. “That’s true for Logan and myself, too.” After all, the most exciting intellectual distance to travel is between what you’ve learned and how you’re able to apply it. In many ways, Design & Sculpture in the Digital Age and interdisciplinary co-taught courses like it are the essence of Swarthmore and the liberal arts: We make each other—and ourselves—better by being well-rounded. “This class made me realize I want to take a good balance of courses to get the fullest base of knowledge,” says Michael Lutzker ’19. “Arts, humanities, technology, everything: I love the view from the place where all these interests meet.” + READ interviews with other professors who co-teach interdisciplinary courses: bulletin.swarthmore.edu SUMMER 2017 / Swarthmore College Bulletin 31 32 AMERICAN TIGER Swarthmore College Bulletin / SUMMER 2017 Thousands of captive tigers in the U.S. in private homes and roadside zoos are caged proof of a society gone haywire by Kate Campbell photography by Laurence Kesterson SUMMER 2017 / Swarthmore College Bulletin 33 N WORN-OUT LEVI’S, Kizmin Reeves ’72 ignored the bracing Colorado cold. As the wind struck in sharp, punchy gusts, she leaned closer to the chain-link fence, talking quietly with 4-year-old Waldo, a tiger pacing at the cage’s edge. He lifted his chin and chuffed, a rush of throaty air. Reassuring the 500-pound animal, she eyed the cramped dirt yard behind him that was his home. For now. Not long ago, Reeves discovered the mysterious and largely unregulated world of privately owned tigers in the U.S. The rise in captive breeding and ramshackle roadside zoos tell of a sordid industry too abysmal—too dangerous— for her to turn a blind eye. Dragging this shadow world into the light, she and husband Bill Nimmo walked away from Wall Street careers to found Tigers in America, a nonprofit devoted to rescuing the magnificent, fierce—and, tragically, growing—American tiger population. The decrepit conditions in Colorado where young Waldo was housed sum it all up. Scattered behind him were a metal beer keg, two empty bowls, and some blowing trash. Even with an injured shoulder, he relentlessly paced, like an ­agitated colonel. “A starving tiger is terrible to see,” says Reeves. Stories like Waldo’s, although they sound rare, are becoming less so. According to the World Wildlife Fund, around 3,890 tigers are left in the wild—a drop of 97 percent over the 34 Swarthmore College Bulletin / SUMMER 2017 last hundred years—living in 13 countries including India, Indonesia, and China. In the U.S., however, the estimated number of tigers kept in private captivity hovers around 7,000. Only about 400 are in accredited zoos, with the rest in roadside attractions, private menageries, or kept by backyard breeders. Seven states have no laws at all on owning wild animals. “There’s no way of knowing the true extent of the problem, since no single agency tracks who keeps tigers,” says Debbie Leahy, manager of captive wildlife protection for the Humane Society of the United States. “Injuries are inevitable,” adds Reeves, “when you put inexperienced people into direct contact with wild, big cats.” A Kansas man, for example, kept tigers and lions in his junkyard, housed in rickety cages. In 2009 when a friend agreed to help the owner at feeding time, one of the animals shredded his arm. Authorities arrived at the surreal scene and set in motion a series of events that are becoming more commonplace: a hurriedly placed call to a rescue organization; a pitiful, dangerous collection process; a new and daunting quest for proper shelter. It’s happening all over. In the Chicago suburb of Lockport in 2014, police arrested a man walking to a bar with a tiger cub on a six-foot leash. A New York City man kept a tiger named Ming in his apartment until it attacked him in 2003; he told doctors that his pit bull bit him, but police eventually discovered the tiger when neighbors complained. Last fall, a Texas woman was arrested for leaving her 14-year-old daughter in a house overrun with exotic animals, including three tigers, a fox, a skunk, and several monkeys. “We typically only learn about an unlicensed person keeping pet tigers when something bad happens—such as the Zanesville, Ohio, incident where a suicidal man released nearly 50 tigers, lions, and dangerous wild animals before killing himself,” says Leahy. “Tigers in America has taken on the very difficult, labor-intensive, and expensive work of rescuing tigers from miserable conditions and relocating them to reputable sanctuaries. Many, many tigers are much better off today thanks to their hard work.” BEFORE HER WORK with tigers, Reeves designed computer systems and owned Partners & Crime, a Manhattan mysterythemed bookstore. A lifelong bookworm and nature lover, she grew up in a log cabin in Florida, a self-proclaimed “river rat” who dug for fossils and was perpetually late for dinner. “I went to Swarthmore as the oldest of six kids. Financial assistance made it possible,” says Reeves, who majored in art history with a minor in zoology. “The zeitgeist and challenge of being around really bright people generated a thoughtful and discussion-oriented community where my ability to question authority developed significantly.” That skill came in handy on Wall Street, where she spent time on trading floors and was often the only woman there. “In the trading world, there’s a lot of adrenaline,” she says. “I saw Wall Street chew up and spit out a lot of people.” What has become the defining mission of her and her husband’s lives began somewhat by chance in 2011 when a Kizmin Reeves ’72 greets Lakota, one of the big cats she helped rescue from Colorado. Aurora, the white tiger featured on the previous pages, watches from the background. friend called to tell them about tigers in a bankrupt Texas facility. Longtime admirers of big cats, Reeves and Nimmo had visited the tigers as cubs in 1996 when a New Jersey woman owned them. Reeves had photographed the cubs, but she and the woman had lost touch. Now, no one was willing to take the tigers—large, agitated, slated for euthanasia. “Fifteen angry, aggressive tigers are not an asset in a bankruptcy proceeding,” Reeves says dryly. She and Nimmo began working to find the Texas tigers homes, all the while planning to settle back into retirement in New York City afterward. They started with a list of 130 sanctuaries, whittling it down to 30 that were reputable and placing the tigers in two of them, including a trio of siblings who were miraculously kept together. Among them was a fierce female named Amanda who bared teeth, charged fences, and generally menaced anyone on two feet—she became Reeves’s favorite. “She is so pure tiger,” she says. But no sooner had that problem been solved than new calls came in from Ohio, Missouri, Alabama, each one regarding tigers in precarious situations with nowhere to go and no one to help. “We didn’t know that retirement would be so hard—or so rewarding,” says Nimmo. “Fortunately, our careers and education made it possible.” “I sort of look at it like the tigers found us,” says Reeves. In her gravelly voice, she describes the situation for tigers in the United States today: “A short word would be insanity.” Since 2011, Reeves and Nimmo’s efforts have changed and saved lives. Not only do they rescue and advocate for the animals, but Tigers in America is also working with Stanford University on mapping the tiger genome. “Kiz and Bill are animal protection heroes,” says Carson Barylak, campaigns officer for International Fund for Animal Welfare. “They’re committed to rescuing big cats from inhumane private ownership situations and to advancing public policy to bring an end to irresponsible breeding, trade, and possession of these iconic animals.” “Iconic” is a perfect description. So are “beautiful” and “fearsome.” In a group, tigers are called an ambush. Apex predators, they hunt alone but share their kill with offspring. A tiger is a watchful, silent hunter, able to crush the skull of a cow with one strike. They eat roughly 10 pounds of meat daily, can SUMMER 2017 / Swarthmore College Bulletin 35 “Their eyes were not even open,” she says. X-rays showed their bones were almost transparent and studded with tiny fractures from poor nutrition. Wearing a bomber jacket and hoodie, Reeves checked that her cellphone was charged and made sure there was extra rope in case a cage came loose. Among the tools on hand: a pack of tie-wires, used to help fasten visual barriers between rolling cages to prevent fights between neighbors. The volunteers, including veterinarians and drivers, were ready to rehearse their roles in moving the menagerie. In the kitchen of a small house on the property, Reeves stood in front of a whiteboard. It was hours before the operation would start. Maps, including a spray of brightly colored sticky notes marking the location of every animal, were in place. When it came time to head to the pens, a certain quiet settled over the team. After all, their cargo was carnivorous, between 300 and 600 pounds, and very, very anxious. “I’ve met a couple of bat-shit-crazy tigers—usually the product of years of abuse—who wanted to kill every living thing they could get at, and they are very scary,” says Reeves. Sometimes during a transport load, if the cats are too scared or aggressive—“the same thing, really”—the vet will dart them and then administer wake-up drugs and liquids to flush their systems of the sedative and make sure they are alert before the trip. Reeves’s role spans from the complex to the mundane: “I may have to let a vet know that a tiger is seizing, or I could be making a food run for the drivers.” If things go smoothly, the highly organized rescues lack drama: The tigers step right into their rolling transport cages, make a nest in the straw, and go to sleep. Reeves helps out when needed, and stays out of the way when not. “Mainly,” she admits, “I’m trying not to do something stupid that could put a cat or a human in danger so the experts can do their stuff.” Henri Rousseau’s 1891 oil on canvas Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!) was the first of his many famous jungle scenes. burst to speeds of up to 40 mph, and are strong swimmers. More whimsically, in captivity they seem to like to pee in wading pools … and on unwary visitors. “Tigers don’t hold anything back,” says Reeves. It is one of the reasons she admires them. “If they are angry and they charge iron bars, they will break their teeth. They didn’t evolve to be afraid of anything, yet they are incredibly graceful and strong. They are very bright, and they’re great to watch when they are having fun.” Immortalized in art, literature, and pop culture, the tiger’s rank is unrivaled. In T.S. Eliot’s “Gerontion,” the poet wrote: “The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.” William Blake’s “Tyger” was burning bright. The 17th century’s The Tiger Hunt by Peter Paul Rubens illuminates the tiger’s ferocity and power. “All the myths are true,” Reeves says. “Tigers are mesmerizing, like a tractor beam.” Sadly, their allure hasn’t worked in their favor: Not only is there a lucrative global market for their body parts for 36 Swarthmore College Bulletin / SUMMER 2017 trophies and for use in traditional Asian medicine, but inbreeding among captive tigers has contributed to a host of medical problems. Poor understanding of cubs’ nutritional needs by ignorant or negligent breeders can lead to completely avoidable metabolic bone disease. But when faced with any sprawling and complicated dilemma, Reeves is steely, tenacious. “I can trace a trait back to Swarthmore that still applies to what I’m doing today,” she says, “which is asking, ‘What will it take to solve this problem and how will you do that?’” THOSE SKILLS HELPED during the tiger-breeding facility shutdown in Colorado where Waldo lived. Tigers in America partnered with Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge, an Arkansas sanctuary, to provide as much on-site care and medical assistance as possible and to relocate all the tigers. Reeves quickly sized up a wide range of injuries and neglect—three white cubs had been pulled from their mother at just a few days old, unable to stand or walk. IN THE U.S., tigers can be purchased for as little as a few hundred dollars. Misguided consumers often buy cubs, failing to reflect on the inherent danger of possessing a wild animal and the significant size and cost of such an animal as it grows into adulthood, says Tony Eliseuson, senior staff attorney for Animal Legal Defense Fund. This means hundreds of tigers are abandoned annually. “Rescue organizations like Tigers in America are a crucial part of providing relief for animals who have been exploited,” says Eliseuson. “When tigers are released from substandard conditions or private ownership, they cannot be returned to the wild. Tigers in America works to identify and support legitimate sanctuaries that allow big cats a safe place to retire and perform natural behaviors in an expansive space.” A major contributor to the U.S. tiger surplus is the practice of using tiger cubs for photo opportunities with the public, says the Humane Society’s Leahy. The cuteness fades as they grow—and then they’re typically discarded. In the wild, a tiger has cubs every three years. In the world of captive breeding, females sometimes have three litters a year and are bred until they are no longer able to bear live cubs, usually dying of mammary cancer. And so, the picture remains bleak—but that’s what keeps Young tigers Tanya and Kizmin were nursed back to health at Turpentine Creek. The refuge named the latter cub in Reeves’s honor. Reeves and Nimmo so committed. “You can’t just walk away knowing everything you know,” she says. BACK IN COLORADO, tigers gazed from behind dilapidated enclosures on 12 scrubby acres. Snow, an 18-yearold male, was in bad shape. He would be moved at night so he could be on the first transport out. White with a ribbon of steel-colored stripes around his thin tail, he seemed to sense the noise and movement blurring on the other side of his enclosure. A jutting stump poked out from his back-left side where, years ago, his leg had been crudely amputated. This left him with three legs to weakly power his once-muscular frame. His massive paws, declawed to render him less SUMMER 2017 / Swarthmore College Bulletin 37 Aurora—very vocally and frequently—interrupted the speeches during the celebration of Turpentine Creek’s 25th anniversary in April. dangerous during performances, had never stopped causing him pain. Watching Snow simultaneously limp and pull his large body across the spare den caused Reeves to wince. It’s not only her compassion for the tigers that fuels her mission to save them. She’s angry, too. “They would sell the chicken for visitors to throw over the fence so they could watch him drag himself across the yard for food,” she says. Snow lived for only a few weeks after the transport. An X-ray of his spine showed it was so severely injured that euthanasia would be the most humane course. At his new home, finally receiving pain medication, Snow relaxed. His caretakers talked quietly with him throughout his last days, which could be described as peaceful. If an animal can convey gratitude with an expression of dignity, this is what Snow seemed to offer his rescuers. A slow eye blink. A chuff. THE COLORADO PROJECT was the largest tiger rescue in U.S. history. Sanctuaries took in 75 tigers as well as 25 other big cats including lions, leopards, and cougars. It took five months to complete. By the time the last tigers were delivered in February, 115 animals had been moved out of bleak, unsafe conditions to the safety of 15 sanctuaries nationwide, from Big Cat Rescue in Florida to Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) in California. Some of the 40 trips took place in the dead of night and often through snowy passes. Tigers in America and their partner Turpentine 38 Swarthmore College Bulletin / SUMMER 2017 Creek Wildlife Refuge had court orders, capital, experience, and help from a network of Tigers in America sanctuaries where tigers will spend the rest of their lives free from fear and the obligation to perform. There are glimmers of hope. The three white cubs from Colorado grew quickly thanks to a new diet, medication, and room to run in Arkansas. This spring, they battled joyfully over a new pool, snuck tricky tail bites, and stealthily charged and tackled one another. Amanda, one of the first tigers rescued six years ago, still furious, delighted in butchering a stuffed St. Patrick’s Day toy. Waldo gained weight at PAWS, content in his new home with a new name, Morris. For Reeves, proof that a tiger’s fate has brightened is a gift. A great thrill is watching them explore a safe place. “When we actually see a tiger being released into its new home, that first step on grass,” says Reeves, smiling, “you can see the sense of wonder.” In April, Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge honored Reeves and Nimmo for their efforts. Violent weather—hailstorms, lightning, floods—marked the occasion, making the sanctuary look even more like an ark. With a break in the storm, Reeves was glad for a chance to stretch her legs and watch some of the animals she’d helped save. But later that day, a stream of new phone messages arrived. Reeves started to pack her bag for the flight home. At twilight the tigers moved through the wet grass like ghosts. Spotting movement in the distance, 11-year-old Rayn starts to run. “Tigers didn’t evolve to be afraid of anything,” says Reeves. SUMMER 2017 / Swarthmore College Bulletin 39 J ON STANCATO ’02 has a secret. “I’ve never performed as a singer in my life,” he says, “and somehow, I’m entrusted with this responsibility to help people find their voices.” But as a vocal coach and founder of the New York- and London-based Inside Voice, Stancato goes beyond the traditional trainings of pitch, tone, and vibrato—delving instead into lessons on establishing intimacy with an audience, unlocking the natural five-­ octave range, and vocalizing the internal secrets that burden and break us. “Because of my really damaged relationship to my own voice and the way SONG OF THE HEART Through music, finding harmony with one another—and within by Elizabeth Slocum 40 Swarthmore College Bulletin / SUMMER 2017 it was liberated by these experiences that I had,” he says, “I realized that I had something special to offer.” To Stancato’s mind, music—like the liberal arts—is interdisciplinary, a tool to help us understand and appreciate the world around us. And by sharing our songs, and singing our secrets, we tune in to one another—and to ourselves. PIANO LESSONS FOR THE ENTIRE WORLD After years of struggling as a musician in New York, Joe Raciti ’05 was ready to part ways with a city he never loved—but not with the young pianists who had made it possible for him to live there. In holding on to those students, though, he didn’t expect to pick up tens of thousands more. “I had heard that one of my kids— who sounded really good—had learned to play something online,” Raciti says. “And I thought, Cool, maybe there’s a way I can still teach them even though I’m not with them.” He stuck with his plan to leave the city and set out to publish free piano tutorials on YouTube. With a camera mounted above his keyboard in his apartment’s makeshift studio, he broke down pop songs into easy-to-play snippets. The web took notice—but not in a good way. “I look back and I’m embarrassed, they were so bad,” Raciti says. “For a year and a half, people left really insulting comments.” Instead of recoiling, Raciti embraced his chance to listen and learn. “I was able to distill the truth from the slurs,” he says, “and change the way I delivered my piano lessons.” Over time, the feedback improved— and so did his following, to the tune of 200,000 YouTube subscribers. Some of his most popular tutorials, such as for Adele’s “Someone Like You,” have even topped the million-view mark. A music teacher at a prep school in Millbrook, N.Y.—where his wife, Jessie Martin ’05, teaches biology and chemistry—Raciti is now expanding “We so often think of our voice as this expression that comes out of us,” says Jon Stancato ’02, photographed here by Laurence Kesterson. “The whole idea of Inside Voice is that it starts inside you.” SUMMER ISSUE FALLYEAR 2016 2017 / Swarthmore College Bulletin 41 “I tell my students to never practice the piano, but to always play the piano,” says Joe Raciti ’05, whose hands are featured in this YouTube screengrab. “When you think it’s fun, you do it more often.” AND ALL THAT JAZZ Judith Lorick ’69’s life has played out much like a jazz tune: with passion, excitement, and unpredictability. A human resources executive on track to become her firm’s first female vice president, Lorick left her career— and, eventually, the U.S.—to pursue her dream of singing professionally. “People said, ‘You’re out of your mind,’” she remembers. “Everybody knew I loved my job; I loved the company. And I thought, You know what? If I stay, I’ll never get off the ladder—it’s too seductive. So I quit.” The decision didn’t come out of nowhere: As a young girl in Philadelphia in the ’50s and ’60s— inspired by a glamorous neighborhood woman who had lived in France (“My image of her is heading down the street in a red dress and a big hat with high heels, looking spectacular”)—Lorick would tell family that she wanted to travel the world, live overseas, marry late. “And so as I grew up,” she says, “that was just in me somehow.” So was singing in church and school, and she even won a local talent show at age 4, earning her a crown and scepter. By college, the Spanish major had discovered a love of jazz, joining a trio and making a name for herself at festivals in and around Swarthmore. “Then right out of school, I went to audition for a gig. And it was disastrous,” she says. “I was a huge hit: The audience loved me, the band was amazing. But the guy who was making the decision was sitting at the bar talking to somebody the whole time. I was so offended, I just walked out—and I didn’t sing for 13 years.” Meanwhile, she built her corporate career, got married, had a child. But a piece of her heart was missing. “One morning, I woke up and said, ‘I need to sing’”—and she approached her first audition as any HR executive would. “I had my cover letter, my résumé—the guy said he’d never seen that from a singer before,” Lorick says. “I also had no clue what singers earned, so when I asked for what I asked for, he just said yes. “It taught me a lesson: I may work less than other people. I may not have as many gigs. But when I work, it’s going to be on my terms. I will be respected.” That instinct served her well: A couple of years later—on the brink of divorce, her son barely 2— Lorick plunged heart-first into full-time singing. After building a following in California, she moved with her son to the south of France, a region well-known for its “A MUSICAL FOUNDATION IS IMPORTANT FOR YOUNG PEOPLE.” —JOE RACITI ’05 42 Swarthmore College Bulletin / SUMMER 2017 “MUSIC IS EVERYTHING: IT BRINGS PEOPLE TOGETHER.’” —JUDITH LORICK ’69 appreciation of American jazz. Her career crescendoed. “Too often we get in our heads, and we forget about our intuition and our emotions and our passions,” Lorick says. “I have never regretted my decision. It was the best thing I ever did.” Lorick returned to the U.S. last fall after 28 years abroad—following another love this time, a soulmate with whom she reconnected. Once again, the pieces have fallen into place. It’s confirmation for Lorick that in life, in love—in music—it’s best to heed the song of the heart. “I don’t know if jazz influenced me or if I’m into jazz because of who I am, but jazz is free and easy—you can’t do it unless you are open and listen with your soul,” she says. “Music is everything: It brings people together. It’s nourishing. It’s a way to bring love and beauty into life.” TO WORK ON THE VOICE … Jon Stancato ’02 lost his voice in grade school. He didn’t find it again until Swarthmore. A boisterous child with a flair for drama—“I was basically ­scream­­ing for attention,” he says—the young Stancato began to develop nodes on his vocal cords. To help him learn an “inside voice,” Stancato was pulled from classes for daily speech therapy. But the 9-year-old felt more shame than relief. “My voice dropped down to bassbaritone range early, and I struggled to sing along with other boys,” he says. “I had a deteriorated idea of what pitch was, to where I was effectively tonedeaf by high school.” EMANUEL HAHN his tutorials to include sight-­reading, rhythm work, and classical music. He’s also incorporating some lessons learned from YouTube—as well as from Swarthmore—into his own classroom. “From my viewers, I learned I was a terrible teacher who thought he was good,” he laughs. “So now I have this problem-slash-blessing, which is that I continue to think that. It’s a good mentality to have—I can always get better.” It was the same at Swarthmore: “The other students inspired me to raise my game, to be really good at something and try to make the world better.” On that note, he’s happy to play a role in making music education accessible to everyone. “I always assumed everyone agreed that music was incredible and the most important thing, but when I became a music teacher, I was surprised to find out almost the opposite,” he says. “Part of me is worried about how seriously people take music education. A musical foundation is important for young people: As you get older, it gives you a gift—it’s always there for you if you want to go back to it.” “In jazz, we have a lot of freedom,” says Judith Lorick ’69. “But in order to work within the frame, we have to be totally attentive to each other, and listen and build on what we hear.” Further crushing his spirits, Stancato later developed a love for theater, particularly musicals—“but I was told I shouldn’t ever audition for one.” Undeterred, Stancato entered Swarthmore as a theater major, with dreams of directing. Fascinated by the relationship between body and voice, and encouraged by Professor Allen Kuharski, Stancato applied for a Lang humanities grant to research at the Grotowski Workcenter in Italy, exploring the therapeutic power of theater. The physically intensive summer program—focusing on the voice as an instrument of expression rather than song—was so challenging, it was preceded by a preparatory workshop (led by his now-mentor Richard Armstrong) that aimed to break down self-imposed limits on the voice, put there through socialization, sexualization, and other outside forces. “The idea was that if you come to understand your self in all of its limitations, you come to understand your voice in all of its limitations,” Stancato says. “Working with the two simultaneously, you can unlock both.” A few hours into the first session, Stancato was told he had a beautiful soprano. “I was completely baffled,” he says, “because as a man, I’d never been told I had a beautiful anything. This idea that I had this rich, lovely soprano lying right on top of my voice, just hidden there all these years, made me fall in love with the possibilities that were SUMMER 2017 / Swarthmore College Bulletin 43 “Hi, I’m Elizabeth. And I am a singer.” OK, so I may not have had an audience since sixth-grade choir (aside from some off-key karaoke performances), but I am a singer. We all are, Jon Stancato ’02 says, which is why his free “Sing a Secret” workshop opens with that affirmation. It’s surprising how difficult and meaningful it is to tell that to a room full of people—and yourself. “The voice is the audible manifestation of the self,” he says—an integral part of what makes us human. But over time, that voice can be stifled—shrouded in armor constructed from our own secrets and insecurities: I hate how my voice sounds. Everyone will judge me. What I have to say doesn’t matter. Through a series of exercises that awaken the senses, Stancato’s course aims to release the imprisoned singer inside each of us. Well into the three-hour-long workshop—after rolling on the floor, allowing three perfect strangers to rub my shoulders and hands (“Just let go!” one admonished, my wrists stiff with control), and getting in tune with my inner symphony—I felt my armor begin to melt. And as I sang my secret and heard others sing theirs, I finally did let go, giving in to the emotion I normally would have suppressed. It was at that moment, I truly felt it: I am a singer. And my own unique self. —ELIZABETH SLOCUM LAURENCE KESTERSON TUNED IN “I stand in complete disbelief every day that I go to work and spend eight hours listening to some of New York’s most beautiful singers sing private concerts and then ask me for advice,” says Jon Stancato ’02. “I can’t believe that’s my job now.” available if I continued to pursue this work.” Stancato applied his newly learned techniques to his daily life and his theater company, Stolen Chair—founded soon after Swarthmore with his wife, Kiran Rikhye ’02. But a teaching gig in 2013 at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London afforded him the first true chance to share the therapeutic tactics that allowed him to unleash a voice that had long been suppressed. “In doing this work, I wasn’t just transmitting technique or expertise, or having fun or creating theater,” “AS A MAN, I’D NEVER BEEN TOLD I HAD A BEAUTIFUL ANYTHING.” —JON STANCATO ’02 44 Swarthmore College Bulletin / SUMMER 2017 Stancato says. “Instead, it felt like we engaged in some delicate dance of understanding each other’s souls. It was completely entrancing to do this work and to have actors in tears saying that their entire life, they had felt estranged from their voice, and they now had a relationship to it.” In just a few years, Stancato’s Inside Voice training program has grown to include free twice-monthly “Sing a Secret” workshops, intermediate and advanced classes, and 38 private students who believe—like Stancato—that to work on the voice is to work on the self. Stancato hopes to expand further— guided by an inner voice that so far hasn’t led him astray. “I have been happy for the longest time, because I’ve been able to work as an artist in New York City,” he says. “But until I found this work of helping others discover the potential of their voice, I didn’t realize what happiness actually was.” class notes A TREASURY OF ALUMNI-RELATED ITEMS ALUMNI EVENTS GARNET HOMECOMING AND FAMILY WEEKEND Oct. 6–8 Attend lectures, cheer on Garnet teams, or just bask on Parrish Beach during this fun annual celebration of what makes Swarthmore special: swarthmore.edu/ garnetweekend ALUMNI COLLEGE ABROAD Jan. 7–16 Join your fellow ­Swarthmoreans on “Cuba: An Extraordinary People-to-People Experience”: bit.ly/SwatAbroad LAURENCE KESTERSON SEND-OFFS TO SWARTHMORE Welcome the Class of 2021 to our alumni community at a summer send-off. Find a locale: swarthmore.edu/ sendoffs Kenneth Mehan ’62 and wife Janet share a visit and a laugh at Alumni Weekend. More photos: bulletin.swarthmore.edu 1941 Libby Murch Livingston lizliv33@gmail.com Emily Audet ’18 sent a fine, interesting letter thanking us for the class scholarships that have allowed her to attend Swarthmore: “Two of the most memorable and formative experiences have been studying abroad in Amman, Jordan, and taking an internship in Philadelphia. I worked with refugees from around the world, helping them navigate the complicated resettlement process. I hope to continue working with refugee populations, and I know that without Swarthmore, I may not have discovered this passion.” We all should be pleased that we have aided Emily’s training in this important field. Our only class news item is a sad one. Ann Driver Miller died at home in Seaside Park, N.J., in March. In our 50th Reunion book (Can you believe that was in 1991?), Ann wrote: “Following teacher’s certificate and a master’s degree from Temple, I taught English in private and public schools and in a reformatory for girls for a total of 22 years. Three sons and their related interests called for a time out in the middle of it all. Now I’m a retired reading specialist who hates to give up, so I am working for Literary Volunteers as an evaluator, workshop leader, and tutor.” Her later years showed this same tenacity: She displayed gallantry in her long battle with illness, and then in rebuilding after Superstorm Sandy, which almost wiped out the home she and Charles had for many years. Her health had declined in the past year, and she went in peace. I had a tragedy, as well. We lost a dear granddaughter in March, a good beach-walking companion of mine. Sue was an active, outdoor-loving person, so it’s even more of a shock. Our family gathered from all over the U.S.—Denver, Chicago, New Orleans, and the East Coast—to give support. I look back on our gathering and the courage of Elinor and Dan, her parents, to understand the importance of family, especially at a time like this. SUMMER 2017 / Swarthmore College Bulletin 45 class notes Lucy Rickman Baruch writes from England: “Leaving your home after 55 years is no fun, but we are well looked after. Our three children visit often and take us to interesting places. We can also drive to the River Thames, walk, and enjoy spring.” Lucy Selligman Schneider has been rehanging her political memorabilia collection. One of her earliest pieces is a 120-year-old framed election poster of Grover Cleveland and Vice President Adlai Stevenson, grandfather of the 1952 and 1956 presidential candidate. Roland Park Place, my retirement community in Baltimore, will undergo a multiyear rebuilding plan to modernize, add healthcare accommodations, and construct a new residential center. We are in for noisy, interesting times! Sadly, Laurence Lohman died in December. News from classmates is more than welcome! 1943 Betty Glenn Webber bettywebber22@yahoo.com 616-245-2687 It was good to hear from friends. Jack Dugan has limited eyesight and relies on a young amanuensis to help with the computer, phone, and other office items. He celebrated his 95th birthday in November 46 Swarthmore College Bulletin / SUMMER 2017 1944 Esther Ridpath Delaplaine edelaplaine1@verizon.net Sue Davison Cooley died in February. She had been married to Ed Cooley ’43, who died in 2000. Please share your memories. Jean Forster H ­ anchett­ died in October. After­­ Swarthmore, where she majored in political science and was inspired by the Quaker values of social justice and pacifism, she worked for the War Labor Board, focusing on gender and racial equality in the workplace. While husband Bill completed his Ph.D. at Berkeley, Jean worked for the Berkeley Planning Commission. They rented an ark on stilts that became a haven for San Francisco Beat scene artists of the 1950s. The pair later moved to San Diego, where Jean completed a master’s in political science and they raised two children. After her divorce in 1968, she attended law school and researched as a paralegal at a San Diego law firm. Jean received two Fulbright awards: to London and Egypt. In the 1990s, Jean and longtime companion Luther Whitten moved to Castro Valley, Calif., where she helped try to incorporate the area as a city. In retirement, Jean produced beautiful pastels and recited many poems with her friends and family. Truly, a Renaissance woman! In January, I, Esther, had the pleasure of hosting Irene Kwon ’17, a student from Korea, during her stint at the World Bank. Later, I joined 500,000 people in the Women’s March on Washington. Due to a production error, my spring notes failed to appear in the last Bulletin: Jane Reppert Jenks Small had reported that a broken ankle left her temporarily wheelchair-bound. She still lives at Foxdale Village, the retirement community in State College, Pa., that she and her late first husband, Bart Jenks, co-founded. Our mothers (Eleanor Runk Reppert and Mary Wilson Ridpath) were in the Class of 1919. In October I flew to San Francisco with 12 children and grands to attend the wedding of granddaughter Emily ’neath redwood trees. She and husband Nick flew off to the Far East for six months of travel. I am now enjoying photos from their trek above Kathmandu, Nepal, where they volunteer with All Hands rebuilding schools destroyed in the 2015 earthquakes. It was a great pleasure to meet President Valerie Smith in the fall when she introduced Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot ’66 (pg. 16) at a reading from Growing Each Other Up at Politics & Prose Bookstore in D.C. Also attending were Lucy Axelbank Cifuentes ’45 and Lee Smith Ingram ’66. If you wish to visit the splendid new National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall, I offer use of my guest room. 1945 Verdenal Hoag Johnson verdij76@comcast.net “Oh, we’re going to the Hamburg Show / See the elephant and the wild kangaroo, / Oh, we’re off to be together / In fair or stormy weather / Oh, we’re going to see the whole thing through.” Good grief, I haven’t thought of that song in half a century. There are other things that come to mind. Do you remember “mystery meatballs”? We had meat-rationing at Swarthmore during World War II, and we never really knew what was in those scrunched-up meatballs, always with delicious gravy. I was a waitress on campus, and one day my trays tipped and I spilled nine plates of food all over the floor. I was very strong; I would show off by carrying two coffee pots or two pitchers of milk in each hand. When I was a freshman, we had tablecloths in the dining Share your pics—on campus and off—on Instagram: @swarthmorebulletin, #swatbulletin ALUMNI IN ACTION Ex-members of the Warmothers and Earthworms Ultimate Frisbee teams reunited on campus in early April. OLIVIA SMARTT Mary Weintraub Delbanco delbanco660@gmail.com students and faculty. On March 10, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education and Gold Foundation DeWitt C. Baldwin Jr. Award was presented to three hospital institutions. Additionally, in August, Bud will receive the Nexus Pioneer Award from the National Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education in Minneapolis. Congratulations, Bud! He and Michele hope to take a farewell trip to France after his 95th birthday in July. He still works full time, but admits to slowing down. Really? Have you visited friends, family, or classmates lately? Have you relocated? Do you still indulge old hobbies or interests, or have they been replaced? Do you belong to a stimulating book group and want to tout a recent favorite? We’d like to hear from you long-silent friends; call or email me. Thuy Tran ’04, Ari Greenberg, and more than 100 other alumni and friends of the College celebrated the launch of “Changing Lives, Changing the World” April 25 at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. Slideshow: bulletin.swarthmore.edu Murtaza Khomusi ’17 and Sedinam Worlanyo ’17 were runners-up in the Georgetown Development Innovation Marketplace Case Competition. Win Armstrong ’51 participates in January’s Women’s March in New York City. Patty O’Connor ’72 and David Hicks ’71 discuss their Swarthmore band Phaedra and reminisce about making music during the politically charged late ’60s and early ’70s: bulletin.swarthmore.edu FEDERAL DONUTS 1942 by falling and breaking a hip and now gets around with walker or wheelchair. Nevertheless, he and Barbara hosted a 70th anniversary dinner party for 23 family members at Christmastime. Not all bad! Ginny Curry Hille is well in St. Louis. She revels in Skype to keep up with great-grand Eliza and is pleased with the retirement community she and Bob moved to in 2008, with good friends and activities now that she is widowed. Besides church, bridge, and book clubs, she says, “best of all, I still love to drive. They didn’t bat an eye when I renewed my license for four years.” Self-chauffeuring is also the preferred option for Mary Stewart Trageser, who enjoys the independence it affords. She looked forward to the arrival of her first greatgrand and to the Boston Marathon, which a granddaughter planned to run. The late Betty Stern Hoffenberg’s son Peter was in touch in the fall to say that Libby Hoffenberg ’20 started at the College in August, where “in addition to intensive Greek, psychology, and other courses, she is playing Ultimate Frisbee, stretching with yoga, and making good new friends.” Peter says Betty died in October 2013 within 72 hours of lifelong friend Ruth Spangler Smith. “Wherever my mom’s soul is—and I’m sure it is protesting current events and reading The New York Times—she is happy that her family’s Swarthmore tradition is being carried out by such a wonderful young woman.” DeWitt “Bud” Baldwin brings us up to date on his longtime passion for interdisciplinary education and training of med-school David Dye ’72, who retired this spring after 25 years leading WXPN’s World Café radio show, received a sweet tribute from Philadelphia’s Federal Donuts: a “Swirled Café” doughnut. Professor Emeritus of Biology Scott Gilbert presented a lecture on embryology this winter to the Dalai Lama, a meeting facilitated with help from Anna Friedman Edlund ’91. More: bulletin.swarthmore.edu Ethan Landis ’84 hosted D.C.-area alumni volunteers for a Day of Giving House Party in support of the College’s successful 1864 Challenge. The Swarthmore College Lab Orchestra, conducted by Andrew Kim ’18 and Aaron Slepoi ’17, performed at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in April. + SEND YOUR PHOTOS/BLURBS TO BULLETIN@SWARTHMORE.EDU Suzanne Durrell ’75 cheered on her beloved New England Patriots at Super Bowl LI in Houston. SUMMER 2017 / Swarthmore College Bulletin 47 class notes room, but that elegance didn’t last after the Navy came—we changed to cafeteria-style. Our freshman year, the student body was pretty homogeneous; there was no talk of diversity. But it was part of us after the Navy came in 1943, though we never thought or talked about it. The only things those beautiful young men had in common were that they were male, around 19 or 20 years old, and bright. They were mostly engineering majors, because the Navy intended to send them to the Seabee group to build ports and air­ bases, and they came from all over the U.S. Edward ’46 and I would never have met without his being in the V-12 program. Even in our ivory tower, the war still came to us. I wrote two or three letters to servicemen every day. Our food choices were limited, but we never suffered because we had such an innovative kitchen staff. Soldiers and sailors, besides our classmates, would turn up on campus to visit friends, and many of us coeds went to military bases in New Jersey and Pennsylvania to “entertain” the troops. We all took first-aid training, and many of us were air wardens; my beat area was the cloisters at Clothier. It was really spooky all alone in the middle of the night, and the air-raid sirens were heart-stopping. Then, too, we had our trauma. One of my best friends received a phone call from the parents of her beloved—he had been killed in a plane accident. It was just before finals in 1944; neither of us did very well on those exams. Wartime also affected travel. Gas was rationed, so if we wanted to go home badly enough, we 48 Swarthmore College Bulletin / would ride trains and buses. We were young, pretty, and friendly, and we were encouraged to talk to anyone in uniform—very different from our prewar experiences. We were brought up not to talk to strangers, particularly if the stranger was not “of our class.” We had been rescued from our snobbish attitudes, and our freedom to mix was joyous. We learned so much from our wartime experience— strange as it was—not heretofore included in the Swarthmore curriculum. 1946 Nancy Fitts Donaldson has retired as class secretary. If you are interested in taking over, please contact Class Notes Editor Elizabeth Slocum at eslocum1@ swarthmore.edu. We thank you, Nancy! 1947 Marshall Schmidt kinmarshal@aol.com Vaughan “Arky” Chambers died March 6 in West Chester, Pa. We send condolences to his family. Arky received a chemistry Ph.D. from MIT in 1951 and spent his career with DuPont’s photo products division, retiring as director of research and development in 1987. Although he was deaf the last 30 years of his life, Arky still sang and entertained family and friends with special renditions of old songs. He enjoyed SUMMER 2017 woodworking, sailing, and completing The New York Times crossword. Arky is survived by his wife of 68 years, Carol, four children, and nine grandchildren. I hope to have caught up with you at our 70th Reunion. Please write and share your experiences. 1948 Phil Gilbert has retired as class secretary. If you are interested in taking over, please contact Class Notes Editor Elizabeth Slocum at eslocum1@swarthmore. edu. We thank you, Phil! 1949 Marjorie Merwin Daggett mmdaggett@verizon.net Jack Koelle’s wife, Barbara, writes that Jack is not very active these days. The pair still have their unit at the Strath Haven Condominium, so he hasn’t gone far from the College. Jack enjoys reading P.G. Wodehouse and Robert Parker, listening to classical music, and visiting with daughter Kate. From Seattle comes news that Alan and Andrea Wolf Rabinowitz are still in the house they moved into 45 years ago. She long ago retired as a child therapist. A granddaughter who is a first-year medical student at the University of Washington lives on their third floor. Andrea reports: “I keep up with friends, go to yoga once a week, and take singing lessons, which I have done most of my life. We belong to a Swarthmore book group, and this year we are reading autobiographies. I devour many other books, as well. My health is great, and I know how fortunate I am. My husband is well but has some health issues. We had lunch with Valerie Smith, and I came away feeling Swarthmore is in very good hands. She is a delight. Our four children and many grandchildren give us endless pleasure and keep us going.” Eliza Larsh Lewis writes from Kennett Square, Pa.: “I live in a garden cottage in a life-care community, Kendal at Longwood, where I serve on the horticulture committee. Combined with our sister community, Crosslands, we have extensive acreage and a fully recognized arboretum. We also have personal gardens, as well as a group vegetable and cut-flower garden. We have a Quaker monthly meeting here, and I am on its finance committee. I am also in the ESL tutoring program and enjoy working one-on-one with a lively young Chinese-American woman once a week. Several Swarthmoreans are here: Peggy Gwynn, David Hewitt ’44, and Peg Allen ’50 come to mind. I also go out a couple of times a week to women’s groups I belonged to before I came to Kendal 13 years ago. They mostly center on meditation and reading. “Crosslands also has some Swarthmoreans: Maralyn Orbison Gillespie, FOLLOW US on Facebook at facebook.com/ SwarthmoreBulletin Sara-Page Merritt White, Betty Nathan ’50, Phil Gilbert ’48, Jean Ashmead Perkins, and Esther Leeds Cooperman ’48, for starters. I enjoy going over for a meal there from time to time and seeing old friends.” Bob Norman reports: “Nita and I live in a retirement community in Lebanon, N.H., quite close to Dartmouth College. We’ve lived here almost seven years. With almost 90 residents, it is about the right size—we all know each other. We are fortunate to have many music and theater events nearby. I don’t read much due to macular degeneration (dry kind). I look forward to a magnifying scheme that will enlarge any written material. I try to keep up on current events. I still make occasional small contributions to research on voting systems. I write this after my favorite lunch of toast or crackers with chunky peanut butter topped with sliced radishes.” I, too, live in a retirement community, editing a quarterly newsletter with short biographies of new residents, going to exercise classes, and participating in a women’s history group. I am also the board secretary for the Concord– Carlisle League of Women Voters in Massachusetts and took two courses at the Brandeis Osher Lifelong Learning Institute this spring. Nancy Burnholz Rawson ’48 and I were in the same course, Traveling Through Cultures, reading historical fiction. Sad news: William Amis, professor emeritus at Georgia State University, died Jan. 18. Bill grew up in South Carolina and attended college there as well as at Johns Hopkins before entering the Army in summer 1945. One of his military assignments was in France, where he formed the lifelong conviction that there “can be nothing quite like Paris.” After he graduated from Swarthmore with a double major in psychology and sociology, he earned a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. He joined the faculty of Georgia State in 1955 and later taught at Emory and Wake Forest before returning to Georgia State in 1961. Five years before retiring in 1983, he and a friend founded the Science Fiction and Mystery Book Shop in Atlanta. Bill loved languages, especially German, French, and Italian. For the past 16 years, Bill and his wife of 42 years, Paula, spent part of each year in Paris, where they kept an apartment, and in Turin, Italy, where Paula worked. Our condolences to Paula and their son. I appreciate all of you who responded with updates on your lives. 1950 1950 has no class secretary. If you are interested, please contact Class Notes Editor Elizabeth Slocum at eslocum1@swarthmore. edu. 1951 Elisabeth “Liesje” Boessenkool Ketchel eketchel@netscape.com Jean Matter Mandler’s husband, George, died last BULLETIN BOARD Notes and announcements from our staff: bulletin@swarthmore.edu ON THE ROAD AGAIN Exploring the country by RV? Tell us your tales of travel and adventure for potential use in a future story. Send pics, too! THE MAGIC TOUCH Magicians, illusionists, assistants, rabbit fans—help us pull a story out of our hat! BOOK IT! We are happy to receive books by alums to be considered for review. Mail copies to Swarthmore College Bulletin, 500 College Ave., Swarthmore, PA 19081. All books will later be donated to McCabe Library. WHAT’S YOUR STORY? Have a great idea for a feature or profile? Share it with us! year, and the memorial service was at UC–San Diego, where they worked. Jean lives in London, but spends winters in La Jolla, Calif. “I hang out at the cognitive science department I started many years ago. It’s so nice that ‘cog sci’ has become a popular set of words.” Robin Cooley Krivanek writes: “What’s new in Sanibel, Fla.? The same thing the whole country is experiencing: a renewed commitment to civic involvement. It’s a great time to be membership and nominating committee chair of the local League of Women Voters.” Richard Frost spent the winter recovering from heart surgery. He and wife Barbara split their time between Hamilton, N.Y., and Santa Fe, N.M. His book on the impact of the railroad on the Pueblo Indians has been well-received. “As an American historian, I spend a good deal of time following our national Share your pics—on campus and off—on Instagram: @swarthmorebulletin, #swatbulletin political catastrophe, and have emailed senators on the historic fallacy of constitutional ‘originalism.’” Dot Wynne Marschak invites D.C.-area alums to two series she organized with the Woman’s National Democratic Club: “U.S. Role in a Changing World” and “Social Role of the Arts.” Her nonprofit CHIME (Community Help in Music Education) now supports the Swarthmore-affiliated Chester Children’s Chorus. Dot writes poetry and keeps her arthritic fingers active with piano chamber music. She’s also active politically—“given extremely limited mobility, on the computer, not the streets.” Jerry Pollack and wife Pat visited Switzerland and England last year. This year, it’s California, then Ireland with their daughters’ families. “We need to travel while we can.” He’s sorry to have missed our 65th Reunion—the first he couldn’t attend. At a Swarthmore reception in NYC a few years ago, he met Robert Putnam ’63, whose presentation about the effects of globalization and technology on his Ohio hometown made a great impression. “As a consequence, I now support Swarthmore’s Summer Scholars, which opens doors for students who are the first in their family to attend college and belong to historically underrepresented groups in STEM fields.” Dan Singer “spent much of the last six months tending to medical issues—not surprising for our age cohort.” Dan now uses a cane and has lost weight. He and wife Maxine Frank Singer ’52 live independently at the D.C. home they’ve shared since 1960. Stop by! Win Armstrong attended the Women’s March in New York. “After listening to the president’s inaugural speech, with its ‘America First’ antagonism, I wanted to put not only mind but body on the line.” Win says her use of a walker inspires marchers: “They look at me and say, ‘If you can do this, so can I.’” After 43 years in the same house, Ken Kurtz is moving into a retirement center, spurred by a diagnosis of “early and mild” Parkinson’s. “I don’t feel bad—mainly a shaking of the hands and my ‘crab-walk,’ as I call it. Problem is, I never know what sort of day it will be.” Daughters Eli and Margaret have been a big help. Meanwhile, Ken teaches an adult-ed class, Classic French Comedy Films, and blogs on Kentucky politics and civic issues for his NPR affiliate. He’s also on the local Society of Professional Journalists board and plays bridge. “Will cut down on things as this goes on. As Bette Davis supposedly remarked, ‘Old age is not for sissies.’” Ralph Lee Smith writes: “One thing that ‘keeps me interested and vital’ is a group in our Unitarian Universalist church called the ROMEOs: Retired Older Men Eating Out. Every Tuesday, we gather at a local hangout for breakfast. It’s delightful because we have traveled such diverse paths. The group includes a former ambassador to Croatia, a Navy fighter pilot, an old-time Midwestern farm boy, and, of course, me—a folk-music goofball from Greenwich Village.” Joy Sundgaard Kaiser reports no changes among herself, husband Herb ’49, and their family, “except for the outrage we feel about President Trump. I’m 86 but healthy enough (I think) to see him roundly defeated for a second term.” Diane Duke Amussen writes: “Most of you have been in the grand business for some time, but my two appeared one day before my 83rd birthday—a long time to wait! We just celebrated their third birthday.” Diane also took part in a get-together initiated by Muslim women emphasizing what unites us. “I live in the San Joaquin Valley, the ‘salad bowl’ of our country and not an activist territory, so this seemed an especially encouraging, important opportunity to work on an interfaith basis.” Setha Goodyear Olson, a well-known chemist in the field of microphotolithography, and Joseph Cary, professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut, died in January. They will be greatly missed. SUMMER 2017 / Swarthmore College Bulletin 49 class notes 1952 Barbara Wolff Searle bsearle70@msn.com I received a long message from Jane Fletcher Fiske, which I will provide in a slightly abridged version: “My sister-in-law Esther Fiske Doherty passed away Jan. 28 in Boston, following a fall about 10 days earlier. She is survived by her husband of 62 years, Robert, three children, and three grandchildren, as well as by my husband (her brother), John Fiske ’49, our two sons, and our five grandchildren. “Esther’s enthusiasm made being around her the absolute best place to be, wherever that was. She and Bob lived in Louisville, Ky., then Rochester, N.Y., Salt Lake City, and Ithaca, N.Y., before moving to Cambridge, Mass., to be near two of her children. Despite mobility issues, she and Bob traveled the world and lived in Malaysia for a year when she was awarded a Fulbright. Since moving to Cambridge, she had made new friends and renewed childhood friendships. She provided the glue—phone calls, remembrances of birthdays—so important in holding the extended family together. The tradition she started 30 years ago of holding a family reunion at her summer house in Wolfeboro, N.H., will continue. A celebration of her life will be held there in the summer. “John and I moved to Cape Cod the summer before last to be close to our elder son, Bill Fiske ’78, and wife Anna. It has been 50 Swarthmore College Bulletin / an adjustment, after 45 years in Boxford, Mass., in a house we built and loved, but being just down the street from Bill and Anna has its advantages, and it’s fun to watch our grandson Thomas growing up. We enjoy visits from our three granddaughters who live off-Cape and our other son, Tom, who lives in Princeton, N.J., with his wife and son. “For the past seven years, I’ve been editor of The Genealogical Magazine of New Jersey. I’ve learned a lot and enjoy working long distance with a great group of people. I also work on book projects for the Society of Mayflower Descendants (of which I am not a member). My last chance to visit Swarthmore was several years ago when the Pennsylvania Society of Mayflower Descendants awarded me the Katherine F. Little award and I gave a talk at their annual meeting near Philadelphia. Having been painfully shy in college, I can only wish that I’d known then that I would give lectures to large crowds and actually enjoy doing it. If I’d been able to open my mouth in classes, my Swarthmore experience would have been different. Oh, to be able to do it over again!” I was sad to hear about Esther but delighted to get the news about Jane. I’m trying to keep better track of our classmates. The winter 2017 Bulletin reports the death of Ellen Hook Norbom. Do you have information about her? Nancy Cliffe Vernon died March 29. She earned a master’s at Radcliffe and became a teacher, CAPTION THIS first in London and then in South Africa. After moving to Fairfax, Va., and raising her children, Nancy received a master’s from George Mason and became an addictions counselor. In retirement, she taught disabled children how to swim. Nancy is survived by three children and four grandchildren. After 35 interesting and fulfilling years in D.C., I have decided to move to Carlsbad, Calif., where my daughter, Karen Linnea Searle ’84, and her family live. I certainly have trepidations about moving into a retirement community (I swore many times that I would never do so!) but I think it is the right thing to do. So, soon, probably just about when you are reading this, I will be packed up and on my way. I think I’ve mentioned before that Linnea and I are probably the only two family members who are both Swarthmore class secretaries. We’ll keep this up as long as you write to me with your news! I look forward to hearing from more of you. 1953 Carol Lange Davis cldavis5@optonline.net YOUR CAPTION HERE! Be creative! Submit a caption by Sept. 16 to cartoon@swarthmore.edu. To see last issue’s cartoon with suggested captions, go to Page 66. SUMMER 2017 Thanks to a nudge from Bob Fetter, I received a wonderful update from Eleanor “Hutch” Hutcheson Epler: “Our retirement life gives us six months in Guilford, Conn., where I am a docent emeritus from Yale University Art Gallery. My husband, Pim, is a fellow at Trumbull College at Yale.” Eleanor is also a guide at the Stewart B. McKinney National Wildlife Refuge at the Outer Island Unit in the Thimble Islands off Branford, Conn. The refuge is open on summer weekends and is accessed by water taxi from the Stony Creek ferry dock. In the winter, the Eplers live in Florida, where Eleanor is a museum docent. They reside on the banks of the St. Lucie River, which accesses the Atlantic and Lake Okeechobee, a pivotal component in the preservation and restoration of the Everglades. “Our most interesting trip in recent years was to the Azores, the midocean destination of the trans-Atlantic sailor,” Eleanor says. “My husband has been an off-shore sailboat racer, and many friends here are ‘circumnavigators.’” Their Eplers’ adult children are in New England and Texas; all five grandchildren are west of the Mississippi. Bob Fetter urged fellow classmates to prepare for our 65th Reunion by going to the 64th Reunion in May. I hope you joined Bob and report back. Barbara Jackson Hazard showed 10 paintings at an art show, “Sourcing Color,” at the Marin Community Foundation in Novato, Calif., Jan. 25 to June 9. I hope nearby classmates were able to see it. I am proud to announce the arrival of a third great-granddaughter, Ilona Lehtonen. Parents Heather and Stephanie bought a house in Vergennes, Vt., shortly before Ilona arrived. Steph is a speech therapist, and Heather— after several years as a dog groomer—is starting a master’s at the University of Vermont to become an English teacher. Please send me your news. It is hard to do this job without it. Share your pics—on campus and off—on Instagram: @swarthmorebulletin, #swatbulletin 1954 Elizabeth Dun Colten lizcolten@aol.com Jay Ochroch received the Philadelphia Bar Association’s PNC Achievement Award for his work with the Consumer Bankruptcy Assistance Project. Corinne Lyman was honored as a longtime Democratic volunteer. She participated “with men, women, and dogs” in Delaware, Ohio’s Women’s March. Did other 1954ers join the ranks? Harriet Donow Cornell’s son Keith ’84 announced his candidacy for Surrogate’s Court judge in Rockland County, N.Y. Keith’s elder son, Robin, is an Oberlin junior; Skyler, 17, is a high-school senior. And Nancy Weller Dorian published My Name Is Quarnig (pg. 6), available on Amazon. To quote Porky Pig, “That’s all folks!” Our shortest column in 63 years. 1955 Sally Schneckenburger Rumbaugh srumbaugh@san.rr.com Judy Wubnig, having closed her apartment in Cambridge, Mass., and about to close the one in Ontario, is living in her parents’ home in Silver Spring, Md. She is working on a book of articles by Brand Blanshard, a philosopher who taught at Swarthmore and under whom she studied at Yale. Judy retired from the University of Waterloo’s philosophy department in 2002. Several people kindly sent me their holiday letters. Bill Shepard’s included a photo of him, wife Elza, and their 10-yearold grandson, all looking relaxed and happy. Continuing his academic work, Bill updated an article on Muslims in New Zealand, reconnecting with locals and visiting a Shiite temple for the first time. Son Bill works with a new stateof-the-art detector for a beamline whose installation he supervised last year. He manages people, gives teaching workshops, and writes scientific articles, using karate to relieve stress and teaching it to his daughters, one of whom is a brown belt. Bill and Phyllis Klock Dominick ’57 had a busy 2016, including grandchild graduations at James Mason University and a Denver high school. One grandson graduated with honors from the University of Michigan and another with a combined undergraduate and law degree from a university in Mexico. The Dominicks attended Bill’s 65th prep-school reunion in West Hartford, Conn., then Phyllis’s cousins’ reunion in Blue Bell, Pa. In October came the “7-D family reunion”: Phyllis and Bill and their five adult children—“no inlaws and no children!”—in Nags Head, N.C. Both are active—Phyllis with yoga, swimming, physical therapy, book club, garden club, and women’s club; Bill with cardiac rehab workouts that help his arthritis. With Swarthmore classmates, they see shows in Richmond, Va., and at the Kennedy Center in D.C. Sadly, Jack Hughlett died April 16 at home in Lancaster, Pa. Earlier this spring, he had written a lovely note about his life after Swarthmore, which I’ll share in tribute to Jack: “After graduating, my only job offer was from Armstrong in Lancaster­.­ Their section that produced musical shows for wholesale conventions wanted someone to write lyrics. I showed them my songs for the Hamburg Show and spent eight years there before being promoted to managing other advertising and promotion activities. “In 1977, I was sent to England with my wife, Kay, to oversee their ad departments in England, France, and Germany. In the four years there, son Chris was born and Kay’s daughter Melanie learned the accents that landed her the lead in her high-school production of My Fair Lady in Lancaster. She graduated from Wesleyan and now handles marketing for TV commercial services. Kay was president of the American Wives Club in England as well as of three Lancaster clubs and our church. “Since returning to Lancaster, I’ve directed two plays and seven musicals—most at the Fulton Opera House, the oldest community-operating theater in the U.S. Chris performed in five of them, from The Wizard of Oz to West Side Story. “I decided to write a musical of my own after reading a book by Kate Summersby, Eisenhower’s Irish driver and aide during World War II, describing their romantic relationship. It has been performed by three theaters with three different casts. A newspaper critic wrote that ‘it’s a terrific show. It’s the songs that make For the Love of Ike soar.’ “Chris also writes music, majoring in composition at Vanderbilt. Since moving to NYC, he’s produced a CD of his songs, joined the Central City Chorus, and formed/directed an eightman a cappella group. He works for an ad agency, and two years ago, he and wife Amy, a Vanderbilt voice major, had my first grandchild, Sequoia.” We lost two other classmates. Anne Kesten Bernstein died Nov. 15 in Los Altos Hills, Calif. She was civic-­minded and generously supported local education, mediation services, patient-support services, and political causes. An avid Francophile and opera buff, she also loved gardening and photography. John Parkes, of Philadelphia, died Jan. 15. He was an Army captain from 1961 to 1963 and was a retired research scientist at Penn. Our sympathy to John’s wife and his brother Alan Parkes; to Jack’s family; and to Anne’s husband, children, and grandchildren. 1956 Caro Luhrs celuhrs@verizon.net FOLLOW US on Facebook at facebook.com/ SwarthmoreBulletin I am sorry to report the death of Michael Juviler from pancreatic cancer Jan. 20. He died peaceful- ly at home in Boca Raton, Fla., and is survived by wife Barbara; children Elizabeth and Adam; stepdaughter Julie; four grandchildren; and two step-grandchildren. Michael was born in London in 1936 and became a U.S. citizen in 1945. He graduated from Yale Law School in 1960 and spent his career in public service, devoted to the integrity of institutions of criminal justice. He began at the Manhattan D.A.’s office, becoming chief of the appeals bureau and working on cases of organized crime and corruption, quiz-show scandals, and music-payola cases. Michael argued five times before the U.S. Supreme Court. He wrote a “friend of the court” brief in Terry v. Ohio—the “stop and frisk” case—after which the court gave him the unusual honor of arguing as an amicus. From 1979 to his 2001 retirement, Michael was a judge—first on the Brooklyn Criminal Court and then, for 17 years, on the New York State Supreme Court. For the last 18 years, until a month before his death, he was a mentor on the New York State Advisory Commission on Judicial Ethics. In 2001, Barbara and Michael moved to South Florida, where he shared his lifelong passions for baseball, horse racing, and literature with family and friends. His wry sense of humor was legendary, and Barbara notes that “a small few will miss his Kabuki performances.” We will miss Michael and send condolences to his family and friends. As winners of a 60th Reunion auction, Carla and Roger Levien and Joyce and Jack Finkelstein—with daughter SUMMER 2017 / Swarthmore College Bulletin 51 class notes Julia ’13—had lunch with President Valerie Smith in December. They met in a beautiful setting: the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s dining room overlooking Central Park. Two hours of conversation about every kind of College concern ensued. Jack found President Smith to be “friendly, knowledgeable, and understanding”; in a single word, “delightful.” He feels we have an excellent president to lead us now and prepare for the future. Medical issues prevented Bill Cunningham from attending our 60th Reunion. He’s back in shape now for road racing and competing with two granddaughters who “left him in the dust” at their first 5K competitions. Last summer, Bill’s six children and their families (24 in all) joined him for a reunion in Hawaii. Five of his children are on the West Coast, including son Bill, an urban planner in Portland; daughter Dawn, who has led communications for the Pacific School of Religion and Mills College; and daughter Rosanne, an executive film producer in LA. As of June 30, 2016, our Class of 1956 Scholarship fund totaled $609,273. Our estimated distribution for 2016–17 is $25,398. Almost 60 percent of the 2016–17 entering class will receive need-based aid. Our 2016–17 class recipient is Terell Dale ’20, who says our scholarship is “an honor and a privilege that I will try to respect with hard work and achievement.” He plans to major in engineering (with an interest in fuel technologies) and chose Swarthmore because he wanted the added benefit of a strong liberal arts education. An active Boy Scout, Terell planned and led the Scouts’ creation of a 52 Swarthmore College Bulletin / permanent orienteering trail for Norristown, Pa.’s Farm Park. He is a church member and youth leader and plays on Swarthmore’s varsity baseball team. 1958 Vera Lundy Jones 549 East Ave. Bay Head, NJ 08742 verajonesbayhead@ comcast.net Marianne Wertheim Makman and her husband live a cheerful, music-filled retirement. Their six grandchildren, ages 9 to 25, “are all coming along in their corners of our world.” One grandchild is at Kenyon College, where Sean Decatur ’90 is president. Marianne looks forward to our 60th Reunion in 2018 and likes the idea of a 1958 class lunch or dinner. Our class president, Babette Barbash Weksler, and Ginnie Paine DeForest are working on reunion plans. Please send suggestions to Babette or Ginnie—or me! 1959 Miriam Repp Staloff staloff@verizon.net Peter Temin retired from MIT several years ago, “as the economics department believes in early retirement. My wife, Charlotte, and I took our children and grandchildren on a trip to the west of England last summer to celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary. The trip was a great success: no fights among SUMMER 2017 siblings and cousins with visits to Stonehenge, Roman baths at Bath, and country houses like Longleat and Stourhead. I have continued to write, publishing five books since my retirement. The latest is The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy, which explains how we have become such a polarized society.” 1960 Jeanette Strasser Pfaff jfalk2@mac.com This column has some new voices. Judith Nordblom Alger writes from Santa Fe, N.M., that she can’t decide whether she avoids writing to the class because she has nothing to say—or too much. However, she responded enthusiastically to my viola da gamba story by recounting that she once constructed a dulcimer. Having finished it, though, she realized she hadn’t wanted to play it— just to make it. She shares a book recommendation: Anatole Broyard’s Kafka Was the Rage. Its atmosphere reminds her of her Swarthmore days. She’d appreciate hearing about books you have enjoyed— maybe someone could send her a Swarthmore book club reading list: vbede673@aol.com. Susan Cotts Watkins spends summers on family vacations in Delaware and researching in Africa for her just-published book, A Fraught Embrace: The Romance and Reality of AIDS Altruism in Africa (bit.ly/CottsWatkins). The rest of the time, she enjoys a peaceful life in her beloved California apartment overlooking the Pacific, swimming every day in the outdoor heated pool. But, she adds, “I sometimes feel as if I’m like a jalopy—bits and pieces don’t work (car window stuck, windshield wipers drop off). I’ve learned to be more orderly, to have rituals—even though I live in a small apartment, I have to have rituals—reading glasses go here, Kindle there, put ‘don’t forget’ notes on every surface, check that I have my house key before I go out the door. And no more driving—it’s all Uber.” Mary “Mecca” Keller Zervigon hasn’t written before partly because she left Swarthmore midway through our sophomore year, but also, she admits, because she felt intimidated by accounts sent in by our many accomplished classmates. Mary lives in New Orleans, where in addition to raising five children, she has had an active life in politics. “Not being qualified to do anything, I did a little bit of everything,” she says. Among the “everythings,” she worked on election campaigns. (“Most of the candidates I worked for lost. That’s how I knew they were the good guys.”) She had a role in the revision of the Louisiana state constitution, was a legislative lobbyist, and negotiated with the labor unions of the local theater. She then returned to school at Loyola and obtained a law degree. “Now I chair the FOLLOW US on Facebook at facebook.com/ SwarthmoreBulletin board of a charter school, the only kind of public school we have around here. It is an open-admission science and math high school—one of the very few in the country that is not selective. I also chair the academic affairs committee of the board of Xavier University of New Orleans, and the Board of Liquidation, which issues and services the bonded debt for the city. I’m a member of the board of a small nonprofit that does in-service training for principals and their staff members, and I’m on a couple of charitable foundations. I love giving money away!” Peter Filene writes: “Ten years into retirement, I feel fortunate and happy. After the shock of divorce, I’ve found a loving partnership with a woman (a political science professor) whom I had known casually (our dogs were best friends). Lucky me, my children and four grandchildren live here in Chapel Hill/ Carrboro, N.C. I belong to a local gallery that exhibits my photographs and provides an exciting art community. And I satisfy my love of teaching at Duke’s Lifelong Learning program for retired adults. Now if only my long-in-the-works, much-revised book on the history of fatherhood would be published.” Jude Cobb reports: “Larry and I happily live in New York City, close to ‘our’ lovely Central Park. I still enjoy my part-time psychotherapy practice, watercolor classes, and singing in an a cappella choir. A peer supervision group and an aging group keep me close to colleagues and friends. Larry is active in singing groups and volunteers in a soup kitchen. In addition to frequent visits to En- gland, we have loved trips with Overseas Adventure Travel to Turkey, Vietnam, and, soon, Morocco. But we are slowing down and considering future options. Staying put in our apartment with our longterm-care insurance in the wings is very appealing, but so is being in a more rural setting for the ‘come what may’ health issues. I would love to hear from others who have explored these options: judecobb@ aol.com.” Joan Bond Sax is adjusting to living alone after 54-plus years of marriage. “I am going through all the stuff in our house and trying to recycle it—my husband’s and mine. It is a slow process. I have been traveling to visit my son in Chapel Hill, N.C., and my daughter in Montana. I also got a young rescue dog who is forcing me to walk a lot.” Sue Willis Ruff reminds us that Walt Strong had been working on a book when he died. His brother saw it to completion. Finding Tony Doughty: Essays, Notes, and Anecdotes is available on Amazon. 1961 Patricia Myers Westine pat@westinefamily.com It’s a springlike March with flowers in bloom in northern Virginia as I write, but we have a threat of a snowstorm—the first this winter—predicted. My apologies to Maurice Eldridge; in the winter Class Notes, I not only reported the wrong year for his grandson at Morehouse College (he’s a sophomore) but also gave the wrong date for the completion of Chester School of the Arts’ new school building; it will be finished in time for the 2017 fall semester. Due to my early submission of the spring Class Notes, I missed including Neil Austrian’s update. Neil is “finally retired for good.” In 2010, after being retired for 10 years, Neil was asked by Office Depot’s board of directors to be interim chairman and CEO. Interim became permanent, and he stayed for more than three years. When the Federal Trade Commission approved Office Depot’s acquisition of Office Max in 2013, Neil again retired. Married 54 years, he and Nancy have four children and 11 grandchildren with whom they’ve spent the Christmas holidays in Colorado for the past 40 years. They just stopped skiing last year when the “grandkid challenge” became too challenging. Two grands graduate from college this year, two more enter college, and the youngest boy is an infant. The Austrians winter in Florida and summer in Old Greenwich, Conn. Neil golfs several times a week and has gotten back into photography, taking classes in Florida, Maine, and New York City. He and Nancy enjoy cooking, traveling, and spending quality time with family. June Rothman Scott, in Atlanta with husband John, retired from Emory University Medical School in 2012. She enjoys playing the flute (which she gave up at Swarthmore) and taking undergraduate courses at Emory in music history and art history. June edits the donor newsletter for the Atlanta Symphony and, with John, has traveled to Western Share your pics—on campus and off—on Instagram: @swarthmorebulletin, #swatbulletin Europe, to Canada, and throughout the U.S. For their 50th wedding anniversary, they rented a condo with Ken and Linda Habas Mantel ’60 in Newport, Ore., and explored the seashore, tidal pools (Linda’s expertise), lighthouses, art galleries, and food, which they really enjoyed. Randy Moore helped June and John plan their first trip to Hawaii in 2016, when they spent two weeks on three of the islands. Thanks to Randy’s help, they saw botanical gardens, volcanoes, and the tropical rainforest. June is on Swarthmore’s Board of Managers, but she was sorry to miss our 55th Reunion due to a trip to England. She hopes to see everyone at our 60th. There was an interesting article in The New York Times (bit.ly/AyeletW) about Ricki Feingold Waldman’s daughter Ayelet, whose book A Really Good Day describes the difference LSD microdosing made in her mood, marriage, and life. The College sent me a financial summary of the 1961 Reunion Fund for the Arts and Social Change; the market value is close to $270,000. Helen Howard Harmon died March 8 of complications from breast cancer. I’ll provide more details in my fall column. I am also sorry to report the death of Lawrence Shepley on Dec. 30 of congestive heart failure. After Swarthmore, Larry earned master’s and doctorate degrees in physics at Princeton, spent two years in a postdoc at Berkeley, and then taught at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interest was the theory of general relativity, and he taught all levels, retiring in 1995. He was a longtime member of the Gilbert and Sullivan Society of Austin, serving on the board and as president. He is survived by his sister and her family. His obituary ends with his “final sentiments, in his own words, ‘Farewell and good luck’”—a good way to end this column. 1962 Evelyn Edson 268 Springtree Lane Scottsville, VA 24590 eedson@pvcc.edu John Solodar has been “term-limited” out of local government, having been on the University City, Mo., planning and zoning commission for six years and the board of adjustment for 15. “Sometimes I ask myself how a research chemist ended up in these positions,” he says, “and I think the broad-based education Swarthmore offered must have helped.” After many years leading birding trips for the St. Louis Audubon Society, he has taken emeritus status, finding that his eyes are no longer able to distinguish field marks well and that his ears, even with hypedup hearing aids, seem to have no idea where bird calls are coming from. John is still active in the Green Center, an environmental and outdoor education and arts group. John kindly sent copies of reports from the Summer 2016 Interns, a program sponsored by our class. Christine Jung ’17 interned at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, working with fundraising software. As a studio arts and economics double major, she found the experience guided her toward what she wants to do academically as well as professionally. Rares Andrei Mosneanu ’18 worked with Psychology Professor Frank Durgin to isolate electrical scalp activity in the human brain when it processes visual information. “This summer has allowed me to build an experiment and improve its design,” he writes. As a prospective honors neuroscience major, he appreciated the opportunity to work closely with Professor Durgin and to discover the field of cognitive neuroscience. The third intern, Henry Ortmeyer ’18, is a painter and spent the summer in Ballycastle, Ireland. “Thank you for making this possible,” he writes. “I immersed myself in a truly beautiful place with people devoted to art, and I am still parsing what I saw and did. I expect I will be for a while.” Phyllis Foster Johnson Satter is taking a memoir-writing class and sent along “An Uncommon Language,” about her first meeting with her future husband, the late Keith Johnson, in Parrish Commons. Look for her beautiful piece in the fall Bulletin. Rebecca Brown Corwin, whose career focused on the teaching of elementary-school mathematics, died in October. Becky graduated with a fine arts degree and earned an Ed.D. from Harvard. She was an education professor at Lesley College and Bridgewater State, where she helped develop a unique master’s degree program. A cat-lover, she requested memorial donations be sent to the Angell Animal Medical Center. She is survived by a sister, Gretchen Brown. Alan Broughton came to SUMMER 2017 / Swarthmore College Bulletin 53 class notes Swarthmore from Juilliard, where he studied classical piano. He taught writing and literature at the University of Vermont for 35 years, retiring as emeritus professor in 2001. At Vermont he developed and directed the Writers’ Workshop Program. He was the author of four novels, two short-story collections, and nine poetry collections. Alan died in May 2013 at Vermont Respite House. He is survived by wife Laurel, three children, and five grandchildren. Our sympathies to these families. 1963 Diana Judd Stevens 429 Crosslands Drive Kennett Square, PA 19348 djsteven1@verizon.net In my annual spring comparison of ’63’s current address list with the previous year’s, I noted classmates who either moved or have a new address. New addresses: Chris Brown in Baltimore; Lynne Fleming Goss in Gaithersburg, Md.; Marcy Lansman in Chapel Hill, N.C.; Ted Nyquist in Bartlett, Ill.; and Bill Potts in Tucson, Ariz. Moves: Barry Mendelsohn from Gallup, N.M., to Fort Defiance, Ariz.; Elsa Resnick Prigozy from Averill Park, N.Y., to Slingerlands, N.Y.; and Anne Welsh from Kirkland, Wash., to Seattle. A year ago, when I compared addresses, I incorrectly reported that Bill Raich had moved from Philadelphia to D.C. Turns out there was a mix-up in the College’s records that took Bill, still a Philly resident, time to straighten out. As many of you know, 54 Swarthmore College Bulletin / Paul ’65 and I moved to Crosslands continuing-­ care retirement community, Kennett Square, Pa., in December. We are making new friends, enjoy seven miles of trails, are engaged in a wide range of activities, and have experienced many “it’s a small world” connections. At dinner one night, a new friend—seeing my name tag (first and last name only)—asked if I knew Diana Judd Stevens. I did a double-take and replied, “That’s me.” Pat Dilley O’Neil ’56 reads ’63’s Class Notes and recognized my name from the column. Keeping the resolution mentioned in the spring Class Notes, I called Barbara Allen Fuchsman and Scott Kane. Scott and Courtney retired to the eastern shore of Maryland, where Scott chairs the Talbot County Democratic Central Committee and is involved with solar power. He worked with Kevin Cornell (who signed up to teach another year of physics at Georgetown Day) to bring solar power to Kevin’s Maryland farm. Barbara is learning the recorder, enjoys her five grandchildren, and like many of us is learning the importance of exercising to maintain muscle and core strength. Barbara said a highlight of our 50th Reunion was connecting with fellow Unitarian Tom Owen-­Towle. Speaking of reunions, please put June 1–3, 2018, the dates of our FOLLOW US on Facebook at facebook.com/ SwarthmoreBulletin SUMMER 2017 55th, on your calendar. This year, Larry Phillips celebrated his 50th med school reunion. He still enjoys full-time work at Emory and the Atlanta VA, seeing patients, teaching, and researching. Earlier this year, Dave ’62 and Alice Handsaker Kidder helped create a Sanctuary Network in Harvard Square, Cambridge, Mass. Alice has also connected with Dorothy Earley Weitzman. Last winter, Jane Jonas Srivastava spent a month on the road, visiting Beth Welfling King in Maryland, traveling with Beth to visit Polly Glennan Watts in Florida, and snorkeling and English country dancing on St. Croix. Polly sings karaoke and goes to lots of concerts. Atala Perry Toy had four of her nature spirit prints accepted into an exhibit at the Norris Cultural Arts Center, St. Charles, Ill. Sucheng Chan writes that her main news is the degeneration of her physical condition at an unwelcome speed; she moves around with a wheelchair or electric scooter. Sucheng installed a very expensive warm-water (95-degree) therapy pool where she can do gentle aqua exercises. She is doing her best to keep her body functioning to sustain her brain, which is needed for the books she is still trying to write. As of June 30, 2016, the Class of 1963 Scholarship had a market value of $648,186.74 and an estimated distribution of $27,020.76. The current class scholar is Hanan Ahmed ’19, a psychology and Arabic major from Chicago. Hanan, who is passionate about social entrepreneurship, is a student academic mentor and a social-justice and Muslim-life coordinator of the Muslim Student Association. John Bernard and wife Esther attended the April 1 donor/scholar luncheon. John writes that the students were thoughtful, impressive young people who showed a deep interest in using their Swarthmore education to improve the world. Cay Hall Roberts has a new career writing recycling tips for her community newsletter. Her “nom de plume” is Verdant Girl. Austine Read Wood Comarow is creating designs for mugs and stickers to raise money for the ACLU. A last-minute change in travel plans for Austine and David meant David flew them to Bryce Canyon National Park, which they toured on their fold-up bikes. While I was writing this column, a game of phone tag with Susannah Stone Eldridge ended with her saying she was in California and would call later with news for the fall column. Meanwhile, I will continue calling classmates. Emails with news are always welcome. 1964 Diana Bailey Harris harris.diana@gmail.com swarthmore64.com Thanks to everyone for maintaining the news flow, including sad items. Louise Jung Elbaum reports: “My husband, Nathan, passed away Jan. 18. He was a true intellectual with a great appreciation of other people. Gloria Steinem said, ‘Dying seems less sad than having lived too little.’ Nathan lived a lot and well.” Philip Grier continues to “live a lot”: “a couple of trips to Russia to visit Ella’s family”; “realizing that there’s very little to be gained from acting our age, we bought new sets of downhill-ski equipment and managed a couple of ski trips each of the last two winters”; and “I was abruptly called out of retirement last spring to take over—midstream—a course in the classics of political theory. I felt slight trepidation (the students, after all, had gotten seven years younger and had no idea who I was). The instant the bell rang, I found myself completely at home and it all went quite well. “Lately, I’m spending time with newly formed local organizations attempting to do something about the political catastrophe.” Peter Freedman writes: “I’ve signed more online petitions and attended more demonstrations in the last few months than in my whole life, and that’s a lot! I’ve reconnected with Bruce Leimsidor ’63, an immigration specialist whose posts are very informative.” Peter is also thinking of cutting back on his teaching of the strategy game Go and re-engaging in politics. Similarly, Michael Meeropol reports: “Annie and I have done more political activity since the election than we did in the previous year. I continue my monthly radio commentaries over WAMC-FM in Albany, N.Y., focusing almost all my attention on resisting the agenda of the fascist Trump presidency. “We’re appalled at the willingness of fellow citizens to swallow the lies of Trump—and of others (we hope are a minority) who agree with his racism, xenophobia, sexism, and Share your pics—on campus and off—on Instagram: @swarthmorebulletin, #swatbulletin religious bigotry. “The sign we made for a (smallish) demonstration at the office of one of our senators comes from a Springsteen song: ‘No Retreat! No Surrender!’ “It’s essential we keep at it all four years. No getting tired—burning out is not an option. Too much is at stake. (I write the day after the gutting of the healthcare law was rolled out.)” Lydia Razran Stone “once had a Russian teacher who’d been a translator of the Nuremberg trials. She told us that it took years for her to shake the sensation of something horrible right around the next corner. I’m feeling somewhat the same. “My husband and I have worked with our mainly Latino immigrant community for decades, running a free drop-in, no-questionsasked English program, with beginners taught in Spanish. Attendance has dropped off sharply because immigrants around here are afraid—there was a raid blocks away from where we hold classes. So far, my only additional help is a day at a legal-aid center helping Spanish speakers fill out powers of attorney for child custody in case the sole or both parents are deported or detained. I’m looking for more things like this to do. Any suggestions?” Bernie Beitman’s new radio show is Connecting with Coincidence (bit.ly/ CCwithBB). He interviews people involved in the study and experience of coincidences. Peter Linebaugh writes: “Everything seems to be going along swimmingly, despite the maelstrom brought by the new regime. My book, The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day, has been published.” Robin Smith Chapman offers—“for your entertainment, at least—my new poetry book, Six True Things.” She also had a solo show of her acrylic paintings at the Steenbock Gallery of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. Rosamund Stone Zander also has a new book, Pathways to Possibility, coming out in paperback in June. She and partner Hansjorg travel to keep an eye on their projects, including to Africa in June to follow the relocation of elephants into parks that better accommodate them. “I am supporting an orphanage and schools in Tanzania, as well as working with Jane Goodall to educate communities on sustainable practices that support a chimpanzee population,” she writes. This spring, she joined the board of Al Gore’s Climate Reality organization. 1965 Kiki Skagen Munshi kiki@skagenranch.com smore65.com As I begin this column, Kay and Warren “Tuck” Forsythe are pulling onto the road after a good visit. They had come to see the wildflowers in Borrego Springs, Calif., a few miles straight down the mountain and over a desert pass from us. Botanists by education, Tuck and Kay have been wildflower fans for many years and make me flush with embarrassment at all I don’t know. Grant Miller writes: “I will have just returned from two weeks in Beijing helping my oldest son IN MEMORIAM 1937 Margaret Coale McBane Nov. 4, 2011 1938 Elizabeth Watson Calfee March 2, 2017 Eugene Lang April 8, 2017 1941 Jean Merritt Hubbard April 26, 2017 1942 Elizabeth Bragdon Easton June 5, 2013 1943 Alumni death notices received by the College from Feb. 12 to May 20, 2017. View expanded memorials at bulletin.swarthmore.edu. 1953 Richard Heineman Feb. 21, 2017 Dorothy Dodson Haag April 7, 2017 Warren Higgins March 24, 2017 1955 Helen Blankenagel Miller April 30, 2017 Marjory Clough Schwertner Feb. 3, 2017 1949 Charles Bush March 24, 2017 John Parkes Jan. 15, 2017 1956 John Chapman March 16, 2017 Patricia Hardy Jacques April 24, 2017 Joseph D’Annunzio Jr. March 21, 2017 Herbert Fraser May 2, 2017 Susan Reinoehl Miller March 24, 2017 1944 Joann Broadhurst Sparks April 1, 2017 Jean Forster Hanchett Oct. 18, 2016 1950 Mary Teale Battin Feb. 27, 2017 Frank Tarbox Unknown Elinor Grobert Unknown 1946 Paul Guinn Jr. April 22, 2017 Anne Newton Burnett April 22, 2017 Mary Louise Milam Creed Dec. 25, 2015 Marie Cooley Haabestad April 8, 2017 Charles Shoemaker Feb. 24, 2017 1947 Vaughan Chambers Jr. March 6, 2017 1948 John Adamson Feb. 19, 2017 Edward Mahler Feb. 22, 2017 Frederick Weymuller Jan. 30, 2017 1952 William Brosius Jr. Aug. 31, 2014 Esther Fiske Doherty Jan. 28, 2017 Richard Heath Jan. 7. 2017 Lee Hallberg April 1, 2017 John Hughlett Jr. May 16, 2017 William Foust Aug. 30, 2013 Sue Davison Cooley Feb. 18, 2017 Anne Kesten Bernstein Nov. 15, 2016 Suzanne Gilbert Sieverts Unknown 1961 Helen Howard Harmon March 8, 2017 1969 Glenda Rauscher March 18, 2017 1970 Marvin Berg July 17, 2016 1972 Howard Richards Oct. 10, 2014 1974 Jean Millican Jan. 16, 2017 1979 Timothy Cohn Feb. 20, 2017 1982 David Shaiken March 16, 2017 2019 Samuel Jenkins March 19, 2017 Nancy Cliffe Vernon March 29, 2017 SUMMER 2017 / Swarthmore College Bulletin 55 class notes adopt his sixth kid from China. They are taking their five current adoptees over and returning with the six kids—three boys, three girls. They need help entertaining the kids while they deal with the legalities. Shortly after retiring in May, I will spend two weeks in Yellowstone/ Grand Teton with my husband, followed by two weeks in New Zealand. After that I start working with homeless teenagers to get them off the streets. We just hosted five participants for the Native American March on Washington. I really look forward to retiring.” Peter Meyer writes: “I was recruited to run for our New Hope Borough council; it took 10 signatures to get on the ballot. Twenty-four hours later, I found out that I am one of four Democrats who filed for four open seats with no Republican opposition! So my next (unpaid) career starts in January 2018.” (I, Kiki, was appointed to the Julian Community Planning Group under similar circumstances.) Dave Darby writes that wife Mary Lee “is painting more, with work in the Yellowstone and Red Lodge, Mont., art museum consignment shops. I remain less accomplished, contemplate a lot, putter, golf some, worry about the state of the world and the nation.” After selling their Seattle condo, the Darbys will divide their time between Fiji and Montana—if Dave isn’t pulling our legs. Dave? Fiji? Kate Donnelly Hickey has become a snowbird closer to home, spending a month in a small RV on the Chassahowitzka River in Florida, kayaking with manatees. Now the news I really don’t like to get or share: 56 Swarthmore College Bulletin / Keith MacAdam died after a brief, acute illness Nov. 6. A masterful teacher, problem-solver, avid hiker, photographer, and enthusiastic singer, he is survived by wife Phyllis and children Daniel and Alison. Keith was born in Rochester, N.Y., and received a physics doctorate from Harvard. In 1977, he joined the University of Kentucky. He was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 1987 and served as a longtime associate editor of Physical Review A. After retiring, Keith still taught a physics class he developed for non-physics majors called How Things Work. He was proud of his efforts to help create an astronomical observatory for UK students and the general public—the MacAdam Student Observatory opened in 2008. As a postdoctoral fellow in Stirling, Scotland, Keith was drawn to the rugged mountains of the country’s northwest coast. He returned to hike and take photos there, most recently in June 2016. Music played a central role in Keith’s life—growing up, he studied piano, and, as an adult, he sang with the Appalachian Association of Sacred Harp Singers and in the Crestwood Christian Church choir. Mark Frankena of Alexandria, Va., died Jan. 11. He was born in Ann Arbor, Mich., and earned a B.A. with highest honors from Swarthmore and an economics Ph.D. from MIT. Mark had been the deputy director for antitrust in the Bureau of Economics of the Federal Trade Commission, but before joining the FTC, he was a tenured associate professor of economics at the University of Western Ontario. He co-authored a book and SUMMER 2017 wrote several articles on antitrust issues. Mark was an avid collector of antique office equipment and was curator of the Early Office Museum. He leaves his wife of 30 years, Kim, and children Morgan and Gregory. A sad postscript: Tuck Forsythe died of a heart attack June 1, shortly before publication. I left the column as is in tribute to him but will follow up in the fall. Condolences to Kay and his children. 1966 Jill Robinson Grubb jillgrubb44@gmail.com swarthmore66.com Today, Gorsuch hearings continue when Trump-­ administration ties to Russian hackers should be investigated. I escape to a beautiful book written and illustrated by Pam Corbett Hoffer for and about her granddaughter. Maggie, a sensitive 7-year-old, takes time to include an outsider at her party. Her MO—pay attention and be kind— seems a good mantra for our country and us. With help on the financial side, Stephen Bennett has offered to email a copy of his book The Organic Dividend Portfolio to interested classmates. If you prefer hardcover, it’s available on Amazon. For those struggling to understand the Trump phenomenon, Steve recommends Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance. Steve’s daughter Tina is Vance’s literary agent. For me, this book reaffirmed the importance of grandmothers (and others) who provide a safe, quiet place and wise advice to children to help them escape an almost hopeless situation. Carl Abbott writes that he and Tom Webb, Frank Cochran, Daniel Pope, and Ellie Arguimbau are working with Swarthmore College Libraries to document the civil-rights activism of students in the early 1960s. Their goal is to compile existing information, conduct oral histories, and collect documents. Your participation is welcome. Visit swatstories.swarthmore. edu/civil-rights-activism. Cathy Wilkerson went to Vietnam with Veterans for Peace working with the Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange/ Dioxin. Children and grandchildren of victims of the chemical warfare are now suffering effects. Veterans for Peace also supports a project to train Vietnamese farmers and children to report ordnance in the demilitarized zone. Thanks to their efforts, fatalities have been reduced from 100 annually, to just one last year. Also reaching out are Rod ’67 and Dorothy Woods Chronister. Hosting a young Afghan student who was abandoned by her sponsor soon after she arrived in the U.S., Dorothy and Rod have shepherded her through ESL classes. She’s now at a community college, trying to get into a nursing program and seeking asylum. They, too, are mitigating against the current madness. Rasaba Sudarkasa-Kyasa, formerly Delmar Scutter, is considering giving a legacy to the College, inspired by James Michener ’29. On the other hand, Tony Loeb—along with Alex Capron, Terry Chapin, and Tom Webb—urges us to sign a petition asking the College to divest holdings in the fossil-fuel industry (bit.ly/66divest). Tony tells me he was a ham-radio operator in Russia in 1983. He joined an expedition to the Soviet Arctic in 1989, married a woman from Russia, and maintains contact with friends there. There’s more to his story. Ask him. Some of you might have seen Wendy Prindle Berlind in her pink pussy hat at the Women’s March on Washington. Congrats to Ann Mosely Lesch for receiving the Service Award from the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) in November. She served on MESA’s board of directors, as its president, and as editor of its book-review journal. Ann also founded MESA’s Committee on Academic Freedom in the Middle East and North Africa. Noble and necessary work. Responding to the Class Notes editor’s request for interesting houses, Barbara Alden-Bosc reported living in a cave in France years ago. Nancy Cooley lived in a string of solar-heated homes with views of mountains, meadows, and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Sending in a few “bests,” Bill Belanger went on an October cruise up the Atlantic coast with his brother and their wives. A strong young woman peddled them around Newport, R.I. Meg Sprague Oravetz’s best trips were four days with her daughter in California and 10 days in Paris with a good friend. Her best musical event was Cold Mountain, an opera by Jennifer Higdon. From Maui, Judy Graybeal Eagle’s upside includes returning to employment consulting, swimming, and dog-walk- ing instead of playing tennis. The downside? Bugs grow as fast as plants, overt anti-haole (or anti-Caucasian-newcomer) racism, and missing us. Best memories shared by Pat Lykens Hankins: going to our warm and wonderful 50th Reunion; climbing to the Tiger’s Nest in Bhutan in the pouring rain; shooing swimming pigs away from their dinghy in the Exumas, Bahamas; and seeing from the top of a pyramid the amazing ruins of Tikal peaking (intended spelling) out of the jungle in Guatemala. Nancy Axelrod, following a career in molecular biology and then working with law firms writing and prosecuting biotechnology patents, has returned to the violin, playing chamber music. Justice Sonia Sotomayor asks herself if she has learned anything and done something kind each day. If not, she reads or sends a letter. What have we learned, and how have we been kind? 1967 Donald Marritz dmarritz@gmail.com swarthmore67.com We will have had our 50th Reunion by the time you read this, so I’m not sure what tense to use in these notes. I do know that those who attended experienced some sort of time travel. To go back even further—to a life in being even before our own—you doubtless have heard about the April death of Jane Lang’s father, Eugene Lang ’38 (pg. 13), monumental figure not only in the College’s histo- ry but in American society overall. With gratitude and grace, he personified what philanthropy ought to look like. His death wrought a “seismic change” for Jane, who has our deepest communal sympathy. On a happier note, Jane enjoyed a visit from Eric Brown, with whom she biked and reminisced about taking the bus from Swarthmore to NYC together. “Ah, the fumes of Port Authority!” Eric did an eight-day guided bicycle tour last fall on the Peloponnese with Cycle­ Greece, followed by two days in Athens. This was his seventh bicycle trip in Europe, and he’s planning the next one, with his two adult daughters. Katharine Rubio Murdock Briggs wasn’t sure that she had news or that she would make it to the reunion. We’ll see if she was successful in getting there by train from Vermont— this being the country of the car. I really hope it happened, Katie, although I’m not sure I will know, given that, as you say, we “are all old and wrinkled, and some of us have cognitive problems.” Tom Harriman and Sheridan Phillips intended to bring a big blender and pour margaritas in our class party suite. Tom plans to finally meet Vietnam War poet and Marine veteran Bill Ehrhart ’73, with whom he has been in “extensive raucous email correspondence for years.” Tom consulted Army Field Manual 135: Urban Warfare and created an alum profile. There was discussion about Vietnam on our class website and surely will have been more at the reunion. My crystal ball is on the fritz, so I can’t report on what happened at the reunion. I will do a follow-up Share your pics—on campus and off—on Instagram: @swarthmorebulletin, #swatbulletin for the next Class Notes, which will now appear in every Bulletin issue. Just one of the many perks of having graduated 50 years ago. Thanks to Belle Vreeland Hoverman for having organized everything, and to Alexander Nehamas, Rob Lewine, Jane Lang, Heidi Hartmann, Kaete Brittin Honig Shaw, Robin Hannay Nelson, Spencer Putnam, Charles Bailey, Barbara Stubbs Cochran, and Menno van Wyk for their talks, music and art. Let’s end on an ever-­ brighter note: Alice Dong ’20 (’20?!) is the recipient of the Class of ’67 Scholarship. Alice intends to be a statistics/economics major. She is a pianist and a chess player—a pursuit in which she excels. We’re glad that we’re able to help you, Alice. 1969 adise Valley, Ariz. Glenda was valedictorian of her Missouri high school and after Swarthmore earned master’s degrees from Harvard and the University of New Mexico. She took such pride in compiling 1969’s news, and her fondness for Swarthmore and devotion to her classmates was apparent in each of her columns. The Bulletin staff joins me in offering condolences to her family, including sons Emerson and Jefferson. What better way to honor Glenda than to fill her class secretary role? Please contact me at eslocum1@ swarthmore.edu. 1971 Bob Abrahams bobabrahams@yahoo.com swarthmore71.org As the Bulletin’s Class Notes editor, I, Elizabeth Slocum, was saddened by the loss of Glenda Rauscher, a retired English teacher and faithful class secretary who compiled Class Notes for 16 years. She died March 18 in Par- Folks have been busy since our 45th Reunion! Lynn West Salvo set a Guinness World Record for oldest woman to cycle across the U.S. (bit.ly/ LynnWestSalvo). Lynn did a mini-documentary last year in which she looks at the challenges and resolution in setting the record. David Inouye has kept busy since retiring from teaching by giving talks in Turkey, Rome, and Bangkok (where he met with the princess); participating in a Food and Agriculture Organization/Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change meeting in Rome; and doing summer research in Colorado. He and wife Bonnie Gregory Inouye ’69 took their eldest granddaughter along to introduce her to Paris and Rome. Their Colorado home is in the largest concentration of organic farms in the state; they recommend visiting to try the peaches, nectarines, and other fruits. Linda Barrett Osborne was a finalist for the Young Adult Library Services Association Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for This Land Is Our Land (bit.ly/SCWriter). Monica Carsky-Kennedy visited with four classmates, “certainly some sort of record for me.” In December, Susan Taylor Jackson was in from Israel to visit the Brooklyn, N.Y., office of the organization she helps run that aids Holocaust survivors using German reparations money. She and Monica “met up at Rockefeller Center for Tubachristmas, during which Bill ’70 and about 400 others play carols using only tubas, sousa- SPOTLIGHT ON … CHERYL WARFIELD MITCHELL ’71 Cheryl Warfield Mitchell ’71 is the recipient of the 2017 Kimberly Krans Women Who Change the World Award, presented by WomenSafe for work that betters the lives of women and children. “Sister Janice Ryan, one of my mentors, said, ‘No matter what you are trying to accomplish, you need a place to stand,’” Mitchell says. “Swarthmore helps you develop great values and skills that can be your solid ground.” + CONTINUED: bulletin.swarthmore.edu SUMMER 2017 / Swarthmore College Bulletin 57 class notes phones, and baritones.” Next was lunch and the Jerusalem exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with Tina Tolins and husband Grady. A month later, Monica and Bill saw Ralph Tryon and wife Maida, who were up for the Michael J. Fox Parkinson’s benefit. And Monica sees Phee Brown Rosnick at professional meetings. “As time passes, Bill and I find more and more pleasure in our Swarthmore contacts—even those we did not know well during our years there—as having Swarthmore in common seems an increasingly valuable shared experience.” Don Mizell has been confirmed as a member of the Florida State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which has played a vital role in protecting the civil rights of Americans since its creation in 1957. His appointment—along with that of 13 others—was approved by commissioners in D.C. in March. As for me, Bob, I keep busy as a community emergency response team volunteer—California is “earthquake country”— and stay involved in the community. And I do lots of things that are just fun, including going to comedy (not just stand-up) and music shows. 1973 Martha Shirk swarthmorecollege73@ gmail.com swarthmorecollege73.com It’s not too early to start planning to attend our 45th (gulp) Reunion, June 58 Swarthmore College Bulletin / 1–3, 2018. Congratulations to Ronda Muir ’74 on the publication of The Emotional Intelligence Edge for 21st-Century Lawyers. “The book’s been awhile coming, but changes in law practice are making emotional intelligence critical, although not always an easy concept for lawyers to get their heads around,” she says. Ronda writes regularly at lawpeopleblog. com on behavioral science in the legal workplace. Congrats also to JoAnn Jones, who received a master’s of divinity in May from the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church, where a classmate was Matt Jacobson ’97. Stay tuned for her next step. Since 1992, Herb Bedolfe has been the executive director at the Marisla Foundation, which focuses on international biodiversity conservation efforts and environmental health and justice issues. He and wife Tamar live in Dana Point, Calif., and have two children: ­Sarah ’11 and Mathias, a 2015 Dickinson graduate. “I still surf, and I am a member of the board of the Surf Industry Manufacturers Association Environmental Fund,” he writes. Ann Lindsay and husband Alan Glaseroff ’74 have retired from practicing family medicine and moved back to Humboldt County, in far north California. For the last five years, they were clinical professors of medicine and co-founded and co-directed Stanford Coordinated Care, a clinic for members of the Stanford University health plan with complex chronic health conditions. They plan to still teach and SUMMER 2017 spread the model of care they developed (tinyurl. com/lttaacw). Joan Rubinstein has also retired from practicing family medicine, with husband Alex Sherriffs, in Fowler, Calif., near Fresno. “After 33 years of trying to be in at least two places at once, I am savoring doing one thing at a time, including hobbies, grandparenting, and being fully present when I’m with my husband,” she writes. Terrence Hicks is “happily retired, splitting time among consulting (startup company fundraising), spending time with the grandkids, and traveling.” He spent most of his career in banking and venture-capital groups engaged with startups (mostly tech companies) and retired as VP for investment at Ben Franklin Technology Partners. He and wife Gail live in Philadelphia. Galip Ulsoy retired last July from the University of Michigan, where he taught mechanical engineering for 36 years. “So far, retirement has been great with lots of travel (Alberta, Italy, Croatia, Hawaii) and fun (golf, canoeing, hiking, reading, shows) as well as continued professional activities (research, lectures, consulting, service).” And here’s a nice, newsy update from Hugh Roberts: “After 45 years of nonstop employment, retirement has meant playing tennis till my knees cried ‘uncle’; bingeing on internet news/Facebook/ FOLLOW US on Facebook at facebook.com/ SwarthmoreBulletin Netflix; getting new KEF LS50 wireless speakers and streaming Spotify ad nauseum; and shopping online for every kitchen convenience known to mankind (I’m the cook now). And, yes, I dragged out my stamp collection.” He’s gotten involved in fighting gerrymandering in Pennsylvania. “I was instantly hooked, and now, for the first time in my adult life, I’m a busy volunteer—and loving it.” Son Jack, 25, works for ESPN’s TheTournament.com; son David, 23, is developing a learning platform for Elsevier; and daughter Alice, 20, studied abroad at the University of Santiago in Chile and will return to Middlebury for her senior year. Hugh’s wife, Sarah, a registered nurse, started a job in quality assurance at Main Line Health. Condolences to the family of Jean Millican ’74, who entered Swarthmore with our class. Jean died unexpectedly from a heart attack Jan. 16 in Seattle. She was a board-­ certified neurologist who was affiliated with the Veterans Affairs Puget Sound Health Care System and was a consultant for the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium. Jean is survived by husband Frank; daughters Maddie and Laura; and sisters Carol and Adrienne. Hugh Cort died in August in Tuscaloosa, Ala., where he had practiced psychiatry at Brookwood Medical Center and the Tuscaloosa VA Medical Center. Early in 2014, he underwent a double lung transplant. Wife Debbie preceded him in death; Hugh is survived by sister Meredith and brother Charles. Hugh ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 on an anti-abortion, anti-terrorism platform that advocated immediate airstrikes against nuclear sites in Iran. We’ve made it easier for you to submit news. Email me; update your profile on swarthmorecollege73.com; or post on facebook.com/ SwarthmoreClassOf1973. 1975 Sam Agger sam.agger@gmail.com Lauren Belfer’s novel And After the Fire received a 2016 National Jewish Book Award. Congrats! Richard Barasch ’76 finished 12 years on the College’s Board of Managers. “The school is in great shape, and Valerie Smith is, and will be, a great president. Best part was reconnecting with Dave McElhinny, who joined the Board.” Bill Huneke left the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Surface Transportation Board, where he was chief economist. “I am spending my birthday with a spa day in the Napa Valley.” Congratulations and well done, Bill. Jean Macfarlane-­ Malarkey retired as Market Strategies International’s managing director/ executive VP in January. Certified as an executive/ transition coach in 2015, she’s building a practice and consulting. “I am loving having time to catch up on long-postponed projects and still happily living in Portland, Ore.” Suzanne Durrell went to Super Bowl LI in Houston and saw her Patriots “stage a historic comeback and Tom Brady (aka the GOAT) win his fifth ring. One less item on my Share your pics—on campus and off—on Instagram: @swarthmorebulletin, #swatbulletin bucket list, and memories to last a lifetime.” Jeffrey Kahn had an eventful few years. “Our two daughters are married, and our wonderful first grandchild was born. Orli will no doubt follow in the small-college family tradition.” Jeffrey was promoted to full psychiatry professor at Cornell Med, and after penning a run of psychosis papers, his two new ones are on atypical depression. “We’ve also had delightful get-togethers with Theresa Sherrod and John Stively ’76.” John Deshong enjoys heading a Bechtel Group global tax team, spending time on legislation matters in Sacramento and D.C. Wife Fran is chair of the Democratic Party of Orange County, Calif. His son is a special assistant U.S. attorney in San Diego, and his daughter is getting a molecular biology Ph.D. at UC–Davis. “No thoughts of retirement—as reformed Pennsylvanians, we are very happy living in the Republic of California.” David Gold’s middle son, Jonathan, joined his law firm, so he is now practicing with two sons—“fine line between boss and Dad.” David also has two grandchildren in southern Florida, “which makes us very happy. Life is good!” Gary Albright and wife Stephanie Sant’Ambrogio, a violinist, celebrated the 20th anniversary season of their Cactus Pear Music Festival in San Antonio last summer. They look forward to the downbeat on their third decade of worldclass chamber music. Anita Cava’s daughter Emily earned a master’s in coastal-zone management at the University of Miami, found a job in Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands, and completed the Saipan Iron Man. Daughter Laura finished three years at Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and is exploring opportunities while husband Jakub finishes a physics postdoc at Harvard. “I have long loved Asheville, N.C., and after spending time exploring it with Alex Henderson and his wife, Molly, I decided to buy a home there,” Anita writes. “Visitors are welcome.” Anita reunited with Holly Corn and Terry Fromson last August and they “greeted each other wearing almost exactly the same outfits. Roommates rock!” Anita, who teaches at UM, sold her home of 30 years in Coral Gables, Fla., and downsized to an apartment there. Peter Wiggins was busy in Europe as senior vice president of the vocal division of IMG Artists. He is now retired and lives in Chicago, although he kept his Paris apartment. “It was a great experience, and I had the pleasure to represent the musical directors of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden and the Paris Opera as well as artists like Renée Fleming. I would be happy to hear from nearby alumni!” George Hui writes that Hong Kong received two Swat presidents in a short period: Al and Peggi Bloom visited in mid-October en route to Shanghai, where NYU (Al’s current employer) was opening a campus. Valerie Smith was in town in mid-November to receive an honorary degree. “At year end, word came that Dan Bennett, who taught philosophy at Swarthmore, died at age 86. I had kept in touch with him through the years.” George’s wife, Lianne, will retire in the fall, so they expect to travel more. “But with my father and mother-in-law under our charge, that travel will be constrained.” Finally, Steve Stutman is in the Boston suburbs, where his son, 16, and daughter, 11, enjoy building things, writing code, swimming, and biking. “They spent a couple of days helping a group of 60 students from Beijing build remotely operated vehicles at MIT.” Steve’s wife is considering importing products from the Netherlands, while Steve works on connected-health gadgets and a home health/ clinic hybrid model. 1977 Terri-Jean Pyer tpyer@hartnell.edu LinkedIn named Bill Boulding one of 2016’s Top 10 Voices in Education, the “must-know” writers who thoughtfully weighed in on important issues. Bill’s subject matter included leadership trends and how business schools can adapt to changing times. He was proudest of his article on embracing discomfort (bit.ly/Boulding). Charles Bennett, endowed chair of the South Carolina SmartState Center for Medication Safety and Efficacy, is on the editorial board for Drugs in Context Health Economics & Outcomes Research, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal. He continues his research on preventing adverse drug events and improving drug safety and his work running the Southern Network on Adverse Reactions (SONAR), hailed as one of the nation’s most successful pharmaceutical watchdogs. Dave Schroeder is making the most of retirement. He published his first novel, Xenotech Rising: A Novel of the Galactic Free Trade Association, in 2015 and has added three titles and a novelette to the series. All are available on Amazon. 1979 Laurie Stearns Trescott sundncr88@comcast.net Brady Kiesling, who spent two decades at the State Department and signed dissent cables during his time there, talked with NPR in February about the department’s criticism of President Trump’s executive orders. Brady explained how the government works to keep American borders and residents safe from terrorism, noting that while our systems are not perfect, those involved are highly trained professionals with many years of solid experience who shouldn’t be discounted because they worked for former administrations. Separately, Brady’s ToposText classics/­ archaeology app/website was nominated for a 2016 Digital Humanities Award for Best Use DH Public Engagement. Kudos! Also weighing in on world affairs, Joshua Landis discussed the Syrian cease-fire talks between Russia and Turkey on PBS Newshour just before Trump took office. He voiced skepticism that it would last, and much has transpired since then. Hopefully, Josh will continue to help us understand the very complicated situation in Syria. Allen Webb, an English professor at Western Michigan University, coled “Addressing Threats to Justice, the Climate, and Civil Rights: A Day of Learning and Action” with history professor Lewis Pyenson ’69 in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day in January. Life is uncertain. And it’s with great sadness that I report we have lost another classmate. Timothy Cohn, a U.S. Geological Survey statistical hydrologist and expert on flood risks, water quality, and hydrologic trends, died at home in Reston, Va., Feb. 20, a few days short of his 60th birthday. Tim served on community boards and was an avid runner, participating in short races, marathons, and ultramarathons. He battled cancer for three years and, as a scientist, was fascinated by advances in cancer treatment; he participated in clinical trials with the hopes that the research would advance science to benefit others. Our collective condolences to Tim’s family, including wife Sarah Humphrey, children Alexander and Hannah, and mother Barbara Norfleet ’47. Please email me or send a note to the alumni office with any news you have to share. Wishing you all a peaceful summer. 1981 Karen Oliver karen.oliver.01@gmail.com Lalitha Vaidyanathan leads off: “Life has been crazy busy between work and my 5(!)-year-old, Pia, who is delightfully naughty SUMMER 2017 / Swarthmore College Bulletin 59 class notes and already prepping for teenage years by going to bed late and sleeping in the next morning. In between, she is busy doing anything and everything that is fun. Amid all this, I have been remiss in my class secretary role, and Karen has been flying solo in authoring our notes. I have loved being your class secretary since we graduated, but my little Pia has changed the order of things in life. If you would like to help Karen, please let her know! Sending loads of love to all.” Christopher Udry is joining Northwestern University as an economics professor. “A key element motivating me is their commitment to scholarship in development economics, building on an already strong base,” says Chris. “I anticipate expanding the research activities my colleagues, students, and I can undertake around the world, but with a special emphasis on Ghana. On the personal side, the move to Chicago puts me and my wife, Barbara O’Brien, in closer proximity to extended family in the Midwest.” Susan Morrison’s novel Grendel’s Mother: The Saga of the Wyrd-Wife won the 2016 Words on Wings Book Award for young-adult fiction, a Literary Classics Top Honors Award. Her book The Literature of Waste: Material Ecopoetics and Ethical Matter was published in 2015, and she hints that yet another book will be coming soon. From Douglas Miron Nydick: “I continue to teach seventh-grade language arts and social studies in ‘Down East’ coastal N.C. I don’t practice law anymore, but I am the teen court judge for the county. I also play Blackbeard’s 60 Swarthmore College Bulletin / first mate, Israel Hands, for regular tours, and I do nature tours of the feral horse herd on the Outer Banks. I keep up my commercial/recreational fishing license and collect clams, oysters, mussels, crabs, whelks, and finfish whenever I can. I have become a reasonably adept Zumba participant in the last few years, shaking my groove thang several times a week. This is not the status update I would have predicted 36 years ago, but I’m OK with that. My children, with Julia Knerr, are doing well. Our two boys are makin’ it in Hollywood, and our daughter is a junior at Vassar.” From Doylestown, Pa., Bill Guerin reports that he and wife Kim Carter “are watching in wonder as our three boys grow into young men—Brian in his last year at Sarah Lawrence College; Kindrick back in high school as a junior after a year of traveling and homeschooling to represent the U.S. skeleton team at the 2016 Winter Youth Olympics in Norway (wonderful family trip); and Cooper in eighth grade playing football, which has given me an opportunity to coach. Last year, we discovered a love of RV-ing and purchased a 30-foot travel trailer, which has taken us to a number of state and national parks in the mid-Atlantic, with plans for an extended trip out west next summer. I moved into management consulting 10 years ago and found it rewarding on many levels—and so three years ago I founded Catalytics Performance Consulting. I’m thoroughly enjoying owning and growing a business and doing meaningful, gratifying work with a diverse group of clients. I’ve taken up long-distance running and SUMMER 2017 SPOTLIGHT ON … GREG DAVIDSON ’83 & TAMAH KUSHNER ’83 Greg Davidson ’83 and Tamah Kushner ’83 enjoy their empty nest and look forward to the next life phase now that their three children (including Arik Davidson ’11) have graduated from college. “Find work you value and value the work you have,” says Tamah, an executive director of a synagogue. “Define ‘balance’ whatever way works for you.” “The most important actions I have taken for a meaningful life have been to prioritize my relationship with Tamah and our children,” adds Greg, a director at an aerospace company. “Take conscious steps to try to love what you do, and if you cannot, then try to effect change.” + will be in the 2017 Boston Marathon.” Are we jealous? Yes! In March, Pat Goldband retired from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania after 32.5 years. Thirty-one of those were as an attorney with the governor’s Office of Administration. “So far, my plans include traveling in my new little RV and gardening. I’m sure other projects will find me.” Susan Cole-Domanico writes: “I live with my husband, Jerry, in North Granby, Conn. Since finishing my Ed.D. at UConn, I’ve worked as director of adult education and education specialist at EdAdvance, a regional education service center in Litchfield, Conn. This follows a decade as a curriculum director and assistant superintendent in the Granby, Torrington, and Woodbury school districts. This year my children, Robyn and twins Alex and Rachel, are all in college (Salisbury University in Maryland, UMass–Amherst, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute). Now that we are empty nesters (sort of, they keep coming back!), CONTINUED: bulletin.swarthmore.edu I hope to catch up with classmates.” 1983 John Bowe john@bowe.us Patty Pesavento and her husband “bought the farm. Really, truly bought a farm. We are learning how to handle land, grow our own food, and tread lightly on this Earth.” Patty still loves teaching at the UC–Davis vet school. Her daughter just finished her freshman year at St. Olaf College. Bill Green leads MIT’s Mobility of the Future project, trying to understand how personal transportation will work in 2050. He was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an award presented by former physics professor Rush Holt. Elizabeth McCrary Asselin is doing the college-application dance with her older son. (“What a horrible process it is.”) At Shell she works on long-term strategy—“what might a non-hydrocarbon-­ dominated energy system look like, and what technical and regulatory changes are needed to make that happen?” After 25 years as a rock critic and arts/entertainment editor at the Newark Star-Ledger, Jay Lustig took a buyout and now freelances and runs NJArts.net. Lisa Hostein is now executive editor of Hadassah Magazine, “a new challenge that I love even though I’m back to commuting from Philly to New York.” Her elder son is an engineering student at Lehigh and her younger one is in high school. Gordon Lafer, a University of Oregon professor, has a new book, The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America One State at a Time. It builds on earlier work on state legislatures’ attacks on unions, minimum wage, and public services since 2011. Betsey Buckheit is working on a certificate at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, making books, building boxes, and Share your pics—on campus and off—on Instagram: @swarthmorebulletin, #swatbulletin looking to start letterpress printing. “We’re all about empty-nest fun—new puppy, new bike, and being a freelance agitator around city government.” Lisa Berglund enjoyed her spring sabbatical, working on a book on reader annotations in early American dictionaries. In July, she becomes executive director of the American Society for ­Eighteenth-Century Studies. Brenda Monroe Greene “has a 13-year-old boy in seventh grade, so college and empty-nesting are many years away.” Jeff Barkin lives in Portland, Maine, and is a medical director at a health IT company managing state Medicaid pharmacy programs. “Our eldest graduated Penn State ’12, and our baby William & Mary ’15.” Kurt Eichenwald covered “Trumpism Versus Republicanism, Explained” in Newsweek, as well as many other topics of national (and global!) political interest. For 20 years, Nils Davis has worked in enterprise software product management, and he writes, trains, coaches, and mentors product managers. He’s in search of his next gig. Ellen Argyros teaches at Babson College and presented a paper on Annie Proulx’s use of the trailer motif. She also wrote and illustrated a children’s book, Angie the Anglerfish. Katy Roth and Dreux Patton ’84 dropped middle child Megan ’20 off at Swarthmore for her freshman year. She started in Mary Lyon, where Katy and Dreux met. Their other kids are at Williams and in high school. Katy is a busy neurologist who enjoys gardening and grows her own plants from seed. Felicia Rosenfeld is in her second year as executive director of the Dance Resource Center in LA. Husband David Linde ’82 was an Academy Award nominee as a producer of Arrival. Leslie Johnson Nielsen’s kids are out of college. “It’s wonderful when they come home (in herds, or alone), but we’re also getting used to having our space!” Siu Li GoGwilt began working at the International Women’s Health Coalition last fall—quite a change from the Metropolitan Opera. Husband Chris, at Fordham, co-edited a book of essays, Mocking Bird Technologies: The Poetics of Parroting, Mimicry, and Other Starling Tropes, due out this fall. It includes contributions by Holt Meyer and a cameo by Professor Kaori Kitao. Suellen Heath Riffkin retired in March 2016 and survived an “idle” year. She’s still editing University of Utah Press books—a gig with Friends Council on Education in Philly—40 hours per month. Sara Tjossem’s book Fostering Internationalism through Marine Science has been published. Andrea Davis is “so happy to report my new life as an empty nester has been fulfilling in work and social relationships.” Both children are pursuing their dream careers—at UC–­Davis veterinary school and finishing an architecture master’s at WashU in St Louis. FOLLOW US on Facebook at facebook.com/ SwarthmoreBulletin 1985 Tim Kinnel kinnel@swarthmore. warpmail.net Maria Tikoff Vargas maria@chrisandmaria.com Once upon a time, a ragtag group of Swarthmoreans did Don Nigro’s play The Curate Shakespeare As You Like It, about a ragtag group of seven players putting on the Bard’s classic. It’s enormously charming, and as sometimes happens in theater, the cast and crew became enormously close and were loath to say goodbye at the end of the school year. So, led by Mike Frontczak and Shelley Lippman ’86, the group spent the summer of ’85 in Stowe, Vt., as the Northern Light Theatre Company, putting on The Curate in repertory with Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Thanks to Shelley, who dredged up photos of that summer and posted them to Facebook, great memories were generated. Along with Mike and Shelley, the company included Liza Knapp, Tim Kinnel, Julia Stein ’87, Simon Hawkins ’87, Patrick McNamara ’87, Hope Nye Yeager ’88, and Ethan Knapp ’88. The late Jack Sutherland ’87, brother of Jill Sutherland, was part of the original production but unable to join for the summer. Once upon another time, there “was a co-captain of that overachieving Swarthmore baseball team of ’85.” His name was Charlie Green. “I wrote a screenplay about it. Got an agent. It didn’t sell,” he says. “Turned it into a novel. Got an agent. All the major publishers passed.” Then a book titled The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach was published in 2011, to great acclaim; Jonathan Franzen ’81 wrote, “Reading [it] is like watching a hugely gifted young shortstop; you keep waiting for the errors, but there are no errors.” But what if there were one big error? For, as Charlie explicates in “Hit by a Pitch ... Beaned by ‘The Art of Fielding’” for Medium, there are quite a few “uncanny coincidences” between his text and Harbach’s. Charlie tells us The Washington Post killed a story about it shortly before publication because it “could not prove access.” Judge for yourself (bit.ly/ HitByPitch). And in more mainstream sorts of Class Notes news: Ted Abel is now at the University of Iowa as founding director of the Iowa Neuroscience Institute, the Roy J. Carver Chair in Neuroscience, and a professor of molecular physiology and biophysics. It’s quite a change after 18 years at Penn. “It’s an exciting time of building research programs and hiring faculty.” Ted is also chair of the neuroscience section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and president of the Molecular and Cellular Cognition Society. Although her mother died in 2016, Andrea Packard has also had reasons to celebrate: 20 years as director of Swarthmore’s List Gallery (bit. ly/APackard), 25 years hitched to Jay Dahlke ’83, and an exhibit, “The Fabric of Nature,” at the Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville, Ark. You can see her art at andreapackard.net. (It’s beautiful, Andrea!) The U.K. report: Although no news of Brexit, Abby Honeywell, who lives just outside London, reports she is taking a “charity sabbatical” working on behalf of the homeless. “Over the past two years, the number of clients sleeping through the night before we meet them has doubled,” she says. Participation with her residents’ association sounds a bit happier: teas, a summer boat party, a Christmas sing-along, and the local pantomime (a musical comedy common in the U.K. around the holidays). Among all the organizing and doing, Abby and her husband celebrated 10 years together, eight with their two cats. While not occupied with her community clinic in Seattle, Sarah Hufbauer is “happy to have our daughter studying at the big university in Mexico City this year. She’s learning about our country from all sides.” Her son is looking at colleges (but he won’t be a Swarthmorean, either). On the other hand, Nathan and Ruth Woodliff-Stanley have one son at Swarthmore and another accepted for next year. Nathan is executive director of the Colorado ACLU (“as you can imagine, his plate is more than full right now”). Ruth is canon to the ordinary for the Episcopal Diocese of Colorado—something like chief operating officer to the bishop’s CEO. Finally, Paula Rockovich Gable is finishing a one-year contract as a senior minister of the First Unitarian Congregation of Ottawa and an executive doctorate in business administration from Georgia State University. “I’ve been enjoying cross-country SUMMER 2017 / Swarthmore College Bulletin 61 class notes skiing in Canada and finally can keep up with my trainer. Problem is, she’s well into her 80s.” That’s all the non-fake news that’s fit to print! 1987 Tom Newman thomas.newman@hdrinc.com Looking for news from our 30th Reunion but can’t wait until the winter Bulletin? Try alumni­ weekend.swarthmore.edu. Or, if you want answers to questions like, “Why isn’t Swarthmore still Quaker?” and “When did Swarthmore admit its first black student?” and “What Parrish cornerstone motto was featured in our last Class Notes?” then check out a documentary directed, written, produced, and edited by Shayne Lightner: bit.ly/MindingSwarthmore. (Thanks, Shayne, for the great work!) Leslie Annexstein, a first-timer to Class Notes, writes: “Has it really been 30 years? Yikes! Here are some life highlights: I live in D.C. with my partner, Todd Cox, a 1987 Princeton graduate, and our daughters, Jasmine, 8, and Leila, 5, who keep us energetic and optimistic. Professionally, I served in the Obama administration for 6 1/2 years as the senior attorney adviser to the general counsel of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and just started as deputy director of the Office of Civil Rights and Sexual Misconduct at the University of Maryland– College Park. I have been serving on the board of our daughters’ public charter 62 Swarthmore College Bulletin / school in D.C., which has kept me in the loop regarding issues in public elementary education. Because I live in D.C., I run into Swatties from time to time. A real treat is that my former roommate and forever friend, Heidi Feldman, visited us from San Diego, where she and her husband live with their two lovely children. I may not plug in formally very much, but I have very fond memories and happily recommend Swarthmore to all who are interested. Happy 30th Reunion!” I also caught up with ­Peter Andreas, a professor of international studies and political science at the Watson Institute at Brown University, after I found his professional profile: bit. ly/PAndreas. (Check it out, it’s amazing!) “Much of my life these days has been about children and childhood,” says Peter. “We have ‘two under 2’ at home, both girls. (I know, I’m late to the whole parenting thing—some of my Swarthmore classmates visit while touring New England colleges with their kids.) I also published a memoir, Rebel Mother: My Childhood Chasing the Revolution (bit.ly/RebelMother), about growing up on the run and a family torn apart by the political upheavals of the ’60s and ’70s. Totally different from any other writing I’ve done. I spend a lot of time around students—not exactly ‘children,’ but not fully formed adults, either. I’d like to think all this keeps me young, even if I feel exhausted most of the time.” 1930: Life Is Given But Once SUMMER 2017 SPOTLIGHT ON … JOHN ERLER ’89 John Erler ’89, a comedian in Austin, Texas, made news this spring dressed as Moses to protest a state bill to limit transgender access to bathrooms. He held signs saying, “Let my people go … to the bathroom.” “On those rare occasions when you can stand up for the marginalized and also make people laugh,” he says, “there’s no better feeling.” + 1989 Martha Easton measton@elmira.edu Kathy Stevens stevkath@gmail.com How nice to hear from so many people. I, Martha, am already thinking about our next reunion! Jennifer Rawcliffe Covarrubias is “officially an empty nester—younger son Francisco is a freshman studying film production at USC. Elder son Martin ’16 is back in Portland, Ore., working with homeless youth. I have had a busy, challenging year as I returned to teaching high school after 20 years, but I’m thoroughly enjoying the kids, my colleagues, and integrating 21st-century technology into instruction.” Andy and Sharon Seyfarth Garner live outside Cleveland, where Andy is a primary care pediatrician and child advocate, and Sharon works with Belly of the Whale Spiritual Direction and Retreat Ministries. Sharon published a book, Praying with Mandalas, and has a follow-up coming out next fall. Daughter Deborah is CONTINUED: bulletin.swarthmore.edu a high school junior, and son Timothy is in college studying music. As Sharon says, “It’s crazy our kids are around the age we were when we were meeting at Swarthmore.” Wayne Finegar, in Columbia, Md., works at Baltimore Yearly Meeting, “running their website, editing publications, event planning, and administering the 10,000-plus membership database. William and Thomas, 12, are doing great in sixth grade. Robert turns 9 this summer. Karen Ohland ’83 and Matt Ohland’s wife, Emily, stayed at our house the night before the Women’s March in January, and Leif Kirschenbaum ’92 visited in February. This spring, I will take one of our sons to look at Swarthmore as a prospective!” Speaking of, Bob and Betsy Witt Bein happily report that son Will was accepted into the Class of ’21. “We look forward to spending four years driving him crazy as we vicariously relive our own Swarthmore experience.” Bob is a VP and senior counsel at Select Medical, while Betsy left teaching to pursue a master of library and information science. Julie Blue “had a fantastic year with wonderful visits from Laura Augustine, Kir Talmage, and Deborah How. I was lucky to help Deb celebrate a new MBA when she graduated from UMass–Amherst. Shortly after, my 9-year-old, Snowden, and I headed to Japan, where I presented at a climate-change conference and fell in love with the wild monkeys on a mountain outside Kyoto. During the conference, Dan Mont ’83 helped me find a babysitter so Snowden wouldn’t be too bored. So glad to be a Swarthmore alum! We hope to do more traveling—we’ve picked up birding as a hobby.” A succinct report: “My life is great. But nothing newsworthy.” Thus says Valerie Lieber. Elizabeth McCulley Gore was promoted to the new government relations department chair of Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, where she will oversee the integration of federal and state lobbying teams. Congrats! Deborah How took ownership of a small West LA performing-arts conservatory, hoping to add creative offerings beyond music and dance. She is going on her seventh year on the Swarthmore Alumni Council and is the global connections chair. “If you are on Facebook, please join our Swarthmore College Alumni Virtual Connection.” Share your pics—on campus and off—on Instagram: @swarthmorebulletin, #swatbulletin Betsy Hayes Wilson and C.J. Malanga hosted an (ill-fated) election-watch in Cambridge, Mass., with Gerald Quirk and Patrick and Alida Zweidler-McKay ’92. On vacation in Hawaii, Betsy and C.J. bumped into Javier Provencio at the Pearl Harbor Memorial, while Javier attended the Critical Care Congress in Honolulu. Erica Barks Ruggles writes: “As part of turning 50, I am trying to see as many of Africa’s primates—our cousins­­—as possible. It gives one a new appreciation for our fragile planet. So far, I have seen mountain gorillas (the largest primate), golden monkeys, blue monkeys, olive baboons, vervet monkeys, L’Hoste monkeys, colobus monkeys, chimpanzees, and eight different lemurs (including Goodman’s mouse lemur—the smallest primate).” Gecole Harley finishes with these lovely words: “I am happy and healthy … and so are my parents and sister. For that alone, I am blessed. I love and miss you all. The last few reunions have reminded me how very special Swarthmore is—I look forward to the next one. I am still in Southern California and open to visits.” Thanks, Gecole—and everyone. Be well! 1991 Nick Jesdanun me@anick.org A few years ago, I wrote about Valerie Aymer’s work on the elevated Liberty Park overlooking NYC’s World Trade Center memorial. By chance, my office moved to the neighborhood in January, and I now walk across Val’s park regularly. Thank you, Val. Other encounters include coffee with Courtney Richmond during her trip to New York and, while in Thailand in December, I met up with Jim Wallace, who lives in Bangkok’s Thonburi section, where my mom grew up. (Check out our selfie on Facebook.) A month later, someone called my name at Disneyland—Rob Biggar and his wife. We were all there for the Star Wars half-marathon. I let Chewbacca win, by the way. Meanwhile, I enrolled in a class in New York offered through Swarthmore’s Lifelong Learning program. Other attendees include Charlotte Rotterdam’s mom, Heidi, and Raul Cuza. Small world! We’re learning about the role of math in nature and everyday life—no competency in math required! Like most of us, Jeannine Mastre Thompson is realizing that college admissions have gotten so competitive, “I doubt I could get into Swarthmore again.” Well, there’s always Haverford … I kid! Her daughters, 13 and 15, will start looking at schools soon. Jeannine teaches elementary-school math near Sacramento, Calif., and works with at-risk students in grades 4–8. Matt Kennel’s eldest daughter, Madison, is off to Northwestern, where she’ll play soccer. Matt is a partner with a travel company, Premier World Discovery, in Redondo Beach, Calif. He caught up with his Swarthmore basketball teammates on campus last year. Some of them played in the annual alumni game preceding the last varsity home game (Swat beat Haverford, 7665.) Do today’s Swatties know the “safety school” chant? Classic. Jed Bell started a film program at San Francisco State University and finished a short, “Dropping Penny,” about two transgender dog-walkers. University of Chicago professor Mike Greenstone was appointed director of the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics. He will retain his job as director of the university’s Energy Policy Institute. In the final days of the Obama administration, Vietnam War expert Ed Miller joined then-Secretary of State John Kerry on a trip to the Mekong Delta to find the site of a Viet Cong attack on Kerry-­ led Swift boats in 1969. According to news reports, Kerry met a Viet Cong soldier who took part in that ambush. Ed, a Dartmouth history professor, helped Kerry locate the site using maps from the 1960s. Speaking of the State Department, Juan Martinez was appointed to an office on cybersecurity and other internet policies. He joins JeeYoung Oh ’08 and Martha Marrazza ’09 in hosting happy hours for D.C.-area alums interested in foreign policy or international development. Fred Wilson Horch and Chris Lyford, along with their sons, spent a weekend skiing at Sugarloaf in Maine. Fred and wife Hadley Wilson Horch ’93 live FOLLOW US on Facebook at facebook.com/ SwarthmoreBulletin in Brunswick, Maine, not far from Bowdoin College, where Hadley chairs the neuroscience program. Nicole Theodosiou Napier is overseeing construction of a $100 million science and engineering center at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y. Let’s hope the funds don’t get sucked up the way our chemistry samples inadvertently did in college, as her lab partner (and this writer) likes to remind her as often as possible. Nicole was appointed director of biochemistry at Union, though she’ll head to Australia this fall to run another term abroad. Nicole also visits Claire Hartten in Cambridge, N.Y., where “she has a lovely home and more free-range pigs than you can count.” Maybe my newly acquired math skills will help. 1995 Sally Chin sallypchin@gmail.com Erik Thoen erik_thoen@alum. swarthmore.edu We hope you’re having an exciting year—we’d love to hear all about it! Laura Raicovich had two books come out this spring: At the Lightning Field, reflecting on the iconic artwork by Walter De Maria, chaos theory, time, and memory; and Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production, which she co-edited. Laura, the director of the Queens Museum, writes: “We are opening five projects that run through mid-August. All feature contemporary artists contending with subjects ranging from water justice and the poetry of protest to boundaries and borders.” Sarah Cebik Walters writes: “I’m still in Cambridge, England, still loving life in a university city, and still working for a major international assessment provider and education consultancy (in a noneducation role); I enjoy the work but wish I had taken advantage of the education department when I was at Swat. My kid is fast approaching the start of his career at Big Kid School in September. (‘Reception’ is like kindergarten.)” Danielle Tylke remarried in 2016 and is one year into a renovation project with her husband and children. She is also helping develop the service-learning program at her high school; every student does direct service as part of graduation requirements. Mehdi Nejad-Sattari writes: “My wife, Katie, and I are moving with our two kids to Chico, Calif., where I’ll work at Enloe Medical Center. Hope to connect with Western Swatties. Best wishes—come visit!” Hattie Fletcher is in Pittsburgh as the managing editor at Creative Nonfiction, where she also now edits a new monthly magazine, True Story, featuring one exceptional long-form essay each issue. Richard Tchen reports that his bicycle has withstood the tenfold increase in his daily commute, SEPTA has wrapped up its work on the Crum overpass, and the woods have reawakened for spring. Phyllis “Bunny” Sedmont Bennett’s new book, The Jealous Dandelion, was released: amazon.com/ author/bunnybennett. SUMMER 2017 / Swarthmore College Bulletin 63 class notes Adam Koplan writes: “After nearly 20 wonderful years in New York City, my family and I moved to my hometown of Atlanta. My company, Flying Carpet Theatre, now has two chapters— in NYC and Georgia. I had a blast directing an NYC production of my musical 1001 Nights (co-­ written with Robert Lopez of Frozen and Book of Mormon fame), staged at Off-Broadway’s Atlantic Theater (bit.ly/NYT1001). My daughters are 9 and 5, and they seem to be adjusting to the Atlanta lifestyle (i.e. much more outdoor time). We miss NYC’s huge Swattie contingent and welcome anyone traveling through.” As for me, Sally, I’m with my family enjoying Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and I find I’m spending a lot more time protesting in the streets than ever before. In the news: Krister Johnson, executive producer of Childrens Hospital, won an Emmy for short-form comedy series: bit.ly/KristerTweet Dan Rothenberg is working on a play for FringeArts about the planet’s future in the age of climate change: bit.ly/Rothenberg Ben Vigoda made deep-learning computers able to continually refine their own capabilities, increasing efficiencies: bit.ly/BVigoda 1997 Joy Oliver joy_oliver@hotmail.com I write this in March, two months before our 20th Reunion; you will read it around July, two months 64 Swarthmore College Bulletin / after the reunion. I still live in Morocco, and the distance rendered me unable to attend. I felt this loss most sharply when I read about Alan Sama’s nostalgic DJ set for the Saturday night party. Nothing beats a Class of ’97 dance party DJ’d by Alan! Please tell me all about the fun. Living in Westchester County, N.Y., for the last year, Alan Sama and wife Jennifer had their second child, Ella Rose, in November. Robin Mandel celebrated son Arlo’s arrival in September. Robin is in his fourth year at UMass–Amherst in the art department. Katie Jozwicki Morgan and her husband bought a house last year and love living in Houston’s Montrose neighborhood. Meghan Kriegel Moore writes that she survived childbirth, a year of sleep deprivation, shingles (Had chickenpox? You might get shingles), and an appendectomy. She then cut off all her hair, figured out which foods were messing with her body, and dropped an eighth of her weight. She’s recommitted to photographing families and small businesses, and gives a more reasonable amount of time to community organizations. Erica Schreiber is a partner at the Conscious Leadership Group—a big departure from her fiercely independent career as an identity and impact strategist for leaders. Erica lives in Santa Barbara, Calif., with son Noah, who is 11 going FOLLOW US on Facebook at facebook.com/ SwarthmoreBulletin SUMMER 2017 on 35. She travels more these days—Bay Area, Chicago, D.C., NYC—and calls it a gift to come home to such a beautiful place and to a boy who brings her such delight. Theresa Williamson still runs the nonprofit Catalytic Communities in Rio de Janeiro, coming up on 17 years, and is launching the Sustainable Favela Network. Todd West finished a first career in hardware and cloud services and is pursuing a second in natural resources, studying habitat use and denning of endangered mountain foxes. Tom Makin moved his intellectual-property litigation practice uptown to Shearman & Sterling. Tom runs across numerous Swattie IP litigators—he broke bread in Boston with patent litigator Ben Stern ’96 and Tushar Parlikar ’01. In March, Matt Jacobson was ordained a deacon at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in NYC. Wife Meredith Linn and Jason Sturm, Hanan Hussein Knoll, and Courtney Clark Metakis ’98 were at the ordination. In May, Matt graduated from the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church, receiving a master of divinity, alongside JoAnn Bradley Jones ’73. Walid Gellad appeared on NPR to discuss negotiation and the pharmaceutical buying power of Medicare (bit.ly/WalidGellad). Uri Ko Yoo lives in the D.C. area with her husband and sons Noel, 3, and baby Asher. She still works at the Social Security Administration HQ in Baltimore—and calls it an exciting (or absolutely, frightfully mind-boggling) time to be a government lawyer at a federal agency. Emily Marston lives with her husband and son, age 3, off the Blue Ridge Parkway in beautiful Roanoke, Va. She’s been a clinical psychologist at VA hospitals for six years and is the coordinator of an inpatient PTSD unit at the Salem VA Medical Center. It’s not a job she anticipated, Emily notes, but one she loves. Twenty years later, we still seek adventures and find that with the laugh lines and gray hairs come a strong sense of self and contentment with the place we’ve carved for ourselves in the world. Good job, Class of ’97. 1999 Melissa Morrell MacBeth mmacbeth@gmail.com Tyler Wigg Stevenson had a busy year. “We welcomed our second daughter, Heloise Appeline, in March 2016, and I just wrapped up 10 delightful weeks at home caring for her and her sister, courtesy of Canada’s generous parental-leave laws. I was ordained in the Anglican Church of Canada to the diaconate in May 2016, and to the priesthood in December. I’ve been loving full-time congregational ministry at Little Trinity Church in Toronto since last June.” Daniel Laurison’s research on the “class ceiling” was quoted in the Financial Times (bit.ly/ DLaurison). Erika Johansen and husband Shane had baby George in September. “We haven’t really slept since,” she writes, “but George is huge and healthy and we’re pretty happy. We live outside London, and I have to learn to drive on the wrong side of the road (and car!), which should undoubtedly be hell.” She’s also working on a book, “but it’s slow going.” Mason Astley saw Matt Menendez at Jed Lewis ’00’s house in Marblehead, Mass., last summer. Jed visited Mason in Boston this spring, “and his wife gave birth two days later.” Katherine Hall Carvajal lives in San Francisco with husband Lucas. “In addition to Sofia, 8, we also have Elena, 4, and Nicolas, 1. The car is full, life is full, and we enjoy staying connected to Swat by hosting students during extern week and summertime.” Mariah Peelle Sotelino doesn’t mind being almost 40, despite Louis C.K. saying being 40 is “being half-dead.” “It is wonderful to be done with diapers and day care” for daughters Marisa, 9, and Vivian, 6, who are thriving in their public elementary International Baccalaureate schools. Mariah and husband Daniel Sotelino ’01 moved to Falls Church, Va., in summer 2015 and are happy to have a backyard. “Daniel installed two swings up high in the maple for the girls, and we’ve had many a weekend grilling, playing music, and hangin’ out by the fire pit. Nothin’ better than that!” Mariah still teaches Pilates (17 years and counting), and her latest interests are singing at Daniel’s gigs, training in Brazilian jiujitsu with her daughters, and sewing 18-inch doll clothes. Stacey Bearden, like many of us, is contemplating this year of turning 40: “I’ve decided to start planning my midlife crisis.” She is considering a trip to celebrate (good idea). She is in a new role leading the global HR department at Wind River Systems—“the Share your pics—on campus and off—on Instagram: @swarthmorebulletin, #swatbulletin ILANA NAGIB ALUMNI PROFILE “Our work is broader than just what happens in the exam room—we have to have an impact on the whole community,” says Alicia Wilson ’96, executive director of La Clinica del Pueblo. “The bigger we make the circle of human compassion, the better off we all are.” ‘OUR WORK IS RESISTANCE’ Across barriers, she keeps a community healthy and whole by Leigh Anderson ’96 WHAT DO YOU DO when your life’s work is threatened by President Trump’s America? For Alicia Wilson ’96, you do what you’ve done for 17 years: Keep the door open at a health center serving one of Washington, D.C.’s most vulnerable populations. Wilson is the executive director of La Clinica del Pueblo, a community-­ based nonprofit that provides primary and mental-health care, interpretation services, health education, and advocacy support to a largely Salvadoran population in the D.C. area. The 35-year-old clinic annually serves roughly 4,000 clients who face considerable obstacles to health care access: 97 percent of its patients have a household income 200 percent below the federal poverty line. Many are uninsured immigrants whose journeys to the U.S. have been physically and mentally traumatizing and who face cultural, linguistic, professional, and even legal barriers once they’re here. All of these factors can contribute to a lack of quality, routine preventive health care—which is where La Clinica comes in. The institution abides by the philosophy that good health begins with the community at large—that treating the unique risk factors of an entire group will improve the health outcomes of the individuals. Even so, Wilson is concerned that the election of Donald Trump, and the concomitant emboldening of conservative policymakers and the alt-right, threatens La Clinica’s clients. The potential repeal of the Affordable Care Act could eliminate funding that keeps the heat and lights on; Wilson also worries about patients becoming victims of hate crimes. She draws strength from her clients, recounting the story of América Guardado, an undocumented immigrant who frequently arrived for her primary-care appointments covered in bruises. Her doctor persuaded her to accept La Clinica’s other services and connected her with their “swat team”—an intervention that included a peer-support group for domestic-­ violence survivors and immigration assistance. The team helped Guardado move into a shelter, get a work permit, and find English classes and coursework for a new career. Guardado is now a certified nursing and medical assistant as well as a member of La Clinica’s board—and so one of Wilson’s bosses. “She works six-and-a-half days a week, but still takes Friday afternoons to support other domestic-violence survivors. La Clinica has a philosophy that ‘we’re all in this together,’ and she’s a great example of that,” Wilson says. “It’s incredibly affirming to work with and for folks like her. It gets me out of bed in the morning.” Looking back, Wilson credits the College with sparking her curiosity— and humility. “I think a lot of us arrived at Swarthmore as high achievers, and we were humbled very fast. Going through that process is an important part of growth,” she says. “I came from a white, Midwestern community and started in a job after college in which I was a minority. That was an opportunity to adopt that humility: I don’t know anything. Please teach me.” Throughout her life and career, that mindset has served her well. “Swat taught me a lot about how to think about power and privilege and how societies are organized,” Wilson says. “It taught me to question my assumptions, to be open, and to push past my sense of my own capacity.” Life’s demands keep testing that capacity, especially in today’s climate. “I’m certainly not a poster child for work-life balance these days—I blame Trump,” laughs Wilson, who has two small children. “I’m sure my partner would agree, as she often takes up the slack in keeping us all clothed and fed.” So how will she face this new era and its challenges? “Our work is resistance,” Wilson says. “That’s what we do—and will do—every day.” SUMMER 2017 / Swarthmore College Bulletin 65 class notes only operating system on Mars!” (They’re in the Mars rover.) It’s challenging because of job and budget cuts, “but also because I have so much to learn and do and change.” On the home front, she enjoys son Glen, 3. “It’s been a tough year with so many transitions from baby to little boy.” Stacey saw Cathy Polinsky in San Francisco; she’s the CTO of Stitch Fix. “After seven years at Salesforce, it’s been really fun jumping into a new business. Coincidentally, David Pearce ’03 joined around the same time. We hosted students as part of the Swarthmore CIL@SF trip.” Ellen Johnson-Price, husband Jason, and son Rhys visited Anna Tischler in Minneapolis in the fall. “We had fun taking our kids to the Renaissance festival and the zoo.” Anne Holland and partner Ngawang live in Montreal, “where we translate Tibetan Buddhist literature into English.” Her first book, A Clear Mirror: The Visionary Autobiography of a Tibetan Master, was published in 2010. They had daughter Delphine Holland on Nov. 13, and “we’re all in love, amazed, and sleep-deprived!” They also had a fantastic visit in the Bay Area with Richard Vezina, husband Alex, and “their delightful, precocious daughter, Abby.” Roger Bock has had the same job for 12 years, “which is a little scary, but I guess also a sign I’ve found something I like.” He works on getting computers to predict cyberattacks by reading the news. In his spare time, he trains in and teaches Brazilian jiujitsu. Roger visited Pittsburgh in October and saw Carl Wellington and Jenny Briggs and Amy and Sarah. “We had a fun time stalking a 66 Swarthmore College Bulletin / self-driving car that Carl helped design.” Roger’s kids attend a school in Cambridge, Mass., with a strong social-justice focus that reminds me of Swarthmore. “My older son even wrote a letter to the town newspaper about transgender rights.” To all of us almost- and just-past-40-year-olds, sleep-deprived and jiujitsu warriors alike, thank you for your news. 2001 Claudia Zambra claudiazambra@gmail.com Evan Gregory happily reports the arrival of twins Gus and Oliver in September; Allyn Dullighan and husband Jeff had Aurora in August; and C.J. Riley and wife Linda had second daughter Laurel. C.J. attended Pat Thrasher’s wedding with Ryan Neiheiser and Darren and Caitlin Schlap-Gilgoff Wood. Emilia Pastor Feldman also had her second child and moved to Paris with her family. She misses Boston (except for the winter). Since 2014, Ryan Neiheiser and wife Xristina Argyros have lived in London, running an architecture practice, Neiheiser­ Argyros, and teaching design. After nine years in Cologne, Germany, Kristen Panfilio accepted a faculty position at the University of Warwick and is moving back to the U.K., slowly transitioning her developmental genetics lab, and beginning a year of international commuting. Kwabena Adu and wife Kate live in Barbados, where they set up a mission of their church, Shep- SUMMER 2017 herd House International. Kwabena pastors the church and makes a living in software engineering. He would love visitors! Amber Adamson is now development director of Starfinder Foundation, a Philadelphia nonprofit that uses soccer for social change. Kara Spangler Rosenberg teaches high school English in Montpelier, Vt., and reads books about teens for Vermont’s Green Mountain Book Award committee. She’s learning guitar and enjoys sing-and-play-alongs with Xiang Lan Zhuo (banjo and mandolin), Robyn Stewart (uke), and their families. Ben Chan received tenure at St. Norbert College and made a new connection when Abraham Nussbaum ’97 visited his bioethics class in February to discuss his brilliant book The Finest Traditions of My Calling. After almost a decade in finance, Gabe Turzo spent some time in a mental hospital and now works at a Trader Joe’s while shopping around his writing. For the first time in a long time, he doesn’t hate his job. He recently moved in with his longtime girlfriend, and they are very happy. Lynne DeSilva-Johnson joined the faculty at Pratt Institute as an assistant visiting professor, teaching interdisciplinary literature/ criticism/theory. The Operating System, an arts organization/small press she founded and runs (pro bono!), will publish 20 books in 2017 and continues to thrive. Among those books she’s most proud of is a title from the OS’s new Unsilenced Texts series, a right-bound Arabic-English translation of Palestinian poet/artist and political prisoner Ashraf Fayadh; after its publication, Fayadh won the Oxfam Novib/PEN Award for Freedom of Expression, and the book is now longlisted for the 2017 Best Translated Book Awards. Wish them luck! Lynne is busy leading ACLU trainings; is making art, writing, editing, and designing beyond the OS; and has publications forthcoming in mags, journals, and anthologies—plus two books on the way! In her, uh, spare time, she’s writing a series for Drunken Boat on National Endowment for the Arts grantees in danger of losing their funding. The D.C. area is ex- periencing shake-ups. Ambrose Dieringer and his family relocated and greatly prefer the Seattle version of Washington over D.C. Aryani Manring is moving from D.C to Yangon, Myanmar, to work at the U.S. Embassy. She and husband Scott Kofmehl and their kids, Talia and Kate, expect to be there until 2020. (Visitors welcome!) Meanwhile, Mattathias Schwartz moved with wife Eva to D.C.; they live near Adams Morgan. And I, Claudia, still live in D.C., traveling often across the planet to Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar for work. CAPTIONED! “There goes another Swarthmore graduate, off to save the world.” — Robin McCarthy Arehart ’92 “The R.A.s are returning early this year!” —Josephine Michener ’79 “Not another phoenix.” —Charles Miller ’59 “Normally he migrates in May, but I guess global warming is affecting him, too.” —James Pasterczyk ’81 + MORE CAPTIONS: bulletin.swarthmore.edu Share your pics—on campus and off—on Instagram: @swarthmorebulletin, #swatbulletin 2003 Robin Smith Petruzielo robinleslie@alum. swarthmore.edu Abram and E.B. Fortier Falk had son Charlie in September. E.B. started as a veterinary dermatologist at Cornell University’s Veterinary Specialists in Stamford, Conn. Abram is a physicist for IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. They now live in Port Chester, N.Y. Feng He married wife Jane in November; the story of how they met was reported in an NPR segment (bit.ly/FengJane). The startup they founded is growing fast. Still teaching math at the GI School in Armenia, ­Colombia, Eric Schober Maya married Maria Fernanda Uribe López in November. Eden Wales Freedman accepted a position as assistant professor of English and diversity studies at Mount Mercy University in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Eden is Mount Mercy’s director of diversity studies and the English department’s graduate coordinator. Laurel Eckhouse is finishing a Ph.D. She and her partner are moving to Colorado, where she will be an assistant professor of political science at the University of Denver. Jeff Regier completed a Ph.D. in statistics at UC–Berkeley in August and stayed for a postdoc in computer science. Franzeska Dickson is finishing a film editing degree at the American Film Institute. Her thesis short on slash fanfiction was to shoot this June in LA. Rob Melick started a law firm in September near his Wisconsin hometown. His practice focuses exclusively on estate planning. Rob and wife Erica Newton Melick ’05 have two sons—Grady, 7, and Hudson, 4—who are already tremendous hockey players. John Fort teaches high school science in Southern California. He visited with Lucy Lang and her lovely family in NYC. Lucy was appointed special counsel for policy and projects at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and director of that office’s educational arm, the DANY Academy. As a 2017 Presidential Leadership Scholar, she is studying leadership under the auspices of the Presidential Libraries. With partner Scott Asher, Lucy celebrated daughter Theresa (“Tessa”) Lang Asher’s turning 1 in December, and son Isaiah (“Ike”) Lang Asher’s turning 3 in April. John Anderson still works at the World Bank, focusing on trade and competitiveness issues in the Caribbean. Wife Karen is an ABC White House correspondent. John and Karen enjoy watching twins Matt and Kelly start to walk, talk, and adore big sister Maeve. Todd Gillette started a job at Northrop Grumman researching acoustic force fields as part of a three-year rotation. Wife Laura also joined Northrop Grumman, as a UX designer. Before starting work, FOLLOW US on Facebook at facebook.com/ SwarthmoreBulletin the two honeymooned in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, and visited Chichen Itza. Hollis Easter and fiancée Jasmine Walker bought a house in Burlington, Vt., where he is a business coach and process doctor/ performance-improvement consultant. 2005 Jessica Zagory jazagory@alum.swarthmore. edu Elizabeth Redden had a piece published on Inside Higher Ed (bit.ly/ReddenSanctuary). Blogger Benjamin Kabak talked the Q train and subways with The Village Voice—with a shout out to The Phoenix (bit.ly/KabakSubway). Mary Blair gave the Sigma Xi talk on conservation biology of primates March 13 at Swarthmore. Joseph Altuzarra got personal in a New York Times piece (bit.ly/­AltuzarraNYT) and designed the statement-making Golden Globes suit worn by Evan Rachel Wood (bit.ly/ AltuzarraGlobes). Geoff Hollinger and wife Bridget Tyler had daughter Antoinette “Toni” Tyler Hollinger on Dec. 18 in Corvallis, Ore. Toni is a happy, healthy baby who looks forward to meeting Swarthmore friends. Ian Miller and wife Evelyn had second child Kai Benjamin Miller on Jan. 11. Big brother Rye has been a big help. Sarah Bryan Fask had second son Samuel McLellan Fask on March 1. She spent a lot of quality time with Samuel and elder son George this spring during her maternity leave. In July, she will be back practicing labor and employment law at Littler Mendelson in Philadelphia. Jawaad Hussain and his family moved from South Philadelphia to Cherry Hill, N.J. He works part time at Weisman Children’s Rehabilitation Hospital in Marlton, N.J., developing projects for pediatric patients with poorly controlled medical illnesses. “Basically, I get to ‘tune-up’ kids who, despite traditional care, are falling apart. And my daughter loves kindergarten.” Class vice president Eugene Palatulan had a second daughter, Emma Juliette. He was accepted into a physical medicine and rehabilitation residency at New York Presbyterian Hospital. Not to be outdone, president Jorge Aguilar was accepted into a pediatrics residency at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. They both graduated from Albert Einstein College of Medicine this spring. Jason Mui lives in Chicago with wife Elizabeth Gorgas, daughter Harley Mui Gorgas, and motherin-law Peggy Kratz. He still works in advertising, teaches trapeze, and performs magic. Tafadzwa Muguwe, Ryan Esquejo, and Melanie Johncilla had a mini-­ reunion in Boston. Finally, Lauren Sippel started as associate director for research at the VA National Center for PTSD Executive Division in White River Junction, Vt. Her main responsibility is to assure the latest research findings help those exposed to trauma. Lauren also has a joint appointment as assistant professor of psychiatry at Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. 2007 Kristin Leitzel Hoy kleitzel@gmail.com After finally living in the same city after many years of long distance, Jillian Astarita married James Peck on Sept. 30 in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. They honeymooned in Peru, where they hiked the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, enjoyed many pisco sours, and squeezed in some relaxation. After returning, they adopted an adorable pit bull puppy named Sierra. Jillian lives in San Francisco and researches cancer immunology at Genentech. Eleanor Joseph finally got her act together to contribute a Class Note in honor of our 10th Reunion. Her decade in brief: two years in economic and strategy consulting in D.C., two years in global health in Uganda, three years of graduate school in Massachusetts, one year in municipal government in Boston, and almost two years of working on her business, Ubuntu Capital—a Yelp or Angie’s List of sorts designed for urban emerging markets. In October, Eleanor married Andrew Johnston in Hopewell Junction, N.Y. Nick Groh, Cristina Alva, Dan Forman, Lizzy Vogel, Rob McKeon, Eric Zwick, Ben Oldfield, Erica Lukoski ’08, Katie Camillus ’08, and Inessa Lurye ’06 attended. In addition, Swatties—Garth Sheldon-Coulson, Dan Sullivan, Jayne Koellhoffer, and Jayanti Owens ’06—comprised almost 30 percent of the bridal party. Eleanor SUMMER 2017 / Swarthmore College Bulletin 67 class notes is incredibly grateful for all her Swarthmore friends. Thomas Bennett, Peter Brennan, and Edward “Sal” Goldstein, and their wives, Randall Johnston ’09, Lauren Kluz-Wisniewski Brennan ’08, and Saori Yamaguchi, respectively, had babies Bennett Johnston, Emilia Brennan, and Kent Yamaguchi, respectively, in December, February, and January, respectively. The proud parents look forward to helping their children become independent thinkers, but for now, they’ll settle for basic motor control. Stephanie Chuang and Jeremy Fahringer ’06 had baby Evangeline “Eva” Grace. Newly minted big brother Theo is pleased that they now create a “square” in the car. Juliet Braslow and Carlos Villafuerte ’08 said goodbye to Kenya after four years and moved to Santiago, Chile. Juliet works with the U.N. in the Sustainable Development and Human Settlements Department of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. Juliet and Carlos welcome Swattie visitors. Jonathan Stott moved from relaxing Austin, Texas, to busy NYC with partner Emily and cats Frank the Tank and Trina. He is the deputy director of EcoRise, a nonprofit that provides sustainability curriculum and professional development to K–12 educators globally. Jon lives in the boonies of Queens but enjoys running into Swatties in the city. Karl Petre moved from Baltimore to San Francisco to begin a job with Apple. Brandy Monk-Payton is finishing a year at Dartmouth as a postdoctoral fellow. She is excited to move back to NYC this summer and begin 68 Swarthmore College Bulletin / a tenure-track position as assistant professor of communication and media studies at Fordham, where she will teach courses like Television and Civil Rights. She’s also working on her first book, Dark Optics: Blackness, Exposure, and Celebrity in Media Culture, and would love to hang out with NYC Swatties. Sherelle Harmon is a fifth-year clinical psychology doctoral candidate at Florida State University. In October, she hung out with Jaky Joseph ’06 in NYC as the first houseguest at his new pad. Little did she know she would spend countless hours unpacking and helping him organize. Earlier this year, she caught up with Kendra McDow in D.C. Kendra later joined her in Tallahassee, Fla., for a good ol’ Southern celebration for Match Day last month. Despite being crazy busy working on her dissertation, Sherelle looks forward to moving to Charleston, S.C., this summer to begin a yearlong predoctoral internship at the Medical University of South Carolina, where she learned that CJ Seitz-Brown ’10 will also be interning. Elsita Kiekebusch is a second-year Ph.D. student in North Carolina State University’s Department of Applied Ecology, studying the effects of climate change on rare and endangered butterflies. She loves Raleigh, N.C., plays ultimate Frisbee, and welcomes visitors. Anna Torres began a two- FOLLOW US on Facebook at facebook.com/ SwarthmoreBulletin SUMMER 2017 year postdoc in UChicago’s comparative literature department. She is completing her first book, an examination of the Yiddish literary avant-garde and the anarchist press in Russia, Canada, and the U.S. Nathaniel Peters defended his dissertation on 12th-century monks and their theology March 22. He and his wife have been enjoying dorm life and fish fries in Milwaukee. Erica George Baugh is on the home stretch of a glide year before medical school this fall, working in clinical research and volunteering at Planned Parenthood Los Angeles. Nick Groh and new wife Ambika Satija visited friends and family in Delhi, India; discovered the speakeasies of Bangkok; and explored Angkor Wat before heading to Hong Kong and then back to Boston. Working in cybersecurity has allowed Nick to visit numerous ’07ers, including Peter Kriss in San Francisco and Dan Sullivan in Chicago. Nick planned to be back in Chicago in April for Eric Zwick’s birthday. James Kalafus found the life-affirming joy of gardening in response to collective despair after fall’s election. He volunteers, works part time, and hoped this spring to open a free Growers Community Yoga Center Saturdays through Tuesdays in Eugene, Ore. He loves his huggable, wiggly dog. Jesse Goodall completed a six-month sabbatical backpacking through 17 countries in Southeast Asia and Central Europe. Staying in all those dorms with so many young friends reminded him of college. He is now in NYC at Contently, where he has had a great time working for three years. 2009 Melanie Spaulding maspauld1@gmail.com Todd Friedman joined a Miami law firm where he focuses on complex commercial litigation, class-action defense, and professional malpractice. He and wife Lindsey adopted a 100-pound Lab/ shepherd and are thinking about getting her a friend. Erin Heaney now lives in Buffalo, N.Y., where she is co-director of Showing Up for Racial Justice, a national network organizing white people against racism. Jessie Bear is still making theater (The New York Times reviewed her Pool Play 2.0)and changing the food system at Blue Apron. Phil Issa is a journalist, focusing on the impact war has on the lives of Syrian civilians. In the field of academic achievements, Emlen Metz finished a psychology Ph.D. at Penn and began a postdoc in the assessment of scientific thinking at Berkeley. If you’re in the Bay Area, say hi. Sarah Ifft Decker is finishing a medieval history dissertation for a Ph.D. from Yale. Abbey Agresta received a medieval history Ph.D. from Yale in May 2016 and is doing a postdoc at Queen’s University in Canada. She married Eric Holzhauer ’10 in April with numerous Swatties attending. Abbey was also a Swarthmore honors examiner for the Medieval Mediterranean course this spring, which is pretty much living the dream. Diana “Teddy” Pozo graduated in December from UC–Santa Barbara with a Ph.D. in film and media studies and a doctoral emphasis in feminist studies. Elizabeth “Zebi” Brown is completing her first year of architectural grad school at the University of Maryland. Kara Peterman and Kelsey Hatzell continue to lead parallel lives and are now assistant professors at UMass–Amherst and Vanderbilt, respectively. Coincidentally, Kelsey’s parents met at UMass and Kara’s parents met at Vanderbilt. Lauren Stokes earned a Ph.D. in August and is now an assistant professor of German history at Northwestern—just in time to teach the next generation about fascism. She also got married in a courthouse ceremony in January 2016. After working in the Peace Corps in Liberia, Kristin Caspar started at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. She will graduate with an M.A. in international economics and conflict management in 2018. Faith Pampel Sikorski married David Sikorski in July 2016 in the Catskill Mountains. She was joined by bridesmaids Kathleen Feeney, Elise Garrity, Nyika Corbett ’10, and Lauren DeLuca ’10. Andrew VanBuren ’10 officiated, and Henry Clapp was master of ceremonies. Jeff and Karen Berk Kushner ’08 had son Grayson William in November. Annie Carter married Prabath Silva in July 2016 in Virginia. Emma Otheguy married Tim Roeper ’07 in August in Pennsylvania, surrounded by happy Swatties. Emma and Tim are working on doctorates in NYC. Kevin and Jordan Schmidt Shaughnessy had son Liam James in October 2015. They live in Austin, Texas, where Kevin is a tech sales manager Share your pics—on campus and off—on Instagram: @swarthmorebulletin, #swatbulletin LAURENCE KESTERSON ALUMNI PROFILE “For me, fiction is a form of empathy,” says Emily Robbins ’07. “The sense of joy that comes from reading a good novel brings us closer to the characters on the page, whatever place they’re living in, and their struggles in a way that connects us to them—and each other.” WHAT ARE WORDS FOR? Love—and heartbreak—for Syria inspired her to write by Jonathan Riggs THERE’S A SAYING that there are 99 words for God in the Quran, and since “God” means “love,” all these words also mean love. For Emily Robbins ’07, a woman who chooses her own words with precision and invests each one with power, that poetic reflection reaffirmed her appreciation for Arabic—and inspired the title of her debut novel, A Word for Love (Riverhead Books). “As an Arabic student at Swarthmore, I learned the ancient story of Qais and Leila, where he loves her so much that he gives up his own name and is only called ‘Crazy for Leila,’” she says. “The idea that language can have such a strong tie to love that we can lose our identity and end up with a new one excited me.” Echoing this immortal story, A Word for Love is the tale of Bea, a young American who travels to Syria to study a mysterious classical manuscript known only as “The Astonishing Text.” Its poetry, romance, and wisdom illuminate essential human truths Bea discovers about love in a time and place beset by war. Written in elegantly spare prose— “so clear and clean you could drink it,” according to fellow novelist Kathryn Davis—the book reflects Robbins’s fascination with the ways political and historical complexities overlap with the human heart’s—and how we endlessly, linguistically reinvent ourselves and one another. As a Swarthmore student, Robbins initially chose to study abroad in Damascus to better understand the region of the world where her activist cousin, Rachel Corrie, famously died in a protest in 2003. “My experience there made me start loving Arabic apart from Rachel—for myself,” she says. “That—and living with a host family who was politically active at a time when that was very dangerous— shaped my idea of how one can be political in the world.” After graduation, Robbins returned to Syria to complete her first Fulbright fellowship, continuing the research for what would become her debut novel and delving deeper into the inner workings and weavings of words. “Arabic is a language based on three letter roots, so it’s very clear which words are related,” she says. “Making those relationships, like realizing that the word for ‘together’ is related to the word for ‘university’—which is related to the word for ‘Friday,’ the day of prayer— allowed me to start making connections between words in English that I hadn’t thought to make before.” Although Robbins is researching her next novel in Jordan on a second Fulbright, she continues to draw inspiration from Syria as a reminder of why, no matter who we are or where we live, the twinned might of art and love can open our eyes, break our hearts, and remind us what it is to be human. “A Word for Love takes place somewhere that no longer exists the way that it once did and never will again,” she says. “People kept asking me whether I was going to set it during the revolution, but that never seemed like a choice I wanted to make. It feels even more important now to have stories of love and stories of Syria as it once was in order to show us what is—and always will be—at stake.” SUMMER 2017 / Swarthmore College Bulletin 69 class notes SPOTLIGHT ON … NINA PELAEZ ’11 Nina Pelaez ’11, assistant curator of public programs at the Williams College Museum of Art, runs People’s Library (goo.gl/NmJmWV), an archive in response to “What book is helping you understand the world right now?” “I remember reading Shakespeare alongside queer theory in Nora Johnson’s Renaissance Sexualities Class and seeing, for the first time, that 16th century literature could be relevant to my life,” she says. “That type of experience showed me, as someone recently said, that ‘there are no dead objects, only living ideas.’” + and Jordan teaches middle-school history. Farah Hussain finished an internal medicine residency in summer 2016. She moved to Philadelphia, where she is now an attending at Penn. Aleta Hong graduated from med school last year and is completing an emergency medicine residency at the University of Maryland. When she’s not busy resuscitating people, she occasionally enjoys leaving the hospital, exploring Baltimore by bike, and eating her way through the local restaurants. When their schedules align, Aleta also visits with Eric Loui and Lin Gyi. Krys and Anna Belc ’07 relocated from Philadelphia to snowy Marquette, Mich., where Krys started an MFA program in fiction at Northern Michigan University. In sunnier climes, Sasha Shahidi led a study tour in Costa Rica and is now back in LA, working at the Ford Theatres in Hollywood and promoting local artists in dance, music, and theater. I, Melanie, am an attorney for the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance. In August 2015, I bought a house, and I’m working on build- 70 Swarthmore College Bulletin / CONTINUED: bulletin.swarthmore.edu ing my menagerie—so far I have a dog, two cats, and a fish. Please let me know if you have any updates; I look forward to hearing from you all! 2011 Ming Cai mcai223@gmail.com International. Andrew Loh works for the President’s Delivery Team in Sierra Leone by supporting government implementation of post-Ebola recovery priorities. In the Kathmandu office of IMC Worldwide, Sneha Shrestha is the country programmes coordinator for Nepal. She is also working on her startup, Sight-Impact, providing Nepali travel experiences. Melinda Neal is working on a global MBA from Yonsei University in South Korea. Having received the Edward Capps Fellowship, Bill Beck is continuing his work at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Sam Barrows lives with his wife in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, and is a business development manager. SUMMER 2017 West. Kathryn Stockbower survived her first year of a pediatric residency at Oregon Health & Science University and loves everything about the Pacific Northwest, “minus the rainy winters, which do require umbrellas no matter what native Portlanders say.” Kelsey Cline graduated from the University of Washington School of Medicine and will start a family medicine residency at Swedish First Hill in Seattle. Kate Walton and Zack Ontiveros married in June 2016 in Blooming Grove, N.Y., and live in the Bay Area with their two dogs. Blaine O’Neill is launching the beta version of Support. fm, a web platform that securely raises funds to post bail for transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals. South and Southwest. Rebecca Woo is in her second year of a Ph.D. program in school psychology at the University of Texas–Austin, with Gabriela Echavarria Moats ’12 in her cohort. Rebecca’s first publication this year stems from a project she worked on while living in Philly. Shilpa Boppana is finishing the second year of a doctoral program at the University of Mississippi. Her master’s thesis examines the relationship between religiosity and psychological well-being in LGBT Christians. She counts Zoe Davis and Amy Smolek among her visitors, and is enjoying the Mississippi Delta blues (and went to her first such festival in April). Midwest. Camilia Kamoun moved to Cincinnati for a pediatrics residency at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, and Karen Shen started an internal medicine residency at the Barnes-Jewish Hospital of Washington University in St. Louis. Ben Van Zee spent the past few years learning Polish and is working on a history Ph.D. at UChicago. Alicia Farnos-Wilker works in sartorial commerce with a Canadian design house and shares her Chicago home with a kitten named Jane (after Austen), though “she’s neither sensible nor sentimental.” Northeast and Mid-­ Atlantic. Nina Pelaez (box above), the assistant curator of public programs at the Williams College Museum of Art, is working on “Summer School: The Library and the Archive,” a series of public programs inspired by academia. This summer, she will host a reading group; screenings of vintage educational shorts; mini-courses led by scholars, artists, and makers; and a lending library of games, picnic blankets, and books to enjoy on the museum’s patio. Nina, who lives in Williamstown, Mass., with cat Juniper, still writes poetry and is part of a local writing group. She was also fortunate to have her best friend and former roommate, Samia Abbass, nearby in Brattleboro, Vt. Susanna Mitro started an epidemiology Ph.D. program at Harvard’s School of Public Health last fall and enjoys exploring Boston. After five years in the Swarthmore Admissions Office and traveling the world in search of new Swatties, Ruby Bhattacharya moved (with the help of Neda Daneshvar ’10 and her husband) to Cambridge, Mass., to pursue a master’s at the Harvard Graduate School of Education; she graduated in May. After more than five years as an actor in Philadelphia, Brian Ratcliffe moved to Syracuse, N.Y., to begin an applied ecology master’s program at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Brian attends the Syracuse Friends Meeting with Ed Stabler ’51. This summer, Brian is back in Philly, having received a Sussman Foundation grant to pursue environmental justice research for the grass-roots environmental group Philly Thrive (whose members include Alexa Ross ’13, Zein Nakhoda ’13, and Dinah DeWald ’13). After clerking for Judge Richard Boulware in the U.S. District Court, District of Nevada, Candice Nguyen is a litigation associate at Cleary Gottlieb in NYC. In addition to practicing general commercial litigation, Candice engages in pro bono matters and filed her first complaint in federal court alleging sex discrimination under Title VII. Next year, Candice will clerk for Judge Allyson Kay Duncan on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. After the presidential election, Steve Dean created the political accelerator Polispace, which secures physical spaces for working on preserving institutions and demo- Share your pics—on campus and off—on Instagram: @swarthmorebulletin, #swatbulletin cratic safeguards. They’ve partnered with the Human Rights Foundation and Run for Something. Amelia Kidd is a licensed social worker for the Mental Health Service Corps, part of the Thrive NYC initiative seeking to improve mental-health services. She is placed at Housing Works, which provides health care, housing, job training, legal assistance, and more to homeless and socioeconomically disadvantaged people with HIV/AIDS. Amelia works with individuals seeking help for depression, anxiety, and substance-use disorders. She also started acting in audio-drama podcasts, including the hit found-footage horror series Archive 81. James ­Preimesberger teaches first grade at the East Village Community School in NYC and is finishing his second certification in teaching students with disabilities. This year, James and a co-teacher have amped up the school’s social-justice focus, including leading a project to create a framework and resources for teaching race and anti-racism in developmentally appropriate ways in grades pre-K to 5. Once tenured, James hopes to be more vocal about adopting more radical stances to anti-oppressive pedagogy and school community-building. Cecilia Marquez is a professor at NYU teaching Latino/a studies in the Department of Social and FOLLOW US on Facebook at facebook.com/ SwarthmoreBulletin Cultural Analysis. She lives in Greenwich Village and would like to know if any Swatties are around. Nicole Machac graduated from Cooper Medical School and was accepted into New Jersey Medical School’s ob-gyn residency. She vacationed in California with Sally Chang, Jordan Bernhardt, Vy Vo, and Jen Tinsman. Samantha Griggs is in Philly teaching yoga, reading, writing, and applying to Ph.D. programs. She wants to study yoga from a sociological perspective and traveled to Japan in May for her brother’s wedding. Sarah Bedolfe relocated to D.C. from the Netherlands in February as a Global Fellow with Oceana, an international conservation organization focused on ocean issues, after receiving a master’s in marine biology. Sarah is thrilled about the job and super excited to be closer to Swatties. 2013 Paige Grand Pré jpgrandpre@gmail.com Four years out, our class is as active as ever. On the East Coast, Abby Starr lives in NYC and works at Macmillan Publishers. She welcomed her 10th “nibling”—and wishes there were a better gender-neutral term for “nieces and nephews.” New NYC resident Rory McTear left his paralegal job in D.C. this winter for a position with Goldman Sachs and lives in the East Village with Iggy Rodriguez ’12. Living in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, is Andrew Greenblatt, the first hire at startup Journey Meditation, which leads live, in-office guided meditation sessions in 10 U.S. cities. Andrew still rocks sweatpants and is looking for people to travel to Tibet with in the fall. Across town, Peter Gross is back in the city with Nina Kogekar, who graduated from medical school in May and started a residency at Mount Sinai this summer. Two-and-a-half years into their marriage, Allen Welkie begins a computer science Ph.D. at Princeton this fall, while Petra Currie Welkie is spending the summer in Morocco working on a horse-breeding farm before joining him in New Jersey. On the West Coast, Michael Fleischmann studies public policy at UC–Berkeley. He reconnected with Cariad Chester this spring and sees Rebecca Roelofs occasionally, too. As for Becca, she is completing a computer science Ph.D. at Berkeley and found a specialty focusing on optimization of deep neural networks. This March, she traveled to a wedding with Amandine Lee and enjoyed visiting with 2013ers. In San Francisco, Taryn Colonnese finished her master’s in education program in May; she teaches third grade and enjoyed a spring filled with beautiful bike rides. At UCLA, Allie Coleman finished her third year of medical school and is deciding on her speciality. Between coasts, Max Nesterak moved to Minneapolis, where he is a producer for Minnesota Public Radio News. In January 2016, Eugenia Tietz-Sokolskaya became certified in Russian-to-English translation. The following May, she graduated from Kent State with a master’s in translation and moved to Columbus, Ohio. Since graduating, she has been gainfully self-employed as a freelance translator—it was scary to launch full time but has worked out pretty well. (Eugenia married Nicholas Tietz on Dec. 28.) Due south, Alejandro Sills enjoys a growing career with Interactions LLC in Austin, Texas. He was promoted in January, and in March received a reclassification from parttime to full-time benefits status. He has not forgotten his musical liberal arts vibe, however, and plays in the Central Texas Medical Orchestra in his spare time. To keep his body and spirit strong, Alejandro performs calisthenics and runs in the mornings, just as he did in college. Ben Goossen authored Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a Global Era, a history of origins and worldwide spread of nationalism since the 19th century, told through the lens of a diasporic Christian community. The tome, released in May, is based on Ben’s Swarthmore honors thesis, written under the advisement of Professor Pieter Judson as Ben double-majored in history and German studies. Ben revised that thesis at the Free University of Berlin before Chosen Nation’s publication and is now a history Ph.D. candidate at Harvard. He will soon be joined in Boston by Yin Guan, who has been practicing austerity while backpacking India and Nepal since February. She is hopeful about enrolling at Harvard Divinity School this fall to study Buddhism. Ariel Finegold will start an MBA at Harvard this fall. Will Schulz wrote a piece for Huffington Post U.K., “Why We Shouldn’t Get So Depressed About Vaccine Hesitancy” (bit.ly/SchulzVaccines). Katie Schultz lives in Amsterdam, where she received a master’s in linguistics research from the University of Amsterdam in 2015. In April, she started as an assessment research and design researcher for the International Baccalaureate Organization and is now based at the IB Global Center in The Hague. Malik Mubeen and Eli Siegel visited her—she welcomes others! In her spare time, Katie bikes around the canals and makes quinoa. Lastly, Katherine Ozawa married Hunter Davis, and they are now Katie Ozawa and Hunter Davis Ozawa. 2015 Alexis Leanza leanzaalexis@gmail.com Treasure Tinsley works at Locus Analytics, a small research firm in New York. She spends most of her free time doing pottery. Harris Hoke finally accepted the Void into his heart—Harr & the Void plan to move into a charming two-bedroom colonial with granite countertops in Exton, Pa., to start a family. They’ve been reading a lot of Nick Land and look forward to building a small part of the unstoppable world-killing machine that will crush humanity forever. He promised me one Meat Mountain sandwich from Arby’s if I submitted this, verbatim. I, Alexis, am slowly succumbing to the corrupting influence of my class secretary position; with great power comes great Meat Mountain sandwiches. SUMMER 2017 / Swarthmore College Bulletin 71 spoken word campuses springing up in India, China, and Africa—like Patrick Awuah ’89 founding Ashesi University College in Ghana—in countries where the approach to college education had been very different. Continuing to connect our faculty and students to these other places could yield rich opportunities and collaborations. SWARTHMORE SALON by Jonathan Riggs ENDOWED IN 2014 by James ’79 and Anahita Naficy Lovelace, the Frank Aydelotte Foundation for the Advancement of the Liberal Arts celebrates and supports Swarthmore’s dynamic intellectual community in myriad ways, according to Senior Associate Director for Program Development Pam Shropshire and outgoing Director Eric Jensen, professor of astronomy. (Each faculty director term lasts three years; this month’s incoming faculty co-directors are English literature’s Rachel Buurma ’99 and history’s Timothy Burke.) 72 Swarthmore College Bulletin / SUMMER 2017 PAM SHROPSHIRE: Before Swarthmore, I worked for nonprofits focused on arts and culture, the humanities, and education. I was drawn to the Aydelotte Foundation because I want to build relationships. ERIC JENSEN: I come from the faculty, where we all have our individual disciplines and research, but we care about connecting across disciplines. It’s important to have a structure like the Aydelotte Foundation that explicitly pays attention to and supports that. It acts as a catalyst for intellectual exploration and engagement. We aim to inspire a greater understanding of, appreciation for, and participation in the liberal arts. That applies to two different but related spheres: on campus and in the outside world. An interesting future possibility for the Foundation is to look outward at the growth of liberal arts education in countries beyond the United States. There are liberal arts Another great initiative is spearheaded by Grace Ledbetter, a classics and philosophy professor who’s part of the Foundation. Faculty meet for dinner and a discussion of one faculty member’s scholarly work. Those conversations can feel like a luxury, but they’re an important part of making us stronger educators and more connected colleagues. I’ve heard faculty say these dinners are exactly the kind of thing they hoped they’d be able to do when they came to Swarthmore. Our goal is to demystify the liberal arts and give voice to those who champion its mission of empowering students with the interdisciplinary knowledge, insight, and experience they need to become leaders for the common good. That leadership is crucial—so many of the problems we wrestle with as a society are multifaceted. For example, I’m trained as an astronomer, but I’ve shifted some of my teaching time toward environmental studies and climate change. It’s a complex issue that requires input and insight from a lot of different disciplines. Working together, the way we do at Swarthmore, to find solutions that take advantage of the entire scope of human knowledge enriches and elevates us all. + LEARN MORE: swarthmore.edu/ aydelotte-foundation LAURENCE KESTERSON LAURENCE KESTERSON On campus, I’m excited about the launch of a new pilot: The Frank 5 Fellows—in recognition of Frank Aydelotte, Swarthmore’s seventh president—will showcase five alums under 30 undertaking interesting, inspiring work across different fields. Through their stories, we aim to expand our conversations with diverse public audiences and ground these conversations in shared values and beliefs. in this issue 9 M.I.T. TIME Science and Stories Bringing liberal arts flavor to STEM. LAURENCE KESTERSON by Josh Sokol ’11 MOMENT IN TIME Celebrate Commencement in full: bit.ly/SwatCom17. Congrats, Class of 2017! SUMMER 2017 Periodical Postage PAID Philadelphia, PA and Additional Mailing Offices WATER JUSTICE p7 DOGMA p10 RESISTENCIA p65 ISSUE IV 500 College Ave. Swarthmore, PA 19081–1306 www.swarthmore.edu VOLUME CXIV SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN YOUR SCHOOL AWAITS SUMMER 2017 Celebrate what makes Swarthmore special for each of us Garnet Homecoming and Family Weekend: Oct. 6–8 swarthmore.edu/garnetweekend CREDIT Curiosity