Swarthmore College Alumni Bulletin 1982-01-01

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Sight and insight: See page
selections from the
Alumni Cen|£nnial photography exhibit. \

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In this issue:
1

The Mirror with a Memory
B y C o n sta n c e Cain
H u n g e rfo rd

2

An Alumni Portfolio

15

On The Difficulties of Being
Reasonable
B y B ra n d B la n sh a rd , H on. '4 7

19

A Balancing Act
B y G ary G re e n b e rg '81

21

The College

24

A Centennial Homecoming

27

Football’8 1 : the big turn-around.

30

Class Notes

Editor:
M aralyn O rb iso n G illesp ie '4 9

Managing Editor:
N ancy Sm ith

Assistant Editor:
K athryn B assett '3 5

Editorial Assistant:
A nn D. G eer

Designer:
Bob Wood

Cover: Photo by W alter H. Pinkus '6 5 .
In this rom antic la n d sca p e the
reced in g pattern of w indsw ept sand
d irects our eyes from the n early flat
foreground to the recessed are a in the
backg ro u n d . The u se of flat
patterning to im ply depth turns this
barren la n d sca p e into a d ynam ic
com position. (See p ag e 2.)
The Sw arthm ore C o lleg e B ulletin (U SP S
5 3 0 -6 2 0 ), of w hich this is Volum e LXXIX,
nu m ber 4, is p u blish ed in Septem ber,
O ctober, D ecem ber, Jan u ary, M arch, and
June by Sw arthm ore C ollege, Sw arthm ore,
PA 19 0 8 1 . S eco n d c la s s p o stag e paid at
Sw arthm ore, PA and ad d itio n al m ailin g
offices. P ostm aster: Send ad d ress c h a n g e s
to Sw arthm ore C o lleg e Bulletin, Sw arth­
more, PA 1 9 0 8 1 .

Though of miraculous detail and
verisimilitude, the daguerreotype
had one major shortcoming: Each
photo, arrested on an opaque
metal plate, was unique.
Concurrently, however, an Eng­
lishman, William Henry Fox Tal­
bot, was perfecting a negative­
positive process. He called this the
calotype, from the Greek word for
beautiful. Talbot's "film" (the sur­
ince 1839, when the details of face bearing his light-sensitive
how to make a daguerreotype chemicals and that which became
were revealed to the public his negative) was writing paper,
in a joint meeting of the Academies the texture of which created a less
of Sciences and Fine Arts in Paris, detailed image, with characteris­
photography has been regarded tic graininess and strong contrasts
uncertainly: on the one hand, as a between darks and lights. Though
"scientific/' mechanical recording less popular with the public than
process; on the other, as an artistic daguerreotype, in the hands of
medium comparable to, though some early practitioners in the
differing from, painting or print­ 1840s and early 1850s such traits
were exploited to aesthetic effect.
making.
The advantages of both pro­
Of course, photography is used
frequently as a record-maker—in cesses—detail and tonal variation,
police mug shots, for example, or with the possibility of making
in views of the rings of Saturn sent duplicates—were jointly achieved
back by Voyager. Throughout its in the wet-plate collodion process,
history the mechanical aspects introduced by Frederick Scott
have always received emphasis; Archer in 1851. In this case the
photography's course is marked support surface was not silverby a series of sometimes accidental plated copper or paper, but glass,
technical improvements whose to which light-sensitive chemicals
economical value has often been adhered because the glass was
realized by the same patent first coated with collodion. Though
process applied to other inven­ its product was superior, the pro­
cess* itself was cumbersome and
tions.
Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre's potentially dangerous, since col­
process produced an image on a lodion was a derivative of the
polished silver-surfaced copper explosive gun-cotton. Each stage
plate, hence Oliver Wendell Holmes' of treatment—coating the plate
characterization of the daguerreo­ with collodion, making it light
type as "the mirror with a memory.'' sensitive, exposing it in the
It required long exposures in camera (by removing the lens cap
bright sunlight, initially twenty and timing with a watch), and
minutes which was later reduced developing and fixing—had to be
to two or three, so that the sitters' completed immediately. Photog­
faces often have pained scowls, or raphers had to have with them, in
they are posed "thoughtfully" addition to the awkward cameras,
with hand to downcast brow. a heavy stock of glass plates, all

S

SW ARTHM ORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

M irro r w ith a M e m o r y
As an art form and as a technological tool, photography has
fascinated observers and practitioners alike for a century and a half.

the various chemicals, and a dark­
room. Use was thus most sensible
in studios, where portraits could
be produced in assembly-line
fashion.
Despite difficulties, the collo­
dion process was taken up enthu­
siastically by such amateurs a>s
Julia Margaret Cameron, who, for
subjects, victimized fellow Vic­
torians (like Charles Darwin and
Alfred Lord Tennyson, using a
glassed-in chicken hutch as her
studio or "glass house"; and Lewis
Carroll, who photographed the
same little girls for whom he wrote
Alice in Wonderland. The process
was used also by Civil War pho­
tographers Matthew Brady, Alex­
ander Gardner, and Timothy O'­
Sullivan—though the "what's-it
wagon," as the troops called the
mobile darkroom, was an uncom­
fortably convenient battlefield tar­
get. In the 1870s and 1880s some
of these intrepid photographers
accompanied the surveying and
railroad-building teams which
opened the territories of the
American Far West. Though oc­
casionally a mule slipped off a
treacherous trail, carrying its
precious load of materials and
finished work, breathtaking pho­
tos were brought back of scarcelybelievable sites like the Grand
Canyon and Yellowstone Park.
Modern photography developed
in the 1880s. Gelatin dry plates,
which could be prepared in ad­
vance, stored, and developed well
after exposure, came into use in
the early 1880s, together with
cameras with improved features
like better and varied lenses, ad­
justable diaphragms, and auto­
matic shutters. Manufactured roll
film was marketed in 1888 and
color film in 1935, while the first
form of the 35mm camera was
JANUARY, 1982

introduced in 1924. Ease of use
has continued to be a selling point:
Just as Daguerre advertised the
virtues of his invention saying
"the little work it entails will
greatly please the ladies," so
George Eastman introduced his
Kodak camera in 1888 with the
slogan "You Press the Button, We
do the Rest."
Because of its mechanical as­
pects the camera always has been
regarded by some as automatic
and objective, its results inde­
pendent of the skill or creativity of
the photographer. Baudelaire ex­
coriated the camera as an instru­
ment of mindless realism, blaming
it for "the impoverishment of
French artistic genius." Yet any­
one who has been disappointed
with newly developed prints or
slides knows that photography
isn 't altogether predictable, no
matter what camera is used. Luck
is useful and sophisticated equip­
ment helps, but knowing w hen to
push the button and at w hat to
have the camera pointed, from
what distance and angle, and
under what lighting conditions,
are all decisions to be made by the
photographer, who may also
manipulate other aspects such as
relative focus, film type, paper,
and possibly darkroom proce­
dures. A final key area of choice,
often overlooked, involves identi­
fying which shots to preserve and
reproduce from the many similar
exposures that may have been
BY CONSTANCE
CAIN HUNGERFORD
Ms. Hungerford, associate professor of art
history and chairman of the Department of Art,
teaches a course on the origins and develop­
m ent of photography as a form of artistic
expression and cultural communication.

made on a roll of film.
These decisions, involving the
treatment of given motifs and con­
ditions in the physical world, may
seem more circumscribed than
those of the painter or draftsman
who can freely alter the raw ma­
terial of nature or give visual form
to entirely imaginary subjects. But
it is at such points that the aesthe­
tic dimension enters photography
and qualifies as an art. The writ­
ings and work of modern masters
like Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Wes­
ton, Ansel Adams, and Henri
Cartier-Bresson all reflect acute
consciousness of the increasingly
broad range of choices given the
photographer. Even seemingly
dispassionate documentary pho­
tographers have the opportunity
to editorialize, as did Lewis Hine,
who photographed child laborers
at the beginning of the century in
order to bring about reforms, or
Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange,
who worked with the Farm Security
Administration in order to demon­
strate the necessity for social
activism in new government pro­
grams in the 1930s.
Official legitimization has come
as major art museums, such as the
Philadelphia Museum of Art, the
Metropolitan, the Museum of
Modern Art, the Chicago Art Insti­
tute, and the Bibliothèque Nation­
ale in Paris, have established
photography sections, with both
historical and contemporary ma­
terial, and as photography has
been incorporated into academic
curricula. At Swarthmore photog­
raphy had long been pursued
informally in an extracurricular
club before Ford Venture Funds
made it possible to equip a dark­
room for classroom use and to
institute a studio arts photography
course in 1977.
□
I

The art of seeing involves the
sensing of light reflected in a variety
of intensities from a variety of forms.
Perception occurs with the interpre­
tation of the light messages through
information stored from past experi­
ences and learning. Perception, thus,
implies not only sight but insight, the
recognition of meaning, relevance,
and value as it relates to the indi­
vidual. Most of us have experienced
the sensation of having a written
word lose its associative meaning and appear strange, an
abstraction, a mere sguiggle. The meaning, as culturally
defined, is what constitutes perception. The squiggle is
what we experienced "seeing.”
Although we realize conceptually that a tree is seen dif­
ferently through the eyes of another person, it is quite a
different experience when we are confronted with that fact
in a graphic medium. This, at base, is the power of
photography.
An individual's unique vision, conveyed through the
photographic composition, becom es the perception within
the viewer s mind, and an expansion of his or her under­
standing and appreciation of life.
This portfolio, a selection of photographs from the recent
alumni exhibition celebrating the centennial of the Alumni
Association, is presented with the understanding that the
Introduction and notes on the individu­ photographers all shared a collective experience called
Swarthmore, and with the recognition that this experience
al photographs b y Brian A. Meunier,
assistant professor of art.
helped define their individual perceptions.
JANUARY, 1982

1

Caroline Carlson ’5 9 : Bottom right:
By using a shallow depth of field,
the photographer separates the
figure in the immediate foreground
from the urban background. This
sharp focus forces us into direct
confrontation with the pain of this
world-weary survivor. Bottom left:
Photographed in low direct lighting,
this image is a richly tonal state­
ment on adult indoctrination of the
innocent. In the photograph on
page 2, the gnarled hands are
emphasized through framing and
shallow focus. Using an over-theshoulder perspective, the photog­
rapher evokes a sense of the familiar.
The tools, as extensions of the hands,
become icons of a livelihood.

Paula Herman Gross ’6 2 : Within
this serene composition, with its
accomplished sense of formal
balance, spring and winter are
juxtaposed. The flowers, in sil­
houette against the window, mirror
in tonality the shadow they cast.
Another contrast occurs between
the shadow thrown on the ground
by an unseen winter tree and the
shadow cast on the table by the
spring blossoms.

\\\\

Grant Heilman ’41: Right: We
are first drawn to the horizontally
shadowed row of sheep in the fore­
ground. Our eyes then move over
the individually shadowed heads
toward the shepherd amid the flock.
The cloud of dust neutralizes the
tones in the center of the print while
those at the periphery remain more
intense, thus giving the image,
printed in natural colors, a curious
hand-tinted effect. Above: The high
contrast and unrelenting overall
white ground in this print almost
eliminate perception of depth. If it
were not for the crisp and granular
texture of the new-fallen snow and
the shadow cast by this lone sur­
vivor, this print would seem to be a
drawing.

6

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Leandr^ K. Jack so n ’7 5 : Devel­

oped in sepia-tone, this photograph
has the quality of an old print and
evokes a sense of nostalgia for
things and times past. The foggy
atmosphere, through which the
bleachers appear as if in a vision,
adds to the sensation that one is
seeing through a memory.

Bruce W. Reedy ’6 8 : Although in
postures of physical intimacy, each
member of this family seems to be
in a separate world and consumed
by private thought. Vertically
aligned, they gaze, nonetheless, in
different directions. Using low
directional lighting, the photog­
rapher has created a pensive por­
trait of a family as a unit and as
individuals.

I

8

SW ARTHM ORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

Carol L. Thompson ’5 2 : In brilliant
sunlight the umbrella's shadow
functions as a reverse spotlight. The
photographer, by setting her light
meter for the shadowed area,
caused the rest of the pavement to
fade to flat white, emphasizing the
detailed pavement within the
shadow. Through manipulation of
light, the artist draws us imme­
diately into the girl's private world
beneath the umbrella.

10

David L. Camp ’7 0 : The uniformity
of sand and sky in this photograph
creates a flattened plane on which
the children seem to be climbing
up to a frieze. The figures, aligned
laterally at the juncture of sand and
sky, reinforce our reading of the
hillside as a two-dimensional plane.
With fence-like legs, the children
appear to be poised in triumph
after their climb.

IN

JANUARY, 1982

Joseph C. Bender ’3 9 : In this
Carolyn Shields Fabricant ’61:
photograph of an overgrown
Like the trees in the photograph at
country lane the trees have a hard,
right, this portrait draws upon the
firm guality produced by high con­
gualities of age and dignity. The
trast tonality while the grass
use of angled lighting enabled the
photographer to model and empha­ remains soft and pliant. Through
the manipulation of light, the pho­
size the woman's physical features.
tographer emphasizes texture and
There is a sense of proud deter­
mination in the subject's pursed lips creates a composition which is both
dynamic and subtle. The picture of
which contrasts with a certain vul­
nerability in her eyes. This sensitive the snail on page 3 is another
careful and thoughtful nature study
portrait conveys the shock of a
by this photographer.
guestion.

Bruce Cratsley ’6 6 : This image
would appear to be completely
abstract were it not for the recog­
nizable silhouette of a leg and highheeled shoe. The leg, as a literal
object, insinuates real space and
forces the viewer to search for other
clues. Intentionally ambiguous, this
photograph exists somewhere be­
tween light-as-phenomenon and
the perceptual interpretation of that
phenomenon.
14

The exhibition of photographs by
alumni, from which these samples
were selected, was on view in
McCabe Library from October 23
through November 25, 1981. In
addition to the photographers rep­
resented here, the following alumni
showed works in the exhibit: loslyn
Barritt '78; Bradley Fisk, Ir. '48;
David K. Veleta '80; and Sally A.
Warren '65.

SW ARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

The grayest of all virtues, although hard to achieve, may be the highest benefit that education can confer.

ON THE
DIFFICULTIES
OF BEING

REASONABLE
By Brand Blandshard, Hon. ’47

I

n the sixty years since I began teach­
ing philosophy, three questions have
cropped up incessantly. The first is:
Why study philosophy at all? The
second is: What is the end we ought to
pursue in education? The third is:
Among the virtues that make a good
citizen, a good person, a good life,
which is the most important? And it
grows clearer to me that the answers to
all these questions, different as they are,
are the same. Why study philosophy? To
reach truth, of course. But when you con­
sider for how many centuries philoso­
phers have been pursuing the truth, and
how widely they still differ, what are
your chances of capturing that truth?
Not high, one must agree. Is the study
therefore wasted? Not at all. For if you
pursue the truth seriously, and fail to get
it, as you may, you come out with a
mind invaluably honed and whetted,
and that in itself is prize enough. What
is the end of education? Not knowledge,
or skill, or financial security, good as
these are, but something far rarer, the
habitually reasonable mind. What is the
most valuable of the virtues? It is that in
us which makes us most likely to be
right in thought and act, and that seems
to be the use of one’s reason. Indeed, I
am inclined to think that to be right is
always to be reasonable and to be
reasonable is to be right. So all three
answers are the same. What we seem to
need above all is the rational temper, the
JANUARY, 1982

habitual attempt, at least, to be reason­
able. So my text is a beatitude that
Matthew somehow missed: Blessed are
the reasonable.
The first thing that has to be said
about this text is that we are in revolt
against it. Reasonableness as the end of
an education or a life? How dull! Rea­
sonableness is the grayest of all virtues.
What we like is dash, not drabness.
Perhaps because of our frontier history,
our heroes are people who live dan­
gerously; we like the bold, the defiant
people who raise our pulse-rates—the
Daniel Boones, the Andrew Jacksons,
the John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart
types; we have been called the Latin
branch of the Anglo-Saxon race.
Reasonableness would put a brake on
all this, and we don’t like brakes, or even
55-mile-an-hour speed limits. Looking
back at the sixties and seventies, would
you say that quiet and thoughtful ration­
ality was more conspicuous by its pres­
ence or by its absence? Think of the
violence issuing in a stream from that
box in the corner of our living room.
Think of the paperbacks on display in
our drugstores and airports. Think of
the eerie silence of our inner cities at
night, when people are afraid to walk
their own streets. Think of what we put
up with in the name of music, painting,
and poetry. Think of how hard it is for
any of us to see straight about race, or
the rights of women, or abortion. These

problems will never be solved by the
appeal to force, or to nationalism, or to
prejudice, however ancient; the only
relevant appeal is the appeal to reason,
the determined attempt on both sides to
see and act reasonably.
But now what does one mean by
reasonableness? Not intelligence. That
would help, no doubt, but I recall the
outburst of President Gideonse of
Brooklyn College that “some of the
biggest swine in history have been great
intellects.” Nor is it breadth of knowl­
edge, for it is possible to be monumen­
tally learned and yet to lack common
sense. No, the reasonableness of which I
speak is a settled disposition to guide
one’s belief and conduct by the evidence.
It is a bent of the will to order one’s
thought by the relevant facts, to order
one’s practice in the light of the values
involved, to make reflective judgment
the compass of one’s belief and decision.
Such reasonableness, unlike intelli­
gence, is an acquired, not an innate,
characteristic. In this respect it is like
knowledge. But the knowledge attained
as an undergraduate has mostly van­
ished by the time one gets one’s diploma
attesting how great it is. If you are like
me, facts do not stay with you, while
habits, for good or evil, do. And reason­
ableness, as I have defined it, may
become a habit. It is a habit that, once
acquired, can be kept permanently and
applied in any field. Indeed, if you man15

age in this fostering place to acqtiire it,
you will have achieved the highest
benefit that education can confer.
There are many things that education
can do for a person. It can render him an
expert technician in electrical engineer­
ing or bone surgery; it can make him a
leading authority in the chronological
stratification of vowel contraction in
Greek. I do not deprecate such knowl­
edge. But a super-mole or a super­
magpie does not necessarily possess an
educated mind. What we expect of such
a mind is a distinctive temper, a readi­
ness to look before leaping, indeed to
look at all sides of an issue and attach
due weight to each, to see things not
through rose-tinted or black-tinted or
distorting or magnifying lenses, but as
they are. In short, what we want from
education is the reasonable mind.
If seeing things as they are seems an
easy business, let it be added that no one
has yet achieved it, and probably no one
ever will. Freud, it is said, contributed
more to psychology than any other man
since Aristotle, and what he contributed
was chiefly an insight into the ways in
which thought veers and shifts under
the control of hidden desires. “Many of
us,” says F. L. Lucas, “having read our
Freud, have grown more skeptical than
ever, seeing reason no longer as a search­
light, but usually as a gust-swept candle
guttering amid the winds and night of
the unconscious.” Nor is it the thought
of ignorant people alone that gutters in
the winds of prejudice. I once heard that
wise «jan Dean Woodbridge of Colum­
bia say that he had almost given up hope
for the League of Nations because of his
experience at Columbia faculty meetings.
Why is it so hard to be reasonable?
“Things are what they are, and will be
what they will be; why then,” asked
Bishop Butler, “should we seek to
deceive ourselves?” That is a fascinating
and important question, but the general
answer to it does not seem difficult.
That answer is that we are all divided
personalities, like the two girls of whom
one said to the other, “I feel rather
schizophrenic today; 1 hope you don’t
mind.” “Oh no,” said the other; “that
makes four of us.” We are lovers of
truth, but also lovers of much else; and
it is hard to keep the competing loves
from interfering with each other.
On the one hand, we all want to know.
A. E. Housman said that the love of
truth is the faintest of human passions,
but it remains a passion nevertheless,
and not even the most bewildered fresh­
16

man or blasé senior is without it. Every
one of us would like to understand
better the world we live in. How
many people, if offered as a gift a full
understanding of Einstein or the best
cure for inflation, would turn it down?
We might not be willing to walk a mile
for it, as we would with such abandon
for a Camel, but we might well say, with
Dr. Johnson, that there is nothing we
would not rather know than not know.
This interest in truth may flicker feebly
in a strumming hippie or rise to the
passion of a life as in Spinoza, but it is
present to a degree in everyone.
On the other hand, along with this
interest in truth each of us has (or
perhaps we should say is) a set of other
interests and impulses—impulses to
love, to fight, to seek company, to imi­
tate, to run from danger, to eat, to
drink, to be merry, and many more.
These impulses tend to organize around
a certain idea, such as the excellence of
one’s self or one’s group, and to respond
positively to whatever supports it and
negatively to whatever threatens it.
These clusters of impulses are called
sentiments. Take the sentiment of selflove. Each of us, if normal, wishes to go
on living, to succeed, to have influence,
to be thought well of, by ourselves and
by others. Whatever furthers this selflove we tend to like— people who
approve of or admire us, games or work
that we are good at, doctors who have
pulled us through, teachers who have
encouraged us, places where we have
been happy and made good. On the
other hand, whatever blocks this selflove we tend to dislike— persons who
criticize us, or make us feel stupid or
gauche, studies in which we are incom­
petent, rivals who sneer at us, hostesses
who ignore us, neighbors who say that
we treat our car, or lawn, or dog shab­
bily. We all seem to recognize some part
of Archie Bunker in ourselves.
A nd just as the thought of our self
/ % is a node around which the
/ % forces of feeling gather, so
l
also is the thought of the
group to which we belong. We are all
members of such groups: first our
family, then perhaps our church, our
party, our country, and our race. We
identify ourselves with them; their
success is our success; anyone who is
against them is against us. There are, to
be sure, people who rise above this, even
as regards blood ties. It is told of Lord
North that while standing once in the

back of a theater and exchanging im­
pressions with a stranger, he was asked:
“Who is that plain-looking woman
yonder?” “That, sir,” he replied, “is my
wife.” “Oh no,” said his companion
hastily, “I mean the woman next to her.”
“That, sir, is my daughter. And let me
tell you, sire, we are considered to be
three of the ugliest people in London.”
But that is a level of unresentment that
for most of us would be up in the clouds.
We can now see a little more clearly
perhaps why it is so hard to be reason­
able. On any given subject there is just
one true view. That view may be hidden
away beneath mounds of ambiguous
and conflicting evidence which only a
committed seeker after truth would
have the determination to sift and clear
away. Yet our whole nonrational self
may press upon us a simpler view of its
own that unifies our nature behind it,
that satisfies our sentiments regarding
ourselves and our group, that cuts off
the restlessness of doubt and the strain
of reflective effort, that gives us the
serene inner peace of being right, that
has in fact only one thing against it:
that it may be, and probably is, wrong.
What our intelligence wants is, of
course, the truth. What the rest of our
nature asks from our intelligence is not
what is true but what will satisfy. By
that we mean what will appease our
impulsive and emotional nature, our
longing to be liked, our desire to see our
future secure, our character respected,
our faith vindicated, our party shown to
be the party of sober sense, our nation
triumphant. When one considers how
hidden and barricaded the truth com­
monly is, how definite it is, allowing no
alternative, how feeble is our passion
for it, and how overwhelming the
tendencies in us to look for it through
distorting prisms, the wonder is not that
most of us are irrational but that some
of us are as rational as we are.
Are we hopelessly caught in this net
of desires? Some people say we are, at
least so soon as we leave the ground of
palpable fact. Freud thought all reli­
gious belief sprang from the desire for
security. Marx thought the defenses of
capitalism commonly offered were
rationalizations of class interest. Even
William James suggested that what
philosophers were doing was engineer­
ing the universe along the lines of their
temperamental needs, coming out as
rationalists if they were tender-minded,
empiricists if they were tough-minded.
Have you ever noticed newspaper picSW ARTHM ORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

tures of golfers making their final putts
on the green, and how they twist them­
selves into fantastic shapes as a means
of helping the ball into the cup? James
thought that philosophers were putters
on the green of life, trying by a little
English to make the nature of things
answer to their wishes.
MacNeille Dixon, in his Gifford lec­
tures on The Human Situation, has put
the case boldly: “There never yet was a
philosopher, whatever they may have
said, no, nor man of science, whose con­
clusions ran counter to the dearest
wishes of his heart, who summed up
against them, o f condemned his hopes
to death. How honestly Darwin con­
fessed the lurking presence of the desire
to prove his theory true! ‘I remember
well the time when the thought of the
eye made me cold all over. . . . The sight
of a feather in a peacock’s tail, when I
gaze at it, makes me sick.”’
Here I think we must demur. The
mention of Darwin was an unfortunate
one for Professor Dixon’s case, for that
great man is one of the finest examples
on record of the honest and objective
mind. He did, to be sure, want to find
his theory true, but his statement of it,
when at last he gave it to the world,
carried conviction precisely because he
was so fully aware of its difficulties; he
had kept a journal of them over the
years, and had answered them decisively
before most of his critics had thought of
them. “I have steadily endeavored,” he
wrote, “to keep my mind free, so as to
give up any hypothesis however much
beloved as soon as the facts are shown
to be opposed to it.” Furthermore, it is
perfectly possible to sum up against
one’s desires. Darwin’s friend Huxley
admitted that the thought of death as
extinction was hateful to him, but he
accepted it because he believed the evi­
dence required it. On the other hand,
Professor C. D. Broad, one of the most
distinguished minds of this century,
concluded, on the evidence of psychical
research, that he probably would sur­
vive death, though in such a form that
he accepted his own survival with
depression.
No doubt none of us is free from un­
reasonable hopes and fears. But unless
our thought can to some extent work
loose from them, what is the point of
philosophizing, even about this? Freud
did not think that his theory of the id
was itself a mere distortion by that id, or
Marx that his theory of class determi­
nation was itself a by-product of his
JANUARY, 1982

If seeing things as they are
seems an easy business, let it
be added that no one has yet
achieved it, and probably no
one ever will.
class, or James that his empiricism was
merely congenial to his temperament
rather than true. And if thought is the
puppet of feeling, what is the point of
education? Educated malice and mis­
anthropy are more dangerous than the
blundering kind; think of Satan, and
Iago, and Stalin. Surely the whole
venture of education assumes that
thought can be freed from slavery to
feeling and desire, and can achieve some
mastery over them.
If this impersonal reasonableness is
hard in thought, it is even harder in
practical life, because it calls for a mag­
nanimity beyond the range of most of
us. But even so, it has been achieved in
high degree. There is a story of how
some tale-bearer came to Lincoln one
day with a report of Secretary Stanton’s
having said angrily, about a recent
action of the President, that he had
acted like a fool. The tale-bearer no
doubt expected an explosion. Instead

Lincoln remarked thoughtfully that if
Mr. Stanton had said that, he was prob­
ably right, since he generally was. Most
men, when they hear criticism of what
they have said or done, consume more
energy in resenting the malice that
they think inspired it than in consider­
ing whether it is true. So it is surprising
to learn that there are people who feel
little or nothing of such resentment. It
was said of Mirabeau that he found it
difficult to forgive the insults and mean­
ness done to him, for the reason that he
had forgotten all about them. It was my
privilege many years ago to hear two
British statesmen who stood tempera­
mentally at opposite poles— Mr. Lloyd
George, a mercurial, emotional, elo­
quent Celt, known as “the Welsh
wizard,” and Mr. Asquith, a man so
incapable of being carried away from
his proud moorings in judicial reason­
ableness, so genuinely impersonal and
unvindictive, that he was called “the last
of the Romans.” Lloyd George appealed
to my youth. With the passage of the
years, Asquith has replaced him in my
gallery of admirations.
I was saying something like this to a
historian colleague when he protested
that I was not seeing things in perspec­
tive. We academics may admire quiet
detachment, but it is not the reasonable
people, he said, who have been the
powers and movers in history. Asquith
after all was turned out in favor of
Lloyd George when a man was needed
who would win the war. As Whitehead
circumspectly puts it, “a certain element
of excess seems to be a necessary
element in all greatness,” or as Leo
Durocher would put it in Anglo-Saxon,
“nice guys finish last.” The people who
have turned the current of events have
more often been flaming, dogmatic,
one-eyed zealots and geniuses than
reasonable men—Genghis Khan, Mo­
hammed, Martin Luther and John
Knox, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Mao
Tse Tung. How far would Hitler have
gone if he had been a reasonable man?
The answer is, first, that he might
never have been heard of, and second,
that it might have been better for the
world if none of these zealots had been
heard of. Secondly, the mere fact of
changing history, without regard to
whether the change is for good or bad, is
no ground for hero-worship. You may
question my including such a hero as
Luther in a list of zealots. He was some­
thing of a hero to me until I read him.
Then I began to think there was sub17

stance in Goethe’s judgment, as echoed
by the historian Froude, that Luther
“threw back the intelligence of mankind
for centuries by calling in the passions
of the mob to decide questions which
ought to have been left to thinkers.” If a
leader does decide things by passion, he
may be either a blessing or a curse.
Thirdly, the notion that reasonable men
must turn out to be Hamlets when given
the reins of power is untrue. Marcus
Aurelius and Masaryk were good
governors in spite of being philosophers;
Turgot and Jefferson left the impress of
their wisdom on their countries. Fourth­
ly, men of reflection have often gained
men of action as their adjutants. It has
been pointed out that the intellectual
yeast of the four great revolutions of
modern times came out of philosophers’
studies. Behind the American Revolu­
tion lay John Locke; behind the French,
Rousseau and Voltaire; behind the
Russian and Chinese the thought of a
poverty-stricken exile, spinning his
webs with intelligence and hatred in the
British Museum. The partial failure of
the last two revolutions springs largely
from the fact that, in the philosophies
they embodied, reason was so liberally
mixed with and neutralized by hatred.
We have seen, so far, that the reason­
able temper is difficult, but that it is not
impossible, and that it is much needed
in high places. May I now go on to say
that it is needed everywhere today. “The
irrational,” says F. L. Lucas, “now in
politics, now in poetry, has been the
sinister opium of our tormented and
demeqted century.” Resistance to this
epidemic virus of the mind is perhaps
particularly needed among Americans.
Our constitution gives us a wide latitude
of freedom, and the Supreme Court has
confirmed it in a notable series of
decisions, such as the one refusing to
gag even pornography.
Such freedom is precious, but it is
bought at a price. It gives the stage and
screen, fiction and journalism and ad­
vertising, carte blanche to be vacuously
sensational if they want to be. And
they commonly do want to be. They
tend to settle to the level of the greatest
dollar return, and that is the Dead Sea
level of what will excite without exciting
reflection. We might, of course, try
official censorship. Russia has adopted
that, even insisting that artists and
scientists toe an ideological line, and
turning violators into unpersons. But
that kind of protection we do not want.
We are taking the high and difficult
18

course—the only course consistent with
our tradition of freedom—of leaving
censorship to the reasonableness of the
individual mind.
Such freedom will be used differently
by the classic and the romantic. The
romantic thinks of the control of
impulse as an infringement of his free­
dom; the classic thinks of it as an indis­
pensable means to freedom. “In all
things,” said Dostoyevsky, “I go to the
uttermost extreme; my life long, I have
never been acquainted with moderation.”
“Those who restrain desire,” said Wil­
liam Blake, “do so because theirs is
weak enough to be restrained.” There
speaks the pure romantic. The classic
would point out that both Blake and
Dostoyevsky were probably mad—
though the romantic might reply that he
would be quite happy to be mad if he
could be Blake or Dostoyevsky.
In the talk about the reasonable
temper as imposing a yoke or a straitjacket upon the life of feeling, there is
much misunderstanding. Reason does
tell the angry or jealous or fearful man
that if he lets all holds go and gives
feeling its head he will pay the price, but
control is not repression, it is prudence;
it is the purchase of a larger good by a
smaller present sacrifice. Burke said: “It
is ordained in the eternal constitution of
things that men of intemperate minds
cannot be free.” Plato reminded us that
life is like a chariot race in which the
driver, reason, is in charge of two spirited
horses, our appetites and our emotions.
It is only if, through an expert use of bits
and reins, the driver can make these run
together that he will ever manage to stay
the course and avoid an Indianapolis
speedway pile-up. Neither horse can
win freedom by running ahead, or hang­
ing back, or tripping up the other, for
that might involve the whole enterprise
in ruin, and other drivers too. Slavery,
Plato insisted, lay not in the dominance
of reason over impulse, which was really
Brand B/anshard, Hon ’47, professor o f
philosophy at Swarthmore from ¡925 to
1944, has been honored with the appearance
o f The Philosophy of Brand Blanshard in
the Library o f Living Philosophers pub­
lished by Open Court. Since the series was
established in 1939 only fifteen philosophers
have been selected for inclusion, among
them John Dewey, under whom Blanshard
studied, and G. E. Moore, who was visiting
professor at Swarthmore in 1943. A con­
tributor to the Blanshard volume is W. T.
Jones ’31, professor o f philosophy at Cali­
fornia Institute o f Technology.

freedom, but in impulse over reason,
which was anarchy.
I hope it begins to appear why I place
so high a value on the gray virtue of
reasonableness. It is not an intellectual
virtue only; it is a spirit and temper that
irradiates practice, permeates feeling and
filters down into one’s taste and talk.
Because it is so impalpable, it may be
thought that reasonableness is rather like
personal charm, something pleasant to
find in anyone, but elusive, inimitable,
hardly to be pursued or even talked
about, a blessing if one has it, unattain­
able if not. Why not leave it at that?
Because we cannot afford to. The best
things in life are impalpable things, and
if the reasonable temper is, as I have
suggested, the finest product of educa­
tion, it ought to be recognized and con­
sciously pursued. To be sure, there are
no courses in it or examinations on it;
and many of us academics would flunk
miserably if there were. Formal educa­
tion helps us toward it, but it is not by
itself enough.
What more is necessary? The most
important thing, probably, is genuine
admiration for it. If a quality of charac­
ter comes to seem so important that one
identifies one’s self-respect with having
it, one will get it. The Stoics felt that way
about bearing pain; Christians have felt
that way about kindliness to others;
soldiers have traditionally felt that way
about their honor; French aristocrats of
the old regime felt that way about
chivalry. Is it an impractical dream to
think that the respect men have felt for
hardihood, for kindliness, for honor,
they might come to feel for the reason­
able mind?
My hope is that in our academic com­
munities, at least, this respect for the
reasonable temper may come to prevail.
Breadth of knowledge is good; research
is good; increasing specialism is inevi­
table. But these are obvious and rela­
tively easy goods. “The great aim of
education,” said Adam Smith bluntly,
“is to direct vanity to proper objects,”
and if there is anything a man can be
vain of without danger, it is the reason­
able spirit, since it is a vanity that
corrects itself. The reasonable temper!
It is the check against the old Adam in
ourselves; it is the ultimate resource of
the community against bigotry and
injustice. Those who have it are not
likely to be the most conspicuous
members of their community, or the
most dramatic, or picturesque, or excit­
ing—only the most likely to be right.
SW ARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

ince May, 1980, I have lived in
the woods in Connecticut in a
small cabin which I built. My
major source of income has
been the sale of firewood and timber
which I cut from the land I live on. It
often seems that my education is irrele­
vant to this life, that my ability to think
is a superfluous commodity in a world
which has little room for the unneces­
sary. There are no questions of philos­
ophy or logic in the woods: The tree
falls, and whether or not it makes a
sound is hardly debatable. The sudden
silence of the woods after the falling is
undeniable; the interruption of its life,
as the silence ripples across it, is
complete.
My friend Willy would not be com­
fortable with questions of logic, he is,
however, clearly at home atop his 1952
Farmall tractor, its front wheels off the
ground, steering it with the brakes. His
well-wron face is almost lost to view as
oil smoke pours out over his task—to
drag a cord of wood up the hill and to
the landing. A log fetches up on a
stump, and the front wheels leap even
higher into the air, then crash down
again, throwing Willy up and down in
his metal seat in a mimic of the tractor’s
bounce. Looking back, pausing only
long enough to shift gears, he backs
over the chain hitched to the wood,
catches it between the lugs of the tire,
and now a sprocket gear lifts chain and
log over the obstacles. He shifts again,
the tractor growls forward up the hill,
its load intact, the rhythm unbroken.
These mishaps and recoveries are rou­
tine, and throughout Willy displays his
marvelous dexterity, his thorough
knowledge of his job and its tools.
Another friend, Cap, reigns over Dick
and Dan, his two-ton team of oxen.
From the moment he coaxes them out
of the school bus in which they travel
until they lumber back up the ramp,
they are perfectly obedient to his com­
mands, heeding him with the speed that
only a bull can have, speed which is
mostly just the movement of an enor­
mous mass at a steady pace in one
direction. With six or seven tons of
sawlog behind them, they pound
through brush and over stumps and
around boulders until something grabs
a log and stops them short. Then Cap
flicks his whip lightly, bids them pull
harder or backs them off or swings them
right or left, maneuvering them in the
turning radius of a compact car. Then,
they are free, without its being clear

S

A Balancing Act
Whenthe mind and the hand
cannot work together,
the heart is divided as well.
By Gary Greenberg ’81

JANUARY, 1982

19

why, and they start back up the hill, the
oxen barely straining, Cap talking
gently to them in their private language.
They are a team of dancers, the pas de
trois as graceful as Willy and his tractor.
It is difficult to convey with words the
grace of a beat-up tractor or of two
bulls, but it is there. And watching them
on a cold October morning in the New
England woods, I hardly miss the ques­
tions I might have asked as a student, or
that I find myself asking later—when
I’m doing the dishes or walking alone in
the woods, or in a moment of clumsi­
ness when a tree falls wrong. But for
now, watching the men, the tractor, and
the oxen on a cold October morning in
the New England woods, their dance is
enough. The activity of mind I am
accustomed to seems out of place
among people whose elegance is largely
the result of not stopping to think and
manifested in an ability to get things
done with whatever is at hand. Cap’s
ten-year-old son can rig a chain faster
than I can figure out the physics of the
matter in my head to arrive at the same
rigging. I will spend half a day trying to
decide which trees in a certain area to
drop, wondering whether this one or
that one is not too beautiful, too old or
too young, home to too many squirrels
to cut down. I can think myself into or
out of doing anything. I am left always
uncertain, even after the trees are down,
always able to conjure up the other side
of the issue. “All the saws of books” are
of no hlep, and I am often on the brink
of a paralysis that perhaps only a varsity
thinker can know: To know how to
think, but not how to stop thinking and
just get things done without at the same
time forgetting that I can think.
Willy has cancer, most likely brought

20

never knew that it takes twenty or thirty
good-sized trees to provide lumber for
one 300-square-foot house. I never saw
the connection between my backyard
and my front door. People here often
build their houses with their own trees.
They can see and comprehend the con­
nection; they know what must be done.
I went to schools in which only shop
students got their hands dirty, while at
college, students exercised their minds
I am capable with both hands
for a life of clean-handed mental dex­
and mind. It is the dexterity
terity. At college, leaves were raked,
lawns mowed, meals served, dorms
to unite them which I lack.
cleaned, linens changed, toilets un­
larynx which gives him a voice like clogged, and buildings painted exclu­
rough sandpaper. And soon I may have sively by people who were “dirtyhanded.” I had a manual job offto miss him.
campus (as a caretaker on a Delaware
All around me woodlands have been
cut off, “liquidated” in the industry County farm), and I often wished to
parlance. Loggers will gladly cut every integrate the school work and the job,
tree over fourteen inches in diameter in the academy and the real world, but my
a woodlot leaving little to look at or to instinct was overridden by the ingrained
serve as a wildlife habitat, and nothing dichotomy. It was hard to miss a class
to log, for years after. As wood heat because a pipe had burst, and the base­
becomes more and more popular, blind ment was filling up with water; it was
harvesting of fuelwood depletes the difficult to interrupt the work of writing
resource even further. The attitude a paper to mow the lawn. My mind was
about firewood is becoming like the engaged at school; my hands were
attitude about oil: Take as much as fast occupied at the farm, and so my heart
and as cheaply as possible. So chunks of was divided. And now, with mind and
wood too large or too small to bother hands in the same place, it is still divided:
with sit in woodlots where they rot, The dichotomy lives on, and I stumble
white oak and ash of sawlog quality are through my inability to reconcile the
cut for fuel, and next year’s timber is two worlds, despite some talent in and a
strong attraction to both.
burned this winter.
I think there must be a way to live
Perhaps my ability to discuss Nagarjuna’s dialectic or the fall of the Ancien practically and simply, yet wisely, with­
Régime are not so absurdly and sadly out a blind emphasis on efficiency, a way
skew to this world as they appear. I lack to get things done without needing to
a dexterity which I need, and I have one shut off my moral or aesthetic or intel­
lectual capacities. I wonder if I could
which often, for lack of the other, seems
have been better prepard for this in
frustratingly superfluous and clumsy.
college by taking part in the practical
Yet the process I know—howto think—
operation of the institution as I took
could well be used in this thoroughly
part in its classrooms. I think I might
practical and often shortsighted world.
have felt more of an affinity with a place
This is an irony I run into every day:
I helped to maintain and with people
Willy and Cap know the processes and
whose help I needed in order to get things
can teach me about rigging this line or
done, than I did for a place where every­
dropping that tree, but I feel incapable
thing was done for me and I had no
of talking with them about the aesthetic
or moral or ecological considerations of work to do with other students except
head work. Maybe exercising my mind
working the woods. Nor can I find a
while trimming the ivy with other
way to talk to them about local attitudes
students would have softened the lines
toward women or minorities or nuclear
between my worlds and eased their inte­
power or anything else. For they know
gration. For I see that I am capable with
how to get things done, and I am green
both hands and mind. It is the dexterity
and struggling. My dexterity is a foreign
to unite them which I lack. And some­
language in this country, and I stumble
times, as on this cool morning, antici­
over it often.
pating a day’s work with my hands, I
I grew up in a frame house, read
wonder why it is so hard to do this
books and newspapers, threw away
dance.
paper towels and cardboard boxes. I

on by his twenty-odd years as an asbes­
tos worker at a local defense plant. Per­
haps some pondering would have pre­
vented this, allowed him to see that the
job was hardly a trade-off for health. It
might have encouraged him at least to
give up smoking, if not the job, when the
hazard of asbestos was discovered. Now
he has a scar from ear to ear and a new

SW ARTHM ORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

THE COLLEGE
Clockwise from top: Capron, I
Willis, Buttenwieser, Edley, H r
Sarnoff, Spock, and Lang.

Eugene M . Lang and Richard B . Willis
elected to head Board o f Managers
Eugene M. Lang ’38 has been appointed
the new chairman of Swarthmore’s
Board of Managers. He succeeds
Charles C. Price ’34, professor emeritus
of chemistry at the University of Penn­
sylvania, who will continue as a term
member of the Board. In a Minute of
Thanks, the Board praised Mr. Price’s
leadership in terms befitting his nautical
interests: “When the wind has been still
and the motor wouldn’t work we have
all been happy to pick up an oar and
row. For we have been confident either
that the captain knew where we were
going, or that he would allow us to
deliberate to consensus. That is why we
have worked so well together for the
College. As Charlie steps away from the
tiller after five years of successful chair­
manship, we see Swarthmore under full
sail with a favoring wind, and we thank
him for it.”
Richard B. Willis ’33 will be the new
vice-chairman, replacing J. Lawrence
Shane ’56. Shane will continue his asso­
ciation with the Board as chairman of
the Investment Committee and as a
member of the Finance and Trusts
Administration Committee. Other new
members of the Board are: Ann Lubin
Buttenwieser ’57, Alexander M. Capron
JANUARY, 1982

’66, Christopher F. Edley, Jr. ’73,
Rosita Sarnoff ’64, William T. Spock
’51, and Jan Tarble.
Eugene M. Lang is founder and presi­
dent of Refac Technology Development
Corporation. He has served as an
advisor to the United States Depart­
ment of Commerce since 1956 and has
been a member of trade missions to
France, India, Japan, the Phillipines,
Burma, Australia, and New Zealand.
In 1963 he received a citation from
President John F. Kennedy for signifi­
cantly aiding the export expansion pro­
gram in America.
He helped launch the first black entre­
preneur program in the New York City
area and was chairman of the board of
The Circle in the Square Theatre from
1972 to 1978. A member of the Presi­
dent’s Advisory Committee on Science
and Innovation from 1978-80, he is
currently national vice-chairman of
Americans for Democratic Action and
a trustee of the Metropolitan Opera
Association and the New School for
Social Research.
As chairman of The Program for
Swarthmore and donor of the largest
single gift ever made to the College,
Lang led The Program to a successful

conclusion six months ahead of sched­
ule and $6 million over its original goal.
He was awarded an Honorary Doctor
of Laws degree by the College in June,
1981.
Richard B. Willis, who devoted
nearly two decades to serving on the
Board of Managers, is retired as vicepresident of the Provident National
Bank in Philadelphia. He joined the
Board in 1962, serving as treasurer and
chairman of the Finance and Trust
Administration Committee from 1962
to 1973. He also has served on the Nom­
inating Committee, the Trusts Com­
mittee, and, most recently, as a member
of the Development Committee.
Willis began his career at Provident
National Bank in 1937. He was director
of investment research and an econo­
mist before being named vice-president
in 1965.
He holds the professional designation
of Chartered Financial Analyst and is a
member of the Financial Analysts
Society and the National Association of
Business Economists.
Willis is a trustee of the Philadelphia
Yearly Meeting. He is active also in the
governance of Foulkeways at Gwynedd,
a Quaker retirement community, and is

Harold and Esther Mertz, with Louis Haber ’82, celebrate the opening o f the new dormitory.

M ertz R esidence H all: “A special kind o f h ab itat”
If you were to ask Harold ’26 and
Esther Mertz who were the most impor­
tant people at the dedication of Swarthmore’s newest dormitory, Mertz Resi­
dence Hall, you would get a resounding
“the students who are going to live there!”
Officially dedicated in ceremonies
held on campus September 26, the new
building was made possible by a gift of
$3 million from the Mertzes in 1979 as
part of a contribution to The Program
for Swarthmore.
In remarks made following a private
luncheon given by the College’s Board
of Managers, Mertz said, “Esther and I
don’t believe very much in bricks and
mortar. What we believe in is people.
We hope that this dormitory will be a
special kind of habitat, a special kind of
environment. We hope that it will create
time, extra time, for every student who
lives there. Extra time to study and

learn . . . to think and establish lifelong
values. Time perhaps to sit quietly and
envision the great exciting world that
lies outside the windows, beyond the
campus, and which beckons.”
The new dormitory, 39,400 square
feet in size, has less total floor space
than the three old dormitories it has re­
placed: Mary Lyon III, Palmer, and
Pittenger. But the square footage in
Mertz is far more efficient in terms of
space utilization and energy conserva­
tion, and has room for 140 beds, more
than the number in the other three
dorms combined.
Mertz Hall contains seventy single
rooms and thirty-five double rooms on
three floors, in varying configurations.
Some of the single rooms have connect­
ing doors, and some of the doubles are
arranged in “quads” complete with
sitting rooms.

currently serving as president of its
board.
Ann Lubin Buttenwieser is currently
director of the Centennial Waterfront
Project for the Columbia University
Graduate School of Architecture and
Planning. She is also co-teacher of
“New York Neighborhood History,” a
course for the university’s planning and

historic preservation program, and is
past assistant to the chairman of the
Division of Urban Planning.
Recently appointed by Governor
Carey of New York to the Westway
Park Advisory Committee, Mrs. But­
tenwieser is co-founder and director of
The Parks Council, Inc. She is also a
member of the West Side Waterfront

22

Park Committee of the New York chap­
ter of the American Planning Associa­
tion.
Named Outstanding Young Woman
in 1966 by the Outstanding Young
Women of America, she holds a master
of science degree in urban planning and
a master of philosophy degree from
Columbia University. She is at present
completing work on her doctoral disser­
tation in urban planning, also at
Columbia.
Mrs. Buttenwieser was a member of
the Alumni Council from 1976 to 1979.
She is currently serving as co-chairperson (with Jeremy J. Stone ’57) of
25th Reunion activities for her class.
Christopher F. Edley, Jr., is an assis­
tant professor of law at Harvard Uni­
versity. He graduated from the College
in three years with High Honors in
mathematics. During his undergraduate
years, he was active in Student Council,
the Swarthmore Afro-American Stu­
dents’ Society, and Upward Bound.'
After graduation, Edley entered the
joint J.D . and Master of Public Policy
programs at Harvard Law School and
the Kennedy School respectively. In
1975 he took a leave of absence to work
on former President Jimmy Carter’s
election campaign. In that same year, he
was elected to the Harvard Law Review,
considered to be the highest honor a law
student can attain.
In the spring of 1978 he became assis­
tant director of the White House
Domestic Policy staff, and in the fall of
1979 he took the position of special
assistant to the Secretary of Health and
Human Services, Patricia Harris. In
1980 he was appointed associate chief of
staff at the White House.
Edley’s involvement in government
has not diminished his involvement
with Swarthmore. In 1975 he was
elected to the Alumni Council, and he
has been energetic in organizing ac­
tivities of black alumni on campus.
William T. Spock is executive vicepresident of Penn Mutual Life Insurance
Company. After graduating with a
degree in physics and mathematics, and
following military service, Spock joined
Penn Mutual’s actuarial department in
1953. His responsibilities increased as
he took on important executive posi­
tions at the firm, and he is now the
executive vice-president, directing the
company’s individual, group, and pen­
sion insurance businesses and related
corporate services.
Spock is a Fellow of the Society of
Actuaries and a member of the AmeriSW ARTHM ORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

M cC abe M em orial Fellowship
to H arvard Business School
Young alumni who are interested
in going to the Harvard Business
School are eligible to apply for the
Thomas B. McCabe, Jr., and
Yvonne Motley McCabe Memorial
Fellowship. This award provides a
stipend of $3,000 toward the first
year of study at HBS. Applications
should be made to Gilmore Stott,
Chairman, Swarthmore College
Committee on Fellowships and
Prizes, to arrive not later than
March 1, 1982. In selecting the
recipient, the committee follows
standards comparable to those of
the McCabe Achievement Awards,
giving special consideration to
applicants who have demonstrated
superior qualities of leadership.
Application forms are available
from Mr. Stott on request. Admis­
sion to the Harvard Business
School is a prerequisite for being
chosen for this fellowship.

can Academy of Actuaries. In 1965 he
started soccer programs in Nether
Providence Township and currently
participates as a referee. He serves on
several volunteer committees for Wallingford-Swarthmore school district
and attends Swarthmore Friends Meet­
ing.
Jan Tarble is currently working in
cooperation with the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service directing annual cen­
suses of migratory birds in the Mohave
Desert in California. A member of the
Audubon Society and of the Nature
Conservancy, she has worked for the
past ten years observing the various
species of breeding birds over four
sectors of the desert and is active in
efforts to preserve the condor.
She attended the Liggett School in
Detroit, Stanford University, and the
University of California at Los Angeles,
where she majored in fine arts and
design.
The daughter of the late Newton E.
Tarble ’ 13, Jan Tarble holds a deep
concern for education in California and
looks forward to carrying on her
father’s interest in Swarthmore.
Two of the new Managers were nom­
inated by the Alumni Association and
are known as Alumni Managers; they
JANUARY, 1982

are Alexander Capron and Rosita
Sarnoff.
Alexander Capron is currently serv­
ing as executive director of the Presi­
dent’s Commission for the Study of
Ethical Problems in Medicine and Bio­
medical and Behavioral Research in
Washington, D.C. He has taken a twoyear leave of absence from the Univer­
sity of Pennsylvania Law School,
where, as professor of law, he teaches a
variety of courses, among them Law
and the Life Sciences, Experimentation
with Human Beings, and Law and
Psychiatry.
After graduating from Swarthmore,
where he had been president of the
Student Council, editor-in-chief of the
Phoenix, and author/director of a
Hamburg Show, Capron worked as an
intern with Attorney Marian Wright
Edelman, Hon. ’80, in the NAACP
Legal Defense Fund Office. He received
his LL.B. from Yale in 1969.
In addition to teaching at the Univer­
sity of Pennsylvania Law School,
Capron has taught also at the law
schools of Yale and the University of
Connecticut and is currently a lecturer
at the University of Pennsylvania Medi­
cal School. He is a member of the Insti­
tute of Medicine of the National
Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the
Institute of Society, Ethics, and the Life
Sciences. For these organizations as
well as the University of Pennsylvania
and the U.S. Government, Capron has
served on numerous committees. He
has published widely and is much
sought after as a consultant, particularly
on matters of biomedical and behavioral
research. He is a past member of the
Swarthmore Alumni Council and for­
mer vice-president of the Alumni
Association.
Rosita Sarnoff is the head of Rosita
Sarnoff Productions, Inc., which pro­
duces material for the theatre and home
video markets. The company, formed
two years ago, combines her interests in
TV, home video, theatre, and film.
Since her graduation, she has worked
in all of these fields, following a family
tradition. She is the daughter of Robert
Sarnoff, former chairman of RCA Cor­
poration and the National Broadcasting
Company; her paternal grandfather, the
late David Sarnoff, also was chairman
of RCA and was the founder of NBC.
Ms. Sarnoff has produced documen­
taries for public television and has
served with NBC News in London and
WNET in New York City. From 1972 to
1976 she was managing editor of The

Looking Down
on Sw arthm ore
An exhibition of aerial views of the
College and its environs is being
assembled for display in McCabe
Library beginning May 3, 1982.
The show, “Swarthmore From On
High,” will consist of photographs,
maps, and U.S. Government soil
and geological surveys.
Alumni who would like to submit
materials for possible inclusion in
the exhibit should send photo­
graphs, etc., to Professor M. Joseph
Willis, Department of Engineering,
Swarthmore College, Swarthmore,
PA 19081. Submissions should not
exceed 36 x 36 inches and should be
received by April 2, 1982.
“Swarthmore From On High,”
sponsored by the Associates of the
Swarthmore College Libraries, will
remain on view through Alumni
Day and possibly through the
summer.

Home Video Report, a leading trade
journal. She later organized and served
as general manager of Esselte Video
Inc., which published directories of
video programming, sold microfilm,
and did consulting work in the U.S.
Recently, Rosita Sarnoff has ex­
tended her interests to the theatre where
she has produced two off-Broadway
plays: Buried Child by Sam Shepard,
which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1979,
and Nightclub Cantata by Elizabeth
Swados, which ran for six months
in New York in 1977 and won Drama
Desk and Obie Awards. At present
she is producing Win/Lose) Draw,
scheduled to open off-Broadway this
spring. She currently serves on the
boards of the Hewitt School in New
York and John Houseman’s Acting
Company, a national repertory touring
company.
23

A Centennial H om ecom ing with a Splash
Ed Faulkner came home as guest of honor at a
ceremony naming the Wharton tennis courts
after him. Marian Snyder Ware ’38 and Dinny
Rath came home to take part in the dedication
of the Ware Pool. Helen Tomlinson Gibson ’41,
Dick Hall ’53, and Neil Austrian ’61 came home
(joining Barbara Wismer ’82) to share their
reminiscences of the Swarthmore scholar/athlete
in their days.
And more than 600 alumni, parents, students,
faculty, and administration came home to a True
Grit party after the games and ceremonies and a
buffet banquet to begin a year-long series of
events celebrating one hundred years of the
Swarthmore College Alumni Association.
A t right, former men’s tennis coach Ed Faulkner addresses a
crowd o f well-wishers who gathered to cheer him on the
refurbished Faulkner courts. Below, John and Marian Snyder
Ware ’38 assist at the christening o f the poo! bearing their name.

THE FAULKNER COURT
NAMED IN HONOR OF

ED

FAULKNER

SWARTHMORE MEN'S TENNIS COACl
1929 TO 1970
OCT. 2 4 , ¡961

Student

the Vili,
sPonsoi

Above left, Virginia ‘‘Dinnv” Rath, former chairman o f the Department o f Women’s Physical Education, watches
the undergraduate Swarthmore Synchronized Swimmers perform (above). Homecoming photos by Martin Natvifr

J

Center, President Friend offers
thefirst piece o f Magill Oaks Cen­
tennial cake to Quentin Weaver,
president o f the Swarthmore
Borough Council. Top left, Tom
Whitman ’82, composer o f the
Alumni Centennialfanfare,
conducts a brass choir o f fellow
students through his composition.

indents, faculty, staff, and their frienc
r e Wle relish a Magill Walk mural pa

yPonsored by the Department o f Art.

Above, John B. Ferguson, Jr. ’41, along with other alumni and under­
graduates, happily receives an oak seedling provided bv the Scott Horti­
cultural Foundation. Above right, Thomas B. McCabe ’15 and Jack B.
Thompson ’27 enjoy the Swarthmore- Ursinus soccer match.

JANUARY 1982

A Centennial Homecoming
continued
The Homecoming buffet /banquet, honoring
Swarthmore’s scholar-athletes, drew a happy
crowd, almost half of whom were students who
alternated at tables with alumni through the
device of garnet napkins for alumni, white for
students. Marshall Beil ’67, president of the
Alumni Association, was master of ceremonies
for a program that included speakers Neil
Austrian ’61, Helen Tomlinson Gibson 41,
Dick Hall ’53, and Barbara Wismer ’82.

• Ranked first in defense in the Middle Atlantic
Conference (MAC)
• Ranked in the NCAA Division III top twenty for
five consecutive weeks, finishing in the top twenty in
the final voting
• Ranked fourth in team defense in NCAA Division
III (and for four weeks ranked first)
• Ranked fourth in passing and seventh in total
offense in the MAC

• The only team from the MAC to be ranked nation­
ally in team defense and rushing defense
• Gave up only 45.8 yards rushing per game for the
season—a total of 412 yards, to rank second in the
entire NCAA Division III
• Gave up only one touchdown rushing
• Placed ninth in voting for the Lambert Bowl
Award, given to the best Division III school on the
Eastern Seaboard

Football’S!:
the big turn-around
Yes, sports fans, that team is
The outcome of this final
Swarthmore’s notable Little
game would determine the
Quakers— or “Earth-Quakers”
winner of the MAC Southern
as they were dubbed on
Division, and would guaran­
campus. The team turned in a
tee an invitation to the NCAA
performance this fall that
Division III national playoffs.
produced tremors which rum­
For many years Widener,
bled from the campus through
ranked number one, had re­
the community and, in the
ceived the invitation. As
last moments of the season,
perennial front-runner, Wide­
into the national media. This
ner was portrayed by the
is even more remarkable when
media as Goliath. Swarth­
you remember the thirty-fourmore, inevitably, was assigned
game losing streak of a hand­
NBC interviews Coach Tom Lapinski before the Widener game.
the role of feisty little David.
ful of years ago.
On Thursday, two days be­
It wasn’t that the Garnet was un­
ient as a “player of the week.”
fore the game, a crew from the NBC
defeated: The team enjoyed undefeated
As the Garnet kept winning games, program SportsWorld arrived on cam­
seasons only twice— in 1939 and 1966.
stories appeared in the press with in­ pus to prepare a feature story to be
It wasn’t that they won the greatest
creasing frequency about the remark­ broadcast the following week. The
number of games in College history:
able scholar-athletes whose pluck, skill, leader of the television crew was Hilary
The Garnet were 8-2-2 in 1901, and only
brains, and courage helped them beat Cosell, daughter of famed sports broad­
7-2 this year.
teams three and four times their numeri­ caster Howard Cosell, whose rival pro­
But the Little Quakers won more
cal size.
gram on the ABC network had also con­
games this year than in any season since
By the time the Little Quakers were sidered coming to Swarthmore.
1919, and they did it all as “underdogs,”
preparing for the last regular season
On Friday students organized a pep
with only thirty-five players (frequently
game, against Widener University on rally in Tarble Social Center. Many
thirty-four because of illness), a partNovember 14th, excitement on and off campus armchair historians noted that
time coach, part-time assistants with
the campus had reached fever pitch. this was the first such rally since the
little experience, no football scholar­
Articles were appearing daily in local early ’70s, and possibly the only rally
ships, high admission requirements for
newspapers, and the Swarthmore team ever held for a game that was not played
all students, and players whose primary
was mentioned on a C BS national tele­ against Swarthmore’s traditional rival,
interest in being at Swarthmore is edu­
vision sports broadcast. In the week Haverford College.
cation, not sports.
before the 14th, local television crews
On Saturday a crowd estimated at
Two players, Quarterback Steve
came to the College to interview the about 9,500 turned out for the big game,
Massi ’82 and Halfback Ed Meehan ’84,
team, and posters and banners began filling the bleachers and the area sur­
accumulated over 1,000 yards in total
to appear on campus as more and more rounding the field. The press box, too,
defense. And Halfback Anthony (Tony)
students became excited about the was overflowing—with reporters from
Burton ’82 was a Maxwell Award recipWidener game.
area newspapers and announcers from
JANUARY, 1982

27

local radio station WQIQ who broad­
cast the entire game. The NBC SportsWorld crew was on hand, and highlights
of the game were filmed by the sports
cable television network, ESPN . In
addition, all three local television sta­
tions filmed footage for their evening
news programs.
The Philadelphia Bulletin reported:
“Swarthmore fumbled the opening
kickoff and the expected rout seemed
under way. Only it wasn’t . . . the gritty
defense held, forced a field goal, and
Widener realized Little David was for
real.”
In the end, David did not vanquish
Goliath: The Garnet lost 16-6 to the team
that went on to win the Division III
national championship. But it was a
close, hard game, and the Little Quakers
emerged with their pride shining, having
proven their skill literally before the
entire nation. It was David, not Goliath,
who stole the show.
“We were the guys in the black hats,”
Widener Coach Bill Manlove said after
the game. “It would have been great for
Swarthmore to win. If they hadn’t been
playing us, I’d have been rooting for
them, too!”

W hat they said:
“Swarthmore is one of the last strong­
holds of true amateurism.”
COACH TOM LAPINSKI

" . . when you see a school like Swarth­
more turn a losing program into a win­
ning program, turn apathy into excite­
ment, it’s especially satisfying. They
don’t go out and buy football players at
Swarthmore.
“The young men who play the game
there are concerned, above all, with
getting an education. This is amateur
college football, not the high-powered,
professionalized entertainment that
flashes onto our TV screens each Satur­
day afternoon to get us warmed up fo r
28

the NFL on Sunday.
“They don’t charge admission fo r fo o t­
ball games at Swarthmore. The entirefoot­
ball budget—covering everything from
coaches’ salaries to equipment, traveling,
recruiting— is $35,000. Head coach Tom
Lapinski and his three assistants are all
part-time. Yet the sport, so near extinction
at Swarthmore in the ’70s, is flourishing.”
FRANK DOLSON, SPORTS COLUMNIST,
PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER

. . we try to be competitive in everything
we do. It’s nice to have three Nobel Prize
winners in a small alumni body, and it’s
nice to have very good women’s field
hockey and lacrosse teams. It’s also nice to
have a very good football team.”
PRESIDENT THEODORE FRIEND

“The most amazing part o f the story is that
Lapinski turned things around. . . despite
these obstacles: a squad o f only thirty-four
players, or 35 when starting linebacker
Greg Shortell gets out o f the hospital this
week. Lapinski uses fourteen players on
defense, each can play two, three, or even
four positions;
A part-time [coach’s~\ salary o f less than
$7,000; his part-time assistants make less
than $1,500 each;
An equipment budget o f $7,500. Players
are expected to pay half the cost o f their
football shoes. New uniforms are bought
piecemeal;
A recruiting budget consisting o f
‘stamps, envelopes and a part-time
secretary’;
A game field on which aluminum goal­
posts were only recently installed;
A meal budget that allows each player $4
fo r dinner after road games. Most o f the
time the team rushes back to eat at the
campus cafeteria, which closes at 7 p.m .”
GAIL SHISTER, SPORTS WRITER,
PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER

“I don’t think the team is out there to win
or to kill, to eat somebody or to mash
someone to the ground. They’re showing
something very Quaker—that everyone
has a special light, has something special to
offer. And that a thirty-four-man football
team, where everyone is special and every­
one is important, can do what a big-ten
university team can do.”
NAN WEINSTOCK ’84,

PHOENIX SPORTS EDITOR

January 1982/Second-class postage paid at Swarthmore, PA 19081 and additional mailing offices.

If that’s Buzz and Mary Lo Eberle,
it must be a Swarthmore Alumni College Abroad
Buzz and Mary Lo Broomell Eberle, both
in the Class of ’40, are really getting
around.
They’ve been to Athens, Delphi,
Istanbul, Mykonos, Delos, County Kerry,
the Shetlands, and the Orkneys. And
many other places.
This spring they are going to Egypt
and Crete, again with a Swarthmore
Alumni College Abroad. They say,
“There’s something special about see­
ing the world with Swarthmoreans and
being caught up in Helen North’s infec­
tious enthusiasm. It’s delightful to be
'en famille.’”
Join the Eberles in Egypt and then
proceed to Kenya! Sign up below.

South of Suez on the yacht “Argonaut”
March 4 to 14
Postlude in Kenya
March 14 to 23
(Postlude in Crete fully subscribed)

Professor Helen North of the Classics
Department will lead this 1982 Swarth­
more Alumni College Abroad, which in­
cludes a seven-day cruise on the Red
Sea to visit such fabled places as the
Valley of the Kings, Luxor, and the rosered city of ancient Petra (registration
limited to 150), and ten days on land in
Kenya (registration limited to 40). Use
the accompanying form to request a
brochure containing complete informa­
tion about these trips.

Alumni Office
Swarthmore College
Swarthmore, PA 19081
□ Sign me up for Egypt
and Kenya.
□ Send me the details of
the trip.

N a m e ___
Address _
Telephone

Class