Swarthmore College Alumni Bulletin 1984-03-01

S w aith n io re
March, 1984

r*e B ulletin

Results of the 1982 Alumni Survey

n the unlikely event that you attended Swarthmore
College for precisely 3.6 years, majored in English,
classify yourself as a liberal, work as a lawyer or doctor,
a teacher or professor, or are in middle management, earn
exactly $26,023 a year, and are married and have
1.8 children—then you are the quintessential Swarthmorean.

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Should your demographics not quite match those
listed above, you may well consider yourself
atypical (a feeling perhaps more typical of a
Swarthmorean in any case), according to a
recently completed statistical analysis of the 1982
Alumni Survey. In fact, the characteristic most
typical of alumni, the College’s computer found,
is that Swarthmoreans tend to be unpredictable.
The computer, programmed to sift the answers to
a 53-question survey filled out by 7,625 alumni
(about 56% of those contacted), often was
stymied in its efforts to find statistically signifi­
cant relationships among the myriad variables.
It does appear to be true, however, that alumni
who majored in French and Spanish like to travel
most (47.8% and 46% respectively), while travel
is least popular among music majors (only
14.3%). The computer also found that alumni
who went through the College’s Program in
Education are both the most civic-minded and
religious of Swarthmoreans. An amazingly high
70% of those in Education who responded to the
survey reported they are active in political
organizations, while only 62.9% of political
science majors reported ties with political groups.
(It should be noted, though, that 44.4% of those
political science majors responding to the survey
indicated they are gardeners, making them the
most likely of all alumni to have green thumbs.)
At the same time, 60% of those who went
through the Program in Education also are active
in service clubs and 50% belong to religious
groups.
r
A considerably more noteworthy correlation
is the survey’s documentation of an abrupt shift
in career patterns among ’70s graduates away
from the professions and into business. As the
table below indicates, only 4.9% of ’70s alumni
responding to the survey classified themselves as
professionals, while fully 21 % categorized them­
selves as middle managers.

Middle
Management Professional

1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s

13.0%
13.9%
10.6%
21.0%

11.4%
16.1%
22.8%
4.9%

Figures for the three 1980s classes participating
in the survey are not included in the table since
MARCH, 1984

few of those alumni have had an opportunity to
establish themselves as yet in a business or
profession. Indeed, 36.6% of ’80s alumni re­
sponding indicated they were students when the
survey was conducted. Figures for classes before
the ’40s were not listed since most of those
alumni have reached retirement age.
While the responses of Swarthmoreans to
most other such questions defy correlation by
computer, answers to individual items on the
survey clearly show that alumni generally hold
the College in high regard. Over 52%, for
instance, indicated that they contribute to the
Alumni Fund every y e a r , an exceptionally high
rate borne out by the 56.2% participation rate
reported by the Annual Giving Office for 198283. These figures appear to be up sharply since
1974, when only 38% of those responding to that
survey indicated they were current contributors.
Another indication of alumni esteem for their
Alma Mater came in response to the question:
“Would you recommend'Swarthmore to your
own child or a friend if he/she were well
qualified?” Over 82% responded positively—
“yes” (30.4%) or “strongly yes” (51.9%)— while
only 2.3% responded negatively—“no” (1.9%) or
“strongly no” (0.4%).
The editors of the Sw arthm ore C ollege B ulletin
were extremely gratified to learn that nearly 91%
of those responding read “some articles and class
notes” (64%) or “all” of the B u lletin (26.8%),
while only 0.2% said they read “none of it.”
When alumni were asked whether they would
like to see any changes in coverage by the
B u lletin , the majority (57.8%) said they wanted
“no changes,” while 16.1% gave top priority to
covering more “news and concerns of the institu­
tion” and 12.9% asked for expanded coverage of
class notes.
Overall, 76% of those responding to the
alumni survey rated Swarthmore’s effectiveness
at keeping alumni informed of campus activities
as “excellent” (28.4%) or “good ” (47.6%). Only
12.8% rated College communications as “fair”
(11.3%) or “poor” (1.5%), while 8.5% said they
“can’t judge.”
When asked, “W hat is your strongest affilia­
tion with Swarthmore?” 44.3% said “friends”
were most important and 21% named their class.
Ties with faculty members and administrators, as
well as volunteer work for the College and local
alumni group activities, also were singled out as

“ I’m not sure
whether I’ve drifted
away from Swarthmore
or it’s drifted away
from me, but the gap is
widening and I’d prefer
it were closing. If
there’s something I
can do in service to the
College, please let me
know.”— ’63
“The Alumni Bulletin is
a real white wash! It
doesn’t give any idea o f
problems at the school
except those requiring
additional alumni
giving. ”— 79
“I think the alumni
magazine is consis­
tently interesting and
well written. It always
makes me glad to be
associated with the
College.”— 7 0
“Swarthmore gave me a
strong commitment to polit­
ical activism and an under­
standing that individuals
can make a difference— a
rare thing in the
’5 0s.”— ’56
“My membership
and contacts with the
Friends of the Scott
Foundation keep me
interested in the
College.”— ’50
“Swarthmore exposed
me to professors like
‘D ucky’ Holmes, Brand
Blanshard, and Robert
Spiller. Being in their
seminars or classes helped
deepen my thinking and
their accessibility as human
beings enriched the quality
o f my college life. ”— 30

“I shall always
remember Swarthmore and
its gentle people. My days
there, though short, meas­
urably affected my life and
career. ”— ’25
“ I would like the Col­
lege to examine the
question: Beyond
excellence, what? Life
and service to human­
ity have very little to do
with arrogant
intellectuality.”— ’61
Swarthmore made a
tremendous difference in
my life— broadened my
horizons and gave me an
interest in social issues and
community action. ”— ’39
“I would not trade
my four years at
Swarthmore for any­
thing. I have always
felt that I was a better
teacher and adminis­
trator for having a lib­
eral arts education at a
quality institution of
smaller size.”— ’36

1982 geographic
distribution
of alumni
(Alaska, Hawaii, and foreign
countries are included in
Zone H.)

important factors in maintaining an affiliation
with the College.
.. During the five years preceding the survey,
most alumni indicated their contact with the
College had been “occasional” (31.1%), “spo­
radic” (32.7%), or “nonexistent” (21.6%). The
most common reason given for not being actively
involved in alumni affairs was “live too far
away” (28.7%), while only 1.4% indicated a
“lack of interest in the College.”

Swarthmore alumni appear to be solidly
upper middle class in terms of both occupation
and income, responses to the survey show. In
describing their occupations, 12.2% identified
themselves as professional, 11.7% as middle
managers, 6.2% as college professors, and 1.4% as
college administrators. At the same time, 2.1%
listed themselves as president or chief executive
officer of a corporation, another 2.1% said they
were in top management, and 0.9% said they

M OST FREQUENT OCCUPATIONS BY PERCENT OF R ESPO NDENTS IN EACH CLASS DECADE
’10s
Homemakers
Education (all levels)
Retired

’20s
28%
16
16

’50s
Education
Business Administration
Scientists
Homemakers
Physicians

2

Homemakers
Education
Engineers
Business Administration
Literary Arts

’30s
22%
12
7
5
5

Homemakers
Education
Business Administration
Engineers
Literary Arts

28%
8
6
6
6

Lawyers/Judges
Students
Education
Physicians
Business Administration

’60s
19%
9
6
6
5

Education
Lawyers/ Judges
Physicians
Business Administration
Literary Arts

’40s
19%
17
9
5
4

’70s

Education
Homemakers
Business Administration
Physicians
Engineers

17%
11
9
5
5

’80s
14%
13
10
9
5

Students
Clerical
Literary Arts
Education
Business Administration

37%
10
9
7
6

SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

owned their own businesses. The remainder,
63.5%, fell into other categories. Listed below are
the largest occupational groups into which
Swarthmore alumni fall.

“I ’m not certain whether
it’s Swarthmore I ’ve felt
alienated from all these
years, or the East, or the
elitist, grasping manchild I
was in those overachieving
years. ”— ’64

The Top Ten Vocational Groups
1. Teachers (all types)...........17.9%
2. Hom em akers..................... 8.5%
3. Business m anagers............ 7.6%
4. Lawyers and judges.......... 6.0%
5. Physicians.......................... 5.1%
6. Writers and publishers — 4.8%
7. Engineers .......................... 4.5%
8. Physical/social scientists
3.8%
9. Students.............................. 3.7%
10. Social w elfare................. 3.3%

“Scholarships are
the only way to attract
an infusion of new
genes and to minimize
cloning.”— ’60

Although homemakers still make up the second
largest vocational group among alumni, it is in­
teresting to note that the proportion of alumni
identifying themselves as homemakers changes
dramatically over the nine decades represented in
the survey, ranging from a high of 66.7% for those
who graduated during the first ten years of the
century to none of those in the classes of the
1980s.
Percent of Homemakers in
66.7%
28.0%
22.3%
18.8%
10.5%
5.7%
3.5%
2.3%

Our survey statistics show that in 1982 70.4%
of all alumni were married, while 15.2% were
single, 5.2% were widows or widowers, and 9.1%
divorced or separated. (By comparison, in 1974
6.6% reported they were divorced or separated.)
Nearly 28% of those taking part in the survey
indicated they have no children. A comparison of
the number of children per family with the
numbers reported from the 1974 survey shows
no clear trend towards larger or smaller families.
MARCH, 1984

Number
of Children

Percent
with Children

One
Two
Three
Four or more

1974 1982
15.1% 14.5%
36.4% 38.0%
29.2% 28.0%
19.3% 19.5%

The personal incomes of most alumni seem to
have more than kept pace with inflation since the
last survey in 1974. The median personal income
for alumni taking part in the 1974 survey was
$ 13,596 and mean personal income was $ 17,885.
By 1982, median personal income had risen
91.4% to $26,023, while mean personal income
rose 91.1% to $34,173. Discounting the effects of
sometimes double-digit inflation during the
1974-82 period, the rise in median incomes
works out to an increase of 4.3% in constant
dollars.
Thousands of dollars

Mean = $34,173

“I would like to see a
Department o f Speech
available to students at
Swarthmore. Surely
Swarthmore, Haverford,
and Bryn Mawr could
jointly create such a
department. . . . I f learning
to swim is still required for
graduation— as it was in
my day— is it not far more
urgent today to keep afloat
in the sea o f words and be
heard [on behalf of]
democracy, human rights,
and peace?”^m !9

PERSONAL INCOME

Median = $26,023
3

“My nephew and I
marched at the head of
the Alumni Day parade
for the 70th and 75th
Reunions of the Class
of 1903__ lam 101
years old but still
active.”— ’03
“The yardstick seems to
be ‘success’/achievement.’
For those o f us who were
wives and mothers for
twenty years, how do we
record that information?
There must be other
Swarthmoreans who wish
to be measured on another
scale. ”— ’46
“I know that I was
greatly changed by my
college experiences
and am grateful for
them. The immediate
postwar period when I
was there was very
disturbing for both me
personally and the
College.”— ’50

The most common major among all alumni
remains English, although the percentage report­
ing it as their major dropped from 16.5% in 1974
to 15.8% in 1982. Only 10.2% of alumni from
classes graduating in the ’70s majored in English
and just 8.5% of those graduating in the classes of
’80, ’81, and ’82 combined majored in English.
This suggests students today are pursuing some­
what less traditional college curricula than their
parents’ generation. Special majors, which are
intended to integrate work across departmental
boundaries, for instance, now comprise 0.5% of
all majors, though they were nonexistent a
decade ago.

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The Swarthmore College Bul­
letin (ISSN 0279-9138), o f
which this is volume LXXXI,
number 5, is published twice
in September, and in Novem­
ber, December, March, and
June by Swarthmore College,
Swarthmore, PA 19081.
Second class postage paid at
Swarthmore, PA and addi­
tional mailing offices. Post
master: Send address changes
to Swarthmore College Bul­
letin, Swarthmore, PA 19081.

4

f

Major

English Literature
Economics
Biology
History
Engineering
Psychology
Political Science
Mathematics
Chemistry
French
Art History
Philosophy
Physics
International
Relations
SociologyAnthropology
Social Sciences
German
Special majors
Latin
Music
Russian
Spanish
Literature
Religion
Greek
Education
Classics
Ancient History
English Lit./

Percent Median
Reporting Income

15.8%
10.9%
10.9%
9.5%
8.5%
8.4%
7.7%
4.7%
4.6%
3.0%
2.9%
2.7%
2 . 1%

$19,427
35,957
28,226
24,554
46,486
21,296
31,935
31,667
32,381
15,750
12,083
26,087
35,000

1.2%

28,889

1. 1%
1. 1%

16,250
28,571
17,857
10,714
13,750
13.000
15.000
31.667
21.667
8,500
14,167
16.667
15.000
15.000

0.5%
0.5%
0.5%
0.5%
0.4%
0.4%
0.4%
0.4%
0.4%
0.3%
0 .2%

0 . 2%
0 . 1%
0 . 1%

Theatre
Medieval Studies
Linguistics

0 . 1%

15.000
27,500
25.000

The proportion of students in seminars “read­
ing for Honors” during their junior and senior
years, as opposed to continuing regular course
work, continues to vary from year to year. Since

the inception in 1922 of the program as a
distinctive educational technique at Swarthmore,
the number of students graduating in Honors has
ranged from a high-water mark of about 38%
during the 1930s to a low ebb of about 23%
during the 1970s. During the first three years of
the ’80s the tide seems to have turned, with
nearly 27% of the seniors graduating in Honors.
Overall, nearly 30% of our respondents report
graduating in Honors.
Apparently there is some correlation between
political views and students’ decisions whether to
pursue Course or Honors at Swarthmore. Those
alumni who graduated in Honors tend to be
more liberal (56%) and radical (7%), whereas
Course graduates tend to be conservative (16%)
or moderate (35%). As a whole, 47% of alumni
responding to the survey reported that their
political views had changed either “a great deal”
(10%), or “somewhat” (37%), during their years
at Swarthmore. As the table below shows those
changes run to both the right and left sides of the
political spectrum, but always away from the
apolitical.

Changes in Political Views

Conservative
Moderate
Apolitical
Liberal
Radical
Other

While
at Swarthmore

After
Swarthmore

14.9%
24.3%
15.3%
39.2%
4.1%
2.1%

-> 13.9%
-► 31.5%
-+ 3.3%
-* 43.7%
-► 4.7%
-> 2.6%

Nearly 29% of alumni respondents assigned
top priority to “faculty and curriculum develop­
ment” when asked to rank the importance of
demands for limited resources at the College.
Scholarships and faculty salaries are considered
most important by nearly as many alumni
(25.3% and 23.5%, respectively). Other priorities
were suggested by 15.7% of the respondents.
While alumni appear evenly divided over
what the College’s top priority ought to be,
nearly half (49.4%) indicated they favored mak­
ing unrestricted gifts over those designated for a
particular purpose. A scholarship fund was the
only special purpose to which a large proportion
of respondents (18.2%) indicated they would be
interested in designating large gifts.

This article was written by Larry Elveru with the assis­
tance o f Ingrid Evans, research associate fo r the Devel­
opment Office, and Jennifer Denman ’80, associate direc­
tor o f Alumni Relations. Gudmund R. Iversen, professor
o f statistics, helped analyze the data, which were pro­
cessed by Lawrence Ehmer ’82, a programmer fo r the
College Computing Center.
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

Victor Navasky ’54 lends
a light touch to ...

Saving The Nation
By Larry L. Elveru
If Victor S. Navasky ’54 seems ideally suited
to his job as editor of The Nation, one of
America’s most widely respected journals of
opinion, perhaps it is because he doesn’t take
himself too seriously.
When asked, for instance, how he con­
vinced Calvin Trillin, a frequent contributor
to the New Yorker, to write a regular column
for The Nation, Navasky explains: “Well,
we usually pay in the high two figures, but
Trillin actually gets in the lowest three
figures. We pay him $100 for his column.
This is a scoop. No one knows that. He’s
been perjuring himself all around the
country saying we pay him in the high two
figures (see accompanying story). Be careful,
though, we don’t want to get him into
trouble with the IRS.”
At one end of Navasky’s unassuming
office sits a massive bookcase filled with
meaty political, sociological, legal, and his­
torical works. Above the bookcase is a walllength bulletin board covered with index
cards arranged in columns under headings
for various magazine sections, including
features, editorials, and “Books and Arts.”
Each column is at least six rows deep,
although there are holes here and there in the
grid.
“We try to plan six weeks ahead and have
a bunch of long-term assignments in the
pipeline,” Navasky explains, referring to the
bulletin board. “But, in fact, of the cards we
have on our board for the issue six weeks
hence, not one may turn up in the issue
because we juggle them depending on how
the articles work out and what’s happening
in the news that week.”
On another wall, nearer Navasky’s desk,
hang a few of the scores of awards and
citations won by the venerable weekly since
its founding by opponents of slavery in 1865.
Navasky’s own American Book Award
(formerly the National Book Award) for
MARCH, 1984

Naming Names, his 1980 book on the ethics
of informing during the McCarthy Era, is
not on display, however.
“I got started in journalism at the Swarthmore Phoenix,” Navasky recalls. “I was co­
editor with a fellow named Bill Waterfield
[’52], who now is a doctor. I was a soph­
omore at the time and as a result of one issue
we did, a faculty committee suggested that a
rule be passed preventing a sophomore from
ever editing the Phoenix again. They felt ah
April Fool’s issue we ran was in bad taste,”
explains Navasky, who obviously still rel­
ishes the memory of the incident.
“I can’t remember all of the specifics,
other than that we attacked the College
administration’s suspension of what they
called the ‘inter-visitation experiment.’ That
was a plan whereby men were allowed to
visit women and women visit men in their
dorm rooms on Sunday afternoons from

—

two to five, provided the doors were open.
After about six months of this experiment
the practice became to have the door closed,
but unlocked. As a result of some episodes
the administration imposed the ‘six-inch
rule,’ requiring you to have your door open
at least six inches.
“So in the Phoenix we superimposed a
picture of President Nason’s face peering in
an open dormitory door with the headline,
‘Peek-a-Boo.’ The combination of that and
an article by Sean Thompson [’53] about
flirtations in the library, called ‘The Lowdow n on Footsie W ith Your Tootsie
Wootsie,’ is what got us in all the trouble,”
Navasky recalls.
The “No Sin at Old Swarthmore” issue,
as the March 18,1952, Phoenix came to be
known, and the publicity surrounding it in
the Philadelphia newspapers, provoked Pres­
ident Nason to condemn the Phoenix issue
as disgraceful and in bad taste.
After graduating from Swarthmore with
honors in political science two years later,
Navasky continued his somewhat iconoclas­
tic style of journalism in the U.S. Army as
editor of the 53rd InJ[antry] News. “We got
into trouble with our Army newspaper by
having the bad judgement to run an editorial
advocating that the Army abandon its alpha­
bet— Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, etc.— in favor
of George Bernard Shaw’s phoenetic alpha­
bet.
“On an Army maneuver in Alaska called
‘Operation Moose Horn,’ I also edited a
newspaper called the Moose Horn Blower.
My main memory of that experience was
that it gave us the opportunity on the last day
of the maneuver to run the headline: ‘Moose
Horn Blows at Midnight.’”
After his hitch in the Army, Navasky
enrolled in law school at Yale University,
although he says he never actually intended
to practice law. “I guess I went to law school
5

6

S T E V E N G. G O L D B L A T T '67

because I had the G.I. Bill and I was
interested in public affairs and journalism,”
Navasky explains. “If public interest law had
existed then, maybe I would have been
interested in doing something along those
lines.”
Instead, while he was in law school
Navasky helped found M onocle, ‘“a lei­
surely quarterly of political satire’ (that
meant we came out twice a year).” The
irreverent magazine— whose motto was “In
the land of the blind the one-eyed is king”—
enlisted the services of several of Navasky’s
Swarthmore contemporaries during its brief,
but colorful, run.
“One of our consulting editors when
M onocle was founded was Christopher
Lehmann-Haupt [’57], now of the New York
Tim es, who was then a student at the Yale
drama school and a waiter at the law school.
Frank Oski [’57], who was features editor at
the Phoenix when I was editor, wrote a
short-lived medical column for us called
‘Moon over my AMA.’ He still makes a
living being medically sacrilegious,” Nava­
sky notes.
“Another little-known fact, except to
students of magazine mastheads, is that our
assistant circulation manager in the Boston
area was one Michael Dukakis [’55], now
governor of Massachusetts. For some reason
he leaves that off his curriculum vitae, but I
think it’s one of his great credits. He was very
effective. W e sold tens of copies in Harvard
Square as a result of his efficient service
operation there.”
After getting his law degree, Navasky
moved with M onocle to New York City.
There, Navasky says, “M onocle evolved
from a ‘leisurely quarterly’ into what we
called a ‘radical sporadical,’ which meant it
came out like the U.N. police— whenever
there was an emergency and whenever we
could solve the financial crisis.” The most
recent issue of M onocle, which appeared in
1965, offered readers ten issues of the
magazine for $7.50, or a lifetime subscrip­
tion for $5.00. “We still have a large body of
lifetime subcribers out there and a new issue
may emerge any hour or decade now,”
Navasky insists. “We ran out of money, not
out of a market.”
To supplement their incomes while pub­
lishing M onocle Navasky and other staff
members free-lanced magazine articles and
“packaged” thirty or so books for more
established publishers. “We had at Monocle
gone into what we thought of as the non­
business side of publishing. We would gen­
erate ‘idea books,’ rather than [commercial]
‘book books,’ and do them ourselves or,
with the help of an agent, find a publisher
and then find writer/researchers to do the

“ lT ¥ 7 e sometimes joke that ‘Reagan is
▼T bad for the country, but good for
The
Nation,’ ” Navasky says. Since 1978,
circulation has shot up nearly 150%.
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

work and enter into partnerships with them
and be the guarantor that these people who
really had never done a book before would
do it—
“We did about thirty books that way that
really didn’t have our names on them,
ranging from a collection of essays called
Revolution at Berkeley, with an introduction
by Irving Howe, about what happened on
the Berkeley campus in the mid-’6 0 s..., to a
book called Barbed Wires, which is a
collection of famous funny telegrams. For
instance, once when humorist Robert Benchley arrived in Venice, Italy, he wired back:
‘STREETS FILLED W ITH WATER.
PLEASE ADVISE.’ O r the telegram that
came to a publicist at a studio in Hollywood
from a journalist asking: ‘HOW OLD
CARY GRANT?’ The publicist wired back:
‘OLD CARY GRANT FINE. HOW ARE
YOU?’ And then we did a book under a
pseudonym, called Report from Iron M oun­
tain, a hoax that purported to be a U.S.
government report stating that the country
couldn’t afford to switch from wartime to
peacetime footing because of the damage it
would do to the economy. The New York
Times actually called the W hite House to try
and verify the report. It was a lot of fun.”
About the time M onocle ceased publica­
tion, Navasky began research on a more
serious book. Kennedy Justice, which was
nominated for a National Book Award in
1971, was the result. It is a thorough and
thoughtful examination of Robert F. Ken­
nedy’s term as Attorney General of the
United States during the turmoil of the early
1960s, documenting his running battle with
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, as well as his
efforts to combat organized crime and
enforce court-ordered school desegregation
in the South.
^
For a few years in the early 1970s
Navasky worked as an editor for the New
York Times M agazine, a publication to
which he had contributed often as a free­
lance writer. Before long, though, Navasky
was anxious to begin work on another book,
one on the ethics of informing during the
McCarthy era of the early 1950s— a period
that he describes as “the Watergate equiva­
lent of the time.”
“I had always been interested in the
McCarthy era. I graduated from Swarthmore in 1954, which was the year of the
Army-McCarthy hearings, and instead of
studying for my Honors exams I remember
sitting and watching, riveted to the television
set during the summary speeches of the
hearings. Actually, there were a lot of other
people in Commons where the television set
was, but most of them were playing bridge,”
Navasky recalls, laughing.
MARCH, 1984

Although there were several excellent
books written about the McCarthy period,
most of them were by or about victims of the
political blacklisting that cost so many
innocent people their livelihoods. Rather
than writing about the victims, Navasky was
determined to ask those who had informed
on them: “W hy did you do it and how do
you feel about it now?” Navasky originally
hoped to complete Naming Names within
two years. It took six, with several detours
along the way.
Viking Press had given Navasky an
advance sufficient for about two years’ work
on the book. To help finance additional time
needed for researching and writing, Navasky
says, “I encouraged my wife Annie, who
was at the time an itinerant stockbroker, to
be less itinerant. She has a lot of free-lance
writer and artist clients who are interested in
investing in peace stocks. She’s got a unique
life on Wall Street.” Along with his wife’s
help, Navasky gained financial support for
his writing by winning a Guggenheim Fel­
lowship and as a visiting scholar under the
auspices of the Russell Sage Foundation. He
also conducted seminars and was a writer-

in-residence at several colleges and univer­
sities while finishing his book. During 1974,
he took nine months off from writing to
manage Ramsey Clark’s campaign for the
U.S. Senate in New York.
“He won the primary,” Navasky notes,
“even though he refused to accept more
than a $100 campaign contribution from
anyone, a kind of revolutionary thing to do
at the time. But we lost the general election
to the Republican incumbent, Jacob Javits,

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the biggest vote-getter in the state.”
When asked whether he had had any
reservations about giving up the security
and broader platform afforded by his job at
the New York Times, Navasky responds
with a rhetorical question: “Broader plat­
form, or blander platform? I left after getting
a stern lecture from my boss, who figured I
was making a big mistake in leaving and
suggested some job alternatives on that
paper considered promotions because they
paid more, even though they had less
substance. He told me I should go home,

When I was approached about writing a
column for The National asked for only one
guarantee: [That] ... I be allowed to make
fun of the editor. When it comes to civil
liberties, we all have our own priorities.
The editor, one Victor S. Navasky, re­
sponded to this question with what I believe
the novelists call a nervous chuckle__
Why did I involve myself in such an
unpromising enterprise? My first mistake,
many years ago, was an involvement with
Monocle and its editor, the same Victor S.
Navasky. In those days, when we were all
young and optimistic, I used to assure
Navasky that the lack of a sense of humor
was probably not an insurmountable handi­
cap for the editor of a humor magazine__
What was most memorable about Victor
S. Navasky at Monocle, though, was his
system of payment to contributors—a sys­
tem derived, according to my research, from
a 1938 chart listing county-by-county mean
weekly wages for Gray Ladies. My strongest
memory of Monocle is receiving a bill from
Navasky for a piece of mine that the
magazine had published—along with a note
explaining that the office expenses for proc­
essing the piece exceeded what he had
intended to pay me for it.
In the late sixties, Monocle folded. I
wasn’t surprised. My assurances to Navasky
about his not needing a sense of humor had
been quite insincere__ Then, only about
ten years later, Navasky fetched up as the
new editor of The Nation. It was difficult for
me to imagine that he would dare pay Gray
Lady rates at a magazine of national reputa­
tion—even a money-losing magazine of
national reputation. (Historians tell us that
The Nation was founded many years ago to
give a long succession of left-wing entre­
preneurs the opportunity to lose money in a
good cause.) The Nation, after all, had
always railed against 'bosses who exploit
workers__
I realize that this history with Navasky is
one reason for some speculation by scholars
in the field about the sort of negotiations
that could have led to my agreeing to do a
column for The Nation. (“If he got caught
by Navasky twice, he must be soft in the

talk to my wife, and ask myself where I
wanted to be in ten years__
“So I went home and talked to my wife
about where we wanted to be in ten years. I
don’t remember where we decided we
wanted to be in ten years, but I’m very
happy where I am now, and actually it is
about ten years later__ I learned a great
deal during my stay at the New York Times ,
but it is a bureaucracy and you spend a lot of
time negotiating through the stories that you
care about,” Navasky explains. “Here I do a
different kind of negotiating— keeping the

The Years
with
Navasky
by Calvin Trillin
head.”) The entire tale can now be told. The
negotiations took place over lunch at a bar
in the Village. I picked up the check. I had
asked Navasky beforehand if he minded my
bringing along my wife, Alice. I figured that
she would be a reminder that I was no
longer the carefree young bachelor who
barely complained about being stiffed regu­
larly by the Monocle bookkeepers, but a
responsible married man with two daugh­
ters and an automatic washer-dryer combi­
nation (stack model). Navasky, the cunning
beast, said Alice would be most welcome.
He knew her to be a sympathetic soul who
somehow saw a connection in his saving
money on writers and the possibility that he
might buy a new suit.
Once we had our food, Navasky made
his first wily move. He suggested two very
specific ideas for regular columns I might be
interested in writing for The Nation—both
of them of such surpassing dumbness that I
long ago forgot precisely what they were.
One of them, it seems to me, was on the
practical side—a weekly gardening column,
maybe, or a column of auto repair hints.
“Those are the silliest ideas I ever heard,”
I said, with relief. “The only column I might
like to do is so far from Wobbly horti­
culture, or whatever you have in mind, that
I don’t mind mentioning it because you
obviously wouldn’t be interested—a thou­
sand words every three weeks for saying
whatever’s on my mind, particularly if
what’s on my mind is marginally ignoble.”
As long as I was safe from an agreement, I
thought I might as well take advantage of

sheriff from the door— but it’s a most
congenial environment.”
Navasky ascribes The Nation’s longevity,
despite its perennially precarious financial
situation, to the need that people feel for
alternative perspectives. “The political estab­
lishment keeps behaving in a way that
requires the magazine to survive. We some­
times joke that ‘Reagan is bad for the
country, but good for The Nation .’
“We don’t feel any obligation to give
equal time to the Democrats and Repub­
licans. W e’re a forum in a different political

one of those rare opportunities to say
“ignoble” out loud.
“It’s a deal,” the crafty Navasky said,
putting down the hamburger I was destined
to pay for and holding out his hand to shake
on the agreement. Caught again.
“I hate to bring up a subject that may
cause you to break out in hives,” I said, “but
what were you thinking of paying me for
each of these columns?” I reminded him of
the responsibilities of fatherhood and the
number of service calls necessary to keep a
stack-model washer-dryer in working order.
“We were thinking of something in the
high two figures,” Navasky said.
I remained calm. The sort of money we
were discussing, after all, was already a step
up from the Monocle rates. The only check I
ever received from MonocleNTor presiding
over a panel discussion in an early issue—
was for three dollars. (“Well, it’s steady,” I
said when Navasky later asked if I would
run similar discussions as a monthly feature
of Monocle. “A person would know that
he’s got his thirty-six dollars coming in every
year, rain or shine, and he could build his
freelance on that.”) Still, I felt a respon­
sibility to do some negotiating.
“What exactly do you mean by the high
two figures?”
“Sixty-five dollars,” Navasky said.
“Sixty-five dollars! That sounds more
like the middle two figures to me. When I
hear ‘high two figures,’ I start thinking
eighty-five, maybe ninety.”
“You shook on it,” Navasky said. “Are
you going to go back on your word right in
front of your own wife?”
I looked at Alice. She shrugged. “Maybe
Victor’ll buy a new suit,” she said.
I called for the check.
A few weeks after I began the column,
Navasky asked me if William Henry Harri­
son’s Secretary of State had ever said what I
had quoted him as saying.
“At these rates, you can’t always expect
real quotes, Victor,” I said, preferring to
leave it at that.
Copyright® 1982 by Calvin Trillin. From
Uncivil Liberties, published by Ticknor &
Fields, New Haven, Conn.

SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

arena. We have arguments among our
contributors, but they are arguments among
radicals, liberals, anarchists, environmen­
talists, pacifists, trade unionists, feminists,
and black nationalists. Rather than an
exchange between trade unionists and
Republicans, we’re more likely to feature an
exchange between trade unionists and
environmentalists. People who can’t get a
hearing for that kind of exchange look to a
place like The Nation .”
A lthough The N ation’s position on
economic issues has shifted from time to
time, it has always been an outspoken
advocate of progressive social policies, civil
liberties, and minority and women’s rights.
The Nation’s early and passionate opposi­
tion to the war in Vietnam, couched in
understated and factual prose, made it must
reading for an entirely new generation of
political activists during the 1960s. That
stand was consistent with what Navasky
calls its “strong sympathy for nonviolent
approaches to dealing with national prob­
lems through the years.”
While Navasky admits to paying con­
tributors to his magazine notoriously low
rates, he seems to have little trouble con­
vincing established journalists and wellknown academics to write for him. He
attributes this to several related factors, but
especially to the influential, although rela­
tively small, audience the magazine enjoys.
“We have a high readership among the
media and the policy-making community,
as well as among educators,” Navasky
notes. The Wall Street Journal, in fact, has
characterized The Nation as “a publication
whose influence far exceeds its circulation.”
In part, that is because most major public
libraries and nearly all college and univer­
sity libraries subscribe to The Nation. Since
Navasky arrived in 1978, its circulation has
shot up from around 20,000 to nearly
50,000 today.
But the unique influence wielded by what
Navasky himself describes as “an old-fash­
ioned, glued, butcher-paper magazine,” has
most to do with the quality and immediacy
of the reporting and opinions on its pages.
“Because we don’t have a lot of slick, fancy
production problems, we’re a place where,
if you have something to say this week in
short form— we hold our editorial pages
open until the same week we go to press—
you can get the benefit of almost instant
publication and yet have a longevity that’s
greater than that afforded by a daily news­
paper op-ed page that may be used to wrap
fish the next day. The Nation has a life
beyond the newsstand and consequently
gets read more carefully because it is bound
and put on library shelves.”
MARCH, 1984

Unlike many journalists of his stature,
Navasky appears immune to the twin afflic­
tions of cynicism and self-importance that
often seem endemic to his profession. “I
tend to take the long view,” Navasky
explains. “For instance, right now a fellow
named Christopher Cerf and I, in partner­
ship with The Nation, are working on a
collection of quotations from experts who
have been wrong from the beginning of time
until the present in virtually every field of
human endeavor.
“It’s very scholarly, a history of expertol-

ogy. It’s done in a very careful manner. In
our introduction we explain that we don’t
claim the experts are always wrong. W e’re
willing to concede that occasionally they’re
right. In fact, there are people who argue
persuasively they are right as much as half
the time. It’s just that our research didn’t
turn up any experts who were right.
“Publication of that book is scheduled for
this summer,” Navasky adds. “But that’s
what the publishing house experts tell us.
W e’ve almost finished our part and we’re
only a couple of years late.” JS*

E D IT O R IA L

Must It Be Meese?
by Victor Navasky
Until he was nominated to succeed
William French Smith as Attorney
General, White House counselor Edwin
Meese 3d seemed to enjoy playing the
role of a fat James Watt. He described
the American Civil Liberties Union as a
“criminals’ lobby.” He announced that
he had never seen “any authoritative
figures that there are hungry children*
in America and that a lot of people go
to soup kitchens “because the food is
free and that’s easier than paying for it.”
He is such a darling of the right that
beside him, James A. Baker 3d is a
liberal.
But there are two important differ­
ences between James Watt running the
Interior Department and Ed Meese
running the Justice Department. First,
Meese is smarter than Watt. Robert
Gnaizda, who was deputy director of
the California Rural Legal Assistance
program when Meese attempted to
dismantle it under Governor Reagan,
says, “Watt only had a fastball. Meese
has a spitball, a knuckler, a curve ball.
You don’t see the damage he’s done
until it’s too late.”
The damage he can do is the second
difference. The Interior Department is a
critical Federal agency, but its head has
limited power. As the President’s law­
yer and the nation’s chief prosecutor,
the Attorney General wields awesome
power, formally and informally. In
addition to the patronage that goes with
the office, he or his subordinates decide
whether, when and whom to indict,
prosecute, deport, enjoin, settle with or
litigate

against in cases affecting millions of
Americans and involving hundreds of
billions of dollars. In addition, the
department’s legal opinions influence
the actions of every government de­
partment.
Examples of the harm a weak, cor­
rupt or lawless Attorney General can
inflict are legion: John Mitchell and
Watergate, A. Mitchell Palmer and his
infamous raids, Harry M. Daugherty
and the Teapot Dome scandal. The less
visible William French Smith under­
scores the point. His Justice Depart­
ment sought to roll back a generation of
civil rights progress, made serious in­
roads into the First Amendment, helped
draw the secrecy veil over the operation
of government and supported the ex­
pansion of the President’s war powers.
Smith comported himself more as
Ronald Reagan’s mouthpiece than as
his legal counselor. Meese will be even
worse. To believe otherwise is to believe
in Tinker Bell.
Congress was last faced with a threat
to the integrity of our judicial system
when Richard Nixon nominated the
racist Harrold Carswell to the Supreme
court. With a healthy assist from civil
rights and civil liberties groups, the
Senate derailed that potentially disas­
trous appointment. Confirmation hear­
ings on the nomination of Meese will be
scheduled in a few weeks. Now that he
is out of the kitchen, let’s put him in the
soup.

An unsigned editorial from the Feb. 4,
1984, issue o f The Nation © 1984.
Reprinted with permission.

9

A collector and a prac­
titioner, President Fraser
introduces many Swarthmoreans to this ancient
and worldwide craft.
B y M aralyn O rbison G illespie ’49.
mm

A

PHOTOS BY BOB WOOD

fter a day of College business in
New York City, Vice-president Jon
Prime boarded the 4 p.m. Metroliner to wait for his colleague, President
David Fraser, who also had had a full
schedule of appointments. Prime was stow­
ing his briefcase in the overhead rack when
Fraser made a startling appearance, easing
his way through the crowded aisle.
His six-foot, two-inch frame was partially
hidden by a four-foot-tall shield which he
was carrying upright by its handle in front of
him, trying to squeeze through the crowded
aisle. He was carrying also a large paper bag
and a briefcase.
“You can see some weirdos in Penn
Station,” said Prime later, recalling the
incident, “but David himself made quite a
sight.”
In response to the unasked question after
the shield was stowed away overhead, Fraser
said: “My last meeting finished early, and I
browsed through a gallery that specializes in
African art. I found these two twined pieces,
the Kuba shield from Zaire and this
W odaabe hat [pulling it from the bag to
exhibit it] from either Upper Volta or Niger.
The proprietor offered to wrap the shield but
it seemed easier to carry this way . . .
although it did make it awkward to hail a
cab. Barbara is accustomed to my coming
home with twined hats and bags, but I don’t
know how she’ll feel about the shield.”
Maybe it is only logical that an M.D.
epidemiologist who chooses to become a
college president should also choose such an
unusual hobby. Although Fraser had a long­
standing interest in fabrics of all kinds, he
first encountered twining in 1980, when he
was working in Cairo on a rheumatic fever
project. The house guest of an Egyptian
colleague, he gave his host Irene Emery’s
standard book on fabric structure. Both host
and guest enjoyed the book.

A

“I put on my right knee a Bedouin saddle
bag I had bought in the bazaar and Emery’s
book on my left knee,” Fraser recalls, “and I
tried to figure out how the bag was made. I
decided it was countered weft twining. I had
never heard the term before. Some of the
textile pieces I had purchase earlier turned
out to be twining too, but with my unsophis­
ticated eye I could figure out only how the
cruder saddle bag was made.”
Four years later Fraser has not only
refined his detective skills in analyzing the
construction of fabrics, he has also taught
himself how to work in what has been called
the “mother craft of all fiber arts.” The
ancient technique of twining predates the
loom and is found the world over. In Scan­
dinavia one of its forms is called card
weaving; in England, tablet weaving; in
New Zealand, taaniko.
Twining can be used to make a wide
variety of items— baskets, bags of all kinds,
rugs, pillows, shawls, belts, wall hangings,
sculptures. Fraser first twined a magnifying
glass holder to hang on a belt, using string
and knitting wool found lying around the
house. “I hung the string on a coat hanger,
and with the book of instructions on one
knee began to twine. The children laughed
at me, and they have continued to laugh as
they see me paying more and more attention
to what they think is absurd.”
His second project, a pencil holder for his

Left: The slightly sinister looking object which
David Fraser is twining, with two pounds o f wool
and two pounds o f dyed clothesline, is a basket...
if it doesn’t collapse under its own weight.
Opposite page, diagrams showing novice twiners
how to turn at the left and right edges
flank examples o f twined objects; above,
objects include winnowing trays and a salt bag
from Ethiopia; below a Fraser basket.
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

wife Barbara, he describes as “a bomb,” but
his third, a pillow, which he spent his whole
seaside vacation— inside the cottage— pro­
ducing, pleased him.
His children may find their father’s twin­
ing amusing, but a group of knowledgeable
twining collectors and practitioners of the
art, whom he met in Seattle last October and
to whom he showed three examples of his
work, judged it “spectacular.” As Virginia
Harvey, a member of the Seattle Weavers
Guild and an author of two monographs on
twining, said (beyond Fraser’s earshot): “I
have not seen any contemporary twining
any more beautiful, both technically and
aesthetically, than these pieces.”
For the uninitiated, Fraser gives this
definition of twining. In regular cloth one
has warps, vertically oriented and laid out
first on the loom. In normal weaving one
goes back and forth across the warps with a
single thread or weft, lapping the warps in
some pattern. Twining has two wefts work­
ing simultaneously, interacting with each

other and with the warps. One weft lies
behind a given warp and one in front. As the
wefts pass from one warp to the next, they
twist 180 degrees, the one behind coming
out in front and the one in front going
behind. Its name comes from the twin
threads, although some twiners, notably the
Maoris in New Zealand, use three and four
wefts.
Fraser says twining appeals to him be­
cause “... it is a terribly inefficient technique
that cannot be mechanized. Only people
who have more time on their hands than
technology do it. If one takes the time to do
it, one must put a great deal of effort into it. It
appeals to me because it celebrates a tradi­
tional way of life.”
Another part of the appeal of twining for
Fraser apparently lies in its experimental
nature. His present project, for example,
pictured on the cover of the magazine, will
be a basket, if it doesn’t collapse under its
own weight of two pounds of wool and two
pounds of dyed clothesline. “I have no idea
whether it is going to work out; I’m experi­
menting with the technique as well as the
materials.”
Left: Fraser, the collector, purchased
this Bedouin wedding headdress
in Cairo; Above: Fraser, the craftsman,
designed and twined these three baskets.

12

SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

He is carrying two sets of warps, radii for
the basket, one of which will make two rings
to encircle the basket. “I don’t know of any
basket that uses two sets of warps and that
has this kind of appendage. There may be a
way to do it with one set of warps but this is
the only way I could devise. I still haven’t
figured out how I am going to tie off the
clothesline. I’ll have to learn something
about braiding.” Fraser tries to find a half
hour before dinner to twine a couple of
rows, setting up in front of the television so
he can talk to the children at the same time.
He can make a basket in a week, or one may
take a couple of months.
While perfecting his skills, Fraser con­
tinues to collect twined articles, building on
a collection of textiles that began in 1972
with a piece of country cloth from Sierra
Leone, which now hangs in his office. Before
he developed his interest in the structure of
textiles, Fraser was fascinated by them as an
art form. When he was a child, his family
purchased some Navajo rugs when they
were living in Arizona. Barbara Gaines
Fraser, an accomplished needlepointer,
comes from a family with a long and
sustained interest in handwork. Her mother
taught it, and her father did bargello cush­
ions for window seats in the president’s
house.
Fraser’s most recent acquisitions are two
American Indian baskets. He found one last
summer in Santa Fe. “I came home, thought
about it, talked about it with a collectordealer in Portland, and finally ordered it by
mail. The other one I bought by mail bid
from Sotheby’s in New York City after I had
seen it earlier.”
In sleuthing the particulars of the two
baskets, the intriguing part of collecting
twining, Fraser is learning that “reputable
sources can not always be relied upon.” One
basket was made by the Porno Indians on
the West Coast, known for the quality of
their twining. The classic book on Porno
basketry states that the combination of
technique and design in Fraser’s basket
doesn’t exist.
“I need now to go see some collections of
Porno baskets— there is a good collection of
baskets at the Museum of the University of
Pennsylvania. It will be fun to see what
branch of the Pomos made the basket.”
The second basket, according to Sotheby,
is Yoruk or Karok, but Fraser says he doubts
this identification and plans to have more
fun tracking down the right one— a proce­
dure not unlike that followed by an epide­
miologist unraveling the mystery of Legion­
naires’ Disease, dkk
MARCH, 1984

Enjoying the beauty o f objects and trying to figure
out how they were made are part o f the fascination
o f twining. Below, Fraser, with twiner and author
Virginia Harvey, puts a dissecting scope to a hat to
“untwine” it and, bottom, points out some o f the
subtleties o f a late nineteenth-century Chilkat Indian
blanket on display at the Seattle Art Museum.
Drawings reprinted from Weft Twining by Virginia
I. Harvey and Harriet Tidball, Shuttle Craft Guild,
Monograph Twenty-eight, 1969.

At a podium on a makeshift stage in a New
Hope, Pa., bar, Vietnam veteran William D.
Ehrhart ’73 stands challenging his country to
live up to its ideals. In reading “Responsi­
bility,” a poem of relentless logic and selfdisparaging honesty, he also betrays the toll
taken by sixteen years of anger and frustra­
tion.
Ehrhart’s hands are thrust deep in his
pockets. His nasal, tenor voice makes his
thin frame seem vulnerable, almost frail. He
speaks with a carefully measured cadence in
an earnest, driving monotone, as if to contain
an unpredictable emotion. In the poem
Ehrhart contrasts waking up with his wife
on a carefree summer morning in America
with a deadly search-and-destroy mission by
government troops in “another country to
the south [where] the soldiers are always
armed with U.S. weapons.” Suddenly his
voice cracks and his face twitches helplessly
for several moments before he can ask:
W hat i f you and I were wrenched from sleep
by soldiers, and they dragged me out
and shot me? Just like that;
the life we share,
all the years ahead we savor
like the rich taste o f good imported coffee,
vanished
in a single bloody hole between the eyes.
He regains his composure to complete the
poem’s final paragraph, a grimly ironic
mockery of false security.
Idle thoughts. Things like that don’t happen
in America. The sun climbs;
the coffee’s gone; time to leave fo r work.
Friday, payday, security:
money in my pocket fo r the weekend;
money fo r the government;
money fo r the soldiers o f E l Salvador,
two hundred bullets to the box.
William D. Ehrhart has been writing
poetry since he was 15 when he penned a
rebellious ditty about running away from
home. Four volumes of his poetry have been
published and two more collections will be
printed this spring— The O uter B anks and
Other Poems and To Those Who Have Gone
Home Tired: New and Selected Poems. His
poems also appear in many poetry periodi­
cals and anthologies, two of which Ehrhart
co-edited.
Ehrhart’s poems can be divided roughly
into two groups— those that analyze Viet­
nam and other military misadventures and
those that explore the rich texture of
America’s landscape and Ehrhart’s own
personal experiences. Poems about sailing
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

the Chesapeake Bay, visiting his wife’s
mother’s grave in Massachusetts, and climb­
ing barns in Ohio differ sharply in tone and
temper from the Vietnam poems, of course,
but they all share the same eye for detail, the
same fascination with inter-relationships
and the same idealistic conviction that that
which should be, can be.
America stubbornly refuses to reward
more than a handful of its poets and writers
during their lifetimes, so it is perhaps not
surprising that Ehrhart has had to work at an
unrelated assortment of jobs in order to
support his poetry habit. Warehouseman,
forklift operator, schoolteacher, engine room
wiper on an oil tanker, evidence officer for
the Pennsylvania Department of Justice,
newspaper reporter— he has done them all
between earning an undergraduate degree in
English at Swarthmore and a master’s degree
in English from the University of Illinois,
Chicago Circle. He has never stayed more
than twenty-one months at one job. Either
out of principle, or to spend more time
writing, he has left every one.
“I’ve quit or been fired from every job I’ve
ever had,” Ehrhart said almost mournfully
in a recent interview. “I don’t know what
flaw or defect in my character I was born
with. But my resume is like a mine field. It’s
really a disaster.

Vietnam veteran
Bill Ehrhart 7 3
insists: “That which
should be, can be.”
“There’s always tension between the
desire to create and the need to make a
living. I think that happens to anyone who
has something they care about and yet has to
make money. I’m trying to allow myself to
overcome societal pressures. The whole
rational world says I have to have a job, but
everything inside me is screaming to write.”
Although his earnings from writing and
editing amount to virtually nothing, Ehrhart’s efforts were finally rewarded last fall
with a flurry of acclaim and publicity. In a
single weekend, he was chosen over 100
other candidates to be the seventh poet
MARCH, 1984

laureate of Bucks County, Pa., (Ehrhart lives
in Doylestown, the county seat) and his first
major work of prose, Vietnam-Perkasie: A
Combat Marine Memoir, was printed by
McFarland & Co., Inc., a Jefferson, N.C.,
publisher.
In October, the Public Broadcasting Ser­
vice began televising its thirteen-part docu­
mentary on the Vietnam War; Ehrhart was
interviewed for fifteen minutes on one pro­
gram and is quoted several times in the best­
selling book by Stanley K arnow that
accompanied the series. Then came a spate
of interviews and readings. Ehrhart appeared
twice on W HYY-FM ’s “Fresh Air” pro­
gram in Philadelphia and was a guest for half
an hour on Philadelpia Channel 12’s “This
W eek” program. Radio station KOA in
Denver interviewed him long-distance, and
Ehrhart drove to New York City twice in ten
days to read poetry at the Colonnades
Theatre. He is scheduled to return to New
York this spring and to go to Washington,
D.C., and a dozen other cities later this year
to take part in more symposiums and
readings.
W hen he was seventeen years old, in the
spring of 1966, Ehrhart wrote the following
defense of America’s involvement in Viet­
nam in an editorial for his journalism class at
Pennridge High School in Perkasie, Bucks
County: “As long as the Vietcong or any
other subversive influences exist, there can
never be a free country of South Vietnam.
This, then, is the cause for which so many
Americans have lost their lives. To those of
you who feel that these boys are dying for no
good reason, we say this: W hat more noble a
cause can a man die for, than to die in
defense of freedom?”
In April 1966, two months before he
graduated from high school, Ehrhart enlisted
in the U.S. Marines, in hopes of serving one
day in Vietnam. He was inspired by John
Wayne movies and by pictures of GIs raising
the flag at Iwo Jima. But his parents— his
father is a minister in the United Church of
Christ and his mother teaches mentally
disabled children in the public schools—
were not thrilled with Ehrhart’s decision and
agreed to sign release papers only after he
argued, “You didn’t raise me to let some­
body else’s kids fight America’s wars, did
you?”
Vietnam-Perkasie, Ehrhart’s autobio­
graphical account of how his innocence wasjH
shattered during a thirteen-month tour of
duty in Vietnam, crackles with graphic
descriptions of high-decibel confusion. Ehr-

It was a routine patrol, like most patrols, the tension so low-key you were
hardly aware of it, but it got me out of the bunker for awhile and away from the
tedium of the battalion compound. The heat rose out of the earth with the same
dull intensity that made each motionless day a mirror image of the ones on either
side of it. It was easily 120 degrees.
“Cake walk, Sergeant Wilson?” I said. “Bake me a cake that won’t melt in
this stuff. You’d have to make it out of concrete.”
“Wait till the monsoons hit, Ehrhart. You’ll wish you’d never heard of rain.
You’ll be delirious for a slice of sunshine.”
We were about three miles north of battalion, moving slowly through the
rice fields between two small hamlets on the back side of the loop formed by the
circular patrol route. W e’d been out nearly three hours. Aside from a few water
buffalo standing around asleep on their feet, we hadn’t seen much of anything.
Everyone but us obviously had sense enough not to be out in heat like this.
And then I saw the figure in black pajamas running along a paddy dike
about 300 meters ahead and to the left. “Got one!” I hollered. “Ten o’clock. He’s
mine.”
The muttered warning to halt— regulations: “Dung lai!” Drop to one knee.
Safety off. Sight in. Squeeze. Crack! The figure in black went flying like a piece of
paper in a gust of wind.
“Get some!” Morgan shouted.
“Nice shot,” said Newcome.
When we reached the body, it was sprawled in one of those impossibly
awkward postures only people who die violently while in motion are capable of
assuming. I nudged the corpse face-up with my boot. It was a woman of
indeterminate age, perhaps fifty-five to sixty.
“Stupid gook,” said Wally. “W hat’d she run for?” Vietnamese from the
nearby hamlets were beginning to gather in clusters nearby, afraid to approach the
old woman while we were still there, some of them keening softly as Wally radioed
in to battalion:
“Annunciate, Annunciate; Annunciate Two Sierra.”
“Annunciate; go ahead Two.”
“We got one Victor Charlie Kilo India Alpha; Bravo Tango two-niner-two
three-six-zero; negative weapons.”
“That’s a roger, Two. Do you require assistance?”
“Negative assist, Annunciate. Everything’s cool here. We’re proceeding in.
Over.” One of the guys dropped a playing card by the body, an ace of spades, and
then we moved on through the silent steel heat. It took us another hour to reach
battalion.
From Vietnam-Perkasie: A Combat Marine Memoir, © 1983, by W. D. Ehrhart, McFarland &
Company, Inc., Publishers, Box 611, Jefferson, NC 28640. $15.45 post paid.

16

hart spares no one, least of all himself.
Unflinchingly, he tells how mounting frustra­
tion goaded him to shoot two South
Vietnamese soldiers looting an American
supply depot, and how he and several other
bored GIs used a sawhorse to demolish a
small Buddhist temple they found while
patrolling the forest.
Ehrhart depicts the American military as
a G oliath that could turn forests into
“matchsticks” with saturation bombing raids
that lit up the night sky, but could seldom
distinguish enemy from friend and frequently
turned its destructive might on innocent
people. But the book’s most unexpected
characteristic is its apolitical perspective. It
reads as though it were told by a nineteenyear-old as he experienced events, not by a
thirty-five-year-old veteran with sixteen
years of hindsight. Ehrhart says he was able
to adopt this viewpoint with editorial help
from Bill Quesenbery, former Dean of
Admissions at Swarthmore, after struggling
through two revisions of the book over a
two-year period (see excerpt at left).
Ehrhart saves Vietnam-Perkasie from
becoming intolerably bleak by describing
his painful maturation off the battlefield—
how his high school sweetheart broke off
their engagement long-distance; how he
read in a newspaper article of the murder of
a Danish woman with whom he’d fallen in
love while on “R & R ” in Hong Kong; and
how he grew increasingly anxious about
returning home and having to tell his parents
what he’d done in Vietnam. He also spices
the book with humorous accounts of endless
“care packages” from home (predictably
stuffed with chocolate-chip cookies), and
with fondly drawn portraits of his buddies,
nearly half of whom were killed or injured.
Ehrhart says he began writing poetry
seriously when he was at Swarthmore, as a
means of dealing with the anger he felt over
his actions in Vietnam— anger at his govern­
ment for hiding the truth about the war and
anger at himself for continuing to fight after
he had concluded the war was wrong.
“All those things in Vietnam-Perkasie— I
did all that. That was me. And I’m a nice
guy. How could I have been a part of that
evil?”
Ehrhart is standing in the living room of
his condominium, pointing almost accu­
singly at a copy of the book. Moments
before, he was relaxing on the couch, but
sprang to his feet when the conversation
turned to Vietnam-Perkasie.
“After Vietnam, I spent years putting my
life back together,” he explains. “For ten
years, I lived in a rage. W hat I did in
Vietnam was totally immoral. I understood
in my young mind that it was wrong, but I
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

chose to turn a blind eye to what I was
seeing. I live with that constantly and always
have and always will. I can’t just forget
about it, doodle along, pay the mortgage and
watch the kids grow up. I can’t forget about
it, I don’t know why, I just can’t. I am
responsible for what happened.”
Ehrhart credits the early development of
his poetry to his status as the only Vietnam
veteran among a politically liberal to radical
student body at Swarthmore in the early
1970s. At Swarthmore he captained the
swim team, was active in water ballet and
joined Delta Upsilon fraternity, but despite
his efforts to enter the mainstream of student
society, he says, many of his peers regarded
him as an oddity because he had fought in
the war.
“The majority of people at Swarthmore
never got p a s t... my being a Vietnam vet,”
he says. “Even though most Swarthmore
students opposed the war, they had been
acculturated enough to believe that some­
how war, combat, was the ultimate experi­
ence, certainly for a man. Once you did it,
you were different, you had been to the
mountain.
“That had a tremendous impact on me. I
ended up being far more politically com­
mitted than most of my peers. But I was
basically really hurting inside and never able
to share it with anyone. So I channeled that
energy into writing. I used poetry as an
outlet, as a way of saying things I could not
say to people around me.”
In his poem “ M aking the Children
Behave,” Ehrhart seems to be trying to
exorcise feelings that won’t go away.
Do they think o f me now
in those strange A sian villages
where nothing ever seemed
quite human
but m yself
and my few green friends
moving through them
hunched in lines?
When they tell stories to their children
o f the evil
that awaits misbehavior,
is it me they conjure?
In contrast to the Vietnam W ar poems
and their preoccupation with death and evil,
Ehrhart’s non-military poems celebrate life
and marvel at the detailed fabric of relation­
ships between people and dreams, events
and places. But underneath the sense of
wonder and the reverence, one can feel a
familiar tenacity in these “civilian” poems.
The same conviction that drives Ehrhart to
derive some lesson from Vietnam also makes
him cling to every experience, to find
meaning from it and to offer it whole and as
unadulterated as possible for objective
MARCH, 1984

scrutiny. Ehrhart’s poetry spans a panorama
as rich and varied as his resume, from love
poems to his wife, Anne Gulick Ehrhart, to
outings in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens with
his students, to the eight-year-old girl who
taught him how to clean fish in Montana.
Ehrhart made these observations on
“Turning Thirty.'”
A nd ju st like that these
thirty years have come and gone;
and I do not understand at all
why I see a man
inside the mirror when a small
boy still lives inside this body
wondering
what causes laughter, why
nations go to war, who paints the startling
colors o f the rainbow on a gray vaulted sky,
and when I will be old enough
to know.

William D. Ehrhart 73

Ehrhart, a marathon runner who never­
theless fuels his writing with coffee and
constant cigarettes, does most of his work in
a small upstairs study filled neatly with
history books, books about Vietnam, and
poetry magazines and anthologies. He has
had to battle occasional dry spells that last
up to eight months and whose origins he
cannot explain.
“I can’t figure out the creative process at
all,” he says. “I don’t know what happens
when the poems are coming easily or what
has happened when they’re not. I used to
generate a lot of ideas in the period of time
between wakefulness and sleep. But having
to work at real jobs the last three years, I’m
tired by the end of the day. I also know I
have to get up the next day, and that if I
work an idea, there’ll be hell to pay. The
practical side of me has intruded upon me to
an uncomfortable degree.”
Ehrhart describes his poetry as “acces­
sible,” but he says that happens by accident,

not design. “One of the things that make my
poetry different from a lot of poetry is that
it’s really accessible on first hearing. For
better or worse it’s not very complicated
stuff. You can listen to it once and under­
stand it right away without having read it
before. That just happens. I don’t choose to
write that way.”
Ehrhart says he has spent more money
publishing his poems and driving to poetry
readings than he has earned in sales and
from the $25 to $250 he is paid to read in
public. And he feels he has not yet achieved
his goal, which is to write poems that will
still be read a hundred years from now.
“I’m fairly certain I have not written a
poem that people will still be reading a
century from now,” he says. “So I’ve still got
a long way to go. I think I can do it. If I didn’t
think I could, I wouldn’t b& wasting my time
trying.
“But I don’t know.”
The interior of Ehrhart’s tastefully fur­
nished condominium radiates stability. Steps
lead up to the home’s thickly carpeted living
room. A framed copy of his poem “Gifts,”
Ehrhart’s wedding present to his wife, hangs
from one wall. The plaque proclaiming
Ehrhart poet laureate of Bucks County is
displayed prominently on another. The
toaster oven and dishwasher seem to suggest
that the home’s owners are at peace with
themselves and committed to an orthodox
lifestyle in the American mainstream.
But Bill Ehrhart cannot relax, any more
than his condominium can shut out the rest
of the world.
He recently has taken a six-month leave
without pay from his job— editor/writer for
R odale Press— to w rite a book about
readjusting to life in the United States after
Vietnam.
He fears that too many people of his
generation have traded the commitment and
energy that inspired the civil-rights and anti­
war movements for complacency, secure
jobs, and “a stake in the system.” There may
be little he can do about America’s growing
military role in Central America, he acknowl­
edges, but Ehrhart says he feels compelled to
try to influence people by reading his poems
and by speaking out politically on radio and
TV.
“People might say, ‘You’ve got it fat, pal.
W hy not enjoy it?’ But just the fact that I
can’t be complacent, can’t sit back and enjoy
the condo, the job, and the car indicates to
me that something is wrong in the world and
I ought not to ignore it.
“Ultimately, I still believe the ideals I was
taught as a kid. But I’ve come to leam that
my country does not stand for those ideals. I
passionately want my country to live up to
the ideals it’s supposed to embody.”
17

Senate legislative assistants Alex Jurkat ’82 and
Franz Paasche ’83 are shown (at right) in a
discussion with Career Planning and Placement
Director Judith Katz (center), flanked by Julia
Stannard ’85, Stacey Franks ’86, Jeanne
Mullgrav ’83, Michael Radiloff ’84, and
Christopher Burry ’84.

Swarthmore's Washington (
Except for the fluorescent lights, Room
1129 in the Longworth House Office
Building on Capitol Hill is elegant. The
draperies and carpeting are matched, a
royal burgundy color, and the walls are
wainscoted with rich walnut. Fourteen
Swarthmore students gathered at a con­
ference table in this setting create an incon­
gruous sight to say the least.
“I guess I’d have to say it’s a combination of what you know and
whom you know,” Pat Dilley ’73 forthrightly explains when asked
how to get a job on Capitol Hill. Dilley, a staff Social Security law
specialist for members of the House Ways and Means Committee,
adds that “it helps to have a special body of know ledge... and the
name of your college will prove helpful. It won’t do everything for
you, but it does help.”
Dilley and two other alumni who work on Capitol Hill clearly
have the complete attention of the fourteen students who are seated
around the lengthy table in the House Ways and Means Com­
mittee conference room. These students, along with eighteen
others, have taken a day off from their studies in November to meet
alumni during a working day in Washington, D.C. It was a unique
opportunity for students to experience “life after Swarthmore” first
hand by seeing the settings and meeting some of those employed in
career areas of interest to them.
Congress is “one of the least structured, least regularized
institutions you’ll find anywhere,” says Fred Feinstein ’69, a staff
attorney for the House Education and Tabor Committee. “There
are no set rules. Each member of Congress has a different staff
setup and everything is done with a sort of political currency
around here.” Besides the political considerations that sometimes
figure in staff appointments, Feinstein warns those interested that
“each year we get about a dozen offers from graduate students in
local programs who are willing to come and work for a year free.”
William Kirk ’74, staff director for the oversight subcommittee
of the Ways and Means Committee, agrees that “graduate degrees
can help” in landing a job, but adds that “experience seems to carry
the day on the Hill.” Kirk, who has a law degree from Georgetown
University, notes that he worked on a congressman’s office staff for
five years, beginning as a press aide, before moving into his present
position.
“Our hours here are very cyclical. If you came here in August,
Pat and Fred and I might have very little to do. It’s a very laid back
atmosphere then because the members are gone,” Kirk explains.
“ But right now it’s very hectic because we are legislating. Over the
18

Above left: Walter A. Scheiber ’46, Susan Willis R u ff ’60 and Judith
Katz. Below left: Arthur Hauptman 72 with Swarthmore students.

last two weeks I’ve averaged getting home about 10 p.m. The
amount of work that others might do on a nine-to-five basis over
six months we sometimes have to do in a month or six weeks. Last
year when we were working around the clock with the Senate to
pass a tax bill, for instance, I came into work one Thursday and
didn’t get back home until Saturday.”
“So you’ll find that Swarthmore is good preparation for this
kind of work,” Dilley interjects, laughing. “In general,” she adds,
“the Hill is a good place for women to work. My experience has
been very positive, I’ve been able to blend in with the boys. There is
one thing about my boss though— he does not swear in front of me.
He really can’t bring himself to do that. But he listens to what I say
and that’s the important thing.”
Later that afternoon, twelve Swarthmore students crowded into
a cubicle in Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s (D-N.Y.) office, to
hear Franz Paasche ’83 and Alex Jurkat ’82 explain how they
converted their internships into permanent staff positions after
graduation. Both are legislative assistants to Sen. Moynihan.
Paasche has specialized in foreign policy issues, while Jurkat
concentrates on tax policy.
“The political science degree I earned at Swarthmore prepared
me well for my job in the Senate,” says Paasche, who served a
full-time internship in Moynihan’s office during the summer of
1981. “Your liberal arts training will serve you well as an intern—
you’ll need stamina too.”
“Sometimes you can work your way into a full-time, permanent
staff position,” Jurkat points out. “But the competition can be
pretty stiff if you’re going up against somebody with a master’s or
Ph.D.”
“Y ou need experience, along with your degree, to get a good job
on Capitol Hill,” Paasche adds.
While this group of Swarthmore students was busy meeting
interns and professional staffers on Capitol Hill, other students had
an opportunity to meet alumni who work for a variety of
government agencies including the Federal Trade Commission,
the Federal Reserve Board, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board,
the Congressional Budget Office, and the Congressional Research
Service. At the same time, several students went to the Smith­
sonian Institution, where they met with Ralph Rinzler ’56,
assistant secretary for public service, and Gretchen Ellsworth ’61,
director of fellowships and grants. Students also kept appointments
with Stephen Hitchner ’67, a vice president of the citizens lobbying
group Common Cause, and with Gloria Helfand ’78, an economist
specializing in public land policy for the Wilderness Society.
These “on-sight seminars” were organized by Swarthmore’s
Career Planning and Placement Director, Judith Katz, with the
help of alumni involved in the College’s new Washington “Con­
nections” program. Robert Ryland ’82, an energy consultant who
credits a Swarthmore alumnus with helping him find his own job
in Washington, was especially helpful in planning the day’s
activities. Katz says such efforts are needed to “help students make
sound career decisions [by establishing] a network of career
resource people.” Similar on-sight career seminars may be
organized in other major Connections cities, such as New York,
Philadelphia, and Boston.
That evening a wine and cheese party gave students another
chance to talk with Washington-area alumni in a more informal
setting. The reception was hosted by Walter Scheiber ’46,
executive director of the Washington Council of Governments, in
the Council’s downtown boardroom.
— Larry Elveru
19

Good summer jobs can be hard to find.
Can you help?
If you or your organization knows of summer jobs for which
Swarthmore students can apply, please complete and return the form
below. And if you’re looking for employment or a change in jobs, the
Office of Career Planning and Placement will be delighted to send you
their monthly Newsletter. Please include a self-addressed, stamped
envelope with your request.

Summer Jobs ’84
□ Yes, I can provide contacts and information about
summer job opportunities.
□ Yes, I will send notices of summer job openings to
the Office of Career Planning and Placement.
□ Please sign me up for the Career Planning and
Placement Newsletter.
N a m e ------— ______________________ C lass______
Home Address____________________
Occupation (title)__________________;____________

Five new Managers
elected to the Board
Five new members have been elected to the
Swarthmore Board of Managers: Dean
Winslow Freed ’43, J. Parker Hall ’55,
Stephen B. Hitchner, Jr. ’67, Elise Faulkner
Jones ’54, and Carolien (Chica) Powers
Maynard ’48. Two of the new managers,
Hitchner and Maynard, were nominated by
the Alumni Association and are known as
Alumni Managers. Charles C. Price ’34 was
named an emeritus member at the Board’s
December meeting.
In other action, Elizabeth J. McCormack
and Janet Hart Sylvester ’37 were reelected
members and Katherine Conner ’68, who
had served on the Board from 1971 to 1982,
also was reelected.

Responsibilities ____________________

Business Address__________________ _
---------- -------------------------- Telephone
Mail to: Office of Career Planning and Placement,
Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA 19081.
You are also wanted as an Extern Sponsor or as a resource person
to help students learn about your career field.

Extern Program
□ I would like to be an Extern Sponsor.
□ I would like to serve as a resource person.
Career opportunity I can provide/advise about

Dean Winslow Freed ’43 is president, direc­
tor, and chief executive officer of EG&G,
Inc., a high-technology Fortune 500 com­
pany based in Wellesley, Massachusetts.
He joined the company in 1970 after
serving as vice president of the BunkerRamo Corporation of Cleveland. At EG&G
he became president in 1978 and was named
chief executive officer last year.
He is a vice chairman and former presi­
dent of the World Affairs Council of Boston
and chairs the board of directors of Emerson
Hospital in Concord. He serves also as a
board member for Eastern Gas and Fuel
Association and Data Technology, Inc.
Freed received his master’s degree in
industrial engineering from Purdue Univer­
sity and did further graduate study at
Columbia University.

N a m e -------------------------------------------- Class
Home Address____________________ ,______
Occupation (title)________________________
Responsibilities__________________________

Business Address _:__________________
------------------------------------- Telephone
Mail to: Office of Career Planning and Placement,
Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA 19081.
20

J. Parker Hall 55
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

J. Parker Hall ’55 is president of Lincoln
Capital Company in Chicago, a post he has
held since 1971.
An MBA graduate of Harvard University,
he is a former president of the Investment
Analysts Society of Chicago, a chartered
financial analyst, and a member of the
Financial Analysts Federation. He also is a
director of the LaSalle Street Fund, a real
estate investment trust, and has served as an
advisor to the Pension Benefit Guaranty
Corporation.
Active in civic affairs, Hall is a trustee of
the Ravinia Festival and involved in invest­
ment management for Ravinia, the YMCA
of Metropolitan Chicago, Winnetka Com­
munity House, and New Trier Township
High School.
At Swarthmore, he has been a member of
the Alumni Council and is a Class Agent.

Stephen B. Hitchner, Jr. ’67 is vice president
for issue development with Common Cause,
a non-partisan public interest action group
based in Washington, D.C. Before joining
Common Cause in 1982, he was director of
the U.S. Department of Justice Office of
Policy and Management Analysis. He has
also served on the faculty of the Kennedy
School of Government at Harvard Univer­
sity, where he directed case studies research
in public sector management.
Hitchner has served as consultant for the
City of New York, the University of Mary­
land, and Harvard University. He was exec­
utive director of the Education for Public
Service Clearinghouse Project and devel­
oped the teaching of case studies in educa­

Elise Faulkner Jones ’54
MARCH, 1984

tional programs for students entering gov­
ernment service.
A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the Col­
lege, Hitchner went on to study at Oxford
University as a Rhodes Scholar. He received
master’s degrees in public policy from the
Kennedy School of Government and in
business administration from the Harvard
Business School.
A demographer specializing in studies of
fertility and contraceptive use, Elise Faulk­
ner Jones ’54 is presently a senior research
associate at the Alan Guttmacher Institute in
New York. She worked previously at Prince­
ton University and has served as consultant
for the United Nations and to the World
Fertility Survey on assignments in Europe,
Africa, and the Middle East.
She is founder and former president of the
Planned Parenthood Association of Bucks
County (Pa.) and has served as a member of
the Committee on Family Planning and Pop­
ulation Education of the American Friends
Service Committee.
Jones is a member also of the Princeton
Research Forum, the International Union
for the Scientific Study of Population, and
the Population Association of America. She
serves as editorial consultant for several
journals, including Demography and Social
Biology, and reviews proposals for the Na­
tional Science Foundation.
Jones earned her master’s and doctor’s
degrees in demography at the University of
Pennsylvania.
Carolien Powers Maynard ’48 was until

Stephen B. Hitchner, Jr. ’67

recently editor for U.S. publications with the
American Field Service. She was also in­
volved with AFS from 1973 to 1980 as field
consultant for more than 300 chapters in the
northwest United States.
Active in numerous civic organizations,
Maynard is a member of the board of
directors of Graham-W indham Family Ser­
vices, the oldest child care agency in the
nation. She is a past president of the AFS
Club of New York and currently serves as a
ruling elder of Huguenot Memorial Church,
Pelham, N.Y. She is also director of Balia
Machree Farms and of the Caribbean Con­
servative Corporation and has been involved
with Planned Parenthood of Westchester.
Maynard is currently vice president of the
Swarthmore Club of New York.

Development Planning Groups
begin deliberations
How can we maintain a talented pool of
1,250-1,300 students who reflect a diversity
of interests and of geographic, economic,
and racial backgrounds? W hat admissions
and financial aid policies will best support
these goals?
Do our facilities, curriculum, and planned
building projects adequately support the
mission of Swarthmore as a residential
college?
Are students with special needs— minor­
ities, women, foreign students, handicapped
students, and others— provided with institu­
tional structures which ensure equal access
to educational and social opportunities?
Such questions and many others are being

Dean Winslow Freed ’43

Carolien Powers Maynard ’48
21

explored in an exhaustive study of the needs
of the College which began in January with
the first meetings of four Development
Planning Groups (DPGs).
Academic programs, physical plant, stu­
dent life, and finances of the College are
undergoing a comprehensive review by the
four DPGs, which include a total of ninety
faculty members, students, administrators,
members of the Board of Managers, and
alumni.
Recommendations on specific needs over
the next ten years are expected in April—
needs to be met either by raising additional
funds or reshaping existing programs. Each
of the DPGs, working from a set of guide­
lines concerning the desired character of
Swarthmore, will produce a report to clarify
needs, evaluate alternatives, and suggest the
ordering of College priorities.
Directing the efforts of the DPGs are
steering committee members: Richard Willis
’33, emeritus member of the Board, chair;
President David Fraser; Chairman of the
Board of Managers Eugene Lang ’38; Neil
Austrian ’61 and Ira Wender ’45, Board
members; and Kendall Landis ’48, vice
president for development, as well as the
chairmen and vice chairmen of the individ­
ual DPGs.
In anticipating the College’s needs over
the next decade, President David Fraser
prepared the following statement, which he
characterized as “a set of rebuttable pre­
sumptions,” to help guide the Development
Planning Groups.

teaching on campus. Recognizing the contri­
bution that diversity of people makes to the
educational process, we strive to include in
our talented student body persons of varied
backgrounds in regard to wealth, ethnic
origin, gender, belief, and location.
We need faculty members who delight in
intense work with undergraduates, who are
skilled in pedagogy and who continue origi­
nal scholarly work, for these are the teachers
who can transmit by example and instruc­
tion the creative thinking that we want our
students to acquire.
W e need a curriculum that draws stu­
dents deeply enough into a field to test their
intellectual limits and to instruct them in the
methods of creating knowledge and that, at
the same time, encourages them to venture
out from the narrow boundaries of a single
discipline to learn how disciplines inter­
relate, for in that interdisciplinary space
much remains to be discovered.
W e recognize that much of the important
learning in college is in the art of living. We
seek to provide the opportunity for our
students to develop their interest outside the
academic curriculum in such areas as the
arts, athletics, politics, social action, and
spiritual life. W e hope that our students,
exposed to a variety of views and having
tested them during their college years, will
adopt a set of moral values and ethical
principles that will guide them well through­
out their lives as they contribute to a better
world.

A composite of characteristics

Swarthmore in the Next Decade
Swarthmore College seeks to help its
students realize their fullest intellectual and
personal potential and develop a deep sense
of ethical and social concern. W e intend that
they acquire the academic skills and intellec­
tual independence that will allow them both
in college and after to forage successfully at
the margins of knowledge and, when neces­
sary, to lean firmly against the wind of
public opinion. Drawing on the Quaker
heritage of the College, we seek to instill in
them a deep and lasting belief in the innate
worth of all men and women, a belief that
contributes a confidence in oneself and
tolerance of differences in others. W e
believe our graduates will thus be prepared
to become wise and imaginative leaders of
their generation.
W e seek students who are extraordinary
in their intellectual, artistic, social, and other
talents, for these are the students able not
only to accomplish the most with the educa­
tion we offer but also to contribute the most
to the process of mutual learning and
22

The College that we envision for the next
decade is a composite of characteristics that
derive from the educational goals outlined
above and from the history of the College,
but will necessarily be affected by external
forces over which we have little control. We
shall continue as a fine coeducational resi­
dential college with instruction in the liberal
arts and engineering. The number of under­
graduates will remain below 1,300 with at
most an occasional master’s degree candi­
date. We shall strive to maintain an enroll­
ment above 1,250, while retaining our his­
torically high standards of admissions, but
recognize that the rapidly dropping number
of 18-21 year olds in this country will make
this difficult over the next decade. Increased
success in recruiting from populations that
are under-represented in our present student
body, such as those with family incomes less
than the national average, those from the
South and West, and Black and Hispanic
students, not only is helpful to achieve
diversity but, because of shifting population
patterns, also may aid in reaching this
numerical goal. To appeal successfully to a

broader range of students, however, it is
likely that scholarship aid will have to be
increased far faster than tuition charges—
especially if Federal support continues to
slacken— and that our recruiting efforts will
have to be expanded.
Preserve intellectual acuity

Several steps will have to be taken in
order to maintain a vital faculty and cur­
riculum at a time of stationary student body
size and few scheduled faculty retirements.
To preserve the intellectual acuity of indi­
vidual faculty members, the College’s gener­
ous leave policy should be continued, recog­
nizing that receding support from external
sources may make it necessary for the
College to underwrite a larger number of
faculty leaves. Ways should be found to
permit those faculty members to retire early
who find that their energies are shifting away
from college teaching. Support for released
time must be found to allow teachers to
master new fields or develop new courses.
But even with these measures, a modest
increase in faculty size is likely to be needed
to create a curriculum that will continue to
attract the high quality of students that we
seek.
The specific shape of the curriculum for
the next decade will be determined largely
by the curriculum review being undertaken
by the Council on Educational Policy. On
first examination, a few elements seem
certain however. The value of upper level
seminars as a capstone to the liberal arts
education seems well shown through the
history of the External Examination Pro­
gram; the strength of such seminars should
be maintained or, where possible, increased.
Students do well to be exposed broadly to
the modes of thinking and areas of concern
of the humanities, the social sciences, and
the natural sciences and engineering; any
revision of the curriculum should ensure that
all students have those exposures. Students
have much to gain from the experience of
living and studying in a non-English speak­
ing culture; sufficient flexibility should be
permitted in curricular and financial aid
programs so that all interested and qualified
students may have that opportunity prior to
graduating from the College.
This vision of the College in the next
decade is offered to guide those who will
participate in the constructive réévaluation
of the institution and its needs. Recognizing
that this réévaluation may lead us in direc­
tions that we had not anticipated, however,
this description may be amended in light of
convincing suggestions for change.
David W. Fraser
President
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER/KENDALL WILKINSON

Kristina Williams, College research technician (left), and Professor Kenneth Prestwich hold bee-covered honeycombs at Swarthmore’s apiary.

Beekeeping course draws swarms of students
When Swarthmore College biology profes­
sor Kenneth Prestwich decided to offer a
spare-time, noncredit course in beekeeping,
he didn’t expect to tap what seems to be a
1980s trend. Students and college staff
members lined up to get into the course even
before it was listed in any College publica­
tion.
“I don’t know how many people I can
take in the course, but somehow the word
got around. I don’t see how I can take
everyone who wants to learn beekeeping,”
Prestwich said ... as he examined a filled
honeycomb manufactured by Swarthmore’s
two active bee hives. [The course, which
began in the fall, continues this spring.]
One Swarthmore College student taking
the course, biology major Jon Margolis
[’84], said he believed beekeeping will be­
come a popular new element in the “selfsufficiency, organic gardening kind of thing”
that he discerns as a trend in recent years.
Whatever the reason, Prestwich said,
people in the Swarthmore College commu­
nity have taken to the idea. “Somehow the
MARCH, 1984

word got out and all these people showed
up, and a lot of them want to start their own
hives/’ Prestwich said.
“The fact is that a well-managed hive can
produce a lot of honey, up to 200 pounds or
more a year, depending on the hive’s loca­
tion, and people enjoy eating it, or giving it
to friends, or even selling it to cover the costs
of beekeeping.
“When I was a graduate student in
zoology at the University of Florida a few
years ago, I had twenty-two hives that paid
for themselves and gave me some financial
help in getting through graduate school by
producing honey. Sometimes I even rented
the bees to watermelon farmers, because
plant pollination by bees increases the agri­
cultural yield significantly,” Prestwich said.
He simply loves bees. “Sometimes they’re
a bit moody, but most of the time they’re
nice and gentle. The secret to not getting
stung is not to act nervous around them.
Now, for some people, that’s kind of hard, I
suppose.
“There’s a lot of satisfaction in managing

a hive of about 40,000 bees and making it
manufacture honey the way you want__ I
guess maybe it’s a bit like gardening and
producing perfect tomatoes__ ”
A key consideration in beekeeping is to
place the hive near a source of food, flowers,
and nectar, so “one of the funny things about
it is that you kind of start thinking like a
bee,” Prestwich said. “You begin thinking
about which flowers are available where for
feeding purposes, how the weather is affect­
ing the feeding of your bees, and I guess the
thought begins to occur to you, ‘Now, if I
were a bee__ ’ ”
Prestwich said that beehives can be suc­
cessfully kept in the middle of the city as
long as plants and flowers are within about a
mile and a half—the radius in which bees
feed.
A beehive, essentially a stack of wooden
boxes in which bees make their home, could
be established for less than $100, Prestwich
said. Several hives will be established as part
of the course.
There are several ways to obtain the bees.
23

Some beekeepers wait for bees to “swarm,”
or to establish a colony on a tree branch or
other support while some of the bees seek
out a new home. The beekeeper can then
gently assist the swarm into the hive and
hope the bees stay there, Prestwich said.
Another option is to order the bees by
mail, by the pound. Several pounds, enough
for a hive, are available for about $30 or so.
“ They’re shipped through the mail or
through United Parcel Service. They’re
marked with a big ‘Live Bees’ sign, and you
can look in through a screen and see the
bees,” he said.
“It’s remarkable how quickly the mail­
man can find you when you’ve got a delivery
of live bees.”
Reprinted by permission of The Philadelphia
Inquirer, Nov. 3, 1983. By Dick Pothier.

Freeman conducting) in a program of J. C.
Bach, Wagner, Levinson, and J. S. Bach.
• Saturday, June 23: An informal con­
cert of chamber music performed by partici­
pants in the festival master classes and
chamber music coaching programs. This
concert is free and open to the public with no
advance reservations or admission tickets
required.
Concerts will begin at 8 p.m. with the
exception of the June 23 informal program,
which is scheduled for 3 p.m. All music
programs will be presented in Lang Concert
Hall. The special dance program on June 16
will be in Clothier.
Festival brochures, which include special
subscription and tickets rates, are available
from the Music Department office by calling

Swarthmore music and dance
festival to bloom in June
Jazz pianist Marian McPartland and Metro­
politan Opera soprano Judith Blegen will
headline the third Swarthmore Music and
Dance Festival on campus June 10 through
23.
Other guest artists taking part in the two
weeks of concentrated performances and
classes are the Emerson Quartet, violinist
Peter Zazofsky, and the Dan Wagoner and
Company dance ensemble, back for a return
engagement following its well-received ap­
pearance at last year’s festival. The Concerto
Soloists of Philadelphia will join in orches­
tral concerts conducted by James Freeman,
professor and chairman of the Department
of Music.
Festival directors Freeman and Paula
Sepinuck, associate in performance (dance),
have put together an extensive schedule of
music and dance classes and workshops
running throughout the two-week period to
complement the varied public performance
program.
The performance schedule for the festival
is as follows:
• Sunday, June 10: Marian McPartland
and The Concerto Soloists of Philadelphia
(James Freeman conducting) in a program
of Haydn, Wilder, and Gershwin.
• Friday, June 15: The Emerson Quartet
performing M ozart, Shostakovich, and
Beethoven.
• Saturday, June 16: Dan Wagoner and
Company.
• Sunday, June 17: Judith Blegen and
The Concerto Soloists of Philadelphia
(James Freeman conducting) performing
Mozart and Leef.
• Friday, June 22: Peter Zazofsky and
the Concerto Soloists of Philadelphia (James
24

chairman from 1976 to 1981.
A member of the Development Commit­
tee of the Board of Managers, he also was a
member of the College’s Promotion and
Tenure Committee, the Science Improve­
ment Committee, and the Black Studies
Committee, among others.
England is a referee and reviewer for
several mathematics journals and has served
as a consultant for I.B.M. He is a member of
the American Mathematical Society, the
Mathematical Association of America, and
Sigma Xi.
He received his A.B. degree from Kansas
State Teachers College and his M.A. and
Ph.D. from the University of Missouri at
Columbia.
As has been the case with past provosts,
the appointment is for five years.

Sun Company donates grant
for science and engineering
Swarthmore has received $50,000 from the
Sun Co. of Radnor, Pa. in support of the
College’s program to upgrade its teaching
facilities in the natural sciences and engi­
neering.
“The grant is the first major gift, rather
than equipment, that Sun Co. has given to
the College,” according to President David
Fraser. “It represents a commitment on
Sun’s part to support excellence in science
teaching at the undergraduate level.”
The Sun Co. grant will be used to enrich
the College’s science programs by increasing
funds for student research, faculty develop­
ment, equipment, and the expansion of
space for additional laboratories, offices,
and science classrooms.
James W England

Mathematician named to
head College academics
James W. England, former professor and
chairman of Swarthmore’s Department of
Mathematics, has been named provost of the
College, effective July 1.
In making the announcement of the
appointment, President David Fraser said
England was “the unanimous choice of the
search committee” and “the right person to
carry on the fine tradition of Harrison
Wright and his predecessors.”
Currently dean of the faculty and vice
president of academic affairs at Occidental
College in Los Angeles, England first came
to Swarthmore in 1969 as associate profes­
sor of mathematics. He was promoted to full
professor in 1973 and served as department

Former Librarian dies
M artha Angeline Connor, Swarthmore
Librarian Emerita, died in November fol­
lowing a long illness. A graduate of the
University of Pennsylvania, she did her
postgraduate work at the University of Penn­
sylvania and Drexel University.
Miss Connor worked at the libraries of
the Franklin Institute and at Temple Univer­
sity before coming to the Swarthmore Li­
brary in 1945. As head of technical services,
she supervised the steady growth of the
College library. She was also responsible for
the development of plans for a new building
and organized the routines and supervised
the move of books and equipment into
McCabe Library. She served as acting librar­
ian between the tenures of Charles Shaw
and James Govan and was Librarian from
1973 until her retirement a year later.
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

(continued from back cover)
vastly more knowledgeable. Though Hugh
looked like a young Marlon Brando, there
was never any question in his or anyone
else’s mind that he would become a writer.
Charlie wore his wavy, red hair in a tousled
arrangement, as if he had more important
matters to think about than his appearance.
He would later become a psychologist, but
in those days he aspired to the life style and
talents of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
In the ensuing months, the three of us
talked incessantly— about God, about great
and not-so-great literature, about our rela­
tively brief past lives, about the nature of
man— and we talked an awful lot about
girls. That talk at all hours has, I think,
something to do with the intensity of friend­
ships formed in early years. Such friendships
demand an investment of time that one can
rarely afford later, as well as a willingness to
be vulnerable, to reveal oneself and to be
receptive to new ideas.
Hugh and I, both New Yorkers, sprang
from relatively similar, stable Jewish back­
grounds. Charlie was the only child of a
Boston Irish Catholic family: his mother, a
fragile woman who worked as a nurse and
communicated rarely with her son; his
father, already in the mental hospital that he
was never to leave. Over the coming years,
Hugh and I were to become variations on
the themes of our cultural pasts. Charlie’s
accomplishment was more awesome: He
had to invent himself almost completely. He
was the first of us to marry and have a child.
In 1955, still in his F. Scott Fitzgerald phase,
Charlie wed a Southern debutante. I was
best man. Hundreds of elaborately dressed
people filled the bride’s side of the aisle; on
the groom’s side, there was Charlie’s mother,
one aunt and uncle, my family and Hugh.
Five years later, Charlie, now recovering
from the end of his first marriage, came to
New York to do research in psychology.
Eventually, he married again, an elegant,
reserved woman who seemed uncomfort­
able with our boisterous behavior. As we
each began to raise our own families, Char­
lie’s new wife gradually drew him away
from our orbit. We were all too busy to
notice what was happening, until one day
Charlie and his family simply disappeared
from New York. They left no forwarding
address. We didn’t know where to look for

him. Besides, I suppose, Hugh and I were
hurt. Charlie, after all, had chosen his new
family over our old “family.” We went on
with our lives. Charlie was now part of our
vanished youth.
Fifteen years passed. Hugh became a
successful novelist; I became a publisher.
Then later in the fall, at a cocktail party, I ran
into a woman who knew us all from the old
days. “Have you heard about Charlie?” she
asked. “He’s divorced again and living in
Annapolis.”
Immediately, I knew what I wanted to do.
I put my drink down, went into an adjoining
room and called Hugh. We agreed that we
were going to visit Charlie whether or not he
wanted to see us. I managed to get his
Annapolis telephone number and nervously
called. “Hugh and I are coming to see you,” I
stammered. “When?” the familiar voice
answered, as if we had spoken only the day
before.
Early one Friday morning last December,
Hugh and I took off for Annapolis. The
small plane flew not far above the ground,
and we fell into silence watching the land­
scape below. W ould our meeting with
Charlie be simply a reliving of past associa­
tions, or would there be more? Could we get
beyond nostalgia for our lost youth and
move into a future friendship as well?
We arrived at the Baltimore-Washington
airport, and, as we passed through the
landing gate, there was Charlie looking for
us. “O h,” I thought, drawing in my breath
and my gut, “we are middle-aged for cer­
tain.” Considerably heavier now, hair thin­
ning, gray mixed with red, Charlie flashed us
a familiar grin. W e burst into excited shouts
like small boys winning a Little League
championship. We seized each other joy­
fully, jumping up and down, whooping,
laughing, hugging and kissing. Arm in arm,
we felt invincible, a reunited troika. We
raced to the car, hopped in and drove off.
Charlie was so excited telling us of his life
over the past 15 years that we completely
missed the highway turnoff and had to drive
30 miles out of the way before we came to
Annapolis. His parents had both died, he
explained. He had gambled everything on
his second marriage, hoping it would give
him the roots he sought, but, while he had
two more children, it had not worked out.

He was alone again.
We pulled up in front of the hotel where
we were to stay. Hugh and I checked in and
chose beds as college roommates do, flip­
ping a coin for first choice. Charlie smiled.
“Hey, I bought us something.” Three iden­
tical gift boxes contained three identical
knitted ties, maroon with jaunty blue stripes.
W e laughed and put them on, three aging
musketeers in the highest spirits despite the
gray and drizzling day.
W e linked arms to roam the streets of
Annapolis. At a restaurant, we began drink­
ing large quantities of wine from pewter
tankards. I realized that Hugh and Charlie
were sitting side by side as they had been the
day I first met them, rattling on about the
work of a writer, while I sat quietly, the
disciple listening to my elders. We drank
more wine, and then reeled from shop to
shop, trying on hats, looking at paintings,
browsing through antique galleries and book
stores. We flirted with a barmaid who
invited us home to bathe in her large zinc
tub. (Hugh and I were flattered; to Charlie
the invitation was commonplace.) We drank
beer and ate dozens of oysters; and, sur-'
rounded by the young people from the local
college and from the Naval Academy, we
briefly found our own youth again, found
our young voices and our young minds.
That night, Hugh and I lay awake in our
hotel beds as we had so often in our college
dormitory. We speculated about the nature
of our relationships and particularly won­
dered how we had all influenced each other
so many years ago. As we drifted toward
sleep, we agreed that the principal quality
we had absorbed from Charlie was a sense of
wit, that ironic edge that adds zest and spice
to thought and language.
The next day, we had breakfast with
Charlie, admired the view from his small
apartment and took turns trying out his
water bed. I told him of our conversation the
night before, and he laughed.
Hugh looked and said quietly, “Charlie, if
we learned wit from you, was there anything
you learned from us?”
Charlie looked at both of us. “I thought
you knew,” he said. “Love.”

— By Paul Gottlieb ’5 6
(Copyright ©1983 by the New York Times
Company. Reprinted by permission.)

In this issue:
1 Results of the 1982
Alumni Survey
5 Saving The Nation

The Reunion

10 Twining—President David
Fraser hones his detective
skills at an ancient craft
14 Poetry out of mud and pain
18 Washington Connection
20 The College

By Paul Gottlieb ’56

y two best friends from

I

Rls

25 Class Notes
Editor:

Maralyn Orbison Gillespie ’49
Managing Editor:

Larry L. Elveru
Assistant Editors:

Kathryn Bassett ’35
Kate Downing
Editorial Assistant:

Ann D. Geer
Designer: Bob Wood
Cover: Some of the attractions

of epidemiology to David Fraser
may also attract him to his hobby
of twining. Designer Bob Wood
photographed Fraser with a work
in progress—a basket of wool
and dyed clothesline. To learn
more about President Fraser’s
hobby, please turn to page 10.

W)

1 .£

intervening quarter o f a century, but
Charlie is another matter altogether.
"Fifteen years ago, he disappeared
completely from our lives. Last
December, Hugh and I rediscovered the
pow ef o f early friendships. ' ' '
.: W e three first met some 30 years agoj
in my first week at Sw’arthmore. I had l l
just turned 17, a nervous Brooklyn Tech
graduate entering a small Quaker college
at the start o f everybody else’s second
semester. In the cavernous commons
room o f the main building, I spotted
two boys who struck me as representing
everything college was supposed to be.
Hugh was discoursing on the meta|
physical poetry of John Swarthmore Reunion
Donne. Charlie was
It’s time to meet your best
friends on the Swarthmore
June 1 and 2, during
blowing smoke rings. I campus,
Alumni Weekend. Reserve the
to see your friends
could do neither. They weekend
now—they’ll be glad you did!
The College and your class are
planning a full schedule of *
fwere older than I by
events for you. Complete
information and a reservation
two years and seemed
form will be mailed in April.