Swarthmore College Alumni Bulletin 1991-02-01

College Bulletin
February 1991

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SWARTHMORE
COLLEGE BULLETIN • FEBRUARY 1991

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Of Moths and Men
Our sense o f time eclipses the rising and setting sun— it is
embedded deep within our cells. A Swarthmore neurobiologist
is mapping the molecular gears o f our internal clocks.
By J

effrey

L

ott

6

The Woman with the Flying Hair
A revolution in the role o f women has not spawned a similar
revolution in the role o f men— and women have become primary
victims o f the resulting work-family speedup.
By A

r l ie

R

u ssell

H

o c h s c h il d

’6 2

10

Faces and Voices
Fred Wasserman 78 knows the ghosts o f Ellis Island, where
millions first set foot in the United States. He helped create a
museum there that summons the poignant immigrant spirit.
By J

Editor:

effrey

L

ott

Maralyn Orbison Gillespie ’49
Managing Editor:

Jeffrey Lott

18

Assistant Managing Editor:

By One’s Own Hand

Kate Downing

Myth: Academic pressure leads to a high suicide rate among
college students, especially at Swarthmore. The College’s Director
o f Psychological Services debunks some myths on youth suicide.
B y L e i g h t o n C. W h i t a k e r ’5 4 , P h . D .

Copy and Class Notes Editor:

Rebecca Aim
Assistant Copy Editor:

Ann D. Geer
Designer: Bob Wood
Cover: The irony of our culture’s
image of the working mother is that
it leaves so much unseen. The
Woman with the Flying Hair,
striding forward in advertisements,
so confident, active, and “liberated,”
helps us ignore the crisis facing
American women and their families.
Story, page 6. Illustration by
Marianne Hughes.
The Swarthmore College Bulletin (ISSN
0888-2126), o f which this is volume
LXXXVIII, number 4, is published in
September, November, December, Febru­
ary, May, and August by Swarthmore
College, Swarthmore, PA 19081-1397.
Second class postage paid at Swarthmore,
PA, and additional mailing offices. Post­
master: Send address changes to Swarth­
more College Bulletin, 500 College
Avenue, Swarthmore, PA 19081-1397.

W
J
'IPS
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| 26

Hope for the Starving
Eritrea, struggling for independence from Ethiopia, is distributing
food to its famine victims under very difficult conditions. But
much remains to be done to help these people feed themselves.
By A

sm a ro m

L

egesse

DEPARTMENTS
1 21 The College
28 Letters
1 3 0 Crossword Puzzle by Charles Bush ’49
F y r w s l
j 31 Class Notes
j 3 9 Deaths
48 Recent Books by Alumni
iÈ n S S i'.l
57 Alumni Council News

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Circadian rhythms affect the behavior of many
species, including Manduca sexta, the moth of the
tobacco horn worm. Proteins triggered by the moth's
DMA—and measured in the striped electrophoresis
ilgel” above—are one of the dues that Kathleen
Si wicki, assistant professor of biology, is using to
investigate the m oth’s internal clock.

ometime during the fall of her
freshman year at Brown University, young Kathleen King sat in a
science classroom, taking notes like any
good student. The introductory biology
course had been very interesting, espe­
cially the section on neurobiology—the
anatomy and physiology of the brain
_
and nervous system. Somewhere deep inside her
brain, there occurred a
■■■H r
unique moment of chemical
and electrical activity. Her
cells were at work, generating an
idea—a complex series of neural
connections—that has inspired her work
and guided her life to this day.
“It was then that I realized all con­
sciousness, thought, and imagination—
all the higher functions of mind—were
likely to be explicable through the inter­
actions of cells in the brain,” says King
—now Kathleen King Siwicki and an
assistant professor of biology at Swarthmore—of the undergraduate revelation
that launched her career as a teacher
and neurobiologist. At 35 she is still
working to understand how molecules
within our nervous systems are able to
modify behavior—to shape our reac­
tions to the environment, our ability
to learn, and—of special interest to
Siwicki —our daily, or circadian,
rhythms.
Discovering what she calls the
“molecular gears” of the nervous system
is a little like doing a jigsaw puzzle—
only in this scientific puzzle, you don’t
have a box lid to refer to, and many of
the pieces are missing. Yet in the last
two decades, a number of these pieces
have appeared, and they are painstak­
ingly being arranged into a coherent
picture.
Neurophysiologists have3traced the
electrical “wiring” of many parts of the
3

brain, learning how neurons process infor­
mation. Neuroanatomists have succeeded in
identifying some of the physical pathways
and chemical transmitters that send mes­
sages from one neuron to another. Geneti­
cists have discovered many of the the genes
that give cells their instructions. And mo­
lecular biologists have decoded sections of
the genetic language that carry these instruc­
tions from generation to generation of cells.
Now scientists like Kathy Siwicki are on the
trail of the particular proteins that operate
within cells to control specific sets of behav­
iors like circadian rhythms.
Biological rhythms are found in an ex­
traordinary variety of living things. Accord­
ing to John D. Palmer’s Introduction to
Biological Rhythms, the ancient Greeks ob­
served and recorded the daily “sleep cycles”
of certain plants. Eighteenth-century scien­
tists found that these plant cycles are not
dependent upon light, but persist even in
total darkness at a constant temperature.
(True circadian rhythms are now classified
by their independence from external envi­
ronmental stimuli.)
Other internal rhythms were recorded in
animals. Fiddler crabs, for instance, have an
activity cycle keyed to the lunar day: At
each low tide, they emerge from their bur­
rows to scurry about the beach, feeding,
mating, and threatening each other with
their giant fiddlelike claws. Yet in labora­
tories far from ocean tides, locked in incu­
bators in total darkness, fiddler crabs will
continue their tidal rhythm with amazing
precision.
In humans the biological clock is well
known to anyone who has jetted across
several time zones or who switches every
few weeks from day to night work in a
factory. The menstrual cycle is another
obvious biological rhythm. But there are
other, more subtle variations. Heart and
respiration rates have a definite daily
rhythm. Body temperature, mental alertness,
and psychomotor dexterity have also been
shown to be connected to our internal
clocks. Recent research suggests that heart
attacks occur more frequently in the morn­
ing and that cancer chemotherapy causes
fewer side effects—and may even be more
effective—when administered at certain
times in a patient’s circadian cycle.
Kathy Siwicki is trying to find out—on a
very basic level—how nature’s clocks work.
What sets and maintains them so precisely?
Where in the brain are the timekeeper cells
located? How is information passed from
these cells to neurons that govern behavior?
A few pieces of the circadian puzzle are
already in place. About 20 years ago, scien­
tists at the California Institute of Technology
4

began looking at mutations that altered the
behavior of the common fruit fly, Drosophila
melanogaster. This research, conducted on
a species that had had a long record of study
by geneticists, included observations of the
fly’s biological rhythms. The Caltech scien­
tists discovered three types of circadian
mutations: flies that were totally arrhythmic;
flies with a long daily activity cycle of about
29 hours; and flies with a short cycle of
about 18 hours. Their key finding was that
all three mutations were due to the action of
a single gene—one part of the genetic blue­
print known as DNA.
DNA, the complex molecule embedded
in the nucleus of every cell, carries the
genetic code from generation to generation.
It provides a template for the molecule
RNA, a copy of the DNA code that moves
out into the cytoplasm of the cell to govern
the production of proteins. These proteins in
turn initiate action in the cell—and, if it is
a brain cell, behavior in the organism. By
chemically cutting and recombining the
DNA, it is possible to identify and duplicate,
or “clone,” the exact genes that cause such
behaviors.

MARTIN NATVIG

ll thought, all
limagination and
behavior are likely
to be explicable
through the interactions
o f cells in the brain.

A

By the mid-1980s researchers at Brandeis
and Rockefeller universities, using this re­
combinant DNA technology, were able to
isolate and clone the part of the Drosophila!s
genetic code that determines circadian be­
havior. Dubbed the period gene, it opened
up a whole new section of the circadian
puzzle.
In 1985 Kathy Siwicki, having received
her Ph.D. in neurobiology from Harvard,
joined the Brandeis team to continue circa­
dian research. The question then was how
to trace the action of the period gene within
the cells. The answer lay with the protein
product of the gene and with the develop­
ment of a specific antibody to that protein.
It is impossible to see the actual protein
within a cell, yet for each unique protein, it
is theoretically possible to generate an anti­
body that will attach itself to that protein.
Immunizing rabbits with pieces of the period
protein, Kathy Siwicki caused the rabbits’
immune systems to create an antibody for
that protein. Then, by “staining” that anti­
body with a chemical tag, she could bond it
with the protein she was looking for in the
cell—and thus measure its occurrence in the
nervous system of the Drosophila. Not sur­
prisingly, she found that levels of this protein
were different at different times of day.
“All of this was somehow affecting the
behavior of the fly. We knew the effects on
circadian behavior, and we’re learning about
how the expression of the DNA—its ability
to control the amount of protein product—
is regulated in a circadian fashion. But we
don’t know the intervening steps. How does
the period protein affect the neurons in the
brain that ultimately control the fly’s circa­
dian behavior?” These were Siwicki’s next
questions, but they became increasingly
tough to answer in Drosophila. The small
size of the fruit fly’s nervous system made it
nearly impossible to study the cells that
produced the period protein.
Why not try a different insect? reasoned
Siwicki. “Going into a larger insect would
allow us to study how this protein functions
in specific cells in the brain.” She selected
Manduca sexta, a large brown moth that
metamorphoses from the hornworm, a com­
mon agricultural pest that attacks tobacco
and tomatoes. “You could fit three whole
fruit flies into a single Manduca brain,” she
says, so it is a lot easier to work with.
Since she came Swarthmore in September
1989, Siwicki has continued her circadian
research while teaching a sophomore course
in neurobiology and a seminar on the neural
basis of behavior, also contributing to the
introductory biology course and to a senior
seminar on evolution.
The routine in Siwicki’s lab is, by the
SW A R TH M O R E C O LLE G E BULLETIN

MARTIN NATVIG

Assistant Professor Kathleen Siwicki is helped
in her research by Anne Danielson ’90, who
dissects moths using a powerful microscope.

nature of the research, connected to the
clock. Moths in various stages of life are
housed in two large incubators, each with a
controlled light/dark cycle. Even in winter
the lights are on 17 hours a day to fool the
moths into thinking it is summer, so they
will go about the business of growing as
hornworms, pupating, and emerging as fullgrown Manduca. Each of the large, bright
green hornworms lives in a separate con­
tainer, fed a homemade mixture that in­
cludes wheat germ, sucrose, yeast, and cho­
lesterol. They grow fast, and after a pupation
period of three to four weeks, a batch of
about 20 moths emerges ready for study.
Lab assistant Anne Danielson ’90 is
“mother” to the moths, but she can’t get too
attached. Carefully noting the time—and
thus the exact point in the moth’s circadian
cycle—she anesthetizes one of the two-inch
long insects in dry ice and then begins a
dissection under a powerful microscope.
The moth’s brain, about the size of a pepper­
corn, is removed and placed in a glass tube
with a buffer solution, then ground up to
form a homogenous mixture of brain cells.
A biochemical assay of these cells is
begun with a process called gel electroPlease turn to page 56

Doing basic research
a t Swarthmore
“I wanted to be in a place where teaching
was taken seriously and was not just some­
thing I ‘had’ to do in order to find a place
to do my research,” said Kathy Siwicki of
her decision to come to Swarthmore. The
College’s reputation for serious academics,
its enthusiastic students, and its small
classes all drew her here.
“I was in New Orleans in 1987 for a
neuroscience meeting, and was—shall we
say—carousing on Bourbon Street with
friends, one of whom was a Swarthmore
grad. We ran into [Professor] Mark Jacobs
and [Associate Professor] Greg Florant.
They said they were recruiting for this job,
and I was immediately interested.”
Siwicki highly values good teaching.
While a graduate student at Harvard, she
had taken a neurophysiology course at the
medical school with David Potter ’52.
Recalling that Potter’s teaching was “so
much better than much of my under­
graduate exposure to the subject,” Siwicki
hoped she might learn to explain and
teach others “as clearly as he did for me.”
Strong foundation support was also a
factor in bringing her to Swarthmore. A
grant from the Howard Hughes Medical
Institute purchased sophisticated teaching

and research equipment comparable to
what a large university can offer. The
Institute’s grant also funds half of Siwicki’s
salary for the first five years of her
appointment.
Her Presidential Young Investigator
Award, one of two currently held by
Swarthmore faculty (Lynne Molter ’79
of the Engineering Department has the
other), provides a basic five-year grant,
with additional matching funds for money
raised from other sources. Siwicki hopes to
use some of the PYI money to fund
summer study at the Marine Biological
Laboratory at Woods Hole, Mass.
In addition, a three-year Research in
Undergraduate Institutions Award from
the National Science Foundation is paying
for a full-time technician, part-time student
wages, and small equipment and supplies.
Is it unusual for such basic research to
be conducted at a college like Swarth­
more? “Yes, but in recent years neuro­
biology has been incorporated into more
small college curricula,” says Siwicki.
“And many respected investigators are
carrying out high-quality research at places
like Bowdoin, Wellesley, and Bryn
Mawr.” And Swarthmore too!
—JL

The Woman with
the Flying Hair
The gender revolution is stalled,
and American families are suffering
call her the Woman with the
Hying Hair. She is not the
same woman in every maga­
zine advertisement, but she
embodies the same idea. She has
that working-mother look as she
strides forward, briefcase in one
hand, smiling child in the other.
Literally and figuratively, the work­
ing mother is moving ahead. Her
hair, if long, tosses behind her. If
short, it sweeps back at the sides,
suggesting mobility and progress.
There is nothing shy or passive about
her. She is confident, active, “liber­
ated.” She wears a dark tailored suit,
but with a silk bow or colorful frill
that says, “I’m really feminine un­
derneath.” She has made it in a
man’s world without sacrificing her
femininity. And she has done this on
her own. By some personal miracle,
this image suggests, she has managed
to combine what 150 years of indus­
trialization have split wide apart—
child and job, frill and suit, female
culture and male.
Cultural images invite. And this image of
the working mother invites young women
to say, “I too can combine career and
children with as little strain as she has.” This
image also implies that the problems of a
working mother—if she has any—are per­
sonal in nature, a matter of having enough
confidence, enough energy, enough capacity
to organize her life. Our attention is guided
toward this woman’s happy face and her
child’s happy face and away from the overall
context in which she lives her personal life.
We don’t see her “working husband” with

I

6

So the first thing to say about the
dilemma faced by the working
mother is that you can’t see it. It’s in
visual disguise. Ironically, the reality
of the working mother’s dilemma is
obscured by our society’s most com­
mon image of her.
There has been a revolution in the
role of women, but not in the role
of men. In 1950 about a third of
American women worked outside
the home. Today that figure has
risen to two-thirds. In 1950, 23
percent of married women with chil­
dren under 6 worked outside the
home. Today it’s over half. We don’t
know how many women with chil­
dren under the age of 1 worked
outside the home in 1950—it was so
rare that the Bureau of Labor Statis­
tics kept no records of it. Today half
of such women do.
This increase in women in paid
work has been proceeding fairly
steadily since 1890. I think we can
»peak of this change in the role of
. MARIANNE HUGHES
women as a revolution. It was not a
his briefcase, child, and flying hair. We don’t revolution “engineered” by a few people
see the day-care worker, often underpaid for with ideas; in writing The Feminine Mys­
work society undervalues. We don’t see the tique, Betty Friedan did not flick a switch
workplace, with its fixed hours and its and turn on this trend. What she did was
notion of a proper “career” in which peak provide an ideological rationale for an eco­
work demands coincide with prime child­ nomic trend well under way by the early
bearing years. Images obscure as well as 1960s. Like the earlier move of men and
invite, and it is these things about her con­ working-class women, the move of women
text—her husband’s part in child-rearing, of all classes into paid work is a fundamental
the lot of day-care workers, and the structure consequence of the industrial revolution.
of work—that this image obscures.
But I believe this is a confusing, incom­
plete, and stalled revolution. Why? Because
By Arlie Russell Hochschild ’62
we have had a revolution in the role of
SW A R TH M O R E C O LLE G E BULLETIN

women without a revolution in the role of
men or in the institutions that most define
them both—the family and the workplace.
Capitalism has incorporated mothers into
wage work while ignoring the needs of
families and while exerting pressure on men
to stay as they have been.
The homemaker of the 1950s is no longer
at home, and so we must ask, “Who is going
to do her work?” Will this work be loaded
onto the woman now working 9 to 5 outside
the home? Will it be shared? Will it be
reassigned to paid help or female kin? Or
will it just not get done? This is the enormous
dilemma we face today, a dilemma dividing
many families, a dilemma lightly tripped
over by the image of the Woman with the
Flying Hair.
Sadly, the one promising source of a
solution to the stalled revolution—the wom­
en’s movement—is on the wane. The move­
ment itself has split into two. One part has
been mainstreamed, corporationized, gutted,
and flattened into a dress-for-success femi­
nism, which only assimilates women to a
male-dominant understanding of life and
work. The Woman with the Flying Hair fits
this. The second part of feminism continues
to challenge the definition of manhood and
success that increasingly provides a model
for women. It calls for humanizing men, not
dehumanizing women. But this humanizing
part of feminism doesn’t fit capitalism and
has been tossed to the cultural margin.
The dominance of work over family life,
of efficiency over human connections—a
distortion from which we had hoped to res­
cue men—is thus now extended to women.
To add insult to injury, this cultural derail­
ment is touted as “a successful feminist
revolution.” A stalled revolution is mistaken
for a revolution completed, and the tensions
caused by it are seen as “just normal family
life.” Humanistic feminism is eclipsed.
Many college students today see them­
selves as the happy inheritors of a gender
revolution that has already been accom­
plished. “You women of the 1960s did the
job,” they seem to say. “All we have to do
is step in behind you.” But young women
and men are inheriting a revolution that is
incomplete.
The Woman with the Flying Hair is an
image. But she implies a further idea. And
the idea is a reversal of an idea commonly
expressed in the 1960s: “the personal is
political.” This meant that “personal” wor­
ries—like a mother’s worry about her
child—could be traced step by step to some
FEBRUARY 1991

overarching social or political situation. The
notion of a “good” mother or a “happy”
child, the exclusion of men from the respon­
sibility for children, the culture that upholds
that exclusion, the inflexibility of either
parent’s workday, and the very idea of a
“normal” or “good” career—all were seen
as matters that broad social or political
action could affect.
Today we are exposed to a “George
Bushization” of that idea. Instead of “the
personal is political,” we have “the political
is personal.” Essentially political problems
have been conceptually thinned down to
merely “personal” problems. Instead ofjoin­
ing the rest of the industrial world by
developing a government policy to aid the
family, President Bush retreats to private
pro-family rhetoric. If you want a strong
family, he seems to say, don’t change any­
thing structural. Don’t aid the new main­
stream two-job family in an era of 50
percent divorce. Don’t take kids off the
street by providing quality day care or by
encouraging companies to offer modified
and flexible work hours. Just say a prayer
and hope for the best. Just as Nancy Rea­
gan’s anti-drug slogan, “Just Say No,”
turned our attention to a question of private
will and away from the problems of poor
education, unemployment, and family break­
down, so George Bush turns our attention
away from any real solution to a major crisis
in the American family.
Researching the two-job family
For eight years I interviewed mothers,
fathers, and day-care workers; and, if fam­
ilies agreed, I also observed in their homes.

apitalism has
incorporated
mothers into wage
work while ignoring
the needs o f families —
and while exerting
pressure on men
to stay as they
have always been.

C

We had a joke that I was like the family dog,
an unobtrusive presence almost everywhere
at home. On the basis of my interviews,
observations, and study of 20 years of
previous research on the division of labor
at home among working couples, I found
the following:
• Women average an extra 12 to 15
working hours each week. They work full
time at the office or factory, then often come
home to a “second shift.” If we add up their
paid and unpaid work and compare it to
that of their husbands, women work an
extra month a year.
• Women are also more likely to do the
daily chores, to make the dinner, fix the
lunches, do the laundry. Men are more
likely to mow the lawn, to fix an appliance,
to change the oil in the car—things that can
be put off until they “have time.”
• Women more often do two things at
once. I would see a woman fold laundry and
talk to a child, or stir the soup and talk on
the phone, or talk to a child and do bills.
Men are more likely to do one thing at a
time, such as a Saturday night gourmet
meal. (“It’s going to be good; get the kids out
of the way.”)
• Women also carry more of the mental
responsibility for the second shift. They are
more often thinking about making the dental
or medical appointments for the children,
writing Aunt Harriet, sewing the Halloween
costume. To be sure, working fathers often
think about financing the house or getting a
checkup for the car. But in general husbands
do less second-shift thinking than wives.
All of this means that women feel the
strain of working two shifts more keenly
than men. They talked more than their
husbands did about combining work with
family, and with more passion. Women also
talked more than men did about sleep;
indeed, many women talked about sleep the
way a hungry person talks about food. In a
sense, women are the primary victims of the
work-family speedup that occurs when
women take full-time jobs outside the home
and not much else changes.
But ironically, in many families women
were also the chief villains. It often fell to
women to take the role that a time-andmotion expert takes in a factory. The mother
would say, “Hurry up; it’s time to go,” or
“Let’s see who can be first out of the bath.
Quick. Quick.” The children would com­
plain, “Mother is always hurrying us up.” To
the mother, hurrying everyone up is yet an­
other job. Yet in doing this job, she becomes
7

a lightning rod for the family’s aggression.
In one out of five marriages, men fully
shared the work of the second shift. These
were by far the happiest marriages in the
study. On the other hand, about 10 percent
of husbands married to full-time working
wives did almost nothing at home, and they
were in the least happy marriages. Which
came first—sharing the load at home or
having a happy marriage—I don’t know;
what was clear was that generally the two
went together.
Most men in my study saw their partici­
pation at home very differently from the
way their wives saw it. Most men felt they
were doing “quite a lot.” Often they would
tell me, “OK, I don’t do half. But I do a lot
more than my father did and more than my
older brother does.” Or they compared
themselves favorably to a neighbor or co­

worker. While men compared themselves to
other men, their wives often replied, “Yes,
but you don’t do as much as / do.”
Aside from the 20 percent of women
whose husbands fully shared the work at
home, many women felt they had to struggle
to get their husbands to help. They felt they
had an extra—and uphill—job of remind­
ing, nagging, and cajoling their husbands
into helping. If they weren’t vigilant, these
wives felt, their husbands would lapse back
into domestic passivity.
Nancy and Evan Holt
Let me give you one example of how the
division of labor at home looms large in a
family’s emotional life and how it affects a
child as well. It is the story of Nancy and
Evan Holt and their son, Joey. Since before
their marriage, Nancy had always done

“Soon the laundry sat like a disheveled guest on the living-room couch. . . . ”
8

most of the housework, and after Joey’s
birth, most of the child care. One day, after
an especially difficult month at work, Nancy
put it to Evan this way: “At the end of the
day, my feet are as tired as your feet. Let’s
divide the work at home. I’ll cook on
Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays. You cook
on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, and
we’ll go out on Sunday. OK?”
Evan replied that he didn’t like “rigid
schedules” but that in principle this seemed
fair. So on Monday Nancy cooked. On
Tuesday evening Evan returned home hav­
ing forgotten the shopping list he would
need to cook the meal he had planned, and
they went out. On Wednesday Nancy
cooked, and on Wednesday night Nancy
became anxious that Evan might slip up
again and a certain scolding tone entered her
voice: “Evan, don’t forget.” Evan braced at
this tone and made the meal on Thursday,
but forgot something vital on Saturday.
So it went for months—Evan the master
of passive resistance, Nancy ever more anx­
ious and imperious in her vigilant watch
over him. Inevitably their conflict spread to
other household tasks. Soon the dirty laun­
dry sat like a disheveled guest on the livingroom couch, untouched by either. And the
paralysis spread until, feeling this could go
on no longer, Nancy declared, “Never mind.
It’s easier if I do it.”
Nancy reassumed the second shift, but
she resented doing it. This resentment be­
came a story all its own. It came out in­
directly in ways that neither Nancy nor
Evan any longer associated with their earlier
struggle over the second shift. Both had
previously spoken to me about Joey’s prob­
lem with getting to sleep. Everything was
fine at home, they said, except Joey had
insomnia. But from the way in which Nancy
put Joey to sleep, I could see that she put
him to bed in a way that kept him up. His
bedtime moved later and later, until at 11:30
everyone was exhausted, and Nancy and
Evan were “too tired” to make love.
In the end, I concluded that Joey’s prob­
lem of insomnia was not his own but really
Nancy and Evan’s problem, and that Nancy
and Evan’s problem was not in any simple
way their own either. It was really the
problem of marriage in a stalled revolution,
for like so many other marriages, theirs had
become a shock absorber for an uneven rate
of change between men and women. There
was much that was unique in their struggle,
but also much that was not.
| What is to be done?
I
There is not one solution to the problems
5 of the two-job family, but many—both
private and public. One obvious remedy is
SW A R TH M O R E CO LLEG E BULLETIN

for the four-fifths of husbands who don’t
share the work with their second-shifting
wives to start sharing the load at home. I
would like to see a nationwide series of con­
ferences on this subject, featuring couples
who share and focusing on how they do it.
In addition, I would like to see a series of
radio and television programs and films
aimed at men, featuring interviews with
children about what they would like to do
with their fathers, how they would like their
fathers to be. Addressing the needs of work­
ing wives as well, such programs could
begin to remove the ideological obstacles to
male participation at home.
In addition, we need to restructure the
workplace in order to adapt it to the changed
work force. Many companies, such as Hew­
lett-Packard, Stride Rite, Xerox, American
Express, Merck, Corning, and Johnson &
Johnson, have instituted policies that ease
the strain on two-job families: paid parental
leave, flextime, job sharing, and jobs with
modified hours, benefits assured. For these
vanguard companies, the issue is how to
convince line managers to help implement
their family-friendly policies. For laggard
companies the issue is to get these policies
on the books.
Finally, we need a government and a
president that offer a real family policy. An
honestly pro-family policy in the United
States would give tax breaks to companies
that encourage family leave for new fathers,
job sharing, part-time work, and flextime.
Through comparable worth, it would pull
up wages in “women’s” jobs. A pro-family
government would create warm and creative
day-care centers. If the best day care comes
from elderly neighbors, students, or grand­
parents, they would be paid to care for
children. Traveling vans for day-care enrich­
ment could roam neighborhoods. Ventures
in “co-housing,” in which clusters of families
could pool resources and share meal prep­
aration, would be encouraged. These would
be real pro-family reforms, reforms that
speak to the reality underlying the image of ■
the Woman with the Flying Hair, reforms
that could unstall this stalled revolution.
Arlie Russell Hochschild ’62 teaches sociol­
ogy at the University o f California, Berkeley.
Her 1989 book, The Second Shift: Working
Parents and the Revolution at Home, was
recently issued in paperback by Viking/
Penguin. She and her husband, Adam, are
the parents o f two sons, Gabrial and David.
David Hochschild is in his second year at
Swarthmore. This article is adapted from a
talk she delivered at Swarthmore in March
1990.
FEBRUARY 1991

Seven years since Swarthmore: If this
is “post-feminism,” why are we so—well, wistful?
arena of male bonding where women
don’t trespass. In my friend’s case, the
by Jamie Stiehm ’83
congressman played squash with the
male aides and had a beer afterward to
When I was living in London in 1988,
talk shop and politics.
a college friend I last saw on gradua­
The way older women were treated
tion day in 1983 came to visit. Still in
also sent shivers down our post­
our mid-20s, we felt we had aged light
feminist spines. Often they ran the
years since Swarthmore. I had gone to
graduate school, married, moved across show while younger men, officially
their bosses, got the credit. They were
the Atlantic, and was then working at
terribly underpaid—or was it that the
CBS News. She had worked for a con­
men were overpaid? For that matter,
gressman and had won a Fulbright to
our own salaries seemed small com­
study politics in Portugal.
pared to what our male college class­
We became friends while working
mates were already making.
on a project on the English suffragettes
Finally, both of us had gone to
in a women’s history class at Swarth­
greater lengths for love than we had
more, taught by Bob DuPlessis. We
ever foreseen. I was living in England
thought Bob was the herald of a new
because of my marriage. She was con­
era because he would say (and mean)
sidering a move to Capetown to join a
things like, “Tonight’s my night for
man she later married. Neither of us
child care.” My friend and I shared a
had given up our careers for marriage,
rosy optimism about our prospects as
women in the real world.
yet we both changed the maps of our
At that point, we were running even
lives for men. Somewhere along the
with our male peers. We had no prob­
way we had absorbed the idea that, for
lem competing with men for A’s or
true love, it was worth going—in her
holding our own in seminars—and we
case literally—to the opposite end of
the earth.
saw no reason why things shouldn’t
stay the same.
What had happened? Had we gone
You see, we viewed ourselves as part backward since graduation day? Why
of the “post-feminist” generation. We
did we feel less empowered, less opti­
thought the battles that the suffragettes
mistic about “having it all”? There was
and women’s libbers had fought were
no question something had to give in
won. We wouldn’t suffer the discrimi­
the struggle between career, marriage,
nations and deprivations we read about and family; we just didn’t know what.
in history books. We would shine in
Away from nurturing college class­
our public and private lives, with bril­
rooms, why were we so—well, wistful?
liant careers, supportive husbands, and
I just remembered something. Be­
beautiful babies. That was the plan,
sides Bob DuPlessis, there was only
anyway.
one man in that women’s history class.
So,
face to face, woman to woman, Our male peers did not drink from the
how did we feel five years after
same cup of visions we had tasted at
Swarthmore? Not so sure of all that.
Swarthmore. They never bothered their
The more we entered into society’s
heads with whether we (or they) were
arrangements, it seemed, the harder it
going to have it all. Yet these are the
was to keep up in the races we chose to men of our generation, the same men
run. Already we felt a little torn in the
we married, the ones we live and work
tug of war between Home and Office.
with every day of our lives. Ay, there’s
We didn’t know what we’d do when
the rub.
Nursery joined the fray.
We had other workplace worries.
Jamie Stiehm ’83 is a writer and jour­
Both of us had noticed the male mentor nalist living in San Jose, California.
system. A senior lawyer, executive, or
Her opinion columns have appeared in
editor might be professional and polite
10 newspapers throughout the U.S. Her
to a young woman at work, but he
as yet unpublished first novel is a
would be much more likely to mentor
coming-of-age story set in a school like
a young man. Sports, especially, are an
Swarthmore.

Faces
and
Voices
by Jeffrey Lott

“When I first walked through this
building, I could feel the ghosts,”
says Fred Wasserman ’78. “My
grandparents came through here.
I know that they walked through
these rooms.”
So did the forebears of more than
100 million Americans—some 40
percent of the population of the
United States—who can trace their
families through the brick and lime­
stone portals of Ellis Island. They
entered America here, taking enor­
mous risks to begin new lives in a
new land. Now, when you visit
Ellis Island, you can feel them
too—these ghosts.
Fred Wasserman knows them
well. He has searched for them,
listened to them, lived with them,
and brought them to life during
more than seven years as a key
member of the architectural and
design teams that created the new
Ellis Island Immigration Museum.
He found their faces and helped
give them voice.
The faces of immigrants haunt the new Ellis Island
Immigration Museum, housed in the restored main
building of the immigration station that operated on
the islandfrom 1892 until 1954. Many of the muse­
um’s exhibits are the work of Fred Wasserman 78.
10

FACES: WATCHORN CO LLECTION/CENTER PHOTO: MARTIN NATVIG

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

llis Island was a magic word.
Because that was the last lap of
the journey. And we knew we were
in America for sure.

E

—Katherine Beychok, Russia, 1910
NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY/WILLIAM WILLIAMS COLLECTION

More than 12 million people crossed this
island during the peak immigration years of
1892 to 1924, before America essentially
closed its doors with highly restrictive immi­
gration laws. The museum’s exhibits pre­
cisely chronicle this historic migration—its
causes, its vast dimensions, and its lasting
impact on America. And illuminating each
carefully researched display is the unforget­
table personal experience of the immigrant.
Photographs, oral history, and interpretive
text are woven together in a powerful tap­
estry that brings the ghosts to life and lets
them tell their story.
Fred began his work on Ellis Island in
1983, when the long-awaited renovations of
the immigration buildings were being
planned. An art history major at Swarthmore and a historic preservation specialist
who had written his undergraduate thesis on
New York’s cast-iron buildings, he was hired
by the project’s architects, the firm of Beyer
Blinder Belle, to prepare what preservation­
ists call “historic structure reports” on the
island’s principal buildings. Conducting a
survey of more than 200 separate rooms,
Fred evaluated their existing condition as

well as their historic and architectural signif­
icance.
“The place was crumbling, plaster was
falling off the walls, floors collapsing—
everything saturated with moisture,” he re­
called. “But still it was wonderful and
evocative in the way that ruins are—only
more so because these were modern ruins.
It had been just 30 years since the buildings
were abandoned, and it made you very
conscious of the swift passage of time, of
memory and mortality. It was like a ghost
town where people had just walked away
one day, leaving it littered with furnishings,
papers, and personal objects. I thought a lot
about my grandparents, wondering where
they had been, whether I was walking in
their footsteps. It really sparked your imagi­
nation.”
With the architectural survey complete,
Wasserman moved in 1985 to MetaForm
Incorporated, the design firm selected by the
National Park Service to create exhibits for
the new museum. Along with just two
colleagues, Fred was charged with research­
ing and curating the museum’s exhibits. The
switch from the history of the buildings to

the history of immigration itself was an
important move for Fred, and when you
talk with him, you realize that in the last five
years, Ellis Island has become more of a
passion than a job.
The exhibit designers’ challenge was to
bring history to life, not just by presenting
the extraordinary statistics, but by celebrat­
ing the immigrants themselves, each of
whom had a unique story, sometimes heroic,
sometimes common, but always human,
always very real. When Fred started on the
project, there was virtually no collection or
organized evidence, so he and the small
research team tracked down thousands of
family and documentary photos, read
hundreds of articles, books, and letters,
edited hours of taped interviews—all the
while pondering how best to tell the story.
“Obviously there’s a wealth of blackand-white photography,” he says. “But what
else can you display? The history of immi­
gration is essentially a paper trail—docu­
ments, passports and steamship tickets, let­
ters and diaries.” Wanting to know the full
range of documents and artifacts available,
MetaForm mounted a national public-relaSW A R TH M O R E C O LLE G E BULLETIN

AMERICAN JEWISH JOINT DISTRIBUTION COMMITTEE ARCHIVES

“When we were getting off of Ellis Island, ” remembered Ann Vida,
a Hungarian immigrant of 1921, “we had all sorts of tags on us. ”
Two children (far left) are taggedfor the Erie Railroad terminus in
Jersey City. The Registry Room in about 1905 (center) was crowded
with would-be immigrants awaiting examination. Jewish war
orphans (above) celebrate their arrival in 1921.

METAFORM INC/KAREN YAMAUCHI

“My poor teddy bear, ” remembered Gertrude
Schneider, a Swiss immigrant of 1921. “Oh,
look at his lopped ears, still the same. But I
treasured him. And he came over with me. He
was in the trunk, though.... He didn’t come
over in a satchel, so I didn’t have him to hug
during our trip over here.... The teddy bear
was part of Switzerland... part of everybody
over there. And that’s probably why I never
wanted another doll. He was just it. ”

FEBRUARY 1991

tions campaign that
brought thousands of
responses to its New
York offices. Each letter
had to be evaluated,
each item cataloged and
filed. Sometimes Fred
went directly to the sources,
conducting interviews and
evaluating potential submis­
sions to the museum.
Going further, the researchers
combed government records and
dozens of archives and collections,
bringing together an eclectic collection of
documents that puts the experience of im­
migration in its cultural and historical con­
text. Tapping sources like flea markets,
antique dealers, and auctions, Fred sought
out ethnic theatre posters, sheet music, po­
litical cartoons, newspaper ads in foreign
languages—even the anti-immigrant pam­
phlets of the Ku Klux Klan. He takes special
pride in all of these “quirky, ephemeral
things that give the museum some real
texture, depth, and complexity.”
In more than 30 rooms, many restored to
their 1920s appearance, you follow the path

of the immigrant and sense the power of the
human tide. During the peak immigration
years, 5,000 people a day were processed
here, and one April day in 1907 saw a
record 11,747. The great tiled Registry Room
still seems to resound with their footsteps.
While more than 80 percent were passed
through in just a few hours, others were
detained for days or weeks due to illness,
lack of money, suspicion of mental defi­
ciency, or other problems. Two percent,
refused admittance, were sent back across
the ocean.
Evelyn Golbe, a Russian Jewish immi­
grant, remembers the sadness: “They found
my grandmother had a black nail___She
raised us; all the years, all the children, she
raised with that hand and that nail. There
was nothing wrong with it. And they held
her back.. . . They sent her back. Nobody
knew enough to fight it___So we never saw
her again. But that was heartbreaking. I’m
still crying over it.”
“This is what makes Ellis Island such a
poignant place,” says Fred, bringing his
hands together. “Emotions were on a much
more epic scale than the way most of us live
today. People spent weeks on a ship, wor13

NATIONÀL PARK SERVICE/AUGUSTUS SHERMAN COLLECTION

In the restored Registry Room today, you sit on a bench where your
grandmother or grandfather might have sat 60, 70, or 80 years ago.

ried, not knowing what would happen. And
suddenly they were looking across the har­
bor at New York City—even then a spec­
tacular skyline unlike anything where they
came from. But they weren’t really in Ameri­
ca, not yet.”
Fred’s normally calm, measured voice
rises perceptibly: “Ellis Island was where
you had the fear of not getting in, coupled
with the anticipation of being reunited with
loved ones—of seeing a father or husband
for the first time in years. Can you imagine
what it was like, coming to meet relatives in
America, wondering whether you would
even recognize them?”
Katherine Beychok, a Russian Jewish
immigrant, came through Ellis Island as a
child in 1910. She remembered: “I saw this
man coming forward, and he was beautiful.
I didn’t know he was my father___Later on
14

I realized why he looked so familiar to me.
He looked exactly like I did .. .. But that’s
when I met him for the first time. And I fell
in love with him and he with me.”
These voices are everywhere at Ellis
Island, full of anxiety, joy, hope, longing,
fear, and dreams. They speak to you in
audio soundtracks, in giant quotations
mounted on the walls, in the captions of
photographs, and at private listening posts
throughout the building where you can
spend a minute or two visiting the past
through haunting bits of oral history.
Yet even the voices didn’t seem to tell the
whole story. As Fred’s research went for­
ward, letters kept coming in offering pre­
cious objects saved in family attics for 60,
70, or 80 years—things brought from the
old country to the new: toys and tools, shoes
and samovars, cutlery and crucifixes. “At
SW A R TH M O R E C O LLE G E BULLETIN

he ghost o f the Mayflower pilots every immigrant ship,
and Ellis Island is another name fo r Plymouth Rock. ”
-Mary Anton, Russia, 1894, from her book They Who Knock at Our Gate

first we planned a little room to display a
few of these things, but soon it became clear
that this was a rich vein, with heartfelt
stories associated with each object,” says
Fred. It was decided to devote an entire
3,000-square-foot exhibit to these “treasures
from home.” In a way, they have come to
form the emotional heart of the museum.
In one case, an elderly Chinese woman in
California was afraid to send her treasures,
so Fred flew to San Francisco to personally
receive her ornate silk jacket, teapot, photo­
graphs, and rare medicine bottles—all of
which had been brought from China at the
turn of the century. “There were tears in her
eyes when she gave them to me,” he said.
“They were really her treasures.”
Again Fred’s voice rises: “These artifacts
speak, rather eloquently, of what mattered
to people, of what was special, what they
wanted to remember of the homeland, what
was unique to their culture, and what their
expectations were of life in America. They
are both the literal and metaphorical bag­
gage of the immigrant.”
These “treasures” ask you to imagine
choosing from your worldly possessions
those things that would fit in a suitcase or
trunk, to imagine leaving all else behind.
What would you take? Fannie Shoock, a
1921 Polish Jewish immigrant, recounted
her family’s possessions: “What did we take
with us? Our clothes, our pillows, our big
thick comforters made from pure goose
feathers—not chicken feathers—and a bar­
rel of pickles.”
A pair of shoes evokes more memories:
“Most dear to me are the shoes my mother
wore when she first set foot on the soil of
America,” wrote Birgitta Hedman Fichter,
whose mother arrived from Sweden in 1924.
“You must see them to appreciate the cour­
age my parents had and the sacrifices they
made. My mother’s shoes tell a whole
story.”
A child’s teddy bear came from Switzer­
land, a copper gefilte-fish pot from Poland,
a folk instrument from Lithuania, Bibles in
a dozen different languages—almost 700
donors sent their treasures. Like the old pair
of shoes, they are not necessarily “museumquality” objects, but taken together they
FEBRUARY 1991

create what Fred describes as “a
critical mass that suggests the mul­
titudes that came through Ellis Is­
land. These objects speak to the
ordinary lives of common people—
real individuals with names, dates,
and places.. . . There’s a certain
wholeness to having these things
returned here. People feel it when
they donate something—that the
thing that they or their grandparents
brought through here has somehow
come full circle.”
At Ellis Island it is the details that
make the whole—first the faces,
then the voices, then the things the
people carried on their backs or
cradled carefully in their hands.
They are details like our details, the
everyday clutter of existence. Fi­
nally, the history of immigration
becomes our history. We begin to
understand the courage of these
heroic ghosts.
Fred Wasserman asserts that the
museum presents a historical inter­
pretation shaped by the new “social
history” of the last two decades.
“People don’t tend to think of them­
selves as history. They think of presi­
dents and wars and treaties as his­
tory. When I studied American
history, immigration was a just small
part of it, but in reality the story of
immigration—the great migra- |
tion— is the history of the United z
States.”
CL
It is Fred’s hope that the lessons 1
of Ellis Island will enhance our
understanding of contemporary im­
migration. “Visitors are surprised to learn
that at the turn of the century, Jews, Italians,
and Slavs were seen as ‘other races,’ as
people who would never assimilate in
America,” he says. “You hear the same
racist arguments now. I only hope that in
learning about this part of our past, people
will make some connection to the present.
Maybe they will have a greater tolerance for
and understanding of the new immigrants.”
In fact, the great migration continues
today. During the 1980s more immigrants

Fred Wasserman ’78 spent more than seven
years working on the Ellis Island Immigration
Museum. An art history major at Swarthmore
and a historic preservation specialist, he is now
finishing a book about the museum and is
“looking for interesting new projects. ”

METAFORM INC/KAREN YAMAUCHI

entered the United States than came during
the decade 1900-1910—up to 10 million,
versus 8.8 million then. The people may be
different—less than 10 percent are now
Europeans—and they arrive here in different
ways, entering through airports, or, in the
case of an estimated 200,000 per year,
illegally across rivers, in small boats, or
hidden in the backs of trucks.
People still flee the same hardships—
famine, persecution, war, economic injus­
tice. They still come in search of opportunity.
They say goodbye, sometimes forever, and
they go. “The day I left home,” remembered

MARTIN NATVIG.

------

“My mother’s shoes tell a whole story, ”said
Birgitta Hedman Fichter, whose mother, Elin
Maria Hedman, came from Sweden in 1924.

a Lithuanian who emigrated in 1899, “my
mother came with me to the railroad station.
When we said goodbye, she said it was just
like seeing me go into my casket. I never saw
her again.” For many it is the same today.
At Ellis Island you begin to understand our
shared nationality as Americans.
Fred Wasserman admits he’s fascinated
by the public’s reaction to the exhibits he
helped create. “In the museum I listen to
people—perfect strangers—sharing family
histories with each other. It resonates from
person to person.. .. Then I think,' what
have we exhibited here? Certainly it’s the
history, the photos, the quotations, the ob­
jects. But we’ve also captured humanity,
emotion, and heart.”
In the cacophony of a Saturday afternoon
on Ellis Island, on a day when more than
10,000 visitors will file through, it’s a little
hard to feel the ghosts. But if you sit on a
bench where your grandmother or grand­
father might have sat 70 or 80 years ago, if
you close your eyes and listen, you hear the
immigrants’ voices in the happy echoes of
their children and grandchildren.
Then you go down to the boat slip in the
slanting afternoon sun and step aboard the
Circle Line ferry that takes you to America,
to your car and the long drive home to your
family. As you walk, you know the footsteps
are there ahead of you. The path has been
trod for you, wherever it leads. The ghosts,
loved ones all, have gone before.

If you go: Visitors to Ellis Islandfind a 100,000-square-foot museum with more than a dozen
exhibits, plus films and other programs chronicling over 400 years of the history of immigration
to America. The island can be reached by ferry from the Battery in New York orfrom Liberty
State Park in New Jersey. The museum is free, but there is a charge for the ferry.
16

Ellis Island:
A Journey Back
by M ark Muro
It was October 31, 1922. Vartan Hartunian ’38 was 7 years old, a refugee come
to Ellis Island in the company of a family
that “was running away, running across
the seas, running away from hell.”
The hell was the Turkish massacres of
Armenians, and the Hartunian family—
father, mother, three sisters, and brother—
looked west to escape a brutal government
in Constantinople that pressed its cam­
paign to “purify” the Turkish east of peo­
ple like them: Christian “interlopers” in a
Mohammedan empire.
“I was born on February 11, 1915, the
genocide began April 24, 1915, and from
then on we were running,” Hartunian
said. Separated from each other, the
family lived furtively and hungrily, until
finally, on October 13, 1922, they
huddled—together—on a boat in the
harbor of Piraeus, Greece.
The passage took place on the King
Alexander, a “smelly, dirty old tramp like
a large fishing boat,” as Hartunian recalls
it. Of the crossing, all Hartunian re­
members are the storms and the family
staying below decks in steerage. “The
wind just pounded the ship, a terrible
wind,” he said. “We were all vomiting,
terribly sick, crouching down there in the
dark. And they took terrible care of us.
We ate macaroni and cheese three meals a
day. It went on forever, it seemed.”
But then one morning— 18 days after
leaving Greece—the family awoke to feel
the ship at anchor and saw light streaming
in. The ship had halted near Ellis Island,
New York. When the Hartunians clam­
bered up on deck, young Vartan caught “a
glimpse” of the Statue of Liberty, though
“it didn’t mean anything to me,” as he
recalled.
What followed was a two-week stay on
the island while the family wrestled with
immigration regulations. It was a period
Hartunian would remember all his life.
“I didn’t know it was Ellis Island. And I
didn’t know it was the great symbolic
entrance to the United States. But I knew
I was getting off that horrible boat, that I
was hungry, that something important was
SW A R TH M O R E C O LLE G E BULLETIN

Later, on the boat back to Manhattan,
as the turrets of Ellis Island receded be­
hind him, Vartan Hartunian said he felt
like a child again. “I tell you what I am
thinking. I am thinking of my father and
mother, and I am thinking in Armenian,
am thinking, ‘My-rig, Hy-rig, hoss yem
him-ah’—‘Mom, Dad, I am here now.’ ”
The Rev. Vartan Hartunian ’38 and his fam ily fle d from Turkish genocide
in Armenia and entered the United States through Ellis Island in 1922.

happening. What’s more, here I was being
handed a boiled ham sandwich.
“It was absolutely delicious.”
Visiting the newly converted Ellis
Island Immigration Museum on its open­
ing day last September, Hartunian remem­
bered the separations from his family and
the immigration facilities themselves.
The dormitory was a big room filled
two or three cots high with bare mat­
tresses: “Just mattresses. No sheets.” As
for the dining room, it was like a fairy tale,
a boy’s dream. “It impressed me,” Hartu­
nian said. “It was a large, large room. All
white. I remember linen, I think. I remem­
ber forks, napkins. To me it was beautiful,
a work of art. But then the immigrants
would rush in, and that would frighten
me. There was butter, and I remember
some of the refugees fighting over it, not
knowing there was plenty.”
Hartunian spoke of how eerie it felt
returning to the staircase between floors
where, as the immigrants walked up,
government doctors were already giving
the first “six-second” checkup by noting
those who had trouble making the ascent.
“I probably was here,” he observed, trudg­
ing up the stairs. “But I can’t quite remem­
ber it. It’s more like a dream. I feel I’ve
been here but can’t quite remember.”
And then up he went to the enormous
Registry Room. Here in the great empty
space beneath the soaring arched windows
and white-tiled ceiling vaults, Vartan Har­
tunian seemed shaken, almost transfixed.
“Oh, my,” he said, pausing. And then out
it came, all the intermixed recognitions of
a grim past and an uplifting present. “This
is inspiring,” he murmured. “This is mag­
nificent. But the magnificence feels new.
To me, it was just dreary: all partitioned,
filled with benches. And we never looked
rrB R U A R Y 1991

up to the ceiling. We always looked
down.”
In a side gallery, Hartunian found
amidst a wall-sized display the three pass­
ports he’d given to the museum. “That’s
my mother and me,” he said, pointing
with proprietary pride to a faded old
document, stamped three times in purple,
bearing a dark snapshot of mother and
child.
“I am so proud,” he said, gazing around
him.

The Reverend Vartan Hartunian ’38, a Phi
Beta Kappa graduate o f the College,
received a master o f divinity degree in
1949 from Union Theological Seminary.
After early careers as a technical writer
and businessman, he entered the ministry
in 1959 and is the pastor o f the First
Armenian Church in Belmont, Mass.
Hartunian attended the Ellis Island
museum dedication ceremonies as an
“honored donor” o f the three passports
that brought his family to the United
States. Mark Muro writes for The Boston
Globe. This story was excerpted with
permission o f the author.

The Hartunian fam ily in 1920, shortly before leaving fo r America.
Vartan is sitting with his legs crossed, a hole in his stocking.

Countering the myths o f student suicide

A rriving on campus as a freshman in
/ % the fall of 1950,1 was told by other
/ % students that at Swarthmore ColJL. A lege someone committed suicide
each year.
Specifically, I was informed that at least
one hapless student, burdened by impossible
academic pressures, jumped to his or her
death each year from the water tower.
During the next four years, it became
evident that, whatever suicides might have
occurred, students no longer chose to jump
from the water tower and were confining
themselves to less spectacular methods. The
myth of perennial suicide at Swarthmore,
though certainly unsupported by facts, may
have served to dramatize the truly ample
student angst and the recognition of loss that
maturing into adulthood so intertwines with
its joys.
Other forms of the myth have been in­
spired since I became Director of Psycho­
logical Services for the College in 1980. A
few years ago, for example, after I appeared
on Ted Koppel’s Nightline to discuss college
student suicide, I came back to campus to
hear a good one. Swarthmore, went the
rumor, must have many suicides since some­
one from the College had just spoken about
the subject in the national media (even
though it was noted on Nightline that Swarth­
more had experienced no student suicides in
10 years).
This experience reminded me of a more
pervasive rumor about the College that had
been presented earnestly and often to me as
a local high-school senior: Swarthmore Col­
lege was thoroughly communist. A year
later, as a College freshman and prospective
political-science major, I became a little
disappointed at being unable to find even
one communist at the College and had to
settle for the fact that a roommate read The
Nation, a liberal magazine.
Last year several prospective students and
18

their parents reported that they had been
informed (by a student guide) that Swarth­
more College has the highest student suicide
rate in the country. At about the same time,
a government researcher launched a largescale study on the premise that college stu­
dents commit suicide at twice the rate of
their noncollege peers. And a coincidental
conference and television campaign featured
professionals who predicted, using grossly
erroneous statistical computations, that an
enormous proportion of college students
would commit suicide at some time in their
lives unless begun on antidepressant drugs
while still students.
Rumors and misinformation, it seems,
have long been in abundance.
A look at the facts
To help counter some of these myths, a
colleague and I spent the last two years
gathering the best contributions we could
obtain for what we believe is the first
comprehensive book on suicide among col­
lege and university students, College Student
Suicide, published recently by Haworth
Press.
The first concerted attempt by profession­
als to understand student suicide occurred in
Vienna in 1910, when Sigmund Freud and
his colleagues investigated the subject. “A
secondary school,” he wrote, “should
achieve more than not driving its students to
suicide. It should give them a desire to live
and should offer them support and backing
at a time of life at which the conditions of
their development compel them to relax
their ties with the parental home and their
family.”
An apparent contagion of suicide was
thought to be due, in part, to its romanti­
cizing. Goethe’s romantic tragedy, The Sor-

by Leighton C. Whitaker 5 4 Ph.D.

rows o f Young Werther, though written
more than a century earlier, was believed to
have had such a powerful impact on young
people that many took their own lives,
imitating the hero of the book.
One does not hear these days of many
students modeling themselves after young
Werther to rationalize suicide, but there are
modern counterparts. Reading Sartre and
other existentialists suggests to some that life
is inevitably meaningless; this interpretation
may serve to justify suicide intellectually
while it obscures the actual causes.
The epidemiology of college student sui­
cide, including its relation to rates in the
noncollege peer population, has been inves­
tigated with increasing care in recent de­
cades. Some authors believe that the appar­
ent rapid rise in the youth suicide rate is
mainly due to better records. But recorded
suicide rates for the U.S. population as a
whole are essentially stable except for youth
rates, and it appears more likely that there
is an actual marked increase among collegeand university-aged youth. Data from the
U.S. Centers for Disease Control shows that
the overall increasing rate of recorded sui­
cide in the United States up to 1980, at least,
is due almost entirely to an increase in
young male suicide, especially that of young
white males.
tudies on about 200 American cam­
puses show that student suicide
occurs at only about half the rate of
suicide of nonstudents of the same
age and sex. But the myth of high student
rates persists despite a decade of corrective
information. The relation of college male to
female suicides is only about two to one,
according to these studies viewed in aggre­
gate, in contrast to a gender rate of almost
four to one among youth generally. Student
suicide rates are not related to institutional
size and prestige or to class standing.

S

SW A R TH M O R E C O LLEG E BULLETIN

Who commits suicide?
The overall likelihood of actual suicide
for students with depression is four times
that of their nondepressed student peers,
while the relatively rare phenomenon of
psychosis—including schizophrenic disor­
der, manic state, and psychotic depressionincreases suicide risk 200 times in compari­
son to the student population generally. The
most common means of suicide in the U.S.
population overall is firearms, especially
among males, but male college students are
only half as likely as males generally to
employ firearms.
While females make many more suicide
threats and attempts than males, they are
generally much more likely to give adequate
signals of their distress and to see a psycho­
therapist, facts that may help to account for
their much lower rate of actual suicide.
The overall rate of actual suicide among
college and university students is about eight
per 100,000 students each year, according to
the best estimates, with the gender rate twice
as high for college men as women. Women,
however, make about three times as many
suicide attempts as men. Thus male attempts
are much more likely to be lethal. But even
for one male student suicide, there are, on
the average nationally, eight attempts and
an additional 12 threats; and for each female
student suicide, there are 58 attempts and
145 threats, according to research data.
The primary methods used by students
attempting suicide involve pills and alcohol,
the latter drug greatly increasing the chances
of death when taken together with pills.
When actual college student suicide occurs,
it quite often involves drug use, especially
alcohol. For example, a study of 33 actual
recent suicides on American campuses, done
for College Student Suicide, shows that 56
percent of those who succeeded in killing
themselves were intoxicated either with al­
cohol or another psychoactive chemical,
while 65 percent were thought to have a
history of diagnosable substance-use dis­
order.
Legal or prescription drugs may be in­
volved more often in attempts than illegal or
“street” drugs. Ironically, the most common
agents in potentially lethal overdoses in the
United States general population have been
tricylic antidepressants, prescribed by phy­
sicians for depression, accounting for about
half the near-lethal suicide attempts by
overdose during the early 1980s.
Suicidal behavior varies in terms of con­
scious intent as well as in potential lethality.
One may argue plausibly that there are
many instances of “accidental” death, espe­
cially among youth, that ought to be counted
as suicides. For example, “drinking games”
FEBRUARY 1991

often result in near death and sometimes
actual death on American campuses. Driv­
ing under the influence of alcohol accounts
for about half of lethal vehicle accidents
nationally. And, of course, one-car “acci­
dents” and “falling” from high places also
connote suicide. Many authors, therefore,
claim that the reported incidence of suicide
is grossly understated.
Cultural influences
Cultural influences play an important
role in determining the much higher rate of
suicide in males, who, as a group, are less
likely to admit to or signal their distress and
seek help. Machismo—the proclivity to
dominate women, use drugs, and act
tough—predisposes men to acts of violence.
The more macho the man, researchers have
demonstrated, the more likely he will be

M YTH :
The suicide rate
among college
students is
high— especially
at highly
competitive
institutions.
involved in morbid behavior, including
homicide and suicide. Such men are also
more likely to avoid mental-health services,
although psychotherapy can be a highly
effective suicide preventative for them as
well as for others. College students tend to
be lower than their noncollege peers in
machismo, which may help to account for
their lower suicide rate.
The tendency to stigmatize mental-health
services and those who use them is inversely
related to education and personal sensitivity,
so students are more likely to consult a
psychotherapist or counselor than are their
noncollege peers. Since such services are
generally much more accessible to college
students, there is more opportunity on cam­
puses to help prevent suicide in particular
and destructiveness generally.
Our cultural tendency to equate depres­

sion and sadness inclines us to try to diminish
a person’s sadness and thereby deny him or
her the opportunity to work through losses
and disappointments. Men, especially, are
not supposed to cry. Pressures to avoid the
reparative process of sadness stifle the person
and may result in despair, withdrawal, and
inclination to suicide.
Withdrawal—not signaling personal dis­
tress, not seeking help, stifling emotions,
including using drugs to limit emotional
awareness—also increases suicide risk. Stu­
dents who are characteristically withdrawn,
in a deeply introverted sense, have a higher
suicide risk than those who readily express
their personal concerns to others. There are
students, however, who seem to express
themselves emotionally but do so only su­
perficially and may, like some “party ani­
mals,” wear misleading masks of cheerful­
ness. These cases of “smiling depression”
and “quiet despair” comprise most of the
surprising suicides of so-called well-adjusted
students whose outward behavior has de­
ceived others. In essence, the psychodynam­
ics of adolescent and young-adult suicide
generally include a tendency toward isola­
tion, substance abuse, low self-esteem, de­
spair, and withdrawal.
Suicide risk in individual cases depends
on the individual’s particular circumstances
as well as on personality, psychodynamics,
and cultural factors. Students who are far
removed from their usual supports are at
greater risk. For example, foreign students
are liable to feel isolated unless special ef­
forts are made to make them feel at home
in the new culture. Similarly, parental sepa­
ration, divorce, and family moves to more
distant locations are stresses that should be
compensated for by greater efforts to support
students. In general, students who lack a
significant support network in terms of
family, friends, or faculty are at greater risk.
Contrary to popular mythology, aca­
demic pressures and concerns are generally
not linked to student suicide. Overall, neither
the existing epidemiologic data nor the
many clinical reports support the notion that
student suicide rates are higher at colleges
and universities regarded as more prestigious
or as having very high academic standards.
Realistic prevention
Realistically, both prevention and inter­
vention strategists must accept student pop­
ulations already carrying with them many
predisposing risk factors. Accordingly, the
most effective prevention strategy is for the
campus community to be caring, personally
knowledgeable, and specifically informed
enough to provide a broad range of suppor­
tive faculty, staff, and mental health profes19

sionals who can provide education, consul­
tation, psychotherapy, and other specialized
services.
Covering up for a student at risk and not
involving him or her in the admittedly
sensitive process of getting help from others
effectively increases the chances of actual
suicide, whereas active interventions reduce
the chances. A student who “needs,” as it
were, to make suicide threats or attempts is
asking for help but is often quite ambivalent
about accepting help. Thus would-be helpers
must be skilled as well as humane and
caring in order to help sort out and resolve
the student’s mixed motives.
A case in point based on an actual cir­
cumstance elsewhere: A young mathematics
major, Fred, was judged by both a friend
and a professor to be depressed and heavily
drinking. His academic performance had
slipped, and he was withdrawn. Together
with the friend, the professor spoke earnestly
with Fred, who admitted to strong suicidal
urges following a breakup with his girlfriend.
Accompanied by the professor and friend,
Fred appeared, quite reluctantly, at the
campus mental-health center. He said very
little through several sessions but did admit
he enjoyed them because of the relief he felt
afterward. He then disclosed a near-fatal
suicide attempt he had made shortly before
beginning psychotherapy.
A few months after becoming quite active
in the sessions, Fred’s social and academic
behavior improved. He had stopped drink­
ing, and he was able to mourn a childhood
and adolescence in which his father had
been psychologically absent. Suicidal incli­
nations seemed then to have been replaced
by his sad realizations coupled with much
greater acceptance of his supporters, includ­
ing the professor and friend.
Suicide at Swarthmore
Though there have been reports of possi­
ble suicides of students previously enrolled
at Swarthmore, and certainly there have
been suicides in the family history and even
contemporaneous lives of students while
they have been at the College, we know of
only one enrolled student who committed
suicide during the past 15 years.
As noted previously, the United States
college and university rate of actual suicide
is about eight per 100,000 students per year;
on a statistical basis, the rate at Swarthmore
over a 15-year period amounts to about five
per 100,000, below the national average and
hardly a basis for the recent rumor that the
College has the highest rate of all institutions
of higher education. But even a single suicide
at a small college can change the institutional
rate dramatically. Furthermore, suicide in
20

any community is just one end of a con­
tinuum of distress. Clearly we have no room
for complacency in any form.
The possibility of actual suicide always
exists in every community, as do myriad
forms of self-destructive behaviors and in­
clinations ranging along the suicidal con­
tinuum. At Swarthmore, as at virtually all
institutions of higher education, there have
been many suicide threats and some suicide
attempts each year. Word of such threats
and attempts may become quite loosely
referred to as suicides. In this light, one can
imagine how using the word “suicide” so
loosely can lead to rumors and myths that
Swarthmore or any other institution has an
extremely high rate of suicide. One is re­
minded of Mark Twain’s often-quoted cable
from Europe to the Associated Press: “The
reports of my death are greatly exagger­
ated.”

M YTH :
The student
suicide
rate at
Swarthmore
averages
one per year.
What is not exaggerated is the need of
any college community to foster a kind of
mutual caring that enables all to find emo­
tional support for the earnest lives that we
challenge students to develop. Colleges and
universities should be places not only where
the first or academic curriculum is fostered
by the so-called “second curriculum” of
student life nurturance and support but also
where personal, emotional development is
highly valued for itself.
Swarthmore College provides consider­
able emotional nurturance in the ways fac­
ulty and staff treat students and in the ways
students treat one another. This context of
caring is essential for student development
generally and for the effectiveness of special
kinds of assistance, including Psychological
Services. About one-third of all students are
seen individually in Psychological Services
by the time they graduate. The vast majority
of students refer themselves, often with

strong encouragement from others who form
a vital supportive influence that greatly
enhances the chances of successful counsel­
ing or psychotherapy. Many other students
are sensitized to issues through the outreach
efforts of education and consultation. Staff
members are also available to address afterhours emergency situations throughout the
academic year. Though all staff are part
time and add up to about 2.4 full-time staff
members, one or more therapists are avail­
able at any time during the academic year.
Many students talk to our staff each year
about both outright suicide inclinations and
the many forms of more covert self-destruc­
tiveness. We like to think that, as has
happened so far, if we have the opportunity
to talk with students, they will not take
irreversibly drastic actions.
To heighten recognition of and help for
troubled students and to facilitate referral to
Psychological Services, we provide training
for resident assistants (RAs), who are an
excellent resource, as are deans, faculty,
health services, and other staff, who often
alert us to urgent needs and provide a very
helpful network. In keeping with the high
level of confidentiality especially needed for
any kind of mental-health service, we must
carefully protect the privacy of any student.
Essentially, while we can listen to anyone,
we can share information only when there
is a threat to life, and even then only on a
strictly limited basis. Thus if an RA or
parent or other concerned party asks us
about a student, even simply whether the
student is keeping appointments, almost
invariably we must limit ourselves to telling
the party to ask the student in question.
In conclusion, factual evidence contra­
dicts the myths of higher suicide rates among
college students, including Swarthmore stu­
dents. But denial of college student angst
and loss, and their expression as suicidal and
other destructive behavior, is far more dam­
aging than even those perennial myths about
perennial suicide. Clearly, all colleges and
universities should help students not only to
avoid suicide but also to address that in­
evitable angst and grief of maturation that is
both loss and the harbinger of personal
growth.

Leighton Whitaker ’54, Ph.D., is Director of
Psychological Services at Swarthmore. He
edits the Journal of College Student Psycho­
therapy, which from time to time publishes
special double issues that become books.
One o f these, College Student Suicide, which
he co-edited, was published in October 1990.
He is also author o f several book chapters
and articles on college student suicide.
SW A R TH M O R E C O LLEG E BULLETIN

I COLLEGE
Presidential search
nears conclusion
Swarthmore’s 10-member
Presidential Search Commit­
tee is nearing the end of its
labors, and a new College
president is expected to be
named in early March. From
an original pool of more than
600 candidates, the committee
members conducted inter­
views with more than two
dozen nominees during
November and December. By
early January the field had
been narrowed to a half-dozen
individuals who, in the words
of a recent committee letter to
the College community, “ap­
pear to offer the most promis­
ing leadership possibilities for
Swarthmore at this point in its
evolution.”
Each of the final candidates
was invited to come to Phila­
delphia in late January for
interviews with panels repre­
senting faculty, students, and
administrative staff. The
Search Committee has main­
tained rigorous confidentiality
about the candidates, and no
public campus visits were
planned before a final recom­
mendation was to be made.
Committee chairman
Samuel L. Hayes III ’57 ex­
plained the need for strict con­
fidentiality in the search pro­
cess. “We wanted to be able
to attract candidates who al­
ready had leadership positions
in other institutions, and we
knew that disclosure of their
candidacy might seriously
compromise their credibility in
their own environments. In
fact, several candidates told us
that they would only speak
with us if confidentiality was
assured.”
He went on to praise other
members of the committee
and its executive secretary,
Constance Ridgeway, for the
FEBRUARY 1991

extraordinary work they had
done. Though a professional
search consultant had been
engaged, the committee did
“almost all of the work our­
selves,” said Hayes. “It was
very gratifying to see the level
of interest in this job. We
have attracted top-flight
candidates.”
The committee’s recom­
mendation is expected to be
presented to the Executive
Committee of the Board of
Managers in mid-February,
then to the full Board at its
regular meeting on March 2.
If the Board approves the
recommendation, an
announcement will be made
immediately.

With days to go before its late January opening, the new Lang
Performing Arts Center awaited a full schedule o f events.

Professor Emeritus
Carl Barus dies
Carl Barus, professor emeritus
of engineering, died Oct. 29 of
complications following heart
surgery. He was 71.
A graduate of Brown Uni­
versity and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, Barus
joined the Swarthmore faculty

Jobspeak, academic style
In 1989 Leo Braudy ’63 circulated the following memo to fellow
members o f a search committee at the University o f Southern
California, where he is professor o f English. It later appeared in
Harper’s Magazine, and Braudy recently sent copies to members
o f the Swarthmore Presidential Search Committee.
TO: Fellow Members, Dean’s Search Committee
FROM: Ad Hoc Committee on Referee Rhetoric,
Leo Braudy, Chair
Due to some confusion in interpreting the comments included in
candidates’ letters of reference, we have put together a glossary
of terminological translation that we hope will help your
deliberations.
bridge builder: likes to compromise
charismatic: no interest in any opinion but his own; gives
frequent print and television interviews
committed to the university: appears at every cocktail party
consults with faculty: indecisive
doesn’t suffer fools gladly: rude and abrasive
intensely interested in graduate education: hates teaching
intensely interested in undergraduate education: has ceased to
do own scholarly work
internationally known: likes to go to or run conferences
listens well: has no ideas of his own
mover and shaker: doesn’t care what anybody thinks; favors
steamroller tactics
remarkably intelligent: listens without yawning when I describe
my latest article
straightforward: blunt and insensitive
very solid in his field: no administrative experience
visionary: can’t handle paperwork

in 1952 after conducting
research on guided missile
development at M.I.T. and the
Raytheon Manufacturing
Company. The research, he
felt, was not consistent with
his social concerns, and he
chose to teach at the College
because of its Quaker back­
ground and its emphasis on
peaceful uses of science and
technology.
Barus had a passionate
personal commitment to the
causes of peace, social justice,
and human freedom. He was
a member of the American
Civil Liberties Union and
similar organizations, and in
the 1950s began to support
and participate in demonstra­
tions against preparations
for nuclear and biological
warfare.
He created the College
course “Ethics and Values in
Science and Technology” and
was a member of the Institute
of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers, taking an active
part in its Society on the
Social Implications of
Technology.

Alumni in finance
organize a
new alumni group
Swarthmore Alumni in Fi­
nance (SAIF) was founded in
1989 by William Stott ’75
and nine other alumni in the
classes of 1975 to 1987. They
planned to use their new
network of alumni in the
21

financial-services industry to
provide a vehicle for commu­
nication, visibilty, and profes­
sional development and to
create opportunities for service
to the College. A year later
SAIF membership spans the
country and numbers 100,
including a 10-person steering
committee, the members of
which, in true Swarthmore
tradition, represent a variety
of majors from art history
and Russian to the more
expected economics.
SAIF has worked with
Thomas Francis, director of
Career Planning and Place­
ment, to present on-campus
panels such as “Swarthmore
Alumni in Finance” and
“Women in Business.”
SAIF has established the
Samuel L. Hayes III ’57
Internship, which provides a
stipend of $2,500 for a
Swarthmore student to pursue
summer research in business
economics. This prize will be
awarded annually, and all
undergraduates are eligible.
SAIF also produces a semi­
annual newsletter that is dis­
tributed to more than 500
alumni, faculty members, and
administrators. The first issue
included articles by Chee
Thum ’79 and Jerry Miller
’83, while the most recent
issue highlighted Steve
Labrum’s [’79] experiences in
Hungary as an evaluator of
state-owned enterprises under­
going privatization, and
Nancy Grossman Spady’s
[’81] analysis of the S&L
disaster.
SAIF will initiate a lecture
series on campus with a talk
on February 28 by Samuel
Hayes, Jacob Schiff Professor
of Investment Banking at
Harvard Business School.
If you would like to know
more about SAIF or be put
on the mailing list for the
newsletter, please contact
David Burd ’78, Professional
Financial Advisors Inc., 103
Chesley Drive, Media, PA
19063-9944 (800-525-4075).
-—Rachel Weinberger 80 I
22

Tributes... The Swarthmore College Music and Dance
Festival, held over three weekends during the fall
semester, paid tribute to two men for their outstanding
contributions to the arts at the College. In September
retired Vice President Kendall Landis ’48 (above) was
feted with a series of concerts, including a performance
by Orchestra 2001, under the direction of music Profes­
sor James Freeman, of Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale with

Landis as the narrator. Boyd Barnard 77 was honored
on his 95th birthday with a concert featuring a host of
alumni, for many of whom Barnard had been a mentor.
With him (below) at a reception are: (standing) Serena
Canin ’88, Shellie Wilensky Camp 75, Pamela Gore
’67, Siri SokolMilkove 75, Susan Rosenbaum ’87, Judy
Berry Smith 77, and Annette DiMedio 75; (seated)
Christine Shinn ’88 and Ossie Borosh ’90.
SW A R T H M O R E C O LLE G E BULLETIN

L
Recycled paper:
some successes,
some confusion
Throughout the College,
efforts are being made both to
recycle paper and to use re­
cycled paper whenever possi­
ble. But it’s not as easy as
merely ordering a new brand
from the warehouse.
There’s already an aggres­
sive student-run paper re­
cycling program on campus,
and students take a truckload
of wastepaper each week to a
recycling center. Bins near the
student mailboxes fill to over­
flowing, and administrative
staff drag boxes of used paper
into the halls for pickup each
Thursday afternoon. “It is no
longer socially correct to
throw away any paper,” says
the sign over one office
copying machine.
With such encouraging
results on the wastepaper side,
student interest has turned to
the use of recycled paper in
the College’s copiers and com­
puter printers. Kalan Ickes ’92
of Earthlust, the student en­
vironmental group, worked
with Darryl Robinson of the
Business Office to evaluate
recycled paper for office use.
Here’s where the confusion
arises.
It seems the word “re­
cycled” has a whole range of
meanings. Paper mills have
always used mill scrap in the
manufacturing process, a sort
of “recycling” of what is
known as “pre-consumer”
waste. Lots of papers can
claim to be recycled in this
way, even though they aren’t
using fibers that have actually
made it to the marketplace
and back.
Yet it is reusing “post­
consumer” waste—stuff from
your wastebasket that other­
wise might end up in landfills
or incinerators—that is of
real value in solving wastedisposal problems. (One esti­
mate is that almost half of
landfill volume comes from
paper and paperboard prod­
ucts.) What Ickes and Robin­
FEBRUARY 1991

son looked for was paper with
a high percentage of post­
consumer waste. After much
research they settled on two
brands to test in College
copiers and laser printers—

L

E

next year will likely force us
to use a somewhat lower
grade of paper than the one
you are holding now. We are
pricing several recycled papers
in these grades, but the per­
centage of pre-consumer vs.
post-consumer waste in these
sheets isn’t always what we’d
like. Readers should know,
however, that we are commit­
ted to finding reasonably
priced, reasonable-quality
recycled paper for our publi­
cations. Our search continues,
and we’ll keep you posted.

Making a budget
engages entire
College community
one that was 100 percent
post-consumer fiber, and
another that contained 50
percent pre- and 50 percent
post-consumer waste. The
new papers look a little differ­
ent—the 100 percent post­
consumer is unbleached and a
little brown—but the tests
have been successful, and the
new paper will be phased in
during the spring semester.
“The goal,” said Ickes, “is
to have no virgin paper being
used in any department or ad­
ministrative offices.” Students
are working to get the aca­
demic departments together to
make bulk paper purchases,
and Robinson will try to sup­
ply recycled paper to all
copiers, laser printers, and
administrative offices by
semester’s end.
It has not been so easy to
change the papers used by the
Publications Office. We have
been looking for some time
for a recycled paper that will
suit our needs—and our bud­
get. The Alumni Bulletin,
President’s Report, and Col­
lege Catalogue could all be
printed on recycled stock, but
most of the recycled publica­
tion papers we have seen
either cost too much, or don’t
meet the standards we have
set for ink bleed-through or
color reproduction, or are
available only erratically.
Budget constraints in the

How would you increase in­
come or cut $2 million off
College costs in order to keep
revenues and expenditures in
balance?
This thought-provoking
question has engaged all
segments of the College com­
munity for the past several
months as Swarthmore strug­
gles with some harsh realities.
A five-year projection of in­
come and expenditures, predi­
cated on a set of assumptions
based on existing policies,
showed that the present bal­
ance between income and
expenditures would become a
$2 million deficit in 1992.
The major factors contri­
buting to this imbalance are:
• The marketplace will no
longer accept double-digit
tuition hikes such as occurred
in the mid-’80s, and the Col­
lege must narrow the gap
between increases in tuition
and increases in the consumer
price index.
• The federal government has
cut its aid to education at the
same time as it has increased
its auditing requirements of
grant recipients.
• Financial aid necessary for
the College’s need-blind ad­
missions policy has risen from
10% to 13% of the budget, and
the current recession makes it
likely that this figure will
continue to increase.
• Return on endowment can­

G

E

not be expected to match the
double-digit rate of the ’80s
and on average is estimated to
be 93/4% a year in the future.
• The new performing arts
building and the enhanced
performing arts program that
it implies.
• Efforts to correct deferred
maintenance.
• Other major budget escala­
tors are competition for
faculty in what is becoming a
seller’s market and costs of
equipment, including scientific
and computer equipment.
• It is estimated that giving to
the College will not keep pace
with the past as financial
markets decline and The
Campaign for Swarthmore
ends.
Spearheading the campus­
wide budget discussions is the
18-person Financial Planning
Committee, appointed by
President David W. Fraser,
chaired by Vice President
William T. Spock ’51, and
composed of faculty, adminis­
tration, and students. Since
1986 the committee has annu­
ally re-examined five-year
financial plans for the College
and recommended to the
president a budget for the
coming year. The president
then makes his recommenda­
tions to the Finance and
Trusts Administration
Committee of the Board of
Managers.
A second committee, also
composed of all campus con­
stituencies, is the 16-person
Strategic Planning Committee,
chaired by the president.
Established in 1990, it seeks
to reach a common under­
standing of the mission of the
College, to define goals for
carrying out that mission, and
to develop a strategy for
achieving these goals.
In order to discuss strategic
planning and budget issues in
open forums, the College
community held two meet­
ings: one in November, called
by student members of the
two planning committees, and
one in December, called by
23

the president. Almost 100 fac­
ulty, administration, and stu­
dents attended the latter meet­
ing to hear the president say:
“The budget will be bal­
anced.” Some questions from
the audience and answers
from President Fraser from the
hour-long meeting included:
Q. “Why not use more en­
dowment income to balance
the budget?”
A. “Spending more now im­
poverishes future generations.
The Board’s policy on endow­
ment spending is an attempt
to weight equally the needs of
this and future generations.”
Q. “How will the tight budget
affect our goal of diversity and
minority representation on the
faculty?”
A. “These things are at the
core of what we’re about.
We’ll protect them [from
budget cuts] because they are
important to the kind of
institution we are.”
Q. “Why is it the College can
succeed in a $75 million capi­
tal campaign and still face a
budget crunch?”
A. “We push the limits. In our
attempt to offer the best edu­
cational program, we accept
partial funding for interesting
new projects and then must
come up with the balance.
Still, the success of the Cam­
paign has kept the current
budget challenge much milder
than it otherwise would have
been.”
Such inclusiveness of the
various constituencies of the
College community in the
budget-making process is rela­
tively new. Professor Robin­
son Hollister of the Econom­
ics Department, who is a
member of both the Strategic
Planning Committee and the
Financial Planning Commit­
tee, notes: “The budget has
primarily been a form of com­
munication between the
administration and the gov­
erning board. Faculty, staff,
and student participation
began only five years ago, and
faculty members are now just
beginning to learn what role
24

we can play in the budget
process and whether we can
make a difference in some
way.”
President Fraser com­
mented on the budget-making
process: “Faculty, students,
and staff have been invaluable
in ensuring that we use our
resources to further the central
mission of the College while
identifying ways we can save
money.”
By the time this magazine
reaches you, recommenda­
tions regarding the 1991-1992
budget will largely have been
made by the president and a
final, balanced budget readied
for presentation to the Board
of Managers for approval at
its March 2 meeting.

Scott Arboretum joins
new marketing effort
The Scott Arboretum has
joined forces with 13 other
Delaware Valley gardens,
arboretums, and historic
homes to market a “Garden
Passport” coupon book that is
expected to bring more visi­
tors to the Swarthmore cam­
pus. The 64-page guidebook,
which sells for $7.95, contains
maps and descriptions of the
participating gardens, includ­
ing Longwood Gardens, Win­
terthur, Historic Bartram’s
Garden, Tyler Arboretum,
Morris Arboretum, and eight
other local horticultural at­
tractions within a 50-mile
radius. With more than $300
worth of discount coupons for
admissions, tours, books, and
programs, the booklet is a
worthwhile investment for
Delaware Valley garden lovers.
The passport was produced
by the Gardens Collaborative
Project as part of the Philadel­
phia Cultural Community
Marketing Initiative Program
of the Pew Charitable Trusts.
It is given as a benefit of
membership to each member
family of the 14 participating
institutions. Copies are sold at
the Scott Arboretum office,
the College bookstore, or by
phone at (215)328-8025.

Students
asked:
How would you
cut $2 million
from the
College’s budget?
Eliminate faculty positions?
Raise tuition 7 percent?
Increase the student-body size?
Cut funding for computing services?
Psych services? Or athletic services?
These dramatic questions prefaced a questionnaire designed
by student members of two College financial planning com­
mittees and sent to all students in November. The question­
naire asked students to determine their priorities for College
dollars. They were given the list of 27 priority items that
President David W. Fraser had enumerated in his 1989-90
President’s Report and then were asked to rank a maximum
of 10 items they felt are most important to the College. The
200 respondents to the survey gave these as their top five
priorities:
1. Preserve need-blind admissions policy. All but one stu­
dent marked this as a priority, and several indicated that this
should be the top priority.
2. Continue to promote racial and ethnic diversity of both
the student body and faculty.
3. Hold tuition and fee increases to 1 percent above con­
sumer price index increases. This was a top concern,
although less frequently marked than the first two items.
4. Maintain strength of faculty and curriculum. A sizable
majority of students ranked faculty compensation in their list
of top priorities and supported related policies, such as fac­
ulty leaves every four years and the five-course teaching
load. Also of top importance to students is maintaining the
variety of academic departments and a low student/faculty
ratio.
5. Maintain present student-body size. A smaller, but still
sizable, number of respondents gave this a top priority. [The
possibility of increasing the student-body size is not under
consideration for 1991-92.]
In addition to assessing students’ priorities, the question­
naire also produced several concrete suggestions for budget
reductions. Four of the more frequently cited ones were:
1. Reduce the number of staff services, such as house­
keeping services. In addition to cleaning their own rooms,
students suggested they be given mandatory jobs on the
grounds and in the dining hall.
2. Cut waste. For example, reduce the amount of paper
used in the computing center, mailroom, and administration.
3. Postpone consideration of installing phones in student
rooms. Although there was “no consensus,” a majority felt
this an unnecessary expenditure given budget pressures.
4. Contemplated renovation or replacement of Trotter,
Pearson, Palmer, and Pittenger was felt “almost
unanimously” not to be needed, unless energy consumption
could be greatly reduced by the changes.

SW A R TH M O R E C O LLE G E BULLETIN

E

C

Fall sports
give fans much
to cheer about

Senior named
Rhodes scholar
Senior mathematics and engi­
neering major Janice Anne
Hudgings was one of 32
American students named
Rhodes scholars in early
December.
A backpacking and skiing
enthusiast who played for two
years as a forward on the
women’s basketball team,
Hudgings plans to pursue
double degrees in math and
philosophy at Oxford.
“I was really surprised,” she
said when the awards were
announced. “It seemed like a
real long shot.”
The Rhodes scholarships
■ were established in 1902 by
the estate of Cecil Rhodes, the
British philanthropist and
colonialist, who had hoped
that the scholarships would
contribute to world under­
standing and peace. Recipients
are chosen for intellectual and
academic excellence, integrity,
respect for others, leadership
qualities, and sports ability.
Transcripts, anyone?
From College Registrar Jane
Mullins ’50 comes the news
that the price of an academic
transcript has risen to $5.
She also reminds alumni
that her office cannot accept
requests over the phone but
will accept signed faxed re­
quests. Transcripts, however,
cannot be faxed back.

Football (7-3): This year’s
Garnet Tide made-its mark
both on and off the gridiron.
Early in the fall, Swarthmore’s
football program was fea­
tured, along with M.I.T.’s and
Chicago’s, in a Sports Illus­
trated article entitled “Smart
Ball.” The 12-page story
focused on the “competitive”
nature of football programs
at the nation’s academically
elite schools. Back at Clothier
Fields, however, Swarthmore
turned in a more than com­
petitive season.
The Garnet defeated all
three of their nonconference
foes—Hobart, Georgetown,
and Oberlin—and finished at
4-3 in the perennially strong
Centennial Conference.
Swarthmore was in the thick
of the conference race
throughout the entire season,
despite a roster that never
exceeded 40 players. Under
first-year head coach Karl
Miran, the team turned in its
finest season, and first winning
mark, in six years.
Men’s Soccer (14-6): In
Curt Lauber’s last year as
head coach of the Garnet
booters, his experienced team
provided a wealth of memo­
rable performances. Their
13-4 regular season included a

win over Division I University
of Delaware, the Drew Uni­
versity Invitational Cham­
pionship, and eight shutouts
by goalie Andrew Cavanagh
’93. One of those shutouts
was a 1-0 victory over rival
Haverford.
Swarthmore was rewarded
for its stellar campaign with a
bid to the NCAA Division III
Championship Tournament.
The team responded with a
great game before dropping a
0-1 heartbreaker to topranked defending champ
Elizabethtown. In the Middle
Atlantic Conference Tourna­
ment, played concurrently
with the nationals, the Garnet
advanced to the Southern
Division championship game,
in which it dropped a 1-2
nail-biter to Moravian.
Women’s Soccer (5-10-3):
All-MAC First Team selection
Alex Minicozzi ’92 led the
women booters through a dis­
appointing season that over­
shadowed a fine 3-1 mark in
conference play, including a
thrilling 2-1 victory over
Haverford.
Volleyball (9-17): Despite
several early-season successes,
the Garnet spikers struggled
through a disappointing sea­
son. However, coach Dale
Strawbridge will be smiling as
he ponders his team’s future:
Swarthmore will lose just one
player to graduation, team

Seniorfullback Greg Selverian rushes in the Garnet Tide’s 28-20
victory over Johns Hopkins. The team’s season record was 7-3.

captain Jen Pizzolo.
Field Hockey (3-13-2):
Coach Gaile Rockey is also
looking to the future to out­
shine the disappointing 1990
campaign. All-MAC First
Team choice Beth McGinley,
one of just two seniors on this
year’s team, led the Garnet in
scoring. Seven freshmen and
at least five other returning
players should guarantee a
return to competitive action
next season.
Women’s Cross Country
(3-1): Anchored by Dayna
Baily ’91 and freshman
phenom Barb Ley, the fleetfooted Garnet harriers won
their second consecutive MAC
championship, defeating arch­
rival Haverford. Baily became
the first woman in Swarth­
more history to win the MAC
individual championship. She
and Ley were named allMAC for their efforts at the
conference championship
meet.
Men’s Cross Country
(7-1): This team of veteran
runners finished a strong
season with an impressive
second-place finish at the
MAC championships, trailing
only nationally-ranked Haver­
ford. Swarthmore also placed
third out of 26 teams at the
regional meet. Robert Marx
’91 and Matt Warshawsky ’92
placed fifth and sixth respec­
tively at the MACs. Marx
received all-MAC recognition,
and his third-place finish at
the regional race qualified him
for nationals, where he placed
34th in a field of 178 finishers.
Last, but not least: Phil
Rosenstrach ’93 won the East­
ern Regional Rolex Tennis
Tournament (held at Swarth­
more) and finished seventh in
the national tourney at Corpus
Christi, Texas. Swarthmore’s
men’s tennis team begins its
1991 defense of the national
championship with a presea­
son ranking of No. 1.
Competition points in this
year’s battle for the Hood
Trophy stand at three apiece.
, — Je ff Zinn ’92

FEBRUARY 1991

25

Famine and war in Eritrea
form the basis fo r academic research
and humanitarian concern
n 1973 an experience on sabbatical in
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where I grew
up, completely altered my academic
career and my life-style. While I was doing
field research on the city, I heard about a
possible famine in the north in Eritrea, a
former Italian colony annexed by Ethiopia
in 1961. Although the government did not
admit to it, I decided to check out the rumor
and took off in my Land-Rover. I did indeed
find a devastating famine. After I returned
to Addis Ababa, I wrote a paper document­
ing what I had seen, and it was distributed
underground. I also helped a young British
reporter to make a documentary film that
was subsequently distributed in Europe,
causing a furor because the emperor con­
tinued to insist that there was no famine.
From that time on, I abandoned my con­
cern with grand and intellectually sophisti­
cated theoretical matters and began delving
into the kind of anthropology that is in­
tended to make a difference in human lives.
The overthrow of the Ethiopian monar­
chy in 1974 and the establishment of a
Marxist-Leninist military government deeply
estranged most Ethiopian and Eritrean in­
tellectuals like me and drove us deeper into
exile. This is a cruel regime whose humanrights violations have been recorded by
many observers, including former president
Jimmy Carter and Amnesty International.
The atrocities committed by the Ethiopian
government stand in sharp contrast to the
humane approaches of the many opposition
movements that have arisen in the country.
One of these movements, the Eritrean Peo­
ple’s Liberation Front (EPLF), has been
fighting the Ethiopian government for 29
years, relying on weapons captured from
Ethiopian forces, and has resisted the mili­
tary government from its inception.
I returned to Eritrea in 1985 and 1988 at
the invitation of the Eritrean Relief Associ­
ation (ERA) to visit areas under its control.
These areas were continually exposed to

I

26

bombardment by the Ethiopian air force,
and, for the first time in my life, I learned to
distinguish Soviet MiGs from friendly air­
craft and to run for cover whenever MiGs
flew overhead. In spite of the danger, I
visited many refugee camps and observed
the distinctive way the ERA ran them.
The ERA famine-relief effort is run by an
army of volunteers, young men and women
in their 20s and 30s. They operate a fleet of
several hundred trucks to serve a million
Eritrean refugees in the southeastern Sudan
and nearly as many famine victims and
displaced persons inside Eritrea. Because
Ethiopia continues to bomb relief camps,
grain depots, and relief convoys, all the
work of transporting and distributing food
must be done at night after the MiGs have
retired.
It is an extraordinary sight to see the hot,
arid, sleepy Eritrean countryside come alive
with activity at sunset. Generators begin to
hum; workshops, garages, and famine-relief
depots light up and buzz with activity.
Convoys of Italian trucks flicker across the
countryside as they roll over the Eritrean
massif on roads that snake up and down the
steep mountains. The Ethiopian air force at
one time tried nighttime bombardment but
failed badly to inflict any damage. Even in

by Asmarom Legesse
Professor o f Anthropology

broad daylight, its marksmanship is crude.
The ERA is unlike most relief programs
in Africa in that it does not take food to a
relief depot and ask the famine-stricken
population to come and get it. How can
starving people walk 20 to 30 miles from
their villages to the distribution centers? The
ERA’S strategy is to build a network of
feeder roads and to transport the food deep
into the countryside. From there, food is
loaded on pack animals and carried to the
villages.
The philosophy behind the ERA relief
strategy is also distinctive. Other relief agen­
cies try to feed refugees but often leave them
helpless in their settlements. The ERA hands
people tools to start building. They are
trained to dig wells and to plant terraced
vegetable gardens. They build their own
shelters with local materials. Eritrea has no
squatter settlements of destitute and demor­
alized people crowded in peri-urban slums.
Instead, the famine victims have become
part of the program of self-reliant develop­
ment that is in evidence throughout the
liberated zone. Hungry people, if empow­
ered, can change their outlook from despera­
tion to hope. What fascinated me as a
student of the sociology of poverty is that
the usual result of aid—helplessness—
wasn’t evident in Eritrea. There, one was
impressed by demonstrated self-reliance.
I spent two days in a refugee settlement
called Nkema. There I met a young woman
named Bisrat, a 22-year-old volunteer who
was in charge of a community of some 30
families. Her responsibilities were quite awe­
some. She spent each day teaching the
villagers to read and write, to dig and
maintain wells, to irrigate the fields. She was
also in charge of distributing famine-relief
food and maintaining a ledger of all food aid
received by each family. These records, she
said, could be examined by representatives
of donor organizations who might wish to
visit the area to make sure that their donaSW A R TH M O R E C O LLE G E BULLETIN

\YEMEN
/
' ARAB
/ PDROF
REPUBLIC/ YEMEN

As Eritrea comes closer to in­
dependencefrom Ethiopia after a
29-year civil war, famine relief
efforts turn toward increasing the
self-reliance of the Eritrean
people. Above, at a distribution
center, grain awaits transport by
pack animal to remote villages.
Below, volunteer relief workers
prepare DMK, a highly nutritious
food product that is given to
famine victims.

SUDAN

KENYA

tions are being used for the purposes for
which they were given.
Since 1985 I have worked closely with
the Eritrean Relief Committee (ERC), the
tax-exempt organization that is the branch
of the ERA in the U.S. I now serve as the
chairman for the ERC and travel extensively
in the States in support 'of fund-raising
activities organized by local ERC branches.
I recently returned from Orlando, Florida,
where a young Eritrean named Stefano has
mobilized the small Eritrean community
there to raise funds for the relief effort.
Stefano lived in Italy before emigrating to
the U.S. and is now the manager of an
Italian restaurant called Vivaldi, which do­
nated a magnificent Italian dinner. In addi­
tion, Stefano’s Eritrean wife, Muzit, cooked
Eritrean food with the help of other women
in the neighborhood. The Italian Club of
Orlando has in recent years become an
active participant in fund-raising events. I
have been impressed by similar activity in
31 other U.S. cities and in European and
Australian cities as well.
I will return to Eritrea for a semester in
1991 to conduct research to help Eritrean
doctors understand traditional cultures and
their attitudes toward health, illness, and
therapy. The doctors keep bumping into
belief systems alien to their own, and unless
these are understood, the doctors cannot be
effective therapists or public educators. Mid­
wifery is a case in point. Eritrean midwives
might stimulate childbirth by energetic mas­
saging of the abdomen, by filling the room
full of smoke, or by picking up the mother
and vigorously shaking her and making loud
noises—all of which doctors say can harm
her.
The Eritrean People’s Liberation Front
seems close to liberating Eritrea in its entirety
and declaring it an independent state. That
Eritreans have been able to sustain their
resistance over 29 years is a remarkable
testimony to the strength of the human
spirit.
Anyone wishing to help with the faminerelief work in Eritrea may write Asmarom
Legesse at Swarthmore College or send con­
tributions directly to the Eritrean Relief
Committee, Room 907, 475 Riverside Drive,
New York, N Y 10115 (212-870-2727). Le­
gesse notes that writers who wish to visit
Eritrea and write about their experiences
would be helped with vehicles and guides.

PHOTOS COURTESY ERITREAN INFORMATION DEPT

FEBRUARY 1991

LETTERS

£ £ Hedley Rhys was
the great teacher o f my
Swarthmore years.. . .
He taught us how
to see, and how to
deeply appreciate
what we see. m

Who could get
serious about studies
when about to go o ff
to save the world
fo r democracy?

“WONDERFUL AND
THOUGHT-PROVOKING”
To the Editor:
I have just been reading the August 1990
Bulletin (courtesy of my grandson, Jeff
Odell ’89). The article “The Season of
Acceptance” on page 29 [about the nursinghome letters of Abigail Ellsworth Warnick
T8] is wonderful and most thought-provok­
ing. I wish her letters might be published,
but I gather it is unlikely that will happen.
Would it be possible to borrow a copy for
reading and use in helping reluctant families
consider this important step? I live in a lifecare community and am very conscious of
the emotional problems involved for both
the potential patient and loving family.
MARGARET KATZENBERG
Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla.

WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE?
To the Editors:
I really enjoyed the November Bulletin,
which just came and which I’ve already
read practically cover to cover. My first
choice was the article on UCA/Swarthmore
collaboration—our background on the Je­
suits stems from several years’ attendance at
Georgetown’s Alumni College (Georgetown
is my husband’s alma mater).
Second choice went to the article on the
new PAC, which was very informative and
thought-provoking, especially as we have an
architect daughter. My complaint about the
presentation was the lack of visual backup—
the paucity of pictures and absence of cam­
pus ground layout. I suppose you are saving
all this for the February issue of the Bulletin
and the article was simply intended to soften
the PAC’s debut, but I would have liked
something graphic to substitute for the daily
visual encounters with the proceedings en­
joyed by readers of The Phoenix, where the
article first appeared.
RUTH STRATTAN CUMMINS ’36
Cortland, N.Y.
Editor’s note: Look for more pictures o f the
Lang Performing Arts Center in the May
issue. It was not yet finished when this issue
was written.

HEDLEY RHYS REMEMBERED
To the Editor:
I was deeply saddened to read of the
passing of Professor Hedley Rhys. Permit
me to add to the rather skeletal tribute
published in the Bulletin, November 1990.
A life may be summarized by a list of
positions, credentials, and publications; but
this is a major injustice, particularly to a
great teacher.
Hedley Rhys was the great teacher of my
28

Swarthmore years. What does this mean? It
means that in an era in which academia is
increasingly dominated by trivial pursuits,
petty squabbling, endless theorizing, and
irrelevant research, Professor Rhys taught us
two things: how to see, and how to deeply
appreciate what we see.
If you think about it, these qualities are
not limited to Hedley’s field of art history.
I believe they constitute the essence of great
teaching in any field. Professor Rhys, with
his deep knowledge and boundless enthusi­
asm, constantly took his students beyond
the usual boundaries—beyond information
to wisdom, and beyond criticism to appre­
ciation and (dare I say?) love.
This mode of being-in-the-world was
Professor Rhys’ gift to us, as alive now as it
was then. Long may his spirit continue to
enrich Swarthmore and the future!
DONALD A. COOPER ’65
San Francisco

THE SUMMER OF ’42
To the Editor:
While each issue of the Bulletin is a visual
and intellectual treat, the latest volume
holds a special charm for me, for both Paul
Mangelsdorf ’49 and I first arrived at
Swarthmore during “The Summer of ’42.”
He recalls many of the sights and sounds
I recall of a Swarthmore seemingly very
tranquil in spite of the tensions building in
the real world around it.
My early recollections involve rap ses­
sions with the likes of Dick Hurd ’48, Bud
Pye ’48, and Dick Johnston ’48, and very
little studying. For who could get serious
about studies when about to go off to save
the world for democracy?
I returned to Swarthmore after the war
and had the good fortune not only to meet
up again with my former rappers, but also
to room with Ray Posel ’50. And the rest,
as they say, is history.
Paul’s description of the College during
the very short time frame of ’42 to ’49
rekindled my enthusiasm for an era long
gone but certainly not forgotten. Please
thank him for me. It certainly was a privi­
lege.
RICHARD M. GREEN ’48
Jenkintown, Pa.
To the Editor:
Paul Mangelsdorf raises a difficult issue in
his delightful memoir, “The Summer o f’42”
(November 1990). Comparing now to then,
Paul says the very success of the College has
made both faculty and students take them­
selves so seriously that they have lost the
spirit of adventure that is so precious a part
of learning. Of its nature, that’s not the kind
of problem that can be easily defined, let
SW A R TH M O R E C O LLEG E BULLETIN

alone resolved. But it certainly merits dis­
cussion. I hope others who have known
Swarthmore over those decades will address
the question that Paul has raised.
DAVID HAPGOOD ’47
New York

UNIVERSITY UNDER SIEGE
To the Editor:
I was extremely interested in the article
“Universities Under Siege” by Professor
Barry Schwartz (November 1990), in which
he discussed the conflict between the Uni­
versidad Nacional de El Salvador (UNES)
and the government, beginning with its
occupation by the military in 1972.1 know
about that because I was there. Perhaps my
experiences will interest readers of the Bul­
letin.
When I started to teach at UNES in
January 1971,1 was one of a group of three
Americans and one Argentinean in the
Chemistry Department. Initially, the politi­
cal situation was relatively calm. But leftist
students, supported by some administrators,
soon began causing trouble. Vehicles with
sound equipment broadcasting political pro­
paganda toured the campus. At times the
students in the class couldn’t hear me lectur­
ing. There was a sign posted in the library
advertising free trips to Cuba to study revo­
lution. No one removed it.
Around May of 1972, the Consejo Supe­
rior (University Council) announced that a
policy of “open doors” would start on July
10. Ajny student with a high-school diploma
would be entitled to enter the university. We
were supposed to prepare for 3,400 in
General Chemistry, compared with 1,800
that year. The Medicina (administrators,
teachers, and researchers in medicine) flatly
refused, saying they did not have the staff or
facilities for such a large increase. The
Consejo Superior ordered them to do so,
and radical students took over their new
building, refusing to let any professors enter.
They also occupied Chemistry, painting
“colador” (filter) on the walls because the
general chemistry course always reduced
the number of students getting into medi­
cine. They painted “Yankee, go home” on
the wall near the staff list and circled the
names of the three Americans in red.
The Faculty of Sciences and Humanities
met to discuss the stand their delegates
should take in the University Assembly. A
radical student asked permission to speak. I
was one of those who voted against it—
because it was illegal—but he received
permission to “provide factual information.”
Instead, he gave a political harangue, in­
cluding references to “Yankee imperialism.”
The majority of the faculty voted to support
FEBRUARY 1991

the Consejo Superior and the rector against
the Medicina.
The assembly then met and voted to fire
the dean and the executive board of the
medical school. The rector then asked the
students to vacate the building and an­
nounced he would obtain foreign medical
professors since those in the country had
been supporting the dean and the faculty of
the medical school.
f • Faculty and students
On the morning of July 19, the report of
the Supreme Court was read to the National . take themselves so
Assembly, stating that the rector and other
seriously that they have
elected officials of the university had not
lost the spirit o f adventure
been legally elected. The National Assembly
then voted to remove the university admin­ that is so precious
istration from office, to repeal the “Organic
a part o f learning. J J
Law” under which the university operated,
and to order that a new law be formulated.
Apparently using this decision as justifi­
cation, the national guard and the federal
police surrounded the campus and took
everyone into custody. Fortunately for me,
I was at home for lunch when this happened.
Faculty members who were on campus
were taken to an empty swimming pool and
kept there in the hot sun for three hours.
The next evening, a jeep with five nonuniformed men came to my home to pick
me up for questioning. The American am­
bassador had told us earlier that if arrested
we should go peaceably but have the U.S.
Embassy notified immediately. As soon as
we left, my wife telephoned a friend from
the embassy. It had started to drizzle. One
man put his rifle between us with the barrel
up under my arm—while we were driving
over cobblestones.
On arrival at the headquarters of the
national guard I was told to empty my
pockets. I was also told to take off my belt,
the traditional precaution. At this moment
an officer appeared and said I was to be
released. Soon afterward the American mili­
tary attaché came and took me out. The ( • They painted ‘Yankee,
colonel in command told me he regretted go home’ on the wall
the inconvenience.
I,
one of my American colleagues innear the sta ff list and
chemistry, and two from biology were al­ circled the names o f
lowed to return to our offices to pick up our three Americans in red. H
belongings. I saw widespread, wanton dam­
age done to the chemical laboratories by the
national guardsmen. Analyzing the course
of events, I believe the military takeover
could have been avoided if leftist adminis­
trators and students had been challenged
from the beginning by moderates in the
university. However, by 1972 the situation
had become intolerable. Something had to
be done, but it is not easy to see how, other
than by military intervention.
FREDERICK C. STRONG III ’39
Lewisburg, Pa.
29

ROSSWORD PUZZLE
ACROSS
1. SWARTHMORE MOTTO, “MIND
T H E __________”
6. PRONOUN STILL HEARD ON
CAMPUS
10. ANNUAL REGATTA LOCALE
14. Relative
15. Congers
16. Emitted magma
17. TYPE OF MATCHBOX (3 words)
20. Homophone of rowed
21. Utah town near Provo
22. Father to Paris
23. Summer in Nancy
24. ELIZABETH BOND, EVERETT HUNT,
OR JANET DICKERSON
25. Chinese cooking vessel
26. Offer
27. What Mrs. Sprat couldn’t eat
29. Caesar: “Omnis Gallia in partes tres divisa
32. Major air hub
35. TROPHY FOR ATHLETIC
SUPREMACY
36. Jamaican resort:__________Rios
37. EARLY PROFESSOR NOTED FOR
ADMONITION “USE THY
GUMPTION” (2 words)
40. BELOVED SWITCHBOARD
OPERATOR FOR 50 YEARS
41. WSGA AND MSG A, FOR EXAMPLE
42. Eat away
43. Engine stat
44. IMPORTANT CRITERIA FOR
SWARTHMORE ACCEPTANCE (abbr.)
45. Anger
46. Indian mulberry
47. Mexican treat
49. Speck
52. PRESIDENT 1969-73
55. Heraldry word
56. Cautious
57. GROUP THAT ESTABLISHED
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE (2 words)
60. Princely Italian family
61. Southern evergreen
62. Bone (comb, form)
63. What the cat says
64. Past Wimbledon winner
65. ADJECTIVE BEST DESCRIBING
PRESIDENT MAGILL

DOWN
1. Metric measure
2 . _________ water; in trouble (2 words)
3. Bird of prey
4. U.S. patriot
5 . _________ -night doubleheader
6. Tropical fish
7. SWARTHMORE’S FIRST MATRON,
LATER DEAN (2 words)
8. Type of sch.
30

9. Abbreviated title associated with the legal
profession
10. AUTHOR OF THE DISTINCTIVE
COLLEGE: ANTIOCH, REED, AND
SWARTHM ORE
11. Turkish liquor
12. Eye part
13. School follower
18. Driven obliquely, as a nail
19. “O nce__________a midnight dreary,”
Poe
2 4 . ________ Bien Phu
25. African gully
26. Scottish hillside
28. Ages
29. Reverberate
30. Atlantic food fish
31. Scholarly book
32. Eskers
33. Hummock
34. Metric or ptote starter
35. Elephant Man portrayer
36. Fairy-tale monster

38. Combustible material
39. Pianist or emperor
44. BLACK STUDENT GROUP SINCE
THE ’60s (abbr.)
45. Bakery worker
46. Oblique
48. Michael Caine movie
49. Divine Comedy creator
50. Taxonomic category
51. MARTHA__________, PARAMOUNT
FOUNDER OF SWARTHMORE
52. DU PONT BLDG. COURSE
53. Swell
54. Eight (comb, form)
55. Elevator man
56. PAINTER WHOSE FARM BECAME
PART OF CAMPUS IN 1874
58. G ive__________go (2 words)
59. Aegean island

Solution, page 53
SW A R TH M O R E C O LLEG E BULLETIN

In orbit
A lifetime o f outer-space work fo r Eilene Galloway ’28
For Eilene Galloway ’28, the
sky has hardly been the limit.
In the 1950s, when most of
the country was still focusing
on the earth, Galloway was
looking beyond the clouds
into our future in space. And
she still is. “There’s always
something exciting going on—
I just wake up in the morning
and do nothing but work on
outer space.”
It all began in October
1957, when the U.S.S.R.
launched its first Sputnik
satellite. The Senate Armed
Services Committee called on
Galloway’s expertise as a
national defense analyst at the
Congressional Research Ser­
vice because earlier that year
she had written on guided
missiles in foreign countries.
She explains, “W hen Sputnik
went up, anyone on the Hill
who had worked on guided
missiles automatically got
drawn into space. W ithin a
few weeks, we were estimat­
ing the effect on the United
States of the Soviet Union
being the first to send up a
satellite. That’s how I was
launched, and then I never
stopped orbiting.”
In 1958 Sen. Lyndon
Johnson appointed her a spe­
cial consultant to the Senate
Special Committee on Space
and Astronautics to work on
the NASA Act. Galloway
believes that was some of the
most important work she’s
done. From 1959 she con­
tinued to be a special consul­
tant and wrote and edited
documents for the Senate
Committee on Aeronautical
and Space Sciences and the
Committee on Commerce,
Science, and Transportation.
At the same time, she was
involved in writing and pre­
senting papers, serving on
committees, and conducting
seminars— all relating to space
law and technology.
Galloway’s retirement from
the Congressional Research
Service in 1975 didn’t slow

34

her down. She set up shop as
a consultant and continued to
do some work for the Senate
as well as to travel, speak, and
write. For many years she’s
been a delegate or official
observer at sessions of the
United Nations Committee on
Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.
In 1982 she was one of 20
foreigners invited by the
Soviet Academy of Sciences
to tour the Soviet Space Cen­
ter as part of a celebration of
the 25th anniversary of the
first Sputnik launch. In 1984
she put on a conference called
“Conditions Essential for
Maintaining O uter Space for
Peaceful Purposes,” which
was sponsored by the United
Nations University and took
place at the Peace Palace, The
Hague.
Along the way she’s picked
up an impressive array of
awards: the Andrew G. Haley
Gold Medal from the Inter­
national Institute of Space
Law in 1968, the NASA Gold
Medal for Public Service in
1984, the Women in Aero­
space Lifetime Achievement
Award in 1987, the Inter­

national Institute of Space
Law Lifetime Achievement
Award in 1989, and an honor­
ary doctor of laws degree from
Lake Forest College in 1990,
to name a few.
But despite those “lifetime
achievement awards,” her
space career is by no means
finished. She’s as busy as ever.
“I have a list of things I have
to do taped on the mirror in
the hall so I can’t walk past
without seeing it,” she ex­
plains with a laugh. Currently
she is a trustee of the Inter­
national Academy of Astro­
nautics and honorary director
of the International Institute
of Space Law. In October she
traveled to Dresden, Ger­
many, to give a paper called,
“Law, Science, and Tech­
nology for the M oon/M ars
Missions.” Now she’s working
on a book chapter on solarpowered satellites and a col­
lection of quotations from her
writings that will be contained
in an upcoming book, Space
Law: Development and Scope,
being prepared by the Inter­
national Institute of Space
Law. That book will be dedi-

cated to her and will contain
chapters written by space law
experts from around the world
as well as the chapter of Gal­
loway’s quotations.
Throughout her space
career, she has been con­
cerned about the laws and
treaties made by the countries
of the world to regulate the
use of outer space. At the
beginning of the space age,
she and her colleagues hoped
that space and space tech­
nology would be used for
peace, and they worked to
make that happen. “Here was
a new environment,” she ex­
plains. “We didn’t have any
hostility there, and we wanted
to keep it that way.”
Throughout Eilene Gallo­
way’s life and career, Swarthmore has had a role to play.
After graduating from the
College, she taught in the
Political Science Department
for two years. Her son David
’48 was born while Galloway
was a junior at Swarthmore,
and both he and his brother,
Jonathan ’61, graduated from
the College. Galloway was
particularly pleased to have
her family’s Swarthmore tradi­
tion extend to the third gener­
ation when her granddaughter
Jennifer ’90, Jonathan’s
daughter, came to the College.
Galloway values her con­
nection to the College because
she believes her Swarthmore
education, in particular the
Honors Program, has been
vital to her intellectual de­
velopment and to her career
success. “That was where I
learned to deal with multi­
disciplinary subjects. It wasn’t
so much the subject matter of
the courses as the way I
learned to take a broad view
of a problem that has many
elements. That’s what I’ve
done with space— with its
political, legal, economic,
social, psychological, and
other multidisciplinary
problems.”
— Rebecca Aim

SW A R TH M O R E C O LLE G E BULLETIN

A letter from Australia
Cows are difficult to count . . .
and kangaroos don't help
By Betty Nathan ’50
August 5 :1 stood at the win­
dow and watched the desolate
start of the fourth day of rain
and gale-force winds. Water
poured down the sides of the
bowl-shaped slopes, overflow­
ing the dams, saturating the
paddocks, covering the clover
and grasses. The cattle fed
restlessly, moving upslope and
down, unable to escape the
weather. Three kangaroos
streaked past the herd and
vanished in the uphill bush. It
is unusual for them to pass so
close by the cattle, but every­
one rubs shoulders on N oah’s
ark. North and west of us, we
heard on the radio, rivers
were cresting at their highest
levels in 40 years. Several
towns had to evacuate resi­
dents. We were lucky. The
house, halfway up the side of
the bowl, stayed dry. Only the
phone died, and the threequarter-mile driveway was
temporarily impassable.
This was not exactly how I
had pictured my initiation to
farming in Australia when my
partner, John Burton, called
me in northern Virginia, jubi­
lantly announcing, “We are
the owners of 72 head of
cattle!” Six weeks later I flew
out to join John and the Herd.
A surprise, and a very
pleasant one, was that even in
the dead of an Australian win­
ter, with nasty windchill fac­
tors, the temperature rarely
stayed long below freezing,
and our abundant garden was
in almost full bloomfl-geraniums below my bedroom
window and assorted native
daisies nodding along the
front path and the veranda.
Equally cheering were the
gaudy Australian birds that
feed on our front lawn— gray
and rose galahs, rosellas in
brilliant iridescent reds and
blues and greens, little wrens
with bands of heavenly azure
blue, sulphur-crested white
cockatoos.
Planning to retire from

42

George Mason University in
Fairfax, Va., we had sought
homes that would be just right
for me in the States and for
John, a native Australian, in
his country. A former resident
of the Borough of Swarthmore, I plan to move back
there for an American base.
Over the last few years, we
had tried various places in
Australia. The solution came
when we fell in love with
W itwood, a 600-acre farm on
the road from Canberra to
Bateman’s Bay at the coast. It
lies midway between two his­
toric towns, Bungendore and
Braidwood. The latter is the
seat of Tallaganda Shire,
population 2,000, of whom
1,100 live in Braidwood. It is
where we attend to our offi­
cial business. Its numbers are
only slightly less than in its
early lively days as market
town and site of the allimportant courthouse and jail.
Cattle, of course, behave
the same the world over.
W hat I had not realized was

how difficult they are to
count. While we waited for
the pregnant cows to calve,
we wanted to make sure each
day that all 38 were present
and accounted for. They
would not let us near them,
so each morning John and I
would park two chairs in
front of a well-oriented win­
dow and, equipped with
binoculars, wait for them to
start moving. As long as they
stood in one clump, it was im­
possible. Once the first cow
moved on to other feeding
grounds, the others would
string along behind. We
prayed that they might peel
off one at a time and not pass
behind trees or down gullies,
but they were rarely so coop­
erative. I quickly learned
to count legs rather than
bodies. Still, it could take
several tries, and it required a
leisured morning. The perfect
occupation for retirees!
We are breeding polled
Herefords, the lovely brown
cattle with white heads, white

tummies, and a white stripe
down the spine. They are
popular here both with other
graziers and with meat whole­
salers. Although we do not
feel knowledgeable enough to
start a stud farm, it’s impor­
tant to breed good stock to get
a good price, so we arranged
to shop for two bulls by visit­
ing a couple of stud farms.
I stayed outside the muddy
yards while John, the agent,
and the proprietor sloshed in
the muck, eyeing the beasts
and muttering about “length
of bone,” “breadth of leg,”
and “used to handling.” Pri­
vately, I wondered if anyone’s
tested for fertility and sexual
performance. It seems not. We
made a selection on confor­
mation and docility and will
have to take our chances on
the sperm count. We’ve now
two beautiful Ferdinands in
our bottom paddock.
O ur 38 pregnant cows were
certified to drop in August,
but the month sped by calf­
less. To our dismay, one of

SW A R TH M O R E C O LLE G E BULLETIN

Robinson “had another interesting
year as director of the Graduate
Program in Communications at
McGill. Have also been deeply
involved in academic women’s
equity issues as one of only six full
professors (out of 225) in the
Faculty of Arts. Wilderness camp­
ing in Oregon with children and
grandchildren was the other high
point during the year. Hope to hear
from Northeastern Swarthmoreans
living in New England; have lots of
room in my Montreal duplex.”
“The 40th annual reunion of the
Sunday Supper Club was held at
Alice and Phil Brickner’s home on
April 21. Dick Mason and Dick
Smith also attended,” the latter
writes. “Just can’t beat the status
quo^jjno change, no complaints,”
from William and Jane Case

Weaver ’51.
I am sorry to have to report the
death of a classmate, Robert S.
Milne, on May 19. We extend our
sympathy to his wife, Barbara
Anderson Milne, and to the rest of
his family.
So long; have a good
w inter... and drop me a note.

52

__________________

a member of the New York State
Senate. He also practices law in
New York City.

Vivianne Thimann Nachmias
celebrated the arrival of a grand­
daughter in February 1990, born to
her daughter Lisa, a Yale Law
School graduate in May. A
younger daughter has been a staff
person for CISPES and visited El
Salvador this year: Vivi and her
husband, Jack, continue happily in
their professorial lives, enjoying the
advances of computer technology,
especially its application to grant
writing. Many of us can identify
with the glee with which John
Porter heralds the graduation of
five of his seven children from col­
lege! John continues as principal
scientist for Cincinnati Inc.
Other reports of offspring in­
clude the graduation of Barbara
Alley Oxman’s daughter, Eleanor,
from Wellesley with honors. Bill
Waterfield’s son and daughter are
both in Cambridge, Mass., while
Bill begins a year as vice president
of the Northern California Psychi­
atric Society. Nancy McGrayne
Conaway’s daughter, Sharon,
practices law in Washington, D.C.,
as her son, Daniel, becomes a law
student in New York City. Nancy
is convalescing from a spine injury.
I am sure we all join in wishing her
a speedy recovery.

Mary Ann Kidder Marshall
6 Washington Drive
Madison, N J 07940
Two classmates are finding
satisfaction in the creative arts:
Sally Hyslop Spofford exhibited
in May as part of the 50th Anni­
versary Exhibition of the Asso­
ciated Artists of New Jersey in
Clinton. Be Crookston Carter
writes that she is newly working in
pottery, finding it a welcome
change from marriage counseling.
Maryal Stone Dale is involved in
giving writing workshops in
Chicago for Urban Gateways. Her
commitment to the 400-plus
students she helps weekly has put
plans to write a mystery guide to
New York and Chicago on hold.
Junetta Kemp Gillespie is back
at the U. of 111., where she is coor­
dinator of video and international
TV for the College of Liberal Arts
and Sciences. Prior to going global,
she spent a year and a half as the
first manager of the Advanced
Learning Technologies Lab at
Arizona State U. “Still interesting
and frustrating” is how Franz
Leichter describes his 16th year as
44

54

__________________

Elizabeth Dun Colten
36 Hampshire Hill Road
Upper Saddle River, N J 07458
The following was hurriedly
written on the eve of our departure
for a short trip to Cannes, Buda­
pest, and Prague. My apologies for
brevity, errors, an d /o r omissions.
Other travelers include Bill and
Barbara Hill Lindsay, who see the
U.S.A. each summer: friends in
Boston, Bill’s D ad in Cleveland,
and children in Piscataway, N.J.,
Bettendorf, Iowa, and Vail, Colo.
They add Bermuda for fun! Julia
Turner Molina writes that she and
her husband, Hernando, have sold
their house, are storing their furni­
ture, and plan to make extended
visits to potential retirement
locales. Their temporary address
(c /o one of their children) is 15
Hidden Hollow Drive, Sicklerville,
N J 08081.
Bill and Marge Paxson Jones

■ C h a r l e s L. A n d e s , J r ., ’52,
chairman and chief executive
officer of the Franklin Institute,
received the 1990 Annual
Achievers Award from W HEELS
Inc. for exemplary community
service in the Delaware Valley.
David and Julie Nixon Eisen­
hower were chairs of the May
award dinner.

’56 have bought a home on Hilton
Head with the plan of retiring
there. For the past 10 years, Bill
has been the partner in charge of
the Atlanta office of Wellington
Management Co. and recommends
Atlanta (four seasons, but short
winters!). Both sons are lawyers;
daughter Cindy is a commercial
interior designer.
Roger ’53 and Dolly Young
Sale are in Europe for a sabbatical
leave— Florence, Italy, then
England. Son Tim is in Seattle, a
“drawer of comic books,” whose
latest includes guest appearances by
Superman and Batman. Daughter
Maggie is a Ph.D. candidate in
American literature at the U. of
Calif., San Diego. Russ and Edie
Hay Ferrell spent the 1989-90
academic year in England,
Scotland, and Ireland while on
sabbatical from the U. of Arizona,
where he teaches systems engineer­
ing and she is a social sciences
librarian.
Thanks to his wife, Margaret, we
hear that Tom Greene, traveler
extraordinaire, made his fifth visit
to Pakistan in a year’s time. He is
working on achieving a political
settlement in Afghanistan. Their
daughter Marion, a junior at
Swarthmore, spent her fall semester
at Pomona College; all Greenes
(minus Tom) enjoyed a June beach
weekend with Milt Cummings.
New address for Len Rorer:
3200 Darrtown Road, Hamilton,
OH 45013-9331. He and Bobbie

Hopes moved last May and invite
Swarthmoreans to stop by “for a
meal, to spend the night in the
guest bedroom, to camp in the
yard, or to jum p in the pond.” Len
has been a professor at Miami U.
since 1975. He teaches mostly
graduate-level courses in the
clinical psychology program and
has published articles dealing with
personality assessment, research
methodology, and rational-emotive
therapy (RET). Bobbie is also a
clinical psychologist, specializing in
forensic work. Len’s daughter Liat
’82 is a senior product manager for
Fidelity Corp. in Boston; Eric (U.
of Calif., Santa Cruz) has an M.A.
in journalism from U. of Missouri
and is a dedicated runner. Mya, 20,
lives in Portland, Ore.
Sally Kennedy ’55 moved to
Bryn Mawr last March to be with
Herb Fanning. Sally has a new
job, teaching at the Agnes Irwin
School; Herb continues with
D u Pont in Philadelphia. His son
Alan is working toward a Ph.D. in
human genetics at Yale, daughter
Amy is a mechanical engineer with
Exxon in Houston, and her twin,
John, is a printing assistant
working in Ardmore, Pa.
Congratulations to Betty
Manson Pyle, recently promoted
to associate director of financial aid
at Brandeis U. Congrats also to
Janet Harvey (daughter of Dave
’53 and Bonnie Brown Harvey,
wife of Timothy Romano ’77, and
mother of Lydia and Mark), who
graduated from Penn Law School
in May.
Phil Green, Sophia Smith
Professor of Government at Smith
College, was chosen by peer
nomination to give one of the Five
College 25th-Anniversary Lectures
last November. His topic: “ ‘I Have
a Philosophy, You Have an
Ideology’— Is Social Criticism
Possible?”
The New York Times Book
Review labels Peter Bart’s new
book, Fade Out: The Calamitous
Final Days o f MGM, a “disaster
tale more jarring than Earth­
quake.” Peter, formerly a reporter
for both The Wall Street Journal
and The New York Times and a
senior v.p. for M G M /U A under
Kirk Kerkorian, recently undertook
the revitalization of Variety. This
meant a move back to Manhattan
(new address: 475 Park Avenue
South, New York, NY 10016), but
California has claimed his two
daughters, one a costume designer
in Hollywood, the other a medical
SW A R TH M O R E C O LLE G E BULLETIN

The saboteur in the classroom
How not to reform British education
By Mary Woelfel Poole ’58

The schools in Britain are
currently the focus o f a bitter
political and educational bat­
tle. A s a teacher, o f course, I
would expect to have a notdisinterested involvement in
this battle, but I did not expect
to figure as an expert. The
producer o f a T V series called
Opinions thought that it would
be an interesting idea to have
a totally unknown practicing
teacher—me, that is ^ ta lk
about education on his pro­
gram. I knew that i f I had
anything worthwhile to say,
my comments would be rooted
in the precepts I had learned
in the Swarthmore educational
program and in the values I
had imbibed there.
The Conservative govern­
ment is m aking sweeping
changes to British education
through its Education A c t o f
1989. In my talk I concen­
trated on the implications o f
the act’s imposed National
Curriculum. Until now each
school in Britain has had local
autonomy to choose its own
curriculum. The National
Curriculum seeks to change
this, specifying which subjects
must be taught at particular•
ages, using national tests o f all
children at ages 7, 11, 14, and
16 to enforce its requirements.
M y talk, excerpts o f which
follow, was given in March
1989 and was entitled “The
Saboteur in the Classroom. ”
I am an American, edu­
cated in the U.S.A. with a
degree in history, but don’t let
that put you off. I’ve been
teaching in English schools for
30 years. I have experienced a
lot of English education. And
so, on the eve of a major
change, I would like to share
some of my ideas about your
education system— seen
slightly from the outside.
If I was asked today what I
thought about the great edu­
cational experiment in which

46

I had taken part— the change
from selective to comprehen­
sive education— I would have
to reply that I have very
mixed feelings. I would not
want to return to the selective
system. I decided that the
change was a good one, badly
introduced, but a needed
reform in English education.
W hy did I think this? I dislike
deeply any system that says to
a child, “You are alpha, you
are beta. You are good, you
are bad.” We would hate it if
people said it to us as adults.
Those of you who went
through 11+ examination
[under the selective education
system] know well that the
label was permanent. If a
child of 7 [under the new
system] has to go around with
a fail tag on her for the rest of
her life, how much worse will
the damage be?
I learned the hard way that
to legislate for a change is not
to achieve it. And here we go
again.
The new educational re­
form is obsessive about testing
and examinations. Education
is not about exams; it is to
encourage a child to think, to
keep alive that germ of curi­
osity, that spark of life that
feeds upon knowledge as a
mental delight. It is not a core
of knowledge that children
need, but a joy in knowledge.
Constant examination teaches
a child not to think but only
to remember— it’s a recipe for
a nation of parrots, a recipe
for uniformity. The real glory
of English education has been
its lack of unanimity and uni­
formity. That’s not bad, that’s
good. That’s the strength of
your education— caring, con­
cerned teachers doing the best
that they can under difficult
circumstances.
I hope all of you remember
one teacher with affection, a
teacher who influenced you,
opened your eyes, or fired you

with enthusiasm for her sub­
ject. Why? Was it because
that teacher recognized you as
an individual, made you
laugh, or made you respect
her for her commitment to the
values of her subject? D on’t
you see what that means? The
teacher that you remember
had a view of life, a philoso­
phy that said that education is
the most important gift we
can give to children.
W hen we teach a child, we
are giving that child a chance
to view her life, to value it,
and to give it meaning— to
know and love life. The
teacher as philosopher has
helped to keep civilization
alive. D on’t change the
teacher into a classroom
robot, a human machine for
ticking and crossing standard­
ized tests.
We are not a totalitarian
society. In a democracy soci­
ety cannot have control of the
classroom but has to support
and value its teachers. The
future of English education
seems to be based on a view
of the teacher as a lackey.
Teachers will have to go along

with all the so-called reforms
that the government intends.
I do not believe that teachers
are compliant. Teachers in
their quiet undemonstrative
ways are effective saboteurs.
How many of you thought
my title, “The Saboteur in the
Classroom,” referred to the
child rather than the teacher?
It doesn’t. W hen you get
down to the classroom level,
whatever the scheme, the
teacher is in control.
Do not reduce the teacher
to a cipher. D o not reduce
education to examination. Do
not produce the nightmare
society of Huxley’s Brave New
World in which every citizen
knows she is an alpha or a
beta and is glad to know it.
Do not allow badly drafted
legislation to wreak havoc
with the future. Look after
our children. Nurture and
nourish their minds and their
spirits. They’re the seed corn
of the future— of our future.
And beware of people who, as
the late Earl of Stockton put
it, have already sold the fam­
ily silver and now want to sell
the seed corn.

SW A R TH M O R E C O LLE G E BULLETIN

Recent Books by Alumni
We welcome review copies o f
books by alumni. The books
are donated to the Swarthmoreana section o f McCabe
Library after they have been
noted fo r this column.

Richard Cartwright Austin
’56, Reclaiming America:
Restoring Nature to Culture,
Creekside Press, 1990. To
reform a society that is over­
whelming the natural environ­
ment, the author proposes
constitutional rights for species
and living systems, land re­
form to assure access to the
earth, and revitalized agricul­
ture to support more people
and conserve ecosystems. The
book is the fourth in a series.

Rebecca W. Bushnell ’74,
Tragedies o f Tyrants: Political
Thought and Theater in the
English Renaissance, Cornell
University Press, 1990. Trac­
ing the early modern image of
tyranny through a wide range
of texts, the author explores
the tyrant in English Renais­
sance dram a in light of the
traditional opposition between
the “proper” king and the un­
stable, effeminate, and histri­
onic tyrant found so often in
Western political treatises and
tracts.

Stephen Henighan ’84, Other

Mary (Fair) McConnell ’48,

Americas, Simon & Pierre,
1990. Brother follows brother
from their farm in Canada to
the poverty and violence of
Bogotá, Colombia, in this
novel, which exposes social,
political, and economic prob­
lems in the “other Americas.”

Still Dancing: Life Choices
and Challenges fo r Women,
Harbinger House, 1990. In
this book the author examines
skills that can help women in
late middle age grow and
master the most important
skill of all: how to take con­
trol of one’s own life and
destiny and become strong,
creative, and happy.

Lena Romanoff with Lisa
Hostein ’83, Your People, My
People: Finding Acceptance
and Fulfillment as a Jew by
Choice, The Jewish Publica­
tion Society, 1990. For the
convert and potential convert,
this book offers essential infor­
mation, from descriptions of
the various branches of Juda­
ism to suggestions on what it
takes to actually “feel” Jew ­
ish.

Elliot D. Abravanel and
Elizabeth A. King (Marsh
Abravanel) ’66, Dr. Abravanel’s Anti-Craving Weight
Loss Diet, Bantam Books,
1990. A diet book designed to
end dieting forever, this how­
to volume explains why peo­
ple crave certain foods and
offers basic tastes that cure
cravings by satisfying the
brain. It also includes daily
menu planning and recipes.

Samuel H . Day, Jr., ’49,
Crossing the Line, Fortkamp
Publishing, 1991. Begun as a
prison journal, this autobiog­
raphy follows the author first
as a crusading editor and then
as a political activist who took
on the nuclear weapons estab­
lishment in the U.S. and paid
the price of a federal prison
term.

at Swarthmore. He is delighted that
his son may finish in seven semes­
ters, saving approximately $10,000.
He notes that “this equals what it
took for eight semesters in 19601964” and asks if this is “progress.”
One classmate has written not to
report a change in her life but to
claim a class distinction of sorts:
48

Richard Martin ’67 and
Harold Koda, Giorgio
Armani: Images o f Man,
Rizzoli, 1990. Fashion de­
signer Giorgio Armani, who
developed the slouchy, soft sil­
houette style in menswear, is
the focus of a photographic
retrospective that covers his
creations from 1975 to 1990.

Andrea Hoff Knox believes that
she “may hold some sort of record
for longest tenure at the same
job— business news reporter, Phila­
delphia Inquirer, 14 years and six
months.” She describes her primary
interests as “human-resources issues
(benefits, training) and the painful
transition from socialism to freer

Estelita Calderon-Young and
Rodney M. Mebane ’74, Mas
Facil: A Quick Reference
Companion fo r the Student o f
Spanish, Azteca Press, 1990.
This contemporary grammar
guide is written specifically to
help students of Spanish
understand the technical com­
ponent— the words and rules
governing the relationship
among words-f|needed to
foster proficiency in the
language.

Myra L. Samuels ’61, Statis­
tics fo r the Life Sciences,
Dellen Publishing, 1989. This
introductory text in statistics
addresses students specializing
in the life sciences to show
them how statistical reasoning
is relevant to biological, medi­
cal, and agricultural research,
to enable them to carry out
statistical analyses and inter­
pret the results, and to raise
their consciousness concerning
basic statistical issues.

H.A. (Alan) Shapiro ’71, A rt
and Cult Under the Tyrants in
Athens, Verlag Philipp von

Zabern, 1989. This study sys­
tematically collects and re­
examines examples (primarily
painted pottery) of Athenian
art in the Archaic period that
reflect an interest in the prin­
cipal gods and heroes wor­
shipped during the time of the
tyrant Peisistratos and his sons
(560-510 B.C.).

Charles Sullivan ’55 (ed.),
Ireland in Poetry, Harry N.
Abrams, Inc., 1990. With
more than 100 works of art as
illustration, this collection
presents 150 Irish poems that
range in date from the time of
the Celtic invasion to the pres­
ent, including both classic
poems of old Ireland and
haunting lyrics of the new.
Margaret Gibson and Shel­
don Weeks ’54, Improving
Education in Western Prov­
ince, The National Research
Institute, 1990. The decline in
academic performance of stu­
dents in grades 6 and 10 in
the Western Province of
Papua New Guinea and the
spectrum of strategies de­
signed to improve the quality
of education are articulated in
this study.

Cécile Whiting ’80, Antifas­
cism in American Art, Yale
University Press, 1989. Be­
tween 1933 and 1945, Ameri­
can painters of widely diver­
gent political views and
artistic styles shared a belief
that their art should aid in the
fight against fascism. This
book presents the first thor­
ough study of the politically
motivated art of this period.

markets in Eastern Europe.” She
reports that “as an outgrowth of the
first, I was one of five U.S. repor­
ters who visited Germany and
Sweden last May (1990) to observe
training systems for high-school
graduates who don’t go on to
college.”

Elizabeth Hodgson Leigh,

currently living in Gamboa,
Panama, concurs with the assess­
ment written by her husband,
Egbert, of the U.S. invasion of
Panama, which they survived with
“remarkably little incident.” He
says that he wishes that “all
Panamanians could say the same. It
is amusing to see a U.S. intervenSW A R TH M O R E C O LLEG E BULLETIN

ALUMNI COUNCIL
New Committee on Social Responsibility Aims to
Support Students Committed to Community Service
Being a member of the Swarthmore Alumni
Council is both a blessing and a challenge.
It’s a blessing because membership provides
renewed connections with current College
students, administrators, and faculty mem­
bers, plus opportunities to see them all in
action and to share that action and excite­
ment with them. It’s a challenge because
each of us wants to give back something in
return for our magnificent education and to
contribute our energy and experience in
ways that are needed and wanted by those
who make up the College community today.
Recently, Council members have been
particularly impressed with the College’s
increased institutional support for student
social responsibility and community out­
reach. Building on its “Quaker ethic” and its
rich history of student community service,
the College has taken a major step forward
by creating the Swarthmore Foundation,
which, in turn, enabled the establishment of
CIVIC. CIVIC (Cooperative Involvement
and Volunteers in the Community) is staffed
by one full-time person and four student
interns, who coordinate and promote student
community-service activities—some requir­
ing a few hours a week and others involving
full-time commitments for a semester or
more. The Foundation provides the funding
for CIVIC and other projects and offers
subsistence stipends—awarded on a com­
petitive basis—for students. The Foundation
also awards funds for supplies and for re­
search that directly results in more effective
community service. Some grant recipients
act as interns at agencies, but many are
technically “volunteers.”
Many Swarthmore students are commit­
ted to community service and want to be
useful to the wider world while they are
getting an education. They also want to gain
experience in different possible careers while
they are still undergraduates. Often they
accomplish this goal through externships
and summer jobs. But many students seek
community-service placements—for a year,
a semester, or even a month—that would
allow them both to contribute something to
a community or an organization and to learn
whether that type of work is something they
want to pursue. Many of these organizations
cannot afford to pay for the students’ work.

How You Can Help
To support these College initiatives,
Alumni Council has created the Committee
on Social Responsibility. You can help the
Committee in several very important ways:
• Identify possible internship placements
for Swarthmore students in your commu­
nity—where you work, at your church,
where you volunteer, at an organization you
know needs help, in your local government
or public-service agency.
• Help develop a support system for
Swarthmore student placement in your com­
munity—by finding or providing housing or
other kinds of support.
• Talk to other Swarthmoreans and your
other friends and pass on the names of
people who might help us build a network
and data base of opportunities, both for
internship placements and for students doing
CIVIC projects in their home communities.
• Support the Swarthmore Foundation
with your contribution. Checks may be
made out to the Swarthmore Foundation
and sent to Maurice Eldridge, acting director
of development, at the College.
The Swarthmore Foundation was estab­
lished in 1987 to encourage and support
social responsibility in the Swarthmore Col­
lege community. It was the outgrowth of
many previous College efforts to encourage
charitable work and social change and has
benefited from alumni endowment contri­
butions, corporation grants, and a $125,000
five-year grant from the Scott Paper Com­
pany Foundation.

Students, and in some cases faculty and
staff, are eligible to receive grants that can
be used to support full- or part-time publicservice work at an independent community
or social-service organization or to establish
new outreach projects. Administered by an
oversight committee of faculty, students,
and staff, the Swarthmore Foundation en­
courages students to participate in all aspects
of the grant-making process. It particularly
encourages social-action work in Delaware
County, the cities of Chester and Philadel­
phia, and the applicant’s home community.
In 1989-90 the Swarthmore Foundation
awarded $70,404 to 61 applicants. Student
projects included working with the AIDS
Law Project in Philadelphia; counseling and
tutoring Tampa, Fla., inner-city youth; de­
livering health-care services and education
to low-income women in Barbados; provid­
ing literacy, legal, and health information to
the impoverished rural population on St.
Helena Island in South Carolina; working in
a Navajo community legal aid office; work­
ing with such organizations as the National
Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered
Women, the Women’s Law Project in Phila­
delphia, the Community for Creative NonViolence (a homeless shelter in Washington,
D.C.), a rural health clinic in Tchula, Miss.
Social responsibility lives at Swarthmore.
If you want to know more about these
activities, can help in setting up placement,
or want to pass on some information, please
return the form below.
— Patricia Im b rie M oore ’55

The Alumni Council Committee on Social Responsibility wants to hear from you!
Please write to the Committee on Social Responsibility of the Swarthmore College Alumni
Association (Lowell Livezey ’66, Chair), in care of the Alumni Office, 500 College Avenue,
Swarthmore, PA 19081-1397.
I | I know of the following community-service internships open to Swarthmore students.
(Please list a contact person and type of service work, if possible.)

□

I know of a foundation that might be interested in supporting the Swarthmore Foundation.

I | I can provide housing for recipients of Swarthmore Foundation grants working in my area.
| | I am interested in helping. Please call me at (_______ 1_____ __________________________
J Please send me more information on CIVIC and the Swarthmore Foundation.
N am e___________________________________________________ _______ C lass____________
A ddress___________________________________________________________________________
C ity _____________________________________S tate_____________Z ip ____________________

You’re invited to
Alumni Weekend
June 7,8,9

Swarthmore’s Adirondack chairs encourage
conversations with friends todayjust as they did
when you were on campus. Put Alumni Weekend
on your calendar and seize the opportunity to renew
those friendships, to hear David Fraser talk
about Swarthmore today, to tour the fabulous new
Lang Performing Arts Center, to attend
a faculty lecture, and to choose froma variety
of events planned especially for you.
Or maybejust stroll the Crum.

Stretch your mind!
Alumni College 1991
June 5 , 6 , 7

Catch once more the intellectual excitement
of Swarthmore by enrolling in one of these
two tracks: “The Soviet Union Today:
Challenges and Prospects” or “Mozart,
Jazz, and Intelligent Listening.” Write the
Alumni Office for a registration form.