Swarthmore College Alumni Bulletin 1994-02-01

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SWARTHMORE
COLLEGE BULLETIN • FEBRUARY 1994

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Can students b e taught to write poetry? “The tea ch er’s role is to
help them teach them selves, ” says A ssociate P rofessor P eter
Schmidt. Every spring sem ester a professor-poet an d 12young
writers com e together in the Poetry W orkshop to hon e their art.
By Judith Egan

8

Editor:
Jeffrey Lott
Associate Editor:
Rebecca Aim
Assistant Editor:
Kate Downing
Class Notes Editor:
Nancy Lehman ’87
Desktop Publishing:
Audree Penner
Designer:
Bob Wood
Editor Emerita:
Maralyn Orbison Gillespie ’49
Associate Vice President
for External Affairs
Barbara Haddad Ryan ’59

Cover: On May 13, 1985, a con­
frontation between Philadelphia
city authorities and the black rad­
ical group MOVE resulted in a
gun battle and ultimately a fire
that consumed more than 60
homes. Story on page 14.
Photo: UPI/Bettmann
Printed in U.S.A. on Recycled Paper
The Swarthmore College Bulletin (ISSN
0888-2126), o f which this is volume XCI,
num ber 4, is published in September,
D ecem ber, January, February, May, and
August by Swarthmore College, 500 Col­
lege Avenue, Swarthmore PA 190811397. Second class postage paid at
Swarthmore PA and additional mailing
offices. Permit No. 0530-620. Postmas­
ter: Send address changes to Swarth­
more College Bulletin, 500 College
Avenue, Swarthmore PA 19081-1397.

F e e d in g t h e F i r e s

W hy S o F e w ?

Less than 3 p ercen t o f N obel scien ce lau reates are women.
Sharon Bertsch McGrayne ’64, author o f a b o o k on the lives and
w ork o f 14 w om en scientists, learn ed that w om en h av e faced —
1 i& r
f
an d still fa ce—enorm ous obstacles in doing scientific research.
---«#• _5 By Evelyn Hess

14

F ig h tin g W o r d s

When P hiladelphia p o lice dropped a bom b on the hou se o f the
radical group MOVE, A ssociate P rofessor R obin W agner-Pacifici
saw a failure in com m unication. H er b o o k abou t the incident
explores the relation ship am ong talk, pow er, an d violence.
By Barbara Haddad Ryan ’59

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As a freshm an, G eoffrey Cline ’96 felt unable to b e open about
his conservative p olitical views. Today it’s easier, h e says,
becau se o f a new cam pus group, the Conservative Union,
which is leadin g a cam pus attack on “political correctness. ”
By Jeffrey Lott

64
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S w a r t h m o r e ’s N ew R ig h t

T en D a y s in M o s c o w

On O ctober 4 P rofessor Ja m es Freem an an d m em bers o f
O rchestra 2001 w oke in M oscow to the staccato sounds o f
m achine gun fire. D espite danger an d delays, they w ere a b le to
give three w ell-received concerts at the M oscow Conservatory.
By Jam es Freeman

D e p a rtm e n ts
2 Letters
25 The College
28 Alumni Digest
30 Class Notes
37 Deaths
56 Recent Books by Alumni

an we all get along?” asked Rodney King two years ago as
riots tore apart Los Angeles. It is, in a way, the essential
question of the age. What seems to trouble us most these
days is “getting along.” From the streets of L.A. or Sarajevo
to the halls of our colleges and universities, the greatest challenges
facing us are those of human relationships—between Serb and
Moslem, rich and poor, among races and cultures, and, need we say,
between the sexes. It’s as though the great geopolitical and histori­
cal questions have all been resolved (which of course they have
not) and what we are left with is each other.
In this issue we meet conservative students who are trying to
assert themselves on a decidedly liberal campus by challenging the
language of “political correctness” and multiculturalism. We exam­
ine the lives of great women scientists who were ignored because
their male peers refused to acknowledge their contributions to basic
research or thought them incapable of thinking in certain ways. We
learn how 11 people died in the 1985
Philadelphia-MOVE cohfrontation
because neither the city bureaucrats
nor the black radicals could under­
stand what the other was trying to
say. And we spend some time with
student poets and their teachers who
value language for other reasons—for
its magnificent ability, as Shakespeare
wrote, to “give to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.”
Language in the ’90s has become as sensitive as a seismograph—
and as indicative of upheaval. Simple statements carry aftershocks
of political inference, and we are often more attuned to connotation
and context than to intention and meaning. (Some even argue that
there is no meaning— only context.) We arm ourselves with loaded
words, and sometimes they go off. Maybe we can’t get along
because we’re losing the ability to listen to each other, to respond
honestly and thoughtfully, to sympathize and to understand.
Among the letters in this issue are three responses to Joseph
Kimmel ’44, whose December letter was highly critical of the Col­
lege. My favorite is from Kenneth Anderson ’86, who urges Mr. Kim­
mel and similarly disaffected alumni to “remain engaged with the
College and [to] continue to make their opinions heard.” Anderson
challenges us to “resist the temptation to shut out dissenting opin­
ions,” because our “ideas and beliefs may be strengthened and [our]
arguments improved for having been challenged.”
Challenge and language are inextricable. In King Lear, Shake­
speare admonishes, “The weight of these sad times we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.” It’s good advice.

■

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A Neat Juxtaposition
From Three Generations
To the Editor:
Wow! Great work, you guys! The
December Bulletin had not been in
our house for even one hour before
I felt compelled to give you my reac­
tions. What got my attention was
the neat juxtaposition of contribu-<
tions from three generations at
Swarthmore: the letter from Mr.
Kimmel ’44, “Our Back Pages” from
Ms. Chijioke ’67, and the essay by
Andrea Gibbons ’97.
As an almost-contemporary of
the dispirited Mr. Kimmel, I hasten
to distance myself from his unhappy
views. If he is right in characterizing
Swarthmore as “an elitist center of
multiculturalism,” I find that far
from dispiriting. In the sense that I
would give those words, Swarth­
more is squarely in the mainstream
of what is best in America today. His
attitudes are what I find dispiriting.
I was refreshed by the history in
Chijioke’s “Friends Forever?” and
reminded again of how the College’s
culture, beyond the curriculum, has
subtly but surely enriched my life.
Last, it was a joy to note how
Andrea Gibbons’ essay reiterates
themes from “Friends Forever?” I
know Tucson, I know poor, and her
words summon up many memories.
I wish I could write about them as
well as she has done. As long as stu­
dents of her caliber enroll, Swarth­
more will not lack for support.
DAVID WITHEFORD ’49 j
Reston, Va.i

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Get Down, Swarthmore;
hoi
liv e and Work at the Bottom
stre
To the Editor:
you
Joseph Kimmel makes some good
edl
points, evidences of tunnel vision
unc
notwithstanding. Is no one minding [ out
the store while Swarthmore deals
too
with pressure groups, personal
the
agendas, political correctness, and
ing

fad courses? I hope not. Because it’s
a howling certainty that no one is
minding vast sections of America.
I work for the Social Security
Administration as a teleservice rep­
resentative (TSR), one of 90 in the
Philadelphia area. Each week the [
average TSR answers 250 calls—
mostly from people in need.
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

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We hear from old people who
don’t have enough food or med­
icine. From young mothers whose
children have learning and behav­
ioral problems, often beginning with
1
re parental neglect, physical abuse,
ic- drug addiction, alcoholism.
We get calls from men in their
40s and 50s who’ve been sold out or
dumped by their employers. Some
file for disability benefits—not be­
cause they are disabled, but be­
n
cause they can’t find work.
We get calls from addicts in their
20s and 30s who can’t or won’t stop.
Sometimes we hear from their par­
n
ents or spouses, who plead for help
>py or curse the benefit check that buys
ng
more drugs.
>f
We hear from mothers whose
husbands have been murdered or
I
are in jail. Old women who need
m replacement ID cards after their
handbags are torn from them. Street
His
people who should be in hospitals.
gOne of my very first calls was from a
in
young mother whose son had seen
;e’s his father taken from the home by
las police: “All he talks about is stealing
a fat car and being just like his
father. It scares me.”
In a year, the average TSR takes
7,500 of these and other such calls.
Swarthmore has to get real. Get
er
down!
Live and work at the bottom!
es.
Do
without!
Watch others get what
5
they
need,
want—
even though you
¡tuare deserving. Feel the pain, the
1anger, the desperation.
'
And while you are there, witness
’49
Va. a most incredible irony: that these
people—these bottom dwellers,
ignored, taken for granted, ware­
housed, shit on— are some of the
strongest, warmest, fairest people
you will ever know. Many are devot­
d
ed to the ideas that got this country
i
under way—even though they’re
ng ( out of the running—even though
too many of them accept that
they’re out of the running. (Sicken­
id
ing irony.)
it’s
Get down to the bottom! Not for
5
a couple of weeks or a month or
L.
two, but for years—decades!
Forge the necessary links with
gp- local, state, and federal government
e
and get a different kind of educa­
: i tion. Check out the unemployment
lines, take the claims, hear the
Please turn to page 62
'IN

FEBRUARY 1994

Okaaay! Everybody limmm-bo!
The crowd hovered in a circle as
the last two participants arched their
backs, threw back their heads, and
carefully, oh so carefully, skimmed
their bodies under the limbo pole.
With the pole just two feet from the
ground, all eyes watched Matt Schenk
’95, 6-foot-l-inch volleyball captain and
editor of the conservative campus
newspaper Common S en se, inch be­
neath the bar. The crowd cheered his
efforts. “He’s the limbo king!” a friend
praised. Schenk attributed his success
to strong thigh muscles.
The limbo contest was one
of many activities the Com­
mittee on Alternative Enter­
tainment planned for its kick­
off event—a ’50s-style sock
hop held before December
finals in the Tarble in Clothier
Student Center. The commit­
tee planned the event specifi­
O
cally to be one without alco­
hol. They got financial sup­
port from the Dean’s Office
and help from Fernando
Chang-Muy, the new assistant
dean for student activities.
A shimmering curtain of
gold streamers hung in the
doorway of Tarble, welcom­
ing students into the streamer-and-balloon-filled all-cam­
pus space, where a profes­
sional deejay spun CDs. On
this Friday night, more than
160 en th u siastic students
filled the hall.
“We were sick and tired of
the bad attitude people
brought to parties. There was
no place for a positive psy­
chological release,” said com­
mittee member Tavis Tindall
’94 as he went around the
limbo line. “We put a lot of planning
into this. We had a lip-synch contest at
dinner and we’re giving away prizes
tonight. We knew this would be suc­
cessful.”
Wearing James Dean peg leg jeans,
T-shirt, and slicked-back hair, Fridtjov
Markussen ’94, another com m ittee
member, agreed. “There are 1,350 stu­
dents on this campus and usually only
two or three social activities to choose
from. There’s also a lot of stress and
burnout, and we needed something to
alleviate th ese problem s. Usually
there’s a frat party where alcohol is
served, and that’s fine. But we wanted
to show students they could have a

good time without alcohol, and they
seem to agree.”
At first it might seem curious for
’90s students to hold a ’50s dance, but
they were quick to offer their thoughts
on the matter. Some felt the theme was
ch osen becau se som e com m ittee
members are political conservatives.
Others thought it was a nice change
from the ’90s rock and pop music.
Amy Karpinski ’95, with her hair in
pigtails and a construction paper and
cotton ball poodle adorning her skirt,
said, “It takes us back to an era that we
don’t always agree with
politically, as far as family
values—but we do identify
with the culture of the youth
at that time. It brings out the
rebel in us. Not that we
aren ’t rebellious enough
now.” And then Amy bopped
back into the crowd dancing
to Sam the Sham & the
Pharaoh’s Wooly Bully.
Dancing with a frenzy was
Jerem y Dilatush ’97, who
with his scruffy beard and
tie-dyed T-shirt looked like
he walked right out of the
’60s rather than the ’50s.
Dilatush said he came be­
cause it “was the co o lest
thing going on campus.” He
had to leave early, though,
because he was in a math
com petition the following
day.
Nicole Hollings ’94 said she
tried to think how Joanie on
the ’50s-themed television
show H appy D ays would
have dressed when she put
togeth er her ensem ble,
which included tight straight­
legged jeans and bright red
lipstick. She and her friends
agreed that high school gym class
dance lessons came in handy.
Scott Friesen ’97 thought the dance
was just a good excuse to “act ridicu­
lous and weird.”
At the bottom of the stairway out­
side the party, where the music could
still be heard and single strands of gold
streamer were strewn on the steps,
David Plastino ’97, a “safewalker,” wait­
ed to escort students who didn’t want
to walk alone to their residence halls.
As the party rocked on into the early
morning hours, Plastino diligently sat
and read medieval literature for classwork.
—Audree Penner

P

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S

3

Feed i nq
the

Fires
Does one becom e a poet in the
act o f crafting a poem , or is
one a poet to begin with?
Sw arthm ore’s Poetry Workshop
explores the question as it feeds
the fires o f student poets.

there is heavy, and growing, demand for it. More and
more students want to learn to be poets.
Still, while writing classes and poetry programs prolif­
erate, there is some controversy about just what they do.
Can anyone be taught to write poetry? Do poets teach
themselves? Do they become poets in the act of crafting a
poem, or are they poets to begin with, acquiring facility
and con trol through p ractice? At Sw arthm ore every
spring semester a professor-poet and 12 students come
face-to-face and mind-to-mind to grapple with these and
other realities in the Poetry Workshop.
Poetry has deep roots at Swarthmore. In the early
hakespeare’s famous lines from A M idsummer
1940s, W.H. Auden taught European Romanticism from
Night’s D ream are as pithy a characterization of
the poet’s art as any written. From Hesiod and
Blake, Rousseau, and Goethe to Joyce, Proust, and Kafka.
He lived—and presumably wrote—in a third-floor apart­
Plato onward, much has been written on the
qu estio n of what co n stitu te s a poem . But
ment on the corner of Ogden Avenue and Walnut Lane.
But Auden did not teach the writing of poetry to Swarth­
though we still have no definitive answer to
that question, the writing and reading of poetry hasmore
neverstudents.
The Poetry Workshop came into being as a regular
been m ore p assionately indulged in, nor has it been
offering in 1968. In the years since, Adrienne Rich and Jean
indulged in by so many. The current edition of P oet’s Mar­
Valentine, among others, have taught it, and many other
k et lists some 1,700 separate poetry markets in the United
famous and not-so-famous poets have come to the cam­
States alone, including mass circulation and literary maga­
pus to give readings and offer students insight about mak­
zines, trade book publishers, small presses, and university
ing poetry of their own.
quarterlies. Poets and readers of poetry abound.
For the past decade or so, the workshop has been
At Swarthmore and on other campuses across the na­
taught by members of the English Literature Department
tion, poetry readings are frequent, well-attended events.
who are also published poets—Nathalie Anderson, Peter
And while practitioners and critics may differ on what a
Schmidt, and Craig Williamson. Ju st this
poem is or should be, the writing of poetry is
taught at Swarthmore and elsewhere because
By Judith Egan year Anderson was awarded a prestigious
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact....
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth,
from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

S

4

SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

Students from last spring’s Poetry W orkshop gather in A ssociate P rofessor N athalie A nderson’s
living room in D ecem ber to share som e new work. From left: Dito Van Reigersberg ’94, Julia Bryan-Wilson ’95,
David McKay ’94, M elissa Running ’94, Professor Anderson, M ichael Rothbart ’94, and Katherin Mclnnis ’95.

nates designated to fill the occasional spot that opens up
Pew Fellowship in the Arts, one of only 16 Philadelphiabecause of schedule conflicts. It’s a difficult process,
area writers and artists to be so honored. The Pew Fellow­
according to Anderson: “The quality of submissions is
ship program was established to support artists at critical
typically high and occasionally dazzlingly accomplished,”
junctures of their careers, to enable them to dedicate
she says. In addition to gender balance and representa­
themselves wholly to their creative work for up to two
tion across the classes, she looks for “individuality in the
years. For Anderson, this means freedom from the pres­
poetic voice or a willingness to experiment.”
sures and constrictions of the academic calendar and the
The workshop is modeled on the seminar format, meet­
opportunity to concentrate entirely on poetry during her
ing once a week for four to five hours. Typi­
1994-95 leave. Now she typically crowds
cally, the class begins with a concentrated
creative work into the wee hours or into
examination of one student’s work, followed
concentrated bursts during the summer
by 10-minute discussion periods devoted to
months.
under the ice
each student in turn. Though the format
Anderson employs is very structured, it is
n d erso n last y ear in itiated an
flexible in allowing students to focus on
advanced poetry workshop that
their individual strengths. Anderson relies
she describes as “the most exciting
also on a set of exercises that sharpen the
course I’ve ever given.” The 11 stu­
sense of rhythm, metaphor, and other ele­
dents who participated had all taken the
ments of voice. Background assignments—
introductory workshop and had written
which are neither handed in nor shared
independently— and all were required to
with the class—encourage the writing of an
submit extensive portfolios of their work to
“em otional au tobiograp h y” com prising
gain a place. (For admission to the introduc­
early memories, experiences, and imagined
tory workshop, students submit a smaller
Sarah DeWeerdt
situations, not in poetic form but making
sample of their work—about five pages of
use of “poetic” material.
poetry. Still, the competition for places is
In another exercise students analyze
intense, with about 40 students applying for
their individual writing inclinations, composing a prose
the dozen available slots.) Anderson strives for variety in
poem that they then convert to lines. Do they feel more at
making her workshop selections, winnowing through sev­
ease in “free” writing or writing lines? What patterns or
eral readings until she is left with her class, with alter-

A

FEBRUARY 1994

5

v a ria tio n s do th ey o b se rv e , w hat s y n ta c tic a l or
metaphoric tendencies can be discerned? They then go
on to try their hands at standard forms: the three-line
stanza, quatrain, sonnet, sestina, and villanelle. Anderson
asks them to write a lyric expressing joy in love (expres­
sions of pain are much more common, she notes), to
compose a narrative in verse (a “confession” or mono­
logue), and to write in the voice of the opposite sex.
One of the most productive and interesting exercises
Anderson assigns focuses on translation. Students listen
to a Chinese or Russian lyric and based on the actual
sound of the verse (making use of a sound translitera­
tion) render a “false” translation into English. Workshop
students are paired and encouraged to share their work
in one-on-one sessions outside the class. They benefit
immensely from the challenge of getting to know each
other’s work intimately, Anderson says. She urges her
poet-students to push at the edges of what they can do
by trying alternatives to what they normally find most
comfortable, poetically speaking.

Professor Craig
W illiamson (right)
and A ssociate Pro­
fessor Peter Schmidt
(below ) have both
taught the Poetry
W orkshop.

he workshop
got you to
see developing
themes, to
discover your
preoccupations
and personal
cosmologies.”

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Poet-teacher N athalie Anderson shares h er writing m ethods with
students. A page from h er n otebook show s how sh e crafts a poem .

ulia Bryan-Wilson ’95 says that the advanced work­
shop enabled her to ritualize a stage of writing in
her life. She valued having scheduled time to com­
pose and to draw creative nourishment from the
group. Feedback and critical interactions with her peers
were especially useful, Bryan-Wilson says. “The assign­
ments were challenging and helped me to tighten up my
style. You could really direct yourself to create your own
voice. There was a lot of freedom.”
Senior David McKay agrees. A philosophy major,
McKay transferred to Swarthmore from Princeton and
had taken poetry writing classes both there and at an
independent summer program. He found the structure of
the course liberating. “The workshop got you to see your
work in terms of developing themes, to discover your
own preoccupations and personal cosmologies,” McKay
says.
As a culmination of last spring’s workshop, it was
decided that each student would create and publish a
volume of work—and they would produce the volumes
them selves. This provided the opportunity to deal at
another level with the “physiology of poetry,” a term
coined by John Frederick Nims in his book Western Wind:
An Introduction to Poetry, the text Anderson uses in the
workshop. With the purchase of desktop publishing softi ware and the guidance of Jane Jam es of the College
Computing Center, student-poets metamorphosed into
graphic designers and ty p esetters. A ccording to
Anderson, dealing with the physical appearance of
lines on the page offered the group a further chal­
lenge, another opening to the poetic process. The
student poets found the experience thrilling, a
“tremendous challenge,” according to Bryan-Wilson. “It
made you see that there is more than linear narrative in
the poems on the page; it made you think about the rela­
tion between the poems in a new way, kind of a gathering
process. The juxtapositions opened up new ways of
thinking about poetic material.”
“Figuring out how to compose the book made you look
beyond the structure of individual poems,” adds David
McKay. “You had to think about the effect of their posi-

J

SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

tion— if you put two poems together on a page, did they
cancel each other out? You had to decide where to locate
them if you wanted them to build on each other.” Accord­
ing to McKay, the group project was enhanced by work­
ing together outside class, when problems—and poten­
tial solutions—were shared. “It helped to see what you
were trying to get at, to look at it from another writer’s
perspective,” McKay says.

THROWN IN
AN ARC

omposing poetry demands both flair and drive,”
says department chair Craig Williamson, author
of African Wings, a,volume of poems, and transla­
tor of Anglo-Saxon riddles and the poetry in
French of Léopold Sédar Senghor, the African lyric poet
and statesman. Though Williamson is ambivalent about
whether you can actually teach someone to write pub­
lishable poetry, in his view almost anyone can be taught
to write more interesting poems. “You can teach students
about imagery and about understatement, about poetry’s
capacity to startle and make you think or feel or notice
something for the first time.” Williamson values the way

C

P lease turn to page 61

Bill Ehrhart 73 was
taken seriously as
a p oet during
his student days.
Now, with a $50,000
Pew Fellowship,
he still is.

ed poetry since his own student days.
He enrolled in Swarthmore’s Poetry
Workshop in the spring of 1971. That
year it was taught by Dan Hoffman of
the University of Pennsylvania, previ­
ously a member of the Swarthmore
English Department. “Dan Hoffman
was an accomplished poet,” Ehrhart
says, “and he was taking my poetry
seriously. He made me think that my

ike Associate Professor Nathalie
Anderson, Bill Ehrhart ’73 re­
ceived a Pew Fellowship in 1993.
After struggling as a writer for more
than 20 years, he remains skeptical
about locating creative writing in an
academic setting. “It can become a lit­
tle haven,” he says, “a respite from the
world. Writers have to engage the
world. Their work has to be reflective
of the resil world.”
Though he has taught poetry writ­
ing at private and public schools,
Ehrhart said he is less and less in­
clined to do so at the secondary level.
“You can’t write poetry if you don’t
read poetry. I feel uncomfortable
about teaching unless there’s a real
commitment on the part of the writ­
ers. Students can’t just say ‘Teach me
how to write a poem’ because they
Poet Bill Ehrhart ’73: “Students can ’t just
think it looks interesting. They’ve got
say ‘Teach m e how to write a poem ’
to make it part of their daily routine.”
because they think it looks interesting. ”
Ehrhart’s daily routine has includ­

L

FEBRUARY 1994

Student poets published
handm ade lim ited
editions as part o f last
spring’s workshop.

secret fantasy to become a poet could
really happen. That propelled me for­
ward in a way I’ve never forgotten.”
Ehrhart went on to earn a master’s
degree in creative writing at the Uni­
verity of Illinois at Chicago and has
since published 10 books of poetry
and nonfiction. As he struggled to
make a living in recent years, often
without regular employment, “scram­
bling around to pay the bills,” he
sometimes felt weighed down by a
sense of failure. “When I couldn’t meet
the bills,” he says, “I’d think the choic­
es I made 20 years ago weren’t the
right ones. Here I was 44 years old and
I didn’t have a job.” The Pew Fellow­
ship has changed Ehrhart’s outlook.
As soon as he learned of the award,
which carries a stipend of $50,000,
Ehrhart was able to arrange for some
long-needed house repairs and to pur­
chase a computer system. “I hope to
concentrate on my writing for three
years with this fellowship,” he says.
More important, the Pew Fellow­
ship is a validation of Ehrhart’s life
and work. “In a way,” he says, “it’s
done the same thing as the workshop
with Dan Hoffman did. It says, ‘You’ve
done this work and we take it serious­
ly. The choices you made were the
right ones.’ It’s given me the mental
space to concentrate on my creative
work, and that feels wonderful.”
—J.E.
7

Why so few?
Only nine Nobel Prizes in science have gone to women.
Sharon Bertsch McGrayne ’64 wondered why,
and her recent book provides some answers.

SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

| i
se
i

N o women allowed. Not even Marie
Curie.
During her lifetime, one of the bestknown scientists of our century dis­
covered two new elements and was
honored with two Nobel Prizes. She
became the first female professor in
the 650-year history of the Sorbonne.
And meanwhile she had exposed her­
self to more radiation than any other
human being before World War II.
But none of th ese achievem ents
could help Curie win her 1911 bid to
become a member of the prestigious
French Academy of Sciences in her
adopted country.
Curie was a transplanted Pole, and
it was rumored that she was a Jew.
Anti-foreign, anti-Semitic, and anti-fem­
inist sentiments in France at the time
led to her defeat. Curie w asn’t the
only woman rejected. The academy
continued to exclude fem ales until
1979.
Ever sin c e wom en have been
allowed to work in the sciences, they
have largely been passed over for
recognition. Of more than 300 Nobel
Prizes for science awarded since 1901,
only nine have gone to women, notes
"Sharon Bertsch McGrayne ’64, author
of N obel Prize Women in S cien ce: Their
Lives, Struggles an d M omentous D iscov­
eries. That means less than 3 percent
of Nobel science laureates are women.
McGrayne opens her book by asking,
“Why so few?”
“I was trying to answ er several
questions in my head,” she says of her
motivation for writing the book. “I
kept hearing that women couldn’t do
scien ce and m ath, but I knew too
many women scie n tists to believe
that. I was told that women had an
especially hard time with physics, but
I knew there are a lot of women physi­
cists in France, Italy, and Spain.” It was
through her husband, George Bertsch
’62, professor of physics at the Univer­
sity of Washington, that she met so
many scientists and began to think
FEBRUARY 1994

The Nine
W om en w h o h a v e w on
a N o b el P rize in th e s c ie n c e s
Marie Sklodowska Curie
Physics, 1903
Chemistry, 1911
Irène Joliot-Curie
Chemistry, 1935
Gerty Radnitz Cori
Medicine or Physiology, 1947
Maria Goeppert Mayer
Physics, 1963
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin
Chemistry, 1964
Rosalyn Sussman Yalow
Medicine or Physiology, 1977
Barbara McClintock
Medicine or Physiology, 1983
Rita Levi-Montalcini
Medicine or Physiology, 1986
Gertrude B. Elion
Medicine or Physiology, 1988
MEDAL© NOBEL FOUNDATION

about women in science.
“Some people write coffee table
books—in the back of my mind, I call
this a dinner table book. The idea for
it began b eca u se I en tertain ed so
many physicists, and I knew that if
they came from the United States or
northern Europe they would almost
invariably be men, but if they came
from southern Europe, I often had a
woman to dinner. And the statistics
bear out my experience. So I won-

By Evelyn Hess

dered—why could women do physics
in southern Europe and even in India?
“Because of my experiences, I had
gotten over the hurdle of whether
women can do science. Clearly they
can— if th ey ’re in a certain kind of
environment. So I thought if I looked
at a group of wom en s c ie n tis ts , I
might be able to learn som ething
about what they had been through.”
But when sh e sta rte d callin g
around to explore the idea, experts
discouraged her. “I was told that the
public perception was that th e re ’s
been only one woman s c ie n tis t—
Marie Curie. And people don’t know
much about her, so they think she’s
boring. If th ey know ab ou t o th e r
women scientists, they assume they
d o n ’t do w o rld -class work. So I
thought that by choosing women who
had been touched by the Nobel Prize,
either by winning it outright or by
working on a project that won it for
som eone else, the public cou ld n’t
argue about the quality of the work
the women had done.”
McGrayne, who has a degree in art
history from Swarthmore, says she
learned about science by reading and
asking questions. In 1964, right out of
college, she married George Bertsch,
who at the tim e was working on a
Ph.D. in physics at Princeton. She
worked for daily newspapers for 15
years and later wrote about physics
for E n cy clo p ed ia B ritan n ica before
switching to full-time book writing.
McGrayne’s original idea was to
write a book on women scientists for
children, but then she realized that
very little had been w ritten about
many of these women at all. “A few
had been written about for children,”
McGrayne says, “but I wanted to pre­
sent a more well-rounded picture of
them and what they were really like,
both good points and bad.”
So she began the three-year project
of researching and writing a book on
the lives and work of 14 women scien9

tists. In addition to using primary and
secondary written sources, McGrayne
interviewed the seven women scien­
tists who were still alive; the students,
family, and friends of all the women;
and experts in each field who could
comment on their contributions.
n the course of her research, she
discovered an answer to her ques­
tion “Why so few?”: Many of th ese
women faced enorm ous o b stacles.
Most of the women scientists profiled
in M cG rayne’s book e ith e r volun­
teered or worked for low wages as a
way to get experience. Some snatched
their education as they could, reading
advanced texts on their own, sneaking
into lectures, and taking instruction
from private tutors.
When Viennese nuclear physicist
Lise Meitner arrived in Berlin in 1907,
the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chem­
istry did not allow women into its pub­
lic areas. Meitner was consigned to
performing her radiation experiments
in a damp carpentry shop in the base­
ment. She grew unbearably curious
about what the men were learning

I

upstairs, so she would occasionally
sneak into the amphitheater and hide
under tiers of seats to eavesdrop on
chemistry lectures.
In time, Meitner and other women
w ere allow ed u p sta irs, and th e
research she and German chem ist
Otto Hahn produced led to the discov­
ery of n u clear fissio n . Her work
brough t h er in c o n ta c t with th e
world’s great physicists: Max Planck,
Albert Einstein, Jam es Franck, and
Niels Bohr. But Meitner was snubbed
by the Nobel Prize committee in 1944,
when they decided to give the prize to
Hahn alone.
W om en s c ie n tis ts w ere often
denied credit that they deserved. In
the early 1950s, English X-ray crytallographer Rosalind Franklin was on the
verge of discovering enough informa­
tion to explain the molecular basis of
heredity when her work fell into the
hands of Ja m es W atson , a young
American geneticist who was working
on DNA with an English graduate stu­
dent, James Crick.
After a visit to Franklin’s lab in
1953, Watson ran into Franklin’s lab-

m ate and scien tific rival, M aurice
Wilkins. Wilkins showed W atson a
copy of an X-ray photo Franklin had
painstakingly devised, which showed
clues to the existence of a doublehelixed molecule of DNA. Wilkins later
said that Watson and Crick could not
have devised their correct model of
DNA without this information, which
he got without Franklin’s permission.
W atson and C rick also used
research data from a report Franklin
had prepared for government funding.
With Franklin’s data and information
they collected from other scientists,
W atson and C rick bu ilt m odels
explaining how genetic information is
passed from generation to generation.
Franklin succumbed to ovarian can­
cer at age 37 in 1958. Four years after
h er d eath , th e N obel Prize for
medicine was awarded to Crick, Wat­
son, and Wilkins. “On the basis of
what the three winners said in their
Nobel Prize lectures, no one would
have known that Franklin contributed
to their triumph,” McGrayne writes.
Even th e great Marie Curie was
n early p assed over for th e Nobel

supportive place to be.
“We don’t have quite the problems
at small schools that you might have
at the big universities,” Williams says.
Two Swarthmore faculty m em bers
“There are some women students
here who feel they are not fairly treat­
talk about women in the sciences .
ed, but the Chemistry Department
has had at least 50 percent women
graduates for about 15 years.”
Williams, a 33-year-old biophysical
chemist who studies DNA, has taught
at the College for five years. Her
father is a chemist, but she says that
wasn’t the reason she turned to sci­
ence. Her interest was first sparked
when a man for whom she was baby­
sitting gave her a job in his lab—
washing glassware and weighing
manure. Eventually, he allowed her to
do research, and she was hooked.
“When I went off to college [at
Wesleyan University in 1977], my first
Swarthmore faculty
chemistry professor told me to be­
hat is it like to be a female sci­
members Lynne
come a nurse, because women didn’t
entist at Swarthmore College
Molter ’79 (left) and
today? According to two of them, become chemists,” she recalls. “That
Alison Williams.
put me off for a few years. But it
assistant professor of chemistry Ali­
helped having a father who said,
son Williams and associate professor
‘Don’t listen to that guy.’”
of engineering and physics Lynne
To this day, women often get off to
Molter ’79, the College is generally a

“It’s not the same struggle....”

■

Biochemists Gerty and Carl Cori
worked so closely that it was hard to
tell who had contributed what. But
Gerty was once told, “It is un-Ameri­
can for a man to work with his wife.”
Curie up for a second Nobel Prize in
1911 for her discovery of radium.

hese women
survived in
science because
they were so
incredibly nuts
about what they
were doing that
for them the
discrimination
they faced paled
in comparison.”

T

a slower start in their professional
careers, she says. “A lot of women
enter the science field later than men.
Why? I guess for several reasons.
They went back to school later in life,
they raised kids or went to school
part time, or they waited to start their
postdoctorals until after their hus­
bands got jobs.
“It’s not the same struggle the earli­
er women scientists had, but we still
have to work hard to get around the
subtle things. I still see it in my stu­
dents working in the labs. The men
sometimes want to pooh-pooh a
woman’s ideas, until I intervene. And
these are 18-year-olds!”
Lynne Molter, who earned a B.A. in
math and a B.S. in engineering from
Swarthmore and is now a member of
both the Engineering and the Physics
departments, has seen Swarthmore’s
science programs from both sides. As
a student, she doesn’t remember
being being treated differently than
the men in her classes or being con­
cerned that she was one of a small
number of women students in two
departments made up mostly of men.

Prize. In 1903 the French Academy of
Sciences nominated only Pierre Curie
and another male scientist for their
work on radioactivity, but with sup­
port from a friend on the nominating
co m m ittee, her prize nom ination
from 1902 was renewed for 1903. This
behind-the-scenes wizardry also set

any of these women pioneered
science in the days before huge
grants, expensive labs, and dozens of
subordinates were available. Most if
not all of the laboratory work was
done by the researcher herself at the
c o s t of long hours and p erso n al
health, working in sheds, basements,
or attics with outdated and inade­
quate equipment.
A m erican g e n e ticist B a rb a ra
McClintock dealt with these problems
by doing most of her research with a
sim ple m icroscope and a few corn
plants. Molecular biologists ignored
her work for years, and it wasn’t until
1983, at age 81, that McClintock won
the Nobel for physiology. Asked if she
was bitter about having to wait so
long, sh e said, “W hen you know

As a faculty member, Molter finds
“It wasn’t until I was in graduate
the atmosphere at Swarthmore to be
school, when someone asked me how
very supportive of her work. But she
many women professors I had at
does notice some differences in the
Swarthmore, that I realized I had
ways female scientists and male scien­
none,” she says. But she doesn’t
tists approach their work. Women
believe that inhibited her learning: “I
seem to be more interested in work­
took my role models for science from
ing cooperatively and are less con­
the scientists I worked with, and it
cerned about preserving the hierar­
didn’t matter what gender they were;
chy than men are, she believes.
for other parts of my life, I had other
And the problem of balancing sci­
role models.”
ence and family life comes up for her,
Now she’s more conscious of gen­
as it often does for women. Molter,
der issues than she was then. Looking
who has found it pos­
back, sh e s e e s th at
sible to have both a
although she knew she
“My first chemistry family and a scientific
would be a s c ie n tis t
professor told me
career, a few years
“since before I can re­
member,” she faced the
to become a nurse, ago attended a lecture
on campus by a fe­
same kind of subtle dis­
because women
male scientist who
couragement most girls
didn’t become
said that women who
face. She says th at in
chemists.”
want to succeed in sci­
our culture, both when
ence have to work so
she was a girl and now,
much they don’t have time for fami­
parents and teachers don’t expect
lies. Molter wanted to stay to con­
girls to be interested in mechanical or
tribute to a discussion on that sub­
scientific subjects, as they might
ject, but she had to leave to pick up
expect boys to be. Therefore, girls
her children from the baby sitter.
don’t get as much encouragement in
—EH.
those subjects as boys do.

you’re right, you don’t care. You can’t
be hurt. You ju st know, soo n er or
later, it will come out in the wash.”
Many women scientists, like Marie
Curie, were able to do their work only
in co m p an y with m ale s c ie n tis ts .
M athem atician Emmy N oether, for
instance, began her career assisting
her father, a university professor, and
by age 31 she was lecturing in his
place at the university because he was
too ill. (Noether also faced difficulties
leaving Germany in the 1930s, when
Swarthmore professor Arnold Dres­
den, among others, was active in get-

ting her out of the country.)
Czech American biochemist Gerty
Cori is another example. With her hus­
band, Carl, she laid the foundation for
our understanding of how cells con­
vert food to energy and pioneered the
study of enzymes and hormones. The
Coris worked so closely for 35 years
that it was hard to tell who had con­
tributed what, and they jointly won a
Nobel in 1947 for their research.
In the 1920s Carl was offered the
job of his dreams at the University of
Rochester—provided he stop working
with his wife. University representa-

iennese
nuclear
physicist Lise
Meitner wquld
sneak into the
amphitheater
of the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute
and hide under
tiers of seats
to eavesdrop
on chemistry
lectures.

V

MPG-ARCHIV

Above: Lise Meitner,
whose work helped
lead to the discovery
of nuclear fission.
Right: X-ray crystal lographer Rosalind
Franklin, who never
received recognition
for her contribution
to our understanding
of DNA.

tives took Gerty aside and informed
her she was ruining her husband’s
career, telling her “It is un-American
for a man to work with his wife.”
“In private later, Gerty burst into
tears,” McGrayne writes. “Carl reas­
sured her. Collaborating with one’s
wife was not un-American, he said. ‘It
is merely unusual.’”
M cG rayne says th a t although
working with a male scie n tist has
alw ays been a com m on way for
women to get the opportunity to do
scientific research, the women paid a
high price. “Professor husbands and
th eir low-ranking, low-paid wives
often worked together for decades,”
she writes. “Other men formed life­
long collaborations with unmarried
women scientists who dedicated their
lives to their protectors in return for
the privilege of working. In either
case, the women were generally vol­
unteers or low-level instructors, lec­
turers, or research assistants while
their male partners were professors
with tenure. A woman had a perma­
nent position only as long as her per­
sonal relationship with the man con­
tinued.”
The structure of the Nobel Prize
itself may also help explain why so
few women scien tists have won it.
The categories of prizes in science
are limited to physics, chemistry, and
medicine-physiology, so the burgeon­
ing fields of medicine and physiology
m ust co m p ete for a sin g le prize.
T h ere are m ore natural scien tists
than p hysicists and chem ists, and
women tend to gravitate toward the
biological scien ces and away from
physics and chem istry, McGrayne
says.
oday, m ore young women than
ever are studying the scien ces,
but they are still a minority. In the
United States in 1990, 40 percent of
b ach elo r’s degrees in scie n ce and
engineering went to women, as did 33
percent of m aster’s degrees and 28
p e rc e n t of d o c to ra te s . How can
women make their way in fields that
men continue to dominate?
“Rosalyn Yalow, Nobel Prize-win­
ning medical physicist, said, ‘They
simply will have to do better than the
m en,”’ McGrayne replies. “Nuclear
physicist C.S. Wu said, ‘Just put your

T

P lease turn to page 61
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

But it’s not over yet
n 1979 Joseph and Mary Schaeffer
Polacco ’66, both biochemists with
doctorates from Duke University, came
to Columbia, Mo., to work at the Univer­
sity of Missouri. Today Joseph Polacco
is a tenured professor in the Biochem­
istry Department at the university, and
Mary Polacco has lost her job there,
which was always somewhat precari­
ous. She had been discriminated against
because of her sex, Mary Polacco said,
and last summer a federal jury in Jeffer­
son City, Mo., agreed with her.
Polacco says that although she had
worked for years in the Department of
Biochemistry as an assistant professor
not on the tenure track, doing the same
kind of work as faculty members with
higher status and pay, the last straw
Biochem ist
came in 1990. She and her husband
M aryPolacco ’66
were on a research leave when she
received a letter from her department
won her
chair telling her that funds were no
discrimination case
longer available to fund her position.
“I was ‘reallocated,’” Polacco says with a
against the
laugh. “But if somebody stops paying
University o f
you, you’re fired.”
Missouri.
So Polacco filed a grievance with the
university and waited. When her griev­
ance had not yet been heard a year and
a half later, she filed suit. The trial was
held in early June, and the jury awarded
her $160,000 (plus attorneys’ fees). The
university is appealing the ruling.
Polacco faced some of the same
problems that have made pursuing sci­
ence difficult for women for decades.
One problem, Polacco says, is that she
was seen as a “faculty wife” rather than
as a scientist in her own right. “There’s
a pattern at institutions of
higher education all over the
“As soon as
country,” she says. “They just
people I worked
don’t know how to treat cou­
with found out
ples because they’re so used
I had a family,
to hiring one person at a
time. Often when there is a
I could see the
double hire, they’re recruit­
look on their
ing the woman and they
faces— you don’t make a position for the hus­
band. But it very rarely hap­
count.”
pens the other way around, from what
I’ve seen.”
For some time before she was fired,
she had been calling on the university
to develop a policy on hiring academic
couples: “If you’re recruiting people
who are part of an academic couple,
you look at their spouses right up front

I

and find a position for them if they’re
qualified. If they’re not qualified, you tell
them that, rather than string them
along.” Polacco believes that the fact
that she had become more vocal about
this issue may have contributed to the
department’s decision to stop funding
her position.
Another reason she wasn’t taken seri­
ously as a scientist, Polacco contends, is
that she played the “womanly” role of
wife and mother; she and her husband
have three children, now 24, 21, and 19.
“From my work, the people in the lab
next door, people who weren’t close to
me, were not even aware that I had a
family. But as soon as they found out, I
could see the look on their faces—you
don’t count,” she says.
“If you have to leave at five to pick up
your kid at day care,” she continues,
“that’s not a good reason. But if you
want to take off the afternoon to play
golf, that’s OK, or if you want to go to
the gym and shoot some hoops, that’s
OK too.” When she looked into some
statistics before she filed the lawsuit,
she discovered that of 15 people recent­
ly hired in the Plant Sciences program,
“maybe three or four were women. That
sounded pretty good—but none of the
women were married and all of the men
were.”
Right now Polacco is still housed at
the University of Missouri, working on a
grant from the U.S. Department of Agri­
culture on the maize genome data base,
which is an on-line source for a array of
information on maize genetics and
breeding. “It’s not research,” she says,
“it’s like writing an on-line book. There
is opportunity for research in the future,
but it’s not quite the same as doing
things the way everybody else was able
to do them.”
Perhaps she can take some comfort
from the fact that Barbara McClintock,
Nobel Prize-winning geneticist, came to
the University of Missouri in 1936 as an
assistant professor and became one of
the leaders of the university’s genetics
center with her research on corn plants.
Five years later, after being told she
would never get a permanent position
and in fact would probably be fired
when her male mentor left, she walked
out the door—and into some of the
most profitable years of her life as a
—R ebecca Aim
researcher.

Fighting W ords
P h ila d elp h ia
city officials,
n eig h b o rh o o d
resid en ts,
and
m em b ers
o f the bla ck
ra d ica l g ro u p
M O VE sp o k e
“d ifferen t
la n gu a ges ”
d u rin g th eir
v iolent
confrontation
in M ay 1985,
says
S w a rth m o re
so cio lo gist R obin
W agner-Pacifici.

i
m
CL

SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

■ he target: A fortified row house at
6221 Osage Ave. in West Philadelphia.
The weapons: Military and commer­
cial explosives, automatic and semiau­
tomatic weapons, sharpshooter rifles,
M-16 and M-60 machine guns, Uzis,
shotguns, a .22-caliber rifle, a Lahti
antitank weapon.
The army: Five hundred members
of the Philadelphia Police Department.
The dead: Six civilian adults and
five children.
It’s been almost nine years since
police officers dropped a bomb from a
helicopter onto a house in Philadel­
phia, burning down two city blocks.
The 11 residents who died belonged to
a militant movement called MOVE.
Another casualty was public trust in
civil authorities who confront
unorthodox groups that challenge
community standards.
Among the thousands who watched
the MOVE catastrophe on live televi­
sion May 13, 1985, was Philadelphia
native Robin Wagner-Pacifici. A mem­
ber of Swarthmore’s sociology faculty
since 1983, she shared the nation’s
shock at this fatal collapse of efforts to
establish co existen ce among
MOVE, its neighbors, and city
government. As a sociologist,
she saw in the tragedy an illus­
tration, both classic and horrific,
of how people with different per­
sonal and professional identities
may fail to communicate across
chasms of habit, training, and
occupational expectations.
Wagner-Pacifici had written
about the ways that politicians
and the media in terpreted
another violent event, the kid­
napping and murder of former Italian
prime minister Aldo Moro by the Red
Brigades over 55 days in 1978. This

study became her first book, The Moro
M orality Play: Terrorism as S o cia l
Drama.
The MOVE confrontation was just
as compelling, and closer to home: a
lethal clash of American “cultures” in
Wagner-Pacifici’s hometown—the City
of Brotherly Love. “I’m analytically
attracted to violence,” she said in an
interview. “Violent events tear apart
society or a family or a city or a cul­
ture. They can be devastating and hor­
rible. But they’re also very revealing.
It’s as if you have a piece of fabric, and
you can see the colors, but you can’t
see the weave until you rip it. Violence
exposes parts of a city or family that
normally are latent or ‘hidden.’ Violent
events are arrows that point to things
we normally don’t have access to.”
After eight years of research, Wag­
ner-Pacifici has completed Discourse
and Destruction: The City o f Philadel­
phia Versus MOVE (University of Chica­
go Press). She calls it a study of ’’the
relationships among discourse, social
power, conflict, and violence.” She
believes a major cause of the disaster
was the different “languages” of those
involved—and the absence of media­
tors who would help them speak in a
language all could relate to.
The book describes the founding of
MOVE in the early 1970s by a black
handyman named Vincent Leaphart,
who changed his name to John Africa.
His followers also took that surname.
This was in the Philadelphia of Mayor
Frank Rizzo, whose police department
eventually would be the subject of a
federal investigation into alleged bru­
tality toward black citizens.
In those early years, MOVE mem­
bers shared a house on 33rd Street in
the Powelton Village area of the city,
not far from the University of Pennsyl-

By Barbara Haddad Ryan ’59

Above: P olice sharpshooters clim b to the
top o f row houses n ear the MOVE house.
Right: P h ilad elp h ia M ayor Wilson Goode,
who gave approval for a h elicop ter to
drop explosives on the house.
F a r right: Sm oke billow s ov er MOVE’S
n eighborhood after the bom b is dropped.

vania. Their neighbors included liber­
al white professionals and workingc la s s b la ck s. T h e MOVE p eo p le
earned money washing cars, walking
dogs, and ch o p p in g firew ood. Al­
though some had middle-class roots,
they rejected bourgeois domestic val­
ues and civic traditions. Their babies
didn’t wear diapers and defecated on
the lawn along with their pets. They
despised technology and ate mainly
uncooked fruits and vegetables. Their
v o ca l d e m o n stra tio n s for anim al
rights at pet stores, zoos, and political
rallies often ended in th eir arrest.
They refused to pay their utility bills.
Wagner-Pacifici notes that obscene
language played a ce n tra l ro le in
MOVE’S development. In a 1992 histo­
ry of the group written by some mem­
bers, she read that MOVE “strategized
profanity to expose the profane cir­
cumstances of the system’s injustice.”
W hether or not this was deliberate
from the start, Wagner-Pacifici said,
the profanity of MOVE’S public dia­
tribes “took on a political life of its
own.” Neighbors and m ayors alike
“focused as much of their energy and
concern on MOVE’S language as on its

alleged hygiene and legal infractions.”
Wagner-Pacifici says that percep­
tions of MOVE have varied according
to circumstance, with outsiders see­
ing the group as anything from a local
nuisance to a terrorist organization.
The m em b ers’ b itter clash es with
police led to trials and jail terms, and
tension grew in May 1977 when mem­
bers staged an armed demonstration
on their Powelton Village porch. Po­
lice reacted with a blockade that last­
ed for months. Neighbors, som e of
th em sy m p a th etic to th e group,
hoped for a negotiated settlement. But
such attempts were fruitless. Then, in
August 1978, a police officer died in a
shoot-out and a MOVE member was
badly beaten by police during his ar­
rest. The house was bulldozed by the
city, and nine MOVE members were
convicted of the policeman’s death.
Th e o th er m em bers even tu ally
moved to 6221 Osage Ave. in a pre­
dominantly black West Philadelphia
neighborhood. Some had grown up in
th e area, and W agner-P acifici de­
scribes the early ’80s as a time of rela­
tive harmony. W. Wilson Goode had
becom e the city’s first black mayor,

and MOVE petitioned him to
reopen the case of those con­
v icted of th e p o lice m a n ’s
death. Goode met with mem­
bers but told them he had no
authority to do so.
Meanwhile MOVE members began
using a loudspeaker on their Osage
Avenue roof to blast political leaders
with stream s of high-decibel invec­
tive. “Their language,” Wagner-Pacifici
writes, “was harsh, threatening, and
profane.” And once again, their neigh­
bors were caught in the middle.
After a police show of force on the
August 1984 anniversary of the 1978
shoot-out, MOVE members fortified
th e h ou se with railro ad tie s and
pieces of steel. Concerned neighbors
formed an organization to protest
conditions caused by MOVE’S pres­
ence, including harassment and dis­
ruption caused by the loudspeaker—
now blaring th re a ts to kill Mayor
Goode and p o lice . T h ey publicly
asked Goode to intervene. Concluding
that MOVE was planning an armed
conflict, Goode gave responsibility for
action to his managing director, Leo
Brooks, a retired black Army general.
He in stru cted Gregor Sam bor, the
white police com m issioner, to pre­
pare a tactical plan to be executed
under Brooks’ supervision.
C om m ission er Sam b or put the
MOVE house under 24-hour surveilSWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

S-LUQ

iolent events
tear apart a
society or a
family or a city
or a culture.
They can be
devastating and
horrible.
But they’re also
very revealing.”

V

« ■ ■ HI
:
1

lance on May 9, 1985, and on May 12
he ordered the neighborhood evacu­
ated. Early on May 13 hundreds of
police officers surrounded the house.
At 5:35 a.m. Sambor delivered an ulti­
matum through a bullhorn. It was
rejected. Tear gas and smoke projec­
tiles were used in an attempt to force
the occu pan ts out and to provide
cover for in sertion of exp losives.
R eturning sh o ts from th e h ou se,
police fired at least 10,000 rounds of
ammunition in 90 minutes.
In late afternoon a citizens’ group
took the bullhorn and pleaded, futilely, for the MOVE people to surrender.
At 5:27 p.m., with Mayor G oode’s
approval, a helicopter dropped explo­
sives onto th e roof. Flam es sh o t
upward and were allowed to burn for
40 minutes before the Fire Depart­
ment turned on high-pressure water
guns that had been set up nearby. By
then th e fire was out of co n tro l,
destroying more than 60 houses over
two city blocks.
The bombing and the death of 11
adults and children—including John
Africa— set off shock waves across
the city and the nation.
Mayor Goode issued an executive
order on May 22 creating the Philadel­
phia Special Investigation Commis­
sion, made up of 11 private citizens.
After 10 months of investigations and
hearings, they produced a bluntly
FEBRUARY 1994

Left: A p olice helicopter prepares to drop
a bom b on the ro o f o f the MOVE house.
Above: Managing D irector L eo Brooks,
Fire Com m issioner William Richmond,
and P olice Com m issioner Gregor Sam bor
before the investigation com m ission.

worded report that put primary re­
sponsibility on the mayor, the manag­
ing director, the police commissioner,
the fire commissioner—and on badly
flawed communications.

W

iM Ss

■MB

agner-Pacifici’s book analyzes
what she calls “two crystallizing
moments”: the days in May leading to
the conflagration and the weeks of
the Commission hearings. She exam­
ined the bulk of the written record:
memos between city officials; min­
utes of meetings; newspaper reports,
feature stories, and editorials; police
surveillance sh eets; tran scrip ts of
MOVE’S loudspeaker declamations;
transcripts of MOVE trials in 1981 and
1985; and videotapes and transcripts
of the Commission hearings. Those
hearings provide what Wagner-Pacifici calls the centerpiece of her study.
There have been four or five other
books about the disaster, WagnerPacifici said, one by a Commission
member and the others journalistic
reports that focus on interviews, who
did what, and the chronicle of events.
Hers is the first to analyze the impact
of th e ways th e involved groups
talked to—and past—each other.

As she studied the materials, she
was guided by both sociological and
literary th eory. “The different lan­
guages em erg ed ,” sh e said. “Each
social institution has its own way of
capturing reality. Courtrooms differ
from hospitals, which differ from mili­
tary bases. Sociologists look at the
norms undergirding institutions. And
from literary theory, we see language
as a medium through which norms are
brought to life.”
She identified four “distinct discur­
sive form ations” in the MOVE case.
First was the domestic, “comprising
images of home, family, children, and
n e ig h b o rh o o d .” S eco n d was th e
bureaucratic, com prising images of
policies, hierarchies, plans, memos,
agencies, and m eetings. Third was
“the military, com prising images of
war, enemies, operations, and tactics.”
Fourth was the legal system, “compris­
ing images of guilt, crimes, rights, dis­
cretions, and warrants.”
An exam ple of th e revealin g in­
sights produced by Wagner-Pacifici’s
approach is a comparison of the state­
ment P olice Com m issioner Sam bor
was supposed to read at 5 a.m.
that May 13 and what he actu­
ally said when he raised the
bullhorn.
The text: “This is the Police
Commissioner. We have war­
rants for the arrest of Frank
Below : Two city blocks w ere
destroyed by fire.
Right: R am ona Africa, the only
adult MOVE survivor.
F a r right: Mourners for John
A frica at the site o f the form er
MOVE house on Os

James Africa, Ramona Johnson Africa,
Theresa Brooks Africa, and Conrad
Hampton Africa for various violations
of the criminal statutes of Pennsylva­
nia. We do not wish to harm anyone.
All o ccu p an ts have 15 m inutes to
peaceably evacuate the premises and
surrender. This is your only notice.
The 15 minutes start now.”
But Sam bor a ctu ally began his
announcement: “Attention MOVE, this

regor Sambor,
the police
commissioner, to
MOVE members:
“Attention MOVE,
this is America.
You have to abide
by the laws of the
United States.”

G

is America. You have to abide by the
laws of the United States.”
Wagner-Pacifici writes, “In the offi­
cial version, the MOVE members are
simply criminals, about to be arrest­
ed. In the delivered version, they are
both cultural deviants, defying the cul­
ture of America, and criminals, break­
ing the laws of the state.”
Of course many people live in more
than one environment; they can be
both private individuals and part of a
professional, social, or other group.
How did such people react and com­
municate in the MOVE case? “It’s an
interesting question,” Wagner-Pacifici
said. “The bureaucratic administra­
tors were asked during the hearings
about their emotions. Their struggles
to articulate those emotions sounded
awkward, phony, and insincere. The
language they spoke as representa­
tives of the bureaucracy was all about
denying emotion.
“Certain kinds of languages are
existentially incapable of saying cer­
tain kinds of things. Although the
bu reau crats couldn’t acknowledge
emotions, both at the time and later
they had to have felt emotions. But
bureaucrats aren ’t supposed to be
emotional.”
The book explores the relationship
among talk, power, and violence: Wag­
ner-Pacifici is drawn to the issue of
“an individual having power versus a
language having power. Certain indi­
viduals have access to forms of talk
that both attract and repel certain
kinds of audiences, while if you talk in

a bureaucratic idiom in the public
arena, that kind of language is recog­
nized as official and gets respect, just
because of the source.
“The neighborhood people—the
‘organic’ m ediators—that day used
vernacular speech and emotionality.
The representatives of the city didn’t
or refused to understand them, so
they were not heard.”
This recalls the old saw that where
you sit determines where you stand.
“Yes,” Wagner-Pacifici said, “and what
you speak determines where you sit.”
Wagner-Pacifici saw missed oppor­
tunities in the potential contribution
of the “organic” mediators, MOVE’S
neighbors. “If only they could have
continued the dialogue,” she said.
“It’s not to say MOVE would have left,
or changed. But there was no reason
for its annihilation. There was nothing
to lose by waiting and reformulating-.
One would-be negotiator said the
MOVE people wanted to reop en the
1978 case [of the killed police offi­
c e r ]— not re le a s e m em b ers from
prison, but just reopen the case.
“If you go in this direction with a
military, bureaucratic, and legalistic
framework and th ere’s a broadside
attack, the chance of a good outcome
is nil.” If you persist with attempts at
mediation, she added, there’s at least
a possibility of averting disaster.
“I recommend a hybridized form of
discourse,” Wagner-Pacifici said, “that
would be elevated to respectable sta­
tus. We should not be afraid to have
Please turn to page 63

Interdisciplinary Sociologist
Robin Wagner-Pacifici
didn’t take a single
sociology course as
an undergraduate.
obin Wagner-Pacifici says she dif­
fers from the typical sociologist in
being “drawn to events with different
interpretations. Sociologists generally
are interested in charting the long-term
structure of phenomena, and this is dra­
matic only in its cumulative nature, for
example unemployment or deindustrial­
ization. Thousands of people are affect­
ed by these conditions, but sociologists
don’t usually look at specific events;
they chart trends and gauge causes. My
book is more interdisciplinary and not
as mainstream.”
She said the possibility of such a
study was part of what attracted her to
sociology in the first place: “It’s an open
discipline that permits a wide range of
methodologies, from the very statistical
and quantitative to how people say
hello on the telephone.
Wagner-Pacifici, who’s 39, didn’t take
a single sociology course as a compara­
tive literature major at Brown Universi­
ty, Class of ’76. The daughter of a physi­
cian, she returned to Philadelphia after
college and got a job as a secretary at
the University of Pennsylvania. One
fringe benefit was free classes.
“They all ended up being in sociolo­
gy,” she recalled. “I wasn’t goal-orient­
ed—they just sounded interesting, and
they connected with my literary and
political interests. They fit in terms of
the narrative process and how society
talks about itself.”
Within two years she earned a mas­
ter’s degree in sociology, and Penn
awarded her a Ph.D. in 1983, the same
year she joined the Swarthmore faculty.
She was attracted to the College be­
cause “I’d always admired it, and I liked
the idea of getting to know people in
other disciplines. At Penn I made forays
into folklore, anthropology, communica­
tions, and education while getting my
doctorate. I really like interdisciplinary
work, which you don’t get teaching at
big universities.”
Wagner-Pacifici met her husband,
Maurizio, at Penn’s International House.
A native of Tivoli, Italy, he’s a biologist

R

STEVEN GOLDBLATT '67

at Penn. They have three children, ages
8, 5, and almost 2. (In the book’s ac­
knowledgments, she warmly thanks her
husband for his support. As for the chil­
dren, “I’m not sure they should exactly
be thanked. But I am sure that I adore
them, and I figure this is as good a place
as any to say that.”)
Wagner-Pacifici was pregnant with
her youngest child during part of the
1'/2-year leave when she worked on the
book. Her research was made possible
by a grant from the Fund for Research
on Dispute Resolution and a Eugene
Lang Faculty Fellowship from the Col­
lege. While the entire project extended
over more than seven years, she wrote
the book in two months. She said the
combined activities of mothering, teach­
ing, and scholarship represent another
“hybridization” that she values.
“I’m active on the task force that’s
looking into College-wide child care,”
she said. “Building community doesn’t
involve only task-oriented issues. Hav­
ing kids and thinking of them growing
up and teaching them about the free­
dom of ideas, about patience and toler­
ance—I have used this in my teaching
and research. I hate to see life rigidly
divided into separate spheres. I want to
be a good citizen of the College and the
community. I want to use being a moth­
er and a scholar. It shouldn’t be a mat­
ter of choices. It shouldn’t have to be
either/or. The voices of mother, schol­
ar, and teacher should be able to be
useful to each other.”
—B.H.R.

■

New Right
■

in December 2 at a few
m inutes b e fo re 8:00
p.m., the Pearson-Hall Theatre was filling up fast. Campus security officers hov■ ■
ered around the edge of the
crowd, ten-fouring into their
two-ways as student orga­
nizers in blue blazers and
d re ssy b lo u se s scu rried
about taking tickets, point­
ing VIPs to reserved seats
up front, and giving lastminute instructions backstage. The Board of Man­
agers was on campus, and a
num ber of m em bers had
decided to join President
Alfred H. Bloom at a wellpublicized talk by William F.
Buckley Jr.
As th e fam ous sage of th e right
s tro d e o n sta g e, m em b ers of th e
S w arth m ore C o n serv ativ e Union
(SCU) sat on the edges of their frontsection seats. Buckley smiled a benev­
olent smile at them and they knew
they had arrived—big time.
Though Buckley was the third highprofile speaker to have been spon­
so re d by th e SCU during th e fall
sem ester, he was clearly th e m ost
important and talked-about. Conserva­
tive econom ist Walter Williams had
drawn about 200 to the Friends Meet­
ing House in Septem ber, and Eagle
Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly had
filled the same theater with students
in October when she delivered a talk
titled “The Truth About Feminism.”
But Buckley seemed to possess the
right mix of intellect and ideology to
attract the broadest range of Swarthmoreans— faculty members, staffers,
even the president.
The 800-plus people in Buckley’s
overflow crowd were a mix of the curi­
ous and the committed. The curious
were wondering what the 68-year-old
editor of the N ational R eview might
have to say to Swarthmore College—
and, of co u rse , what Sw arthm ore
m ight have to say in retu rn . One
20
adm itted political voyeur, Dominic
Sagolla ’96, said: “This is one of the
reasons I came to Swarthmore. I’m not
too involved in politics, but I wanted


£
tf>

DENG-JENG LEE

More than 60 students have join ed the C ollege’s new conservative student group since its
founding a y ear ago. Shown abov e are m em bers (clockw ise from top) Tom Makin ’97,
Matthew Ram L ee ’95, Sean Wright ’96, Ron Smith ’96, Carl H eiberg ’96, Eric Jansson ’96,
A lice Stillman ’96, Arthur Krause ’97, and Vijay Toke ’96. At center is Matthew Schenk ’95,
editor o f the new conservative campus new spaper, Common Sense.

to see the reaction of the crowd.”
The committed, in addition to the
SCU’s 60-plus m embers, included a
carload of excited conservative stu­
dents from Bucknell University and a
ca u cu s of ab o u t 20 w ell-d ressed
Delaware County Republicans. Buckley was a god, and they weren’t going

By Jeffrey Lott

to miss a word.
They had to pay close attention.
Speaking in his patented ironic pen­
tameter, Buckley launched into a ram­
bling 40-minute critique of the Clinton
administration and everything else he
believes is wrong with America. His
polysyllabic exegesis was alternately
amusing and confusing, predictable
and provocative: a jab at Clinton’s
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

approach to health care reform—“It’s
as though every few minutes he were
rushing downstairs to the excitement
of the Christmas tree”; a lesson about
F ed eralism — “Th e m oney com ing
back from W ashington is the same
money that is going to Washington,
except while it’s in Washington it goes
out on the town”; and a denunciation
of the evils of illegitim ate birth s—
“What if the moral sensibilities of the
community were sharper? What if the
com m unity concluded that unwed
mothers are irresponsible citizens?”
Buckley’s appearance at Swarthmore was something members of the
C on servativ e Union had w orked
toward for nearly a year. The student
group is new, springing from a core of
six or eight social and political conser­
vatives who got together in February
1993 at the urging of Matthew Ram
Lee ’95. Lee had put up a few posters
asking, “Are you conservative? Feeling
lonely? Feeling marginalized?”
“Marginalized?”
Lee’s irony was obvious—it’s the
ultimate politically correct word. On a
campus that to conservative students
seemed to harbor nothing but politi­
cally co rrect groups, he wanted to
start a different one—a conservative
force that would, more than anything,
lead the attack on PC.
Lee’s appeal did not fall on deaf
ears. It wasn’t long before the nascent
group applied for and received a Stu­
dent Council “ch arter”— something
student organizations need before
they can get access to the $231,000
activities fund. Before long, a budget
of $690 was approved for the 1993-94
school year.
The SCU’s coming-out party was an
April 29 talk by au th o r Dinesh
D’Souza, w hose 1991 critiq u e of
academia, Illiberal Education: The Poli­
tics o f R ace an d S ex on Cam pus, has
become a manifesto for those who see
political correctness and multiculturalism as great evils. D’Souza attacked
m u lticu ltu ralism during his wellattended Swarthmore speech, and it
was a fitting opening salvo in the
SCU’s campus campaign: “Liberal edu­
cation,” he said, “is not about freezing
us into categories of race and class.
FEBRUARY 1994

It’s about emancipating us from those unable to be open about his conserva­
tive views, either in or out of class: “It
categories.”
Vijay Toke ’96, SCU co-chairman seem ed like if you tried to oppose
(with Geoffrey Cline ’96), elaborates: something in a class where 20 people
“Focusing on differences only makes believe it, you were going to get total­
people less willing to work together. ly sh o t dow n.... Even o u tsid e the
Why don’t we focus on our similari­ classroom, I didn’t bring up politics,
ties instead of our differences? In­ but now [with th e C on servativ e
stead of pulling people together, [mul­ Union] I think th at people are no
ticulturalism] is just pushing people longer afraid to express a political
apart.... Sure, Americans come from a belief.”
very diverse number of cultures, but
he D’Souza talk opened up an
to put them into one American identi­
important source of support for
ty would be very important for unity.”
As an Indian American who favors th e SCU. The stu d en ts had ap­
English as an official language for the proached the Young America’s Foun­
United
S ta tes,
Toke doesn’t see ^
any problem with
learn in g about %
o th er cu ltu res. §
“I’m from another
cu ltu re m yself.
But what we learn
is only a political­
ly correct version
of other cultures.”
For exam ple, he
says, R ig o berta
Menchu (the Gua­
tem alan Q uiche
activist who won
th e Nobel P eace
Prize in 1992) is
held up as a rep­
resentative of all
G uatem alan cu l­
tu re. “Why? Be­
cause it ’s PC,”
says Toke. “B e­
SCU co cause Menchu is a
M arxist-L en in ist a freshman, Cline felt unable to express his conservative views.
lesbian.”
Co-chairman Cline says that the dation (YAF), a Washington nonprofit
conservatives are more interested in group, to help fund D’Souza’s appear­
changing attitudes at the College than ance. There they found an enthusias­
they are in electoral politics or con­ tic friend in James Taylor ’72, execu­
servative activism off campus: “We’re tive director of the foundation, which
join in g fo rces with o th er cam pus publishes conservative critiques of
organizations, not to change society academia and funds more than 200
but to ch an ge co lleg e cam p u ses speakers per year on college campus­
across the country.” A political sci­ es (see next page). The YAF provided
ence major, Cline says he “wasn’t very most of the money to bring D’Souza,
political” until he cam e to Swarth­ and Taylor established a relationship
more but was “pushed to the right by with the SCU that led directly to its
what I was exposed to when I got higher profile last fall.
Swarthmore is a “special project”
here.” As a freshman, he said, he felt

T

21

for the YAF this year, explains Taylor.
After meeting with SCU leaders last
summer, he invited them to draw up
plans for a co n cen tra ted effort to
“reform” Swarthmore “to be more re­
ceptive to conservative ideas, speak­
ers, and students.”
“We wanted to do this at a small
liberal arts college, so we asked stu­
dents from Amherst, Williams, Oberlin, Wellesley, and Swarthmore to sub­
mit a p ro p o sa l.” Th e YAF c h o se
Swarthmore because, says Taylor, the
SCU “had the m ost underclassm en
and an enthusiastic set of leaders.... I
felt like a football coach who has had
a good recruiting year.”
YAF support not only launched the
SCU speakers’ program, it also led to
the publication of a new conservative
campus newspaper, Com m on S en se.
E d itor M atthew Sch en k , a ju n io r
English major, had served as editor of
The P hoen ix in the spring of 1993. In
his inaugural ed ito ria l, he w rote,
uCom m on S en se was founded on the
belief that a lack of ideological, politi­
cal, and philosophical diversity will
ultimately result in ignorance, smallmindedness, and a dangerous intoler-

M ichael Flynn ’95 m oderates
as William F. Buckley Jr.
answers questions after his
D ecem ber talk.

ance of ideas that do not
fit into the popular, liber­
al, and often n arrow ­
minded category of what
is acceptable.” In an inter­
view, Sch en k said he
wanted to “collect togeth­
er conservative views on
campus ... so that people
could see that there are
o th e rs out th e re who
w Èèèê
believe the same things.”
S ch en k c ritic iz e s T he
P hoenix as “a few people PAOLA TAGLIAMONTE
standing on their private soapbox,”
though he admits he did the same
thing when he was the paper’s editor.
After the debut of Common Sense, a
journalistic battle was joined through­
out the fall semester, with writers in
each paper criticizing the other, most
notably over the issue of outside fund­
ing for conservative activities.
“My con cern is that it seem s so
imported,” said Andrew Perrin ’94, a

Jim Taylor’s Campus Crusade
“In the ’60s radicalism
was m ore among the
students. Today the
left-wing students o f the
’60s have tenure. ”

W

hen Jim Taylor ’72 arrived at
Swarthmore in the fall of 1968,
he was a world apart from most of his
new classmates. They were 18-yearolds for the most part and were most­
ly opposed to American involvement
in Vietnam. Taylor was older, 25, and
his ideas about Vietnam were quite
different because just two months
before his freshman orientation, he’d
been there— as an Air Force sergeant.
Attending college on the GI Bill, he
saw the student anti-war movement
as responsible for the impending
American defeat in the war. For Taylor
it was the beginning of a lifelong com­
mitment to changing the political
atmosphere on America’s campuses.
22

Now, as executive director of the
Young America’s Foundation (YAF),
he’s making a special effort to have an
impact on his alma mater, a place
where he admits he was “angry most
of the time.” Before joining YAF in
1980, Taylor worked at the conserva­
tive Intercollegiate Studies Institute in
Bryn Mawr, Pa., and at the National
Right to Work Legal Defense Fund. He
served on President Ronald Reagan’s
Equal Employment Opportunity Com­
mission transition team in 1980 and as
a member of the president’s advisory
council on the Peace Corps in
1986-87. He also served as vice presi­
dent of the International Youth Year
Commission in 1985-86.
“I was generally conservative
before Swarthmore,” said Taylor in a
recent Bulletin interview, “but my col­
lege experience really put a sharp
edge to my beliefs. In just about every
class, the fundamental principles I
believed in were undermined by pro­
fessors and the curriculum. If you

T

he goal: “to change
college campuses
across the country.”
The hot targets:
political correctness
and multiculturalism.

were patriotic or religious, you just
did not say so publicly without being
laughed at.” And Swarthmore in the
late 1960s, he observes, was “not as
bad as some other schools.”
Taylor hears today’s conservative
students echoing some of the feelings
he had as a student, and he gives the
members of the Swarthmore Conserv­
ative Union (SCU) “a lot of credit for
sticking their necks out and proclaim­
ing their beliefs.”
SCU leaders say that their ability to
be so visible has been greatly
strengthened by YAF support. Foun­
dation dollars and political connec­
tions have made high-profile conser­
vative speakers possible, and YAF
funds have helped launch the new
conservative campus newspaper,
Common Sense.
The YAF, which has an annual bud­
get of $3.5 million, grew out of a 1969
student group at Vanderbilt Universi­
ty. Until it became independent in
1978, it was an arm of the now-defunct
conservative youth group Young
Americans for Freedom. It raises its
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

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)

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t

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left-wing activist who was elected edi­
tor of T he P h o en ix for th e spring
semester. “A lot of the content of Com­
m on S en se comes from off campus,
and their speakers have been largely
funded from off campus. They’re part
of a national conservative campaign
th at b e lie v e s th e u n iv ersity has
become a tool of the left. Multiculturalism, deconstructionism, feminism,
gay rights, racialism—they’re the new
bogeymen now that dommunism is
gone as an international force.”
The funding issue caused a minor
flap with the College’s administration
in November, when the YAF sent a
three-page letter to several hundred
alumni asking for financial support of
the “Swarthmore Project.” The letter,
which was not sanctioned by the Col­
lege, came from a group that called
itself Swarthmore Students and Alum­
ni for Meaningful Diversity. It was
signed by Taylor, Charles Floto ’68,
and Michael Flynn ’95 of the SCU and
a sse rte d th a t d esp ite P resid en t
Bloom’s provision of $3,000 for the
speakers’ program, the SCU “feels that
the [adm inistration] is not serious

about bringing true intellectual diver­
sity to the College.” It asked for dona­
tions from $25 to $10,000 to the Young
A m erica’s Foundation in order to
“bring balance” to Swarthmore.
The letter, said Harry Gotwals, vice
president for alumni, development,
and public relations, was “unfortu­
nate.” Gotwals had already proposed
to help the SCU approach a limited
number of alumni whom the College
believed to be sympathetic to their
cau se. A co m m u n ication s mix-up
occu rred and Flynn didn’t receive
Gotwals’ offer until after the YAF had
mailed the solicitation. Gotwals says
the College adm inistration and the
SCU are working together on the orga­
nization’s funding.
Justin Herring ’97, treasurer of the
SCU, thinks that the controversy was
“overblown” by The P hoenix. “In ret­
rospect [the letter] was a big mistake.
I wish it hadn’t happened. But the
administration has a vested interest in
encouraging alumni involvement in
whatever goes on here.” He estimates
that the SCU has already received
“about $1,000” in alumni support. Got-

wals, for his part, urges alumni who
are interested in helping the SCU to
contact him to learn a direct way to
support the organization through the
College.
The funding controversy aside, fos­
terin g d iv erse view s on cam pus

funds through direct mail solicitations
and grants from other foundations.
The YAF has committed up to
$35,000 for the one-year Swarthmore
project, Taylor said, with the under­
standing that the SCU will find other
sources of funding to match as much
of the foundation’s money as possible.
Celebrities like William F. Buckley Jr.
don’t come cheap. His talk cost
$12,500, said Taylor. Phyllis Schlafly
got $5,000, and economist Walter
Williams was paid $3,000. Former At­
torney General Edwin Meese ($5,000)
and former Secretary of Education
and drug czar William Bennett
($15,000) are scheduled for the sec­
ond semester.
The purpose of all this, according
to Taylor, is to counter a trend he
sees on campuses across the country.
“In the ’60s the radicalism was more
among the students. Today it’s
switched to where the administra­
tions and faculties are on the cutting
edge of what the left wants to achieve
on campus. The left-wing students of
the ’60s now have tenure.

“There seems to be more of a will­
ingness on the part of the campus left
to put aside principles of fair play and
free speech, more of an openly ex­
pressed intention to use the campus­
es to change society. You see this
with the multicultural programs,
speech codes, mandatory courses,

sensitivity training, things of that sort.
It’s tending in a totalitarian direction,
though you see some developments
recently that may start reversing
this.”
Responding to objections to out­
side influence on campus politics,
Taylor contends that “without our
involvement there would be no pro­
gram like this at Swarthmore.” He is
“skeptical that there will be any con­
servative program next year without
further outside help. College adminis­
trations usually wait for these things
to blow over, then go back to business
as usual.”
At Swarthmore, said Taylor, the
YAF’s goal has been to “show that stu­
dents will come out to hear conserva­
tive speakers and that they will re­
spond to them positively even if they
don’t agree with them. Our other goal
is to leave behind a strong organiza­
tion and a good publication that will
continue to make an impact.” He
thinks that both of these goals are
well on their way to being met.
—J.L.

FEBRUARY 1994

TWIN LENS PHOTOGRAPHY

Jim Taylor 72

PAOLA TAGLIAMONTE

I

Phyllis Schlafly attacked feminists during
her October talk. Referring to the HillThomas hearings, she said that charges o f
sexual harassm ent are used as a “tool to
destroy any man they set out to destroy. ”

23

remains the SCU’s primary goal. Even
among its members, there is a wide
range of e co n o m ic, p o litica l, and
social thinking. While political correct­
ness and multiculturalism may seem
like their hot topics, abortion, homo­
sexuality, and other “lifestyle” issues
are also on some members’ conserva­
tive agenda. Intersections with stu­
dent pro-life and religious groups exist
in a few members, for example SCU
founder Matthew Ram Lee and Alice
Stillman ’96, both of whom are also
active in the Swarthm ore Christian
Fellowship.
Stillman sees the two organizations
as quite separate. The Christian Fel­
lowship tries to stay focused on spiri­
tual matters, while the Conservative
Union is m ore issu e-oriented. Like
many m embers of the conservative
movement, she is concerned about
being able to express both her politi­
cal and religious views freely. To illus­
trate, she hypothesizes a “spectrum
ranging from an upper-class, white,
heterosexual male on one end to, let’s
say, a b lack , le sb ia n , u n d e rcla ss
woman on the other. People today are
wondering who has more of a right to
speak. Because this woman has ‘suffe r e d ’ so m uch, has been so ‘oppressed,’ should her voice be given
more weight than the man’s?
“There’s almost a ranking going on,
even am ong m in orities. W here do
Jew ish people fall? In th e middle?
W hat if y ou ’re half w hite and half
Asian [as Stillman is]? Where do you
get to speak? To have people feel that
what they have to say is not as worth­
while as what some other people say,
because they haven’t experienced as
much oppression ... that scares me.”
Stillman sees feminism as a further
example: “I don’t think that women
should bond togeth er as ‘v ictim s.’
There are so many excuses as to why
the world is out to get you, as to why
you can fa il.” She su p p o rts equal
rights for women and says she knows
that there is sexism and racism in the
world, but “you shouldn’t harp on it
because in America people have so
many more opportunities than any­
where else in the world.”
(Phyllis Schlafly had said much the
same in her October talk. Referring to
feminist consciousness-raising, she
said, “Grievances are like flowers. If
you water them, they grow.”)
24

Stillman knows she is in the minori­
ty among Swarthmore women. The
SCU has clearly attracted more male
than female students, and Stillman is
th e only woman among its lead er­
sh ip — and one of only a b o u t 10
women among its total membership of
more than 60. She thinks that abortion
and other issues tend to make Swarth­
more women more liberal and that
“so-called educated women tend to be
m ore liberal b ecau se th ey are thé
ones who are aspiring to be more suc­
cessful, to get somewhere in life.”

eople come up
to me and say,
1 think you’re dead
wrong, but it’s great
that you’re here.’”
—Vijay Toke ’96

P

UJ

^
S
i
°
§
jg

Top: A lice Stillman ’96: “P eople are won­
dering who has m ore o f a right to speak. ”
Bottom: Matthew Schenk ’95: “Lack o f ide­
ological and political diversity ultimately
results in ignorance and intolerance. ”

he spring semester is bringing its
share of con servative activism .
The SCU has brought former Attorney
General Edwin Meese to campus and
hopes to get former Education Secre­
tary and “drug czar” William Bennett
as well.- But the big-name speakers can
last only so long. Next year co-chair­
man Vijay Toke (who is a sophomore)
wants the SCU to “bring in more con­
servative intellectuals, more policy
people— from the Heritage Founda­
tion, for example. The crowds might
not be as big, but I think this would be
far more intellectually stimulating and
more significant in bringing balance.”
“Balan ce is th e key,” interrupts
Geoff Cline. “Our whole purpose is to
provide a balance that I think is sorely
lacking here now. The College is head­
ing down one path, and until now it
hasn’t been worried about the other
side at all.”
Andrew P errin d isa g re e s: “At
Swarthmore there hasn’t been a single
instance of censorship or the disal­
lowing of speech. No one has made
that claim. All they’ve claimed is that
they feel uncomfortable being conser­
vative on campus—and I don’t think
th at’s so terrible, frankly. Conserva­
tiv e id e a s— and an ybod y e ls e ’s
ideas—are just that, ideas.”
Point. Counterpoint. As President
Bloom settled into his seat to listen to
William F. Buckley Jr., he was asked
about the impact of the SCU. “Conser­
vative voices add to the intellectual
diversity and the diversity of expres­
sion on campus,” he said. “It’s a good
thing for the College.”
Vijay Toke would agree: “I can’t tell
you how many tim es people have
com e up to me and said , T think
you’re dead wrong, but it’s great that
you’re here.’” ■

T

SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

ËCOLLEGE
College judicial case
gets national attention
It’s usually difficult for
small colleges to attract
national publicity. But this
winter a surprised SwaYthmore turned up in the
headlines and on the air­
waves across the coun­
try—even with competition
from the Los Angeles earth­
quake, Tonya Harding, and
Whitewater.
The College found itself
in—among dozens of other
news outlets— The New
York Tim es, The Wall Street
Journal, The Washington
Post, The P hiladelphia
Inquirer, The Chicago Tri­
bune, Tim e magazine, and
U.S. News & World Report,
on the Associated Press
and UPI wires; and on ABC,
CBS, NBC, and CNN.
The stories, many of
which were inaccurate or
incomplete, discussed
what normally would have
been a confidential student
judicial case at the College.
In mid-January President
Alfred H. Bloom and Board
of Managers chairman Neil
Austrian ’61 decided to
send a letter to alumni, par­
ents, and friends to explain
the College’s actions in the
case.
A first-year woman had
brought charges against a
male classmate of sexual
harassment and intimida­
tion, and of violating a
pledge to actively avoid
her. A dean’s committee
heard the case, and al­
though it dropped the
charge of harassment and
intimidation, it recom­
mended suspending the
male student for violating a
prior agreement to avoid
the woman. Both students
appealed the recommenda­
FEBRUARY 1994

tion to Bloom, who, after a
lengthy investigation,
found that there had been
intimidating behavior. To
resolve the case, he
reached an agreement with
the man that he would take
a leave from the College
and seek counseling.
“We agreed that his
return to the College would
be conditional on his de­
monstrating an ability and
commitment to respect the
standards of conduct of the
community,” said Bloom.
The case had started to
draw national attention in
early December, when the
young man decided to pro­
fess his innocence to The
Washington (D.C.) Times.
Although the newspaper’s
circulation is small, ex­
plained Barbara Haddad
Ryan ’59, associate vice
president for external
affairs, its column about
the case was read by the
huge capital press corps.
The column led to an
avalanche of calls from
newspapers, magazines,
wire services, television
networks, local TV stations,
radio networks and talk
shows, college newspa­
pers, and specialized
newsletters.
NBC’s Today, for exam­
ple, decided to send a cam­
era crew to campus during
exam week, with or without
the College’s cooperation.
Meanwhile the young man
and his attorney were read­
ily available to reporters.
The media demands grew
so frenzied over the holi­
day period that the College
found it necessary to hire a
Philadelphia public rela­
tions firm to help handle
inquiries.
“There were several

legitimate reasons for this
attention,” said Ryan, a for­
mer newspaper reporter
and public relations execu­
tive. “First, the case in­
volved two major issues
that the media have been
covering in the ’90s. One is
how society is revising the
‘rules’ for relationships
between men and women
and reconsidering appro­
priate responses to un­
wanted behavior. The
other is how colleges and
universities are dealing
with campus controversies
about free speech and race
and gender relations.”
Ryan said another rea­
son was the innovative
nature of Bloom’s decision,
which included the Col­
lege’s agreeing to pay for
up to four courses at
another institution while
the male student is on
leave and undertaking
counseling. He has enrolled
at Boston University.
“He’s been on full schol­
arship at the College,” Ryan

said, “so Swarthmore
would be paying his tuition,
room, and board if he were
here. The young woman’s
family liked the decision. It
reflects the fact that the
College’s primary mission
is to educate students, and
our Quaker tradition
emphasizes the positive
potential in every person.”
Among other reasons
for the media blitz, Ryan
said, “the weeks around
the holidays traditionally
are ‘slow news days.’ The
young man lives in New
York City, so it was a ‘local’
story in the media capital
of the country. And finally,
this case had built-in sex
appeal—one original
charge, later dismissed,
was sexual harassment.”
Swarthmore officials
worked diligently to pro­
tect the confidentiality of
the case while delibera­
tions were under way. But
the one-sided coverage
eventually led both the Col­
lege and the woman to
DENG-JENG LEE

Pearson readied for north cam pus project.... Construction
began last month on Pearson Hall to house departments that will be
displaced during the three-year renovation o f the north campus. Two
offices plus a large hall storage section have been added on the sec­
ond floor in space formerly occupied by a computer lab. The old the­
ater space (abov e) has been gutted so that both the first floor and
the basem ent can be used. When com pleted in June, the first floor
will house m ore than 20 offices for p eop le who will have to vacate
Parrish Annex—mem bers o f the Department o f Modem Languages
and Literatures and the C ollege’s Personnel Office. The basem ent
area will hold meeting rooms, rest rooms, and copier space. The
reconstruction is planned as perm anent space, although longterm
use has not yet been decided. Groundbreaking for a new academ ic
building north o f Parrish Hall is scheduled for June, to be follow ed
later by the com plete renovation o f Trotter Hall.
25

E

C

release more detailed infor­
Let it rot: The
mation. The woman agreed
College composts
to a single national televi­
So you have a 300-acre
sion interview, on CBS
campus with thousands of
News’ Eye to Eye with Con­ I trees and miles of lawns,
n ie Chung. Associate Dean
and you face the same
Robert Gross ’62 explained
dilemma as many homePresident Bloom’s decision
owners: What do you do
on Chung’s program, NBC’s
with grass clippings and
Today, ABC’s G ood Morning
leaves?
A m erica, and CNN —which
At Swarthmore, as is
sent the story around the
I true in many area municiI world.
j palities, the words are recy­
Ironically, for several
cle and compost. By state
months a committee of the
law the College must recy­
Board of Managers had
cle aluminum, high-grade
been discussing ways to
office paper, corrugated
enhance Swarthmore’s
cardboard—and leaves.
national profile, primarily
Jeff Jabco, director of
to help with student re­
grounds and assistant
cruitment. “Even if many
director for horticulture for
more people have heard of
the Scott Arboretum, said
Swarthmore,” Ryan said,
the majority of leaves—
“and even if fewer will ask,
those that fall on the
‘Isn’t that a girls’ school?’,
lawns—are mulched on
no one would have predict­
site by mowing several
ed— or recommended—
times with a rotary lawn
getting publicity this way.”
mower. “The particles are
small enough to sift down
NTY DAILY TIMES
between the grass blades,”
he says, “and over time the
clippings and leaves break
down into humus and en­
rich the soil. Many people
feel that grass clippings
need to be constantly
removed to prevent thatch
buildup, but there
shouldn’t be a problem
unless the grass is too high
at the time of cutting.”
Where leaves are heavy
on the lawn or in land­
scaped beds, they are col­
From 1968 to now... Former
lected by a large vacuum
U.S. senator and presidential
and taken to the leaf com­
candidate Eugene McCarthy visit­
posting area in the Arbore­
ed the campus in late January
tum’s nursery. The com­
for two days o f lectures and sem ­
post area consists of long
inars. Sponsored by the C ollege’s
windrows of leaves that are
P eace Studies Program, his
piled and turned over a
appearances included a speech
nine-month period. By then
on “Threats to D emocratic Soci­
the leaves have broken
ety, ” in which he talked about
the declining state o f American
down into composted leaf
politics, government, and society
mold and can be used as
in general. McCarthy also dis­
soil amendment.
cussed and read poem s from his
Jabco said that tree
latest book, which contains
removal and pruning waste
poem s written during his 1968
is also recycled. “Tree
presidential bid.
26

E
trunks are either cut into
lumber or split into fire­
wood. Limbs and stumps
are either ground out,
chipped to use as mulch,
or added to compost
piles.”
With landscape waste
accounting for nearly 18
percent of the total volume
of trash in the nation’s
landfills, Jabco urges every­
one to emulate the Col­
lege’s policies of dealing
with green matter.

610 in effect as
College’s area code
Last month the College’s
telephone area code was
changed to 610. You can
also reach us using the old
215 code for the balance of
1994, but Bell of Pennsylva­
nia suggests you make note
of the change now. Calls to
this area after Jan. 1,1995,
will not be completed using
the old area code.

Five fall teams
have winning seasons
Under the direction of firstyear head coach Ted
Dixon, the men’s cross
country team finished the
season with an overall
record of 5-1 and tied for
third place in the Centenni­
al Conference. The harriers
were led throughout the
season by sophomore
Scott Reents, who placed
eighth at the Centennial
Conference Champion­
ships at Dickinson College
on Oct. 30. Kerry Boeye ’97
and John Freeman ’96 also
gave strong performances
throughout the season. At
the Regional NCAA Cham­
pionship held at Allentown
College on Nov. 13, the Gar­
net placed ninth in a field
of 26 teams, and six of

G

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Swarthmore’s seven com­
petitors ran their personal
best times. Nine of the
team’s Top 10 runners will
return for the 1994 season.
The women’s cross
country team also had a
successful season under
head coach Ted Dixon.
Margaret Sloane ’94 consis­
tently led the way for the
Garnet, finishing fifth at the
Centennial Conference
Championships and 16th of
176 runners at the NCAA
regional qualifying meet.
Sloane received All-Centen­
nial honors and All-Mid
East honors for these out­
standing performances.
Kate Dempsey ’95 was
another top performer
throughout the season.
The team finished in third
place in the Centennial
Conference and had a
record of 4-2.
The men’s soccer team had an impressive record
of 11-5-2, after playing a
tough schedule that includ­
ed several nationally
ranked teams. Despite
missing several weeks
because of an injury, Nate
Fairman ’95 led the team in
scoring with eight goals
and four assists. Seven
players received Centenni­
al Conference honors at the
season’s end; senior cap­
tains Jeff Nebelsieck, Todd
Kim, and Peter Jacobs were
named to the second team,
while Fairman, Len Cuello
’96, Ben Cook ’95, and
Shawn Bundy ’97 were hon­
orable mention selections.
Kim and Nebelsieck were
also selected as third team
Mid-Atlantic Region Adidas !
Scholar Athletes.
The field hockey team
had its most successful
season since 1987, finishing
with a record of 13-7. Melis­
sa Bonder ’95 and Lia Ernst
’97 combined to lead an
extremely powerful attack.
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

Melissa Bonder ’95 scored a record 26 goals, leading the field hockey team to its best record since 1987.

Bonder finished the season
with 26 goals and nine as­
sists, establishing new
school records for most
goals in a season, most
points in a season, and
most career points (50
goals, 14 assists, 114
points). She led the entire
Centennial Conference in
scoring (61 points). Ernst
contributed 21 assists and
two goals, also establishing
a school record for most
assists in a season. Both
players were named as
first-team All-Conference
players, while Kristen
Osborne ’97 and Kelly
Wilcox ’97 received honor­
FEBRUARY 1994

able mention recognition.
The volleyball team
squeaked by with a win­
ning record, ending up 15
wins and 14 losses. The
final match of the season
was a hard-fought battle
against Albright, which the
Garnet won by taking the
final game of the match, 1614. Highlights of the season
were taking second place
at the Cabrini Tournament
and the ability of sopho­
mores Diana Bieber and
Kaori Shingledecker to step
into the setting roles with­
out having prior experi­
ence in that position.
Senior standouts on the

team included Jenny Willis
and co-captains Katie Westin and Way-Ting Chen.
After losing outstanding
quarterback Chip Chevalier
to graduation, the football
team experienced a season
devoted to rebuilding.
Wide receiver Josh Drake
’94 finished his stellar
career with 177 receptions
for 2,500 yards. Drake now
holds 10 Swarthmore Col­
lege football records. He
and place-kicker Matt
Minero ’96 were named as
first-team All-Conference
players. Minero was the
team’s leading scorer with
38 points (eight field goals,

14 PATs). Other players
who received postseason
honors were second-team
selections Nick Milligan ’96
and Mark Fink ’95 and hon­
orable mention selections
Chuck Hudson ’96, Dan
Maher ’95, and Mike Vag­
ner ’94. Additionally, eight
players were named Aca­
demic All-Conference.
Despite the women’s
soccer team’s record of 614, the team had more wins
this season than any
Swarthmore women’s soc­
cer team has had since
1989. Madeline Fraser ’95
was third in the Centennial
Conference in scoring with
13 goals and five assists for
31 points. She was named
to the first-team All-Centen­
nial Conference team, while
fellow juniors Bess O’Neill
and MaryCatherine Arbour
received honorable men­
tion status. In her second
year as head coach, Cheri
Goetcheus was pleased
with the performance of
her team and expects to
see even more improve­
ment in the coming years.
Hood Trophy: The fall
sports season ended with a
3-3 tie in the annual compe­
tition between Swarthmore
and Haverford. Swarth­
more defeated Haverford in
field hockey, volleyball,
and men’s soccer, while
Haverford came out on top
in men’s cross country,
women’s cross country,
and women’s soccer.
W rong about Wright
In the “People and Transi­
tions” section of the 1992—
93 President’s Report, the
date for the arrival on cam­
pus of Harrison M. Wright,
the Isaac H. Clothier Profes­
sor Emeritus of History and
International Relations, was
incorrect. Professor Wright
joined the faculty in Sep­
tember 1957, not 1958.

AL U M N I
he Alumni Council does much of
its work through its nine commit­
tees and devotes a portion of each of
its meetings, held three times a year,
to working sessions of these special­
ized committees: Admissions, Athlet­
ics, Career Planning, C onnections,
Long-Range Planning, Social Outreach,
and Student Life.
The A dm issions Com m ittee, co ­
chaired by Elenor Reid ’67 and Debo­
rah Van Lenten ’90, works closely with
the Admissions Office in a variety of
outreach activities designed to find
and encourage prospective students.
The Book Award Program was initiat­
ed by the committee to increase name
recognition of the College and pro­
mote applicant diversity by recogniz­
ing acad em ically outstanding high
school juniors in schools with large
minority student bodies. Ten awards
are now p resen ted , and plans are
under way to expand the program as
quickly as additional sch o o ls and
interested alumni “presenters” can be
identified. Committee m em bers, as
well as other alumni, also interview
applicants to the College.
The Committee on A thletics was
e s ta b lis h e d in 1991 p a rtia lly in
response to a request from the Athlet­
ic Department that alumni assist in
revising a mission statement on ath­
letics at Swarthmore. This has been
done, and the closing paragraph of
the statem ent reads: “Swarthmore’s
program must pursue the am ateur
ideal in athletics by offering a wide
range of activities for the novice as
well as the skilled and charging no
fees for any contests. The program
exists for students, not sp ectators.
The College must be com m itted to
maintaining excellent facilities, an out­
standing staff, and an appropriate bal­
an ce betw een a th le tics and o th er
aspects of student life.” The Commit­
tee also established an award to be
presented at the annual spring sports
banquet to an alumna/us “who active­
ly participated in athletics at Swarth­
more and has reached a high level of
achievement in some aspect of his or
her life after graduating.” Award win­

T

28

ners to date have been Neil Austrian
’61 and Lee MacPhail ’39. While trying
to decide whether its work is over, the
co m m ittee, ch aired by C ath erin e
Rivlin ’79, intends to look at the wo­
men’s athletics program and the role
of Friends of Swarthmore Athletics.
The Career Planning Com m ittee
assists the Career Planning and Place­
ment Office in identifying ways alumni
can provide a leg up to students seek­
ing career advice, intern or summer
jo b opportunities, or postgraduate
employment. Recognizing the obvious
interest the Parents Council has in
this area, we have invited it to have an
observer at meetings of the commit­

tee, which is chaired by Martha Salzmann Gay ’79. A current p ro ject is
under way to id en tify g rad u ates
employed in human resources who
are willing to assist in creating a net­
work to help students and alumni find
jobs.
The chairs of each of the 13 Swarth­
more Connections comprise a Council
com m ittee that m eets to exchange
war stories of successful (and unsuc­
cessful) Connections events and prac­
tical advice on the staging of these
events. The chair of the chairs is Vir­
ginia Mussari Bates ’73.
The Long-Range Planning Commit­
tee, chaired by Howard Vickery ’70,
was set up to “think ahead” about
m atters the Council should be ad­
dressing. The committee is reviewing
Council activities—past, present, and
potentially future— and preparing a
draft mission statement designed to

set forth the Council’s purpose and
aspirations. This will be followed by a
look at the selection process of Coun­
cil membership.
The Social Outreach Committee,
ch aired by Salem Shuchm an ’84,
works to promote awareness of, pro­
vide support for, and encourage ser­
vice activities by the College commu­
nity. Specific activities include coordi­
nating community outreach, facilitat­
ing the interaction of students and
alumni who are involved in service
activities, and sponsoring presenta­
tions about social action.
As its name implies, the Student
Life Committee concerns itself with
issues that affect student life on cam­
pus and a ttem p ts to keep alumni
informed about them. The committee
sponsors panel discussions at Council
meetings on topics such as multiculturalism, Honors, and social responsi­
bility. Panels are comprised of mem­
bers of the faculty, administration,
and student body. Members of Coun­
cil have an opportunity to provide
their perspective as well. Alan Symonette ’76, president designate of the
Alumni Council, serves as chair of this
committee.
Responsibility for selecting candi­
dates for officers and members of the
Alumni Council and for Alumni Man­
agers of the Board of Managers rests
with th e N om inating C om m ittee,
which is chaired by Adalyn Purdy
Jones ’40 and which meets twice in
the fall.
Th e five o fficers of th e Alumni
Association and the committee chairs
co n stitu te th e Council’s Executive
Committee, which meets during the
summer to map out the coming year’s
activities. As needed at the time of
Council meetings, the committee also
deals with other m atters, including
the selection of an alumna or alumnus
to receive the Shane Award for contri­
butions to the well-being and health of
the College over an extended period
of time.
The Alumni Council welcomes sug­
gestions on ways these committees in
their ongoing efforts can help serve
the College and the alumni body more
effectively.
Gretchen Mann Handwerger ’56
President, Alumni Association
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

DIGEST

Recent Events
New York: On Dec. 10 alumni, par­
ents, and friends gathered to view the
Quaker Tapestry, on display in the
Lower Gallery at the Citicorp Center.
Dinner at La Brochette followed. The
evening was arran ged by Philip
Gilbert ’48.
On the same evening, Swarthmore
young alumni had the chance to par­
ticipate in a Young Alumni Tri-College
(Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, and Haverford) Event. Marissa Tirona ’93 helped
to organize a private show at the
Boston Comedy Club and a late-night
get-together at the Sun Mountain Bar
and Café.
N ote: R ecen tly th e rem ain in g b a l­
an ce from the treasury o f the form er
Swarthm ore Club o f New York was sent
to the C ollege by P en elope Owens Adelmann ’66. These funds are now a part
o f the G eorge B. Ja ckso n ’21 S cholar­
ship Fund, which is a n eed-based schol­
arship with p referen c e given to New
York m etro area students.
P h ilad elp h ia: Dulcim er expert
Ralph Lee Smith ’51 spent a November
Saturday afternoon on campus with
alumni, parents, friends, and students
demonstrating the Appalachian dul­
cim er. Ralph and dulcim er m aker
Bernd Kraus show ed sev eral rare

instruments, discussed the history of
the dulcim er, and entertained the
audience with a variety of songs.
Lorraine Lindhult, a graduate of the
University of Pennsylvania, is forming
a women’s a cappella singing group in
the Philadelphia suburbs and invites
Sw arthm ore alum nae a cap p ella
singers to join. You can call her at
(215) 657-5786.
S eattle: The Seattle Connection
kicked off the new year with a January
get-together at Jazz Alley in downtown
Seattle. The evening of good food and
live music was arranged by Anke VanHilst Gray ’73.
St. Louis: On Dec. 11 Robert DuPlessis, professor of history and mem­
ber of the North Campus Planning
Committee, talked about “The North
Campus...What’s Happening?” Close
to 20 alumni, parents, friends, and
prospective students gathered at the
home of Walter ’52 and Marie Lenfest
Schm itz ’52 to w elcom e P ro fesso r
DuPlessis and get caught up on cam­
pus news.
Washington, D.C.: Harrison Wright,
the Isaac H. Clothier Professor Emeri­
tus of History and International Rela­
tions, met with the Washington, D.C.,
Connection in early February for a dis­
cussion about South Africa today. The
presentation, organized by Chuck ’60
and Susan Willis Ruff ’60, explored lib­
eral and radical approaches to the
country as well as som e dilemmas
that face an independent government.

April Coolfont Weekend
Will Explore Medical Care
Alumni, parents, spouses, and friends
are invited to the fourth annual
Swarthmore Weekend at scenic Coolfont in the foothills of the Blue Ridge
Mountains on the weekend of April
15-17.
Coordinators of the 1994 event are
Barbara Starfield Holtzman, M.D. ’54
and Neil A. (Tony) Holtzman, M.D. ’55,
professors of medicine at Johns Hop­
kins and internationally known
authors. They’ll help lead discussions
of the weekend’s theme: Health Care
Reform: What Should It Accomplish.

FEBRUARY 1994

Swarthmore W eekend has becom e a tradi­
tion at Coolfont—an ideal p lace for con­
templation, recreation, and fellowship.

Garnet Sages: More than 25 Garnet
Sages came to campus for a Novem­
ber luncheon/lecture, “Perspectives
on Health Care R eform ,” given by
David Smith, the Richter Professor
Em eritus of P olitical S cien ce, and
Robinson Hollister, the Joseph Whar­
ton Professor of Economics.
The Garnet Sages gathered at the
Highland Park Club in Lake Wales,
Fla., from Feb. 1 through Feb. 6. A Gar­
net Sage reunion, with all local Sages,
was held Feb. 4.

Upcoming Events
New York is planning a gallery talk
and exh ib it of paintings by A lice
Zinnes ’77 on March 2. Also coming up
for the New York Connection in late
spring: Symposium VIII will be led by
David Wright ’69 and Don Fujihira ’69;
John McIntyre ’51 will lead a tour at
the Newberger Museum of La Frontera—an examination of the Mexican
American experience; and Margaret
Helfand ’69 and her team of architects
will show plans for and discuss the
north campus renovations.
The Paris Connection is planning a
spring panel discussion about interna­
tional organizations.
An informal gathering of students
and parents from the Baltimore area
is in the works for March 5 at the
home of Sidney and Salam Mir, par­
ents of Sarny ’96. Also in the planning
stages is a visit to the Baltimore Muse­
um of Art to see a Matisse exhibit.

Participants also will enjoy live
entertainment and such diversions as
hiking, swimming, bird-watching, and
aerobics. Although last March’s gath­
ering was snowed in by “the blizzard
of the century,” a great time still was
had by all. So we’re confident that the
certain glory of an April weekend will
guarantee a memorable 1994 retreat.
Coolfont is a picturesque resort,
conference center, and health spa
near Berkeley Springs, W.Va. It’s
owned and operated by Sam Ashelman ’37 and his wife, Martha.
For program and reservation infor­
mation, please write or call Alumni
Relations at (610) 328-8402.

29

“Peace Must Begin With Me”
Ted Herman ’35 is developing a p eace studies program in the form er Yugoslavia.
ike trying hold air in the
palm of your hand,
achieving peace in the wartorn form er Yugoslavia
seem s an alm ost im possible
feat. But there are som e who
never stop striving to edu­
cate, com m unicate, and
humanize what is inhumane.
Ted Herman ’35 is one of
those people.
When he retired in 1981
after 26 years as a professor
of geography at Colgate Uni­
versity, Herman took on a
new jo b — education for
peace. And while the task
may b e daunting, Herman
refuses to give in. You sen se
it in his dem eanor and his
body language when he dis­
cu sses the daily tragedies
that occu r in the former
Yugoslavia. His m otto is sim­
ple: “Peace must begin with
me.”
While Herman says he has
always been an activist, he
attributes his interest in the
peace movement to his
becom ing a Quaker in his
senior year at Swarthmore,
the death of fellow Swarth­
m ore student Jo e Selligman
’37 while fighting in Spain
against Franco, and the suf­
fering he saw when he went
to teach at the Shanghai
American School in 1936.
During the Sino-Japanese
War, he was in the antiJapan ese underground, orga­
nized industrial cooperatives
in unoccupied China, and
was eventually interned by
the Japan ese in Shanghai
until exchanged back to the
United States in 1943. In 1970
he helped to start the Peace
Studies program at Colgate,
and in 1981 he organized,
with a colleague, the first
global cou rse on nonviolence
at the Inter-University Center
for Post Graduate Studies in
Dubrovnik.
Herman has been to the
form er Yugoslavia several
tim es, m ost recently in the
fall of 1993 for m ore than six
weeks to help develop a

L

34

“If you can get one soldier to
lay down his gun and tell
another soldier why he has
done it, it’s likely the other guy
may put down his gun too, ”
says Ted Herman ’35.
Balkans P eace Center at the
University of Skopje, Mace­
donia, for which he is now
seeking funds in the United
States. It will include an aca­
dem ic peace studies pro­
gram and a community out­
reach program designed to
give practical training and
research opportunities in
conflict resolution, reconcili­
ation, and nonviolent social
change to faculty members
and students. He is promot­
ing the sam e idea in other
regional cities so that peace
education will spread in the
Balkans with help from mem­
bers of the International
P eace R esearch Association,
UNESCO, and the new Euro­
pean University for Peace in
Schlaining, Austria.
In the United States and
abroad, Herman works as a
consultant to colleges and
universities for this new
interdisciplinary field that
seeks solutions to violence at
all levels of human contact,
w hether betw een individu­
als, groups, or nation-states.
His own specialty is nonvio­
lence training based on per­
sonal transform ation that
uses group activities that
lead participants to do away
with personal barriers and
build trust.

“As a Quaker I believe that
‘there is that of God in every
person’ and that this good
must be recognized and
strengthened through use,”
he says. “For many this is a
powerful spiritual experience
that needs only encourage­
ment to take action for
good.” He shares a personal
letter from Mother Teresa,
born in Skopje, that has
helped him check his own
strong ego with the reminder
to “do what you are doing for
the glory of God.”
“W hat do you think it’s
like,” Herman questions, “to
be a young guy from an ordi­
nary hom e who’s drafted
against his will and who
knows that a lot of guys who
are doing these awful things
are, in fact, prisoners pur­
posely released from jail in
Belgrade and fired up with
brandy and drugs every day?
You try to encourage these
guys who are not happy to
talk, to begin to show som e
d ecency among them selves
and to their enem ies, and
perhaps eventually to lay
down their guns.
“The public needs to
know that opposing individu­
al soldiers and civilians do
many acts of goodness for
each other,” he says. “If the
media covered these acts, it
would encourage others to
becom e involved.
“At the sam e tim e,” he
says, “you try to work on sol­
diers’ families to write letters
asking their sons about what
they’ve seen and done. You
want to generate enough
movement in people so they
will refuse to obey these ter­
rible orders and so that the
men in command realize
they don’t have power.”
Little things mean a lot to
Herman. He carries around a
banner with Gandhi’s picture
on it that states in bold let­
tering: “I ob ject to violence
becau se when it appears to
do good, the good is only
tem porary— the evil it does

is perm anent.” The banner is
alm ost com pletely covered
with signatures of people
who oppose the war. Signa­
tures include the president
of Macedonia, high Roman
Catholic and Serbian Ortho­
dox clergy, a philosophy pro­
fessor at the University of
Sarajevo, as well as Tibetans
and Chinese citizens and stu­
dents from all parts of the
world.
“What I want to do is take
the banner to the United
Nations and get the am bas­
sadors from opposing coun­
tries to sit down and sign it,”
he says with a laugh.
Many people in the Bal­
kans realize they can ’t keep
killing each other, but educa­
tion is necessary. “Peace
does not grow out of the bar­
rel of a gun,” says Herman.
The way Herman educates is
to get people to examine
their own experiences. A typ­
ical conversation challenges
people to confront their own
thoughts and feelings and
then take action, he says.
“T hat’s what I like about
the Media (Pa.) Friends Meet­
ing. They wanted to do som e­
thing about the Balkan situa­
tion,” Herman says. “They
decided to invite three musi­
cians from thé former Yugo­
slavia who now live in this
area to give a concert.
Swarthmore College opened
the Friends Meeting House
for it and they raised more
than $3,000.” Media Friends
gave part of the money to the
children’s ward at the Univer­
sity of Belgrade Hospital and
part to a refugee program in
Slovenia. And while Herman
knows that the money didn’t
do anything to actually stop
the war, what it does say is:
“You and I can do something
for human distress, and that
gives us courage to go on
and do something else. We
grow through our experi­
ences, and they show what
we can do together.”

—Audree Penner
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

A Calling of the Heart
Griff Raymond 182 took a leap o f faith into furniture making.
rom all
the material that is
not necessary for
appearances
it seem ed as if
strength.”
Griff Raymond ’82
He liked the look
so much he car­
had nailed the
ried it through in
trappings of suc­
ce ss with his dual
his other pieces,
including a dining
college degrees
and a promising
room set and a
chest. His sm allest
career in the engi­
tables start at
neering field.
$200, while his
Yet three
largest ones are in
years ago he de­
the $1,000 range.
cided to leave it
When Griff isn’t
all behind and do
working on his
som ething h e’d
line, he does cus­
wanted to do
tom work. Recent­
since he was a
ly the Falmouth
boy: becom e a
Historical Society
furniture maker.
com m issioned
“The tragedy
him to design dis­
is people who
play cabinets for
work in jo b s they
their exhibit of
don’t like and
Cape Cod arti­
becom e experts
Griff Raymond ’82 developed his own style by using
facts.
at som ething
angular cutouts in furniture arms and legs.
“I wanted to
they don’t like,”
develop my own recogniz­
he said.
“It seem ed like I had a sat­
able style but not something
isfying and exciting career,
Griff knows all about tran­
so artsy people wouldn’t
b u t ... I wanted to create
sition. He grew up in an aca­
want it in their hom es,” he
som ething of my own and
dem ic family (his father and
said. “I wanted something
work for myself.”
sister are both d octors) and
that stands the test of time
Griff decided finally to
said he felt an unspoken
and is not a fad. I call it
take a leap of faith. He quit
pressure to follow in their
structuralism becau se it con­
footsteps. After earning a
his jo b and went to work
tains elem ents rem iniscent
with local kitchen cabinet­
degree in biopsychology at
of classical structures in
makers for a year.
Swarthmore, he worked as a
bridges.”
He branched out on his
research assistant at the
His m echanical engineer­
own “b ecau se I was more
Marine Biological Laborato­
ing background is reflected
interested in the artistic end
ry in W oods Hole, Mass.
not only in his designs but in
of furniture,” he said. During
While at MBL he applied to
his technique. He does all of
the winter of 1991 he built a
medical school. During an
his design work on a com ­
large barn shop in the back­
interview at one school, he
puter instead of a drafts­
yard of his W oods Hole
was asked questions about
man’s table.
home. He’s spent the last
his father’s educational
“It’s a useful tool,” he
two years in the well-lighted,
background.
said. “It’s a lot quicker to
airy workshop developing a
“I didn’t have a lot of
change proportions of
design concept.
answ ers,” he said. “It made
things. You can design parts
His sleek, contem poraryme realize I probably wasn’t
and change them before you
style furniture is ch aracter­
that interested in becom ing
actually make a piece.”
ized by angular cutouts in
a doctor.”
A self-described perfec­
the arms and legs. It is
Instead, he went to the
tionist, Griff pays careful
lightweight yet strong.
University of M assachusetts
attention to detail.
Griff said the unusual de­
at Am herst and got a degree
“W hen I make a piece of
sign cam e to him when he
in m echanical engineering.
furniture, I get an incredible
was making his first piece, a
For a time he felt content at
amount of satisfaction,” he
library ladder made of cher­
W oods Hole Oceanographic
said, “especially when som e­
ry and walnut.
Institution, w here he worked
one else is pleased with my
“It’s a style I’ve never
with the group of engineers
creation.”
seen in furniture before,” he
responsible for maintaining
—Johanna Crosby
said. “The cutouts take away
the subm arine Alvin.

F

54

Steindorf in a sunny wedding
in the cloudy Northwest. Mari­
lyn Howarth, husband Law­
rence Livornese, son Law­
rence, and daughter Katie wel­
com ed the latest addition to
the family, Michael Scott
Livornese, on June 12.
Lifestyles: Margaret Gilles­
pie has taken up with the TM
movement. Their aim is to get
5 percent of Boston meditat­
ing with hopes of levitating
City Hall. Jason Greenberg
would rather have the majori­
ty of Bostonians be deluded
into thinking that has hap­
pened (through the m iracles
of psychosurgery).
Career: Andrea Turner has
been appointed special assis­
tant to the chancellor for affir­
mative action and equity at
the U. of W is.-Stevens Point.
She has also been asked to
head the task force on shorter
jo b titles. Pat Holmes is taking
and teaching classes in com ­
puting at UCLA Extension.
Hallie Robbins is becoming
certified in craniosacral thera­
py (?!) in the last year of her
residency in physical medi­
cine and rehabilitation in
Cleveland. She hopes to leave
there soon. Griff Raymond
has won praise in the Woods
Hole, Mass., area by making
fine custom furniture with lots
of holes in it. Andrew Brad­
bury has taken up beekeep­
ing.
Obituary: It is with a great
sen se of loss and frustration
that we must report the death
of Drew Siegel on Sept. 27
after a long struggle with AIDS.
We quote from newspapers
and friends: “Drew was a dedi­
cated political activist, partic­
ularly for gay and lesbian
rights. He was a board mem­
ber of the National Gay & Les­
bian Task Force, as well as a
past director of policy for
Mobilization Against AIDS. He
helped organize the gay com ­
munity’s first March on W ash­
ington and greatly increased
worldwide participation in the
annual International AIDS Can­
dlelight Memorials. Drew died
as he had lived, bravely and
honorably. Drew ch ose his
own death by jumping to the
waters under the Golden Gate
Bridge.” Contributions may be
made in his name to the
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

Recent Books by Alumni
We w elcom e review copies o f
books by alumni. The books
are donated to the Swarthm oreana section o f McCabe
Library after they have been
noted for this column.

Linda W. (Wiles) Davis ’67,
W eed Seeds o f the Great
Plains: A H andbook for Identi­
fication, University P ress of
Kansas, 1993. Illustrated with
m ore than 600 photographs
and drawings, this handbook
provides information about
the seed s of 280 sp ecies of
plants of the Great Plains,
including ones com m only
found in crops, rangeland,
lawns, and along roadsides.

W. (William) D. Ehrhart 7 3 ,
The Distance We Travel,
Adastra Press, 1993. Ehrhart’s central concern of how
to perceive contem porary
events in humane and uni­
versal term s is reflected in
th ese 22 poem s dealing with
topics ranging from war and
death to wife, daughter, and
country.

David Hapgood ’47, Year o f
the Pearl: The Life o f a New
York Repertory Company,
Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. Taking
the reader day by day, step
by step, Hapgood provides
insights into the life and
workings of the Pearl, a small
off-Broadway repertory com ­
pany dedicated to the clas­
sics.

Judy (Branch) Hart ’58,
Love, Judy: Letters o f H ope
and Healing for Women with
Breast Cancer, Conari Press,
gy efficiency consulting busi­
ness. He had his second
daughter in August and is
gaining a greater understand­
ing of the term “terrible tw os”
with his first. Jorge Munoz
planned to finish a Ph.D. at
Stanford last fall and then
work in the W ashington, D.C.,
area. Pauline Price has
moved to Berkeley, w here she
has entered the clinical psy­
chology program at UC56

1993. W ritten as a resource
for breast cancer patients
and their families and
friends, this book is made up
of original letters sharing the
author’s accounts of healing
activities that sustained her
through treatm ent for her
second breast cancer.

Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr. ’53
and Michele Taruffo, Ameri­
can Civil Procedure: An Intro­
duction, Yale University
Press, 1993. This book dis­
cu sses specific details and
broader them es of American
civil litigation, explaining
(without legalese) jury trial,
the adversary system , the
power of the courts to make
law, and the role of civil jus­
tice in government and in the
resolution of controversial
social issues.

Ken Hechler ’35, The Bridge
at Remagen, Pictorial Histo­
ries Publishing Company,
1993. Revised and updated,
this history chronicles the
crossing of the Rhine River in
1945 when U.S. Army troops,
despite Nazi efforts to de­
stroy Remagen Bridge, se­
cured the vitally important
span to help shorten the war
in Europe.

Seth Koven 7 8 and Sonya
Michel (eds.), Mothers o f a
New World: M atemalist Poli­
tics and the Origins o f Welfare
States, Routledge, 1993. In
this collection historians of
Australia, France, Germany,
Great Britain, Sweden, and
the United States provide a
sweeping view of the scop e

Berkeley. She writes that one
advantage of being back in
school is taking free dance
classes at a great studio. Alex
Valsamakis has updated us
on 1992, “the biggest year of
my life so far.” In May she
com pleted an M.D./Ph.D. at
UPenn, got married to Andy
Golden, and moved W est.
Alex is now a pathology resi­
dent at UCSD, and Andy is
doing a postdoc at Caltech in

of women’s work and make
com parisons across soci­
eties and over time.

Molly M. (Miller) Kyle ’80
(ed.), Resistance to Viral Dis­
eases o f Vegetables: Genetics
and Breeding, Tim ber Press,
1993. This book provides a
critical synthesis of informa­
tion on plant viruses from
breeding programs and
genetic studies that inte­
grates developm ents in
m olecular biology and bio­
technology, including the
biology of infection and the
process of its interruption.

Christoph K. Lohmann ’58,
Discovering D ifference: Con­
temporary Essays in American
Culture, Indiana University
Press, 1993. This collection
of essays is the result of a
lecture series that included a
deliberately eclectic mix of
scholars, chosen for their
stimulating lectures rather
than their political alignment
or theoretical orthodoxy.

Richard Martin ’67, Fall from
Fashion, The Aldrich Muse­
um of Contemporary Art,
1993. This catalog was pro­
duced to accom pany the
1993 exhibition at the Aldrich
Museum of Contemporary
Art of works expressing com ­
plex ideas related to fashion:
style, gender identification,
sexual identity, self-image,
and clothing as a vehicle for
social and political com m en­
tary.

Betty Nathan ’50, Top Paddock, Brolga Press, 1993. In
Pasadena. Their com m uter
marriage thrives thanks to
wonderful weekends spent
together. May you have many
more, Alex. Laurie McPher­
son has joined the faculty of
San Mateo High School, where
she teaches physical science.
Lisa Silverman is living in Los
Angeles with Mitchell Hart­
man ’85. She finished her dis­
sertation in French history
through Rutgers U. and is

this novel Will McHugh, a
specialist in conflict resolu­
tion, returns to Australia to
retire peacefully on a farm on
the Southern Tablelands. But
lurking in the top paddock
are death, passion, and jeal­
ousy, waiting for his special
talents.

Robert L. Pfaltzgraff Jr. ’56
and Richard H. Shultz Jr.
(eds.), Naval Forward Pres­

ence and the National Military
Strategy, Naval Institute
Press, 1993. Focusing on mar­
itime power and the future
roles and missions of the U.S.
Navy, this book is the out­
growth of a series of confer­
ences held to assess this
country’s defense needs in
an era of change.

Robert Roper ’68, Cuervo
Tales, Ticknor & Fields, 1993.
T hese 10 interlinked stories,
set in California, chronicle
the life of Abel Richards, a
man who cam e of age in the
late 1960s and witnessed
much of the turmoil of the
next decade: drugs, the
“back to the earth” move­
ment, and experimentation
with love and its permuta­
tions.

Mary Roelofs Stott ’40,
Bluenose Country, The Inter­
national University Press,
1993. Told in blank verse,
this is the tale of any and
every family that piles the
kids in the backseat, in front
of a cam per trailer, to live
out a sum mer together of
loving, playing, tussling, and
growing.

teaching history at USC.
Finally, we have a mystery
location. Kathryn von Frank­
enberg Maneval writes she
passed the CPA exam in No­
vem ber 1992 and is working
toward acquiring the required
experience for becoming
licensed. Congratulations.
That concludes our wild
and wondrous tour. We look
forward to seeing you at
reunion. Until then.
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

FEEDING THE FIRES
Continued from page 7
poetry permits the making of argu­
ments by image and how, at its best, a
poem com m unicates betw een con ­
scious and unconscious thought.
Williamson has found the student
selection process to be straightfor­
ward. “You can tell in 10 lines whether
there is sensitivity and the ability to
control language,” he says. “You know
it when you see it.” In teaching the
workshop, Williamson requires stu­
dents to make use of models, such as
the Anglo-Saxon riddle and the son­
net, which they are asked to imitate.
In this exercise, originality is directed
but it is also left free to generate its
own perceptions.
The best technique for teaching the
writing of p o etry , W illiam -son
believes, is to take a poem you like to
read and use it as a springboard to
move beyond the limits of the confes­
sional/ autobiographical mode. “We
all articulate in one way or another,”
he says. “When a poem works, it is the
only way. It’s the only way to catch
the truth of a particular experience.”
Associate Professor Peter Schmidt
first taught the workshop in 1983 and
finds it to be challenging, immensely
satisfying, and fun. Each workshop

WHY SO FEW?
Continued from page 12
head down and keep working.’
“These women survived in science
because they were so incredibly nuts
about what they were doing that for
them the discrimination they faced
paled in comparison,” McGrayne con­
cludes. “They were willing to put up
with whatever they had to put up with
to do scientific research. Scores and
hundreds of women fell by the wayside because of all these problems,
and these are the survivors.”
But women’s opportunities to win a
Nobel science prize have improved by
now, haven’t they?
“The chances have improved dra­
matically,” McGrayne says. “I’m told
women do better in the science pro­
fessions than they do outside of sci­
ence. They have better salaries, better
hours, and more job flexibility than
FEBRUARY 1994

develops its own dynamic and ethos.
Schmidt characterizes the difficulty of
trying to describe exactly what hap­
pens in the group. “It’s very hard to
talk about,” he says. “The atmosphere
must be honest, because the writers
are very vulnerable. Their egos are
both tough and fragile. But poetry is
an art form that can help students
understand things in their own lives

hen a
poem
works, it is the
only way to
catch the truth
of a particular
experience.”

W

and in the culture generally. Nothing
else can do that like poetry.”
Like Anderson, Schmidt uses a vari­
ety of set assignments to teach the
writers different ways of seeing. An
interior monologue, practice with indi­
rection and multiple voices, and met­
rical exercises are typically assigned,
though Schmidt mixes them up. Metri­
cal work is especially useful, he be­
women working outside of science,
but it’s still not totally equal.”
R esea rch in stitu tio n s have not
com pletely em braced the needs of
women scientists, McGrayne says. By
the time a woman lands an assistant
professorship, she is likely to be in
her late 20s or early 30s. She then has
five or six years to turn out enough
first-rate work to gain tenure. If she
has children, she often must take care
of them while competing against men
who work 60 and more hours a week.
“I think one of the major problems
is that research scien ce is so very
competitive and it moves so fast. If
women take time off to rear children,
it sets them back,” McGrayne says.
“The research system at universities
is set up for men who had wives do
their cleaning and cooking.”
But scientists can no longer count
on having someone at home to deal
with every need while they devote
themselves to science. “Universities

lieves. “It’s a challenge that’s good for
them; it helps the ear and teach es
how to use line breaks and internal as
well as regular rhyme. And it makes
them better at writing free verse.”
In struggling with the challenge of
writing poetry, workshop participants
also learn about tact. “It’s very im­
p o rtan t to be a lert to fe e lin g s,”
Schmidt says. “Students have to learn
you’re not questioning the validity of
the experience [they write about].
The workshop gives them a chance to
get h o n est re a d e rs .” A nderson,
Schmidt, and Williamson concur that
writing poetry makes students better
readers of poetry, able to respond to
literature more intensely. “A positive
workshop experience helps them to
get out of themselves, to be good wit­
nesses to what happens around them,
to take risks,” Schmidt says. “They get
into their own life-material in a new
way. The te a c h e r’s role is to help
them to teach themselves.” Or, in the
case of the exceptionally talented, he
says, “You just stay out of the way. And
feed the fire.” ■
Judith Egan is the author o f a range o f
n o n fictio n a r tic le s a n d o f a n ov el,
Elena: A Love Story of the Russian
Revolution. She is a longtime resident
o f Swarthmore.
have not adapted to that. They’ll have
to, because now there are so many dif­
feren t kinds of people in scie n ce ,
when it used to be only one kind of
person.”
But by and large, the women in
McGrayne’s book did not complain
about hardships. Instead, they spoke
of the joys of doing science.
“The love for and dedication to
o n e’s work seem s to me to be the
basis for happiness,” Gerty Cori said.
“For a research worker, the unforgot­
ten moments ... are those rare ones,
which come after years of plodding
work, when the veil over n atu re’s
s e c re t seem s suddenly to lift and
when what was dark and ch a o tic
appears in a clear and beautiful light
and pattern.” ■
Evelyn Hess is a free-lance writer and
m a n a g er o f co m m u n icatio n s a t the
P hiladelphia chapter o f the American
Institute o f Architects.
61

¡fa

L

E

T

sto rie s, walk th e jo b se a rc h e s . Go to th e
p rison s, s e e th e m inds and b o d ies ju st
sitting th ere. Sp eak to them , listen to
them , h e a r how th e y got th e re . S ee w hat
p rison d o es to a m an o r w om an.
Get dow n to th e p u blic a s s is ta n c e
offices, th e Social S ecu rity cu b icle s. Sit
in on th e d isab ility claim s. Spend tim e
w ith th e overw orked so cia l w orkers. Lis­
ten to th e en d less p h o n e ca lls for help.
L isten to th e shou ting and crying and
cu rsin g in th e backgrou nd — th e raging,
n a rco tic televisio n s.
Sensitivity sp e cia lists? G end er ed u ca­
tion ad visers? A lternative lifestyle facili­
ta to rs? Okay. Now invite in th e on es
w ho ca n talk ab o u t te en a g e pregnancy,
p rem atu re birth , “high lead ,” asth m a,
“young b ru ise s.” Hear th e m o th e rs w ho
talk ab o u t 7- and 8-year old s w ho s e t
fires, p ee out th e window, b e a t up c la ss ­
m ates, and th rea te n fam ily m em b ers.
L isten to m o th e rs w ho talk a b o u t a
w orld th a t looks th e o th e r w ay w hen
th e ir kids a re cau gh t in drive-by s h o o t­
ings. G et to know w hat th e ir altern ativ e
lifestyle m eans for th e future of this
cou ntry.
Talk ab o u t it, w rite ab o u t it. Argue.
T ake w hat you learn, w hat you think
you u n d erstand , and go b a ck down.
D on’t sto p going b a ck down. M eet and
deal w ith an insane, trag ic h o lo ca u st of
in ch es. Do it soon!
MIKE PETRILLA 7 3
U pper D arby, Pa.

Swarthmore Needs
Everyone’s Voices
T o th e Editor:
As a gay alum nus, I am d eeply d istu rbed
at Jo se p h Kim m el’s sta te m e n t th a t
“Sw arth m o re’s indulgent p o licies will
m ake it a haven for gays, lesb ian s, and
vario u s ra c e s and e th n ics th a t se e k th e
pam p ered co lleg e life.” P resu m ab ly he
would like only straig h t w hite p eop le to
b e ad m itted to th e College.
T h at said, I b elieve Mr. Kimmel
brings up a n u m ber of valid issu es. As a
political ce n tris t w ho is em ployed in th e
b u sin ess w orld, I to o am tired of sim plem inded negative ch a ra cteriz a tio n s of
industry. T h e p ositive co n trib u tio n s of
ind u stry lead ers shou ld b e recognized
b y th e College— and hav e b een . O ne of
th e h o n o re es at m y C o m m en cem en t
w as Je ro m e K ohlberg Jr. ’46, w ho is n ot
an y o n e’s idea of a far left-winger.
M any lib erals tend to rid icu le c o n s e r­
62

T

E

R

S

vative beliefs and d ism iss co n serv a tiv es
out of hand w ithout hearing w hat th e y
have to say, and fru stration o r anger is a
natural re sp o n se to su c h treatm en t. But
co n serv a tiv es w ho claim to b e op­
p re ssed for th e ir view s d em o n stra te a
lack of un derstand ing of w hat life is like
for anyon e w ho is tru ly o p p ressed . I
d ou bt v ery m u ch th a t Mr. Kim m el has
ever b ee n assau lted w hile walking down
th e s tre e t for n o t being politically c o r­
rect, as I have for being gay.
It also d o es n o t help co n serv a tiv es
w hen th e y oversim plify issu es, su ch as
w hen Mr. Kim m el te rm s m ulticulturalism “th e d enigration of W estern thought
and literatu re of th e la st 3,000 y e a rs and
th e exaltation of tribal and aboriginal
p ra ctice s in stea d .” T o m y mind, multicu ltu ralism is a b o u t including non-W estern thought, n ot denigrating anything.
But I g uess it is e a sie r to k nock dow n a
straw m an th an to learn new id eas or
serio u sly re-evaluate o n e ’s habitual
m odes of thinking.
It is ironic th a t w hile Mr. Kimmel is
against b o y co ttin g co rp o ra tio n s for
infringem ents of left-wing ca u se s, he
see m s to im plicitly su p p ort alum ni w ho
b o y co tt th e College for infringem ents of
right-wing sen sib ilities. Sw arthm ore
n eed s thoughtful co n serv a tiv e v o ices,
and I would urge th a t Mr. Kim m el and
sim ilarly d isaffected alum ni rem ain
engaged w ith th e College com m unity
and con tin u e to m ake th e ir opinions
heard . I also challeng e all m em b ers of
th e Sw arthm ore com m unity to re sist
th e tem p tatio n to sh u t out dissentin g
opinions. O ne’s own id eas and beliefs
m ay b e stren g th en ed and o n e ’s argu­
m en ts im proved for having b ee n ch a l­
lenged.
KENNETH R. ANDERSON ’86
W heaton, 111.

The College Today
T o th e Editor:
As an alum na, a form er facu lty m em ber,
and facu lty wife, I am s o filled w ith adm i­
ration for y ou r College T od ay issu e th a t
I only w ish I cou ld begin m y undergrad­
u ate y e a rs again. C ongratulations on a
facu lty and ad m inistration unafraid of
q u estio ning and exploring. P lea se c o n ­
tinue to sh a re it all w ith us as you can.
BEATRICE BEACH MacLEOD ’31
Ithaca, N.Y.

The writer serv ed as instructor an d direc­

C ontinued fro m page 3

tor o f dram atics from 1934 until 1946. She
coi
is the widow o f Professor R obert M acLeod,
wa
w ho founded the D epartm ent ofP sycholo- Th
gy at the College.
I as

ab<
T o th e Editor:
! ho
I have co m e to rely on th e Bulletin for a
we
feeling of w h ere th e College is at th e
Sw
m om ent. I am accu sto m e d to reading of
new ideas, w ider horizons, d ed icated
pu rsuits of alumni. T h e D ecem b er issue
told m e non e of th e ab ove. It w as nearly
To
a gen eric D evelopm ent O ffice to o l for
Ar
a ttra ctin g funds and new stu d en ts; not
jo>
m em orable, n ot enlightening, n ot emin 1
pow ering. If this issu e is, as usual, a
42
reflection of th e cu rre n t College, th en
1,0
th e w orld is p o o rer for th e lo ss of a
BT
unique institution.
roi
I ca n only h op e th a t Sw arthm ore is
1,0
still in ta ct and th a t it is only th e alumni
sai
p u blication th a t h as fallen victim to a
! 151
vision of an in tellectu ally and em otional37.
ly challenged read ersh ip . N ever befo re
, co:
h a s th e re b ee n any q u estio n th a t th e
: fee
m agazine, a s well a s th e College, is indethe
pend ent.
BT
JANE DIXON M cCULLAM ’62 , the
Newbury, Ohio 1 81,
T o th e Editor:
Ju s t a n o te to sa y how v ery illuminat­
ing and e n jo y a b le I found th e College
T od ay issu e of th e Bulletin. It gave a flav o r of cam pu s life and p eop le for th o se
of us w ho d o n ’t have m u ch co n n ectio n
to Sw arthm ore th e s e days.
Although I d on ’t think I cou ld afford
to sen d a child to Sw arthm ore, I value
th e ty p e of ed u cation it provides and
realize th a t th e s c a le of giving from
alum ni h a s to in cre a se to keep th e College afloat. W hen I look at th e Alumni
Fund annual rep ort, I am am azed at how
little th e average alum m y age see m s to
b e giving. W e’re in ou r peak earning
y ears, and som eth in g like five o r 10
bu ck s a w eek would hard ly b e noticed.
Keep telling p eop le w hat a good jo b
Sw arthm ore is doing.
ANNE THOMPSON 7 0
G reenbelt, Md.

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na
mi

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sy>

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-pc
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Steam Heat— Ouch!
T o th e Editor:
I en jo y ed th e in terestin g a rticle [Decernb e r 1993] on th e steam -prod ucing part
of th e College. Y ou w ere v ery su b tle
ab o u t announcing th at th e College has
m ad e a stunning b reakth rou gh in th e

SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

Th
cei
rel

n(-

mc

FIGHTING WORDS
C ontinued from page 19
conversion of 2.1 million gallons of
water into 81.3 million pounds of steam.
' This should be front-page science news,
I as 2.1 million gallons of water weighs
about 17 million pounds, which some|how gets transformed into five times its
weight in steam. I knew the folks at
Swarthmore were clever, but Jeez....
EDWIN SEVERINGHAUS ’48
Langley, Wash.
(

To the Editor:
Anumber stumble interrupted my en­
joyment of the nice article “Steam Heat”
in the December Bulletin. I calculate that
42 billion cubic feet of natural gas at
1.000 BTU/cubic foot equals 42 trillion
BTU. This much heat would create
roughly 42 billion pounds of steam (at
1.000 BTU/pound). Since fuel oil use is
said to be 250,000 gallons, this oil (at
! 150,000 BTU/gallon) would yield roughly
37.5 billion BTU. So I believe that the gas
, consumption is actually 42 million cubic
: feet, yielding about 42 billion BTU. Thus
the combined oil- and gas-generated
BTU (79.5 billion) would roughly equal
the heat necessary to create the stated
1 81.3 million pounds of steam.
JEROME T. COE (MIT ’42)
Greenwich, Conn.
Mr. Coe is right. Incorrect figures on natu­
ral gas usage w ere supplied to the Bul­
letin. As for the water, director o f mainte­
nance Ralph Thayer explains that the 2.1
million gallons is “m akeup w ater” that
replaces w ater lost or drained from the
system ov er the course o f a year.

We’re Sorry You Don’t
To the Editor:
1don’t care much for the recent graphic
and editorial changes in the Bulletin,
though it’s not my intention to suggest
that you change back again. I have seen
the same types of change in The New
* York Times and The New Yorker. There’s
; adifferent media-trained generation
that’s now the desirable editorial target.
Iguess I’m a has-been target. But I don’t
i have to like it.
LOUISA. KISLIK’52
Hewlett, N.Y.
The Bulletin w e l c o m e s le t te r s f ro m r e a d e r s c o n ­
cerning t h e c o n t e n t o f th e m a g a z in e o r is s u e s
relating t o th e C o lleg e. A d d r e s s : E d ito r,

more College Bulletin,

Swarth-

5 0 0 C o lle g e A v e., S w a rth ­

more PA 1 9 0 8 1 -1 3 9 7 . L e t te r s m a y b e e d ite d fo r
clarity o r s p a c e .
FEBRUARY 1994

different ways of speaking intersect
with each other—to expand instead of
d etract— so that som e are not less
legitimate than others.”
Although the MOVE tragedy was
not primarily about race, only one
Commission member dissented from
a statement in the final report saying
that official response to the organiza­
tion would have been different “had
the MOVE house and its occupants
been situated in a comparable white
neighborhood.” It said that “the sad
fact exists that racial and other preju­
dices remain in our society.”
“If the MOVE house had been in
Society Hill, it wouldn’t have been tol­
erated to this point,” Wagner-Pacifici
said. “That’s the only place in a long
report where race takes center stage.
It p laced MOVE and a d estro y ed
n eighborh ood in th e co n te x t of a
racist society. The Commission specu­
lated, and it felt this was important.”

W

agner-Pacifici holds both mas­
te r ’s and doctoral degrees in
sociology (see page 19), and much of
the book is written in what she would
agree is “academic discourse.” Casual
readers might be stopped cold by
lines like, “This involves aspects of the
poststructuralist problematization of
a unified, autonomous, self-contained
subject who surveys a world from a
vantage point outside of it.” So who is
her intended audience?
“This may be an experiment,” she
said. “My first book was my doctoral
dissertation. It was very topical and ‘a
grabber’ because it was about terror­
ism, but it was very academic. In this
new book, I wanted to pare down my
language and make it more accessible.
It’s an acad em ic book, with som e
complex and theoretical parts, but a
hybrid. I moved consciously between
academic and vernacular prose.”
In other words, she used two “lan­
guages” to write a book analyzing four
others.
Wagner-Pacifici said she’ll consider
her book a success if it inspires dia­
logue— “a colloquy”—that continues
th e d iscu ssio n of th e issu es sh e
explores. She also hopes its lessons
can help prevent other conflagrations.
The book opens with a reference to

parallels between the MOVE bombing
and the 1992 Los Angeles riots—the
burning of n eig h b o rh o o d s and
“charges of police engaging in both
excessive force and excessive inac­
tion, along with the difficulties of a
black m ayor dealing with a white
p o lice co m m issio n er, along with
issues of misfired judicial encounters.”
But Wagner-Pacifici also is struck
by similarities to last year’s Branch
Davidian catastrophe. “The parallels
with MOVE are eerie,” she said. “For
example, the way the Branch Davidians were characterized by the U.S.
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Fire­
arms and its notion of negotiations;
the narrative expectancy of a televi­
sion audience—an audience set up to
wait for a climax, and the clock tick­
ing. There was a delay in putting out
the MOVE flames, and there were no
fire engines nearby when the fires
started at Waco. Neither [official re­
sp on se] was planned or execu ted
well.”
The tremors from the MOVE saga
co n tin u e to re v e rb e ra te . In v e sti­
gations by state and federal grand
ju r ie s did n ot lead to crim in a l
ch arg es against any city officials.
But among pending civil lawsuits is
one filed against the city of Philadel­
phia by Ram ona A frica, th e only
adult MOVE member to survive the
conflagration.
A federal judge ruled on January 3
th a t th e d e c is io n to bom b th e
h o u se— a d ecisio n M ayor W ilson
Goode had approved— did not justi­
fy a law su it. A cco rd in g to T h e
P h i l a d e l p h i a I n q u ir e r , th e ju d g e
“found the bombing reason able in
light of the goal of destroying the
g u n p o rt-eq u ip p ed b u n k e r.... He
noted that under a ruling of the U.S.
Supreme Court, police are entitled
to use deadly force to prevent injury
to themselves or others.”
But at the sam e time, the judge
opened the way for Africa to sue for­
mer Managing Director Brooks, for­
mer Police Com m issioner Sambor,
and fo rm er F ire C o m m issio n e r
William Richmond. The city’s high­
e s t o ffic ia l at th e tim e — fo rm er
Mayor Goode—was granted immuni­
ty because he was watching the fire
on TV in his office and didn’t partici­
pate in the decision to let the house
burn. Appeals are expected. ■
63

Ten Days
in Moscow
By James Freeman

W

e wake to the staccato sounds
of machine gun fire rattling in
the streets just outside our windows,
to the ominous roar of tanks and the
bursting of shells a half-mile away at
Moscow’s Parliament Building. Is this
the life-altering experience we antici­
pated when we arrived in Moscow
two days ago, or is it simply a life-end­
ing experience?
It is 6:30 a.m., the morning of Octo­
ber 4, 1993. We are 10 members of
Orchestra 2001, Philadelphia’s 20thcentury music ensemble, which has
been invited to give a series of three
concerts in the beautiful Rachmani­
noff Hall of the Moscow Conservato­
ry. With us are Pulitzer Prize-winning
composer George Crumb of the Uni­
versity of Pennsylvania and music
critic Lesley Valdes of The P hilad el­
p h ia Inquirer. The first of our concerts
is scheduled to take place the day
after tomorrow.
We are all staying in the Conserva­
tory’s spartan dormitory-style apart­
ment a block away from the school.
We have three and four people to a
room, no phone, no TV, and only my
short-w ave radio (from w hich we
manage to coerce a static-impaired
BBC newscast) to keep us abreast of
the cataclysm ic events now taking
p lace th re e b lo ck s away in Red
Squ are and eight b lo ck s away at
M oscow ’s “W hite H ou se.” The
absence of our stage manager, Seth
Brenzel ’94, who is visiting his Rus­
sian cousins somewhere on the other
sid e of M oscow , is alarm ing. But
strangely, despite the shelling and
nearly constant gunfire outside, we
do not feel particularly threatened.
That is probably because we were
in much greater danger last night as
we returned at 1 a.m. from a gala
party at the home of a Russian friend.
After several hours of wonderful food,
vodka, much toasting, and an unfor­
gettab le bilingual songfest led by
64

George Crumb and our host’s elderly
Russian grandmother, we had ven­
tured onto the dark streets to return
to our apartment. Suddenly, we were
surrounded by a menacing group of
gun-wielding R ussian hoodlum s
screaming at us “Amerikanski!” Our
Russian grand m other, her arm s
entwined around three of us, shouted
b ack in R ussian, “T h ese are our
friends. Leave us alone!” With hearts
pounding, we were allowed to pro­
ceed. Later we learn that three people
were killed during the night at this
very place.
We are elated when Seth returns
with his cousins at 9 a.m. Despite the
continuing turmoil outside, our great­
est concern now is whether or not we
will be able to present our scheduled
c o n c e rts . Five o th er m em bers of
Orchestra 2001, still in Philadelphia,
are due to board planes for Moscow

American musicians
perform American
music while tanks
rumble in the streets.

in seven hours. We know they must
t
be seeing this mini-revolution unfold
r
on American TV and will understand­
ably be reluctant to come. We realize
s
too that there is not a single piece in
r
our repertoire for the three concerts
a
that can be performed without them.
t
Our host and principal contact at
j,
the Conservatory, musicologist Svetj]
lana Sigida, arrives at our apartment
at 10 a.m. Her determination, energy,
j
vitality, sense of humor, and concern
\
for our well-being are incredible. Chars
acteristically, she has made her way
t
th is m orning through dangerous
1
streets and blockades of all kinds, cars
rying a pot of borscht for us so that
g
we will not go hungry.
fj
At noon five of us brave the blockf]
long walk to the Conservatory. There
(
Svetlana arranges an international
a
phone call to George’s wife, Liz, who
tl
promises to call all our families to tell
them we are safe. Three hours later | a
we place calls to our Orchestra 2001
c
colleagues in Philadelphia. The U.S.
c
State Department is sternly warning
o
Americans not to travel to Russia at
S
this time, and we realize it will be
E
impossible for the five to fly today.
n
Our hearts sink as we realize, too, that
t
our opening all-Crumb concert on the
p
6th cannot take place as scheduled.
\
We huddle with Svetlana and deteri<
mine th at the first co n cert can be
c
delayed until the 8th, with the second
s
and third concerts taking place on the
e
9th and 11th. Our Philadelphia col­
l
leagues make hurried calls to Delta
Airlines, which arranges for them to
1
leave on the 6th— if the situation in
m
Moscow is stable by then.
h
Sporadic gunfire prevents us from
r
sleeping very much during the nights
t;
of the 4th and 5th. But the Parliament
It
Building has been stormed, burned,
and taken, and despite the appalling ) T
death toll that has caused, Moscow
V
thereafter gradually resumes its norv
mal life. We now begin to prepare in ) c
earnest for our concerts. We need the
A
Conservatory’s permission to mark,
A
damp, and pluck the strings on the
ii
insides of the Rachmaninoff Hall’s two
m
beautiful Hamburg Steinways (several
o
pieces on our programs require mutv\
ing, harmonics, and other pianistic
e
extensions). At first the administratl
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tion will not budge: We can­
not touch the insides of the
pianos. Svetlana calls Edi­
son Denisov, one of Russia’s
most respected composers,
and his approval convinces
the authorities to allow our
intrusions into their instru­
ments.
The next problem is find­
ing reh earsal tim e in the
hall, which is in nearly con­
stant use by the Conserva­
tory’s students and faculty.
The woman in ch a rg e of
scheduling is reluctant to
give us the time we need. I
finally fall on my knees in *
front of her, kissing her feet o
(Svetlana says, “Go ahead ^
and try it”), and curiously |
this works.
Our biggest problem is locating
and transporting the mountain of per­
cussion necessary for all three con­
certs. Our percussionist Glenn Steele,
our executive director Allison Herz,
Svetlana, and our always-reliable Seth
Brenzel spend the greater part of the
next two days gathering drums, crotales, chim es, marimbas, and xylo­
phones from d ifferen t co rn e rs of
Moscow, and finally all the percussion
is in place. At the same time, our five
colleagues from Philadelphia arrive
safely, and we throw our arms around
each other. Now we are ready.
Our opening concert, with Crumb’s
Lux A etem a, E leven E ch o es o f Autumn,
1965' and Z eitg eist, goes extrem ely

well. George introduces each piece
himself, and at the end he and we are
recalled to the stage six times by the
typically Russian rhythmic applause.
It’s a good beginning.
The follow ing evening we play
Thea Musgrave’s O rfeo III, Richard
Wernick’s K addish-R equ iem , and two
works by Swarthmore College faculty
com posers: Thom as W hitm an’s
Aubade and Gerald Levinson’s B ron ze
Music. The Wernick R equ iem , written
in 1971 in tribute to the victims of the
war in Indochina, with its tumultuous
opening movement and concluding
whisper of hope for peace, seem s
especially appropriate for Moscow at
this time. For me, the concert is the

A bove: Ja m es Freem an (center) and Orchestra 2001. “For m e the concert is the most
moving w e have ev er given, ’’says Freem an o f the group’s Oct. 9 Moscow perform ance.
O pposite p a ge: The Russian Parliam ent Building under attack by pro-Yeltsin forces.

most moving one we have ever given.
O ctober 10 is our free day, and
Svetlana takes advantage of it by hir­
ing a van and taking us to Novodivichy Convent, where a mass for the
victims of the uprising a few days ear­
lier is in progress. We are stunned by
the beauty of the Russian Orthodox
Church, by a superb a cappella choir,
and by the rapt devotion etched onto
the wrinkled faces of ancient Russian
women as they pray and weep. We
leave the church with tears streaming
down our own faces.
It is October 11, the day of our last
concert in Moscow. Because we are
performing at one of the world’s great
m usic sch o o ls, we begin with two
p ieces by very young A m ericans,
composers the same age as many of
the m em bers of our audience: the
N o n e t of Jam es M atheson ’91 and
James Primosch’s Septet. We also play
Timothy G reatbatch’s A C lo ck w o rk
L e g e n d (its prem iere perform ance)
and Joseph Schwantner’s gorgeous
chamber arrangement of his Distant
Runes a n d Incantations. They provide
a haunting ending to our series, and
we are besieg ed by w ell-w ishers.
Flowers, b o ttles of vodka, dishes,
trays, and mementos of all kinds are

heaped on us in appreciation.
Back at our apartm ent, we cele­
brate with Stolichnaya vodka and
cakes that have been made for us by
our Russian friends. With very little
sleep in between, we are driven in
several cars and vans the next morn­
ing to Moscow’s busy international
airport and climb wearily aboard the
Delta flight home.
As the plane takes off, we are begin­
ning to plan our next trip to Moscow.
The Conservatory, full of enthusiasm
about our three con certs, has just
invited us to return in N ovem ber
1994, and Olym pia R eco rd s has
already begun to plan a series of CDs
we will make on our next trip. Can we
arrange our individual schedules—so
busy and so varied— in such a way
that the next trip can take place? We
agree that we will all do everything we
can to make it possible, for in our
week and a half of living in this huge,
sprawling city of dramatic contrasts,
of great beauty and great chaos, of
great love and great anger, Moscow
has become our second home. ■
Ja m e s F reem an is D aniel Underhill Pro­
fesso r o f Music a t Sw arthm ore C ollege
an d m usical director o f Orchestra 2001.

to the ru1
Crossings Visionary W riters
Boundary Crossing
^ Century
and Thinkers tor th
M H social, and

Swarthmore

Alumni
College
on Campus
June 1,2, 3
Explore either o f th ese
two topics in a unique
three-day sem inar,
h eld p rior to Alumni
W eekend. Housing
a n d m eals are
provided on cam pus.

Complete information
and registration will
be mailed in March.

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