Swarthmore College Alumni Bulletin 1994-05-01

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Dean’s Dean
Disembarks
ollowing a career at

F

the College that
has spanned five

decades, Dean of Admis­
sions Robert A. Barr Jr.
’56 is leaving that posi­
tion at the end of this
academic year. Barr
joined the staff in 1957 to
help formalize the admis­
sions process under Pres­
ident Courtney Smith and
later became dean of
men. Between 1970 and
1977, he worked in the
administrations of
Chatham and Dickinson
colleges, returning to
Swarthmore in 1977 as
admissions dean. At a
reception in Barr’s honor
held May 6, President
Alfred H. Bloom pointed
to some remarkable
statistics about Barr’s
tenure: From 1978 (when
record keeping began)
through the spring of
1994, “he has directed the
processing and review of
45,855 applications and
helped shape entering
classes totaling 5,674 stu­
dents.” After a sabbatical
Barr will return to the
College next year to
undertake special proj­
ects in alumni relations
and development.

SWARTHMORE
COLLEGE BULLETIN • M AY 1994

4 Blood, Ink, and Tears
“Some deaths continue to haunt newsmen throughout their
lives, ” writes Malcolm Browne 52, who in 1964 won a Pulitzer
Prize for his general news coverage in Vietnam while working
for the Associated Press. “For me five o f them stand out. ”

By Malcolm W. Browne ’52

8 Strange Days
The Vietnam War, student movements, assassinations,
psychedelic drugs, political upheavals, the tragic death o f
President Courtney Smith— members o f the Class o f 1969 talk
about the events and ideas that left them changed forever.

By Jeffrey Lott
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

14 The Challenge of Change
Swarthmore s ninth president, Courtney Smith, believed that he
needed to be engaged as a constructive critic o f student
activism. But he knew early in the 1960s that a new— and for
him disturbing— style o f confrontation was emerging.

By Darwin H. Stapleton ’69 and Donna H. Stapleton

20 Something Happened
The founder o f the first U.S. rock magazine, Crawdaddy!, muses
on what made the music o f the late ’60s unique. “Rock albums
were heard as a progression, not just in aesthetic quality but in
a process o f expanding consciousness, growing self-awareness. ”

Associate Vice President
for External Affairs
Barbara Haddad Ryan ’59

By Paul Williams ’69

Cover: Collage by Bob Wood.
Photography by Steven Goldblatt
’67. Artifacts from the collections
of the Friends Historical Library
and of the middle-aged members
of the editorial staff.

72 A Day in the Life
As 1965 began members o f Swarthmore’s Class o f 1969 were
completing their applications to college. American deaths in the
Vietnam War numbered just 356. In Our Back Pages we follow
the class through the next four years o f peace marches, draft
resistance, civil rights movements— and some lighter moments.

P r in t e d in U .S .A o n R e c y c l e d P a p e r

The Sw arthm ore C ollege B ulletin (IS S N
0888-2126), o f w hich this is volum e XCI,
num ber 5, is published in Septem ber,
Decem ber, January, February, May, and
August by Sw arthm ore College, 500 Col­
lege A venue, Sw arthm ore PA 190811397. Telephone (6 1 0 ) 328-8401. E -m ail
jlottl@ cc.sw a rth m ore.ed u . Second class
postage p a id a t Sw arthm ore PA and
additional m a ilin g offices. P erm it No.
0530-620. Postm aster: Send address
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PA 19081-1397.

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24
31
32
40
66

Letters
The College
Alumni Digest
Class Notes
Deaths
Recent Books by Alumni

ita

-L_E T,T

Diversity— or Hypocrisy
and Ignorance?
s history linear? Perhaps it is over the long haul, but as far as it
exists in our individual memories, I don’t think so. Our lives
are like loopy scribbles; they spiral forward, sometimes slowly,
sometimes in a headlong rush. But in our minds we are con­
stantly circling back, gathering thoughts and images, testing feel­
ings against facts, remembering events large and small. We need
our past. We feed it back into our current selves, and it helps us

I

make sense of our lives.
Reunions and anniversaries are good times to make a giant
loop back, to share with old friends the gathering of yesterdays
that define us today. The 25th reunion of the Class of 1969 seemed
to us an especially important moment for such reflection. Their
college years were tumultuous ones, not only for them personally
but for Swarthmore and the nation.
Everyone who lived through those
strange days was affected by them,
but those who came of age then
were especially touched by history.
Our two big projects this spring
have been this issue of the Bulletin
and a new book called A Singular
Time, A Singular Place. The book, to
be published June 1, is about
Swarthmore and what’s known around our office as “The War
Years.” By this we’ve come to mean the classes of the 1940s whose
young adulthood was defined and changed by World War II. The
book is a collection of transcripts from a special Alumni College
and War Years Reunion that was held for them in June 1992. They
spent three days spiraling back a half century, filling a book with
profound observations and tender reminiscences about their gen­
eration and their war. (See page 44 for details about the book.)
This issue of the Bulletin is about another set of war years. It’s
become commonplace to view World War II and the Vietnam War
as very different experiences— usually “the good war” and “the
bad war.” (As if there could be such a thing as a good war.) Yet
having edited this magazine and worked on that book, I am more
struck by the similarities than the differences. Both generations
grew up in times of great conflict and change. What happened to
the kids who went to college in the early 1940s somehow parallels
what happened to those who matriculated in the late 1960s. Their
worlds were turned upside down, at least for a while. They— and
the College— were forever changed by the experience.
—,LL.

PARLOR I
TALK
I

2

for]
not

To the Editor:
not
The misguided members of the
Swarthmore Conservative Union
bee
(SCU) claim that they are opposed
me
to grouping individuals into cateYei
gories such as race and class, but
anc
Vijay Toke ’96 dismisses Rigoberta ■ len
Menchu as a “Marxist-Leninist les- , tra<
bian.” Despite his stated goal of
fad
unity, it appears that Mr. Toke
to i
believes that certain categories of
car
people should be excluded.
pro
The SCU members’ hypocrisy is ^ can
equalled only by their ignorance, i da;
The SCU’s newspaper is called
tun
Common Sense, borrowing from
Hue
Thomas Paine, the leading radical
Nat
of his day. The SCU members
Ma
would do well to rdad Paine’s
Mo
famous pamphlet. Alice Stillman
rep
’96, who professes strong religious
tha
beliefs, may also wish to peruse
giv<
Paine’s The Age o f Reason.
I To!
I favor greater diversity at
Swarthmore, but diversity should
not be confused with hypocrisy
and ignorance.
Col
DAN FEINBERG ’83 to
Oakland, Calif. • To
I Iw<
Conservative Views Not
Bui
Unsafe on Campus
see
To the Editor:
ing]
I think your recent article on the
the
Swarthmore Conservative Union
abc
misses the essential problem with
my
the SCU’s argument that they feel
Yoi
unsafe to voice conservative views
the
on campus. Their indictment of
I
I
our college rests on the assumpYoi
tion that the College is a liberal
ass
bastion. I propose that the College
oth
is much more middle-of-the-road
gan
than anyone (the SCU or the liberac<
als) wants to admit.
to t
The Conservative Union argues
son
that since its members feel the
i vat:
campus is more liberal than they
To
are, the College is inherently leftan;
wing. That’s as ludicrous as my
inte
saying the college is full of rightme;
wing conservatives because I feel
is a
my political views are to the left of
j
the majority of students and faculenc
ty members. Granted, Swarthtre<
more’s student body is probably j plei
more liberal than the American
i tior
public at large, but not trementhe
dously so. If conservatives want to
S W A R TH M O R E COLLEGE BULLETIN

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form a club, fine, but they should
not blame the rest of campus for
not espousing their views.
Though the curriculum has
been expanded a bit, it has by no
means changed on a large scale,
Yes, feminism, deconstructionism,
and multiculturalism are all prevaP lent on this campus, but so are the
| traditional parts of the canon. In
fact, most of these “isms” are used
to get a fresh view on the old
canon. Classes such as English
Professor Peter Schmidt’s Ameri1 can Prose, which compares three
| classic works of American litera­
ture—Moby Dick, Walden, and
Huck Finn— with works by current
Native American authors— Leslie
Marmon Silko, William Least Heat
Moon, and David Seals— better
represent the new developments
than the alarmist descriptions
given by Matthew Schenk, Vijay
1 Toke, and crew.
EUGENE SONN ’95
Swarthmore,Pa.

College Needs Commitment
’83 to Intellectual Diversity
alif. I To the Editor:
i I was mentioned in the February
Bulletin as the signer of a letter
seeking alumni support for “mean­
ingful diversity” on campus. Since
e
there’s been some controversy
n
about this letter, I’d like to clarify
ith
my motives in cooperating with
:el
Young America’s Foundation and
iws
the SCU.
Based on the experience of the
)- , Young America’s Foundation in
assisting conservative students at
ege
other colleges, YAF was willing to
d
gamble that Swarthmore alumni of
eracertain age would be responsive
to our appeals. I hoped that even
les
some alumni who are not conserI vative could support our efforts.
:y , To the extent that Swarthmore is
tan academic institution and an
intellectual community, the most
tmeaningful diversity we can seek
:el
is a diversity of ideas,
t of
As a student, I certainly experi:ulenced a deficiency in this area. I
treasured the opportunity to supy | plement my Swarthmore educaI tion with the resources offered by
the Intercollegiate Studies Insti0
Please turn to page 30

"THE REVOLUTION W ILL NOT BE TELE­
VISE D ,” from a recording by Gil Scott-

Heron, the African American poet/songwriter, took on new meaning for Jason
Dougal ’96 when he heard it in the film
Berkeley in the Sixties, shown to a class
on that decade. “It means you have to
go out and join the protest, You can’t
hope someone else will do something.
You’re not going to see it on TV. You
hâve to be there.”
Students studied the history and
activism of the 1960s in the course The
Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage,
taught by Meta Mendel-Reyes,
assistant professor of political
science, and M arjorie Mur­
phy, associate professor of
history. Th e p ro fes so rs
worked from the premise of
“the promise of the ’60s,” the
idea that individuals and
grass-roots movements make
a difference. “Young people
are part of a tradition of mak­
ing the future better through
activism, even if on a day-today basis it ’s hard to see
change,” says Mendel-Reyes.
Ben Stern ’96 learned of
the promise’s successes and
perversions. “W hile not all
goals during the ’60s w ere
fu lly re a lize d ,” Stern con-;
eludes, “activism did make a
difference. Movements today
have come out of those in the
’60s, particularly, Ï think, the
environmental and gay rights
movements. Just because the
promise of the ’60s was lost,
that doesn’t mean it wasn’t
valid.”
Joanne Weill-Greenberg ’96
noted that the u rgency to
change circum stances has
evolved since the ’60s. “T o­
day, being an activist is more of a com­
munity service type thing,” says WeillG reenberg, w ho is an es co rt fo r
Planned Parenthood in Philadelphia.
“You do it when it’s convenient and fits
your schedule.”
Films, Dougal says, prompted some
of the most interesting discussions.
The class saw Easy Rider, Woodstock,
and Super fly, but the docum entary
Berkeley in the Sixties elicited the most
rewarding conversations.
“After the movie I spent hours talk­
ing with others who were in the class.
Because we have so much homework
here, we wondered how they managed
to do all that protesting and still study.

Did th ey bring th eir books to the
protests? W e w ondered w here that
activism went. What is our generation
about?”
Keelyn Bradley ’95 has taken an
interest in fashions of the decade. He’s
doing research on how hair in the black
community is an indicator of the con­
sciousness of the comm unity. The
class sh ow ed him how the natural
styles of African Americans during the
’60s were an indication of change in cul­
tural aesthetics and a move toward lib­
eration. He also says that the hippies of
the time adopted the fash­
ions of N ative Am ericans
w ith beads, fringes, m oc­
casins, and ankle bracelets.
“Young people were embrac­
ing the Native American cul­
ture as the m ost back-tonature way of living, like they
wanted to be, but they did
not contribute to the move­
ment for N ative Am erican
rights,” says Bradley.
Many of the leaders of the
’60s are now only historical
images to these students,
m ost of whom w ere born
between 1972 and 1976. Dou­
gal is fascinated by Malcolm
X: “He was willing to give up
his life for something greater.
He knew he would be assas­
sinated, but that didn’t stop
him. I try to imagine that self­
lessness.” Weill-Greenberg
says she would have liked to
m eet ea rly Southern civ il
rights leaders “I would want
to know how they were able
to w ork fo r change when
their lives were threatened.
Today it’s safer,” she says.
Bradley, the current presi­
dent of the Swarthmore AfroAmerican Student Society, has been
able to go one step further. He has spo­
ken to some of the most recognized
black leaders of the ’60s, including
political activist Stokely Carmichael,
educator Toni Cade Bambara, and poet
Nikki Giovanni, who is expected to
speak on campus in the fall. Bradley is
cu rren tly in con tact with p olitical
activist Angela Davis to arrange a cam­
pus visit. “It’s important to pay homage
to those dead and alive who were the
spirit of the ’60s,” says Bradley. “But
it’s also important to interrogate them
and develop a learned perspective of
your own by listening.”
— Audree Penner

Blood
Ink.
and
Tears

A Pulitzer Prize-w inning
war correspondent recalls
days o f death in Vietnam.

By Malcolm W. Browne ’52
don’t think many journalists take
pleasure from human suffering,
but since this is a personal chron­
icle, I h a ve to adm it to having
sometimes profited from others’ pain.
It wasn’t intentional, but that doesn't
help. Journalists inadvertently influ­
ence events they cover, and although
th e e ffe c ts a re so m e tim e s fo r the
good, they can also be tragic. Either
way, when death is the outcome, psy­
chic scars remain.
After a while the flood of death the
average newsman witnesses begins to
numb the senses and feelings. But
some deaths continue to haunt news­
men throughout their lives, and for
me five of them stand out. One of my
ghosts was an aged Buddhist monk.
The other four were simple merchants
who faced a firing squad for trying to
profit from war. Many people, includ­
ing journalists, profit from war; but
some are unlucky enough to pay with
their lives.
History treated the five deaths I’m
speaking of in very different ways. The
sp ecta cu lar self-im m olation of the
B u d d h ist m onk m ad e h e a d lin es ,
helped to bring down a government,
ch an ged th e c o u rse o f a w ar, and
found a place in history books. The
deaths o f the four m erchants, w ho
died as victims of an anti-black mar­
ket ca m p a ign (th a t w as g e n e ra lly
applauded by the press), w ere mere
footnotes in a day of news. They were
forgotten by most people before the
blood was dry, but I haven’t forgotten
them.
In the summer of 1963, Saigon was
in turmoil, and events w ere m oving
tow a rd a crisis that w ou ld change

I

both the United States and Vietnam
(not to mention my personal life). The
picturesque rush-hour crowds began
to include clusters of angry monks,
conspicuous in th eir saffron robes
and c a rry in g fla g s and b a n n ers
instead of their begging bowls.
D esp ite w h at P re s id e n t John F.
Kennedy and his advisers w ere say­
ing, the war against the Viet Cong that
summer was going badly, and far from
“ w in n in g h earts and m in d s ,” th e
Am erican w ar effort was alienating
growing numbers of Vietnamese. An
occupying army is never popular, and
by 1963 Am erican m ilitary men and
civilian advisers w ith plentiful sup­
plies of the dollars sought by local bar
girls were becoming ubiquitous. Mid­
dle-class Vietnamese, including many
who had initially welcomed the co van
my— the American advisers— began to
feel as Britons had during World War
II: that the Americans were “overpaid,
oversexed, and over here.”
Many Vietnam ese held President
N go Dinh Diem respon sible for the
Am erican invasion, and his popular
support, such as it was, eroded.
Diem, like President Kennedy, was
a Catholic and the scion of a large and
influential family. Shrewdly, the lead­
ers of South Vietnam’s normally easy­
going Buddhist community (as well as
the V iet Cong) spotted a chance to
exploit the unpopular American con­
nection— including its Catholic associ­
ations— as a chink in the Ngo govern­
ment’s armor.
The crisis came because of a flag.
On May 8, the ceremonial birthday
of the Buddha, marchers in the cen­
tral Vietnam ese city of Hue tried to
display the five-colored Buddhist flag
in defiance of a governm ent order.

C en tral V ietn a m w as ru led as a
satrapy by one of President Diem’s
brothers, Ngo Dinh Can— an authori­
tarian Catholic hated by Buddhists,
human rights activists, and a lot of
other people, and he cracked down
hard.
W hen the Hue m archers took to
the streets with their Buddhist flags,
police and troops attacked, and eight
of the demonstrators were killed and
severed dozen injured. Overnight the
w o rd of th e B uddhist m artyrdom
spread b y w ord of mouth, and the
revolt soon reached Saigon.
The significance of that summer’s
events is still hotly debated, especial­
ly by present or former American offi­
cials, journalists, and m ilitary men.
Some of these people were mere chil­
dren in 1963, but so enduring are the
issues brought to a head that summer
that later generations have debated
them as veh em en tly as if they had
actually been in Vietnam in 1963.
S W A R TH M O R E COLLEGE BULLETIN

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Malcolm Browne 52 took this famous
photograph on June 11, 1963. He was the
only Western reporter to witness the
suicide of Buddhist monk Thick Quang
Due, an event that helped bring down the
government ofNgo Dinh Diem.
four main pagodas I was w atchin g
came to trust me, although I made no
pretense of sharing their religious or
political beliefs. It was this trust that
made me the sole foreign journalist to
w itness a fie ry su icide that w ould
shock the world.
s I made the rounds of the pago­
das, I picked up a lot of interest­
ing news, as w ell as som e delicious
v e g e ta r ia n m eals s e r v e d to th e
monks. Despite the growing tension
in th e stre e ts , th e tem p le s th em ­
selves, esp ecia lly the Xa-Loi head­
quarters pagoda, were restful places;
the monotonous chanting, the chim­
ing of brass prayer gongs, the odor of
burning joss, and the stifling tropical
heat could reduce even a visitor to an
unwilling trance. In the early stages of
the uprising, Buddhist demonstrators
had gathered by stealth, arriving at
dem onstration sites from separate
directions in buses, cyclos (tricycle
p edicab s), and blue-and-cream Re­
nault “ Quatre Chevaux” taxis. Th e
police w ere nearly always taken by
surprise by such exercises, but even­
tually they ceased to care, convinced
that the demonstrations were having
no impact on the general populace.
Foreign newsmen lost interest com ­
pletely.
I was an exception, convinced that
the monks w ou ld even tu ally make
good their suicide threat. And when
Thich Due Nghiep telephoned a few
dozen foreign correspondents on the
night of June 10 to say there would be
an important event at a small pagoda
the follow ing morning, I alone took
him at his word.
M y Vietnam ese colleague Ha Van
Tran and I set out b efore dawn on
June 11, but despite our early start,
the pagoda was already packed with
yellow-robed monks and gray-robed
Buddhist nuns. One of the latter has­
tened to serve us tea, tears streaming
down her face. The spokesman, Thich
Due Nghiep, spotted us and scurried
o v er to w hisper a w arning that w e
sh o u ld b y no m eans le a v e until
events had run their course.

A

I
s a
m’s
orists,
t of
•wn

As an o v e r w o r k e d 32 -year-old
bureau chief of the Associated Press, I
regarded the Buddhist uprising merel y as an important story, not a cause,
j Wire services do not tolerate agenda
journalism , and I w h o le h e a r te d ly
embraced the depersonalized, factual
: to | approach of wire service news coverigs,
age.
ght
The 1963 Buddhist story was mostind
l y my personal beat, because I had
the
already lived in Vietnam for a couple
om | of years and I knew something of the
the
country’s s o ciety and politics. M y
own feel for Vietnam led me to believe
sr’s j

horror show w as
at hand, and the
sweat started from
my brow as I cocked
my camera.

Dffien.
hilthe
ner
ted
lad

ETIN

A
may

1994

th at th e B u d dh ist r e v o lt w o u ld
become a national revolution. But this
feeling was not shared by other for­
eign newsmen at the time, so I was on
my own when I interviewed monks at
the pagodas w here the fom ent cen­
tered. Many of the monks were barely
literate sons of farming families who
had spent th eir en tire lives in the
cloistered pagodas, chanting, meditat­
ing, and p e rfo rm in g such ro u tin e
ecclesiastical chores as begging for
rice. But other monks had come to the
p a g o d a s as a du lts a fte r le a v in g
ca reers in business or the p ro fe s ­
sions, and these holy men were politi­
c a lly s o p h is tic a te d , d e s p ite th e ir
shaved heads and show of piety.
A fair number of the latter group
had been educated abroad. An activist
monk named Thich Quang Lien, for
instance, w ho was particularly dis­
tru sted b y A m erican officia ls, had
been a student at Yale.
In time som e of the monks at the

5

Ip

A s th e y step p e d
away from him, I saw
T h ic h Q uang Due
strike a m atch in his
lap and le t it fall.
In sta n tly, he was
enveloped in a column
o f sm ok y, y e llo w
flam e. As the breeze
w h ip p e d th e flam es
from his face I could
see that although his
eyes w ere closed his
features w ere contort­
ed w ith a go n y. But
throughout his ordeal,
he n e v e r u tte re d a
sound or changed his
position, even as the
smell of burning flesh
filled the air. A horri­
fied m oan ro se from
th e c r o w d , and the
ra g g e d ch a n tin g of
so m e o f th e monks
w as in te rru p te d by
scream s and cries of
anguish. T w o monks
unfurled a large cloth
ban n er re a d in g (in
The AP office in Saigon, 1963. Left to right
are photographer Horst Faas, reporters
Peter Arnett and Don Huth, and Malcolm
Browne ’52. Faas, Arnett, and Browne each
won Pulitzer Prizes in the next few years.
The air in the little temple was suf­
fo c a tin g ly h ot and th ick w ith joss
sm ok e, but th e a tm o s p h e re w as
charged with tension. The monks and
nuns seemed to be pouring their souls
into the chanting— a steady, monoton­
ic drone whose cadence quickened a
little every few repetitions. A half hour
passed, and then, at a signal from the
leaders, the entire assembly fell silent
and m oved into the street to form a
colum n of m archers. A t th eir head
was an old Austin sedan occupied by
five monks.
As w e walked along, a white police
jeep approached, not to interfere but
to lead the way and clear traffic ahead
of the m archers; so b o red had the
govern m en t b e co m e that Buddhist
marches and gatherings at that point
were treated as a traffic nuisance.
But when w e reached the intersec­
tion of tw o main streets, Phan Dinh
Phung and Le Van Duyet, the car and
marchers halted and form ed a circle
6

blocking all approaches. Three monks
emerged from the car, one of them old
and feeble, the other two, both young,
helping to support him as he walked
to the center of the intersection. A
horror show was at hand, I realized,
and the sweat started from my brow
as I cocked my camera.
he tw o y o u n g m onks p la c e d a
square cushion on the pavement
and helped the old man, Thich Quang
Due, to settle himself in the lotus posi­
tion. The two assisting monks lugged
a large plastic gasoline can from the
car, and then, rather hastily, th ey
sloshed the pink fluid over the seated
monk, soaking his face, body, robes,
and cushion.

T

hen Ky cracked
I f the whip, he
wanted the world
to know. Som e
horrifying photos
recorded the results.

English):

a

b u d d h is t

p r ie s t

bu rns

fo r

B U D D H IST D EM A N D S.

As the minutes passed, police vehi­
cles con verged on the awful scene
and a fire truck pulled up to extin­
guish the pyre. But to prevent it from
intervening, several monks prostrat­
ed themselves under its wheels and
hung on, while the driver vainly blast­
ed his horn to get them to move.
Numb with shock, I shot roll after
roll of film, focusing and adjusting
exposures mechanically and uncon­
sciously, almost as an athlete chews
gum to relieve stress. Trying hard not
to perceive what I was witnessing, I
found m yself thinking: “T h e sun is
bright and the subject is self-illumi­
nated, so f 16 at 125th of a second
should be right.” But I couldn’t close
out the smell. After about 10 minutes,
the flames subsided and Thich Quang
Due pitched over, tw itched convul­
sively, and was still.
Concealed up to that moment, a
w o o d e n c o ffin m a te r ia liz e d from
som ew here and the monks tried to
jam the body into it. But Thich Quang
Due’s limbs had been roasted to rigid­
ity, and he could not be bent enough
to fit in the casket. As the procession
S W A R TH M O R E COLLEGE BULLETIN

moved off toward Xa-Loi Pagoda, his
blackened arms protruded from the
coffin, one of them still smoking.
A lot of things happened after that.
My photographs w ere published all
over th e w o rld , and the B uddhist
leaders displayed them to goad the
Vietnamese masses to revolt. Even
today in comm unist Saigon, one of
my photographs remains affixed to
the car that carried Thich Quang Due
to his death— a car now revered as a
sacred relic.
Henry Cabot Lodge, who had just
been nam ed U.S. a m b a s sa d o r to
Saigon, w as in W a sh in gton at the
time. When Lodge went to the Oval
Office for his instructions, he told me
later, he saw one of my immolation
pictures on P r e s id e n t K e n n e d y ’ s
desk. “W e ’re g o in g to h a ve to do
something about that regim e,” JFK
remarked.
Th e sum m er becam e ev er m ore
violent; hundreds w ere arrested and
some w e re killed. Finally, at JFK’s
command, American officials signaled
to leaders of the South Vietnam ese
armed forces that a coup against the
Ngo fam ily w ould be acceptable to
Washington.
On N o v e m b e r 1 Diem w as du ly
overthrown and slain, and an era of
military rule began in South Vietnam,
which, aside from a brief interval of
civilian adm inistration, ended only
when Hanoi’s tanks smashed through
the gate ou tside Saigon’s Doc Lap
Palace on May 1,1975.
A few months after Thich Quang
Due’s death I was called to The Hague
to r e c e iv e th e 1963 W o r ld P re ss
Photo Award from Prince Bernhard,
and the fo llo w in g year, I shared a
Pulitzer P rize (w ith D avid Halberstam), not for my photograph but for
general news co vera ge of Vietnam.
Partly on the strength of that prize, I
began g e ttin g so m e te m p tin g jo b
offers, and I accepted the one from
ABC-TV. A book I wrote about the war
was selling briskly, and m y career
bloomed.
So I can hardly deny having profit­
ed from the horrible death of a harm­
less old monk. But I have sorrow ed
these many years for Thich Quang
Due, as w e ll as o th e rs fo r w h o s e
deaths I may bear some responsibili­
ty, including four Chinese war profi­
teers.
MAY 1994

hroughout the Vietnam War, one
of the themes on which news agen­
c ie s and r e p o r te r s c o n tin u o u s ly
harped was the pervasive corruption
o f the Saigon govern m en t and the
black market it tolerated. Many of us
b elieved that no governm ent could
“win the hearts and minds” of a peo­
p le if th e p e o p le w e r e c o n s ta n tly
gouged by racketeers, profiteers, and
shakedowns.
Stung by such reporting, Air Vice
Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky, the officer
who seized power as the nation’s pre­
mier in 1965, decided to crack down
on profiteering by Saigon business­
men. Ky was not a man known for
restraint; an avowed admirer of Hitler,
the flamboyant pilot quickly drifted
into the role of a despot. W hen he
c ra ck ed th e w h ip , he w a n ted th e
world to know what he had done, and
some horrifying photographs record­
ed the results.
One o f th es e p ic tu re s w as o f a
street-corner execution carried out in
1968 by Ky’s police chief and interior
minister, Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Loan.
When an alleged Viet Cong prisoner
was led up to him, he simply drew his
revolver and blew the man’s brains
out. Th e A P ’s Eddy Adam s was on
hand, and his p h o to g ra p h o f th e

T

atrocity won him a Pulitzer Prize.
But long before that incident, Ky
had closed down all the Vietnameselanguage new spapers and issued a
series of harsh decrees that mandated
the death penalty for anyone convict­
ed of war profiteering.
Convictions were not slow in com­
ing, and soldiers quickly erected sand­
bag walls and w ooden stakes on the
National Railw ay Building sidew alk
facing Saigon’s main market square. A
few nights after the stakes went up, I
was roused from my bed to observe
their use.
It was about three in the morning
when I arrived, and although the night
w as a lm o st sp en t, th e m u ggy air
seemed as oppressive as it had at sun­
set. In the darkness the four stakes
w e re b rig h tly ligh ted b y the head­
lights of several jeeps parked in front
of them. The glare of the execution
site contrasted starkly with the sub­
dued and peaceful kerosene lamps
m arking hu ndreds of little m arket
stalls. People were up early, but not to
sell food.
On one side of the stakes, a fire
truck stood parked, and on the other,
four w ood en coffins w ere lined up.
Behind a cordon facing this tableau
Please turn to page 70

Another image that drove home the violence in Vietnam is Eddy Adams’ photo of Gen.
Nguyen Loan executing a suspected Viet Cong guerrilla on a Saigon street, Feb. 1, 1968.
7

The Class o f 1969 looks back on its
happy, sad, scary, beautiful time o f change.
By Jeffrey Lott

ic drugs, the debates over parietals
hey came from the four corners
and the College’s “sex rule,” the for­
and scattered to the four winds,
passing eight semesters togeth­ mation of the Swarthmore Afro-Ameri­
can Students Society (SASS) and the
er in a crucible of events and ideas,
emerging “educated,” changed forev­ crisis of January 1969— the SASS occu­
pation of the Admissions Office, the
er by their experience. It might be the
story of any Swarthmore class, of any demands, the shocking death of Presi­
dent Courtney Smith.
class at any college, but for the Class
But history isn’t the same as mem­
of 1969 the metamorphosis was more
than personal. The College was chang­ ory, and m em ory is a curious thing.
The late ’60s were strange days, days
ing to o . T h e w h o le c o u n try w as
out o f a n oth er life. R em em b erin g
changing.
The key events of the era are part them now, 25 years later, is like trying
of America’s and Swarthmore’s histo­ to drink water with your hands. You
can’t hold onto it, except maybe a few
ry: th e V ietn a m W ar, th e stu den t
sips, but your hands get wet, and as
m ovem ents, the assassinations and
political upheavals of 1968, psychedel­ the water evaporates you feel some­

T

thing. The interviews on these pages
aren’t so much about water as they
are about evaporation, about what
was— and is— felt.
Thanks go to Darwin Stapleton,
Michael Schudson, and class secre­
tary Susan Tripp Snider, who helped
me select the interview ees. I asked
them to suggest a cross section of
classmates, not just those who were
highly visib le at the tim e (though I
talked w ith som e o f th ose to o ). In
doing these interviews, I found that
the experience of the ’60s wasn’t just
the experience of hippies or student
activists. It was e v e ry o n e ’s happy,
sad, scary, beautiful time of change.

The Unspoken
Became Spoken
David Hilgers
Joan Glass Hilgers
ou h ave to get a pictu re of me
c o m in g to S w a r th m o r e ,” says
Austin lawyer David Hilgers in his soft
Texas drawl. “I was right off the farm. I
had never seen anyone like these fel­
lows in my whole life.” He had arrived
early from Texas for preseason foot­
ball and he was in shock.
“ Our big fam ily trip had been to
Colorado, and here w ere these sophis­
ticated New York guys who had gone
to Exeter and Andover. I had a very
difficult time the first year and nearly
transferred to the University of Texas.
I think the fraternity is what saved me.
I was able to fit in at DU and at least
feel a bit comfortable.”
David’s wife-to-be, Joan Glass, felt
little of this freshm an d is co m fo rt.
C om in g fro m a p r iv a te s c h o o l in
Southern C alifornia, she liked her

Y

Joan Glass Hilgers and David Hilgers in their 1965 Cygnet photos and today.
ro o m m a te, e n jo y e d h er cla ss es ,
played sports, settled in happily. “I
really enjoyed it,” she smiles.
But w here you started in the ’60s
wasn’t necessarily w here you ended
up. “By the tim e I graduated,” says

David of his own metamorphosis, “my
circle of friends had expanded expo­
nentially. My affiliations had changed
dramatically. I started out with frater­
nity friends as my only support and
en ded up w ith a much w id er specS W A R TH M O R E COLLEGE BULLETIN

trum of friends with diverse political
and social views.”
Joan says she ch an ged too, but
“probably not as much as I wanted to.
I grew up some and learned a lot from
friends about different approaches to
life. It was incredibly broadening.”
Both David and Joan saw a big gen­
eration gap, but not the ordinary gulf
between th em selves and their par­
ents. Rather it was the abrupt change
in the lives of young people between
1967 and 1969. Joan’s boyfriend grad­
uated in 1967, and she says “it became
almost im possible to explain to him
how much things changed those last
two years. Our whole world view had
shifted.”
The College shifted too, almost off
its gray stone foundations. “When we
came to Swarthmore,” recalls David,
“drinking was to ta lly forb id d en on
campus. W om en cou ld be in y ou r
dorm fo r tw o hou rs on S atu rday
evenings, w ith the d o o r op en and
everyone’s feet on the floor. By the
time we left, people were living togeth­
er in the dorms. N obody enforced the
rules. Drinking was ignored and the
drug revolution hit. And w e had ma­
tured politically with the assassina­
tions of 1968, the Chicago convention,
the Nixon-Humphrey-Wallace election,
and of co u rse th e black stu d en ts’
takeover of the Admissions Office.”
“It was as if blacks w ere invisible
the first two years,” adds Joan, who is
a fifth grade teacher in a poor innercity Austin public school. “But then
the things that had been unspoken
became spoken.
“The ’ 60s taught us to qu estion
authority. It was a big revelation that
the grown-up establishm ent did n ’t
quite know what it was doing. And to
this day when som eone in authority
says something, som eone from our
generation is lik ely to say, ‘W ait a
minute. L et’s take a second look at
this.’”
“But now,” says David, “w e’re total­
ly cynical. W e thought w e had a lot of
power, but when Johnson quit w e got
Nixon. I don’t call that radical reform.
Afterward w e had W atergate. N ow
you get Whitewater and w e’re looking
for the flaw in every person.”
Joan disagrees. She’s m ore posi­
tive: “T h e r e ’s this thread of social
responsibility from Swarthmore that’s
probably not even unique to the ’60s,
and it says that w e ow e som ething
MAY 1994

back to the community. The College
encouraged that in me and I value it
very much.”
David allows this and adds, “Our
gen eration has felt im portan t ev er
since. W e felt different, more thought­
ful, more enlightened, and w e believed
w e had struggled harder. It had an
ennobling impact on our self-esteem
as a g en e ra tio n , and r ig h tfu lly o r
wrongfully, it made us feel special.”

Fire

andFaith

Marilyn Allman Maye
he was the Calhoun S c h o o l’s
1965 v a le d ic to r ia n , and sh e
walked off the stage with an armful
of awards. But afterward, when all
the hugs and congratulations w ere
finished, she and her family got on
the subway and went home to Har­
lem. The next tim e she saw those
girls was at their 20th reunion.
Marilyn Allman M aye struggles
w ith b itte rn e s s to th is day. N o t
toward anyone in particular. The girls
at Calhoun had been nice enough, and
the young black woman had bought
into the idea of the m elting pot, of
“one nation, indivisible.” But som e­
how the choices available to her were
not the same as for her classmates.
After six years on scholarship at the
exclusive N ew Y ork private school,
her only real friends w ere in her fami­
ly, her church, and her community.
She d e cid ed on Sw arthm ore b e­
cause she thought its Quaker heritage
might be a saving grace, but even that
turned out to be disappointing. “The
Quakers had this great abolitionist tra­
dition and a reputation for fairness,
morality, unpretentiousness, for being
liberal— almost radical,” says Maye.
“But m y experien ce of Swarthm ore
was that the Quakers w eren ’t much
different from the status quo. Th ey
didn’t seem to have that abolitionist
fervor anymore.”
As a committed Christian who had
gone to a predominantly Jewish high
sch ool, M aye says she “ could g ive
anyone a run for their money in a reli­
giou s d iscu ssion , but p o litic a lly I
hadn’t a clue.” Her political awaken­
ing at Swarthmore came swiftly— not
in her classes but through an aware­
ness of class.
“Th e w ork fo rc e on campus was
alm ost all A frican A m erican ,” says

S

M a ye. “ M any w e r e m id d le-a ge d ,
overqualified for their jobs, people of
substance in their community. But at
Swarthmore they w ere called by their
first names, and every one of them
was su pervised b y a w hite. A t the
same time, there were no black facul­
ty members. W e were being prepared
in this very elite style and we had no
ro le m odels for w hat w e m ight be
when w e got out. When I first arrived
on campus, the lady who deemed the
dorm was the person I felt closest to,
yet she had no standing at the Col­
lege. N o b o d y knew anything about
her other than her first name.
“Then, one by one, w e found out
from our room m ates that they had
been asked how they felt about hav­
ing a room m ate of color. It was al­
most like a plantation. There was this
paternalistic overtone. It was subtle
and calm, very benign and polite.
“The formation of the Swarthmore
A fro -A m e ric a n Stu d ents S o c ie ty
(SASS) in late 1966 really caused an
uproar. The whites felt that there was
no problem and questioned w hy we
needed an organization of our own.
W e re w e b e in g s e p a ra tis t? T h e y
didn’t understand it at all, and really,
w e didn’t fully either. W e w ere just
livin g it— the isolation w e felt was
9

very intense, and the support we gave
one another was essential. W e just did
what we had to do.”
After Swarthmore, Maye earned an
M.A.T. from Harvard and an M.A. in
mathematical statistics from Colum­
bia. She taught math for 16 years, first
in New York City public schools and
then at the C ity U n iversity of N ew
York. In the mid-1980s she quit teach­
ing and recycled herself as a comput­
er specialist. Today she’s an assistant
comm issioner of computer and data
communication for New York City, a
position she considers to be hard up
against the glass ceiling.
Maye sharply questions the notion
that ed u cation and hard w ork can
transcend race and class in America:
“I went to an elite independent school,
an elite co llege, and elite graduate
schools. But I came out in substantial­
ly the sam e social class in w hich I
started. You go in rich and dumb and
can com e out rich and dumb— or you
go in poor and brilliant and can come
out p retty much the same. Th e de­
grees alone don’t guarantee access to
higher social classes.
“That’s been a rude awakening but
a liberating one too. All this talk about
the angry black m iddle class— well,
that’s one side of me. There’s another
sid e that c h o o s e s to retain clo se,
active ties to the community in which
I grew up. In my career, I’m the person
who made it to the glass ceiling and
wonders what happened. The people I
went to school with, the people who
got low er grades than I, th ey’re five
rungs ahead. W hat did th ey know?
You don’t get your first job on the fast
track through qualifications and de­
grees and documents. It’s how you are
id en tified and w h o you know. Y ou
take m ore risks and ex ercise m ore
option s w hen th e re ’s m oney in the
bank, in h erited assets, or a fam ily
business to fall back on in slow times.
Sometimes this realization is very diffi­
cult to deal with. Sometimes it moti­
vates me to defy the odds.”
Is she still an angry black radical
from the ’60s? “No,” says Maye with a
laugh, “that’s not how I see myself.”
She says her strong faith in God, the
support of her family, and her basic
lo v e for p e o p le m itigate the b itter­
ness. “My faith gives me the optimism
I need to keep struggling for justice.
You can’t make it any other way.”
10

to
sc

Still Some
Things to Do

sh
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Lindsay Richards
indsay Richards was something of
an oddity at Swarthmore; she was
from the Deep South. For her, getting
to Swarthmore “was like landing at an
oasis in the d esert— to be w ith all
those other young people who were
all bright and less conventional. It
was very exciting and liberating, and
for the first few months I felt younger
than I had felt before. People would
take off their shoes and walk on the
grass and swing on the swing. Where I
was from you w ore nylons and white
gloves and you kept your shoes on.”
Her liberation wasn’t merely social,
either. Richards had learned in Au­
burn, Ala., that being an intellectual
“makes you sort of a misfit in a small­
town culture.” Though her parents
w ere against segregation and she had
been involved in some small but sig­
nificant interracial projects during
high school, college was still a pretty
heady experience.
She recalls a revelation she had
while researching a sociology paper
freshman year: “I learned that most
poor people don’t participate in the
dem ocratic process. It so upset my
image of American dem ocracy that I
stayed in the library for days trying to
find out more about it. It sounds so
innocent now, given how jaded w e
became in the next few years.”
Liberation led to alienation, both
fro m h er p a ren ts and from “ th e
track.” On her visits home, she would
have screaming fights with her moth­
er over the Vietnam War. (Her mother
had m arched at Selma with Martin
Luther King but had an enorm ous
allegiance to President Johnson and
his war.) “Our arguments were really
so m eth in g,” says Richards, “ and I
would usually leave early. There was
a lot of distance between me and my
family.”
After graduation, Richards also put
som e distance between herself and
Swarthmore. “I felt out of the system,
against the establishm ent, m ostly
because of the war. I couldn’t identify
with the people who ran things, with
the tracks that you would normally
be on. It never occurred to me to go

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the establishment,
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to graduate school, to look for a job
commensurate with m y training and
ability.”
She and Len Nakamura ’69 headed
for California on an odyssey of what
she calls “ countercultural explora­
tio n ,” and though she returned to
Philadelphia a year later, Swarthmore
and the ca reer track rem ained far
away. “The thought of setting foot on
cam pus gave m e a stom achache,”
says Richards, w ho drifted around,
trying elem entary sch ool teaching,
looking for “some way to plug in my
energy.”
“A book did it for me, a book about
health care in China before and after
the revolu tion . I said to myself, ‘I
could do that,’ and I applied to medi­
cal s c h o o l.” N o w an obstetrician/
g y n e c o lo g is t in M issou la , Mont.,
Richards says she is finally happy,
with a job she loves, plenty of money,
a w onderful family, a hom e in par­
adise.
But she still has a cause. She does
abortions. In Montana. W here they
burn d o w n w o m e n ’ s c lin ic s and
threaten doctors on the phone in the
middle of the night. W here most doc­
tors w on’t do abortions because it’s
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too much trouble. Lindsay Richards
som etim es w o n d e rs w h e th e r she
should w ea r a b u lle tp ro o f v e s t to
work.
“It’s not easy,” she says quietly,
“but I’d feel like a fake if I didn’t stand
up to this. There’s a residue of what
we w ere like as you n g p eo p le . W e
were off the wall and wacko in certain
parts o f it, but c o n c e iv in g o f ou r­
selves— and this is a v e r y Quaker
idea— as having an individual respon­
sibility to act in the world according
to our light, even if w e h ave to be
ridiculed or shunned— well, for me it
goes back to my childhood, to Alaba­
ma. You can’t just float along, just
enjoy. There are still some things you
have to do.”

Moral Imperatives
Clinton Etheridge
hil Ochs’ song “When I’m Gone”
helped Clinton Etheridge make a
fateful decision in the spring of 1968.
The late Sam Shepherd ’68, a founding
father and ch airm an o f SASS, was
graduating. S h ep h erd w a n ted his
friend and room m ate, Etheridge, to
succeed him as SASS chairman, but
the shy, so ft-s p o k e n e n g in e e rin g
major was ambivalent, agonizing over
the decision.
Shepherd used “W hen I’m G one”
(from P h il Ochs in C oncert) to p er­
suade E th erid ge. T h e song, w hich
rhapsodizes on the im p ortan ce of
making your contribution while you
are “here,” has two lines that particu­
larly hit home with Etheridge: “W on’t
be asked to do m y share when I’m
gone” and “Can’t add m y name into
the fight when I’m gone.”
“I heard that song and became con­
vinced of the obvious— that I couldn’t
escape m y duty, m y responsibility,
perhaps my destiny,” he remembers.
“That con cept of m oral insight and
responsibility, I have discovered, is
something d e e p ly ingrain ed in m y
character, particularly when the issue
concerns the black race.” He became
SASS ch airm an and h e lp e d take
Swarthmore College through the most
transforming few weeks in its history.
By all accounts, Etheridge was no
radical or militant. “I dislike the labels
radical,’ ‘activist,’ and ‘militant.’ In

P

our own small way, SASS and I w ere
trying to do at Swarthmore what Mar­
tin L u th er K in g had d o n e on th e
national level, to use creative tension
and nonviolent direct action to make
the com m u nity co n fron t its latent
moral inconsistencies. Dr. King was
striving to make the American Dream
as relevant and meaningful to black
A m ericans as to w h ite Am ericans;
SASS was trying to make Swarthmore
as relevant and meaningful to black
students as to white.
“W hen I cam e to Sw arthm ore in
1965, blacks w e re in v is ib le ,” says
Etheridge, using the Ralph Ellison
Invisible Man metaphor. “I am invisi­
ble,” w rote Ellison, “sim ply because
people refuse to see me.... W hen they
approach me they see only my sur­
roundings, themselves, or figments of
their imagination— indeed everything
and anything except me.”
“Black students w ere invisible at
Swarthm ore in those days because
there were so few of us, and because
it was assumed that w e w ere ‘ju st’
S w a rth m o rea n s— a lb e it s w a rth y
Swarthmoreans,” says Etheridge. “The
only times we w eren’t invisible w ere
when w e sat togeth er in the dining
hall or when our all-black touch foot­
ball team, the Black Grand Arm y of
the Crum, w ent undefeated for the
season, even beating the DU team that
had some real football players on it.
“SASS and the crisis helped to bring
about an im m ediate paradigm shift
concerning black students. A ll of a
sudden we were no longer invisible.
“In the ’60s, the College was a so­
cial organism ripe for reform and self­
ren e w a l, th ou gh v e r y fe w p e o p le
seemed to know it at the time— Presi­
den t C o u rtn e y Sm ith in c lu d ed . I
admired Courtney Smith greatly when
I was student, and I still do, but I don’t
think he was able to adapt very well to
the moral imperative of the ’60s.”
To Etheridge the fundamental mor-

“SASS and the crisis
helped bring about
an immediate
paradigm shift
concerning black
students. All o f a
sudden we were no
longer invisible. ”

A

al im perative was to ask, as Martin
Luther King did, about the essential
nature of American society’s relation
to black people, to ask whether Ameri­
can so ciety was reform able or irre­
deemable, moral or racist. SASS force­
fully posed these questions to Court­
ney Smith and the students and facul­
ty of Swarthmore College.
In struggling to answer them, the
College learned and grew and evolved,
and so did Etheridge: “The crisis of
1969 was w h ere m y real education
cam e fro m at S w a rth m o re. I w as
forced to stretch myself, to grow in
ways that I would not otherwise have
grown during my college years. There
w ere times when I had to dig down
deep inside myself and pull out things
I didn’t know I possessed. It was the
biggest challenge of my life and, next
to witnessing the births of my three
children, the most sublime experience
of my life.”
Etheridge later served in the Peace
C orps in Gam bia, W est A frica . He
earned an M.B.A. from Stanford Busi­
ness School, did corp orate banking
for severa l years, and is to d a y the
senior project manager for a minorityowned construction company in Oak­
land, Calif. He is involved in local poli­
tics, m in ority business issues, and
ch u rch affairs. But th e a c tiv ity o f
which Etheridge is most proud is his
s c o u tm a s te r d u ties in B o y S cou t
Troop 409 in Oakland. “W e’re starting
to produce some black Eagle Scouts
now ,” says Etheridge, “w hich is the
best way for a 46-year-old man like me
to change the world.”

■KM

LINDA RUSSELL
MAY 1994

11

■
*%had the
feeling I
was in
a foreign

3

0

countryA

7f||

Straight

^

Taylor Cope
aylor Cope grew up in
Huntington, Indiana,
w here he knew and shared many of
th e sam e va lu es w ith fo rm e r V ic e
President Dan Quayle. A three-sport
athlete and “A ” student in high school,
he follow ed his father and uncle to
Swarthmore. In 1965, he says, he was
“open-minded, clean-cut, enthusias­
tic— a good friend and a Republicanto-be.” In the nonsexual parlance of
the time, Taylor Cope was “straight.”
He still is. But though C ope is a
politically conservative cardiologist in
Flossmoor, 111., just south of Chicago,
it’s not as if the ’60s passed him by.
He was there too, experiencing those
strange days in his own way.
He rem em bers coming to Swarth­
m ore from the M idwest: “I had the
feeling I was in a foreign country. The
look of everything was different, peo­
ple’s accents w ere different, even the
telep h on e poles looked different to
me. And the kids— in high school girls
dressed up e v e ry day w ith hairdos
and matched outfits. Going from that
to S w a rth m o re w as a d ra m a tic
change. M y father [Stanton E. Cope
’42] was grossed out by it all.
“ But w e b ro a d e n e d as w e w en t
along. I had been fo r G old w ater in
1964, and m y p o litic s n e ver rea lly
changed, but I think I developed a fair­
er view of the world. I learned that my
view s w ere not necessarily good for
everybody.”

T

12

President Courtney Smith’s death
in January 1969 affected him deeply.
“He always looked like he stepped out
of the Brooks Brothers window, and
everything he said just rolled off his
tongue as though he had been work­
ing on it for months. He used to come
to our games and into the locker room
to pat us on the back. It seemed that
he was much too big and important to
be hanging around with the likes of us.
“I was awfully sad when he died. I
sort of felt like he’d been sacrificed
because at the tim e I didn’t under­
stand the nature of the conflict.
I thought the minority was bul­
ly in g th e m a jo rity to g et its
way.”
D oes he h a v e a d iffe re n t
understanding of it now? “Oh,
yes. Th ere was a certain des■ fW
p eration that things w e re n ’t
■ ■
g o in g w e ll— and that th e y
hadn’t been goin g w ell for a
jm
long time. People were just fed
up with it. If I’d had that cultur­
al experience, I w ould have felt the
same way.”
Still, Cope is concerned about what
he sees as “separatism ” on campus
and in society today: “I prefer to think
of A m erica in the old ‘m elting p o t’
sense. If ‘diversity’ means glorying in
major differences that keep us apart,
then it’s an evil. Our goal as youthful
idealists was to think that there was
room in Am erica for everyb od y and
that w e would all sort of fit together.”
Yet Cope sees the legacy of the ’60s
as “clearly positive.... There was a lot
of ex p erim en ta tio n . Th ou gh som e
were ruined by it, many went through
that p e rio d o f g rea t change, trie d
many parts of it, and kept what they
thought was good.”
For him, the experience helped him
to be a “tolerant person, a good listen­
er who cares about the underdog. It
taught me to think through difficult
problem s and to get to the heart of
them . It’s g o o d to remember what that was
really all about.”
“I ’ve always
been interested
in seeing what
goes on behind
doors that
have been
closed to me. I

Making History
Marilyn Holifield
arilyn Holifield has been making
history since she was a teenager,
but she says she doesn’t usually see
her many struggles and accomplish­
ments as historic. “I have always felt
that I was just passing through life and
these w ere just the things that were
happening,” she claims.
Some “things”: In 1963, at 15, Holi­
field was one of three African Ameri­
cans to desegregate Leon County High
School in her hometown of Tallahas­
see, Fla. “Teenagers,” she remembers,
“think they are invincible. They can
do daring things and not even under­
stand why. I don’t think I really under­
stood the danger and the tensions
that w ere swirling around me then.”
By 1965 she “couldn’t wait to get as
far away from Tallahassee as possi­
b le.” Her destination, Swarthmore,
was a p la ce she had n e ver visited
before enrolling, but Holifield helped
make history there as well, participat­
ing in the founding of SASS in late 1966
and sitting in at the Admissions Office
during the crisis of 1969.
SASS, she says, “was our quest for
identity, for an appropriate role, and
for recognition. Even with its reputa­
tion as being liberal and broad and
flexible, Swarthmore had fallen into
the American trap of not acknowledg­
ing the intellectual existence of other

mm

iH lM

I
I
1
9
1

S W A R TH M O R E COLLEGE BULLETIN

cultures, es p e cia lly A frican A m eri­
cans. There was no sense of the influ­
ence of Africans on history and cul­
ture and p o litic s w o rld w id e . Even
many blacks until that time had been
insulated from this perspective.”
For most blacks and many whites
at Swarthmore, SASS changed all that.
And in the process it changed the bal­
ance of power at the College. “The is­
sue was a cco m m od atin g stu d en ts’
desires to participate in decisions that
were traditionally reserved for presi­
dents and provosts and faculty mem­
bers,” says Holifield. “N ow it’s not a
big d eal to su g g est that stu d en ts
should have a signature on policies or
issues that shape the heart and soul
of the College. That, I think, is a won­
derful legacy of SASS.”
A fte r S w a rth m o re, sh e w en t
straight to Harvard Law. In the 1970s
she served as a staff attorney for the
NAACP Legal D efense Fund and as
general co u n sel fo r the N ew Y o rk
State Division for Youth. But before
long H olifield took up another chal­
lenge— returning to Florida. In 1981
she joined Holland and Knight, one of
the state’s largest and m ost presti­
gious law firms. “The idea of a highly
trained, highly visib le black fem ale
lawyer walking around in Florida cor­
porate circles was, shall I say, uncom­
mon. But I’ve always been interested
in seeing what goes on behind doors
that have been closed to me. It’s a per­
sonal challenge to go through those
doors, to see how you fare.”
Holifield has fared well. She moved
to Miami in 1984 and became the first
black woman partner at Holland and
Knight. ( “ P e o p le tell me th at’s his­
toric,” she says modestly.) In 1990 she
becam e in v o lv e d in o r g a n iz in g a
three-year boycott of Miami hotels, a
protest sparked by the snubbing of
Nelson Mandela by local elected offi­
cials and the brutal beating of peace­
ful H aitian d e m o n s tra to rs b y th e
Miami police. “I didn’t set out to be
involved in th is,” asserts H olifield.
“We were planning a convention here,
and suddenly the meeting decided to
take the convention elsew h ere and
start a boycott.” The action ended last
spring w ith a 20-point a g re em en t
between Boycott Miami: Coalition for
Progress and Hispanic and Anglo busi­
ness leaders of Miami. One provision
has led to plans for the development
MAY 1994

o f a b la ck -o w n ed h o te l in M iam i
Beach.
Speaking of opening doors once
c lo s e d , e a r ly th is y e a r H o lifie ld
attended her first meeting as a mem­
ber of Swarthm ore’s Board of Man­
agers. “Back in the ’60s,” she says, “it

Radicalism
and Resentment

w ou ld n e ver h ave oc cu rre d to me
that I would ever sit on the College’s
board. But then I have always felt that
there should be no artificial barriers
on what a person does.” More history
made. And at 45 Marilyn Holifield still
has a lot of history ahead of her.

11111111 ¡¡■Hi

Barry Wohl
la rry W o h l w as a c o m m itte d
,
'activist
from the first. Influenced
by his liberal parents and by Quakers
at a summer camp he attended, he
had started a chapter of the Student
Peace Union at Low er M erion (P a .)
High School in 1962. His first
peace march came during the
O ctober 1962 Cuban M issile
C risis, and he jo in e d th e
August 1963 civil rights march
on W ashin gton. So Sw arth­
m ore seem ed like a natural
place to go, and the Swarth­
m o re P o litic a l A c tio n Club
w as th e firs t g ro u p W o h l
joined as a freshman.
“The most important thing
fo r m e at S w a rth m o re w as to be
among a group of political radicals
who were good thinkers, solid people.
Our leaders w ere philosophers com­
m itted to n o n vio le n t change, and
some of them, like John Braxton [ ’70,
w h o w en t to ja il fo r refu s in g th e
draft], are models for me even today,”
says W oh l, n ow a p e d ia tric ia n in
Sheridan, Wyo.
Yet Wohl still harbors some resent­
ment toward Swarthmore. For his ap­
plication to medical school in 1971,
he asked for letters of recommenda­
tion, and one was placed in his file by
a former dean who, says Wohl, “wrote
that I had flagrantly violated the rules
of the College.” An interviewer at Yale
showed it to him and asked him what
it was all about. Had he been selling
drugs?
Wohl, who had graduated Phi Beta
Kappa with high honors in psycholo­
gy, says, “I told him, ‘No, but I was
sleeping in the dorm with Jane [Elkington Wohl], my now-wife, when she
cam e dow n to visit me from N YU .’

B

“Our leaders
were philosophers
committed to
nonviolent change. ”

T h e in terview er laughed and said,
‘Oh, everyone does that now. No one
even bats an eyelash.’ But I almost
d id n ’t get into m ed ical sch ool b e­
cause of this letter.”
In the fall of 1967, W ohl says, he
was a resident assistant in Hallowell
and he concluded that sleeping there
w ith his girlfriend prob ab ly w asn’t
the right thing to be doing. He was
also Student Council president and
knew he was supposed to be som e­
thing of a role model, so he went to
Dean o f M en R o b e rt B arr ’56 and
asked to resign his RA position. Barr
readily agreed, and W ohl m oved off
campus that winter. He and Jane were
married in June 1968— “and w e still
are,” says Wohl.
“I withdrew from my activism then,
but during the crisis I came back to
becom e sort of a m oderator for the
student discussions. It was a v e r y
positive experience for me, helping
others get their ideas out and form a
Please turn to page 71
13

THE
CHALLENGE
OF
CHANGE

intractable problems in America.
How did Courtney Smith form his
views? Smith was a product of both a
M id w estern u pbringing and an Ivy
League education. Educated in public
schools in Iowa (where he was born in
1916), he was a champion debater and
speaker. He went to Harvard in 1934
on a scholarship, majored in English
literature, and then spent a postgradu­
ate y e a r (1 9 3 8 -3 9 ) at O xford as a
Rhodes scholar. He returned to Har­
vard as a tutor and teaching fellow
and earned a Ph.D. in English litera­
ture in 1944. Then, after a two years of
military service, he spent seven years
(1946-53) on the English Department
faculty at Princeton University, where
he also assisted form er Swarthmore
president Frank A yd elo tte with the
management of the American office of
the Rhodes Scholarship Trust.
Courtney Smith thus took office at
Swarthmore in 1953 with 15 years of
training and teaching at three of the
leadin g edu cational institutions in
A m e rica and B ritain— an excellent
preparation for becoming a protector
By Darwin H. Stapleton ’69
of Aydelotte’s rigorous education pro­
and Donna H. Stapleton
gram established at Swarthmore 30
years earlier. But Smith’s commitment
to the life of the mind was tempered
uring his presidency of Swarth- by his personal knowledge of some of
more College (1953-69), Court­ th e m isfortu n es and in eq u ities of
ney C. Smith encountered stu­ m odern A m erican life. In the early
dent activism that ranged from 1930s
ex­ after his father’s bank failed,
Smith and his family experienced first­
p re s s io n s o f d e e p c o n c e rn abou t
social and political issues to the time­ hand the scarcities of the Depression.
less tensions between students and And du ring his s e r v ic e in the U.S.
N avy (1944-46), he saw a far more
administrations on college campuses.
troubling aspect of m odern society.
The framework for Smith’s views on
Smith was for nearly tw o years at a
student activism was form ed by his
partially integrated base at Pensacola,
twin beliefs that a college is a place
Fla., serving as the officer assigned to
“committed to rational processes and
resolve cases of racial injustice and
orderly procedures” and that “college
students have the same rights as all abuse. Confronting the results of both
citizens to express their social con­ institutional racism in the Navy and
cerns as individuals.” That framework legalized discrimination in the South,
Smith left the Navy feeling that racism
allowed him to hold a middle ground
that the majority of the College’s con­ w as a te r r ib le lesion on American
society that was damaging both white
stituencies could accept and that was
in a c c o rd w ith S w arth m ore tra d i­ and black Americans.
When the 37-year-old Smith arrived
tions— socially liberal, academ ically
in August 1953 to assum e Swarthrigorous, and politically neutral. His
m ore’s presidency, he found the Col­
framework was challenged at the end
lege also had a strong current of con­
only by the College’s encounter with
cern regarding racial and ethnic dis­
the racial lesion that he had years
crim ination. A d e ca d e b efore, stubefore recognized as one of the most

The crisis o f 1969 was the last
o f many encounters with
student activism that tested
the “rational processes and
orderly procedures”advocated
by President Courtney Smith.

D

14

S W A R TH M O R E COLLEGE BULLETIN

dents had led the College to end dis­
crimination in adm issions, and the
College regularly admitted Jews and
had admitted a few African Americans
by Smith’s time. In 1951 students had
begun a debate about the exclusion­
ary membership policies of the male
fraternities on campus. Despite the
objections of their national organiza­
tions, Swarthm ore’s fraternities had
begun offering m em bership to Jews
and blacks just about the time Smith
took office. He supported the fraterni­
ties’ efforts to reform their nationals
and the d e c is io n s th re e c h a p te rs
made to becom e local organizations
when that proved impossible.
Another student-related issue of
the 1950s facing Smith was the chal­
lenge to intellectual freedom on cam­

puses across the nation. In his inaugu­
ral address in October 1953, President
Smith spoke out on behalf of “a tradi­
tion of dissent” at colleges and univer­
sities, and later he joined with the stu­
dents and faculty to send a petition to
Pennsylvania senators James Duff and
Edward Martin calling for the censure
of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, infamous for
his defamatory attacks on academics
for their political viewpoints.
Late in the 1950s, Smith assumed
national leadership in the fight against
the imposition of a loyalty oath on the
recipients of National Defense Educa­
tion Act scholarships and fellowships.
He worked with the students, faculty,
and Board of Managers,
he recruited other leaders of higher education

to the cause, and eventually he testi­
fied in Congress in the ultimately suc­
cessfu l cam paign to elim in a te the
oath.
National issues regarding protec­
tion o f the freed o m of sp eech had
local parallels. Q uoted in The New
York Times as saying that American
colleges should “resist intellectual bul­
ly in g and ... fig h t th e p re sen t-d a y
trends that seek to control the spirit
o f fre e in q u iry on the ca m p u ses,”
Smith forthrightly defended student
groups that in the 1950s and 1960s
invited such controversial speakers to
campus as William F. Buckley Jr., Gus
Hall, Alger Hiss, and Paul Robeson. A
fe w y e a rs la te r,
Smith published his
v ie w s on o u ts id e
To preserve the
sp ea k e rs fo r all
alum ni to rea d : “ I
“spirit of free
am con vin ced that
inquiry,” Smith
our policy of permit­
tin
g stu d en ts, on
defended student
their own initiative
groups that
and on th e ir ow n
a ssu m p tion o f r e ­
invited to campus
sp on sib ility, to in­
such controversial vite any speaker in
w hom th ey have a
speakers as
genuine and intelli­
William F. Buckley gent interest is right
and prudent.”
Jr., Gus Hall,
But regarding stu­
dents’ responsibility
Alger Hiss,
for their own dress
and Paul Robeson. and behavior, Smith
was far m ore criti­
cal. When he arrived in 1953, he found
that he agreed with some members of
the Board of Managers who disliked
the a ppearan ce o f m any students.
Smith enunciated his point of view in
the 1950s during several addresses to
the students on what he called “man­
ners and morals.” He argued that
th e C o lle g e co m m u n ity liv e d
“essentially by mutual trust”
and that a necessary com po­
nent of that trust was the
s tu d e n ts ’ a g re e m e n t to
adhere to the standards of
behavior and appearance
that traditionally governed
the College and polite soci­
ety. For Smith, a m eticu­
lous dresser, not the least

of these standards was neat clothing,
and he called on the men to take on
the “burden of a coat and tie.” But the
students w ere unresponsive, and a
few years later Smith said that he now
understood their slovenly appearance
as “a patterned expression of confor­
mity.”
It is clear that from the beginning of
his presidency, Smith believed that he
needed to be engaged as a construc­
tive critic of student activism. As the
College moved into the 1960s, Smith’s
in volvem en t w ith student activism
continued to cen­
ter on issues of
racial discrimina-

■

wm

«¡¡SSI

tion, g overn m en t p olicies, and oncampus behavior, but Smith remarked
early in the decade that a new— and
for him disturbing— style of confronta­
tion was emerging.

n the 1962-63 academic year, many
S w a rth m o rea n s jo in e d th e civil
rights movement by regularly partici­
pating in sit-ins and marches on Mary­
land’s Eastern Shore that were initiat­
ed by the Student Nonviolent Coordi­
nating Committee. In a review of that
year, Smith comm ented approvingly
on the students’ “continuing
... c o n ce rn fo r civ il rights,
with the concern highlighted
Suddenly
in a w eekly caravan to Cam­
bridge, Md.” But the next year
Swarthmore was
brought escalation.
in the public eye
In Novem ber 1963 Swarth­
more
students became signifi­
and the press
cantly involved in picketing
was on campus
the Chester schools, joining a
m ovem en t dem anding that
daily. In this
the system give its predomi­
nantly black schools, which
whirlwind Smith
w ere overcrow ded and dete­
made few public
riorating, the same support
as those that w ere predomi­
statements
n a n tly w h ite . O ne o f the
except to plead
demonstrations featured civil
d is o b e d ie n c e — blockin g an
for calm, orderly
en tra n ce to a s c h o o l— and
debate and
res u lted in th e a rrest of a
number of Swarthm ore stu­
adherence to the
dents. T h e C h ester school
Quakerly behavior board ultim ately gave in to
of mutual respect some of the demands, but in
the meantime student demon­
and careful
strators w ere am ong those
blamed for vandalism.
deliberation.
Smith su pported the stu­
dents’ right to demonstrate
and to picket but also sup­
p o r te d a s ta te m e n t fro m Swarthm ore’s deans that emphasized (refer­
ring to civil disobedience) that there
are “im portant differences between
socially responsible procedures and
those which are violent, or which tend
to lead to violence.” Students respon­
sible for breaking the law, the deans’
statement said, might be subjected to
discipline on campus in addition to
any action by legal authorities. Stu­
dents and the faculty both vigorously
debated this policy, but in the end no

I

■
S W A R TH M O R E COLLEGE BULLETIN

HL

students were disciplined and neither
the College policy nor the students’
deepening in v o lve m e n t in C hester
were changed.
By the fall of 1964, student efforts in
C hester had b o th m o d e ra te d and
expanded. At the first collection that
year, Smith could say optim istically
that he h o p e d “ ou r c o n s tr u c tiv e
efforts can continue: the tutorial proj­
ect, the voter registration efforts, the
research work on the actual nature of
com m u nity p ro b le m s , [a n d ] th e
Sw arth m ore-W ade H ouse sum m er
project, which I think was one of the
high moments for this college and can
serve as a model for many communi­
ties throughout the country.”
n the other hand, Smith’s consid­
ered p o sition on a student-led
effort to raise consciousness about
international racism was firmly nega­
tive. Early in March 1965, the on-campus Swarthmore Political Action Com­
m ittee (S P A C ) w ro te to P re sid e n t
Smith asking him to su p p ort th eir
request that the C ollege’s Board of
Managers order the sale of the Col­
lege’s stock in Chase Manhattan Bank,
which had made loans to South Africa.
SPAC had identified divestment as a
means for protesting South A frica ’s
apartheid policies, a position soon
secon ded b y th e stu den t cou n cil.
Smith took the students’ request seri­
ously and sought expert advice from
faculty members familiar with South
Africa. He also took advantage of his
acquaintance with David Rockefeller,
Chase Manhattan board chairman, to
ask him about the bank’s rationale for
its loans to South Africa.
At the April 6 meeting of the Man­
agers, Smith explained the students’
concerns but told the Managers that
from the information he had gathered,
he was sure that “the symbolic act of
selling one corporation’s stock would
in the present instance be misleading
and unjust. Th e co rp oration w hich
has been singled out has a known rep­
utation for positive influence. It is not
clear that w ith h o ld in g o f loans to
South Africa, on the part of this corpo­
ration or others, would combat the ills
of apartheid.” Smith was persuasive,
and after a long discussion that one

O

MAY 1994

m em b e r c h a r a c te r iz e d as “ soulsearching debate,” the Board took no
action on divestiture. It was another
decade before the Sullivan principles
e ffe c tiv e ly set anti-apartheid stan­
dards fo r A m erica n in vestm en t in
South Africa and more than 20 years
before the Board adopted a com pre­
hensive disvestment policy.
While Smith at times set limits on
student activism , The P h o e n ix was
almost impossible for him to regulate.
Smith— the advocate of free debate
and inquiry— co op era ted fully with
the newspaper and occasionally con­
tributed an essay to it. Still, he was
regularly irritated by its outspoken
style and administration-bashing. In
September 1962 he com plained that
The Phoenix had predictable, political­
ly liberal responses to virtu a lly all
issues, on or off campus. He asked
pointedly, “Has The Phoenix becom e a
one-party press?” He also called on
the Phoenix editors to better check its
facts before making “broad jumps” to
new claims and bluntly asserted that
if they did not, they were “engaging in
a form of violence.” Smith was particu­
larly exercised when The Phoenix crit­
icized him for spending most of his
time in “maintaining the image” of the
College (which, in reply, Smith said
took “no iden tifiable tim e ”) and in
fund raising (which Smith said took 5
percent of his time). In Smith’s view
The Phoenix's style changed little in
res p o n s e to his critiq u e, and fiv e
years later he told the alumni that
uThe Phoenix has never seemed to me
to be worthy of this student body.”
His criticism of The Phoenix was a
particular example of Smith’s concern
about “the spread of ‘doctrinaire’ lib­
eralism” on campus. He told the stu­
dents he w orried that Swarthmore’s
dominant liberalism could becom e a
“kind of reflex action” that accepted
ideas blindly without reflection. “The
point is not that Swarthmore is m ov­
ing to the left or to the right,” Smith
wrote in his annual report to the Col­
lege. “What I am arguing for is less
restricted agendas, more open minds,
more dialogue.”
Smith’s concern about single-view­
p o in t d iscu ssion s m ay be w h y he
never contributed to the overwhelm ­

ingly anti-Vietnam War discussion on
campus, although he did try to shape
national policy regarding the effect of
the Vietnam-era draft on higher edu­
cation and the career paths of stu­
dents. In 1966 Sm ith w r o te to his
friend Sen. Joseph Clark of Pennsylva­
nia to offer his opinion that “the coun­
try will be making a serious mistake if
no change is made in existing draft
legislation as it affects next y e a r s ’
graduate students.” He was d e ep ly
c o n c e rn e d abou t th e “ abru p t and
severe withdrawal of intellectual tal­
ent” that he envisioned. Smith’s com­
ments about the draft were among the
few he made related to the Vietnam
War; as a Quaker president at a Quak­
er college, he may have been content
to let his position be assumed.
t is likely that the most prickly stu­
dent matter Smith dealt with during
his p resid en cy was the adm issions
process. It was not student participa­
tion in adm issions com m ittees that
bothered him, although others in his
administration urged him to end that
p ra ctice . He th ou gh t the stu dents
m ade c o n s tr u c tiv e c o n trib u tio n s .
Smith w as m o re c o n c e rn e d abou t
defending Swarthmore’s highly selec­
tive admissions process. He gave his
personal attention to ensuring that
ch an ges in a d m ission s w o u ld not
“ [endanger] the standards of our col­
lege or expose accepted candidates to
humiliating failures.” Y et it was pre­
cisely the adm issions standards of
Swarthmore that brought Smith and
the College to its deepest confronta­
tion with student activism.
Given the highly segregated and
discrim inatory secondary education
system in the U nited States in the
1950s and 1960s, Swarthmore’s stan­
dards (which favored not just the aca­
dem ically gifted but also those with
extracurricular skills) effectively limit­
ed admissions of African Americans to
the few who had grown up in relative­
ly p riv ileg ed circum stances. Smith
recognized that problem and in 1961
su ggested that the c o lle g e p ro v id e
“ven tu re sch o la rsh ip s” fo r A frican
Americans “now outside the pattern
of college expectancy.” He suggested
that “through a special program of

I

17

a result of improved financial support,
and 19 w ere enrolled in 1965 after the
first full year of the recruitment effort.
P re sid e n t Smith d rew little public
attention to the Rocke­
feller Foundation grant,
^
"
choosing in the fall of
1964 to describe it only
Three days before as “ a special scholar­
ship program ” result­
his death, Smith
ing fro m th e recent
told a student
Centennial campaign.
He and oth ers in the
assembly, “We
administration expect­
ed th at m ost o f the
have lost
African Am erican stu­
something
dents could be assimi­
lated into the student
precious at
body without program­
Swarthmore—
m atic e ffo r ts , and
Smith believed that the
the feeling that
stu d en ts b rou g h t in
force and
through the Rockefeller
program did not want
disruptiveness
to be seen as “special.”
are just
B ut th e entering
African Am erican stu­
not our way.”
den ts had co m e to
S w a rth m o re in the
midst of the rising ex­
pectations of the civil rights move­
ment, and many found that they could
n o t— o r ou t o f c o n s c ie n c e would
n o t— ca su a lly m eld w ith th e elite
white academic culture that Swarth­
m ore rep resen ted. In that environ­
ment many of the African American
stu dents rec ru ited to Swarthmore
recru itm en t ... [m in o rity stu den ts
became activists.
could] be shown to have a potential
W hat b ecam e the flash point for
for rigorous college work.”
m in o r ity a d m iss io n s m atters at
Swarthm ore was the issuance of an
h ree years later the R ockefeller
internal College report in the fall of
Foundation o ffere d Sw arthm ore
1968 summarizing the results of the
and several other small liberal arts
colleges $275,000 each to create four- program funded by the Rockefeller
Foundation. Briefly made available for
y e a r p ro g ra m s to ex p a n d A fric a n
College-wide review, the analytic char­
A m erica n adm issions th rou gh the
a cter o f the rep o rt incensed many
kind o f fo c u s e d re c ru itm e n t and
increased scholarship aid that Smith African American students. Moreover,
it described in detail the recruited stu­
had hoped for. At the time the College
dents and the “risk factors” associat­
had on ly 12 blacks en ro lled out of
ed with their admission. To some the
over 900 students, and six of those
report seemed to be an intrusion on
w ere Africans.
In April 1964 the foundation grant their privacy; to others it gave the
image of an administration failing to
was awarded and Swarthmore began
its new m inorities adm issions p ro ­ comprehend the true needs of African
American students.
gram. Th e results w ere im m ediate:
D uring th e C o lle g e ’ s Christmas
nine students w ere enrolled in 1964 as

T

S W A R TH M O R E COLLEGE BULLETIN

break in 1968, the Swarthmore AfroAmerican Students’ S ociety (SASS)
presented President Smith a series of
demands, including that the College
recruit and admit more African Ameri­
can students, c re a te su p p ort p r o ­
grams for “risk” students, and hire an
African Am erican assistant dean of
admissions for minority recruitment.
Early in January 1969, Smith (as
chair of the faculty meetings) brought
the demands to the faculty, but when
the faculty did not act immediately,
SASS began a sit-in in the Parrish Hall
Admissions Office. In response Smith
called the faculty into alm ost daily
sessions to consider SASS’s demands
and College policies, and it began to
enact a series of recom m endations
and resolutions regarding m inority
admissions. The bulk of the white stu­
dents initiated daily mass meetings to
hear reports and presentations from
both the faculty and SASS and to for­
mulate their own resolutions of sup­
port, compromise, and agreement.
Suddenly Swarthm ore was in the
public eye, and the press was on cam­
pus daily. In this w h irlw in d Smith
made few public statements except to
plead for the calm, orderly debate and
the adherence to the Quakerly behav­
ior o f m utual re s p e c t and ca refu l
deliberation that he had advocated
throughout his presidency.
Smith attempted to work within the
College community, rejecting any plan
for outside police action to end the
sit-in. W hile he refused to negotiate
with SASS on the basis of “demands,”
he also made it clear that he thought
SASS’s general concerns w ere legiti­
mate and could be considered with
deliberate speed.
The strain on Smith was substan­
tial. The depth of his personal distress
was clear in his remarks to the stu­
dents assem bled in Clothier Hall on
January 13 w hen he said that “w e
have lo s t s o m e th in g p r e c io u s at
Swarthmore— the feeling that force
and disruptiveness are just not our
way.” On the morning of January 16,
1969, m ore than th re e w eek s into
what had becom e known at Swarthmore as “the crisis,” Courtney Smith
died in his office of a heart attack. The
College’s greatest struggle with stu­
MAY 1994

d en t a c tiv is m w as his last, and
although the crisis took some time to
be resolved, the Courtney Smith era at
Swarthmore had ended. ■
Darwin H. Stapleton ’69 has a Ph.D. in
history from the University o f Delaware
and has published several books and
articles in the history o f science, tech-

nology, and education. He is the direc­
tor o f the R ockefeller A rchive Center.
D onna H. Stapleton holds a m aster’s
degree in the science o f social adminis­
tration from Case Western Reserve Uni­
versity. This article is based on their
research for a forthcoming book-length
biography o f Courtney C. Smith. ©1994
by the authors.

Courtney Sm ith on "The M atrix of Social Ju stice”
hat role should Swarthmore
College and its students play in
bringing about social change in the
wider society? During his presidency
in the 1950s and 1960s, Courtney
Smith faced this question— which is
still hotly debated at the College—
head on. His faith in the life of the
mind, his recognition that education
without application to society was
without meaning, and his belief in
mutual respect shaped and guided his
actions as he coped with student
activism. Smith effectively encapsulat­
ed his philosophy regarding activism
in “The Academic Community and
Social Concerns,” an essay he pub­
lished in the December 1965 issue of
the Swarthmore College Bulletin.
President Smith’s central concern
in the essay was to define what he
thought was the proper role of institu­
tions of higher education in social
change. He began by arguing that a
college’s primary function in society
is to train the intellect and to provide
students and the faculty “an environ­
ment for reasoned and honest explo­
ration.”
For Smith that exploration had a
direct relationship to the concerns of
society at large. A central passage of
his essay describes his view of that
relationship: “A college’s job, drawing
on the contributions of men of intel­
lect and integrity and conscience and
good will, is to determine what is
social justice, and to help students
develop the capacity to determine in
subsequent years what is social jus­
tice, and to try to sensitize students
to care about social justice, and to
produce the leaders who will seek to

W

secure social justice, and to provide
within its own walls an instance of
social justice, but not at any moment
to be itself a direct instrument for
social justice. A college, in short, is
the matrix of social justice” [italics
his].
Smith went on to determine the
coordinates for what he called “the
activist spirit” on campus. He argued
that the College as a corporate body
must act on social and political mat­
ters in its own interests and suggest­
ed that the students had a role in
voicing those interests. He also
emphasized his expectation that
members of the College community
would speak out as individual citizens
yet would take care in public to distin­
guish their views from those of the
College.
Finally, Smith considered concrete
manifestations of activism itself and
stated that “effective social action
must be based on reason, and reason
must be calm and clear-eyed.” He
called for students to do “what the
public has a right to expect of Swarth­
more graduates”— to devote time to
the study of each issue and to the
consideration of the consequences of
action. In the latter regard, Smith
urged that action occur in the context
“not only of the compassion that
leads us to champion the interests of
the disadvantaged, but the much
more difficult compassion for those
who are or seem to be the obstacles
in the way of progress.” He concluded
that in combining intellect and social
action, Swarthmore could make “a
special contribution to social justice
in our time.”
— D.H.S. and D.H.S.
19

in Hie 1960s and
it wasn't on the news •
It w as in the music.
ll I want is the truth,” said
John Lennon in 1971, waking
up from the dream of the
1960s like a man with a serious hang­
over. But truth is elusive.
There can be little argument about
how extraordinarily central and
important music was for so many of
us college-age persons in the years
1965-1969. Mere mention of this sub­
ject in mixed company, however
(Boomers and non-Boomers), is an
invitation to fierce skepticism and
intergenerational resentment. The
myth of The Sixties has hung like a
wet blanket over the heads of every
“generation” of rock music fans that’s
come of age since 1969: “Ha, ha. There
was this really great party and you
completely missed it.”
“You’ve heard it a good trillion
times prior to reading this,” writes 26-

A

year-old Bart Cameron in 360 Music
Magazine, March 1994, “and it’ll be
repeated a trillion times later, ‘To­
day’s music lacks the substance and
meaning that the music of my genera­
tion had.’ Which is complete and utter
h orse-----.”
I arrived at Swarthmore in the fall
of 1965 with the rest of the Class of
’69, feeding nickels into the juke box
at Soms to hear the Young Rascals
sing “Good Lovin’.” And I would have
graduated with them too, probably to
the tune of the Beatles singing “Get
Back,” except that I dropped out in
1966 to start a rock and roll magazine.
I was consumed by this feeling that
“something is happening” and by the
idea that the most useful common ref-

by Paul W illia m s '6 9

erence point for talking about whatev­
er it was that was happening to us
was the music we were listening to.
We. There’s a punchline to an old
joke in which Tonto says to the Lone
Ranger, “What do you mean ‘we,’
white man?” and I always hear it in my
head when I catch myself talking
about what “w e” w ere doing in the
1960s (or ’70s, ’80s, ’90s...). But this
word “we,” however false, illusory, or
limited, plays an important role in the
truth about this mysterious some­
thing that occurred in American (and,
to a significant degree, European and
Japanese) culture and politics in the
1960s. It is also, I think, the key to the
riddle of what made the popular
music of the time seem so damned
important.
The music (Bob Dylan from 1963 to
1966 particularly, the Beatles from
S W A R TH M O R E COLLEGE BULLETIN

1964 to 1969, the Rolling Stones from
1965 to 1972, Otis Redding, Jimi Hen­
drix, the Grateful Dead, the Who, the
Beach Boys, Smokey Robinson, Aretha
Franklin, Buffalo Springfield, Jefferson
Airplane, the Kinks, the Velvet Under­
ground) was important because as
song after song and album after album
spoke so profoundly, yea to the point
of revelation, about what was going
on with me, they also implicitly spoke
about what was going on with us.
They were in fact the announcement,
piped into every dormitory, every
crashpad, every apartment, that there
was such a thing as “us.”
So far what I’m describing is univer­
sal to every generation of music fans.
“The golden age of science fiction is
12,” critics and writers and readers of
science fiction are fond of pointing
out, and in the same manner the gold­
en age of jazz and rap and rock and all
other cutting edge musics is 17. Mu­
sic—generally and preferably new
(contemporary) music— tends to
reach its listeners most profoundly at
some brief period in adolescence or
young adulthood when they are most
alone and most in need, and it ingrati­
ates itself by articulating clearly and
forcefully what no one else will ac­
knowledge or admit or even allude to.
This is true for every generation
and probably every culture. Plato
observed that harmony was a gift of
the Muses “meant to correct any dis­
cord which may have arisen in the
courses of the soul; and rhythm too
was given for the same reason, on
account of the irregular and graceless
ways which prevail among mankind
generally, and to help us against
them.”
Let us make a distinction, then. The
Baby Boomers are wrong in their fre­
quent and often condescending com­
plaints that “music isn’t what it used
to be.” Young people today have just
as much need to assert themselves
against the irregular and graceless
ways of their Boomer parents as those
parents did during their own rites of
passage, and the new music that helps
them in this process is every bit as
imaginative and heart-satisfying and
enduring as anything produced by the
icons of “classic rock.” I cite albums
released in the last 18 months by
R.E.M., Liz Phair, Arrested Develop­
ment, Pavement, Nirvana, Belly, Tom
MAY 1994

Waits, Counting Crows, Smashing
Pumpkins, Dr. Dre, Uncle Tupelo, Zap
Mama, and Freedy Johnston as intro­
ductory evidence, and at the same
time warn older listeners that if this
new stuff on quick listen doesn’t seem
to compare with their memories of
the great old days, it may be because
their need is not what it once was and
because they’ve forgotten that even in
the golden age it took more than a
skeptical “quick listen” to connect
with something truly new and revela­
tory.
But— and this is the more difficult
argument, the more elusive “truth”—
something extraordinary did happen
in the latter half of the 1960s, a phe­
nomenon that has not been repeated
since. And the music we were listen­
ing to played a very central part.
Like other generations before and
since, w e were awakened by our mu­
sic and received messages from it,
and it spoke for us and to us and
seemed to encourage us constantly in
the direction of social, political, cultur­
al, and personal change. What was
unique about that era, as far as I can
tell, is the pervasiveness of the illusion
o f community that w e created for our­
selves and/or found ourselves within.
We came to believe and feel that

there was a “w e”— that something was
happening. I can’t speak for the
artists, but I know that for the listen­
ers the Beatles’ albums and the
Stones’ albums and rock albums in
general were heard as a progression,
not just in aesthetic quality but in a
process of expanding consciousness,
growing collective self-awareness.
This sounds somewhat absurd in
hindsight, but I assert that it was true
for most listeners experientially, and
the point is that it was not about
music per se. The music was a con­
duit, information carrier, much more
so than newspapers, a very direct and
content-rich medium of expression
and communication.
The content was perceptual, and it
had to do with politics, lifestyles, eco­
nomics, sexuality, consciousness
(specifically as affected by drug use
and other spiritual practices— and
yes, for a brief period drug use was as
much as anything a spiritual practice).
“W e” were rethinking civil rights, hu­
man rights, the war in Vietnam, sexual
mores, and the legitimacy of our polit­
ical and economic system and all
social systems we found ourselves
within, including the university, mar­
riage, parent-child, employer-employ­
ee, citizen-state. The headiness of the

What was unique about the 1960s was the pervasive illusion o f community. You didn’t
need to drop out of college or attend a rock festival or even a political demonstration
to feel a part of the tide of change. The music o f the Beatles (above, in 1968) and
Bob Dylan ( opposite, in 1964) helped the “Woodstock Generation” define itself.
21

times was due to the fact that this
wasn’t just thought and talk. We
marched, blocked the streets, occu­
pied buldings, surrounded the Pen­
tagon, started communes, got arrest­
ed for draft resistance and peddling
“obscene” underground newspapers,
took powerful psychedelic drugs and
experienced genuine terrors and ec­
stasies, and compared notes with oth­
ers who w ere having similar experi­
ences.
W e were in a dialogue with the
state and the media and the govern­
ment, and they responded to us (hos­
tility is a response). This was also a
progression. The subjective (specifi­
cally not objective) large-scale
changes in reality that w e’d felt read­
ing history or science fiction novels at
a younger age w e now saw taking
place around us. When the Beatles
sang “I’ve got to admit it’s getting bet­
ter (couldn’t get much w orse)” and
the Stones sang “Pleased to meet you,
hope you guessed my name,” we
(thought w e) knew exactly what they
were talking about. W e felt ourselves
caught up in a historical moment. It
was very exciting.
Of course there was no consensus
among “us” as to what was happening.
That was what made the universality
of the music so important. Music,
from the point of view of the mind, is a
wonderfully ambiguous (and there­
fore inclusive) medium. Meanwhile,
from the point of view of the emo­
tions, its content can be very power­
fully specific.
“Light My Fire” by the Doors is a
song (with dumb w ords) about a sexu­
al encounter. But it was also on the
radio, usually with its long Dionysian
instrumental section intact, during the
inner city riots ( “Burn, baby, burn!”)
of summer 1967, a time that Robert
Kennedy called the worst American
crisis since the Civil War. That may
have been hyperbole, but it is precise­
ly the pervasive mood of hyperbole at
the time that I wish to call attention
to. Every public event took on a
heightened sense of importance. The
Tet offensive in Vietnam received dra­
matic television coverage; Lyndon
Johnson lost the primary in New
Hampshire as a result and then an­
nounced that he wasn’t going to run
for re-election. Bob Dylan sang, “Let
us not talk falsely now, the hour is get-

22

ting late.” Martin Luther King was
assassinated. Bobby Kennedy was
assassinated. The Band sang, “Take a
load off Annie and you put the load
right on me.” The Grateful Dead sang,
“You know he had to die.” Strange
days had tracked us down. Nineteen
sixty-seven was a year of elation, 1968
of depression, 1969 brought a rebirth
( “Oh Happy Day”) climaxing in Woodstock and the springlike sound of the
first Crosby Stills & Nash album, fol­
lowed by the anticlimax of Altamont
and the Stones’ wonderfully nihilistic
Let It Bleed album ( “you better gimme
shelter...”) and Jefferson Airplane’s
self-consciously revolutionary Volun­
teers.
It was not that the music was par­
ticularly political. It is easier to find
intelligent political commentary in the
rock music of the ’80s and ’90s
(though it’s still pretty rare) than in
the music of the ’60s. Even Bob Dylan
had almost nothing to say about the
Vietnam War, for example— his most
overtly political songs were about
civil rights martyrs, but his real politi­
cal impact was in songs that ex­
pressed his and his listeners’ confu­
sion at and rejection of the social con­
sensus: “It’s Alright, Ma,” “Desolation
Row,” “Subterranean Homesick
Blues.” Dylan flew the flag of the out­
sider and gave the role more depth
and nuance and made it more appeal­
ing than any American voice since
Whitman. The alternate reality that
Dylan’s songs implied was both more
ambiguous and more tangible than
Kerouac’s, ahd it ultimately inspired
more converts, not that that was nec­
essarily either artist’s intention.
You didn’t need to drop out of col­
lege or attend a rock festival or even a
political demonstration to feel a part
of the great inevitable tide of change
that “w e” knew ourselves to be caught
up in. Since I did do those things, I
can’t say for sure, but my impression
is that listening to the music and mak­
ing one’s own connection with it, and
being aware that others w ere doing
so, was enough to give most people a
strong sense of inclusion. In this way
the music became, among other
things, a kind of correspondence
course. You rushed out to buy the
new albums in order to get the latest
information and teachings, or perhaps
to confirm that the latest set of an-

UPI/BETTMANN

X H E MUSIC
BECAME A KIND OF
CORRESPONDENCE
COURSE. YOU
RUSHED OUT TO
BUY THE N E W
ALBUMS IN ORDER
TO GET THE LATEST
INFORMATION
A N D TEACHINGS,
PERHAPS TO
CONFIRM THE
LATEST SET OF
ANSWERS YOU'D
WORKED OUT O N
YOUR O W N .
S W A R TH M O R E COLLEGE BULLETIN

The Rolling Stones released “( I Can’t Get
No) Satisfaction”just as the Class of 1969
graduated from high school. Later Jimi
Hendrix asked, “Are you experienced?”
swers you’d worked out on your own
was similar to what the Stones or the
Byrds had come up with as they sepa­
rately and almost simultaneously
worked on the puzzle.
The illusion of community came to
an end in May 1970, after the invasion
of Cambodia, when students were
shot and killed by soldiers during
demonstrations on the campuses at
Kent State and Jackson State. “Got to
get down to it, Soldiers are cutting us
down.... How can you run when you
know?” Crosby Stills Nash & Young
sang on a rush-released single, but no
one responded. No revolution. The
silence was deafening. The communi­
ty looked around and didn’t see itself
anymore. “W e” were scared and tired.
Ma y 1994

The long adrenalin
rush was over.
In the 19th century
and for millenia before
that, there was no such
thing as recorded
music. It’s still too
soon to talk intelligent­
ly about the impact of
this invention. It’s easi­
er to look back and
give Gutenberg’s print­
ing press part credit
for the Reformation
and, ultimately, the
advent of the Age of
Science. Changes in
communication and
transportation media
have come fast and
thick in this century
and are still coming.
The role played by the
growing influence of
the broadcast media,
particularly television
news, on national and global con­
sciousness in the 1960s is more obvi­
ous than and arguably much greater
than the role of music. But Walter
Cronkite and David Brinkley will
never, I think, hold the place of Jimi
Hendrix or John Lennon or Bob Dylan
in our hearts— and it is in the heart, to
a significant degree, that values are
formed.
“Through song, the unwritten histo­
ry of the people and the laws of the
community are taught and main­
tained; the entire physical and spiritu­
al development of the individual is
nurtured; the well-being of the group
is protected;... news is passed from
one group to another.” The quote is
from Aboriginal Music by Australian
anthropologist Cath Ellis, but it cer­
tainly has application to our own
would-be tribes. Rock music during
the era roughly defined by the arrival
and departure of the Beatles on the
U.S. scene (1964-1970) enjoyed a
smaller and much more unified audi­
ence than what w e experience today.
Most fans were exposed, via Top 40
radio and, later, FM (album) radio, to
most of the significant new artists.
There were exceptions, but it was
nothing like the splintered collection
of almost unrelated marketing and
radio categories that divide up the
rock audiences today. It was possible

to imagine, when “Hey Jude” was on
top of the charts, that the whole world
(an ethnocentric and Eurocentric and
ageist concept, but still a potent illu­
sion) was listening to this song this
month. This creates a powerful feeling
of connection. It was, of course, a
somewhat superficial connection, and
it is in large part due to this superfi­
ciality that the illusion didn’t last or
grow into something more real.
But there is also something not at
all superficial about listening to “Hey
Jude” (or “Peggy Sue” or “When Doves
Cry”) and being moved by it and
knowing that unseen others are also
experiencing these feelings. And I
think that is one reason, beyond sim­
ple nostalgia, that so many people
have retained their love for the music
they heard during the period when
they, however vaguely, felt the pres­
ence of some sort of “w e” that seemed
to be engaged in a collective process
of becoming self-conscious. Beyond
illusion, perhaps this is a real process
(as Teilhard de Chardin envisioned)
that is constantly taking place wheth­
er w e are aware of our participation in
it or not. Through the music, through
our daily papers and PC modems and
fax machines and satellite TV and con­
stant travels on the globe— and also
very possibly through organic pro­
cesses that occur as the human popu­
lation steadily, exponentially, increas­
es— something is happening to us. W e
don’t know what it is. But the story of
our lives is partly the story of this
larger adventure that we have
momentarily felt ourselves part of.
“How often have you been there?”
John Lennon and Paul McCartney
asked in 1967. “Often enough to
know.” Maybe, maybe not. But no one
alive on Earth right now has any rea­
son to feel like they missed the party.
The truth is, it’s getting wilder all the
time. ■
Paul Williams ’69 started Crawdaddy!,
the first U.S. rock magazine, in early
1966 shortly before he dropped out o f
Swarthmore. He is the author o f 18
books, “only some o f which are about
rock and roll. ” In his 1991 autobio­
graphical novel, Heart of Gold, he
writes about his Swarthmore days. He
recently revived Crawdaddy! A sample
copy can be obtained by writing Paul at
B ox 231155, Encinitas CA 92023.
23

SCOLLEGE
Faculty debates
prosposal for revising
Honors Program
This spring Swarthmore
faculty members from all
academic departments
have been involved in a
close scrutiny of the Exter­
nal Examination (Honors)
Program. Discussions have
centered on what the Hon­
ors Program should do and
how it should be revised to
most fully meet the needs
of the College’s best stu­
dents.
“W e’ve been worried by
the fact that w e have a pro­
gram we call Honors, but
most of our best students
aren’t in it,” says Philip
Weinstein, professor of En­
glish and chair of the Coun­
cil on Educational Policy
(CEP) task force that is
leading the discussion.
The number of students
applying for and being ac­
cepted into the Honors
Program has been steadily
falling for some time. In the
days following the inaugu­
ration of the program in
1922 under the leadership
of President Frank Aydelotte, close to half of the
junior and senior classes
would typically be enrolled
in Honors. In the 1960s it
was still usual for about 40
percent of seniors to gradu­
ate with Honors, but over
the following decade the
number fell to about 20
percent. The last few years
have seen 15 to 16 percent
of the senior class in Hon­
ors, and estimates for next
year are even lower.
Reasons for the declin­
ing numbers have long
been known. For some stu­
dents the structure of the
program is unattractive
because it does not leave

time to explore a wider
variety of interests. It can
be difficult (or impossible)
to study abroad, partici­
pate in community-based
learning, or earn teacher
certification at the same
time as pursuing Honors.
Another perennial prob­
lem is that Honors semi­
nars receive no grades.
“There was a day when this
program was so wellknown that just to be in it
would help open the doors
for graduate admissions,”
says Weinstein. “But lots of
our students have decided
that they can’t risk an
empty transcript during
junior and senior year in
order to get a bunch of H’s
upon graduation— after
admissions to graduate
schools have taken place.”
A related concern is that
students and faculty mem­
bers have become less
comfortable with giving all
the power of evaluation to

external examiners at the
very end of the process.
“Many faculty members
believe very strongly that
preparing our students to
present their knowledge
and abilties to a person
from outside the College is
exactly the right goal,” says
Jennie Keith. “But others
now feel that there’s so
much variety in how peo­
ple approach a discipline
that they can’t teach what
they believe in and at the
same time feel secure that
they are preparing their
students for an outside
examiner.”
A number of faculty
members believe that the
program would not be hurt
if they graded “prepara­
tions”— courses and semi­
nars that prepare students
for Honors examination—
as long as there is addition­
al work evaluated only by
external examiners. In re­
cent years some faculty
members have been grad­
ing Course students who
take seminars, and several
have commented that they

were surprised to find that
giving grades did not have
the negative effects on the
collegiality of seminars that
they had feared.
The current Honors Pro­
gram also fails to appeal to
several departments be­
cause it seems rigidly
bound by a single curricu­
lar structure of six semi­
nars and six written and
oral exams. Some depart­
ments, like English, politi­
cal science, history, and
economics, have found the
structure fits their needs
well and thus have had fair­
ly successful programs. But
others, like biology, psy­
chology, and sociology/
anthropology, have had
trouble working within the
system.
Finally, in recent years
faculty members and stu­
dents have struggled with
the elitism inherent in the
program. In the original
Honors Program, Honors
students were completely
separated from other stu­
dents for their junior and
senior years, which they
DENG-JENG LEE

Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor o f English Literature Philip Weinstein (center)
is chair of the faculty task force that has presented a proposal to revise the Honors Program.
Here he teaches an Honors seminar on modern comparative literature in his home.

24
S W A R TH M O R E COLLEGE BULLETIN

E
devoted exclusively to
Honors seminars. “I don’t
think there was the cultural
embarassment, the recog­
nition that you were doing
a kind of sheep and goats
division of the College,”
says Weinstein. “That’s
become increasingly op­
pressive.”
The current program
does not separate Honors
students as much as Aydelotte’s did. In 1968 the num­
ber of seminars required of
Honors students was low­
ered from eight to six, and
in 1987 seminars were
opened to Course students.
However, a few faculty
members feel that Honors
is still unjustifiably elitist,
while “others believe that
there is important educa­
tional value in identifying
the work the College wants
its best students to do and
in ensuring that they have
opportunities to do it,”
says Keith.
Though these problems
have been evident for
some time, finding a solu­
tion has been difficult.
Major revisions of the pro­
gram in 1968,1977, and
1987 have not halted the
decline in numbers of stu­
dents. According to Philip
Weinstein, that’s because
in previous revisions “the
assumption has been that
Honors is good and that for
some probably perverse
reason certain departments
are hanging back.”
This time the faculty
task force began by re­
thinking the program from
the very beginning. “We
said, ‘What should an hon­
ors program do?”’ Jennie
Keith says, “and it seemed
to us that it should present
a model of the best of a
Swarthmore education, of
the things we want our
best students to do.”
Weinstein explains the
may

1994

C

next step: “W e went to all
the departments and said,
‘When you are doing what
you do best, what format
does it take?”’ The answers
they received were var­
ied— from seminars to lab­
oratory research, from the­
ses to performances.
Based on what they had
learned, in March the task
force drafted a first propos­
al, which was circulated
among faculty members
and thoroughly discussed.
After hearing the sugges­
tions and concerns of the
faculty, the task force
revised the proposal and
presented it again at the
beginning of April. This
proposal became the main
agenda item for a series of
faculty meetings in April
and May.
Among the elements
that were debated are the
number of preparations;
grading of preparations by
Swarthmore faculty mem­
bers; a credit-bearing peri­
od of senior Honors study
during which students
would prepare for external
evaluation by extending,
reviewing, and integrating
their earlier work; and elim­
ination of Distinction in
Course as an alternative
pathway to honorifics. If
the proposal or a version
of it is accepted by the fac­
ulty this semester, the
revised program could be
available to next year’s
sophomores.
Despite the difficulties
the Honors program has
had, the task force is com­
mitted to maintaining it in
the spirit in which Aydelotte founded it. “As a col­
lege, w e are what we are
because of a 70-year tradi­
tion that Aydelotte pretty
much inaugurated,” says
Weinstein. “Just passively
staying with the program
would be a mistake, but

E
abandoning it would be a
worse mistake. I think our
best choice by far— and the
testimony of graduates

G

E

supports this— is to make it
work. Change it in the de­
tails to get back to its
essentials.”

Local TV crews covered the silent vigil in Parrish Hall when
students protested offensive words chalked on Magill Walk.

Graffito sparks
protest, debate
A racist graffito found on a
campus sidewalk sparked a
silent sit-in that blocked the
front entrance to the Ad­
missions Office for about
eight hours on April 4. A
crowd of about 70 stu­
dents, most of them African
Americans, protested what
they said was a pattern of
hate speech directed at
black, gay, and lesbian stu­
dents. Later that afternoon
more than 300 students,
faculty members, and
administrators gathered on
Parrish lawn for an hourlong vigil in opposition to
bigotry.
Sometime on the night
of April 1 the words “Fuck
Niggers” were chalked on
Magill Walk near the train
station underpass. Previ­
ously, an anti-gay epithet
had been written on the
door of the Lesbian, Gay,
and Bisexual Alliance

office. It could not be deter­
mined whether the culprits
in either case were Swarth­
more students.
President Alfred H.
Bloom and Dean of the Col­
lege Ngina Lythcott joined
in condemning the graffito
as “a personal offense to all
members of the Swarth­
more community, express­
ing as it does blatant disre­
gard for the values of re­
spect and interpersonell
understanding that are at
the heart of the College.”
Bloom later told The Phila­
delphia Inquirer, “Clearly
w e are not exempt from the
kinds of acts that plague
our entire society.”
Members of the Swarth­
more Afro-American Stu­
dents Society who orga­
nized the Admissions Of­
fice protest carefully avoid­
ed the term “demands” as
they issued a set of “goals”
for their action. These
included the creation of a
25

G
“tangible hate speech poli­
cy,” a series of collections
to “assess the role of multiculturalism” on campus,
and the formation of a com­
mittee with broad powers
to investigate and punish
“speech, actions, and
crimes of a hateful nature.”
In the weeks following
the incident, a lively debate
ensued over the nature of
free speech at an academic
institution. A public forum
on April 12 drew more than
100 students, faculty mem­
bers, and staff members to
hear a range of opinions on
speech codes and First
Amendment rights.
Afterward, Dean Lythcott said that despite the
real pain caused by hate
speech, she continues to

be “a strong oppo­
nent” of adjudi­
cating speech
unless it threat­
ens physical vio­
lence or is clearly
harassing behav­
ior— “such as fight­
ing words that are
personal and
repeated.” She said
she believes “the best
response to hate
speech is providing
comfort to those who
have been hurt by it and
responding with more
speech.” She added that
communities that value
free expression have “the
additional obligation to
work to create a climate
that makes hate speech
less likely to occur.”

Bulletin takes
CASE bronze
The Swarthmore College
Bulletin was named one of
the nation’s top six college
general interest maga­
zines— taking a third-place
bronze medal— in the 1994
recognition awards spon­
sored by the Council for
the Advancement and Sup­
port of Education.
One gold medal, three
silver medals, and two
bronze medals were award­
ed in the category from a
field of 53 entries.

CAROLYN STILLWELL '92

Swarthmore builds
partnership with local
community college

Poet, choreographer, and community activist Janice Mirikitani
read from and talked about her work March 16 as part of the Col­
lege’s Asian American Awareness Month. As a Sansei ( third genera­
tion Japanese American) survivor o f the World War II internment
camps and as an incest survivor, Mirikitani uses her art to raise
issues of race and gender, attempting to “break through the silence”
to reject stereotypes and create new images of Asian Americans.
Her books of poetry and prose Shedding Silence and Awake in the
River have both received critical acclaim.
26

The College’s involvement
in community and politiceli
programs in nearby Ches­
ter took on a new dimen­
sion this semester with the
introduction of several new
courses addressing issues
of urban poverty.
Working under a grant
from the Pew Charitable
Trusts, faculty members
from Swarthmore and the
Chester and Media cam­
puses of Delaware County
Community College have
begun courses in child
development and social
policy, the literature of
oppression, and urban

E

research. Additional cours­
es are being developed on
subjects such as the use of
quantitative methods in
studying urban poverty,
grass-roots movements for
urban social change, urban
environment and urban
renewed, early education,
and civic participation,
education, and social trans­
formation.
The cooperative efforts
grew out of talks between
College administrators and
faculty members and lead­
ers of organizations and
institutions in Chester.
They seek to increase rele­
vant student involvement
in community-defined proj­
ects and, at the same time,
to balance theoretical
learning in the classroom
with elements of urban
reality experienced first­
hand.
As the program now
stands, in each course two
professors, one from each
of the institutions, teach no
more than 24 students
from the two schools. Stu­
dents are paired to work
together on readings, oral
presentations, writing, and
preparing for exams.
Maurice Eldridge ’61,
associate vice president
and executive assistant to
President Alfred H. Bloom,
said the program was start­
ed with “two principal con-

New dates for
October break
Please note that the dates
for October break for
1994 have been changed
to Oct. 7 (end of last
class or seminar) to Oct.
17(8:30 a.m.).
The change is to coin­
cide with the fall vaca­
tions of Bryn Mawr and
Haverford colleges and
the University of Penn­
sylvania.

S W A R TH M O R E COLLEGE BULLETIN

E

sidérations in mind: How
could the College interact
more effectively and sys­
tematically in Chester with
a view to making a contri­
bution to long-term change,
and how could we bring
the study of the reality of
urban poverty more ade­
quately into our curricu­
lum?” He added that long­
term goals of the project
include involving other
area institutions to study
“the issues of major con­
cern to residents of Ches­
ter and of U.S. inner cities
more generally.”

C

of various types of liquid
crystals and the nature of
the transitions that take
place as one phase changes
into another.
Collings taught at Ken­
yon College in Ohio from
1976 until 1990, when he
joined the Swarthmore fac­
ulty. He is chair of the De­
partment of Physics and
Astronomy.

Women’s Resource
Center reopens
after changes
A year ago, the College’s
Wom en’s Center was “dys­
functional,” said Katie Bow­
man ’94. “A lot of women—
especially women of col­
or— didn’t feel comfortable
going there.”
The center’s interns re­
signed suddenly last spring
after an all-campus women’s
meeting revealed wide dis­
satisfaction with the role of
the organization. Bowman
helped organize a “transi­
tion team” to run the cen­
ter while changes in the
governance of the center,
including the creation of a
board, were discussed.
“It took a lot longer than
I thought it would,” said

Bowman. Several propos­
als w ere floated, and in
November 1993 another
mass meeting of women
students reached agree­
ment on a new board of
nine women. A minimum of
three board members
would be women of color,
and at least two were to be
what Bowman described as
“queer identified.”
Physical renovations of
the center, which is housed
in one of the former frater­
nity lodges, were also under­
taken. When board elec­
tions w ere finally held in
March, the W om en’s Re­
source Center was on its
way to becoming what new
board member Patrice
Bone ’96 hopes will be “a
place where any woman, or
group of women, or even a
group dealing with wom­
en’s issues, can walk in,
claim a space, and take
what they need.”

Phoenix “strikes”
for cash or credit
The editors of The Phoenix
suspended publication of
the student newspaper at
the beginning of the second
semester to press for either

Codings wins American
Physical Society Prize
Peter J. Collings, the Morris
L. Clothier Professor of
Physics, has been awarded
the American Physical Soci­
ety Prize to a Faculty Mem­
ber for Research in an
Undergraduate Institution.
' Collings was cited for his
“excellent experiments on
the optical properties of
liquid crystals” and for his
“skilled direction of under­
graduate students at Ken­
yon and Swarthmore col­
leges, who have been given
major responsibilities in
carrying out this research.”
Internationally known
for his work, Collings does
research on the structure

THE PHOENIX
Swarthmore Debate Claims National Championship
The Championship Trophy Returns to Campus for the First Time in Seven Years
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The Phoenix is back after a seven-week strike. Look for
more about two Swarthmore students ’ national debate
championship in the next issue of The Garnet Letter.

compensation or the grant­
ing of course credit to the
paper’s top staffers. The
“strike” lasted until late
March, when Student Coun­
cil members engineered a
compromise.
Editors Andrew Perrin
’94 and Jonathan Seitz ’96
had been elected in Decem­
ber 1993 on a pledge to
take the action, which Per­
rin asserted would lead to
improvements in the quali­
ty of the paper: “The princi­
pal problem with The Phoe­
nix is that the staff doesn’t
have the time to do the
quality of work they’d like
to do.” Every member of
this spring’s editorial
board, he said, has a pay­
ing job on campus plus a
full course load. Compensa­
tion of the editors would
allow them to quit their
other jobs, or course credit
would lighten their aca­
demic schedules.
The College’s adminis­
tration refused to get in­
volved in the dispute, say­
ing that there was no mon­
ey in the budget to pay the
editors and that academic
credit was a matter for the
faculty to consider.
“W e reached an im­
passe,” said Student Coun­
cil member Dallas Brennan
’94. “The students were
being denied a paper, but
the editors had a point
too.” The Council was
unable to increase student
activities funding of The
Phoenix in order to pay the
editors, so Brennan pro­
posed that the paper re­
sume publication while the
Council explored the issue
of credit with the faculty
and administration for a
period of up to a year. The
striking editors agreed but
resigned in favor of a new
staff for the remainder of
the semester— and The
Phoenix rose again.

Teams lag but
individuals shine
in winter sports
Although the women’s
swim team ended the year
with a record of 6-7, the
season was marked by sev­
eral outstanding individual
performances. Most no­
table among these was
sophomore Skye Fulker­
son’s feat of qualifying for
the Division III National
Championships. Fulkerson
qualified in the 100-yard
breaststroke, in which she
took first place and set Col­
lege and conference rec­
ords at the Centennial Con­
ference Championships.
The women w ere guided
through the season by the
leadership of senior cap­
tains Jenny Diamond and
Kate Moran.
The men’s swim team
finished with an overall
record of 3-9, but Kendrew
Witt ’96 became the confer­
ence champion and set Col­
lege and conference rec­
ords in the 100-yard and
200-yard breaststroke.
Jason Greenwood ’94 set a

College record in the 200yard backstroke, while the
200- and 400-yard medley
relay teams also estab­
lished new Swarthmore
records. Senior captain
Dave Helgerson provided
valuable leadership for the
team throughout the sea­
son.
The wrestling team also
had some great individual
accomplishments. Eric
Williams ’95 was named
Centennial Conference Out­
standing Wrestler after he
defeated Muhlenberg’s
Tom Gulick in the finals at
the conference champi­
onships. Before meeting
Williams, Gulick had been
undefeated for two years.
Williams was one of only 66
wrestlers chosen as NCAA
Division III Scholar AllAmericans.
The men’s indoor track
and field team finished
third at the Centennial Con­
ference Championships,
behind Haverford and
Western Maryland. Scott
Reents ’95 finished third in
the 1,500 meters and the

Super sophomore swimmers... Although both
members of teams with losing records, Kendrew
Witt and Skye Fulkerson set individual records.
Witt became the Centennial Conference champi­
on and set College and conference records in the
28

5,000 meters, establishing a
new College record in the
5,000. Other top finishers
included Eric Pakurar ’97,
who came in second in the
triple jump and fourth in
the 400-meter dash, and
Sam Paschel ’96, who came
in third in the long jump.
Captain Mike Vagner ’94
finished fourth in the shot
put.
The women’s track and
field team fought lack of
numbers throughout the
season; however, at the
Centennial Conference
Championships, the wom­
en still managed to finish
fifth overall. Tw o women,
Tina Shepardson ’94 and
Megan Cunningham ’95,
took first place in their
events, the triple jump and
the 800-meter race. Joanna
Vondrasek ’94 finished
third in the long jump and
fourth in the high jump.
The badminton team
finished the season with a
record of 8-2. Captains Val
Casey ’94, Meredith Collins
’95, and Kar-yee Wu ’94
provided leadership for the

100- and 200-yard breaststroke. Fulkerson quali­
fied for the Division III National Championships
with her time in the 100-yard breaststroke, in
which she took first place in the conference cham­
pionships and set College and conference records.

group, and first-year stu­
dents Thanh Hoang, Vanya
Tepavcevic, and Norma
Nangju had excellent rook- |
ie seasons for the Garnet.
At the Philadelphia Invita­
tional and the Mid-Atlantic
Classic, Hoang reached the
finals and semifinals. At the
Northeastern Intercolle­
giate Tournament, Jeff
Switzer ’94 won the men’s
singles and Hoang reached
the singles semifinals. To­
gether, Switzer and Hoang
reached the semifinals of
the mixed doubles.
Women’s basketball fin­
ished the year with a rec­
ord of 6-18. Despite the los­
ing record, the women dis­
played marked progress
from past years. Senior
captains Kerry Laufer and
Jenny Willis led the team in
scoring with 8.53 and 6.89
points per game. For the
second straight season,
Nancy Rosenbaum ’96 led
the team in rebounding,
averaging nine per game.
The men’s basketball
team also ended the sea­
son 6-18. Kirk Daulerio ’95
led the team in both scor­
ing (15.0 ppg) and re­
bounding (7.75 rpg) for the
season. He was chosen as
an honorable mention
selection of the All-Centen­
nial team. The men should
come back as a stronger
group next year, as only
three seniors, Brett Fenster, Corey Mulloy, and
Greg Nini, will be lost to
graduation.
The Hood Trophy com­
petition stood at 6-5, with
Haverford in the lead, after
the winter season. Haver­
ford defeated Swarthmore j
in men’s and women’s
track, while Swarthmore
defeated Haverford in
wrestling. Both the men’s
and wom en’s basketball
teams had one win and one |
loss against Haverford.
S W A R TH M O R E COLLEGE BULLETIN

Eight new members
join Board of Managers

Delta Upsilon Centennial... More than 150 past and present
members of Delta Upsilon fraternity held a banquet on campus
March 19 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Swarthmore Col­
lege chapter. Among those returning was Herbert Taylor ’27 (inset,
right), who was honored as “the most senior statesman” by Bill Lee
Jr. ’60. Lee, who served as the evening’s emcee, also presented the
Bill Lee Sr. [ ’33] Service Award to Dave Helgerson ’94. Speakers
representing DU through the decades included Taylor and Chuck
Martin ’42, Wes Argo ’57, Dale Larrimore ’72, and Ken Pitts ’85. The
evening was planned by committee members Tim Malarkey ’89,
Paul Stevens ’65, Bill deGrouchy ’78, Ken Pitts, and Bill Lee, with Ed
Perkins ’49, Joe More ’82, and Eben Sales ’57.
MAY 1994

Within the last year, eight
new members have been
appointed to the College’s
Board of Managers.
Julie Lange Hall ’55,
head of the North Shore
Country Day School in Winnekta, 111.; Lillian E. Kraemer
’61, a partner in the law
firm of Simpson Thacher &
Bartlett in New York City;
Jane Lang ’67, partner in
the Washington law firm of
Sprenger & Lang; William
G. Nelson ’56 of St. Louis,
president and chief execu­
tive officer of Pilot Software
in Boston; and Marc J. Son­
nenfeld ’68, a partner in the
Philadelphia law firm Mor­
gan, Lewis & Bockius, were
named Term Managers.
Marilyn J. Holifield ’69, a

partner in the law firm of
Holland and Knight in
Miami, and Jeffrey A. Wolfson ’75, owner of invest­
ment firms PAX Options
and BOTTA Trading Inc. in
Chicago, w ere elected as
Alumni Managers. Miriam
Jorgensen ’87, a Ph.D. can­
didate in political econom y
at Harvard, was named a
Young Alumni Manager.
Gretchen Mann Handwerger ’56 serves as Manager
during her two-year term
as president of the Alumni
Association.
Term Managers are
elected for four years and
may serve two additional
four-year terms. Alumni
Managers are appointed
for one four-year term.
Both are eligible for re-elec­
tion after one year off.
29

LETTERS
tute. In the ’60s conservative state­
ments on campus often were an­
swered with intimidation rather than
intellectual discussion. I wonder how
much that has changed.
I would prefer to work within the
system toward the day when conser­
vatism no longer has to be imported
to Swarthmore. In particular, I’d hope
that the Swarthmore Conservative
Union could be among those student
groups with enthusiastic faculty sup­
port. Until the College demonstrates a
significant commitment to intellectual
diversity, I’ll remain the same uppity
conservative who founded Swarthmoreans for Goldwater-Miller and
wrote the Phoenix column “Charily
Speaking.”
CHARLES FLOTO ’68
Washington, D.C.

Balanced, Inclusive Curricula
Necessary in Liberal Arts
To the Editor:
Joseph W. Kimmel’s [’44] characteriza­
tion (in the December 1993 Bulletin) of
“interculturalism” as “the denigration
of Western thought and literature of
the last 3,000 years and the exaltation
of tribal and aboriginal practices”
speaks volumes about the need for
balanced, inclusive curricula in the lib­
eral arts. This kind of reductionist,
ethnocentric name-calling is absolute­
ly antithetical to the spirit of the
“great books” invoked by Kimmel. To
choose homogeneity over diversity in
either the college curriculum or the
college community would be a fearful
step backward.
President Bloom’s appointment of a
dean for multicultural affairs seems to
be a measured and thoughtful re­
sponse to a rapidly changing world
and educational milieu. The terms
“multiculturalism” and “political cor­
rectness” may in fact refer to real phe­
nomena of knee-jerk social pressures
on campus. More often than not, they
are used (successfully) to trivialize
and to polarize discussions of serious
political and social concerns. I hope
that Swarthmore will be able to avoid
these pitfalls and to maintain a posi­
tion of excellence, balance, and
integrity in American higher educa­
tion. It should leave its graduates with
more questions than answers, more
humility than arrogance, and more
30

Continued from page 3

openness to the possibilities of truth
and beauty in traditions other than
one’s own.
RON HALE ’65
Santa Fe, N.M.

Swarthmore’s Problem
Is in Its Finances
To the Editor:
Too many girly-men and manly girls,
feminists, radicals, and ethnic flavor­
ings are the least of Swarthmore Col­
lege’s future problems [Kimmel letter,
December 1993]. A pattern is begin­
ning to emerge that recent graduates
of the College are less satisfied with
their education at Swarthmore than
are graduates of peer institutions
(Amherst, Williams, Bryn Mawr,
Haverford, et al.) They are expressing
their displeasure by refusing to donate
a nominal sum of money to the Col­
lege.
Let us investigate some facts about
the finances of a Swarthmore educa­
tion. Its cost increased astronomically
from $3,500 in 1970 to $23,500 in 1993.
The expenditure side is more reveal­
ing, however. The spending mix indi­
cates that administration, student ser­
vices, and development doubled as a
percentage of the budget from 17 in
1970 to 33 in 1993. Currently, Swarth­
more spends an almost equal amount
of its budget on administrative over­
head, grass, and new buildings (33
percent) as it does on academic
instruction (34 percent).
Colleges have traditionally made
the argument that rising tuition has
enabled them to offer financial aid to
the poor, middle class, or exceptional
student by overcharging the wealthier
student. Fair enough. Some even want
exemption from the antitrust statutes
to continue their “philanthropy.” The
financial report at Swarthmore indi­
cates otherwise. Financial aid at
Swarthmore from 1985 to today, a
period when college costs were boom­
ing and the recession (1990-93)
brought some folks up short, in­
creased from 13 percent of the budget
in 1985 to 14 percent in 1993. In some
years, it decreased as a percentage of
the budget. Apparently, academic
instruction and financial aid have less
priority on new expenditures than
administration and development.
Unfortunately, Mr. Kimmel’s anger

against ethnic groups or girly-men is
misplaced. The intellectual and cur­
riculum crisis is a symptom and con­
sequence of the financial crisis, and
there is no easy way out of it.
GORDON SMITH ’88
West Boxford, Mass.
Vice President for Business and
Finance William T. Spock ’51 replies:
“We cannot make direct functional com­
parisons between 1970 and 1993 due to
the lack o f prior information. Listed
below in a different way is the data
shown in the chart on page 29 o f the
President’s Report. Because so much
staff support is directly involved in the
academic program, it might be more
helpful to Mr. Smith and others if we
were to use this breakdown in future
reports.
Item
% of Budget. 1994-95
Faculty Compensation
23%
Staff Direct Support for Faculty
5%
Academic Department Expenses
6%
Sponsored Academic Programs
3%
Total Academic
37%
Administrative Support
Financial Aid
Facilities, Maint., Debt Service
Student Services, Admissions,
Food Service
Development
Total Expenditures

21%
14%>
13%
11%
4%
100%

“Scholarships and student aid have
grown from 8 percent to 14 percent of
the budget between 1970 and 1993. The
years since 1985 have been difficult
ones for families, as Gordon Smith says.
The increase in charges for next year is
4.5 percent, much lower than in prior
years. It should be noted that a faculty
committee report concluded that during
the 1980s administrative staff compen­
sation rose at a lower rate than faculty
compensation. This is still true if staff
support to the faculty is included on the
faculty side o f the ledger. ”
And from Douglas Hasbrouck, direc­
tor o f the Annual Fund: “Swarthmore’s
classes o f 1983 to 1992 average 42.4
percent participation in annual giving.
Amherst’s percentage is 52.3, but Haver­
ford (43.8) and Williams (41.3) are
essentially the same as Swarthmore.
Bryn Mawr’s participation in that age
range is 20.4 percent. ”
S W A R TH M O R E COLLEGE BULLETIN

ALUMNI
Recent Sw arthm ore Events
Albuquerque, N.M.: Swarthmore Cen­
tennial Professor of English Literature
Tom Blackburn, along with his wife,
Ann, visited with New Mexico alumni,
parents, and friends on April 15.
Everyone gathered at the home of Kip
’67 and Roxanne Rensch Allen ’66 to
get caught up on what’s happening at
Swarthmore today.

Baltimore: Parents and their Swarth­
more students kicked off spring break
on March 5 with a Saturday afternoon
get-together at the home of Sidney
and Salam Mir, parents of Sarny ’96.

New York: On March 7 Alice Zinnes
77 presented a slide show and talk in
conjunction with her current exhibi­
tion of paintings and etchings.
John McIntyre ’51, a docent at the
Newberger Museum of Art, led a
group of alum­
ni, parents, and
friends on an
April 24 tour of
La Frontera, a
controversial
art exhibit of
the Mexico/
U.S. border
experience.

Washington, D.C.: On April 10 the
Washington, D.C., Connection had its
annual Orioles outing. A talk by Dick
Hall ’53 started off the day, followed
by an Orioles vs. Rangers game, at­
tended by 223 alumni, parents, and
friends. Dorita Sewell ’65 organized
the event.
Coolfont: Swarthmore alumni, par­
ents, and friends spent a sunny April
weekend at the Coolfont resort in
Berkeley Springs, W.Va., hosted by
owners Martha and Sam Ashelman
’37. The fourth annual event, with the
theme “Health Care Reform: What
Should It Accomplish?” was coordi­
nated by Barbara Starfield (Holtzman), M.D. ’54 and Neil A. Holtzman,
M.D. ’55. A distinguished group of
alumni and faculty members partici­
pated in the discussion, including
Thomas Plaut, Ph.D., M.P.H. ’49, David
G. Smith, Richter Professor Emeritus
of Political Sci­
ence, and Emilie Passow, as­
sistant profes­
sor of English
Literature.

Garnet
Sages at
Highland
Park
The winter
get-togeth­
er of the
Garnet
Sages took
place at the Bob Peelle ’39, Ethel
Wolf Boyer ’41, and
Highland
Vincent
Boyer 39
Park Club
in Lake
Wales, Fla., during the first week
in February. The foundation for
the gathering was four winter resi­
dent Swarthmore alumni, Frank
Hutson ’37, Gene Smith McCul­
loch ’42, Robert Wilson ’31, and
John W ood ’37.
A highlight of the weekend was
a luncheon on Friday, Feb. 4,
attended by 35 Swarthmoreans
and guests. The group included
six transients who traveled from
other points in Florida. The prize
for the earliest graduate went to
Betsy Palmenberg Pugh ’29.

Paris: Eighteen

members of
the Paris Con­
nection en­
joyed a wine
Philadelphia:
tasting on
The Philadel­
April 8. Under
phia Connec­
Carlton [7 5 ] and Christine Henry greet emeritus
the direction
tion, together
Professor Harrison Wright after his February talk to of a certified
with Alumni
enologist, par­
Council, hosted the Washington, D.C., Connection on contempo­
rary events in South Africa.
ticipants duti­
an event on
fully looked,
campus on
sniffed, and finally drank their way
March 19 featuring Christopher
through six wines from various wine­
McBride, one of the w orld’s leading
making areas of France— Burgundy,
experts on white lions. He showed
Cotes du Rhone, the Vaucluse, Bor­
slides, discussed the history of the
deaux, and the Southwest. The
lions, and spoke about his experi­
evening continued with a buffet din­
ences living in South Africa.
ner and the opportunity to finish the
favorite bottles of wine.
South Florida: A reception with Mari­
Future events planned for the Paris
lyn Holifield ’69, newly appointed
Connection include a sailing trip in
member of the Board of Managers,
May to one of the small islands off the
and Harry Gotwals, Swarthmore’s vice
coast of Normandy, a bike trip in the
president of alumni, development,
summer, a cocktail party for the Alum­
and public relations, was held on
ni College Abroad group in August,
March 9. Bonnie and David Gold ’75
and social occasions with visiting Col­
hosted the event in their home.
lege faculty and staff members.

MAY 1994

DIGEST

Upcoming Sw arthm ore Events
New York: Wine tasting with David
Wright ’69 and Don Fujihira ’69 in the
late spring. Also coming up: Margaret
Helfand ’69 and her team of architects
will talk about and show their latest
plans for the north campus project.
Watch your mail for details.
Washington, D.C.: Swarthmore Assis­
tant Professor of Biology Am y Vollmer
will visit with area alumni, parents,
and friends and talk about her current
sabbatical research. And in the Balti­
more area, plan to com e and see the
Matisse exhibit on June 26 at the Balti­
more Museum of Art.

Philadelphia: On May 27 the Philadel­
phia Connection, together with
Swarthmore’s graduating seniors, will
travel to Veterans Stadium and cheer
on the Phillies when they play the
Houston Astros.

31

Battles and Business
David Goodman ’83 finds profits and pitfalls in computer software enterprise.
r. Goodman is ready
now,” says his secre­
tary, calling back a reporter
for an interview.
David Goodman’s voice is
robust, clear, and excited as
he talks computerese of
“front ends” and “user
agents.” His company, Swfte
International, Ltd., is “on
line” in the computer soft­
ware market and is ranked
on Inc. Magazine's list of the
500 fastest-growing privately
held companies for the third
year in a row.
Goodman ’83 started
Growth for Swfte has come
Swfte in June 1983 with
“like fruit on a tree, ” says
Swarthmore friends Bill DetDavid Goodman ’83. One of
tering ’84 and Bob Packer ’83, Swfte’s newest products on
who have since sold their
the market is The Big One, a
interest in the company. His
comprehensive seismic simu­
current national sales manag­ lation o f the Los Angeles
er is Marty Piombo ’84.
basin earthquakes.
As president and chief
executive officer, Goodman
has seen his company’s for­
Gettysburg game was re­
tune rise rapidly in the mar­
leased to stores in March.
ketplace battle—and it is a
Swfte, which originally
computer simulation of a real
stood for Software for To­
battle that is putting Swfte on
day’s Environment, was
the front lines. When Ken
started as a font software
Burns’ Civil War series for
company. The company still
PBS first aired in 1991, it
produces font collections,
caught the attention of Good­ including the award-winning
man and his company. In­
Typecase. Other software
spired by the program, the
programs are for Bicycle
company’s software design­
playing cards, Workman Pub­
ers created a historically cor­ lishing quiz cards, and The
rect simulation/edutainment
New York Times crossword
puzzle. With headquarters in
game that faithfully recreates
Hockessin, Del., and offices
the battle of Gettysburg. The
and sales throughout the
game also gives players the
United States and world, the
opportunity to change histo­
ry using variables such as
company’s 1993 fiscal sales
were just over $7 million.
terrain, mindset of the unit
However, the rise of his
commanders, stamina of the
troops, and ammunition. At
independent company has
not come without a price. He
nearly the same time, the
has been introduced to the
movie Gettysburg, produced
world of big business law­
by entertainment magnate
suits that can strip a person
Ted Turner’s company, was
of energy and focus.
released in theaters, thereby
Says Goodman: “Business
generating more public inter­
is not a friendly thing; it’s not
est. The timing of the two
about honor. Capitalism has
brought Swfte and Turner
Interactive together. The out­ a dark edge that makes it dif­
ficult sometimes to move for­
come is a CD-ROM that com­
ward in an environment that
bines game simulation,
changes rapidly without
voiceover, and actual film
making missteps and trusting
clips from the movie. The

M

62

the wrong people. Relation­
ships are what drive busi­
ness, and relationships have
a way of coming and going at
hyper-speed. It’s challenging,
particularly for an indepen­
dent.”
Goodman says that what
has helped him survive in
the corporate jungle is his
Swarthmore education.
“At Swarthmore I wasn’t
coming in as a top person in
my class. It was challenging.
It’s definitely a no-gloves en­
vironment. The bare knuck­
les fighting there prepared
me well for challenges of the
business world today. People
I talk with in financial circles
look at me funny when I say
Swarthmore because they
think of Swarthmoreans as
carrot-crunching socialists
who sit around discussing
Freud. The outside world’s
perception of Swarthmore
College is that it’s an erudite,
backwater institution with a
few good engineers.
“I think no matter what
the discipline, it’s really a
place to learn how to learn. It
probably took me almost 10
years to realize what I had in
a Swarthmore education.
You have to step back and
interpret it. It was a humbling
experience.”
Goodman’s years at
Swarthmore were an aca­
demic walkabout.
“I was a wanderer. I took a
cross-section of classes,”
says the art history graduate.
“There were several times
when [art history professor]
Kaori Kitao looked at me and
said, ‘I don’t know what
you’re doing with this course
load.’ But she gritted her
teeth and let me do it.” His
choices included digital
logic, Gothic architecture,
calculus, and engineering
classes. His interest in those
classes paid off when Good­
man started his software
business. The Philadelphia
Business Journal ranked his
company as one of the Top

100 private companies in the
Philadelphia area for 1990,
1991, and 1993.
For the future, Goodman
has some plans and some
worries. One of his compa­
ny’s newest projects is in
conjunction with MCI to pro­
duce The Wire, an electronic
mail interface for MCI’s mes­
saging service, a competitor
to the popular Internet.
Another area the compa­
ny will focus on is contentbased media. There’s a rush
between Hollywood and Sili­
con Valley and independents
such as Swfte to get involved
with films and books, as
Swfte did with Gettysburg.
But in the software busi­
ness, the margin for error is
stripped away by the consoli­
dation of the market. Good­
man expects to continue col­
laboration with several me­
dia giants in creating multimedia software. But he be­
lieves these companies will
want to play with Swfte for
only a certain amount of time
before they buy or merge
with his company. He hopes
Swfte has enough propri­
etary technology to keep that
from happening. If it does
happen, he hopes to keep at
least a portion of Swfte inde­
pendent.
Goodman says his biggest
surprise since starting Swfte
has been the personality the
company has taken on.
“Swfte has a life force and
a personality all its own,” he
says. “I had not expected
that. I thought it would be
abstract, but it’s very alive
independent from me.” He
was told recently that the
reason Swfte received the
Workman Publishing con­
tract was because of its
apple-pie image. Never, he
says, in his wildest dreams
would he have characterized
the company that way. He
sees his multimillion dollar
business’s image as very...
Bohemian.
—Audree Penner
S W A R TH M O R E COLLEGE BULLETIN

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

summer at the beach sud­
denly full of satisfying sur­
prises when a silver kite and
an answer to a message sent
in a green bottle enter his
life.

Carl Abbott ’66, The Metro­
politan Frontier: Cities in the
Modem American West, Uni­
versity of Arizona Press,
1993. This survey of urban
experience in 19 U.S. West­
ern states, moving from eco­
nomic change to social and
political response, examines
the initial boom of the 1940s,
the process of change in the
following decades, and the
ultimate impact of Western
cities on their environments,
on the regional character,
and on national identity.

Joseph Cary ’51, Three Mod­
em Italian Poets: Saba, Unga­
retti, Montale, University of
Chicago Press, 1993. Focus­
ing on the works of Italian
poets Umberto Saba,
Giuseppe Ungaretti, and
Eugenio Montale, this book
facilitates the understanding
of their poetry and presents
biographical portraits of
these giants of literary mod­
ernism. A Ghost in Trieste,
University of Chicago Press,
1993. Part travel diary, part
guidebook, part literary his­
tory, this book explores the
Adriatic port city through
the works of poet Umberto
Saba and novelists Italo
Svevo and James Joyce in the
early part of this century.

William H. Armstrong ’54,
Edward Parmelee Smith: A
Friend to God’s Poor, Univer­
sity of Georgia Press, 1993.
Smith, a Congregational min­
ister from New England, was
a leading light in forming an
evangelical response to the
Civil War and Reconstruc­
tion. This biography traces
strands of American church
history: the reform move­
ment, the assistance the
churches gave to President
Grant’s Indian Policy, and the
movement to bring the
gospel to Africa.
Fredeiicka (Nolde) Berger
’54, The Green Bottle and the
Silver Kite, Greenwillow
Books, 1993. In this novel for
young readers, 10-year-old
Phil finds his unpromising

band, Nathan. She finished an
M.A. in religious studies at
Brown and spent last year
working for the ACLU in
Boston.
Kevin Hall writes: “I’ve left
my position as the executive
director of Teach for America
in LA to teach fourth grade at
Roosevelt Elementary School
in Compton, Calif. I am fulfill­
ing a dream and teaching and
learning from 35 special stu­
dents in an under-resourced
66

Russell P. Leslie and Kathryn
M. Conway ’76, The Lighting
Pattern Book for Homes,
Lighting Research Center,
1993. The continuing evolu­
tion of lighting and energy
conservation is now entering
everyone’s home. This book
gives the homeowner practi­
cal designs to help see well
and save money, details on
energy-efficient lamps, lumi­
naires, and controls, and
plans for installing quality
lighting in every room.
Gerald Epstein ’73, Julie Gra­
ham, and Jessica Nembhard

school. It’s hard to verbalize
how fortunate all of us are to
have a Swarthmore education,
but I see it in my students’
eyes each day.”
Joan Cargill serves as the
New York editor of Premiere
Movie Magazine of the UK and
New Woman Magazine of Aus­
tralia. After completing her
fourth year of the clinical psy­
chology program at Boston
College, Kunya Des Jardins is
doing an internship through

(eds.), Creating a New World
Economy: Forces o f Change
and Plans for Action, Temple
University Press, 1993. This
reader of 23 essays by ac­
tivist economists describes
how the global economy
works. Analyses include such
complex topics as interna­
tional debt, Keynesianism,
trade policy, immigration,
and the drug trade.
Clark Kerr ’32, Troubled
Times for American Higher
Education: The 1990s and
Beyond, State University of
New York Press, 1994. This
study examines emerging
problems influencing the
near future of higher educa­
tion, including the quality of
undergraduate education,
ethics, the racial crisis, and
competition for recognition
and resources among the
nation’s research universi­
ties.
Howard N. Rabinowitz ’64,
Race, Ethnicity, and Urbaniza­
tion, University of Missouri
Press, 1994. This series of
essays introduces readers to
recent developments in the
fields of race relations, eth­
nicity, and urban history,
including assessments of the
nature of black leadership,
the origins of segregation,
the expansion of urban histo­
ry to include the South and
the West, and the writing of
ethnic history.
Jeffrey Ruda ’69, Fra Filippo
Lippi: Life and Work with a
Complete Catalogue, Harry N.

the Tufts U. School of Medicine/Boston Veterans Admin­
istration Hospital Consortium.
Rebecca Mison completed an
M.A. at the U. of Pa. and is
now teaching social studies at
George Washington High
School in Northeast Philadel­
phia.
Noël Bisson is “quite
happy,” although she can’t
wait to be through school. She
is working toward a Ph.D. in
musicology at Harvard. Ken

Abrams Inc., 1993. A mixture
of text and a catalog of
works, this biography traces
the life and art of the great
pioneer of the psychological
naturalism of the early
Renaissance.
Peggy (Bebié) Thomson ’43,
Siggy’s Spaghetti Works, Tam­
bourine Books, 1993. A guid­
ed tour of the workings of a
spaghetti factory highlights
this fully illustrated chil­
dren’s book, which also
includes bits of pasta history.
Richard Wolfson ’69, Nuclear
Choices: A Citizen’s Guide to
Nuclear Technology, The MIT
Press, 1993. This book up­
dates treatments of both
nuclear power and nuclear
weapons issues through the
collapse of the Soviet Union.
Topics include the Strategic
Arms Reduction Treaties and
a shift in emphasis from the
bilateral nuclear confronta­
tion of the Cold War era to
the renewed threat of nucle­
ar proliferation throughout
the world.
John Wright ’62, Traveling
the High Way Home: Ralph
Stanley and the World of Tra­
ditional Bluegrass Music, Uni­
versity of Illinois Press, 1993.
This portrait of one of the
most revered figures of bluegrass music is a mixture of
oral history from Stanley’s
co-workers, friends, promot­
ers, and others and an evalu­
ation of his more than 40year career with his Clinch
Mountain Boys.

Harris is also continuing his
graduate school work, study­
ing parasite molecular biology
at Yale. A so lost somewhere
in graduate school, Kir Talmage writes: “Hoping to grad­
uate this grad school thing
next June. No idea what next,
but I haven’t panicked yet.”
Hanne Weedon is working
and going to school at Penn.
She’s very involved in the
campus employee organiza­
tion and in community/neighS W A R TH M O R E COLLEGE BULLETIN

BLOOD AND TEARS
Continued from page 7
w ere a few hundred gaping street ven­
dors, soldiers, journalists, and other
spectators. At the appointed hour, an
ambulance arrived, backed up to the
stakes, and unloaded the four con­
demned men. Since all the prisoners
w ere ethnic Chinese, Ky and his advis­
ers expected little popular objection.
M a n y V ie tn a m e s e d e te s te d th e
wealthy Chinese businessmen living in
their midst.
The four firing squads, each with
fiv e so ld iers arm ed w ith A m erican
carbines, stepped into place, and the
p ris o n ers w e re tied to th e stakes.
Three were pinioned with their hands
tied behind the stakes, but the fourth,
a recent convert to Christianity, had
asked that his hands be left free so
th at he c o u ld d ie w ith his palm s
together in prayer. The executioners
obliged him.
T h e squad leader barked a com ­
mand, the carbine bolts clattered, and
in the brief silence that follow ed w e
could hear the Christian praying loud­
ly, his blindfolded face raised toward
heaven. Then cam e the com m and,
and w h en th e 20 c a rb in e s fir e d a
r a g g e d v o lle y , th r e e o f th e m en
instantly slumped from their bindings
and w e r e still. But th e born-again
C hristian rem ain ed alive, h o rrib ly

chanting a hymn. His hands, torn and
shattered b y bullets, had evid en tly
deflected the volley, leaving his heart
beating.
A fte r an in term in able pause the
squad commander, his vo ice hoarse
with annoyance, ordered his men to

our firin g squads,
arm ed w ith
A m erican carbines,
stepped into place.
Th e prisoners w e re
tied to th e stakes.

F

fire another volley. This time the pris­
oner slumped, but w e could still hear
him trying to sing as blood foam ed
from his mouth. Finally, the squad
le a d e r d re w his .45 c a lib e r p isto l,
chambered a cartridge, and shot the
merchant through the head.
The executioners exchanged some
w h isp ered co n versa tion , and then
their leader barked a command and
marched them away. The ambulance
cre w cut dow n the bodies, h eaved
them into the coffins, and carted them
off. T h e fire truck h osed aw ay the
blood, and the crowd drifted away.
I had seen many people die, includ­
ing som e w ho w ere executed, but I

ex p erie n ce d an u nw onted w a v e of
hatred that morning— hatred not only
for Ky and his firing squads but for all
o th e r c o ld -b lo o d e d ex ecu tio n ers .
Th ere’s something about the slaying
o f a h elpless creatu re— a man at a
stake or a bull in the Madrid ring—
that brings me to a vengeful fury.
T h a t m o rn in g I a lso h a ted the
smooth American diplomats, the State
D epartm ent and W h ite House, and
everyon e else w ho had connived at
placing Ky in power. And yes, I hated
journalists too— reporters, including
myself, w ho had contributed to this
horror by goading a childish dictator
into ordering a bloodbath.
Fortunately, rage passes. No jour­
nalist can indulge in rage at others or
in self-hatred without losing the bal­
ance n e ed e d to p ly his tra d e. But
there are some deaths reporters can­
not forget. The best that can be said is
that such deaths season us and make
us think tw ice before w riting some­
thing that m ay lea ve b lo o d on our
hands. ■
M alcolm W. Browne 52 is senior writer
in the science news department o f The
New York Times. This article is excerp­
ted from his 1993 a u tob iogra p h y ,
M u dd y B oots and Red Socks, pub­
lished by Tim es Books, a division of
Random House. Text and photographs
are re p rin te d by p e rm is s io n o f the
author.

Help make history in

England and France this summer
Alumni College Abroad
July 30 to August 14
e among the first to take the new Eurostar train through the Chunnel
from London to Paris. Tour the beaches of Normandy as the world
commemorates the 50th anniversary of the historic Allied landing.
Discover the gentle pleasures of country villages and provincial towns,
the charm of the Cotswolds (which inspired some Swarthmore architec­
ture), and the lyrical beauty of Mont-Saint-Michel.
Tom Blackburn, Centennial Professor of English Literature, and his
British-born wife, Ann, will lead the Swarthmore Alumni College Abroad to
southern England and northwestern France in a summer of milestones.
Veteran travelers to Europe and first-timers alike will share unique
experiences on this delightful trip. You’ll have the advantage of Tom ’s
impressive scholarship when you attend a Shakespeare production at
Stratford, and Ann will offer personal recollections of the Battle of Britain.
For further information please call Barb Lee at 1-800-825-2900 today.

B

70

S W A R TH M O R E COLLEGE BULLETIN

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STRANGE DAYS

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Continued from page 13

rs.
ing
t a

cohesive approach to the crisis.”
He rem em bers SASS as “not ve ry
radical. But the adm inistration felt
that whatever their demands, this was
not the way they talked to students. I
don’t think Courtney Smith show ed
the leadership he might have if he had
said, ‘I’m going to walk in there, sit
down, and stay with them until we can
work this out.”’
Swarthm ore, he says, “firm ed up
my commitment to a lifelong sense of
ethics and fairness and taught me to
strive for a life grounded in principle,
The ed u cation al ex p erie n ce o f the
Honors Program was the best I could
have im agined because the p ro fes­
sor’s jo b was not to test us but to
teach us. Every day, as I try to counsel
and treat kids, I think of my Swarthmore experience.”

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clear that if I went there, I w ouldn’t
have to spend another minute on that
normal act.”
Now the only member of her class
who is a college president (of Scripps
College in Claremont, Calif.), Bekavac
looks back in wonder at the innocent
Swarthmore of 1965: “There w ere peo­
ple in plaid skirts and button-down
shirts who thought life (and parties)
w ou ld contin ue as a m ore intense
form of high school. There w ere semi­
radicals w ho saw Sw arthm ore as a
sort of Sorbonne-on-the-Crum. And
there w ere clueless M idw esterners
like me [from Clairton, Pa., near Pitts­
burgh] who just wanted to get it right.
T h in g s w e r e so s tra ig h t th at th e
thought of cutting a class was some­
thing I couldn’t really get m y mind
around.”
Change came fast in 1966-67. “Mari­
juana became pretty widespread. LSD
hit that spring. The fury over the war
picked up speed, and by the spring of
sophom ore year the counterculture

The Long Scream

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Nancy Bekavac

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^ % e o p le fro m h er cla ss seem to
associate Nancy Bekavac with the
GE C ollege Bow l, that quiz show for
brainy c o lle g e kids w h ere she and
th ree o th e r S w a rth m o rea n s t r i­
umphed in late January 1969, just
when it seemed that the College itself
would drown in conflict and grief.
“I didn’t want to do it,” she asserts.
“It was embarrassing to have all that
trivial knowledge. I was trying
very hard to be an intellectual,
but I knew reams of bad poet­
ry and all the Big Ten fight
songs.” Professor of Philoso­
phy (a n d C o lle g e B ow l
“c o a c h ”) C h a rles R aff had
twisted her arm by offering to
forgive a paper on Decartes if
she tried out. Bekavac hated
Descartes.
During high school Bekavac says
she “spent an enorm ous amount of
en ergy a p p ea rin g norm al, b ein g a
cheerleader, doing the yearbook. But
it wasn’t a very successful act. I had
no interest in going to Penn State and
being Sally C oed. I had heard that
truly smart and slightly weird people
went to Swarthmore, and it was pretty
MAY 1994

year with such
fondness.' And /
said, ‘No. Not
this year....'”

was pretty much everywhere.”
She remembers going to Philadel­
phia to review two art shows for The
Phoenix. Andrew Wyeth had a big ret­

rospective, and Andy Warhol was all
the rage. That same day she watched
Bob Eaton ’65 publicly returning his
draft card on the steps of the Philadel­
phia post office. “That p retty much
summed it up— Wyeth, Warhol, and a
draft protest,” says Bekavac.
“ By the tim e w e got to the total
trauma of 1968, everything was blow­
ing up. I just remember it as one long
scream — King, Kennedy, the Dem o­
cra tic co n ve n tio n , th e e le c tio n o f
Nixon, the sit-in. That last semester,
w e w ere a benum bed sen ior class.
After College Bowl, my mother said to
me, ‘You’re going to look back on this
year with such fondness.’ And I said,
‘No. Not this year. I’m not going to
look on this year with anything but
relief that I’m out of here.’”
For B ekavac, “ out o f h e r e ” w as
quite literal. She used her Watson Fel­
lo w s h ip to take a trip arou n d th e
w o r ld that w o u ld h a ve m ade Ken
Kesey’s head spin: Holland, England,
Ireland, Scotland, Denmark, Russia.
Th en Germ any, Y u g osla via ,
Italy, Greece, Israel, and Iran.
Hooked a ride from Tehran to
N ew Delhi. Saw Nepal. Spent
two months in Vietnam. Then,
near exhaustion, near insanity,
she started law school at Yale.
“Didn’t anybody notice that I
w as c r a z y ? ” sh e r e c e n tly
asked former law school class­
mate Robert Reich. “Yeah,” hie
replied, “but how w ere w e to
know that you w ere ever any­
thing but crazy?”
Nancy Bekavac shoves one
final memory across the table:
S o m e tim e in January 1969,
w h ile the A dm issions O ffice
was being occupied by mem­
bers of SASS, she ran into Pres­
ident Courtney Smith in front of the
library. “He had on a tweed jacket and
hat, and there was this little piece of
dirt on his face, just b elow his eye.
In s tin c tiv e ly , I r e a c h e d up and
brushed it away. I was im m ediately
surprised and horrified at myself. He
told me how proud he was of how we
w e re doin g on C ollege B ow l, and I
rem em ber saying that he should be
proud of what the black students and
other students w ere doing as well. He
co ck e d his head and said q u ietly ,
‘Thank you for tellin g me. I’ll think
about that.’ ” ■
71

A Day
in the Life
As 1965 began, total U.S. deaths in
Vietnam w ere just 356 after four years’
involvement in the war. President Lyn­
don Johnson was preparing to send
federal troops to protect civil rights
marchers at Selma, Ala., and The
Sound o f Music was up for the Acade­
my Award for Best Picture. In June
Johnson and U.N. Secretary General U
Thant received honorary degrees
from Swarthmore College. That sum­
mer 80,000 fresh troops arrived in
Vietnam, the Watts riots killed 35, and
Bob Dylan had a hit single with “Like a
Rolling Stone.” This chronology fol­
lows the Class of 1969— and the coun­
try— through the next four years.
September The Class of 1969— 150
men and 141 women— arrives at
Swarthmore. Nineteen are said to be
members of minority groups.
October President Johnson has a gall
bladder operation and shows the
nation his scar. • Dean of Women Bar­
bara Pearson Lange ’31 asks a W o­
men’s Student Government Associa­
tion (WSGA) meeting on curfews,
“What do you do after 12:00 on cam­
pus if all the buildings are closed?”
November A two-day blackout para­
lyzes the Eastern United States • More
than 100 delegates attend a regional
conference of the Students for a
Democratic Society in Bond. • “You
Keep Me Hangin’ On” by the Supremes tops the charts.
December The Beatles release “Day
Tripper.” • Phoenix headline: “Off
Campus Living Desirable; Permission,
Pad Hard T o Get.”

January The Selective Service System
announces that student deferments
will henceforth be contingent upon
class rank and the results of a stan­
dardized test to be given by the gov­
ernment.
February Acting independently of the
WSGA, Dean Lange abolishes curfews
for senior women and extends junior
72

curfews to 3:00 a.m. • Student Council
passes a resolution recommending
the abolition of WSGA because they
w ere not consulted.
March The Pentagon reveals that
Negroes, who are 11 percent of the
population, comprise 21 percent of
combat deaths in Vietnam. • In the
Heat o f the Night wins Best Picture. •
The Blues Project performs at the first
Swarthmore Rock Festival.
April President Johnson proposes a
bill to end racial discrimination in
housing. • B-52 bombers raid North
Vietnam for the first time.
May Johnson
warns against
“Nervous Nellies”
in a speech attack­
ing critics of his
O
cc
war
policies.
O
June
The United
Q
g
States now has
<
285,000
“Nervous Nellies” Vietnam. • John­
son escalates the air war against
North Vietnam, bombing Hanoi for the
first time. • James Meredith is shot
and wounded as he marches for civil
rights in Mississippi.
July Medicare goes into effect. • Race
riots flare up in New York, Chicago,
Cleveland, Omaha, Baltimore, San
Francisco, and Jacksonville. • “Hot
town, summer in the city,” sing the
Lovin’ Spoonful.
August Charles Whitman shoots 44,
killing 14, from atop a University of
Texas building. • The Pentagon issues
the highest monthly draft call since
the Korean War— 46,200. • Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr. is stoned by angry
whites during a march in Chicago.
September The Class of 1969 returns
to Swarthmore as sophomores. •
President Courtney Smith appoints a
Commission on Educational Policy
(CEP) to study the College’s academic
program. • The College’s “sex rule” is
codified to read: “The College does
not condone premarital sexual rela­
tions ... and would regard a breach of
this standard as subjecting the stu­
dent to suspension or expulsion.”
October President Johnson visits
Vietnam as troop strength reaches
331,000. • A Phoenix editorial advo­
cates the legalization of marijuana.

November Forty Swarthmore stu­
dents are among 600 marchers in a
Philadelphia protest against the war.
December Thirty-six black students
meet to form the Swarthmore AfroAmerican Students Society (SASS), the
first formal campus organization of
minority students. • The Beach Boys
sing “Good Vibrations.”

January Three astronauts are killed in
a launch-pad fire in the first Apollo
spacecraft. • Phoenix headline: “Blue
Route Is Scheduled for Completion in
1971.” (It opened in December 1991.)
February President Johnson calls for
passage of a Civil Rights Act. • SASS
receives a charter from Student Coun­
cil and launches a black awareness
week called “Seven Days of Soul.” •
soldiersAirplane
in
The Jefferson
and Tim Buckley headline the second annual
Swarthmore Rock Festival.
March American combat deaths
reach a one-week record of 274. • Stu­
dent Council writes President Smith,
urging the hiring of Negroes for facul­
ty and administrative positions, say­
ing, “In general at Swarthmore, stu­
dents see Negroes only in positions of
manual labor.”

“Greatest purveyor o f violence ...”

April Martin Luther King Jr. calls the
United States “the greatest purveyor
of violence in the w orld” and urges
draft resistance.
May Police fire on black student
demonstrators in Jackson, Miss.,
killing one and wounding two. • The
appointment of African sociologist
Asmarom Legesse, Swarthmore’s first
black faculty member, is announced.
June The Beatles release Sgt. Pepper’s
Lonely Hearts Club Band. • War erupts ,
between Israel and Syria, Jordan, and f
the United Arab Republic. • President
S W A R TH M O R E COLLEGE BULLETIN

Johnson meets Soviet premier Aleksei
Kosygin in Glassboro, N.J. • Aretha
Franklin demands “Respect.”
July Five days of rioting leave 43 dead
in Detroit. Violence spreads to a
dozen other cities. • The Doors sing,
“Light My Fire.”
August President Johnson asks for a
10 percent income tax surcharge to
finance “guns and butter.” • “All You
Need Is Love,” say the Beatles.
September Junior year begins for the
Class of 1969. • McCabe Library and
Dana and Hallowell dormitories open.
• President Smith kicks off discussion
of the CEP report, calling 1967-68 a
“year of decision.”

Mobilization at the Pentagon

October Thurgood Marshall becomes
the first black to sit on the Supreme
Court. • More than 200 Swarthmoreans join in the National Mobilization
to End the War.
November President Smith asks Stu­
dent Council to cancel the Hamburg
Show because the script exhibits
“questionable taste.” The show is
rewritten to star King Arthur instead
of Jesus. • The Defense Department
announces the organization of 125
National Guard riot control units.
December Classes are suspended for
“Superweek,” a College-wide discus­
sion of curricular and student life
reforms. • Christian Barnard performs
the first human heart transplant in
Capetown, South Africa.

January The Kerner Commission says
America is heading for “two societies,
separate and unequal.” • The Viet
Cong hit 30 cities in the Tet offensive.
February Student Council president
Barry Wohl ’69 proposes “total dorm
autonomy.” • The Graduate plays at
the movies.
M AY 1994

M arch S en ator
Eugene McCarthy
polls 42 percent of
th e v o t e in th e
N ew H a m p sh ire
primary. • Robert
K e n n e d y en te rs
the race and Lyn­
don Johnson drops
42 Percent
out. • The late Otis
R edd in g’s “Sittin’
on th e D ock o f th e B a y ” to p s th e
charts.
April Martin Luther King Jr. is assassi­
nated in Memphis, Tenn. • The faculty
votes to change Honors from eight
required seminars to six. • Students
take over two buildings at Columbia
University.
May Students and workers riot across
France. • The first formal peace talks
between the United States and North
Vietnam open in Paris.
June Robert Kennedy is assassinated
after winning the California primary. •
The American death toll in Vietnam
nears 28,000.
July Starvation caused by civil war
kills 6,000 people per day in Biafra. •
Pope Paul VI condemns all artificial
methods of birth control.
August The Soviet Union invades
Czechoslovakia. • Riots sweep Chica­
go as the Democrats nominate Hubert
Humphrey for president.
September The Class of 1969 returns
for its senior year. • The Mexican
Army seizes and closes the National
University after weeks of student
protest. • President Courtney Smith
announces that he will resign in June
1969. • The Beatles sing, “Hey Jude.”
October SASS leaders question why
only eight blacks are in the freshman
class. Dean of Admissions Frederick
Hargadon presents the results of a
controversial study of “Negro admis­
sions.” • Richard Nixon announces
that he has a “secret plan” to end the
Vietnam War. • Jimi Hendrix sings,
“All Along the Watchtower.”
November President Johnson an­
nounces a Vietnam bombing halt four
days before Richard Nixon is elected
president. • SASS members meet with
the Admissions Committee and attack
the “integrationist ethic” of the Col­
lege. • Student Council votes to back

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|
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SASS’s demands for more “risk” stu­
dents and a black dean in the Admis­
sions Office.
December Three Americans becom e
the first men to fly around the moon,
• U.S. deaths in Vietnam reach 30,000.
• The faculty athletics committee
rescinds the rule that Swarthmore’s
male athletes must have short hair
and clean-shaven faces. • Marvin
Gaye sings, “I Heard It Through the
Grapevine.”

January SASS members issue an ulti­
matum and four days later occupy the
Admissions Office. • The faculty
meets in almost continuous session. •
In the midst of the crisis, President
Courtney Smith dies. • Swarthmore
mourns and the crisis seems to dissi­
pate.
February Four Swarthmore students
win the GE College Bowl quiz show. •
Acting President Edward Cratsley ini­
tiates a study of decisionmaking at the
College. • Student protests sweep the
country. “Many of these kids are
sick— paranoid,” says psychiatrist
Bruno Bettelheim.
March SASS criticizes the lack of
progress on its demands and asks to
be represented at faculty meetings. •
Barbara Lange resigns as dean of
women.
April Police clear 300 student demon­
strators from University Hall at Har­
vard. • Swarthmore’s faculty passes
“dorm autonomy,” but the changes
are rejected by the Board of Man­
agers. • American deaths in Vietnam
surpass the Korean War.
May Robert Cross is appointed presi­
dent of Swarthmore. • The Admis­
sions Office announces that 21 blacks
will enter in September.
June President Nixon announces that
25,000 American troops will leave
Vietnam, calling it “Vietnamization” of
the war. • The Beatles sing, “Get
Back,” as the Class of 1969 graduates.
Sou rces: The W orld A lm anac and B ook o f Facts,

1966-70; The Ph oen ix; The B illb oa rd B ook o f
Top 40 Hits; R ock and R o ll: The 100 B est Singles,
b y Pau l W illia m s ’69. C o m p ile d b y K a te D o w n ­
in g and J e ffre y Lott.

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