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SWARTHMORE
College Bulletin
March 1999
The College acquires
an impressionist collection.
S W A R T H M
COLLEGE BULLETIN
MARCH 1999
6
Features
A Gift of Art
10
The College acquires an impressionist collection.
By Cathleen McCarthy
Nurturing the Teacher-Scholar
14
The College’s leave policy pays off in the classroom.
By Jeffrey Lott
Swarthmore’s Crisis of 1969
20
How Life magazine saw Swarthmore’s most troubling time.
By Paul Good
14
On the cover: This portrait by
Mildred Miller is among 300 of her
works recently donated to the
College. Photograph by Karen Mauch.
20
O R E
30
4
Alumni Profiles
Note worthy
Departments
Letters
3
Your views on our pages.
Collection
4
News of Swarthmore today.
Alumni Digest
26
Your College events connection.
Class Notes
28
The lives of Swarthmoreans.
Deaths
35
30
George Gershwin courted
Rosamond Walling Tirana ’31.
By Audree Penner
A bridge to grow on
51
Valerie Prescott Bradford ’78 runs
Philadelphia’s Ben Franklin Bridge.
By Jeffrey Lott
Life and limbs
59
59
Relief in Africa can be as simple
as a $10 prosthesis.
By Terri-Jean Pyer ’77
Swarthmore remembers.
In My Life
44
The word that changed everything.
By Philip Cooper ’57
Books & Authors
54
An expanded look at alumni books.
Our Back Pages
64
Barbara Lange Godfrey’s Swarthmore.
10
Parlor Talk
M
y father died in 1969—suddenly, unexpectedly, just turned
49. I was 22, and it wasn’t a good time for him to go. (Is there
ever one?) The two of us were estranged: he the conservative businessman and I the longhaired college dropout, rejecting all
he stood for. There existed a great gulf of misunderstanding between
us, a divide of dashed expectations, worry, contempt, and fear.
Our last few years as father and son had been tension filled, and I
regret that he never got to see the fruits of what he had given me: an
honest upbringing, self-confidence, a love of language, and, eventually, my education (which I didn’t complete for another five years). I, in
turn, never got to thank him for being the stoic and loving wall
against which I could throw my rather lengthy adolescent rebellion.
Swarthmore’s father died
that year too—suddenly, unexCourtney Smith was the
pectedly, just turned 52. (See
last Swarthmore president
page 20.) The loss of Courtney
to stand before the
Smith was felt by all of his children,
including, perhaps espeCollege in the same manner
cially,
those who were
that my father presided over
estranged from him at the
our family dinner table.
time. He, too, had given them
many gifts, not the least of
which was the power to question. Two years before his death in the
midst of the College’s greatest crisis, he had led the most comprehensive self-examination in Swarthmore’s history. He even suspended
classes so that students could contribute to the critique.
As a good father does, President Smith encouraged his Swarthmore children to ask hard questions; as a good father must, he
exposed himself and this institution to the resulting challenges. Students were questioning all of society’s institutions, including their
College, and by 1969 they were asking about larger, more difficult
issues than merely revising the Honors program. It became Smith’s
turn to see his sons and his daughters go beyond his command.
Courtney Smith was arguably the last of Swarthmore’s presidents
who could stand in front of his students in the same manner that my
father presided over our family dinner table—with a sense of authority that was almost beyond question. Almost. It may not have been
their choice, but Smith and other university presidents of the era
(including Clark Kerr ’32 in California and the late Jim Perkins ’34 at
Cornell) rang down the curtain on in loco parentis, the now-quaint
idea that colleges and universities should take on the role of surrogate parents, with the authority to set curfews, enforce dress codes,
and the like. Some may lament the loss of these “standards,” yet their
demise made possible the freedom, openness, and diversity that
characterizes the best of higher education today.
If my father were alive, he’d be delighted to see what has happened to me, to read this magazine, to see his fine grandchildren.
Yes, I still like to question authority, and sometimes it gets me into
trouble, but that might also please him.
And what of Courtney Smith? He’d be delighted, too, I think—at
the rich lives of his former students and the promise of those who
have followed at Swarthmore. Like a proud grandfather, he would see
the College’s current vibrancy and solid reputation as one more legacy of the hard questions that he wasn’t given time to answer in 1969.
—J.L.
2
SWARTHMORE
COLLEGE BULLETIN
Editor: Jeffrey Lott
Managing Editor: Nancy Lehman ’87
Class Notes Editor: Andrea Hammer
Collection Editor: Cathleen McCarthy
Desktop Publishing: Audree Penner
Designer: Bob Wood
Intern: Jim Harker ’99
Editor Emerita:
Maralyn Orbison Gillespie ’49
Associate Vice President
for External Affairs:
Barbara Haddad Ryan ’59
Changes of Address:
Send address label along
with new address to:
Alumni Records Office
Swarthmore College
500 College Avenue
Swarthmore PA 19081-1397
Phone: (610) 328-8435. Or e-mail:
alumnirecords@swarthmore.edu.
Contacting Swarthmore College:
College Operator: (610) 328-8000
www.swarthmore.edu
Admissions: (610) 328-8300
admissions@swarthmore.edu
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alumni@swarthmore.edu
Publications: (610) 328-8568
bulletin@swarthmore.edu
Registrar: (610) 328-8297
registrar@swarthmore.edu
The Swarthmore College Bulletin (ISSN 08882126), of which this is volume XCVI, number
4, is published in August, September,
December, March, and June by Swarthmore
College, 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore PA
19081-1397. Periodicals postage paid at
Swarthmore PA and additional mailing
offices. Permit No. 0530-620. Postmaster:
Send address changes to Swarthmore College Bulletin, 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore PA 19081-1397.
©1999 Swarthmore College
Printed in U.S.A. on recycled paper
Letters
FOOTBALL AND DIVERSITY
To the Editor:
Outstanding. Absolutely outstanding. “Swarthmore on
the Line of Scrimmage”
(December 1998) was the
first Bulletin article that I
have read slowly (and twice)
in years. The true meaning of
“diversity” is so often lost at
Swarthmore. Football—no,
make that football players—
add a dimension to the College community that should
be valued, not derided.
President Bloom, coach
Peter Alvanos, and all of the
members of the Garnet football team certainly have my
wholehearted support.
DAVID THOENEN ’69
Raleigh, N.C.
GIVE ATHLETES
A CHANCE TO WIN
To the Editor:
As a member of three
Swarthmore championship
football teams (you remember those halcyon days when
we won games, received
some national press, and
then ran the most successful
coach in Division III off campus), I was buoyed by some
of the comments of administrators and faculty. John
Caskey’s question asking if
we “want Swarthmore to be
all tree-hugging liberals” and
Jennie Keith’s comment
warning of “a disdain for
things not intellectual” were
positive signs. In the end,
talk is cheap. Football proponents such as Professor Tom
Blackburn and Board member Neil Austrian ’61 have
been around for years, and
we’re still having the same
ridiculous debate about football at Swarthmore.
What has never changed
is the attitude espoused by
our athletic director and
president in this article: “a
successful team need not be
defined by a winning season.” This is a dangerous
state of mind for a studentMARCH 1999
We played
athlete playhard that
ing a gruelyear, with
ing collision
abandon.
sport. If the
Our last
score of a
game was
football
against
game is
Haverinconseford—the
quential,
last football
then why do
game the
students get
Fords
grades in
played. I
the classhave never
room?
felt anySimply
Editor’s Note: The large volume
thing more
fielding a
of letters concerning our Decemintensely
team is not
ber cover story has made it
than the
enough. Givnecessary to edit most letters for
desire to
ing these
space. Thanks for writing.
win that
student-athgame. We
letes every
lost that game and every othchance to win each week is
er one that season, starting a
the least the College can do.
losing streak that didn’t end
With athletic facilities that
until 1975.
haven’t seen a decent
Why does football still
upgrade since the 1950s, can
arouse such passion in me?
we really say that we sup• Football invokes the
port any of our sports as well
desire for initiation. Good
as the other top liberal arts
coaches and good teamschools U.S. News & World
mates provide the mentoring
Report measures Swarthand bonding that young men
more against each year? The
need to grow up. Though inianswer is no.
TONY CIANCI ’86 tiation is a more spiritual
Malvern, Pa. than physical experience,
football and other sports can
ARCHETYPAL WARRIORS
play a part.
To the Editor:
• Football invokes
I arrived at Swarthmore in
archetypal warrior energy.
1968, and knowing no other
True warrior energy, which
way, I played football.
is way out of fashion in our
In 1969, another way
feminized society, is neither
began to dawn on me. Maybe savage nor brutal, but disciit was Woodstock, maybe
plined, skilled, passionate,
falling in love. In any case, at
and loyal. We could use
football camp that summer I
more of this energy (chanfound I didn’t like hitting
neled, of course, by the intelpeople anymore, which crelectual skills Swarthmore
ates a certain liability for a
hones so well) in tackling the
linebacker. So I quit, took
problems our planet faces.
modern dance, learned to
Under good coaching and
meditate, and marched
with the proper perspective,
against the war.
football is a crucible in which
Yet two years later, I
important energies are
wrote to Coach [Lew] Elverforged into disciplined
son, asking to rejoin the
action—an intensification of
team. Despite all that had
life that is hard to find elseopened up for me in other
where. It can be deeply satisdimensions, I had left somefying, not only from winning
thing important on the field.
but from finding qualities in
yourself you doubted.
BILL PRINDLE ’72
Silver Spring, Md.
NOTHING WRONG
WITH SUCCESS
To the Editor:
Two of our children were
students at Swarthmore in
the 1980s when the College
fielded “good teams.” Our
recollections of Swarthmore
at that time don’t jibe with
Associate Provost Barry
Schwartz’s reference to “subrosa warfare between the
football team and the rest of
the campus.”
What’s wrong with being
successful in a host of
endeavors? John Caskey and
Tom Blackburn express faculty views that we as alumni
share: Don’t lower standards, but do attract the academically qualified studentathletes who frequently
matriculate at Amherst,
Williams, Hamilton, or Middlebury.
We applaud Al Bloom’s
decision to rebuild the football program.
TOM JONES JR. ’53
VERA LUNDY JONES ’58
Bay Head, N.J.
THE JOY OF BEING
TAUGHT AND CHANGED
One evening in my first
semester at Swarthmore, I
was swimming in formation
as one of the hunters in a
water ballet performance of
“Peter and the Wolf.” Just as
we reached the end of the
pool, I looked up and gasped
to see President Courtney
Smith smiling down at me.
Unlike football, water ballet will probably never
embody any of the quintessential questions for Swarthmore. Yet this tiny poolside
event was an illumination for
me. I thought: “This is the
kind of place where the president doesn’t rule out the
Please turn to page 62
3
Collection
THE COLLEGE TODAY
New student rep sends wake-up call
O
The telescope’s on a mountain in Chile,
but the astronomer’s in Swarthmore
J
DENG-JENG
LEE
ohn Gaustad, the Edward Hicks Magill Professor of
Astronomy, has joined a team of astronomers across the
nation to map the southern sky using a new robotic telescope installed at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory
in Chile. Without losing a wink of sleep, Gaustad and his fellow mappers will study the night sky by analyzing the data
gathered by the telescope.
One goal of the two-year project, which began in November 1997, is to map the intricate structure of the interstellar
medium—the gas and dust between stars. So far, the
team has mapped about 86 percent of the southern sky.
The new telescope allows Gaustad and other astronomers to see up to 50 times more than previous instruments allowed. “There is a lot in our galaxy that we
haven’t known about before. It was either too far away
to detect or intrinsically less bright. So we may discover new remnants of supernovas or other kinds of structures. Even where the robotic camera sees nothing,
the data are still of great scientific value,” Gaustad
says. “Other astronomers can now be certain that
their observations are not contaminated by radiation
coming from interstellar gas in our own galaxy.”
Another goal is to analyze that gas. “Our survey
will show that in parts of the sky, the gas from our
own galaxy is so sparse that it doesn’t interfere with
studies of the cosmic background, which is important
in learning about the formation of galaxies,” he says.
And how does the electronically transmitted
Chilean sky compare with gazing up at the real
thing? “Just being in an observatory with the
dark sky is thrilling compared with living here in
Philadelphia, with so many bright lights you can
hardly see anything,” he says. “But as far as the scientific data are concerned, the images are viewed
on a computer anyway, no matter where they come
from. So you may as well be home where it’s warm and dry.”
4
nce upon a time, Swarthmore was a hotbed
of student activism. These days, students
don’t even know how decisions at this college are made, decisions that impact their everyday
lives.... That needs to change.”
So opened the December election bid by Jenny
Yang ’00, the new student representative on Swarthmore’s College Planning Committee (CPC), a group
of Board members, faculty, staff, and students conducting a two-year study of the College’s priorities.
After missing the deadline for submitting platforms, Yang had to run as a write-in candidate.
Despite that formidable handicap, she won by a
wide margin, helped, in part, by spirited campaign
promises published in The Phoenix.
Those familiar with the outspoken, charismatic
student were amused but not surprised by her
offbeat campaign. A political science/public policy major,
Yang plays on the volleyball team and works as an admissions tour guide. She has also served as president of the
Swarthmore Asian Organization, played clarinet in the wind
ensemble, and had a WSRN radio show. She plans to enter
public service and, eventually, teach government in public
high school.
“As members of the student body, we shape Swarthmore’s identity just as it has shaped ours,” she wrote in The
Phoenix before the CPC election. “Think about it—we contribute financially more to the College than the average
alumnus/a. It’s time to wield that ‘consumer power.’”
Among other things, Yang promised to meet “every single
student—really, I’m not kidding,” to report on every CPC
meeting in the student newspapers, and to publicize and
personally run public forums “with food provided, of
course.” She also pledged
to hold weekly
“office hours” in
Parrish Parlors.
(“Yes! Your very
own talk-to-yourCPC-rep booth!”)
“Make your opinions known,” she
urges fellow students. “I’m going to
talk at every single
CPC meeting. And I
mean talk.”
Top left: This image of a
huge hydrogen gas cloud
in the constellation
Orion was taken with a
robotic telescope in Chile
by Swarthmore astronomer John Gaustad.
Left: New College
Planning Committee
member Jenny Yang ’00.
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
MY FORMAL
VALENTINE
G
runge
may rule on
campus, but students still
love to get decked out, especially on
Valentine’s Day. And nobody throws a
party—or a formal dance—like the International
Club (IC), as this detailed plan by IC member Jane
Ng ’01 demonstrates. The drawing was pinned to a
Parrish Hall bulletin board, and someone added graffiti
under the lone figure: “Girl not asked by a boy, mind you,”
referring to the club’s stipulation that males could not ask
females to the dance. Couples had no trouble forming,
we’re told.
MARCH 1999
5
Collection
Peggy Seiden became College
librarian in September, coming to Swarthmore from Skidmore College. She brought
expertise not only in traditional libraries but in the new
field of “information services,” which encompasses
everything from books to
bytes, from incunabula to the
Internet. Seiden spoke with
Collection editor Cathleen
McCarthy about the future of
college libraries.
Which interest came first,
computers or books?
A love of books. At the University of
Toronto, I was in medieval studies,
which involves old-language scripts.
I’ve always liked being in libraries.
How did you get from medieval
studies to a specialization in
electronic media?
I tend to hop to opposite extremes.
When I left my graduate studies to go
to library school in the late ’70s, I had
to choose between Columbia, which
had a wonderful rare books program,
and Rutgers, which was up-and-coming
in the use of computers. I chose Rutgers. I was tired of feeling stuck in
ninth-century England. I wanted to
know more about the world.
A visit to the library of the future
with new College librarian Peggy Seiden
library and why, and how they do their
research. Before this year, Swarthmore
didn’t have a huge amount of materials
in full text online, so there wasn’t a
great deal students could do from their
dorms, but we have at least doubled—
if not tripled—what we provide. Now
students can access library information at 3 a.m. from their dorm rooms.
What kind of impact has electronic
information had on research?
We did a study at Skidmore, and it
revealed that students look for the
most convenient way to access information—and computers provide that.
What we found is that when somebody
does [an electronic] search, they tend
to go with the first piece that strikes
them. An article that’s cited in an electronic index will be used more often
than one that’s not. And that’s going to
redefine what is viewed as seminal or
core information on a particular topic.
Do you think bound books will exist
in the distant future?
Oh, definitely. The monograph was a
great little invention, and it’s going to
remain an important component of
undergraduate research. Everybody
agrees that nobody wants to read a
book online. But I think books will get
published in a different way. Right now,
presses can’t afford to keep large
inventories of material, so they do a
short run and then another, and that’s
it. I think publishers will eventually
maintain presses just for online inventory. Then anybody can request anything at any time. Universities have
been doing that for years with theses,
maintaining them on microfilm and
printing out copies as needed. I think
we’ll see that with digital archiving.
Any plans to do a study like this
at Swarthmore?
I plan to go right into the dorms this
spring and set up focus groups in the
lounges during study breaks. We’ll provide coffee and popcorn and get the
students talking about who goes to the
Are libraries moving away from their
original role as warehouses?
Warehousing will certainly continue to
be an important function of the library.
Libraries have to fulfill the need for
archives because nobody else will. But
the perception of libraries has changed
6
considerably from warehouses of knowledge to places
where people
come to learn. Still,
libraries need to be
more inviting. If you look at the architecture of McCabe Library, there’s no
room for interaction. That’s something
I really want to change.
Can studying and socializing happen
in the same space?
The success of Borders and Barnes &
Noble proves they can. There is a huge
amount of browsing that goes on there,
and a lot of socializing. Yet I read a
study recently that shows students are
going to those bookstores to study.
Libraries need to take a lesson from
them.
What hints of Borders might we
expect in a renovation of McCabe?
I’d like to see lounges. Let’s take the
newspaper lounge upstairs and make it
a coffee bar. If somebody spills coffee
on the current issue of Time, it’s no big
deal. We have it online and on microfilm. I think that’s the way people
study. The advantage of coming to the
library is that if you need help, there is
a staff here to help you.
Do students depend on staff for
computer expertise?
Computer research requires a different
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
Victorious
debating duo
the Board of Managers
from 1995 to 1997.
Sophomore John
Dolan and senior
Damon Taaffe
teamed up to take first place at the
Bucknell Invitational Debate Tournament in December, defeating teams
from Columbia, Yale, and the University of Virginia. As a result of this victory and a November second-place finish at the University of Pennsylvania,
the pair is ranked fourth in the nation
in a league of about 500 two-person
teams.
• Young Alumni Manager Michael J. Kuh ’94 is
director of field operations for the Children’s
Scholarship Fund, which manages a
$2 million fund for disadvantaged
public school children. He was an Ivy
Award recipient and Honors history
student.
kind of librarian. If you’re
providing access to online
information, library staffers
need to know the ins and
outs of databases and how
to fix the printer when it
breaks down. Since the circulation staff members are
the first ones students turn
to, they’re being trained by
the Computing Center.
And what about the
faculty—what changes
can they expect?
For a library to remain vital,
it has to be more heavily integrated into
the curriculum. I’d like much closer ties
to the academic departments. I want to
provide the faculty with more instruction about information resources. Right
now, when academic departments want
to use computing in their curriculum,
they’re being supported mainly by the
Computing Center. If a professor is constructing a Web page with information
resources for his students, I’d like him
to be able to come to a divisional librarian who specializes in that field.
Will it be expensive to bring McCabe
into the electronic age?
Our libraries are incredibly well funded, but most of our budget is tied up in
periodical subscriptions. We’ve canceled 200 periodical subscriptions, and
we’re down to about 2,300. Of our budget, we’re spending at least 70 percent,
some $630,000, on periodicals. That
allows no flexibility to explore new
areas of curriculum like online
resources. I’ve asked for a 50 percent
increase—$50,000 more for online
resources next year.
What do you think of the near-exclusive use of Macintosh computers at
Swarthmore?
I’m very strongly against it. Our students are going out into a Windows
environment, both in grad school and
in the business world. No matter what
the popularity of the Mac, it will only
be a market segment. We try to create
a cozy and safe environment for students and faculty, but maybe we need
to make it riskier. The world is risky.
MARCH 1999
New Board members
Six new members were elected to the
Board of Managers in December.
• Term Manager Paul Corddry ’58
retired in 1992 as senior vice president of European operations for H.J.
Heinz. Corddry majored in economics
at Swarthmore and endowed the economics wing of Kohlberg Hall, which
was named for Corddry and his wife,
Charlotte, in 1996.
• Term Manager Carley Cunniff ’72 is
vice president and portfolio manager
for Ruane, Cunniff & Co. and assists in
managing the $3 billion Sequoia Fund,
a top-performing value investment
fund. She was an art history major
who went on to receive an M.B.A.
from Harvard.
• Alumni Manager Catherine Good
Abbott ’72 is chief executive officer of
two interstate pipeline subsidiaries of
Columbia Gas System that transport
most of the natural gas used in the
Washington, D.C., area. She received a
B.A. in religion and sociology/anthropology from Swarthmore and, from
Harvard, a master’s in public policy.
• Alumni Manager Elizabeth Scheuer
’75 is a medieval studies scholar who
became an attorney. With an M.A.
from University College, London, and
a J.D. from Columbia University, she
works for the Community Outreach
Law Program of the Association of the
Bar of the City of New York.
• Alumni Manager Alan Symonette
’76 became a self-employed labor
arbitrator/mediator in Philadelphia
after earning a B.A. in political science
and a law degree from Villanova University. He served as president of the
Alumni Association and member of
And a new VP
After a yearlong search, Dan West
was named vice president for development, alumni, and public relations
at Swarthmore. He began his new job
in mid-January. The position has been
vacant since the October 1997 death
of Harry Gotwals.
A veteran fund-raiser and administrator, West spent the last six years as
vice president for college relations at
Union College, where he directed a
capital campaign that raised more
than $150 million and doubled annual
giving. He
also served
as president
of Carroll
College in
Wisconsin
and Lyon
College in
Arkansas
and coauthored
two books
on higher
education
management.
A Presbyterian minister with a
New VP Dan West
D.Div. in systematic theology from Vanderbilt University (and
an Ed.D. in higher education administration from Harvard), West says
one thing that attracted him to
Swarthmore was the College’s ethos.
“I identify with the residue of Quaker
values that still pervades the place,
the commitment to diversity, academic rigor, social justice, and the search
for truth.”
The new VP, a devoted horticulturist, has already found his favorite spot
on campus. If he’s not at his desk,
look for him in the rose garden.
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
PEOPLE
7
Collection
The geometry of change
An emotional education takes place in the midst of the academic enterprise.
mation-gathering attitude that makes them such excellent
students falters in the face of self-study, which is more often
hat are college professors for anyway?” honorary
characterized by a judgmental, foreclosed attitude. “I’m here
degree recipient Ulric Neisser M’53 playfully asked
to learn of things I haven’t yet imagined” becomes “I really
the audience at Commencement last June. A domishould know better, and I should be able to figure this out
nant figure in cognitive psychology, Neisser joked that the
myself.” The latter fosters neither curiosity nor understandfaculty is potentially obsolete, what with the College’s exceling and can become a major source of stress. At this
lent library, loads of information available on the World
impasse, the triangle of shared attention can prove indisWide Web, and the fact that our students are so bright.
pensable.
Neisser then answered his own question. Professors, he
Learning your subject, in this case, is not simply a matter
asserted, are an essential part of a triangle. Human learning
of getting answers to questions but of learning how to reis distinguished by the uniquely human ability of two people
flect on oneself. As counselors, we try to get students to
to focus simultaneously on an abstract object of interest,
study themselves just as they might study a text or another
thus creating a triangle of learning.
culture. Our job is to help them find the most effective ways
In his words, I recognized the enterprise in my little corto become nonjudgmental observers of themselves. We
ner of the campus. At Psychological Services, the triangle
offer talking as a form of stress relief.
consists of the counselor, the student, and the shared object
People do many things to relieve stress, but the simple
of interest—the student’s inner world. In this sense, the role
act of talking can be a most profound release—if it’s done
of counselor mirrors the role of the professor. The goal in
the right way. That’s why students often feel relieved after
both cases is to help the student come to know his or her
meeting with a professor whose course they’re struggling
subject. This involves essentially the same process: knowing
with. Although people assume that professors create the
what questions to ask, what assignments to suggest, when
bulk of students’ stress, they also de-stress them because
to push, and when to wait.
they’re there to talk to. So are we, and unlike some instituLately, the stress of college life has been receiving a lot of
tions, Swarthmore does not limit the amount of counseling
media attention. It’s not just the intensity of the academic
some students may receive. Someone is available 24 hours a
process that generates that stress, it’s the potent combinaday at the Worth Health Center to become part of the triantion of applied intellectual effort with unexpected, often puzgle of learning.
zling revelations of emotional expeAt graduation, as students proudly
rience.
claim their diplomas, we have the
As I sat on stage looking at the
most tangible evidence of intellectual
Commencement audience, I recogtransformation wrought by the colnized many faces. More than a third
lege experience. But another, less tanof these 328 graduating seniors had
gible transformation has also
visited Psychological Services at
occurred. Ideally, it includes the
some time in their college careers.
maturing ability to understand and
Most of these graduates chose
accept one’s inconsistencies, tolerate
Swarthmore College in order to
ambiguity, and build an enduring
become full participants in “the life
sense of self-worth independent of
of the mind.” The discovery that
one’s immediate ability to have all
such a life includes much more than
the right answers. Achieving this has
the school’s renowned academic
meant coming to terms with the loss
rigor takes many students by surof some illusions—including the posprise. What unfolds during their
sibility of perfection. It has meant
years here inevitably includes
creating new possibilities consistent
experiments in self-definition, a
with one’s genuine interests and
reworking of relationships with
skills, discovering new abilities, and
peers as well as authority figures
settling some unfinished business.
(including parents), and the develWithout necessarily saying so
opment or reconsideration of one’s
explicitly, graduates know that someprimary mission in life. An emotionthing quite profound has occurred
al education takes place in the
during their years at Swarthmore.
David Ramirez, director of psychological services, Part of the special quality of that
midst of the academic enterprise.
sees his work as another aspect of the learning
Yet the keen analytic eye students
experience derives from finding
process. By the time they graduate, more than
turn on the world around them often
someone to work with, someone
a third of students will take advantage of the coun- whose curiosity matched—or kinfalters when applied to themselves.
seling services offered by his office.
The objective, nonjudgmental, infordled—their own.
By David Ramirez, Director of Psychological Services
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
W
8
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
High-scoring Schofield
would “rather win”
F
rom the moment Tim Schofield ’99
entered Swarthmore as a freshman, it
was obvious he was just what the men’s
basketball team needed. A starting player
from his first year, he soon became the leading
scorer, averaging about 19 points per game.
As his final season wound to a close in late
January, Schofield made a three-point baseline
shot against Messiah College and became the
14th man in Swarthmore history to score 1,000
points. With seven games left in the season, he
had set a new school record for three-pointers
(177) and become the fifth highest scorer.
Perhaps more significantly for a small liberal
arts school, Schofield has proved himself to be
a team player. With 208 assists to his credit,
he’s seventh on the all-time assists list.
“He’s always been a good scorer,” says
head coach Lee Wimberly of his star player. “But what many people don’t realize is
that Tim is a selfless player. If someone
has a better shot, he’ll give the ball up.”
After a rewarding first two years, ending with a win over Johns Hopkins that
took the team to the conference champi-
College ranks high
with black educators
B
TERPRISE
© BLACK EN
MAGAZINE
lack Enterprise magazine recently listed
Swarthmore among the
nation’s most highly recommended schools for African
American
students.
The college
guide in the
magazine’s
January
issue ranked
Swarthmore
13th overall
and fourth
behind Stanford, Georgetown, and
Oberlin.
Atlanta’s Spelman College
and other historically black
institutions topped the list.
More than 1,000 black
professionals in higher education rated schools with a
minimum of 1.5 percent
African American students,
based on factors such as
graduation rates, academic
MARCH 1999
strength, and social environment.
Reacting to the ranking,
President Alfred H. Bloom
points out that the percentage of students of color has
risen from 16 to 34 percent
during his tenure, with black
students now
accounting for 9 percent of the student
body. Diversifying
Swarthmore has
been one of his
major goals, Bloom
says. A high percentage of students
of color is “vital for
minority students
to keep from feeling marginalized,
or treated as tokens,”
he told the Student Council
recently.
As an African American
who attended the College
when that percentage was
much lower, Vice President
Maurice Eldridge ’61 agrees:
“It’s that critical mass that
makes people feel comfortable.”
onship in 1997, things began to go downhill.
Despite Schofield’s consistent performance,
two disappointing seasons followed. As co-captain during this period, Schofield was doing his
best to motivate himself and his teammates
but admits it isn’t always easy. “Personal
achievement is nice,” he says, “but
when you’ve lost as much as we
have, there’s really no feeling like
coming home with a win. When it
finally happens, you appreciate it
that much more.”
An economics and political
science major and member of
the golf team, Schofield has
already lined up a job after
graduation as analyst for
Andersen Consulting. Basketball, he says, has made him
“mentally tougher” and a pro
at self-motivation.
STEVEN GO
LDBLATT
ʼ67
As the season wound down,
Schofield had a shot at becoming
third highest scorer in College
history. “It would be nice,” he
admitted. “But I’d rather get a
win.” He got it all: a third place
with 1,284 career points, Regional
Academic All-American honors—
and four wins.
Winter sports standouts
Heather Kile ’02 of Marlton, N.J., became the first Swarthmore player to be named to the All-Centennial Conference
(CC) Women’s Basketball first team. Kile set the CC record for
points scored by a freshman (478) and the school record for
rebounds in a season (355).
Aliki Bonarou ’02 of Athens, Greece, won Outstanding
Swimmer honors at the Centennial Conference Swimming
Championships, where Swarthmore finished second for the
fifth year in a row. Bonarou won the 200 individual medley
(IM) and the 400 IM and placed second in the 200. During the
season, she also set College records in the 200 and 400 IM.
At the Centennial Conference Indoor Track and Field
Championships, Desiree Peterkin ’00 of Staten Island, N.Y.,
won the triple jump for the second consecutive season and
the long jump for the first time. Peterkin has qualified for the
NCAA Division III Championships in the triple jump for the
third straight season. On the men’s side, Steve Dawson ’00
captured his second straight Centennial high jump title.
Winter records
Overall
Women’s Basketball..............................12-12
Men’s Basketball......................................4-20
Badminton ..................................................6-2
Men’s Swimming........................................9-4
Women’s Swimming................................10-4
Men’s Indoor Track & Field ....................7-1
Women’s Indoor Track & Field ..............8-1
Wrestling ....................................................5-6
Centennial
Conference
......................7-8
....................2-11
......................5-1
......................6-1
......................1-5
9
By Cathleen McCarthy
AGift ofArt
A Swarthmore exhibit revives interest in
the work of Mildred Miller, a onceprominent Pennsylvania impressionist.
S
trolling through the College’s List Gallery, Virginia
Stern Brown ’49 and her husband, Kenneth Brown
’47, smile with satisfaction as they look at the paintings they recently donated to their alma mater. It’s
not unusual for Swarthmore to receive donations in the form
of art, china, or antiques, but it’s rare indeed to receive much
of the life’s work of an individual artist—in this case, Virginia’s aunt, Mildred Bunting Miller. “We had more paintings
than we could use,” Virginia says. “And we wanted her work
to be seen.”
More than 300 of Miller’s paintings and hundreds of
other works, valued at about $350,000, are now in the
hands of the College, where Miller applied for admission 90
years ago and was accepted. But Swarthmore lacked an art
program then, and Miller ended up at Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. There she trained from 1910
to 1915 under painting legends like Daniel Garber and
Cecilia Beaux, and eventually she became one of the few
prominent women among the Pennsylvania impressionists.
List Gallery Director Andrea Packard ’85 points to examples from the College’s permanent collection of paintings,
hung near the Miller exhibit. “These make an interesting
backdrop [for the Miller works] because they’re the American painters she would have studied at the academy, including Peale and Eakins. She must have looked at works like
these,” Packard says, pointing to impressionist landscapes by
Garber and Childe Hassam, “and they must have seemed so
lively and of-the-time then. This was what students were
aspiring to.”
The donation has led to the first serious exposure of
Miller’s work since her death in 1964. Miller’s art supported
her for most of her life, earning several prestigious awards
and exhibits in prominent museums. But after her death,
few paintings appeared on the market, and her name virtually disappeared from the art world.
Now her paintings are being warmly received by local art
10
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
Opposite: A small oil sketch
on a panel shows Miller’s
impressionist influence and
skill with the figure.
Top: Miller studied at the
Pennsylvania Academy of
Fine Arts, where she experimented with different
styles. Many French and
American artists were fascinated by Japanese themes.
Right: Brush strokes at the
bottom of this unframed
gouache show Miller’s
search for the precise color
and tone.
PAINTINGS PHOTOGRAPHED BY KAREN MAUCH
MARCH 1999
11
AGift ofArt
Top: This detail of a study shows
Miller’s deliberate placement of
strokes of pure color to create form.
Bottom: Pastoral landscapes were an
important subject for Pennsylvania
regional artists. This scene is typical of
the area near Chester Springs, Pa.,
where Miller co-directed an art school.
PAINTINGS PHOTOGRAPHED BY KAREN MAUCH
12
critics and have attracted several dealers, one of whom
bought 27 works on the spot. The College plans to sell
most of the collection over the next few years, using the
proceeds to endow the directorship of the List Gallery.
Miller’s work, which will go on display again in June during Alumni Weekend, depicts the rural landscapes around
Philadelphia, where the artist spent half a century, and
southern California, where she lived in prolific isolation for
her last 18 years.
Virginia Brown pauses before an elegant gouache. “This
is one of my favorites. That’s Painter’s Farm,” she says,
pointing to a cream-colored farmhouse in the painting,
part of the Pennsylvania Academy’s country school in
Chester Springs, Pa., which Miller co-directed from 1916
to 1934. “I knew many of these places as a very small
child.”
Kenneth Brown met Mildred Miller on the Browns’ honeymoon, when they spent three weeks at the artist’s California desert oasis. While Miller painted Ginny’s portrait,
Kenneth painted the artist’s studio, and the three became
fast friends. Though scientists themselves, the Browns
ended up living the artist life vicariously through Miller.
“Art is such a tenuous thing. The standards for gauging
‘important art’ are not like the standards applied to science.
Artists must live with a lot of uncertainty,” Kenneth says.
“But she was a strong-minded woman with a lot of ideas
that were way ahead of her time.”
When the time came to place the collection, the Browns
met with art experts and consulted gallery owners. Offers
were made to buy the collection outright, Virginia says,
“but the gallery owners we spoke to had priorities that
were very different from ours.” In the end, the Quaker couple took a Quakerly approach to the problem. “We agreed
to ponder the situation for three days without discussing
our thoughts,” Virginia says. At the end of that time, they
sat down, and she announced her desire to donate the collection to Swarthmore. “He smiled,” she recalls, “and he
said, ‘That’s exactly what I want to do.’”
And how would Aunt Mildred feel about their decision?
“Oh, she would be so pleased,” Kenneth says without hesitation. “This is the beginning of a period where she will
become known again—perhaps better known than she
was in her own lifetime.” ■
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
Top: The contrast between youth
and age is reinforced by Miller’s
boldly designed interplay of vertical trees and blue shadows on the
horizontal surface of a building.
Left: A similar tension is found
in this landscape. Horses were
a common theme in Miller’s work.
MARCH 1999
13
S
Nurturing the
TEACHER
Scholar
warthmore College is distinguished by the
depth of its commitment to intellectual
growth and scholarship
among its faculty,” said
Provost Jennie Keith in a
campus talk last fall.
“One of the defining
aspects of the College,”
said Keith, “is our belief
that active involvement
in scholarship allows
our faculty members to
teach with an authenticity that they could not
have if they were not
actively involved in being
members who will do this year in and
learners themselves. It’s something
that’s taken extremely seriously here.” year out requires the College to commit not only to supporting them as
Teaching is the central mission of
they teach but as they pursue their
Swarthmore. But the College views
own scholarly work.
teaching from a somewhat difKeith has a special
ferent perspective from many
interest in intellectual
other educational institutions,
and personal growth.
said Keith: “We don’t see our
As a leading researcher
students as passive acceptors
on the subject of old
of knowledge; we want them to
age in various cultures,
learn more at Swarthmore than
she is an author (with
how to answer questions—or
six collaborators) of
even how to look for the anthe 1994 book The
swers. We feel that a SwarthAging Experience:
more education should equip
Diversity and Commonour graduates to analyze a
KEITH
ality Across Cultures.
problem and then to pose new
The book was the culquestions that advance undermination of a 10-year study of the wellstanding or knowledge.”
being, perceptions, material resources,
These skills of scholarship are cenhealth, and functionality of the elderly
tral to everything the College does.
in a range of cultural settings around
According to Keith, they are not only
useful for students who plan to pursue the world.
academic careers but also have value
in business, government, and public
nowledge is a moving target, and
service. “We hear again and again
it’s not always easy to stay current
from the people who employ our grad- in fast-changing fields like anthropolouates that this is what sets Swarthgy—or even English literature. Speakmoreans apart—their ability in very
ing to the Board of Managers last
complicated situations to put together spring, Philip Weinstein, the Alexana framework that helps define the
der Griswold Cummins Professor of
questions and their desire to find a
English Literature, described the life
way to work through those questions
of a faculty member in these terms:
to make something happen.”
“We arrive here, fresh from the graduBecause the College’s goal is to
ate academy, with something close to
teach students to frame such quesa state-of-the-art knowledge of the curtions, it is important that its teachers
model this intellectual activity. To
By Jeffrey Lott
ensure that Swarthmore has faculty
rent ways our discipline
is practiced. From that
point forward, our active scholarly life consists of our keeping that
knowledge up to date,
fresh, and vital. Reading
others’ research, attending conferences, networking with peers at
other institutions, and
producing our own
scholarship—marginally
during the summers and
more centrally during
sabbatical leaves—is
how we stay young in
our disciplines.”
Weinstein’s own work
is one of the best examples of a distinguished Swarthmore career, both as
teacher and scholar. An acclaimed
Faulkner scholar, he has taught at the
College for 27 years and has five
books to his credit, including the 1996
study What Else but Love? The Ordeal
of Race in Faulkner and Morrison.
When the College hires a new faculty member, it is with the hope—and
expectation—that he or she will stay
at the College for a long time, in some
cases as long as 35 years. “We don’t
know how long a faculty member’s
graduate school experience will
remain current in a given discipline,”
explained Keith, “but it certainly isn’t
35 years. In some disciplines, it’s a
small fraction of that.” She believes
that unless a professor is involved in
continuing to create knowledge—in
being an active scholar—at a certain
point he or she is going to start transmitting “canned information.”
“At this point, our students would
no longer be taught by someone who
is part of the intellectual ferment, who
is still wrestling to define a discipline’s
questions and to figure out new ways
to answer them. We help our faculty
avoid that fate by supporting their
scholarly pursuits,” said Keith.
Nurturing the teacher-scholar provides faculty members with the constant reinvigoration that comes from
having a chance to be immersed in
active scholarship. Engagement in the
world of ideas—and the consequent
ability to inspire students to achieve
SAM ERICKSON ʼ88
Swarthmore’s leave policy
pays off in the classroom.
K
14
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
H
Teaching at a liberal arts college is
an intense, time-consuming activity,
said Keith. It requires a personal commitment to students that is not found
in large research universities—a relationship that ranges from the classroom to office hours to
informal contacts that
often extend into the faculty member’s home.
O
ne further effect of
Swarthmore’s
leave policy, said
Keith, is that it
enhances the College’s ability to
recruit the best facul-
ELEFT
HERIO
S KOS
TANS
ELEFT
HERIO
S KOS
TANS
ow does
Swarthmore nurture
its teacherscholars? At
RER
SWEA
present, the
College proThe skills of
vides one
semester of paid
scholarship are central
leave every fourth
to everything
year for all tenured or
tenure-track faculty
the College does.
members. It also
provides up to eight
College-funded second-semester leaves
each year, allowing
some teacher-scholars a full year away
from the classroom
to do research,
ty. “This is not always
complete a book,
an easy sell. The teachor work in parter-scholars we compete
nership with othfor have lots of choices
ers in both
when they come out of
academia and
graduate school. They are
industry. In
prepared to be professionaddition, a sigally active at extremely
nificant numhigh levels, and because
ber of other
they are coming from Ph.D.
MAGE
faculty memprograms in the best univerNHEIM
bers—particusities, their advisers frelarly those in the natural
quently tell them that they’d
sciences—receive foundation, corpobe crazy to go to a liberal arts
rate, or government funding for seccollege. In fact, some of the ruder
ond-semester leaves.
advisers tell young scholars to wait
“This is a generous leave policy,”
until they are a little bit worn out, and
admits Keith. “We maintain it—and
then they can go to pasture at a liberal
ultimately would like to expand it to
arts college.”
include even more full-year leaves—
Of course, that’s not what Keith has
because we know that it’s very diffiin mind for Swarthmore. Fortunately,
cult to sustain first-rate professional
some candidates have attended a libscholarship while teaching a full load
eral arts college, so “they’ve had some
at Swarthmore.”
MARCH 1999
inoculation against the message they
are getting from the university.” Others tell Keith that they are unhappy
with the way they have just been
taught in graduate school or describe
a negative experience as teaching
assistants for professors who rarely
see an undergraduate. “They find
themselves interviewing at Swarthmore because they care about their
students and want to teach.”
Yet at the same time, young scholars don’t want to give up the work
that “they’re absolutely passionate
about,” says Keith. “What candidates
ask is, ‘Can I really do both here?’” Her
answer is yes, and she supports this
assertion by telling them about the
College’s faculty leave policy.
“At Swarthmore, that’s
how we put
our money
where our
mouth is.
That’s where
we say, ‘Not
only do we
want you to
continue to be
a scholar, not
BROWN only do we
think it’s crucial for the
kind of teaching we want, but by giving you a leave every fourth year, we
will make it possible for you to continue to grow in your field.’”
From Keith’s viewpoint, this is the
most important support that Swarthmore provides for its teacher-scholars. As Philip Weinstein told the
Board of Managers last spring,
“Intense faculty engagement in both
teaching and scholarship helps make
Swarthmore Swarthmore. Though
we’re sometimes only intermittently
aware of it, all of us are on a larger
stage than ‘just Swarthmore.’ Our
scholarship is not some private thing
we do on the side; it is, in fact, the
largest public declaration of our
value—and often of our values. In
doing it, we simultaneously represent,
both for our students and for the larger world, our selves, our discipline,
and our institution.”
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
that same sort of engagement—helps
faculty members go beyond the role
of teacher and mentor. The lifelong
intellectual curiosity of the outstanding teacher-scholar adds value to relationships that develop in the classroom, and it helps avoid provincialism, which, said Keith, “is
in many
ways the
greatest
danger for
our brand
of college.”
15
Swarthmore’s
A lifetime of scholarship
and innovative teaching.
D
onald Swearer, the Charles and
Harriett Cox McDowell Professor of Religion, has been teaching at Swarthmore for a generation,
and he remains one of the College’s
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
TSEcAhCoHlaErRs
DON
SWEARER
16
most popular professors and prolific
scholars. During his 33-year career as
a college teacher, he has published 16
books and more than 80 articles,
many of which have been translated
into languages such as German,
French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese,
Korean, Thai, and Tagalog.
Arriving at Swarthmore in 1970
after five years at Oberlin College,
Swearer was granted his first sabbatical in 1972, and he has been able to
take time off from teaching every
fourth year since then. He’s had the
good fortune to extend almost all of
his College-sponsored one-semester
leaves into full-year sabbaticals with
the help of grants from the National
Endowment for the Humanities, the
Social Science Research Council, and
the Ford, Guggenheim, and Rockefeller foundations.
“Most of my sabbaticals have been
spent in Asia,” says Swearer, who is
on leave during the current academic
year, working on a study of sacred
mountain traditions in Southeast Asia.
Many of his books and articles have
explored Buddhist religion and society in Southeast Asia, particularly
Thailand, where he has spent a total
of more than six years since his first
research trip there in 1967. In January,
he returned to Thailand for another
three-month stay based at Chang Mai
University.
At Swarthmore, in addition to
teaching in the Department of Religion
(and chairing it for more than eight
years), Swearer has become a strong
proponent of interdisciplinary study.
He participates in the Asian Studies
and Environmental Studies programs
and has co-taught courses with faculty members from history, classics,
biology, physics, and sociology/
anthropology. Drawing most recently
on his interest in the influence of spirituality on the environmental movement, in October he participated in a
national conference on religion and
ecology, speaking on a panel of experts on Asian religions moderated by
Bill Moyers.
“The rhythm of my professional
life as a scholar and a teacher,” says
Swearer, “moves in terms of three seasons: the academic year, the sumSWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
MICHAEL
BROWN
mers, and sabbatical leaves. This
rhythm is not always as harmonious
as I would like it to be, and there are
certainly conflicts among the various
competing demands on my time. But
there is no question that my ability to
sustain an active research and writing
program while teaching at a liberal
arts college has depended on Swarthmore’s leave program.”
Swearer says that his scholarly
work has oriented his teaching to the
living traditions of Buddhism, something that helps his students go
beyond mere textual analysis. “I’ve
tried to be an innovative teacher,” he
says. “I use lots of slides and field
trips. One year I brought one of Thailand’s most respected scholar-monks
to Swarthmore and co-taught a course
with him.”
He sees this authentic, original
approach in the teaching of many
Swarthmore faculty members. “Rather
than rely on the work that other people have done, we are able to base a
lot of what we teach on our own original research,” he says. “If you don’t
have this opportunity, you can be
forced into a borrowed voice.”
MARCH 1999
Cutting-edge physics
with undergraduates.
W
hen Cameron Geddes ’97
won last year’s American
Physical Society award for
the top undergraduate physics thesis
in the country, he hadn’t won it alone.
Physics research is a team effort, and
when Geddes was a junior, he joined
the team of Michael Brown, assistant
professor of physics. Geddes is now a
research assistant at the Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratories in
California, and Brown, in his fifth year
at the College, has won his own award.
As last year’s recipient of the U.S.
Department of Energy’s [DOE] Junior
Investigator Award, Michael Brown is
the rare teacher at a liberal arts college who has gained national attention
for groundbreaking scientific research, which Peter Collings, Department of Physics chairman, describes
as “some of the most significant science ever done at the College.”
In a basement laboratory of the
DuPont Science Building, Brown and
his students aim to provide the first
up-close look at solar flares and the
Michael Brown with students Amy
Reighard ’01 and Walter Luh ’99 and the
Swarthmore spheromak experiment.
process behind the heating of the
sun’s corona. They use a “spheromak,” a custom-built tungsten-lined
chamber in which they re-create conditions found on the surface of the
sun, including temperatures approaching one million degrees.
Brown’s Swarthmore Spheromak
Experiment (SSX) has been supported
by the DOE and the National Science
Foundation, partly because it is fundamental research but also for its implications for nuclear fusion, the elusive
technology that could provide a clean
and limitless power source.
“In solar flares and the corona, we
have two very old physics problems
that haven’t been solved,” says
Brown, who spent seven years as a
senior research fellow at the California Institute of Technology before
joining the Swarthmore faculty in
1994. Scientists have puzzled for years
over the “dynamo problem”—how
solar flares, some of which would
dwarf the Earth, are formed—and
over the extremely high temperatures
17
18
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
found in the corona. To explore the
dynamo problem, Brown and his students create and analyze a sphere of
liquid sodium, looking at the conversion of spinning kinetic energy to magnetic energy. To study the corona
heating problem, they merge two magnetized rings of plasma—hot, ionized
gases that simulate solar flares—and
track the conversion of magnetic energy into X-rays and heat.
“I realized that these problems
could be addressed with undergraduates at Swarthmore in a way that
would both advance science and the
training of the next generation of scientists,” says Brown. Each summer,
Brown has had three to five students
in his lab, including a handful from
local high schools, who are sponsored
by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. They help design experiments,
build instruments, analyze data—and
then co-author the resulting papers.
“The flares we create, which last
only a few hundred-millionths of a second, have the same twisting shape
and the same temperature, material,
density, and magnetic field as those
on the sun,” Brown says. Undergraduates are at his side every step of the
way. When he fires up the spheromak,
he and his students crowd into a
shielded, grounded box that looks like
a small screened porch. Working with
microbursts of electricity at 10,000
volts and 100,000 amperes—“artificial
lightning” says Brown—they and their
computers need some protection.
When on leave, as he was in
1997–98, Brown doesn’t have to go to
a research lab at a big university. Collaboration with colleagues in his field
is easy on the Internet, and his lab—
and undergraduate assistants—are
right at Swarthmore. “As sophisticated as all this looks,” he says, “it’s
physics that’s understandable by
undergraduates. And Swarthmore students are really remarkable. The
physics majors here are as talented as
those at any university.
“Science in America can’t survive
unless we continually feed students
from the bottom up. If we focus primarily on grad students, we run the
risk of spoiling the whole enterprise of
physics. The future is in these outstanding young people.”
ELLEN
MAGENHEIM
The illogical
economy of child care.
T
he logic of the marketplace seems
simple enough: Products are created in response to demand, competition leads to efficiency and lower
prices, and quality is determined
largely by the willingness of consumers to pay for it. Not true with
child care, says Ellen Magenheim,
associate professor of economics,
who studies how the child care market functions differently from that for
most other products or services.
Take the question of quality.
“Experts have a pretty clear idea of
what they believe good quality child
care looks like,” says Magenheim, “but
there’s still a lot of child care out
there that doesn’t approach these
standards, and the market isn’t necessarily taking care of this. Is it because
of some imperfection in the market, or
is it because parents have a definition
of quality that is different from that of
the experts?”
These are among the questions she
is studying during her sabbatical this
year—research that will not only
enhance her teaching but may lead to
better public policy in the industry.
Magenheim, who coordinates the
College’s Public Policy concentration
and teaches Public Policy and the
American Family, argues that child
care is an important economic and
policy issue not only because of the
increased demand but because of
growing knowledge of how it may
affect labor force participation, child
development, and even the success or
failure of welfare reform.
“Despite growing consumer
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
demand, there are persistent shortages of certain types of child care,”
says Magenheim. “Also, many parents
see child care not as just another consumer good to be purchased but as a
‘merit good’ to which all are entitled,
regardless of ability to pay.
There’s another big public policy
question in child care, says Magenheim: “Why is it acceptable for the
government to make education available once children are 5 years old but
not before that?”
In a proposal to the Smith Richardson Foundation, which is funding the
second semester of her sabbatical,
she wrote: “There is growing consensus that school readiness is a goal
toward which quality child care can
readily contribute. The policy puzzle
is that, with exceptions such as Head
Start, care for children from birth to
age 5 is a private responsibility.”
In the past, much child care policy
has focused on how child care affects
parental decisions about work. More
recently, attention has also focused
on how child care quality and early
I
Swar thmore’s
TSEcAhColHaErRs
students then see the theoretical
alongside the practical.
Theory and practice come together
in Magenheim’s personal life as well.
With husband William Turpin, professor of classics, she is raising a daughter, 10, and a son, 3. Her work on the
child care industry started when her
daughter was a newborn. “I was drawn
to it because the industry poses very
interesting industrial organization
questions,” she says, “but having children has certainly added another
dimension to my research. It’s taught
me something every parent understands—how hard it is to know what’s
going on when you’re not there.” ■
Who takes over when professors go on leave?
t really depends on the
needs of the department
and the students,” says
Provost Jennie Keith.
“We’re very concerned
about the students, and we
try to bring in leave
replacements who can
offer stability in the curriculum and maintain the
quality of the courses.
Sometimes they actually
enhance a department’s
offerings.”
There are several
approaches to hiring leave
replacements. Some
departments, especially in
the performing arts, find
that part-time instructors
fit the bill. Departments
with more sequential curricula, such as mathematics and statistics or chemistry, hire one-year leave
replacements who can
teach a range of courses,
MARCH 1999
education experiences affect children.
Some parents, as well as state policy
makers, have come to recognize that
formal educational experience before
age 5 may be good for children.
Magenheim, who also teaches
Industrial Organization and Health
Economics, draws a comparison
between child care and health care,
wondering why child care “coverage”
is not tied to employment in the same
way that health insurance has been.
“Child care, like health care, is more
than a pure market good—it’s a social
good. It’s in our collective interest to
have our children be well taken care
of when they are young.”
During a leave in 1993–94, Magenheim spent time at Child Trends Inc.,
a Washington, D.C., research firm that
looks at the sociology and demography of children and families. She says
one of her courses, Public Policy and
the American Family, depended on
this research; in addition to its focus
on economics, it uses concepts from
sociology and demography to frame
issues in a larger social context. Her
especially at the introductory level. Disciplines such
as sociology and anthropology use “rotating” leave
replacements—faculty
members who are generally hired for one to three
years, filling in for several
professors in sequence.
These professors often
add areas of study that
complement the work of
the permanent faculty.
Some larger departments,
such as economics and
philosophy, are actually
“staffed for leave,” which
means there are enough
tenured or tenure-track
professors to allow for the
departure of one or two
colleagues for any given
semester.
The frequency of
Swarthmore sabbaticals
forces students to plan
carefully, sometimes tak-
ing a certain course or
seminar a year before or
after they might have otherwise. The College gives
sophomores information
about which courses will
be offered as they plan
their studies for the final
two years.
The cost to the College
of sabbaticals in any given
year depends on who is on
leave and in what departments. Last year, about a
quarter of the faculty was
on sabbatical, and leave
replacements constituted
8 percent of the total faculty salary budget of $13
million.
Another “cost” comes
from the time spent hiring
leave replacements. In several departments, there
are near-constant searches
because of the size of the
faculty and the frequency
of leaves. “We take these
seriously,” says Keith, who
as provost authorizes
national searches for the
best possible temporary
faculty members. “We
don’t just call up grad
schools and ask them to
send us someone.”
Keith wants to add to
the stability and productivity of the faculty by having
fewer one- or two-year
appointments and using
more “rotating” leave
replacements, who,
though not in line for
tenure, often stay at the
College for several years.
A few seem especially right
for Swarthmore and
become candidates for a
tenure-track opening—like
anthropologist Keith, who
first arrived as a leave
replacement in the spring
of 1969.
—J.L.
19
SWARTHMORE’S
CRISIS
OF1969
A LOOK
BACK
I
t’s been 30 years since that terrible winter of 1969, when Swarthmore went through a paroxysm of
protest and suffered the loss of
President Courtney Smith, who had
led the College since 1953. In most
minds, the two events are inextricable—the occupation of the Admissions
Office by black students intent on pushing Swarthmore to admit more African
Americans, and the sudden, shocking
death of a popular leader. The wounds of
January 1969 were so raw that this magazine scarcely mentioned that tumultuous
time for more than two decades. Always
the deep, unspoken question has been: Did
the protesters “kill” President Smith?
Paul Good attempted to answer this
question in his May 9, 1969, Life magazine
article, “Requiem for Courtney Smith.” At the
request of the Bulletin, historians Darwin Stapleton ’69 and Donna Stapleton have edited
Good’s powerful article for republication here.
(On page 25, they point out some of the article’s strengths and flaws.)
We are reprinting “Requiem” not to open old
wounds but to do something that is particularly
Swarthmorean—to look inside and examine ourselves. To see where we were and where we are.
To reflect on change.
Gilmore Stott, Smith’s friend and assistant
(who was at his side when he died), has had three
decades to reflect on those days. In a talk to the
Alumni Council last June, he said, “My personal
thought is that differences in perspective on those
events, and on Courtney’s sudden and tragic death,
20
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
will never be utterly resolved.” Then Stott gave his own
perspective: “I remember the night before the sit-in,
and student leaders I knew well came down to the Stott
house to talk. In substance, I said, ‘Courtney wants the
changes you want.’ When they finally left, quiet and
orderly, they said to me, ‘We know that,
but we think direct action will be productive.’ What was productive and by
whom I won’t argue, [but] notice something about this…. Whereas in some
institutions so-called negotiation took
place between administrators and
armed student activists, nothing of
this kind happened at Swarthmore….
When escalation threatened, Courtney and his staff reached a bold
accommodation … and our president knew he could carry the
Board and faculty. When that last
morning he bent over his desk, he
had already succeeded. It was not
his spirit but his body, long devoted around the clock to Swarthmore affairs, that bowed under
the strain.”
Swarthmore, along with all of
higher education, has worked
hard to meet the challenges
presented to it in the 1960s.
In the fall of 1968, just eight
blacks entered the College, a
number that led directly to
the protest. In the fall of
1998, that number was 43,
roughly 12 percent of the
entering class. African
Americans make up 9 percent of the student body
today, yet black is only
one of the colors of
Swarthmore’s—and
America’s—rainbow. The
“bold accommodation”
reached with the
protestors of 1969
began a process that
has resulted in a stuSION
ERMIS
dent population that
WITH P
D
E
T
REPRIN
E INC.
is
one-third
minority—black,
E, © TIM
IN
Z
A
G
A
LIFE M
Asian, Latino/a, or Native American.
As he closed his talk last June, Gil Stott spoke of
contemporary struggles for recognition and rights,
specifically his concerns over women’s and gay rights.
“The progress of both is finding its place here,” he said.
“And great as these issues are, their dominant feature
is easy to express—and that feature is simply a specifically moral one, a matter of human rights, and increasing recognition that everyone counts.”
—Jeffrey Lott
MARCH 1999
21
REQUIEM
FOR
COURTNEY
SMITH
By Paul Good
Excerpted from Life, May 9, 1969
O
n the morning of Thursday,
Jan. 16, this year [1969], Dr.
[Courtney] Smith walked up
the paths from his home to Parrish
Hall, a tall, free-striding figure quietly
well-clad in Ivy League tweeds. There
was a crisis on campus. Black students had been occupying the Admissions office in Parrish for eight days,
demanding increased black enrollment and a black “presence” in the
administration. It was by now a familiar national story. But the Quaker college outside Philadelphia had never
been so shaken in its 105-year existence.
Courtney Smith’s health had
always been excellent, but before he
reached Parrish, where black paper
hung by demonstrators covered some
Admissions windows, he felt a spasm
in his chest. By the time he climbed a
flight of stairs to his office, he was
dying of a heart attack. The college
physician was called and began counting Dr. Smith’s pulse, and as the count
was about to reach 20, the Swarthmore president died.
Five hours after the death, the
members of the Swarthmore AfroAmerican Students Society (SASS)
abandoned the Admissions office but
not their protest. They had cleaned
up the litter from eight days of occupation and the office was undamaged,
the files untouched. But there was
wreckage—a rubble of broken illusions and shattered trust.
“We sincerely believe,” said the
SASS statement, “that the death of any
human being, whether he be the good
president of a college, or a black person trapped in our country’s ghettos,
is a tragedy.”
22
A New York Times editorialist handed down his pronouncement: “The
death of Dr. Courtney C. Smith ... in
the face of disruptive action by a
small group clamoring for more black
power, appallingly underscores the
price extorted by these policies of
excess.”
The Times’s assumption of a causeeffect relationship between SASS and
the death was repeated in many newspapers. But the Times did not see fit
to print as news the statement of the
Swarthmore Student Council: “The
entire college community deeply
mourns the death of our President,
Courtney Smith. There is no question
in our minds of blame or guilt; there is
room only for sorrow, not for bitterness.”
The Student Council had rejected a
simplistic, vindictive response to the
death of Courtney Smith. He would
have been proud of that reaction, a
practice of his preachments. And he
would have favored an effort to comprehend the essence of his tragedy,
since it goes beyond the death of a
man to the life of a nation and its institutions. The tragedy of Courtney
Smith is a peculiarly American tragedy, devoid of villains, full of good
intentions, ultimately disastrous. Perhaps it is the American tragedy.
Two days before Christmas, 1968,
Courtney Smith had the first intimations that his well-ordered world
might be coming apart. He received a
letter from SASS which began:
“Merry Christmas! Enclosed are the
‘clarified’ SASS demands you requested some time ago. If you fail to issue a
clear, unequivocal public acceptance
of these non-negotiable demands by
noon, Tuesday, January 7, 1969, the
black students and SASS will be forced
to do whatever is necessary to obtain
acceptance of same.”
The demands called for a markedly
increased black enrollment which
would include so-called “risk” students who were to be provided with
support programs. SASS also wanted
a black assistant dean of admissions
and a black counselor appointed—
subject to its review—who would
enhance “black perspective” on campus.
The tone of the letter and its mocking greeting seemed out of place on a
campus accustomed to the genteel
Quaker practice of governance by
consensus, and Prof. J. Roland Pennock, chairman of the Swarthmore
political science department for more
than twenty-five years, has this to say
of President Smith’s reaction: “He was
confronted with non-negotiable
demands and rhetoric that did great
offense to him.... This hurt him bitterly. But he never let himself be moved
to anger despite the affront to his
standards of civility.”
A reasonable man tries to understand the grievance behind a hurt
done to him, and understanding the
present necessarily involves the past;
to overlook the history of men and
nations is to try to comprehend a
tragedy without viewing its first act.
Courtney Smith’s sense of continuity
and of debt to the past was strong.
Swarthmore College was founded
the year before the Civil War ended....
The college prospered and in 1921
began its Great Leap into academic
elitism under President Frank Aydelotte, who said he did not care if
Swarthmore were 20 years behind the
times socially so long as it was 20
years ahead intellectually. A system of
seminars was developed that demanded the very best young scholars; only
one out of five applicants was accepted and high school valedictorians
were a dime a dozen.
I
t was only in the ’40s that a few
hand-picked Negroes were admitted; and when Courtney Smith
became president in 1953, the campus
reflected the tokenism that white
America tacitly accepted as the
nation’s Way of Life. The country was
on the eve of the Supreme Court
schools’ decision, and wellsprings of
social unrest were everywhere being
tapped. Yet in his inaugural address
President Smith plainly articulated his
beliefs concerning the role of a college
in relation to society at large. It was a
belief he held as long as he lived and it
is central to an understanding of his
tragedy.
“I personally find it more helpful,”
he said, “in thinking of what ‘education’ should be, to focus on the individual student rather than on the society in which he is to live, though the
society must appear somewhere in
the background of the picture.”
Swarthmore’s new president carSWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
ried among his credenand felt their survival in
tials a special experience
doubt. They sought
that established his dedirespite from the
cation to a liberal per[wrongs] of 350 years in
spective, an experience
America, a chance to
unexpected in a man
overcome humiliation
raised in the small Iowa
and [show] their own
town of Winterset and
excellence. They had
thereafter insulated in
observed that the opinwhite academia. As a
ions of good white men
Navy lieutenant (j.g.)
did little to change black
during World War II, Dr.
realities: they had come
Smith had been assigned
to discover that black
to represent the interests
action—civil disobediof Negro sailors at the
ence, carrying a placard,
Pensacola, Fla., training
even muttering or shoutstation and he had
ing “Off with their
fought successfully to get
heads”—sometimes prothem a gymnasium and
duced results.
their own beach facilities. His widow, Betty,
hilosophies were
in conflict, and by
the mother of their son
last spring the first
and two daughters,
tremors of racial unrest
recalls: “For two and a
had rattled the Swarthhalf years, he lived their
more campus. Blacks—
life. He felt every insult,
Don Mizell ’71 reads a SASS statement during the 1969 occupation of the like blacks on campuses
every hurt to his poor
Admissions Office. An unidentified reporter holds the microphone.
and in ghettos the counlads.”
try over—were challengDuring the first 10
ing President Smith’s
years of Dr. Smith’s presintegrationist ethic and embracing the
idency, only 20 Negroes were
doubtless right in our present time,”
oneness of blackness. Hair was growenrolled. But society was edging up
he wrote. “But not all the people who
ing out naturally, interracial dating—
from the “background of the picture.”
sustain segregation are evil. They are
which only a few years before had
In the 1964 Centennial year, the colignorant (which should be a concern
been the campus groove—was
lege received a $275,000 grant from
of social justice) or frightened (which
frowned on. Swarthmore’s Afro-Amerithe Rockefeller Foundation to spur
should be a concern of social justice)
can Students Society was displeased
black enrollment. It would appear that or complacent (which should be a
the mind of Courtney Smith, so sensiconcern of social justice), but they are about many things. There were few
tive to injustice in the abstract, was
seldom evil. And they have minds and black courses and only one full-time
black professor, Asmarom Legesse,
untroubled by Swarthmore’s sense of
hearts that can be reached if we are
who came from Ethiopia. (A black lecpriority: the college would raise $1.3
willing to do something more than
turer from the University of Rochester
million for a dining hall, but would
carry a placard or mutter, ‘Off with
wait for foundation money before
their heads.’... a college’s job, drawing visited Swarthmore one day a week to
intensifying black enrollment. History
on the contribution of men of intellect teach a course in economics.)
Blacks—5% of the student body—felt
had conditioned his attitudes, perand integrity and conscience and
physically swamped and psychologihaps, even as it had conditioned the
good will, is to determine what is
cally dubious about the motives of
attitudes of lesser administrators the
social justice, and to help students
President Smith in having them on
country over: Swarthmore (or X Coldevelop the capacity to determine in
campus at all. A black spokesman
lege) had, after all, done as much for
subsequent years what is social juswould write in the student newspaper,
Negroes as most—and racism, after
tice.”
The Phoenix:
all, was a campus problem but not the
So here was Courtney Smith’s dec“SASS sees the ‘integrationist ethic’
problem, as Northern unrest and
laration of faith in what his college
as Swarthmore saying, ‘We want black
demonstrations throughout the South should be: a citadel of wisdom on the
made clear. But President Smith was
darkling plain of society, sending wise, students so that we can see how the
other half lives. The college hopes
equally clear—in the immediate wake
brave and true men and women out
that social contact with blacks will
of Birmingham, St. Augustine and
through the sally ports each graduaabate the racism and prejudice of
Selma—on what the college role in
tion to do battle against ignorance
whites.’ By contrast, Swarthmore
relation to society should be. For the
and evil.
should place top priority on giving talDecember 1965 Alumni Bulletin, he
But out on the alarm-swept plain
ented young blacks both the compeexpanded his 1953 inaugural theme.
of society, black people had been
tence and the race pride with which
“Something of the activist spirit is
encountering frightening realities
P
MARCH 1999
23
to fill the service and
leadership vacuum in
their own black communities.”
When Admissions
Dean Fred Hargadon
reported that only eight
blacks would be entering
Swarthmore in the fall of
1968, down from a high
of 19 four years earlier,
President Smith ordered
the dean to make a study
for the faculty’s Admissions Policy Committee.
For the first time, Smith
singled out race for attention in his annual
report, conceding the
appearance of black separatism. “There were
moments of edginess on
these matters during the
year,” he wrote, “reminding us that our only immunity at Swarthmore
adheres in the lively continuance of our community’s reasonableness.”
Before he went to
bed that Thursday night,
Courtney Smith learned
that his students had
voted to endorse all the
SASS demands.... Easy
indictments of others
and comforting self-analysis were not Courtney
Smith’s way; trying to
sleep that night, he must
have faced his dilemma.
Whatever his
thoughts that night,
when President Smith
settled in at his desk the
next morning he was preoccupied with a worry
beyond race. The previous night’s vote had signified not only approval
of SASS but an assertion
of Student Power. Made
restive by a general frusPresident Smith welcomes the incoming class in September 1968. He had
trating inability to conalready announced his intention to resign at the end of the academic year. trol their destinies, students had been inspiring
campus protest over
tradition of the Quaker dialogue to
issues trivial and significant from San
which he was devoted.
Francisco State to Notre Dame to
n Thursday, Jan. 9 ... the
While President Smith awaited stuHoward. It was true that Swarthmore
Swarthmore immunity ran
dent reaction to the occupation of the students, strung out on intellect, were
out. Shortly after noon, SASS
Admissions office that Thursday, one
more docile than most.... Only two
chairman Clinton Etheridge led a
student in particular filled his
years before, students had even been
group of black students into the
thoughts: Clinton Etheridge, the 20encouraged to participate in a masAdmissions office, charging that their
year-old chairman of SASS. Etheridge,
sive, self-searching critique of their
Christmas demands had not been
who came from New York City, was
school.
met. There was no violence. White
serious, soft-spoken and, like virtually
administrators left on request and the everybody at Swarthmore, relentlessut the critique was not an issue
doors were padlocked behind them.
now. What was the issue was
ly articulate.
Confrontation had come to a campus
summed up in another report
The fact that Etheridge also
of consensus and President Smith had admired the president only makes
inside President Smith’s briefcase, a
one more week of life.
document that was the catalyst in the
more ironic their inability to find a
Students and faculty plunged into a common wavelength. “The condition
Swarthmore crisis presently concenseries of meetings that continued day
trated in the Admissions office on the
of black student life in a college like
and night, a loquacious demonstrafloor beneath him. It was the report
this is something white liberals can’t
tion of Swarthmore’s innate capacity
on Negro enrollment he had requestgrasp,” Etheridge says. “They autofor verbalizing its concern. But in the
ed from Admissions Dean Hargadon.
matically think they understand the
exciting swirl of debate, the comings
Racially, things had gone downhill
racial scene, but they don’t. White
and goings of would-be negotiators,
since the report’s release in mid-Octomen like Courtney—a very good
President Smith was strangely isolatber, and President Smith was still bafguy—are molding your mind from
ed. He had always kept aloof from the
above, making all decisions from a life fled, even annoyed, by student reacfaculty to guard against suspicion of
tion to it and to the dean. It seemed to
style that isn’t yours. We need the
him a very proper report and Dean
favoritism, he had always kept stuprotection of numbers that AdmisHargadon was obviously an excellent
dents at a firm arm’s length. Now, in
sions can provide if we’re going to
man. The rangy, athletic son of a bluea vulnerable moment, the president
keep our black entity intact. When
found himself alone with his idealism.
government studies tell you that we’re collar worker in suburban Philadelphia, Hargadon had grown up in a biHaving made the initial decision that
moving toward two societies, what’s
racial neighborhood and squeezed
police would not be called onto the
the point in adopting the integracampus, he waited for the faculty and
tionist ethic? The world outside is and through college on the GI Bill. President Smith felt him uniquely qualified
students to assert themselves in the
always has been segregated.”
O
B
24
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
to treat the Negro question and Dean
Hargadon agreed.
Dean Hargadon’s report had offered
a logical presentation of the difficulties
of Negro enrollment. But the dean’s
first statistical table focused on family
structure, on how many Swarthmore
blacks came from one-parent homes
(he offered no tables comparing black
broken homes to white), and he compared his findings with those of the
Moynihan report on The Negro Family,
a document resented by militant and
moderate Negroes alike, and noted the
coinciding figures. Because of the
small number of blacks on campus,
other tables made it possible to pinpoint—and embarrass—individuals,
and the report departed from pure
fact-finding to make critical references
to SASS. Though he worried whether
Swarthmore could preserve its
“integrity and genius” by accepting
risk students, Dean Hargadon had the
wit and good grace to recall novelist
Peter de Vries’ comment on elite
schools: “Of course they graduate the
best—it’s all they’ll take.”
Courtney Smith could smile at that.
And he could embrace the white logic
of the report. But the ensuing discord
was repugnant to him. SASS denounced the report, and the Student
Council voted overwhelmingly to back
SASS. Dean Hargadon accused the
council of making “grandiose and
grandstand declarations,” and in language not usual on a campus given to
nice-Nellyisms, declared publicly: “So
you have been had.”
President Smith stood squarely
behind his dean. He wrote to Hargadon: “I want to underline my dismay
at the inappropriateness and lack of
justification in SASS’s remarks that
concerned you and your work in
admissions, including Negro admissions. I count on your knowing that I
regard your work at Swarthmore as
one of the great strengths of the college.”
On the weekend of Jan. 11 and 12,
the third and fourth days of the Admissions office occupation, efforts to
resolve the crisis were nothing less
than feverish. The faculty had begun
Occupation Week with a simple resolution condemning failure to use rational procedures. Now it was shooting
out resolutions calling for an Ad Hoc
Black Admissions Committee, amMARCH 1999
nesty for demonstrators, revamping
of admissions procedures, and
appointment of black administrators.
Dean of Men Robert Barr [’56], while
condemning the occupation tactics,
said it was “absolutely correct” that
SASS had made the faculty stir itself.
On Monday, Jan. 13, President
Smith appeared before the entire student body for the last time to speak in
support of the faculty recommendations. He appealed to SASS for a spirit
of mutual trust, also warning that
direct action would not be tolerated in
any future campus dispute. And then
the mask of the presidency slipped
and for a moment he was just another
man disillusioned with the way life
had turned out. “We have lost something precious at Swarthmore,” he
said, “the feeling that force and disruptiveness are just not our way.”
The days began to run together
now. The president was working late,
too late, and at six or seven in the
evening his secretary, Mrs. Pierre
Decrouez, would say: Do you need
anything more? And he would answer:
“REQUIEM”: A COMMENTARY
After eight years of research, Darwin H.
Stapleton ’69 and Donna Stapleton are
now completing a full-length biography
of Courtney Smith. The foregoing Life
article, they say,“provides a poignant
retrospective on a troubled time, but not
everything in the story is accurate.”
Their commentary follows:
P
aul Good effectively highlights
Courtney Smith’s values. He
was indeed a president with
clearly “liberal ethics” who strove to
maintain the genteel practice of governance by consensus. Certainly his
“standards of civility,” which were
more conservative than his political
standards, were deeply contested and
challenged during the crisis and did
not allow him to condone or respond
to coercion. President Smith was
committed to academic excellence
and to social justice, yet he believed
that both excellence and justice took
time and effort to develop fully.
Good’s conjectural remarks, however, fail to capture the deeper context of the crisis for Smith and Swarthmore. Courtney Smith and Swarthmore College were long dedicated to
education primarily as a tool to enlighten society and transform the socalled real world. Smith was not a proponent of the status quo as Good suggests; instead, throughout his presidency he monitored trends and social
issues to anticipate needed changes.
He was willing to break with tradition
when he felt that change could be
made peacefully and respectfully.
Good is simply wrong in asserting
that President Smith was “isolated”
from faculty and students. The fact is
that he led all faculty meetings and
had frequent informal discussions
with faculty members and staff. He
opened his office doors to students
and regularly read the student newspaper—even when he was appalled
by it. He applauded student participation in desegregation movements in
Chester, Pa., and Cambridge, Md.,
even while he deplored confrontational tactics there or anywhere in the
nation.
Moreover, the article does not
acknowledge that many of the factors
that led to the crisis were out of
Swarthmore’s and Smith’s control.
Black unity was, at the time, a rapidly
developing and increasingly self-conscious phenomenon. There was a
nationwide groundswell of skepticism
regarding authority in any form, and
few institutions and leaders escaped
dynamic confrontations such as that
at Swarthmore without serious difficulty.
Still, in this probing piece, Paul
Good did get the essence of the situation correct: Time had run out for
“understanding.” No white person
could then (or even now) fully understand the feelings, desires, concerns,
and needs of black persons, and
Courtney Smith and the College were
caught in the inexorable pressures of
the times.
—Darwin H. Stapleton ’69
Donna Stapleton
25
Alumni Digest
Where did you come from? And where did you go?
VT ..........162/19
NH..........160/10
MA ......1,254/93
Geographic Distribution of
Swarthmore Alumni/Students
RI ..............92/3
CT ..........503/51
NJ ........905/107
DE ..........182/25
MD ........893/84
DC..........382/19
375/33
42/2
1/1
162/20
148/21
200/18
15/4
21/2
136/13
5/1
14/3
23/5
36/5
36/2
1,837/131
113/10
2,359/175
46/5
110/9 279/36
414/22
239/15
140/7
2,136/246
254/26
19/4
107/8
49/4
617/40
61/9
80/11
344/26
78/3
13/2
39/3
23/1
162/21
261/28
46/0
42/4
441/39
13/3
48/7
International Distribution Alumni/Students
APO/FPO ......................18/2
Argentina ..........................4/0
Armenia ............................1/0
Australia ........................19/1
Austria ..............................5/1
Bahrain ............................0/1
Bangladesh ......................3/1
Belgium ............................2/0
Benin ................................1/0
Bermuda ..........................3/0
Bolivia ..............................2/0
Botswana ..........................1/1
Brazil ..............................13/5
Cameroon ........................1/0
Canada..........................156/7
Chile ..................................3/0
China ..............................10/4
China–Hong Kong only 23/2
Colombia ..........................5/4
Croatia ..............................3/0
Cyprus................................4/0
Czech Republic ................2/0
Denmark ..........................6/0
26
Ecuador ............................3/0
Egypt..................................3/1
England ........................134/0
Finland ..............................2/0
Fr. Polynesia ....................1/0
France ............................49/2
Germany ........................36/5
Ghana................................2/6
Greece ............................22/1
Guam ................................2/0
Honduras ..........................1/1
Hungary ............................3/0
Iceland ..............................1/0
India ..................................4/4
Indonesia ..........................5/1
Ireland ..............................9/0
Israel................................16/0
Italy ..................................19/1
Ivory Coast........................1/0
Jamaica ............................5/2
Japan ..............................39/4
Jordan................................1/0
Kenya ................................3/0
Laos ..................................1/0
Lebanon ............................1/0
Lesotho..............................2/0
Malaysia............................6/1
Mauritius ..........................0/1
Mariana Islands ..............1/0
Mexico ............................18/2
Nepal ................................0/2
Netherlands ....................19/1
New Zealand ..................11/0
Nigeria ..............................6/1
Norway..............................4/0
Pakistan ............................3/5
Palestine............................1/0
Panama ............................5/0
Paraguay ..........................3/0
Peru....................................2/0
Philippines........................2/2
Portugal ............................2/0
Russia................................2/0
Saudi Arabia ....................2/3
Scotland ............................8/0
Singapore........................12/2
Slovakia ............................2/0
South Africa ......................7/1
Spain ..............................11/1
Sri Lanka ..........................2/0
St. Lucia ............................1/0
Swaziland ........................1/0
Sweden..............................6/0
Switzerland ....................24/0
Taiwan ..............................7/2
Thailand............................8/1
Togo ..................................1/0
Trinidad ............................0/1
Trinidad & Tobago ..........1/3
Turkey ..............................7/7
Turks Island ......................1/0
Venezuela ........................2/4
Vietnam ............................1/0
Virgin Islands....................9/3
Zambia..............................1/0
Zimbabwe ........................4/0
SOURCE: ALUMNI
RELATIONS OFFICE
DATA ACCURATE
AS OF DECEMBER 1998
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
SWAR THMORE
CONNECTIONS
Upcoming Events
Recent Events
Chicago: Connection chair Marilee
Roberg ’73 will lead a group of alumni to a performance of the “Blue Man
Group” on Wednesday, April 21.
Boston: Connection families visited
the New England Aquarium, and others enjoyed an evening at the Improv
Asylum, where Leah Gotcsik ’97 performed.
Metro DC/Baltimore: Ralph Tryon
’71 will lead the Connection’s fourth
annual “Christmas in April” service
project on Saturday, April 24.
Philadelphia: Jane Golden H’98,
artistic director of Philadelphia’s
Mural Arts Program, will lead the
Connection on a tour of the city’s
murals on Saturday, April 17. The
group will enjoy breakfast and lunch
at Opus 251.
UPCOMING
CAMPUS EVENTS
Parents Weekend
April 16–18
Alumni Weekend
June 4–6
Alumni College Abroad:
Prague to Berlin
June 13–24
Homecoming
September 25
IN BRIEF
Go for a swim
The Class of 1999 invites all swim
team alumni back to Ware Pool for an
alumni swim meet and informal banquet to be held on the weekend of
April 24. Contact Leisha Shaffer ’83 at
(610) 543-2377. We look forward to
seeing you at this once-in-a-decade
event.
Nominate a president
MEGHAN KRIEGEL ʼ97
This issue of the Bulletin includes
nomination forms for class presidents
in the copies sent to members of this
year’s reunion classes (class years
ending in 4 or 9) and the Class of
1968. If you are in one of those classes
and a tear-out form is not included in
MARCH 1999
your magazine, please contact the
Alumni Relations Office.
Organize an event
Regional Swarthmore events are run
by volunteers. If you would like to
organize an event in your area, please
contact Katie Bowman ’94 at kbowman1@swarthmore.edu or (610) 3288404.
Make a gift toll free
It’s now possible to make a gift to
Swarthmore by calling the College’s
new credit card hotline: (800) 6609714. Gifts to the Annual Fund and all
restricted funds may be phoned in on
this line.
Externship ... During winter break, John Gallup ’85
(right) hosted Kwabena
Adu ’01 at the Harvard
Institute for International
Development. Adu, an
international student from
Ghana, took advantage of
the College’s growing
externship network to
study the future of information technology in Rwanda.
Metro NYC: David Wright ’69 and
Don Fujihira ’69 hosted the 13th
annual wine symposium, “The Foods
and Wines of Greece,” or “The Alpha
and Omega of Wine.” Two separate
events had to be scheduled to
accommodate the demand.
Philadelphia: Ken Schaphorst ’82
and his 18-piece big band played to a
full house at Lang Concert Hall on
campus and afterward met the audience at a reception hosted by the
Connection.
Navasky to speak
at Alumni Collection
V
ictor
Navasky ’54,
one of the country’s most admired journalists,
will be the Collection speaker on
Saturday, June 5,
during Alumni
Weekend.
Editor of The
Nation magazine
Victor Navasky ’54
since 1978,
Navasky became its publisher and
editorial director four years ago. He
also is director of the George T. Delacorte Center for Magazine Journalism
at Columbia University and does a
monthly commentary on public radio.
Navasky graduated Phi Beta Kappa
from Swarthmore, with high honors
in the social sciences, and earned a
law degree at Yale in 1959. Before
joining The Nation, he was an editor
at The New York Times Magazine and
wrote a column about publishing for
the Times Book Review.
He is the author of Kennedy Justice
and Naming Names and co-author
with Christopher Cerf of The Experts
Speak: The Definitive Compendium of
Misinformation.
27
CLASS
NOTES
ARTHUR ZITO JR. ʼ81
Alumni Profile
Note worthy
Rosamond Walling Tirana ’31 was courted by George Gershwin.
Y
our letters have a way of making me
happy, and, for a long time after
receiving them the feeling persists. For
example, the other morning, I awoke,
not feeling too “hot” and was handed a
stack of mail. One after another I opened
the letters with the mechanical precision
and expression of a robot. Then your letter loomed up and then—a smile—a sitting up in bed—a slight quickening of the
pulse—a careful read of your sweet letter
and the day was made for me....
Love, George
This excerpt of a letter from George
Gershwin to Rosamond Walling ’31
dated October 10, 1929, is just one of
dozens of letters Rosamond received
from the renowned composer while
she was a student here. Their voluminous correspondence spans a five-year
period that ended shortly after Rosamond’s marriage to Rifat Tirana in
1932, with whom she had three sons.
Some letters are flirtatious; others are
filled with witty sarcasm about friends
or events. Most, however, chronicle
activities in their respective lives and
plans for their next get-together. The
entire collection of mostly handwritten
letters was given to the Library of
Congress last year.
Rosamond’s life first became intertwined with Gershwin’s when she was
9, and they met at the 1919 wedding of
her cousin Emily Strunsky to Lou Paley.
Gershwin, then 21 years old, was in
attendance because his brother, Ira,
was married to Emily’s sister, Leonore.
Their worlds continued to touch,
and the relationship changed from
friendship to a more romantic one.
They often met at family gatherings, or
Rosamond would be Gershwin’s guest
at a musical he had written—as was
the case when she attended shows that
opened in Philadelphia while she
attended Swarthmore.
In an interview from her New York
home, Rosamond’s younger sister,
Anna Walling Hamburger ’33, who
attended Swarthmore for two years,
remembered being a “chaperone” on
one of those dates: “It was great to go
to play openings such as Girl Crazy in
Philadelphia or even out to lunch with
them.”
30
Rosamond Walling (above,
around 1931) and George
Gershwin (right) corresponded and had a “very real
friendship.”
Anna says Rosamond
and Gershwin “had a very
CORBIS/BETTMANN
real friendship.” She continues: “You have to understand the
times in which they lived. There was no
physical contact except maybe a kiss
goodnight on the cheek—a peck—at
the door,” she recalled with a quiet
laugh.
Rosamond was not only the recipient of Gershwin’s affection but also of
his gifts. While at Swarthmore, Rosamond received from Gershwin one of
the first portable radios. “Anna came
down to my room,” said Rosamond in a
recent interview at her Georgetown
home in Washington, D.C. “She saw
that I had the windows wide open, and
my roommate and I had our coats on.
She asked, ‘Why do you have the windows open?’ I said, ‘We can’t close the
windows because we have to let in the
airwaves.’”
With a degree in history, Rosamond
went to England to do graduate work at
the London School of Economics but
found fulfillment in painting, primarily
landscapes. It was an avocation in her
years with Gershwin that later became
a vocation, and her work has been ex-
hibited in galleries across the country.
Although family members say Rosamond would never have married
George Gershwin, she was one of only
a few women with whom Gershwin had
seriously discussed marriage and children. “Gershwin asked me to marry
him several times. When I asked him
why, he would always say, ‘because if
you do, it would be good for my health
and digestion,’” Rosamond recalled. He
hadn’t said she would be good for his
heart, a romantic sentiment she
thought was missing and wanted to
hear.
Anna agrees that
Gershwin loved Rosamond, but she was
not in love with him.
Rosamond once
wrote that she
believed George
wanted what has now
become known as a
“trophy wife,” which
she knew was not a
strong basis for a
marriage. When
George Gershwin
died at the age of 38
in 1937, he had never married.
Today, at age 89, Rosamond can no
longer easily hear the strains of Gershwin’s compositions because of a profound hearing loss, and she spends
much of her day reading books. But
her apartment walls are covered with
fond memories. Among her own colorful paintings and those of Edward Corbett, her late second husband, are two
8 x 10 photographs of Gershwin.
One shows George sitting at his
piano, with the handwritten inscription: “For Rosamond with admiration
and affection, George—November 29,
1928 (Thanksgiving).” Next to the
words is a hand-drawn musical staff
with the opening bar to “Rhapsody
in Blue.”
Rosamond gave the original of this
photo and three other Gershwin
photos to the National Photo Gallery.
As the first photographs the gallery
has ever had of Gershwin, Rosamond’s
cherished memories are now documented for a nation.
—Audree Penner
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
In My Life
The word that changed everything
By Philip Cooper ’57
M
ost of us take words for granted. They are simply language,
our vocabulary. It wasn’t until
college, when I began to work crossword puzzles and had to write papers,
that words, in and of themselves, began
to fascinate me. I learned that each
word has a very specific meaning, all its
own, and could be used to communicate
more exactly. A part of the quality of a
word was its precision.
As a boy, I had, of course, learned
that “the pen is mightier than the
44
sword,” but I never fully realized the
power of words until much later, after I
began my business career, when it was
often necessary to use words—either
written or spoken—to get something
accomplished. Then, when I started
some serious creative writing, I discovered that words, and combinations of
words, like notes or colors, could be
used to create written music—or written paintings. Words were beautiful too.
Now, many words have special meaning for me: love, forgiveness, God, to
name a few. But there is one word that
has recently changed my life. That word
is “cancer.”
As for most of us, this word was a
part of my vocabulary, used to describe
a disease that others had or a condition
that needed to be cured. I had even suggested in my consulting business that
some companies had “cancers,” characteristics that could be expunged only by
executive surgery. It was a dramatic and
effective metaphor.
But no other word has had so draSWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
matic or effective an impact on me as
the word “cancer,” as used by my doctor when he came to greet me in the
recovery room. He had performed a
biopsy on my rectum, a place that had
been uncomfortable for some months,
and although he and some other doctors had used the word “cancer” as a
possibility, each had encouraged me to
believe that this spot was a fissure—not
a pleasant condition but certainly
repairable. I was lulled into a false sense
of ease, even as I went into the operating room. I was still recovering from the
anesthesia when my doctor said, without platitude or prelude, “It is cancer.”
Perhaps it is just as well that I was still
somewhat numb.
Since then, the word “cancer” has
taken on a new significance for me. It
now has the power to affect me—not
only on the sympathetic and understanding me that I present to others but
also the visceral me, the me that lives
inside me. I am no longer on the outside,
looking in at cancer—an abstraction I
might use in my business—but on the
inside, looking out at those who are still
free of what Webster’s calls, among
other things, “a malignant evil that corrodes slowly and fatally.” It’s a little like
the difference in the sound of a train
whistle when it’s approaching and when
it’s retreating.
Now I feel as though “cancer” is a
kind of magic password that initiated
me to some special fraternity with strenuous rituals and a mystic aura, where
people exchange looks like secret handshakes. I did not apply for this lifetime
membership but was somehow randomly selected.
The word “cancer” has also become
magnetic. It glows from its previous
place in the darkness of my consciousness to a brightly lit awareness where it
seems to be all around me. It blinks at
ILLUSTRATION BY JANE OʼCONOR
Editor’s Note
In My Life is a new department of the
Bulletin that features first-person
essays. Readers interested in submitting an essay for publication should
first write for editorial guidelines.
Address: Editor, Swarthmore College
Bulletin, 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore PA 19081-1397, or send e-mail
to bulletin@swarthmore.edu.
MARCH 1999
“Cancer”
is a kind of magic
password that
initiated me to
a special fraternity
with strenuous rituals
and a mystic aura.
I did not apply
for this lifetime
membership
but was somehow
randomly selected.
me from articles in newspapers and
magazines, from stories I would never
have read before but now devour in my
hunger for information. It has drawn my
friends, my family, even my neighbors
to me, and me to all of them, in a new—
or at least renewed—intimacy that I’m
sorry we don’t exhibit on a more regular, noncrisis basis.
Although I have not yet had this
experience personally, I’ve learned that
for some patients, cancer means the
invasion of the body by an alien force.
They are encouraged to visualize the
marshaling of internal armies to repel
this marauder. Perhaps this sensation
will yet come to me, and I will practice
the mental imagery of directing intense
blue and healing light to the ulcerous
mass two by four centimeters just inside
me, on the wall of my rectum.
At 63, I have habitually walked three
miles a day and worked out three times
a week at a gym. I still have some of my
hair, not too much of a gut, and have
taken a certain pride in looking and feeling somewhat younger than I am. But
last week, still hobbled by my surgery, I
had trouble hurrying to cross the street
before the oncoming traffic. I’ve become
hyperaware of the ages (many younger
than mine) and causes of death (so
many from cancer) in my daily scan of
the obituaries. “Cancer,” glaring at me
like some neon sign, has made me begin
to feel old.
Oddly enough, the one feeling the
word “cancer” has not yet evoked in me
is fear. In what I think of as a demonstration of grim optimism, my doctor told
me that if I had to have cancer, this was
the kind to have. It involves radiation
and chemotherapy, with all the discomfort and unpleasantness that both of
these therapies imply: loss of hair, sterility, impotence, incontinence. But the
chances of recovery are “better than 80
percent,” he said. And as the lyrics of a
popular Annie Lenox song go, “Dying is
easy; it’s living that scares me today.”
Ghoulish as this may sound to some,
I have decided to keep a journal of this
whole experience, putting into words
the events and my feelings, my reflections on what happens. Somehow I find
the process of articulation of the words
to be cathartic. By writing all of this
down, I can get this experience out
where I can see it within some context.
Words have now become my comfort.
I’m sure that to some there are other
words that may have meaning of equal
or greater import—“heart attack,”
“Alzheimer’s,” “stroke,” or “AIDS.” But
for me, that one simple word, “cancer,”
with all of its nuance and various meanings, has a newly precise and vigorous
power in my life. I feel confident that I
face my coming therapy with a positivism that will be effective and that I
will emerge from this among the 80 percent. At that point, the word “cancer”
may take on a still different connotation.
But one thing is certain. Because of that
word, I can never be the same again. ■
Phil Cooper lives in Baltimore. Following
radiation and chemotherapy, he learned
in October that he is cancer free.
45
Alumni Profile
A bridge to grow on
Engineer Valerie Prescott Bradford ’78 runs Philadelphia’s Ben Franklin Bridge.
JEFFREY LOTT
n Sept. 29, 1998, Valerie Prescott
Bradford ’78 was walking in her
Willingboro, N.J., neighborhood—without her pager. It was her first free afternoon away from her office since taking
a new job in April 1998, and she meant
to take advantage of it.
While she walked, her husband,
Reginald, was driving around, frantically looking for her. Their teenage son
was at home, glued to the 5
p.m. news, watching live pictures of a fire high on a cable
of the Benjamin Franklin
Bridge. “Mom, mom, the
bridge is on fire,” he yelled as
she came in the door. Workers 377 feet above the Delaware River had accidentally
ignited materials on their
work platform. Traffic was
halted while firefighters put
out the blaze. And Valerie
Bradford, bridge manager
since April, was headed back
to work and stayed well into the night.
On a frigid January day four months
later, she pointed out the spot on the
30-inch cable where the fire had
occurred—and where she had climbed
the next day to inspect the damage.
“There were plenty of experts up
there,” she said, “but it was something
I wanted to do. I’m an engineer.”
She’s the first engineer, in fact, to
hold the top management position at
the 72-year-old span. And the first
woman. And the first minority. Though
she’s a pioneer of sorts, Bradford takes
a pragmatic approach to advancement.
“I’ve never felt hindered in my career.
In every job I’ve held, I’ve had to start
producing very quickly, and I’ve been
judged by my performance. That’s the
way the system should go.”
Bradford also attributes her success
to a “deep, active faith in God, who has
blessed me with vigor and opportunities.” She is involved in Bible studies at
her church and is a regular with the
Swarthmore Alumni Gospel Choir.
After nine months on the job, Bradford is clearly enjoying the new challenge. On a tour of the 7,870-foot
bridge, she clambers up stairs and
down ladders in a silk pantsuit and
worn leather work boots. Seven lanes
MARCH 1999
Back in her sunny corner office overlooking the
Camden toll plaza, the
energetic Bradford says
that being an engineer is
an asset in this job but
having a liberal arts background has really made it
possible for her to oversee
the bridge’s $6.5 million
operating budget, deal
with revenue and public
safety issues, and supervise a staff of 100. “It’s one
thing to be able to crunch
the numbers and solve the engineering
problems,” she says, “but in a business
setting, being able to communicate and
to step back and look at the big picture
is very valuable.” She’s clearly found
work that combines the two passions
that she says originally drew her to
engineering—a desire to work with
people and an interest in problem solving.
The 72-year-old bridge presents
plenty of problems. (Engineers call
them “projects”; “I’m very project oriented,” says Bradford.) The 30-inch
bundles of wire that hold up the deck
have never before been unwrapped,
inspected, and repaired. When that’s
done, the span will need another paint
job, this time blasting down to bare
metal to remove eight layers of leadbased paint. Then there’s ongoing deck
maintenance, electrical system upkeep,
running new fiber-optic lines, rebuilding the toll plaza, and installing the new
EZ-Pass electronic toll system.
Bradford says her new job has
“been an adjustment from being in the
engineering division—the kind of challenge that makes for growth.” Near her
desk is a wood plaque bearing two
sturdy leather gloves and two hanks of
frayed, slightly charred nylon rope. It’s
handmade, but she treasures it because it commemorates her Sept. 29
cable climb. “The bridge maintenance
guys gave it to me the very next day,”
she explains with a smile. “It was kind
of the old-boy network’s way of saying,
‘welcome to the club.’ Little things like
that make this job very rewarding to
me.”
—Jeffrey Lott
PHILADELPHIA CONVENTION AND VISITORS BUREAU
O
Running Philadelphia’s Benjamin
Franklin Bridge
takes more than
collecting the tolls
and keeping the
traffic moving. It
takes a Swarthmoretrained engineer.
of traffic, two commuter rail lines, and
a spectacular pedestrian walkway
cross the river on a steel deck suspended from twin 350-foot towers. The main
suspension cables are anchored in
massive piers at either end, splaying
out to giant eye-bolts embedded in
tons of concrete. From atop the towers,
says Bradford, you can see the roadway suspended on hinges that allow
the whole dynamic structure to move
as it shrinks from the cold and sways in
the wind. We won’t go up there today,
but she says the view is “breathtaking.”
There’s history here too. Nestled
inside the east tower is a never-used
rail station, complete with a decaying
tiled concourse and ticket booths.
Another station was planned for the
Benjamin Franklin Plaza on the
Philadelphia side, where Bradford’s
construction and maintenance supervisor swings open massive steel doors to
reveal a three-story-deep cavern
beneath the lightning-bolt sculpture
that commemorates Franklin’s famous
experiment. Lying awkwardly on their
backs in the gloom are three 10-foot
seminude bronze angels. At one time,
says Bradford, they—and a fourth
already crated for storage—graced fluted pedestals at the bridge entrances.
51
Books & Authors
Renewing citizenship
Michael Schudson ’69, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life,
The Free Press, 1998.
T
his is a terrific book—and I’m not
saying this out of Swarthmore loyalty. It addresses a big and interesting
issue, namely, the current crisis of civic
disengagement. Think here of the rapid
increase in nonvoting since 1960, the
general indifference to politics, and the
rise of “bowling alone,” to use another
Swarthmore graduate’s apt term for
Americans’ massive switch in how they
use their leisure time. As Robert Putnam
’63, the coiner of that phrase,
has found, Americans now
spend a lot more of their time
in front of the television, on
the Internet, and at museums
and sports stadiums. As a
result, they no longer volunteer nor join other networks of
trusting interconnectedness,
such as bowling leagues and
book clubs.
Schudson explores the current “crisis” by examining how
civic connectedness evolved before we
got to our current discontent. About 95
percent of The Good Citizen is about the
past, an expert tour of political practices
and their underlying assumptions from
the colonial period to the present.
Schudson believes that we will never
understand our current crisis unless we
place it in historical perspective. He
asks a question that is hardly obvious
but is nonetheless right: What is today’s
crisis a case of? If that question is properly answered, Schudson suggests, we
can avoid a falsely alarmist inference
that our country has turned its back on
the wisdom of a lost, golden age.
Our current discontent, he asserts, is
actually the latest iteration of a cycle of
discontent over democracy’s functioning that stretches back to the Revolution. The issues have hardly been the
same, of course, from one turn of the
cycle to the next; our society is too
dynamic for that. But think about
George Washington’s farewell address,
in which he complains about the protoparties that, to him, meant a falling away
from the civitas and virtue of the Foundation. Or remember the mugwumps of
54
the 1880s and 1890s, who decried their
era’s political parades, vote buying,
fisticuffs and brawls on election day—a
day that should instead be a moment of
thoughtful reflection on issues.
Yet The Good Citizen offers considerably more than tales of democracy’s discontents. Most of its analysis focuses on
our national accomplishments in constructing and constantly revising a public sphere—including our shifting ideas
about what constitutes good citizenship.
In a sense, Schudson is having a dialogue with Aristotle. Among the oldest
and best political insights are Aristotle’s
famous distinction between the good
person and the good citizen,
and his idea that citizenship
varies in relation to its physical, moral, and social circumstances. Schudson
shows, as Aristotle might
have, that Americans have
periodically re-created the
circumstances of citizenship, building, for instance,
a party system in one period that reached deep into
daily life, then taming and
reforming these same parties in the
next. In periodically revising our earlier
public sphere, we have not lost virtue,
or what it meant to be a good person,
but we have simply refashioned the context for and assumptions of citizenship.
Here we get to Schudson’s most striking and daring claim: What looks like a
recent flight from political involvement
is actually a new kind of political
involvement. We may not vote as much
as we once did, but we are nonetheless
being citizens when we monitor our
workplaces for invidious gender or
racial discrimination or when we monitor debates about Social Security and
other social rights. When we push for
and use such rights, we implement and
animate the new citizenship.
Now, if you want to be a good citizen—and gain a better understanding of
what that means—read this subtle,
wise, and lucid book. It will recast how
you think about the political world
around you and make it possible for you
to find the current state of American
politics a cause for both concern and
satisfaction.
—Rick Valelly ’75
Associate Professor of Political Science
Untangled Dementia
Muriel R. Gillick ’72, Tangled Minds:
Understanding Alzheimer’s Disease and
Other Dementias, Dutton, 1998.
H
ere’s the good news: If you are old
enough to be reading this piece, the
odds favor your living to be at least 85.
And here’s the bad news: If you make it
to 85, there is a 50-50 chance that you
will develop Alzheimer’s disease or one
of the other types of dementia that
make you completely dependent on others. And you will have plenty of company. If you turn 85 in 2030, you will be one
of nine million; if you turn 85 in 2050,
you will be one of 19 million.
Muriel Garfunkel Gillick, M.D., ’72 has
written a wonderful book about Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.
She is a professor at the Harvard Medical School, where she directs the Geriatric Fellowship Program and spends
much of her time treating elderly people. The book takes us through the
course of Alzheimer’s disease—from initial diagnosis to death—in Sylvia, an
imaginary patient who is actually a composite of several people Gillick has
cared for. We watch through Gillick’s
eyes as vibrant Sylvia goes through the
process of decomposition. We see what
it does to Sylvia and what it does to her
devoted family. We see in detail the difficult decisions that a family faces at
almost every step of their mother’s
deterioration.
But we see much more than Sylvia
and her kin. Chapters about Sylvia alternate with chapters that lay out the science, history, politics, economics, and
sociology of dementia in particular and
aging in general. We learn of much
recent scientific progress on several
fronts but that no clear answer is yet in
sight. We tackle the question of whether
dementia is really a “disease” or just
“normal aging,” and we see how that
question affects the politics of research
support. We see how the reimbursement policies of insurance companies
and the economic interests of the “medico-industrial complex” can get in the
way of the most effective care of
demented people. We even get a
glimpse of the social construction of
“aging” and see how especially painful
Alzheimer’s disease is in a culture that
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
prizes individualism
and independence
above all else. But
after each of these
general discussions, we get
brought back to
the particular as
we encounter
another chapter
in the end of
Sylvia’s life.
I have a few
minor quibbles with the book.
First, I don’t think the book’s title and
controlling metaphor—“tangled”
minds—serves well. Things that are
“tangled” can get untangled and corrected. It is quite unlikely that the deterioration that characterizes dementia is
reversible. Further, the cognitive nature
of that deterioration suggests vacancy
rather than confusion. Yes, initially
there is confusion. But before too long,
there is little left that can get confused. I
think “hollowed” minds would be a
more accurate description.
Second, we see the effects of dementia on a family that seems to have all the
time and money it needs to do what is
necessary at every step of the process.
Those effects are devastating. But one
can only imagine how much more devastating it would be for a family that
had neither the time nor the money to
respond quickly and appropriately to
every emergency.
But these quibbles really are minor.
Whether we are aging parents or their
nervous children, this book will help us
prepare ourselves and our loved ones
for what may grow to be inevitable as
other branches of medicine get better at
keeping us alive indefinitely.
—Barry Schwartz
Dorwin P. Cartwright Professor
of Social Theory and Social Action
Other recent books
Byron Brown ’74, Soul Without Shame:
A Guide to Liberating Yourself From the
Judge Within, Shambhala, 1999. Brown
argues we are our own worst enemies,
sabotaging attempts to flourish, and
suggests ways to escape self-judgment.
Stephen M. Davidson ’61 and Stephen
A. Somers (eds.), Remaking Medicaid,
MARCH 1999
Jossey-Bass, 1998. Health care leaders
identify challenges facing policy makers,
with guidance on Medicaid changes.
Economics, 1998. This study discusses
currency changes in countries in Asia,
the United States, and Europe.
Joachim K. Krauss, Robert Grossman
’53, and Joseph Jankovic (eds.), Pallidal
Surgery for the Treatment of Parkinson’s
Disease and Movement Disorders, Lippincott-Raven, 1998. This clinically oriented
book reviews the current knowledge on
pallidal surgery and basal ganglia function.
Edward and Andrea Packard ’85, Mayday! Bantam Books, 1998. Part of the
Choose Your Own Adventure series for
young readers, this story with alternative endings features an emergency
landing in remote areas of Alaska.
Pieter M. Judson ’78, Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in the Austrian
Empire, 1848-1914, University of Michigan Press, 1996. Judson follows the German liberal and nationalist political culture in Austria from the revolutions of
1848 to the outbreak of World War I.
Pieter M. Judson, Wien Brennt! Die Revolution von 1848 und ihr liberales Erbe,
Böhlau Verlag, 1998. This book discusses the history of Vienna and the Revolution of 1848.
Dale G. Larrimore ’72, Pennsylvania
Rules of the Road, West Group, 1998. A
book detailing state motor vehicle code
that is designed to help lawyers prepare
for accident cases.
Richard Martin ’67, Cubism and Fashion, The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Harry N. Abrams, 1998. This work shows
evidence of cubist art influencing fashion designers from 1908 to the present.
Ann P. McNeal ’64 and Charlene
D’Avanzo (eds.), Student-Active Science:
Models of Innovation in College Science
Teaching, Saunders College Publishing,
1997. Articles by college science faculty
and administrators present strategies
for hands-on learning in the classroom.
Vicki Mechner ’63 (ed.), Healing Journeys: The Power of Rubenfeld Synergy,
OmniQuest Press, 1998. These personal
stories illustrate ways to access the
body’s wisdom and healing potential.
Marcus Noland ’81 (ed.), Economic Integration of the Korean Peninsula, Institute
for International Economics, 1998. Contributors examine the Korean peninsula,
including economic conditions and policies, the food crisis, and refugee flows.
Marcus Noland, Li-Gang Liu, Sherman
Robinson, and Zhi Wang, Global Economic Effects of the Asian Currency Devaluations, Institute for International
Robert H. Parks ’49, Unlocking the
Secrets of Wall Street: A Noted Expert
Guides You Through Today’s Financial
Markets, Prometheus Books, 1998.
Parks, a Wall Street economist, translates insider jargon and explains investing, speculation, and regulatory policy.
Sara J. Shettleworth (Mrosovsky) ’65,
Cognition, Evolution, and Behavior,
Oxford University Press, 1998. This
resource for students and researchers
in psychology, zoology, and behavioral
neuroscience describes how animals
process, retain, and use information.
Mary McDermott Shideler ’38, Visions
and Nightmares, Ends and Beginnings: A
Woman’s Lifelong Journey, Scribendi
Press, 1998. The third book, exploring
identity and function, in an autobiographical series describes the author’s
experiences in her late 30s to middle
50s.
Simon St. Laurent ’92, Sharing Bandwidth, IDG Books Worldwide, 1998. St.
Laurent, a Web developer and network
specialist, offers innovative ways to
improve network connections.
Barbara Starfield ’54, Primary Care: Balancing Health Needs, Services, and Technology, Oxford University Press, 1998.
Starfield examines equity in health services and the overlap between clinical
medicine and public health. ■
Attention authors
The Bulletin welcomes review copies
of books, compact disks, and other
works by alumni. (No magazine or
journal articles, please.) The editors
choose featured books for review, and
others receive capsule reviews. All
works are then donated to the Swarthmoreana section of McCabe Library.
Send your work to Books & Authors,
Swarthmore College Bulletin, 500 College Ave., Swarthmore PA 19081-1397.
55
Alumni Profile
Life and limbs
Relief in Africa can be as simple as a $10 prosthesis.
T
he 7,200 miles separating Baltimore from Kampala is only one
measure of how far Ted Silver ’94
has traveled for his job with the
World Rehabilitation Fund (WRF)—
and probably the least significant
measure at that. “Provoked,” as he
says, by theorists he encountered
in classes with Professor Steven
Piker and inspired by the Quaker
ethic so prevalent at Swarthmore,
Silver knew that he had to choose a
future that included traveling, interacting with people from other cultures, and making a difference in
the world. By all accounts, he’s
been wildly successful.
After college, Silver volunteered
in Zaire with the United Methodist
Committee on Relief, teaching
English to refugees and translating
for physical therapy sessions. He
developed a close friendship with a
refugee named Jean-Paul, who had
lost a leg to a land mine while trying
to flee the genocide in Rwanda.
When Silver’s volunteer stint was
finished, he returned to the United
States determined to send his new
friend a limb. He contacted hospitals that had unwanted prosthetic
limbs and arranged for them to be
An artificial limb “allows kids to play
with other kids, makes them healthier,
sent back to the refugee camp. To
and gives them hope,” says Ted Silver
his delight, Jean-Paul received a
’94 (right), who directs a prosthetic
limb and was able to come to
America and resume his education. technology project in Uganda.
“That experience—knowing him
especially valuable, and Silver credits
and being involved with prosthetics in
his ongoing support and expertise for
that way—was very inspiring to me to
the success of the Uganda work.
continue this work,” explains Silver.
Silver is now project director of
“I like to see things tangibly. I like to
WRF’s Uganda Project, a grassrootstaste things so that I can understand
international partnership that is bringthem. My work in the camps made me
ing prosthetic technology to Ugandans.
realize that I wasn’t interested in the
Silver sings the praises of the “Jaipur
relief effort as a massive logistical enterprise. But helping a person walk was Foot” that the project uses. “It is by far
the best appropriate technology. The
something I could really do.” So Silver
foot itself costs about $10, is incredibly
trained in the South Bronx for a year to
strong and durable, is good for barebe a prosthetic orthotic technician and
foot walking and farming, is watercontacted everyone he knew in Africa,
proof, looks like a real foot, and is dark
trying to find a way to do this work
skinned. “People like it, and it works.”
over there. He hooked up with Rotary
WRF’s main partners are Bhagwan
International, volunteering with its
Mahaveer Vikland Sahayata Samiti, an
limb-making project in Kigali, Rwanda.
Indian organization that innovated the
There he pledged to do similar work in
Jaipur Foot, and Rotary International,
Uganda. One contact he made, a Ugandan physician named Wanume, proved through the Rotary Jaipur Limb Pro-
MARCH 1999
ject. These groups were brought
together in Uganda largely by the
dogged determination of Silver himself. “Giving someone a limb does
more than just giving them a limb.
It allows adults to support their
families, it allows kids to play with
other kids, makes them healthier,
and gives them hope.”
After nearly a year of frustrating bureaucratic delays, the project
got under way in May 1998 with the
training of seven local prosthetic
technologists to make and fit limbs
and train amputees in their use at
Kumi Hospital. Within months
of opening the doors to the Kumi
project in eastern Uganda, 200
people were fit
with artificial
limbs. Another
project is under
way in the north,
where the needs
are even greater.
“The choice of a
local facility is
really key to the
sustainability of
this project,”
explains Silver.
“We need to find
an established
site that has its
own means of support and a good
record of offering services at low or no
cost, which could add prosthetics to
their repertoire.
“Creating this project from nothing
in a developing country has taught me
to be patient and learn what’s really
happening, which is not always easy
when you are operating in another culture.” With approximately 17,000
amputees in Uganda alone, about half
of whom are victims of land mines and
most of whom are extremely poor,
there is a lot of work yet to be done.
But Silver will continue for as long as
he can: “When you sacrifice yourself to
a project, you have to say, ‘whatever
happens, I’m in.’”
—Terri-Jean Pyer ’77
For more information on the Uganda
Project, contact WRF at (212) 725-7875.
59
Letters
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 3
very idea of spectating at a
water ballet.”
So I took great pleasure in
Garret Keizer’s “Swarthmore
on the Line of Scrimmage.” I
love the fact that President
Alfred Bloom is “delighted by
that entire process” of being
unguardedly engaged by a
perspective outside his background. This is what sets
Swarthmore apart—that Al
Bloom knows the joy of
being taught and changed.
Now I, too (who attended
maybe one football game in
four years), could get passionate about football at
Swarthmore. I, too, “want
these guys to win.”
JEAN WARREN KEPPEL ’68
Tucson, Ariz.
A BAD FIRST DAY
To the Editor:
Your article on values,
Swarthmore, and football
brought the following experience to mind: One of the
attractions of choosing a
small college was that I
would be able to play football. I was not large or fast
enough to consider a “big”
football school, but I had
played football in high
school and loved it. The
Swarthmore football program had fallen on hard
times, and a rebuilding effort
was under way.
On my first day as a freshman, showing up a week early for football, the trainer
took me in his office. He told
me that I had not been
recruited, and that though I
might practice for four years,
I would never get into a
game. Why didn’t I try another sport, like soccer? Maybe
he honestly felt I wasn’t good
enough, and this was an
attempt to politely dissuade
me from trying. Yet in high
school I had come back from
having cancer to play football, and so I was ready to try
to defy expectations.
That evening, I went to my
62
first team meeting. My only
memory is the coach telling
the players that if they get in
trouble with the authorities,
come to him first. He said
that there had been an incident the previous year, and
that he couldn’t do anything
to fix the problem if the
administration heard about
it first. That was the clincher
for me.
I remain friends with
some people who played on
those teams, and they recall
a much more upbeat and
supportive atmosphere.
Maybe it was just a bad first
day at college, but this was
not the environment that I
had wanted when I chose
Swarthmore.
Oh, the rebuilding effort
was a success. Several years
later, the team played for the
Division III championship.
GREG DAVIDSON ’83
Redondo Beach, Calif.
WORKING-CLASS KID
To the Editor:
It disturbs me when I hear
that football is incompatible
with an “academic” or “intellectual” environment. Amherst and Williams colleges
are surely the academic and
intellectual equals of Swarthmore, and year after year
they have good football programs. Larger universities
such as Harvard, Yale,
Princeton, and Stanford also
stand out in both academics
and athletics.
In the late 1930s, when
Swarthmore was developing
its present academic reputation, the College suffered
through some losing sports
seasons. Some concerned
alumni, including the late
Thomas McCabe ’15, decided
to do something about it.
They organized alumni to
recruit “scholar-athletes,”
established scholarships,
and hired some outsanding
coaches, including Lew
Elverson.
I was offered such a scholarship. I was impressed by
the alumni who encouraged
me to go to Swarthmore, and
many of my Swarthmore
cohorts had similar experiences. Over the years, we
have been active alumni.
I have always been supportive of Swarthmore’s
emphasis on diversity. Working-class kids (I guess I was
one) represent diversity too,
and I learned more about its
real meaning from my sports
teammates than I ever could
have learned in the classroom. I am greatly encouraged by the article and its
implications, and I urge likeminded alumni to get behind
the programs described.
JACK DUGAN JR. ’43
New Vernon, N.J.
Editor’s Note: Though the College actively recruits scholarathletes (just as it seeks other
qualified students with special
talents), members of Division
III of the National Collegiate
Athletic Association are prohibited from offering athletic scholarships. Swarthmore’s financial
aid is need based.
ILLUMINATING
TERRA INCOGNITA
To the Editor:
As a tree-hugging liberal
egghead, vintage 1949, I had
no interest in football. I still
am, and I still don’t—except
for its impact on stadiumbuilding cities like mine. To
me, all athletics was—and
still is—terra incognita.
Imagine my surprise and
pleasure, therefore, in finding Garret Keizer’s article to
be absolutely brilliant. In the
course of his writing, some
of the Swarthmore “thing”
has obviously rubbed off on
this non-Swarthmorean. He
touched so many bases so
concisely and told me so
many things I didn’t know.
TED BROMWELL ’49
Pittsburgh
REWARDS AND
PUNISHMENT
To the Editor:
It’s both comforting and disquieting to note that some
things never change—such
as the football debate at
Swarthmore.
The answer 40 years ago
was the same as it is today
and will be far into the
future: Swarthmore College
needs football and team
sports like it to keep itself
attached to the earth. Without them, like a helium balloon, it would float higher
and higher until it exploded
of its own expanding
gaseousness. Intense, physically demanding team sports
bring an immediate rewardpunishment schema that balances out the heady thinking
fostered by pure academia.
The rounded person
needs a synthesis of both
perspectives. It’s really not a
question of values; it’s a
question of relevance.
WILLIAM BOEHMLER ’60
Reading, Pa.
UNIVERSAL TRUTH
To the Edtor:
I hope Michael Marissen’s
essay (“Is religious faith
incompatible with academic
life?” December 1998) turns
out to be the first shot in a
much-needed philosophical
battle at Swarthmore. Marissen poses big questions that
were practically taboo during my time at the College
and presumably remain so
today: “Is it so difficult to
imagine that intelligent, psychologically stable people
might ... be inspired by genuine religious beliefs?” Then,
“are our students really free”
to believe and develop intellectually?
Many intellectually honest, faithful students and professors answered “no” to
Marissen’s second question
during my time at Swarthmore. Perhaps I can shed
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
some light on why.
At Swarthmore and in
mass youth society, tentative
agnosticism and mystic spiritualism are in; “organized”
religion is out. Individual
truth is in and so is “group
truth.” Universal truth, upon
which most religious faiths
rely, is considered socially
and intellectually imperialist.
But Swarthmore should
be interested in universal
truth. Not only does it exist;
it can liberate.
I recall one friendly
debate in 1995: “How can
you believe that Christianity
is true and other religions
are wrong?” my agnosticatheistic companion
exclaimed. “That’s totalitarian!” But by my friend’s own
standard—“no single truth
can prevail”—atheism
(which is nothing more or
less than a universal viewpoint) is just as totalitarian.
Fellow students also
reminded me that organized
religion has a nasty, violent
history based on claims of
universal justice. It is threatening, they said, so it must
be a bad thing. I sympathize
with that perspective but
only historically, not philosophically. Universal truth
has been abused as justification for massacres, hatreds,
and tyranny—but this only
WRITE TO US
The Bulletin welcomes
letters concerning the
contents of the magazine
or issues relating to the
College. All letters must
be signed and may be
edited for clarity and
space. Address your letters to: Editor, Swarthmore College Bulletin, 500
College Avenue, Swarthmore PA 19081-1397, or
send by e-mail to bulletin@swarthmore.edu.
MARCH 1999
proves that human beings
can be deceitful and nasty. It
says nothing about truth.
Marissen’s essay points
out that German academics
say Geisteswissenschaften
(spiritual/ intellectual knowledge) while Americans say
“humanities.” If Swarthmore
could somehow get past
these prejudices and break
out of the “humanities” trap,
the College could be positioned to lead philosophical
thought in academia and
society. Can anyone observing the lame stalemate of the
current culture war doubt
that this is necessary?
ERIC JANSSON ’96
Racine, Wis.
VINTAGE NELSON
To the Editor:
Trust Ted Nelson to create
legends about his undergraduate years. He has not lost
the impishness that characterized him then. After a
series of acts of vandalism in
Wharton, I asked students
not to protect those who
were causing discomfort and
inconvenience to all. If Ted
really distributed the “confession” forms that he
describes, no word of it
reached Parrish Hall. Certainly no one returned
them—much less “a couple
of hundred.” This is vintage
Nelson!
WILLIAM C.H. PRENTICE ’37
Westport, Mass.
ROMANTIC INDIVIDUALS
WRITE LOUSY SOFTWARE
To the Editor:
Ted Nelson’s Xanadu project
(“Searching for Xanadu,”
December 1998) failed for
reasons that are implicit in
its name. In the 1990 edition
of his manifesto, Literary
Machines, Nelson rather
disingenuously says he
chose “Xanadu” for “its connotations in literary circles”
as Coleridge’s symbol for a
“magic place of literary mem-
ory.” But most readers of
“Kubla Khan” remember the
poem’s pleasure dome
instead as one of our culture’s preeminent metaphors
for the transfiguring power
of the individual imagination.
Overweening romantic individualism makes for great
poetry but lousy software;
Nelson never invented the
World Wide Web because he
never really learned to collaborate.
The world’s most popular
Web server software
(Apache) and the operating
system it is most often run
under (Linux) were developed the way so much of the
Internet was, as collaborative projects with freely
available protocols and
source code modified in
response to the input and
needs of a multitude of users
and developers.
Ted Nelson will always
deserve honor for helping
prod the computer world to
invent workable hypertext.
His single-vision approach to
design is somewhat less
Quakerly than the vast meetinghouse of software designers out of whose consensus
has emerged one the greatest triumphs of pragmatic
tinkering in the history of
technology.
DAVID SEWELL ’76
Tucson, Ariz.
REMEDY REDUX
To the Editor:
As readers of Bill Kent’s
excellent article, “Dr.
Brown’s Remedy” (February
1996) may recall, Thomas
McPherson Brown ’29 was a
controversial but highly successful Washington, D.C.,
rheumatologist who believed
that arthritis, lupus, scleroderma, and similar disorders
all derived from some kind of
systemic infection.
In a 50-year career, Dr.
Brown treated about 10,000
patients, about 90 percent of
whom experienced improvement or remission with his
therapy, which consisted
principally of oral tetracyclines (usually minocycline
and doxycycline). Brown’s
success in treating pernicious connective-tissue diseases was rewarded by
fierce loyalty among his
patients, despite his being
disparaged as a heretic in
the field of rheumatology.
Several significant developments have occurred
since the publication of the
Bulletin story. There have
now been seven major studies of minocycline in rheumatoid arthritis (RA), each
more promising than the
last, and the drug is now certified by the USP as a standard therapy for RA. Positive
results have also been
reported for osteoarthritis,
and now the British medical
journal The Lancet has reported a study at Harvard
Medical School of this same
therapy for the usually fatal
disease of systemic scleroderma, with 82 percent of
the patients substantially
improved and two-thirds of
those who completed the
study in remission after 48
weeks.
The Harvard study was
sponsored by the National
Institutes of Health and The
Road Back Foundation,
which takes its name from
Tom Brown’s book The Road
Back, which we co-authored
in the last year of his life. I
can hear Tom’s familiar
chuckle even now—warm,
gentle, and, yes, infectious.
HENRY SCAMMELL
Orleans, Mass.
Editor’s Note: Henry Scammell
is author of The New Arthritis
Breakthrough, which incorporates information from The
Road Back. He is also the
author of Scleroderma. Both
books are published by M.
Evans.
63
Our Back Pages
By Jeffrey Lott
From “fussing hour” to coed dorms—
Barbara Godfrey’s Swarthmore century
H
ow many readers of this magazine can say that they were
born on the Swarthmore campus? Barbara Pearson came into the
world in the Benjamin West House on
July 5, 1910, the daughter of Paul M.
Pearson, professor of public speaking.
Who remembers playing on the
College’s gates as a child? She grew up
only two blocks from the campus and
loved to watch the world go by from
atop the stone orbs on Elm Avenue.
How many have been lifelong members of the Swarthmore Friends Meeting? Barbara’s parents left Methodism
to join the Friends, and the religion
became her birthright.
Who studied under such legendary
professors as Philip Hicks and Frederick Manning—and called some of
them “uncle?” Barbara Pearson
entered Swarthmore in 1927 with a
White Open Scholarship, yet she
stayed only two years at the College
and, in fact, never received a college
degree.
Barbara Pearson Lange Godfrey
’31—professor’s daughter, Swarthmore student, later director of dramatics for 14 years and dean of
women in the turbulent ’60s—has
observed Swarthmore College from its
Quaker roots to the threshold of the
new century. For most of that time, it
has never been far from her thoughts.
Today Barbara (let’s just call her by
her first name—as she encouraged
her drama students to do) lives just
eight miles from campus, and I
stopped by the other day to talk
about ... what else? Just listen:
On her two years as a Swarthmore
student, before she left to study at
the Yale Drama School: “My favorite
course was history with Freddy Manning. The rule was that if the professor was more than 10 minutes late, we
could leave, but we always waited for
Professor Manning. He challenged us
to know things. I was so impressed
with him that I read the whole of Gibbon’s Rise and Fall of the Roman
Empire. He turned everybody on.”
On performing with Swarthmore
Chautauqua, the traveling summer
64
theater company and cultural series
founded by her father: “We performed
the same play every night in a different town.... It was a worthless little
play—boy meets girl, boy loses girl,
boy gets girl.... But my father’s idea
was that you gave the audience what
they wanted—that was the bread of
the sandwich—and the meat was the
things he wanted them to have, like
Shakespeare and the Renaissance
plays.”
On the “Pet,” a Victorian couch that
sat for generations outside the doors
to the Parrish Hall dining room: “It
was a real hazard for women. If you
wanted to go from one end of Parrish
to the other you had to go past it—
and all the whistles and remarks from
the men. Often we would cross over
on the second floor in order to avoid
going in front of the Pet.”
On “fussing hour,” the hour after
dinner when men and women were
allowed to spend time with each
other: “We weren’t really supposed to
be with the opposite sex except in
that hour. We got together in a classroom or outdoors if the weather was
nice. At the end of the hour, the bell
on Trotter would ring, and we’d go off
to our rooms to study.”
I always wondered what that bell
was for. It’s still there in its little brick
cupola, but the College is so different
now. Coed dorms. No curfews. Condoms at the health center, no ques-
I
became the
enemy. It was
terrible. So difficult.
I just couldn’t get
used to that after
so many years of
having a different
kind of relationship
with students.”
tions asked. A lot of these changes
began to unfold right before Barbara’s bright blue eyes. On her watch,
you might say.
On dormitory “open houses” (the
“fussing” of the ’60s?): “Pete Thompson [professor of chemistry] and I
were on a committee to discuss dormitory open house hours—when
boys and girls could be in each
other’s rooms. The students were
plugging for four hours on Sunday
afternoons, but [Dean] Susan Cobbs
said two was enough. One student
said to her, ‘Miss Cobbs, what can I
do in four hours that I couldn’t do in
two?’ And she said in her Southern
drawl, ‘You could do it twice.’”
It’s not apocryphal, Barbara says
with a smile: “I was there. Susan had a
great sense of humor.”
On President Courtney Smith: “I
was in awe of him. I thought he was
the greatest man. But there was
something I didn’t realize until one
time he and I were sitting on the facing bench at the meetinghouse, getting ready to talk to the new class
during freshman orientation. I said
something to him and put my hand
on his arm and realized how tense he
was. The calm that he evinced was
not real—it was just control.”
On becoming dean of women in
1960: “I was asked to be dean because
I was so friendly with the students. I
think [Courtney] had seen my relationship with the students and
thought maybe I could get something
out of them that nobody else had gotten. Well, that was not true. As long
as the students who had known me
as director of dramatics were at the
College, it was all right. But once they
all graduated, I became the enemy. It
was terrible. So difficult. There were
young women I met in the hallway
who didn’t speak to me. I just
couldn’t get used to that after so
many years of having a different kind
of relationship with students. That’s
why I gave up. I wrote to Courtney
and told him the job was no longer a
joy to me ... but he died before he had
a chance to find a replacement.”
Being the enemy was “heartbreaking,” Barbara says, shaking her head. I
feel a silent pang of guilt; I was one of
those ’60s kids who saw my college
deans in that light. Could I have been
breaking their hearts? But Barbara
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
GEORGE WIDMAN
Though many remember her as
dean of women in the ’60s, Barbara
Pearson Lange Godfrey ’31 says
she’s most proud of her 14 years as
Swarthmore’s director of dramatics.
She’s seated here on the stage of
the Pearson-Hall Theatre in the Lang
Performing Arts Center, named in
honor of Barbara and her father,
Paul M. Pearson, by Julie Lange Hall
and J. Parker Hall III, both ’55.
remembers helping them as well:
“I always knew what was happening when a girl would walk into my
office after a vacation and tell me she
had to get a job in order to stay at the
College. I knew that her parents had
found out she was having sex or living
with a man and had threatened to not
give her any more money. The one
thing I did as dean of women that I’m
proud about is that I was able to keep
some of these families together. One
family called me from New York and
said they wanted to meet me but
didn’t want to come on campus. So I
suggested we meet at the airport, and
they told what they had found out.
They were so shocked by what they
had learned about their daughter, but
I said don’t disinherit her because
then she’s gone, and you might lose
her forever. I asked them to talk with
her and find out what she was doing
and why. They did, and they thanked
me afterward.”
She smiles again, this time a satisfied smile. She still hears from some of
her “girls.” Funny, the term’s not in
use anymore. College students think
of themselves as women and men
now—and perhaps they are. That’s
another one of the changes, I guess.
Barbara on the best of times—her
years as director of dramatics: “I’m
prouder of that job than I am of being
dean of women. I didn’t do anything
creative as dean, but I really did as
director of dramatics. I helped the
students choose plays from different
periods of theatrical history, different
forms of plays, and I just thought it
was part of their college experience
to know what theater was like—and
to be responsible for a performance.
There was no credit for it, but the students did it all—sewing constumes,
building sets, lighting, performing.”
One more story, on the fun of it all:
“In the mid-1950s, the Book & Key
Club was trying to improve its image,
and they sponsored a one-act play
contest. Prizes were given by vote of
the audience for the best play, the
best actor—the best everything. And
while the votes were tallied, the
actors came to my house, where I
served burgundy punch. It was very
mild, but in the excitement, it sometimes got some of the people a little
drunk, and the parties started to get
out of hand.”
This on a “dry” campus in a “dry”
town, mind you. To get things back
under control, Barbara decided that
instead of an audience vote, an outsider should judge the plays, leaving
a little less time
for imbibing
before awarding
Barbara’s
the prizes. So she
suggested Judy
Burgundy
Kazan’s [’58] parPunch
ents, Molly and
2 QTS. RED BURGUNDY
Elia Kazan, and
1 PT. PORT
they agreed to
1 CUP CHERRY BRANDY
come.
2 CUPS ORANGE JUICE
It was the best
1/2 CUP LEMON JUICE
party: “Ted Nel1 CUP SUGAR
son [’59], who
2 QTS. CLUB SODA
had written one
of the plays, came
to me and asked
if his mother could come to the party.
I said, ‘Who’s your mother?’ and he
said, ‘Celeste Holm.’ So we had Molly
Kazan, the playwright, Elia Kazan, the
director, and Celeste Holm, the
actress. The students all sat on the
floor at their feet, and that was the
best party I have ever given in my
house.”
Did she serve the famous punch?
“Oh yes,” she said with a twinkle in
her eye, “but I don’t think anyone got
drunk.” ■
GEORGE WIDMAN
O
ur generation went
through Swarthmore
in the War Years. We were
very idealistic, and Swarthmore gave our lives
direction—the ability to
evaluate, to put first things
first. I give to the College
in the hope that these
ideals will continue
in a new generation.”
Mary Jane Felix Smedley ’43
Life Income Gift Donor
M.J. Smedley’s gifts to Swarthmore pay her an
income during her lifetime and will provide future
support for the endowment, including the Class of 1943
Scholarship. Contact the Planned Giving Office
for a financial proposal tailored to your circumstances.
Call Margaret Nikelly, director of planned giving:
(610) 328-8334; or Anne Bonner, associate director
of planned giving: (610) 328-8629.
Swarthmore College Alumni Bulletin 1999-03-01
The Swarthmore College Bulletin is the official alumni magazine of the college. It evolved from the Garnet Letter, a newsletter published by the Alumni Association beginning in 1935. After World War II, college staff assumed responsibility for the periodical, and in 1952 it was renamed the Swarthmore College Bulletin. (The renaming apparently had more to do with postal regulations than an editorial decision. Since 1902, the College had been calling all of its mailed periodicals the Swarthmore College Bulletin, with each volume spanning an academic year and typically including a course catalog issue and an annual report issue, with a varying number of other special issues.)
The first editor of the Swarthmore College Bulletin alumni issue was Kathryn “Kay” Bassett ’35. After a few years, Maralyn Orbison Gillespie ’49 was appointed editor and held the position for 36 years, during which she reshaped the mission of the magazine from focusing narrowly on Swarthmore College to reporting broadly on the college's impact on the world at large. Gillespie currently appears on the masthead as Editor Emerita.
Today, the quarterly Swarthmore College Bulletin is an award-winning alumni magazine sent to all alumni, parents, faculty, staff, friends of the College, and members of the senior class. This searchable collection spans every issue from 1935 to the present.
Swarthmore College
1999-03-01
42 pages
reformatted digital
The class notes section of The Bulletin has been extracted in this collection to protect the privacy of alumni. To view the complete version of The Bulletin, contact Friends Historical Library.