Swarthmore College Alumni Bulletin 1999-09-01

SWARTHMORE
College Bulletin

September 1999

COLLEGE BULLETIN • SEPTEMBER 1999

S WA RT H M O
Features
Why Studio Arts?

12

Studio arts have taken their place in the liberal arts.
By Vicki Glembocki

Liberal Artists’ Gallery

16

Six Swarthmore artists show their stuff.

Save the Males

22

David Page ’78 decodes the Y chromosome.
By Carol Cruzan Morton

Around the World for 30 Years 26
Watson Fellowships provide a personal challenge.
By Laura Markowitz ’85

22

26
On the cover: Nathan Florence ’94, a modern
painter with a classic style, captures a perennial
Swarthmore summer activity—construction
work—in his 1996 painting, now in the collection
of the College. The painting was photographed by
Karen Mauch. See article on page 12 and the
artists’ gallery on page 16.

4

R E
58
12

Departments
Letters

3

Everybody has an opinion.

Collection

4

News and views from the campus.

Alumni Digest

30

The Alumni Council and more.

Class Notes

32

The lives of Swarthmoreans.

39

Swarthmore mourns.

Books & Authors

48

Alumni books.

In My Life

54

Between two worlds.
By Yosef Branse ’76

Our Back Pages

68

The making of The Crime.
By Woody Thomas ’51

16

A diplomat’s eye

54

37

Ralph Fisher ’39 took his camera
along on his foreign-service travels.
By Audree Penner

Conscience of the Senate

Deaths

68

Alumni Profiles

45

Franz Leichter ’52 won the respect of
both parties in New York.
By Terri-Jean Pyer ’77

Maverick musical mavens
Beth McIntosh ’80 and Judith
Edelman ’87 take their songs
on the road.
By Ali Crolius ’84

58

Parlor Talk

O

n the long drive home, our minivan seemed awfully empty. Four
of us had departed Delaware the day before with a brimming
load of clothes, computer, stereo, sports equipment, linens,
lamps, books, and CDs. Now a cavernous vehicle was taking home a
family minus one. For our first child at least, 18 years of day-in-day-out
parenting is over. He’s gone to college.
As we drove north to Massachusetts, my head was spinning with
fatherly advice: Be sure to.... Don’t forget.... You ought to.... Of course, I
didn’t actually say any of these things. By the end of a summer of
shrugs at parental wisdom about the college experience, we were way
beyond that. So I edited my words to the emotional basics as he
unpacked his gear: “Stay in touch,” I said. “Take good care of yourself.... We’ll miss you.”
I’m sure his head was spinning as fast as mine—only on a completely different axis. He had his own thoughts about what he was
about to do, and a few hours after we arrived on campus, you could
already see him start to change. He strode purposefully ahead of us
while we stood wondering where to go next. He seemed distracted by
our simple questions, as though he
had already decided everything
When we finally said
that needed to be decided. And
when we finally said good-bye,
good-bye, he hugged us
standing next to the empty car, he
lovingly, then bounded
hugged us lovingly (even his brothup the steps of his dorm er got one), then bounded up the
steps of his dorm without a look
without a look back.
back. As we drove away, I remembered a moment that morning
when another first-year student asked him where he lived. He had
replied matter-of-factly, “I used to live in Delaware.”
Change, of course, is what college is all about. At its best, the college experience is a journey of self-discovery, intellectual awakening,
and personal transformation—even falling in love. Who would send a
son or daughter to college to graduate unchanged?
The most profound changes come in the ways college students
think of themselves. For most, there is a wonderful moment when they
realize that they can respond to the question: “Who are you?” by saying, “I am a scientist,” “I am a historian,” or “I am a writer.” Their
answer might be different at different times—another happy result of
the rich concentration of ideas and opportunities found at a liberal arts
college—yet the first such epiphany is often the best because suddenly
all the others seem possible.
For increasing numbers of students at Swarthmore, one likely
answer is: “I am an artist.” The rise of the studio arts at the College is
an example of how a liberal arts curriculum evolves. A stagnant
Swarthmore would never have embraced studio arts as part of its curriculum, but a dynamic Swarthmore has. The strong department that
has emerged in the past 20 years only increases the depth and richness of the College’s academic program.
One of my unspoken pearls of parental wisdom was this: No matter
how you define yourself today, you can—and probably will—become
something else tomorrow. As for me, I started college as an English
major, but eight semesters later I graduated with a degree in studio art.
It doesn’t matter that I am now a magazine editor; the glory of it all is
that change continues to be possible for me—and for Swarthmore.
—J.L.
2

SWARTHMORE
COLLEGE BULLETIN
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for External Affairs:
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Letters
AHEAD OF HIS TIME
I found the article on computing at Swarthmore (“Digital Dancing,” June 1999) gratifying. Kudos (and thanks) to
the faculty and staff for their
continued work in sensitively—and sensibly—integrating the computer into academic life.
I’d add recognition of the
architect of this rich computing environment, Professor
of Physics John Boccio. Ten
years ago, the concepts of
campuswide networking, an
Internet connection, universal faculty and student
access to computers, and
their use across the curriculum were not simply considered novel—they were
viewed by many Swarthmoreans as bizarre, overly
expensive, and possibly
damaging to the liberal arts
tradition.
John Boccio saw computing as a fundamental tool,
part of an important evolution of that tradition, and
insisted that it be made available to all students and faculty. As associate provost for
computing, he put together a
comprehensive plan to realize this vision and oversaw
much of its initial implementation. The infrastructure he
built—and the expectations
of excellence he set at the
time—has enabled the array
of activities described in the
article.
If it seems strange today
that universal computing
was viewed with suspicion
less than a decade ago, it’s
an indication of the practical
success of this vision. Boccio’s contribution to the College may ultimately be as
fundamental and lasting as
any made to the academic
program.
Success like this also
comes from details as much
as grand visions. I vividly
recall the occasion, seven
years ago, when John excitSEPTEMBER 1999

edly
showed me
a new tool
he’d just
compiled—
called an
“http server”—and
predicted
that revolutionary
things
would come
from it. (To
set the context properly, at the
time there were a total of 17
Web sites worldwide.) He
then set about fixing a few
bugs in the code. I had as
fine an education working for
him in the Computing Center
as I did in four years as an
undergrad. He taught me—
and the College—to put
visions through the hard
tests of engineering reality
and real-world use.
MATTHEW WALL ’86
Pittsburgh

WHERE CREDIT IS DUE
It was with great excitement
that we opened the June
issue of the Bulletin, featuring “Digital Dancing.” We had
all worked with Sasha Welsh
’99 [featured on the cover]
on various phases of her
choreography and indeed
had orchestrated the viewing
of her computer piece in the
theatre for the Spring Dance
Concert.
In an article detailing the
work of faculty members
Miguel Díaz Barriga, Ann
McNamee, Sharon Friedler,
and others, I was disappointed to see no mention of the
work of the Media Services
staff. The staff, Drew Metherall in particular, contributed
materially to all of the projects mentioned in the article. Drew did much of the
research that led to buying
the College’s new digital
video system. In addition,

Drew has
spent
many
hours this
year training faculty
and students on
the system
as well as
teaching
video production
workshops
to students in a
broad
range of disciplines.
Many of us work behind
the scenes here. That’s how
we know we’re successful—
when our work is invisible.
But sometimes it’s nice to be
noticed.
SUSAN SMYTHE
Managing Director
Lang Performing Arts Center

PLAYING CARDS
I read with interest about
The New York Times op-ed
by Nate Stulman ’01 decrying
the excessive amount of time
wasted on college campuses
fooling with computers (“Digital Dancing,” June 1999). All
I could wonder was: “Don’t
people play bridge anymore?” Give Mr. Stulman a
ride back to the 1960s so he
can observe firsthand that
even though we lacked computers, we still found incredibly creative ways to avoid
studying.
BETTY C. DUCKMAN
(Parent of Jamie Duckman ’98)
Long Beach, Calif.

GOOF OFF NOW
Nate Stulman’s New York
Times op-ed exposing the
entertainment-obsessed
computing underworld at
Swarthmore will surely find a
receptive audience among
the four-miles-to-schooleach-way crowd, but you can
count me out. I regret not
goofing off more at college.

After being ejected into
mainstream society in 1995,
I’ve found increasingly fewer
opportunities to goof off in
the real world.
Rather than addressing
the fact of student frivolity,
Stulman’s critical energies
might be better directed
toward understanding the
root cause and dangerous
trajectory of the expression
of frivolity at Swarthmore.
Have the Tarble pool tables
been replaced by workstations because of the Astronomy Department’s insatiable
techno-lust? Have macroeconomic trends caused a
decline in community-building drug and alcohol abuse?
Has political pressure moved
fraternities to bring up chat
rooms and multiuser roleplaying games, thus straying
from their historic dedication to conviviality and swill?
Alumni have an ongoing
responsibility to ensure that
these premonitions never
come to pass—that within
Swarthmore’s evolving
canon of Chinua Achbe,
Immanuel Kant, Naomi Wolf,
and William Shakespeare,
there’s still a place for
Jonathan Swift and the
movies of Chris Farley. God
help us if computer gaming
should ever replace that.
JUDE O’REILLEY ’94
Seattle

INSULT TO THE COLLEGE
Ulan McKnight’s [’87] letter
[“Who Benefits?”] in the June
Bulletin offended this old,
white alumna. His extreme
condemnation of Swarthmore’s efforts to increase the
number of students of color,
unsupported by any evidence, is a gratuitous insult
to the College.
He asks: “Why can we not
bring our own culture, our
own values, our own
desires?” Of course, we all
bring our own cultures,
Please turn to page 66
3

Collection
THE COLLEGE TODAY

I

t began much like any other Swarthmore commencement, with seniors fishing roses from buckets of water
and posing for pictures in the rose garden. Unlike recent
graduations, however, relentless sunshine took the place of
showers. Mingling in front of Parrish Hall before the ceremony, faculty dabbed at their faces, and many students
wore their robes open, exposing signs of the times: clunky
black platform sandals, nose rings, Nike sneakers.
Many carried balloons, handing them off to President
Alfred H. Bloom as they took their diplomas. Engineering
students carried handmade traffic signs instead—“dead
end,” “deconstruction zone”—alluding to renovations going
on around campus.

Eve of the millennium
Gathered in the dappled
light of the Scott Amphitheater, students cheered for
Tyler Stevenson, a religion
major from San Diego chosen to address his classmates this year. Stevenson
got things off to a rousing
start, reducing the crowd to
near hysteria with a satirical Armageddon speech.
“We are at the eve of the
millennium. And I do not
speak of VCR failure, of email apocalypse, of this
foolish Y2K concern. Today
we sit here as a desperate
hope, as a body that has
Senior speaker Tyler Stevenson
survived four years of the
life of the mind, as a body
grown strong through labor and tuition....
“We have lived with each other for four years; have broken bread; have shared beds. Together we have staved off
the plague, grief, duress, and those unlit police ‘stealth’
bikes. We know how to take care of our own. The question
is whether or not we can carry this compassion into the
dark valleys outside, where backyards are not arboretums,
and there is no cappuccino bar in the living room.
“Swarthmore is a wonderful teacher for relativism and
discussion, but comets and brimstone will not be halted by
4

Commencement ’99
“I declare to you this morning: We have
been baptized by an education
that would have killed a large pony.”
dialogue. We are at the End of All Things Known, and it
does not need a response board; it demands action. So, to
all of you who had something to say about majoring in religion: ha! I have learned to see the future, and though it is
jobless, I will be ready.... I declare to you this morning: We
have been baptized by an education that would have killed
a large pony.”
As the cheers subsided, Stevenson abruptly changed the
mood with a dramatic eulogy for several deaths that had
touched this class, including Carl Wartenburg, the late dean
of admissions; Michael Durkan, the late College librarian;
Gabriel Cavallari ’97; Duncan Kirkpatrick ’98; and 13-yearold Josh DuBee, brother of classmate Alex DuBee ’99.
Straight to the heart
Receiving one of three honorary degrees was Margaret
Allen ’70, who left Swarthmore with a degree in zoology and
went on to become the first woman in history to perform a
heart transplant, founding the first heart transplant program in the Pacific Northwest at the University of
Washington. She does
research in cardiac gene
therapy and works with
the Inuits and local
African-American and
Asian-American community health organizations.
Attempting to modernize a remote hospital in
Papua New Guinea, she
noticed the village leaders wore necklaces of
bamboo rods, commemorating donations they had
made. “In Seattle, where I
Heart surgeon Margaret Allen ’70
live, Bill Gates would be a
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

PHOTOGRAPHS BY STEVEN GOLDBLATT ʼ67

big chief,” she said. “In our society, individuals are revered
for what they ... keep, not what they give away. Now, which
of the two societies is the most primitive culture?”
As a surgical resident at Stanford, she set out to teach a
gorilla sign language, only to find the gorilla knew more
signs than she. “Many of you may have visions of helping
others in your life,” she concluded. “Instead of helping people, you need to be striving to learn ... from every situation,
to become the perennial student. This attitude will make
you wise. Unfortunately, it also means you’ll never really
graduate.”
Public servants wanted
“When you meet someone and exchange pleasantries about
where each of you went to college, struggle as best you can
to be humble,” instructed Christopher F. Edley Jr. ’73. “I
have failed at this,” he
said. Edley Jr. went on to
become a professor of
law at Harvard University, where he edited the
Harvard Law Review and
co-founded its Civil
Rights Project, which he
now co-directs. He
served under Jimmy
Carter, worked in the
Office of Management
and Budget for the Clinton administration and
as special counsel to the
president. There, he led
Law professor and presidential
the review of affirmative
adviser Christopher Edley Jr. ’73
action, producing his
“mend it, don’t end it”
policy, and he is now helping Clinton write a book on racial
justice.
At Swarthmore, Edley Jr. said: “I learned to face the limits of my intelligence, without fear. I learned what it means
to really understand something hard, only to realize that I
was dead wrong, or that there was another, perhaps better
way to understand it.... And I learned that when there is
trouble, find a grove of lilac bushes, lie down, get drunk on
the fragrance, and think about important things.”
He recommended his own passion, public service.
SEPTEMBER 1999

“There are more hard problems than there are good people,” he stressed, adding: “Return to Swarthmore often.
Come in the spring and smell the lilacs. Bring money with
you. And if you should wander off and settle in some
strange land, like Equitorial Guinea or California, and you
can’t get back to campus, just send the money.”
Benign subersive
President Bloom called Robert Kuttner’s “one of the most
clarifying and appreciated voices in the arena of American
social commentary.” Kuttner, who edits The American
Prospect, has written for The Village Voice, The Washington
Post, Business Week, and The New Republic, founded the
magazine Working Papers for a New Society, and served as
chief investigator for the Senate Banking Committee. Unlike
the other speakers, Kuttner did not graduate from Swarthmore but from Oberlin—which gave him an added edge
when he said: “I want to take a moment to commend to you
the role of outsider.”
“My own career has followed a twisting path, the path of
what Albert Hirschman called the trespasser,” he continued. “I write books and articles about political economy
and play an economist on television, having taken exactly
one economics class.... I am finishing a book about psychology and family relations, whose concepts I learned mostly
from my wife.
“But there is something exhilarating about being an outsider. Thinking outside the box becomes second nature
because you are
never in the
box.... Most of
you will pursue
more conventional career
paths than I did.
But even within
the professions,
you can be constructive,
ecstatic outsiders, and
benign subversives—by holdJournalist Robert Kuttner (right), with Richard
ing on to what
Valelly ’75, associate professor of political science.
matters.”
5

Collection
Ethical Intelligence
By President Alfred H. Bloom
Following are the remarks of President
Bloom to members of the Class of 1999
at their Commencement on May 31.

6

STEVEN GOLDBLATT ʼ67

I

n my inaugural talk seven years ago,
I identified ethical intelligence as one
of the distinctive goals and triumphs of a Swarthmore education.
Since that time, the term has gained
some currency in this community, and I
have seen consistent evidence from the
Class of 1999, and from each of its predecessors, of the development of those
very habits of person and mind to
which that term refers. I thought it
important to speak to you today about
what I mean by ethical intelligence and
about why Swarthmore takes such
pride in its students’—and its graduates’—practice of this highly constructive and responsible approach to ethical decision-making.
The roots of your own practice of
ethical intelligence lie in the analytic
abilities and values you brought with
you to Swarthmore four years ago—
credit for which goes in large measure
to the careful nurturing supplied by
those wonderful people sitting behind
you. Then your academic training and
your experience of this intentionally
ethical community began to wield their
formative effects.
Amid the rigors and exhilarations of
your academic work, you developed a
prodigious knowledge base and an
extraordinary range of intellectual
skills, including the ability to draw subtle distinctions, the ability to gain perspective from others’ perspectives, and
the ability to identify the conclusions
that a body of evidence does and does
not support—each of which plays a
critical role in the practice of ethical
intelligence.
You also developed two additional,
perhaps less obvious, intellectual
habits that are fundamental as well—
namely, the readiness to suspend certainty and to engage ambiguity in the
search for truth and the determination
to ask of yourselves contributions of
significance.
As you sought to explain experimental results, define the causes of historical events, clarify complex philosophi-

President Alfred H. Bloom returned to themes first expressed in his 1992 inaugural address
during his speech to the Class of 1999. He is flanked at the ceremony by Robert Gross ’62,
dean of the College, and Sue Welsh, the College’s treasurer.

cal arguments, or interpret an artist’s
intent, you repeatedly came up against
a world in which the choice of the right
explanation or the right interpretation
was not as clear as you may have
expected it or wanted it to be—a world
in which your initial assumptions were
challenged by complicating information
and unanticipated perspectives and
that offered no clear-cut solutions in
their place.
In response to these salutary
encounters with ambiguity, you developed the habit of approaching intellectual problem solving through suspending certainty and proceeding to identify, engage, and test the full range of
possible explanations or interpretations of the data at hand, before making
a judgment. Further, you came to recognize that even after that work is done,
the evidence you have gathered will
likely not resolve all ambiguities and
that, therefore, you, rather than the
data, must bear responsibility for the
judgment you make.
Moreover, that recognition of ambiguity and that acceptance of responsibility have not diminished your commitment to the advance of knowledge.
Rather, they have only heightened your

appreciation for the tolerance of uncertainty and for the embrace of complexity that intellectual advance exacts.
Over the past four years as well, you
have consistently asked of yourselves
that you not only add, but add in some
fresh and important way, to what has
already been thought, expressed, or
proved. Through responding to that
continuing challenge, you have refined
your own sense of which intellectual
questions are most meaningful to ask
and your own criteria for deciding
which insights and findings count as
significant.
The intellectual habits you have
thus developed—suspending certainty,
engaging ambiguity, and distinguishing
significance—represent, I believe, the
central contributions of fine academic
training to the practice of ethical intelligence. And, prompted by a community
that identifies itself as much by its commitment to values as by its commitment to intellectual quality, you have
applied these very habits to ethical
practice.
By suspending certainty regarding
ethical positions that you once defended without qualification, you have
allowed yourselves to discover that
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

ethical decision making is far more
complex than you expected or wanted
it to be. You have seen in the actual
dilemmas of ethical life that, more often
than not, the principles that motivated
your initial stands compete with other
principles you value as deeply and that
actions you defended on the basis of a
single principle alone have been compromised in their ethical integrity by
questionable effectiveness or by the
harm they visited on other values that
you did not recognize were also at play.
In response to these salutary
encounters with ethical complexity,
you have developed the habit of
approaching ethical decision making
through eliciting, identifying, and
engaging the full range of principles at
stake as well as the constraints and
opportunities inherent in the situation
at hand, before making a judgment.
And you have come to expect that,
even after that work is done, your judgment will likely still require a complex
act of evaluation, synthesis, and creativity, including the shaping of a
response that not only respects the
principle of highest priority, but also
reflects to the extent possible the other
principles at play and is most likely to
succeed in generating the consequences you intend. Your judgment will
be one for which you, rather than any
single ethical principle, must bear
responsibility.
Furthermore, your recognition of
this ambiguity and acceptance of this
responsibility have not diminished
your ethical resolve but rather
anchored that resolve in a context of
examined complexity that only
strengthens its resilience.
In turn, you have brought these
developed habits of ethical judgment to
bear on issues we face as citizens of
this nation and the world, on issues
ranging from whether our society
should prescribe preferences based on
race in the short term to promote equal
opportunity in the longer term; to
whether it has the right to interfere
with an individual’s decision to take his
or her own life or to assist another in
that act; to under what conditions the
use of force can be justified in the international arena and whether a nation
that tolerates unconscionable poverty
at home can presume to ethical leaderSEPTEMBER 1999

ship abroad; to how a developing
nation should balance commitment to
the environment against responsibility
to open economic opportunity; to how
free science should be to experiment
with the creation and design of life.
You have also brought these responsible habits of ethical judgment to
issues facing our own community, to
issues ranging from how this College
should balance a commitment to equity
in its offers of financial aid against a
need to respond to market pressures;

Responding to
multidimensional
issues in
multidimensional
terms is not
compromise.
Failing to examine
the full value
implications
and consequences
of a position is.
to whether and when it should support
activities in which participation is
restricted along the lines of gender,
race, or ethnic group; to whether
respect for diversity in religious beliefs
requires deleting the phrase “in the
year of our Lord” from the Swarthmore
diploma.
And, by working through these
dilemmas of ethical principle and practice, you have defined more clearly for
yourselves the ethical ends you see as
most important to pursue; and you
have, as in the intellectual realm, begun
to factor that clearer sense of significant ends into the particular judgments
you make.

By your practice of ethical intelligence, you will distinguish yourselves
from those who subordinate ethical
concern to their own self-interest; and
you may very well find yourselves dismissed by such individuals as impractical and idealistic. But you know that
ethical vision and resolve can change
the world—just consider the progress
in racial, gender, and sexual orientation
equity achieved over the past 30 years.
By your practice of ethical intelligence, you will also distinguish yourselves from those who argue from single-principled stands and who, in often
adversarial and alienating ways, protect
what they see as the “ethical purity” of
their positions by refusing to consider
confounding complexities and alternative views. And you may very well find
yourselves branded by these individuals as indecisive, ethically weak, or too
willing to compromise.
But responding to multidimensional
issues in multidimensional terms is not
compromise. Failing to examine the full
value implications and consequences of
a position is.
Furthermore, your readiness and
responsibility to appreciate the ways in
which other points of view speak to
truth will equip you particularly well
for reaching out to those who argue
from single-principled stands and for
establishing with them areas of common ground—common ground from
which you can then draw them toward
that greater acceptance of ambiguity
and complexity that turns contentious advocacy into constructive dialogue.
As you assume positions of leadership across the spectrum of American
and international life, your practice and
modeling of ethical intelligence will
help sustain our societies and world on
courses that are at once effective and
ethically responsible. And you will
demonstrate the fundamental contribution that fine undergraduate education
makes, not only to both success in
careers and to intellectual advance but
also to distinguished ethical leadership.
Warmest congratulations, Class of
1999! Swarthmore is deeply proud of
your intellectual, ethical, and personal
achievements and wishes you every
satisfaction and happiness as you build
upon them.
7

Collection
Managers approve plan
for Swarthmore’s future

the College’s most historic building. Under the plan, Parrish
would remain a multipurpose building, with student residence halls, administrative offices, an admissions center,
n what President Alfred H. Bloom called “a meeting of his- and increased space for student activities and organizations.
toric importance,” the College’s Board of Managers on
Before renovation of Parrish could begin, the CPC deterMay 1 endorsed a long-range plan that includes the modmined, a new residence hall would need to be built to house
ernization of the College’s science facilties, the long-awaited
the students who currently live in the upper floors of
renovation of 135-year-old Parrish Hall, the construction of a
Swarthmore’s original structure. Once students moved back
new residence hall, and several important initiatives in acainto a renovated Parrish, the new dormitory would be used
demic and student life.
to alleviate crowding in some current residence halls and to
The plan, which was completed by the College Planning
eliminate undesirable rooms in areas such as the basement
Committee (CPC) in the spring, is the result of two and a half
of Mary Lyons. Additional residence hall beds would not
years of study by a broad-based group that included memmean an enlargement of the student body beyond its current
bers of the faculty and staff, students, alumni, and members
average of 1,375—an enrollment target affirmed by the Board
of the Board. In presenting the major elements of the plan,
in March. Other “student life” proposals include the followBloom told the Board: “We must do this … to sustain and
ing:
advance the quality of this institution.”
• Further renovation of Tarble in Clothier, the hybrid stuThe CPC plan will likely commit the College to raise more
dent center that currently occupies most of 80-year-old
than $200 million in new funds, well over
Clothier Hall.
half of which will go to academic programs
• New programs to support campus
and facilities. Among the highlights:
diversity and intercultural understanding,
• The DuPont Science Building, first
including funds for an Interfaith Center
opened in 1958, will be renovated and
and other religious activities not currently
expanded to become a state-of-the-art
funded by off-campus resources.
teaching center for Departments of Chem• Increased support for the Office of
istry, Physics and Astronomy, and MatheCareer Planning and Placement, including
matics and Statistics. Renovations to Marnew outreach to potential employers and
tin Hall, home of the Biology Department,
increased use of job-search technology.
would complete the upgrade of the Col• A campus “Learning and Teaching Cenlege’s science facilities.
ter” that would coordinate academic sup• The College will dramatically increase
port for students and offer encouragement
its support for faculty leaves, which give
for pedagogical innovation by members of
professors time away from the classroom
the faculty.
to concentrate on scholarship and curricuA final “institutional” section of the CPC
lum development. Most tenured or tenureplan addressed several College-wide
track faculty members receive a single
needs. It called for a significant investment
semester of leave every fourth year, but
in endowment for the periodic replaceA complete renovation of Parrish
only eight are currently eligible for Colment of crucial computing, instrumentaHall is among the plans approved
lege-funded two-semester leaves. The
tion, and media resources. It also designatby the Board of Managers.
ambitious CPC plan increases that number
ed new funds to maintain the College’s histo 25. It also envisions College support for
toric commitment to need-blind financial
what is being called the “Swarthmore Institute,” a program
aid and to enhance the ability of the Admissions Office to
that would bring leading scholars to campus for speaking
reach new populations of potential Swarthmore students.
and research.
No exact timetable was announced for the implementa• The plan calls for Swarthmore’s curriculum to be
tion of the long-range plan, but Dan C. West, the College’s
enhanced by the addition of new teaching positions in such
vice president for alumni, development, and public relations,
areas as computer science, education, and political science— said that work is under way toward a capital campaign that
disciplines where increased enrollment has put pressure on
would extend over five years. Architects and engineers are
existing programs. New curricular areas to be explored
currently studying building options and developing cost estiinclude cognitive studies, Islamic studies, film and media
mates, with the first phases of construction likely to begin
studies, and Japanese language instruction.
within three or four years.
• McCabe Library, opened in 1968, would see significant
President Bloom closed his remarks to the Board with a
renovations to improve its capacity to serve students in a
call to action: “This College, through its very success, offers
technology-based learning environment.
proof that institutions and societies can ask of themselves
• Other academic proposals include increased support for the most demanding and significant goals—and that they
the revitalized Honors Program, for student summer
can achieve them. We have spent two and a half years identiresearch, for athletics, and for efforts to recruit and retain a
fying the elements essential to sustaining and advancing the
more diverse faculty.
quality and preeminence of Swarthmore College. We cannot
Under the heading of “student life,” recommendations
fall short in meeting its needs.”
adopted by the Board include the renovation of Parrish Hall,
GEORGE WIDMAN

I

8

SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

Lean on them

G

irls—especially white, upper-class girls—learn early
on that their angry responses are unacceptable,” Lyn
Mikel Brown, author of the book Raising Their Voices:
The Politics of Girls’ Anger, told the audience at a recent campus conference. “Good girls are supposed to be calm and
quiet. They don’t directly express anger; they don’t shout.”
It seems the rites of passage haven’t changed dramatically
since Rebel Without a Cause hit the cinemas—except that
Natalie Wood is acting out instead of cheering on Jimmy
Dean.
At least, that’s what Brown, associate professor of education and human development at Colby College, would like to
see. So would the women who coordinated this conference,
called “Lean on Me: Educating and Mentoring Adolescent
Girls,” two weeks after graduating in June, long after most of
their classmates were gone. Six were freshmen when they
came up with the idea for the Summer Community Learning
Project (SCLP), a mentoring program for adolescent girls.
For them, the conference was as much a culmination of their
four years at the College as Commencement had been.
In 1995, Nicole Breazeale, Chloë Dowley, Kirstin Lindermayer, Andrea Meller, Mandara Meyers, and Erica Turner,
then freshmen, set out to form a community of local girls
from all socioeconomic backgrounds and help them establish positive gender identification and self-esteem. In the
process, they designed a formal (and sometimes not so formal) summer curriculum, put on an original performance
piece using the girls’ voices and stories, painted a mural and
wrote a book commemorating “the community of Swarthmore women,” taught an education course called Educating
and Mentoring Adolescent Girls, and presented their work at
local conferences and community meetings. Over the years,
SCLP received several grants and this spring was awarded
the Naomi Kies Award for community service.
About 40 people filed into the Friends Meetinghouse for
the conference, only two men among them. Most seemed to
know the SCLP coordinators. Many had teenage daughters
who had been enrolled in the summer program, and others
had consulted with them regarding their own programs.
Brown’s solution to repressed teen anger is one that the
SLCP has made the basis for its work: Encourage girls to
understand and embrace their emotions, then express them
constructively instead of turning them inward.
Of course, it’s one thing for a college professor to teach
that lesson. It was a little harder for a group of college students, fresh from their own teen angst—and in many ways,
as they discovered, still immersed in it. “What we learned
about most was ourselves and one another,” says Mandara
Meyers ’99. “We were forced to reflect on our own adolescence and work it out with each other, before we could help
girls 10 years younger than us. We set out to create a community of adolescent girls, and in the process, we created
our own.”
One of the first audience members to speak out at the
conference was Idahlia Carter, a dormitory housekeeper.
Last year, Carter enrolled her granddaughter, Ebony, in the
summer project. “She was very angry,” Carter told the audience, “but since she’s been involved with SCLP, she’s
become a different child. She has learned to mingle with
SEPTEMBER 1999

Conference attendees (left to right) Rebekah Adens,
Sasha Joseph, Madonna Green, and Parul Vora compare
notes outside the Friends Meetinghouse.

blacks and whites. At SCLP, these girls can explain themselves to one another.”
The middle school years are the most formative time in
girls’ lives, the students discovered, the point where young
women begin to lose a well-developed sense of self and
descend into a spiral of silence and self-doubt. “We decided
to look for a group of rising fifth- through seventh-grade
girls, aiming to find individuals old enough to think critically
and maturely but young enough to be just feeling the effects
of their coming of age,” the women wrote in the introduction
to a book documenting their work on the SCLP. Like their
interactions with the girls, both the class and conference
focused on issues the group had found, through research, to
be the most critical for adolescent girls: gender, body image,
sexuality, school experiences, peer interactions, and identity.
It’s not easy to establish and run such a program at a
demanding school like Swarthmore, but the students managed to meet weekly, and in the summer put in as many as
16 hours daily on the project. Early on, they came up with a
group mantra that they repeated to each other when frustrations arose, a quote by Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a
small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change
the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever does.”
Whether or not their work will lead to world change, they
made the way a little easier for girls like Idahlia Carter’s
granddaughter. “I think she has learned that you have to see
the other person’s side, not just your own,” Carter said,
adding, with a glance at the new graduates: “God bless these
girls as they go their way.”
9

Collection
Where the boys are

O

The Chester
Boys Chorus,
directed by
John Alston,
assistant professor of music,
rehearses in the
Lang Concert
Hall during a sixweek summer
camp. Alston’s
dream is to start
a performing
arts school in
Chester.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JIM GRAHAM

10

n a sunny July morning, children’s voices rise sweetly
from the stage of the Lang Music Hall. It sounds like ...
Italian opera?
That’s right. While their friends frolic in the sun, 15 children are learning opera from John Alston, associate professor of music at Swarthmore and director of the Chester
Boys Chorus and campus day camp. He directs a training
chorus of mostly fourth graders, but the singers here today
belong to the concert choir. Most are African American from
poor Chester neighborhoods, between 8 and 14 years of age.
There are two girls among them today. Few of these kids are
used to strict discipline and none to opera. But they show
up at this camp six days a week—and that means two to
three hours of choir rehearsal a day.
Two baby grands have been pushed aside. Beside
the choir, the arboretum woods glow through a wall
of plate-glass windows. The kids have trouble standing still. Except for his ponytail and spectacles, Alston
is dressed as they are, in T-shirts, shorts, and sneakers. He picks out the melodies on an electric keyboard, singing along in a sort of falsetto, several
octaves above his usual bass.
Alston knows what it means for a kid to give up his
summer days to sing. He did it himself as part of the
Newark Boys Choir. As a boy growing up fatherless in
a tough neighborhood, it was the best thing that ever
happened to him. Five years ago, he had the inspiration to start his own boys choir. It has been his consuming passion ever since.
Today the choir is learning three-part harmony.
Alston runs them through bits of Giordani’s Taro Mio
Ben, Pergolesi’s Magnificat, and Mozart’s Exultate Jubilate. “Say it, altos: languisce il cor,” he says, rolling his
r. “That means my heart, my heart. Sing it out. No
fear, like the commercial says.... You can’t be an Italian unless you have a lisp.... Sopranos, be quiet.
“Slow,” Alston says, as they sing a line from the
Mozart. “Don’t confuse slowly with wimpy. Could it be soft
and a little bit dancy? Soft but strong—alleluia, then we
dance.” A girl in the back row takes him literally and
bounces to the next line, doing a little Whitney Houston
hand motion. “Who sings this? Mary. What’s she so happy
about? They just said, ‘You’re the one.’ And what she really
said was, ‘I’m too young for this. Take my sister.’ But they
couldn’t write that. … Don’t improvise, brother,” he tells a
small boy in the front row. “You’re supposed to be singing,
not doing karate.”
The boy is 8. “His name is Nkenge, which means ‘brilliant’
in some African language,” Alston tells me later. “He is brilliant—a musical genius. Nkenge loves music; he really hears
it. He’s already improvising on the piano. We call him Bruce
because he looks like Bruce Willis and behaves like Bruce
Lee. Bruce loves karate.”
Right on cue, at 11:30, karate instructor Stuart Bryant
strides into the room, a muscular man with shaved head
and tattoos. The class snaps to attention as he launches into
a rapid-fire military question-response.
“What’s up?” he barks, smiling.
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

“You are sir.”
“What’s happening?”
“We are sir.”
“How’s your karate?”
“Huuuuge, sir!”
“He’s also a blues musician,” Alston whispers. ”And the
greatest karate instructor in the area.” The children file out
behind Bryant for a “nature appreciation tour” of the arboretum before he runs them through their moves. Later this
afternoon, the boys will play baseball on DuPont field.
How do baseball and martial arts fit into a boys choir? “In
a lot of ways, this camp is everything that I love to do,”
Alston says. “There are probably other things I should be
teaching them, but I don’t know those things. I understand
music really well, and I understand martial arts.” He discovered Kung Fu during a sabbatical in 1994 and soon progressed to tai chi, which he practices religiously. Two of the
older boys now study karate in a program Alston paid for
with money received as a wedding gift. Max, the oldest, is
about to get his blue belt.
“Karate teaches them discipline,” Alson says. “If I call
them to attention the way they’re called in karate, they snap
to immediately—even in front of 200 people.” He pauses for
a bite of cereal, eating on the run as usual. “I’m just beginning to learn how to handle the kids’ temper tantrums—
without just being louder and stronger. There are 17 different
personalities. One kid was born addicted to cocaine. I have
to find the right way to deal with each one.”
About the two girls in this boys choir, he says: “It just
happened. They would come to pick up their brothers, and I
started having them sit next to the troublemakers. That was
very effective.” Naturally, they started singing along, their
voices at this age indistinguishable from the boys’. Alston
admits he’s not sure whether to make the choir officially unisex. “In this day and age, there’s probably no excuse not to
include girls, especially since the boys have such an advantage as adults. But as children, the boys are at a disadvantage. We have three fathers in this whole group. They do not
have role models. And it does make a difference.
“I sure wish my father had been around—and that’s definitely part of the motivation. I don’t have any fantasy about
being their father. I just want to provide a little joy and structure in their lives. Who knows? For some of these guys, this
might be the ticket to a career.”
Alston’s dream is to open a school for the performing arts
in Chester, but just now he’s finding it a challenge to keep
the camp and choir going. Thanks to an anonymous gift last
year, he has a new program director, which saves him time,
and, in the summer, buses shuttle the kids to and from the
College on weekdays. But on Saturdays, Alston still drives
the van to pick them all up. “It takes from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. to
run an-hour-and-a-half rehearsal on Saturday,” he says. Camp
lasts from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. in the summer. During the school
year, Alston drives to Chester twice a week to rehearse the
choir.
“I probably make about 50 cents an hour on average running the choir,” he laughs. “But I’m not complaining. We’re
paid well at Swarthmore. Teaching music to the most
enlightened students in the nation, and getting to play Bach?
That’s not work, it’s play! I’m lucky–and I’ve got to share it.
It’s the right thing to do.”
SEPTEMBER 1999

Swing low
The swing tree is gone—and it made its own decision about
when to hit the ground. The large red oak near Sharples Dining
Hall, which had suffered in recent years from rotting limbs and
dying roots, was scheduled to be removed in mid-August
because of safety concerns. But on Aug. 6 it “took matters into
its own limbs,” according to Larry Schall ’75, vice president for
facilities and services, and fell without the aid of a chain saw.
The century-old tree, had reached the end of a normal life span
for its species. No plans have been made for the relocation of
the swing.

Swarthmore tops U.S. News list
For the third time in five years, Swarthmore has topped U.S.
News & World Report’s ranking of national liberal arts colleges.
Amherst came in second, followed by Williams and Wellesley,
with Haverford
U.S. News & World Report Rankings
and Middlebury
tied for fifth.
1
The top five
national universities were the
California Insti2
1
tute of Technology, Harvard,
MIT, Princeton,
3
and Yale. Presi1
dent Alfred H.
1995 1996 1997 1998 1999
Bloom told The
W = Williams
A = Amherst
Philadelphia
W
= Wellesley
B
=
Bowdoin
Inquirer that
1=Tie
S = Swarthmore
the popular but
controversial
list provides important national exposure for Swarthmore, raising the number of applicants and thus the College’s selectivity.
He also happily pointed out that the president of Cal Tech, the
top-ranked university, is a Swarthmore grad—Nobel laureate
David Baltimore ’60.

A

S

W

B

W

Two retirements
Two faculty members retired in June after more than 25 years
at Swarthmore. H. Searl Dunn first joined of the Department of
Engineering in 1973, and Robert Roza became a member of the
Department of English Literature in 1966.

Miss that college radio?
Now alums can tune into WSRN from anywhere in the world—
providing they have Internet access. WSRN has begun Webcasting its programs live, including blues, classical, folk, hiphop, jazz, rock, ska, world, and talk. To listen in, visit the WSRN
Web site at http://wsrn.swarthmore.edu.

Article of the year
“Swarthmore on the Line of Scrimmage” by Garret Keizer, the
cover story of the December 1998 Bulletin, has been honored
by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education
(CASE) as one of the four best articles of the year in a college
or university magazine. The feature, which explored the role of
football at Swarthmore, was chosen by a panel of three judges
from The Chronicle of Higher Education, which sponsors this
category in CASE’s annual awards program.
11

Why Studio Arts
AT A LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGE?

Q

uite a lot of hugging and storytelling is going on outside the
List Gallery. Name tags timeline more than 50 years, as is
the case with all the alumni on campus
for Alumni Weekend at Swarthmore. But
all those gathered outside the List
Gallery seem to know each other.
One by one, they stroll inside the
gallery. Suddenly, the storytelling stops
as if, in the face of art, communication
changes. These alumni, many with
majors in studio art, walk slowly
through the exhibit, pausing in front of
each work of art, taking the time to
understand the artist behind the art.
In the gallery this weekend are delicate Chinese ink brush drawings by
Lloyd Craighill ’49, bold and vivid oil
paintings by Mark Van Buskirk ’89, and
detailed bronze-colored sculptures by
Don Gordon ’49. Craighill stands in a
corner, quietly playing the violin he
crafted and brought as part of his exhibit. Van Buskirk shakes hands with one of
his classmates. Gordon sits on a bench
while his wife, Joan, snaps a photo.
Gordon has never exhibited his work
before. He’s been sculpting his whole
life, ever since he took a sculpture class
when he was 8 years old. By 18, when he
arrived at Swarthmore, he was hooked
on the medium. But, 50 years ago, there
was no such thing as a sculpture class
at the College. No ceramics. No drawing.
No painting. No studio art courses of
any kind. A few extracurricular arts and
crafts classes were offered, but Gordon
didn’t know about them, and the Art
Department certainly didn’t recognize
them as part of its curriculum. “The aim
of the department is to study the historical-cultural significance and aesthetic
value of architecture, sculpture, painting, and graphic art,” reads the 1949–50
course catalog. “Since the objective ... is
to foster an intelligent comprehension
of the visual arts rather than to train
professional artists, no courses in draw-

12

Acceptance

was a long time
coming, but the fine
arts have taken
their full place in
the curriculum.
ing, painting, and sculpture are offered
for credit.” So Gordon, now retired from
a career as a builder in New York, did
his sculpture during summer vacations
and spent his school years studying
political science.

D

o studio arts belong at Swarthmore? The question is almost as
old as the College and, during the
past 130 years, has inspired much
debate among the faculty and administration. The common notion is that
Quakers considered the fine arts to be
frivolous and nonutilitarian. Edward
Hicks, a Virginia Quaker, had described
them in 1851 as “trifling” and “insignificant” with no “substantial use to
mankind.” Yet the Hicksite Quakers who
founded Swarthmore thought that drawing was useful enough to offer two
courses—Mechanical Drawing and Freehand Drawing—to the College’s very
first class. In fact, in the minutes of the
annual stockholders meeting in 1874, it
was noted that freehand drawing was
not only required for all students but
“absolutely essential, and to all it must
prove, if properly taught, only second in
practical usefulness to the art of writing
itself.”
Rarely, if ever, has anyone in Swarthmore’s history questioned the value of
practicing art. The contention over the

BY VICKI GLEMBOCKI

years has involved a far subtler concept—the academic rigor of practicing
art. Does throwing a pot or painting a
landscape or sketching a model involve
the brain as much as it involves the eye
and the hand? Do studio art classes
engage the intellect in the same way
that physics or mathematics or history
classes do? Do the studio arts have a
place in a liberal arts education—particularly in a liberal arts education with the
intellectual standards that Swarthmore
has achieved?
The answer was yes—until 1910. In
the late 19th century, painting had been
added to the freehand drawing course, a
class that was pitched to students in its
course description as “a very important
adjunct to the other courses, especially
to those in science.” Courses in the history of art appeared later, in 1892, and
when Joseph Swain became president of
the College in 1902, two classes were
offered in art history and two in studio
art. Soon after, four more classes were
added in art history. Then, in 1910, both
disciplines disappeared abruptly from
the course catalog. In 1912, art history
classes returned, but studio art did
not—and 56 years went by before it was
offered for credit again in 1968.
It is not known why studio art was
suddenly removed from the curriculum.
Perhaps, in his push for higher intellectual standards, President Swain decided
that the study of art should be only an
academic subject. When Frank Aydelotte replaced Swain in 1921, practical
art classes remained outside the curriculum. The art history program, on the
other hand, continued to grow and was
coupled with courses in music history
under the Department of Fine Arts and
Music—studies defined in the 1926 catalog as “critical and appreciative rather
than practical.”
When Aydelotte established the Honors Program in 1922, the concept of an
academically rigorous education in the
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

sculptors had their own room on the
third floor. Ayala Talpai (Linda Becker)
’62 took classes with Elmore who, Talpai
remembers, was “covertly looked down
upon by some students because she
used her hands.”
Still, Elmore fought hard for better
equipment and better facilities for the
arts and crafts program and won big in
1961, when the program moved to better quarters in Pearson Hall. “I felt
strongly that studio arts should be on
the curriculum,” Elmore wrote in a letter
to T. Kaori Kitao, former chair of the Art
Department. “[I] could not see how art
history majors could graduate without
ever having tried their hands at painting
or sculpture.”

I

t’s ironic that the Art Department—
both art history and studio art—has
made its home since the late 1970s in
Beardsley, a building named after
Swarthmore’s first engineering professor. Yet art students have made the
place their own. A ceramic relief in the
stairwell leading to the department
offices reads, in huge red script: “I
thought I’d died and gone to SoHo.”

But if anyone at Swarthmore can be
credited with recognizing the academic
value of studio art and then helping to
change the College’s perception of the
discipline, it’s Kaori Kitao, now the
William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Art History. When Kitao arrived to teach
Renaissance and Baroque art in 1966,
she found a “rigorously verbal” curriculum—serious study meant discussion
and interpretation, and serious scholarship meant academic papers. “Academics saw art as nonintellectual, as a
pursuit that engaged the hands and
eyes,” she says. “Artists, of course, knew
that it wasn’t just hands and eyes but
the coordination of the hands, the eyes,
and the mind.”
When Kitao came to the College, two
cultural changes were working in favor
of putting studio art back in the course
catalog. First, abstract expressionism
had started to be replaced by a new
realist movement—Andy Warhol’s pop
art, George Segal’s figurative sculpture
installations, and Jasper Johns’ flag
paintings—that was concerned more
with the tangible world than with the
individual. This “nouveau realism,”

JIM GRAHAM

liberal arts jumped to the next level. Students, who may have been looking for
an outlet from the increased intensity of
their Oxford-style seminars, decided to
start an extracurricular arts and crafts
program. Studio art came back—conditionally. Listed as a “student activity” in
the 1938–39 catalog, the program
description read: “Creativity at Swarthmore is undertaken for its own sake as
part of undergraduate life. It is generally
felt that some form of self-expression, in
arts, crafts, or some other medium, is a
necessary factor in the educational process.... It is hoped that all students will
take part in some of these activities but
will exercise such restraint not to interfere with academic work.”
Although the College clearly viewed
practicing art as a less serious endeavor
than more established academic studies, including art history, the arts and
crafts program turned out to be so popular that, in 1954, the College hired Barbara Elmore to direct the program. In a
small office on the second floor of Trotter, which she shared with the director
of dramatics, Elmore taught jewelry,
enameling, and pottery. Painters and

Randall Exon, Art Department chair: “Originality is as hard for a student to achieve in studio art as it is to achieve in science.”
SEPTEMBER 1999

13

wrote art critic Pierre Restany in 1961,
“registers the sociological reality without any controversial intention.” As
modern art became more tangible, the
practical study of it seemed to become
more acceptable as well.
The second change had a more
direct effect on the study of art at
Swarthmore. In 1955, the Quaker Fellowship of the Arts was founded in Britain
in an effort to bridge the gap in Quaker
philosophy that separated the aesthetic
from the spiritual. Janet Stanley Mustin
’45, who says that being both a Quaker
and an artist has always been a challenge for her, works with the Fellowship
of Quakers in the Arts in Philadelphia,
an organization modeled after the
British group. “The notion that selfexpression is a spiritual experience has
been in revival,” she says. “The traditional disapproval of the arts has vanished. Now art is considered to be close
to the soul. And the soul has to have its
expression.”
Finally, in 1967, the College undertook a re-examination of its entire curriculum. Part of this thoroughgoing selfstudy, which was published as the Critique of the College in 1968, was a proposal by the Art Department to give
credit for creative arts.
Soon after, studio courses received
credit. Harriet Shorr ’60 returned to
Swarthmore in the fall of 1963—when no
credit was given—to teach painting and
drawing and administer the studio arts
program, staying until the early 1970s.
“Credit and credibility were important
for the students,” wrote Schorr in the
third installment of a history of the art
program recently compiled for the
department’s newsletter. Schorr also
stated that “one explanation for Swarthmore’s attitude toward the arts was the
Quaker tradition: Quakers were suspicious of beauty that was not utilitarian.”
In The Critique of the College, the Art
Department also recommended faculty
status for full-time art instructors. These
changes and others were debated in faculty meetings. “Extreme opponents
expressed their opinions,” remembers
Kitao. “Some of them had a very oldfashioned notion that what artists do is
on a lower level of intellectuality. They
compared it with athletics, claiming that
art was a technical matter, like basketball.” Nonetheless, painting and sculpture were approved for credit. The controversy dealt more with ceramics—one
faculty critic compared the art to finger
14

painting. The evening before the faculty
voted on whether or not to give credit
for ceramics courses, the Art Department had brought in a promising young
ceramist named Paulus Berensohn to
lecture. Berensohn explained that a
ceramist makes pots in the way a tree
makes leaves. At the faculty meeting the
next day, Paul Mangelsdorf ’49, now
Morris L. Clothier Professor Emeritus of
Physics, used the idea in his argument
against the course. “Making pots,” he
reportedly said, “is compared with a
purely vegetative function.”
Mangelsdorf, a lifelong Quaker whose
daughter graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts, is somewhat
less stringent in his opinion of art at
Swarthmore today. “I think that the art
program sets pretty high standards, and

“Making art is a

complicated,
critical process,
which has the
ultimate intent of
trying to interpret
the world.”
I’ve been impressed with some of the
work the students do,” he says. “But I’m
still not convinced that work in the creative arts should be put in the same curricular category with work in the more
academic specialties. Art ... contributes
to the enrichment of the lives of the students. But it’s definitely not in the same
intellectual category with calculus or
the study of the classics.”
Professor of Studio Arts Randall
Exon, the current chair of the Art
Department, claims to have a limited, if
not nonexistent, knowledge of calculus.
“The problem is,” he says, “there are
also those who have a limited education
in art but have very strong opinions
about it. I don’t know exactly what they
are basing their opinions on. That said, I
think we needed those opinions—we
needed to understand what that generation of scholars and scientists meant by
the phrase ‘intellectual pursuit,’ in order
to push us to create a truly rigorous
program.

“Making art is a complicated, critical—particularly self-critical—process
that has the ultimate intent of trying to
interpret the world in some way. That,
to me, requires as much thought, criticism, and technical ability as learning
how to write. There is also a deeper
interpretive understanding required.
Originality is as hard for a student to
achieve in studio art as it is for a student
to achieve in science.”
Still, Mangelsdorf’s feelings were not
uncommon on campus in the late 1960s;
as a result, studio art (eventually including ceramics) remained a program with
no major until 1977, two years after
Kaori Kitao became chair of the department. In that role, she was known for
being outspoken on the subject of art at
Swarthmore, including at the annual
meeting when new faculty members
were introduced. The introductions
were made by departments in alphabetical order, so the art department went
first. Kitao would say: “Since this is the
only time art ever comes first at Swarthmore College, I’d like to take full advantage of the moment.”
Kitao points to four crucial turning
points in the more recent evolution of
the studio art program. First, housing
art history and studio art together in
Beardsley Hall (an idea initiated in the
1980s by Harrison Wright, then provost)
increased the dialogue between the two
disciplines. Having them in separate
buildings, she says, bred more animosity than collegiality. Second, giving studio artists the space they needed to do
their work—big studios with high ceilings and lots of natural light on the third
floor of Beardsley—encouraged the students’ development and helped reinforce the fact that the College had come
to truly respect their craft. Third, hiring
four faculty members in art history and
four in studio has brought balance to
the department. Finally, changing the
studio art major a few years ago to
include 7 credits in studio art and 4 in
art history (for years, the requirements
were equal—5 credits in each) has
enabled the department to offer a program that reflects the seriousness of
studio art as an academic discipline.
“It has been, and still is, a constant
upstream effort,” says Kitao, who is
planning to retire in 2001. Through the
process of natural selection, as Kitao
archly describes it, many faculty members who opposed giving studio art its
own major are no longer at the College.
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

JIM GRAHAM

Professor T. Kaori Kitao: “It has been, and still is, a constant upstream effort.... We have to be constantly alert to potential opposition.”

Yet within the past 10 years, she has
noticed a wave of conservatism among
new faculty. “Some are alarmingly indifferent or unlearned in the matters of art.
We have to be constantly alert to potential opposition.”
But being unlearned in the matters of
art is inherent in American culture, says
Exon. “There’s a problem with arts education in this country today,” he says.
“There are so many people with no education in art at all. Educational systems
in other parts of the world see the study
of art as fundamental, as evidence of a
person’s intelligence.”

M

ark Van Buskirk sneaks out of
the List Gallery, where his
paintings are on exhibit for
Alumni Weekend, and sits for few
moments on a brick wall. Van Buskirk
has been exhibiting his art for 10 years,
since he graduated as a studio arts
major in 1989, and has been teaching
painting and drawing in the bachelor of
fine arts program at Mississippi State. In
the fall, though, he’ll move into a teaching position at Earlham College—a

SEPTEMBER 1999

small, Quaker-founded liberal arts
school in Indiana.
“I made a real conscious decision to
move from a fine arts professional program to a program like the one at
Swarthmore. I know that you can teach
students technical skills, as a fine arts
program does, but I also believe that
they need the balance of liberal arts,”
Van Buskirk says. “I know a lot of great
artists, and none of them is stupid. They
need nourishment outside their field in
order to make compelling statements in
their work.”
For a high school student who wants
a college degree in art, there are essentially two choices: a professional program at an art school or university or an
art major at a liberal arts college. Virginia Red, provost of the University of
the Arts in Philadelphia, calls it a yinyang situation. “It depends on students
and how they want to balance their
time,” she says. At the University of the
Arts, students take one third of their
credits in the liberal arts. The rest of
their time is spent in studio classes.
“They don’t have to steal the time to do

the studio work that they want to do.
And so they graduate with an impressive portfolio and with enough practical
experience to jump right into an entrylevel position in their field.”
When speaking with prospective
Swarthmore students who have an
interest in studio art, Department Chair
Randall Exon is careful to distinguish
between what a larger art school would
offer and what Swarthmore offers—
essentially the mirror image of the program at the University of the Arts. “I
know many artists who are one-dimensional but not the artists who come
through this program,” he says. “I have
students who can tell me the chemical
makeup of a particular patina they’re
using on their sculpture. They don’t just
know the techniques—they know how
their materials are made. They know the
chemicals. They link what they’re learning outside of the studio with what
they’re doing in the studio. That’s what
makes us different from a professional
school.”
It’s not just the chemicals either. It’s
Please turn to page 67
15

Swarthmore College boasts hundreds of artists among its
alumni—amateurs and professionals of all ages and talents
who work in almost every medium. All of them are also “liberal artists” because they have received a liberal education at
the College instead of the career-oriented training they might
have received in an art school. They tend to think differently
about their art, drawing relationships and influences from art,
science, history, politics, and literature. Some Swarthmore
artists realized early in their lives that they wanted to draw or
paint or sculpt. Others started later. Still others, we suspect,
are waiting for the moment when they can indulge their creativity. This “liberal artists’ gallery” showcases the work of six
Swarthmoreans who have followed their hearts into art.

THE
LIBERAL
ARTISTS’
GALLERY
Six Swarthmore artists
By Vicki Glembocki

Jessica Smith ’99
“It’s a really hard decision to
become a studio art major,” says
Jessica Smith ’99. “You’re basically saying: ‘I am going to major in
art, I’m not going to be able to get
a job, I’m not going to make any

“UNTITLED”

16

money, and I’m not going to be
taken seriously by a lot of people.’
You’re really putting yourself on
the line.” And those, says Smith,
are exactly the kind of things you
can’t worry about if you’ve decid-

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ed to be an artist. You just have to
make art.
“That’s really the emphasis
here at Swarthmore,” she says,
“doing art for the art, making art
the most important thing.” Studying with studio art professor and
painter Celia Reisman, Smith
found that what she needed to
learn more than anything else was
how to keep making art, what to
do to keep making art. (The painting at left is one of Smith’s early
works, done in Reisman’s class.)
“That’s the focus I’ve left with,”
says Smith. After graduation,
Smith took off to Poland, where
she spent the summer painting
before returning to Brooklyn,
N.Y., where she intends to work
and paint before applying to graduate programs in the fine arts.

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SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

“ST. LOUIS STARS, 1929”

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30 x 40 INCHES

Nancy Parks Valelly ’52
“I came to art very late in the
game,” says Nancy Valelly ’52. In
fact, it took three years of studying political science at Swarthmore, another year at the University of Puerto Rico, two years finishing up at City College in New
York, a couple of decades traveling around the world with her
husband who was an international banker, and a few years living in
Alexandria, Va., before Valelly
moved to New England and, in
1987, took her first painting class
at the Rhode Island School of
Design.
Since then, she’s evolved into
what some might call a folk artist.

SEPTEMBER 1999

Her oil paintings, simple and primitively styled, often deal with historical events and usually work as
part of a series. Her exhibit South
Carolina Memories, for example,
was shown this summer at the
Coastal Discovery Museum in
Hilton Head and chronicled early
African-American experiences in
South Carolina, where Valelly now
lives. (Her son, Richard Valelly
’75, teaches political science at
the College.)
“The hardest part is coming up
with the idea, problem solving,
creating something within a general theme,” Valelly explains. “The
act of painting is secondary to the

idea. I don’t think you could sit
there and chew gum and play basketball and come up with a coherent body of work.”

17

Jesse Amar ’91
Jesse Amar ’91 is a sculptor who
thinks the term traditional is
almost pejorative when applied to
his work. He admits he’s not an
avant-garde artist, but he doesn’t
apologize for his representational
figures in cast bronze. “It was the
most natural course for me,” says
the Gloucester, Mass.–born artist,
who worked with his hands from
an early age as apprentice to his
father, a carpenter.
He came to Swarthmore thinking to major in English literature
but graduated in studio art. He
took full advantage of the liberal
arts curriculum, boning up on art
history (“the academic backbone
of the program,” he says) and
English courses. As a graduate
student at American University,
he says he was “able to draw references from literature that most
of my classmates were at a loss to
do.”
Amar is not yet able to support
himself entirely with his art. He
has continued to work as a carpenter and as an ornamental plaster craftsman while accepting
commissions and making new

sculptures. He’s teaching this fall
at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania and, modeling himself after
his friend and mentor Randall
Exon, would like to be an artist/
teacher at the college level.
He credits Haverford College’s
Christopher Cairns with teaching
him both the aesthetics and techniques of sculpture. “The people

“DEATH”

18

at Swarthmore were great about
my studying with Chris; it was the
right thing for me at the time,” he
says. But he asserts that his
Swarthmore education gave him a
chance to “read and write and
exercise my brain,” something he
believes has definitely helped him
become a better artist.

BRONZE RELIEF

13 x 13 INCHES

SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

“EVENING, LANCASTER COUNTY”

Timi Sullivan ’75
“If you wanted to do art at Swarthmore, you were kind of on your
own,” says Timi Sullivan ’75.
“There were a few art courses.
But Swarthmore knew what it did
well, and studio art wasn’t what
they did here back then.” It also
wasn’t what Sullivan did at
Swarthmore back then. Though
she’d always wanted to be a
painter, she decided to major in
literature and fill her creative arts
requirements—limited then to 5
credits per student—with painting courses.
When professors would send
SEPTEMBER 1999

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the students outdoors in search
of a landscape on campus to
paint, Sullivan would go into the
Crum Woods or sit along the
creek. “This campus is so beautiful, a perfect place for a painter to
be,” she says. After graduation,
she attended the Boston Museum
School, where she painted from
morning until night. (“It was an art
school,” she says. “That’s all they
did.”) Then, for several years, she
taught art at colleges and secondary schools and recently got a
master of fine arts degree from
Penn. Living in Glen Mills, Pa., Sullivan is still painting local landscapes inspired by the parks and

11 X 12.5 INCHES

hills of Delaware County. Her oil
paintings are small and delicate
and often portray early morning
or late evening. Says Sullivan: “I
try to capture the character of a
place.” ■

19

Mark Van Buskirk ’89
“I’d rather be around people in
other disciplines than be around
other painters,” says Mark Van
Buskirk ’89. “Finding the connections between them, between different disciplines, can make really
good art.” After Swarthmore, Van
Buskirk received an M.F.A. at
Boston University and taught
painting at Mississippi State University, where he stole as much
time in the studio as he possibly
could. His oil paintings are bold
and colorful, and his subjects can
be anything from chocolate
éclairs to cows. “I take the stuff of
my life, paint it, and look to see
how the painting clarifies or
enhances my relationship to it,”

“DARLENE IN MOTION”

20

Van Buskirk says.
His Swarthmore class—at that
time the largest group of students
to graduate with studio arts
degrees—proved how a liberal
arts background could enhance a
career in art. One woman doublemajored in chemistry and art, got
an M.F.A., interned at the National
Gallery of Art, and then put it all
together publishing chemistry
books. Another student was a
ceramics major, went to art
school and dropped out, started
in book publishing in New York,
and is now publishing art books.
Even now, as an assistant professor of art at Earlham College in
Indiana, Van Buskirk still looks for

CHARCOAL

a lot of his inspiration outside of
the art world. “My students
always have questions that I have
never even considered,” he says.
“That keeps me alive and keeps
me addressing different issues—
which ultimately affects my
work.”

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SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

Nathan Florence ’94
Nathan Florence ’94 believes that
part of a liberal arts education is
keeping your options open. By
coming to Swarthmore, that’s
exactly what he learned to do.
Arriving at the College as an engineering major and thinking about
eventually going to medical
school, Florence considered
painting to be “a cool thing but
not a career.” Then, in the middle
of his organic chemistry and
physics classes, he’d suddenly
catch himself thinking: “I hate
this. I don’t want to do this.”
He went to the registrar, said
he was planning on getting an
M.F.A. after Swarthmore, and
asked if an art school would care
if he dropped organic chemistry.
“She said ‘no,’” Florence remembers. So he withdrew from the
class; dove headfirst into painting;
and, after graduation, got married
and landed a job as a designer at
the Franklin Mint in Philadelphia.
“Again, I knew it wasn’t what I
wanted to do. And I also knew
that it wasn’t ever going to be any
easier to quit my job and be a
painter. It wasn’t as if, in a few
years, I’d say, ‘oh look, now we
have a couple of kids and a mortgage; now might be a good time to
paint.’ So I quit my job.”
That was two years ago, and
Florence has been painting full-

time ever since. His oil paintings,
often landscapes or portraits, all
start as sketches that are either
inspired by something he sees or
by a philosophical concept he’s
toying with. “I just go into the
painting and try to figure it out,”
he says.

“MARIAN”

SEPTEMBER 1999

Five years after graduation,
things are looking up for Florence. He’s represented by a
Philadelphia gallery, has won a
grant from a foundation that supports young artists, and will have
a one-man show in Santa Fe, N.M.,
this winter.

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56 x 72 INCHES

21

David Page’78 reveals the evolutionary roots of sex and gender.
By Carol Cruzan Morton

F

or a guy whose work brought new respect to the
has evolved fast and furiously, a story Page is preparing to
scorned but macho Y chromosome, geneticist David
tell more fully.
Page ’78 seems downright mild mannered. In his office
Over the past few thousand years, poets, playwrights,
on a chilly January evening, he looks out over the lights of
philosophers, and, most recently, special prosecutors have
Cambridge and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
gone to great lengths to explain the various delights and
and marvels about the differences between the sexes.
woes resulting from sexual dimorphism. Researchers, too,
“Sometimes people ask me how sex evolved,” Page says.
have tackled the elusive understanding of the sexes from per“Most people are thinking about the act, but I’m thinking
spectives ranging from behavior to physiology. But as a
about the co-existence of two different forms within a
geneticist, Page picked the loneliest place on the genome.
species. It makes for a wonderful subject of study.”
Once the Y chromosome was discovered to be the key to
For scientific inquiry, the two sexes can be defined at
maleness in 1959, it languished under the palling weight of
many levels. What makes a man male? What makes a woman
scientific apathy. Amid 45 other human chromosomes, all
female? Externally, the differences may mean
generous sausages stuffed with genes, the Y is
beard or breasts, penis or clitoris, scrotum or
the runt of the human genome. Page estimates
labia. Internally, men have testes that make
22 genes are now known on the Y. Its X partner,
sperm, and women have ovaries that hold
on the other hand, may house as many as 3,000
chromosomes
eggs. And then there are differences in horgenes, including those that code for muscle
mones, behavior, and identity.
development, blood clotting, and color vision.
are
the
runts
Genetically, in humans and other mammals,
The X chromosome has been intensely—
sex differences boil down to a mismatched set
and disproportionately—studied, Page believes,
of the human
of chromosomes. Men and women have in
because of its link to many inherited traits and
genome
common 22 pairs of the puffy, cinch-waisted
disorders that almost exclusively affect males.
blobs called chromosomes. What’s different is
In males, no backup X covers for absent or
and have
the 23rd set, the sex-determining chromomutated genes. Or, as Page puts it, X genes in
languished in
somes, which are named “X” and “Y.” Women
the male “fly without co-pilots.” Thus, up to 10
usually have two Xs; men typically have an X
percent of men suffer nicks and dings in their
scientific
paired with a Y. Page started here.
single X in the form of color blindness,
The emerging story of the Y chromosome
hemophilia, and more than 300 other genetic
obscurity.
has been written, in large part, by Page and his
traits. Even before the current understanding of
Until now.
graduate students and postdoctoral fellows.
genes, people were aware of the special heritaThey have shown that the Y does a lot more
ble properties of the X. “In elaborations of Judathan define a male. Page’s group has found
ic writings, there were proscriptions exempting
genes on the Y that are needed for cellular processes
from circumcision boys whose maternal uncles died at cirthroughout the body. He has also found that the Y may be a
cumcision,” Page says. “They recognized hemophilia as an Xhaven for genes that guys need in order to chauffeur their
linked disorder thousands of years ago.”
half of the genome to the next generation.
As a piece of genomic real estate, by contrast, the Y had
The Y chromosome doesn’t have a monopoly on maleall the appeal of rapidly eroding beach-front property when it
friendly genes, which are scattered around on the genome,
caught Page’s attention. Although the X and Y probably startbut these genes may have a difficult time staying in the coed
ed out as equal partners about 200 million to 300 million
gene pool. It appears that when genetic members of the heyears ago, somewhere along the way, the Y became isolated
man club are kicked off the communal chromosomes, the Y
and unable to engage in most of the healthy gene-swapping
may provide a refuge for these outcasts, preserving crucial
that shores up and sustains other chromosomes with fresh
jobs such as the several Y genes that seem to be necessary to
genetic material.
produce any or enough sperm. The human Y chromosome
An isolated chromosome rapidly becomes an endangered

Y

22

SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

SAM OGDEN / WHITEHEAD INSTITUTE

chromosome. Biologists have shown in fruit flies that an isolated chromosome will evolve out of existence in little more
than 35 fruit-fly generations. Scientists believed—until Page’s
work—that the Y had withered down to a single-purpose tool.
For a couple of days more than seven months before the
birth of each baby boy, the Y turns on the male gender
switch, starting the cascade of events leading to growth of the
male sex organs, hormone production, and male behavior.

David Page received an M.D. in 1984, a MacArthur Fellowship
in 1986, and an honorary degree from Swarthmore in 1989.
SEPTEMBER 1999

Nature takes an unnecessary risk, it seems, by maintaining
an isolated sex chromosome in humans and so many other
species. After all, animals really don’t need two different sex
chromosomes to make males and females. For example, turtles and alligators have the two sexes but no sex chromosomes; sons and daughters are determined by the egg incubation temperatures. For that matter, living creatures really
don’t need two sexes to have two parents. All the benefits of
gene swapping conceivably could come from two individuals
of a single gender, such as in baker’s yeast, whose gametes
look identical. Such musings deepen the mystery of when
and how two distinct forms, male and female, sperm and egg,
X and Y, arose.
And by rigorously following such musings, Page made his
mark quite early in his career. He runs an internationally
respected lab at one of the country’s top research institutes,
the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, and is an
investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Born in Harrisburg, Pa., Page grew up in the Pennsylvania
countryside. Until he attended Swarthmore, he had never
met a scientist. Swarthmore professors and alumni gave Page
his first taste of raw science. The summer before his junior
year, he worked at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on
Long Island. The following summer, he lined up a heady
research position under the mentorship of Robert Simpson
’59, then at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Md. This was Page’s first exposure to cutting-edge molecular biology. He began to design his own experiments and
became obsessed with the biological puzzle, returning to
Simpson’s NIH lab the next summer as well.
“I was really living and breathing the edge of the unknown,” Page says. “The pure excitement of being the first
person in the world to know something was absolutely captivating.”
Page graduated with a degree in chemistry and entered
Harvard Medical School. For advice on a summer lab position, Page turned to Nobel Prize winner David Baltimore ’60,
then a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) and now president of California Institute of Technology, who suggested David Botstein, a pioneer in genetic engineering and studies of heredity. Botstein put Page to work on
what turned out to be the precursor to the Human Genome
Project, the current unprecedented effort to identify all the
genes on the human genome.
Page liked the pure science but still thought of himself as a
physician in training. A little over a year later, however, he
took a leave from medical school. He spent six months working in a remote Liberian hospital and then another year and a
half in Botstein’s lab. In Liberia, he endeared himself to the
Toronto medical student who would eventually become his
wife by chasing hoards of cockroaches from her room before
her arrival. Back in Boston, Page thrived in the lab. He began
wavering between research science and medicine. He finished an M.D. degree in spring 1984 and was offered a fellowship at the new biomedical research institute affiliated with
MIT being built across the street. The Whitehead Fellows program was designed to jump-start promising researchers by
providing a lab and an assistant. Then Page won a MacArthur
Fellowship, nicknamed the “genius” prize, in 1986. The institute broke its rules about not promoting internally and
named Page to its faculty in 1988. The next year, Swarthmore
23

Y

SAUL ROSENBAUM

awarded him an honorary degree—rare for
Then the bad news started trickling in, soon
someone so young.
becoming a flood. It was the wrong gene, sugPage calls his involvement with the Y a fluke.
gested subsequent reports from a British team.
chromosomes
In the Botstein lab, he arbitrarily selected one
The sex-determining gene for males was the
of a million snippets of DNA to develop a tool
neighboring SRY. The foundation of Page’s
provide a
that other scientists could use as a landmark
work was solid, but he had misinterpreted the
living record
when exploring the human genome. The genetdata. He had been working with DNA from an
ic signpost Page developed signaled a shared
XY female who was missing more than this one
of their
set of sequences on both the X and Y chromogene from her Y.
somes. A use for this new tool emerged at his
“You commit yourself to ideas you think are
genetic
first scientific meeting, where he met Albert de
so wonderful,” Page says. “Sometimes they
history—and
la Chapelle, who had described the first case of
have a useful lifetime of six months; other
sex-reversed XX males in the 1960s.
times, they last decades.” For a time, the atmoclues to the
Together, they proved a theory that XX
sphere of intense competition took the fun out
males actually carry the tiny piece of the Y
of science for Page. But after some soul-searchorigins of
chromosome that turns on the male switch in
ing, he found his bearings again in the “pure
inherited
the embryo. It also explained the unusual
beauty of the question.”
occurrence of XY females, who they found were
Meanwhile, in 1992, his group was among
diseases.
missing the same piece, then known as the
the first to clone a human chromosome—the Y,
testes-determining factor. The question of how
of course. (Another group had cloned chromotwo forms within a species evolved gets murkier when the
some 21 and published results one day earlier.) Page’s lab
two forms represent a continuum rather than an absolute.
produced the first comprehensive map of the Y chromosome
Complete sex reversal happens in 1 in 20,000 people. But
and provided DNA landmarks to navigate its genetic informaabout 1 in 2,000 people have minor abnormalities in sexual
tion. Two years ago, his group reported 12 new genes, more
differentiation, thanks to wayward extra pieces or a missing
than doubling the total number of known genes on the Y
part of the Y chromosome.
chromosome.
Hot on the trail of identifying the crucial maleness switch
The genes readily sorted into two classes. Some code for
in that small piece of Y, Page narrowed the elusive gene
proteins expressed in only testes, where sperm is made. The
down to one candidate, called the “ZFY.” (Genes tend to be
other category of genes makes proteins needed in all cells.
called by three- to four-letter abbreviations describing the
Known as “housekeeping” genes, they have nearly identical
most relevant insight or function at the time of naming.) Or
counterparts on the X chromosome. (News of these shared
so he thought. Headlines around the world heralded the
genes, some of which help maintain body cells, tickled
newly discovered gene for maleness. Page was 31 years old
reporters, who delighted in the irony that the Y was home to
and three years out of medical school, where the only formal
housekeeping genes and wondered about more characterisresearch training he received was as a medical student on
tic male genes for belching, loud snoring, obsessive channel
leave.
surfing, and inability to ask directions.)
The housekeeping
genes also offered new
insight into a medical
condition known as
Turner syndrome.
Often fatal in the
womb, females who
are born with only one
X chromosome suffer
short stature, infertility, and defects in many
organs. Yet males
seemed to survive
with one X. The newly
discovered housekeeping genes on the Y suggested people need at
least two copies of several genes, either on
both Xs or on the X
and Y.
Although housekeeping genes were
not previously recognized on the Y, their
presence isn’t a com24

SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

SEPTEMBER 1999

ual
Unus

XX
Male

Normal

XY
Male

Unus
ual

XY
Male

SAUL ROSENBAUM

plete surprise. After all, scientists had long postulated that
the X and Y were once a matched set of chromosomes. Why
wouldn’t the mismatched chromosomes still share a few
genes in common?
A paper published in April may present the most complete
picture to date about the Y’s rapid evolution. The genes on
the Y chromosome have revealed three major evolutionary
plot lines to Page and his associates. The first is persistence.
Some genes on the Y have persevered from the ancestral X,
accounting for about 1 percent of the Y’s length and including the housekeeping genes. Other genes tell a story of
“transposition,” where a dislodged piece of another chromosome found refuge on the Y, which includes at least one gene
(known as DAZ, an acronym for “deleted in azoospermia”)
necessary to make sperm. The third story told by the Y genes
is “retroposition,” a fancy word for a more streamlined version of a gene from another chromosome homesteading on
the Y.
Page is completing a kind of unifying history of the sex
chromosomes, dismissing with a final wave the old notion of
the Y as a degenerate X and offering provocative ways of
looking at both the modern Y and X. In a sense, the working
genes on the X and Y chromosome provide a kind of living
fossil record of their history.
From a 50–50 shared responsibility, Page says, the genetic
workload of producing proteins shifted to the X and diminished on the Y. When the gene activity was fully transferred
to the X, the Y lost the gene, and one X gene was able to
make so much protein that only one X gene was needed.
“Ninety-nine percent of the genes once shared are already
at this end point,” Page says. “That’s why there are 100 times
more genes on the X. The X and Y still have a long way to go
in reaching the inevitable outcome where the genes have
shifted entirely from two copies per pair to one copy per pair
of sex chromosomes. Once they’ve shifted, there’s no problem, but this unfinished business has medical consequences.
I would argue that Turner syndrome is a manifestation of the
incomplete evolution of the youngest parts of the X and Y.”
Although Page contributed new research techniques early
in his career, these days he’s more of a thinker than a doer. “I
don’t do experiments with my own hands,” Page says. “I help
chose experiments, provide strategic guidance, and help
interpret things. It’s especially interesting when data
announces an answer to a question you haven’t even asked.”
In a field dominated by large consortiums and huge group
efforts, Page fields a small research team, gives them the best
equipment and latest technologies, and waits for what he
calls the “data heroes” to work their magic. In calling them
heroes, Page refers to the leap of faith his students take when
“choosing to take on monumental tasks and figure out how to
accomplish them without going insane.” For example, in two
years, Bruce Lahn, the graduate student who found 12 new
genes on the Y, “accomplished the equivalent of all the
world’s previous molecular studies of the Y,” Page says.
Page can clone a catchy phrase with the same precision
his research associates can clone genes. Page not only excels
at explaining genetic research and its implications, he feels a
responsibility to share this information with people affected
in some way by it.
“In the case of the Y, evolution has operated as an opportunistic real estate broker,” Page says. “Let’s assume that all
genes relocate periodically. If some of those genes happen to

be beneficial to males but not of much use or even detrimental to females, the real estate broker of evolution says, ‘Have I
got a home for you.’”
But the Y is genetically unstable and occasionally loses
genes in individual mutations. Four years ago, Page’s group
and their Finnish colleagues found that a specific defect in
the Y chromosome may be responsible for 13 percent of
cases of azoospermia, the complete inability to make sperm
and the severest form of male infertility. On a region of the Y
known as AZF, they suspect one gene in particular, DAZ. Page
has let people know that these findings affect couples seeking
a type of fertility treatment called intracytoplasmic sperm
injection, where doctors inject a single sperm into an egg to
circumvent the low sperm counts. Because men may pass
along the very Y mutation that made them infertile, they risk
creating an infertile son.
Lately, Page has put this combination of communication
skills and social consciousness to work as chair of the Whitehead Task Force on Genetic Testing, Privacy, and Public Policy. The task force aims to stimulate informed discussion
about some of the social and legal ramifications of the human
genetics revolution. Last spring, the task force hosted what is
believed to be the largest public symposium addressing these
issues. The participants included scientists, students, media,
legal experts, and ordinary citizens. On a smaller scale, Page
has made many presentations to members of state government, trial lawyers, health care advocates, business leaders,
the insurance industry, and the federal judiciary.
He’s also exploring how humans make eggs and sperm,
which are called germ cells—another way of defining male
and female. In the early days of an embryo, when it is still a
mass of undifferentiated cells, before it makes a heart, a liver,
or a hand, it puts aside certain cells that will form the next
generation’s germ cells. Only then does it see to the rest of
the details of shaping a human.
“In a sense, you can view the rest of the body as the germ
cell container,” Page says. “In evolutionary terms, it’s all built
around the germ cells. It’s obvious that the egg came first,
and the chicken came later to serve the egg. As my high
school biology teacher used to say: ‘We are all mere drops in
a stream of protoplasm that’s been flowing for billions of
years.’” ■
Carol Cruzan Morton is a science journalist based in Boston.
25

26

JIM GRAHAM

S

arah Azaransky ’98 is perched on a
low wall inside Jerusalem’s Jaffa
Gate, ignoring a man who thinks
she needs company. “Creepy guy number three,” she sighs, then turns to him
and says, for the third time that afternoon, “Go away, I’m not interested.” He
finally gets the message and drifts off.
Swarthmore’s latest Watson Fellow
has been on the road for 10 months
now, and these types of confrontations
don’t faze her anymore. She’s already
spent six months in Belfast, doing volunteer work for women’s peace groups
and sitting in on monthly meetings of
women from both sides of the Northern
Ireland conflict. It’s part of the Watson
Fellowship project she designed, to
study the role of women in the peace
process.
She felt focused and happy in Belfast,
but now she’s in Israel, and it’s frustrating. She doesn’t speak Hebrew or Arabic, the peace process has been stalled
by Netanyahu’s government, and she
really misses Snapple and Thursday
night television. She’s making plans to
leave in a few days for Sri Lanka, another hotbed of conflict. “The problem is, I
keep feeling like I’m not doing enough
with this opportunity or living up to the
reponsibility of being a fellow,” she says,
echoing what Swarthmore’s Watson Fellows have been saying for 30 years.
It’s not that Azaransky is failing as a
Watson Fellow. It’s that the Watson Fellowship doesn’t give out any grades or
provide a formal evaluation. You never
have a final exam. There is no thesis to
turn in at the end of the year. For
Azaransky, it’s a challenge to shift gears
and let herself be the judge of whether
she is succeeding or failing. “I know I’m
doing my project, and I’m learning a ton,
but it’s so different not having the feedback,” she says.
Azaransky is one of 57 Swarthmoreans who have received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship since the fellowship was
first created 30 years ago. Perhaps the
most creative fellowship around, the
Watson was founded by the Watson
family in the name of Thomas J. Watson
Sr., founder of IBM. Up to 60 fellowships
are offered each year to graduating
seniors from 25 top colleges, which
nominate finalists. In the original

Noam Unger ’99, Swarthmore’s latest Watson Fellow, plans to visit nine countries on the 10th parallel, making a film of activities at midday. His project is
typical of the creative years abroad encouraged by the Watsons.

brochure from 1969, the foundation
describes their raison d’être: to provide
“a focused and disciplined wanderjahr....
A period in which [the fellows] might
have some surcease from the increasingly prescribed educational lockstep ...
in which they might have an unusual
opportunity to test themselves.”

T

he fellowship consists of a
$22,000 stipend ($31,000 for married fellows and those accompanied by legal dependents) to pursue a
project of the fellow’s own devising for
a full year. The only stipulations are
that the fellows live abroad for the full
year—no trips home midway through
the year—and check in periodically
with the foundation, including a final
report chronicling the year’s adventures.
Does the fellowship offer a year to
sample the microbrews of Prague, study
the economics of rickshaw drivers in
Nepal, or hunt for fossils in Mozam-

bique? Yes, and no. What the Watson
family envisioned was a journey that
would broaden the minds of fellows and
challenge new graduates to learn about
themselves. The projects are important
inasmuch as they give the fellows a
focus and a purpose, but those at the
foundation care more about Sarah
Azaransky, and the kind of world citizen
she’ll become after her year of traveling
on her own. They care that she learns
to be self-reliant, adapt to new cultures,
and wrestle with her own identity and
values as a result of being exposed to
different ones.
The Fulbright and Rhodes Scholarships and the Guggenheim Fellowship
focus on academic excellence, whereas
the Watson family created a fellowship
that invests in the character development of its fellows. In many ways, the
Watsons’ vision was not unlike the philosophy behind liberal arts education,
where studying a broad range of topics
is as much about knowledge as it is perSWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

AROUND
THE
WORLD
FOR
30 YEARS
Since 1969, Watson Fellowships
have offered new graduates
a chance to test themselves.
By Laura Markowitz ’85

sonal transformation through knowledge and, perhaps, the growth of wisdom.
It may sound like a year to play, but
any Watson Fellow, past or present, will
tell you it’s difficult work. Some fellows
have flown across the globe only to discover that their projects were not feasible and then had to renegotiate with the
SEPTEMBER 1999

foundation about what they would do
for the year. Even those who had a successful Watson year—the vast majority,
in fact—struggled through bleak
moments when loneliness, weariness,
and homesickness made it seem more
of a chore than a privilege to be a Watson Fellow.
“This is going to be the most inde-

pendent thing I’ve ever done,” says
Noam Unger ’99, about to leave on his
Watson fellowship, which will involve
making a documentary film of how people move, stand, use their hands and sit,
from a cross-cultural perspective. He
plans on filming at midday on the 10th
parallel, going to Costa Rica, Venezuela,
Guinea, Ivory Coast, Ghana, India, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines.
“There’s never been a time when I’ve
been as alone as I’m about to be, and I’m
worried that I’ll get sick of myself,” he
says.
He can’t imagine what it will feel like
to adapt to seven countries in 12
months, what he’ll do if his equipment
fails, or how he’ll handle the technical
challenges of filming during the strong
light of midday. He is struggling with the
ethics of filming people unawares and
what it will mean to film them looking at
him while he is looking at them. “I feel
scared,” he admits, “but if I can do this, I
will know I can do absolutely anything
for the rest of my life. That’s pretty
cool.”

F

ormer Watson Fellows would
agree with Unger. “My Watson
year permanently immunized me
from the idea that only a settled way of
life is legitimate,” says Judith Mayer ’77,
now an environmental planning professor at Virginia Tech and a visiting scientist at the Center for International
Forestry Research in Bogor, Indonesia.
During her Watson year, Mayer studied
handcraft industries in Southeast Asia
and Sri Lanka, including apprenticing
herself to a batik master in Yogyakarta,
Indonesia, and setting up her own workshop in Bali. She has since had a Fulbright, a National Science Foundation
Fellowship, and an Institute for Current
World Affairs fellowship.
“Each of these research periods have
required a lot of self-confidence to go to
a new place and quickly develop expertise and to feel comfortable outside my
home culture,” she says, “all of which I
learned during my Watson year.” Like
many Watson Fellows, Mayer had traveled abroad during her college years,
but it was nothing like her Watson year,
she says. There was no program to fall
27

28

LAURA MARKOWITZ

back on, no adviser to check in with,
and no choice about changing your
mind and going home. More important,
there was the responsibility to the foundation. They had chosen her, one of 60
or so out of a field of hundreds of candidates. She didn’t want to waste the
opportunity or their faith in her.
The newly appointed director of the
Watson Foundation, Tori Haring-Smith
’74 says she has been treating her life
like a Watson ever since she had the fellowship. During her Watson year, she
and her husband, Robert, visited the 13
smallest countries in the world. It was a
dream that had started in seventh
grade, after she read a book called
Report From Practically Nowhere by John
Sack, who had visited those countries in
the mid-1950s.
In the end, she went to only 10 of the
countries though. Amb had been flooded and was at the bottom of a lake, Punjal was inaccessible by plane, and
Sikkim had been taken over by India the
week before she was set to go. But she
did get to see Lundy—an island that
blocks the mouth of the Bristol channel,
with 30 citizens; Sark—the last surviving
feudal community in the world; Andorra, Monaco, Liechtenstein, Swat, San
Marino (“It’s in Northern Italy but had
an incongruous bust of Abraham Lincoln in its federal building,” remembers
Haring-Smith), Mount Athos, Sharja, and
the Sovereign Military Order of St. John
of Jerusalem, Rhodes, and Malta, a
country so small that it is a three-story
building in the center of Rome. “The
country can only house three people at
a time,” Haring-Smith says, “but even so,
they have their own stamps, coins, and
license plates.”
Haring-Smith became a professor of
theater at Brown and a freelance theater
director, but then left her tenured position at Brown and moved to Cairo to
teach and live for a few years, and is
now back to head up the Watson Foundation for two years. “My Watson experience taught me that no matter where I
am, I can survive and thrive,” she says.
“It gave me the ability to leave behind
what’s certain and pursue what’s important to me instead of what’s safe.”
Not every Watson project involves a
dozen countries, although the founda-

Above: Sarah Azaransky ’98 in
Jerusalem. She spent her Watson
year studying the role of women in
peace groups. In another Watson project last year, Alison Marsh ’98 took
factory tours and researched industrial monuments in Europe to write a
technical travel guide.
Right: Tori Haring-Smith ’74 is beginning a two-year stint as director of the
Watson Foundation.

tion likes to see fellows go places they
have never been before, to take them
out of the familiar and test their mettle.
D. Gene Dillman II ’85 set out for France
during his Watson year. He planned on
studying goat cheese making there, with
the thought that he might someday set
up a goat cheese industry back home in
Kentucky. “Looking at the backside of a
goat all day, I decided there was probably something else I should do with my
life,” says Dillman, now a family physician in Lexington, Ky. His interest in
medicine developed on the goat cheese
farms. “Most of the people who raise
goats have a lot of health problems
because it’s so physical—they get
carpal tunnel syndrome, shoulder rota-

tor cuff tears, things like that. I was
never interested in medicine at all until
my Watson year.” He apprenticed himself to a traveling French agriculture
expert and helped develop a survey that
is still used to assess sanitary conditions of dairies. “In too many ways to
tell, my Watson year changed me, but
mostly I would say it improved my ability to solve problems,” says Dillman.
“When you spend a lot of time in a different culture, you start to understand
that there are more options than the
ones you take for granted. There’s
always a different way of doing things.”
For Nancy Boyd-Franklin ’72, her Watson year shaped the course of her
future career as a family therapist. She
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

JOHN FORASTE

traveled to East and West Africa to look
at the differences between the use of
vernacular and national languages on
education, health, and mental health
care, spending time in Ethiopia (“a week
after the first coup—my mother almost
had a heart attack!” she says), Tanzania,
Kenya, Nigeria, and Ghana, with short
stops in Togo and the Ivory Coast. BoydFranklin started Swarthmore in 1968,
right after the death of Martin Luther
King Jr., and being an African-American
student during those years meant struggling to come to terms with her racial
identity. A year in Africa, where she was
in the majority, was eye-opening for her
and reinforced her sense of where she
was from and who she was. It also
SEPTEMBER 1999

changed the future of her career as a
family therapist. In Nigeria, she visited
Aro, a mental health village where
patients and their families lived while
the patient was being treated.
“My Watson year, and the experience
of Aro in particular, taught me to look at
‘family’ as an entity much broader than
just your blood. It’s your whole tribe,”
says Boyd-Franklin, who is considered
one of the leading African-American family therapists in the world today. “I am
so grateful to the Watson Foundation for
this real gift they gave me,” she says.
“It’s one of those very special experiences in my life that I often don’t talk
about but that shaped who I am in fundamental ways.”
Swarthmore’s most notorious Watson Fellow is probably Nancy Bekavac
’69, now president of Scripps College
and member of Swarthmore’s Board of
Managers. Bekavac received the fellowship ($6,000 back then) the first year it
was offered and later served as the foundation’s director from 1985 to 1987.
Originally from Pennsylvania, Bekavac
had never been outside the United
States except for a brief border crossing
into Canada. Her plan was to visit the
places her favorite writers had lived and
worked—Ireland, for Yeats and Joyce,
and the Soviet Union, for Tolstoy and
Dostoevsky.
Carrying a portable typewriter and a
backpack, and with a $1,200 round-theworld airline ticket, Bekavac circled the
globe. After Ireland, she went to London
and met W.H. Auden. She took a train
across Russia in winter, went through
Eastern Europe and the Middle East—
including driving from Tehran through
Afghanistan and Pakistan to India and
then Nepal. She spent time in Southeast
Asia and then flew to Vietnam at the
height of the war and got a job as a
stringer for Catholic Welfare News and
Metro Media News. “It was a year of

unbelievable kindness from strangers,”
Bekavac says now, still moved to tears
by the memory of her rich Watson experience. “I learned that whatever the risks
of reaching out to people, the rewards
are so huge that they are worth it. I
learned that there are so many ways of
living a worthwhile life on this planet.
Not a day goes by that something from
my Watson journey isn’t with me.” ■
Laura Markowitz ’85 (below) spent her
Watson year in Ireland, England, Finland,
France, Israel, Thailand, and Sri Lanka
living in convents, Orthodox Jewish communities, and Buddhist monasteries to
explore how women make space for
themselves in patriarchal religions. She is
editor and publisher of In the Family
magazine and senior editor of Family
Therapy Networker magazine. She
served on the Watson Foundation’s Selection Committee in 1994–95.

COURTESY LAURA MARKOWITZ

W

hen you spend a lot of time in a
different culture, you start to
understand that there are more options
than the ones you take for granted. There’s
always a different way of doing things.”

29

Alumni Digest
Alumni Weekend
Virtual Photo Album
A first for Swarthmore:
Alumni Weekend ’99 is on the Web!
A special Web site at http://alumniweekend.swarthmore.edu.
features photos of class reunions
and other weekend events.

Meet Jody Sanford,
new in alumni relations

T

Upcoming events
Metro NYC: The Connection will sponsor book clubs featuring a syllabus by
Philip Weinstein, the Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of English
Literature. The book clubs will kick off
with an opening
lecture by Professor Weinstein on
Thursday, Oct. 21.
Pittsburgh: Connection Chair
Melissa Kelley ’80
has arranged a
private tour of
“The Architecture
of Reassurance:
Designing the Disney Theme Parks”
at the Andy
Warhol Museum,
followed by dinner and jazz at the
James Street
Restaurant on
Thursday, Sept.
23. The Connection will visit the
Carnegie Museum
on Wednesday,
Nov. 17.

Metro DC/Baltimore: Professor of
Classics Gilbert Rose lectured on “The
Greek Tragic Vision” to launch the
1999–2000 Connection book groups,
whose members
will read Greek literature in translation, led by Sue
Ruff ’60.

1999

Homecoming
September 25

2000

Black Alumni Weekend
March 17–19
Family Weekend
April 7–9
Alumni College
May 30–June 2
Alumni Weekend
June 2–4
Alumni College Abroad
in Spain
June 17–July 2

Recent events
Boston: Becky Joseph ’81 organized a
family walking tour of the Black Heritage Trail, while young alumni cele30

brated a happy hour at Flattop Johnny’s in Kendall Square in June.

Paris, France:
President and
Mrs. Alfred H.
Bloom hosted a
reception for
alumni, parents,
and friends at the
Ritz Hotel in Paris
in July, assisted
by Tom O’Donnell
’69.

Regional Swarthmore events are
run by volunteers.
If you would like to
organize an event
in your area,
please contact
Jody Sanford,
assistant director of alumni relations at
(610) 328-8404 or jsanfor1@swarthmore.edu. The latest information on
upcoming alumni events and activities
is on the alumni home page:
www.swarthmore.edu/Home/Alumni.

he Swarthmore community welcomed Jody Sanford in July as the
new assistant director of alumni relations, succeeding Katie Bowman ’94. A
native of Hyde Park, N.Y., Jody graduated from Cornell University in 1994
with a bachelor of science degree in
human development and family studies. Last spring, she earned a master’s
degree in education from the College
of William and Mary.
Jody has worked in admissions at
both Cornell and Marist College. As a
graduate student at William and Mary,
she organized campus events for the
student affairs office and planned
library fund-raising gatherings.
Alumni are getting acquainted with
Jody as they work with her on class
reunions and Alumni Weekend, Garnet Sage activities, regional Connection events, and other gatherings. She
looks forward to meeting others who
visit the Alumni Relations Office at the
west end of Parrish Hall.

JIM GRAHAM

STEVEN GOLDBLATT ʼ67

Handover: Elenor G.
Reid ’67, who began
a two-year term as
president of the
Alumni Association
in June, receives the
association gavel
from outgoing President John A. Riggs
’64. Riggs, who
shared this year’s
Shane Award for
alumni service to the
College with the
Alumni Gospel
Choir, will continue
to volunteer for
Swarthmore as the
next general chair of
the Annual Fund.

Jody Sanford, the College’s new assistant
director of alumni relations.
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

Swarthmore Alumni Council, 1999–2000
Officers of the
Alumni Association
President
Elenor G. Reid ’67
President-Designate
Richard R. Truitt ’66
Vice President
James P. DiFalco ’82
Vice President
Roberta A. Chicos ’77
Secretary
William J. Pichardo ’71

Lyndhurst, NY
Jed. S. Rakoff ’644
Larchmont, NY
Isaac T. Schambelan ’613
New York, NY
Gaurav Seth ’983
New York, NY
Zone C Connecticut, Maine,

Massachusetts, New Hampshire,
Rhode Island, and Vermont
Martha Sanders Beshers ’773
Barrington, RI
Andrew Caffrey III ’991
Somerville, MA

Members of
Alumni Council
Zone A Delaware, Pennsylvania
Allison Anderson Acevedo ’893
Philadelphia, PA
Robin Shiels Bronkema ’891
Wallingford, PA
Anthony J. Cheesebrough ’972
McDonald, PA
Elizabeth Killackey ’862
Lansdowne, PA
Duleesha P. Kulasooriya ’972
Glenolden, PA
J. Randolph Lawlace ’733,4
Wynnewood, PA

Zone D District of Columbia,
Maryland, and Virginia
Olushola I. Abidoye ’974
Bladensburg, MD
Margaret W. Capron ’693
Arlington, VA

Lauren S. Basta ’983
Oyster Bay, NY
J. David Gelber ’632
New York, NY
Willa Freeman Grunes ’472
Ithaca, NY
Nancy L. Hengen ’731
New York, NY
Karen J. Ohland ’834

Steven D. Gordon ’711
Falls Church, VA
M. Regina Maisog ’891
Baltimore, MD
David A. Maybee ’623
Rockville, MD
Alice Lund Norris ’554
Washington, DC
Zone E Illinois, Indiana, Iowa,
Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota,
Missouri, Nebraska, North
Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South
Dakota, Texas, West Virginia,
and Wisconsin

1 Term ends 2002 (new member).

SEPTEMBER 1999

Marialuz Castro ’983
Philadelphia, PA

Richard W. Mansbach ’642
Huxley, IA
Ashwin Rao ’991
Hinckley, OH

Connection Representatives
Boston
Jeremy Weinstein ’97
Cambridge, MA

Joel S. Taylor ’653
Bexley, OH
Burnham Terrell ’451
Minneapolis, MN

Chicago
Marilee Roberg ’73
Evanston, IL

Lesley C. Wright ’793
Iowa City, IA

Robert J. Amdur ’813
Lebanon, NH

Stephen L. Gessner ’662
Baltimore, MD

Rikki Abzug ’863
New York, NY

Member at Large

Dorothy K. Robinson ’721
Hamden, CT

Richard I.P. Ortega ’731
Glen Mills, PA

Zone B New Jersey, New York

Martha Easton ’891
Minneapolis, MN

Ruth Jones McNeill ’702
Medford, MA

John F. Leich ’422
Cornwall Bridge, CT

Henry B. Leader ’424
York, PA

Peter R. Warrington
Kingston, PA

David D. Wright ’691
Santa Barbara, CA

Zone F Alabama, Arkansas,
Florida, Georgia, Kentucky,
Louisiana, Mississippi, North
Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, territories, dependencies, and foreign countries

Kevin C. Chu ’721
Falmouth, MA

Catherine Livingston
Fernandez ’802
Bethesda, MD

’692

Joanna Bailey ’882
Grand Rapids, MI

Metro D.C./Baltimore
Kathy Stevens ’89
Silver Spring, MD
Metro N.Y.C.
Sanda J. Balaban ’94
New York, NY
Deborah Branker Harrod ’89
Jersey City, NJ
North Carolina
George Brown Telford III ’84
Durham, NC

P. William Curreri ’581
Daphne, AL
Timothy M. Kuykendall ’892
Mooresville, NC

Philadelphia
Jennifer J. Rickard ’86
Philadelphia, PA

Donna C. Llewellyn ’803
Marietta, GA

Pittsburgh
Melissa Kelley ’81
Pittsburgh, PA

Eric Osterweil ’563
Brussels, Belgium
Katharine Winkler ’931
Durham, NC
Zone G Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii,
Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New
Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming
Virginia L. Boucher ’731
Santa Ynez, CA
John B. Collins ’592
Seattle, WA
Marian Westover Gade ’562
Kensington, CA
Richard W. Kirschner ’491
Albuquerque, NM
Carola B. Sullam ’723
San Francisco, CA

2 Term ends 2000.

3 Term ends 2001.

San Francisco
Neal D. Finkelstein ’86
Oakland, CA
Rebecca L. Johnson ’86
Oakland, CA
Seattle
Deborah Read ’87
Seattle, WA
National Chair
Don Fujihira ’69
New York, NY
To contact a member of the
Alumni Council, call the Alumni
Relations Office at (610) 3288402, e-mail alumni@swarthmore.edu, or consult the 1999
edition of the Alumni Directory.

4 Nominating committee.

31

U ntil this summer, these tiny
photos lay hidden in the
back of a desk drawer—
perhaps since the1940s,
when ivy decorated many
Swarthmore buildings.
They remind us of how the
campus has both changed
and stayed the same.

Class Notes

32

SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

Alumni Profile
A diplomat’s eye
Ralph Fisher ’39 captures photographic light and perspective.

Fisher’s photographs include
(clockwise from
top left): Boats in
Nigeria’s Lagos Harbor; his favorite
photo of a woman
in Naples, Italy; and
the Fisher family in
Ethiopia in 1953.
Inset: Ralph Fisher
in 1998.

R

alph Fisher ’39 had a State
Department career that took
him to some of the most fascinating countries in the world. As
a Foreign Service Officer working on issues of agriculture or
economics, he, wife Sally, and
four sons have lived in Ethiopia, Korea,
Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, and Uganda.
But since he was an adolescent
attending school in Germany, he has
taken photographs—first with a Leica
35mm camera and later, in salon work,
with a Mamiya Rb67 camera that is perfect for creating 8 x 10 photographs. “I
prefer the larger negative,” he said. He
also processed the photos in his home
darkroom.
Fisher studied at the New York
School of Photography in the mid-1940s
and in 1976 with the internationally recSEPTEMBER 1999

ognized photographer
Fred Picker of Putney,
Vt. Fisher’s skill and
eye allowed him to
supplement his State
Dept. income by selling his photographs
through an agent in
New York. Photos he
took while on assignment for the State
Dept. have appeared in Grolier’s Encyclopedia, Foreign Service Journal, The
Washington Post, Yankee, Christian Science Monitor, and Vermont Life, the magazine of the state where he now lives.
The photograph he is proudest of
was taken in Naples in 1959 on his way
back to the United States after completing a two-year assignment in Ethiopia.
“I took the photo out of a hotel window
and focused on an elderly woman sitting in a chair across the way. She was
looking sad,” he recalled.
Today, Fisher doesn’t take many
photographs because of his diminished

eyesight, but he does take a lot of snapshots of his six grandchildren.
In 1972, Fisher retired from foreign
service work and moved to East Hardwick, Vt. Since then, he has taken photos of local Vermont scenes and still
lifes, but primarily he has been working
150 acres of sugarbush he owns.
His eldest son, Galen ’70, is the primary operator of Ralph Fisher & Sons
Maple Syrup, located in Greensboro,
Vt., which produced 605 gallons of
syrup from 2,200 trees last year. “It
takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup,” Ralph said.
Galen said his father’s work can still
be found on the walls of local Vermont
businesses: “I was at the health clinic
recently and saw one of my father’s photographs on the wall from about 10
years ago. They’re still around.”
“It gives me a great deal of pleasure.
I enjoy being able to capture the light
and find the perspective,” Ralph said.
“It’s an artistic outlet.”
—Audree Penner
37

Alumni Profile
“Conscience of the Senate”
Retired N.Y. Senator Franz Leichter ’52 traces his moral compass.

F

ranz Leichter ’52 (D/L, Manhattan/Bronx) retired last year after
serving 30 years in the N.Y. state legislature. Dubbed the “conscience of the
Senate” by The Village Voice, Leichter
was a tireless champion of justice and
fairness, no matter how unpopular the
cause or how hopeless the political
battle.
To rise to any level of prominence is
quite an accomplishment, considering
that Leichter spent his entire legislative
career—six years in the state assembly
and 24 in the senate—-as a member of
the minority party.
“It was not an easy 30 years,” admits
Leichter. “Constantly being in the
minority in a very partisan system is
frustrating. It is a struggle to get people
to pay attention to a minority bill in
Albany.” But given this political reality,
Leichter was uncommonly successful,
as his political friends and foes readily
admit.
A modest, pragmatic man, Leichter
exhibits pride when speaking of two
legislative accomplishments that stand
as bookends around his career. In 1970,
a bill he introduced made New York
the first state to legalize abortion. This
was three years before the U.S.
Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision
and an extremely controversial move
at the time—especially for a newcomer. “It was just the right thing to do,”
says Leichter of his pioneering effort.
And in 1998, Leichter and others,
working with the Hudson River Park
Alliance, succeeded in passing the Hudson River Park Act, which will create a
riverfront park between Battery City
and 59th Street in Manhattan, finally
opening up the riverfront to recreational use and limiting commercial development. “I view this as an environmental issue and also a way to make public
space available. The New York waterfront is just so spectacular.”
Both measures had immense opposition, requiring unusually demanding
public relations campaigns. But public
relations became one of Leichter’s
strong suits over the years. And
Leichter learned right away that, being
a minority politician, his strongest
allies might just be the public. He was
convinced that if he could make them
SEPTEMBER 1999

Franz Leichter ’52 credits Swarthmore, to
a great extent, for helping him develop
his moral sense of direction. He has carried the torch of a liberal outsider, voting
against a particular bill or challenging
legislative procedures that he perceived
as unfair.
aware of some of the wasteful, corrupt,
or undemocratic practices that existed
in government, they would react as
strongly as he did. So he launched into
investigations, compiling endless
reams of data and publishing reports
that exposed institutional injustices
and inefficiencies.
“I had to find some way to have an
impact. I didn’t want to just go up there
and be paid to have someone call me
‘senator’. I wanted to find a way to
move toward some of the goals I had,”
Leichter explains. “I needed to raise
issues and get some bills passed, and I
did so mainly by issuing reports and
holding press conferences to publicize
issues. Even while I was very frustrated
about all the things I couldn’t do, I certainly had some satisfaction and some
sense of achievement.”
Although his political adversaries
might cringe at the prospect of being
delivered a voluminous Leichter report
or having to endure a Leichter end-ofthe-year colloquy, he is a genuinely
well-liked and -respected man.

Leichter was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1930. His interest in public service came naturally, he says, as both of
his parents were active in politics in
Austria before World War II. He thereafter moved to New York and graduated from Swarthmore in 1952, majoring
in history with minors in both political
science and philosophy. He went
straight to Harvard Law School, but his
education was interrupted by being
drafted into the Korean War. Upon
graduation in 1957, he worked as a
Democratic Party official, beginning his
career alongside reformers Eleanor
Roosevelt and Governor Herbert
Lehman.
His reform politics garnered him a
reputation as a political maverick, an
apt description to this day. Whether
the issue has been environmental protection, consumer fraud, campaign
finance reform, or the degradation of
city parks by the laxity of dog owners
(hence, his famous “pooper scooper”
law), Leichter has not been afraid to
stand alone. More often, though, he has
stood with his constituents firmly
beside him.
Has it ever felt like a burden to carry
the torch as a liberal outsider? Leichter
is philosophical. “It would have been
difficult for me to cast a vote that I
didn’t believe in. And I really credit
Swarthmore, to a great extent, for helping me to develop my moral compass.
So I felt comfortable very often being
the only member of the legislature voting against a particular bill or challenging some of the procedures of the legislature that I thought were undemocratic, unfair or that closed government.”
After a moment, he playfully adds,
“Well, I guess I have a stubborn streak.”
In June, President Clinton nominated Leichter to a position on the Federal
Housing Finance Board, a position that
appealed to Leichter because it will
allow him to continue his involvement
in important issues of affordable housing and community investment. With
Senate confirmation likely this fall,
Leichter will be able to keep himself
“involved in his time” for at least another six years. Then, he’ll undoubtedly be
on to yet another cause.
—Terri-Jean Pyer ’77
45

Books & Authors
God’s Last Offer

fast as the news media can serve it.
Our global economy is based on a
system of blind accounting. Ayres
points out, “When profits are piling up,
the whole system looks so solid that it
seduces us into shutting our eyes to the
question of whether there may be hidden costs not reflected in the prices,
which someone, sooner or later, will
have to pay.” The economic system will
contribute more to the problem than to
the solution as long as it evades full
accounting of the true costs of production and fails to include all costs in its
prices to consumers up front. Market
economies have always suffered the
“tragedy of the commons,” and ecocatastrophes have undermined several
now-dead civilizations, but none before
ours has had the benefit of extensive
scientific knowledge of the problem and
of possible solutions.

COURTESY WORLD WATCH INSTITUTE

Ayres’ book is not a jeremiad. He
offers hope and suggests solutions. His
advice is compelling—inspiring in
Ed Ayres ’63, God’s Last Offer: Negotiplaces—but I found it frustrating as well.
ating for a Sustainable Future, Four
He suggests finding and joining a
Walls Eight Windows, New York, 1999.
“healthy community,” one that doesn’t
Revolutionary changes are sweeping the
“suck huge amounts of resources from
world. To say they are unprecedented in
the surrounding area, and expel huge
human history is an understatement. In
amounts of waste.” Where can I find
the history of our planet, there has
such a community without abandoning
never been anything like the titanic conthe part of the earth where I feel rooted,
fluence of events that Ed Ayres calls the
where I have spent a large part of my life
four “spikes”: skyrocketing surges in
soaking up knowledge about the natural
population, consumption, atmospheric
environment? The answer isn’t easy:
carbon dioxide, and extinction. It’s no
Help organize like-minded people and
wonder we don’t know what to do and
work to create such a community.
are in deep denial. As Ayres puts it: “It
Ayres ventures hopefully, “If the
[is] clear that we are in a megacrisis of
information climate is changed to make
our own making, and that we have a
the costs of excess consumption visible,
chance now to escape it before it
we might begin to see cultural attitudes
destroys us—but the chance won’t last
change in turn—and what seems politilong. The window of opportunity is closcally difficult would then become politiing fast.”
cally supported.” But how fast
This is as big a news story
can human culture, especially
T H E P O P U L AT I O N S P I K E
as an asteroid on a collision
human values, change? Fast
Millions of People (6,000 million = 6 billion)
course with the Earth. Why
enough to catch up with the
7,000
isn’t it on the front page of
dizzying curves of the four
➐ Global population now increases as
much every 3 days as it did in a
every newspaper and the lead
megaspikes and reverse their
whole century for most of the thousand
centuries we’ve been on Earth.
story on the evening news,
tilt, before the Earth’s bioevery single day? If you are
sphere permanently loses the
6,000
1999
confused about whether overcapacity to support more
➏ The U.S. Congress withdraws
American financial support for
population is still something
than a small fraction of our
international family planning—
you should worry about,
current population? It is
taking away an essential tool of
population stabilization.
whether global warming is
arguably too late already.
1987
5,000
caused by human activity, or
We might still have time or
➎ “Population momentum” builds. As the base gets
whether the rising extinction
we might not, but we may as
larger, stabilization becomes more difficult. A low
fertility rate with the large base population of the late
rate merits attention from
well act as though we do
20th century produces more increase than a high
anyone but nerdish rebecause it’s better than the
rate did decades earlier, when the base was smaller.
1975
4,000
searchers in arcane branches
do-nothing alternative. If
of biology, it’s probably not
many people would take this
➍ Life expectancies increase in most countries,
including countries where birth rates remain high.
your fault.
book’s message to heart, I
Corporate public relations
believe they could transform
1960
managers issue ersatz news
the world. The world will
3,000
releases and “scientific”
change anyway, but the ques➌ Thomas Malthus writes An Essay on the Principle
of Population, warning that population can
reports, leading journalists
tion is: How painful will it be?
expand geometrically, but food supply cannot.
and their readers to believe
Will the transition be as catasthat a spectrum of responsitrophic for our species as it is
2,000
1930
ble scientific opinion exists
now for the many other
➋ With the Age of Exploration, more of the
where it does not. The public
species that our actions are
world is colonized; human dominance of
1900
the environment now covers the globe.
gets the impression that scicarelessly consigning to obliventists are engaged in fierce
ion? Or will enough human
1,000
1825
controversies on these issues.
beings wake up and take
➊ After about 90 millennia of hunting and gathering,
1750
Ayres documents what
responsibility for how we are
the advent of farming and herding allows for accumulation of food surpluses and the capacities of
500
1650
amounts to a hoax, except
sabotaging our future
400
communities
to
support
more
people.
Population
300
growth begins to gain momentum.
200
that the consumers of inforprospects on this planet by
100
mation seem to be as complicundertaking the drastic
4000
3000
2000
1000
1000
2000 2050
5000
0
it as its propagators. He
actions needed to save ourBC
BC/AD
makes a convincing case that
selves?
there’s a thriving “market for
—Roger Latham ’83
Population growth is one of four revolutionary changes that will
denial,” and we’re buying it as
Assistant Professor of Biology
“transform everything” on Earth, according to Ed Ayres ’63.
48

SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

L. Wesley Argo ’57, French, German,
and Swiss Links in Pennsylvania:
Descendants and Ancient Ancestors,
Gateway Press, 1998. This book covers
the historical lineage of the author’s
wife, Marjorie Thom Argo ’57.
W.D. Ehrhart ’73, Ordinary Lives: Platoon 1005 and the Vietnam War, Temple University Press, 1999. W.D.
Ehrhart and Philip K. Jason (eds.),
Retrieving Bones: Stories and Poems of
the Korean War, Rutgers University
Press, 1999. (See photo caption.)
Pamela Haag ’88, Consent: Sexual
Rights and the Transformation of American Liberalism, Cornell University
Press, 1999. In this investigation of

social history, popular culture, legal
doctrine, and political theory, Haag’s
book discusses the history of sexual
rights in the United States.
Margaret Helfand ’69, Margaret
Helfand Architects: Essential Architecture, The Monacelli Press, 1999. (See
photo caption.)
Judith (Markham) Hughes, Freudian
Analysts/Feminist Issues, Yale University Press, 1999. Within the history of
psychoanalysis, the author explores
multiple gender identities.
Martin K. Hunt ’90 and Jacqueline E.
Hunt, The History of Black Business,
Knowledge Express Company, 1998.
This work chronicles the history of
African-American–owned businesses
and spotlights 10 around the world.

ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS

Ruth Mary Lamb ’56, Mary’s Way: A
Memoir of the Life of Mary Cooper
Back, FuturePrep Corporation, 1999.
This memoir of Mary Back—artist, naturalist, wife, Wyoming pioneer, dude
rancher, airplane mechanic, hiker,
hunter, author, and philosopher—was
compiled by her niece.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, W.D. Ehrhart ’73 “may be the bestkept literary secret of the Vietnam War.”
Author of 17 books of poetry and prose,
Ehrhart has three new books out in 1999.
Retrieving Bones, which he co-edited
with U.S. Naval Academy professor Philip
Jason, is a collection of stories and
poems that add depth to the literature of
the Korean War. Ordinary Lives: Platoon
1005 and the Vietnam War chronicles
the lives of members of Ehrhart’s Marine
boot-camp platoon—men he spent five
years tracking down and interviewing.
The Philadelphia Inquirer said Ordinary
Lives “makes comrades of ‘ordinary’
men, tests their bonds of fellowship, and
then returns the survivors to face the rigors of peace—after their lives have been
changed forever.” Ehrhart’s third book of
the year, Beautiful Wreckage: New and
Selected Poems, is due out in November.
It will be reviewed in the December Bulletin.
SEPTEMBER 1999

Jenifer McVaugh ’64, The Love of
Women, Borealis, 1998. This first novel
is a moral tale focusing on women and
is told from their own viewpoints.
Pamela Miller Ness ’72, Alzheimer’s
Waltz, Swamp Press, 1999. This poetry
collection, accompanied by line drawings of leaves collected and pressed
by Ness’ father, describes his experience with Alzheimer’s disease.
Barbara Norfleet ’47, The Illusion of
Orderly Progress, Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.
Norfleet’s entomological compositions, including those titled “Frolic,”
“I Won’t Deny My Nature,” and “Dance
Betrayal,” offer fables about human
nature.
Gertrude (Joch) Robinson ’50, Constructing the Quebec Referendum:
French and English Media Voices, University of Toronto Press, 1998. This
book addresses the ways different
élites presented their perspectives of
nationalism during the 1980 referendum debate.
Mary McDermott Shideler ’38, The
Struggle for Clarification: Stage IV in the
Series Visions and Nightmares, Ends
and Beginnings, A Woman’s Lifelong
Journey, Scribendi Press, 1999. This

KEN KORSH

Other recent books

The cover of Margaret Helfand Architects: Essential Architecture features a
detail shot of Swarthmore’s Kohlberg
Hall. In December, the building won a
Design Award from the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.
Margaret Helfand ’69 (above) designed
the new humanities building in 1996,
three decades after she left the College to
attend the College of Environmental
Design at the University of California at
Berkeley. Kohlberg’s simplified, contemporary lines reflect the Quaker aesthetic
Helfand discovered at Swarthmore as
well as the primitive architecture she
found during her travels.
theologian-writer describes her search
for intellectual and spiritual nourishment during her sixth decade of life in
the 1970s.
Simon St. Laurent ’92 and Ethan
Cerami, Building XML Applications,
McGraw-Hill, 1999. This guide shows
programmers how to integrate the
Extensible Markup Language (XML)
with Java programming to create
applications. Simon St. Laurent and
Robert Biggar ’91, Inside XML DTDs:
Scientific and Technical, McGraw-Hill,
1999. This book explains existing XML
vocabularies and tools and ways to
develop new ones.
Walter R. Goldschmidt and Theodore
H. Haas, Haa Aani, Our Land: Tlingit
and Haida Land Rights and Use,
Thomas F. Thorton ’86 (ed.), University of Washington Press, 1998. This
book, which publishes the report “The
Possessory Rights of the Natives of
Southeastern Alaska” for the first time,
explores the early 1940s boom in
white migration that raised legal land
and resource rights questions.
49

In My Life

M

y 15-year-old son was in our
bedroom, waiting for my wife to
finish ironing his white shirt. He
began leafing through the recent copy of
the Swarthmore College Bulletin that lay
on the bed.
“Put it down,” shouted my wife, hurriedly lowering her iron. “That’s not for
you!” She grabbed the magazine from
my son’s hands. In an instant, the loving,
solicitous mother became a hurricane of
zealous conviction. “They’ve all got to
go,” she cried out to me. “We can’t keep
them in the house!”
I understood my wife’s wrath at seeing our son peruse the Bulletin. The
issue included an article by a woman
who recounted her experiences as a lesbian at Swarthmore. I had found the article interesting, and certainly not offensive, but my wife held firmer views
about the advisability of keeping such
material in our home, even though none
of our children read English fluently.
To me, it’s another reminder of the
other world—the one from which I
came. Even after 20 years of living and
working in Israel, studying Torah, raising my children, and serving in the
army, in some important facets of my
life, I remain an outsider.
Several years after graduating from
Swarthmore, I became a ba’al teshuva (a
penitent Jew) and took on the lifestyle of
Orthodoxy, circumscribed by the religious law derived from the Torah. My
turn to observance began during a visit
to Israel in 1978. During what was to
have been just an interlude in a European backpacking tour, I found myself
studying in a Jerusalem yeshiva (Talmudic academy) for the newly observant. I
returned to America, studied briefly at
another yeshiva in Miami Beach, and
then returned to Israel in 1979. Except
for three brief visits, totaling about 10
weeks, I have been here for 20 years.
Between 1976 and 1981, I graduated
from Swarthmore, worked as a copy editor and writer at TV Guide, backpacked
through Europe, became an observant
Jew, studied in a yeshiva, moved to a
country where I had no family and barely spoke the language, married, and
fathered my first child. No other fiveyear period of my adult life has been so
densely packed with such a helter-skelter of significant experiences. Clearly,
sleeping held less charm for me then
54

Between
Two Worlds
By Yosef (Jody) Branse ’76
than it does now.
In our first year of marriage, shortly
before our eldest son was born, my wife
and I moved to the development town of
Migdal HaEmek, in Galilee. There, surrounded by ample fields and gentle
green hills, we became part of a small,
close-knit community of Orthodox
English-speaking immigrants—primarily
Americans—living side by side with
Sephardic Israelis. Together with our
peers and our rabbis, we maintained a
synagogue and educational system,
raised our children, celebrated communal joys, and shared communal anguish.
For various reasons, the community
never became viable. Over the years,
the flow of residents came to be deci-

T

hough my children
will never attend
their father’s alma mater,
I hope also to have
passed on to them some
legacy from Swarthmore:
a basic respect for other
people, even those
with whom they differ
passionately and
fundamentally.

sively away from Migdal HaEmek. We
reluctantly moved out in 1996, among
the last to leave, with a feeling of going
into exile. However, our diaspora was
not very far away. We settled in Rechasim, a small town on the outskirts of
Haifa. With an outstanding yeshiva,
Rechasim had developed into a major
Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) center.
By choosing to live in these small
communities in Israel’s north, we have
experienced a different environment
from most American immigrants, who
overwhelmingly settle in the crowded,

urbanized center of the country
between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Unlike
their urban peers, my children have
grown up accustomed to seeing countryside all around them.
This is, indeed, my home, and I don’t
think I would fare well in America after
having spent nearly all my adult life as
an expatriate. Yet I have been disconcerted to discover that I remain
between two worlds, that I don’t really
feel a part of things.
Perhaps the most glaring example of
my “otherness” is in the workplace,
where I sense most keenly the gulf
between my past and present. Since
1981, I have worked in the library of the
University of Haifa, located atop Mount
Carmel, helping to develop and maintain
the computer systems that provide
information services to about 20,000 students and staff.
I spent much of my childhood in the
public library and at Swarthmore was in
the McCabe and Cornell libraries more
than in my dorm room. I am what I have
read, more than what I have done.
So, as I walk to my office, surrounded
by hundreds of thousands of books, I
feel like a hungry but muzzled cow
standing before an overflowing feeding
trough, frustrated by the good things
that are so near at hand yet unattainable. My muzzle is woven of both practical concerns—I have a lot of work to do
and not enough time for sampling the
library’s wares—and of the awareness
that, in the stern view of my religion,
most of the items in the university’s collection are at worst forbidden reading
and at best a waste of time that would
be better spent immersed in holy texts.
Jewish tradition maintains that one
should spend as much time as possible
studying the Torah, Talmud, legal
codes, and their voluminous commentaries—with minor concessions to the
need to make a living and tend to worldly matters. If one works, then the time
outside working hours should be devoted to learning. Yet if one is able, it is
considered exemplary to spend virtually
all one’s waking hours in the yeshiva,
engaged in intense religious study.
That is the course taken by most
young men in the Haredi community,
from youth through the first years of
married life. In all likelihood, my own
sons—three of whom are already studySWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

ing in yeshivas—will follow that path,
which is the natural outcome of their
education.
In my case, however, the process of
internalization stalled somewhere. In my
head, the words of daily prayers coexist
with 30-year-old radio jingles, the weekly
Torah portion with William Butler Yeats
and Isaac Asimov, cantorial melodies
with Sibelius and Alan Sherman. Intellectually, my religious commitment is solid;
however, unless someone discovers a
way to reformat a human brain, a significant part of me will remain secular.
Although I enjoy excellent relations
with my work colleagues, my religious
appearance and behavior mark me as
someone whose worldview, daily routine, and priorities are so different from
their own as to preclude any but proper,
professional conversations. Most of my
colleagues are women, and the strictures of traditional Judaism regarding
social contact between the sexes as well
as the prohibition of any idle gossip
form another barrier to personal relations. I don’t take part in the university’s
varied cultural life; I am strictly a commuter. I have given the best years of my

career to an institution with whose
ideals I cannot wholeheartedly identify,
which, in some ways, are antithetical to
my beliefs. I cloister in the office I share
with the library computer, work long
and intensely, and try to project a positive image of a religious Jew to my coworkers.
I am between two worlds, like a
spacecraft whose movements are governed by competing gravitational forces.
I have to cope with ambiguity and perhaps alienation. I am neither an Israeli
nor an American, neither ultra-Orthodox
nor secular. Even in the confines of
Rechasim, I am neither newly observant
nor one of the good old boys. My closest friends, and my wife’s, are still those
from the community in Migdal HaEmek
whose lives have followed a similar
path.
My children do not share this ambiguity. They know who they are and
don’t grapple with identity crises. In a
curious reversal, my wife and I—like our
immigrant forebears in America—contend with a different language and culture, no longer a part of the old world
and unable to completely assimilate into

Yosef Branse ’76 (right), has lived in Israel for 20 years. He says he is

“neither an Israeli nor an American, neither ultra-Orthodox nor secular,”
but his wife, Deborah Reisman, and children have no such identity crises.
SEPTEMBER 1999

the new.
Jewish tradition survives by virtue of
its unbroken transmission from parents
to children. But it’s difficult to pass on
something that I didn’t receive from my
parents. We’re trying to reforge links in
a chain of tradition battered by assimilation, secularism, the Holocaust, and
materialism. We’re raising our children
in a world vastly different from the one
in which we grew up, and we don’t
always have the tools for the job.
From almost anywhere in Rechasim,
the pleasant slopes of Carmel, and the
university, are before my eyes. Not visible, on the other side of Haifa near the
Mediterranean coast, is another prominent site, where, according to tradition,
the prophet Elijah contended with and
defeated the pagan prophets of Ba’al,
annihilating them with a fire summoned
from the heavens. These two landmarks
symbolize for me the polarities within
both myself and contemporary Israeli
society: the allure of liberal, pluralistic,
materialistic Western civilization on the
one hand and the demands of uncompromising, all-encompassing Judaism on
the other.
The struggle between those worldviews has been raging for 50 years on
many fronts—national, communal,
familial, and personal. There is no sign
that it will be resolved anytime soon. My
own modest, silent contribution to this
fray has been, together with my wife, to
raise children who will continue the tradition and sanctify G-d in their public
and private lives. If they are successful,
they will probably owe more to their
teachers than to their parents.
Though my children will never attend
their father’s alma mater, I hope also to
have passed on to them some legacy
from Swarthmore: a basic respect for
other people, even those with whom
they differ passionately and fundamentally. So, for the time being, the Bulletins
remain in the house, piling up in a bedroom corner. The bookshelves in the living room display texts more appropriate
for our milieu.
The prophet Elijah has an additional
role in Jewish tradition. He is not only
the fiery, zealous destroyer of idols and
false prophets but the messenger of
peace, who will herald the Messiah’s
arrival. When he comes, we are told, he
will resolve all our insoluble problems.
I’ll let him decide what to do with the
Bulletins. ■
55

Alumni Profile
Maverick musical mavens
Beth McIntosh ’80 and Judith Edelman ’87 blaze their own trails West and South.

A

sk Madonna or Mick: the life of a
touring musician is grueling even
when you have a coterie of roadies to
help you. When you’re a woman on
your own, driving solo through the vast
American West in a car crammed with
your own CDs and a guitar and only gas
money in your pocket, grueling does
not begin to describe it. But the gruel
factor is mitigated by the exhilaration
of pursuing a dream on your own
terms.
That’s how two singer-songwriters
from Swarthmore describe their separate years on the road. In the years following graduation, Elizabeth C. McIntosh ’80 and Judith Edelman ’87 have
lived passionate, if precarious, lives as
musicians and recording artists—freelancers on tour, pioneers in the creative wilderness, frontier women in the
West. Though always touch-and-go
financially, the endeavor has enriched
them in other ways: with loyal fans who
come down from the hills to local
watering holes to sing along to lyrics
they know by heart, collaborations
Elizabeth McIntosh ’80 (above) has been dubbed by Jackson Hole Magazine as “a
with artists of every stripe, and critical
mysterious, lion-maned songwriter whose poems are as complex and meaningful as
acclaim. For albums such as Fire and
her adept guitar work.” Judith Edelman ’87 (opposite page) has also garnered praise
Sage and Grizzlies Walking Upright,
from The Wall Street Journal, Billboard, and Music Review, the last of which
acoustic guitar player McIntosh has
described her music as “fully literate and shockingly good songwriting.”
won awards like the Wyoming Performing Arts Fellowship and been dubbed
her soul through the process of production is truly amazby Jackson Hole Magazine as “a mysterious, lion-maned
ing. She knows that everything she sees, smells, eats, and
songwriter whose poems are as complex and meaningful as
thinks makes its way into her work.”
her adept guitar work.” Edelman’s recordings, Perfect World
McIntosh and Edelman are articulate, intense, nervy indiand Only Sun, have garnered praise from The Wall Street
viduals fully seasoned in the realities of staying afloat in a
Journal, Billboard, and Music Review, the last of which
not-always-kind industry. The similarities between them are
described her music as “[p]art bluegrass, a smidge pop, a
striking. Both are Easterners—Edelman grew up in the
dash alternative, fully literate, and shockingly good songcrush of Manhattan and McIntosh in a Boston suburb, both
writing.”
in homes warmed by a spiritual hearth of music. Trained in
With the gap in their ages, the two never met each other
classical piano, Edelman became adept at the Mozart and
at Swarthmore. But when they met—2,000 miles away in
Beethoven sonatas that everyone in her high-achieving famWyoming through the men in their lives, Edelman’s longily played, including Dave Edelman ’83. In comical contrast,
time partner and award-winning banjo player and mandolinMcIntosh has “the funniest picture of my two parents sitting
ist Matt Flinner and bluegrass guitar and bassist Phil
in front of the TV with their guitars,” following along to the
Round, whom McIntosh married in 1980—they quickly
tutelage of a hippy-folksy gal” in the days when everyone
became each other’s biggest fans.
wanted to be Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell. In such an envi“Beth is in touch with an incredibly deep wellspring,”
ronment, it was only natural that McIntosh was already
crooned Edelman, who lives in Idaho, 20 miles over a pass
picking her way among the strings and frets by the time she
in the Tetons from McIntosh. “She’s an incredibly brilliant
was five, emulating James Taylor during an awkward adoand intuitive person all around. She sees the connection
lescence and playing coffeehouses by the time she came to
between creative wildness and environmental wildness.”
Swarthmore. (Some may remember her appearances at
Of her younger sister in songwriting, McIntosh said:
Mephistos.)
“Watching how [Judith] works from the bedrock layer of
58

SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

SEPTEMBER 1999

SKY
AME
R
NE H
© AN

Both chose majors in the humanities, McIntosh in
psychology, Edelman in English when the Women’s
Studies program was in its infancy. Each briefly pursued paths after Swarthmore that smothered their
creative fires: McIntosh fished commercially in Alaska and went on to postgraduate work in anthropology with plans to go into academia. She found herself feeling “top-heavy,” overly cerebral, and longing for a place “where your body can bash up
against the natural forces that are informing
you.” Edelman did field research in Third World
agricultural development. It was in Nairobi that
Edelman first picked up a guitar, in the home of
a stranger who took her in when she was critically ill with a case of salmonella.
Both alumnae were influenced by their
brothers. Edelman’s curiosity about the
rhythmic potential of bluegrass had been
awakened by violinist Dave’s combo band
at Swarthmore. It was this genre she pursued in lessons when she moved to San
Francisco after returning to the United
States. McIntosh heard of the Rocky
Mountains’ splendor from her brother
and followed him westward. “It was as
far away from anything academic as
you can get. I’d asked myself: Where
is my heart? What is the most intelligent thing I can do with my life? So
far, I hadn’t found the answer in
academics or a professional track.
The only thing was my guitar and
my music.”
In these ways, both found
themselves in the uncharted
territory of making music (not
that any career in the arts
comes with a road map),
careers without 401Ks, paid
sick days, or guarantees of
success. They played concerts large and small, for
college audiences and
women’s festivals. “It
was great,” recalled
McIntosh: “Get in the
car and drive a zillion
miles and leave with
some money.” Edelman teamed up with
touring groups, immersing herself in
bluegrass’s intertwining of tradition and innovation. Through
that magical
combination of
persistence
and serendipity, both found
agents, then small

independent labels—Compass Records for
Edelman, and McIntosh eventually
appointed herself president of her
own company, ECM
Music.
Today, the
musicians’ lives
are undergoing
changes. Edelman
and Flinner made a
leap of faith and
moved to Nashville
this summer, reluctantly bidding farewell to the majestic
and affordable West for
the hustle and hoo of
the nation’s bluegrass
and country capital;
there, they hope to find
steady session work and
visibility among other writers. Four years ago, McIntosh became the mother of
Wilder, who was followed this
spring by Raynor. The addition of a nursing infant to the
demands of the road proved
arduous. There was a note of
wistfulness in McIntosh’s voice
as she related her decision to cut
back on touring for now. She has
stayed closer to home, writing
music for a film and teaching workshops like “Finding Your Wild Voice”
at the Teton Science Center near her
family’s log cabin in Wilson, Wyo.,
with a population of 202.
Yet ironically, motherhood has only
deepened McIntosh’s music. She just
released The Wild Ride, whose title
alludes to the journey of birth and maternity, to her encounter with the wilderness
in her own body as well as the external
wilderness she limns in imagistic, Cassandra-like songs. She is less consumed by the
idea of albums as product and more interested in the process of living, which may eventually end up as a song or album. Reading Zen
and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance author
Robert Pirsig’s latest book, Lila, helped put the
question of creative output in perspective for
McIntosh. “There were 10 years between his last
book and this one,” she mused softly, while her
children burbled in the background. “The guy waited until he really had something to say. I want to
write the same way. It’s about seeing your life as a
body of work and of trusting in the gestational
aspects of creativity.”
—Ali Crolius ’84
59

Letters

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 3
values, and desires to college. How could we not? But
college broadens our understanding of our own culture,
adds understanding of other
cultures, challenges us to
examine our values in light of
other value systems, and
exposes us to whole new
worlds of desire.
The guilt Mr. McKnight
pins on Swarthmore belongs
to generations of white
Americans, but Swarthmore
deserves praise for creating
leaders of the civil rights
movement and many other
moral crusades of our time
and earlier times.
JUDITH GRACE STETSON ’59
Falmouth, Mass.

It is to be doubted
whether the cultivation of
guilt ameliorates race relations, for we all find it difficult to reconcile with whom
we are held to have wronged.
In any case, let the sins of
the fathers not descend to
their offspring.
It was Malcolm X who

say that extending parietal
hours raised her worries
about “what you’re going to
do again” (Letters, June
1999), a similar story circulated. In the mid-1950s, the
story was that a student government representative asking that senior women be
allowed to stay out one hour

“The guilt Mr. McKnight pins on Swarthmore
belongs to generations of white Americans,
but Swarthmore deserves praise for creating leaders of the civil rights movement and
many other moral crusades of our time and
earlier times.”
—Judith Grace Stetson ’59

ENTERING THE DIALOGUE
The letter by Ulan McKnight
is a vitriolic attack on a
Swarthmore bias toward
white males. I agree that the
most prevalent bias the
world over is toward males
of the dominant culture, but I
was disappointed by the letter, which instead of providing examples that would give
credibility to the accusation,
just continued to throw
punches. To quote another
writer in that issue, Hillary
Thompson ’99 (“Conservative rebel”): “For [one’s]
views to be a part of campus
dialogue, [one has] to be a
member of the community,
not attack it from the outside.”
PENEL ADELMAN ’66
Scarsdale, N.Y.

CULTIVATING GUILT
One merely sets oneself up
as a target for obloquy by
engaging in any discussion of
racial issues, but I rise to the
bait provided by Ulan McKnight in his intemperate
letter (June 1999) calling
upon Swarthmore to proclaim its “guilt” before celebrating advances in the representation of minorities at
the College.
66

stated that the worst crime
of the whites was to teach
blacks to believe in their subordinate status. It is really
impossible to requite such a
psychic wound, beside
which more objective forms
of discrimination, however
despicable, seem almost trivial. Yes, American society—
including Swarthmore—has
much to answer for. It is
understandable that an air of
self-celebration grates on
those who have suffered vilification. But to vilify an institution that is earnestly trying
to rectify past wrongs seems
perverse.
PETER DODGE ’48
North Hampton, N.H.

SWARTHMORE LEGENDS
A decade before Alex Capron
’66 heard Dean Susan Cobbs

later, asked: “But Dean
Cobbs, what could they do in
the second hour that they
couldn’t do in the first?”
Dean Cobbs’ response, in her
lovely southern drawl was:
“My de-a-r, they could do it
tw-i-ce.” It won’t surprise me
if someone comes up with an
even earlier version.
Is it just an “enhanced
memory,” or did Dean Cobbs
really tell the freshman women of the Class of 1957 to
“draw up the petals of your
virginity about you” at our
for-women-only orientation?
MINNA NEWMAN NATHANSON ’57
Washington, D.C.
Editor’s Note: Egad! Are all
the classic Swarthmore stories—the Susan Cobbs tales,
the cow in the dormitory, Cass
Elliott—merely the College’s

urban legends, made up by
clever undergraduates and
foisted on unsuspecting freshmen? No matter; it’s fun just to
remember and retell them.

QUAKER TESTIMONIES
Another great issue of the
Swarthmore Bulletin: The letters to the editor are truly
inspiring, as is the profile of
compañera Elizabeth Martinez ’46 by Andrea Hammer.
I find it ironic that issue after
issue the Bulletin veritably
douses us with direct and
indirect references to
Friends Testimonies without
clearly identifying them.
They are Love, Joy, Peace,
Patience, Generosity, Faithfulness, Gentleness, and Selfcontrol. The justice sought
by letter-writer Ulan McKnight ’87 would be much
closer to reality at Swarthmore if the Testimonies were
the guides of more Quakerly
admissions and student-life
policies at the College.
STEPHAN H. HORNBERGER
(parent of Ch’uyasonqo
Hornberger ’97)
Philadelphia

AUTHOR’S QUERY:
W.H. AUDEN
For a study of W.H. Auden’s
pedagogy, a scholar at
Oxford University is seeking
to interview Swarthmoreans
who studied with or knew
the poet during his time at
the College, 1942–45. Please
write Daniel Varholy, Magdalen College, Oxford, OX1
4AU, U.K., telephone (011-44)
1865-209248, or e-mail danielvarholy@magd.ox.ac.uk.

CORRECTION
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.

Faculty member Kemal
Nance ’92 conducted the
dance workshop pictured in
the June “Alumni Digest.”
The caption incorrectly
implied that Tamala Montgomery ’98 also led the class,
which was held during Black
Alumni Weekend in March.
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

Why Studio Arts?

stairs. During the 1998–99 school year,
the main room of the former library and
student center (which was partially
destroyed by fire in 1983) was transformed into individual art studios, divided by shelves and rough partitions.
Senior art students worked day and
night on the pieces they planned to
include in their final project—an exhibit
that functions, for the most part, as
their senior thesis.
Today, though, the partitions are
gone, and the walls are festooned with

“It was really hard to be in the studio
art program here,” she says. “There’s
not much of an art community. I’ve been
the ideas. Timi Sullivan ’75, sitting on a
trying to build one. But people here
wooden bench a few yards away from
don’t seem to take art seriously—includthe crowd at the List Gallery, always
ing some art majors. I had to practically
knew that she wanted to paint, and so
beg people to put their work in this
she came to Swarthmore—and majored
show.”
in literature. “I wanted to learn about
During the summer of 1998, Smith
other things. This is a very intense acastudied painting at the Chautauqua
demic place. And it exhausted that part
Institution in western New York, an
of me. That’s what I wanted—that verintensive program that gave students
bal part of education. When I left here, I
the space and the freedom to paint all
was ready. And that’s
day. There, she says, she
when I went to art school,”
got a taste of what an art
Sullivan explains. “Art isn’t
school environment would
just about art.”
have been like. By coming
Long gone are the days when Swarthmore offered two art history
Andrea Packard ’85
to Swarthmore, she chose
courses and two others in the studio. The current catalog lists 32
also headed to art school
yin. And at Chautauqua, she
after she graduated from
discovered that she probaart history courses plus eight seminars, plus 21 studio courses—
Swarthmore. “When I was
bly should have chosen
not all of which are offered in a given semester. Here’s a selection
at art school, I found that
yang.
of the courses being offered this academic year. To read full
having had the experience
“I spent the whole sumcourse descriptions, find the catalog on the World Wide Web at
of so many art history
mer
with 30 people who
www.swarthmore.edu/ Home/Academic/catalog/.
courses and literature
were really focused and
courses and political scireally into talking about art.
Art History
Studio Arts
ence and sociology gave
Then I came back here and
Critical Study in the Visual Arts Foundation—Elements of
me something to say in my
tried to start the same
Western Art
Visual Thinking
art,” says Packard, who
kinds of conversations, and
Asian Art
Multimedium Sculpture
now runs the List Gallery.
people said: ‘I have biology
Critical Study: Picasso
Ceramics
“Some of the students I
to do,’” Smith explains. “I
19th-Century European Art
Photography
encountered had masdon’t think that Swarth20th-Century Western Art
Oil Painting
tered their technique, but
more has figured out yet
Gothic Art and Architecture
Life Modeling
they didn’t always know
how to bridge academics
Rembrandt and His Times
Life Drawing
what to do with it.”
and art.”
Modern Art
The Potter’s Wheel
Randy Exon thinks that
African-American Art
Works on Paper
here are two other
Smith’s point is valid. “StuTraditional Japan
Advanced Ceramics
art exhibits going
dents leaving the College
Japanese Painting and Prints,
Advanced Drawing
on at Swarthmore
are a very critical bunch,”
1550–1850
Advanced Painting
this Saturday. In the lobby
he says. “They should be.
Approaches to Tibet
Advanced Photography
of McCabe Library, BenThat’s exactly what SwarthSpecial Topics in Medieval Art
Advanced Sculpture
nett Lorber ’64 is showing
more taught them to do—
Philadelphia and American
Advanced Printmaking
his spare, intellectual
exactly what a liberal arts
Architecture
Senior Workshop
abstractions drawn from
education teaches them—
History of Photography
Senior Advanced Study
the work of the Dutch
to be critical about what
Senior Workshop
artist, Rogier Van Der
they’re experiencing, to
Weyden. Lorber, a physireflect on that experience,
cian, has been painting
but, most important, to try
since he was a child. Lorber didn’t take
art. One of the paintings is at least 12
to make sense of it. Having been
studio courses in college “because there feet tall and is covered with words: “I
through Swarthmore, Jessica knows
weren’t any,” but he says that even as a
first met Gertrude Stein in Man Ray’s
that she’s going to go into grad school
premed student, he took as much art
apartment. Duchamp said: ‘and how is
to a master of fine arts program and feel
history as he did zoology. “Painting
Marcel?’ Which was the big joke in Paris
absolute joy with what she’ll find there.
enriches my life,” he says. “It’s not an
in those days. Je suis paraplui. But my
I’m glad that she’s thinking critically
extra part of my life—not like someone
days as a Dadaist are dead.” Instead of
that way.” Exon pauses, then adds, “But
playing golf on weekends—it’s just
printing handouts identifying which
it will be interesting to talk about it with
something I do and need to do. It’s there piece belongs to which artist, Jessica
her again, in five years maybe, and see if
all the time.”
Smith ’99, who organized the exhibit,
she feels differently. I’m pretty sure she
Down the hill, a hand-painted sign in
simply wrote the list in white paint on
will.” ■
front of Old Tarble reads: “Student
the floor. It’s been almost a week since
Vicki Glembocki is a freelance writer and
Exhibit,” with an arrow pointing up the
she graduated.

Continued from page 15

The art curriculum today

T

SEPTEMBER 1999

67

Our Back Pages

THE FILMING OF
Story and photographs by Woody Thomas ’51

THE ACTION
It is a warm night in early June. The year
is 1950. The time is after midnight. The
campus is silent. No one stirs. Then,
slowly, stealthily, a door in Clothier
silently opens. A crime is about to be
committed—to film.
In April of that year, John Weigel’s
play, The Crime, had won the first Book
& Key one-act play contest. A contemporary allegory of the story of Adam and
Eve, the play caught the fancy of Ted
Conant, who had the vision of turning it
into a short motion picture and a College first—the first student-produced
movie to be shot in Hollywood’s professional film format, 35mm.
However, the nearest available 35mm
motion picture cameras were in New
York City at Camera Equipment Company, a rental agency serving the film-producing community on the East Coast.
The rent for the huge camera, sturdy tripod, and a few lenses seemed enormous
beside the slim financial resources of
the student producers, who, therefore,
decided to rent the camera for just one
day. The entire production would have
to be done in 24 hours, including the
time to drive to New York to buy the
film, rent the camera, and return it the
next day. Furthermore, because there
was no “sound stage” on campus, the
filming and recording of dialogue would
have to be done after midnight, when
the College was quiet.
Karl Ihrig, who had one of the very
few student cars on campus, remembers “driving up to a Kodak film warehouse in New Jersey and having to
empty our pockets and use canvas
boots because of the extreme fire hazard.” Thirty-five-millimeter film was not
safety film at that time.
As soon as the camera and film
reached the campus, we made test
exposures and developed them in the
68

Camera Club darkroom on the top floor
of Trotter to bolster our confidence that
we really knew what we were doing.
In the meantime, others were readying the stage in Clothier. They placed
the set, originally created for the play,
against the back side of the closed theater curtain and turned the lights to face
toward the front of the stage. The sound
crew struggled to locate the microphone in a spot that would give good
reproduction of dialogue in a place not
at all intended for sound recording. The
recording was on magnetic tape, commonplace today, but a relatively new
medium in those days. Thacher Robinson ’50, whose home was adjacent to
the campus, owned the two Magnecord
tape recorders, which were also used at
WSRN. The tape was 1/4 inch wide and
ran on 12-inch reels through the recording machines at 15 inches per second. A
modern professional cassette recorder
can do as well on a track about 1/16 inch
wide on tape running at 17/8 inches per
second.
Clare Whittlesey Weigel reminisces:
“Ted came back from New York with a
camera he had rented for 24 hours, a
very short time to shoot a one-act play
even if you don’t include the round-trip
to New York. The time problem was
compounded by the small amount of
that expensive commodity, raw film
stock, available to us. For the cameramen and the actors, there was a challenge to get the shot right on the first
take, and usually they did.”
Preparations to do something most
of us had never done before naturally
took longer than any of us had imagined, but, well into the night, the filming
did finally begin. The actors were surprised to find that making a film is not
the same as presenting a play. As Jean
Matter Mandler describes it: “The filming was done at three different distances—close up, middle distance, and

far—and all the actions at each distance
were filmed at one time.... The outcome
must have been a good deal of choppiness in event sequences. For example,
an actor’s reply to a statement might be
filmed hours after the statement was
made. Because the filming took so long,
our clothes got rumpled, and our voices
changed timbre. My recollection is that
there were some scenes in which my
voice went from a squeak to a growl and
my clothes from neat to disheveled
within a few seconds of film time.” Tom
Kinney affirms Jean’s reaction, but his
principal memory is of extreme fatigue.
After the filming, he says he went to bed
and didn’t wake up until the middle of
the afternoon hungry but with no
money to buy anything to eat.
Clare recalls: “Although I had directed a number of stage and radio dramas
in high school and at Swarthmore Network [now WSRN], I knew zip about
movie directing. This is where Barbara
Pearson Lange came in. She somehow
appeared at my side. She showed me
how to make a story board and initiated
me into the concept of camera movements and angles, helping me to plot the
lengthy panoramic shot with which the
film begins.”
The filming stretched on into the
dawning hours, and the campus began
to awake. As we neared the end, we had
to station guards on the road by Clothier to stop any traffic during each filming episode to keep the extraneous
noise off the sound track. But finish we
did, and the rush was on to get the camera back to New York to beat the 24hour deadline.
Bill Young made the return trip in his
1928 Model A Ford panel truck, pedal to
the floor all the way—remember, no
Interstate highways in those days. Bill
pulled up to Camera Equipment Company on the west side of Manhattan, where
his companions unloaded the gear onto
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

a freight elevator that opened right
onto the street. Bill drove on to find
some place to park. When he asked a
policeman on the corner where he
could put his venerable truck, the
THE CHA
cop eyed the vehicle and then
RACTER
S
said: “I suggest you take it
The Auth
or
straight to the Sanitation DepartJohn We
igel ’50
ment.” (Young still has the truck—
The Dire
and, in fact, it was pictured on
ctor
Clare Wh
page 15 of the March 1998 Bulletin.)
ittlesey W
eigel ’50
Months later, the picture editing,
The Prod
ucers
sound
editing, titling, music comTed Con
ant ’51
posing, recording, narrating, and
Frank Ke
nsill ’51
printing came to an end. Ted Conant
The Cas
arranged
to have the film shown in
t
the movie theater in Swarthmore. We
Tom Kin
ney ’50
all trooped down for the “World PreJean Matt
er Mand
miere.” The Crime was distributed
ler ’51
Lorenz H
ansen ’5
nationally for several years by Brandon
0
Bob Pato
n ’50
Films, a distributor of mainly nontheThe Com
atrical films, in a 16mm print version. A
poser
Christop
35mm film print is in the archives of the
her Mon
tgomery
Swarthmore College library. I have a
’53
The Crew
16mm print from which Ken Kurtz has
Bill Youn
g ’57
recently made a video copy.
Wolf Eps
This brief event in our college life
tein ’51
Ken Kurtz
influenced,
or perhaps abetted, career
’51
Wood Ta
choices for several of us. Ted Conant
te ’50
Merrillan
continued in the motion picture and
Murray T
homas ’5
Woody T
related fields, working with a U.N. film
3
homas ’5
1
Karl Ihrig
unit in Korea, the National Film Board
’51
of Canada, WGBH in Boston, and in
John Cor
ya ’51
other areas of the communications
Ruth Me
rson Nele
industry. Mike Eisler ’51 worked in the
ski ’50
Joe Rutle
dge ’50
audiovisual field. Ken Kurtz made his
Caroly W
ilcox ’52
career in the television industry. I
and othe
rs
worked for Kodak for a third of a centuThe Adv
ry, about half in technical areas related
isers
to motion pictures, and, for the last 15
Barbara
Pearson
Lange ’3
years, I have been producing and showFlorence
1
Wilcox
ing motion pictures professionally.
John Weigel writes: “As for the
The auth
results,
the film itself was remarkably
or thanks
the follow
ing for th
different
from the stage performance.
eir contrib
utions to
this story
With Clare’s direction and Lewis
: Ted Con
an
Matter M
Core’s* stage set, it had the lightheartandler, Jo t, Jean
hn and
Clare Wh
ed, near-foolish effect I believe I had in
ittlesey W
eigel, Ke
Kurtz, Ka
mind. With the strong black-white conn
rl Ihrig, B
ill Y
and Tom
trasts, seemingly slower pace, and the
Kinney. A oung,
video
copy of th
close-ups, the film gave [the play] a
e film ma
y be had
by writin
suddenly ominous effect, with constant
g Ken Ku
rtz at 255
Irvine Ro
insinuations of meaning.... I don’t
ad, Lexin
gton KY
40502.
remember having this intent and certainly felt I’d loaded on the hokey, but it
all fit together in turning the play
around to a darker side, which I could
now see always had underlain the lighthearted foolery.” ■
* A friend of Clare’s from Morgantown, W.V.

F

rom our first visit to
Swarthmore, we knew it
was the place for us. We
treasure the breadth of what
we learned and the chance to
have taken a wide variety of
courses for our own intellectual
interest. Swarthmore gave
us so much, that in whatever
little way we could, we wanted
to give something back.”
Anne Chandler Fristrom ’54
C. Kermeen “Punky” Fristrom ’55
Life Income Gift Donors

GEORGE WIDMAN

Punky and Anne Fristrom’s gifts to Swarthmore pay
them an income during their lifetimes and will provide
future support for the College’s endowment. Contact the
Planned Giving Office for a financial proposal tailored to
your circumstances. Call Margaret Nikelly, director of
planned giving: (610) 328-8334.