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SWARTHMORE
College Bulletin
RELIGION in the age of SCIENCE
December 1999
S WA RT H M O
COLLEGE BULLETIN
DECEMBER 1999
Features
Steps of Change
12
A Swarthmore foreign study program emerges in Poland.
By Cathleen McCarthy
Religion in the Age of Science
20
Ian Barbour ’44 explores the intersection of two spheres.
By Tom Krattenmaker
The 20th Century’s Greatest Hits 26
An eclectic “Top 40” list for the waning century.
By Paul Williams ’69
72
55
On the cover: From angels to evolution, religion and science
seek to explain the mysteries of the universe—but from very
different perspectives. Physicist and theologian Ian Barbour
’44 has spent a lifetime trying to bridge the conflicts between
the two. Story on page 20. Illustration by Mike Kerr.
R E
20
12
Departments
Letters
3
Our readers speak.
Collection
4
Events and ideas on campus.
Alumni Digest
Get connected here.
Class Notes
36
Alumni Profiles
Where everyone turns first.
Up on the roof
Deaths
Janet Carpenter Deckert ’42 lives
up to her maiden name.
By Andrea Hammer
43
Swarthmore remembers.
Books & Authors
50
Poetry and peace.
In My Life
60
Slowing the pace.
By Kate Harper ’77
Our Back Pages
Book and Key revealed.
By Elizabeth Weber ’98
26
4
34
72
Like the voices of angels
45
55
Ann Stuart ’65 and son play
the glass harp.
By Audree Penner
A chosen path
Delvin Dinkins ’93 expands world
views at a suburban high school.
By Alisa Giardinelli
66
Parlor Talk
G
race Wilson Miller ’21, 100 years of age and one of Swarthmore’s oldest living alumnae, sat in the front row the other
night as I spoke to an alumni gathering at Crosslands, a retirement community a few miles west of the College. About 35 Swarthmoreans were in the audience, including one of our most revered:
John Nason, president of the College from 1940 to 1953 and an honorary member of the Class of 1948.
My topic was the Bulletin—its history, purpose, and present editorial direction. Several members of the audience were students when
this magazine’s direct ancestor, then called The Garnet Letter, was
launched in September 1935. Its first editor, William Tomlinson ’17,
president of the Alumni Association, called this new publication “an
effort to bring the College and her alumni into a closer relationship
through a better understanding of the aims, objectives, and activities
of Swarthmore today.” This is remarkably close to the stated mission
of the magazine today (it became the Bulletin in 1952), which is “to
strengthen and extend the positive connections that are part of the
Swarthmore experience and to promote a sense of responsibility for
the future of the institution.”
Historically, this “sense of responsibility” hasn’t just meant writing a check to the College when asked. In fact, publication of The Garnet Letter predated Swarthmore’s
first Annual Fund by almost six
The Bulletin traces its
years. Clearly, some greater and
roots to 1935, when
more meaningful connection was—
and is—intended.
the Alumni Association
President Nason told me later that
sought a greater role
his predecessor, President Frank
in the College’s affairs. Aydelotte, had been through “three
big fights” with the alumni in the
1920s and 1930s—de-emphasizing athletics, the institution of the Honors Program, and the abolition of sororities. The inauguration of The
Garnet Letter can be seen as an attempt to repair this strained relationship, but it quickly proved to be more. In the newsletter’s second
issue, Tomlinson put forth a sweeping proposal to involve alumni
more closely in Swarthmore’s affairs.
The subsequent reorganization of the Alumni Association created
the Alumni Council and led to the nomination of alumni representatives to the Board of Managers, reforms that are reflected in the governance of the College today. Every current manager is a graduate of
the College, and the Alumni Council remains an active conduit for
alumni involvement.
What struck me about my audience at Crosslands, which included
six current or former class secretaries, wasn’t so much that they are
in fine fettle in their 70s to 90s (even Grace Miller walked in under her
own power and asked a trenchant question) but how dearly they hold
this College in their hearts. My talk elicited questions and stories that
showed a fierce interest in Swarthmore and an intense pride in being
members of its larger community. I marvel at the bond these Swarthmoreans feel with each other and the College.
It remains our goal that the Bulletin continue to nurture the “closer relationship” that its first editor envisioned in 1935—not just
because Swarthmore needs your financial support (which, of course,
it does) but because it continues to value your ideas and involvement
in the life of this great school.
—J.L.
2
SWARTHMORE
COLLEGE BULLETIN
Editor: Jeffrey Lott
Managing Editor: Andrea Hammer
Class Notes Editor: Carol Brévart-Demm
Collection Editor: Cathleen McCarthy
Staff Writer: Alisa Giardinelli
Desktop Publishing: Audree Penner
Designer: Bob Wood
Intern: Carol Duong ’02
Editor Emerita:
Maralyn Orbison Gillespie ’49
Associate Vice President
for External Affairs:
Barbara Haddad Ryan ’59
Changes of Address:
Send address label along
with new address to:
Alumni Records Office
Swarthmore College
500 College Avenue
Swarthmore PA 19081-1390
Phone: (610) 328-8435. Or e-mail:
alumnirecords@swarthmore.edu.
Contacting Swarthmore College:
College Operator: (610) 328-8000
www.swarthmore.edu
Admissions: (610) 328-8300
admissions@swarthmore.edu
Alumni Relations: (610) 328-8402
alumni@swarthmore.edu
Publications: (610) 328-8568
bulletin@swarthmore.edu
Registrar: (610) 328-8297
registrar@swarthmore.edu
World Wide Web
www.swarthmore.edu
The Swarthmore College Bulletin (ISSN 08882126), of which this is volume XCVII, number 3,
is published in August, September, December,
March, and June by Swarthmore College, 500
College Avenue, Swarthmore PA 19081-1390.
Periodicals postage paid at Swarthmore PA
and additional mailing offices. Permit No. 0530620. Postmaster: Send address changes to
Swarthmore College Bulletin, 500 College
Avenue, Swarthmore PA 19081-1390.
©1999 Swarthmore College
Printed in U.S.A. on recycled paper
Letters
WHERE CREDIT IS DUE
Vicki Glembocki’s article,
“Why Studio Arts at a Liberal
Arts College?” (September
1999) provided an engaging
and timely view of the burgeoning arts program at
Swarthmore. Even in 1981,
when I entered Swarthmore,
studio arts (and all the creative disciplines) were institutionally suppressed by the
rule allowing credit for no
more than five courses in any
of the arts combined (music,
dance, theater, or art). This
rule, repealed in 1990, discouraged both in-depth
study and interdisciplinary
artistic effort. By allowing
only superficial study, the
rule reinforced the underlying misconception that creative studies produce superficial and dilettantish results.
The change in the past
decade has been remarkable.
This spring, the List Gallery
will devote 9 separate exhibitions to the work of 10 graduating studio majors and 2
Honors minors.
Upon reading Glembocki’s
artist profiles, some may mistakenly believe that Swarthmore primarily produces representational painters. As
editor of the Friends of Art
Newsletter, an annual publication distributed to more than
500 alumni and supporters of
the arts at Swarthmore, I am
impressed by the surprising
diversity and talent of alumni
artists.
Many of us are aware of
talented architects such as
Margaret Helfand ’69, Steven
Izenour ’62, and A. Stover
Jenkins ’75, but few know
how many alumni ceramists
are following in the footsteps
of internationally known
artist Robert Turner ’36.
Notable sculptors include
Jonathan Shahn ’59 and Sally
Moore Warren ’63. Alumni
photographers include Sarah
Van Keuren ’66 and the late
visionary Bruce Cratsley ’66.
Experimental video artists
DECEMBER 1999
and filmmakers
include
Linda Gibson ’73 and
Bruce Weinstein ’82.
Nick Tobier
’89 is among
those whose
site-specific
installations
transform
our usual
habits and
categories
of seeing.
Future issues of the magazine
might feature the puppetbuilding exploits of Caroly
Wilcox ’52 or the weavings of
artists such as Mary Van Tassel Murtha ’54 and Bonnie
Gregory Inouye ’69.
This list gives only a hint
of the variety of alumni
efforts in the arts. To continue the conversation about
the value of the arts at
Swarthmore and the growing
presence of Swarthmore in
the art world, look for the
next issue of the Friends of
Art Newsletter, which will be
published in June 2000. To
join our mailing list or contribute to the issue, please
contact me at apackar1@swarthmore.edu or by writing the Art Department.
ANDREA PACKARD ’85
Director, List Gallery
Swarthmore
ART HISTORY
The recent article on studio
arts at Swarthmore strains
credibility. Anyone who was
in the art studios in the 1960s
knows that the direction,
energy, and professional
quality of the program was
the direct result of the efforts
of Harriet Shorr ’60. She
designed a program that
reflected her interest in
Swarthmore students and
her experience at the Yale
School of Art. The daily practice of painting, drawing,
sculpture, and ceramics
would not
have existed at
Swarthmore without her.
Harriet
Shorr’s
amazing
efforts—
and her
commitment to
introducing students to a
flow of visiting artists from New York
and Philadelphia—helped
turn “students” into “young
artists.” People such as Kit
Yin Tieng, Joe Bailey, Dan
Black, Frank Dominguez, and
Will Brown enriched our
experience.
The support of art history
professors Hedley Rhys, John
Williams, and Robert Walker
was crucial for an independent studio program. They
recognized the quality of the
work and the direction of the
studio arts and granted consenting, hard-won approval.
Members of other departments were also sympathetic—particularly Thompson
Bradley, Richie Schuldenfrei,
and a young composer
named John Beel.
Finally, there were the
extremely creative students
who learned and worked
together in the studios—
friends such as Ray Bub ’70,
John Fahnestock ’69, Jeff
Carter ’68, Rob Turner ’69,
Barry Feldman ’68, Dorothy
Twining ’69, Harriet Butts ’71,
Susan Wanklyn ’73, and Beatrice Diebold ’69. They were
an amazing part of my arts
experience at Swarthmore—
where I began to have confidence in being an artist.
JIM LONG ’71
New York
Editor’s Note: Long is the husband of Harriet Shorr.
MORE ART HISTORY
Not enough can be said
about the contribution of
Harriet Shorr ’60. She kickstarted the arts program by
“being there” in every sense
of the term as an authentic
artist who talked art, made
art, and knew artists. She
encouraged us, pushed us,
found us jobs, involved us in
setting up exhibitions—even
loaned us her car. In short,
she was a wonderful example
for us as an adult, a friend,
and an artist.
And there is also Paulus
Berensohn, who was then—
and still is—one of the most
articulate craftsman/artists in
the country. He gave more of
his time, energy, and love
than he could ever have been
compensated for.
I value the skills of critical
analysis and communication
that I learned on my way to a
degree in English literature,
but the depth that studio arts
added to my education is
something wonderful. If it
weren’t for Harriet Shorr and
Paulus Berensohn, many of
us would have missed the
chance to get the best of
both of those worlds.
JEFF CARTER ’68
Boone, N.C.
HABITS OF MIND
The review by Assistant Professor of Biology Roger Latham ’83 of God’s Last Offer by
Ed Ayres ’63 (“Books and
Authors,” September 1999)
took me back to Swarthmore
30 years ago. The cause then
was Marxism instead of environmentalism, but the habits
of mind displayed were
remarkably similar. Then, as
now, a small cadre of
advanced thinkers saw the
truth—and the failure of
most Americans to also see it
was ascribed not to rational
disagreement but to inaccurate perception on the part of
the benighted majority
Please turn to page 71
3
Collection
THE COLLEGE TODAY
col-lec-tion n. 1. an accumulation of objects gathered
for study, comparison, or exhibition; 2. (at Swarthmore
College) a gathering of persons for the purpose of reporting, contemplating, or discussing events or ideas.
Helping hands
the summer, they decided to target the nearby Hoopa Valley
Indian Reservation. Hepatitis A outbreaks had occurred
hen senior biology majors Joseph Tucker and
there in 1978, 1985, and 1993.
Guido Grasso-Knight decided to conduct an on-site
Using the labs at UC–Davis, the students studied water
study of infectious diseases, they had no idea that
samples taken from streams, wells, septic tanks, and public
they would end up in their own country. Their sights were
utilities used on the reservation. Knowing that simply washset on Shanghai, where hepaing hands frequently can
titis A, a disease that causes
stem the disease, they also
inflammation of the liver, had
visited schools to teach
infected as many as 300,000
Hoopa children proper
people at one point. They
hygiene and used the stuknew that hepatitis A thrives
dents’ artwork to illustrate
in poor countries like China
new pamphlets on disease
because it’s carried by conprevention, which they distaminated water, recurs in
tributed on the reservation.
cycles, and is very expensive
After Tucker and Grassoto cure.
Knight presented their findOver spring break, Tucker
ings, physicians from the
and Grasso-Knight traveled to
local medical center congratShanghai, where they conulated them. “They told us
ducted a feasibility study and
there is no sustained commitlaid the groundwork for their
ment to Native American
project. Grasso-Knight had
health care on any level,”
spent the fall 1998 semester
Tucker says. “The reservain China, could speak some
tion has trouble finding qualiChinese, and had contacts in
fied physicians, and having
Shanghai. “Being in Shanghai Seniors Guido Grasso-Knight and Joseph Tucker visited schools on
someone offer help from outwas an amazing experience,” the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation, teaching children that washside the community is really
he says. But before he and ing hands can prevent hepatitis A—and using their “handiwork” in unique.
Tucker could return to begin health care brochures distributed on the reservation.
Tucker, who graduates
their work in earnest, U.S.-led
this spring, says the experiNATO forces bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, and
ence altered his future plans. Before pursuing an M.D./Ph.D.,
the plan crumbled.
he plans to spend a year on a reservation in Ontario, CanaIn what Grasso-Knight describes as a “backup scramble
da, setting up an infectious disease program that will incorplan,” he and Tucker decided to study the disease on an
porate traditional healers as well as medical doctors.
American Indian reservation instead. “We still wanted to
One of the sweetest moments of the summer occurred at
work on a project that would make science useful to the comthe reservation’s only restaurant, run by a young woman
munity,” Grasso-Knight says. Closer to home, no community
who had helped them make contacts among the tribe. Her
needed such help more desperately than the Native Amerifather, a respected tribal elder, introduced himself and sat
can reservations. “There’s a vicious cycle on the reservations
with them, expressing his gratitude. “He told us stories
that mirrors conditions in emerging countries like China and
about how the tribe had changed in terms of health conIndia,” Tucker explains. “Of
cerns,” Tucker recalls. “Then
all the people in the Northern
his granddaughter came over
Seven for science … Seven Swarthmore alumni were
Hemisphere, only Haitians
and said, ‘Hey, I remember
among 900 scholars awarded graduate research fellowhave a shorter life expectanyou! You came into our classships by the National Science Foundation in April. Timocy than Native Americans.”
room and taught us how to
thy Bretl ’99, Robert Eberhardt ’98, Elizabeth Glater ’97,
After Dr. Dean Cliver, head
wash our hands.’ We realized
Nancy Hofmann ’96, Aarti Iyer ’99, Molly Jacobs ’97, and
of the World Health Organiat that moment that it wasn’t
Anna Rives ’98 each received $15,000 for three years of
zation’s Collaborating Center
just one generation we were
graduate study in science, mathematics, or engineering.
on Food Virology at the Uniaffecting. We really made an
versity of California at Davis
impact.”
offered them lab space for
—Cathleen McCarthy
W
4
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
A
robotic penguin is rolling across a room in Kohlberg
Hall carrying a large tray of chocolate chip cookies.
“Alfred” won first place in the “Hors d’Oeuvres, Anyone?” competition at the American Association for Artificial
Intelligence National Conference held in Orlando in July.
Now his creators—two professors and their students—are
showing him off for the home crowd.
Spotting a woman with his electronic eye, Alfred stops.
“Oh hello,” he says in a bad British accent. “And who are
you?”
“Deirdre.”
“Oh, that’s nice. I think I’ll call you MacBeth. Would you
like something to eat?”
“Yes,” she says.
“Yes, what? Be polite now.”
“Yes, please.”
“Oh much better! Take whatever you want,” Alfred says,
before rolling on.
Bruce Maxwell ’91 smiles approvingly.
Maxwell, an assistant professor of engineering, and Lisa Meeden, an assistant
professor of computer science, led the student
team that began designing the prize-winning
robot in May. All are here today, watching Alfred
like proud and anxious parents. Each student took
on aspects of Alfred, according to their fields of
study. Jane Ng ’01, an Honors art major and engineering minor, designed Alfred’s physical structure.
Seth Olshfski ’00, a theater and computer science
major, and Jordan Wales ’01, an Honors engineering
major and psychology minor, came up with
Alfred’s theatrical voice and personality. Engineering majors
Laura Brown ’00, Paul Dickson
’00, and Nii Addo ’02 worked on
integration, navigation, face detection, and speech programming, and computer science major Eli Silk ’01 handled the computer vision.
“I only wish the competition could have
been this quiet,” Maxwell says of today’s
attentive campus audience. Apparently,
Alfred was baffled at times by the buzzing
crowd of 500 at the conference. But that did
not keep him from impressing the judges.
Alfred also bagged the award for Best Integrative Effort, but it was his first place that
allowed the team to return to Swarthmore
with the big prize: a $7,000 Magellan robot
from Real World Interfaces.
Alfred competed against robots from
Carnegie Mellon University and the universities of Arkansas, South Florida, North
Dakota, and Southern California. Other
teams showed up with automated sharks
and blowfish and robots based on characters from the animated cable series South
Park. Alfred, however, was the only robot
that actually served hors d’oeuvres and had
DECEMBER 1999
no noticeable technical difficulties. It also didn’t hurt that he
remembered the judges’ names—at least, the ones he gave
them. Judging from this demonstration, these include MacBeth, Cordelia, and Jenny Halowell.
Back at Swarthmore, Alfred demonstrates his ability to
navigate his way to the refill station to load up on cookies
and, when he “recognizes” Deirdre/MacBeth, his artificial
memory. He has also, apparently, been programmed to recognize “OK.” “Don’t use that vernacular with me!” he reprimands a student. All of this, Maxwell explains, is powered
by two 24-volt batteries.
“Such a good, sturdy name!” Alfred says to a professor
who has just introduced himself.
“If you flatter someone, you’re perceived as being more
intelligent,” Maxwell explains to the crowd, “so we’re flattering people.”
Just then, Alfred turns to a woman in the crowd. “Well,
that gent looks well fed. I don’t think he’ll be needing anything,” Alfred announces haughtily, before moving away
with his cookies.
So much for flattery.
—Cathleen McCarthy
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
My man Alfred
Victorious robot makers gather (clockwise
from top left): Jane Ng ’01, Laura Brown ’00,
Seth Olthfski ’00, Eli Silk ’01, Jordan Wales ’01,
Assistant Professor of Computer Science Lisa
Meeden, Nii Addo ’00, and Assistant Professor
of Engineering Bruce Maxwell ’91.
5
Collection
Honors examinations:
wisdom through dialogue
Editor’s Note: Professor of English Literature and Associate Provost Craig
Williamson has served as coordinator
of the Honors Program since the faculty implemented significant reforms in
1996. Close to 30 percent of the Class
of 1999 participated in the revitalized
program. Last June, Williamson spoke
at a lunch for their visiting examiners.
6
CORBIS/ARCHIVO ICONOGRAFICO S.A.
T
he principle of independent
examination is central to
Swarthmore’s Honors Program
and depends on the generosity and
wisdom of our outside examiners.
We believe that the surest test of
learning is to be able to enter into a
dialogue, not only with fellow students and teachers but also with outside teachers and scholars whose
works we all read, discuss, and
admire.
Each year in their evaluation of
the program, students give the examination process very high marks. Students are understandably anxious about being examined by wise strangers. But
when they reflect back upon the process, they say that the
opportunity to engage in a dialogue with scholars and
teachers from the larger professional world is, as one of
them put it, “a rare privilege.”
This year, while I was administering the Honors Program,
I was also reading what is called wisdom literature in Old
English. This eighth-century literature includes such genres
as riddles, proverbs, precepts, charms, and advice from
teachers to students. One night, I came across an anonymous wisdom poem called “The Wonders of Creation” by
early editors and “The Order of the World” by later editors.
What struck me immediately was the challenge of the
opening lines, which can be translated roughly as: “So,
smart guy, how would you like to trade talk, match wits with
a stranger?” And I thought, “Aha! Honors orals in eighthcentury England.” So while Grendel was gobbling up Danes
in one corner of the poetic landscape, in another, scholars
were thinking about intellectual inquiry into the nature of
creation and the importance of dialogue with enlightened
strangers.
Professor Elaine Hansen of Haverford College, who was
head examiner in 1998, writes about this poem: “The traditional speech situations invoked at the beginning of ‘The
Order of the World’ imply that no matter who is speaking,
wisdom is the product of verbal interaction between two
parties, challenger and opponent or disciple and wise
teacher.” I believe that for the 20th century as well as the
8th, this dialogue is the heart of learning.
I spent much of May translating and transforming the
opening frame of this poem, using the old text to reshape a
new one as poets have often done. Sometimes I would hold
true to the Anglo-Saxon poet’s notions of dialogue and divinity; sometimes I would call back with the cadences of Gerard Manley Hopkins or the worldview of Stephen Hawking.
My poem begins in the original Old English voice, moves
from translation to transformation, and finally opens a dialogue across a span of 1,200 years.
Weaving Wisdom
Wilt pu, fus hæle, fremdne monnan,
wisne wodboran wordum gretan,
fricgan felageongne ymb fordgesceaft,
biddan pe gesecge sidra gesceafta
cræftas cyndelice cwichrerende,
pa pe dogra gehwam purh dom godes
bringe wundra fela wera cneorissum…
Are you willing to trade talk with a stranger,
Unwrap riddles, mix words with the wise,
Wonder how and why each element
Of creation quickens from cell to star,
Each song shapes from Beowulf to blessing,
Each primrose or prayer begins to bloom?
Each day through dom—through judgment,
Through honor or ordinance, majesty or meaning,
Some mystery offers itself up for unraveling
To those who can thread thoughts and hear
The shuttle singing, click and clack,
Across the web, across the centuries.
And you, wanderer of landscape or light,
Can you read runes, sift evidence,
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
Here’s a Saxon proverb:
A wise man or woman never wearies
Of asking questions about creation,
Never tires of digging up ideas and artifacts,
Never says, “No,” to the dirt of history
Or the mind mucking back through memory,
Rooting about for tribal glory or plain truth.
So that by repeating, rehearsing, revising,
We take the cunning wonder of the world
And weave it into a nest of numbers,
A house of hypotheses, a web of words.
The Saxon poet says, Leorna ∂as lare—
“Learn this lore.” So scholars wrote riddles,
Teasing the wits of would-be solvers,
Celebrating the mystery of moon and mailcoat,
Warhorn and harrow, piss and plow,
Weathercock, wine-cup, web and loom.
And across the bridge of language that lifts
Over the river of years, here is my riddle:
What shapes us all from morning to meandering,
From ancient galaxies to ribonucleic acid,
From certainty to serendipity, dawn to doom,
From quarks to quasars, from proofs to passions,
From kisses to calibrations, love to longevity,
From warriors to websongs, high art to half-lives,
From the flowers of heaven to the fields of Einstein?
Let each student who loves a mystery,
Either as a shaman or as a detective,
Inquire after the wonders of creation,
The order of the world, inscribe in her book
Or his understanding the searorun
“The secret skill or inwrought power,”
Of each elemental thing, each nascent thought,
Each truth-song inscribed in number or narrative.
Be bold to question, quick to doubt,
Eager to imagine, proud of precision,
Humble at the end of a proof or poem.
Give thanks that some part of this grand,
Unabating, intimate mystery remains
Unknown, whether you want to call it
A unified field, a world-wide web,
Or a shuttle singing through the loom of time.
This is my dialogue with the Anglo-Saxon shaper. The kisses
and calibrations are mine. The searorun and the tribal glory
are his or hers. This is a dialogue in what the Russian critic
Bakhtin calls “great time.” It’s my way of carrying on a conversation across centuries, two poets together, weaving wisdom—as I hope we have done with our Honors students.
—Craig Williamson
To hear Craig Williamson read his poem, visit the Bulletin
Web site at www.swarthmore.edu/bulletin.
DECEMBER 1999
Distinctively American
T
he Annapolis Group, an association of America’s leading liberal arts colleges, collaborated last winter with
Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences, to publish a special issue titled “Distinctively American: The Residential Liberal Arts Colleges.” The
issue contained 14 essays from college presidents, scholars,
historians of American higher education, and notable alumni of Annapolis
Group institutions, including Eugene
Lang ’38, emeritus chairman of Swarthmore’s Board of Managers.
Lang calls on liberal arts colleges to
return to their historical mission, which
he describes as preparing students “to
function knowledgeably within a framework of civic responsibility.”
“Whatever the nature of the instituEugene Lang ’38
tion or its curriculum, the processes of
proposes an action undergraduate education both in and
agenda for liberal
out of the classroom should be
arts colleges.
designed to enrich the experience of
students by inculcating democratic values, respect for the institutions of democracy, ethical perspectives, civic duty, and social responsibility,” writes Lang,
who is also the founder of the “I Have a Dream” Foundation
and a trustee of the New School University.
Citing a statistic that 64 percent of all college students are
currently involved in some form of community service activity, Lang says that young people are more than ready to “initiate or become involved in social causes that touch their idealism, emotions, or sense of justice.” Residential liberal arts
colleges are “natural laboratories for undertaking long-term
institutional commitments to serve social objectives.”
Lang’s agenda for action includes greater involvement by
higher education in primary and secondary schools: “From
their prestigious position at the top of the educational ladder, colleges and universities have shown little disposition to
reach down with a sustained commitment to help make the
total process of education work effectively for everybody.”
In addition, Lang challenges liberal arts colleges to teach
courses that foster responsible citizenship in a pluralistic
democracy, to model social responsibility in the design and
governance of their campus communities, and then to
“reach out insistently into their communities, where, by
their nature, they are important members.” He urges collaboration among students, faculty members, administrators,
trustees, and alumni in a broad program of social and community involvement that goes beyond “extracurricular ‘feel
good’ exercises that confer little benefit and that may be
seen as superficial or patronizing.”
The Daedalus special issue proved to be so popular that
all copies have been sold, though it remains available in
libraries. By special permission, the full text of Eugene
Lang’s essay is available through the Bulletin Web site at
www.swarthmore.edu/bulletin. The Annapolis Group was
formed to share mutual interests and information intended
to strengthen the educational programs and enhance the
national visibility of its 94 members. Swarthmore President
Alfred H. Bloom served as its first chairperson.
—Jeffrey Lott
DENG-JENG LEE
Draw conclusions or a straight line,
Craft arguments in prose or a pot in clay,
Chart the universe, charm the moment
With child’s play?
7
Collection
Still giants
J
ust as baseball’s living legends often
make cameo appearances at major
league stadiums, two retired faculty
“giants” recently returned to Swarthmore to lecture. But there was a big difference: Samuel Hynes and Daniel Hoffman are still at the top of their game.
Both were stars in the Department of
English Literature, Hynes from 1949
to 1968 and Hoffman from 1957 to
1967. Hynes left for Northwestern
and then a distinguished career at
Princeton, where he is Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature Emeritus.
Hoffman served as the nation’s poet
laureate in 1973–74, and he left an
impressive legacy at the University of
Pennsylvania, where he is Felix E.
Schelling Professor of English Emeritus. His son, MacFarlane, is Swarthmore ’80.
This fall, they lectured in the
McCabe Library lobby, amid
exhibits related to themes in their
work. Hynes spoke on “A Critic Looks
at War.” J. William Frost, Howard M. and
Charles F. Jenkins Professor of Quaker
History and Research and director of
the Friends Historical Library, introduced him, observing that although he
joined the faculty after Hynes left, the
professor’s reputation still intimidated
his contemporaries. A decorated
Marine aviator in World War II, Hynes
won acclaim for his books exploring
warfare from World War I to Vietnam—
most recently The Soldier’s Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War.
Hoffman’s talk was titled “Returns
From the Grave: The Spirit of Poe in
Hynes
Hoffman
Taken from the 1959 Halcyon
Recent Fiction.” Thomas Blackburn,
Centennial Professor of English Literature, introduced him, noting that he
was a junior colleague of both Hynes
and Hoffman, “the mainstays of what
was surely the most distinguished college English Department in the country.”
Marking the 150th anniversary of
Edgar Alan Poe’s death, Hoffman surveyed Poe’s massive influence on both
high and pop culture. He said that at
speaking engagements he often meets
“direct descendants” of the author, who
died childless.
As a former student of both professors, these programs were a special
treat for me. Having studied The
Great Gatsby with Hynes, I knew we
were getting extra insights because,
like Fitzgerald, Hynes grew up in
Minnesota. After our freshman class
disappointed him by reacting cluelessly to Faulkner’s “The Bear,”
someone restored Hynes’ famous
wry grin by draping a bear rug over
his lectern.
Those of us who took Hoffman’s
Honors seminars in the 1950s found
ourselves reflecting his intensity
back at him. That was the era of the
New Criticism in college English
departments, and he excelled at making
close textual analysis a tool for revelation rather than pedantry. Exploring
Moby-Dick with Hoffman, even the
fabled whiteness of the whale became
less baffling, while losing none of its
cosmic mystery.
—Barbara Haddad Ryan ’59
STEVEN GOLDBLATT ʼ67
Glutted market … Never let it be
said that Swarthmore econ profs
don’t get published. No fewer than
three members of the economics
faculty-—Thomas Dee ’90, Stephen
O’Connell, and Bernard Saffran-—
had articles in the summer 1999
issue of the Journal of Economic
Perspectives. Saffran writes a regular column for the journal.
Bonding ... Incoming first-year students light each other’s candles in the Scott Amphitheater during their first Collection in September, a ritual that has become a tradition of freshmen orientation in recent years.
8
Bang for your buck … In addition
to the top ranking among liberal
arts colleges, U.S. News & World
Report gave the College the No. 1
best value in liberal arts colleges,
based on average cost ($14,570)
after financial aid. U.S. News
reported that the average discount
on the total cost of a Swarthmore
education is 55 percent.
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
STUDENT MIND
Real to reel
One good class can
turn your life
around—even if it
takes 15 years.
Bruce Weinstein ’82
was a philosophy
major at Swarthmore
when he took Art History Professor T. Kaori
Kitao’s film class.
Weinstein went on to a
Ph.D. from Georgetown University and a
career as a medical
ethics professor at
West Virginia University (WVU). But a seed
of ambition planted in
Kitao’s class finally
reached fruition in
1995, when Weinstein
left WVU to become a
filmmaker.
His first documentary, Singing in Color,
follows the Chicago
Children’s Choir on a
recent visit to South
Africa to sing with a
Singing in Color, a documentary film by Bruce
children’s choir there
and tour the impover- Weinstein ’82 got high marks from Professor
ished Soweto. When it Kaori Kitao, Weinstein’s former film teacher,
aired at his alma mater when it was shown on campus this fall.
on Sept. 24, Kitao
introduced him—and was the first to raise her hand when the 47minute feature ended. “Uh-oh, now I’m nervous,” Weinstein said. “My
cinema teacher is asking me questions!”
He financed the $138,000 production himself, by maxing out nine
credit cards—or, as he puts it, “receiving nine grants” from Visa, Mastercard, and others. Weinstein, who played in a rock band while at
Swarthmore, also had to sell his drum set and guitar collection.
Beyond Kitao’s class and a film class at NYU—“Everybody there
thinks they’re Fellini!” Weinstein joked—the budding filmmaker
received no formal training. “Making this documentary was my film
school in a box,” he says. “I hear [Kitao’s] voice often when I’m working. I hear her say: ‘The first shot of a film is its thesis.’” Andrea
Packard ’85, director of the List Gallery, raises her hand and notes
that Weinstein chose the rising sun as his opening shot for Singing in
Color. Was it meant as a unifying symbol—a reminder that the same
sun rises over Chicago and South Africa? Weinstein nods.
Before retiring to the refreshments, he shows a preview of his documentary-in-progress, a study of pop-culture fans. This film features
interviews with Trekkies in full costume filmed at a Star Trek convention. When a student asks why he went from a children’s choir to fan
clubs, Weinstein muses: “I’ve noticed a theme running through my
films. They’re all about the struggle to create community. I really
miss the community I had here at Swarthmore. I’m always trying to
recreate it.”
—Cathleen McCarthy
DECEMBER 1999
Samples from some recent
Swarthmore literary magazines
…I’m too white, not right,
for the Asian boys.
And
so Asian, just right,
for the white boys.
My black hair is straight, so Asian
with my innocent gaze, just right.
I speak my mind, too white,
and would do it again, not right.
With bangs all my life, so Asian,
I must cook a mean fried rice, just right.
I raise my voice, too white,
to make my point, not right.
For white boys I move too slow,
for Asian boys too fast!
Exotic or white. What shall I be today?
—Jih-Fang “Jenny” Yang ’00,
from celebrASIAN
(Swarthmore Asian Organization)
My ancestors curled up inside houses
clustered together inside the russian steppes
they liked the proximity—
the way the smell of their breath all merged together
the garlic and spicy chives.
Even god lived close—nestled under their
armpits in the winter
and blossomed on their cheeks in the spring.
—Mariana Pardes ’00, from “forgotten,”
Elu V’Elu (by Jewish students)
Your heart beats soft next to mine
a slight bump jump of life—
acknowledged and newly affirmed…
Your stomach, soft, released against mine
no tension there, where it usually rests
constant and unnoticeable in its
regularity.
soft there is shocking in a cotton candy
teddy bear, g’night kids sort of way
soft there is innocence
—Renee Witlen ’02, from “Untitled,”
Common Speaking (Swarthmore College women)
I watched in my mind
As your blood replaced the
Rain on the pavement.
Screaming with no sounds
Running with no motion
Crying with no tears
I share that night with you, my friend
The night I wasn’t there
And now you aren’t here
—Anonymous, from “1 Night,”
Mjumbe (students of the African diaspora)
9
Collection
Through the looking glass
Tough love
t all started after lunch at a Friendly’s Restaurant, when
Sarah Willie noticed her mother’s maiden name on her
waitress’s name tag. Though she had only recently
moved to this neighborhood in upstate New York, her mother’s family was from the area. “Excited by the possibility of
familial, if distant, connection, I smiled,” Willie recalls, and
“started to say something to her. And then I hesitated.”
Sarah Willie is African American, and the waitress was
white. “One brief, unfocused look at
my face, and my African ancestry is
unmistakable,” she muses. “So is
my European ancestry. But in this
society, my whiteness is not only
less visible to most people, it is less
important and to some less real.”
Willie is an assistant professor of
sociology and director of the Black
Studies concentration. Although
most folks might let such an
encounter pass unexamined, Willie
Sarah Willie, assistant
examined it—carefully. The result
professor of sociology
was “Outing the Blackness in Whiteand director of the
ness: Analyzing Race, Class, and Sex
Black Studies Program:
in Everyday Life,” a paper that will
“White supremacy has
be published next month in Annals
messed us up good.”
of Scholarship—and which Willie
presented on campus in October.
She examines her Friendly’s encounter—and the lingering
undercurrent of white supremacy in our society—through
the looking glass of contemporary scholarship, philosophy,
and feminist literature. She concludes that Lewis Carroll
says it best. “Living as we do within so many constricted
systems of identity and status can resemble the absurdity of
Wonderland,” she writes. “‘If any one of them can explain it,’
said Alice. ‘I’ll give him sixpence. I don’t believe there’s an
atom of meaning in it.’”
“Just referring to our consciences is not enough,” she
told faculty and students; tackling this problem requires a
fresh look at American history. “Don’t be fooled,” she said.
“White supremacy has messed us up good.”
—Cathleen McCarthy
harlie Ellis loves football—the guys, the
game, the good feeling of accomplishing something together. As his senior
season winds down, Ellis, a
tight end, counts the dwindling practices and games,
measuring the minutes of
football he has left. A painful
broken hand has sidelined
him for a few weeks, but he’s
healing now, getting ready.
Charlie Ellis also loves
Swarthmore College. He
chose Swarthmore over
Williams because of the
“awesome” conversations he
had when visiting the College
as a high school senior:
“You’d meet someone and
end up talking for six hours.”
The minds of fellow students
attracted him—not the football program, which didn’t
even recruit him.
Four years ago, when Ellis
made the team as a walk-on,
Swarthmore was just seven games into its record 28-game losing streak. The streak was stopped—for a game at least—on
Sept. 4, when Swarthmore trounced Oberlin 42-6 in what an
Oberlin admissions counselor dubbed the Brain Bowl.
Ellis scored two touchdowns. “It was incredible,” he said
weeks later, a little catch in his voice as he remembered
“running off the field together, celebrating, seeing Swatties
excited about the team. I’ll never forget it. It felt like all the
work and suffering through losing all those games was
worth it. It felt like we’d done something significant for ourselves but also for the school.”
Loving both football and Swarthmore hasn’t always been
easy for Ellis and many of his teammates. “We’ve had our
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
I
That voodoo that you do …
Joining an American group of 11
priests, priestesses, and scholars
interested in African-based religions,
Yvonne Chireau, associate professor
of religion and expert on voodoo, visited Brazil in June to attend a ceremony and conference in honor of the
Oba (King) Akako Mendes of São
Paulo.
Nearly 1,000 participated in the
weeklong festival, which marked a
new era in transnational relations
10
C
between members of African-based
religions worldwide—including Yoruba, Candomble, and voodoo practitioners—and the first formal recognition by Brazil’s federal government of
the thousands of African spiritual
houses in that country.
Chireau reported on the event on
behalf of the African Religions Congress, of which she is a member, and
is writing a book on the intersection
of traditions in Afro-Cuban, AfroBrazilian, and Afro-American diaspora
religions. She teaches courses on New
World African religions.
No. 2 in doctorates … In a recent
study of doctoral degree recipients in
FY 1997, Swarthmore ranked second
among liberal arts colleges. Oberlin
was first—and 72nd among all institutions in the total number of doctorates awarded to its graduates. The
College ranked first in the proportion
of graduates earning doctorates in
psychology and the social sciences.
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
JIM GRAHAM
share of rough times, but
playing alongside these guys
has been a very positive
experience,” he said.
Ellis is the prize-winning
product of an elite science
and technology high
school—a computer science
major who was learning
about the Internet before
most people ever heard of it.
He spent last summer at
Microsoft designing software, but his favorite
Swarthmore course, he says,
was International Politics
with Professor James Kurth:
“He’s a great lecturer—so
knowledgeable. And he
never shuts off a conversation; he values the ideas of
every student.”
Yet he says that many students and faculty at Swarthmore—the same people he chose to spend four years studying with—“aren’t prepared to accept the kind of contribution we make to the school…. Nothing frustrates me more
than people who make some negative comment about football players,” he says quietly, looking at the floor. “When I
hear this, I’ll say, ‘Wait a minute, I’m a football player.’ And
they’ll say, ‘But you’re different.’ The irony is that everyone I
know on the team has had the same experience.”
Maybe that’s because football players feel a closeness
that separates them from the rest of the school. In a fierce
physical game, they learn to depend on each other like
brothers. “This happens with any activity people do together here, but football gets such scrutiny and negative attention because it’s not something that some Swarthmore intellectuals see as a positive experience.” Yet he credits the
administration’s current commitment to football and appreciates the strong support of some alumni.
Seeing his playing time running out, Ellis seems to ask of
both Swarthmore and the game: If we can’t be lovers, can
we at least be friends? He says it’s been “tough love” all
around—“rewarding but not all sunshine and happiness.
We’re even proud of our near misses.”
The broken hand is healing. Only a few games remain,
and win or lose, Charlie Ellis will give himself passionately to
the few hours of football he has left, just as he will give himself to Swarthmore for a few more months. “I’m not a bitter
guy,” he says with a shrug and an easy smile.
—Jeffrey Lott
DECEMBER 1999
Cross-country tops fall sports season
Overall
Centennial
Record
Conference
Men’s Cross-country ..................4-0....................3rd of 9
Women’s Cross-country ............4-0 ..................6th of 10
Field Hockey ..............................9-7 ........................6-3
Football ........................................1-8 ........................0-7
Men’s Soccer ..............................4-15 ......................1-8
Women’s Soccer ........................7-12 ......................2-8
Volleyball ....................................4-20 ......................1-9
Jokotade Agunloye ’01 qualified for the NCAA Cross-country Championships for the second consecutive season after
a second-place finish at the Mideast Regional earned her AllMid-East honors. Agunloye became the first Swarthmore
woman to capture the Centennial Conference (CC) championship, completing the 5K
course in a school-record
time of 18:41.67 to earn CC
Female Runner of the Year
honors. For the men, Liam
O’Neill ’00 finished second
at the regionals and was
named to the All-Mideast
Regional squad, earning his
first trip to the NCAA championships. O’Neill also finished in second place at the
CC championships to earn
first-team All-Centennial honors.
Midfielder Kristen English
’01 led the field hockey team
in scoring with 7 goals and 5
assists for 19 points. She was
named to the 1999 AstroTurf/National Field Hockey
Coaches Association Regional All-American squad as
well as first-team All-Centennial Conference. Joining English on the All-Centennial
team are midfielder Julie
Finnegan ’00 and defender
Jamie Flather ’00, who were Cross-country runner Liam
named second team, and for- O’Neill ’00 was named to the
All-Centennial Conference first
ward Kim Cariello ’02, who
received honorable mention. team.
Running back Ken Clark ’03
was named second-team All-Conference after leading the
Garnet in rushing and all-purpose yards. Clark led all freshmen backs in the conference with 664 rushing and 1,259 allpurpose yards finishing third in the CC in both categories.
In soccer, freshman goalkeeper Chris Milla was named second-team All-Conference. Milla recorded three shutouts on
the season while posting a 2.31 goals against average and an
.801 save percentage for the men’s team.
—Mark Duzenski
MARK DUZENSKI
Charlie Ellis ’00 drives for a
touchdown against Oberlin.
Swarthmore’s 42-6 victory
snapped a 28-game losing
streak but was the only win of
the season for the Garnet.
11
FROM BYTOM WCZORAJ BEUTHEN O/S GESTERN, MEZEUM GORNOSLASKIE W BYTOMIU
Steps
Change
OF
By Cathleen McCarthy
Newly democratic
Poland is home
to Swarthmore’s
latest foreign
study program—
an unusual
combination of
environmental
engineering and
modern dance.
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
W
hen Allen Kuharski first went
to Poland in September 1981,
to study scenic design at the
Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, communism was alive but in crisis. He searched
the city in vain that winter for a store
that sold winter coats—or a restaurant
that served a decent meal. Food shortages were widespread and so were corrupt practices, like state-run “dollar
stores” that forced Polish citizens to
convert their zlotys into overvalued
American dollars—a supposedly illegal
practice—to pay for basic necessities.
Kuharski has returned to Poland
many times in the last 18 years to study
Polish theater and history. He has
watched the country evolve from communist rule to a free-market economy.
Now director of the Theatre Studies Program at Swarthmore, he sits in Essie
Mae’s snack bar in Tarble in Clothier on
a May afternoon, trying to explain
Poland. I’ll be accompanying him—
along with Steven Piker, professor of
anthropology and foreign studies director; Arthur McGarity, professor of engineering; and Kim Arrow, assistant professor of dance—on a summer journey
to Krakow and Bytom, where they plan
to lay the groundwork for Swarthmore’s
newest foreign studies program. President Alfred H. Bloom and his wife, Peggi,
will join them to discuss the program
with local government officials.
Since the trip, an exchange program
has been established that will send five
Swarthmore students to Poland for the
next spring semester, and an environmental engineering professor and choreographer from Poland to teach at the
College in the next two academic years.
The students going to Poland are
among nearly 100 Swarthmore students
who will spend the spring semester
studying abroad as participants in the
College’s growing foreign studies program. This fall, there were 68—half of
them in Western Europe and only 3 in
Eastern or Central Europe. Eight were in
France; 6 each in England, Ireland, and
Italy; 5 in Spain; and the rest scattered
through 21 other countries—including 7
Members of the Silesian Dance Theatre
(left) perform during a Swarthmore residency in February. Their visit led to a program that will take Swarthmore students to
the historic mining region of eastern Poland (top, ca. 1936), where they will study
theater, dance, and environmental change.
DECEMBER 1999
in Costa Rica. Thirty-eight percent of the
Class of 2000 will have studied abroad
for at least a semester—according to
Piker, about double what it was 10 years
ago.
“The faculty couldn’t be more supportive of foreign study,” Piker says.
“It’s part of the Swarthmore agenda:
international education.”
President Bloom sees foreign study
as one vital component of an education
for the next century. “Swarthmore has
an increasing commitment to educate
students for a global world,” he says. It’s
essential, he believes, for students “to
understand, appreciate, and learn from
other cultural perspectives—but even
more important, to see the extent to
which we, as societies and as individuals, share similar hopes and values and
deal with similar problems, and how
important it is to build on these commonalities to reach collective goals.”
Swarthmore is a member of several
college consortia that sponsor foreign
study programs. “The virtue of consortia membership is that we consider
these good programs; by being a member, we can have a little input into their
design and content,” Piker says, “but we
have no responsibility for running
them.”
One factor in the increasing popularity of foreign study may be the revisions
made to the College’s Honors Program
in 1995–96, which made it easier for
Honors students to integrate a foreign
study experience into their preparation
for external examinations. Craig
Williamson, English professor, associate
provost, and Honors Program coordinator, has tracked the number of Honors
students abroad as part of an ongoing
study of the Honors Program. Their
numbers have risen along with those of
the rest of the students, he reports,
from 17 percent a decade ago to 28 percent last year. It’s possible to do Honors
preparation abroad, but most students
prefer to work this out on campus with
Swarthmore faculty, often spending time
abroad during the sophomore instead of
the junior year.
Until now, Swarthmore has actually
administered only 1 of the 100 or so foreign studies programs offered to its students—the 40-year-old Grenoble program in France. But in 1995, Sharon
Friedler, professor of dance and director
of the dance program, pioneered a looser form of faculty and student exchange
in Ghana, resulting from a Cornell visiting professorship offered to J.H. Kwabena Nketia, a world-renowned ethnomusicologist. Friedler returned during a
leave, and students from other colleges
can now participate in the Swarthmoreinitiated Ghana program.
The new program in Poland will be
exclusive to Swarthmore for now and
will accommodate only a handful of students each year. Though they represent
nothing close to its investment in the
popular Grenoble program, the College
has made a commitment of resources
and faculty time to both the Ghana and
Poland exchanges.
T
ry not to jump to conclusions in
Poland,” Kuharski warns. “There are
so many levels to what people there are
doing. There is a certain lack of trust
that can seem like cynicism, but Poles
are incredibly idealistic at the same
time.” Living with communism for so
long left them distrustful, he explains,
but defeating it added the conviction
that good will triumph in the end.
The connection to Poland is more
than a professional one for Kuharski. His
forebears emigrated from Poland in the
1850s and established a Polish community in Wisconsin. Kuharski’s grandmother’s first language was Polish, but
he had to learn it in school. Since his
earliest trips to his ancestral home, Polish cities have become tourist friendly—
especially after borders opened and visa
restrictions were dropped in 1990. In
fact, according to the World Tourism
Organization, Poland is now the fifth
most popular tourist destination among
European countries. It is this transition—still ongoing—that Kuharski
believes makes Poland perfect for onsite study.
Arthur McGarity thinks so, too.
McGarity has lived and studied off and
on in Poland for a decade—twice on Fulbright fellowships. His first yearlong
stay began in 1989 on what he likes to
call “the day the Cold War ended.” He
and his family landed in Krakow on the
last day of the communist parliament.
The next day, the Solidarity party took
power. “During the first four months, it
was basically the same: long lines, shortages, no meat—all the old stuff.” McGarity and wife Jane’s children were ages 2,
4, 6, and 8 at the time. “We saw remarkable changes. Poland took the ‘coldbath’ approach to the free market,” he
13
says. “They just jumped right in.”
On Jan. 1, 1990, price controls were
lifted. Stores filled with goods, he
recalls, but prices shot so high, nobody
could buy anything. “Things started to
change dramatically then,” he says. “By
the time we left in June 1990, vendors
were setting up on sidewalks, selling
stuff they’d gotten from Germany or
other countries in the West.” In April of
that year, McGarity, a committed environmental engineer, helped organize
Poland’s first celebration of Earth Day.
The country’s dire environmental conditions were being acknowledged for the
first time by the new regime.
McGarity returned for six months in
1998. “Usually the Fulbright committee
frowns on people returning to the same
place for their second grant,” McGarity
says. “But I made the argument that
Poland was a very different place, and
they bought that.” He pauses. “And it
was very different.”
P
14
ever, and it doesn’t take long to gauge
the seriousness of his intentions. “Upper
Silesia has serious environmental problems,” he says, “and Bytom is right in
the middle of that region. The environment there was exploited to produce
steel for the Soviet military for decades,
and coal is still being mined and
burned.” But there will be
plenty of pollution problems
right in Krakow for students
to explore.” Just to the east of
Krakow, he says, is a steelworks. The prevailing wind
blows in the opposite direction, fortunately. “But west of Krakow is
Bytom,” he points out. “So pollution
elbows in.”
Like Kuharski, however, McGarity
warns against jumping to conclusions.
“Be careful. I’ve seen journalists portray
this area as a toxic waste dump, but it’s
not,” he stresses. “It has difficult problems, but there are beautiful places. It’s
remarkable, really, how the environment has survived all this. These problems are solvable.”
Steps
Change
LEFT AND ABOVE: CATHLEEN McCARTHY
resident Bloom’s philosophy about
global problem solving is at the
heart of why both Allen Kuharski and
Art McGarity, scholars from widely different disciplines, want students to
study in Poland. The catalyst for the
emerging foreign study program—and
the linchpin for both its artistic and
environmental components—is the Silesian Dance Theatre, a contemporary
troupe of international reputation based
in Bytom, a town of 208,000 in the coal-
mining region west of Krakow. At
Kuharski’s suggestion, the company and
its director and choreographer, Jacek
Luminski, visited, taught, and performed
at Swarthmore in February 1999. Luminski, Kuharski, and Sharon Friedler put
their heads together then, and now the
choreographer is inviting Swarthmore
students to live and work at
his cultural arts center in
Poland.
For McGarity, Silesia
OF
means something else; it’s
one of the most polluted
regions in the former Eastern Bloc. His base of operations is
Krakow—specifically, the Politechnika
Krakowska, where he has long-standing
connections. But Bytom is only a twohour train ride away, and McGarity
plans to use the dance/theater program
to leverage Swarthmore’s first semester
abroad program for engineering students.
At another college, it might seem
extraordinary that it took a contemporary dance troupe to bring an engineering foreign studies program to fruition.
Things don’t get more “interdisciplinary” than this situation. Thus, it has
all worked out in a distinctly Swarthmorean way—something McGarity
seems to relish. This is, after all, a man
who chose to teach engineering at a
small liberal arts school, not MIT.
Get McGarity talking about his
end of the Poland program, how-
I
n Krakow at the end of June, there is
no evidence of that elbowing pollution. As I wander into town the first day,
A century of coal mining has left its mark on
Bytom (left). The home of the Silesian
Dance Theatre (above) is a former hunters’
club. Directed by Jacek Luminski (far right),
the Polish dancers performed the North
American premiere of “Melody to Plait a
Twig” at Swarthmore last February (right).
the sky is a dazzling blue, and there is
“peasant,” brings her dog on the train,
no sign of soot in the air or on the buildwhile a yuppie across the aisle talks into
ings. The only visible smoke issues from a cell phone. I can already see it’s a land
grizzled old vendors who puff cigarof contrasts—particularly between genettes, hunched over their buckets of
erations.
flowers along the sidewalks. At an outIn the Bytom cultural center, where
door market, families bustle around
the dance company is based, Luminski’s
stalls laden with bread, meat, and perclass warms up to classical music in the
fect vegetables. Goods seem plentiful on main dance studio, awash in sunlight
this Friday morning and so do buyers.
streaming through the back windows.
On the Rynek Glowny, the city’s cenHis is one of many classes being taught
tral square, a costumed polka band pertoday here and in various venues
forms—the ultimate cliché of Old
around Bytom. Like Luminski’s class,
Poland—while New Poland crisscrosses
the dance being taught and performed
the square: waifish young women who
at the festival is contemporary. He puts
look like models in their capri pants,
on a Barry White CD for the first combiplatform slides, and purple hair.
nation, and the young dancers begin to
Next morning, I’m off to Bytom for
follow him across the floor, flinging and
the last weekend of the 10-day dance
unfurling their bodies in Luminski’s
festival and conference organized by
idiosyncratic version of the “release
Jacek Luminski’s Silesian Dance Themethod.” As the music changes to
atre. From the windows of the train to
Aretha Franklin, even the youngest
Bytom, there are still no visible signs of
dancers still rock out to “Dr. Feelgood.”
environmental ravage. Morning mist
The music jumps unpredictably from
clings to the passing countryside, flat
classical to Europop and back again, but
but lush, sprinkled with small farms,
the movement gets only more frantic,
red-roofed houses,
and the 20-somethings
occasional
sweat to keep up with
haystacks, and
the wiry 40-year-old
winding streams. A
choreographer.
hirty-eight
middle-aged
Luminski’s movement
woman, who might
and choreography are
percent of
once have been
based, in part, on his 15
the Class of 2000
described as a
years of research into
T
Poland’s Jewish traditions, particularly
Hasidic ecstatic dance, prayer rituals,
and wedding customs that flourished in
prewar Poland—and a strange syncopation he discovered in the music of
Kurpie, a region long isolated in the
woodlands between Warsaw and Gdansk. “I look for different rhythmical patterns,” he tells me later. “You can find
them in any music—classical, rap, or
jazz. Sometimes it takes my students
time to understand the structure
because it’s so unusual.”
His experience the previous winter
with Swarthmore students was eyeopening, he says. “I was amazed at how
receptive they were, how committed
they are to what they want to do, and
how easily they get new ideas. They
were not always able to do what we
wanted, but you could see that they
understood what we were thinking
about,” he recalls.
One student, Jim Harker ’99, made
such a strong impression that Luminski
invited him to come to Poland after
graduation to dance with the company.
Trained as a gymnast in high school,
Harker is remarkably flexible, which
helped him master Luminski’s acrobatic
movements. Harker is here at the festival, but after dancing 10 hours daily for
the past week, he has strained his knee
and is sitting it out today.
will have studied
abroad for at
least a semester.
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
SILESIAN DANCE THEATRE
15
After the last class of the day, the
buzz is audible in the theater café as students mingle with teachers, dashing
down mineral water and $2 plates of
vegetarian goulash before the nightly
performance. Tonight, a German company opens with a stark, hour-long modern
number, followed by an entertaining
piece by a Polish troupe, featuring characters in costume—ostensibly hookers
and a pimp. The featured dancer wears
a Marilyn Monroe–like wig
and 3-inch heels at one
point yet still manages to
OF
dance beautifully. At the climatic moment, the lights
dim, and video images of
her flash, showing her slowly undressing until she is naked. The
number closes to wild applause.
This performance, Kuharski tells us
over dinner, is typical of contemporary
dance in Europe right now, which is
really an amalgam of theater and dance.
At 10:30 p.m., we join the crowd gathered on the town square, where a “happening” is scheduled. Several dancers in
druid-like robes carry torches and hand
them off to people in the crowd. Choreographed by a Bosnian and involving
Russian, Polish, German, and American
dancers, the event, we are later told, is
meant as a statement of global solidari-
ty. But as this strange and somber spectacle drags on, some boys begin to hoot;
others wander off.
I think of something a local steelworks
manager and member of the town’s Cultural Commission said a few days earlier
at a meeting with McGarity, Piker, and
Kuharski: “As far as culture goes,” he
said, “it doesn’t get any better than Frank
Sinatra as far as I’m concerned. I can’t
really understand anything beyond
that—and that’s fine. I still
think the Silesian Dance Theatre is good for the community.”
The commission he represented expressed more interest in the economic boost a
relationship with Swarthmore might
mean to the city and in a possible connection to the university at nearby
Katowice, a Silesian city between
Krakow and Bytom. “They are already
discussing introducing dance into the
curriculum at the university,” Kuharski
says, “and one way to do that would be
to make the Silesian Dance Theatre an
institution for dance studies connected
to the university. A connection like that
is something the community can understand more easily than naked people
doing avant-garde dance while much
of the system is in collapse.”
Steps
Change
A tour guide (second from left above) shows President Al Bloom, Allen
Kuharski, and Peggi Bloom (left to right) the Jagiellonian University, where
Swarthmore students will study Polish language and culture. Top inset: Jim
Harker ’99 learns the Martha Graham technique at a dance festival class.
16
T
he Bytom city government currently
subsidizes the wages and rent of the
Silesian Dance Theatre, which employs
17 people, including the dancers. Last
year, when the Ministry of Culture
threatened to withdraw funding, Luminski called in the national press. “The old
comrades’ method,” he says with a wry
smile. “I told them that they were using
this for the elections, to make people
vote for them. We also wrote to the
deputies of the Polish government, and
we now have five of them supporting us
very strongly.” Whether or not it was
due to Luminski’s political savvy, the
funding came through.
“I keep hearing these [cultural] programs will be made national eventually,”
Luminski says. “The people on the
national level understand the value of
community, the value of what we do.”
Still, keeping an avant-garde theater
afloat in this economic climate
would be challenging even in a large
city. “It is difficult,” Luminski admits.
“That’s why it helps when national television and newspapers cover us. People
here see that there is something to this,
even if they don’t understand it at all.
We are trying to build positive snobbery.”
On the last morning of the festival,
Kim Arrow conducts his final yoga class.
He has already performed at the festival,
dancing and playing his didgeridoo; this
morning, he played drums for a class on
Martha Graham technique. At the College, Arrow teaches modern dance and
rhythmic drumming—not yoga. But he
has studied Ashtanga yoga intensively
for several years. For 10 consecutive
days, with a translator shouting his
directives in Polish, he has been aggressively stretching out young dancers
from all over Eastern Europe. After
class, the dancers applaud, and two
young Polish women approach
with a camera, asking if Arrow
will pose for a picture.
Afterward, Jennine Willett, an American
dancer who was
invited to join
Luminski’s company a couple of
years ago—and a
loyal attendee of
the yoga class—
takes Arrow and
me to a café in
Bytom’s central square. Like Willett and
the other company dancers, visiting theater and dance students will stay in theater housing. Willett exists, humbly, on
about $300 per month—pretty close to
the average income in Poland, according to Kuharski.
Walking back to the theater, Arrow
admires the art nouveau ornament on
the once-grand buildings. Form is all
that sets them apart beneath the thick
layer of soot that has turned the town a
monotonous gray. “Bytom looks a lot
like Pittsburgh before it was sandblasted,” Arrow remarks. Now and then, a
recently cleaned-up building glows amid
the gray, reminding us how beautiful
this city could be.
The effects of communism linger, Willett tells us, and for an American, it’s
sometimes frustrating. “Living under
communist rule for so many years,
many people picked up the habit of
putting in hours just to collect a paycheck. If you ask a question,” she says,
“their instinct is to send you to someone
else, so they don’t have to deal with it.”
A
program such
as this one
could only happen
at a school like
Swarthmore.
T
wo days after the festival ends, President and Mrs. Bloom, Steve Piker,
and Art McGarity arrive in Bytom for a
press conference and a meeting with
the mayor. Talking with the mayor, a
reformed communist who has not
always supported funding the Silesian
Dance Theatre, Bloom eloquently
describes the concept of the small liberal arts college, and McGarity explains
the “synergism” between the engineering program in Krakow and the dance
and theater program in Bytom.
Luminski is hoping this new connection with a respected American college
will help solidify his tenuous hold on
city funding. Bloom and Kuharski offer
Swarthmore as both a model and a facilitator in Poland’s struggle to redefine its
system of higher education, including
incorporating dance and theater in university curricula—something now
unheard of in Poland. This suggestion
seems to please the mayor.
After the meeting, Bloom, Kuharski,
and Luminski huddle in the parking lot
to discuss another forthcoming meeting.
“We cannot become advocates on internal political issues,” says Bloom. “It
would be inappropriate as well as damaging to the relationships we are trying
to develop. What we can do is speak to
the extraordinary cultural and educational contributions the Silesian Dance
Theatre makes and to the benefits to
both Swarthmore and the Dance Theatre that will follow from building a clos-
PHOTOS BY CATHLEEN McCARTHY
Left: Professor of Engineering Arthur McGarity, Jacek
Luminski, President Bloom, a translator, and Director of
Theatre Studies Allen Kuharski (left to right) explain the
proposed foreign study program at a press conference in
Bytom. Above: Assistant Professor of Dance Kim Arrow
teaches Ashtanga yoga at the festival.
17
er association between us.”
Later that day, the group meets with
Piotr Bulahe, president of the city’s cultural commission, a stout
middle-aged man who is a
former coal miner, and, like
the mayor, a reformed
OF
communist. “I want to
stress that our country is in
a very difficult period of
economic transformation,” he says from
the head of a conference table where
President Bloom, Kuharski, Luminski,
and McGarity sit with the translator who
has been following us from meeting to
meeting. “During such a transformation,
little attention is usually paid to culture,
yet we strongly support institutions like
the Silesian Dance Theatre.”
The cultural director has a gentle
demeanor and trades jokes easily with
Bloom and Kuharski. Under communism, he explains, “the average family
had a very easy life because their place
of work did everything for them, from
providing a flat to organizing cultural
events. Many of these people are not
independent, and it’s difficult for them
to change their habits. That’s why I
want to address mainly younger people.” He compliments Luminski for his
community outreach programs involving senior citizens and children.
Bloom describes Chester, Pa., the
impoverished city only a few miles from
Swarthmore, and the Chester Boys
Choir, the community outreach program organized by John Alston, associate professor of music—who, like
Luminski, focused on the children.
Chester has roughly the same population as Bytom, Bloom points out, with
its own set of severe economic conditions, “and this is the wealthiest period
in American history.”
As for Bytom, the director concludes,
“It will take about 40 years to change the
country and the face of our town
because first [our generation] must die
to make room for the second generation.” Just before rising to shake hands,
he turns to Bloom: “I can assure you
that our municipality will support this
kind of cooperation, maybe because we
want something out of it, too—not so
much financial but in terms of information and experience.”
tion. Built on a hill in the Middle Ages,
the castle housed Polish royalty for five
centuries. Our guide explains why the
trumpet played every hour
from the tower of the grand
Mariacki Church halts so
abruptly. During a Tartar invasion, the legend goes, a watchman stationed in the tower lifted his trumpet to sound the
alarm but was silenced by an arrow.
After the castle tour, we visit the
ancient courtyard of the Jagiellonian
University, founded by King
Kazimierz in 1364—
exactly 500 years
before Swarthmore College,
McGarity
points out.
Though
most foreign
study students will
take classes
at the
Politechnika,
engineering students will live in a
dormitory owned by
the Jagiellonian University, where they will study the
Polish language. “Dom Piast houses a lot
of international students—an interesting
community for our students to be part
of,” McGarity says, “and it’s close to all
the good stuff in town.”
As we step out of the courtyard onto
the cobbled streets of Krakow’s town
center, an old violinist stationed there
overhears our chatter and breaks into
“It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” When we
laugh, he asks, “You are English?”
“American,” someone tells him. Without
missing a beat, he lifts his violin and
launches into Stephen Foster’s “My Darling Clementine.” We give him a couple
zloty, and he bows.
Steps
Change
B
ack in Krakow, Kuharski arranges a
tour for the Swarthmore entourage
of Wawel Castle, the city’s main attrac18
I
n October, the trees along Magill Walk
glow gold and amber against a vivid
blue sky, and I recall the sky above
Bytom’s gray buildings. I tell McGarity
that Kim Arrow compared it with Pittsburgh before the cleanup. Bytom is like
Pittsburgh all right, McGarity tells me—
Pittsburgh about 100 years ago. “You
saw a clear blue sky because you were
there in July,” he says. “Go back now,
and it wouldn’t be because they’re burning coal again. They don’t have to heat
Clockwise from top left: A
Krakow street violinist serenades the Swarthmore contingent; dancers grab a bite
between classes at the theater
café; Romantic poet Adam
Mickiewicz presides over
Krakow’s Rynek Glowny
Square as the 14th-century
Mariacki Church is renovated
behind him; a dragon decorates a building in Warsaw;
and exhausted dancers sleep
through the final performance
of the Bytom festival.
buildings in July.”
Bytom still gets more than 90 percent
of its energy from coal, he says. “And
coal is a very dirty fuel. The miners have
to go deep to get the coal, through layers of saltwater, which they pump into
the freshwater streams, degrading their
ability to recover from the raw sewage.
And the soil is contaminated from the
metals in the coal. It’s better than it was,
but the problems that remain are compounding.”
As the
faculty part
of the exn Poland,
change,
students will
McGarity’s
colleague
see a society in
from the
Politechnitransformation.
ka, Vlad
Wojcik, will
be a Cornell
visiting professor at Swarthmore for the 2000–01 academic
year, and Jacek Luminski will
spend the spring semester in
2001 teaching dance at the College as a Lang Professor of
Social Change. Five students
have signed on to spend the
spring 2000 semester in
Poland—a dance major, a theater major, one engineering student, and two concentrating in
environmental studies. One student has expressed an interest
in Poland’s transition to a freemarket economy, so McGarity is
arranging a tutorial. Theater student Heather Weyrick will live in
Krakow with the engineering
students, studying language and
culture, and then she plans to
move to Bytom to work in arts
administration at the Silesian
Dance Theatre.
Jim Harker, having learned
the language and culture from
his time dancing in Poland, is
moving to Krakow. There, he
will serve as the College liaison,
orienting students as they arrive
and taking them on theater trips
throughout Poland that Kuharski has arranged.
“When my engineering students heard that Heather would
be traveling all over Poland
attending performances, they
started perking up,” McGarity
PHOTOS BY CATHLEEN McCARTHY
I
says, smiling. There will be field trips for
environmental studies as well, he adds,
but theater and dance started looking
good. “Given the kind of students we
have, there is going to be an overlap—
theater students will study environmental science, and engineers will take
dance classes.”
No matter what students are studying, he adds, “issues come up very starkly in Poland—like the trade-off between
jobs and the environment.” Both he and
Kuharski are struck by the sad irony
that many of Bytom’s steelworkers and
coal miners were members of the Solidarity Party that brought down communism and now watch their industries
undergo downsizing under capitalism.
Those on the city’s cultural commission
are dealing with the added irony of funding avant-garde dance and environmental cleanup while their mills close.
Silesia, although not the center of
Polish economy, politics, or culture,
offers a unique opportunity to study all
these aspects of the nation’s transformation. The transformation of Silesia,
Kuharski believes, ties the theater/
dance program to the environmental
studies program. “There is a need to
think in a holistic, global way about
issues,” he explains. “That’s what environmental studies teaches, what Jacek’s
philosophy and performance is about,
and what the transformation of Silesia is
ultimately about. Silesia is in a terrible
place because there has not been
enough thinking about how economic
issues, environmental issues, and cultural and educational issues come together
to create a healthy community and a
healthy environment.”
McGarity adds that “environmental
problems are interdisciplinary by their
very nature. Certain aspects of that you
could ignore in the United States, but in
Poland, they jump out at you. It’s a great
opportunity for our students. If they can
actually contribute something, that’s
great, but they will definitely get a lot
more back from seeing all these problems in one place.”
As President Bloom told Bytom’s cultural commission: “One reason this is
such a valuable program for our students is that they will not only learn
about Polish theater and dance but
experience a society that is undergoing
economic transformation and developing a new, postcommunist identity. That
is a rare opportunity.” ■
19
RELIGION
IN
THE AGE
OF
SCIENCE
W
hat an opportunity. While
working on a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, Ian Barbour ’44 had been a teaching assistant
to Enrico Fermi, one of the fathers of the
atomic bomb. Now, with the Cold War
heating up, Barbour was a young
physics professor with the connections
and credentials to be a player in the
next phase of the nuclear age. But he
wasn’t so sure he wanted to be. Increasingly concerned about ethical issues
arising from scientific research and
about the credibility of religion in an age
of science, Barbour did something that
could have only perplexed many of his
physicist colleagues—he went to divinity school.
That decision nearly half a century
ago was not only a crucial milestone in
Barbour’s career but a pivotal moment
in the development of the modern
exploration of the interplay between science and religion—a pursuit that is gaining greater public interest in the final
years of the century. “People are realizing that you don’t have to choose
between God and science,” says the
unassuming Barbour, who earlier this
year collected the $1.24 million Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.
Although his writings are credited
with laying the intellectual groundwork
for a dialogue between science and religion, Barbour’s admirers point out that
the conduct of his life and career has
been crucial to overcoming deep-seated
resistance to a relationship between the
two spheres. His credentials as both a
scientist and theologian—and the care
he takes never to overstep the bound20
Science, says
physicist and
theologian
Ian Barbour ’44,
helps us see the
immanence of God
rather than the
transcendence
stressed in
traditional
religious teaching.
aries of either—have given would-be
critics few opportunities to pounce.
“Barbour embodies the interface of
science and religion,” says Patrick
Henry, a former religion professor at
Swarthmore who is now executive director of Saint John’s Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research. “Here you
have someone who started his career in
physics and went into theology. He
models the field not just in his thought
but in his biography. The reason he’s
successful is that he’s one of the least
arrogant intellectual giants I have ever
encountered. Instead of being proud
about how much he knows, he’s constantly aware of how much more there
is to know.”
By Tom Krattenmaker
R
eligion, seemingly, has absorbed
repeated blows from science over
the centuries. Copernicus, for one, challenged the supremacy of God and
humankind by declaring that the Earth
revolves around the sun; Darwin undermined the literal truth of biblical creationism with his case for evolution; and
20th-century advances in physics
explained more about the birth of the
universe to the point where there was
“nothing for a Creator to do,” in the
words of the late astronomer Carl
Sagan. Resisting at every step has been
religion in its various embodiments,
vividly present as recently as August
1999 in a Kansas Board of Education ruling to virtually delete evolution from the
state’s recommended science curriculum.
Indeed, exploring the interplay
between religion and science can be like
comparing apples and chickens. In science, truth is discovered through experimentation; in religion, truth is revealed
from a higher and immutable source.
One is about experimentation, empirical
evidence, and rational thought, and the
other depends on faith. How can pursuits so fundamentally different have
common ground? To Ian Barbour, not
only is there ample potential for a dialogue between science and religion, but
he believes that both fields benefit from
such an interaction.
“In many ways, science and religion
are separate spheres, but at some point,
the two circles overlap,” Barbour says
in an interview at his office. The Atherton Bean Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Carleton College
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
MIKE KERR
DECEMBER 1999
adds: “The dialogue starts with the
recognition of limitations on both sides,
the recognition that neither science nor
religion has all the answers. I don’t think
you find this humility everywhere, but a
significant minority of scientists and a
significant minority of religious people
are more open-minded, humble, and
willing to not just talk but to listen to the
other.”
Barbour, whose office feels like that
of a minister with its serene stainedglass windows and inspirational posters, professes belief in God and is a
devoted church member. Yet the physicist in him is disturbed by biblical fundamentalism that rejects science. Evolution and other fruits of scientific inquiry
might change people’s understanding of
God, Barbour says, but they needn’t
shake their faith.
“Through much of Western history, it
was assumed that God created the
world as it is, a very static world,” says
Barbour, his voice at times dropping
barely above a whisper. “Now, with our
understanding of evolution, one knows
creation is a long, slow, painful process.
It’s a more dynamic universe. There’s
no reason to think the process is finished. As a religious person, you’ve got
to imagine God being involved in the
process, working from within. Science
helps us see the immanence of God
rather than the transcendence that has
been stressed in traditional religious
teaching. As we rethink God’s role in the
process as something more gradual and
subtle, there are ways you can use ideas
from science to gain a better understanding.”
21
This science-inspired “reformulation”
of his own religious thinking has led Barbour to an understanding of God as the
mind behind the scenes—the patterns
in nature, the intelligence in the design,
the “communicator of the information”
that organizes matter and energy into
what we call life. To Barbour and other
religious scientists, a better understanding of the physical world, shaped by science, can actually deepen faith as it
inspires wonder and awe in the intricate
majesty of the universe. Tellingly, a
poster Barbour keeps on his office wall
is a product of technology but something that works on a spiritual plane—a
photograph of Earth as viewed from
space, bearing the simple message
“Planet Earth.”
Although surveys show that most scientists are nonbelievers, Barbour and
growing numbers of scholars are convinced that religion has much to offer
science, even to its nonbelieving practitioners. They think religion can establish useful contexts and directions for
research, address the ethical questions
often raised but rarely answered by science, and approach cosmic issues like
the meaning of life that scientists usually admit are beyond their scope.
“I don’t think religion contributes
directly to scientific research,” Barbour
says. “Certainly, most scientific research
can go on without any religious or philosophical assumptions. But religion can
contribute to placing science and nature
in a wider philosophical context. When
you’re interpreting science, you begin
raising questions at its boundaries. For
example, what is the purpose of creation? These are religious questions.
Religion can also contribute to the scientist as a person.”
Barbour asks, for example, how
researchers determine what to investigate. Is it based simply on what looks
promising, or is it influenced by determinations of what is most beneficial to
society? It is clearly the latter, Barbour
asserts, which means scientists make
decisions that involve religion and
ethics. “Look at access to health care.
What medical cures are important to
work on?” Barbour asks. “We’ve done
very little with malaria, which millions
of people die from each year, because
it’s not a disease of a rich country. Many
public policy issues come up around the
funding of science. With these kinds of
questions, it’s important to ask not only
22
T
he dialogue
starts with
the recognition
on both sides
that neither
science nor
religion has all
the answers—and
the willingness not
just to talk but to
listen to the other.
what can science do for religion, but
what can religion bring to science?”
Mark Wallace, chair of the Religion
Department at Swarthmore, has applied
Barbour’s thinking about religion and
science to his own work on God and the
environment. Wallace points to the
“environmental racism” evident in the
trash incinerator, medical waste autoclave, and sewage treatment plant all
located within one square mile of
Chester, whose children have elevated
levels of lead in their blood. The pursuit of social justice, which Wallace
approaches as a religious person, is
thus informed by scientific findings
about lead and its deleterious health
effects on children. “Theology is not
going to tell us anything about lead,”
Wallace says, “but it does tell us why we
should care. And science tells us how to
care for the biological order. To care for
the environment comprehensively, you
need science and theology in dialogue
with one another.”
A key to building and sustaining the
dialogue is a clear recognition of what
science and religion can and cannot
accomplish, Barbour says. He rejects
the temptation that has trapped some
theologians to use science to “prove”
the existence of God. So, too, is he skeptical about the hoopla heard in recent
years about scientific findings that
prayer aids human healing. Barbour
believes the evidence is shaky at best.
And from another perspective, he
believes it distorts the purpose of
prayer, treating God as a “cosmic errand
boy.”
He sees inappropriate boundary hopping in the other direction as well. A
prime example is a tendency among
some cosmologists to take their scientific understanding of the origin of the universe an extra step and conclude that
there is no God or ultimate meaning to
life. A case in point is the Nobel
Prize–winning physicist Steven Weinberg, who is known for his disdain for
religion and has written that advances
in cosmology lead to the despairing conclusion that there is no point to the universe. With such a pronouncement, Barbour says, Weinberg and like-minded
scientists clearly venture into a realm
where their science no longer applies.
“Science itself does not prove atheism,”
echoes William Grassie, a religion scholar who is teaching at Swarthmore this
year while directing the Philadelphia
Center for Religion and Science. “Anyone who thinks so better take another
look at the dogma.”
More than 50 years later, Barbour is
still guided by the same impulse that led
him to attend divinity school rather
than advance nuclear technology. “I
realized then that there were wider
issues in which science can tell you
what’s possible but not what’s desirable,” he reflects. “Those issues have
varied over the years, but they’ve
always been there in one form or
another.”
W
hile growing up in China, England, and the United States—
both parents were academics, his mother American and his father Scottish—
Barbour developed a strong interest in
science. The religion passed on from his
parents, he recalls, became “sort of a
separate sphere in my life.” He was not
ready to dismiss it as antithetical to science but couldn’t fathom a way to integrate it into his career. After Swarthmore, where classmates recall him as
quiet and absorbed in his studies, Barbour did alternative wartime service
fighting forest fires in Oregon and working at a mental hospital in North Carolina. Then it was on to graduate school.
He earned a master’s in physics from
Duke University in 1946 before pursuing
research in high-energy physics at
Chicago, where he completed a Ph.D. in
1949.
Barbour then joined the faculty at
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
© TOM ROSTER / COURTESY CARLETON COLLEGE
Ian Barbour ’44 won the 1999 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.
DECEMBER 1999
Kalamazoo College in Michigan, continuing to shine as a young scientist. In addition to publishing numerous papers, he
was promoted to department chair in
1951, at the age of 28. But Barbour was
interested in somehow incorporating
the religious side of his life into the professional.
“When I was teaching physics, I was
increasingly concerned about ethical
issues in science, of which nuclear
weapons were an example at the time,
and the credibility of religious beliefs in
an age of science,” Barbour recalls. “A
lot of people are able to put these two
sides of their lives—science and religion—into watertight compartments,
but I wasn’t satisfied with that. I wanted
to look at a way of integrating them
more closely.”
The solution was to study religion.
Barbour enrolled in Yale Divinity School
and did additional work at Union Theological Seminary in New York, receiving
a bachelor of divinity degree from Yale
in 1956. Although Kalamazoo was ready
to take him back, Barbour was attracted
by a unique job offer from Carleton in
Minnesota, a joint appointment in the
departments of physics and religion.
Enticed by the similarities between Carleton and his alma mater—both had traditions of interdisciplinary work and
small faculties whose members knew
each other well—he opted for the Carleton position.
One of the most significant milestones in his career was the publication
in 1965 of his first book, Issues in Science
and Religion. Many view it as the seminal work in science and religion.
Although the book circulated widely
and attracted much notice—and other
respected works followed—Barbour’s
remained a lonesome voice through
much of his active career. In recent
years, Barbour is finding his ideas about
a closer relationship between science
and religion gaining wider currency.
A sharp upturn in the number of
books echoing Barbour’s philosophy
includes Henry’s 1999 work The Ironic
Christian’s Companion: Finding the
Mark’s of God’s Grace in the World. Barbour also observes more courses and
forums on the nexus between religion
and science. The most prestigious professional organizations of scientists and
theologians are now including religionscience workshops at their conferences;
the American Association for the
23
Advancement of Science, Barbour notes,
has established an office on the religionscience dialogue. Media coverage is similarly on the rise, epitomized by a July
20, 1998, Newsweek cover story headlined: “Science Finds God.”
Many have showered recognition on
Barbour himself in the last decade. He
was invited in 1990 to give Scotland’s
prestigious Gifford Lectures on philosophy and theology, an honor previously
bestowed on such luminaries as Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. The widely publicized Templeton Prize—Barbour
traveled to Russia in May to deliver the
acceptance speech at the Kremlin—led
to features on Barbour and his ideas in
major newspapers and on television network news.
B
arbour rejects
the theological
temptation to
use science to
“prove” the
existence of God—
and sees
inappropriate
boundary hopping
in the other
direction as well.
If Barbour was ahead of his time in
the 1950s and 1960s, the times have
begun to catch up in the 1990s. Society’s
belief in technology and progress—such
a central characteristic of modernism—
is giving way to a technology weariness,
even wariness, creating renewed interest in philosophy and religion. “The
modernist mind-set put reason on a
pedestal and taught religion as a relic
from the past,” says Stephen Dunning, a
religion professor at the University of
Pennsylvania and a founder of Penn’s
new Religion in Public Life program.
“The dethronement of enlightened rationalism is opening up the discussion, and
religious intellectuals are being invited
to participate.” Mark Wallace of Swarth24
more’s Religion Department adds: “I see
a cultural convergence that wasn’t there
when Barbour first started doing this
work.”
Still, not everyone is sold on the
desirability or appropriateness of a relationship between religion and science.
Feeling burned by episodes like the
Kansas measure against teaching evolution, some scientists remain convinced
that a steel door between the two entities remains the only sure way to maintain the integrity of science. In some circles, the work of the well-endowed Templeton Foundation is dimly viewed as a
veiled attempt to co-opt science for the
advancement of religion. In a May 9,
1999, Philadelphia Inquirer article, University of Chicago cosmologist Rocky
Kolb was quoted as saying, “Integrating
[science and religion] is a mistake....
Religion is mostly based on revealed
truth. That’s really the antithesis of science.” Quoted in the same article, Weinberg says: “I think it’s good they remain
at odds. I think the great achievement of
science is that it made it possible for
intelligent people not to be religious.”
Such continued resistance disappoints Barbour, who believes the holdouts often fail to distinguish between
the mutually respectful religion-science
dialogue he envisions and the notorious
turf invasions. “I think there is some tendency to be afraid of interaction, lest the
religious right dominate the discussion,”
he says. Kolb and others, Barbour adds,
“are focused on religion at its worst,
which I agree is in conflict with science.
A lot of the troubles have come from the
excessive claims of biblical literalists
who venture outside of their proper territory.”
Barbour acknowledges the truth of
the assertion that science made it possible for intelligent people not to be religious, and that, he believes, is all to the
good. A simple twist of the phrase
describes his hope for the future, one he
is beginning to see realized—the day
when intelligent people can be religious
and when religious people, even in the
eyes of nonbelieving scientists, can be
intelligent. ■
Ben Wurgaft ’00
Nyssa Taylor ’00
Tom Krattenmaker is a frequent contributor to the Bulletin. He is Swarthmore’s
director of news and information and is
studying religion and public policy in a
master’s program at the University of
Pennsylvania.
Gabe Cumming ’00
Hungry for Meaning and Values
Religion has become a popular major
as today’s students look beyond the
secular world of their parents.
approach to understanding the world.
Wurgaft, who describes his upbringing
as “atheist Jewish,” saw in religion an
ideal way to combine several of the academic fields that contemplate meaning.
“I reached the realization that religion
was the ideal nexus of an array of studies, like culture, philosophy, literature,
and so on. I think it’s the same for many
of us who choose religion.”
By traditional definitions, faith is a
concept that applies to religion, not science. But Nyssa Taylor, a senior religion
major from Havertown, Pa., isn’t so sure
that scientists don’t sometimes make
leaps similar to those of the religiously
faithful. She points to astrophysics as an
example. “What about wormholes?” she
asks, citing a theoretical portal at the
center of a black hole that would provide for near-instantaneous travel
between two points in the universe.
“What’s the difference between believing in that concept and believing in
God?” She adds: “The further science
pushes our knowledge of the world, the
more it seems to create an awareness
that technology will get us only so far.”
Gabe Cumming matches Wallace’s
description of the typical religion student of the 1990s. “I grew up in a relatively secular environment, with enough
distance from religion to be interested
rather than feeling I had to get away
from it,” says Cumming, a senior from
Greenwood, S.C. “My parents certainly
weren’t hostile toward religion. They
encouraged me to be interested in religion and to respect the beliefs and attitudes of different people. So I had the
privilege of developing a kind of pantheism in that I’m able to draw meaning
from a variety of sources.”
Including science? “Science has an
answer,” says Cumming. “There are
many answers, all worth considering.
But I find it worthwhile to consider them
in relationship to one another, not as
ultimate truths. In that sense, I’m an outsider because I realize that people within these traditions consider their
answers to be the truth.”
—T.K.
Mark Wallace,
associate professor of religion
T
hese students
want to learn
about a facet
of the human
experience they
don’t know
much about.”
PHOTOS BY ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
I
have a gripe with modernism,” says
Greg Hansell ’00 of Villanova, Pa., one
of the growing number of religion
majors at Swarthmore. “It makes everything so practical. It takes the romance
out of everything.”
Call Hansell a sign of the times. As
evidenced by rising public interest in
the religion-science dialogue championed by Ian Barbour ’44 and the increasing number of religion majors at Swarthmore and other colleges, Americans are
apparently less satisfied with the rational, scientific approach to understanding the world. Enter postmodernism and
renewed fascination with religion.
At Swarthmore, this has translated
into a surge in the number of religion
majors—to 28 in the Class of 2000. In
1990, there were just 11.
Mark Wallace, associate professor
and chair of religion, attributes the rise
partly to the secular orientation of the
generation that raised today’s collegeage population. “The parents of today’s
students left churches in the 1960s.
These kids, in large part, have grown up
in secular environments,” Wallace says.
“These students don’t have any hostility
toward religion, but they have no background. They want to learn about a
facet of the human experience they
don’t know much about. And they are
hungry for meaning and values.”
That wasn’t entirely the case with
Hansell, who was raised Roman Catholic
and attended parochial schools. But he
became fascinated with traditions other
than those emphasized at his home and
school, particularly Eastern religions.
And Hansell was displeased by the large
degree to which he saw religion, in general, seemingly removed from the world
outside of his Catholic church and
school. “My decision to study religion
certainly did have something to do with
a lack of meaning I observed in my own
life and other people’s,” he says. “I think
students have a real desire to see and
experience the transcendent.”
Ben Wurgaft, a senior religion major
from Cambridge, Mass., was dissatisfied
with a science-oriented “utilitarian”
Greg Hansell ’00
25
The 20th Century’s
Greatest Hits
A “ TOP 40” LIST
By Paul Williams ’69
I
This list, though, is something different. It’s a
n the half of this century that I’ve lived in, it’s
minuscule
cross section, a few of the 20th-cenquite common to encounter “best-of-the-year”
tury’s
greatest
aesthetic hits, necessarily limitlists of movies or records in newspapers and
ed
to
the
rather
small sampling that could reamagazines, starting in late December. When I
sonably
come
to
one person’s attention. I’m not
noticed a “First Annual International Music
even
trying,
actually,
to make a carefully
Writers Poll Ballot” lying on the floor of my
thought-out
representation
of my own preferworkspace in January 1998, I thought it must be
ences. These are all creations I believe are wortime to start my own “bestthy to be on a list of, or in a
of-the-century” list.
collection of, great artistic
Out of this list grew a
The
20th
Century’s
works or achievements of
series of essays on what
Greatest
Hits
the 20th century.
may seem to be unrelated
They have been blindly
works of art that have got1. “Things We Said Today”
selected
by my Muse, or her
ten my attention and greatly
The Beatles (1964)
seeing
eye
dog, with the
enriched or enlightened me
2. “Sister Ray”
intention
of
demonstrating,
in the last 50 years, includThe Velvet Underground
and,
therefore,
arguing—an
ing works from earlier in the
(1968)
essay is a kind of argucentury that I eventually disment—that “art” is what we,
3.
“Girl
Before
a
Mirror”
covered thanks to their repthe receivers, observers, lisPablo
Picasso
(1932)
utations or serendipity or
teners, readers, experience
good luck. Of course, I’m
4. The I Ching or
when we encounter it.
teasing if I give the impresBook of Changes
“Great art,” then, is not
sion that I’m going to try to
Translated by Richard
some objective phenomWilhelm (1923)
rank the “top” artistic creenon; it is an essentially subations of this just-ending
5. Ulysses
jective, and often profoundcentury in the Western
James Joyce (1922)
ly spiritual, personal experiworld—or any world. That
6. “God Bless the Child” and
ence on the part of a person
kind of hierarchical apor persons reading a book,
“I
Cover
the
Waterfront”
proach is contrary to cerlistening to a recording,
Billie
Holiday
(1941)
tain philosophies of life that
looking at a painting, or
I hold dear. True, I did once
7. “The Universal Declaration
watching a play or a film.
write a book about “the 100
of Human Rights”
The greatest hits of the 20th
best rock-and-roll singles.” I
Eleanor Roosevelt et al. (1948)
century happened mostly in
didn’t rank them, but I did
8. Winnie-the-Pooh
private places.
enjoy selecting them, even
A.A. Milne (1926)
This article, which conknowing that the best I
tains
four of the essays from
could hope for was a 50 permy new book, The 20th Cencent overlap between my
tury’s
Greatest
Hits
is,
therefore, a personal exlist and the one any reader might construct
ploration.
I
wonder
what’s
on your list?
for herself or himself.
26
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
“‘Girl Before a Mirror’ is very simply
Picasso telling the truth about his happiness at this moment in his life.”
DECEMBER 1999
A love poem of
a painting
“Girl Before a Mirror”
by Pablo Picasso
Painted March 14, 1932
the application of a canon of beauty but
what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon.”) But anyway,
rules need exceptions, and here’s a
quote from H.H. Arnason’s 1977 History
of Modern Art. He says “Girl” is a
“moment of summation” between Picasso’s “cycles of fertile and varied experiment”:
“Girl Before a Mirror” brings together Picasso’s total experience of
curvilinear cubism and classical idealism. The painting is powerful in its
color patterns and linear rhythms,
but above all it is a work of poetry:
the maiden, rapt in contemplation of
her mirror image, sees not merely a
reversed reflection but a mystery
and a prophecy. This lyrical work
revives the poetry of the blue and
rose periods and of his period of
classical idealism; it adds a dimension of strangeness to the exotic
Odalisques that Matisse painted,
and anticipates Braque’s haunting
studio scenes.
OK, it’s fun for art scholars that every
one of Picasso’s works is another installment in an ongoing narrative that tells
the story of this artist’s aesthetic adventures. But for the aspect of this painting
that speaks most strongly to me, aside
from its sheer beauty and eye pleasure, I
like this quote from John Berger (1965):
MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
P
ablo Picasso was 50 years old when
he painted “Girl Before a Mirror.”
The model for the painting, Picasso’s mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, was
22 in the winter of 1932. As for the person looking at the painting, I’m 49 as I
write these sentences and gaze at the
reproduction of the girl (and her reflection) included in Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective, the book/catalog I bought at
that 1980 Museum of Modern Art show.
So I was 32 when “Girl” first inflamed my
imagination and my soul and my sexual
organs of perception (ears; fingers;
tongue; mind; and, in this case, eyes).
“A poem should be palpable and
mute / As a globed fruit,” Archibald
MacLeish told us in his poem “Ars Poetica” (in 1926; he was 34). This comes to
mind, of course, because “Girl” is full of
images of globed fruits—breasts, belly,
even face and head—images the viewer’s mind immediately intuitively and/or
consciously associates with other contemporary Picasso paintings. When is a
desirable woman like a colorful bowl of
fruit? In the eyes of her hungry lover. It
also happens that Picasso’s painting
sublimely realizes the standard young
Archibald defined (six years earlier) for
a “poem.” It is “motionless in time as the
moon climbs.” And it certainly embodies (no pun intended) the last lines of
“Ars Poetica,” the only part of the poem
that shows up in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations: “A poem should not mean / But
be.” “Girl Before a Mirror” is. It does not
need to be interpreted or understood. It
speaks silently and directly and profoundly and oh-so-palpably.
I don’t intend to call much on certified “experts” to justify my selections
here (Hey! This one really is a “20th-Century Greatest,” the big boys all say so)
because, after all, my premise is that
you and I as individuals have as much
right as any expert to form our own
ideas of what is/was great art in our
time or any time. I’m foolhardy enough
to presume that what a Picasso painting
means to little old me is as useful a
morsel of information as the informed
opinion of a scholar. (Picasso himself
said on this subject, in 1935, “Academic
training in beauty is a sham. Art is not
27
“What makes these paintings [the portraits of Marie-Thérèse] different is the
degree of their direct sexuality. They
refer without any ambiguity at all to the
experience of making love to this
woman. They describe sensations and,
above all, the sensation of sexual comfort.”
Yes. These paintings caused me to
fall in love with Picasso because I could
see we’d been to the same place. And it
meant as much to him as it did and does
to me. This reaffirms my humanity. In a
world that is often hostile to and judgmental of sexual love. “Look!” I thought.
“This painter understands. And worships the same God. At last, a friend I
can talk to about this.”
The really radical and experimental
move for an artist to make in any era or
in any art form is to find a way to tell the
truth. “Girl Before a Mirror” is very simply Picasso telling the truth about his
happiness at this moment in his life,
while also employing a new visual language he has been developing in his
work in order to more honestly represent what humans see when they look at
each other’s faces. Look, he famously
tells us in so many paintings and drawings: You see the person’s profile and
their full face both at once—two eyes on
one side of a nose!—and your mental
picture of the friend you’re looking at is
actually a composite of the information
conveyed by both perspectives.
In the case of the girl before the mirror, her eyes are properly on opposite
sides of her nose; however, as we look
at her face, it changes like an animated
cartoon, from a beautiful, evocative face
seen full on, shining like a full moon, to a
calm pensive profile, to subtle differences in whether she’s seen as looking
right at the camera (or painter) or halflooking toward the mirror. The whole
effect is as if her head were seen in the
process of turning from a deep gaze into
the mirror to glance inquisitively (and
affectionately) toward the observer.
And then there’s the twin girl on the
right side of the painting, the one in the
mirror. This reflection is definitely the
same woman and a different one both at
once. And again, we are paradoxically
treated to the sight of one girl from her
side (beautiful pooching-out curve on
that ready-to-be-pregnant belly) and the
other turned toward us (her torso facing
28
us, but her head and features turned
away as though looking at the girl to her
right). So much action in this still picture! The real girl almost has her arm
protectively on the shoulder of the mirror girl. But the same lines suggest the
mirror girl too is reaching toward her
double (maybe fondling her breasts).
And one more trompe l’oeil: Is the girl
on the left (and, therefore, both of them)
naked or wearing clothes? She’s obviously naked because you can see so
much of her body (including an x-ray of
her womb), but she’s obviously clothed
because we can see that those stripes
belong to a sweater or blouse. And the
backgrounds! Are those colorful
checkerboard markings the walls of the
boudoir, or are they a representation of
how the observer’s mind feels looking at
this scene? We can see that he feels
affection and deep admiration. And genuine wonder at the miracle of God’s cre-
9. Martian Time-Slip
Philip K. Dick (1964)
10. “Howl”
Allen Ginsberg (1956)
11. Pet Sounds
The Beach Boys (1966)
12. Old Path White Clouds:
Walking in the Footsteps of
the Buddha
Thích Nhât Hanh (1990)
13. “The Dance”
Henri Matisse (1910)
14. 2001: A Space Odyssey
Stanley Kubrick and
Arthur C. Clarke (1968)
15. Concert performance
Umm Kulthúm (1942)
16. “The Bear” and “Nobel Prize
Acceptance Speech”
William Faulkner (1942, 1949)
17. Renaldo & Clara
Bob Dylan (1978)
18. Gravity’s Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon (1973)
19. Concert performance
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (1995)
20. The Anatomy of Dependence
Takeo Doi, M.D. (1971)
ation that this woman, his lover, is. Not
just her lovely face and exquisite
body—everything about her, including
her relationship with herself, her mirror
companion.
This painting is a passionate love
poem. And full of humor. And very
revealing of who the unseen member of
this relationship (the painter, the lover)
is. I love the way Picasso expresses love
and desire in this series of paintings of
Marie-Thérèse (“The Dream,” “The
Dream [Reading],” “Nude on a Black
Couch,” “The Mirror,” and others). With
such immediacy. So for the first time, I
can actually show somebody how I feel
when I feel this way. You think I’m mad?
Or sex crazed? Look at these paintings!
You see, this is part of the human experience for many of us. Look at this man
boasting about how voluptuous his
young girlfriend is and about how wild
and tender she makes him feel.
It took a lot of courage for this 50year-old man who felt increasingly
trapped by his wife’s moods and their
bourgeois lifestyle, to speak so forthrightly and eloquently of his great sexual happiness (and self-discovery) with
his 22-year-old mistress. But we expect
courage of Picasso. Courage and honesty. And an indomitable will to change
the nature of our perception of the universe. “Gotcha!” he laughs as he throws
up this mirror before us. And flatters us
by suggesting we might possibly love
women and life as much as he does.
For me, Marie-Thérèse comes across
as a real person in these paintings, as
tangible and knowable as any character
in Shakespeare. Her every look and gesture seem genuine to me; I can feel her
personality and presence. I adore her
like one loves a favorite movie star of
the opposite sex. I long for her, and I
sense her comforting presence, her
affectionate support. And I thank Pablo
Picasso for saying some things that
needed to be said about what it’s like to
be a male person. And for sending out
such a positive message, for once, about
a love relationship that works. At this
moment. Most of all, I celebrate this
painting for being such a fabulous portrait of two particular people, and their
special moment in time, in which each
has become so delicious to the other’s
eyes and hands and heart.
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
CORBIS/CHRIS RAINIER
A human being like you and me
Old Path White Clouds: Walking in
the Footsteps of the Buddha
by Thích Nhât Hanh
Parallax Press (1990)
T
his is a biography of Siddhartha
Gautama, written near the end of
the 20th century in Vietnamese in
France by a Zen monk/poet/scholar/
peace activist who had traveled to
North America at the height of the Vietnam War “to try to help dissolve some
of the wrong views that were at the root
of the war.” In the United States, Thích
Nhât Hanh (TNH) spoke with students,
teachers, government officials, and
other peace workers; in 1967, he was
nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by
American civil rights leader Martin
Luther King Jr.
This thorough biography is the major
work of one of the great world literary
DECEMBER 1999
figures of the second half of this century, a man not yet known in literary circles but author of a substantial (and, I
predict, enduring) body of work consisting of more than 30 books, including a
novel, collections of poetry, collections
of short stories, translations of Buddhist
sutras, and many books of practical philosophy directed to the general public,
of which two of the most widely read
are Peace Is Every Step and Living Buddha, Living Christ. In a very real sense,
everything that TNH shares with us in
all his other writings can be found in Old
Path White Clouds. And although I am
aware of such European retellings of the
Buddha’s story as Siddhartha (Herman
Hesse, 1922) and The Light of Asia (Sir
Edwin Arnold, 1879), I do not believe
there has ever been another book like
this, a straightforward, carefully
researched narrative nonfiction account
“I can hardly imagine the reader who
could turn page after page of Old Path
White Clouds without feeling intense
tides of idealism surging in his or her
own veins.”
of the life and work of the man who
inspired a million statues.
“Buddha was not a God. He was a
human being like you and me, and he
suffered just as we do,” TNH tells us in
another book. The resulting narrative is
told with the confidence of a biographer
who is certain he knows as much as any
modern person could of what happened
day to day and how it felt to the protagonist and other participants as it was
happening. The reader can feel this in
the narrator’s voice and can’t help but
be further reassured by the careful
notes in the back of the book identifying
the specific sources for the stories told
29
in each chapter.
But for all of its loving faithfulness to
the 2,500-year-old “Pali canon” that is
the basis of all “Buddhism,” the greatest
value of Old Path White Clouds is what it
tells us about the consciousness and
feelings and (by extension) experience
of the 20th-century person who wrote it.
Jorge Luis Borges in his tale “Pierre
Menard, Author of the Quixote,” imagines a 20th-century man who undertakes
to compose chapters of Don Quixote
that may be word for word the same as
the 17th-century original but will have
enormously different implications
because of the new author’s consciousness and identity. “It is not in vain that
300 years have gone by, filled with
exceedingly complex events.”
So the Vietnam War is in this biography—and a fierce idealism that is
startlingly recognizable as the idealism
of my youth in the sixth decade of this
century, the era of the Beatles and Martin Luther King and the Vietnam War.
TNH is so palpably proud, for example,
of the fact (and he has painstakingly satisfied himself that it is a fact) that this
son of the Indian nobility called “the
Buddha” was adamant (in the face of
opposition from friends, students,
strangers, and other teachers) that he
would let himself be touched by members of the “untouchable” caste and
would accept them as his students and
brothers because: “Our way is a way of
equality. We do not recognize caste.”
Obviously, the purpose of TNH’s
book is to transmit this sort of courage
to its reader, as the Buddha’s writings
did for Henry David Thoreau and Thoreau’s did for Mahatma Gandhi and as
the Buddha and his dharma-heirs did
for the current Dalai Lama of Tibet. I can
hardly imagine the reader who could
turn page after page of Old Path White
Clouds without feeling intense (and
sometimes awkward and implacable)
tides of idealism surging in his or her
own veins. Reader beware. This is
heady brew. Hero worship—sincere
admiration for and emulation of another
human being’s life and deeds and
motives—is exceedingly rare in modern
literature but very welcome and affecting in this case.
Reading this book, and finding the
protagonist interesting and likable, I find
myself aware that what attracts me is
30
21. On the Road
Jack Kerouac (1957)
22. For a Few Dollars More
Sergio Leone (1965)
23. “Mr. Costello, Hero” and
“And Now the News...”
Theodore Sturgeon (1953,
1956)
24. Horses
Patti Smith (1975)
25. Two-Lane Blacktop
Monte Hellman (1971)
26. Concert performance
Grateful Dead (1969)
27. “Krazy Kat” Sunday page
George Herriman (1920)
28. “Smokestack Lightnin’”
Howlin’ Wolf (1956)
29. God Bless You,
Mr. Rosewater
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (1965)
30. Impressions (side one)
John Coltrane (1963)
the Buddha as seen through TNH’s eyes.
Like Yogananda’s Autobiography of a
Yogi, this book is actually a passionate
love story. Thay (TNH’s nickname,
which means “teacher” like the
Japanese sensei) loves the Buddha.
Loves him from the perspective of a
mid-20th-century man who saw the best
minds (and hearts and bodies) of his
generation destroyed by a senseless
war and who found refuge—and the
opportunity to be genuinely helpful to
his countrymen—in the example of the
Buddha.
I have never in my life been what anyone would call “religious,” but I can
relate to this. I’m attracted to this sort of
spiritual activity because it seems to me
do-it-yourself, something you only
embrace insofar as it seems true to and
proves helpful to you, in other words, a
“faith” based entirely on personal experience as opposed to social intimidation.
TNH, in chapter 62 of Old Path White
Clouds, quotes the Buddha as saying to
a group of young villagers, “My friends,
you are already qualified to discern
which things to accept and which things
to discard. Believe and accept only
those things that accord with your own
reason, those things which are supported by the wise and virtuous [i.e., persons whose values you admire, your
heroes whoever they are], and those
things which in practice bring benefit
and happiness to yourselves and others.
Discard things that oppose these principles.” This to me is not “religion” but the
antidote to what religions are too often
presented as.
And since I’m an American writer, it
shouldn’t seem odd that I hear in this
the same philosophy I believe I’ve heard
in and learned from Emerson, Clemens,
Ginsberg, Dylan, Vonnegut, Faulkner,
Jefferson, and others. Just as I consider
the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights literature, poetry rather than politics, so I consider TNH’s scribblings in
Vietnamese and English—retelling texts
written in Pali, Sanskrit, and Chinese—
literature, belles lettres rather than religion. And most of all, I love TNH
because when he gathered a tiny group
of Buddhists to help deal with the circumstances of the war exploding all
around them, he wrote some Buddhalike precepts or rules for the group to
live by.
The first (and, he said, most important) rule was: “Do not be idolatrous
about or bound to any doctrine, theory,
or ideology, even Buddhist ones. Buddhist systems of thought are guiding
means; they are not absolute truth.”
That’s the kind of disclaimer I want to
read on any spiritual package, Christian
or Moslem or Jewish or whatever it may
be. TNH saw his country and its young
and its old destroyed by ideology, so
when he talks about the Buddha’s life,
he’s not offering you or me a set of ideas
to live and die for. He’s keenly aware
how destructive “isms” can be. Rather,
he wants to give others a chance to see
Siddhartha the way he does, as a person
just like you or me who woke up by
looking at things differently from what
his parents and peers had taught him,
who found liberation (peace and freedom) in a way of being toward oneself
and others that (1) anyone can do,
according to Siddhartha; and (2) that
makes possible happiness, even in
wretched circumstances.
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
“The Magna Carta for All Mankind”
T
The Universal Declaration of
Human Rights
Adopted by the U.N. General Assembly
on Dec. 10, 1948. Written by the Drafting Committee of the U.N.
Commission on Human Rights,
Eleanor Roosevelt, chairman.
the subject of the 20th-century’s “greatest hits” comes up. OK, the mass media
have ignored the Universal Declaration
so far, to their discredit—but what song
or novel in this century has spoken for
or had an impact on or liberated more
people?
Article 1
All human beings are born free and
equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and
should act towards one another in a spirit
of brotherhood.
Article 2
Everyone is entitled to all the rights
and freedoms set forth in this Declaration,
without distinction of any kind, such as
race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social
origin, property, birth or other status.
Furthermore, no distinction shall be
made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs,
whether it be independent, trust, non–selfgoverning, or under any other limitation
of sovereignty.
Article 3
Everyone has the right to life, liberty,
and security of person.
Article 19
Everyone has the right to freedom of
opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without
interference and to seek, receive and
impart information and ideas through any
media and regardless of frontiers.
Article 23
1. Everyone has the right to work, to
free choice of employment, to just and
favourable conditions of work, and to protection against unemployment.
2. Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal
work.
3. Everyone who works has the right to
just and favourable remuneration ensur-
CORBIS
hroughout 1947 and 1948, Eleanor
Roosevelt was the “chairman” of a
committee that wrote the most
important and wonderful piece of writing produced by any committee in this
century.
The drafting committee worked, in
part, from draft declarations and proposals submitted by the governments of
Chile, Cuba, India, Panama, and the United States, but in the end, eight men and
women wrote these 1,774 words. In this
case, the essence of the creative act was
not the choosing of words but the process of agreeing to agree on them.
All observers and commentators
agree that Mrs. Roosevelt deserves primary credit for making this act of agreement possible, through her own artful
presence. Eleanor led by devotion to
worthy principles and by loving-kindness. And look at what was created,
back on the first Human Rights Day,
Dec. 10, 1948: “The Magna Carta for All
Mankind.”
The thing that baffles me is why this
isn’t the first thing people think of when
President Harry Truman meets with Eleanor Roosevelt in
1951 before she attends a meeting of the U.N. Human Rights
Commission. Mrs. Roosevelt was a principal drafter of the
DECEMBER 1999
Universal Declaration of Human Rights—“a work of expression; a short piece of prose; and ... as much an example of
human art from its era as any film or sculpture or poem.”
31
ing for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means
of social protection.
4. Everyone has the right to form and
to join trade unions for the protection of
his interests.
Article 27
1. Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement, and its benefits.
2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests
resulting from any scientific, literary, or
artistic production of which he is the
author.
Be assured that the other 24 Articles
include all the basics almost any of us
would wish declared and embraced:
freedom of movement within, and the
right to leave or return to any country,
freedom from arbitrary arrest, the right
to education, freedom of religion, the
right to a standard of living adequate to
health and well-being.
Why include the Universal Declaration in this book? Because it is a work of
expression; a short piece of prose; and
therefore, in my view, as much an example of human art from its era as any film
or sculpture or poem. What greater or
more memorable poem than this? A distillation into a few well-chosen words (in
five languages simultaneously) of the
standards virtually all nations and persons agree apply to the circumstances
of every human being everywhere, a
song of love and a grand essay on the
many twists and turnings in the relationships between individuals and states,
between personal power and consciousness and collective power and consciousness.
We agreed, and that’s the point. The
work of human rights organizations like
Amnesty International is completely
based upon, made possible by, and carried out by reference to this declaration
that was passed resoundingly by an
assembly of the representatives of all
nations and peoples of the world on
Dec. 10, 1948. Every nation that has ever
joined the United Nations has, by that
act, formally expressed its willing acceptance of the U.N. Charter and, by extension, the text of the Universal Declaration. The progress toward the realization of Mrs. Roosevelt’s and the United
32
Nation’s original intention—an International Bill of Human Rights accepted as
law and given the support necessary to
make it enforceable in the realpolitik of
international affairs—is another story,
one that the reader is urged to inform
herself or himself about.
And finally, dear reader, a bit of
homework. The Preamble to the Declaration concludes:
Now, therefore, the General Assembly proclaims This Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a common standard of achievement for all
peoples and all nations, to the end
that every individual and every
organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall
strive by teaching and education to
promote respect for these rights
and freedoms.
That’s where we come in. Have you
told your kids? Your friends and neighbors? Yourself? How can we live by such
a beautiful code if we don’t educate ourselves as to its content and its existence?
31. Stranger in a Strange Land
Robert Heinlein (1961)
32. “The Lottery in Babylon”
and “The Wall and the
Books”
Jorge Luis Borges (1945, 1950)
33. The Little Prince
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
(1943)
34. Gandhi
Richard Attenborough and
Ben Kingsley (1982)
35. The Rolling Stones, Now!
The Rolling Stones (1965)
36. Dune
Frank Herbert (1965)
37. “Oh Happy Day”
The Edwin Hawkins Singers
(1969)
38. Kundun
Martin Scorcese (1998)
39. A Private Correspondence
Henry Miller and Lawrence
Durrell (1963)
40. “Lost Highway”
Hank Williams (1949)
Oh Happy Day
The Edwin Hawkins Singers, featuring
Dorothy Combs Morrison (formerly the
Northern California State Youth Choir).
Released May 1969
O
h happy day, oh happy day,
when Jesus walked, oh when He
walked, He washed my sins
away.”
It was an accidental hit, and no examination of the greatest hits of the 20th
century could be complete without discussion of an accidental hit and, by
extension, the apparently accidental
nature of all hits. But we have to be
careful. Some believe passionately that
there are no “accidents” or rather that
what humans perceive as accidents are
actually events consciously and purposefully arranged by unseen forces, or
deities. Your humble scribe does not
presume to take a position on such lofty
matters, but here are the “facts” as they
were passed down to me:
Edwin Hawkins (the credits above
are as they appear on the original 45rpm record, and if they’re a bit unwieldy, that reminds us again that it isn’t
always obvious who deserves credit for
a great work of art) in 1967 was the
director of the choir at the Ephesians
Church of God in Berkeley, California.
For the purpose of a performance at an
annual Christian youth convention back
east, at which there would also be a
Southern California State Youth Choir,
Hawkins (then age 34) and a woman
named Betty Watson organized the
Northern California State Youth Choir,
which included Dorothy Combs Morrison (then age 32) from Longview, Texas,
who began singing gospel as a child
with a family ensemble called The
Combs Family. Also present was 19year-old Walter Hawkins, Edwin’s
younger brother, later a minister and
(like Morrison) a successful professional
singer. In order to raise money to attend
the convention, Edwin and the choir
recorded an album called Let Us Go Into
the House of the Lord.
They managed to sell 500 copies of
the album to friends and neighbors, and
a year and a half later, a San Francisco
rock music promoter found a copy of it
in a stack of records in a warehouse,
bought it, and gave it to a local disc
jockey, who listened to it and started
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
playing one track, “Oh Happy Day,” on
his popular radio program on KSAN. His
listeners loved it and insisted on hearing
it again and again, and so Buddah
Records in New York City bought the
rights and put out a 45-rpm single,
renaming the choir The Edwin Hawkins
Singers. Soon millions of copies were
sold worldwide, and “Oh Happy Day”
became what has been called “the only
crossover gospel hit in chart history.”
We use the word “accidental” because
obviously Edwin Hawkins didn’t plan or
anticipate this outcome when he rearranged a tune he’d found in an old Baptist hymnal, taught it to his choir, and
included it on their homemade record.
And the 4-minute, 59-second performance and recording that resulted is
indeed a great work of art, a superb
expression of the human spirit, speaking
of and beyond the moment when these
singers and this choir director were
alive and creating it. Or re-creating it ...
maybe “art” is actually a series of stories passed along like a juicy rumor
from mouth to ears to mind to mouth to
ears, for centuries and maybe longer.
“He taught me how ... to walk ... right,
and pray! Good God! Oh yeah.” No two
minds hear it quite the same way, so it
is transformed in a living and creative
fashion as it’s passed along.
And “Oh Happy Day” is here on this
list because I’ll stand it up against
Ulysses or the Charlie Chaplin or Marx
Brothers film of your choice. Listen to
what this young woman and her
screaming companions are doing to
these words! This is a truly American art
CORBIS/BETTMANN
An accidental hit—great joy awaits you
form and truly universal and, on this
perfect and funky recording, truly 20th
centurian. Do you feel that change when
“He taught me how” comes in? What we
have here is five minutes of ecstasy. The
love of God is a common starting point
for many of the world’s great art forms
and creative traditions.
And because this five-minute “accidental” recording really is so aesthetically perfect, it is evidence that you
don’t need to be an acknowledged
“genius,” a Matisse or a Joyce or a Brian
Wilson, to produce exceptional work
that will nourish humans forever if the
Internet
“Advance”
Paul Williams ’69 spent just
one semester in 1965–66 at
Swarthmore, where he founded Crawdaddy!—the first
magazine devoted to rock
music. He is the author of
more than two dozen books,
ranging from autobiography
to music criticism to practical philosophy.
The writing of his latest
book, The 20th Century’s
Greatest Hits, was financed in
DECEMBER 1999
Paul Williams ’69
Edwin Hawkins (right), shown with conductor John Harris (left) and producer
Paul Anka, was responsible for recording “five minutes of ecstasy”—the
1969 crossover hit “Oh Happy Day.”
word is passed along. Search those
warehouses, friends. Who knows what
great works of art may be waiting to be
discovered! And please remember, as
the Buddha said, that you are already
qualified to discern which things to
accept and which things to discard.
And, if you get a chance, listen to “Oh
Happy Day.” Great joy awaits you. ■
an unusual way by his loyal
following on the World Wide
Web (http://paulwilliams.com or www.cdaddy.com).
Since early 1998, intrigued by
a prospectus and sample
essay on the Web, about 150
“patrons” (including the
Swarthmore College Bulletin)
have sent Williams $50 each
as an “advance” on the book.
This fall, each contributor
received a signed, self-published first edition. (Ours will
go to McCabe Library.) A
trade edition will appear in
September 2000, published
by Tor Books in New York.
“This pilot ‘patron-of-the-arts’
approach to financing the
writing of a book has been
successful at providing me
with the freedom, time, and
encouragement needed to
undertake and complete an
ambitious project,” writes
Williams, who lives in Encinitas, Calif. He intends to take
the same approach for his
next book, the third volume
of his musical biography of
Bob Dylan.
—J.L.
33
Alumni Digest
WA
ME
403/33
MT
ND
35/4
201/20
ID
15/0
WY
UT
32/2
CO
AZ
IL
OK
18/4
114/8
KY
83/11
13/2
AL
MS
40/6
621/40
NC
346/28
TN
GA
83/6
United States
17,446/1,263
183/13
470/
40
50/0
International
869/118
43/3
HI
PR
403/33 DC
883/93 MD
SC
LA
266/25
180/19 DE
VA
63/9
AK
513/46 CT
911/106 NJ
43/
WV 7
8
19/1
TX
OH
IN
107/13
94/5 RI
PA
2,373/170
431/27 114/ 286/37
MO
35/2
NM
AK
59/5
KS
250/13
136
154/9
11/2
1,303/89 MA
2,180/266
251/
25
IA
NB
25/0
MI
142/12
MN
18/0
NV
1,903/
5/1
160/12 NH
NY
WI
SD
CA
55/20
VT 157/15
59/21
1/2
OR
12/4
FL
50/11
Geographic Distribution of Swarthmore Alumni/Students
International Distribution Alumni/Students
APO/FPO ......................18/3
Argentina ........................3/1
Australia ......................18/0
Austria ............................6/0
Bahamas..........................1/0
Bahrain ............................1/1
Bangladesh ....................4/0
Belgium............................5/0
Benin................................1/0
Bermuda..........................3/0
Bolivia..............................3/0
Botswana ........................1/1
Brazil..............................14/5
Bulgaria ..........................3/3
Cameroon........................1/0
Canada ........................152/8
Chile ................................3/0
China................................8/6
Colombia ........................2/4
Costa Rica ......................3/0
Croatia ............................1/0
Cyprus ............................4/0
Czech Republic ..............2/0
Denmark ..........................5/0
Ecuador ..........................1/0
Egypt................................2/1
34
England........................142/3
Ethiopia ..........................0/1
Finland ............................2/0
France ............................53/3
Guam ..............................1/0
Guatemala ......................0/1
Germany........................38/3
Ghana ..............................4/7
Greece............................22/1
Honduras ........................1/0
Hong Kong ....................24/3
Hungary ..........................3/0
Iceland ............................2/0
India ................................6/4
Indonesia ........................2/1
Israel ..............................20/0
Italy ................................15/2
Jamaica............................5/3
Japan............................47/10
Jordan..............................1/0
Kazakhstan......................1/0
Kenya ..............................3/1
Korea ..............................7/1
Laos..................................2/0
Lebanon ..........................1/1
Lesotho............................2/0
Malaysia ..........................6/2
Mauritius ........................0/2
Mexico ..........................15/3
Morocco ..........................2/0
Mozambique ..................1/0
Netherlands ..................21/1
Nepal................................1/2
New Zealand ................11/2
Nigeria ............................6/0
Norway ............................5/0
Oman ..............................1/0
Pakistan ..........................4/4
Palestine..........................1/0
Panama............................4/0
Paraguay..........................1/0
Peru..................................2/0
Philippines ......................3/3
Poland..............................1/1
Portugal ..........................2/0
Romania ..........................1/1
Russia ..............................2/0
Saudi Arabia....................4/1
Scotland ..........................9/0
Senegal ............................1/0
Singapore ......................12/2
Slovak Republic..............2/0
South Africa ....................9/1
South Korea ....................3/0
Spain ..............................12/1
Sri Lanka..........................2/0
St. Lucia ..........................1/0
Swaziland ........................2/0
Sweden ............................6/0
Switzerland ..................21/0
Taiwan ............................5/2
Tanzania..........................0/1
Thailand ........................11/1
Togo ................................1/0
Trinidad & Tobago ........3/2
Turkey ............................8/5
Turks Island ....................1/0
Uruguay ..........................1/0
Venezuela........................3/2
Vietnam ..........................1/0
Virgin Islands................12/1
Wales ..............................2/0
Zambia ............................1/0
Zimbabwe........................4/0
SOURCE: ALUMNI RELATIONS OFFICE
(Data accurate as of October 1999)
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
SWAR THMORE
CONNECTIONS
Upcoming events
Claremont, Calif.: Women’s basketball
will take on Claremont College on Saturday, Jan. 8. Alumni are invited to a team
reception after the game.
Hanover, N.H.: Judith Aitken Ramaley
’63, president of the University of Vermont, will speak with alums at a luncheon hosted by Chica Powers Maynard
’48. They will gather at the Kendal
Retirement Community on Saturday,
March 25.
Iowa City, Iowa: Leslea Haravon Collins
’89 will host a potluck dinner at her
home on Saturday, March 25. Alums will
also see the world premiere of the Bill T.
Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company’s Oh?
You Walk? that evening in the University
of Iowa’s Hancher Auditorium.
San Francisco: Connection Chairs
Rebecca Johnson ’86 and Neal Finkelstein ’86 have arranged an evening at
the Berkeley Repertory Theater to see
The Beauty Queen of Leenane on
Wednesday, Jan. 5.
Recent events
Boston: Alida Zweidler-McKay ’92 organized a visit to the Junior League Decorator’s Show House, for the first public
tours of the Commander’s Mansion on
the Watertown Arsenal. The Book Club
kicked off its year at the home of Steve
’62 and Sylvia Schoenbaum. Participants
are reading works from a list prepared
by Philip Weinstein, Alexander Griswold
Cummins Professor of English Literature.
Greenwich, Conn.: The Swarthmore
College Alumni Gospel Choir performed
at the First Presbyterian Church of
Greenwich for church members, alumni,
and prospective students. Ross ’66 and
Cathy Hyder Ogden ’67 coordinated the
program, which was sponsored by the
First Presbyterian and First Baptist
Churches of Greenwich.
Lake Geneva, Wis.: Donna Jo Napoli,
professor of linguistics and children’s
author, signed books at the Lake Geneva
Public Library book sale.
Lexington, Va.: North Carolina Connection Chair George Telford III ’84 hosted a
tailgate party at the Swarthmore vs.
Washington and Lee football game.
Metro DC/Baltimore: Connection Chair
DECEMBER 1999
UPCOMING
EVENTS
Black Alumni Weekend
March 18–20
Family Weekend
April 7–9
Alumni College
May 30–June 2
Alumni Weekend
June 2–4
Alumni College Abroad
June 17–July 2
Kathy Stevens ’89 led a hike through the
Sugarloaf Mountains Northern Peaks
Trail in Maryland, which included a picnic lunch.
Metro NYC: Connection Chairs Sanda
Balaban ’94 and Debbie Branker Harrod
’89 hosted Professor Phil Weinstein at
the Book Club kickoff event. Alums
joined graduates of other colleges for a
Festival Chamber Music Society Concert
and champagne reception in Merkin
Hall. Vincent Jones ’98 arranged a young
alumni bowling tournament, complete
with donated prizes. Young alums also
volunteered at a soup kitchen over the
Thanksgiving holiday.
Paris, France: The Connection has been
rekindled by Robert Owen ’74. Alums
joined other American college graduates
for a Thanksgiving dinner at the Institut
des Etudes Americaines–Maison des
Nations Americaines.
Philadelphia: Connection Chair Jennie
Rickard ’86 and local alumni gathered
on campus for cider and cookies after a
performance by The Flying Karamazov
Brothers. Jennie also organized a visit to
the Philadelphia Museum of Art to see
The Kingdom of Edward Hicks, with a
special lecture by Jerry Frost, Howard
M. and Charles F. Jenkins Professor of
Quaker History and Research and director of the Friends Historical Library.
Carolyn Morgan Hayden ’83 invited
Swarthmore families to attend a production of The Snow Queen by the Pig Iron
Theatre Co. (founded by Swarthmoreans) and Arden Theatre.
San Francisco: Connection Co-chairs
Rebecca Johnson ’86 and Neal Finkelstein ’86 led an alumni hike around
Point Reyes and had bag lunches on
the cliffs. The Connection also took a
guided tour of the San Jose Museum
of Art.
Santa Fe, N.M.: Emily Gibson ’90 invited
other alums to help celebrate the opening of Nathan Florence’s [’94] art exhibit
at the Cline Fine Art Gallery.
Regional events are organized 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.
ALUMNI ON LINE: www.swarthmore.edu/Home/Alumni
New directory now on Web
The Swarthmore College Online Alumni
Directory will make its debut on or
around Feb. 1, 2000. Instructions will be
mailed late in January to all alumni so
they can log onto this secure Web site,
provided by Harris Publishing Co.
Among the features will be e-mail forwarding, posting of resumes, and the
ability to design advertising for businesses and services.
Those who don’t receive the instructions by Feb. 4 should contact the Alumni Records Office at alumnirecords@swarthmore.edu or (610) 328-8408.
Folk Festival Reunion alert
Alumni on the Folk Festival Reunion
Committee would like to borrow photographs, memorabilia, written anecdotes, and other materials from campus
folk gatherings over the years. Those
with items to loan may contact John
Loven ’70 at (610) 489-0895, or at cyberskunk@cyberconnection.net.
Photos from past folk events and a
preview of the Folk Festival Reunion at
Alumni Weekend 2000 can be seen on
the “Swarthmore Folk” Web site at
http://www.cyberconnection.net/cyberskunk/sfolk.
35
CLASS NOTES
I
n the fall of 1943,
Swarthmore welcomed
a contingent of Chinese
naval officers, sent here
to learn English before
going off to war. This
photograph, found
recently in the Engineering Department,
shows the officers in
the Lamb-Miller Field
House—with each man’s
signature on the back of
the picture. The photo
will be donated to the
Friends Historical Library
after publication.
36
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
Alumni Profile
Up on the roof
Janet Carpenter Deckert ’42 builds houses in the Yucatán, Peru, and Kosovo.
J
anet Carpenter Deckert ’42, an
RCA engineer for 30 years, now
shingles roofs at the age of 78. As
the sixth female engineering
major to graduate from Swarthmore—and now the president of
Habitat for Humanity in Martin
County, Fla.—Janet has also
helped build a church near Mérida in the Yucatán and traveled
with a medical team to Pucallpa,
Peru.
“I was from a family that
always helped the poor,” Janet
said. The Quaker influence at
Swarthmore, where she remembers the “good dialogue” at meetinghouse services, reinforced the
giving attitude that Janet’s father
imparted to her. When they ate at
restaurants, her dad always left
disproportionately large tips and
said, “I have enough.”
After World War II, Janet
helped rebuild orphanages in Holland, Luxembourg, and France. “I
saw small children with missing
limbs, and that tears your heart
out,” she said.
These experiences remained
in her mind until 1993, when
Janet’s husband died. She decided,
after caring for him for five years, that
“it was time to give my energy, ability,
and money” to the community. “I was
always fortunate,” she said, “and I
wanted to give something back.”
Janet became an elder in her Presbyterian church and helped raise
about $4,000 for the Mayans in the
Yucatán peninsula. The money was
sent ahead to Rev. Dr. Ricardo Santana,
president of the Yucatán presbytery, to
buy building materials, including trusses, nylon rope, and concrete blocks.
A week later, Janet then traveled
with her church group to the Yucatán.
They worked alongside the Mayan
Presbyterians to build their church, “La
Hermosa.” Janet has now visited this
area in southeastern Mexico four times
and said it is “as close as Atlanta to my
home,” in Palm City, Fla. At construction sites on various trips, she has
helped build roof structures, poured a
concrete slab for children to play, and
constructed bathrooms.
DECEMBER 1999
The maiden name of Janet Carpenter Deckert ’42 (left) has guided
her record-setting forays into engineering—when few women were
active in the field—and her
building projects in the Yucatán.
Janet works with others (above)
on “La Hermosa” in Mérida,
Yucatán, during her second trip
to southeastern Mexico.
In March, with United Servants
Abroad, Janet traveled to Pucallpa,
Peru. By motorboat on the Ucayali
River, they visited the Shipbo Indian
villages. Storms caused by El Niño had
flooded the Amazon basin, many crops
didn’t survive, and the homes of rough
wood on stilts were like islands in the
water. “These five days made me realize more about God,” she said.
Janet, who has also helped build a
9,000-square-foot hospice residence in
Florida, continues to use some of the
engineering skills she learned at
Swarthmore—where she was active in
athletics, including hockey and swimming. Over the years, she has helped
build 25 houses, with 6 Habitat for
Humanity homes completed in 1999. “I
can build a house, and I know all of the
state codes now,” she said. “I can’t lift a
wood truss, and I have macular eye
degeneration, a heart valve replacement, and a birth defect resulting in the
partial loss of my left lung, but I can instruct others from start to finish.”
Completing a house is deeply fulfill-
ing for Janet, who marvels at the
transformation of “starting with land
and then having a house to put people
in,” she said. Her efforts often inspire
others, which is another part of the
motivation behind her work. “When
the men see a gray-haired woman with
wrinkles picking up a block, they work
a little harder,” she chuckled.
Her latest trip, in November, took
her with a group of 13—all older than
age 50—to Skivjan, Kosovo. In this village of 5,000, including 600 families, 300
homes were completely destroyed.
The two-story farmhouses just had bits
of roof hanging and no windows or
doors.
Just before leaving for her trip, Janet
had bought a 68-pound generator to
take on the plane for their work. Even
though friends worry about her safety,
Janet doesn’t give these concerns
much thought.
“When God wants me, he’ll take
me,” she said. “As long as I can, I’m
going to keep doing this work.”
—Andrea Hammer
45
Books & Authors
W.D. Ehrhart ’73, Beautiful Wreckage:
New and Selected Poems, Adastra Press,
Easthampton, Mass., 1999
W
ho taught you to believe in
words?” That devastating question at the heart of W.D. Ehrhart’s Beautiful Wreckage mocks poet and reader
alike with a generation’s soured idealism. In poem after poem, Ehrhart—
already a veteran of the war in Vietnam
before he began his studies at Swarthmore in 1969—traces the profound disillusionment radiating out from that conflict. For the boy-soldier who can’t distinguish Vietnamese civilians from the
Viet Cong—“They all talk / the same language”—and so comes blandly and horrifically to “quit trying”; for the mature
man whose cries against injustice fall on
deaf ears—“Everywhere you go, the
blade of your contempt / draws blood.
No wonder people hate you”; for the
husband who tells his wife, “I give you
the worst gift first / as a warning: the
sullen silence . . . , / the quick tongue
slashing”—for all of these, language
itself has been tainted, can’t be trusted,
can’t be controlled, bites back: “If sorry
has a name, it must be mine.”
Yet words are all a poet has. In
Ehrhart’s wrenching poem “Guns,” a
father, speechless before his daughter’s
questions, asks us, “How do you tell a
four-year-old / what steel can do to
flesh?” Our answer matches his—you
don’t—but the poem’s last lines make
us think again, as “yet another generation / is rudely about to discover / what
their fathers never told them.” Indeed,
the poems gathered here, some new,
some selected from the 12 books
Ehrhart has published since 1975, are
particularly effective in conveying the
threatened vulnerability of children and
the distressing paradox that to preserve
their innocence is to risk perpetuating
ignorance, violence, regret: “What fire
will burn that small / boy marching with
his father? / What parade will heal / his
father’s wounds?”
In “The Heart of the Poem,” Ehrhart
imagines, with visceral intensity, opening a body to find the heart. Despite the
disturbingly violent medical imagery,
the poem’s title leads us to assume that
its strong beating heart is what keeps
50
body and poem alive. Yet Ehrhart concludes: “Get rid of it. / Sentiment’s for
suckers. / Give us poetry.” As these lines
suggest, this is a poetry of clear-eyed
witness, of plain-spoken testimony, of
grounded integrity, but that’s not to say
it’s heartless. The speaker of these
poems finds solace in love, in friendship, in a child’s trust, in the unanticipated astonishments of the natural
world: “the lake so still, the stars fall in.”
And he returns to Vietnam, where he
finds, in lives broken by the war and
then remended, circumstances that illuminate his own. “The Distance We Travel” concludes with a Vietnamese man
repeating the name of the speaker’s
daughter, “touching / the stranger’s
heart with his open hand.” Surely these
are open-handed poems—dropping
their weapons, showing their wounds,
touching the stranger’s heart.
—Nathalie Anderson
Professor of English Literature
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE PEACE COLLECTION
Beautiful Wreckage
Nobel Peace Prize winner Jane Addams
(left) and Swarthmore President Frank
Aydelotte plant a tree on campus in 1931. It
still stands on the hill below Clothier Hall.
Peacemakers
Ann (McCaghey) Keene ’62, Peacemakers: Winners of the Nobel Peace Prize,
Oxford University Press, 1998
I
t has long been rumored that Alfred
Nobel, the inventor of dynamite,
established the peace prize that bears
his name because he felt guilty for mak-
ing money from the manufacture of
weapons. In fact, the Nobel fortune
came from chemical inventions and the
peaceful uses of explosives, such as
engineering projects, railways, canals,
and road building. The idea for the
Nobel Peace Prize actually emerged in
Paris in the 1880s, where the Swedish
industrialist met the Baroness Bertha
von Suttner, a well-known supporter of
international peace efforts. Von Suttner
nurtured Nobel’s interests in world
peace and suggested he fund an annual
prize for peace work.
The first Nobel Peace Prize was
awarded in 1901, five years after Nobel’s
death. It went to two men: Henri Dunant
of Switzerland, one of the founders of
the International Committee of the Red
Cross; and Frédéric Passy of France, the
organizer of several international peace
groups and a supporter of peaceful arbitration between governments. The most
recent prize, awarded in 1998, was given
to John Hume and David Trimble for
their efforts to find a peaceful solution
to the long conflict in Northern Ireland.
One prize winner had a close connection to Swarthmore College. In 1931,
Jane Addams, the legendary founder of
Hull House, became the first woman in
the United States to win the Nobel Peace
Prize—the same year that Swarthmore
College awarded her an honorary
degree. Addams had a long acquaintanceship with the College, having been
invited to speak in 1918, when her popularity was at an all-time low because of
her opposition to World War I. In 1930,
Lucy Biddle Lewis, a member of the
Board of Managers, convinced Addams
to donate her personal and professional
papers to Swarthmore. These formed
the core of an archive on the peace
movement around the world, first
known as the Jane Addams Peace Collection and now as the Swarthmore College Peace Collection. Ann Keene
doesn’t mention Addams’ connection
with Swarthmore in her book on Nobel
Peace Prize winners, but it is filled with
other inspiring stories.
Wonderful illustrations are included
with each entry. In addition to portraits
of the prize winners, there are many pictures illustrating the kinds of work they
did, such as the relief work in France
after World War II performed by the
American Friends Service Committee
and the Friends Service Council, two
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
letters in new and surprising ways.
organizations that shared the prize in
1947.
A glance at the appendix on the “Century of Peace Prize Winners” reveals
that most prize winners have been
North Americans and Europeans. Not
until 1936 did a South American receive
the honor; it was another 14 years
before the prize went to an African and
an additional 13 years before the first
winner from an Asian country. More
than half of the winners in the last 20
years have come from Asia, Africa, the
Middle East, and Latin America. The
Norwegian Nobel Committee that
selects the winners is finally looking
beyond the United States and Western
Europe to honor those working for
peace and a better world. Books such as
this one will help spread the word.
—Wendy Chmielewski, Curator
Swarthmore College Peace Collection
Gilbert Harman ’60, Reasoning, Meaning, and Mind, Oxford University Press,
1999. Harman presents 15 interconnected essays on fundamental issues at the
center of analytical philosophy.
Marc Elihu Hofstadter ’67, House of
Peace, Mother’s Hen, 1999. Kindness
toward one’s own experience underlies
the poems in this book.
Susan Holahan ’61, Sister Betty Reads
the Whole You, Gibbs-Smith, 1998. These
often prose-like poems present a multifaceted tableau of our life and times.
Mark and Matthew Lore ’88, Rubberneckers, Chronicle Books, 1999. This
travel game entertains families on long
car trips and makes traffic jams fun.
Mike Mather ’65, Tomorrow’s Headlines,
Buy Books, 1999. This book demonstrates where the media’s obsession
with sex and politics will take us next.
Other recent books
Lewis Pyenson ’69 (ed.), Fortiter,
Feliciter, Fideliter: Centennial Lectures of
the Graduate School of the University of
Southwestern Louisiana, University of
Southwestern Louisiana, 1999. This
book served as a preview of two lectures by invited speakers at the University of Southwestern Louisiana’s centennial celebrations in June 1999. Lewis
Pyenson and Susan Sheets-Pyenson, Servants of Nature: A History of Scientific
Institutions, Enterprises and Sensibilities,
HarperCollins, 1999. The authors explore the interaction between scientific
practice and public life from antiquity to
the present. Lewis Pyenson (ed.), Value:
Carl Abbott ’66, Political Terrain: Washington, D.C., From Tidewater Town to
Global Metropolis, University of North
Carolina Press, 1999. In examining the
contested social construction of Washington’s identity, Abbott explores issues
central to national character.
Brent Askari ’92, Not Ready for Prime
Time, Carroll & Graf, 1999. A tough
young singer with a hard-rock girls’
band tells all in this upbeat debut novel.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth ’79 and Christine
Stolba, Women’s Figures: An Illustrated
Guide to the Economic Progress of
Women in America, AEI Press and Independent Women’s Forum, 1999. This
fact-packed analysis is a salute to American women’s economic progress; it
shows how they have substantially
achieved equality in key areas of education and employment.
Eleanor M. Gates ’52 (ed.), Leigh Hunt: A
Life in Letters, Together With Some Correspondence of William Hazlitt, Falls River,
1998. Using 70 manuscript sources,
Gates reveals this quintessential man of
DECEMBER 1999
JAY ACKERMAN
David M. Bressoud ’71, Proofs and Confirmations: The Story of the Alternating
Sign Matrix Conjecture, Cambridge University Press, 1999. This introduction to
recent developments in algebraic combinatorics is accessible to anyone with a
knowledge of linear algebra.
Ann Lubin Buttenwieser ’57 is a
waterfront planner
and president of
the Parks Council
in New York City.
These roles provided material for
several chapters
of her book. She is
currently developing a floating swimming pool (the model
for which was discovered in her research)
to be anchored in New York’s waterways.
Her new book, Manhattan WaterBound: Manhattan’s Waterfront From
the Seventeenth Century to the Present
(2nd ed.), was published by Syracuse University Press, 1999.
The Knife and Fork Band, featuring
Denis Murphy ’89, Cameron Voss ’91,
Meg Murphy, George Shirley, and Jon
Kelsey, has been playing in the Philadelphia area since 1992. Their debut CD,
Almost Friday Night (Chapter 7
Records, 1999) offers songs that are
catchy, heartfelt, and indignant.
Pondering Goodness, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1999. This volume
describes the proceedings of the fourth
graduate colloquium, devoted to the
question of value, at the University of
Southwestern Louisiana.
Don E. Wilson and Sue Ruff ’60 (eds.),
The Smithsonian Book of North American
Mammals, Smithsonian Institution Press,
1999. In this work, more than 450 photographs illustrate written depictions of
the varied world of North American
mammals.
Martha Shirk ’73, Neil G. Bennett, and
Jo Lawrence Aber, Lives on the Line:
American Families and the Struggle to
Make Ends Meet, Westview Press, 1999.
Personal profiles combined with demographic analysis offer a vivid portrait of
family life below the poverty line.
Jeremy J. Stone ’57, “Every Man Should
Try”: Adventures of a Public Interest
Activist, PublicAffairs, 1999. In this memoir, Stone describes some of his most
fascinating experiences as an activist.
Peter J. Weiden ’77, Patricia L. Scheifler, Ronald J. Diamond ’68, and Ruth
Ross, Breakthroughs in Antipsychotic
Medications: A Guide for Consumers,
Families, and Clinicians, W.W. Norton &
Co., 1999. This book aims to share science-based information in a form consumers can understand and find helpful.
Douglas Worth ’62, Some Sense of Transcendence, William L. Bauhan, 1999. This
collection of poems, written between
1983 and 1998, offers a lyrical depiction
of the crises and joys of life and human
relationships.
51
Alumni Profile
Like the voices of angels
Ann Stuart ’65 and son Jonathan Stuart-Moore play the glass harp.
R
emember feeling bored at a family
dinner and running your finger
around the rim of a water glass only to
get a squeaky sound, which, with the
right pressure, suddenly became a
lovely ringing tone? Your parents
would then admonish you to “stop it
now,” and all the guests shifted their
eyes in your direction without turning
their heads.
Instead of that squeaky sound being
an annoyance, it could have been
viewed as the beginning of a musical
career. In the case of Ann Stuart ’65,
this sound was the beginning of an avocation that has created a musical bond
with her 16-year-old son, Jonathan.
They began playing glasses when he
was 5 years old and made their first
public appearance when he was 11.
Stuart also uses her glass-playing
talent in her career as a researcher and
professor in the medical school at the
University of North Carolina–Chapel
Hill, where she has taught since 1979. “I
give lectures on hearing and bring
some of the glasses in to make various
points in the lecture. I also go to elementary and middle schools, where I
play the glasses and talk about music
and hearing,” she said.
Stuart says she has always loved
music and throughout her life has
played the piano, French horn, and
cello. But while an assistant professor
at Harvard in neurobiology, Stuart
showed her social spirit at a department holiday party and played glasses,
also known as a glass harp. The sounds
they create when played are surely
what a choir of angels must sound like.
No squeaks. No shrill notes. Just light,
airy tones.
The hobby is not an inexpensive
one. There are 68 glasses representing
two arrays, each roughly three octaves.
Each glass may cost as much as $50.
Stuart and her son travel in a minivan
with the glasses, three tables, and
other paraphernalia. The packing of
glasses and setup time for each performance requires four hours and a twohour breakdown.
The only roadie is Stuart’s husband,
John Moore, who constructed the
series of pedastals to which the glasses
are secured. A glass is chosen only
DECEMBER 1999
Ann Stuart ’65 and her son Jonathan Stuart-Moore have been playing glasses together for
11 years. This unique mother-and-son duo’s performance was featured on a segment of
Scientific American Frontiers in 1998.
after Ann has listened to the specific
tone it makes with water in it. “I’ve
been known to go to Crate and Barrel,
for instance, with my jar of water and
newspaper clippings showing who we
are and explain to the manager what I
am doing. I’ll ask if there’s a place I can
sit on the floor or a back room and listen to 30 or so glasses. I stroke them
and listen to the sound,” she said.
“Sometimes I’ll ask the manager if the
background music in the store can be
turned down so I can hear the tone better. Sometimes they’re understanding.
Usually they’re intrigued.”
The Stuarts’ sparkling glasses are
lined up on two levels and divided by
octaves, like a piano, in a linear pattern.
A change in octaves is indicated by a
glass filled with colored water, which
further adds to the glass harp’s attractiveness. The base, also built by her
husband, holds the glasses steady and
sits on top of a silver, padded tablecloth.
Stuart and her son were featured on
a segment of PBS’s Scientific American
Frontiers, which aired in 1998. She
believes they were chosen because
they were the only mother-and-son duo
playing at the Glass Music International
Festival in 1997 that the TV show covered. But she also stated that their
attractive glass setup caught the pro-
ducer’s eyes.
Stuart is similarly proud of an invitation they received to perform in the
Duke University Chapel during the
Christmas holiday season in 1998. “It’s
a well-known chapel that can seat
about 1,000 people. It was an enormous
high to be able to play there,” she said.
Stuart equated her experience in Duke
Chapel to what it must feel like to play
in Carnegie Hall. “It has fabulous acoustics and a prolonged echo.” The team
has also been invited to perform at the
Glass Music International Festival in
Philadelphia in April 2000.
Stuart and her son play sacred
music that easily lends itself to glasses
as well as Broadway show tunes. Their
repertoire includes music from Les Misérables and West Side Story. They
choose pieces with descants, harmonic
structure, and ones in which she and
Jonathan can have musical conversations. Occasionally, they do have
squabbles over which music to perform, but, once settled, Stuart arranges
the music for the glasses.
“Our duo will stop when Jonathan
goes to college. Although it will not be
the same as playing with my son, I
guess I will look for another partner,”
Stuart said. “Playing the glasses brings
me immense joy.”
—Audree Penner
55
In My Life
Slowing the Pace
By Kate Harper ’77
T
he sun is streaming in the kitchen
window, throwing a spotlight on
the kitchen floor. A mug of peppermint tea radiates warmth into my
hands. I take a breath and feel the hot,
moist air and the sweet tang of mint fill
my nose. The house is silent, but everywhere around me is the chaos of living:
half-eaten breakfasts, dropped shoes,
and hills of laundry. My two girls, ages 7
and 10, are at school. My husband is at
work. I’m taking a break from cleaning
out “my box”—sorting, responding,
recycling, or otherwise dealing with all
those pieces of paper that pile up.
In front of me is the annual alumni
appeal from Swarthmore. The check is
written, signed, and inserted. But I’m
hesitating. My eyes go to the small
space at the top of the flap. “Alumni,
please keep in touch!” This exhortation
is calling to me. My life is radically different from just one year ago, and I want to
tell others about it.
A little more than a year ago, I had
everything a modern woman could
want. The company that I helped found
six years earlier had just gone public,
and my founder’s stock was worth a lot
of money. I had a great job as the director of technology transfer, which used
my engineering and organizational talents as well as my intuitive people skills
and allowed me to travel all over the
world. I had a loving husband who supported my career. And not only did I
have a challenging job, I even did it parttime. I could be home for the school bus
and volunteer at church. I was the “good
mother” and successful career woman.
But the outer success did not tell the
inner story. I was miserable. I kept thinking, “I have everything; I should be
happy.” The disconnect between my
head and my heart made me deeply
depressed, but I was so busy achieving
that I didn’t have time to feel anything.
Doing two (or more) things at once was
my credo. I could cook dinner, help with
60
The real problem
wasn’t being busy;
I was living at odds
with my deepest
values. I’ll never
forget the day
when I realized how
out of whack
things had become.
homework, and write a memo in my
mind. I would talk on the phone with a
client and fold laundry. My life was like
the plate-spinning vaudeville act on Ed
Sullivan. Dozens of fragile plates spin,
each on top of a tall stick. Just as one
was about to stop and smash to the
floor, I’d run and give it another twist. I
was the master plate spinner, but I was
caught in a trap; I could never let a plate
drop.
Not only was I physically doing two
things at once, my mind was constantly
active: planning, worrying, and thinking
about the past or the future. I was simply never in the current moment. In the
shower, I was thinking about the day
ahead. “Do Brownies meet tonight? Is it
my day to make the snack?” While
brushing my teeth, I was arranging my
work schedule. “I’d better call Hank and
make sure he gets those agendas sent.”
While cooking dinner, I was thinking
about what happened at work. “Why
didn’t they accept my proposal? Did I
say it too harshly, or was I too weak? I’m
no good at selling.”
If something wasn’t “important,” it
was a chore. Before kids, my passion
was cooking, but each evening, I’d look
up at the clock and think, “What am I
going to do for dinner? Why is this my
responsibility?” I’d be angry as I sliced
carrots, guilty as I ordered pizza, or
cranky as I yelled at my husband that it
was his turn to fix dinner.
The real problem wasn’t being busy; I
was living at odds with my deepest values. I’ll never forget the day when I realized how out of whack things had
become. I had spent the day teaching
listening skills to a group of engineers.
Patiently, I modeled paraphrasing and
reflecting, emphasizing the need to give
the other person your full attention and
not cut them off. At home that night,
when I was putting the kids to bed, I
heard my daughter call, “Mommy, can I
talk to you?” A wave of exhaustion
swept over me. Visions of hearing about
yet another endless playground saga
appeared before me. “Katie told Amanda that she said that I said….” I looked
at my watch and then said to my daughter, “You can talk, but you have to say it
all in three sentences.” As I waited impatiently, I heard my daughter crying softly. Then it hit me: I had spent the day
teaching listening skills, but I didn’t
have it within me to listen to the people
I love the most.
That event was the first of many
awakenings. Today, my life is radically
different: I don’t have a high-powered
career. Last fall, I made the decision to
leave my job and not work outside the
home while I regained a sense of what
was important. I am no longer wealthy.
The company I worked for made several
poor management decisions that led to
significant losses, and now the stock is
worth pennies. I have given up spinning
plates. I try to do only one thing at a
time and be aware of what is happening
in each moment. Now, I regularly experience love, peace, and joy, and I am more
accepting of anger, sorrow, and frustration. I know my purpose: to love others.
And I know my priorities: to take care of
myself and my family and then make the
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
DECEMBER 1999
me see my inner values. Last winter,
something prompted me to get back in
touch with Professor Rose. During my
freshman year, it became clear that
Classics was not my forte, but I became
one of his baby-sitters, and he became a
mentor for me throughout my college
years. Last year, I sent him an e-mail,
telling him of my “wonderful” life. He
wrote back, wanting to know more and
my mind. My mind had been going at
warp speed for 40-plus years—and I was
proud of it! Something about KabatZinn’s explanation changed the way I
saw meditation. Meditation is not so
much the practice of clearing the mind
as it is the practice of being aware—
noticing the mind wandering and nonjudgmentally bringing it back to the present moment. Today, I have a daily meditation practice, which
has helped me to be
more present in my life.
For example, I have
returned to a love of
cooking. Slicing carrots
can be a joy. The wonderful rhythm of cutting
and the beauty of the
color give me great
pleasure.
For me, the most
important change in my
life is taking the time to
love. Mother Theresa
said, “We can do no
great things; only small
things with great love.” I
let people go ahead of
me in line. I’m nice
when I tell the telemarketers that I want my
name removed from
their list. I make it a priority to listen to those I
love.
It has been an entire
year since I left my job.
I’ve enjoyed driving in
the slow lane. I’ve also
discovered that after
taking care of myself
and my family, I have
time and energy for
more. So I’ve started a small consulting
business helping software organizations
improve their productivity and increase
employee satisfaction.
Will I start spinning plates again? I
don’t think so. Now, I see myself more
as a painter of plates. A few are carefully
arrayed before me, with the most important ones close by. I give each one individual attention, and if I get to the point
where I cannot work on a design, I will
put it aside until the time is right. ■
SHERRI JOHNSON / ENIGMA GRAPHICS
world a little bit better place.
Is this just a woman’s issue about
how difficult it is to work and be a mother? I don’t think so. I think it is about
being driven by external achievement
and what is expected of us and not by
what is internally satisfying. This affects
men, or women without children, and
even stay-at-home moms. We are just
spinning a different set of plates.
In The Power of
Myth, Joseph Campbell
says, “We’re so
engaged in doing
things of outer value
that we forget that the
inner value, the rapture that is associated
with being alive, is
what it is all about.”
Ever since I can
remember, external
achievement defined
me and measured my
worth (alas, always to
come up lacking). It is a
common path for many
of us high achievers
and reinforced by a
culture that celebrates
the extraordinary individual. How many of us
secretly wish to have
an article written about
us in Newsweek
extolling our success?
How many of us have a
hidden sense of failure
as we read the Class
Notes because we feel
we have nothing noteworthy to report?
How do we escape
the dissatisfying pull of
external rewards and experience the
inner value? Joseph Campbell says to
study myths. I did not try that path,
although I found myself reading books
on various religious and spiritual topics.
I don’t have the answer to this question,
nor do I think there is any single answer.
Things did not change for me overnight,
and I still struggle with exactly how to
spend my time. However, three things
have greatly helped me make a fundamental shift in how I experience life:
compassionate friends, meditation, and
time to love.
Gil Rose, my Greek professor from
Swarthmore, is one of many compassionate and truthful friends who helped
asking me to call him. He has a gift for
listening, and somehow he got me to
talk about the misery beneath my success. Over several months of occasional
phone calls and e-mails, he listened with
acceptance and compassion and
encouraged me to take some time out to
discover what I really wanted.
For Christmas last year, a friend gave
me the book Wherever You Go, There
You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life by Jon Kabat-Zinn. It taught me
that I was never in the present moment.
Kabat-Zinn recommends meditation as
the disciplined practice of being in the
present. Years ago, I had decided that I
could not meditate; I could never clear
Kate Harper ’77 lives in Groton, Mass.
The Bulletin invites submissions for future
“In My Life” columns. Call or write for a
set of editorial guidelines.
61
Alumni Profile
A chosen path
Delvin Dinkins ’93 expands world views at a suburban high school.
O
ne of the critical
Dinkins credits the
issues in public eduatmosphere he found on
cation is the increasing
campus with reinforcing
disparity in funding for
his sense of social reurban and suburban
sponsibility. “It gave me a
schools. Delvin Dinkins
sense of urgency,” he
’93 makes sure his stusays. “What I observed
dents are aware of the
around me validated
problem.
what I really wanted to
“It’s very much a condo—and that was to
versation piece,” he says.
teach. There was an
“I’m very open with them
almost spoken voice sayabout their relationship
ing, ‘it’s OK; it’s feasible.’”
to the world and getting
Although he graduated
them to see that not all
in 1993, his connection to
the world is quite this
the College is still strong.
Delvin Dinkins ’93 (right) and Conestoga High School track-team
privileged.”
“I’ve been able to incormembers accept the Central League 4 x 400-meter relay champi“Privileged” is a word
porate pieces from my
onship award at the Penn Relays in 1997.
often associated with
Swarthmore courses into
Conestoga High School,
my own courses,” he
where Dinkins has taught and develYou have to overfund and keep it oversays, “even from some of my notes,
oped courses in English, world literafunded to bring the level up. Furtherand I’ve called professors for input in
ture, and modern American literature
more, he says that money alone won’t
classes I’m designing.”
since 1995. The school is located in
offer a long-term solution to urban
Dinkins’ connection to the College
Berwyn, Pa., just beyond the Main Line; schools’ dilemmas.”
isn’t only professional. He met his wife,
almost all of its graduates go to college.
“People want simple solutions for
Davirah Timm-Dinkins ’93 and now
But the numbers are what really dis- complex problems,” he adds. “It
Swarthmore’s coordinator of student
tinguish the area. Conestoga and the
doesn’t work that way. The culture of
activities, during the summer before
other schools in its district spent twice
the school, of the neighborhood, of the
their freshman year. Dinkins says
as much per student last year than the
city—there are so many layers. This is
they’ve been best friends ever since.
schools in the Chester-Upland School
not to say you can’t succeed, but there
At Conestoga, Dinkins’ reputation
District less than one hour away—a dif- are a lot of subtleties.”
precedes him. “I’m pegged as one of
ference of more than $5,000.
Dinkins grew up in Chester and is a
the hardest teachers in the school,” he
Diversity, however, doesn’t reach
1989 graduate of Swarthmore Acadesays proudly. “I hold my students to
many faculty lounges in suburban high
my. As part of the Upward Bound provery high standards.”
schools, and Conestoga is no excepgram during high school, he fondly
As high as those standards are, they
tion. When Dinkins was hired, he was
remembers coming to the College for
are no less than those he expects from
the only African-American person there several weeks each summer. “It was
himself. In addition to teaching five
to teach an academic subject.
very appealing,” he says. “It really
courses, all of which are at the Honors
Although Dinkins is not alone in that armed me with an almost idealized ver- or Advanced Placement level, Dinkins
role now, he continues to see its impor- sion of what Swarthmore was like. I
coaches both the girls and boys indoor
tance. “Getting the students to see mul- remember it as almost a paradise of
and outdoor track and field teams.
tiple perspectives gives them much
learning and wondered what it would
“I really love it,” he says. “I try to be
more of an understanding of the world
be like to be there.”
cooperative as a coach. I hope that’s
around them,” he explains. “Often peoOnce enrolled at the College, Dinkhow I come across in the classroom.”
ple have the habit of existing within
ins wasted little time before getting
Dinkins will get a break from the
themselves.
involved. Subsequently, his numerous
classroom next fall when he begins an
“Typically, our discussions are very
athletic, musical, and community-oriadministrative internship at his school
open,” he continues. “They want to
ented activities proved to be a central
district’s central office. He believes this
learn and understand, but it’s hard for
part of his Swarthmore experience.
step is the next one toward his goal of
them to learn that the world doesn’t
“The Black Cultural Center [BCC]
becoming a high school principal.
work for everyone.”
sustained me,” he says. “I very much
“I’m getting 100 percent support and
So how can public education work
found being part of the BCC gave me
a lot of opportunities from that disin places less privileged than Berwyn?
entry into the activism on campus. The trict,” he says. “I’m teaching at the level
“Yes, more money is one answer,”
Swarthmore African-American StuI’ve always envisioned.
he says. “To close the gap, three to
dents’ Society was also at the center of
“This is the path I have chosen.”
four times as much money won’t cut it.
my experience.”
—Alisa Giardinelli
66
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
Letters
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 3
(“false consciousness” then,
and “denial” now).
Then, as now, the nefarious machinations of “corporate” interests were decried,
and opposing viewpoints
were dismissed out of hand
rather than engaged in serious argument. Then, as
now, “facts” were confidently cited that turned out not
to be true (1969: The Soviet
economy is as productive as
that of the United States—
Paul Samuelson says so.
1999: Human-caused global
warming is happening
now—scientists say it’s so).
Then, as now, apocalyptic
vision was in vogue (1969:
The final crisis of capitalism
is imminent. 1999: “It is
arguably too late already” to
prevent ecocatastrophe).
Then, as now, professors
anguished over whether life
in the academy was compatible with political virtue
(which question, after much
heroic struggle, was usually
decided in the affirmative).
And finally, then as now,
people who fell into ideology often wasted years inside
it because once its tenets
were accepted, it was not
falsifiable from within.
I wonder what new
enthusiasm will seize the
imaginations of some
Swarthmoreans 30 years
hence, after the much-anticipated ecocatastrophe—like
the socialist revolution
before it—fails to arrive?
WILLIAM BERRY ’73
Tucker, Ga.
JOYS OF JUDAISM
I read with great interest
“Between Two Worlds” by
Yosef (Jody) Branse ’76 (“In
My Life,” September 1999). I,
too, discovered the joys of
Orthodox Judaism shortly
after my graduation from
Swarthmore. I, too, have
faced the wonders and challenges of accepting a worldview quite different from
DECEMBER 1999
that with which I was raised.
And I, too, am quite careful
that my children—who do
know English—do not get a
chance to open a Bulletin. I
am concerned, however,
that readers of the Bulletin
might have gotten a mistaken impression of the “stern
view” and “uncompromising, all-encompassing”
nature of traditional
Judaism.
“Uncompromising” and
“all-encompassing” mean
that traditional Judaism provides a framework that
directs adherents in every
aspect of their lives. There
is joy in having such a welldefined purpose and in
striving each day to meet its
challenges. There is happiness in seeing one’s children
grow up with a set of concrete values, largely ignorant of the horrors that constitute the bulk of contemporary media and isolated
from the scourges of
promiscuity and substance
abuse that afflict so many
young people. And there is
the pleasure of living in a
tight-knit community of people who look out for each
other.
Yosef Branse writes:
“Jewish tradition maintains
that one should spend as
much time as possible
studying the Torah, Talmud,
legal codes, and their voluminous commentaries.” As a
graduate student in physics,
it was not unusual for me to
spend all my waking hours
single-mindedly engaged in
a physics problem. More
recently, I have had time for
the intellectual pleasure and
spiritual fulfillment that
come in studying these
texts. I have been changed
by what I have learned in
them—an experience I
never had in all my previous
years of education.
ELLIOT WACHMAN ’83
Pittsburgh
71
Our Back Pages
The Select Seven
I
n the spring of 1996, I was writing
weekly articles on Swarthmore’s history for The Phoenix. Looking
through the old photograph files in
Friends Historical Library, I came across
a folder of “destroyed buildings.” Most
of them were unsurprising: old gymnasia and an old swimming pool. I knew
about these things. But what to make of
a series of photographs of a windowless
Egyptian-style Temple? It reminded me
of nothing so much as the Temple of
Dendur in New York’s Metropolitan
Museum of Art. But this photo was
clearly taken in Pennsylvania, not in
Egypt. Those were elm trees behind the
temple. The back of the photographs
said only “Book and Key.”
The catalog of the Swarthmoreana
collection in Friends Library listed several boxes of material on the Book and
Key Society, and so I asked to see them.
I found minute books, photographs, a
very large Bible, song sheets, correspondence, newspaper clippings, and some
written reminiscences. I called some of
the alumni whose names appear in the
society’s records and asked them what
they remembered.
The story I heard sounded completely unlike the Swarthmore I knew: For
decades, at 7 minutes to 7 each Thursday night, 7 male leaders of the senior
class would silently arise from their dining-hall places and would walk side by
side to a small Egyptian-style temple at
the end of Whittier Place. No one
besides these selected members of
Book and Key ever saw inside the temple. No one else was ever intended to
know what went on at these meetings.
Book and Key members first saw the
inside of the temple in May of their
junior year, when graduating members
of the society would “tap” them on the
shoulder at dinner. Bill Carroll ’38
remembered: “There was quite a bit of
gossip when spring came, and people
were guessing who was going to be
tapped and who wasn’t.... I was surprised that I was tapped. At least, I don’t
remember looking forward to it at all.”
Initiation into Book and Key was
designed to be dramatic. The juniors
72
stood blindfolded outside the door of
the temple. Every few minutes, a hand
would appear at the door, pulling an initiate inside the building. Some years, a
gong would be rung on the roof every
hour, all night, and the initiates would
not reemerge until morning. Inside the
temple, the initiates received their lapel
pins, learned the secret handshake, and
heard about the workings of the society
from the graduating members and visiting Book and Key alumni. The society’s
records include several texts of an elaborate initiation ritual, including many
oaths and symbolic obstacle courses,
but the amount of this ritual actually
Book and Key
initiates were brought
into the temple
blindfolded and
spent the entire night.
enacted varied over the years. Ed
Mahler ’50 said that in his initiation
year, the initiates were brought into the
temple blindfolded and spent the entire
night in the temple, ringing a gong on
the roof every hour. Bill Carroll ’38 said
that in the spring of 1937, the new initiates didn’t stay all night. Larry Shane ’56
said he couldn’t remember any initiation ritual at all.
Book and Key alumni attended each
spring’s initiation at least through the
early 1940s. As Howard Cooper Johnson
recalled in a history of the society written as a tribute to Morris Clothier of the
Class of 1890, “Shortly after 1900, Morris
Clothier and I conferred about the
establishment at Swarthmore of a Senior
Honor Society based on the plan of the
Yale Societies. We visited, from the outside, Skull and Bones, Scroll and Key,
Book and Snake, and others and gath-
By Elizabeth Weber ’98
ered bits and pieces of information from
various sources and together planned
the building and its furnishing.
Alumni continued to play an active
role in the selection of students for initiation and in the general supervision of
Book and Key during the early decades
of the society. The power that the Temple Trust Association had over undergraduate members of Book and Key was
evident in 1922, when it became apparent that the senior members of Book
and Key had consumed substantial
quantities of alcohol in the temple one
Thursday evening. “After earnest and
thoughtful consideration, it was pointed
out that the seniors had violated the
provisions of the By-Laws of the Society,
and had also been guilty of misconduct
tending to tarnish the fair name of their
Alma-Mater, and it was on motion, duly
made, seconded, and unanimously carried, Resolved that the Board of Directors recommend to the general membership of the Temple Trust Association
that the 1922 seniors ... be suspended
indefinitely, that they not be admitted to
the Temple, and that they should surrender their pins.” The Book and Key
Class of 1922 members were reinstated
after they graduated.
Members of Book and Key were
selected because of their activity in College organizations and their commitment to the College. Most were captains
of sports teams, student council members, fraternity officers, or leaders in
other student organizations. “The idea
was basically to have individuals who
came from different parts of campus,”
said Warren Higgins ’48. “They looked
for individuals who followed their own
ideas to try and get a cross section of
leaders on campus.” Book and Key
members discussed whether Swarthmore should adopt an honor system
(they didn’t think so), whether the College should grant “distinction in course”
to non-Honors students (they thought it
should), and whether a picture directory of the freshmen class should be published (they thought so). They discussed fraternity pledging, turnout for
football games, chaperones at parties,
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
FRIENDS HISTORICAL LIBRARY
The select seven in 1925 included (back, left to right) Marvin Burr, Spencer Keare,
Charles Limberger, and Lloyd Goman; (center) Benjamin Burdsall; and (front) Joseph
Shane and Carlton Henderson—all seniors that year. Shane later became vice president
of the College, helping make the decision to raze the Book and Key temple. His son,
Lawrence Shane ’56, is currently chairman of the Board of Managers.
low grades of the first-year students,
plans to get a piano for the temple, and
problems in the lunch line. Members
would not mention the society’s name
to nonmembers—any actions they
agreed to carry out were done through
the campus organizations they led.
In the 1930s, several of the rituals of
the society, including the weekly Thursday evening procession to the temple,
were dropped. Later, most of the secrecy surrounding the organization was
also ended. By the time Morris Clothier
died in 1949, the initiation ritual remained, but other activities were car-
ried out openly. In that year, Book and
Key members sponsored a play contest;
organized a shoe drive for European
refugees, a faculty-student quiz program, College open houses for high
school boys, and freshmen orientation;
and ushered at lectures. “We were trying to justify the existence of the thing,”
said Edward Perkins ’49. “I was extremely honored to be selected. It meant a
great deal to us at the time, although we
realized that its day had gone.”
Within a decade, Book and Key had
initiated its last member. “I had a feeling
that we were near the end,” said Ed
Mahler ’50. “I remember talking with
some of the other guys about it on the
night we were brought in: What was this
all about? What was the purpose of it?
You began to question it. You were still
quite flattered by being selected—
although it wasn’t as if your fellow students bowed and scraped before you
because you were a ‘Bookie.’”
Swarthmore had changed dramatically since Book and Key began in 1906.
Students played a much more active
role in making decisions. A self-perpetuating elite group of 7 male members of
each class didn’t seem like quite such a
good idea. The Class of 1951 was the
last class with only 7 members—membership expanded to groups of 11, 16,
and 21. New members were sent letters
of invitation, and several declined the
offer to join. In the end, the Class of 1957
decided against tapping members of the
next class. Older members of the Temple Trust Association were very upset
by the society’s demise, but they could
do little. In 1965, the Temple Trust Association gave up all hope of reestablishing Book and Key. They sold the Temple
to the College for $1 and donated their
financial assets to the College.
Many members of the Temple Trust
Association continued to meet informally. The Book and Key members of the
Class of 1934 continued to go on vacations together for decades afterward,
said S. Dean Caldwell ’34. The building
they sold the college was a curiosity: a
small two-story Egyptian-style temple
with a meeting room, a library on the
second floor, and a kitchen in the basement. Four stained glass windows (with
a book, a key, the scales of justice, and
the number 232) were illuminated with
artificial lights—no windows let in the
sun. The Phoenix reported: “Equipping
the building to meet legal requirements
would have cost an estimated $30,000 to
$35,000. No permanent specific uses for
Book and Key were judged worthy of
such an expenditure. As a permanent
location for music practice rooms or an
art gallery, the building seemed inadequate.”
In 1967, the building was razed. The
Book and Key Scholarship Fund, established with the society’s financial assets,
is still in existence. ■
Elizabeth Weber ’98 is a Swarthmore history buff. She works for the Census Bureau
in Washington, D.C.
June 2–4, 2000
Details Details Details
L
ife is busy—so
many things to
remember. Here’s one
detail you won’t want to
forget: Alumni Weekend
at Swarthmore. Come
back to campus and
enjoy the little things.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
Swarthmore College Alumni Bulletin 1999-12-01
The Swarthmore College Bulletin is the official alumni magazine of the college. It evolved from the Garnet Letter, a newsletter published by the Alumni Association beginning in 1935. After World War II, college staff assumed responsibility for the periodical, and in 1952 it was renamed the Swarthmore College Bulletin. (The renaming apparently had more to do with postal regulations than an editorial decision. Since 1902, the College had been calling all of its mailed periodicals the Swarthmore College Bulletin, with each volume spanning an academic year and typically including a course catalog issue and an annual report issue, with a varying number of other special issues.)
The first editor of the Swarthmore College Bulletin alumni issue was Kathryn “Kay” Bassett ’35. After a few years, Maralyn Orbison Gillespie ’49 was appointed editor and held the position for 36 years, during which she reshaped the mission of the magazine from focusing narrowly on Swarthmore College to reporting broadly on the college's impact on the world at large. Gillespie currently appears on the masthead as Editor Emerita.
Today, the quarterly Swarthmore College Bulletin is an award-winning alumni magazine sent to all alumni, parents, faculty, staff, friends of the College, and members of the senior class. This searchable collection spans every issue from 1935 to the present.
Swarthmore College
1999-12-01
49 pages
reformatted digital
The class notes section of The Bulletin has been extracted in this collection to protect the privacy of alumni. To view the complete version of The Bulletin, contact Friends Historical Library.