Swarthmore College Alumni Bulletin 2002-12-01

DECEMBER 2002

Photo
Blitz:

Student
Visions

ON THE COVER: B DAN FAIRCHILD’S [’03] PHOTOGRAPH OF PARRISH HALL
MAILBOXES GRACES THE APRIL 2003 PAGE OF NEXT YEAR’S SWARTHMORE
COLLEGE CALENDAR. IT IS ONE OF THOUSANDS OF PHOTOS SUBMITTED
DURING THIS FALL’S “PHOTO BLITZ,” SPONSORED BY THE PUBLICATIONS
OFFICE. FOR MORE STUDENT VISIONS OF SWARTHMORE, TURN TO PAGE 20.

CONTENTS: HANG NGO ’05, ONE OF MORE THAN 360 STUDENTS WHO
PARTICIPATED IN THE PHOTO BLITZ, SAID OF THIS PHOTO: “THE SHADOWS ARE
[ONES] OF ME AND ... MY BEST FRIEND HERE, FRANCISCO CASTRO ’05 [LEFT].”

DECEMBER 2002

Features
Cell Divisions

14

Swarthmore-educated scientists,
ethicists, and legal scholars help
lead the stem-cell and cloning debate.

De p a r t m e n t s
Letters

3

Collection

4

Readers’ feedback

By Tom K r a t t e n m a ke r

Through Student
Eyes
20
A weeklong “Photo Blitz” reveals
students’ vision of Swarthmore.

Current news

Alumni Digest

42

Class Notes

44

Connections and adventures

By Jeffre y L o t t

Liberal Arts
in a Conservative
Land
26

Correspondence from friends

Wo r k i n g Towa rd
a B e t t e r Wo r l d 4 8
Sam Ashelman ’37 hosted Bosnian
diplomats at Coolfont Resort.
Resort
By Elizabeth Redden ’05

Following
the Wind

Jon Lyman ’77 enjoys the scenery
and sociability of ballooning.

Two Swarthmoreans help start
a women’s college in Jeddah,
Saudi Arabia.

Deaths

By Carol B r é v a r t - D e m m

B o o ks & A r t s

68

On the Go

In My Life

76

By Carol Brévart-Demm

Sympathy extended

Mysteries and more

We t l a n d s
Wa r r i o r

Margaret Reno Hurchalla ’62
battles to save Florida’s Everglades.

32

Sinking, Floating

B y J e n n i f er Gross ’98

By Angel a D o o d y

Émigré

The College as
a Place of Refuge
By Alisa G i a r d iin
nelli

53

Profiles

34

O u r B a c k Pa g e s

Hosting the Hangman of Hungary
B y E l i z a b eth Redden ’05

80

64

By Angela Doody

Tanisha Little ’97 is happiest
with lots of activity.

74

PA R L O R TA L K

A

s I arrive on campus each morning, I often see Martin Ostwald, the William
R. Kenan Jr. Professor Emeritus of Classics, walking to work from his home
on Walnut Lane. Now 80, Ostwald paces purposefully to his 4-by-6 carrel
on the third floor of McCabe Library, where he spends his days reading texts in
Greek and writing articles and e-mail in English and German. These days, there’s a
different rhythm to Ostwald’s life—but it hasn’t always been so quiet.
Ostwald is one of Swarthmore’s best-known teacher-scholars—revered by his
students and widely recognized for his contributions to classical studies. If you
engage him in a conversation about contemporary politics (about which he is very
much up-to-date), he will soon cite a classical author who has just the right take on
today’s problems. He is the model of an educated man—but he is also a man with
an extraordinary history, the last of his generation to stride Swarthmore’s sidewalks.
As he helped us prepare “Émigré: The College
as a Place of Refuge” (page 34), he showed us the
passport he carried when he left Nazi Germany in
1939. He has kept it all these years—stamped
with a prominent J for “Jew.” The photo inside is
of a handsome young man, age 17, with a slightly
worried look on his face. When it was taken, perhaps he knew that he would be leaving his
home—and his parents—behind. He did not
know what lay ahead of him.
Ostwald is the last of a magnificent generation
of émigré professors who taught at Swarthmore
from the 1930s until the 1980s. He rightly sees
himself as a scholar and teacher who made it on
his own merits after a near-tragic start. The passport is a symbol of the past; although he says he can’t forget about the past, he
refuses to be defined by it or singled out because of it.
Writers of history have a way of putting people into boxes. Our article “Émigré”
inevitably does this with the experiences of Ostwald, Hilde Cohn, Wolfgang Köhler,
Hans Wallach, Olga Lang, Franz Mautner, and six others whose profiles appear in
our Web edition only. All came to America and to Swarthmore after living in their
homelands became impossible because of religion, politics, and violence; yet each is
a distinct individual with a unique story.
Swarthmore was one of many American colleges and universities that offered
refuge—and distinguished careers—to intellectuals fleeing fascism and war. Yet the
College should not take undue moral credit for hiring them; it merely upheld its
own high standards of teaching, scholarship, intellectual freedom, and humanity.
These men and women were asked to teach here because of what they could offer,
not because they were victims of oppression. In the bargain, Martin Ostwald and
his émigré colleagues enriched this college for more than half a century.
—Jeffrey Lott

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

Martin Ostwald
and his émigré
colleagues
enriched this
college for
more than
half a century.

2

Swarthmore
COLLEGE BULLETIN

Editor: Jeffrey Lott
Managing Editor: Andrea Hammer
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The Swarthmore College Bulletin (ISSN
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number 3, is published in August, September, December, March, and June by
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DECEMBER 2002

fication, which require minimal preprofesI read the story about Kevin Huffman ’92
sional training, do much more than “de(“Teaching for Change,” September
professionalize” teachers; they may actually
Bulletin) with interest because Teach for
contribute to the growing gaps in achieveAmerica (TFA) has also impacted my life. I
ment between students in affluent and
went from Swarthmore to TFA in 1998
nonaffluent communities. Considerable
with lots of idealism, which didn’t last
research has demonstrated that the quantilong. Neither did my enthusiasm for TFA.
ty and quality of teachers’ professional
I was assigned to teach at East St. John
training has a direct impact on their stuHigh School in rural St. John Parish, La.,
dents’ achievement. Recent analyses of
which is about 40 miles and at least a halfscores on the National Assessment of Educentury outside of New Orleans. It is just
cational Progress (NAEP) have found that
one of the many failed public school sysstudents whose teachers have had better
tems that are stuck with educating children
preparation in their preprofessional course
in a community where education will get
work, more preservice or in-service training
you nowhere. I was assigned to teach
in working with diverse student populaCareers for Education, a course title
tions, more training in developing higherdevised by the head of special education.
order thinking skills, and more experience
When I suggested Education for Careers, I
with designing interactive learning enviwas met with blank stares. The title didn’t
ronments do better on the NAEP assessmatter, though, because curricula for the
ments.
HYPOCRISY
school’s special education classes did not
In light of such research, TFA’s fiveAlthough Teach for America (TFA) provides
exist.
week orientation seems to offer a poor suba temporary solution to the teacher shortThe administration seemed more constitute to traditional teacher education proages facing many economically disadvancerned with expelling its African-American
grams—many of which now require
taged school districts, I was disappointed
students than providing a decent educaprospective teachers to earn a master’s
that your article did not more fully address
tion. It was especially not interested in new
degree in education while practicing under
the criticisms that many educators have
ideas from young Yankee do-gooders like
a skilled mentor and taking courses in
raised. Although I deeply respect the time
me. I taught in a dirty, hot trailer on cechild development, educational philosophy,
and energy that Kevin Huffman ’92 has
ment blocks behind the school; most days,
learning theory, and teaching methodology.
devoted to channeling enthusiastic, highI could not hold a class together for more
As a graduate of Swarthmore’s teacher cerachieving college graduates into the teachthan 10 minutes. I was about as prepared
tification program, I can attest that the
ing profession, I worry that programs such
to teach these students as I was to be an
extensive preprofessional course work and
as TFA convince the public that mere
air-traffic controller.
mentoring I received drastically improved
enthusiasm and a liberal arts degree are
TFA places some of its corps members
my confidence and competence during my
enough to prepare prospective teachers
in districts that are beyond help. A recent
first year of teaching. Putting enthusiastic,
adequately for the enormous challenges
college graduate from the suburbs cannot
inexperienced college graduates in the
awaiting them in the nation’s most undererase centuries of unspeakable poverty and
most disadvantaged schools does not seem
served schools.
racism. These districts are not interested in
like “teaching for change”; rather, such a
Many of us currently in the teaching
change; but they do need adult, collegeprogram threatens to overwhelm beginning
profession, myself included, fear that those
educated bodies to fill classrooms, and TFA
teachers and underserve the very students
so-called alternative routes to teacher certiis happy to oblige.
it aspires to serve.
That these teaching posiUltimately, I do not fault
STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT, AND CIRCULATION
tions need to be filled is an
Huffman or TFA for the fun1. Publication: Swarthmore College Bulletin
security holders holding 1 percent or more
unqualified truth. But TFA
neling of the least experi2. Publication number: 0888-2126
of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or
isn’t the answer. Although its
enced teachers into the poor3. Filing date: Oct. 25, 2002
other securities: none
12. The purpose, function, and nonprofit
organizers and supporters pat 4. Issue frequency: August, September,
est schools; such a trend is
December, March, and June
status of this organization has not
themselves on the back for
nothing new in the history of
5. Number of issues published annually: 5
changed during the preceding 12 months.
6. Annual subscription price: none
14. Issue date for circulation data: Sept. 2002
their ingenuity—and spin
education. Instead, I fault the
7. Office of publication: 500 College Ave.,
15. a. Total number of copies (net press run):
wildly to deflect the foul
hypocrisy of a society that
Swarthmore PA 19081-1390
24,014
8. General business office: same
b. Paid or requested circulation through
stench of criticism that
demands the best teachers
9. Publisher: Swarthmore College, 500
dealers: 0
envelops the program—TFA
for its most affluent, advanCollege Ave., Swarthmore PA 19081-1390
c. Paid or requested mail subscriptions:
Editor: Jeffrey Lott, 500 College Ave.,
20,992
allows the status quo to contaged students while refusing
Swarthmore PA 19081-1390
d. Free distribution by mail: 79
tinue and devalues the teachto provide its most disadvanManaging editor: Andrea Hammer, 500
e. Free distribution outside the mail: 2,735
College Ave., Swarthmore PA 19081-1390
f. Total free distribution: 2,814
ing profession.
taged students with the qualSwarthmore College, 500 College
g. Total distribution: 23,806
PATRICK RUNKLE ’98 10. Owner:
ified, committed teachers
Ave., Swarthmore PA 19081-1390
h. Copies not distributed: 208
i. Total: 24,014
P l e a s e t u r n to page 79
Oakland, Calif. 11. Known bondholders, mortgages, or other

LETTERS

FOUL STENCH

3

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

K

4

arima Wilson ’03 has always known
that there was something just a little
bit different about her. “I grew up as part of
a biracial family in a very segregated town—
Birmingham, Ala.,” she said. “Especially in
Birmingham, everyone who’s not black or
white is put into this amorphous category.”
For years, Wilson wondered about the
differences that distinguished her from her
friends, although she didn’t know how to
talk about them. All that changed after her
ninth-grade year when Wilson attended
Anytown, a weeklong youth leadership program sponsored by The National Conference for Community and Justice (NCCJ).
There, she found an open setting to discuss
issues of diversity, and, as she said, “For the
first time, I was able to tell people I was different, and they were like, ‘That’s cool.’”
Her experiences at Anytown are something that Wilson still cherishes today. As
one of 22 Eugene M. Lang Opportunity
Scholars currently enrolled at Swarthmore,
Wilson has been able to use college grants
to fund her own social justice project. So for
the past three years, Wilson has worked
closely with the NCCJ to ensure that programs like Anytown will continue well into
the future.
Wilson, a sociology/anthropology major
and psychology minor, said the NCCJ works
to eliminate bigotry and racism by promoting greater understanding among people of
different cultures and races. She spent two
summers interning with the organization,
the first at a regional branch office in Birmingham and the second at the national
headquarters in New York City. She

ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS

COLLECTION

STANDING
FOR
SOCIAL
JUSTICE
returned home to Birmingham last February
to begin work on her capstone project—the
development of a volunteer training program for the NCCJ.
As Wilson explained, volunteers are
often undertrained and underused by nonprofits. She, therefore, set out to create a
program that would develop a group of
qualified volunteers capable of effectively
instructing youth leaders in the vocabulary
of diversity.
“The program was about training the
volunteers in the same issues they’re going
to be training the leaders in. So we talked
about race, we talked about class, we talked
about gender, we talked about ability. And
we talked about developing leadership skills
around these issues,” Wilson said. Twentyone volunteers completed the inaugural
training session.
Wilson spent the entire spring and summer planning and executing the project,
beginning in February and finishing in
August. Now a senior, she is unsure of what
she plans to do next year. Maybe law school,
maybe graduate school—teaching is also a
possibility. What she does know for sure,
however, is that issues of diversity and
social justice will always be important
aspects of her life.
“What’s most special about diversity
work is the bonds that people make because
of it,” she said. “People are able to be
friends because they understand each other
better and understand where they come
from. We understand that everyone has biases
and prejudices, but we can work around that.”
—Elizabeth Redden ’05

LANG OPPORTUNITY SCHOLAR KARIMA WILSON
’03 DEVELOPED A VOLUNTEER TRAINING PROGRAM
FOR THE NATIONAL CONFERENCE FOR COMMUNITY
AND JUSTICE IN BIRMINGHAM, ALA.

ONE QUESTION
I hear a lot about minority groups on campus. How does the College decide when a
student is a member of a minority group?
This decision is not the College’s. Students are asked to identify their own
background on admissions forms. Students
may check more than one category—and
even expand on the general categories—
but in keeping with state and federal
reporting requirements, the College must
report them in only one of the allowable
categories, which include African American, American Indian/Native Alaskan,
Asian/Pacific Islander, Hispanic, and
white (non-Hispanic). Those who fail to
self-identify are counted as “white.”
Of 1,467 students enrolled during the
2001–2002 academic year, 61 percent
were white, 16 percent were Asian, 8 percent were African American, 8 percent
were Hispanic, and less than 1 percent
were American Indian. The rest were
international students, who are not counted in the same way as American citizens.
Director of Institutional Research Robin
Shores reports that these standard categories are slated to change in 2004. The
College will then be allowed to report students in multiple categories.

Endowment drop squeezes budget
Editor’s Note: Vice President for Finance and Treasurer Suzanne Welsh
has been fielding a lot of questions about the current state of Swarthmore’s finances. She prepared the following questions and answers for the
College community in mid-November.

• The Board of Managers has named an Expenditure Review
Committee to ensure that the allocation of College resources
fully reflects our priorities. As part of this effort, it is conducting
a cost-comparison study with six other institutions and looking
at long-term financial models to assure adequate funding for
What is the College’s current financial picture?
the core elements of Swarthmore’s quality and character.
• The decline in the stock market has caused a downturn in the
What are the guiding principles for this process?
endowment. The endowment declined from a peak of about $1
billion in the late summer of 2000 to about $830 million at the
• The College is committed to the following:
end of October 2002. In addition, lower interest rates are lead- Sustaining an academic program and broader educational
ing to lower revenues on operating cash balances.
program of the highest quality.
• The lower endowment is putting strong pressure on the Col- Safeguarding need-blind admissions and providing adelege’s ability to increase endowment support to the budget. It
quate financial aid to assure access to an exceptional and
makes it difficult, if not impossible, to pay for the cost of new
diverse student body.
facilities from the endowment, making the success of the cur- Recruiting and supporting the finest faculty.
rent capital campaign essential.
- Recruiting and retaining an excellent staff.
• The budget is feeling pressure from large increases in health
- Preserving the long-term health of the endowment.
insurance and property insurance.
- Providing responsible stewardship of the College’s physical
• The College has entered this period in excellent financial conresources.
dition and is well positioned to meet the challenges. NonetheWhere will costs be saved? Will positions be eliminated?
less, our commitment to our priorities combined with the more
• We do not have all the specifics yet. Each area is looking for
constrained finances has reinforced our focus on efficiency and
budget savings.
allocation of resources to our most important priorities.
• We have identified some positions that have been vacant and
How does the endowment affect Swarthmore’s budget?
will not be filled.
• The endowment is the largest source of revenue in the College
How does the capital campaign fit in?
budget, providing even more revenue than net student fees.
About 46 percent of the revenues in this year’s budget come
• The Meaning of Swarthmore has attracted gifts and pledges of
from the endowment. Income of $39.5 million from the endow$114 million toward a $230 million goal that is scheduled to be
ment was used last year.
reached by 2006. Although we have seen some slowing in
receipts on pledges and less
Will there be budget
comfort from donors given the
reductions?
unpredictability of future finan• Yes. Although the College
cial markets, we remain confiplans to sustain the regular
dent that, given the responsibilincrease in the endowment
ity that alumni feel for the Colsupport to the budget in
WELSH IS APPOINTED
lege, we will succeed in meeting
order to protect the quality of
FINANCIAL VICE PRESIDENT
the campaign goals.
its educational program, as a
• Our first priority is to raise
result of lower interest rates
n August, President Alfred H. Bloom
more support for the science
and the cost pressures menannounced the appointment of
center, which is only partially
tioned earlier, we still need to
Suzanne Welsh (right) as the College’s vice president for finance
funded.
find savings of up to $1 miland treasurer. Welsh replaced Paul Aslanian, who retired after
lion to balance the budget
seven years as vice president for finance and planning.
• The next priority will be to
and respond to cost increases
Welsh joined the College in 1983 and has been treasurer
raise support for the necessary
beyond our control.
since 1989. She received undergraduate degrees in mathematics
renovation of Parrish Hall. This
and accounting from the University of Delaware and an M.B.A.
will also require construction of
What is the budget process?
from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
a new residence hall to provide
• The president’s staff and the
At the same time, Bloom broadened the responsibilities of
housing for students currently
College Budget Committee are
Larry Schall ’75, whose title was changed from vice president for
living in Parrish Hall while renalready working on next year’s
facilities and services to vice president for administration.
ovation proceeds. The start of
budget and are examining the
Bloom also announced that Associate Vice President for
construction on these will
consequences of reducing
Human Resources Melanie Young would henceforth report directdepend on campaign progress.
costs in several areas.
ly to him.

DECEMBER 2002

I

JIM GRAHAM

!!!!!

5

COLLECTION

C A M PA I G N A P P R OAC H E S
H A L F WAY M A R K

T

JIM GRAHAM

he Meaning of
Swarthmore, the
College’s current
$230 million capital
campaign, is just
short of its halfway
mark both in time
and dollars raised.
As of Oct. 30, the
campaign, which is
set to end in 2006,
had garnered $114
million in gifts and pledges.
Fund-raising from key leadership donors
began in 1999, following a three-year study
of the College’s most pressing academic,
community-life, and physical-plant priorities.
The campaign was publicly announced in
December 2001 with the publication of The
Meaning of Swarthmore, a 48-page case
statement. The kickoff of the public phase of
the campaign had been scheduled for a campus gala on Sept. 21, 2001, but the event
was canceled following the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks. Instead, the College has hosted

TWO SOARING INVERTED ROOFS ARE AMONG THE
DISTINCTIVE ARCHITECTURAL—AND ENVIRONMENTAL—FEATURES OF THE COLLEGE’S NEW
SCIENCE CENTER. THE ROOFS WILL DIRECT
RAINWATER TO TWO DISTINCTIVE “WATER
FEATURES” ON THE SITE, FROM WHERE IT WILL
FLOW INTO UNDERGROUND STORAGE TANKS.
RATHER THAN RUN DIRECTLY DOWNHILL TO CRUM
CREEK, IT WILL RECHARGE THE GROUNDWATER
AQUIFER.

alumni, parents, and friends at a series of
regional events. This fall, Swarthmore gatherings were held in Philadelphia, London,
Boston, and Los Angeles. Other events have
been held in Washington, D.C.; San Francisco; Chicago; New York; and Brussels.
Dan West, vice president for alumni,
development, and public relations, said in
early November that “although this is a challenging economic environment in which to
raise funds of this magnitude, The Meaning
of Swarthmore is on track and making
progress toward meeting the College’s most
important future priorities. We are about
where we need to be after the first year of a
five-year public phase of the campaign.”
These priorities include construction and
renovation of important facilities; endowment for new academic initiatives, faculty
teaching and research, instructional technology, and student financial aid; and fortification of the Annual Fund. A complete list of
campaign priorities and opportunities to participate is at www.swarthmore.edu/support.
—Jeffrey Lott

!!!!!

A

lthough Swarthmore has long been known as one of the
nation’s best liberal arts colleges, in recent years, comparative rankings have become a national obsession. The highereducation list published each fall by U.S. News & World Report—the
weekly magazine’s best-selling issue—has generated debate about
the usefulness of such lists, how they are compiled, and whether
they have prompted colleges to change their admissions practices.
In the 2003 U.S. News rankings of national liberal arts colleges,

ed here with their weight in the total score): academic reputation
(25 percent), student selectivity (15 percent), faculty resources (20
percent), graduation and retention (20 percent), financial
resources (10 percent), alumni giving (5 percent), and what the
magazine calls “graduation-rate performance” (5 percent). Many of
these factors have subcategories.
Critics have claimed that colleges, which self-report data to U.S.
News, are tempted to inflate their numbers, but Shores credits the
magazine with being increasingly thorough in checking
the data received. “They are now very specific about
how we are to count things,” she says, “There are
numerous follow-up questions, and they cross-check
our surveys against other sources of data.”
Still, says Shores, the single factor with the most weight—academic reputation—is largely subjective. To generate this statistic,
U.S. News asks college presidents, provosts, and deans of admission to rank peer institutions on a scale of 1 to 5. “I see this as
somewhat self-perpetuating,” says Shores.
Although she believes that the rankings fill a need for information that colleges “have not instinctively done a good job of providing,” she says that “they torture the data in order to make fine
distinctions that are not really useful to parents and prospective
students. The difference among schools that are closely ranked is
not significant.”
Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Jim Bock ’90 agrees.

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

Quantifying Quality

6

released in September, Swarthmore tied for second place with
Williams College. Amherst College held the No. 1 spot, and the top
10 was rounded out by Wellesley, Carleton, Pomona, Bowdoin,
Middlebury, Davidson, and Haverford colleges.
According to Robin Shores, the College’s director of institutional research, since the inception of the U.S. News rankings in 1983,
Swarthmore has never fallen below third place among national liberal arts colleges. It has held the top position six times, including
last year, tied with Amherst. Because of its generous financial aid
program, Swarthmore has also consistently ranked among the
magazine’s “best values” in higher education.
U.S. News derives its rankings from seven different factors (list-

O STANS

EF
TH
ER
IOS
K

DECEMBER 2002

Despite Swarthmore’s position at the top of the rankings, “we
don’t tout [the rankings] in our publications or in talking with
prospective students. We don’t want people to choose Swarthmore
for the wrong reasons.”
Bock says that he doesn’t feel any pressure to stay at the top of
the rankings. “It’s just not part of the conversation,” he says. In
any case, he explains, actions taken by the Admissions Office have
scant effect on the College’s overall U.S. News performance: “It’s
been said that we’re being more selective, using early decision, or
driving up yield [the percentage of students offered admission
who matriculate] in order to maintain our position, but acceptance rate and yield account for just 4 percent of the total. The
SATs and ACT are also about 6 percent. [Yield and test scores are
subcategories within the student selectivity factor.] Whether we
are up or down 10 points on our median SATs doesn’t affect these
rankings.”
The median combined SAT verbal and math score for those
recently admitted to the Class of 2006 is 1,450.
What does Swarthmore get from of the rankings? “It’s free
publicity,” says Bock. “It gets Swarthmore’s name out there. But
really, how do you quantify quality? Every school is different, and
every student’s experience of it will be different. The college experience is subjective, and U.S. News tries to make it objective.”
—Jeffrey Lott

political blunder of his career,” said
Dukakis. “By the time he threw his
support to Nixon’s bill, Watergate blew
up, and it was too late.”
Dukakis said the United States
spends twice as much per capita for
medical care as any other advanced
industrialized country, “and what do
we get for it? They provide universal
health care at half the cost of running
the U.S. system, and we have 42 million
people without insurance. Where do
these people go when they get sick?
To hospital emergency rooms, where
it costs about $1,000 per patient to
“WHY CAN’T THIS GREAT COUNTRY
treat them. And where does that
OF OURS COME TO GRIPS WITH AN
$1,000 come from? From individuals ISSUE AS FUNDAMENTAL AS THIS?”
and employers who do pay for insurASKED MICHAEL DUKAKIS IN THIS
ance. If you insure your employees,
YEAR’S M C CABE LECTURE.
you also have to pay for the guy
down the street who doesn’t.”
Dukakis said that government-run single-payer health care is
“unlikely to pass, given the private insurance system that has
evolved in America.” He favors a national system similar to
Hawaii’s, which he called “very close to the original Nixon plan.”
Under Hawaii’s law, which has been in effect since 1974, all employers are required to provide basic coverage for their employees; insurance companies cannot deny coverage for preexisting conditions or
other common risk factors, and state government covers those who
are changing jobs, unemployed, or indigent. “It’s worked well for
nearly 30 years,” said Dukakis, who teaches one-quarter of each year
at the University of Hawaii. “They have better health outcomes
overall, and nobody’s gone out of business because of it.”
Dukakis said the Clinton administration’s 1993 health care proposal, which failed to make it through Congress, was “far too complicated—they should have modeled it on the Hawaiian system.” He
blamed the Democratic Party’s 1994 loss of Congress on the “fallout
from that defeat.” Since then, politicians have been “nibbling
around the edges of the problem” with prescription drug coverage
under Medicare and the patient’s bill of rights, which he said “marginally improves things for those who have coverage to begin with.
“As a society, we’ve defined employer responsibility to include
worker’s compensation, unemployment insurance, and retirement.
Why not health? We spend $1.5 trillion dollars a year on health care,
yet we still have millions of Americans who have no coverage.”
Before taking questions, Dukakis closed with a plea to Swarthmore students to get involved in politics: “Guided by the experiences I had on this campus, I’ve had the good fortune to be involved
in politics for a lifetime. I want you to think seriously about becoming actively involved in the politics of your communities. Get into
campaigns, work for people you admire and whose values you
share—you can make a difference.”
—Jeffrey Lott

EL

I

DUKAKIS URGES
HEALTH CARE REFORM

n his first appearance on campus since
1995, former Massachusetts governor and
1988 Democratic presidential candidate
Michael Dukakis ’55 urged the adoption of
federally mandated health insurance. Delivering the annual McCabe
Lecture to a large audience in the Pearson-Hall Theatre, Dukakis
asked: “When are we finally going to make the decision that all
Americans deserve basic health insurance? What is it about our
political system that makes it impossible to do what every other
advanced industrialized nation does for its people?”
Noting that students in the audience were in preschool when he
challenged then–Vice President George Bush for the White House
in 1988, Dukakis recounted that presidents Truman, Kennedy,
Johnson, Nixon, and Clinton had attempted to pass legislation to
create a government-run universal health insurance plan or to mandate employer-paid private insurance. Only Johnson succeeded, but
his Medicare plan is limited to the elderly and the subsequent Medicaid plan covers only the poorest Americans.
After Medicare passed in 1965, said Dukakis, who teaches public
policy at Northeastern University, “everyone assumed that it was
only a matter of time until benefits would be extended to everyone.”
In 1972, Republican Richard Nixon put forward a comprehensive
plan that would have required all employers to provide basic medical coverage. It might have passed over the objections of the insurance industry and the American Medical Association, said Dukakis,
but for the opposition of Democrats who favored a government single-payer system. Massachusetts Senator “Ted Kennedy told me
that his early opposition to Nixon’s plan was the single biggest

7

COLLECTION

TOTA L LY S WAT

©KIM SAYER/CORBIS

Grenoble Program Turns 30

8

THE COLLEGE’S PROGRAM IN GRENOBLE,
FRANCE (ABOVE), WAS FOUNDED BY PROFESSOR
SIMONE SMITH—A DECORATED MEMBER OF THE
FRENCH RESISTANCE DURING WORLD WAR II—
WHO TAUGHT AT THE COLLEGE FOR 26 YEARS.
GRENOBLE WAS SMITH’S HOMETOWN.

programs, which are formally affiliated with
Swarthmore, recent students have taken
advantage of approved study-abroad opportunities in more than 30 countries, with the
most popular including Australia, England,
France, and Italy.
Study abroad has increased dramatically
in the 1990s. Between 1991 and 2002, the
number of students who have studied at
least one semester outside the United States
jumped from 23 to 48 percent of the graduating class.
—David King ’00

GEORGE FOX’S LEGACY

DS
HIS
T

OR I
CAL

LIBRARY

Look up George Fox on the Web today, and the search
engine is likely to take you to the site of the Canadian
country-rock musician. But country music was far from the
minds of the 150 Quaker historians and others who attended a two-day conference on “George Fox’s Legacy” at the
College in October. They were more interested in the lasting
influence of George Fox (1624–1691), one of the founders of
the Society of Friends and a dominant figure among 17thcentury Quakers. The conference spanned two days and included
such topics as the Barbados Declaration, the Hicksite-Orthodox separation and the holiness
movement of the 19th century, evangelical Quakers of the 20th century, Quakers and politics,
Quaker education, the prophetic voices of Quaker women, and perfectionism. The conference
was sponsored by the Friends Historical Association and the Friends Historical Library.
—Jeffrey Lott
FR
IEN

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

T

his year, the College’s oldest foreignstudy program celebrates its 30th
anniversary. The Swarthmore Program in
Grenoble, France, began in 1972, a result of
the efforts of Simone Smith, a former College professor of French. Today, according to
Swarthmore’s Foreign Study Office, it is one
of the most respected programs in all of
Europe. “Significantly more Swarthmore
students attend Grenoble than any other
single program that we recommend,” says
Steven Piker, professor of anthropology and
foreign-study adviser.
College French majors must spend at
least a semester in the program, but it is
open to all Swarthmore students and to all
American colleges and universities. It
attracts people from all over the United
States, according to Professor of French and
James C. Hormel Professor of Social Justice
George Moskos, program director this
semester. Currently, 11 of the 105 Swarthmore students studying abroad for credit,
along with 10 students from other schools,
are enrolled through the program in classes
at Université Stendhal and live with host
families in and around Grenoble, which is
aptly named “Capital of the Alps.” The city
of about 150,000 is renowned for scientific
research and has a large international student population.
The program in Grenoble is the first and
oldest operated by Swarthmore. The College
also has a formal affiliation with a program
in Madrid, Spain, operated by Hamilton
College. Recently established programs in
Poland and Ghana have expanded foreignstudy opportunities. In addition to these

The Dash for Cash is no more. The men’s
and women’s rugby teams’ long fund-raising tradition of running naked down the
halls of Parrish, grabbing dollar bills from
cheering spectators, has received a firm
reprimand from the Eastern Pennsylvania
Rugby Union (EPRU).
According to president of the men's
rugby team, Brett Klukan ’03, the EPRU
got wind of the Dash from an Associated
Press report in The Philadelphia Inquirer
about last spring’s Dash. Said Klukan:
“When [the EPRU] heard of it, they told
us that they felt it represented an aspect
of rugby that they’d rather not have
shown in the mass media, and that they
would like us not to host it anymore; if
not, we’d be subject to penalties.”
Fortunately for Dash fans, the event
took place as usual on Nov. 1—renamed
Cash for Dash under the auspices of The
Availables, a campus band, which opened
the naked run to any student who wanted
to bare all.
About 10 students, about evenly divided by gender, took the challenge and
dashed past the Admissions Office before
a smaller than usual crowd just after 1
p.m. One admissions tour guide later said
she made sure her group had cleared Parrish by then. “It’s easier to explain the
Dash than it is to have the prospective
students and their parents actually see
it,” she said.
—Evelyn Khoo ’05, The Daily Gazette

hat kinds of facts are needed to form
sound value judgments? What is
objectivity? What role do values play in scientific activity and to what extent do they
determine areas of scientific research? These
are some of the questions that challenge students attending Scheuer Family Professor of
Humanities and Professor of Philosophy
Hugh Lacey’s course Science, Values, and
Objectivity this fall.
Leading an exploration of ways in which
the natural sciences interact with moral and
social values, Lacey questions the idea that
science is value free. He presents the notion
that general philosophical issues arise in life
situations but that, conversely, they can also
define life issues. Although value judgments
cannot be logically derived from scientific
judgments, he says, scientific knowledge is
nonetheless essential to form sound value
judgments, and moral and social values play
a vital role in the acquisition of scientific
knowledge. When values are applied to scientific activity at the “right” moment—in
which case, science is not value free—they
in no way undermine the objectivity of scientific judgment, he says.
Lacey illustrates these abstract assumptions by referring to concrete, current issues
in agriculture—specifically to case studies of
conflicts connected to the use of genetically
modified organisms.
In the first class meeting, Lacey encouraged the nine students to examine the
nature of values, guiding them to distinguish between personal values and social/
moral values. Suggesting that humans form
values according to what they think is worthwhile, and that these values are part of their
being, he offered an example of a personal
value, saying: “I spent most of my life doing
philosophy because I think it’s worthwhile.
Not many people think that. It’s a personal
value.” Then, he went on to question the
importance of friendship. Although one or
two students said that it is possible to do
without friendship, most argued that life
would be unpleasant without it, thus forming a shared, or deeper, moral value.
In the second half of the three-hour
class, Lacey used a concrete example to show
that in every social conflict there are embed-

ing and interesting. The best part for me is
that Professor Lacey brings in a current
news item that is directly related to the
course material for that day or from the
week before.”
The issues concerning sustainable agriculture were among the major topics of September’s World Summit on Sustainable
Development in Johannesburg, South
Africa. In honor of Lacey’s retirement at the
end of the year, a conference will be held on
his work next March, featuring, among others, Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin and
Vice Rector of the University of Central
America Rodolfo Cardenal.
—Carol Brévart-Demm

KEITH HONORED
Centennial Professor of Anthropology and
former Provost Jennie Keith was honored in
May by her alma mater, Pomona College,
with an honorary doctorate. In her talk to
the graduating class, she recalled the stress
of working with a piano professor who sat
behind her poised to leap forward “to defend
whatever composer I was mangling,” an
experience that taught her that learning,
especially from a great teacher, is seldom
comfortable. “And when you’re in that situation,” she said, “I’d like to be that little
voice in your ear saying, ‘Go ahead, try, be
uncomfortable. You might learn something.’”
Keith, whose research has focused on the
influence of culture and society on the lives
of older people around the world, has
returned to Swarthmore after a one-year sabbatical to become head of the Lang Center
for Social Responsibility, a new effort to
coordinate the College’s civic programs.
—Jeffrey Lott

DECEMBER 2002

W

ded philosophical conflicts. He recalled a
news report about aid
shipments of transgenic corn seed—Btcorn—to famine-ridden African nations,
which refused the
corn. The conflict is
evident: A high-yield,
improved form of food
is offered to starving
people, and they refuse
it. Because of the varying moral outlooks of
the two culturally and socially different
groups, a conflict arises.
The aid organizations, backed by the seed
manufacturers, aim primarily to combat
famine by using modern “technoscience.”
The African farmers, on the other hand, fear
that the introduction of transgenic seed—in
this case, corn whose DNA has been modified by insertion of genes from Bacillus
thuringiensis, a naturally occurring, soilborne bacterium that acts as a pesticide—
will be harmful to their agricultural system.
They claim that traditional farming methods
would suit their needs better—were they to
be given adequate resources.
Both claims are based on facts but are
defined by widely differing values, Lacey
pointed out. Technoscience has developed
an agricultural product that has been proven
to work, at least for now, but whose longterm effects on biodiversity and farming
have been neither thoroughly researched nor
tested over time. The established values of
traditional farming, on the other hand, combine productivity with sustainability, emphasizing biodiversity and enabling local
farmers to work independently of large seed
corporations.
The students actively participated in class
discussions. After the first meeting, senior
Andrew Fefferman, a physics major and philosophy minor, said: “The question of
whether my work as a scientist would be
value free is one that has haunted me for a
long time.” A few weeks later, Keefe Keeley, a
freshman interested in environmental studies and especially the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in agriculture, said:
“We are acquiring a strong philosophical
platform on which to discuss the issue [of
GMOs], and the class is continually engag-

JIM GRAHAM

Science
a n d Va l u e s

9

CLAIRE VAN VLIET, FOUNDER AND OWNER OF
JANUS PRESS IN VERMONT, COLLABORATES WITH
ARTISTS AND WRITERS TO SHAPE BOOKS—SUCH
AS CIRCULUS SAPIENTIAE HERE—INTO MANY CRE-

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

ATIVE FORMS.

10

JIM GRAHAM

handmade paper—displayed in McCabe
Library through mid-October. Even though
the works were behind glass, Associate College Librarian Amy Morrison said, “These
books are meant to be read.” Some of Van
Vliet’s more than 100 works appear in collections at the Library of Congress, Victoria
and Albert Museum in London, Montreal
Museum of Fine Art, Philadelphia Museum
of Art, and the National Gallery of Art.
Other books in the exhibit illustrated
Van Vliet’s blending of ink, paper, color, and
structure—on pop-up and wagon-wheel
pages—to mirror content. In Night Street
(1993), about a young woman in the city,
she wanted to convey “architectural excitement and a sense of the city that was enticing but threatening.” Aunt Sallie’s Lament
(1993) is a quilter’s story on diamondshaped leaves; “the poem’s perfect symmetry
becomes clear as the reader turns the page,
and they finally form a quilt square,” Van
Vliet said.
Van Vliet enjoys working with other
artists because it “pushes me to do things I
wouldn’t do otherwise,” she said. “None of
us works in a vacuum,” Van Vliet added,
particularly gratified by “being able to make
a living as an artist.”
—Andrea Hammer

E VAN
VLIET

H

olding a book is like protecting a
treasure: The most enchanting
ones synthesize the size, shape,
and texture with lyrical words.
As Claire Van Vliet, founder of Vermont’s
Janus Press in 1955, said during an early
October slide lecture in Kohlberg Hall,
“These books are unusual shapes because of
the text, which inspired a different approach.” Students, faculty, staff, and alumni
who attended were mesmerized by the display of her work. Van Vliet, a native of
Canada who believes that a book “must be
comfortable in the hand,” has taught at the
University of the Arts in Philadelphia, the
University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the
University of Vermont.
“The landscape seen from the press is
used a lot in our work,” she said, showing a
photograph of her home and studio in
Newark, Vt., surrounded by 5 feet of snow.
The dramatic Vermont landscapes are often
translated into her designs, such as Lilac
Wind (1993)—one of several foldouts on

CLAIR

COLLECTION

Books Take Flight

WHAT’S IN A VERB?

W

hat does a verb mean? It may sound
like a simple question. But in Navajo,
the answer can leave even native speakers
tongue-tied. Associate Professor and Chair
of Linguistics Ted Fernald should know. As
vice chair of the Navajo Language Academy
(NLA), he organizes the group’s annual
summer institute. Held this year in Rehobeth, N.M., just outside the Navajo reservation on the Arizona border, the institute
combines theoretical linguistics with practical exercises that Navajo language teachers
can use in their classes.
According to Fernald, the verb is the key
to both. “Navajo packs a lot of information
into the verb, not just agreement with subjects and objects,” he says. “You have to
know a lot about grammar to understand
one.”
Of all the languages and cultures in
native America, Fernald says, Navajo has the
best chance to survive intact because of the
size of the tribe and the amount and location of the land it controls. But in many
ways, the NLA is in a race against time.
Although roughly 100,000 Navajo speakers
currently exist, the number drops sharply
every generation. Recent studies show that
less than half of Navajo preschoolers speak
the language, and Fernald thinks the actual
figure is much lower. The numbers underscore the importance of the summer institute, which brings together educators from
both off and on the reservation.
“Because few Navajo linguists are able to
be active in the field, teachers and aides

FERNALD ARE WORKING TO UNDERSTAND—AND
PRESERVE—THE NAVAJO LANGUAGE.

come to us for help,” he says. “Teaching the
verb is hard, so most teach nouns, and the
classes are horrible. We try to convince
them the verb isn’t crazy, that there really
are rules. It’s great to turn them onto that.”
Lindsey Newbold ’03, an honors linguistics major from Chester County, Pa., discovered this challenge when she attended the
institute to conduct her own research. “My
senior thesis, on how [a Navajo verb’s]
seriative prefix causes plural interpretations, is a real mind bender,” she says. “I
couldn’t have done it if I had just showed
up in New Mexico on my own. But with all
the interest and expertise among NLA
members, everything was set up for me.”
In June, Newbold presented her thesis
at the Athabaskan Language Conference at
the University of Alaska. Her work became
the first from a Swarthmore student to be
published as part of the conference’s proceedings.
In past summers, the NLA’s institute has
ranged from 10 days to five weeks, depending on what the group can afford. This year,
it lasted three weeks; although Fernald
hopes for the same next year, he ruefully
admits that without an endowment,
“things usually get thrown together and are
very much hand-to-mouth.”
An additional challenge this year was
the palpable absence of Ken Hale, a legendary linguist from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology who helped establish what became the NLA in the 1970s.
Hale died last fall, not long after teaching
his last class—on the structure of the
Navajo verb—at the institute.
“He was dying, but it was exactly where
he wanted to be,” Fernald says. We were all
thrilled and amazed by his dedication, and
he was grateful for the opportunity.”
This dedication fuels Fernald. “My
dream is to build the NLA so it operates
year-round and provides career opportunities for Navajo linguists,” he says. “To
engage in a high level of academic work
while helping people gain access to the scientific community and the information that
is useful to them—for me, that integration
is a lot of what Swarthmore is about.”
—Alisa Giardinelli

Leading African Poet Is Cornell
Visiting Professor

I

nternationally renowned Ghanaian
poet Kofi Anyidoho’s writing philosophy is different from that of most English bards. His compositions are supposed to be heard rather than read
silently.
Consequently, he won’t use a word
that does not easily roll off his tongue or sound pleasing to his ear.
“As a rule, I won’t use a word that I can’t say without feeling awkward about it. That’s
why it’s not difficult to [perform] many African poems on stage. It’s a different experience
to hear poems out loud,” says Anyidoho, who holds the Julien and Virginia Stratton Cornell Visiting Professorship at Swarthmore this year.
One of Africa’s leading poets and writers, he is currently a guest of the Theater Department and the Black Studies Program. He’ll teach two courses this year that deal with oral
literature and the challenge of bilingual creative writing in Africa.
Anyidoho is head of the English Department and director of the African Humanities
Institute Programme at the University of Ghana–Legon. He also promotes African culture
as host and producer of Ghana television’s African Heritage Series. His latest poetry book,
PraiseSong for TheLand, was released this fall.
—Angela Doody

“The News From Home”
I have not come this far
only to sit by the roadside
and break into tears
I could have wept at home
without a journey of several thorns
I have not spread my wings
so wide only to be huddled into corners
at the mere mention of storms
To those who hear of military coups
and rumours of civil strife
and bushfires and bad harvests at home
and come to me looking for fears and tears
I must say I am tired
very tired
tired of all devotion to death and dying.
I too have heard of
all the bushfires
the sudden deaths
and fierce speeches
I have heard of
all the empty market stalls
the cooking pots all filed with memory and ash
And I am tired
tired of all these noises of
condolence from those who
love to look upon the anger of the hungry
nod their head and stroll back home

!!!!
worrying and forever worrying
about overweight and special diet for
dogs and cats.
Like an orphan stranded
on dunghills of owners of earth
I shall keep my sorrows to myself
folding them with infinite care
corner upon corner
taking pains the foldings draw circles
around hidden spaces where still
our hopes grow roots even
in this hour of finite chaos
Those who sent their funeral clothes
to the washerman
awaiting the mortuary men to come
bearing our corpse in large display
Let them wait for the next and the next
season only to see how well earthchildren
grow fruit and even flower
from rottenness of early morning dreams
Meanwhile
I am tired
tired of all crocodile condolence.
—Kofi Anyidoho, 1984
Reprinted with permission from Earthchild
(Woeli Publishers, 1984).

DECEMBER 2002

PROFESSOR AND CHAIR OF LINGUISTICS TED

JIM GRAHAM

LINDSEY NEWBOLD ’03 (LEFT) AND ASSOCIATE

11

COLLECTION

On the Ball

2

2

JIM GRAHAM

GRACE (Graduate
Robot Attending
ConferencE)—the
brainchild (literally) of researchers
THE FACE OF GRACE
from Carnegie Mellon University, Swarthmore, Northwestern
University, the Naval Research Laboratory,
and defense contractor Metrica—was an
active participant at last July’s American
Assn. of Artificial Intelligence conference in
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. After being
dropped off at the door, the 6-foot-tall
GRACE successfully navigated her way to the
registration desk; lined up and interacted
with other participants; requested a name
tag, bag, and directions to the talk area; and

ELEANOR FORBES ’05 BECAME THE FIRST SWARTHMORE PLAYER SINCE 1993
TO EARN FIRST-TEAM ALL-CONFERENCE HONORS AS SHE LED THE GARNET
WOMEN TO THEIR BEST SEASON SINCE THE PROGRAM BEGAN IN 1982.

points, placing sixth in the conference in scoring. Woodworth
closed her career with 26 goals, eight assists, and 60 points, ranking ninth on the Garnet career goals list and 10th on the all-time
points list. Goaltender Kate Nelson-Lee ’03 earned Centennial
Conference honorable mention recognition, recording a 1.47 goalsagainst average and a .848 save percentage that ranked fifth best in
the conference. Nelson-Lee closes her career with 12 shutouts, a 1.5
goals-against average, and a school-record 425 saves.
In volleyb all (5–19, 1–9), Emma Benn ’04 led the Garnet with
178 kills and was second with 309 digs, earning Centennial Conference honorable mention. Outside hitter Pattice Berry ’06 was fifth
in the conference in digs per game (4.02) and seventh in aces per
game (0.50). Setter Emily Conlon ’05 ranked seventh in set assists
per game (6.29), and middle-blocker Natalie Dunphy ’05 finished
fourth in the conference in blocks per game (0.82).
—Mark Duzenski

gave a 15-minute presentation on her historic accomplishment, explaining her hardware and software to an audience of hundreds. Exceeding all performance expectations, she received a standing ovation. Assistant Professor of Engineering Bruce Maxwell
’91 developed GRACE’s vision module, which
enabled her to navigate her way through the
crowd and around the conference. Next,
Maxwell plans to give GRACE the capability
of reading name tags and detecting face as
she interacts with people.
—Carol Brévart-Demm

CARTOONIST LECTURES
Clay Bennett, winner of the 2002 Pulitzer
Prize for Editorial Cartoons, visited Swarthmore on Nov. 12 to present an illustrated
slide lecture. Bennett has served as editorial

© CLAY BENNETT

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

ROBOT WOWS
CONFERENCE

JOHN FERKO

A

t 10–9, the w om en’s soccer team recorded the most wins in
a season and just its second winning season since the program began in 1982. The team was 5–5 in the Centennial
Conference. Eleanor “Ele” Forbes ’05 led the Garnet in scoring
with seven goals and three assists for 17 points and became the first
Swarthmore player to earn first-team all-Centennial Conference
honors since Madeline Fraser Cook ’95 in 1993. Goalkeeper Catherine Salussolia ’04 led a Garnet defense that allowed just 24 goals in
19 games, the fewest goals allowed in a season. Salussolia finished
second in the conference with an .869 save percentage and ranked
third with five shutouts, earning conference honorable mention.
Charlie Taylor ’06 led m en’s soccer (5–14–1, 0–9) in scoring
with five goals and five assists for 15 points. His five assists tie for
third place for assists in the Centennial Conference. Goalkeepers
Reuben Heyman-Kantor ’06 (.792) and Nathan Shupe ’05 (.790)
ranked fifth and sixth in the conference in save percentage.
The m en’s and w om en’s cr oss cou ntr y team s both delivered
solid performances again this year, earning seventh and fourth
places in the Centennial Conference Championship, respectively.
For the men, Lang Reynolds ’05 earned NCAA III All-Region honors for the second consecutive season with a 27th-place finish at
the Mideast Regional Championships. Reynolds also earned AllConference honors with a 10th-place finish at the championship
meet, leading the Garnet to a fifth-place team finish. Maria Elena
Young ’04 led the Garnet women to a seventh-place finish at the
2002 NCAA III Mideast Regional. Young earned All-Region honors for the third consecutive season with a 31st-place finish, covering the 6K course in 22:22.90. She also earned All-Conference
honors with a third-place finish at the conference championship,
leading the team to a fourth-place finish.
In field hockey (7–11, 3–6), forward Margaret “Meg” Woodworth ’03 earned second-team All-Conference honors. Woodworth
led the team in scoring with nine goals and two assists for 20

cartoonist for the Christian Science Monitor
since 1998.
Bennett’s lecture, accompanied by an
exhibit of his cartoons in McCabe Library was
the latest in McCabe’s annual cartoonist
series.
—Elizabeth Redden ’05

A plaque commemorating the final seasons of
Swarthmore’s football program has been
mounted outside the Lamb-Miller Field House
at the entrance to Clothier Field. It lists the
names of 88 athletes and 13 coaches who
worked with former Head Coach Peter
Alvanos during the 1998 to 2000 seasons.
Swarthmore played its final football game
on Nov. 11, 2000, defeating Washington and
Lee 16–6.
The plaque, which was installed in September, was part of an effort begun last
spring to honor those players. About 180 former players and family members attended a
banquet at Springfield Country Club in April
organized by Kathy Pagliei, mother of Justin
’02, and Eleanor “Peggy” Schmidt Clark ’71,
mother of Ken Clark ’03. Tom Krattenmaker of
the College’s News and Information Office
spearheaded production of a video, One
Heartbeat, that was shown at the banquet to
commemorate the seasons under Alvanos.
Copies of the video, a scrapbook of team
memorabilia, and rings made from the Cloth-

CLOTHIER FIELD RENOVATED

JIM GRAHAM

COLLEGE HONORS FINAL
FOOTBALL TEAMS

A NEW ARTIFICIAL SURFACE AND LIGHTS WILL
ALLOW FOR MULTIPLE USES OF CLOTHIER FIELD.

ier Field goalposts were given to the former
players and later sent to those who were
unable to attend.
Pagliei had proposed the idea to President
Alfred H. Bloom, who provided funding for
the event and video. She said that after the
College decided in December 2000 to end its
football program, “it was all about the decision, the negativity. These kids had accomplished a lot, and they needed a reason to
celebrate—to have what they did be recognized. It was great to see them laughing,
having fun, and enjoying each other again.”
—Jeffrey Lott

Construction is nearing completion on a new
field, track, and lighting system to replace
the College’s old Skallerup Track and Clothier
Field. The project includes a state-of-the-art
synthetic track surface as well as Sofsport
synthetic grass on the field.
The all-purpose, all-weather facility will
be used by field hockey, men’s and women’s
soccer, and men’s and women’s lacrosse; it
will also be available for club and intramural
sports. Lights on the field will extend its
uses into the evening.
When completed in December, the surface
will consist of 2-inch tufts of synthetic grass
atop a 1/2-inch porous rubber mat. A mixture
of sand and ground rubber is then added to
the “grass” to create a field that, according
to Associate Director of Athletics Adam
Hertz, “is nonabrasive and feels like a good,
soft natural turf field.”
The project was designed to allow for
groundwater recharge under the Borough of
Swarthmore’s recently adopted storm-water
management plan.
—Jeffrey Lott
MEMBERS OF THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST
MOVEMENT RALLY ON THE STEPS OF

TRACKING THE
GEOGRAPHY
OF HATE

THE KANSAS STATEHOUSE UNDER A
SIGN OPPOSING THEIR VIEWS ON
AUG. 24, IN TOPEKA, KAN. A STUDY BY
TWO SWARTHMORE ECONOMISTS FINDS
NO CORRELATION BETWEEN EDUCA-

I

n 1999, Associate Professor of Economics
Philip Jefferson and Professor Emeritus
of Economics Frederic Pryor published a
paper in the journal Economics Letters that
has gained renewed significance during the
past year. Titled “On the Geography of
Hate,” their research analyzed the correlation between socioeconomic factors and the
location of hate groups, concentrating on
groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, Christian
identity groups, and white supremacist
“skinheads.” Surprisingly, they learned that

factors such as education and unemployment, which might be presumed to be predictors of intolerance and frustration in
communities, were not, in fact, statistically
significant. Further investigation showed an
equally negligible connection between local
laws against hate crimes and the existence
of hate groups in the respective localities.
Although it focuses on domestic hate
groups, the paper was cited after Sept. 11 by
scholars trying to explain the terrorist
attacks. Jefferson believes it is important

DENCE OF HATE GROUPS.

that the paper was published some years
before Sept. 11. “That fact gives it a level of
objectivity,” he says. “It’s unclouded by the
event. No one can think that the data were
engineered to fit the situation. And what is
exciting for us is that similar types of analyses of data gathered in places like Germany
and the Middle East supported our broader
findings that socioeconomic factors are not
really useful in predicting the location of
terrorism.”
Jefferson says that although, in a way, the
result is negative, it has been confirmed in
at least two other geographical settings,
“which is good for academics,” he laughs,
“but we have to look elsewhere for a solution to the problem of hate groups.”
—Carol Brévart-Demm

DECEMBER 2002

CHARLIE RIEDEL, AP/WIDE WORLD

TION, UNEMPLOYMENT, AND THE INCI-

13

Cell Divisions
S WA R T H M O R E - E D U C AT E D
SCIENTISTS, ETHICISTS, AND
LEGAL PHILOSOPHERS ARE
HELPING LEAD THE CLONING
A N D S T E M - C E L L D E BAT E .
By Tom Krattenmaker

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

Illustrations by Esther Bunning

14

Williamses. Meanwhile, news reports surfaced of a researcher
named Panayiotis Zavos, formerly of the University of Kentucky,
who claimed he was working with seven infertile couples, attempting to have cloned babies by next summer. The experiments reportedly were occurring in an undisclosed foreign country.
Are these promising directions for society?
Maxine Frank Singer ’52, an award-winning biological scientist
and president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, is quick
to point out that we are in no position technologically to produce
the first cloned human being. With the science of reproductive
cloning still raw, to attempt it with a human is reckless and dangerous, she says.
Singer, chair of the Committee on Science, Engineering, and
Public Policy of the National Academy of Science (NAS), points to
the dim recent history of animal cloning. Dolly, the cloned English
sheep that attracted worldwide attention, appeared normal at birth
but is now prematurely arthritic, among other problems. Most animal-cloning experiments have produced poor success rates. Typical
is a 1999 goat-cloning experiment, cited in a recent NAS report, in
which just 20 of 230 embryos produced were judged sufficiently
viable for implantation in a uterus; of 20 implanted, 17 miscarried.
Scientists aren’t sure why cloning is proving so difficult.
“For me, the fundamental objection to reproductive cloning is
that it’s dangerous,” says Singer, who oversaw an exhaustive report
on cloning produced by the NAS panel she chairs. “Parents will be
bitterly disappointed by the failures. I fear that a significant number
of the children who are born may be damaged.”
Singer, for one, would not ban reproductive cloning if it were
ever made reasonably safe. Then, she believes, it could become a
viable last resort for the small number of couples in the severest
reproductive situations—cases in which both the would-be mother
and father are infertile.
Like Singer, David Baltimore ’60, a 1975 Nobel Prize winner in
medicine and president of the California Institute of Technology,
would allow reproductive cloning if it were safe. Thoughts of a real,
live “mini-me” repulse our sensibilities, he acknowledges, but
because of the powerful force of environment on the shaping of a
personality, a clone would never turn out the same as the genetic
“parent.”
“Let us say we could reconstruct a human from a cell of Einstein,” Baltimore says, “and a young Einstein is born into our world
today. Would that Einstein be the same man Albert Einstein was? I
would argue no. First of all, our world is so different today. Would

DECEMBER 2002

W

ith the advance of biotechnology, the fanciful is becoming increasingly real. Although not perfected, cloning—
once the stuff of science fiction—has become ever more
possible. But is it wise to create genetic carbon copies of ourselves?
Is it morally justifiable to clone embryos—and, as some would
remind us, destroy them—to secure the stem cells that could unlock
the door to astonishing new medical treatments?
The questions surrounding biotechnology are, in the words of
Robert George ’77, a member of President Bush’s Council on Bioethics, as prominent and poignant as any we face. And, as society
begins to take them on with new urgency, Swarthmore-educated
scientists, ethicists, and legal philosophers are helping lead the
debate.
“It’s an exciting time to be working on these issues,” says Alex
Capron ’66, a bioethicist and University of Southern California law
professor who this fall became director of ethics for the World
Health Organization. “But it’s also a somewhat difficult, vexing,
and potentially dangerous time for society at large,” he adds.
“We’re reaching the point where we’re going to go one way or
the other with this technology,” says George, a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University noted for his ethical stand against
destroying embryos for scientific research. “There’s going to be no
way to stay in the mushy middle.”
Unlike the ethical questions around it or the science of
actually executing it, the concept of human cloning is fairly
straightforward: A nucleus containing most of the source person’s genes is extracted from his or her cell, inserted into an
egg, and implanted into a womb. The result, if all goes well,
is the birth of a child that is a genetic copy of the source.
Another primary purpose of cloning is to produce
embryonic stem cells for medical research and, if the
research eventually bears fruit, hoped-for treatments
or cures for diseases such as Parkinson’s or diabetes.
Current U.S. law says nothing about reproductive
cloning. Although research is allowed today on
existing stem cells, the president has banned the
cloning of new embryos for scientific work.
Last summer, while researchers, pundits,
and politicians debated cloning, the headlines were making the once-abstract more
concrete than ever. One story from the
sports pages sounded like science fiction:
The children of baseball legend Ted Williams
had the body of the newly deceased slugger
cryogenically frozen. In addition to hoping to
bring him back to life at some point, reports
said, Williams’ son wanted to sell his
father’s DNA to people interested in
cloning and rearing their own Ted

Unlike the ethical questions
and the actual science,
the concept of human cloning
is fairly straightforward.

15

If a cloned
Einstein were
born into our
world today,
would he be
the same man?
he even be interested in physics? I don’t
know. What if he went into commerce rather
than science? I’m not worried he would be
another Albert Einstein.”
But what about scary scenarios like cloning
farms to produce athletes, armies, servants, slaves, or a
genetically superior ruling caste? Baltimore believes it is
not necessary to ban cloning to prevent the fiction of
Orwell and Huxley from coming true. “Our democracy protects us. No one has control over human breeding,” Baltimore
says. “The real worry is a Hitler, not cloning—a leader who dictates who breeds with whom.”

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

M

16

any in scientific and policy circles do not share Baltimore’s
confidence that society could handle cloning if it became
available. Capron and George, for instance, are troubled by its
implications for the fundamental bargain at the heart of parenting
and human reproduction decisions. People enter parenthood
understanding that they cannot know what kind of person they
will produce and that they will commit to him or her no matter
what. A notion central to cloning, on the other hand, is producing
a type—a copy of a beloved daughter who died prematurely, perhaps, or a duplicate of a sports hero through whom the parent can
live out his own unfulfilled athletic dreams. Then comes the difficult question: What if the clone, because of environment and all the
other factors that shape ability and personality, disappoints? What
if the mini–Michael Jordan has no interest in basketball?
As a society, Capron notes, we tend to trust personal choice in
matters of reproduction; our laws, after all, allow a woman to
decide whether to bring a fetus to term. Couples are free to use
such technologies as artificial insemination if they cannot have a
child the conventional way. But Capron, who served on President
Clinton’s National Bioethics Advisory Commission, fears that personal choice might not serve us in such good stead when—or if—
the era of technologically viable human cloning dawns.
“I believe individual choice is very important,” he says, “but we
can’t be as confident that the choices people might make (around
cloning) will have outcomes that are as predicable for them and as

acceptable for society as reproductive decisions have been to this
point. I don’t think asexual reproduction is just another form of
reproduction. It changes in a basic way the relationship between
generations. In a certain way, it obliterates it.”
Robert George has many of the same concerns. “As parents, we
have a certain trusteeship over our children, but we don’t own
them,” he says. “They’re not products. Reproductive cloning would
replace that view with a conception of the child as a product that is
manufactured to order, subject to quality controls for the satisfaction of our desires.”
Capron points to possible scenarios that are downright creepy.
Suppose a husband clones his beloved wife so he can have a daughter “just like her.” Then, what is the man’s relationship to this child
who bears none of his genetic material? Is she his daughter or his
wife? If his wife prematurely died, would he expect the clone to fill
the void?
“The desire that feeds wanting to clone is a desire that cannot
be fulfilled,” Capron says. “I worry what it will mean when this
desire is frustrated. The little Mozart might be more interested in
going in the driveway to play basketball, and the little Michael Jordan might want to go inside and play the piano. The parent might
say, ‘Wait, that’s not what I ordered.’ This is not a formula for
human flourishing. This is a formula for treating children as
objects.”

David Baltimore ’60, one of the
most influential biologists of his
generation, was awarded the
Nobel Prize for Medicine at the
age of 37 for his work in virology. He has also had a profound
influence on national science
policy regarding such issues as
recombinant DNA research and
the AIDS epidemic. Baltimore is
president of the California Institute of Technology.

Robert George ’77 is McCormick
Professor of Jurisprudence and
director of the James Madison
Program in American Ideals and
Institutions at Princeton University. George has served on the
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
and is a former judicial fellow at
the U.S. Supreme Court. He is
the author of In Defense of Natural Law and The Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Morality, and Religion in Crisis.

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

and save untold lives. But what makes them attractive is the same
thing that makes them ethically problematic. They can be extracted
from only embryos, and they cannot be “harvested” without
destroying the source in the process.
Complicating the issue was news earlier this year of research
indicating that the same medical breakthroughs might be possible
with adult stem cells, though the results were too inconclusive to
give Baltimore, for one, any confidence that adult cells could ever
substitute for embryonic cells. “It would be nice if adult cells could
do the same things, and I’m sure people will continue to pursue
research on them,” he says. “But embryonic cells represent our only
hope at the moment.”

Alexander Capron ’66 is one of
the nations’s leading bioethicists. He teaches at the University of Southern California Law
School and co-directs the Pacific
Center for Health Policy and
Ethics. In the 1980s, he served
as executive director of the President’s Commission for the Study
of Ethical Problems in Medicine
and Biomedical and Behavioral
Research. Capron was recently
appointed director of ethics for
the World Health Organization.

DECEMBER 2002

Biochemist Maxine Frank Singer
’52 is president of the Carnegie
Institution of Washington and
chair of the Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public
Policy at the National Academy
of Science. In 1992, she received
the National Medal of Science for
“her outstanding scientific
accomplishments and her deep
concern for the societal responsibility of the scientist.”

CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

CARNEGIE INSTITUTION OF WASHINGTON

nlike reproductive cloning, so-called research cloning is within the grasp of science here and now, giving the issue an
immediate urgency. The prominence of Swarthmore graduates in
the debate was readily apparent on the opinion pages of The Wall
Street Journal in July 2001, when George and Baltimore published
dueling opinion pieces on the question on the same day. George,
who insists that embryos are human beings in the earliest stage of
their lives and thus deserving of legal rights, argued against allowing researchers to extract stem cells, which unavoidably destroys
the embryo. Reflecting the view of most scientists, Baltimore
argued conversely that an embryo—“a tiny mass of cells that has
never been in a uterus”—is hardly a human being. Banning their
use in research and eventual therapies, he wrote, would hamstring
the fight against deadly diseases suffered by actual human beings.
Their unformed nature and wide-open potential are what give
embryonic stem cells their unique beauty in the eyes of medical
researchers. The goal is to find techniques to develop the stem cells
into specific tissues and organs that could replace diseased ones in
patients’ bodies—a possibility that could revolutionize medicine

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

U

The human embryo
is entitled to
full moral respect
and should not
be exploited or
destroyed to benefit
others, says George.

17

!!!!!
Decision Rests With Society, Not Scientists
JIM GRAHAM

AT S WA R T H M O R E , M A N Y D E PA R T M E N T S
PA R T I C I PAT E I N T H E P H I L O S O P H I C A L D E BAT E .

Professor of Biology Scott Gilbert
is often asked about both the science and ethics of cloning and
stem-cell research. He offers his
own answers to some of the questions raised in this article—questions, he says, that are frequently
discussed in classes at Swarthmore.

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

How does government policy
affect stem-cell research?
Should it go forward?
Cloning of stem cells in laboratories should go forward, but it
must be regulated. Neither a
complete prohibition nor a laissez-faire capitalist approach will
work. Under the rules imposed
by the Bush administration in
August 2001, most of the 60 or
so usable lines of stem cells are
controlled by biotech corporations or foreign research institutes. I don’t think the American
public wants this to be an unregulated business enterprise. We
established an Atomic Energy
Commission to oversee nuclear
fission; why not a similar
authority to help us regulate an
equally powerful technology?

18

Some assert the “inherent dignity” of human stem cells.
When do embryonic cells
become a human being?
There are several ways to define
that moment, but because science is better at saying what’s
not true than what is, the ultimate decision must rest with
society, not with scientists.

One idea is that human life
begins at the moment of fertilization, when the egg and sperm
nuclei fuse.
Another is when the fertilized
embryo “individuates”—when,
about 14 days after fertilization,
an embryo can only produce one
individual rather than twins or
triplets. In religious terms,
“ensoulment” would only be able
to occur after individuation. This
embryologic view is accepted by
the biomedical community in the
United Kingdom.
Then, there is the brain-wave
moment at about 25 weeks,
when we can first detect fetal
brain activity on an electroencephalogram. Interestingly, the
medical community accepts the
cessation of brain waves as the
definition of human death. It
could become a standard for the
beginning of life as well.
Then, there’s viability—the
point at which a fetus can survive outside the womb. In Roe v.
Wade, the Supreme Court said
that a fetus should not be aborted after 26 weeks, but that was
in 1973. As medical technology
improves, this has become a
moving target.
Finally, there’s birth itself.
Certainly, this is a point where
the new life becomes physiologically independent of the mother.

Is there a moral side to this
issue?
This isn’t a debate between science and religion or between
good and evil. There are legitimate competing views as to
what constitutes human life and
dignity. The abstract view of
human dignity holds that any
living entity with the potential
to be human must be accorded
the respect due to a human
being. This isn’t necessarily just
a religious attitude—after all,
we have laws against slavery and
cannibalism.
Another view of dignity considers disease. Disease can rob
people of their dignity, but one
of the glories of being human is
that we have learned to alleviate
and cure disease, restoring that
dignity. If a certain avenue of
research might give back a person’s bowel function or muscle
control, how can we prohibit it
in the name of protecting human
dignity?
It’s easy to make a principled
argument, to say yes or no. But
it’s much more difficult to say in
some instances, yes, and in others, no. As former religion professor Patrick Henry used to say,
the Manicheans had it too easy.
They merely pitted good against
evil. The hard decisions are when
two goods compete.

SCOTT GILBERT MAJORED IN
RELIGION AS AN UNDERGRADUATE AT WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY
AND IS THE AUTHOR OF THE
BEST-SELLING TEXTBOOK
DEVELOPMENTAL BIOLOGY.

Are Swarthmore students
engaged in this debate?
Yes, indeed—and the philosophical debate doesn’t just happen
in the humanities departments.
Part of the mission of teaching
science in a liberal arts college
is to integrate it into the milieu
where it is practiced. In Embryology, I assign readings about
ethical issues. I also teach a
course called History and Critique of Biology. John Jenkins,
who teaches genetics, talks
about eugenics. Amy Vollmer
(biology) and Hugh Lacey (philosophy) have together offered a
course on genetic engineering.
Colin Purrington’s biotechnology
course challenges students to
question the value of bioengineering. And Jennie O’Connell of
sociology/anthropology is offering a course on bioethics.
Students who become scientists in the next few decades will
have incredible power. They need
to learn how science has been
misused in the past, what the
ethical issues are today, and
what they are likely to be in the
future.

Stem cells developed
into specific tissues
and organs that could
replace diseased ones
might save untold lives.

Singer agrees with Baltimore that the paramount concern must
be for the lives of human disease sufferers. “To me, you have to balance these embryonic cells against all the ill people you might
help,” she says. “My colleague who has Parkinson’s disease is a wise
human being who has a family and friends. To me, it’s a no-brainer
to say that if we could treat him with some cells, we ought to do
so.” To focus on the welfare of embryonic cells, she says, ponders
only half the question—“because the life at the other end has got
to be at least as precious as the couple of cells that might grow into
a human being.”
But to George and others opposed to the use of embryonic stem
cells, embryos surely constitute human life. To deem humans in
one stage of life exploitable for the welfare of humans in another
stage—to judge some lives more valuable than others—is ethically
shaky indeed, they contend.
“I believe human dignity is inherent, that you have it by virtue
of being a human being. And you have it from the moment you
come into being,” George says. “So it seems to me that the human
embryo is entitled to full moral respect and should not be treated as
an entity that may legitimately be exploited and destroyed for purposes of benefiting others. To do that is to reduce the embryo to the
status of being the means to other people’s ends, and, in my view,
that means to treat it as a thing.”

ut are embryos “human life,” deserving the same legal
rights as those we regard as full-fledged people? If not,
when does life begin? Illustrating the profound differences in the stem-cell debate, proponents of the two
primary viewpoints disagree on the very means of
approaching the question.
George contends that the answer is to be
found in science as a definitive “yes.” An
embryo, he says, “is not something apart
from a human being like a potato or a car or
a tree. Rather, the embryonic stage is simply
a [step] in the life of a unitary determinate
human being who will, if all goes well, by
internal direction develop and mature to the
next more mature stage of its development;
and then, to the next; and ultimately, into
adulthood with its unity, determinateness, and
identity fully intact.”
Scientists Baltimore and Singer disagree. “That’s
a philosophical question, not a biological one,” Singer
says. “Does a new human being begin with the formation of the
egg? Does it begin with the formation of the sperm? Does it begin
when the two come together? ... Does it begin at eight weeks of gestation? Those are questions that are legal, philosophical, religious.
They’re not biological.”
The most practical source of the answer is current law, Baltimore
adds. “We allow abortion,” he says. “I believe the law of the land
should prevail.”
In August, George and fellow members of the bioethics panel
recommended to the president a four-year moratorium on cloning
performed for research purposes and a ban on reproductive
cloning. Although some pundits called the moratorium an act of
“wimping out,” George says it would buy our country the time it
needs to study, understand, and debate the issue.
“These issues are difficult, but they are not resistant to rational
evaluation and discussion,” George says. “I think if we’re rigorous
in debating, respectful of each other in conducting the debate, and
willing to listen to arguments and make counterarguments, we can
actually resolve these things. It does take an open mind and a willingness to confront uncomfortable truths. But I have faith that
when people are willing to do that, we can get to the truth of these
matters.” T
Tom Krattenmaker is the College’s director of public relations.

DECEMBER 2002

B

19

†CLAIRE WEISS ’03

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

“Late afternoon is my favorite time
of day on campus, when the sun
invades western windows and the
colors are truer than reality. The
paths in the Nason Garden between
Trotter and Hicks are calmer than
most, as they aren’t at the heart of
activity. This picture embodies the
sense of calm brought on by the
afternoon sun—a by-the-wayside
vision of Swarthmore.”

20

πLISA UBELAKER ANDRADE ’06

“’Can’t We Stop and Think?’ was taken on the
steps of Parrish during a September protest
organized by the student group ‘Why War?’
Signs protesting the impending war on Iraq
were hung all along the outside of the building, but this one seemed to strike a chord
even outside of that context. The message
echoes some of the meaning of Swarthmore—
an urge and an opportunity to pause and seriously contemplate action, thought, and life.”

THROUGH
STUDENT
EYES
A WEEKLONG “PHOTO BLITZ” REVEALS
S T U D E N T S ’ V I S I O N S O F S WA R T H M O R E .

√A R P I TA PA R I K H ’ 0 4

more than 6,000 photographs
were processed the following
week. Students were given a set
of their pictures and asked to
submit up to three per roll to a
jury consisting of Professor of
Studio Art Brian Meunier, freelance photographer Steven
Goldblatt ’67, and members of
the publications staff. Fourteen
photographs were selected for
the calendar, but many others
were worthy of publication.
A representative selection is
presented in these pages, accompanied by brief comments from
the photographers. In addition,
an exhibition of all photographs
submitted to the jury was held
in Parrish Hall in late October.

What do these pictures tell
us about students’ visions of
Swarthmore?
Two messages are clear:
First, Swarthmore students
value—above all other aspects
of their experience at Swarthmore—their fellow students. The
people they meet, the friendships
they form, and the lessons they
learn from each other are easily
as valuable as the classroom
experience.
Second, the beauty of
Swarthmore’s campus is more
than a mere backdrop for their
education. Whether reading on
“Parrish Beach,” chatting on a
garden bench, or exploring the
fog-shrouded campus in the

middle of the night, students
appreciate the College’s natural
setting. Taking photographs for
the Photo Blitz may even have
increased their awareness of
Swarthmore’s beauty.
The Photo Blitz was generously supported by donations
from Fuji Photo Film USA Inc.
and the Ritz Camera Centers Inc.
The Publications Office
retained copies of the submitted
photos, which will be placed in
the College’s photo archive along
with a description of the project.
At some time in the future,
someone will come across these
pictures and remember that
week in September 2002.
—Jeffrey Lott

DECEMBER 2002

T

he 2003 Swarthmore calendar—
mailed to alumni,
parents, and
friends of the College in November—is titled Through Student
Eyes. Its images of the College
were all taken by students,
mostly during the week of Sept. 9.
During that week, the College Publications Office sponsored a “Photo Blitz,” handing
out more than 360 single-use
cameras and rolls of film to students. The instructions were
simple: Show us your vision of
Swarthmore.
A quarter of the student body
picked up cameras or film, and

“Capturing people on film has been
a consistent source of pleasure for
me both before and during my
Swarthmore experience. I admire the
simplicity and timeless quality of
the face and the body as the central
subject matter. The challenge is
in bringing the subject to life.
Dale Jennings ’04 (left) and Jyothi
Natarajan ’05 (p. 25) are glowing
in what I find to be their natural
states of joy.”

21

πCLAIRE WEISS ’03

Students were asked to take a picture of a numbered placard
identifying each roll of film. Claire Weiss had a little fun with
hers: “I’ve acquired a lot at Swarthmore—knowledge, friends,
experiences, stories, and memories. The objects here remind me
of people and places I have come to know: coral from a spring
break in Puerto Rico, a mini-rug from a friend (brought from
Pakistan), a little Eiffel Tower from another friend’s trip to
Paris, my hermit crab, and the list goes on.”

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

LAURA HIRSHFIELD ’03

22

®

“Lena Loefgren, the 1-year-old
daughter of Assistant Professor of
Anthropology Farha Ghannam, is
already practicing to be like one of
her baby-sitters Emily Clough ’03.
Emily and I baby-sit Lena several
days a week. Lena, who can be seen
all over campus with her mother or
one of us, is a great favorite among
students, staff, and faculty. Here,
she is busy researching one of her
favorite things—Elmo!”

πHANG NGO ‘05

√WEE JHONG CHUA ’06

πELIZABETH BADA ’06

“This is Alan McAvinney ‘06. The
intriguing aspect of this photo is
the unique contour of his hair.
As the wind from the fan forms
the free-flowing image, the focus
is shifted from the person to the
movement. The picture was taken
in Willets with a professional single-use 35mm camera.”

“Swarthmore—it’s full of early classes, late-night study breaks, papers,
and exams. Sometimes you just need
to unwind. And who knows? You just
might find that thesis statement in
the clouds.”

DECEMBER 2002

“Except during infancy, my friends
and I haven’t had as many naps
during any period of our lives as
we seem to take at the College.
This is one of those Swarthmore
afternoons when we all nap together in our ‘cuddle puddle’ in Chris
Schad and Francisco Castro’s room
in Palmer. Here, Chris is reading
Spanish—he’s never taken a Spanish course before—to Maile Arvin,
on the floor, to lull her to sleep.”

23

†SONAL SHAH ’05

“Begum Adalet ’05 (left) and Anand Vaidya
’05 are international students who came
to Swarthmore to expand their horizons.
To this end, they actively engage in viewing the world from a different perspective
every day, even turning it upside down on
occasion.”

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

πJEFFREY MAO ’06

24

“Coming to Swarthmore can be a humbling
experience. Everything is new and exciting,
yet confusing and challenging all at the
same time. You realize, when just starting
out and looking up, that there are still so
many steps to climb. But at the same time,
you have this feeling of anticipation about
the journey. It draws you in and makes you
want to go higher.”

B E N JA M I N GA LY N K E R ’ 0 3 ®

“It’s Saturday, Sept. 14, and I’m standing on
the balcony above the stage at Olde Club,
where bands often play on weekends. On
stage is a rock band called ‘The Walkmen.’
I often find myself taking pictures at Olde
Club because it’s so loud that I can’t have a
conversation. The pictures help me remember
the music and the moment.”

πZACHARIAS MICHIELLI ’06

“Here we have the very rare species
Herschelbus peckerus (Herschel Pecker
’06), known to inhabit only a small
area in southeastern Pennsylvania. I
was able to capture this teenage
specimen in what is called ‘Stupid
College Student Behavior.’ This
extremely rare behavior has never
before been photographed from such
a close, dangerous vantage point.”
√A R P I TA PA R I K H ’ 0 4

DECEMBER 2002

See caption on page 21.

25

LIBERAL
ARTS
in a
Conservative

Land
T W O S WA R T H M O R E A N S H E L P
S TA R T A WO M E N ’ S C O L L E G E I N
JEDDAH, SAUDI ARABIA.

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

COURTESY OF EFFAT COLLEGE

By Carol Brévart-Demm

26

A

new liberal arts college opened on Sept.
8, 1999. Stretching over several city
blocks, it has classrooms, laboratories,
and sports facilities—including an Olympicsized pool. There’s an 800-seat auditorium, a
cafeteria, state-of-the-art library, computer center, and a house of worship.
Groups of students in jeans, T-shirts, and
sneakers lounge in the cafeteria, laughing and

chatting. In class, they discuss education, psychology, science, English, and computer technology; after class, they spend time in the library,
the pool, or on the basketball court.
Sounds familiar—a little like Swarthmore?
Except that here, the entire student body is
female. Some ride to campus in college vans;
others are driven in family cars; some live on
campus. The college is surrounded by walls, into

which rooms have been built to accommodate
male visitors including the students’ fathers.
(Mothers are allowed on campus.) All the faculty and staff members are women. Until they
enter the gates of the college, students, administrators, and faculty cover their clothes with
ankle-length, black abayas and their heads with
matching scarves. The campus house of worship
is a mosque.

The greatest
challenge was
finding leaders
to work with
both American
academe and
Saudi Arabian
culture.

IN ADDITION TO A MOSQUE (TOP), EFFAT COLLEGE’S CAMPUS (LEFT AND ABOVE) ALSO
INCLUDES AN 800-SEAT AUDITORIUM. ITS SIZE,
SAYS GRANT, IS UNUSUAL BECAUSE “WAHHABI
ISLAM HAS NO CONCEPT OF THE SECULAR. THERE
IS NO PUBLIC REALM OF ENTERTAINMENT, SO NO
NEED FOR PUBLIC SPACES.”

the professors (also male) on closed-circuit
televisions. Queen Effat, seeing that this
distance from the professors put the female
students at a distinct disadvantage, imagined a college environment where women
could interact directly with their teachers.
Yet until 1997, when a royal decree permitted the establishment of private nonprofit universities, the queen’s vision could
not begin to be realized. When it became
possible, she was granted the kingdom’s
first license to start a college. She put her
daughter Princess Lolowah al-Faisal in
charge of the project. Funding for the college would come from Queen Effat’s personal fortune.

P

rincess Lolowah, educated in Saudi Arabia and Switzerland, inherited her
mother’s vision and also brought her own
educational concerns. She had struggled to
find appropriate teaching methods in Saudi
Arabia for one of her children who is dyslexic.
“Because of the way our children are
brought up in Saudi Arabia, many have
learning problems, but I am convinced that
everyone can learn,” she told Grant.
Disagreeing with the traditional methods of rote memorizing, listening, and
silent note taking practiced in Saudi public
universities, she wanted female students to
think for themselves, question, communicate, and discuss. Women, she thought,
should be enabled to receive an education
that instilled a sense of independence and
confidence. Her goal was not only to ensure
successful careers for women (currently, the
Saudi workforce is approximately 7 percent
female) but also to give them as mothers the
tools to raise confident and independent
daughters.
In searching for educational models,
Princess Lolowah visited the American
women’s colleges Mount Holyoke and
Smith as well as Columbia and Harvard
universities in early 1999 and was impressed by what she saw. Her greatest challenge lay in finding leadership for Effat
College—a dean (women cannot be “presidents” of institutions under Saudi law) who
would be able to work with cultures of both
American academe and Saudi Arabian society. During the visit, she met Grant’s friend
Dr. Alice Ilchman, former president of Sarah
Lawrence College and chair of the board of
The Rockefeller Foundation, and invited her

DECEMBER 2002

his is Effat College in Jeddah—the first
liberal arts college in Saudi Arabia. For
Marcia Montin Grant ’60, working to help
found Effat College and act as its first dean
was the job of a lifetime. “Starting what I
call an Islamic liberal arts college drew on
everything I learned at Swarthmore,” says
Grant.
Islam dominates life in Saudi Arabia,
home to two of the religion’s three holy
places. Saudi society has changed rapidly in
the last half-century as a result of being the
“keeper” of these holy sites, on the one
hand, and one of the world’s richest nations
because of petroleum, on the other. At every
turn, modernization and affluence are negotiated with Saudi cultural traditions and
Islamic law.
The role of women in Saudi society is
different from other Muslim cultures, says
Grant, and women are frequently portrayed
in the West as oppressed. It is true that
Saudi women may not drive cars, cannot be
in the company of men unknown to their
families, and must cover their hair and wear
an abaya in public. But, Grant points out:
“Saudi Arabian society is constantly changing, and the role of women within it. There
are many business women in Saudi Arabia,
women can inherit, and they have the right
to divorce. Although they seem to be more
limited than women in some other Islamic
societies, they have more rights in certain
areas. It is simplistic to think that women
are oppressed simply because of Islam.”
Within a culture where women have traditionally had a preeminent role only within
their families, opportunities for Saudi
women in both education and employment
have been increasing. Queen Effat, wife of
the late King Faisal, was a staunch advocate
of education for women. In 1955, before
Faisal became king, Princess Effat created
Dar al-Hanaan, a private K-12 school for
girls. The modernization of Saudi Arabia
under Faisal, who ruled from 1964 until his
assassination in 1975, included a national
education program for women. By the early
1980s, public education was available to all
Saudi girls.
According to Grant, Queen Effat always
dreamed of starting a private women’s college. Currently, 15,000 women attend the
public King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, but they are taught in separate rooms
from the male students, where they watch

PHOTOS COURTESY OF EFFAT COLLEGE

T

27

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

G

28

rant was clearly a good match for the
task. “I developed an early sensitivity
to non-American perspectives from childhood stays in Colombia and Mexico,” she
says. As an honors student at Swarthmore
in political science, she undertook projects
in Peru; Cuba; and Cameroon, Africa. Subsequently, she obtained a Ph.D. in political
science from the London School of Economics. She began her variegated international career as a professor of international
politics at Oberlin College. When invited to
Jeddah, Grant was living in Barcelona,
Spain, directing the Institute for North
American Studies, a private, nonprofit
organization aimed at promoting mutual
understanding between Spain and the United States.
After two days of consultation in Jeddah,
Grant and Ilchman submitted a formal proposal. “We thought that wonderful things
could be done with a liberal arts education
and that they should take a year to set up
the college,” Grant says. She wrote to thank
the princess. Returning to Spain, she
learned that her thank-you note had generated more enthusiasm than the proposal.
“No one on the staff could even read a formal, American-style proposal,” says Grant.
“But they saw from the personal language of
my thank you that I understood Effat’s
vision for a liberal arts college.” Invited
back, Grant returned to Jeddah for one week
the following June.
Grant learned that Princess Lolowah was
unwilling to wait a year—she wanted the
college to open in September, just three
months later, partly because of the elderly
queen’s failing health. Grant set to work. “I
only had the one week, and I still had obligations in Spain,” she says, “so I drew up an

application form and set
up a small admissions
office.” Tuition was set at
$10,000 a year, and financial aid was made available
for needy students.
In August, Grant moved
to Jeddah to continue the
project full time. Waiting
to find a house in a Westerners’ compound, she settled into a hotel. Part of
her success, she believes, is
that she was a complete
anomaly in Saudi Arabia—
a professional woman,
functioning without American government, petroleum, or military interests.
“Everyone was very helpful,” she says, “although
they thought I was a little
crazy at the hotel. Normally, women do not stay
alone in hotels in Saudi
Arabia. I’d send faxes in the
middle of the night or be
on the phone to South
Africa or the United States
or wherever I was trying to
recruit faculty or staff. One
morning, a fax machine
appeared in my room.”
“Everything had to be
reorganized or built from
scratch,” says Grant. When she went to
look at the campus, the phones were not
working. “I went down to where the telephone operator sat, and the phones were all
ringing, but her desk was empty. I looked for
the operator and saw that she was praying
in the corner. I had to figure out quickly
how to set institutional standards within a
culture where work and religion had to coexist. And on top of that, I wanted to hire
an entirely female staff and faculty. My goal
was to hire as many excellent women from
the Middle East as possible but also people
who understood the importance of a liberal
arts education.” Grant says she searched
worldwide, looking especially for women
who could fill more than one job.
The fact that everything was being done
for the first time was both difficult and
exciting, Grant says. “We were defining
what an Islamic liberal arts college would
COURTESY OF KERRY LAUFER

to Jeddah. Ilchman asked Grant to go with
her.
“I have always enjoyed consulting in cultures different from my own and was
thrilled to have the opportunity to visit
Saudi Arabia,” says Grant. She had studied
African and Latin American politics and
held seminars in Egypt on the nonprofit
world. “But,” she says, “both the obvious
hurdles and the immense opportunity
involved in creating a Western-style college
for women in Saudi Arabia drew on everything I knew—or didn’t know I knew—how
to do.”

be. There was a lot of talent involved in the
project, but, in many cases, it hadn’t been
recognized.” Among the clerical workers,
Grant discovered a woman from the Sudan
who was pursuing a doctorate in computer
science. “She got the Computer Science
Department started with the help of the
head of computer science at Smith College,”
she says.
Looking for staff, Grant turned to her
daughter, Alexandra ’95, who recommended
her Swarthmore basketball teammate Kerry
Laufer ’94. Then a French teacher at Penncrest High School in Media, Pa., Laufer
had also taught English as a foreign language. Grant and Laufer talked on the
phone. “Marcia offered me a job right then
and asked how soon I could come,” says
Laufer. “Ten days later, I was on a plane
bound for Jeddah. My title was registrar of
the college, but we did everything.”

Grant had to
figure out quickly
how to set
institutional
standards within
a culture where
work and religion
had to coexist.
JEDDAH IS RICH IN ISLAMIC CULTURE AND ARCHITECTURE, SUCH AS THE CARVED WOODEN BALCONIES IN BALAD, THE OLD CITY (ABOVE LEFT).
NOW LIVING IN FRANCE, GRANT (ABOVE) SERVES
AS EDUCATIONAL CONSULTANT TO PRINCESS
LOLOWAH AND JAMAL AL-LAIL. SHE VISITS JEDDAH FREQUENTLY. WITH THE COLLEGE
ESTABLISHED, GRANT SEES HER ROLE AS
“TRANSLATING WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED IN JEDDAH BACK TO THE OUTSIDE WORLD.”
ABAYA-CLAD BIOLOGIST DIANA STEIN AND CHEMIST SHEILA BROWNE (ABOVE RIGHT), BOTH MT.
HOLYOKE COLLEGE FACULTY MEMBERS, VISITED AS
CONSULTANTS LAST YEAR.

COURTESY OF ELIZABETH MCCORMACK

L

aufer’s interest in the Arab world comes
from being part Lebanese. She focused
her studies at Swarthmore on North African
literature influenced by French colonialism.
But she never expected to live and work in
Saudi Arabia. “I wouldn’t have sought it out
were it not for this Swarthmore connection,” she says.
With so little time, Grant and Princess
Lolowah decided to open the college with
only two majors: early childhood education
and computer science, which they considered to be the most crucial areas of training
for women in Saudi Arabia.
Building a curriculum was exciting. “The
question was how to teach in a way that will
promote critical thinking,” Grant says. “I
wanted the women to get the intellectual
tools to be able to understand both their
own culture and Western traditions, so that
they could study whatever they wanted
while understanding the limits of both
Islamic and Western traditions. But we had
to begin at the beginning: calculus and writing. This is what makes Effat College like
any school, anywhere.” They were required
by the Ministry of Higher Education to
teach Islamic studies and Arabic.
Grant insisted that the curriculum also
include physical education. “Women in
Saudi Arabia don’t have regular physical
activity,” she says. “They don’t work out or
move a lot—they send maids to get them
glasses of water. So I found an American
woman of Navajo ancestry in Jeddah to

English. On the spot, Grant and Laufer
decided to create a preparatory English-language curriculum, hiring the American consul general’s wife to teach English.
Laufer’s role expanded, soon corresponding to the American equivalent of assistant
to a college president. To write a student
handbook, she used Swarthmore’s as a
guide. When Grant needed an academic policy or an administrative procedure, she says
she “just pulled it out of her head.” Alexandra, who visited the college, observes: “My
mother says that creativity is translating an
idea to a new place. In the case of Effat, the
idea of a liberal arts college, so familiar to
us, was taken and planted in Jeddah.” She
adds: “I think that Swarthmore was present
at all times in its founding. Both Kerry and
my mother demonstrated incredible ingenuity because of the values and ideals inculcated in them at Swarthmore.”
Princess Lolowah had given Grant complete authority to make the college happen.

DECEMBER 2002

KERRY LAUFER

teach gym.” Initially, the students were
unwilling participants, but Grant accepted
no excuses. “They would have needed a note
from a government hospital to get out of
gym,” she said. In the end, the Effat College
basketball team ended up being one of the
most popular extracurricular activities
among the students. (Last year, the college
staged a basketball tournament, which
Laufer refereed, playing teams from several
local educational institutions and a charity
organization, and they held the first
women’s basketball banquet in the kingdom.)
One of Laufer’s first tasks was to interview the students. She found most of the
students’ English skills insufficient for college courses, all of which were taught in

29

Grateful for not having to deal with the
Saudi bureaucracy, Grant says: “We worked
in a way that cut across any lines. It’s amazing how much you can get done in a short
time under those circumstances.”
As opening day approached, Grant realized that they had not planned an orientation event for the students and their parents. Then, it occurred to her that they could
invite only the mothers. Despite this, she
says, “I was amazed at how very much the
fathers wanted this education for their
daughters.” A large assembly was arranged,
including a lunch with the princess for the
mothers, a tour of the campus facilities, and
meetings with the teachers.

Bryn Mawr College.
Now in its fourth year, the college has
200 students. Eighteen new faculty members were hired this year, bringing the total
to 40. The current curriculum, approved by
the Ministry of Higher Education, includes
information systems, educational psychology, and linguistics and translation in addition to early childhood education and computer science. Courses are offered in mathematics, chemistry, biology, history, and economics, and there are electives in art and
decoration as well as a course on child musical expression. Although Western philosophy may not be taught under that name,
philosophers may be referred to as

“thinkers” and their ideas and teachings
integrated into the curriculum in ways that
do not conflict with Islamic values.
Laufer says, “As the organizational structure has taken shape, and as we continue to
find increasingly qualified individuals to fill
key positions within that structure, we now
have time for more long-term projects and
strategic planning.”
The college has established relationships
with the science departments at Mount
Holyoke, Smith, and Bryn Mawr colleges. In
January 2001, a physicist from Bryn Mawr
and two chemists and a biologist from
Mount Holyoke were invited to Jeddah to
consult and hold a panel discussion for an

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

30

ffat College opened in September 1999.
There were 37 students from 17 to 29
years old. They were single, married,
divorced, and some were mothers. Most
were Saudis, but there were also students
from Afghanistan, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, and
Kenya. When the Class of 2003 was asked
to stand, there was a moment of intense
emotion, Grant says.
“Our goal,” said Grant in her opening
remarks, “is to prepare these students to
cope with the world’s rapid changes, to be
educated wives and mothers, in addition to
getting them ready for careers.” Mindful of
where she was, she added, “We must also
keep in mind Islamic values and traditions.”
Princess Lolowah relayed an inaugural
message from Queen Effat. “She asked me
to tell you that although she has been concerned about the education of Saudi women
for more than 50 years, she is now handing
this mission to the students of Effat College. It was one of her dreams to provide a
unique college for girls, and now, her dream
has come true.”
Aware that Effat’s leadership must be in
the hands of a Saudi Arabian woman by
mid-2001, Grant began the task of finding a
replacement for herself. “I was very fortunate to find and be able to work with Dr.
Haifa Jamal al-Lail,” she says. The first
woman in Saudi Arabia to hold a Ph.D. (in
public policy), which she completed at the
University of Southern California, Jamal alLail is a member of the college’s original
development team and was Grant’s first
consultant at Effat. In summer 2000, she
and Grant attended a seminar on higher
education administration for women at

COURTESY OF ELIZABETH MCCORMACK

E

HAIFA JAMAL AL-LAIL, DEAN OF EFFAT COLLEGE;
MARCIA GRANT; ELIZABETH M C CORMACK, A
PHYSICS PROFESSOR FROM BRYN MAWR COLLEGE;
AND MICHAEL FRIGANOTIS, COMPUTER SCIENCE
AND AUDIOVISUAL CONSULTANT FROM DUBAI
MEN’S COLLEGE IN THE UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
(ABOVE, LEFT TO RIGHT), CONSULT ON THE COLLEGE’S SCIENCE CURRICULUM.
KERRY LAUFER AND HUSBAND DAVID LANDERS
(OPPOSITE TOP), AN AMERICAN TEACHER WHOM
SHE MET DURING A SCUBA-DIVING COURSE IN
JEDDAH, BARTER FOR RUGS.
PORTRAITS OF MEMBERS OF THE SAUDI ROYAL
FAMILY ADORN THE WALLS OF THE COLLEGE’S
STUDENT HALL (OPPOSITE RIGHT).

audience of local high school teachers, the
press, Effat students and parents, and
women from greater Jeddah. The American
scientists discussed science education for
women, including the formation of an integrated science program. Elizabeth McCormack, an associate professor of physics from
Bryn Mawr, says of her visit: “One of my
strongest impressions was the remarkable
collaboration of the American and Saudi
women. There is an incredible feeling of
common purpose and energy.”
Grant is proud that Effat College has
developed a college culture similar to that
of American institutions. McCormack observed this as well: “One of the best parts of
our trip was a casual conversation with a
group of students,” she says. “My gut reaction was ‘They’re so like the young women
in our country.’ They’re excited and bubbly

“Women in
Saudi Arabia
don’t work out
or move a lot—
they send maids
to get them
glasses of water,”
Grant says.
So they started a
physical education
program—and a
basketball team.
Arabia, the college is seeking international
accreditation through the Middle States
Association.
“This will take several years, but we’re
setting the foundations now and talking to
the right people,” says Laufer, who is in
charge of the project. Currently dean’s assistant for institutional development and quality control and a member of the college’s
senior management team, she reports to

COURTESY OF EFFAT COLLEGE

and enthusiastic about their potential to
change the world. At the same time, they’re
very different. The diversity was amazing.
And they were all so interested in science—
just like our students.”
Laufer stresses the development of wellrounded individuals at Effat College. “It’s all
about communication, leadership, and selfconfidence,” she says. “Effat professors use
‘questioning techniques’ to encourage students to participate in class and let them
know that it’s fine to express their opinions.”
As it continues to evolve, Effat College
faces several challenges. One is the expense
of running the college—particularly as parts
of the campus still need refurbishing. Upon
Queen Effat’s death in February 2000, a
third of her personal fortune went to create
the Effat Foundation, which now funds not
only the Dar al-Hanaan school and Effat
College but many other projects as well.
Responsibility for all projects is shared by all
nine of her children, including Prince Saud
al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister.
With the uncertain international situation, Grant and Dean Jamal al-Lail are concerned about recruiting good faculty, but
applications were actually stronger this year
than in past years. The college also needs to
increase student enrollment.
“The real test will come,” says Laufer,
“when we graduate our first class and send
them out into the world,” which will happen
in June 2003. Saudi parents are still waiting
to see how well the students of Effat College
will do.
Now an established institution in Saudi

“By establishing Effat College, we were
able to open a door in Saudi Arabia to
thinking about nonprofits and philanthropy,” says Grant. Earlier this year, Grant and
Jamal al-Lail were panelists in the first two
meetings held in Saudi Arabia on nonprofit
organizations. “They were coed meetings,”
says Grant, “which is amazing because there
really are no conferences including both
men and women in Saudi Arabia, except in
the medical field.”
Alexandra adds: “Seeing Effat allowed
me to understand that the future lies in
building cross-cultural institutions, where
exchanges are made that create trust and
opportunity for members of all cultures
involved. My mother and Kerry have both
given a face to the idealism of Swarthmore
and, more generally, of the United States—
our educational values. And, truly, none of
this would have come to pass if my mother
were not so daring, so willing to see potential, where others would just see a foreign,
impenetrable culture. Swarthmore gave her
the tools to do it.” T

DECEMBER 2002

COURTESY OF KERRY LAUFER AND DAVID LANDERS

Jamal al-Lail and has worked on drafting
most of the college’s procedures for the
implementation of the Saudi Ministry of
Higher Education’s academic policy.
Detailed and demanding of accuracy as this
work is, particularly as the ministry is
known to make unexpected visits and
demands for documentation, Laufer says
that it has been helpful in setting up systems and upholding standards. “It helps
prepare us for the much more rigorous standards we will face with international accreditation,” she says. The Ministry of Higher
Education looks to Effat College as a model
for liberal arts colleges in the country,
reports Grant.

31

Wetlands
Wa r r i o r
MARGARET RENO HURCHALLA ’62
B AT T L E S T O S AV E F L O R I D A’ S E V E R G L A D E S .

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

A

32

sk Margaret “Maggy” Reno Hurchalla to discuss her
career, and “professional grandmother” is the first job title she
mentions.
But don’t be misled by her humility and maternal inclinations.
Hurchalla is something of a living legend in southern Florida—a
colorful character in local politics, the first female commissioner to
be elected in Martin County there, and a champion in the fight to
preserve the Everglades.
During her 20 years as a county commissioner, Hurchalla has
been credited with helping to keep the Martin County beaches public, creating a program to buy lands for conservation, and writing
the county’s comprehensive growth-management plan.
She was also a founding member and leader on the Governor’s
Commission for a Sustainable South Florida for five years until
1999. That group’s ongoing mission is to help developers, business
owners, and environmentalists cooperatively plan the area’s growth
while preserving its fragile ecosystems.
Although Hurchalla retired from elected politics in 1994, she is
still considered an authority on the resuscitation of South Florida’s
watershed, which has been nearly destroyed in recent years by
excessive development, farm runoff, and fresh water flushed from
Lake Okeechobee to prevent flooding.
“If it’s wet, and it’s in Florida, then I love it—and I’m concerned,” Hurchalla said. “Too many beautiful places are being
destroyed, and we’re running out of time.”
Environmental experts contend Hurchalla’s knowledge of com-

JIM HURCHALLA

By Angela Doody

plicated watershed issues and her ability to work with and understand both sides of the preservation vs. development debate is
extraordinary. She’s frequently asked to lead panel discussions or
state her opinion on different issues—especially those involving the
Indian River estuary, where she lives.
“She’s remarkable, very persuasive. She’s got a charm about her,
an easy, approachable warmth. But underneath there’s strength and
confidence—classic leadership qualities,” said Shannon Estenoz,
national co-chair of the Everglades Coalition and director of the
World Wildlife Fund Everglades Program.
“She has an extraordinary knowledge. She’s smart, energetic,
and she’s an expert in government and environmental issues. She
also knows all the players. She knows which personal chemistries
will work and which will not. She really does see the big picture,”
agreed Col. Greg May, head of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in
Jacksonville, Fla., who recently invited her to participate in the 27th
Annual Water Management Conference on the Indian River
Lagoon.

B

ut for all the noteworthy stories about her professional accomplishments, there are just as many anecdotes about Hurchalla’s
unconventional personality and upbringing.
For starters, there was the night she took a group of politicians
and reporters skinny-dipping after voters approved a bond issue to
save Martin County’s ocean beaches. Or the time she got stuck in
the mud with her kayak and had to spend the night in a Florida
swamp. Or how her mother taught her to wrestle alligators, and
how she’s passed the skill on to her own 11-year-old granddaughter.
Hurchalla, her two brothers and sister—former U.S. Attorney
General Janet Reno—grew up “on 20 acres of cow pasture” along
the edge of the Everglades. The Reno children helped their mother,
Jane Wood Reno, construct their childhood home, and Hurchalla’s
sister still lives in the house today. Their parents were career journalists who worked for competing daily newspapers in Miami, and
the Reno children grew up with pet ponies, peacocks, the occasional
alligator in the house, and lots of freedom. It was there that Hurchalla developed her lifelong passion for the outdoors.

SOME OF HURCHALLA’S RECENT TRAVELS INCLUDE THE NEW GUINEA HIGHLANDS, WHERE SHE POSED WITH A WAGHI VALLEY MUDMAN (ABOVE). NOW
THAT SHE HAS RETIRED, SHE’S TRYING TO SPEND MORE TIME IN THE FLORIDA
WATERS SHE LOVES (OPPOSITE).

HEIDI RIDGLEY/NATIONAL WILDLIFE FEDERATION

Florida, then I love it—
and I’m concerned.”
“I find her much more interested in achieving [ecological]
restoration than pushing a personal agenda or satisfying her own
ego. She has [the highest level] of leadership traits and at the same
time has a lot of personal humility,” May said.
When Hurchalla was first elected county commissioner, the position was part time and perfect while she was raising her children.
But that changed by the time she retired 20 years later.
“When I started, there were 30,000 people in the county. By the
time I left, there were 100,000, and I was working 80 hours a
week.
“No, I don’t miss it. It’s sad when you see things going to hell,
and you can’t do anything about it,” she said, maintaining that the
county’s current board has not put environmental issues on the
forefront of their agenda. “But it’s also a big relief. As a friend
noted, I can drive by a pothole now and say, ‘hey, I don’t have to do
anything about that.’”
In retirement, Hurchalla has enjoyed a wide variety of activities—international adventures including scuba diving on Australia’s
Great Barrier Reef, meeting natives in New Guinea, and hiking
Hawaiian swamps and volcanoes. She also loves canoeing and
kayaking the Indian River Lagoon and is trying to pass her love of
nature and wildlife on to her two grandchildren, Kimberly, 11, and
James, 9.
She also occasionally hit the campaign trail with her sister when
Janet Reno ran unsuccessfully for governor earlier this year.
Although she’s usually willing to attend an occasional meeting
on the environment or act as a sounding board to environmentalists and politicians, Hurchalla is trying to spend more quality time
with her family. She is also often found in her kayak, exploring the
beloved waters near her home.
“A friend said, ‘you’re trying to save [the estuary] because you
love it. If you love it, then go outside, and enjoy it.’ That’s what I’m
trying to do more of these days,” she said. T

DECEMBER 2002

“Mother disliked convention and didn’t care about things like us
wearing shoes. But she was strict about us not being mean to people who were smaller than you.
“I didn’t realize at the time that everyone didn’t have the childhood that I had,” said Hurchalla, who taught herself to scuba dive
at the age of 12 and was giving professional lessons at 13.
Hurchalla’s brother, Robert Reno, a columnist for Newsday,
recalled that even as a child, his younger sister was a “veteran
explorer” of the swamps near their home. “I don’t think there’s any
part of South Florida she hasn’t been through.
“I wouldn’t have predicted that she was going to be a politician. I
think she got dragged into it because Martin County was developing into this suburban sprawl horror, and it was going to be ruined
if someone didn’t do something,” Robert Reno said. “I think both
my sisters got into [politics] because they care.”
But Hurchalla’s career choice is not surprising to Janet Reno,
who calls her younger sister her “best friend.”
“Both my parents were interested in politics, and they taught us
to be aware and understand the issues.
“Maggy is extremely intelligent and has a tremendous capacity
to learn. Once having learned [an issue], she’s very good at talking
about it. She also cares a great deal about people,” Janet Reno said.
Hurchalla met her husband, Jim ’60, during her freshman year
when they shared a ride to Florida from Swarthmore before Christmas break. On one of their first dates, Jim stood guard while Hurchalla and a friend climbed up the College’s water tower to paint
“Cheer Up” on the side. They married in the fall semester of her
junior year, and their first child, Jimmy, was born the following
summer. (Hurchalla has fond memories of taking the baby to a few
honors seminars during her senior year.) She was pregnant with
her second child when she graduated Phi Beta Kappa, majoring in
psychology and minoring in biology and philosophy.
The pair eventually purchased land along the bank of the Indian
River estuary, where they raised their four children: James, Robert,
Jane ’86, and George ’88.
Hurchalla was elected Martin County’s first female commissioner in 1974. During her 20-year term, she became one of the most
well known political figures in South Florida. The outspoken,
6-foot-1-inch Hurchalla consistently went head-to-head with those
who wanted to indiscriminately develop Martin County and was
sometimes criticized for inhibiting the county’s growth. But many
also credit her with saving valuable wetlands.
“Maggy’s impact is enormous here. You drive through Martin
County, and it doesn’t look like the rest of South Florida. There are
more Everglades there because [the county] has a progressive wetlands ordinance.
“Maggy realized early that a restored Everglades was instrumental to the economic prosperity of South Florida and that the environment and the economy are inextricably linked,” Estenoz said.
These days, Hurchalla advocates “soft solutions” to restoring
South Florida’s wetlands. One possible strategy, she maintains, is
purchasing land from willing farmers and restoring those areas as
wetlands, instead of allowing the property to end up as subdivisions.
“There are people who you want to call for feedback, and Maggy
is definitely one of them.

33

A

s fascism and war infected
Europe in the 1930s and
1940s, millions fled their
homes to escape persecution
and violence. Only a fraction of
those uprooted managed to settle
in the United States, yet among them
were a remarkable number of scholars—many of them Jewish. This
intellectual migration brought
extraordinary men and women to
many American colleges and universities, where they enriched the
intellectual, scientific, and cultural life of the entire nation.
Perhaps the most famous of these
refugees—Albert Einstein—was the
principal speaker at Swarthmore’s
1938 Commencement. Invited by President Frank Aydelotte, the great
mathematician challenged America’s
isolationists, asking how anyone
could “look on passively, or perhaps
with indifference, when elsewhere
in the world innocent people are
being brutally persecuted, deprived
of their rights, or even massacred.”
He did not refer by name to the
dark forces at work in his native
Germany, but his message was

T

u

Emigre
The College
as a
Place
of
Refuge
DRIVEN FROM EUROPE BY
FA S C I S M A N D WA R ,
EMIGRE SCHOLARS
E N R I C H E D S WA R T H M O R E
F O R N E A R LY
H A L F A C E N T U R Y.

By Alisa Giardinelli

u
Martin Ostwald

he numbers of refugee faculty are dwindling fast. Only one, William R. Kenan Jr.
Professor Emeritus of Classics Martin Ostwald, remains a presence on campus. He can
still be found most mornings making his way
from his home on Walnut Lane to his study carrel in McCabe,
where he continues his writing and research.
Last fall, Ostwald was awarded an honorary doctorate from the
university in his hometown of Dortmund, Germany. His decision to
accept the award and return to Germany—which he had fled as a
teenager—was not an easy one. But he did and, in the process,
found some relief for what he calls an “agony of the soul.”
Ostwald’s father, a classically trained lawyer, insisted on a similar
education for both him and his younger brother. But Martin’s plans
to enter the rabbinate—as well as life itself—changed drastically
after Nov. 10, 1938—Kristallnacht.
“It was a free-for-all on anything Jewish,” he says. “In the middle of the night, a bunch of SS officers came to our apartment and
wrecked the place.”
In the morning, the family called the police. “We were still citizens deserving of their protection,” Ostwald says indignantly.
“They came and said, ‘We don’t see anything.’ My brother and I

were teenagers. They arrested us and took us
to police headquarters.”
They and their father were held in a cell
with 17 others. “The next day, the 11th,” he
says, “we were marched to a railroad station,
put on a train, and shipped out to Sachsenhausen, a concentration
camp near Berlin.”
His experiences at the camp are burned deep in Ostwald’s memory. Most of all, he remembers his father’s words to him and his
brother just before the boys’ release on Dec. 3.
“My father is the one to whom I owe my love of classics,” he
says. “He knew Greek fairly well, and he quoted Homer to us: ‘The
day will surely come when holy Troy will perish, with Priam and
Priam’s people.’ He wanted to comfort us, to tell us this kind of Germany wouldn’t last. It didn’t, but he didn’t either.” His sons never
saw him again.
Ostwald suspects it was his mother’s efforts to get them on a
children’s transport that brought about their release in late 1938. It
took them first to Holland, then 10 weeks later to England.
“At the time, neither my brother nor I realized we’d never see our
parents again,” he says. “It was not until after the war that we
learned of their deaths.”

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

(b. 1922)

34

clear—and prescient. Within a few
months, Kristallnacht would wreak
havoc on Germany’s Jewish communities. In September 1939, the Nazis
invaded Poland, and Europe—and
later the world—was plunged into
war.
Einstein was just one of the many
refugees who made immeasurable
contributions at institutes, labs,
colleges, and universities around
the United States. Together, they
not only advanced their fields but
changed the very nature of what
was considered “American” scholarship and culture.
Some of them came to Swarthmore.
They became some of the most
respected and accomplished professors the College has ever had on its
faculty. Mostly Jewish, they shared
a common, if loosely knit, bond with
each other. Some became longtime
campus fixtures; others arrived late
in their careers and stayed only a
short time. One even inspired a
work of fiction.
All made lasting connections
with their students.

WALTER HOLT

OSTWALD (HERE CA. 1970) BECAME AN INTERNATIONALLY
RECOGNIZED CLASSICAL SCHOLAR, KNOWN FOR HIS ABILITY TO COMBINE RIGOROUS STUDY OF LANGUAGE WITH
BROAD INTERESTS THAT INCLUDE HISTORY, POLITICS,
POETRY, AND MATERIAL CULTURE.

DECEMBER 2002

“I can’t forget about
the past, but I also
know the past is
largely gone. Of
what dregs remain,
people must cleanse
themselves in their
own way.”

35

In 1941, both Ostwald parents were sent to the Theresienstadt
(Terezin) concentration camp, where his father died in 1943 and was
buried by Leo Baeck, the last chief rabbi in Germany. “On Oct. 18,
1944, my mother was sent to Auschwitz,” he says. “That’s the last we
know of her.”

A

fter escaping from Germany—on a passport stamped J, which
he still has—Ostwald’s path to America took several years, over
anything but a straight line. In fits and starts, he even managed to
continue his education. In England, he lived at a Ramsgate hostel,
which had been rented by a group of Jewish doctors to provide
housing and English lessons for refugee children—one of the many
selfless acts to which Ostwald attributes his education. Once the
war began, he was forced to move to decidedly worse conditions at a
farm school in Oxfordshire. Later, after Germany invaded France in
May 1940, a stint as an apprentice waiter in Bournemouth ended
when he was interned, not unhappily, by the British government.
Shipped to the Isle of Man, then to Canada, Ostwald arrived in
Quebec City on July 14, 1940: Bastille Day. He was 18. Ostwald did
not see his brother, who remained in England, again until several
years after the war.
Ostwald spent two years in refugee camps. Fellow internees
started a camp school, where he resumed his education and also
taught Greek and Latin. Students were excused from some camp

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

He had vowed never to return
to Germany: “One doesn’t
know whose hand one shakes.”

36

work but not all. While working toward his high school certificate,
Ostwald also made camouflage netting and knitted socks for the army.
With the backing of a Jewish fraternity, the University of Toronto
accepted him and about 20 others from the camp. To assuage
trustees worried about “enemy aliens” studying on campus while
the country was at war, the group trained, in uniform, in the school’s
Canadian Officer Training Corps.
After Toronto, Ostwald enrolled at the University of Chicago’s
Committee on Social Thought, where he wrote a master’s thesis on
the treatment of the Orestes myth in Greek tragedy. In Chicago, he
met his wife, Lore, also a German refugee; in 1952, he earned a Ph.D.
from Columbia University.
Ostwald taught at Wesleyan University for one year and at
Columbia for seven before Centennial Professor Emerita of Classics
Helen North, now his neighbor, recruited him to Swarthmore. He
recalls fondly his colleagues’ friendly reception on his arrival and
the “warm, family atmosphere” at Crum Ledge Lane.
At Swarthmore, Ostwald taught honors seminars that combined
Germanic philological rigor with a relaxed, conversational style. He
also benefited from an unusual joint appointment with the University of Pennsylvania, which allowed him to continue research on
fifth-century Athens with Penn graduate students, maintaining this
dual role for 20 years. He published widely, and his magnum opus,
From Popular Sovereignty to the Sovereignty of Law, in which he exam-

ined the political and social tensions within ancient Athens, has
been praised as an indispensable work of political, social, and cultural history.
In an even greater testament to his influence, Ostwald also drew
generations of students to careers in classics. “There is no question
that Martin was the person I wanted to emulate as a scholar,” says
Ralph Rosen ’77, a professor of classical studies at the University of
Pennsylvania. “His interests are amazingly broad within the field of
classics. He showed that the real reward of getting good at reading
Greek and Latin came when one asked the ‘big’ questions about
antiquity that still resonate with us today.”
On Ostwald’s retirement in 1992, Rosen solicited and co-edited
more than 40 critical essays from his mentor’s former students and
colleagues for Nomodeiktes: Greek Studies in Honor of Martin Ostwald.
Ostwald’s additional honors include some of academia’s most
esteemed: president of the American Philological Association; election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; member of the
American Philosophical Society; and an honorary degree from the
University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Yet none required the soul
searching that would be asked of him in Dortmund in fall 2001.

I

had vowed never to go back, never to set foot on German soil
again,” says Ostwald. “One doesn’t know whose hand one
shakes.” Despite this aversion, he had made occasional trips over
the years, including an emotional return with his two grown sons to
his family’s ancestral village, Sichtigvor, where he was reunited with
long-lost childhood friends.
Yet it was his first trip back, in 1966, that may have led him to
return in such a public capacity last fall. On sabbatical in Greece, he
took a side trip to visit two former Columbia professors, both German and then living in Munich. “One was so thoroughly admirable
it was almost unreal,” he says. “He felt it was his duty to go back
and educate young Germans.” It was a lesson Ostwald would emulate more than 30 years later.
In 2001, seemingly out of the blue, the University of Dortmund
offered him an honorary doctorate for his achievements in cultural
history. Flattered as he was, Ostwald says he could not suppress the
thought that the invitation would not have been extended had he
not been a hometown Jew. Receiving assurances he had been selected before his heritage had been investigated, he accepted—on the
condition that he could meet informally with a group of students
and find out firsthand what they knew about the Nazi period.
This meeting with several dozen students, who peppered him
with questions about his past, was the clear highlight of a trip that
also included a visit to his old school. “They understood when I told
them I sympathized with them for the terrible burden they had to
bear for the shame their immediate ancestors had put on a once
great and respectable nation,” he says.
It may have taken a lifetime, but Ostwald says he has come to
terms with his past. “My personal experiences show me,” he says,
“how human beings are capable not only of degrading and dehumanizing themselves and their fellow men but also that people have
the potential to achieve greatness by creating monuments in art, literature, philosophy, and social justice that constitute the values of
civilized life. In my case, the Greeks have shown the way, and it is
their heritage that I have tried to pass on to my students.”

C

u
Hilde Cohn

lever, charming,
utterly devoted
to her students but
also tough, intense,
even “a holy terror.”
Those who knew and loved her use these words to describe Hilde
Cohn, who taught German language and literature at Swarthmore
for more than 25 years.
Cohn was born in Görlitz, a town on the German-Polish border.
Her childhood visits to the opera in nearby Dresden instilled a lifelong love of the art, and after studying literature and fine arts, she
earned a doctorate magna cum laude from the University of Heidelberg in 1933.
As a young woman, Cohn wrote essays for Jewish youth organizations and cultural articles for Berlin’s Vossische Zeitung. She also
published a study on the Jewish woman in medieval Germany,
taught German Jewish children in a Florentine boarding school,
and worked as a librarian at the American Academy in Rome.
But life as she knew it did not last. Cohn was living with her
family when her father was first arrested around 1935 (when her
sister and brother-in-law left Germany for Italy, later settling in the
United States) and taken into “protective custody.” In a 1994 interview, she said: “To us, that is not a good term.” He was released
soon after, but it was a sign of the worst still to come.

In 1937, Cohn became the first in her family to come to America.
She did so on the advice of Hertha Kraus, a member of Bryn Mawr
College’s social work faculty and also a Jewish refugee. By Cohn’s
count, Kraus helped “hundreds of people like me.” In her case,
Kraus encouraged her to teach German, saying she would not know
much about her language until she did. When a position to teach
introductory German opened at Bryn Mawr, she took it. More than
50 years later, she still had the pay stub (for $300) for her first
American job.
But Cohn’s parents had remained in Germany. Soon after arriving in the United States, she received word that her father had
died—or was killed (she never learned the details)—in Buchenwald. Cohn’s mother managed to escape on the last boat to Italy
and followed Cohn to the United States. The Nazis later used her
family’s home, which her father had built, for offices.
Cohn taught at Bryn Mawr for 10 years before joining Swarthmore’s German Department in 1948. At Swarthmore, Cohn mentored the German club and developed a strong following among
her students. “She wanted her students to succeed and would give
them as much time as was needed,” says Betty-Barbara Smart, a
longtime friend. “She loved her subject and wanted them to love it,
too.”
Cohn could also be serious, almost to a fault. “She saw no reason why I—an American who came to German at 20—didn’t read

COHN IS REMEMBERED FOR HER PASSION FOR ART AND MUSIC AND HER LOVE
OF THE WORKS OF THE AUSTRIAN WRITER HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL.

[Thomas] Mann in the original German,” Smart laughs.
After she retired in 1975, Cohn maintained a steady presence in
Swarthmore by attending lectures and classes on campus and volunteering in the town’s library. “She thought of her life as a continuing intellectual journey,” says Thompson Bradley, professor emeritus of Russian. “That kept her intellectually young.”
Cohn is remembered for her tremendous passion for art and
music, her well-cut suits, and her love of the works of Hugo von
Hofmannsthal, an Austrian poet, dramatist, and essayist. Her
friends could expect a poem in English and German on their birthdays. For this woman who never married and lived alone much of
her adult life, these relationships meant the world.

S

u
Wolfgang Köhler

tudying psychology under Köhler is like studying
religion under
god”—at least that’s
how the Halcyon once put it. But for Köhler, hyperbole was hardly
needed. His reputation as a founder of Gestalt psychology and
dominant figure in the field was already well established before he
came to Swarthmore.
The son of German parents, Köhler was born in the port city of
Revel [now Tallinn] in Estonia, then a Russian province. After
attending the Gymnasium (academic high school) in Wolfenbüttel,
he studied at the universities of Tübingen, Bonn, and Berlin and
received a Ph.D. in 1909 for a dissertation on psycho-acoustics.
In its early days, experimental psychology was “all very romantic” to the young Köhler, as it was filled, he imagined, with labs,
experiments, and dramatic discoveries. He continued his auditory
research as an assistant and lecturer at the Psychological Institute
at the University of Frankfurt, where he met Kurt Koffka and Max
Wertheimer. Together, their work launched the Gestalt movement,
based on the belief that perception is best understood as an organized pattern rather than as separate parts.
In 1913, Köhler became director of a primate research facility

(1887–1967)

DECEMBER 2002

“She wanted her students to
succeed and would give them
as much time as was needed.”

FRIENDS HISTORICAL LIBRARY

(1909–2001)

37

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

Köhler helped put Swarthmore
on America’s intellectual map.

38

Frank Aydelotte to offer him a position. The result: Köhler came
that year and, with MacLeod, built the department by attracting as
research associates names now familiar in the field, including
Henle, Karl Duncker, and Hans Wallach. The latter two had been
his assistants in Germany.
“He was very good about helping his younger colleagues,” Henle
says. “We would show him papers we were preparing for publication. He even made our English better. He once inserted a sentence
in a paper of mine, then quoted the sentence and attributed it to
me.”
At Swarthmore, Köhler was also known for his intellectually
exhausting seminars and for his deadly serious approach to his
research. In a 1976 interview, Wallach described one perception
experiment, related to figural aftereffects, in which Köhler, as the
subject, had two electrodes fastened to the back of his head.
Kohler, sitting in front of a complex pattern, expected to see it
change shape as the current passed through his head. Not seeing
any change, he encouraged his assistant to turn the current higher,
ultimately past the safe limit. At that point, Wallach fell ill and left
the room. Köhler, meanwhile, never saw the pattern distort.
“He stopped the experiment when half of his visual field turned
dark,” Wallach said. “For the next week, he looked awful. He suf-

FRIENDS HISTORICAL LIBRARY

maintained by the Prussian Academy of Sciences on Tenerife, the
largest of the Canary Islands. There, he applied Gestalt principles
to study chimpanzees and recorded their ability to devise and use
tools and solve problems. Effectively interned there with his family
during World War I, he used the time productively. In 1917, he published and gained fame with The Mentality of Apes, in which he
argued that his subjects, like humans, were capable of insight learning. His work led to a radical revision of learning theory.
Köhler returned to Germany in 1921 as head of the Psychological Institute and professor of philosophy at the University of
Berlin, where he continued to explore and write about Gestalt theory. At the same time, he publicly responded to the country’s changing political situation by writing, in April 1933, what became the
last anti-Nazi article openly published in Germany under national
socialism. Speaking of his friends who had not joined the Nazi
movement, he wrote: “Never have I seen finer patriotism than
theirs.” Köhler, who was not Jewish, went on to name several influential and respected scholars—including philosopher Benedict
(Baruch) de Spinoza and physicists Heinrich Hertz and James
Franck—who were, as he noted, all Jewish.
Köhler’s independence did not go unnoticed. “The Nazis invaded his institute,” says New School University Professor Emerita of
Psychology Mary Henle. “It was a very close-knit group, and they
hired and fired people without consulting him.”
Conditions deteriorated further. By 1935, Robert MacLeod, who
as a young researcher had studied at Köhler’s institute in the
1920s, was chair of Swarthmore’s Psychology Department. Learning of Köhler’s untenable situation, he prevailed on President

WOLFGANG KÖHLER (LEFT) WAS ONE OF MANY NON-JEWISH SCHOLARS
FORCED FROM EUROPE BY THE FASCISTS. HE WAS SOON JOINED AT
SWARTHMORE BY HIS FORMER RESEARCH ASSOCIATE, HANS WALLACH
(RIGHT), WHO LATER BECAME PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY AND A LEADING
PROPONENT OF GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY.

fered tremendous headaches and feared he had done permanent
damage to his brain. But there were no long-lasting ill effects.”
Köhler received numerous honors throughout his career, including the American Psychological Association’s first Distinguished
Scientific Contribution Award. He later served as the organization’s
president. He also spent a year as a member of the Institute for
Advanced Study at Princeton University and was a research professor at Dartmouth College. He died in New Hampshire in 1967.
After Köhler retired from Swarthmore, the College awarded him
an honorary doctorate in sciences, one of many he received. The
citation acknowledged his status as an innovator, discoverer, and
scientist of “the first rank” and as a “broad humanistic scholar who
is informed in history, politics, the arts, and philosophy and who
uses all to further his insights into the human mind.” Dean
William Prentice also described him as “a cherished colleague … in
many fields and many lands, he is also a warm and loyal friend of
students and fellow Swarthmoreans without number.”

F

u
Hans Wallach

or more than
50 years, Hans
Wallach—a major
contributor to the
field of visual and
auditory perception and learning—was one of the most distinguished members of the Swarthmore community. That he ever
arrived was as much a fluke as Wolfgang Köhler’s arrival the year
before.
Born in Berlin, Wallach joined the University of Berlin’s Institute of Psychology, then the center of Gestalt Psychology, as a 22year-old research assistant for Köhler, a role he would also play at

(1904–1998)

Wallach had no doubt about his
likely fate had he stayed in
Germany: “I would be dead.”
his work as a research associate until 1987.
In that time, Wallach firmly established his reputation for brilliant scholarship and an inspirational, decidedly eccentric style. He
drove a jalopy and called people “darling.” He chain smoked during
his seminars, often getting so immersed in thought that he would
hold his Camels as they burned to the ends. And he paced.
“You could go to Hans with a question,” says his former student
and colleague Dean Peabody III ’49. “He’d pace in his office, into
the hall, and disappear. Then, he might come back in a half hour.”
Thompson Bradley, new to the Russian faculty in the 1960s,
remembers how Wallach used to walk with his hands tucked
behind his belt, flat against his stomach. “He’d often come to your
office door, ask a question, then walk away,” he says. “A day later,
he’d come back and ask, ‘So, what do you think about that?’”
But despite his immersion in his work, Wallach could be surprisingly interested in life’s nonacademic aspects. “When I was
deciding whether to go to graduate school in French or in psychology,” says his former student Johanna Mautner Plaut ’59, “Hans
Wallach told my father [Franz Mautner] that he worried that if I
chose French, I’d have less chance of finding a husband. I was both

touched and amused that such a serious, famous scholar would
even think about my marriage prospects.”
Wallach won numerous awards and fellowships during his
career, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Howard Cosby
Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists. In
1986, he was elected to the National Academy of Science. His
research on perceptual adaptation advanced the field’s understanding of the role of learning in the perceptual process. He is also credited with discovering the basic psychological principle that makes
stereophonic reproduction possible.
In 1991, a fellowship was established in Wallach’s honor to support a summer research project in psychology by a Swarthmore student. Many of his colleagues and former students contributed to
the creation of the prize.
Although known primarily for his work in perception, Wallach
thought the subject had been explored enough. So he began to
study memory. Ironically, he thought his own was not so good:
“I always say: ‘Half of creativity consists in forgetting what one
thought about the matter before.’ So a bad memory may be an aid
to creativity. I think I never had a very good memory. You can
always make a virtue out of a shortcoming.”

T

u
Olga Lang

he Russian Revolution. The rise
of fascism in Berlin.
Japan’s invasion of
China. The Nuremberg trials. Communist witch-hunts in the United States. Olga
Lang witnessed enough major events in the first half of the 20th
century to last several lifetimes. Then, she came to Swarthmore.
Like her fellow émigrés, Lang brought to the College a broad cultural knowledge. “Olga by memory knew almost all of Russian
poetry,” says her colleague Thompson Bradley. “You could give her
a line, and she would recite the whole poem. She was the quintessential Russian intelligentka.”
But unlike other émigré colleagues, Lang never received tenure
and was never promoted to full professor. Her time at Swarthmore
was by far the shortest of any of them.
“Of all the émigrés on the faculty, the most interesting—and
most difficult—was Olga,” says her friend Martin Ostwald. “She
knew and published a lot and was a wonderful and dedicated
teacher. But she never received the recognition she deserved.”
“She needed senior faculty to fight for her,” Bradley agrees,
“though most did not recognize her true gifts or her scholarship.
She was small, had a pronounced accent, and she often was treated
with condescension. It was easier to dismiss her or find her comical
than find out who she really was or what she lived through.”
Lang was born to a Jewish socialist family in Ekaterinoslav, Russia (a large industrial city, now Dnepropetrovsk, in eastern Ukraine).
She studied Russian and European history and literature at the
elite Women’s University in Petrograd during World War I and
became an activist member of the Left Socialist Revolutionary
Party, witnessing the 1917 revolution.
After further study at Moscow University, Lang worked for the
Central Council of Trade Unions and later moved to Berlin in 1927

(1898–1992)

DECEMBER 2002

Swarthmore. “I had enormous luck,” he said in a 1976 Bulletin
interview. “[W]e did a lot of different things that year. No publications resulted, but I learned a lot.”
After working with Köhler for a year, Wallach continued his own
experiments on perceptual phenomena at the institute. When the
Nazis came to power in 1933, the institute’s administration advised
him to complete a Ph.D. as quickly as possible. He did the next
year—barely. As he wrote in a memoir: “Being Jewish, I knew that I
had eventually to leave Germany and had better hurry getting my
Ph.D. [N]ot well prepared, I took my orals. I shall never forget the
kindness of [two professors] who, aware of my precarious situation, allowed me to pass.”
Soon after, Köhler, who had previously told Wallach he would
see to it that he would get to America, invited his former assistant
to join him at Swarthmore. He arrived in 1936 but did not teach
until he became an instructor after the war. “The research associates did no teaching,” he said. “Being asked to teach a course at
Swarthmore has never been a casual matter.”
Had he not followed Köhler to the United States, Wallach had
no doubts about his likely fate. “If I had not been Jewish and I had
made the mistake of staying in Germany, I would be dead,” he said.
“All of my friends who stayed behind were of draft age and were
killed on the Russian front. That’s where I would [have been], if I
had stayed. Somewhere dead in Russia.”
At Swarthmore, Wallach progressed through the ranks and was
named a full professor in 1953. He chaired the department from
1957 to 1965 when he was named Centennial Professor of Psychology. Wallach retired from the active faculty in 1975 but continued

39

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

COURTESY OF THOMPSON BRADLEY

with her husband, a German doctor. As a reporter covering German
labor and politics for the Soviet labor journal Trud, she interviewed
workers and attended (sometimes taking part in) strike meetings
and conventions. She also joined the German Communist Party. In
1932, a collection of her “sketches” was published in Moscow as
Images of German Workers.
By the time Hitler became chancellor in 1933, Lang was part of
the radical left intellectual world in Berlin along with her second
husband, Karl August Wittfogel, then an outspoken critic of the
Nazis. Swastikas in neighbors’ windows became more frequent, as
did attacks on Communists in their homes. After their apartment
was raided, the couple went into hiding. Lang developed then what
would become a lifelong predilection for public telephones, terrified
as she was of being overheard by Nazi police if she used her own.
Later that year, Wittfogel was arrested while trying to leave the
country and sent to a prison camp. Lang pushed for his release over
the next eight months, even, with her strongly accented German,
appealing in person to SS officials at Gestapo headquarters. Her
efforts succeeded, and the couple fled first to England, then China.
(Wittfogel later renounced communism. In 1951 testimony
before a McCarthy-era House subcommittee on internal security, he
named Lang—by then his ex-wife—along with several of his former friends and colleagues.)
In China, Lang immersed herself in the culture and learned to
speak and write the language. She also met Ida Pruitt, an American
social worker whose files from the Peking Union Medical College

40

OLGA LANG’S SWARTHMORE COLLEAGUE PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF RUSSIAN
THOMPSON BRADLEY SAID OF HER GENERATION OF EMIGRE INTELLECTUALS:
“IT WAS A RICH CULTURE AND A WONDERFUL, COSMOPOLITAN WORLD THEY
BROUGHT WITH THEM. AT SWARTHMORE, WE WERE THE FORTUNATE BENEFICIARIES. WHEN ONE OF THEM DIED, IT WAS AS IF NOT JUST A PERSON HAD
GONE—BUT A WHOLE WORLD.” BRADLEY IS FAR RIGHT IN THIS PHOTOGRAPH, WHICH ALSO INCLUDES (LEFT TO RIGHT) LANG; THE LATE COLLEGE
LIBRARIAN MICHAEL DURKAN; AND IDA PRUITT, WHO LANG HAD FIRST MET
IN CHINA DURING THE 1930 S .

“Of all the émigrés on
the faculty, the most
interesting—and most
difficult—was Olga.”
Hospital, where she was head of social services, helped form the
basis of Lang’s Chinese Family and Society, published in 1946.
After Japan invaded China in 1937, Lang came to America, where
during World War II she helped prepare soldiers for service in Asia
as part of the Army Specialized Training Program. She also helped
compile and edit a dictionary of spoken Russian. After the war, she
worked for the newly formed United Nations and as an interpreter
and researcher at the Nuremberg trials.
In 1951, Lang began graduate studies at Columbia University
and received a Ph.D. in Chinese and Japanese. She became an
expert on Pa Chin, an anarchist writer popular among Chinese students in the 1930s and 1940s. Her dissertation Pa Chin: Chinese
Youth in the Transnational Period was followed by her 1967 book Pa
Chin and His Writing: Chinese Youth Between the Two Revolutions.
Although by then at Swarthmore, Lang never taught Chinese at the
College because, despite her efforts, no program existed. (Swarthmore offered its first year of Chinese language in 1981.)
Lang eschewed small talk and rarely spoke of her personal life.
Yet she relished discussions of theater, politics, and Russian history
and literature. After a dinner party Lang gave for a Soviet bureaucrat in the writers’ union who spoke on campus in 1964, she and
her guests peppered the official with questions. According to
Thompson Bradley, also in attendance: “Olga Lamkert (see box. p. 41)
wanted to know about everything happening in the Russian church;
Helen Shatagin wanted to know about the [Smolny Institute], which
after 1917 had become the Communist Party headquarters; Olga wanted to know about trade unions, people in cultural affairs, how the university was organized, and most of all about the writers and poets.”
Bradley was amazed by what followed. “When he couldn’t
answer any of their questions,” he says, “they gave him a stern
political, historical, and cultural history of Russia and the Soviet
Union since the beginning of the century. He was flabbergasted.”
Lang always kept an apartment in New York, and, after retiring
from Swarthmore, she returned to Columbia as an adjunct associate professor of Russian. She continued her research on ChineseRussian cultural relations and remained affiliated with the university until 1985. She then moved to a nursing home in the city,
where she died in 1992. Her death went unnoticed by the College,
which continued to send her mail for another year, until a former
neighbor included the news in a returned invitation.
Although Lang may have not received the respect she deserved
from Swarthmore, “she did get lifelong recognition from her students,” Bradley says, “and she should have. They loved her.”
“She was a mensch,” says Ostwald, “a civilized human being.”

E

u
Franz Mautner

nveloped by language” is how
one former Swarthmore student
described Franz Mautner, who taught German language and literature at the College
from 1955 to 1972. But he was not simply a Germanist. For Mautner, “Greek and Latin were among the celestial bodies that wandered the heavens of literature.”
Born in Vienna, Mautner studied at the University of Heidelberg in Germany and at the University of Vienna, where he received
a Ph.D. in German language and literature in 1926. At that time in
Austria, Jews were prevented from teaching at the university level,
so Mautner and his wife, who were both Jewish, taught at
Gymnasia. But within days of Hitler’s occupation of Austria in 1938,
both were dismissed from their positions.
Even at that early point in his career, Mautner demonstrated his
ability to make strong connections with his students. According to
his daughter Johanna Mautner Plaut ’58, one of her father’s Gymnasium students “courageous[ly]” wrote to him not long after his
dismissal to thank him for his teaching and for giving him an
appreciation of the German language. The letter touched him
deeply, and he wrote in his reply:
“Amidst the worries and suffering that have come to me and my
fellow teachers, it is a consolation for me that my life’s work—to
convey to others my love for the German language—has not been

in vain.… But I do not want to burden you with the historical
events that have come to you, that must be seen as the intertwined
consequences of deep-rooted historical and intellectual developments…. Your letter did me a great deal of good. I, too, will never
forget you.”
After the war, the student tracked his former professor down
through the Red Cross, and they developed a deep friendship.
With the help of his older brother, a bank economist in Amsterdam, Mautner and his family left Europe in July 1938, when daughter Johanna was 1 1/2 years old. He and his family went to the United States, and his mother, other brother, and two sisters went to
London. But the brother stayed in Amsterdam. “When Holland
was occupied,” Plaut says, “my uncle was tragically sent to the
camps, first Terezin and then Auschwitz, where he was killed.”
After arriving in the United States in 1938, Mautner taught at a
number of colleges, including Ohio Wesleyan and Kenyon. In 1955,
Plaut’s sophomore year, he arrived at Swarthmore. “It was exactly
the right place for him,” she says. “In his later years, he would often
say how lucky he was to have come. He particularly appreciated
Swarthmore’s Quaker values and the quality of the students.”

MAUTNER PLAYED WAITER AT A DORMITORY DINNER AT OHIO WESLEYAN
UNIVERSITY IN 1947. HIS WIFE, HEDI (RIGHT), LAUGHS AS HE JOKES WITH
THEIR DAUGHTER, JOHANNA MAUTNER PLAUT ’58.

During his distinguished career, Mautner wrote more than 50
articles and six books and edited 10 more, all on German literature.
His critical works on three writers in particular—18th-century German physicist and aphorist Georg Lichtenberg; 19th-century Austrian satirical playwright Johann Nestroy; and Karl Kraus, an early
20th-century Austrian satirist—are credited with helping raise
them from relative obscurity to prominence in the German-speaking world.
Honors followed, including his election to the German Academy
for Language and Literature in 1977, a rare honor for scholars not
living in Germany or Austria. He also received the Cross of Honor,
First Class, for Merit in Arts and Letters in 1969 from the Austrian
government and, later, a silver medal from the City of Vienna.
Mautner never commented on the irony.
“My father was a real gentleman, even in his very old age,” Plaut
says. “He preserved his European chivalry.” Thompson Bradley
offered an example of this at Mautner’s memorial service at the
Swarthmore Friends Meetinghouse. “I learned the word ‘colleague’
from Franz,” he says. “When I received tenure, he was the only person who wrote me a letter to congratulate and welcome me as his
colleague.”
Mautner surely embodied the word. Says Bradley: “He looked
and always behaved like the fine, principled, European scholar that
he was.” T

Other refugees who found
homes at Swarthmore

Source references and additional photographs of the émigré professors featured in this article may be found at the Bulletin Web site:
www.swarthmore.edu/bulletin/dec02. Also on the Web are biographical sketches of five additional émigrés who taught at Swarthmore:
Elisa Asensio, Oleksa-Myron Bilaniuk,Tatiana Manooiloff Cosman,
Olga Lamkert, and Helen Shatagin. Readers may contribute reminiscences of these and other émigré professors to the Web site.

DECEMBER 2002

“Swarthmore was exactly
the right place for him. He
would often say how lucky he
was to have come.”

BRELSFORD/COURTESY OF JOHANNA MAUTNER PLAUT

(1902–1995)

41

ERIC SALATHE JR. ʼ87

ALUMNI DIGEST

Connections

A GROUP OF SEATTLE-AREA ALUMNI ARRANGED FOR A NATURALIST-GUIDED LOW-TIDE WALK ALONG
PUGET SOUND IN AUGUST. CONNECTION CHAIR DEBORAH READ ’87 ORGANIZED THE EVENT.

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

RECENT EVENTS

42

COUNCIL MAKES APPOINTMENTS
TO COLLEGE COMMITTEES

Boston: Stephanie Hirsch ’92 is the new
chair of the Boston Connection. We welcome Stephanie and thank outgoing chair
Leah Gotcsik ’97 for her service. After a
planning meeting, this Connection really
got moving. Kevin Chu ’72 invited Swarthmore alumni to his Cape Cod home for a
weekend in September. Julia Trippel ’02
arranged for paddling on the Charles River,
and David Wright ’69 hosted a picnic at his
home in Wellesley in early October.
Los Angeles: We are delighted to announce
that David Lang ’54 is our new Connection
chair in the Los Angeles area. David and his
wife, Mary Jo, are in the process of making
plans for several events in the spring.
In August, Jonathan Fewster ’92 and 12
classmates ran the Hood to Coast, a 196mile relay. The Oregon relay begins at Timberline Lodge at 6,000 feet on Mount Hood
and ends in Seaside on the Pacific Ocean.
Alumni flew in from Djarkarta, Indonesia;
Washington, D.C.; and Mongolia to participate in the relay, which they finished in 24
hours and 36 minutes.
Philadelphia: More than 50 Swarthmore
alumni and friends attended a private tour
of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Kimmel
Center in October. Associate Professor of
Engineering Carr Everbach discussed the
acoustics and sound equipment in the performing arts center.

Triangle (N.C.) Connection: With the help
of Connection Chair George Telford III ’84,
Nancy Shoemaker ’71 hosted several alumni
at her home for a wine-and-cheese party
and discussion of the College with Director
of Alumni Relations Lisa Lee ’81 and Alumni Council Representative Julia Knerr ’81.

UPCOMING EVENTS
From April 27–29, 2003, alumni are invited
to attend a retreat at Coolfont Recreation
Resort, less than two hours from Washington, D.C., near Berkeley Springs, WVa.
Stephen Bayer, the College’s assistant director of planned giving, will discuss how you
can benefit financially by supporting the
College. Alumni may attend at a substantially discounted rate, and members of the
Class of ’37 will attend free of charge as the
guests of Coolfont founder Sam Ashelman
’37. For more information, call (800) 8888768, and ask for the “Swarthmore Retreat.”
Philadelphia: The Connection will host a
Young Alumni get-together in February at
Buffalo Billiards. Also planned is a tour of
Carpenter Hall on March 8, with a talk by
Henry Magaziner, a renowned architect and
historical preservationist.
Pittsburgh: The Pittsburgh Connection
hosts informal luncheons on the third
Thursday of every month at the HYP Pittsburgh Club. Contact Barbara Sieck Taylor
’75 at (412)243-8307 or btaylo@verizon.com.

The Alumni Council has appointed two
alumni to current College committees.
Michael Davidson ’91 has joined the LandUse Planning Committee, which is charged
with looking at the long-term land use
needs and policies of the College. Davidson
is an attorney with Duane, Morris & Heckscher in Philadelphia.
In addition, Scheryl Williams Glanton
’74 is a member of the Parrish Hall Renovation Committee, which is helping to plan
the upcoming renovation of Parrish Hall.
Glanton, an entrepreneur, is proprietor of
Country Elegance in Philadelphia.

UPDATE YOUR E-MAIL ADDRESS
Does the College have your current e-mail
address? E-mail saves time, money, and
trees! In return, you can communicate with
your classmates, which is especially important for reunion; receive notices regarding
Connection events and faculty lectures in
your area; receive a quarterly e-newsletter;
and help the College save money on paper
and postage. Please keep your Swarthmore
Connection strong. Send your name and email address to alumnirecords@swarthmore.edu if it is new or has been changed in
the last few years.

SPRING 2003
ALUMNI EVENTS
Lax Conference on
Entrepreneurship
April 6
Fa m i l y We e ke n d
April 11–13
Alumni Council Meeting
March 28–30
Alumni College Abroad
in Sicily
May 10–20
A l u m n i We e ke n d
June 6–8

SWARTHMORE AROUND THE WORLD

WORKING GROUP SEEKS
STRONGER RELATIONSHIPS
AMONG COLLEGE AND ALUMNI

ARABELLA CARTER AWARD
NOMINATIONS INVITED
Each year, the Alumni Council gives this
award to an alumnus/a who has made a significant contribution to his or her community but has not received public acclaim for
these efforts. If you know of an alum who
fits this description, please contact Tricia
Maloney in the Alumni Relations Office at
(610) 328-8404 or pmalone1@swarthmore.edu. Nominations must be received by
Jan. 31, 2003.

M

ore than 40 percent of the Class of 2003
chose to pursue foreign study while at
Swarthmore. Among this year’s students
studying abroad are (left to right) Sarah Frohardt-Lane ’03 (Nepal), Rasika Teredesai ’04
(Tibet or Nepal), Yasmin Khawja ’03 (Cuba),
Keisha Josephs ’04 (Australia), Ben Juhn ’03
(Spain), Phuong Bui ’04 (United Kingdom).
Seated in the front row are Rosa Bernard,
administrative coordinator in the Foreign
Study Office, and Steven Piker, professor of
anthropology and director of foreign study.
Study abroad can be daunting until stu-

dents get to know their way around in unfamiliar surroundings. One initiative of the
Alumni Council Student Support Working
group is facilitating their access to a knowledgeable resource: Swarthmore alumni.
Martha Rice Sanders ’77 and Susan Rico
Connolly ’78 worked with Piker and Bernard
to launch an ongoing project that matches
students studying abroad with alumni living
in that country who have volunteered to
serve as resources. If you are interested in
volunteering for this program, please contact
Bernard at rbernar1@swarthmore.edu.

EXTERN PROGRAM CONTINUES TO GROW

A

pproximately 200 students have
applied to participate in the January
2003 Extern Program, which is co-sponsored by the Alumni and Career Services
offices. Students work with or shadow
alumni and parent sponsors during winter
break. Many live during their externships
with alumni or parent host families. The
College salutes the efforts of the volunteer
coordinators of the program listed here and
many other alumni on the coordinating
committees.
Alumni and parents wishing to become
new hosts or sponsors for the 2004 Extern
Program, which is tentatively scheduled for
Jan. 12–16, should contact the Career Services Office at (610) 328-8352 or e-mail
extern@swarthmore.edu.

National coordinators
Cynthia Graae ’62
Nanine Meiklejohn ’68
Boston
Susan Turner ’60
George Caplan ’69
New York
Kimberly Nelson ’98
Philadelphia
Elizabeth Killackey ’86
Metro DC–Baltimore
Daniel Mont ’83
Vicki Bajefsky Fishman ’93
San Francisco
James DiFalco ’82
Nadja McNeil Jackson ’92

DECEMBER 2002

he Alumni Council’s Alumni Support
Working Group (ASWG) focuses on
strengthening the relationship between
alumni and the College. Led by co-chairs
George Telford III ’84 and Anna Orgera ’83,
the ASWG has developed several initiatives
to increase opportunities for communication with and among alumni. Their recent
projects include the following:
Advising the Alumni Relations Office on
improving the alumni Web site was a key
step to increase communication. ASWG discussions have been helpful in the redesign
of office’s Web pages. The new site includes
an Alumni Council section with highlights
of each council meeting, a suggestion made
by this working group.
In addition, the site provides lists and
descriptions of recent winners of the Arabella Carter Award. The Carter Award is an
opportunity for the College to celebrate an
alumnus or alumna who has devoted his or
her life to the service of others. Please see
the request for nominations following.
A subgroup of ASWG went even farther
in exploring communication via the Web.
Nick Jesdanun ’91, Vida Praitis ’88, and
David Wright ’69 analyzed the Web sites of
Swarthmore and of 15 other schools to generate new ideas and improvements. “I came
away from this survey impressed with the
enormous variety and complexity of information that people might want to know
about a college—and [new respect for] the
intellectual effort involved in organizing it
all on a Web site” Wright says.
Ongoing interests of the ASWG also
include support for regional Connections
and exploring opportunities for alumni
career networking activities.

TRICIA MALONEY

T

43

44

ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

CLASS NOTES

SA M A S H E L M A N ’ 3 7 R E C E N T LY H O S T E D B O S N I A N D I P L O M AT S AT C O O L F O N T R E S O R T.

N

estled in the mountains of Berkeley
Springs, W.Va., sits the pristine Coolfont Resort, a 1,300-acre wilderness
retreat just 90 minutes from Washington,
D.C. More than a recreational resort, Coolfont stands for nothing less than the philosophies of a man who has traversed the globe
in pursuit of his dream of “working toward a
better world.”
Sam Ashelman, owner of Coolfont, is a
former consultant for the State Department
as well as various American-based foundations. He has lived and worked in a total of
20 countries, offering advice to high-level
government officials along the way. He has
sat at the Dalai Lama’s feet and worked
under the Shah of Iran, the president of
Zambia, and a minister of India.
Ashelman’s travels were not without their
perils. He once came close to being deported
from Uganda, suspected of attempts to
organize a revolution. A trip to South Africa
to protest the country’s racial policies turned
desperate when South African officials
refused to let the plane of protesters land.
Short of fuel but with no choice but to
return whence they came, Ashelman and his
friends came within 50 feet of running out
of gas before landing safely. “I had reconciled that we were going to crash,” Ashelman
said of his close call. “But at least it was for a
good cause.”
Finally, the increasing uncertainty of living abroad became something Ashelman,
who has five children, including Peter ’62,
could no longer ignore. “Working in the
Middle East and Africa just became too dangerous,” he said. So when Ashelman fell in
love with a stately manor house (ca. 1912)
and the surrounding land during a West Virginia camping trip, he “made a ridiculous
offer of half of what they were asking.” It
was accepted, and, in 1977, the resort incorporated as “Coolfont RE+Creation” was
born.
“This is not a recreation place. It’s a
RE+Creation place for health and stress
relief,” Ashelman explained. “We hope that
when people leave, they will be re-created.”
To accomplish this goal, Coolfont has
become a center of health and wellness. One
of the largest massage centers on the East

SAM ASHELMAN OWNS
COOLFONT RESORT,
A 1,300-ACRE WILDERNESS RETREAT IN THE
BERKELEY SPRINGS,
W.VA., MOUNTAINS
LYNN SELDON

ALUMNI PROFILE
S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

48

Wo r k i n g Towa rd a B e t t e r Wo r l d

Coast, Coolfont is, according to Ashelman, a
place where tired and stressed individuals
come to heal by immersing themselves in the
beautiful natural surroundings. There, they
can soak in a Jacuzzi; hike through the wilderness; opt for a spa treatment; or enjoy the
drama, dance, and musical performances the
resort’s Coolfont Foundation has hosted for
33 years.
More than a simple spa resort, Coolfont
has come to stand as a center for social,
environmental, and international justice in
the midst of a West Virginia wilderness.
Ashelman, the man who counts such diverse
locales as Switzerland, Nepal, and Sri Lanka
among his favorite destinations, has not
forgotten his past as a global advocate for
social change. Instead, he has brought it with
him.
“We’ve always tried to attract good people here—people with idealism and people
who want to build a different kind of place
for human beings,” Ashelman said. A center

THAT HOSTS AN
INTERNATIONAL
CLIENTELE.

for environmental preservation, Coolfont
developed a state-of-the-art sewage system
that requires absolutely no energy input.
Ashelman is hoping that Coolfont, which
also has a solar-heated swimming pool and a
large organic garden, can serve as an oasis in
a country he feels has done poorly by the
environment. “What we’re doing in the
United States is terrible—we’re building
mountains of trash,” Ashelman said.
Ashelman, who has no plans to retire,
dreams of the day when Coolfont will be
known as “an international thinking and
problem center.” The resort recently hosted
diplomats from three different areas of
Bosnia, and Ashelman said the three groups
left West Virginia with a greater understanding of one another.
“I have always had this concern about
working toward a better world,” Ashelman
said. “Coolfont is just an expression of
that.”
—Elizabeth Redden ’05

J O N LY M A N ’ 7 7 E N J OY S T H E S C E N E R Y A N D S O C I A B I L I T Y O F BA L L O O N I N G .

H

ot-air balloonist Jon Lyman never
knows at the start of his journey
exactly where the wind will take him
or where he’ll land. But that’s the allure of
the sport for the 47-year-old Bedminster, N.J.,
resident.
“It’s beautiful. The earth just melts away.
But the real fun is meeting people. Balloonists have to be social because we need permission to land on someone’s property. You
never know who you’re going to meet,” said
Lyman, who has piloted his own balloon, the
“Painted Dragon,” for the last 12 years.
Lyman is a school psychologist at Mt.
Olive High School in Flanders, N.J. He
became interested in ballooning more than
two decades ago, after casually chatting with
a balloon pilot who later invited him on a
short ride. He was hooked after his first
200-foot flight.
In 1990, Lyman finally became a registered pilot and purchased his own balloon,
which he flies about 40 times year-round.
According to the Balloon Federation of
America, Lyman is one of about only 10,000
registered balloon pilots in the world. The
process for obtaining a ballooning license is
similar to that for a light plane or jetliner.
Balloonists must study weather, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations, and
balloon nomenclature. There is also a series
of training flights, and pilots eventually have
to pass a flight test with a FAA examiner on
board.
Besides the extensive piloting requirements, another deterrent to the sport may be
its price tag. The balloon alone costs
$25,000, and Lyman figures he has about
$50,000 invested in all his gear, including
the chase van that follows the balloon
on each flight. He’ll have to replace the balloon portion of his craft, called the envelope,
after about 400 flights.
Although ballooning can be peaceful and
breathtakingly beautiful, it can also be dangerous. Lyman attends safety-training courses each year to prepare for possible emergencies. One of the greatest hazards for a balloonist is to lose wind over power lines.
Once, Lyman had a close call with a helicopter that flew too close to his balloon, causing
the air to escape from his envelope. His bal-

ANGELA DOODY

ALUMNI PROFILE
S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

64

Following the Wind

JON LYMAN IS ONE OF ONLY 10,000 REGISTERED BALLOON PILOTS IN THE WORLD. ALTHOUGH BALLOONING IS
EXPENSIVE, HE ENJOYS THE TECHNICAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE SPORT.

loon dropped 400 feet in seconds.
“That’s the only time I’ve ever lain down
on the floor of my basket,” he said.
“You’re constantly thinking ahead. It’s
not like you can just get lost [in thought] up
there. From the beginning, you start thinking about where you might land and what’s
going on with the wind. There’s a lot of mental activity involved.”
The first recorded human balloon flight
occurred in Paris in 1783. In an effort to
appease the local farmers who were suspicious of the fiery objects descending from
the air, balloonists got in the habit of presenting the landowners with bottles of
champagne when they came down. The tradition continues today and is the favorite
aspect of Lyman’s ride.
“Neighbors gather to watch the balloon
come down. Kids chase it. A little girl pulls
on my pants leg and says, ‘My house is the
yellow one. Next time land in my yard.’”

On a recent flight near Whitehouse Station, N.J., Lyman touched down in a subdivision. A crowd immediately gathered
around the balloon as Lyman landed in a
yard where a family was barbecuing. When
his craft was safely moored and the chase
vehicle arrived, he jumped out and retrieved
an ice-cold bottle of champagne for homeowner Ginny Kinsman, who was thrilled to
see Lyman and his entourage.
“Wow, I’d heard about the bottles of
champagne, but I didn’t realize you still did
that,” Kinsman said, as she uncorked the
bottle to share with the ballooning party.
“Well, it’s a 100-year-old tradition. Who am
I to stop it?” Lyman asked.
“That’s why I love this sport,” said Lyman
after he packed up his balloon and headed
home in the chase vehicle. “It brings people
together. The more people who are involved,
the more fun you have.”
—Angela Doody

BOOKS & ARTS
S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

68

Undercover in the 13th Century
T H E T H I R D I N A S E R I E S O F M E D I E VA L M Y S T E R I E S F O L L O W S M O R E A D V E N T U R E S .

Alan Gordon ’81, A Death in the Venetian
Quarter, Minatour Books, 2002

the initial launch and kept the sack of
Constantinople at bay for three years …
three additional years of life for thou
sands of people … given the choice
between dying today and dying three
years from now, which would you prefer?
(p. 281)

A

lan Gordon’s A Death in the Venetian
Quarter is the third in a series of
medieval mysteries exploring the further adventures of Feste the Fool, whom you
may recall from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.
Feste, aka Theophilos, is a member of The
Fools Guild, the 13th-century equivalent of
Her Majesty’s Secret Service, with the mission to bring peace to and sustain prosperity in Europe and the Middle East. Feste is a
clever man, schooled in the arts of selfdefense, deception, and discretion. He is
also multilingual, well traveled, and enjoys
the rank in the jester of the guild. Married
to Viola, here called Aglaia, he has been her
hero, having solved the murder of her husband, the Duke of Orsino (you remember
him from Twelfth Night don’t you?) in Gordon’s first novel, Thirteenth Night. He has
been her master as she became an apprentice fool under him. Their first mission
together for the guild, revealed to us in Gordon’s second mystery of the series, Jester
Leaps In, took them to Constantinople to
prevent a planned fourth Crusade, thwart
the guild’s enemies, and stabilize the throne
of Byzantium.
And that is where we find them in the
third mystery—still in Constantinople.
There, Feste is approached by the eunuch
and power next to the throne Philoxenites,
“a large, bald man, a source of much ridicule
among the masses but … a wily, manipulative, ambitious schemer” who has a knack
for thriving no matter who sits on the
throne and now seeks Feste’s help in uncovering the murderer of an informant in the
Venetian quarter. Feste and Aglaia undertake the assignment, and thus a well-plotted
and delightfully Byzantine exploration of
neighborhoods is launched—the high, low,
and even underbelly of Constantinople—as
the Venetian siege begins. You will eagerly
pursue adventure with them as they pick
their ways through the political baffles and
conflicts that accompany the struggle to
control the Byzantine throne. The plot
unfolds through their alternating narratives;

A delightfully
Byzantine
exploration of the
high, low, and even
underbelly of
Constantinople.
through their agency, the Guild manages to
stave off the inevitable for a few more years:
Feste: When I look back at the Guild’s
efforts to stop the Fourth Crusade, I see
from the perspective of Time and old age
that it was impossible. But that is not to
say that we failed. A handful of men and
women in motley [condition] staved off

The pleasure I have taken from Gordon’s
series leads me to urge you to begin at the
beginning. Appealing to my taste and interest in pursuing stimulating escape routes,
magic is in all his pages. You will revel in the
delicious mix of history, fantasy, and fiction
plotted around crime solving and the higher
aims of the guild to be the agency for the
good—or at least the good order—of a
growing Christian world order spreading
from Venice to Constantinople.
I admire Gordon’s daring in creating a
sequel to a Shakespearean play and applaud
his discovery of this jester as a worthy central figure—to the ordinary imagination, an
unlikely hero. I have always been attracted
to Lear’s Fool but had overlooked Feste and
so have been moved to revisit Twelfth Night
and read all of Gordon as well. I am also
struck by Gordon’s successful evasion of the
formulaic, a peril to which all too many
authors fall prey when they seek to exploit
an initial success. Richly imaginative recreation of a world eight centuries gone, depiction of wit-ready protagonists, intriguing
plot turns, lively dialogue, and enough history to suggest authenticity, taken altogether, spirit our author and his readers past the
traps of familiarity and accurate anticipation
onto paths of surprise, astonishment, and
enlightenment.
Alan Gordon’s fourth novel in his
Medieval Mystery series (“The Widow of
Jerusalem,” St. Martin’s/Minotaur Books)
series will be published in March 2003. You
just have time to read the first three to whet
your appetite for it. Put them on your holiday lists; by 12th night, you’ll be well on
your way to a season of distraction as well
as an enlivening focus.
—Maurice G. Eldridge ‘61
Vice President for College and Community Relations and Executive Assistant to the President

OTHER BOOKS

Pamela Miller Ness ’72, The Hole in Buddha’s Heel, Swamp Press, 2002. This chapbook is a collection of 14 haiku and tanka
inspired by Buddhist works of art.

Richard Bradshaw Angell ’40, A-Logic, University Press of America, 2002. According to
Professor of Philosophy Hugh Lacey: “Modern logical theory presupposes that valid
inferences derive from logical form rather
than from the specific meanings of premises
and conclusions of an argument. Brad
Angell questions the fundamental logical
forms that usually are identified—offering
an alternative system of mathematical logic
proposed as better fitting arguments that we
actually deploy."

Lewis Pyenson ’69 and Jean-François Gauvin (eds.), The Art of Teaching Physics: The
Eighteenth-Century Demonstration Apparatus
of Jean Antoine Nollet, Septentrion, 2002.
This book explores Nollet’s life and work,
focusing on the instruments that he
designed and built to study physics.
Michael Seidman ’72, Republic of Egos, University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. This work
focuses on the personal and individual
experiences of common men and women in
the Spanish Civil War.

Valerie Worth (Balke) ’55; pictures by
Natalie Babbitt, Peacock and Other Poems,
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. This posthumous collection by the author—who
“brilliantly employs all aspects of the poet’s
craft,” according to The New York Times Book
Review—includes 26 gems about peacocks,
pandas, steam engines, onions, and icicles.

Philip John Davies SP and Paul Wells
(eds.), American Film and Politics From Reagan to Bush Jr., Manchester University Press,
2002. Focusing on the 1980s and 1990s,
11 authors from both sides of the Atlantic
explore central themes in American politics
and society through the films of that time.
W.D. Ehrhart ’73, The Madness of It All:
Essays on War, Literature and American Life,
McFarland & Co., 2002. “One of the great
poets and writers of nonfiction produced by
the Vietnam War,” according to The Nation,
offers 43 essays on subjects including war,
junk mail, the Internet, and small-town life.
Joshua Feinstein ’87, The Triumph of the
Ordinary: Depictions of Daily Life in the East
German Cinema, 1949–1989, The University
of North Carolina Press, 2002. Drawing on
archives and interviews with directors,
actors, and state officials, the author

CACTUS PEAR MUSIC FESTIVAL (TOP) IS FEATURED
ON THE WEB SITE WWW.CDBABY.COM/CPMF.
BEAUTY AND THE BOVINE: COWS IN PAINTING
(BOTTOM) WAS AN EXHIBIT OF ALI CROLIUS’ [’84]
NEW WORKS AT THE BURNETT GALLERY IN
AMHERST, MASS., DURING OCTOBER.

explores the cinematic portrayal of East
Germany, which changed because of national political developments and cultural trends
such as television and rock ’n’ roll.
Stover Jenkins ’75 and David Mohney, The
Houses of Philip Johnson, Abbeville Press Publishers, 2001. This work surveys the career
of architect Philip Johnson and includes
numerous plans, drawings, and photographs.
Joyce Milton ’67, The Road to Malpsychia:
Humanistic Psychology and Our Discontents,
Encounter Books, 2002. This work chronicles the impact of the human potential
movement on American culture, with portraits of key proponents such as psychologists Timothy Leary and Abraham Maslow
as well as anthropologists Margaret Mead
and Ruth Benedict.

Stephanie Dyrkacz Weidner ’98, Auch das
Schöne, Silver Lake Publishing, 2002. Opening with “Nänie (Song of Lamentation),
this work is in the voice of “a leader against
the evil which threatens our worlds again,”
continuing the fight for peace. Its sequel,
Amazing Grace, Silver Lake, 2002, begins
with “Amazing Grace: Traditional” and an
introduction comprising the life stories of
the “promised Messiah of Earth,” the “Freedom Fighters,” and “how we angered the
Warriors for Peace.”
Melanie (Kuhlman) Wentz ’80, Once Upon
a Time in Great Britain: A Travel Guide to the
Sights and Settings of Your Favorite Children’s
Stories, St Martin’s Press, 2002. The author,
a longtime teacher and administrator who
recently spent a year exploring England and
Scotland with her family, offers a practical
travel guide for discovering the real-life
places that inspired classic children’s tales.

COMPACT DISK
Gary Albright ’75, Cactus Pear Music Festival:
Live From the First Five, Cactus Pear Music
Festival, 2002. This compilation of the festival’s first five seasons begins with Brahms
and includes Mozart, Schubert, and Corelli.

DECEMBER 2002

Robin (Smith) Chapman ’64, Arborvitae,
Juniper Press, 2002. Two hundred copies of
this six-part poem about “the tree of life”
were originally handset and printed in May
2000. The Only Everglades in the World, Parallel Press, 2001. This collection of poems—
by the author of four previous works—
includes “Easy Days,” “Willingly,” and “The
Dolphin’s Smile.”

Persia Walker ’78, Harlem Redux: A Novel,
Simon & Schuster, 2002. Burdened by his
own secret, a young lawyer returns to
Harlem—where he explores both wealthy
salons and crowded tenements of the
poor—to understand his sister’s death.

69

C O R P O R AT E AT TO R N E Y TA N I S H A L I T T L E ’ 9 7 I S H A P P I E S T W I T H L OT S O F AC T I V I T Y.

T

anisha Little ’97 doesn’t do well with
down time. “It bores me. I like to go,
go, go and be right in the thick of
things,” she says. So the energetic political
science major decided in junior high school
that she wanted to become a corporate
lawyer.
Currently a junior attorney with the New
York City law firm of Stroock & Stroock &
Lavan LLP, Little delights in the fast-paced
environment, where she is often required to
make on-the-spot decisions, snap assessments or analyses, or provide quick answers
to unexpected questions from clients.
“Because of the way this job works,” she
says, “you can’t sit back and reflect for long.”
That’s just the way she likes it, and her highquality work and enthusiasm have already
reaped rewards—for both Little and her
clients.
Last January, the 27-year-old Little,
whose performance while collaborating with
partners and associates on other cases had
not gone unnoticed, was offered an opportunity that comes only rarely to a junior associate. She was selected to be lead attorney for a
$928 million public offering of capital securities for a well-known international bank.
When asked how she reacted to being
given the job, Little answered: “I was a little
shocked. I thought, ‘This is a really big deal.’
But I was also very excited.” Although a little
nervous about the case, she said, “Once I
started, that all sort of melted away, and it
was great.”
Engrossed in an assignment that
required an infallible sense of timing and
judgment, Little worked 12- to 14-hour days
throughout January, drafting and assembling about 50 weighty documents in preparation for closing the deal. Having collaborated earlier with associates and partners on
a similar transaction with the same client,
she was familiar with the material and was
also able to quiz her colleagues if necessary.
Of the vast amount of money concerned, she
said, “I tried not to look too hard at the dollar amounts because that can just bury you.”
In August, Little concluded another, similar deal, this time a smaller one, involving,
instead of 36 million shares, only 20 million. These days, she says, with the economy

DANIELLE SCHAEFER

ALUMNI PROFILE
S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

74

On the Go

CORPORATE ATTORNEY TANISHA LITTLE IS USED TO WORKING LONG HOURS. “IN REALLY INTENSE PERIODS, I START AROUND 9 OR 10 A.M., AND I’M HERE UNTIL BETWEEN 10 P.M. AND MIDNIGHT,” SHE SAYS.

on a roller-coaster, life is a little slower in the
corporate area, and so she works an average
of 10 hours a day—leaving more time for
downhill skiing, whacking the occasional
bucket of balls on the driving range, or cooking gourmet meals for friends.
Little’s success as a lawyer is due, she
says, in large part to her association with
two institutions: the McDonald’s franchise
one block from her home in Springfield,
Mass., where she worked part time when in
high school; and Swarthmore.
She credits McDonald’s with teaching
her how to interact with others. “People
tend to look down on McDonald’s workers,”
she says, “but it’s really good experience. I
gained a lot of customer service skills there.
As a lawyer, you’re in a service industry, and
you definitely need to be able to give clients
what they want. And it’s not just a case of
satisfying their legal requirements.”
Of Swarthmore, Little says: “That was
really where I learned to use and fine-tune
the assets I’m using now, the intellectual

curiosity, the need to question everything,
and the analytical skills. The challenges of
Swarthmore more than prepared me for law
school. I am the poster child for Swarthmore.
I love the school.”
Currently, Little is strengthening her
attachment to Swarthmore by serving as a
member of the College’s Board of Managers,
something she has dreamed of doing already
as a student. As she enters the second year
of her four-year term, she enjoys experiencing the College from a different perspective
from that of a student, seeing how Swarthmore operates, and interacting with the
other Managers—“amazing people,” she
says.
Yet, they are no more amazing than Little
herself. Her ability to speak clearly and articulately on the phone to satisfy her legal
clients was developed, she says, while serving “drive-through” customers via a loud
speaker coming out of Ronald McDonald’s
head.
—Carol Brévart-Demm

ERIC FELACK/VALLEY NEWS DISPATCH

A MARINE BIOLOGIST CHANGES DIRECTION.

By Jennifer Gross ’98

“AT LEAST FOR NOW, I HAVE TRADED MY
FLIP-FLOPS FOR HIGH HEELS,” GROSS SAYS.

CORBIS

IN MY LIFE

Sinking, Floating

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

S

76

ometimes, when I need an easy answer, I blame it all on Shamu.
Every summer, when I was a child, my dad would drive my
younger sister, Randi, and me to Sea World in Aurora, Ohio,
to watch the famous Orca whale perform. During the car trip home
to Pittsburgh, I used to imagine myself in a wetsuit with a microphone and bucket of raw fish, playing with whales and dolphins.
And that’s where the dream began.
Other childhood vacations were spent on the Outer Banks, the
barrier islands off mainland North Carolina. Randi and I would play
for hours in the tide pools carved by the Atlantic surf.
If my dad didn’t join us for a swim, he stood knee-deep in the
water as our lifeguard, imbuing in me a fearful respect for the
ocean’s strength through his own vigilance. We learned to float passively on our backs should we ever be trapped in a rip current. We
learned how to tell the difference between the dorsal fin of a shark
and that of its harmless, cartilaginous relative, the skate. The ocean
became more than a theme park. It was blustery, unpredictable, and
I was in love.

M

y love did not go unrequited for long. Danny and Judy, friends
of my mom, tired of the frantic pace of city life in Pittsburgh
and moved with their two children on to a 45-foot wooden cruiser
in the Florida Keys. When I was 12, my mom arranged for me to live
on board for three weeks to learn how to dive.
Every day in Key Largo came and went with a drowsy, sun-kissed
rhythm. Despite the slow cadence of island life, I approached my
study of scuba with zeal. To earn my certification, I had to complete
several ocean dives. I couldn’t wait.
My love for the sea turned to passion after my first breath of
compressed air under open water. The white noise of the terrestrial
world disappears the moment your head slips beneath the surface,
and you can hear only your own slow, continuous breaths—followed by the soothing murmur of exhaust bubbles. You descend
through rays of light before reaching your desired depth, at which
point, if you are weighted properly, you achieve neutral buoyancy,
where you neither sink nor float.
You hang, suspended in liquid, the ocean bottom rising up to

meet you. You shift into the dazzling dimension of aqueous time
and space, where sound travels faster and objects appear larger and
closer. Scuba gear weighs nothing under water, and the dance of a
single fish can hold the attention of even the most restless mind
until it’s time to ascend.
When I returned home from the Keys, I spent hours watching
underwater travelogues on cable TV. I subscribed to Skin Diver,
Woman Diver, and Sail magazines. I waddled around the house in my
fins, sucking air through my snorkle. Landlocked in Pittsburgh, my
passion became an obsession—that kept me afloat as I struggled
with the awkwardness of being a 13-year-old girl.
It was time for high school,
and I was sent to a locally
renowned, coed private school,
where what you wore was more
important than who you were.
Invisible and friendless, I somehow managed to make it
through my freshman year, all
the while dreaming of open
water.
That summer, my parents forked over an embarrassingly large
amount of money for me to hack it out in the British Virgin Islands
on a 51-foot sailing sloop named Shibumi, with seven other kids from
fancy prep schools in New York.
I learned how to tack into the wind and tie a rolling hitch. We
anchored off uninhabited islands and paddled to shore to hike
through lush rainforests and cactus-covered hills. I logged hour
upon hour underwater, drunk on compressed air. The sky was
always a dizzying blue, and the water was always 80 degrees and
clear.
My parents hardly recognized me when I stepped off the plane
from the British Virgin Islands, blond, bronzed, and a little tougher.
Although less than optimistic, I could almost bear the thought of
returning to my sophomore year because I had a clear goal: to
become a marine biologist.
For years, when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I
would smile with confidence and reply, “a marine biologist.” Now, in
search of a place where I could shine, I set out in earnest to study
marine biology.

intensity. While drowning in work the winter of my junior year, I
learned about a foreign-study program in marine biology and ecology in Denmark. I registered the next day for the upcoming spring
semester.
In Denmark, a country of 406 islands wedged between the
North and Baltic seas, I felt truly alive for the first time since living
in the British Virgin Islands. Danes tend to be relaxed and informal,
unafraid to slow down. After about a month away from Swarthmore,
I slowed down too, buoyed by enchanting Copenhagen and resurfacing dreams. There, I learned about the problems of nutrient
dumping in estuarine ecosystems, which I decided to study in graduate school.

M

y path to success wasn’t obvious because marine biology is not
an especially popular or relevant profession in Pittsburgh. I
was, however, fortunate to live within walking distance of the city’s
aquarium, where I volunteered as an assistant keeper.
During my time scrubbing algae and chopping squid, I also
began to understand the fundamental connection between science
and the sea. I started to work hard in the same chemistry and
physics classes that had previously failed to capture my attention. I
believed that good grades in these subjects would be my ticket back
to the coast.
As graduation approached, my heretofore amorphous dream at
last began to take shape: a bachelor’s degree in biology, five to six
years of graduate work to earn a Ph.D. in marine science, two years
in a postdoctoral position, and then tenure track. I enrolled at
Swarthmore, where I approached my studies with an unwavering

moved to UNC’s marine lab in
Morehead City—a flat strip town in a region sometimes referred to
as the Redneck Riviera—to conduct my research.
But the life of a graduate student in marine science was not what
I expected. I rarely went out on the water and certainly wasn’t fighting for the plight of the world’s oceans in any tangible way. Most of
my time was spent leafing through journal articles and reorganizing
my lab bench. Actual science happened just twice a week, when I ran
my experiments using water samples others collected from the
Neuse River estuary.
On Tuesdays and Fridays, I would lock myself in a pitch-black
room—clad in two layers of rubber gloves, heavy boots, and a white
lab jacket. For more than three hours, I bathed the microscopic algae
in my water samples (and myself) in treatments of radioactive isotope, hydrochloric acid, and a carcinogenic fixative. I was told that
my data, in conjunction with other work being completed in the lab,
would be enough for me to tack the letters Ph.D. after my name, if
only I would keep at it for a few more years. Ah, the glamorous life of
a marine biologist, splashing around with whales and dolphins.
Yes, I was finally a marine scientist. But reality fell far short of
the life I had imagined for myself. My dream had run abruptly
aground, and I was forced to acknowledge that my passion for the
ocean did not mean I was destined to be a marine scientist.
Almost three years have passed since I requested leave from UNC
and moved home to Pittsburgh, where I work as a reporter for a
local daily paper. I know I won’t be going back. It took 15 years, but
I’ve finally learned to treat all new flights of fancy and grand master
plans with an appropriate dose of circumspection.
I still love the ocean and wet sand between my toes as I stand in
the milky froth at the water’s edge. I love breaking waves as they
surge over my body in their inevitable journey toward the shore. I
love the feather-like caress of a school of fish, the sharp taste of saltwater, and the sound of my own breath underwater.
So I will forever be dreaming about my next beach vacation. T
Jennifer Gross is currently a staff writer at the Valley News Dispatch in
Tarentum, Pa.

DECEMBER 2002

Swarthmore, North
When the dream came true, A fter
Carolina lured me back
an inauspicious fusion
it was no longer something through
of scientific ego and childhood
After one year of course
I desired or even recognized. memory.
work in idyllic Chapel Hill, I

77

they desperately need. If more communities
pressured their state and local leaders into
following the lead of New York City, which
recently saw its teacher shortage evaporate
when the city’s teacher salaries were raised
to levels competitive with suburban districts, the nation’s disadvantaged districts
would have no need to mortgage their students’ futures on the charity of underqualified teachers.
NATHAN MYERS ’99
Philadelphia
WHOLE SOUL

It was refreshing to read about the less onetrack-minded Swarthmore alumni (“Are You
a Renaissance Soul?” September Bulletin).
We live in a social and economic system that
seems to be based on the rule: “Exploit
yourself as you would exploit others.” This
controlled way of dealing with ourselves and
the world has its roots in the darker side of
our Judeo-Christian mentality: that is, in
our fear of life itself and [of] true growth.
We grow not just up but in all directions,
within and without. I believe that the diversity of interests and selves to which I have
given expression are part of a larger unity
that will be revealed to me in time, or, as I
like to say: Many are the ways before becoming one.
“Renaissance soul” is elegant and complimentary enough but makes me sound
more antiquated than I feel. Thus, I suggest
the more explicit: “Whole soul.”
JEAN-MARIE CLARKE ’74
Staufen, Germany
DREAMS, NOT DOGMA

At Swarthmore, I was known as that “libertarian guy.” Rarely could I resist challenging
the school’s dominant left-wing ideology, be
it in Sharples, Parrish Parlors, or The
Phoenix. Yet, on my way to the 2002
reunion, I wrote in my journal: “Drop the
politics. What’s important? People, relationships. Not ideology and arguing.”
I looked forward to the Collection
address by Arlie Russell Hochschild ’62,
titled “Why We Need Dreams.” (An edited
version of her talk was printed in “Back
Pages,” September Bulletin.)

continued from page 3
Unfortunately, Hochschild never explained why we need dreams. To her credit,
Hochschild eloquently described them but
could not resist slipping in political statements, which she glibly stated as if her
audience agreed with them. Her thesis was
that the only worthwhile dreams advance
left-wing statist political causes, and Quakerism inherently supports them.
My point here is not to debate Hochschild’s politics or her interpretation of
Quakerism; rather, it is to decry the speech’s
fraudulent title and its presumptuous and
small-minded content. Even if I did agree
with her on these issues, I would still find
them inappropriate for a Collection speech.
Swarthmore professes to be a tolerant
community bound by not only by the love of
learning but also dreams. Yet, by invalidating the dreams of anyone who disagrees
with her politics—and those alumni whose
dreams simply do not concern politics—
Hochschild efficiently alienated much of her
audience.
BRIAN SCHWARTZ ’97
Boulder, Colo.
CHUTZPAH

I feel bad for Aviva Kushner Yoselis ’96 (“In
My Life,” September Bulletin). Like Anglo
settlers on what was then Mexican and
Native American land or Germans in various occupied parts of Europe during World
War II, she is living on land that does not
belong to her. In the case of the occupied
territories, this land has been forcibly taken
over in violation of international law and
numerous U.N. resolutions. What chutzpah
she has! What a great tragedy for the moral,
ethical, and humane stature of Judaism that
she and her ilk are representing Jewish people.
JEREMIAH GELLES ’63
Brooklyn, N.Y.
SWARTHMORE SANCTIMONY

Although I applaud and support the work of
Bill ’72 and Amy Vedder Weber ‘73 (“A
World That Is Not Our Own,” September
Bulletin), I have to disagree with some of
their throw-away comments.
The first was Weber’s assertion that the
(current Bush) administration is “in bed

with” oil and energy. How unfortunate it
would be if Weber’s science parallels his
analysis of politics and the finance thereof,
because he omitted important data. His own
paycheck comes from Wildlife Conservation
Society (WCS), an organization that is supported, in part, by Jaguar of North America
(oil-dependent Ford); ConEdison (energy);
and, among others, Kraft (big tobacco). Are
we to assume the bed is king sized? No, of
course not….
Weber went on to decry the same administration’s lifting of the moratorium on logging roads in national forests. He doesn’t
merely disagree but views the decision with
contempt. Yet he and his wife own two (presumably wood-frame and furnished) homes,
have written a book (presumably printed on
paper), and another WCS sponsor is The
New York Times, the annual output of which
accounts for quite a few logged acres all by
itself.
I grow tired of what seems to be the prevailing Swarthmore sanctimony: “It is OK
for me to take money from these evil/wasteful/polluting/unhealthy capitalist organizations because I will use it to do the right (or
left or progressive) things. And I can have
nice things because I have the correct political views. But do you see those people over
there? They disagree with me; therefore,
when they take the money, or if they live in a
gated community or drive, say, a Jaguar, it
only shows how corrupt they are.”
According to this attitude, it is impossible to have integrity unless you believe in
the right things. Then, anything you do is
OK. This thinking seems to have been the
justification for several of humankind’s
greatest indecencies. At the very least, it poisons public discourse. And it makes me
cranky.
Disclaimer: I am not now, nor have I ever
been, a member of the Republican Party.
JAN MENEFEE MCDONNELL ’78
Irvine, Calif.
EDITOR’S NOTE

We received more letters than we could
print in the limited space available in this
issue. Additional letters may be found at
www.swarthmore.edu/bulletin/dec02/letters.

DECEMBER 2002

Letters...

79

BAC K PAG E S

Hosting the
Hangman of
Hungary
A N U N F O R G E T TA B L E
COLLECTION
By E l i z a b et h R e d d e n ’ 0 5

T

S WA R T H MO R E C O L L E G E B U L L E T I N

he campus was in turmoil that early spring morning. It was
April 1965. The war in Vietnam was gathering steam. The
Cuban Missile Crisis and President Kennedy’s assassination
were still fresh in the minds of students everywhere. Civil rights
marches were sweeping the country. It was not a time in which politics was taken lightly.
Stepping into this highly charged political atmosphere was
Sergei Nesmeyanov, the infamous “Hangman of Hungary,” communist oppressor of human rights. Invited by the Student Council to
speak at Thursday morning Collection, Nesmeyanov was described
in press releases as the Byelorussian delegate to the United Nations
and a key figure in the brutal suppression of the 1956 Hungarian
Revolution.
The student response was explosive. Posters calling him “Worse
Than Rezelman” were scattered throughout campus. Protestors
greeted Nesmeyanov’s arrival, and students jeered and booed and
rolled marbles down the aisle during his speech. Meanwhile, members of Students for a Democratic Society stood angrily on their
chairs, yelling at students to be quiet and allow Nesmeyanov his
right to speak. Tensions were high, and passions were still higher.
Nesmeyanov ranted and raved in Russian about “The Decadence of
Western Culture” for a full hour, with a translator by his side.
And Ellen NicKenzie Lawson ’66, for one, is still laughing.
After Collection, she recalls, the students began walking toward
Sharples Dining Hall, confused and unsure about what to think of
what they had just heard. “We were all kind of slowly walking
down the hill when people started whispering ‘April Fools’ and
stopped still. They couldn’t believe they’d been taken in,” Lawson
recalled in a recent interview.

80

Y

es, it was April Fools’ Day 1965 when Nesmeyanov, otherwise
known as Bruce Specter of Columbia University, appeared on
campus with Robert Lister as his translator. Brought to the College
by the Student Council for what Dick Scheinman ’66 called in his
April 2, 1965, Phoenix article “a perfect all-college hoax,” Specter
and Lister, neither of whom could speak a word of Russian, successfully pulled off the final stage in an elaborate prank many students would never forget.
“They fooled the entire Swarthmore community for a full
hour—and a little bit after that,” Lawson recalled. “High SATs and
honors programs to the contrary, there were a lot of fools at

Swarthmore that day. I totally enjoyed the moment. Savored it
even. And retold it at dinner parties for years.”
Ann Mosely Lesch ’66, president of Student Council in spring
1965, remembers the prank fondly. At that time, Collection was
held every Thursday morning, and all students were required to
attend. The Student Council was traditionally entrusted with planning one Collection per year. “When we heard ours was on April 1,
we knew we had to rise to the occasion,” Lesch said. “We thought it
would be interesting to see what kind of controversy we could stir up.”
Thus, council members went about planning an elaborate hoax,
with Alex Capron ’66, Michael Kortchmar ’65, and the late Douglas
Redefer ’65 taking the lead in the preliminary stages. “I don’t
remember exactly who got us started, who came up with the idea,
but everyone liked it,” Kortchmar remembers. Redefer had a friend
at Columbia, Bruce Specter, whom he thought would be interested
in playing the part of the obscure but hated Sergei Nesmeyanov.
Specter liked the idea and enlisted the help of Lister, an actor
friend, to accompany him and act as his translator.

W

“People booed him,
and all the lefties
were up there
yelling, ‘Let
the man speak!’
I guess the
easiest people
to fool are the
ideologues.”

ith their actors
selected, the council’s next challenge was
to create a believable,
yet incendiary, character. “We needed to
make him a pretty
important figure but—
at the same time—
someone people would
not be expected to
know. So we made him
a part of the Byelorussian delegation to the
United Nations,”
Kortchmar says.
Kortchmar wrote
Specter’s speech, titled
“The Decadence of
Western Culture,” which he describes as a “sort of heavy-handed,
bureaucratic, anti-capitalism speech.” He gave the speech to his
mother, Lucy Kortchmar, a native Russian speaker, who wrote a
phonetic Russian translation for Specter to recite on stage. She also
read the speech into a tape recorder for him to practice orally.
Meanwhile, Lesch and Capron were occupied with the more
practical aspects of the hoax. Joseph Shane ’25, a vice president of
the College and head of the committee that approved outside Collection speakers, was not convinced that Nesmeyanov was an
appropriate selection. He wanted to contact the Byelorussian mission to confirm Nesmeyanov’s credentials—something the Student
Council members obviously did not want to see happen. So when
Lesch returned home for spring break in March, she asked her
father, Phillip Mosely, a leading Sovietologist at Columbia University, to write Shane a letter vouching for Nesmeyanov’s speaking abilities. Satisfied, Shane did not call the mission, and plans for Collection were allowed to proceed without obstruction.
Student Council members then began distributing posters and

press releases throughout
the campus. Using the
Print Club’s old, rarely used
letter press in the basement
of the student activities
building, Capron crafted letterhead for the press attaché at
the Byelorussian mission, complete with a believable, albeit
fictional, address and phone
number. He then used a College
mimeograph to create the fake stationery for a press release describing Nesmeynov’s appearance.
“His U.N. colleagues described
his supposed biography in the most
laudatory terms, but we leaked to The
Phoenix that he was known as the
Hangman of Hungary, just to stir
things up,” remembers Capron.
Capron says that the only outsider let
in on the plot was Professor Emeritus of
Russian Thompson Bradley: “He agreed to
keep a straight face but then floored me
when he said he thought I’d been clever
with the choice of names because one way to
translate Nesmeyanov was ‘he who does not
laugh.’”
n the morning of April 1, Kortchmar and
Redefer walked to the train station to pick
up Specter and Lister. They then brought them
back to their dorm rooms to get dressed and do
some last-minute practice. When the time for Collection came around, Specter and Lister were
loaded into a borrowed black Lincoln Continental,
adorned with Soviet flags, for the short ride to
Clothier Hall.
Kortchmar was thrilled to see campus conservatives out picketing the speaker’s arrival—“That was
exactly what we wanted to see!” Specter, a thin man
with a black moustache, his hair grayed at the temples,
looked the part as he walked through the protestors and
up to the podium to give his speech.
“People booed him, and all the lefties were up there
yelling, ‘Let the man speak!’” Kortchmar recalls. “I guess
the easiest people to fool are the ideologues—any stripe at
all.”
“I kept [from] almost bursting out laughing myself during the
Collection,” Lesch said. “I have to admit that during the speech, I
was afraid everyone would realize his accent was terrible, and the
whole thing would just fall apart. But it was only afterward that
people realized they were suckered.”
Most took the hoax in stride, temporarily fooled but goodhumored about it. Members of the Russian faculty spent most of
the speech bemusedly trying to figure out where that terrible accent

had originated. Capron remembers a note being passed to the Russian
major sitting next to him asking, “Is he really speaking
Russian?” To which came back the reply, “Yes, but with a southern
accent.” Students who had protested felt rather embarrassed but
soon recovered, although Lesch reports that Vice President Shane
never spoke to her again. At the speech’s conclusion, President
Courtney Smith allegedly leaned over to tell Dean Susan Cobbs, “I
think we’ve been had.”
Not to worry. He was in good company. T
Elizabeth Redden ’05 is an English major and Bulletin intern.

DECEMBER 2002

O

Planning Ahead

F

or us, planned giving has been an attractive way to
support Swarthmore,” says Theodore “Tedd” Osgood ’53.

“We have gained current income in exchange for highly
appreciated, low-yielding stock, and the College will
eventually receive the balance. As I approach my 50th
reunion, the importance of Swarthmore and the years I
enjoyed there continue to grow. It is with feelings of both
pride and gratitude that I contribute to Swarthmore
through the Alumni Fund and through planned giving.”
Tedd Osgood and his wife,
Dorothy, of Hanover, N.H., first
participated in Swarthmore’s
Planned Giving Program more
than 10 years ago. Tedd’s
Swarthmore experience was an
important factor in their decision

RICHARD QUINDRY

F

to live at Kendal at Hanover, a
retirement community reflecting
Quaker values.

To learn how Swarthmore’s gift planning
could work for you, please contact the
Office of Planned Giving at (610) 328-8323
or plannedgiving@swarthmore.edu.

Visit the Office of Planned Giving Web site
at pg.swarthmore.edu.