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TRUTH
in
translation
features
14: Home Abroad
Alumni expatriates create new lives outside
the United States.
By A ndre a H a m me r
20: Black Voting Rights
How Swarthmore helped in the 2006
reauthorization of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
By Jef fre y Lo tt
an d R i c ha rd Va lel ly ’ 7 5
24: An Informed
Citizentry
The precarious state of public-affairs
broadcasting threatens our democracy, says
veteran PBS news producer John Siceloff ’76.
departments
3: Letters
Readers react.
4: Collection
Campaign success and campus buzz
40: Connections
Swarthmore comes to you.
42: Class Notes
profiles
67: Care, Comfort,
Convenience
BJ Entwisle ’78 helps to revive an abandoned
medical tradition—the house call.
B y S us an C ous in s Br ee n
Alumni news and views
69: The Ethics Guy
By Jef fre y Lo tt
47: In Memoriam
30: Stopping Sprawl
Remembering departed friends and
classmates
Bruce Weinstein ’82 is in the business
of doing the right thing.
Community activists offer
alternatives to bigger, wider
highways that encourage
suburban sprawl.
B y E li z ab et h Re d de n ’0 5
34: Campus View
Echoes of The Emerald Isle ring out
across campus.
Pho to by El e ft h erio s Ko sta n s
36: A Singular Career
Robert MacPherson ’66 defies the stereotype
of the unworldly mathematician
58: Books + Arts
Kill Me Like You Mean It by Kiran Rikhye ’02,
directed by Jon Stancato ’02
R e vi e w ed by J ef f re y Lo tt
72: In My Life
Orcas and Ice
B y Ke rs ti n K irsche nba u m Row e ’ 93
80: Q + A
“Preposterously Delightful”—
Hansjakob Werlen
B y Car o l Br éva r t- De mm
By D an a M a c kenz ie ’ 7 9
on the cover
In March 1965, a young demonstrator in Montgomery, Ala., with the
word “vote” written in his sunscreen, marches for black voting
rights—part of a long struggle for black suffrage in the United States.
Photograph ©Bettmann-Corbis. Story on page 20
opposite
An unidentified snowboarder, using an improvised jumping platform,
shows off some “righteous” skills after one of this winter’s meager
snowfalls. Photograph by Eleftherios Kostans
B y Audr ee Pe nne r
77: Compassion in
Business
Gabriel Fairman ’02 believes that corporate
success depends on more than just a product.
B y C ar ol Bréva r t- De m m
parlor talk
I
cast my first presidential ballot in 1968, voting rather reluctantly for Vice President Hubert Humphrey. The Vietnam War was raging, the Democratic Convention in Chicago had spawned a police riot, and I couldn't understand why I had
to choose between the lesser of two evils—Humphrey or Richard Nixon—in my
first presidential election. I desperately wanted to be able to support someone I
could believe in, but that wasn't an option in 1968—and, as I have learned in subsequent elections, it isn't often a choice in our two-party process.
It's actually remarkable that, during that tumultuous year, I wanted to vote at all.
I was a college dropout and hippie vagabond, not exactly part of the mainstream
political system. But voting mattered to me then—and still matters now. As a
teenager, I'd witnessed the black voting-rights struggles, the courageous marches,
the brutal murders, and the inspiring speeches. I had listened to Bob Dylan and
knew the times were indeed changing.
I had seen that African Americans cared so deeply about the franchise that they
were willing to risk their lives to attain it. The blood of Selma—and, a century
before, of the Civil War—elevated
Swarthmore
the vote for everyone, including white
male Americans like me whose voting
scholarship,
rights had never been in question. Our
backed by the
history, however, contradicts the idea
College's consistent that democracy has prevailed since the
Revolution.
commitment to social As the magazine’s history of black
voting rights (p. 20) makes clear, the
justice, had a small
expansion of suffrage in the United
but significant
States has been a constant battle since
effect on the federal the founding of the Republic. Many
to voting have fallen—property,
government's effort barriers
gender, and race among them—but, as
to protect black
evidenced in the recent history of the
Voting Rights Act, significant obstacles
voting rights.
must be monitored and overcome.
Swarthmore scholarship, backed by the College's consistent commitment to social
justice, had a small but significant effect on the federal government's effort to protect black voting rights.
For a time after 1968, I lived in rural Vermont, where our paper-ballot voting
booths were nailed together with pine lumber and simple muslin curtains. It was
there that I voted for George McGovern, who managed to win Massachusetts but
no other state. He would have ended the war quickly, but the electorate decided on
4 more years for Nixon. (After Watergate and some articles of impeachment, his
term turned out to be fewer years than that.)
I've voted for a huge crop of losers since then. I've learned to live in the minority,
hewing to principles and trying to feel just a little bit smug as my candidates went
to their noble defeats. It's not a good way to feel. George McGovern was a really
good man—a man of peace. Why is it so difficult for us to vote for candidates who
truly promise peace?
—Jeffrey Lott
2 : swarthmore college bulletin
Swarthmore
COLLEGE BULLETIN
Editor: Jeffrey Lott
Associate Editor: Carol Brévart-Demm
Class Notes Editor: Susan Cousins Breen
Staff Photographer: Eleftherios Kostans
Desktop Publishing: Audree Penner
Art Director: Suzanne DeMott Gaadt,
Gaadt Perspectives LLC
Administrative Assistant:
Janice Merrill-Rossi
Interns: Lauren Stokes ’09,
Lena Wong ’10
Editor Emerita:
Maralyn Orbison Gillespie ’49
Contacting Swarthmore College
College Operator: (610) 328-8000
www.swarthmore.edu
Admissions: (610) 328-8300
admissions@swarthmore.edu
Alumni Relations: (610) 328-8402
alumni@swarthmore.edu
Publications: (610) 328-8568
bulletin@swarthmore.edu
Registrar: (610) 328-8297
registrar@swarthmore.edu
World Wide Web
www.swarthmore.edu
Changes of Address
Send address label along
with new address to:
Alumni Records Office
Swarthmore College
500 College Avenue
Swarthmore PA 19081-1390
Phone: (610) 328-8435. Or e-mail:
alumnirecords@swarthmore.edu.
The Swarthmore College Bulletin (ISSN
0888-2126), of which this is volume CIV,
number 5, is published in August, September, December, March, and June,
with a special issue in September, by
Swarthmore College, 500 College Avenue,
Swarthmore PA 19081-1390. Periodicals
postage paid at Swarthmore PA and
additional mailing offices. Permit No.
0530-620. Postmaster: Send address
changes to Swarthmore College Bulletin,
500 College Avenue, Swarthmore PA
19081-1390. © 2006 Swarthmore College
Printed in U.S.A.
letters
COURAGE TO ACT
Thank God for Sean Barney. He saw
through the trees and understood the fundamental truths of today: We are at war,
freedom is not free, and democracy implies
responsibility. The selective study of history—does the name Neville Chamberlain
mean anything to anyone?—is dangerous.
Paradoxical and tragic as it is, there are
times when war is the only route to peace.
I am still hopeful that my son-in-law's
death on 9/11 was not in vain.
ROBERT ROWLEY '61
Danbury, Conn.
human life for a cause that was lost from
the start because it was based on flawed
thinking, false pretenses, and outright lies.
How can it be right to serve ideals that are
being trampled by President Bush himself?
I live in Germany, and when Bush is
irresponsibly compared to Hitler, it has a
different ring here. With blind trust, the
German people followed their democratically elected leader into a catastrophe,
persuaded that they were doing the right
thing. If ever there was an example of a
leader unscrupulously abusing the best
traits of his people, this was it. Viewed
from this vantage point, making war on
Iraq seems nothing less than insane.
With all due respect for Sean Barney's
suffering, is there not a higher duty than
risking your life and condoning the loss of
other lives—American and Iraqi? Would it
not have been better to mobilize with the
same devotion to duty every last moral
fiber in America to prevent this sad waste?
If there must be heroic acts, then why
aren't the Marines—with soldiers like Sean
Barney at their head—marching on the
White House?
JEAN-MARIE CLARKE '74
Staufen, Germany
IF THERE MUST BE HEROIC ACTS
THE BEST TEACHERS
Sean Barney's devotion to his ideals is
exemplary. The risk that he exposed himself to in their name—not to mention the
price that he paid—makes his position
that much more believable and persuasive.
Thus, he has a great responsibility to what
he represents. Yet, although I can follow
the thinking that led him to enlist and
then to volunteer for duty in Iraq, I am left
with a nagging doubt.
He writes about the loss of American
lives and mentions that these often come
about as a result of Iraqi suicide missions.
How convinced or desperate must one be
to resort to such a drastic measure?
Although murder was part of Saddam
Hussein's politics, Iraqi men and women
were not committing suicide on this scale
under his regime. The great loss of civilian
lives and the suffering of the rest of Iraq's
population is therefore a direct result of
that war. This—and not the loss of American lives—is what is really wrong.
I am not talking about differences of
opinion but about the wanton waste of
How wonderful to see a full-page picture
and a profile of Centennial Professor
Emerita of Classics Helen North (“Q+A,”
December Bulletin). My one regret, years
after graduating from Swarthmore, was
that I never took a course with her. I was a
chemistry major—why would I need Greek
Literature in Translation? Yet everyone who
took that course worshipped Professor
North. Going to her class was the highlight
of their week.
During the years that she was leading
Alumni College Abroad trips to the
Mediterranean, I had neither the time nor
the money to take them. Finally, when I
had both, I managed to plug a giant hole in
my education by traveling with Professor
North around Ireland, looking at Neolithic
sites, learning about the Stone Age, the
Celts, medieval times, and William Butler
Yeats. At age 83, she ran circles around us.
It was an honors seminar without having
to write the papers. I treasure every minute
I spent with that remarkable woman.
It really is true that the best advice you
It is a sad commentary on the American
people and our current culture that, as
Sean Barney '98 points out in “A Soldier's
Tale” (December Bulletin), “the well educated and the well-to-do are increasingly
absent from the military's ranks.”
With a tear in my eye and a lump in my
throat, I thank Sean Barney for the sacrifice he has made. He had the courage to act
on his convictions when most of us turn a
blind eye and look in the other direction.
WILLIAM NORWOOD '50
Spokane, Wash.
FUNDAMENTAL TRUTHS
can give a young person starting college is:
“Find out who the best teachers are, and
take their courses. It doesn't matter what
they are teaching."
ELIZABETH PROBASCO KUTCHAI '66
Charlottesville, Va.
REMEMBERING DOUG WEISS
It was with dismay and sadness that I read
of Doug Weiss' death in September 2006
(December Bulletin). Although some 30
years have passed since I last saw Doug, I
have recently been thinking of him while
trying to make a rather unremarkable
comeback in the local weight room.
Some time after I made Doug's acquaintance in the Swarthmore Field House
weight room, he challenged me to a contest: the most dips on the parallel bars and
the most behind-the-neck pull-ups on the
Universal Gym bars. He easily won the first
category, and I won the second, but the
contest itself didn't matter. What really
mattered was that, whenever I saw him, he
took a personal interest in me and my
training, reaching out a hand of friendship
in the process.
God has a special place in his heart for
those who reach out to others as Doug did.
ROGER KARNY '76
Denver
FOR THE RECORD
Novelist Benjamin Kunkel was inadvertently misquoted in “The Writer's Writer”
(Dec. Bulletin). Referring to Norman Rush's
['56] award-winning novel, he actually
said: “For my money, Mating is the best
American novel of the last 30 years.”
march 2007 : 3
collection
The Meaning of Swarthmore
beats goal by $15M
4 : swarthmore college bulletin
• Renovated the College’s original building, Parrish Hall, the figurative and literal
“heart” of the campus
• Established the Lang Center for Civic
and Social Responsibility, Swarthmore’s
central link between rigorous academic
training and the development of leadership
skills required to shape a more just, democratic, peaceful, and inclusive world
• Created the position of associate dean
for multicultural affairs
• Built an endowment for religious
advisors
• Expanded the scope and impact of the
Career Services Office; and
• Opened up additional personal development opportunities for College staff.
“This campaign is significant, in part,
because it expanded the College’s capacity to
fund its programs and meet its needs for the
future,” said Dan West, vice president for
alumni and development. “Our entire development effort has been stepped up to a new
level of effectiveness.”
This spring, celebratory events to thank
Swarthmore alumni, parents, and friends
are scheduled to take place in San Francisco
and Los Angeles in March; Philadelphia on
April 17; New York City on May 8; Washington, D.C., on May 14; and Boston on June
19. Invitations will be sent out in advance of
each event, and a reply is requested.
—Alisa Giardinelli
ENVISIONING
SWARTHMORE 2025
In January, a planning committee consisting of faculty members, administrators, alumni, the Student Council president, and members of the Board of Managers was formed to begin the process of
envisioning the College in 2025.
In a February letter to alumni, Board
Chair Barbara Weber Mather '65 and
President Alfred H. Bloom invited participation in the first stages of the planning
process by asking for thoughts on these
questions: “What is your vision of the
Swarthmore of 2025? In what ways
would you want the College to be similar
to and in what ways different from the
Swarthmore of today?”
Alumni responses to these questions
will become part of a semester-long discussion this spring that will lead to the
formation of “focused planning groups
charged with identifying how the College
can best advance toward the goals set,”
the letter said.
The planning process began just after
the successful completion of The Meaning of Swarthmore, which raised more
than $245 million in gifts and pledges to
fulfill many of the goals set by a previous
plan that was completed in 1999.
—Jeffrey Lott
©ESTO/JEFF GOLDBERG
On Dec. 31, the College completed The
Meaning of Swarthmore, the most successful and ambitious capital campaign in its
143-year history. The final total in gifts and
pledges—$245,462,000—surpassed the
campaign’s original goal by more than $15
million. A remarkable 87 percent of alumni
made a gift to the College during the period
from July 1, 1999 to Dec. 31, 2007.
“We are all delighted at the outcome and
thrilled that we’ve surpassed our goal,” said
Meaning of Swarthmore Co-Chair Fred
Kyle ’54. “The campaign was successful
thanks to the hard work, dedicated effort,
and generosity of many, many people.
Everyone pitched in. We received gifts from
alumni ranging from as far back as the
1920s to last year’s graduating Class of
2006. The outpouring of support from
alumni and the entire College community
has been deeply gratifying.”
President Alfred H. Bloom noted that
“the College, a remarkable institution, is
now even stronger. The success of the campaign is a magnificent collective accomplishment, which will allow Swarthmore to
continue to live its distinctive vision and
deliver its singular educational impact for
many years to come.”
Made public in September 2001, The
Meaning of Swarthmore focused on academic and student-life priorities essential to
preserving and extending the quality of a
Swarthmore education into the 21st century
and beyond. Among its most significant
accomplishments, the campaign has:
• Funded 10 new tenure-track and several
non–tenure-track faculty positions and created five new second-semester faculty leaves
• Helped put in place new curricular initiatives in cognitive science, film and media
studies, and Islamic studies
• Created 170 new scholarships and reinforced the College’s commitment to needblind admissions and financial aid
• Supported each varsity sport with a fulltime coach and funded improved athletic
facilities
• Underwritten the cost of a revised Honors Program
• Built a state-of-the-art science center
and the Alice Paul ’05 Residence Hall
The College’s state-of-the-art science center was a campaign centerpiece.
The Beauty of Beauvais
Jesus Calling Peter and Andrew is one of dozens of stained-glass windows that Michael Cothren, professor of art history and consultative
curator at the Glencairn Museum in Bryn Athyn, Pa., writes about in
Picturing the Celestial City: The Medieval Stained Glass of Beauvais
Cathedral (Princeton University Press, 2006). The book offers the
first serious look at the collection of Gothic stained-glass windows
originating from the 13th, 14th, and 16th centuries that has dominated the experience of those who enter the Cathedral of SaintPierre in Beauvais, France.
Lavishly illustrated and elegantly written, Cothren’s latest book
has been declared “a staple for scholars and students of medieval
stained glass” by Stephen Murray of Columbia University. The
author takes the reader back in history to examine the four main
phases of the cathedral’s medieval glazing campaigns. He also dismantles a long-held misconception that medieval pictorial art was a
substitute text or “Bible for the poor” and shows how the rich
stained-glass scenes functioned more as sermon than scripture.
—Susan Cousins Breen
Triple
Hooray
SWARTHMORE LEADS IN
BLACK FRESHMEN ENROLLMENT
As the College welcomed 43 black first-year students to campus
this year, the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education announced
that Swarthmore was first among America’s highest-ranked liberal
arts colleges for the greatest percentage of black students in its
freshman class.
According to Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Jim Bock
’90, “this achievement represents Swarthmore’s commitment to a
diverse educational experience, and we hope that more prospective students will see and appreciate this.”
The number of black students at Swarthmore also creates a
“critical mass” that Director of the Black Cultural Center Timothy
Sams says is essential to a healthy and viable community of black
students on campus.
Sams sees breadth and depth among these students. “There
is a deepening heritage that the black students at Swarthmore
have achieved beyond numerical representation,” he says, “in
which they are actively engaged and leading organizations that
allow them to weave themselves into the Swarthmore community
in ways that maintain their own cultural identity.”
Along with higher levels of applications and enrollment, the
number of admitted early-decision black students has also grown,
demonstrating a growing interest in the College.
—Susan Cousins Breen
In November, Joseph Wharton
Professor of Economics Robinson Hollister received the Peter
H. Rossi Award from the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. Given in
memory of the achievements of
late eminent sociologist Peter
Rossi, the award recognizes
contributions to the theory
and/or practice of program evaluation. Hollister was honored
for his contributions to the
field, with emphasis on the use
of random assignment designs
to test the impact of new social
policies. He was praised as “a
devoted teacher who has introduced generations of students
to the intellectual challenges
related to program evaluation.”
Many former students are now
professionals in the field.”
Frederic Pryor, emeritus professor of economics and senior
research scholar, was a recipient
of the J. Michael Montias Prize
from the Association of Comparative Economic Studies in
January. The prize is awarded
biennially to the author of the
best overall paper published in
the Journal of Comparative Economics. Fo-cusing on industrial
economies, Pryor’s paper illustrates a new statistical method
for classify-ing economic systems and linking them to economic performances.
Associate Professor of Russian Sibelan Forrester was honored in the fall with the award
for Best Translation in Slavic/East European/Eurasian
Women’s Studies published in
2004–2006. In a press release,
Forrester’s translation, American
Scream: Palindrome Apocalypse, of
female Croatian poet Dubravka
Orai Toli’s Urlik Amerike: Palindromska Apokalipsa was lauded
as “a wonderful example of
what this translation prize seeks
to recognize. It is an extraordinary book of poetry and prose
by the celebrated female Croatian poet, essayist, and literary
critic … masterfully, creatively,
and sensitively translated by the
well-known female Slavic literary scholar....”
—Carol Brévart-Demm
march 2007 : 5
Dinner
with the
Nobel Laureates
Dressed in a long, black satin
gown and elbow-length white
satin gloves—and escorted by a
man in tails—petite Ranga Atapattu ’08 was going to a party.
Not just any party, but the event
of the year in Stockholm, Sweden—the Nobel Prize dinner.
Atapattu, who studied at
Stockholm University last fall,
was one of only 100 students in
Sweden who won a pair of tickets in a lottery to attend the
banquet in the famous Blue Hall
of Stockholm’s Statshüs. Both
Atapattu and Saben Murray, the
Brown University student who
accompanied her, also wore traditional white caps that identified them as students.
Although Atapattu did not
get the chance to meet him,
another Swarthmorean was
among the more than 1,000
guests at the party. John Mather
’68, who shared the 2006 prize
in physics, was seated with
Swedish royalty on the upper
level of the hall.
The elegant evening began
with opening remarks by King
6 : swarthmore college bulletin
Carl Gustaf XVI and featured
entertainment between each
course of the meal.
“My Swedish contact family
told me that the food is such a
big secret before the banquet
that in Sweden, if I found out
just an hour beforehand, I could
probably have made a lot of
money. It’s never been leaked to
the press. Once the menu is
revealed after the ceremony, it’s
served at a well-known restaurant in Sweden,” Atapattu said.
This year’s banquet menu
included a mosaic of salmon
and scallops with Kalix bleak
roe; herb-baked saddle of lamb,
mashed potatoes and Jerusalem
artichokes, olive oil–glazed vegetables and port wine sauce; and
for dessert, pineapple parfait
with caramelized pineapple
salad and mint.
Atapattu heard Mather’s
speech after dessert and later
saw Sweden’s Prime Minister
Fredrik Reinfeldt and George
Smoot, the co-winner in
physics, at the after-dinner
dance where a band played jazz.
“In Sweden, the banquet
“But I called my parents, and
is something akin to the celebri- my mom convinced me by sayty award shows in the United
ing, ‘even at that price, when
States. They show the entire
would you ever get such a
thing live on television, and
chance again’ They also offered
comment on the dresses,
to pay for some or all of it, if
the food, the performances,”
necessary,” Atapattu said. She
she said.
estimated the entire evening
Atapattu described several
cost $500.
highlights she experienced dur“I will always remember
ing the evening: “When I saw
being part of this amazing
the place setting with my name
moment in history,” Atapattu
and all of the gold-rimmed
said. “In the room with me were
glasses and plates, when I stood some of the most intelligent
up and saw the royalty descend- people in the world. People who
ing with the winners, and when worked hard to achieve worldthey served dessert. This was the changing discoveries. I was
finale. The chefs descended the
proud to be a part of honoring
grand staircase with their trays
them. I know it will remain one
while the music and lights were of the best nights of my life.”
still on from the previous per—Audree Penner
formance. The trays held
pineapple pieces with
Ranga and Saben
sparklers flying out of
them. My mouth dropped
open at that moment.”
Atapattu almost didn’t
enter the lottery because,
although the lottery tickets
cost only $3, actually winning would mean purchasing a $150 ticket to the
event. Then, she would
need to buy a dress, jewelry, shoes, and all the
accoutrements required for
such a celebrated occasion.
MELISSA KING
© FREDRIK SANDBERG/EPA/CORBIS
collection
CARBON-NEUTRAL
ALUMNI WEEKEND
Steps will be taken this June to offset the
environmental impact of Alumni Weekend
by making it possible for the College to
reduce its long-term carbon emissions.
Following a suggestion from Matthew
St. Clair ’97, Professor of Engineering Carr
Everbach and students in his environmental studies class Swarthmore and the Biosphere tackled the problem. Based on a
complex set of assumptions, they calculat-
ed the total carbon emissions for the
weekend—including travel, meal preparation, air conditioning, and campus activities—at 640,565 pounds. Details are at
www.swarthmore.edu/es/energy/AW2007.
Comparing this to the world market for
carbon credits, they fixed a value of $8 per
attendee for the “cost” of the carbon. But
rather than ask alumni to pay their carbon
bill on the world market, it was decided to
support the College’s efforts to reduce its
own carbon footprint.
Upon registration for the weekend,
alumni will be asked to donate a “carbon-
EVE STENSON
In a world where oil supplies are dwindling and global warming is increasing, there’s a need for clean,
renewable energy sources. One such source may
someday be nuclear fusion using deuterium, a naturally occurring isotope of hydrogen, which, when
superheated and fused to larger nuclei such as helium, releases energy without producing either
radioactive waste or carbon dioxide.
Associate Professor of Physics Michael Brown
talked about the process in November at the opening of a symposium that brought top U.S. and Japanese fusion researchers to Swarthmore. When deuterium is heated, he explained, its nuclei and electrons break away from each other. This results in the
formation of a plasma in which the freed nuclei fuse
to form helium. The new helium nucleus has a lower
mass than the sum of their two original masses, and
the difference is emitted as energy.
Brown’s Swarthmore Spheromak Experiment
Associate Professor of Physics Michael Brown ( right ), leads a tour of the Col(SSX), conducted with his students in the College’s
lege's plasma physics lab during an international symposium held last fall.
state-of-the-art science center, focuses on one of the
keys to controlling fusion reactions—the behavior of
tion in Laboratory and Astrophysical Plasmas funded in 2003 by the
plasma. At the heart of the SSX is a vacuum chamber in which twin
National Science Foundation. The center’s other members are research
high-energy bursts of plasma called “spheromaks” are produced—and
universities: Princeton, the University of Wisconsin, and the University
then observed as they reconnect magnetically. The goal is to better
of Chicago.
understand how these plasmas (also called “magnetofluids”) behave—
Japan has become a hub for alternative concepts of nuclear fusion.
and ultimately to apply that knowledge to the design of fusion
Professor Yasushi Ono of the University of Tokyo described the effireactors.
ciency and cost of different forms of fusion with which Japanese scienCurrently, Brown told the symposium audience, the energy
tists have experimented. His team built a reactor that creates toroidal
required to create and contain the plasma in which fusion takes place
rings of plasma (shaped like smoke rings) that are brought together to
is roughly equal to the amount of energy produced. Thus, the cost of
form a spherical cloud capable of sustaining fusion for longer periods
the fusion process remains higher than the value of the electricity it
of time. Ono’s approach is now generating renewed interest in the
could produce.
United States.
But laboratories around the world are working on the problem.
Brown’s experiment is part of the Center for Magnetic Self-Organiza—Jeffrey Lott, with reporting by Myles Dakan ’10, Daily Gazette
neutral weekend” fee of $8 per person.
The College will pool these funds to make
improvements in its sustainability—and
future environmental studies classes will
monitor the result. One example mentioned in the calculations was to convert
incandescent-bulb exit signs to LED
(light-emitting diode) signs, which draw
just 4 watts of power versus an average 40
watts for incandescent fixtures. Each new
sign costs about $75 to install.
The fee will be entirely voluntary—and
tax deductible.
—Jeffrey Lott
march 2007 : 7
collection
MEGAN NADOLSKI
Joie de
Glass
!
Under the tutelage of his father, Fletcher Coleman ( foreground ) is learning the tricky
art of glass blowing, for which, he says, perfecting the basics is crucial.
8 : swarthmore college bulletin
For the past 8 months or so, Fletcher Coleman
’09 has been spending his free time learning
the art of glass blowing in the shop his father
constructed 30 years ago in a barn on the
family’s Ohio farm.
As a child, Coleman often traveled to
exhibits and craft shows with his father, a professional glass blower who sells his works to
retailers and galleries.
“I finally got to the point where I really
wanted to blow glass myself. My dad’s growing older, and I wanted to learn while I was
still home a bit and had the opportunity,”
Coleman says. “It’s an incredibly interesting
and rewarding process that allows you to have
a final product. You have all these ideas in
your head, and then, at the end, you have this
beautiful piece of glass that you’ve made—a
tangible product of the creative process.”
Coleman’s fellow students are also benefiting from his artistry. At the end of last semester, he organized a campus sale of his creations. “I was just testing the waters,” he says,
“to see what the response would be. My stuff
isn’t expensive. I do this because I enjoy it,
and it’s hard to put a price on stuff like that,
especially for someone in my position because
I’m not that good at it yet.”
Coleman’s fellow students would disagree.
His entire inventory sold out in 40 minutes.
—Carol Brévart-Demm
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
In the back of your mind is your mother’s voice, saying, “Wash your
hands.” You think you’re getting away from that when you go to college, but instead, the same hygiene reminder is coming from your
fellow students—from a group named Swarthmore Clean Hands.
Seniors Michael Stone and Stephanie Koskowich set out last fall
to improve student hygiene by promoting better hand-washing
habits. Koskowich’s motives were admittedly selfish: “I just got sick
at Swarthmore a lot, and I was tired of it.” So they put out the word
and got organized.
Mara Phelan ’10 has an interest in public health and began collecting stories about illness. “It’s a domino effect with people who
share bathrooms,” she says. “One sick person touching faucets and
door handles can get everybody sick.” She’s noted spikes of sickness
around midterms and finals. “We hope when students see this data
they’ll take proper precautions. Stress levels are high, and they’re
not getting enough sleep. They’re not taking care of themselves.”
The group’s first priority was to make it easier for students to
take care of themselves by washing before meals. Sharples Dining
Hall has one set of bathrooms near the main entrance—each with
just three sinks. Although students know that they should wash
their hands before eating, Stone says that “the infrastructure makes
it difficult for us to do that.” Koskowich agreed, saying of Sharples
that “although it’s great that there’s a common space where we all
come together, it’s also a breeding ground for germs.” Swarthmore
Clean Hands asked for and got foaming sanitizer hand soap in the
Sharples bathrooms.
The group is currently working to conduct a student survey to
see what kind of hand sanitizer is preferred—according to Stone,
students want one that “doesn’t dry out or leave a sticky residue.”
The administration has been supportive and will almost certainly
fund the project once a sanitizer is chosen. Koskowich cited a study
done at a large school where they installed hand sanitizers “and not
only did sickness rates go down, but it actually saved them money.”
Once the sanitizer is installed, Clean Hands will try to track the
rate of upper respiratory infections at Swarthmore, collecting statistics on symptoms to see how they spread on a small campus. Visiting Sociology Professor Ginny O’Connell and her Research Design
class are helping with the study. With Haverford as a control group,
MICHAEL GILMORE
wash up!
Stressbustin’
“One waffle or two? Three?”
“Why not?” “Strawberry and
maple syrup? Whipped
cream?” “Oh, yeah!” These
were some of the utterances
heard at the Dec. 14 Midnight
Breakfast in Sharples Dining
Hall. Dean of Students Jim
Larimore said it was organized
to provide students with an
emotional boost before
finals—“not to mention a
few calories to help them get
through a long night of
studying.”
Staff and faculty members—including president
Alfred H. Bloom and his wife,
Peggi—attended, some manning the kitchen as cooks,
waiters, and servers. Larimore
worked the waffle line with
Paula Dale, executive assistant
in facilities and services, who
said: “I’m usually bleary-eyed
by that time of night, but the
students were so happy and
appreciative that we all got
caught up in their energy.” Students received star-shaped
stress balls as party favors. At
midnight, all joined together
for a Swarthmore tradition—
the “primal scream.” “Imagine
800 students and a handful of
faculty members, including the
president and his wife, screaming in unison at Sharples,”
Larimore said. “Next year, I’m
going to throw down my hot
pad and run into the dining
room to howl with them. I
can’t wait,” Dale added.
—Carol Brévart-Demm
they will compare the spread of sickness in a community that uses
sanitizer with one that does not.
Stone hopes the group will survive beyond its stated goal of
Clean Hands: “We wanted to build up a body of people paying
attention to public health issues on campus.” Amber Viescas ’09
would like to inspire a shift in the way students see their own
health. She wrote in an e-mail: “Swarthmore’s emphasis on academic performance ‘first and foremost’ can actually erode physical
health. Every Swarthmore student sees that conflict every time they
get sick: They ask themselves, ‘Do I go into class and possibly infect
more people, or do I stay in and risk getting too far behind?’ I’m not
sure all professors see it the same way.”
Although the core group is small, more than 60 different students have been involved in Clean Hands in some way or another—
a small hand-washing army, hoping to give the “Garnet Death” the
nasty end it deserves.
—Lauren Stokes ’09
march 2007 : 9
KYLE LEACH
collection
Records Fall As Swimmers Make a Splash
Women’s swimming (7-3, 6-1 CC) The
Swarthmore women won a share of the
Centennial Conference (CC) dual meet title
with Gettysburg and Franklin & Marshall.
Freshman Anne Miller qualified for the
NCAA Championships after setting three
school records (100 and 200 butterfly, 500
freestyle) and winning three gold medals, as
the Garnet swam to third place at the Centennial Conference Swimming Championship meet. Allie Jordan ’09 also set three
school records—in the 50 and 100 backstroke and as a member of the Swarthmore
400 medley relay team, which won gold and
set a new school record. Senior Sarah Cotcamp picked up three gold medals, includ10 : swarthmore college bulletin
ing an individual gold in the 50 freestyle, and classmate Janice Yeo
also collected two golds for Swarthmore.
Men’s indoor track (8th at CCC) Senior Matt Schiller won gold
in the 400 meters at the 2007 Centennial Conference Championships, and the distance medley relay team of Ross Weller ’08,
Schiller, Connor Darby ’09, and Vernon
Chaplin ’07 took home the bronze medal.
Weller also posted a top-10 time at 3,000
meters.
Women’s indoor track (8th at CCC) Sophomore Cait Mullarkey won the gold medal at
800 meters at the Centennial Conference
Championships, and freshman Nikya Corbett just missed a medal with a fourth-place
finish but still managed to post a top-10
time in the 3,000. At the St. Valentine
Invite, hosted by Boston University on Feb.
11, Corbett broke the indoor mile record
with a time of 5:16.02, besting the previous
mark set by Sarah Hobbs ’05.
AURORA IMAGING
Men’s swimming (7-2, 6-0 CC) The Swarthmore men concluded a
banner 2006–2007 season, with the program’s first-ever Centennial Conference dual meet title and a second-place finish at the
Centennial Conference Swimming Championship meet. The Garnet broke six school records at the meet, led by Andrew Koczo ’07
and Douglas Gilchrist-Scott ’09, who
together collected 12 medals. In the 100
breaststroke event, Koczo posted an NCAA
provisional time, broke the school record,
and won the gold medal; Gilchrist-Scott, a
school-record holder in four events, gathered seven medals. The pair joined with
Brian Roth ’09 and Jon Augat ’07 to win a
gold medal in the 200 medley relay—the
quartet set a new Centennial record and
school record in the process. Augat also
enjoyed a strong Centennial meet, collecting three gold medals including a schoolrecord performance in the 50 freestyle.
Junior Ian McCormick led Swarthmore in
points, rebounds, and blocks—and was
selected second-team All-Conference.
Men’s basketball (11-14, 8-10 CC) Juniors
Ian McCormick and Matt Kurman received
All-Centennial honors at the culmination of
the season as Swarthmore finished sixth in
the Conference, just missing a berth in the
Centennial playoffs. McCormick, a forward,
made second-team All-CC after leading
Swarthmore in points (14.9 per game),
rebounds (8.6 per game), and blocks (2.08
per game). On Feb. 16, McCormick became
the sixth Garnet man to score 1,000 points
and collect 500 rebounds in a career.
McCormick completed the season tied with
Rob Ruffin ’00 (1998–1999) for the school
Following the selection of the phoenix as
the new Swarthmore mascot last spring,
steps have been taken to create a costumed character representing the mythical bird in time for an anticipated fall
2007 debut.
Ideas solicited from the student body
during the winter were recently reviewed
by a student-staff committee, which
chose two as the basis for a final design.
According to Karen Borbee, professor of
physical education and senior woman
administrator in the Department of
Physical Education and Athletics, a professional costume vendor will now be
selected to refine the student ideas and
produce a phoenix costume.
Current members of the committee
include Karen Berk ’08, Zach Moody ’07,
Kristen Traband ’08, and Brendan Work
’10 as well as several staff members from
the Alumni Relations Office, Athletics
Department, and Dean’s Office.
Borbee said the committee saw elements in each of the two student designs
that they wanted to incorporate in the
final product. (The student submissions
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
D OES S WARTH MORE H AV E “ SC H OOL SP I R IT?”
were not available at Bulletin press time.)
“This has been a student-driven process,”
Borbee said. “It’s their idea, and we [staff
members] are advising them”
Berk, who plays varsity basketball and
volleyball, said that the mascot will not
supplant “The Garnet” as the name for
the College’s intercollegiate teams. “The
phoenix will provide a way for the whole
community to be united behind a symbol
of our pride in Swarthmore,” she said.
“We want to see the mascot beyond athletic events—at Alumni Weekend, Family
Weekend, and other campus gatherings.”
Asked whether there was “school spirit” at Swarthmore, Berk said: “I definitely
think there’s school spirit here, but it’s
shown in different ways. School spirit at a
lot of other institutions is funneled
through athletics, but at Swarthmore, we
see different expressions of our pride.
Sometimes, our spirit shows through academics, or rallies for social change, or
other clubs and activities.”
Still, it appears that support for teams
and participation in athletics is playing a
part in building community at the College.
A recently released progress report on
intercollegiate athletics stated that “the
College as a whole is benefiting from the
enhanced sense of community generated
by the intercollegiate athletics program.” It
also found that student athletes “gain a
very worthwhile experience despite mixed
win/loss records.” [A copy of the report is
available in pdf format at www.swarthmore.edu/news/athleticsreport2007.pdf.
For a print version, call the Office of News
and Information at (610) 328-8533.]
—Jeffrey Lott
record for blocks (50) in a season, also collecting the fifth-most
rebounds (206) in a season. Kurman, an All-CC honorable mention, led the team with 41 three-point field goals, averaging 11.1
points per game (third on the team). He ranked eighth in the Conference in assists per game (2.72), setting a career-high with 68
helpers.
Badminton (5-2) The Garnet, led by freshman Kim Kramer and
senior Candice Cherk, won the Collegiate Trophy at the 2006 MidAtlantic Juniors Tournament. Kramer picked up the individual singles’ title and teamed with Cherk to win the doubles’ title as well.
Kramer is undefeated in singles’ competition this season, claiming
the women’s singles title at the 2007 Northeast Collegiate Tournament held at Swarthmore.
—Kyle Leach
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
Women’s basketball (4-20, 1-17 CC) The Garnet women made
appearances in the championship game at the Swat Tip-Off Tournament and the Seven Sisters Championship (the fourth consecutive). Junior center Karen Berk made All-Centennial for the second
consecutive season, leading the Conference in scoring (18.5 ppg.),
rebounding (12.5 rpg.), and free throws (125). On Jan. 27, Berk
became the sixth Swarthmore woman to score 1,000 points in a
career and also broke two blocking records during the season.
Junior center Karen Berk led the Centennial
Conference in scoring, with 18.5 points per game.
march 2007 : 11
collection
12 : swarthmore college bulletin
iSTOCKPHOTO.COM
At its February meeting, the Board of
Managers made a commitment to purchase 35 percent of the College’s total
electrical energy needs from windpower sources. With this move,
Swarthmore will become the Pennsylvania institution of higher education
purchasing the highest percentage of
its power from renewable sources.
"We are very pleased that we have
been able to increase the College's
energy mix derived from wind power
from 19 to 35 percent," said President
Alfred H. Bloom. "This goal was conscientiously sought by student groups,
and we are very proud to realize it."
Earthlust, the student environmental group, launched a campaign to
bring renewable energy to campus in
1997. Although the college originally
purchased 2 percent of its total energy
from wind power, this percentage rose
to 8.5 percent in 2005 due to continued student involvement.
In November, Earthlust hosted a
rally on the steps of Parrish Hall to celebrate the administration's commitment to renewing its contract with
wind power companies and to encourage the College's leadership in a cleanenergy future by increasing wind
power purchases.
"We are thrilled by this victory; it is
everything we asked for at this point.
However, we know—and the administration knows—that it's only one step
forward on a path toward total carbon
neutrality," said Earthlust member
Rachel Ackoff '07.
The student-run campaign for
renewable energy at Swarthmore is
part of the Campus Climate Challenge,
an international project of more than
30 leading youth organizations
throughout the U.S. and Canada.
The Challenge is building a generation-wide movement to stop global
warming.
The annual “Coming Out Week” sponsored
by the Swarthmore Queer Union (SQU)—
the College’s gay, lesbian, bisexual, and
transgendered students organization—
regularly features a favorite form of campus
communication: chalked messages and
drawings on campus pathways. In November, some Coming Out Week chalkings
caused significant controversy—and a
provocative campus discussion of the limits
of public expression.
Chalkings are typically used to advertise
upcoming campus events, but during Coming Out Week, “we’re advertising that we’re
queer,” says Diana Pozo ’09, an organizer of
a week-long series of events intended to
raise consciousness about queer issues and
affirm the identity and sexuality of queer
students.
An estimated 15 members of queer
groups chalked anonymous messages
across campus on the night of Sunday,
Nov. 5. They ranged from questions such
as “When did you come out as straight?” to
slogans such as “Don’t assume I’m straight,
and I won’t assume you’re an ass****” and
“Dip me in honey and throw me to the lesbians!” One rainbow flag proclaimed, “Be
free to be yourself.”
But the chalkings everybody was talking
about were graphic cartoon depictions of
explicit sexual acts, including heterosexual
anal sex, a masturbating woman, and a
large vulva outside Sharples Dining Hall.
Pozo explained that although “some people
identified them as pornography,” she considered them to be “an expression about
the silent nature of my sexuality.”
By the time rain washed away the first
round of chalkings on Tuesday, there had
already been significant discontent voiced
about the sexual images and messages—
both by queer students who didn’t think
the chalkings represented them and by
members of the wider community who
expressed concern about how children and
campus visitors would react to the drawings. Some students said that the explicit
images triggered memories of sexual abuse.
Others thought that the chalkings might
even be a form of illegal sexual harassment
LAUREN STOKES ʼ09
“Coming Out ” Chalkings
Spark Debate
COLLEGE COMMITS
TO PURCHASE
35 PERCENT
WIND POWER
“What happened to
liberal campuses
when suddenly we’re
arguing for
censorship? Under
what circumstances is
it acceptable to
behave in ways that
hurt people and
continue doing it,
particularly when the
hurt is through
sexual speech?”
for which the College could be liable.
Reactions similar to these have been
expressed each year since the chalkings first
appeared in the early 1990s. Thinking that
the proper response to speech that offends
one person is not censorship but rather
more speech, Michael Stone ’07 stood in
front of Sharples on Wednesday morning
with a bucket of chalk and invited students
to express themselves on the wide stone
patio. Stone said that “the only thing that’s
going to make this situation different from
the year before is if somebody jumps in and
gets the two sides talking.” Almost immediately, Stone says, conversations began to
develop.
The chalked responses, which ranged
from “Is it wrong to be straight?” to “Shut
the F*** Up Already,” were erased by more
rain on Wednesday night—but a second
round of queer chalkings appeared on
Thursday. Statements like “The chalkings
were not for you, they were for me” raised
more questions than they answered, according to Stone.
“We don’t like
feeling like we’re
being provoked by
people who refuse to
explain themselves…. The public
[sidewalks were]
being used in a sexual manner that clearly made people
uncomfortable,”
Stone said.
Pozo explained that
the second round of
queer chalkings did,
in fact, respond to
the original chalkers’
frustration with
Wednesday’s messages: “I was personally confronted multiple times,” Pozo
said. “They came
from a place of anger
and a place of distress.”
On Friday, copies
of a new “Chalkings
Manifesto” appeared
at Sharples. Written
by Coming Out
Week organizers, the document attempted
to answer questions about why the first
chalkings had appeared but succeeded only
in further stoking the debate, particularly
because of a statement that asserted:
“Attacks on the sexual nature of the chalkings are inherently homophobic and
heterosexist.”
Kayley Whalen ’08 explained that the
manifesto “was not meant as a means to
silence discussion about the chalkings but
as a political expression of our reasons
behind the chalkings.... In future years,
we’re going to refine the language of the
manifesto and put it out there from the
start.”
She explained that her agenda as a transgendered person is about bringing sexuality
into the public realm, because “the societal
privileging of sex as the private realm—and
the constant assertion that it’s obscene—is
tied into the continued oppression of queer
and trans identities. A lot of the chalkings
are a refusal to buy into the ‘equality’ model
of queer liberation—a refusal to say queer
people are just like anybody else.”
Pozo agreed: “As members of a sexualitybased community, if we can’t discuss sexuality in a public forum, how can we unite as a
community?” She also cautioned members
of the campus community not to assume
“that because you haven’t seen homophobia
at Swarthmore, it doesn’t exist,” citing a
recent incident where a queer student’s
“Queer Safe Space” door sign was burned.
More discussion ensued in the Friends
Meetinghouse a week later, when more than
120 students showed up for a discussion
moderated by Associate Professor of History
Bruce Dorsey and Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion Elliot Ratzman. Emotional
statements, apologies, and tears wound into
the late hours, but there appeared to be no
resolution of the question of what the
chalkings might be like in the future.
Although surprised by the diversity of
responses to the chalkings, Ratzman noted
in a later interview that “if anybody was
against the idea of Coming Out Week in
general, they weren’t speaking. The power in
the room was the radical pro-chalkers, and
they were the ones who had to be
appeased.”
Stone also stressed that “there are people
who have strong religious convictions on
the matter, and those people are being
notably silent. It’s just as unreasonable for
them to feel that they have to be silent as
any of the other kinds of silences going on
here.”
Stone also thinks that a lot of issues
opened up by the chalkings discussion are
“not being followed through on. What happened to liberal campuses when suddenly
we’re arguing for censorship? Under what
circumstances is it acceptable to behave in
ways that hurt people and continue doing it,
particularly when the hurt is through sexual
speech?”
Although many questions remain, the
chalkings controversy could be read as a testament to Swarthmore’s strong sense of
community. As Pozo said: “I’m allowed to be
at this place where I can draw sexual
imagery on the sidewalk having to do with
my identity as a queer woman. That I feel I
can do that is a real testament to … our confidence in Swarthmore as a community that
is able to adjust itself to the needs of groups
that still feel marginalized.”
—Lauren Stokes ’09
march 2007 : 13
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
PASCALE RO
UZIES
HOME
Although many will always think of the town where they were born as home
,
few spend their entire lives there. Some willingly move to another place to put down roots near family and friends. Others move—or must
relocate—to follow career paths. Still others, those with a thirst for adventure, deliberately pick up stakes and travel across the country—or
the world—to create entirely new lives.
For those with wanderlust, travel offers the opportunity to explore new cultures and locales, where they sometimes discover a sense of
belonging—and the peace of finding their true home. Sometimes, Swarthmore’s Foreign Study Program, which offers opportunities to explore
international destinations from Ghana to Grenoble, sparks an interest in living abroad. Occasionally, those visits unfold into long-term stays.
More than 100 alumni from the classes of 1980 to 1995 are recorded in the College’s database as living abroad for at least 10 years in
places such as Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, and Spain. Their varied professions include translators, researchers,
historians, and policy officers on peacekeeping missions.
The following stories explore the paths of five alumni expatriates—their choices and compromises—as they integrate a broad spectrum of
experiences beyond the United States into their lives.
Jim Michener once worked for Lao Airlines and is seen
here with a Chinese-made Y-12 aircraft.
14 : swarthmore college bulletin
!
ABROAD
ALUMNI EXPATRIATES CREATE NEW LIVES
OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES.
By A n dr ea Ham me r
SEEKER
Jim Michener ’73: Vientiane, Laos
word Poison in the Wind manuscript into 50 television episodes for
Vietnamese television.
Jim Michener not only shares the same name as the late James A.
Laos has no bookstores; everyone gathers information on the
Michener ’29 but also a Quaker heritage, Swarthmore affiliation,
Internet and through cable television. They live without “frills”—no
and writing profession. Living in Laos, he is currently writing Poison shopping malls, movie theaters, or fast-food chains. Michener also
in the Wind, a novel about his boyhood life in Solebury, Pa., and his
says that a Party policeman, who watches the nine homes in front of
life as a helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War.
his, occupies every 10th house.
“I’m nobody’s namesake,” he says, recalling a letter in which the
Athough Michener was born in Doylestown, Pa., and misses
older Michener encouraged him to absorb the richness of other cul- American food, he now thinks of old Indochina and Thailand as his
tures for his writing career, which he
home—viewing the United States as
did during his own military experia “foreign country.” He sees no need
ences during World War II.
to return.
The younger Michener was 20
“What gets Washington into so
Michener now thinks
and wearing a uniform when he first
much trouble overseas, I think, is
arrived in Asia. He experienced 2
always thinking in linear terms,
of old Indochina and
years of wartime there—from 1964 to
which is the opposite way that most
1965 in the Philippines and Okinawa
Asians think, even highly educated
Thailand as his home,
and 1966 to 1967 in Vietnam. At age
ones,” Michener says.
23, he returned to the United States
He adds that it is becoming
viewing the United
and did not go back to Asia until 20
increasingly difficult for non-Asians
years later, when, in 1987, he purto find work because of the localizaStates as a “foreign
chased a one-way ticket to Bangkok.
tion trend. When an expat manager
He put his total savings of $3,000 in
leaves a major company, Michener
country,” although he
his pocket and boarded a plane.
says, a local with a U.S. college educaMichener had no job waiting for
tion is now the replacement.
misses American food.
him and planned to stay only 6
Michener can walk from his home
months. But he has remained in
to the Mekong River in 30 minutes.
Southeast Asia, which he is still
In the opposite direction, he is in a
“decoding.” Now, Michener has expeStone Age rice paddy in 30 minutes.
rienced 20 peacetime years there in “a kind of self-imposed exile,”
But he has been robbed at home eight times in 14 years. Thieves, he
he says.
says, are a never-ending headache in Third World countries.
Michener compares the “old-fashionedness and timelessness” of
“So it isn’t paradise, and poverty isn’t picturesque. The attraction
Laos with the old Quaker world of his grandparents, the source of
for me, a bachelor, is that domestic help costs next to nothing,” he
its charm for him despite the cruelty of communists—particularly
says. By leaving the mundane tasks to his household staff, he is able
in the past. He also decided to leave America in search of knowledge to focus on his writing. “Of course, they expect you to send their
that wasn’t available in classrooms or books, both of which taught
children to private school and pay for hospitalization, which you do.
Michener to be skeptical of anything but original sources.
And you’re knitted into their family, and they become yours. And it’s
“I’ve never considered anything that I’ve done in my life to be a
just a lot of fun on good days and a gargantuan headache on bad.”
job,” says Michener, who worked enough before leaving the United
A Thai executive, who had never been to Laos, visited Michener
States to start receiving Social Security benefits last year. “What one several years ago. “He remarked: ‘It’s a time warp. It mirrors the era
does should always be fun.”
of my grandparents. The place is just like Thailand before World
A film producer at Television Film Studios in Ho Chi Minh City
War II,’” Michener recalls.
is collaborating with Michener to adapt his more than 200,000“Hey, I like it like that.”
march 2007 : 15
!
SOUL HOME
care, Umemoto would like to remain in London indefinitely.
“Gradually, I have become more out of sync with standard American views. In recent years, the disconnect has become immense.
Diane Umemoto’s husband, Steve, was determined to do humanitar- I find it more and more difficult to identify with the prevailing
ian work in Southeast Asia. So, shortly after they were married in
American attitudes, with the inability of many Americans to under1966, he joined Unicef. For the next 30-odd years, they lived in
stand that America is now seen as a bully, not a savior,” she says.
South and Southeast Asia.
“For most Americans, people in the rest of the world—especially
When the couple first moved to Asia in 1969, Umemoto taught
the Third World—are non-people, too alien to relate to. But for me,
at the University of Indonesia and Chulahaving lived with them, they are very real
longkorn University in Thailand. She also
indeed, ordinary people like the rest of us,
wrote freelance articles.
just trying to get on with life. It matters to
“London is my
Umemoto says that Swarthmore’s honme when we Americans are responsible for
ors courses taught her independent study.
their deaths and try to convince ourselves
soul home,”
The College instilled “lifelong loves”—litthat we are only killing terrorists.”
erature and art—and gave her the skills to
For those new to living abroad, Umemoto
Umemoto says.
learn, a key to “survival” as a spouse who
advises: “Understand that you are going to
couldn’t always obtain a work permit.
lose your identity, and go with the flow. The
“Living here is
“What saved my life was finding other
rewards can be enormous, provided you can
dynamic women who set up study groups,
stop expecting the small things of life to be
the fulfillment
put out cultural publications, eventually
the same as they were at home, which takes
wrote books, and always did charitable
about 2 years to accomplish. You can reinof a dream.”
work. Learning and giving were Swarthvent yourself. Every moment in a foreign
more’s core values,” she says.
country is an adventure.”
Now a resident of London, she teaches at the American School
Umemoto adds that if you go to the Third World, you learn never
there. When Steve retired in 2000, Umemoto did not want to retire to take any material goods for granted—and certainly not your health.
or return to the United States.
“If you are going as a spouse, the biggest challenge might be
“So, for the first time, I looked for a job on my own—rather than keeping your marriage together. Adjustments are much more severe
appearing on a school’s doorstep as a ‘local hire’—and was extreme- for a nonworking spouse; my husband only had to face that after he
ly fortunate to find this one in London,” she says. Having taught in retired and followed me instead! When culture shock hits, it’s easy
international schools for about 20 years, she describes teaching as a to blame each other.”
“portable profession.”
Umemoto’s neighborhood, near the school, has apartment houses, townhouses, terrace houses, and flats.
Judith Lorick ’69: Mougins, France
“If I walk in one direction, toward St. John’s Wood, I’m in with
the yuppies and wealthy retirees. In the other direction, toward
Swiss Cottage, I’m in lower- and middle-class territory, like Queens, As a child in Philadelphia, singing was at the center of Judith
Lorick’s life. She started as a soloist in church and moved into jazz
N.Y., where I grew up,” she says of her “vibrant community,” where
during her college years, when she performed at the Villanova Jazz
samosas and bagels are available in the same shop.
Festival.
Thirty-five years ago, Umemoto sewed all of her children’s
After college, Lorick lived in southern California, working her
clothes because off-the-rack items were not available in Indonesia.
way up the corporate ladder in human resources. In the early 1980s,
Shopping was largely in outdoor markets, for all goods—not just
she formed the Judith Lorick Quartet in California and began a fullproduce. During biannual home leaves, her family spent hours portime career as a jazz vocalist, receiving rave reviews from local critics.
ing over the supermarket shelves.
Since then, she has appeared in concert as well as in jazz clubs and
“London is like any big city, only better. It’s safe enough to go
festivals in the United States and Europe.
out at night, and there are large beautiful parks within easy walkLibération, a major French newspaper, said of Lorick (Dec. 1,
ing distance—all the cultural advantages of New York and greenery
1998; translated from French): “One would place her more approas well.”
priately between Sarah Vaughn, for her boldness of melody and
Umemoto’s main hobby is watercolor painting, and she spends
rhythm, and Shirley Horn, for an impressive art of silence that
her leisure time poking around museums and historical areas. She
knows so well how to glide between the notes.... Judith Lorick naviparticularly enjoys visiting historic mansions that are owned by the
gates with sensuality through unexpected improvisations, just this
National Trust and open to the public.
side of perfection.”
“London is my soul home,” she says, even while missing U.S.
Lorick first visited Europe to study in Spain during the summer
autumns. “When I was growing up in New York City, I read a lot of
before her senior year. The train from Munich to Barcelona went
English literature. Living here is the fulfillment of a dream. The fact
through the Côte d’Azur, and she got off in Nice to spend some time
that London resembles my hometown, New York, doesn’t hurt.”
at the beach.
Despite concerns about finding high-quality affordable health
Diane Levine Umemoto ’65: London
DEJA VU
16 : swarthmore college bulletin
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Teacher Diane Umemoto often takes her students
to the British Museum ( left ), where the Asian
artifacts are among her favorite collections.
“It was an amazing experience: The air felt familiar on my skin; it
smelled familiar. I seemed to know where to walk…. It was as if I had been
here in a former life,” she says.
Lorick decided that she would live in France one day. After living in
southern California, she decided to step off the corporate ladder in human
resources and pursue a career as a jazz singer in 1984.
“I decided to fulfill the rest of my dream and moved here,” says Lorick,
who moved to Mougins [just north of Cannes] in 1988 and continued to
earn a living in music. A few years ago, Lorick enjoyed supervising the construction of a new home.
“It’s very close to everything. But, when we look around, all we see are
trees; blue skies; and, through a tiny hole in the trees, the Mediterranean,”
Lorick says. “The only thing that took getting used to is living behind
gates. Unless one lives directly in a village, most of the villas have a huge
hedge and an electronic gate. Popping over for a chat is just not done.
I was thrilled recently to find a note from our new neighbor asking if
I wanted to meet her. She’s British and also misses the spontaneity of a
neighborhood.”
Lorick buys everything fresh at the green grocer, fish market, and bakery
four or five times a week. She goes to the supermarket for staples only.
“I and my German partner, Heiner, have adopted some of the French
obsession with food. Much of our social life is around lovely meals,” she
says. “We often drive over to Italy, less than an hour away, for lunch and
shopping. We also collect and enjoy good wines.”
Today, music is on the back burner for Lorick, who started consulting in
1998 and has a flourishing business as an independent consultant, developing and facilitating leadership programs as well as team-building and
skills-building seminars. She also is a coach for executives in leadership
positions in international companies.
Although Lorick misses friends and family, she only occasionally thinks
about U.S. conveniences. She has to organize her activities around shops
that close for lunch and by 7:30 p.m. as well as on Sundays.
“Home is definitely here now. I can’t imagine living in the States at this
point. I worked hard to rebuild my life here and did so successfully. I raised
my son here; he lives in Aix-en-Provence,” Lorick says. “Almost all of my
work contacts are here, both in music and consulting. Most important, I
am happy here.... I love my life.”
.
Lorick is more informed politically than when
she lived in the United States. She says that living away from the States for so long has allowed
for greater objectivity.
Swarthmore was her first exposure to many
different cultures, enabling study abroad and
encouraging curiosity. She was a language major, who
learned French and Spanish and—equally important—how
to learn a language, which facilitates living abroad. Lorick
now speaks five.
To download samples of A Sleepin’ Bee and You’ve Changed
from Lorick’s first CD and Songs for My Mother (1999)—a
tribute to her mother and jazz singer Nancy Wilson—visit
www.flohr.net/judith.
HEINER BECKER
EY
JIM VARN
Judith Lorick ( below ) is a jazz singer living in
France. She also is an independent consultant
who develops and facilitates leadership programs and skills-building seminars.
march 2007 : 17
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
LIMBO
COURTE
SY OF C
HRISTI
New York City native Hannah Brown went to Israel in 1984, the
summer after graduating from Swarthmore, just to visit the Jewish
state and learn the language. During that year, she met her future
husband, Yoram Yovell, and they moved back and forth for several
years between Israel and America. But, in 2000, after their children
were born in America, they moved to Israel permanently.
“My husband and I agreed when we married that we would
return to live in Israel after our children were born. My husband
was born in Israel and missed it very much when we lived in New
York. So I don’t see myself moving back to the States,” she says.
“I’ve lived abroad so long that I don’t feel quite at home in New
York anymore but don’t really feel at home in Israel either. I’m just
in a kind of limbo.”
Brown, a literature major who won two fiction prizes at Swarthmore, has worked as Newsweek’s Jerusalem bureau chief and as an
AN HEN
RY
Hannah Brown ’84: Moshav Beit Nekofa,
Jerusalem
editor and columnist for The Jewish Daily Forward. A former movie
critic for the New York Post, she now writes for the Jerusalem Post and
lives in a moshav—a small village—outside of Jerusalem.
“In the past, moshavim were similar to kibbutzim in that some
of the land was owned and worked by the entire moshav, but people
lived in their own houses. On a kibbutz, there are no privately
owned houses. Now, in most of the moshavim in my area, there is
no real agriculture, so they are more like suburbs,” she says. Brown
often shops in a nearby Arab village, Abu Ghosh, one of the few
Muslim villages that have friendly relations with Jewish Israelis.
“Strangely, I don’t feel that threatened by the possibility of being
the victim of a terror attack on a daily basis,” Brown says.
Whenever she goes to a public place, Brown is accustomed to
searches of her purse and the trunk of her car. Her family rarely
takes public transportation, where the risk of terrorism is greatest.
“I have friends on the left of the spectrum and friends on the
right but almost never discuss politics with anybody. We all know
where we stand, and no one I know really feels that there is any
hope of changing anyone else’s mind about anything,” she says.
For a while, in 2003, Brown was concerned about the schools
shutting down for the duration of the Iraq War. “Fortunately, that
didn’t happen,” she says. Nonetheless, all children in Israel were
required to have gas masks in school.
Still identifying herself as American, Brown has a greater appreciation for the high standard of living in the United States.
“For example, in Israel, almost no one has full-time hot water.
You have to heat the water with a heater before you shower. In the
summer, if you have a solar heater, you don’t need to heat it electrically. But you can’t always take for granted that there will be hot
water,” says Brown, who misses U.S. conveniences.
In particular, she can’t help but notice that bureaucracy, the conveniences of daily life, and tolerance of people who are different—
things that were so common in New York—are missing from the
SHIA LEVITT
For 2 weeks each month, Christian Henry ( above) works
and lives at The Island School in the Bahamas.
Writer Hannah Brown ( left ), on the roof of her home near
Jerusalem, still identifies herself as an American.
18 : swarthmore college bulletin
!
Israeli way of life. Brown has two children, Daniel and Rafael, one
of whom has autism.
“Although I work, my life revolves around my son’s care and helping him learn. He is making progress, and it is very rewarding. But
because of this, I probably have not been able to invest time in
learning to acclimate myself to Israel,” Brown says.
She describes the special-education bureaucracy in Israel as particularly rigid, with some administrators who don’t believe that
autistic children can ever be helped in any significant way.
“If I weren’t forced into contact with these bureaucrats, then I
would probably be more positive,” she says. “On the plus side, my
son receives treatment at the International Center for the Enhancement of Learning Potential in Jerusalem, founded and run by
Reuven Feuerstein, a professor who has pioneered extremely effective techniques for teaching people with autism, mental retardation,
learning disabilities, and brain injuries,” Brown says.
nity Outreach Program; and a marine science/green technology
research institute.
As chief financial officer of the foundation since 2004, Henry
helped to develop the school’s academic program. Currently, he is
responsible for management, administration, and development of
relationships with high schools that send students to the Bahamas.
“I am also offering a course in entrepreneurship; it is a first step
toward a longer process of making the lessons of The Island School
real,” Henry says. “It represents one small way we are trying to keep
the promise we make to our students as they get on the plane to go
home. We say that the learning they have done here is only useful to
the degree that it has significant impact in their world.”
In 2003, Henry co-founded the Cape Eleuthera Institute, which
provides research opportunities for students and models sustainable
systems. He received a 2003 Kinship Conservation Institute Fellowship to study market solutions to environmental issues.
“It’s great to be part of a learning community and to feel like our
school has impact outside the gates,” Henry says. “Young people
who have a vision and a way to make it happen in a self-sustaining
Christian Henry ’96: Cape Eleuthera, Bahamas
way—in a way that creates value for everyone involved—are the
most powerful force we have to change the world for the better.”
In 1998, after teaching at a private school in New Jersey, Christian
Henry lives on campus, 5 miles from Deep Creek, the nearest
Henry was open to adventure. An opportunity arose when he met an town. The supermarket and bank are a 45-minute drive away. There
ex–Navy Seal who was starting The Island School in the Bahamas, a is but one doctor on the island, which is a 2-hour flight from Miami.
nonprofit school, where groups of students from high schools
He says that the island “bush” is dense and low; the islands are flat,
around the United States, the Bahamas, and Canada can spend 3
not volcanic.
months experiencing the Eleutheran environment and people first
“Tourism drives the economy here, and because most Americans
hand. Henry accompanied the first group of 20 high school stuchoose Nassau and the glitzy casino world of Atlantis, islands like
dents to Eleuthera.
Eleuthera remain depressed. Houses stand
“It wasn’t so much a question of why live
half built; roads have potholes with names;
abroad as much as why not?” says Henry,
and outside of government jobs, there is lit“It’s a risk to go
who divides his time between Eleuthera and
tle besides fishing and farming to keep peoBaltimore, where his fiancé lives. “My perple going. But it’s sunny, never dips below
abroad, but it’s
sonal goal is to do good and do well, as the
50 degrees, and the color of the ocean at
Quakers used to say. It is important to me to
sunrise will break your heart every day,” says
riskier to stay
spend time creating a meaningful life for
Henry, who wakes up for a 6:15 a.m. faculty
myself and others—and the fruits of that
meeting before an hour of exercise with the
put,” Henry says.
are a community of learning and growth.”
students.
In addition to English, math, and histoBorn in Fort Belvoir, Va., Henry moved
ry, Island School students are offered envievery 4 years until high school as part of a
ronmental art and marine ecology. SCUBA
career army family. He lived in Germany and
diving, island exploration, and two short kayaking expeditions com- learned how to “regrow roots” in new places, he says.
plement daily morning exercise. Science research projects and cam“Barry Lopez writes about this great idea of home called the
pus work help students to develop leadership and teamwork skills.
querencia. It’s Spanish for ‘home’ or ‘hearth,’ but it also is the place
The fee for one semester is $15,975 in 2007–2008. Each semesin a bullring where a bull retreats to when a matador has hurt it. It
ter, about 40 percent of the school’s students receive some financial is the place you get your strength from. I have several of these
aid; more than $320,000 in scholarships, from small foundations
places; one is where I live with my fiancée in Baltimore, where I
or private individuals, were awarded this year.
spend 2 weeks each month. One is in the woods in Lawrenceville,
“It was so much harder than we expected to start a school from
N.J., where I went to high school. One is in the bell tower at
scratch. Luckily, I have a boss who encourages people to grow.
Swarthmore,” he says.
Through Duke’s Cross-Continent Program, which combines on“I went back for my 10th reunion. It was powerful to hear those
campus and distance work, I was able to get an M.B.A. and still keep bells ringing, and it brought me right back to being 19 and giddy on
up my duties at the school,” says Henry.
the smell of daffodils and fresh-cut grass.” T
After 8 years, the school now has 500 alumni; a local middle
school, founded by the nonprofit Cape Eleuthera Foundation in
Andrea Hammer is a freelance writer and editorial consultant in PhiladelSeptember 2001, which evolved from The Island School’s Commuphia. She is the former managing editor of the Bulletin.
WHY NOT?
march 2007 : 19
How Swarthmore College influenced
the 2006 reauthorization of the
1965 Voting Rights Act – and other
facts about black voting rights
1865
(in 20 dramatic steps).
1 President Abraham
Lincoln delivers a speech
from the balcony of the
White House on April 11,
proposing partial African
American suffrage. In the
crowd is actor John Wilkes
Booth. Three days later,
Lincoln is assassinated.
Text by Jeffrey Lott and Richard Valelly ’75; design by Karlssonwilker, Inc.
2 Black suffrage spreads rapidly through
the South through Congressional
Reconstruction under the protection of
the U.S. Army. The process culminates
in the passage of the 15th Amendment:
“The right of citizens of the United States
to vote shall not be denied or abridged
by the United States or by any State
on account of race, color, or previous
condition of servitude.” Congress is given
the power to enforce this.
1866: Veterans of the
Confederate Army start
the first Ku Klux Klan.
It is suppressed by the
Enforcement Act of 1871.
1867-1870
1890
1882: The Chinese
Exclusion Act
denies citizenship
and voting
rights to Chinese
Americans.
5 Mississippi Democrats meet in Jackson
to write a new state constitution. It disenfranchises African-American voters,
beginning a 20-year process of driving all
black voters out of the Southern electorate
through such devices as the poll tax,
literacy tests, residency requirements, and
the “white primary.”
20 : swarthmore college bulletin
COURTESY OF AGRIBUSINESS COUNCIL;
JAMES WORMLEY RECOGNITION PROJECT
1871-1875
3 Congress passes
five separate
statutes that make it
a crime to interfere
with the right to
vote and permit
federal monitoring
of elections.
1877
4 A great crisis in Republican
support for black voting
rights occurs when lameduck
President Ulysses S.Grant
and President-elect
Rutherford B. Hayes permit
Republican governments
in three southern states to
collapse, making way for
white Democratic control.
1893
6 For the first time since 1857, the Democratic Party gains
control of both houses of Congress and the White House.
They repeal the election enforcement statutes passed
during Reconstruction. When they return to power 4 years
later, Republicans acquiesce, leaving African Americans to
fend for themselves.
1955: Rosa Parks refuses
to give her seat on a
Montgomery, Ala., bus to
a white man.
1960
1944
BRUCE DAVIDSON
9 In Smith v. Allwright, the U.S. Supreme Court, in response to
pressure from NAACP lawyers including Thurgood Marshall,
strikes down the white primary. It holds that racial discrimination in
Democratic primaries violates the 14th and 15th Amendments. The
decision triggers a huge black voter registration drive in the South,
increasing black registration by more than 100 percent.
10 The Civil Rights Act of 1960 gives
the Justice Department standing to sue
local election officials and to petition
federal judges to register black voters.
The Kennedy administration encourages
black voter registration, but the strategy
fails in Deep South states, resulting in a
wave of violence against black activists
and their white allies.
African Americans demonstrating for the right to vote
1915: D.W. Griffith
releases The Birth of a
Nation. The second Ku
Klux Klan is founded.
1920
8 The 19th Amendment is ratified:“The
right of the citizens
of the United States
to vote shall not be
denied or abridged
by the United States
or by any State on
account of sex.”
Black WWI veterans
return home and
begin to organize
local chapters of the
NAACP. In 1921,
Maggie L. Walker,
a black woman,
runs for education
superintendent of
Virginia.
1905
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS / WINNING THE VOTE BY R.COONEY
7 Alice Paul graduates from
Swarthmore College. She
becomes a leader in the
women’s suffrage movement,
devising the radical tactics
that finally force President
Woodrow Wilson and
Congress to report the 19th
Amendment to the states.
Alice Paul unfurling the ratification banner, 1920
march 2007 : 21
1964
1965
11 The Civil Rights Act of 1964
addresses accommodations and
public transportation but not voting.
1962: James Meredith becomes the first
black student to enroll at the University
of Mississippi. President Kennedy sends
troops to quell riots.
12 National television attention focuses on a voter
registration campaign in Selma, Ala., where police
brutally beat demonstrators. Congress passes the
Voting Rights Act in response to a dramatic appeal
by President Johnson.
1966
1970: The 1970 Voting Rights Act
bans literacy tests in 20 states,
including N.Y., Ill., Calif., and Texas.
AP
13 Federal officials register
several hundred thousand
black voters. Between 1964
and 1968, the registration of
black southerners increases
from 43% to 62%. The 15th
Amendment is restored to life.
1966: The Black Panthers
are founded by Huey
Newton and Bobby Seale.
© BETTMANN / CORBIS
1982
1999
14 After twice being
renewed by Congress—
and extended to cover
Latino voters—the
temporary enforcement
provisions of the act are
extended for 25 years.
A permanent amendment
establishes the right of
minority voters to elect
minority candidates of
their choosing.
Richard Valelly
Christopher
Seaman
15a Peyton McCrary is the historian
in the Voting Section of the U.S.
Justice Department.
Christopher Seaman ’99 majored in
history and later received a law degree
from the University of Pennsylvania.
He is currently an attorney in Chicago.
Richard Valelly ’75, professor of
political science, has taught at
Swarthmore since 1993. He wrote
the prize-winning book The Two
Reconstructions: The Struggle for
Black Enfranchisement.
Peyton McCrary
22 : swarthmore college bulletin
15 After a year as Eugene Lang Professor of Social
Change at Swarthmore, Peyton McCrary returns
to his job in the Justice Department. That summer,
Christopher Seaman ’00 works with McCrary in
Washington under a Roland Pennock Summer
Fellowship. Studying official correspondence, they
code the legal basis of Justice Department reviews
of Southern election plans. They thought the data
might be interesting.
2005-2006
PAUL MORSE
19 The Swarthmore
article is discussed in
Congressional hearings
on reauthorization.
The House Judiciary
Committee reports an
amended Voting Rights
Act that specifically
overrules Bossier.
The committee report
justifies reversing the
court decision through
extensive reference to the
Swarthmore article, which
is published in June 2006
by the Michigan Journal
of Race and Law.
20 President George W. Bush signs
the renewed Voting Rights Act.
It contains new language that
strengthens the Justice Department’s
ability to fight discrimination against
minority office-holding.
2006
18 Knowing that the Voting Rights Act’s
enforcement provisions would require
Congressional renewal by 2007, they
develop and circulate an unpublished
manuscript among voting-rights lawyers.
2000
2001, John Liu is
elected to the New
York City Council,
becoming the first
Asian-American
elected to a major
legislative position
in the city with
the largest AsianAmerican population
in the United States.
NARA
2004
15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, 1870
16 In Reno v. Bossier Parish School
Board, Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for
the Supreme Court, effectively prevents
the Justice Department—when reviewing
election changes under Section 5 of the
Voting Rights Act—from objecting to
changes intended to discriminate against
minority voters unless the change is
designed to make matters worse for those
minority voters.
17 Following Bossier,
McCrary, Seaman,
and Valelly analyze
their data to predict
the impact of the court
decision on Justice
Department efforts to
gain compliance with
the 1982 amendment.
They find that Bossier
clearly contradicts
recent Supreme Court
precedent and will
likely prevent further
increases in minority
office-holding.
march 2007 : 23
REBECCA WHARTON
“Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things
INFORMED
AN
CITIZENRY
THE PRECARIOUS STATE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS BROADCASTING THREATENS OUR
DEMOCRACY, SAYS JOHN SICELOFF ’76, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER OF NOW ON PBS.
REBECCA WHARTON
B y Jef f rey Lo t t
Khadijah White ’04, the youngest
staffer in a New York office full of experienced TV hands, is pitching a story—one of
three being considered on a January afternoon for the PBS program NOW With David
Brancaccio.
A half-dozen people listen as White
explains how, after the Food and Drug
Administration approved a vaccine for
human papilloma virus (HPV), the Centers
for Disease Control (CDC) quickly recommended last year that all girls be vaccinated,
starting at age 11–12. The virus, which is sexually transmitted, is thought to cause most
cervical cancers in women.
Backed by the CDC recommendation,
public health authorities in several states
want to make the vaccine a routine part of
childhood immunization schedules—like
protection from hepatitis B, diphtheria, or
polio. But, White says, conservative groups
are objecting: “They say that giving the vaccine to girls as young as the sixth grade is
like giving them permission to have sex.”
White, a production associate, thinks
that a recent clash over the vaccine in the
Michigan state legislature might provide a
good avenue for the weekly public affairs
program to examine what could become a
national issue.
Producer Peter Meryash, head of White’s
In 2001, John Siceloff ( left ) teamed up
with Bill Moyers to launch NOW on PBS.
The weekly news magazine, hosted since
2005 by David Brancaccio, airs around
the country on Friday nights.
production team, lists some of the publicpolicy questions being raised: Should the
vaccination be mandatory, or might there be
an opt-out provision for parents opposed to
its use? Will most private insurance cover it?
Will government health programs pay to
vaccinate girls who are from families that
cannot afford it?
Cervical cancer kills about 3,700 women
each year in the United States—more than
a third of those diagnosed with the now
preventable disease. “To be most effective
across society, the vaccine needs to be widely used,” White adds.
Executive producer John Siceloff ’76 listens attentively to White’s pitch and two
other ideas offered by Meryash’s team. Asking a few questions, he encourages them to
keep working on a story about the legal fallout from a constitutional amendment in
Ohio intended to ban same-sex marriage —
some judges there have interpreted it as
voiding domestic-violence laws—and
White’s HPV piece.
Siceloff, slim and boyish at 53, is a
TV news veteran. His office overlooking
New York’s Penn Station rail yard is decorated with striking photos he took in Africa
during a post-Swarthmore Watson Fellowship. His Watson project explored how different cultures constructed stories and how
the introduction of photographs influenced
those tales. Thirty years later, he’s still
telling stories with words and pictures.
Siceloff worked as a filmmaker and freelance TV journalist in Africa and Central
America from 1978 until 1984. He joined
CBS News in 1984 as a producer based in
Costa Rica and Nicaragua, then covered the
region for NBC from 1987 until 1989, when
he returned to the United States. A decade
of news and documentary production followed, first at NBC News and, from 1995, at
ABC. He’s won three Emmy Awards for
national news and a Peabody Award for his
work on ABC News’ 9/11 coverage.
He left commercial television in 2001 to
start NOW With Bill Moyers on PBS. Leading
a staff of 60, Siceloff and Moyers designed
the hour-long program from scratch. Both
wanted the freedom to do in-depth interviews, investigative reporting, and thoughtful commentary in a setting that wasn’t
driven by ratings or advertising concerns.
When accepting a 2004 Emmy for best
report in a newsmagazine, Siceloff said the
mission of NOW is to “encourage viewers to
participate as citizens—not just delivering
the news but giving people the context to
think about their relationship to the larger
world.” The Emmy-winning show Inside the
Pentagon had examined a shadowy plan—
later abandoned in light of publicity that
included the NOW report—for the Air Force
to lease a fleet of 100 air-tankers from Boeing for $900 million more than it would
have cost to buy them outright. Exposure of
the deal later cost Boeing CEO Philip Condit his job.
Moyers, now 72, retired from NOW in
late 2004. But the incisive, thoughtful
brand of journalism he personifies remains
the program’s stock-in-trade. Despite the
show’s success—it has grown to 2.5 million
viewers weekly, more than Hardball With
march 2007 : 25
get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.” —Thomas Jefferson
Chris Matthews and Larry King Live combined—Siceloff worries that “the space for
serious public-affairs programming that
looks at economic, cultural, and political
issues that affect our lives today is shrinking. A democracy needs engaged citizens
who have accurate information, but what
passes for public information throughout
the country is in a precarious state.”
There are many reasons for this
“precarious state.” Serious public affairs
broadcasting has been in decline on the
commercial networks for two decades, a
period that neatly coincides with the rise of
giant media conglomerates that own TV
networks, newspapers, and hundreds of
radio stations. On the public side, a steady
“OVER THE PAST
5 YEARS,
THERE HAVE BEEN
SUSTAINED
AND REPEATED
ATTEMPTS
TO GET US
OFF THE AIR,”
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
SICELOFF SAYS.
drop in government support for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) has led
to a “culture of begging for funds” that
threatens the quality of programming.
Then there’s the political pressure.
“Over the past 5 years, there have been
sustained and repeated attempts to get us
off the air,” Siceloff says, almost losing his
Quaker cool. (A birthright Friend, Siceloff
served for nearly a decade on the board of
the American Friends Service Committee.)
The most serious of these attempts originated with Kenneth Tomlinson, who was
appointed chairman of the CPB in 2003 by
President George W. Bush. Tomlinson, a former editor at Reader’s Digest and close friend
of Bush aide Karl Rove, went on a crusade
against alleged liberal bias in public broadcasting. Without the knowledge of the CPB
board, he commissioned an amateurish
$14,000 study of the week-to-week content
of NOW that classified guests and topics. He
also threatened in private e-mails to withhold funding if PBS did not offer its member stations a political commentary program
hosted by the editors of the Wall Street Journal. The Journal program aired briefly on
PBS and then moved to the Fox Network.
After Tomlinson’s actions were revealed,
Moyers snapped: “The more compelling our
journalism, the angrier the radical right ...
gets. That’s because the one thing they
loathe more than liberals is the truth. And
the quickest way to be damned by them as a
liberal is to tell the truth.”
Tomlinson resigned from the CPB board
in November 2005, following an internal
investigation that determined he had violated corporation policy by trying to influence
the content of PBS programs. Nevertheless,
Siceloff says, “the thought is chilling. PBS
belongs to the people, not to whatever
administration is in power in Washington.”
A further challenge is financial.
“It often surprises people to learn that less
than 20 percent of funding for public
broadcasting comes from the federal government,” he says. The rest must be raised—
mostly by the member stations—from an
aging member base, foundations, and corporations.” Still, 20 percent is important,
and it’s repeatedly been the object of political manipulation.
PBS, which collects fees from member
stations for the national programming it
produces, provides about half of what’s
required to put NOW on the air each week—
about what it takes to do a talk show,
Siceloff estimates. To pay for additional
costs like research, travel, and field production, he and Brancaccio spend a significant
amount of time raising money.
Despite significant corporate support
from Calvert, the investment firm known for
its socially responsible mutual funds, “we
need to identify another $1 million this year
to keep the program at the level of quality
we want,” Siceloff says.
It infuriates him to watch the Federal
Communications Commission auction the
electromagnetic spectrum to big corporations for huge sums—“our airwaves,” he
says. “We’re in the midst of a land grab of
space and spectrum by commercial interests
that can make huge amounts of money.”
An effort to get Congress to funnel some
of the auction proceeds to public broadcasting “went nowhere,” perhaps because the
same Republican Congress had earlier tried
to cut PBS altogether, giving up only after a
grassroots campaign by members of local
stations convinced individual representaMedia conglomerates are moving away
from tough reporting to “comfy, viewerfriendly news with big doses of celebrity
and entertainment,” Siceloff says.
26 : swarthmore college bulletin
tives to buck their leadership and restore the
proposed cuts.
At the National Conference on Media
Reform in January, Peter Hart, activism
director at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, described how “the fight against public
broadcasting happens the same way every
time.”
First, “the right wing pundits or politicians … scream about liberal bias and call
for defunding the system…. Advocates for
public TV rally to save Big Bird, save Sesame
Street. The “compromise” result, Hart says, is
a leaner budget. “The right has chipped
away at public broadcasting. Management at
public broadcasting will often express interest in accommodating these bogus rightwing concerns … and then we repeat the
whole thing about 2 to 4 years later.”
The Bush administration’s 2008 budget,
delivered to Congress last month, once
again seeks to eliminate federal support for
public broadcasting. It’s ironic, Siceloff says,
that the “education president” wants to
slash the budget for PBS, the largest single
educational institution in the country.
The problems faced by NOW and PBS
are no small skirmishes, but many media
professionals and activists see the steady
consolidation of commercial media ownership as the root cause of the “precarious
state.”
“More and more, journalists in these big
companies are moving away from tough
investigative news to comfy, viewer-friendly
news, with big doses of celebrity and entertainment,” Siceloff told an international
audience of journalists at a recent meeting
of World Information Transfer, a U.N. sponsored program.
And, because of its size and global reach,
Big Media is inevitably enmeshed in a conflict of interest with government: “These
giant companies have dozens of regulatory
and tax issues working in Congress and the
government at any one time. How can journalists in the employ of such megacorporations report on these issues without bias or
influence from the corporate boss?” Siceloff
asked.
NOW has regularly reported on media
consolidation, especially after the FCC in
2003 attempted to relax rules that prohibited media companies from owning multiple
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
“A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue
SPANNINGER SAYS
THAT WHEN SHE
FIRST WORKED AT CBS,
NETWORK
NEWS
DIVISIONS “WEREN’T
EXPECTED TO BE
PROFIT CENTERS....
WEREN’T
EXPECTED TO
WE
HOLD OUR OWN
AGAINST THE
ACADEMY
AWARDS AND
THE BASKETBALL
PLAYOFFS.”
outlets in a single market. The FCC proposal was blocked by a Federal court, but,
Siceloff says, “most of the commercial press
was silent on this story. A lot of the big players stood to gain.”
In a commentary aired on NOW in
November 2003, Moyers told viewers: “The
Martha Spanninger ’79 has seen “a slow
but steady erosion of the quality of news
on TV” during more than 20 years in the
business. She joined NOW in 2004.
founders of this country believed a free and
rambunctious press was essential to the
protection of our freedoms. They couldn’t
envision the rise of giant megamedia conglomerates whose interests converge with
state power…. We think this is the most
important story of all, the one that determines what other stories get told—and
how.”
Brancaccio puts it more bluntly: “Media
conglomerates have so many fish to fry in
Washington that they really don’t want their
news divisions rocking the boat.”
Sixteen NOW staffers—with equal
numbers of men and women—gather for
their weekly production meeting. The topic
is this Friday’s program.
Next to Siceloff, on one side of the
square table, sits Martha “Marty” Spanninger ’76, the program’s senior supervising
producer. The classmates have been friends
since their theater days at Swarthmore and,
although they have never worked as closely
as they do at NOW, their careers have
crossed paths many times. Spanninger
joined NOW in early 2005 after nearly 3
decades of TV news jobs at CBS—where she
march 2007 : 27
to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean
was first hired as a receptionist in 1977—and
at NBC and ABC. She too owns a Peabody
and an Emmy, both awarded in 1990 for the
MTV documentary Decade, which chronicled
the 1980s.
Producer Bryan Myers describes this
week’s program, which features country
music legend Willie Nelson and his pet project, a brand of bio-diesel fuel marketed by a
company he partly owns. “BioWillie,” a
blend of cottonseed oil and regular diesel
fuel, can be used in any diesel engine. The
NOW report will follow it “from plow to
pump,” Myers says, fielding questions that
are both technical and editorial. The atmosphere is collegial, with discussion of a range
of related issues, including ethanol and the
role that Big Oil might play in the bio-fuels
industry. Myers lists some of the potentially
negative consequences of bio-fuels, such as
the environmental impact of clearing more
acres to grow crops for fuel.
Back in her office, Spanninger talks about
the changes she’s seen during her career. At
NOW, she supervises five production teams,
developing reports that can take as little as 6
days or as long as 6 months to get from idea
to air. The environment at PBS is more conducive to this flexible pace—like it used to be
at the commercial networks.
When she started in news production in
the early 1980s, Spanninger says the Big
Three news divisions “weren’t expected to be
profit centers.” At the CBS Reports documentary news program, where she first encountered Moyers, “we could take a year to do a
story that was important. There was no ratings pressure. We weren’t expected to hold
our own against the Academy Awards and
the basketball playoffs.”
But, she says, the commercial success of
CBS’s 60 Minutes, which became television’s
most-watched show in 1979–1980, changed
the news business by spawning “a whole
industry of newsmagazines” that were also
expected to make money.
At the same time, the networks were
absorbed by larger corporations such as General Electric, which bought RCA/NBC in
1985, and Capital Cities Communications,
which took over ABC the same year. More
and more news divisions “had no gut for
news” and “there was a slow but steady
erosion of the quality of news on TV,”
Spanninger says.
28 : swarthmore college bulletin
I n public broadcasting, it seemed that
there could be a different model. PBS, which
provides programming for 300 member stations, has a solid history of public-affairs
shows such as Washington Week in Review,
NewsHour, Frontline, and the documentary
program POV. Moyers’ contributions have
included Bill Moyers’ Journal and such deepthinking series as The Power of Myth, Healing
and the Mind, and Genesis. (In April, Moyers
will come out of retirement to revive Bill
Moyers’ Journal.)
Brancaccio asserts that PBS is the most
trusted media brand in the nation. “It’s selfevident that we aren’t doing things like
[NOW] for ratings,” he says. “It has to have
some higher purpose.” Still, he says, trust in
a free and open press has fallen in recent
“IN-DEPTH COVERAGE
OF
ANYTHING—
LET ALONE THE
PROBLEMS REAL
PEOPLE FACE
DAY-TO-DAY—IS AS
SCARCE AS SEX,
VIOLENCE, AND
VOYEURISM ARE
PERVASIVE,”
MOYERS SAYS.
years. He cites a recent poll conducted by the
BBC, Reuters, and the Media Center, which
found that although an average of 65 percent
of people in the 10 countries surveyed
thought that the media accurately reports the
news, just 46 percent of Americans agreed.
“The information food chain is broken,”
Brancaccio says. “Journalists and others—
like historians, sociologists, and scientists—
are supposed to come up with the facts. And
that’s supposed to spark the next step. We
hold hearings. We form solutions.”
It’s this public conversation that Siceloff
sees as vitally important to a functioning
democracy. “In the next 10 years, we face
both a crisis and an opportunity in how
Americans learn about what’s going on in
the world.” With the rise of the Internet,
“the paradigm for how people get, use, and
act on information has changed.
“The crisis,” he says, “is the increasing
potential to insert government and corporate
interests at the heart of determining what
kinds of information we receive.”
In a speech to the National Conference
on Media Reform in January, Moyers asked:
“What does today’s media system mean to
the notion of an informed public [that is]
cherished by democratic theory? Quite literally, it means that virtually everything the
average person sees or hears, outside of her
own personal communications, is determined by the interests of private, unaccountable executives and investors whose primary
goal is increasing profits and raising the
share prices…. In-depth coverage of anything—let alone the problems real people
face day-to-day—is as scarce as sex, violence,
and voyeurism are pervasive.”
The media reform movement, which
has been gathering steam in the past few
years, encompasses many different organizations and has a broad agenda, but consolidation of media ownership is seen by most
reformers as the root of all other evils,
including the decline in local programming
on both radio and television.
In his new book, Fighting for Air: The Battle for Control of America’s Media, New York
University sociologist Eric Klinenberg
asserts that “Big Media companies parlayed
bold political entrepreneurialism and the
federal government’s blind faith in the power
of markets and technology to win historic
concessions from Congress [in the Telecommunications Act of 1996] … which they used
to dominate local markets coast to coast.”
Klinenberg’s book also tells the story of
grass-roots efforts by citizens and civic
groups to keep local cultural and information
lines open—essentially the story of the
media reform movement itself.
Although groups across the political spectrum—from the American Civil Liberties
Union to the National Rifle Association—
have collaborated on some media reform
causes, notably equal access to the Internet,
the movement has its critics on the right.
Accuracy in Media (AIM), a conservative
press-watchdog group, charges that “the socalled ‘media reform’ movement, which
wants to check and dilute the power of con-
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.” —James Madison
As a production associate at NOW,
Khadijah White ’04 has contributed
important ideas to the program.
servative media, especially talk radio,
includes members of communist groups
openly dedicated to America’s destruction.”
Less strident criticism of Klinenberg’s—
and the movement’s—emphasis on ownership conglomeration comes from Michael
Schudson ’64, professor of communication
at UC–San Diego. Writing in the Columbia
Journalism Review, Schudson acknowledges
that ownership matters but says there are
other factors that affect the quality of information found in the press and on the air.
These include public taste, which media
companies may try to “anticipate and channel” but cannot control; “professional
norms, values, and courage” among journalists, who, unlike their corporate bosses, are
willing to “risk their lives covering Iraq” or
“track down the expert who might explain
cancer clusters”; the “public legitimacy” of
the media and its natural foil “public disaffection and protest”; and “the climate of
opinion within which the media operate”—
including the current influence of science
and religion, modern society’s tolerance for
a certain “coarseness of public expression,”
declining deference to “conventional
authorities and canons,” and the broadly
endorsed “view of the United States as
multicultural.”
Finally, Schudson writes, “the degree of
consensus in the political elite matters.
When there is significant, open disagreement among politicians, the media are
empowered and emboldened to report critically; when politicians close ranks, as they
did … in the wake of Sept. 11, the media have
no constituency for pressing alternative
viewpoints.”
Five weeks after she pitched the
story on HPV and cervical cancer, Khadijah
White is wrapping up last-minute production details for Vaccine Debate.
She conducted much of the initial
research and set up interviews with a pediatrician, his 14-year-old patient, and the girl’s
mother. The story also featured Republican
State Representative Patricia Birkholz, who
introduced legislation requiring the vaccine
in Michigan. Peter Sprigg of the Family
Research Council argued that vaccination
should be entirely voluntary. Another conservative is quoted as saying, “This is telling
girls that they can be promiscuous and still
be safe.”
“We were looking for the best voices on
both sides of the issue,” White says. Asked
what she hoped the impact of NOW’s story
might be, White paused, then said: “Ideally,
parents will see this, and fewer girls will die
of cervical cancer. As a woman, it’s been
good to help get this story out there. We try
to provide the information people need to
make good decisions. A lot of the [healthcare] agenda has been set by men who will
never experience cervical cancer—and
women need to be heard.”
White says “it’s fun to find something
and watch it come to life.” At NOW, she’s
contributed to stories such as one showing
how laws intended to prevent voter fraud
often make it more difficult for minorities
and the elderly to cast ballots and another
that investigated health-insurance policies
that turn out to cover very few of the costs
of being sick.
But, she says, there’s often not enough
time to do justice to a subject the way she
was taught at Swarthmore: “It’s hard, coming out of Swat…. I want to get as much
information out there as possible. I’m
always concerned that we haven’t said
enough. Still, this is a place where you can
give voice to people who don’t get heard.”
It had been a good week for White, who
joined NOW after teaching for a year in
Brooklyn. The HPV story aired on Feb. 23,
and she was credited as associate producer.
The vaccination controversy heated up when
Governor Rick Perry issued an executive
order on Feb. 5 mandating the immunization of girls in Texas, so “it’s fortunate that
we went ahead with it,” White says. And, in
preparation for a future program, she had
hung out for most of a day with actor and
activist Danny Glover, who had unexpectedly helped her with something that’s been on
her mind since she left Swarthmore. Like
many young college graduates, White is
unsure about her future—it seems as if
there are almost too many possibilities.
“[Glover] told me that he had ‘kind of
fallen into acting.’ It wasn’t what he had set
out to do. He said, ‘I always knew that what
I wanted to do is to be of some use.’” White
says. “That’s what I want to do, too—to be
of some use. I believe that all paths lead
somewhere, whether it’s teaching, journalism, whatever you do.
“He also told me that acting had been an
unexpected revelation for him. I wrote that
down. I guess I’m still looking for my unexpected revelation.” T
Find links to NOW programs and other
resources mentioned in this article at the Bulletin Web site: www.swarthmore.edu/bulletin.
march 2007 : 29
JIM GRAHAM
30 : swarthmore college bulletin
Denis Newbold ’71 ( left ) and Dee
Durham ’83 have organized members
of their community to oppose sprawl,
but their efforts have not always been
welcomed by highway planners,
developers, and others in southern
Chester County, Pa.
Stopping
Sprawl
What does urban sprawl look like?
COMMUNITY ACTIVISTS OFFER
ALTERNATIVES TO BIGGER,
WIDER HIGHWAYS.
By E l iza be th R edd en ’0 5
Nestled along Pennsylvania’s border with Maryland and Delaware,
southern Chester County, Pa., is rolling country known for its
mushroom houses, horse farms, trickling creeks, and open spaces.
Take a ride on Pennsylvania Route 41 from the Delaware state line
north toward the city of Lancaster, Pa. You’ll see tidy farms, historic
villages, and occasionally, horse-drawn Amish buggies. But you’ll
also contend with scores of tractor-trailers and congested traffic
from new housing developments and shopping centers that are
springing up—almost like mushrooms—all along the corridor.
Known as the Gap-Newport Pike since the early 19th century,
this 22-mile highway has served as the main north-south route
between Lancaster and Wilmington, Del. Now it’s under increasing
stress from sprawl—and, to solve the problem of traffic congestion,
the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) proposed widening a 10-mile stretch to four lanes and building
bypasses around the historic towns of Avondale and Chatham.
But some residents say they have a better way to manage growth
and keep sprawl in check: If you don’t build it, they won’t come—at
least not as quickly.
“My view on sprawl is that it is, to a large extent, facilitated by
infrastructure,” says Denis Newbold ’71, one of the founding members of S.A.V.E. (Safety, Agriculture, Villages, and Environment).
The nonprofit community organization, which advocates for sustainable transportation solutions in southern Chester County,
counts two Swarthmore alumni among its leaders. “There’s an insatiable demand for transportation. If government takes the attitude
that it will support an insatiable demand for transportation, it will
never stop,” Newbold says.
Arguing that government can no longer build its way out of
society’s transportation problems, S.A.V.E.’s success so far can best
be measured in terms of what hasn’t happened, not what has.
Formed in 1997 to block what seemed to be an inevitable expansion
of Route 41, its efforts have prompted PennDOT to re-evaluate its
original plan, backing off from the conventional approach of turnmarch 2007 : 31
COURTESY OF THE BRANDYWINE CONSERVANCY
ing two lanes into four—plus turn lanes and high-speed limitedaccess lanes. Now, as PennDOT’s environmental process moves forward, S.A.V.E. will be judged by what it helps to create through its
continued advocacy for a two-lane alternative to widening Route 41.
The transportation department’s work to encourage townships
within the corridor to replace traffic signals with roundabouts—an
option long advocated by S.A.V.E. as a mechanism to enhance safety and cure some of the local congestion without building bigger
and wider—is a step in the right direction.
Newbold, an aquatic scientist who studies southern Chester
County’s watersheds, moved there in 1983, before the suburban
sprawl really hit. Even then, he says, he would shake his head while
waiting to cross Route 41: “Even in the 1980s, I would think,
‘Hmm, this is a pretty busy road; I hope they never turn it into a
superhighway.’” But that was the plan.
“We’ve spent more than $1.2 million in the last 10 years. Isn’t
that amazing? That’s a lot of money to spend on battling your own
government,” says Dee Durham ’83, executive director of S.A.V.E.
since 2002 and the organization’s only paid staff member. “The
state was doing what they’d always done. They thought they were
doing the right thing. How could a bunch of lay people know better
than engineers?”
“The difference,” Durham says, “is that the lay people love their
community and know what they want it to be.”
But where S.A.V.E.’s leaders saw a need for traffic-calming
devices and limitations on trucks, the state wanted to double the
road’s capacity. Originally, Durham and Newbold say, their arguments faced great resistance, and in 2001, their two-lane alternative—which also featured a two-lane bypass around Avondale—
was flatly rejected. “They shut the door on us at that point,” Newbold says.
However, with the election of Democratic Governor Ed Rendell
in 2002—and the looming reality of a state budget crunch that
made building new highways less feasible—S.A.V.E. pushed the
door back open. In a protracted game of high-stakes Ping-Pong,
competing consultants produced studies alternately supporting
S.A.V.E.’s two-lane proposal and rebutting it. In 2005, with
PennDOT finally embracing the concept of “context-sensitive
32 : swarthmore college bulletin
design,” S.A.V.E. and other stakeholders from local government,
the business community, and industry, met with the agency monthly to find a solution to the safety and congestion problems on
Route 41.
“PennDOT was looking at how to do things differently,” says
Mary Raulerson, the agency’s project manager for Route 41. “We
wanted a compromise alternative that everyone could live with.”
But, as Raulerson says, other than the stipulation of a need to make
safety improvements at existing intersections, no clear compromise
arose from the meetings.
Without a clear community mandate, PennDOT is now working
with the Federal Highway Administration to formulate a list of
appropriate capacity-building initiatives that will undergo environmental study. The options will then be presented in public hearings
and only after assessing the feedback will the agency determine the
“preferred alternative.” The four-lane option isn’t off the table,
Raulerson cautions, and it likely will be studied alongside other
alternatives. But, she adds tellingly, “We don’t believe that the
municipalities want four lanes throughout the whole corridor.”
Durham says roundabouts will reduce existing congestion, citing federal data showing that roundabouts increase traffic capacity
by 30 to 50 percent, in addition to reducing injury crashes by 76
percent, with up to a 90 percent reduction in fatalities. By routing
traffic around a one-way circular intersection, cars can continue filtering through a yield rather than being forced to stop, preventing
back-ups. “The U.K. model is ‘Wide nodes, narrow roads,’ in other
words, fix the congestion where it occurs—at the intersections.
There’s no need to widen the whole roadway,” Durham says.
Not everyone agrees with S.A.V.E.’s agenda. “The issue is one of
under-capacity and significant congestion,” says Jack Weber, chair
of the Southern Chester County Organization on Transportation,
which advocates for a bigger bypass around Avondale, further
removed from the town, than the one that S.A.V.E. has proposed.
Weber refutes the argument that roundabouts will cure congestion
and believes that, although expansion is not a foregone conclusion,
the state should purchase right-of-way now to prepare for possible
future construction. “We respect S.A.V.E’s opinion but don’t necessarily think it’s what’s best for the county,” says Weber.
KEARY LARSON/WWW.SOMETHINGINTHESKY.COM
They explain optimistically
that this is the direction
of progress—a progress
that begets preservation.
Opposite: New housing development s
are springing up along the Route 41
corridor in Chester County, Pa., built
on some of the state’s best—and most
beautiful—farmland.
Above: Improving traffic flow through
the use of roundabouts is an alternative to increasing a highway’s capacity.
Not all townships in Chester County want a roundabout. But
although the Britain-based roundabout movement was slow in
coming to Pennsylvania, Durham and Newbold say an increasing
number of municipalities are now embracing the roundabout concept. The first roundabout in southern Chester County opened in
August 2005 on Pa. Route 82 near Unionville. It was the second
roundabout to be constructed in the state and is a model for future
construction, say Durham and Newbold. They explain optimistically that this is the direction of progress—a progress that begets
preservation.
When asked whether they think they’ve fully escaped the threat
of Route 41 becoming a superhighway, Newbold and Durham look
at one another before answering. “We think so,” Newbold says
slowly, with the caution of a veteran community activist.
“There’s change happening across the country,” says Durham,
who rode horses in Chester County as a child and previously
worked in historic preservation. “You can’t keep building bigger,
wider roads to ‘solve congestion.’”
“We’re into an era—I hope—when we don’t build dams and we
don’t build nuclear power plants and we don’t build highways,”
says Newbold. “We now know there are better ways.” T
Elizabeth Redden writes for InsideHigherEd.com in Washington, D.C.
march 2007 : 33
campus view
34 : swarthmore college bulletin
ERIN GO BRAGH!
Light of foot and
nimble of finger,
dancer Catharine
McIntire Parnell ?06
and piper Jamie
Kingston ?07 led an
impromtu parade of
revelers through the
campus on St.
Patrick?s Day 2006,
treating the College
community to a breath
of Irish spring.
march 2007 : 35
8
A Sin8ular
Career
ROBERT MACPHERSON ’66 DEFIES
THE STEREOTYPE OF THE UNWORLDLY
MATHEMATICIAN.
By Da na M ac ke nzie ’ 7 9
If
there is one thing a
mathematician dreads, it’s a
singularity. Singularities are places
where the usual rules—of geometry, or
algebra, or calculus, depending on the
problem—break down. For example, a
black hole is a singularity in spacetime. A
more ordinary example is the crossing
point in a figure 8. If you were in a car
driving along a figure-8 track, you
could drive full speed ahead
most of the time. Only at
the crossing
point,
the rules would change. It
is the only place where traffic can
come from another direction, and so you
would have to slow down or stop and look
both ways. That is the nature of singularities.
Robert MacPherson has made a career of going forward where other mathematicians were forced to stop.
His specialty is understanding the structure of singularities in multidimensional spaces. Perhaps he is a singularity himself—in the best sense of the word.
MacPherson is a person to whom the usual rules
don’t apply. The son of a conservative father,
MacPherson became a political radical. He was
beaten by police at the famous April 1969
Vietnam War protest at Harvard.
36 : swarthmore college bulletin
MATH OR MUSIC?
Born in Ohio in 1944, MacPherson was the
son of a nuclear engineer. Herbert MacPherson (called “Mac”) worked on the Manhattan Project as an expert in the production of
graphite with no boron impurities. Mac was
not pleased that Robert went into mathematics. “Among his friends, the word ‘mathematician’ was a put-down,” MacPherson
says. “It meant a person who had no physical intuition, who was interested in the
wrong aspects of any question and had no
interest in reality.”
Robert MacPherson is far from the
stereotype of the unworldly mathematician.
He is an avid cyclist, loves boats, and is an
excellent chef and amateur carpenter. “He
makes it a point to do everything at least
once—build a wall, install plumbing, put up
a barn,” says former student Tom Braden,
now at the University of Massachusetts.
During MacPherson’s Swarthmore years,
mathematics faced some very stiff competition from another passion—music. He
majored in both. “I studied the Well-Tempered Clavier and the Goldberg Variations
more than any other book, including math
books,” he says. “The density of ideas is
incredible.” As the only music major in his
class, he enjoyed almost unlimited attention
from the two-man music faculty of Claudio
Spies and Peter Gram Swing.
During a summer internship at Oak
Ridge National Laboratory, where his father
was the deputy director, MacPherson
worked with a mathematician named Robert
Coveyou. They were a good match—neither
really fitting into the buttoned-down culture of the national laboratory. (Coveyou’s
group was jokingly called the “Baker Street
Irregulars.”) But their work is still cited.
To simulate nuclear reactions, engineers
needed a way to generate lots of random
numbers (because radioactive decay is
inherently a random process). Mathematicians have devised various formulas to produce “pseudo-random” numbers. But Coveyou and MacPherson discovered that many
of these approaches actually perform badly.
If you graph strings of two (or three, or 20)
consecutive pseudo-random numbers in a
2- (or 3-, or 20-) dimensional space, you will
often find that they cluster onto planes
instead of dispersing themselves randomly
through space. Coveyou and MacPherson
developed a “spectral test” to detect these
bad pseudo-random number generators,
and that test is still state-of-the-art today.
Although his career led to mathematics,
MacPherson remains a serious music
enthusiast, an opera lover with front-row
season tickets at the Metropolitan Opera in
New York. “Bob is extremely allergic to
Robert MacPherson (left) and his mathematics collaborator—and life partner—
Mark Goresky (right) now reside in
Princeton, N.J., where MacPherson is a
fellow at the Institute for Advanced
Study. They have pioneered the field of
intersection homology.
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
His first Ph.D. student, Mark Goresky,
eventually became his life partner—a rare
arrangement in math (but not so rare as
either gays or mathematicians would think).
“Goresky and MacPherson” has become
practically a single mathematical entity,
much like “Rogers and Hammerstein” or
“Ben and Jerry.” In the early 1990s,
MacPherson spearheaded a unique relief
mission, raising more than $100,000 to
keep Russian mathematics afloat—and
smuggling a significant part of that money
into Russia himself.
MacPherson is not a rule breaker by
choice. He’s more of a rule inventor, and
nowhere is that more evident than in his
mathematics. In the 1970s, he and Goresky
created a new theory called intersection
homology, which has revolutionized the way
that mathematicians deal with singularities.
Previously, they had mostly worked around
them. A black hole can be understood by
looking at the space around it. A figure 8
can be understood—sort of—by looking at
similar shapes, the hourglass shape formed
by the outside edges of the track, or the two
separate oblongs formed by the inside
edges. Goresky and MacPherson’s rules have
in many cases eliminated the need for such
work-arounds.
“Intersection homology totally changed
the landscape,” says Paul Gunnells of the
University of Massachusetts, a former student of MacPherson. “It’s a tool that is
almost universally used now. For example, it
revolutionized representation theory—it’s
absolutely inconceivable nowadays that you
could do without it.”
march 2007 : 37
background music,” says Goresky. “If there
is music playing, then he’s listening to it,
thinking about the harmonies, trying to
hear the inner voices, concentrating on it.”
The two own a Steinway grand piano, which
MacPherson frequently plays after dinner.
“INVENTING OUR WORLD”
While he was at Swarthmore, MacPherson
says, he knew that there was something different about himself. “I remember thinking
that there was some difficulty, and this was
a difficulty I was going to overcome. I didn’t
have a name for it,” MacPherson says. The
words “homosexual” or “gay” were rarely
uttered back then—even as insults.
For a while, MacPherson seemed to have
his “difficulty” licked. He got married as a
graduate student at Harvard, and many
friends considered it an ideal marriage. But
in 1970 he took a teaching position at
Brown, and, in the fall of 1971, a graduate
student named Mark Goresky arrived.
Goresky was also married, but that didn’t
stop a remarkable chemistry from emerging
between the two men.
“During my third year of graduate
school, Bob and I saw a lot of each other,”
Goresky says. They worked together, had
dinners together, even planned a garden
together. MacPherson invited Goresky and
his wife to come with him the following year
to Paris. “It is easy to see now, 30 years later,
that the intensity and electricity that was
developing in our relationship was something very unusual,” says Goresky. “But at
the time, neither of us imagined that we
might some day move in together.”
Certainly, they had far from the typical
student-teacher relationship. One memorable day, they were working together on a
problem and couldn’t agree on the notation.
MacPherson decided that there was only
one way to resolve the impasse: a duel with
water pistols. They chased each other
around the Brown University Math Department, which was in an old house with lots
of nooks and crannies, until Bob found the
perfect spot to lay an ambush. Sure enough,
he heard steps coming downstairs, leaped
out—and soaked one of the most senior
faculty members of the department.
During their year in Paris, Goresky and
MacPherson discovered intersection homology, the theory that would make both of
them famous. Goresky received a doctorate
in 1976, and they spent the next year apart.
38 : swarthmore college bulletin
“During that year, both of us independently
began to wonder about sexual orientation
and to experiment to see what we were really attracted to,” recalls MacPherson. The following year, they spent increasing periods of
time with each other.
Still, it couldn’t last. In 1978, Goresky
and his wife returned to Vancouver, their
hometown, where he got a job at the University of British Columbia, where he felt cut
off from the rapidly developing circle of
ideas involving intersection homology. After
3 years, he moved back to Massachusetts. In
theory, at least, the move precipitated the
breakup of his marriage in 1981. Bob was
separating from his wife at the same time; in
fact, the two couples were divorced in the
same month. “It’s obviously not a coincidence,” MacPherson says. “You could see
what was going on at an emotional level.”
During a 1985 sabbatical in Rome,
Goresky and MacPherson tried living
together for the first time—an arrangement
that was conveniently ambiguous as long as
they were abroad. By 1987, the ambiguity
was over. Both of them were in the job market, making it clear they were a package
deal. After being hired at M.I.T. (MacPherson) and receiving a substantial raise at
Northeastern (Goresky), they bought a 100year-old oceanfront Victorian house in
Quincy, Mass.—a commitment akin to a
marriage. “I loved that house,” says Goresky.
“I can still remember our first night there. It
was a hot August evening, and we had all
the windows open. I fell asleep to the
swoosh, swoosh of the waves on the shore.”
Asked to compare their story with Brokeback Mountain, MacPherson and Goresky
give intriguingly different answers. “I guess
the similarity is that both of us were highly
resistant to the idea that we were gay, and
we didn’t know any other gay people,” says
MacPherson. “We were inventing our own
world—that’s the parallel I would make
with Brokeback Mountain.”
For Goresky, the movie portrayed a fate
narrowly averted. “I found the story quite
moving,” he says. “Time and again, Ennis
makes plans for them to move in together,
but it never happens. Then Ennis dies, and
Jack ends up living an empty life of memories and regrets. This was almost our story. I
came very close to staying in Vancouver.”
Now, the two are much more connected
to the gay community at large, but they are
not sure how much it accepts them. One
year, MacPherson helped plan a session on
careers for gay students for the annual Sager
Symposium at Swarthmore. He was stunned
when no scientists were invited. The idea
that gays could have careers in science was,
apparently, news to the gay community.
“I get that same impression when looking at the national gay media as well,”
MacPherson says. “There is huge coverage
of people in politics, in queer studies, artists
and musicians. It’s almost as if, if you’re a
creative gay, that’s the end of the story.”
And yet Goresky and MacPherson are far
from the first same-sex couple in mathematics. Two of the most famous Russian mathematicians of the 20th century are Andrei
Kolmogorov (1903-1987)—virtually the
inventor of probability theory—and Pavel
Aleksandrov (1896-1982) a topologist and
inventor of “Aleksandrov spaces.” Although
printed references to their relationship are
extremely oblique—homosexuality was a
crime in the Soviet Union—they lived
together for more than half a century, and
the nature of their friendship was an open
secret among Soviet scientists.
“Every Russian knew it, and there was a
rumor that even Stalin himself knew it,”
says MacPherson. “Kolmogorov was a member of the Academy of Sciences”—a body of
great power in the U.S.S.R., quite unlike its
American counterpart—“and he proposed
Aleksandrov for membership. [Nikolai]
Luzin said, ‘In the academy we only have
mathematicians, not wives of mathematicians.’ At this point, Kolmogorov got up and
slapped Luzin,” MacPherson says.
But that wasn’t the end of the story.
Word of the incident reached Stalin, the
supreme dictator, who could easily arrange
for anyone in the Soviet Union to disappear
forever. Stalin pondered, sucked on his pipe,
and then pronounced, “I sometimes lose my
temper, too.” In this way, Aleksandrov
became a full member of the academy.
A RUSSIAN WINTER
MacPherson has been closely connected to
Russian mathematics since 1977, when he
met Israel Gelfand, a student of Kolmogorov, in Paris. He first visited Moscow
in 1980 and returned yearly thereafter. He
smuggled Russian research papers out for
publication in Western journals, cutting the
names of the authors off the papers so they
would not be in danger if the papers were
confiscated. Not that they ever were.
88
Although it was illegal (the papers were supposed to be scrutinized first for “state
secrets”), the border guards shrugged when
they saw that it was “just mathematics.”
MacPherson, the consummate collaborator, found in Moscow the mathematical
community of his dreams. “Every time I
went there, I would feel so happy, as if I had
come home again,” he says. None of the best
younger mathematicians could get jobs
doing math, because they were Jewish.
Instead, they did research purely for the joy
of it. “No one had an office, so math was
done in people’s houses, over tea. The math
was at such a high level and so pure in its
motivations,” MacPherson says. “People
thought that they would never get any material reward for the work they did.”
Unfortunately, after the Soviet Union
collapsed in 1991, the situation took a drastic turn for the worse. An economic crisis
devalued the ruble to the point where $50 in
American currency could support a family
for a month. Russia’s mathematicians (and
other academics), who had supported themselves with low-paying sinecure jobs, suddenly stopped getting any paychecks. “The
government had a choice of paying scientists or subway drivers, and they paid the
subway drivers,” MacPherson says.
MacPherson asked the American Mathematical Society (AMS) to set up a relief
fund, and within months, American mathematicians had contributed more than
$100,000. “I’ve never heard of anything
else like it,” he says. Later, MacPherson
helped persuade the Soros Foundation to
contribute an even larger sum.
But there was a problem: how to get the
money into the anarchic country? “This was
the one romantic moment in my life,”
MacPherson says. After the AMS determined that it was not worth paying outrageous commissions to untrustworthy middlemen, MacPherson and Tim Goggins, an
AMS staffer, decided to carry it by hand.
“I was really worried,” MacPherson says,
“because we were carrying about $23,000—
and, at that time, you could be murdered for
$50. The Russian law was that if we brought
that kind of money in, we had to declare it
at the border, but everyone knew the border
guards were in touch with the hoodlums.”
So after years of smuggling math papers
out, he smuggled the money in.
MacPherson handed it out, $200 or
$300 at a time, at Public School No. 2 in
PARTNER AND TEACHER
not clones of each other. Everyone who
knows them comments on this: MacPherson is the geometric mind, the intuitive
thinker whose lectures, more often than
not, include drawing beautiful multicolored
pictures on the blackboard. Goresky is the
perfectionist who makes sure all the details
are correct, puts them into words, makes
sure the papers get written. There is no
“senior” or “junior” in the partnership,
although it placed a strain on Goresky when
MacPherson moved to his current position
at the Institute for Advanced Studies in
Princeton. Goresky had to swallow the pill
of becoming an unpaid member of the institute, but he has gradually come to appreciate the role of an independent scholar.
Despite his Russian adventures, MacPherson’s influence on mathematics has
mostly been quiet. He is widely praised as an
expositor. “When someone gives a lecture at
the Institute and [Pierre] Deligne or [Robert]
Langlands is in the audience, the speaker
feels the need to go as fast as possible,” says
Braden. “Bob does not do that. Because of
his personality, he inspires people to give
talks that others will understand.”
As an adviser, his quirks are legendary.
Gunnells once wrote a guide for MacPherson students, which dispenses such advice
as this: “If he leaves the room suddenly
without announcement, don’t do anything.
Just wait; most likely he’ll be back. Indeed,
sometimes he will leave in the middle of a
sentence, then return 10 minutes later to
complete the sentence as if nothing happened… Exception: if he doesn’t return after
half an hour or so, then you have missed the
last train to Braintree.”
Nevertheless, MacPherson does give his
students a full hearing on issues that can
range far beyond math. “I spent my early
graduate career being unsuccessfully mentored by straight white guys living conventional straight-white-guy lives,” says Laura
Anderson, a professor at Binghamton University. “If any of them had any doubts
about who they were and where they fit in
the world, they didn’t show it. As I was
preparing to bail out of math, I finally met
Bob and had the first sympathetic conversation of my graduate career. He took a great
weight of alienation off my shoulders.” T
It’s hard to tell exactly what has made
Goresky and MacPherson such a perfect
match, both as collaborators and as a couple. Part of it, undoubtedly, is that they are
Dana Mackenzie is a science writer in Santa
Cruz, Calif. This is his fifth feature article in the
Bulletin.
Moscow. He resists any suggestion that the
money was largesse. Officially, the payments
were grants, awarded over the space of two
years to 374 mathematicians on the basis of
peer-reviewed applications. According to
Sergei Gelfand, Israel Gelfand’s son, who is
now an officer of the AMS, it was a watershed moment in Russian mathematical history—the first time that money had ever
been awarded on the basis of merit. In spite
of the chaotic conditions, every designated
MacPherson
raised more than
$100,000 to help
support Russian
mathematicians,
then
carried
bundles of cash
across the
Russian border.
grantee eventually received his or her
money, and every penny was accounted for.
Most importantly, the program kept Russian
mathematics going. “The situation today is
definitely much better than I ever thought it
would be,” says Gelfand.
Even so, MacPherson misses the old
days. Most of his Russian friends have now
emigrated to the West, and to see them he
now has to travel all over the world, instead
of crowding into an apartment or a public
school in Moscow. But he agrees that the
Russian system is producing talented young
mathematicians, and the institutionalized
anti-Semitism is thankfully a thing of the
past.
march 2007 : 39
connections
recent...
Delhi, India
There was an impromptu “connection” of
10 Swarthmoreans in Delhi, India, in January. Among the five young alumni and
five students who found themselves—and
each other—in India were Anmol Tikoo
’07, Dan Hammer ’07, Arpita Das ’08,
Aatish Bhatia ’07, and Jesse Goodall ’07 as
well as Emily Wistar ’06 and Tanya Aydelott ’05, Sonal Shah ’05, Raghu Karnad ’05,
Make your plans now to join us for Alumni Weekend, June 8–10.
and David Owen ’06.
nearby Politics and Prose Bookstore,
where they enjoyed a lecture titled
“Empire, Exile, and Longing for Home:
Two Tales from the Sri Lankan Diaspora”
by Professor of Psychology Jeanne Marecek, this season’s faculty mentor. Marecek,
who has worked in Sri Lanka for more
than 15 years, discussed the books Running
in the Family by Michael Ondaatje and
Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai.
upcoming...
Emily Wistar ’06 ( left ) and Tanya
Aydelott ’05 connected in India.
Philadelphia
On Feb. 7, the Philadelphia Connection
hosted a talk by Congressman Rush Holt
(D–N.J.). Holt, a former Swarthmore
physics professor, is now entering his
fourth term in the House. Topics included
the recent elections and the upcoming
109th Congress.
Tucson
APRIL
13–15 On Campus
Family Weekend
15 New York City
Faculty Talk: “Is All Terror Local? Analyzing Communal Violence within the
Context of the Global War on Terrorism,” with Assistant Professor of Political Science Jeffrey Murer.
15, 22, 29 New York City
Lifelong Learning Program : “Utopia
On and Off Broadway,” a 3-week minicourse with Professor of History Robert
Weinberg. For information, call (610)
328-8696, or visit http://www.swarthmore.edu/lifelonglearning.xml.
On Feb. 21, the Tucson Connection book
group met for a spirited discussion of Jane
Austen’s novel Persuasion. The discussion
was led by guest speaker Gene Koppel,
retired University of Arizona professor of
literature and author of The Religious
Dimensions of Jane Austen’s Novels. The
group is organized by Laura Markowitz
’85, and the meeting was graciously hosted
by Dabney ’51 and Kate Worth Altaffer ’52.
17 Philadelphia
Washington
28 Haverford College
On Jan. 13, Sue Willis Ruff ’60 hosted a
get-together for the DC book group at her
home. Then, she led the group onward to
40 : swarthmore college bulletin
The Meaning of Swarthmore
Celebration
20–22 On Campus
Alumni Council Meeting
Men’s lacrosse: Swarthmore alumni vs.
Haverford alumni, followed by lunch
and the varsity regular-season finale
MAY
3 Wilmington, Del.
Garnet Sage Tour of Winterthur
Country Estate and Gardens
8 New York City
The Meaning of Swarthmore
Celebration
14 Washington, D.C.
The Meaning of Swarthmore
Celebration
20 Princeton, N.J.
Faculty Talk: “What 35 Years of Drug
War in Latin America Can Teach Us
about Fighting a (35?)-Year War on Terror in Iraq,” with Kenneth Sharpe,
William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Political Science.
22 Baltimore
Faculty Talk: “Does a College Degree
Reduce Employment Volatility?”
With Philip Jefferson, professor of
economics.
JUNE
8–10 On Campus
Alumni Weekend: Reunions for classes
ending in “2” and “7” and the Class of
2005
19 Boston
The Meaning of Swarthmore
Celebration
For more information about alumni events,
call the Alumni Office at (610) 328-8402 or
e-mail alumni@swarthmore.edu.
a real-world
externship
seeks new sponsors
Each January, when the College’s Extern Program kicks into action,
the Career Services Office takes on the ever-expanding task of providing hundreds of students with a week’s worth of experience in
professional settings in cities across the country. With the assistance
of an extraordinary Alumni Extern Committee, headed by James
Lindquist ’80, 180 of the 269 students who applied for externships
were placed this year, and 80 of them were also hosted in alumni
homes. A record 358 alumni hosted or sponsored students this year.
Anonymous student program evaluations produced a number of
positive comments: “I liked interacting with people who have been
through Swarthmore and have done something great with their
lives”; “They [alumni hosts] made the ‘real world’ a lot less daunting”; and “I feel fortunate to have such a strong network of alumni.”
The Extern Program is always searching for additional sponsors,
in particular in the fields of law and medicine. Externships are available primarily in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco,
and Washington, D.C., although alumni from other cities may volunteer as workplace hosts, too. Alumni volunteers who live outside
the primary extern cities are encouraged to also offer housing to
interested students. If you wish to find out more or to volunteer,
please contact extern@swarthmore.edu.
Thanks to reception sponsors Mary-Mack Callahan '77, James
Gregory '85, Susan Turner '60, and Wallace Clausen '60, alumni
and student externs gathered in New York, Washington, D.C.,
Philadelphia, and Boston for socializing and networking. Left: Ana
Chiu '06 and David Vinjamuri '86. Right: Sanda Balaban '94 and
Laura Dattner ’95.
Lax Conference
showcases
entrepreneurs
Each year, the The Jonathan R. Lax Conference on Entrepreneurship
brings approximately 150 alumni and students to campus for education, networking, and socializing. This year's keynote speaker was
Cheung Kwai Kong '86, president of the specialty retail business at
Easton-Bell Sports, who addressed “The Role of Entrepreneurs in
Shaping our World.”
This year's offerings included a first-ever “case study” of Clarix
LLC, with its CEO Jagath Wanninayake '96. A panel titled “Entrepreneurship and the Global World” featured Ronald Krall '69, senior vice president and chief medical officer, GlaxoSmithKline; Rebecca Voorhies '93, group director, finance and corporate development,
Cadence Design Systems; and Theresa Williamson '97, founder and
executive director, Catalytic Communities Inc. “Web 2.0: Buzzword
or Power Shift” was discussed by a panel including Jonah Gold '04,
producer, The Electric Sheep Company; John Hammond '82, senior
director, Sony BMG Music Entertainment; Jeffrey Schon '73, partner, The Cheyenne Group; and Christophe Watkins '87, vice president, Icarus Studios.
swarthmore travels
For more than 30 years, Swarthmore has offered popular Alumni
College Abroad trips to alumni, parents, and friends. Trips to
three destinations are planned for 2007.
Journey of the Czars
with Professor of History Robert Weinburg, July 18–30
Salmon River Whitewater Adventure (Idaho)
with Associate Professor of Biology Sara Hiebert Burch ’79,
June 18–24
Experience China
with Associate Professor of Chinese Haili Kong, Oct. 12–27
For more information, call (800) 789-9738, e-mail
alumni_travel@swarthmore.edu, or visit the Alumni College
Abroad Web site at www.swarthmore.edu/alumni_travel.xml.
march 2007 : 41
class notes
Postcards
Sculptor Phillip Stern ’84 designs publications for the College and delights
in capturing images of the beautiful postcard that is Swarthmore—cherry blossoms
bursting forth in all their pink finery, stately lampposts gracing walkways, spent
magnolia petals languishing on the lawn, a giant Adirondack chair (created by
Jake Beckman ’05) dwarfing a gathering of traditionally sized models on Parrish beach.
42 : swarthmore college bulletin
books + arts
“All I want to be is average—but with a great deal of money.”
“Looks like it’s going to be a family affair. All the best affairs are.”
“You can’t expect everything to be altogether real all the time.”
“I don’t care about the truth. I care about the facts.”
Comic Chaos
JOSEPH BELSCHNER
Facts and truth often get
Year for 2005. Reviews of
mixed up in murder mysterKill Me have boosted its repies. Kill Me Like You Mean It,
utation even further. (Read
the latest production by The
reviews and see more phoStolen Chair Theatre Compatos from the production at
ny, twists truth and lies into a
www.stolenchair.com.)
theatrical pretzel that circles
Kill Me is the ninth proaround itself for 90 tight,
duction for the company,
funny minutes. It’s staged in a
which was founded by
keenly drawn cinematic style
Rikhye, Stancato, and eight
and delivered with ironic lines
other Swarthmoreans in
(like those above) that pop
2002. Dingman, also a
like flashbulbs illuminating
founding member, returned
the absurdities of life and
to the company for this prodeath—creating what director
duction. Aviva Meyer ’01
Jon Stancato ’02 calls “comic
was the show’s managing
chaos out of the possibility
director.
that American life might actuStolen Chair—the name
ally be pointless.”
comes from a scene in a film
Performed in January to
biography of Molière by
sold-out audiences at The Red
Ariane Mnouchkine, seen in
Room, a small off-off-Broada Swarthmore theater
way space on New York’s East
class—is one of four resi4th Street, Kill Me is the secdent companies of Horse
ond production in Stolen
Trade, an artists’ collective
Chair’s planned “CineTheatre Sam Dingman ’04 ( left ) plays a police detective in Kill Me Like You
that provides access to facilTetralogy”—four plays in clas- Mean It , a new off-off-Broadway play by the Swarthmore-spawned
ities such as the 32-seat Red
sic film styles. (The first, The
Stolen Chair Theatre Company, one of many theater groups born here. Room and two other downMan Who Laughs, a live silent
town theaters. In addition
film for the stage, ran in fall 2005. It has
Tommy Dickie (Tommy Dickie); and his sis- to its stage productions, Stolen Chair offers
since been published in Playing with Canons, ter, American Ingénue Vivian Ballantine
professional workshops, in-school residenan anthology of innovative theater adapta(Liza Wade White). The “truth”—or whatcies, a youth physical theater camp, and
tions of classical texts.) Playwright Kiran
ever you can believe of it—is eventually
master classes.
Rikhye’s [’02] new murder mystery draws
exposed by American Police Detective Jones,
“Keeping a company like this going for 5
its spirit from Eugene Ionesco’s absurdist
played with great presence and vocal power
years is a milestone—a real sign of achievedramas and its style from 1940s American
by Sam Dingman ’04.
ment,” says Allen Kuharski, professor and
film noir.
Stancato’s cinematic direction—with
chair of theater, who accompanied me to
Stancato says the play seeks to “revisit
jump-cuts between scenes, actors revealed at New York to see the production and linboth forms in their original context and col- odd angles, and repeated lines that seem
gered after the show like a proud uncle.
lide them to learn what they can teach us
like zooms and close-ups—complements
Swarthmore’s department—long known
about our responses to the contemporary
Rikhye’s Tommy-gun dialogue, which tummore for studying theater than for making
sociopolitical climate.”
bles out in staccato phrases and arresting
it—has, in recent years, spawned an impresFrom the first scene—in which American aphorisms. Despite touches of color, such as sive group of young actors, writers, direcPrivate Investigator Ben Farrell (Cameron J. Mona’s red lips and Vivian’s gown—the
tors, and theatrical entrepreneurs. These
Oro) receives a mysterious phone summons CineTheatre is shot through with black and include Philadelphia’s Pig Iron Theater
and then witnesses the murder of the beau- white. Stark lighting by David Bengali com- Company, currently led by Quinn Bauriedel
tiful nightclub performer (Emily Otto) who
pletes the look. You can almost hear the old ’94, Dan Rothenberg ’95, and Dito Van
called him—Kill Me rolls out briskly as both projector clattering in the booth behind you. Reigersberg ’94; SaBooge Theatre of New
whodunit and parody-of-whodunit. AbsurRikhye’s playful yet precise use of lanYork and Montreal, with Simon Harding
dist overtones are apparent in every charac- guage and Stancato’s well-informed direc’99; Early Morning Opera, a Philadelphiater, including the chief suspects: American
tion have attracted attention in New York’s
based company directed by Lars Jan ’00; FlyFemale Publisher Lydia Forsythe (Alexia
bustling theater scene. NYTheatre.com
ing Carpet Theatre of New York, with Adam
Vernon); her writer, American Playboy
named the company one of its People of the Koplan ’95 as artistic director; Green Chair
58 : swarthmore college bulletin
Dance Group, the first dance-theater company to come out of the College; playwright
Deborah Stein ’99; actress Solveig Holum
’97; Poland-based director Michal Zadara
’99; and London-based designer Erik Rehl ’94.
Recently, many of these alumni have
been encouraged in their work through
the Swarthmore Project in Theater, which
provides free summer housing and rehearsal
space for groups to develop their work.
Stolen Chair has held five on-campus residencies with the support of the project.
Stancato recalls that he and Rikhye were
the only two students in the advanced
directing course at the College—an early
seed of a collaboration that has lasted 8
years. “[At Swarthmore,] we really got a passion for both the process [of making theater] and the idea of using theater history as
our palette,” he says. “Each project we do is
a chance to throw ourselves into a new area
of study—to open our minds beyond theater to literature and politics.”
—Jeffrey Lott
BOOKS
William Armstrong ’54, Thinking Through
the Children’s Sermon, The Pilgrim Press,
2006. In this book, the pastor-author offers
suggestions for preparing and presenting
children’s sermons in ways that make them
meaningful, edifying, and valuable additions
to worship.
Glenn Good, Bernard Beitman ’64, Counseling and Psychotherapy Essentials: Integrating
Theories, Skills, and Practices, W.W. Norton &
Company Inc., 2006. Integrating theories,
concepts, and techniques into a single
essential source for today’s counselors and
psychotherapists, the authors provide students with a textbook that connects their
classroom experiences with their actual
work with clients.
(Christopher) Kitoba Sunami ’97,
How the Fisherman Tricked the Genie,
Atheneum Books for Young Readers,
2002. Accompanied by Amiko Hirao’s
illustrations, three interwoven stories
show that good works should not be
rewarded with evil. The book was selected as a 2003 “Notable Book” and nominated for a 2006 Georgia Book Award.
Liza (Crihfield) Dalby ’72, East Wind Melts
the Ice: A Memoir Through the Seasons, University of California Press, 2007. This set of
essays is structured on ancient Chinese seasonal observances. Susan Griffin, author of
The Book of the Courtesans, says, “Like a lush
garden, this book is meant to savor.”
Arthur Dannenberg ’44, Pathogenesis of
Human Pulmonary Tuberculosis: Insights from
the Rabbit Model, American Society for
Microbiology Press, 2006. This 450-page
text describes 40 years of research by Dr.
Max B. Lurie (Dannenberg’s mentor) and
40 years of the author’s own research since
Lurie died. Tuberculosis in the rabbit model
resembles the human disease more closely
than the disease in any other laboratory
animal.
Heidi Carolyn Feldman ’87, Black
Rhythms of Peru: Reviving African Musical Heritage in the Black Pacific , Wesleyan University Press, 2006. In an exploration of the people and events that
shaped the resurgence of black Peruvian
culture, the author celebrates a cultural
tradition that was nearly lost.
Christine Downing ’52, Gleanings: Essays
1982-2006, iUniverse, 2006. This collection
of essays reflects both the author’s continuing exploration of Greek goddess traditions
and other aspects of Greek mythology and
her ongoing involvement with the thought
of Freud and Jung.
Christine Downing (ed.), Disturbances in
the Field: Essays in Honor of David Miller,
Spring Journal Books, 2006. This
Festschrift celebrates the 70th birthday of
David Miller, Watson-Ledden Professor of
Religion Emeritus and Downing’s friend
and colleague.
Kenneth Turan ’67, Now in Theaters
Everywhere: A Celebration of a Certain
Kind of Blockbuster , Public Affairs™,
2006. In a review of the best big films of
the last decade, Turan, who is film critic
at the Los Angeles Times and is heard
weekly on NPR’s Morning Edition ,
explains what makes films such as Blade
Runner and Conan the Barbarian so successful, revealing which filmmakers
repeatedly bring quality entertainment to
a mass audience.
march 2007 : 59
books + arts
tion of Victorian literary history, the author
questions the relationship between labor
and pleasure, two concepts central to the
Victorian imagination and the literary output of the era.
Andrew Low ’73, Low on Appellate Practice:
Collected Columns, Continuing Legal Education in Colorado Inc., 2006. This collection
of appellate attorney Low’s quarterly
columns written for The Colorado Lawyer
during the past 16 years demonstrates his
wit and wisdom in a creative narrative illustrating complex legal concepts.
David Swanger ’62, Wayne’s College of
Beauty, BkMk Press, 2006. This collection of poems, which won the publisher’s
2005 John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, is,
according to the contest judge Colleen J.
McElroy, about “neighborhoods and welltraveled paths…. The poet’s strong sense
of voice climbs above the resin of form.
The cadence evokes imagery without
losing the balance of sentiment and
sentimentality. These poems are both
hard edged and beautiful, an exciting
collection.”
Steven Epstein ’74, Purity Lost: Transgressing
Boundaries in the Eastern Mediterranean,
1000–1400, The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2006. The author investigates the
porous nature of social, political, and religious boundaries prevalent in the eastern
Mediterranean during the Middle Ages.
Caitlin Killian ’95, North African Women in
France, Stanford University Press, 2006.
This book examines how Muslim women
construct and manage their identities in the
midst of a foreign culture, why some cope
better than others with the challenges that
confront them in their new country, and
how they raise their children who will one
day be French.
Carolyn Lesjak ’85, Working Fictions: A
Genealogy of the Victorian Novel, Duke University Press, 2006. In this reconceptualiza60 : swarthmore college bulletin
John and Anne Tedeschi ’56 (translators),
The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy: From Equality to
Persecution, University of Wisconsin Press,
2006. This book, the Tedeschis’ eighth
translation from Italian, offers the first
translation into English of Italian historian
Michele Sarfatti’s work, which focuses on
the treatment of Jews in fascist Italy.
Jeremy Weinstein ’97, Inside Rebellion: The
Politics of Insurgent Violence, Cambridge University Press, 2007. Drawing on interviews
with almost 200 combatants and civilians
who have experienced violence firsthand,
the author demonstrates how characteristics
of the environment in which rebellion
emerges constrain rebel organization and
shape the patterns of violence that civilians
experience.
Richard Wolfson ’69, Essential University
Physics (two volumes), Pearson Education
Inc., 2007. This reasonably priced, calculusbased introductory-level physics textbook
embraces proven techniques from physics
education, employing a strategy-based
approach to help students build the analytic
and quantitative skills and confidence
needed to apply physics in science and
engineering.
CDs
Denise Mitkus, David McCullough, Lisa
Wildman ’84 (Peanut Butter Jellyfish),
Peanut Butter Jellyfish, Peanut Butter Jellyfish, 2006. This CD of family-friendly
music for children of all ages offers songs
about tolerance and caring for the earth,
children’s favorites, and lullabies.
David Randall '93, Chandlefort: In the
Shadow of the Bear, Simon and Shuster,
2006. The author's intense and compelling sequel to Clovermead (Simon
Pulse, 2005) explores the strength of
love, courage, and forgiveness in the
battle of good and evil.
Jane Goodall and Dana Lyons ’82,
Circle the World: Songs and Stories ,
Lyons Brothers Music, 2004. This CD is
the result of a collaboration between
Lyons, a singer/songwriter and activist
for the environment, social justice, and
animal rights; and conservationist/chimpanzee expert and storyteller Goodall.
Its title song was inspired by Goodall’s
vision for a global celebration on United
Nations World Peace Day, with so many
people marching all over the world holding giant peace-dove puppets that it
would be visible via satellite from space.
profile
Care, Comfort, Convenience
GEOFF FORESTER
BJ ENTWISLE ’78 HELPS TO REVIVE AN ABANDONED MEDICAL TRADITION—THE HOUSE CALL.
Patients are grateful for BJ Entwisle (right) and her Frail Elder
House Call Program.
T
hanks to BJ Entwisle ’78, internist and geriatrician, a group of
elders living in the Concord, N.H., area are enjoying the return
of an abandoned medical tradition—the house call. Entwisle, director of the Frail Elder House Call Program, located in Concord Hospital’s Capital Region Family Health Center, explains: “I took 13
frail, little old ladies I knew from private practice—who were homebound—to launch the program.”
“There is something so rich about caring for people in their
homes,” Entwisle says. “It changes the power dynamic—the patient
feels more empowered, the doctor less domineering.” While there,
she learns a lot about the patient: “I see photographs, talk with family members, and admire great-grandmother’s quilt. When I’m in
their kitchens, watching my patients take their medicines, it’s the
only time I really know what they are doing with their medicines.”
Entwisle had been in private practice with The Hitchcock Clinic
in Concord for 10 years when she accepted the position of professor
of adult medicine with the newly developed New Hampshire-Dartmouth College Family Residency Program in 1998. She also signed
on to launch the Frail Elder House Call Program. Each elder must
meet strict conditions to be eligible for the program. “The first is
that they have stopped driving,” Entwisle says. “My nurse assistant,
Peggy Tucker, the hub of this whole program, then screens each candidate to measure their daily level of activity.”
Today, Entwisle oversees the care of 120 elders—60 at home and
the others in assisted living and nursing homes—assisted by 16 second- and third-year residents who are learning the finer points of
geriatric medicine from Entwisle, a subspecialist in the field.
According to Constance Row, executive director for the American
Academy of Home Care Physicians (AAHCP), the premise of elder
house calls is simple: “It’s a way to manage permanent health problems so elders can age in their own homes rather than an institution.”
Personalized care, convenience, and comfort are key benefits. Ethel
Eisely, who cares for an 83-year-old quadriplegic in his home, says:
“I don’t know how we would have managed for the last 3 1⁄2 years
without the program.” House calls also eliminate transportation
problems and provide someone to call with questions or in a crisis.
For Ely Buena, a second-year resident from Greenfield, Mass.,
Entwisle is a great mentor and resource who “listens to her patients
and is aware of their environments. She wants us [residents] to see
the elders as individuals who need independence as well as health
care.” Eighty-six-year-old patient Mary Lou Hancock of Concord,
N.H., shared her litany of praises by phone: “Dr. Entwisle is very
thorough, professional, thoughtful, and caring. She’s also compassionate and perceptive.”
After World War II, the rate of house calls sharply declined.
“More patients had access to cars, and medical technology was centered in one place,” Entwisle says, “so it made sense for patients to
go to the physician. In the 1970s, renewed interest in house calls
emerged; by 1984, AAHCP had been established. Row believes the
growing number of elders who are unable to get to their physicians’
offices and the financial benefits—home care is a fraction of the
cost of hospital care—have contributed to the increase in house
calls. AAHCP estimates that there are 1,000 house-call practices
nationally. According to a study in the November issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, the annual number of house
calls increased 43 percent between 1998 and 2004.
Entwisle’s bond with elders began with her maternal grandparents who lived well into their 80s. Her alma mater, Boston University School of Medicine, has the oldest house-call program in the
country. As a fourth-year medical student, Entwisle spent a month
doing house calls in Boston. As a resident at Boston City Hospital,
“she realized how much she enjoyed taking care of older people.”
Mother of Rachel, 19, a student at Bates College, Entwisle makes
her home with four other Swarthmore graduates—Jordan Cornog
’74, Julie Dewdney ’75, Juliana Eades ’75, and Christopher Cornog
’77—whom she describes as a “family of friends.”
Entwisle says, “I tip my hat to the little black medical bag of the
past with an L.L. Bean briefcase that we call the “house-call bag.”
—Susan Cousins Breen
march 2007: 67
profile
The Ethics Guy
GEORGE POULOS
BRUCE WEINSTEIN ’82 IS IN THE BUSINESS OF DOING THE RIGHT THING.
Weinstein’s most recent book is Life Principles: Feeling Good
by Doing Good, which sets forth five basic principles to guide
one’s ethical decision-making: do no harm, make things better,
respect others, be fair, be loving. He is currently working on an
ethics book for tweens.
Y
our roommate turns in a term paper she downloaded from the
Internet as her own work. Do you tell the professor? A dental
hygienist sees substandard work done by her own employer. Does
she tell the patient, discuss it with the dentist, or say nothing at all?
An employee enhances his resume to get a job. He gets the job. A
year later, should the employee tell the boss what he did? These are
just a few scenarios that Bruce Weinstein ’82, considers as an ethicist.
When Weinstein, known popularly as The Ethics Guy (theethicsguy.com), entered Swarthmore, he thought he was headed for medical school. But a course in ethics taught by the late Gilmore Stott
intrigued him and pointed him in a slightly different direction. After
receiving a Ph.D. in philosophy from Georgetown University in
1989, he taught bioethics for 6 years at the West Virginia University
School of Medicine.
While there, he decided that many of the questions bioethicists
were facing were also applicable to the general public. “I decided to
make the world my classroom,” he said. In 1995, Weinstein left
WVU and set up his own company, Ethics at Work Inc.
Now living in New York City, he regularly speaks to audiences
with more than 5,000 professionals in fields ranging from medicine to real estate. He has a syndicated weekly newspaper column
and appears frequently as an ethical analyst on TV news shows,
including Good Morning America and The Today Show.
Weinstein said the reason to be ethical is because “it is the right
thing to do.” But when he asks his audiences the “why be ethical”
question, the answer is often quite different.
“People will say ‘so I can sleep at night,’ ‘so I can get into
heaven,’ or ‘so I can look at myself in the mirror.’ People have a
self-referential response. People want to know ‘What’s in it for
me?’” Weinstein said.
“As a leader, I needed to answer that question. The good news is
that all roads lead to nirvana. If you do the right thing, you’re satisfying your ethical obligation to other people and benefiting yourself.
The flip side is if you take the low road, such as if you’re a corrupt
CEO, it will come back and hurt you. You’ll risk legal liability, your
reputation may be ruined, and you may be fodder for negative discussion in the media.”
Weinstein has edited or written five books, and his syndicated
column “Ask the Ethics Guy” appears on BusinessWeek.com, where
a recent comment drew fire in a way Weinstein hadn’t anticipated.
He had given his response to whether an employee should tell
the boss that he padded his resume when he applied for the job.
Weinstein said he should tell.
“Owning up to one’s mistake shows the moral virtue of courage,”
Weinstein said. “I believe the employer would keep the employee
because he did something that wasn’t easy to do.”
But BusinessWeek.com readers disagreed.
“I know it was a skewed sample because people tend to write letters mostly when they’re angry, but, having said that, there are so
many people willing to defend the behavior of lying with ‘everybody
does it,’ and ‘the CEO did it.’ Covering it up is really disturbing. It’s
why we see corporate scandals, and it will continue until businesses
take ethics seriously,” he said.
Weinstein said he chose to become a populist ethicist because
“many of our society’s issues are discussed from political, military,
and legal perspectives. But we also need to talk about the ethical
perspective. Ethics often requires more of us than the law does.”
Weinstein doesn’t think our world is any worse off than in earlier
times. “As far back as Aristophenes and Plato, there were complaints
about youth,” Weinstein said. “Human nature hasn’t changed
much. But it’s not clear to me that from an ethical perspective our
society is any worse off than 20 years ago. The fact that I’m seeing,
in my professional life, a more widespread recognition of the
importance of ethics is evidence to me that we’re not getting worse
as a society.”
—Audree Penner
march 2007: 69
in my life
Ice
Orcas &
THE WORLD IS AN ENDLESSLY
EXCITING PLAYGROUND
FOR ADVENTURE SEEKERS.
By Ke r s t i n Ki rsc hen b au m R o we ’9 3
No set itinerary
We set out one morning in British Columbia expecting to arrive at our next destination by early afternoon. But The Lonely Planet
always tells the careful reader about scenic
byways. So we took a narrow little road just
feet from the ocean through towns that can
hardly be called towns. Maybe they were just
collections of buildings that happened to be
close to one another. We finally came to a
town referenced in the guidebook, hoping
for some breakfast and a bathroom. Walking
along the one street, we came upon a sign:
72 : swarthmore college bulletin
DAVID ROWE
During the past 2 years, I have driven
beyond the Arctic Circle, hiked glaciers in a
rainforest, sipped tea in 100-year-old gardens, clocked more than 4,000 miles on a
car in Scandinavia, walked a road with my
name on it, strolled around Hobbiton, been
to Hell’s Gate and back, felt a buffalo’s
tongue, watched a bear while sea kayaking,
and witnessed orcas dancing atop the
ocean.
When I am not teaching more than 120
students and grading more than 1,500
essays each school year, I travel. No. Not
merely travel. The type of “vacation” preferred by my soul mate and me is an adventure—the type where the only things barring a longer one are the length of our summer breaks and countries that don’t hand
out visas that are valid for more than 30
days. Before leaving our continent, we usually have only plane tickets, two guidebooks,
and hotel reservations for our first few nights.
From there, we poke and prod, saunter and
summit, walk and wander our way into and
around the chosen destination.
Kerstin Kirschenbaum Rowe explores a crevasse in New Zealand’s Fox Glacier.
“Orcas! 40 minutes away! Tours at 12 and
5 p.m.”
We looked at each other. Orcas only 40
minutes away? We wouldn’t arrive at our
night’s lodging until after dark, but we
decided to change our plans.
An hour later, stepping into the inflatable Zodiac boat, I was filled with anticipa-
tion. A 45-minute ride brought us well into
the Georgia Strait, and the craft slowed. We
saw the first of many orcas’ dorsal fins coming right up out of the water, like so many
sharks. We spent about 20 minutes watching the fins and noses of the orcas surfacing
and submerging, surfacing and submerging.
And then I turned to the left.
“Look!” I screamed—but not in enough
time for my husband to catch it. Never have
I seen such a stupendous sight. Never will I
forget the image of a 4-ton orca fully, completely, thoroughly airborne, horizontal to
the water, flinging his mass free of his environment. In my mind, he will always be suspended in the air for as long as he likes,
before gravity takes hold, crashing him back
into the waves, into his element.
Then, in front of us, another orca leaped
clear of the rough waters, flinging his body
skyward before he, too, plashed back into
the sea. For the next 5 full minutes, there
was a symphony of orcas leaping around us.
Over there. Then there. Then over there. You
didn’t know which way to look, so the three
of us moved our heads like watching a frenetic tennis match, trying to keep our eyes
on all parts of the ocean. From every direction, it seemed, the orcas flung themselves
into the air like fountain jets in Las Vegas.
The most amazing feat was by one that
decided to somersault. Truly somersault.
The orca whipped his fluke skyward, nose to
the ocean, performing a vertical upsidedown balancing act, flipping himself clear
over his own enormous body. The power of
these animals was stupefying. We took no
pictures. To view the display through a camera lens would have cheapened it. It was
also impossible, considering the rocking of
the Zodiac and the speed of the whales.
As suddenly as it had begun, it ended.
The orcas decided, for reasons unknown to
the most experienced marine biologists, to
stay in the water. To swim away. To continue
their perennial search for salmon. Our jaws
were slack. We could not find the words to
express our excitement and wonder. We
spoke in fragments. But we knew we had
experienced magic—the magic that can only
come from having no set itinerary.
Take risks
The risks we take do not begin with the
overused title “Extreme … ” But we still take
risks—healthy, good for the soul, low-possibility-of-dying risks.
Like the time we went glacier hiking.
There are two places in the world where glaciers paradoxically reside in rainforests: New
Zealand and Chile. Finding ourselves a
scant 120 miles away, we boarded a train to
traverse New Zealand westward to Fox
Glacier and signed up for a full-day hike.
Grabbing an alpenstock and strapping
on crampons over rented boots, I felt like an
old-time explorer. I was Shackleton, getting
ready for his trip to the South Pole. Using
the most basic gear, I would cross continents and summit mountains. The first step
onto the ice was glorious. Tony, our 20something guide, showed us how to get
around. We had to do a funny kind of widelegged stomping walk, like the villainous
cowboy barging into a saloon. This shoved
the tiny teeth of the crampons into the ice
to prevent slipping. We had to play mental
gymnastics with ourselves: The emotional
part of the brain looked at the ice and said
“Step tenderly! Or you’ll slip!” Logically, I
told myself, “Step firmly! So you won’t slip!”
But I was not to be deterred. On more
than one occasion, I got close enough to a
fascinating crevasse to be able to ask Tony,
“Can we go down there? It looks so cool!”
And our expert guide would check it out,
making sure it wouldn’t cave in and send
our group of 10 to a newspaper headline
and the outfitter to lawsuits. More often
than not, he gave the OK and would start
chopping ice steps for us. Exploring the
glacier’s crevasses was amazing. We were
surrounded by high walls of thick, clear,
turquoise-blue ice, smoother than glass.
They were narrow fractures, fit only for the
fit. I imagined what it must have been like
for Captain Cook and his men to have dis-
Before leaving our continent, we usually
have only plane tickets, guidebooks, and
hotel reservations for our first few nights.
From there, we poke and prod, saunter
and summit, walk and wander our way
into and around the chosen destination.
It took me about one second to start stomping all over my icy playground. I felt like I
could go anywhere, do anything—much to
my husband’s and Tony’s horror.
“Get away from there!” someone behind
me yelled, like a reproachful mother.
“What?” I thought and half mumbled,
annoyed at being distracted from my Lewisand-Clark dream. “I just wanted to see how
deep this crack was!” I called back petulantly. My husband stomped up behind me.
“That can be really dangerous,” he
explained. “Those crevasses can go very
deep, and you could fall far. I don’t want to
lose my wife.” I was not prepared to believe
him, his glacier-hiking experience being 35
minutes—exactly the same as mine. So I
looked at Tony to get a different answer. But
the look on Tony’s face told me “the parents” were united. He clearly didn’t feel like
spending his fun workday saving some
dumb American tourist from a deep, icy
chasm. “Okay,” I grumbled, sort of agreeing
to stay away from the edges of potentially
hazardous cliffs.
covered this glacier. How they must have
slid all over it, chopped off pieces for 19thcentury piña coladas, written home about
the strange wonder.
We walked through glassy blue tunnels
formed by the melting ice. Ice surrounded
us. It was our floor, walls, and ceiling. It was
the next room and downstairs. It was thousands of ice rinks. We had to grab our fear
and stomp it just as we stomped our crampons. The day was exhilarating.
We emerged from our journey unscathed
but deeply touched. My spirit was soaring,
filled with confidence. We had entered a different world. A world of excitement and of
the unknown. A world of risk taking. A
world of adventure. T
Kerstin Kirschenbaum Rowe worked for 12 years
as an English teacher, the last 5 at Overland
High School, in Denver, Colo., where she lives
with her husband and fellow adventurer, David.
Currently, she is enjoying the supreme adventure
of staying home with their baby girl, born in
August.
march 2007 : 73
profile
Compassion in Business
MURILO RODRIGUES
GABRIEL FAIRMAN ’02 BELIEVES THAT CORPORATE SUCCESS DEPENDS ON MORE THAN JUST A PRODUCT.
Despite his facility with languages, Fairman describes himself
primarily as an agent for social transformation. For more
information on his company, visit www.bureautranslations.com.
aving been born in São Paulo, Brazil, Gabriel Fairman grew up
H
speaking Portuguese. He also learned Spanish early on from his
Argentine father and picked up English attending American
schools, where he was also taught French. At Swarthmore, he
learned Italian during a semester abroad in Italy. And, in his senior
year, he began studying Mandarin Chinese, which he polished during a 5-month stay in a Zen Buddhist monastery in Taiwan.
So it’s not surprising that Fairman—now back in São Paulo—
makes his living working with words, as executive director of
Bureau Translations, where translators interpret in 20 languages.
Beside his love of languages, Fairman has a penchant for philosophy and psychology—thanks to his College courses, he says, especially those taught by Frank and Gil Mustin Professor of Psychology
Emeritus Kenneth Gergen. Fairman graduated with a special major
titled The Death and Rebirth of Human Agency.
“This is just a fancy name for the study of how people are
impaired in their decision-making by influences subconsciously
engrained as a result of their culture,” he says. The rebirth of these
processes occurs when we become actively aware of this cultural
conditioning of our modes of thinking and allow ourselves to be
open to alternative explanations for human behaviors, rather than
passively seeing only one “right” explanation. “I could never really
accept any one way of thinking as the ultimate way,” Fairman says.
Fairman’s route to his current job was not a direct one. After
months of monastic routine “working as a gardener, meditating,
teaching English to children at an orphanage inside the monastery,
and practicing kung fu,” he worked at a New York consulting firm
for a while, followed by a year with his father in international trade
and 6 months in the export department of Brazil’s largest mineral
exploration company.
Back in São Paulo, Fairman was struck by the clash between the
harshness of the business world in “this do-or-die, cut-throat city”
and the insights he had gained in his pursuit of philosophy and
personal inner exploration. “I was disillusioned by business practices that put the importance of human relationships in the background, so I took over the home business my mother founded 25
years ago and turned it into a start-up company that had at its core
an emphasis on relationships,” he says.
In light of Fairman’s drive to reach beyond the limitations of culturally imposed perceptions, his choice of profession—in which he
must strive on a daily basis to reconcile the cultural differences that
reveal themselves through language—seems entirely appropriate.
His staff—experts at building connections through language—
are expected to be equally adept in forming relationships based on
traits like tolerance of differences, understanding, and compassion.
For example, Fairman describes being commissioned to translate
a set of highly sensitive documents pertaining to a multimilliondollar contract between a Brazilian company and Chinese company.
“We had to understand the thought process of the Brazilian supplier and figure out how the wording in the original Chinese version of
the contract would fit within this context. Brazilian texts are typically not concise and are often filled with flowery language. So, with
the help of consultants, we examined the language of the original
Chinese document before translation. Then, after translation, we
consulted with lawyers in both countries and did more rewording or
rephrasing before producing the final contract,” he says.
Fairman’ s carefully chosen staff comprises 10 in-house consultants and 15 translators. All spend a fair amount of time in the office
attending training sessions, seminars, or presentations. “I am looking for people who have the basic set of characteristics needed for
working in a company, such as punctuality, diligence, and thoroughness,” he says, “but above all, they should be able to understand and
accept differences and be willing to learn from these differences, not
just sit back and accept the status quo.”
At weekly meetings, employees share ideas on topics such as
project management, health issues, and company-client relationships. “We have a continuous learning system,” Fairman says. “I’m
trying to balance my theoretical background with the pressing
demands for productivity to build a business based on harmonious
and evolving relationships rather than just a product.”
—Carol Brévart-Demm
march 2007: 77
Q+A
“Preposterously Delightful”
By Car ol Bré va rt - De mm
Professor of German Hansjakob Werlen
loves language—his own and others. Born
in a tiny Swiss valley, he grew up speaking a
local Alemanic dialect, the language in
which he still feels most comfortable, even
though his German is impeccable. So is his
English. After attending Spanish classes
taught by colleagues and spending time in
Latin America, he also enjoys conversing in
and reading Spanish. He gets by in French,
too. He finds beauty in the sounds of words.
As a graduate student at Stanford, his interest in semiotics led him to attend a seminar
taught entirely in Russian by an Estonian
semiotician, whose reading of Pushkin held
Werlen spellbound for a semester, although
he knew no Russian. He occasionally visits a
Vietnamese restaurant in Philadelphia,
where, over a bowl of steaming phô, he listens to the sounds of the conversation.
For 20 years, Werlen has been teaching
18th- and 19th-century German literature to
Swarthmore students, many of whom stay
in touch. Recently, he’s been teaching contemporary German literature and food studies. He is a member of the International
Herder Society and the American Goethe
Society.
Passionately interested in food, Werlen
founded the Philadelphia chapter of Slow
Food in 1998. The international eco-gastronomic movement, with 80,000 members
worldwide, is dedicated to ecologically
sound food production, the invigoration of
regional culinary traditions, and the pleasures of the table. He spent a week living
with a Ketchua family in Ecuador, helping
the local cooperative of 400 families expand
its small cocoa-bean business into the international gourmet chocolate and cocoa market. A beer connoisseur, he has friends
among Philadelphia’s microbrewers.
Werlen enjoys using the occasional oxymoron. He’s something of an oxymoron
himself—intensely intellectual, wildly jocular. He describes his time at Swarthmore as
“preposterously delightful.” The same can
be said of time spent in his company.
80 : swarthmore college bulletin
What’s cool about the German language?
Many German words have a kind of literal
descriptiveness that can be fun when you
teach the language, such as Fingerhut (thimble, literally, “finger hat”) or Stinktier
(skunk, literally “smelly animal”).
Which courses do you enjoy teaching most?
My recurring favorite is the Goethe Seminar. He was such a revolutionary writer. All
those trite, romantic settings of current
soap operas could be vernacular variations
on The Sorrows of Young Werther. Another
good one was the freshman seminar
Between Appetite and Aesthetics. This was a
way to sneak in my preoccupation with food
and the history of aesthetics. Rick Eldridge
(philosophy) came and explained how the
sensual part of taste was banned by German
philosopher Immanuel Kant, and Mark Wallace (religion) talked about religious food
taboos. It was great fun.
Is there a work of German literature that everyone should read?
Read Goethe’s Faust, Part I. It’s funny, beautiful, tragic, and relates to issues being
debated now—the role of science, utilization of the earth, things like that.
If you could be a German literary figure, who
would you choose?
I’d like to have been someone like E.T.A.
Hoffmann. He was a jurist by training, composer, conductor, music critic, draftsman,
caricaturist, and a great writer. He felt
deeply about art and wrote beautifully and
humorously, yet he also had a dark side. He
was just a convivial, fun, irreverent guy.
Everyone should read Tales of Hoffmann or
listen to the opera.
Are you planning any new research projects?
I’m collaborating on a volume about the history of methodologies in my field. I’m interested in the “half-life” (as I call it) of theory,
and I’m looking at a particular set of theoretical practices that were important for
Germanistik in the 20th century.
Do you have a teaching style?
I have no fixed script. I love to digress. After
all, you’re learning about life, so I’m as apt to
deliver a plaidoyer for good stout as I am to
talk about the Enlightenment.
Do you have a favorite beer?
Basically, the last good beer I drank. We
have about 10 world-class small brewers in
and around Philadelphia. I know them all
because they come to Slow Food events I
organize. Living in the United States right
now is like living in beer heaven. When I’m
in Germany, I declare apodictically that,
after Belgium, the United States is the best
beer country in the world. The Germans
don’t take this lying down, of course.
What was your most recent Slow Food event?
I invited Herb Eckhouse, an Iowa prosciutto
maker and father of Laurel Eckhouse ’03, to
talk with us and let us taste his incredible
cured meats. He brought speck, culatello,
prosciutto, and pancetta. All his products
measure favorably with the best Italian and
Spanish cured meats. It’s just like the American beer. Or Metropolitan bread. You can
search far and wide in France before finding
the quality of sourdough bread-making that
you find at Philly’s Metropolitan Bakery.
Which three words describe you best?
Curious, energetic, and change-loving.
How do you think your wife would describe you?
Generous, funny, and gregarious.
What do you consider the height of success?
It’s a bit like what Barry Schwartz says about
the paradox of choice—when you don’t
manically compare yourself and your lot
with that of others, when you’re happy with
your own situation in life. I’ve reached it.
I’ve been here for 20 years. I enjoyed it from
the very beginning, and I enjoy it more now.
According to Hansjakob Werlen, the
growth of North American microbreweries—such as Yards Brewing Co. in
North Philadelphia ( right )—has heralded
a Golden Age of Beer in this country.
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
REVISIT. REKINDLE. REUNION.
Come back to Swarthmore this June.
ALUMNI WEEKEND 2007: JUNE 8–10
All classes ending in “2” and “7” and the
Class of 2005 are celebrating reunions,
but everyone is invited, so make plans now
to attend Alumni Weekend 2007.
Up-to-date information is available at
http://alumniweekend.swarthmore.edu
Registration is now open on-line.
Questions? E-mail the Alumni Office at
alumni@swarthmore.edu, or phone (610) 328-8402.
make this your year!
Swarthmore College Alumni Bulletin 2007-03-01
The Swarthmore College Bulletin is the official alumni magazine of the college. It evolved from the Garnet Letter, a newsletter published by the Alumni Association beginning in 1935. After World War II, college staff assumed responsibility for the periodical, and in 1952 it was renamed the Swarthmore College Bulletin. (The renaming apparently had more to do with postal regulations than an editorial decision. Since 1902, the College had been calling all of its mailed periodicals the Swarthmore College Bulletin, with each volume spanning an academic year and typically including a course catalog issue and an annual report issue, with a varying number of other special issues.)
The first editor of the Swarthmore College Bulletin alumni issue was Kathryn “Kay” Bassett ’35. After a few years, Maralyn Orbison Gillespie ’49 was appointed editor and held the position for 36 years, during which she reshaped the mission of the magazine from focusing narrowly on Swarthmore College to reporting broadly on the college's impact on the world at large. Gillespie currently appears on the masthead as Editor Emerita.
Today, the quarterly Swarthmore College Bulletin is an award-winning alumni magazine sent to all alumni, parents, faculty, staff, friends of the College, and members of the senior class. This searchable collection spans every issue from 1935 to the present.
Swarthmore College
2007-03-01
55 pages
reformatted digital
The class notes section of The Bulletin has been extracted in this collection to protect the privacy of alumni. To view the complete version of The Bulletin, contact Friends Historical Library.