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AS
[YOU]
ARE
Swarthmore students today
feat u r e s
d e partments
profiles
16: When the Ground
Shakes
3: Letters
Readers share their thoughts.
61: When Malaria
Is a Fact of Life
4: Collection
Terrie Taylor ’77 devotes her life to
saving children from the deadly disease.
Highlights from campus
By Susan Cousins Breen
40: Connections
69: In Search of Solitude
Swarthmore reaching outward
Kevin Hood ’91 monitors and seeks to
preserve wilderness.
Swarthmore’s Taiko Program dances and
drums on.
By Eliza b e th R e d d e n ’ 0 5
20: A Taste of Spirituality
During a week of events focused on
religion, faith becomes an unusually hot
campus topic.
42: Class Notes
By Carol B r é v a r t - D e m m
Alumni have their say.
27: As You Are
49: In Memoriam
Swarthmore students today
Remembering departed friends and
classmates
Photogra p hs b y E l e f t h e ri o s Ko s t a n s
Text by J e f f r e y L o t t
36: The Floating Pool Lady
64: In My Life
To Venture Out Fearless
Decades of persistence pay off in a unique
public pool.
B y S u s a n ne Monahan ’86
By Paul Wa c h t e r ’ 9 7
74: Books + Arts
Big Dams of the New Deal
by David Billington and Donald Jackson ’75
R e v i e w e d by Faruq Siddiqui
80: Q + A
Why Is Sarah Willie So Delightfully Tired?
B y E l i z a b eth Redden ’05
ON THE COVER
Carlos Villafuerte ’08 of Los Angeles, Calif., listens to “Shine a Little Love” by
Electric Light Orchestra on his iPod. Of himself, he says, “I can cook, tango,
and massage.” Meet more Swarthmore students “as they are” on page 27.
Photograph by Eleftherios Kostans.
OPPOSITE
At twilight on a winter night, the windows of Clothier Hall frame the flag high
atop Parrish. Photograph by Eleftherios Kostans
By Audree Penner
parlor talk
M
y earliest memory of church is of the scratchy wool suit I was required
to wear on Sundays. And of lying on the living room floor in that suit,
reading the funny papers while my parents prepared for church. We
were Presbyterians then, driving from our suburban home to attend the in-town
church my father had grown up in. I remember nothing of the Sunday school,
except that the church had a gymnasium, where we played while our parents had
post-liturgical coffee.
In the late 1950s, our family became Episcopalians. I wasn’t consulted, but I
suspect this denominational switch was prompted more by convenience than theology; our new church was just two miles from home. I still had to dress up on Sundays, for it was a “high” Episcopal church. My mother always wore a hat, often with
a hint of a veil.
At age 13, following classes with The Rev. Harold Towne, I was confirmed in the
church and received first communion from the local bishop. Father was a member
of the vestry and sang baritone in the
choir; Mother served in the altar guild;
and I became an acolyte, carrying the
big brass processional cross while
dressed in a red cassock and bright
white surplice.
I had a church, for sure, but did I
have religion? Even today, I can recite
the creed—“born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried.”
But credo means “I believe,” and, all
along, I wasn’t sure I did.
The end came at college. The Rev.
Towne made an annual tour of the New
England schools where his parishioners
habitually sent their progeny, and he
arranged to visit me in my freshman dorm at Middlebury. He was a friendly, likeable
man, popular with young people in the church, and I knew him well, having helped
him prepare and serve communion many Sundays. But after some pleasant conversation over dinner in a nice restaurant, there followed an awkward attempt at mutual prayer. I balked; he left. I knew my churchgoing days were over. (They were not,
but that’s a story for another day.)
For many young people, whether arriving as skeptics or believers, college can be
a challenging time. Independent living, the rationalist intellectual atmosphere, and
the opportunity to meet people of many backgrounds can either confirm or undermine a young person’s belief system. Yet, the same challenges to faith can also draw
students closer together, either in familiar religious communities or in exploring the
ideas of others. This year’s Religion and Spirituality Week at Swarthmore (see page
20) was a way for students to affirm and to explore—something they do every day
in their academic, social, and spiritual lives. It’s part of the journey of living, part of
Swarthmore.
—Jeffrey Lott
For many young
people, whether
arriving as skeptics
or believers, college
can be a challenging
time. But it’s part
of the journey, part
of Swarthmore.
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 6, 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. © 2007 Swarthmore College
Printed in U.S.A.
letters
SUFFICIENT WIND
It is with great enthusiasm that I celebrate
the College’s decision to purchase 30 percent wind power for its electricity needs
(“Collection,” March Bulletin). But the
decision came somewhat as a surprise,
since most of academe has been fueled
predominantly by wind for generations.
What considerations could possibly
prevent the College from moving immediately to purchasing 100 percent of its electricity from wind-power producers and
other nonhydrocarbon resources? Is there
perhaps lurking anywhere on campus a
craven desire to appease the producers of
fossil fuels?
If, by chance, there’s an economic factor
at work here, would the College care to disclose the higher cost that it is choosing not
to incur? Quite possibly a socially aware
benefactor might come forward with a contribution to cover that cost.
As a purely intellectual exercise, might
an economics class be invited to research
alternative uses for those funds such as
additional financial aid, increased faculty
salaries, or additional vice presidents? A
philosophy class might then be asked
whether the logic associated with not taking the steps to purchase the full 100 percent might in any way be applied to the initial 30 percent—taking into proper
account the sheer embarrassment of being
associated with an institution with an
insufficiency of wind.
STEVE PENROSE ’66
Dallas, Texas
Editor’s Note: According to Ralph Thayer,
the College’s director of maintenance, “We
buy ‘national wind credits’ from Community Energy Inc. Purchase of wind credits is
a contractual agreement that kilowatt
hours equal to the credits purchased will be
generated by a wind turbine and injected
somewhere into the nation’s electric grid at
some point in the year. Those credits are
purchased at a premium on top of our electricity supplier’s regular rate. Last year, the
College bought a total of $1.34 million
worth of electricity. At today’s best price for
wind credits—and based on last year’s
total usage—we would have added
$68,000 to our electricity bill by purchasing 100 percent wind power.”
According to Stephen Bayer, director of
development, a gift of $1.6 million to the
College’s endowment would “just about
cover the additional cost” at current electricity rates. “Call me,” he added. “Let’s
talk.”
Neither Thayer nor Bayer would comment on the sufficiency of wind on
campus.
STOPPING SPRAWL
It was with great interest that I read “Stopping Sprawl” (March Bulletin), which
focused on the Pennsylvania Route 41 corridor through western Chester County. In
the mid-1960s, I was the planning consultant for a cluster of seven contiguous townships south and west of Coatesville, Pa.,
including two through which Route 41
passes.
I worked with these townships to
achieve adoption of their first comprehensive plans and zoning ordinances. At that
time, I saw development pressure coming
from the east—the Philadelphia suburbs
extending beyond Valley Forge and West
Chester. In fact, that happened. An informal inspection of the area in 1993 revealed
that more than 300 houses had been constructed in the easternmost township, with
the charming name of East Fallowfield.
Fortunately, town officials had followed my
plan, and the subdivisions were clustered
near Coatesville, thereby avoiding suburban sprawl.
In the 1960s, I did not envision the
Wilmington-Lancaster pressure in the
Route 41 corridor. I hope my clustering
plan is working there as well, but I commend Dee Durham ’83 and Denis Newbold
’71 for fighting to keep Route 41 two lanes.
This area is too beautiful to allow highwayinduced sprawl to occur.
STEVE PITKIN ’57
Stuart, Fla.
HOW WORD TRAVELS
When I filled out the forms Swarthmore
sent me the summer before my freshman
year, I gave the names and addresses of
both my grandmothers (my only living
grandparents). My father’s mother lives in
Iran and doesn’t speak or read a single
word of English, but I provided her name
and address anyway. I knew that Swarthmore sent the Bulletin to grandparents,
because my American grandmother praised
its interesting articles. But I never considered that Swarthmore would send the mag-
azine to my grandmother living in Iran.
My dad told me that when mailings first
started arriving in Iran, my grandmother—
not being able to read anything that was
arriving—was terrified that she owed the
school money and that I would be kicked
out if she didn’t respond. She called my
dad in a panic, but he assured her that she
could merely enjoy the pictures in everything she received and that she didn’t owe
any money. So, after enjoying the pictures
in the magazines, my grandma passes them
on to a close family friend in Iran who
speaks and reads English fluently.
Apparently, every time Mr. Mansoori—
this family friend—talks to my dad on the
phone, he asks after me. He always tells my
dad that he is very impressed with everything he reads about the school, and
recently he said he had decided that
Swarthmore is the best college in the
world. Amazing how word travels, no?
ZSALEH HARIVANDI ’07
Swarthmore
A CALL FOR LIBRARY MEMORIES
Been holding those Swarthmore library
memories on reserve? The time’s long
overdue to share them in a project being
undertaken by College Librarian Peggy
Seiden, who is researching an article about
“library as place.”
What are your memories of the library
during your college years? What part did
the library play in your intellectual or social
life? Share your recollections with Seiden
at pseiden1@swarthmore.edu, or write
to her at McCabe Library, Swarthmore
College, 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore
PA 19081.
june 2007 : 3
KAREN MAUCH
collection
With Simple Dignity—
A Portrait of Gilmore Stott
When the President’s Office called on Professor of Studio
Art Randall Exon to paint a portrait of the late Gilmore
Stott, the College’s beloved associate provost emeritus and special
assistant to the president, Exon felt honored yet a little intimidated.
As a close friend of Stott, he feared that his personal feelings might
interfere with the need to provide an institutional “look” to the
work, which now hangs in the entrance lobby of Parrish Hall.
planning process
proceeds
The process of envisioning Swarthmore
College in the year 2020 and weighing
future institutional goals and priorities
will kick into high gear in the fall.
After soliciting suggestions from students, faculty, staff, and alumni, a campus
steering committee met this spring to
identify several broad areas—such as academic priorities, student life, financial aid,
and College resources—which will be
examined and widely discussed during
4 : swarthmore college bulletin
“Finally, though, I just decided to forego the institutional aspect
and concentrate on what I knew of Gil. Then, it became very
straightforward.”
“He was an interesting man,” Exon says, “ in that he appeared
almost aristocratic in the way he carried himself, and yet he was so
down-to-earth, so comfortable to be around, always trying to make
people feel at home. He was a real intellectual but never defined
himself that way—he was just a person of the world, and he
respected everybody. To capture that, I painted him wearing a simple
shirt, with his sleeve rolled up—but the shirt is dark purple, which I
thought might convey that sense of the stately.”
Stott, a violin and viola virtuoso, learned to play the cello in his
70s, says Exon, who took violin lessons from him. “Within no time
at all, he was playing the cello as well as he played the viola. He was
so musically inclined, it just came naturally to him, and I wanted
to show that, too, but with him thinking about music rather than
playing it.”
Exon has happy memories of his music lessons at the Stott
home. “I don’t know how well it comes across in the portrait, but my
lessons were always in the early evening, when the sun was going
down, and I recall his house being filled with that late afternoon
light while we played music. So that was on my mind, too.
“After all these thoughts came to me quite quickly, I thought I’d
be able to capture him in a moment of contemplation and relaxation,” Exon says.
The portrait was unveiled at the Swarthmore College Orchestra
Concert on April 28 to the delight of the audience and several members of the Stott family.
“To my father,” says William Stott ’75, “there was nothing more
important than maximizing human potential in all forms. He taught
himself to play the cello late in life to complete our family quartet.”
He added that Exon had been one of his father’s favorite violin students and a dear friend.
“It was a highlight for me to do this,” Exon says. “It brings a
closing to the past two years since Gil’s death—a strange time for
me, almost as if one of the major buildings had gotten up and
walked away. This project allowed me to reflect on what Gil meant to
the College and to me. He was enormously proud of his association
with the College, so it’s nice that the College returned that.”
—Carol Brévart-Demm
the academic year 2007–2008.
A February letter and e-mails from
Board of Managers Chair Barbara Weber
Mather ’65 and President Alfred H. Bloom
to members of the College community
elicited more than 200 responses, according to Robin Shores, director of institutional research. “Each touched on an average of three topics,” says Shores, “so we
started with a lot of input.”
A list of six to eight areas for the planning process will be finalized during the
summer. It is expected that focused planning groups will be formed by the fall to
research each topic and engage the College
community in considering options. As yet,
no date has been set for a final report. The
planning process that resulted in the goals
for The Meaning of Swarthmore, the
recently concluded campaign for Swarthmore’s future, lasted for two years, from
1997 to 1999.
The Planning Steering Committee
includes faculty members, administrators,
students, and members of the Board of
Managers. The Alumni Council is represented by Sam Awuah ’94 (see page 41).
—Jeffrey Lott
Linus landed
a job last fall.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
Sherelle plans
grad school.
Sherelle in
everyday garb
Linus in his
econ T-shirt
DRESS FOR SUCCESS (IN BORROWED CLOTHES?)
“The first impression you make
is very important! Research
shows that the image you project is an important aspect of
the recruiter’s decision-making
process. Therefore, it is necessary for you to give some
thought to your dress and overall appearance” when showing
up for a job interview, counsels
Swarthmore’s Career Services
Office (CSO) Web site.
In addition to helping students polish their resumes, the
CSO recommends that they
also polish their shoes. Appar-
ently, it’s better to look like the
PC guy than the Mac guy in
those Apple commercials.
Recommended for men are:
A well-fitted medium to dark
gray or navy blue suit (pinstripes or not); a classic width,
small-print or striped tie; black
or navy socks; and slip-on or
lace-up shoes.
Women interview best in a
well-fitted—“not too tight”—
conservative dark suit (although pants suits are “acceptable in most industries”); plain
leather pumps; light or dark
hose; and maybe a scarf.
Although the site (www.swarthmore.edu/x10731.xml)
lists local clothiers for men and
women that range from Target
to Talbots, the CSO acknowledges that many students don’t
want to shell out for a new suit
that they won’t exactly be wearing to chemistry class. Enter
the Career Closet, a not-quitecouture but clean-and-ready
collection of interview duds
on loan for those special jobsearch occasions.
Here we meet seniors Linus
Waelti (left) and Sherelle Harmon attired in Career Closet
finery—and in their usual
Swarthmore apparel. Waelti, an
honors economics major with
an honors mathematics minor,
was offered a job last fall as an
actuarial associate at the
Boston consulting firm Towers
Perrin. Harmon, who majored
in psychology, is—as of early
May—still looking for a transitional job before heading to
graduate school in clinical psychology or public health.
—Jeffrey Lott
june 2007 : 5
collection
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
Students planted an organic garden
across from Mary Lyon, hoping to
raise some produce for the Chester
Co-op and Sharples Dining Hall.
SUSTAINABLE, LOCAL, ORGANIC
Planting an organic garden is just one
idea emerging from a new campus initiative
called Swarthmore Good Food—a group of
students committed to sustainable, local,
and organic foods and ethical food habits.
Good Food members sponsored a week
of events in April, including a Sharples
“takeover” that included delicious organic
salmon and kale; a lecture on the “Future of
Food”; a discussion with Mari Clements, a
nutritionist at the Worth Health Center;
and a campus discussion about what it
means to eat ethically.
Most Good Food members are vegans or
vegetarians, but the group also includes
“conscientious omnivores,” who are mindful
of where their meat comes from.
Putting their ideals into practice, students planted a College produce garden in a
plot across the street from Mary Lyon Hall.
Using organic seeds, they are trying out a
variety of crops—including carrots, garlic,
potatoes, scallions, peas, spinach, kale, eggplant, beets, and tomatoes—to see what
grows best. In the future, planting will start
in the campus greenhouse in late winter
and, assisted by helpers funded by the Scott
Arboretum, continue through the summer.
All students who enjoy grubbing around
in soil and breathing fresh air are welcome
to work in the garden. One gardener, Mia
Adjei ’09, explains, “I think it’s important to
be connected to where your food comes
from,” but she is also happy to reconnect to
an activity she has enjoyed since childhood.
Claudia Seixas ’10, who enjoys teamwork, reflects, “I like the communal aspect
of gardening.” With the student plot adjoining plots cultivated by other Swarthmore
residents, Claire Galpern ’10 says, “I feel
more tied to the people.”
Project members will sell their produce to
the Chester Co-op, which started last June.
According to Marshall Morales ’08, one of
the founding members of Good Food, “The
Co-op fits into our ideals of food justice”—
the notion that everyone should be able to
afford organic food. He explained that grocery chains often avoid locating in impoverished communities like Chester. The Co-op
will give Chester a community-based grocery store capable of supplying local food,
such as the lettuce, spinach, and kale that
will be coming from the Swarthmore garden
in early summer.
When students return in the fall, the garden will supply Sharples Dining Hall. “We
can’t supply all of Sharples,” Morales says,
“but we want to slide in where we can.
They’ve been very willing to work with us.”
So, in early September, students can look
forward to Swarthmore-grown pumpkins
and watermelons.
—Lauren Stokes ’09
More than a dozen a capella and dance groups from Swarthmore,
Bryn Mawr, and Haverford joined to kick-off the Tri-College Peace
Week in March. The weeklong series of free events also included
speakers, displays, and films—all dedicated to reducing violence.
Peace Week is a project of Students Against Violence Everywhere
Are Us (SAVE R US), an international student-run anti-violence
organization, founded in 2001 by Brandon Lee Wolff ‘08.
In addition to the annual Peace Week, SAVE R US runs a “Peacemakers” program that sends trained college and high school students into elementary schools to conduct programs aimed at fostering diversity and working against violence, especially among youth.
“Through Peace Week and the hands-on Peacemakers program,
we hope to educate the youth of today so that we will have a less
violent society in the future,” Wolff says.
6 : swarthmore college bulletin
JIM GRAHAM
PEACE WEEK PROMOTES NONVIOLENCE
IN COMMUNITIES AND SCHOOLS
Brandon Lee Wolff (left) works with fellow students
on a poster at the beginning of Peace Week, which
Wolff coordinated for the third time in April.
FOUR RECEIVE TENURE
MERTZ HALL
RO
R
TE
PA
32
0
–
CH
ES
ALICE PAUL HALL
In March, ground was broken for construction of David Kemp Hall, the companion
dormitory to Alice Paul Residence Hall. The two residences, both with environmentally sustainable designs, will share a landscaped courtyard. Like Paul Hall, Kemp will
house 75 students in single and double rooms and bi-level lofts.
The leadership donation of $7 million for the new hall is part of a $10 million gift
from Gil Kemp ’72 and his wife, Barbara Guss Kemp, to The Meaning of Swarthmore.
David Kemp Hall, named for Gil Kemp’s grandfather, is scheduled to be completed in
April 2008.
In its April 2007 issue, Glamour
magazine chose Stephanie Nyombayire
’08 as one of its Top 10 College Women
for her work as a co-founder of the Genocide Intervention Network. The organization has raised $1.5 million to support the
peacekeeping forces in Darfur and $250,000 to provide armed
escorts for women refugees who risk rape when they leave
their camps to seek firewood. Nyombayire had met many such
women during a 2005 trip to the Chad-Sudan border, when
she served as a correspondent for mtvU, MTV’s campus television network. She was one of three students chosen to collaborate with the network on a film documentary on the crisis in
Sudan. A Rwandan native, Nyombayire lost more than 100
family members during the 1994 genocide there.
“Two years ago, when we went to Chad with MTV to make
the documentary and let people hear the voices of the
refugees we spoke to and get them to care about the issues
there, few knew where Sudan or Darfur were,” Nyombayire
says. “This award indicates that people are paying attention to
the work we’re doing. It represents a growth in awareness of
what is happening in Darfur, how receptive people have
become, and how much they wish to remain involved—and
that’s great.”
—Carol Brévart-Demm
june 2007 : 7
WILLIAM RAWN ASSOCIATES ARCHITECTS
DAVID KEMP HALL
AD
GROUND
B R O KE N
FO R N E W
RESIDENCE
HALL
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
At its February meeting, The Board of Managers approved the promotion of four faculty members to associate professor status
with continuous tenure.
Diego Armus is a historian of Latin
America whose interests range from the
urban experience of modern Latin America
to medicine and disease. He is the editor of
Disease in the History of Modern Latin America: From Malaria to AIDS (Duke University
Press, 2003).
Kendall Johnson teaches American literature in the Department of English Literature, focusing especially on 19th-century
writers. His forthcoming book, Henry James
and the Visual, will be published by Cambridge University Press.
Jose-Luis Machado, a native of Columbia, is an ecologist whose research focuses
on the structure and dynamics of temperate
and tropical forest communities and ecosystems, including Swarthmore’s Crum Woods.
Art historian Patricia Reilly specializes in
Italian Renaissance art and art theory and
in printing and the graphic arts. She also
teaches the art and architecture of ancient
Greece and Rome.
Full professorship was awarded to Sydney Carpenter, studio art; Sibelan Forrester,
Russian; and Allen Kuharski, theater.
COURTESY OF BELLA LIU
collection
Memory and Hope in Rural China
Lang Opportunity Scholarships, awarded annually to no more than six
sophomores, reflect Eugene Lang’s [’38] vision that students with demonstrated commitment to social justice should be enabled to design and
implement innovative solutions to social problems.
Here, in her own words, is the story of Lang Scholar Bella Liu ’07
(above right), a biochemistry major from Pittsburgh, Pa., who has
worked at a children’s AIDS clinic in her hometown and is the founder of
Swarthmore’s chapter of Amnesty International.
I was filled with both awe and doubt when I saw the front
cover of a May 2006 Newsweek, depicting a glamorous Chinese
movie star against a Shanghai skyline with the title “China’s Century.” How many readers would stop to think that just a 14-hour train
ride away from the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai, most homes
have dirt floors and the nearest hospital is a day’s bicycle ride away?
Today, China is a rising superpower, experiencing unrivaled economic growth and modernization. Yet there is a tremendous socioeconomic difference between the wealthy urban China known to
the Western world and the poor rural China still covering most of
the country’s territory. Last summer, I worked with a community in
rural China that has suffered from this difference.
In the 1980s and 1990s, thousands of rural peasants in several
central provinces, notably Henan, were infected with HIV/AIDS
when, to alleviate their poverty, they sold their blood in places that
used poor sterilization techniques. After an initial cover-up of the
crisis by local officials, the Chinese government offered free medical treatment to the country’s HIV/AIDS patients. Although medicine is now available and the infection rate has been curbed, the
difficulty remains of helping the affected families deal with the
8 : swarthmore college bulletin
deepening poverty and stigma in their communities. In an area
where a large portion of a working-age generation has succumbed
to HIV/AIDS, the blood-selling disaster represents a deeply rooted
socio-economic problem.
This problem is particularly reflected in the situation of a growing number of children from Central China who were orphaned by
the epidemic. Most of these children are not HIV-positive themselves. Yet, with parents who are sick or dying, the children often
lack the funds or motivation to stay in school. Socially isolated,
growing up without parental love and care, with no means to provide for themselves, many children risk ending up destitute, illiterate, and alone. Extremely few programs are in place to ensure their
psychological and long-term well-being.
In high school, reading about the families of the “AIDS villages”
in Central China, I wondered how I could connect with and help
them. Then, I found a Chinese charity, the Chi Heng Foundation,
one of a handful of nongovernmental groups allowed to operate
there at the time. They sponsored the education and living costs of
the children orphaned by HIV/AIDS and planned to start a secondary program to provide the children with psychological support.
The summer of my freshman year, I teamed up with the foundation and, with a Swarthmore Foundation Grant, created the China
Memory Book Project. The goal was to help the children deal emotionally with their stress by making memory books, similar to
scrapbooks.
The memory books were printed “activity booklets” with guiding prompts, focusing on the children’s future and not just their
past. The children were not only prompted to describe their parents, family traditions, and any worries but also to record contact
information for relatives, their progress in school, and their personal achievements and aspirations. Through the Chi Heng Foundation, memory books were given to more than 3,000 children
along with collected writing and drawing supplies.
As I worked on the China Memory Book Project—and read
many copies of the completed books—I realized how important a
connection with society will be for these children when they grow
up. Without guidance, many are left questioning, even doubting
their future role in society. I began my Lang Opportunity Scholarship project in summer 2006 with that in mind.
Working with Chinese university students, I helped create Big
Brother Big Sister Mentorship Programs for the Chi Heng Foundation children, with the university students as the big brothers
and big sisters. The mentorship program will continue to take
place every summer at Zhongshan University in Guangzhou,
Tsinghua University in Beijing, Fudan University in Shanghai,
and possibly others in the future.
Together with the Chinese university students, I spent my
summer playing and interacting with several dozen children.
Although shy, they really enjoyed pairing up with their mentors,
and many were inspired to pursue university educations. We are
thinking of ways to make the mentorship program more helpful
for the children when they return home, for example, by having
mentors visit the children’s home villages during winter break.
Wrapping up the mentorship program in Shanghai, one night,
I found myself walking with the children along the Bund, a stretch
of swanky, touristy waterfront that has come to
symbolize Chinese modernization and prosperity.
Admiring the colorful
lights of the skyline across
the river, one girl asked
me, “Sister Bella, don’t you
think that is a waste of a
lot of energy?”
This little question has
come to represent so many
other questions I have
about China in the context
of my project work. How
will China, with the
world’s largest population,
be able to deal with its
population- and resourcerelated problems, includThe memory books were printed
ing an AIDS epidemic? And “activity booklets” with guiding
how will China, with the
prompts focusing on the chilworld’s fourth-largest econ- dren’s future, not just their past.
omy, be able to deal with
such an unequal distribution of wealth and opportunity? Whatever the future brings, I hope at least that the children I’ve been
working with will not be left behind.
For more information on the Memory Book Project, visit
www.swarthmore.edu/x10097.xml.
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
NEW LEADERSHIP FOR LANG CENTER
Joy Charlton, professor of
sociology and associate dean
for academic affairs, will
become executive director of the
College’s Lang Center for Civic
and Social Responsibility in the
fall. The Lang Center was founded in 2001 to provide a home
base for social action on campus. Charlton will replace
founding director Jennie Keith,
who is retiring (see page 13).
Charlton has taught courses
on urban sociology, social
inequality, and work and organizations—all interests that she
says will serve her well at the
Lang Center. Although she
expects to be busy at the center,
Charlton thinks it’s important
to continue to teach. “Next year,
I may offer a senior version of
the course Everyday Life for
those who took it as a first-year
seminar; after that, we’ll see
what happens.”
Asked whether there is a connection between the disciplines
of sociology and anthropology
and the Lang Center’s commitment to social responsibility,
Charlton says, “Jennie and I are
both fieldworkers—our research
is based on observation and
interviews, which is to say direct
contact with people and communities. Our interest in better
understanding and interacting
with the social world make us a
good fit for the Lang Center.”
Charlton has been engaged
in social responsibility programs
since she came to Swarthmore
in 1981. She has been active on
the Ad-Hoc Committee on Service Learning; the Swarthmore
Foundation Committee (and its
precursor the SwarthmoreChester Internship Committee);
the Lang Center Advisory Committee; the Community-based
Learning Faculty Discussion
Group; the Lang Opportunity
Scholars Program (and its precursor the Lang Scholarship
Committee); and in teaching
community-based learning
courses. All of these activities
are now gathered under the
Lang Center umbrella.
Charlton hopes to use her
new position at the Center “to
find ever better ways to integrate
student interest in social responsibility with the curriculum
and faculty involvement; to productively bridge the boundaries
between the College and local
and global communities; and to
represent and focus the College’s
long-standing commitment to
contextualizing students’ intellectual growth with what President [Alfred H. Bloom] calls
‘ethical intelligence.’”
The Lang Center will soon
have a change of location as well
as leadership, moving from
cramped quarters at the Swarthmore train station to a new campus home at 3-5 Whittier Place.
Charlton describes herself as
“especially eager” about the
move, since it will be “closer to
the center of campus while still
remaining an easy linking point
for local communities. I think
students, staff, faculty, and community members will find it a
welcoming and energizing
space.” The new location will
also offer more space for student
activities, including a resource
room for tutoring and a space
designed for student use that
will be available in the evening.
—Lauren Stokes ’09
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ELENA RETFALVI
“Densely Beautiful,
Disarmingly Rich”
Poet Nathalie Anderson (left) is professor of English
literature and director of the College’s Creative Writing
Program. Her second published collection of poems,
Crawlers (Ashland Poetry Press, 2006), won the 2005
McGovern Prize.
Award-winning poet Denise Duhamel writes:
“The poems in Nathalie Anderson’s Crawlers explore
family, in its traditional sense and as a metaphor
for the relationships of the world at large, mining dark
and complicated truths. Anderson’s imagery is densely
beautiful, disarmingly rich. Hers is an expansive and
generous poetry—desperately moving, meticulously
crafted.”
Anderson was a 1993 Pew Fellow and serves as poet
in residence at the Rosenbach Museum and Library.
In addition to her poetry, Anderson is the author of
libretti for three operas written in collaboration with
Associate Professor of Music Thomas Whitman ’82.
Crawlers may be purchased from Ashland Poetry Press
(www.ashland.edu/aupoetry) or from the Swarthmore
College Bookstore (http://bookstore.swarthmore.edu).
The Slaking
There is one story I can hear again
and again, the story where the shoe fits,
where the tempered steel snagged in the cleft rock
eases itself into the proper hand, where
the stranger flings back his hood and Robin
kneels in that verdant heart, where the mourner
complains to the gardener, where the man
with the child on his back stands open-mouthed
half-way across the river as his old name
flows away, where the one who beds the hag
wakes in the morning to the young queen.
Put your hand in my side, he said: yes, yes,
now I see. Not discovery—you knew it
already; not disguise stripped bare; but re-
in the cave where the wheat-sheaf lights the dead
to life, I stood in the ball court and watched
the blood fly, I stood in the cathedral
where even the glass is stained, and I am
no believer. Yes, I have seen the victor run
triumphant into darkness, the vanquished giddy,
drunk with free-flowing rain. Who was that masked man?
And mama, why did he leave us, hi-yo
Silver away? On the fourth day without sleep,
edges began to shimmer, one action
bled into another, the molecules
the atoms veering off into space: what goes
when you choose noon over midnight. As a planet
turns first one cheek and then the other
cognition, the train leaping the synaptic track,
the ship slipping its galactic tether,
the perfect stone skipping its way across
the cloudy nebulae. He promised me
a thing that is not easy: boots of the skin
of a fish. I have worn those boots, I have
worn them down, the leather carp-rosy, the old scales
petaling the sides, a vellum so sheer
my pulse blushed salmon-ruddy through that
suppleness, that tenderness so shocking to the heel.
In those boots I have walked for seven leagues,
I have walked for seven years, the moon
bounding before me, wringing out its white loins
every twenty-eight dreams. In those boots I stood
to best advantage, as a planet
slowly turns its ravaged face to the light,
we come round at last. The moon swells, the moon
empties. Some nights, I swim sleeved in darkness,
a fish flowing into itself, flowering out
of its own elements; some days, I walk the earth
flayed of my skin, and every breeze salts the wound,
my eyes seared, my tongue scalded—coals of fire.
If the skin fits, wear it, fling back the hood, ease your
worn heart from your side, wake in the morning as
the new queen. Re-cognition. This is
what you are, and this is where: so much light spilling
over the lip of the world, it slakes, it dazzles,
it splashes profligate into the trees.
10 : swarthmore college bulletin
designs and develops technology for use in
the rehabilitation, education, military, entertainment, and space fields. Then, they split
into groups for 50-minute-long workshops,
participating in hands-on projects with the
enticing titles “Chemistry is Colorful” by
Virginia Indivero, a lecturer in the Chemistry Department; “Solar System” by Mary
Ann Klassen, a lecturer in the Physics and
Astronomy Department; “Cooperation,
Competition, and Chocolate” by Bree BangJensen ’07; and “Bully Behaviors of Fighting
Fish” by McCord.
Speaking of her own EYH experience
years earlier at the University of Texas as a
Girl Scout, McCord recalls the excitement
she felt seeing a female doctor in charge of
an experiment. “I just remember thinking
that college women were so cool and knowledgeable,” she says.
This year’s girls were similarly enthusiastic about their conference experiences.
Penns Grove [N.J.] School 8th-grader Maria
Lombardi says: “I’d never really contemplated a profession in the sciences because I’ve
always wanted to be an attorney, but maybe
now I’ll consider other options.”
Planned by Swarthmore students who
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
How many middle school girls does it take
to fill the Science Center’s Eldridge Commons? Try 150—the number of adolescent
females who gathered there one Saturday in
April to participate in the Expanding Your
Horizons (EYH) Conference. This 8-hour
event gave girls the opportunity to delve
into math and science and to spend time
with female role models in two fields that
have historically been male-dominated.
“There is an established gender gap
within [math and science] Ph.D.s and
M.S.s,” says Lauren Yoshizawa ’09, one of
the conference coordinators. “Many girls
just stop pursuing these subjects in high
school.”
Biology Department Laboratory Instructor Aleia McCord, a workshop leader and
EYH alumna herself, explains: “Before
puberty, androgyny protects you from ideas
of male and female gender roles, but after
puberty you become more aware. And if you
don’t see positive role models when you’re
forming these gendered identities, that’s
when you lose these girls.”
The girls’ motivations to attend the event
were varied: “My
mom made me,”
says Sydney
Mitchell, an 8thgrader from
Cedarbrook Middle School. But
Mandy Collar
from Oxford
Middle School
says, “I absolutely
love math and
CSI crime-scene
stuff.”
Yoshizawa was
impressed by the
enthusiasm
Juliana Macri ’09 (center), a psychobiology special major, helps
expressed in the
two
aspiring scientists conduct an experiment during “Expanding
girls’ applications
Your
Horizons,” a program to encourage girls to become scientists.
to attend the conference. “You
have to hope that continues,” she says.
run a campus chapter of a national organiThe conference planners went out of
zation of the same name, this year the EYH
their way to ensure that it did.
conference was funded through a grant
First, the girls listened to keynote speak- from the Swarthmore Foundation. Next
ers Delores Wright, a Chester High School
year, funds for the conference must be
science teacher, and Corinna Lathan ’88,
sought from other sources.
who founded AnthroTronix, a company that
—Lena Wong ’10
WITH GRACE AND A READY
SMILE: PATRICIA BOYER
Patricia Wityk
Boyer’s passion for
dance and
vision for the
future of
Swarthmore’s
dance program are in
large part
responsible
for the rich
and vibrant dance environment that exists
on campus today. She died on April 10.
“Pat’s tireless work on behalf of dance at
Swarthmore College paved the way for the
creation of the current program,” says
Stephen Lang Professor of Performing Arts
Sharon Friedler.
Joining the faculty in 1968, Boyer
became the College’s first director of the
program. Teaching courses in modern dance
and ballet technique, dance composition,
and dance history, she directed the Swarthmore College Dancers and choreographed
for them, often in collaboration with members of the Music Department. In 1982, she
and Professor Emeritus of Music James
Freeman co-founded the Swarthmore Music
and Dance Festival.
“Pat was a wonderful friend,” Freeman
says. “How well I remember working with
her on an all-student production of Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale—the event that led directly to dance moving from the Physical Education to the Music Department.
“Shortly thereafter, in June 1982, we put
together the first Music and Dance Festival,
a weekend of performances that included
legendary pianist Lili Kraus playing her last
public concert and the Alvin Ailey Dance
Company in a nearly filled Clothier Hall.
“The aneurysm that struck her down
occurred as we were planning the 1983
Festival. Even after that, Pat’s courage and
her love for life and dance never failed.
She was a remarkable woman whom I’ll
miss forever.”
Boyer retired as a full professor in 1983.
The Patricia Wityk Boyer Studio and Dance
Lab in the Lang Performing Arts Center was
named for her, and the 2007 Spring Dance
Concert was dedicated to her memory.
—Carol Brévart-Demm
1983 HALCYON
MAKE ROOM IN THE
LAB FOR THE GIRLS
june 2007 : 11
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ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
HOPKINS: “WHEN IN DOUBT,
DO IT!”
Leading scholars of international politics convened
in March for a symposium on “Challenges in Contemporary International Politics” to honor retiring Ritcher Professor of Political
Science Raymond Hopkins—a prolific and internationally influential scholar and pioneer in the study of world food policy. Hopkins,
who leaves a 40-year legacy of dedication to his students, was
“thrilled to see such a splendid mix of the best academic and policy
people in the field at the event.”
Hopkins, a 68-year-old Swarthmore resident, teaches international politics, African politics, and food policy and is an authority
on global food issues and political economy. He has dedicated a
lifetime of research to understanding how international organizations develop.
In a letter announcing the Hopkins International Public-Policy
Internship, Professor Emeritus of Political Science Charles Gilbert
describes his colleague as “a caring and stimulating teacher whose
intellectual energy, personal modesty, good humor, and community
concern have figured signally in the fabric of the College for nearly
four decades.”
“He is deeply committed to bringing about a more humane
world with less hunger and more social justice,” says Professor of
Political Science Carol Nackenoff. “This is not only an academic
concern for him; he lives this commitment in all his activities.” And
his students live it with him.
When asked what he would miss most at Swarthmore, Hopkins’
response comes quickly: “The students. I’ll miss the interaction
with them, especially the seminar experience where I really get to
know them.”
12 : swarthmore college bulletin
Over the years, Hopkins has embraced collaborative teaching
and experiential learning and that is, perhaps, where he has made
the biggest difference for his students. Using his connections with
the World Bank, United Nations, United States government, World
Food Programme, and the International Food Policy Research
Institute as well as his research in various countries in Europe,
Africa, and Asia, including Bhutan, Tanzania, and Italy, he has
helped more than 100 students obtain internships in Washington,
D.C., the United Nations, and countries throughout the world.
In addition to teaching and research, Hopkins’ life is filled with
a network of friends, community activities, politics, and church
activities—he’s been an elder at the Swarthmore Presbyterian
Church three times. In June, the father of two grown children will
be even busier. There are four conferences to attend, an addition to
complete on the family log cabin in Maine, and son Mark’s wedding
in Italy to attend with his wife, Carol, their daughter, Kathryn, and
her family. During the next two to three years, he hopes to sail the
Atlantic and make his nonprofit organization, the International
Service Community—which takes professionals to foreign countries to do volunteer work—self-sustaining.
Reflecting on the sailing photos, ID tags, and other mementos
tacked to the large, simple bulletin board over his desk, Hopkins
remarks, “I’ve lived a wonderful life.” His life advice? “When in
doubt, do it.”
—Susan Cousins Breen
Jennie Keith, Centennial Professor of Anthropology,
Swarthmore’s first female provost, and founding director of the
College’s Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, retires
this month after 39 years on the faculty.
Keith became an academic at a time when opportunities for
women were expanding in higher education. As a member of the
Class of 1964 at Pomona College and a graduate of Northwestern
University—where she received a Ph.D. in anthropology in 1968—
Keith says she “came along with a cohort of women who were
always in the minority in the profession, but there were major
shifts in our view of what was possible.” As a result, Keith says, she
was often “invited” into leadership positions.
A leading authority on aging, Keith co-authored, among several
dozen other books and articles, The Aging Experience: Diversity and
Commonality Across Cultures (Sage Publications, 1994), a decadelong, cross-cultural study of growing old in the United States and
other countries.
Keith served as the College’s provost from 1992 until 2001 and
became director of the Lang Center in 2002. Associate Dean for
Academic Affairs Joy Charlton will succeed her at the Lang Center
(see p. 9).
As provost under President Alfred H. Bloom, Keith concentrated
on building faculty morale and increasing faculty diversity. “Al
wanted a provost who would help him engage the faculty in the
leadership of the College—and that’s very challenging,” she says.
“We wanted to get to where people with different points of view
would work together in solving problems.”
Through aggressive recruitment of top female and minority
scholars, Keith oversaw a steady increase in the numbers of both on
the faculty. Because of tenure and the small number of retirements
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
KEITH: CO-LEARNING
FOR 39 YEARS
each year, changing the composition of the faculty can be a very
slow process, Keith explains. Tenured and tenure-track women on
the faculty have risen from 29 to 39 percent since 1990; minority
faculty members have gone from 11 percent to 17 percent in the
same period.
As provost, Keith, who is a Quaker, saw herself as “a princess of
process.” She presided (with Professor of English Literature Craig
Williamson) over the 1996 reform of the Honors Program; helped
lead the two-year planning process for The Meaning of Swarthmore, the recently concluded capital campaign; and chaired the
Athletics Review Committee, which recommended in December
2000 that Swarthmore end its football and wrestling programs as
a part of an effort to strengthen the remaining intercollegiate
sports.
“Now that was a very complex problem,” Keith says of the athletics decision. “We tried our best to do this in a respectful and fair
way, but whatever we did, there was going to be loss and pain.”
In May, a campus event in her honor featured an introduction
by President Bloom and three speakers who talked of Keith’s influence on their lives and careers: Marc Freedman ’80, co-founder of
the social-capital think tank and incubator Civic Ventures and of
The Experience Corps, the United States’ largest national service
program for Americans 50 and above; Cynthia Jetter ’74, a longtime
public-housing activist and administrator, now director of community partnerships and planning at the Lang Center; and Professor
Miguel Díaz-Barriga, chair of sociology and anthropology.
Keith is considering a research project on the historical relationship between the College and the nearby community of Chester, Pa.
“This hasn’t been a one-way relationship,” she says. “I’m particularly interested in the times when Chester has been the actor, the
motivator, the giver. We need to know more about the complexities
of the relationship between people in an elite higher-education
institution and a city that faces tremendous challenges—particularly in education.”
Asked about lessons in her research on aging that she might
apply to her own retirement, she says that staying in a community
you know—and that knows you—is vital: “Your personal identity
and history are not ‘vested’ in you as an individual—you can’t take
them with you like your pension.” Although she and her husband,
psychiatrist Roy Fitzgerald, will live in Lewes, Del., Keith plans to
keep an office at the Lang Center and will remain engaged with the
campus community.
“Sharing the learning experience with the students I’ve known
at Swarthmore has been a privilege,” Keith says. “Teaching is colearning, using my skills to support the process. I love to learn
alongside people with such quality minds—and who are genuinely
good and want to do good in the world. I’ve learned so much about
giving up control over the process—trusting my fellow learners and
going with them.”
—Jeffrey Lott
ARCADIA IN THE AMPHITHEATER
The weather was fine on April 21 and 22 for a student production
of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia in the Scott Amphitheater. The play,
set in an English country house, juxtaposes the views of love,
literature, and science of residents of the house in 1809 and
1989—becoming a commentary on history itself. “The
amphitheater proved the perfect location—a beautiful setting
for a play in which landscape is a critical concern,” wrote
Daily Gazette reviewer Daisy Yuhas '09. Directors Micaela
Baranello '07 and Nora Nussbaum '08 prepared a cast of five
for the play, which Yuhas called “ideal entertainment for Swatties on a hot spring day.” Actors pictured are (left to right) Fletcher Wortmann ’09, Katie Bates '08, and Mikio Akagi '08.
PHOTOGRAPH BY MILES SKORPEN 0ʼ 9
june 2007 : 13
collection
Women’s Tennis (13-7, 9–1 Centennial Conference (CC)) Swarthmore, ranked 15th in NCAA Division III, made its fifth consecutive
appearance in the national team championships, advancing to the
second round. Seniors Sonya Reynolds and Sara Sargent won the
Wilson ITA Southeast Regional doubles’ title, becoming the first
Garnet duo to earn All-America honors. Reynolds and sophomore
Jennie Park were named All-Centennial for singles play, and
Reynolds and Sargent were selected for doubles. Reynolds went to
the NCAA Division III Individual Championships for the third
consecutive season, advancing to the second round.
Men’s Tennis (7–10) The Garnet advanced to the Division III Tournament for the 30th time in 31 years, hosting the first three rounds
of action at the Edwin Faulkner Tennis Courts. Swarthmore defeated the College of New Jersey, 5-0, in the second round before
falling to 2006 National Champion Emory University, 5-0, in the
regional finals. Senior Jon Reiss was selected to compete in the singles competition of the Division III Individual Championships,
advancing as far as the second round.
Baseball (4–25, 2–16 CC) Swarthmore catcher Andy Bender ’08
and infielder Conor Casey ’09 posted career-high batting averages,
and freshman outfielder Jimmy Gill led the team with 22 RBIs. Junior centerfielder Scott Dalane had four hits, including his first
career home run, to lead the Garnet to a thrilling 14-8 win at
Haverford on April 20, spoiling the Fords’ chance to the make the
CC playoffs. Senior captain Sammy Faeder became the sixth Garnet
baseball player to sign a professional contract. He will be catching
for the Netyana Tigers in the Israel Baseball League this summer.
Golf (tied for second at CC Championship) Swarthmore’s golf
team enjoyed its best season ever, shooting a 306 (third-lowest in
school history) as a team on the final day of the CC Championships at Pilgrim’s Oak Golf Course in Peach Bottom, Pa. The
Garnet posted a three-day total of 933, tying McDaniel for second
KYLE LEACH
Strong Spring Seasons for Tennis and Softball
Kathryn Riley ’10 posted an 11–4 record with a 1.15 ERA. She
also led the team in batting with a .363 average and 37 hits.
behind champions Franklin & Marshall (924). Seniors Eric Zwick
(74-78-78=230) and Zach Moody (81-75-74=230) tied for fifth
among individual golfers to earn All-CC status. Zwick was also
honored as 2007 Philadelphia Inquirer Academic All-Area Men’s
Golf Performer of the Year.
Men’s Lacrosse (5-7, 2-6 CC) Garnet defender Dan Sartori ’08 was
the fifth Swarthmore defender tabbed as All-CC, earning an honorable mention selection after leading the team with 44 ground balls
and anchoring a Garnet defense that allowed 7.8 goals per game,
good enough for sixth in the Conference. Junior goaltender Frank
Mazzucco also played a key role in the stingy Swarthmore defense,
finishing second in the CC in saves per game (12.6) and third in
Sonya Reynolds ’07 concludes her collegiate career as one of the
best ever to swing a tennis racquet on campus. She posted a 63–21
overall singles’ record over four years, leading the Garnet women’s
team to three Centennial Conference (CC) championships (including a streak of 31 straight Conference wins) and four consecutive
invitations to the NCAA Division III Tournament. In each of the
past three seasons, she has been selected to participate in the
NCAA Division III Individual Tennis Championships, advancing
into the second round this past season. Reynolds is the first player
in Swarthmore history to be named All-America in singles (2005)
and doubles (2007) and is one of the most decorated athletes in
Centennial Conference history, having received seven All-CC selections (four for doubles, three for singles). Reynolds received the
Gladys Irish Award at the annual Swarthmore Department of Athletics Banquet, given to the senior or junior female athlete who,
through her commitment, dedication, and the pure enjoyment of
her sport, has achieved the highest degree of excellence.
—Kyle Leach
14 : swarthmore college bulletin
KYLE LEACH
TOPS IN TENNIS
save percentage (.635). Mazzucco was also named 2007 Philadelphia
Inquirer Academic All-Area Men’s Lacrosse Performer of the Year.
Women’s Lacrosse (11-7, 4-5 CC) Three Swarthmore women were
named All-CC in 2007: sophomore defender Melissa Grigsby, senior
midfielder Lindsay Roth, and junior midfielder Megan Sanborn.
Sanborn was selected for the second team after tying for second in
the CC for assists (1.02 per game, 31 total) and leading the Garnet
in five categories—draw controls (50), ground balls (47), caused
turnovers (31), assists and game-winning goals (five). Roth, a team
captain, won an honorable mention (her third All-CC selection)
after scoring 27 goals to conclude her eighth career all-time at
Swarthmore in goals (127) and ninth in points (153). Grigsby also
won an honorable mention after leading the Swarthmore defensive
unit. She was second on the team with 46 ground balls and 34 draw
controls as well as adding three assists.
Softball (22-13, 11-5 CC) The Garnet set a school record for CC wins
in a season to earn a second consecutive trip to the conference playoffs. Kathryn Riley ’10 made an immediate impact, becoming just
the fifth Swarthmore first-year to make First-Team All-CC (as a
pitcher) and All-Region (as utility player). Riley posted a record of
11-4 in 2007 with a 1.15 ERA in 97.0 innings, tallying three shutouts and striking out 74 batters. She also made a significant impact
at the plate, leading the team in seven offensive categories: batting
average (.363), hits (37), doubles (8), home runs (3), total bases
(54), walks (12), and on-base percentage (.458). Second baseman
Christine Sendelsky ’09 became the first Swarthmore player to make
First-Team All-CC twice, making the 2007 team after hitting .306 in
conference play and finishing tied for the team lead in runs scored
(23). Junior shortstop Katherine Gold received an All-CC honorable
mention after leading the team in triples (three) and slugging percentage (.535). Head coach Renee Clarke recorded her 300th career
win on March 25 in a sweep of Penn State–Berks.
Men’s track and field (ninth at CC Championship) The 4 x 800meter relay team—consisting of Matt Schiller ’07, Dillon McGrew
’07, Connor Darby ’09, and Vernon Chaplin ’07—broke the College
PHOTOGRAPHS BY KYLE LEACH
At the CC Championships, Ross Weller
’08 (left) earned a silver medal in the
steeplechase with the fastest Swarthmore
time in 16 years.Seniors Eric Zwick
(above) and Zach Moody each shot a 230
to bring Swarthmore a second-place finish in the golf finals. And Lindsay Roth
’07 (right) was among three Swarthmore
women named All-Conference in lacrosse.
record (7:49.50) and captured a bronze medal at the CC Championships. Freshman Matt Turner collected a silver medal in the long
jump, and junior Ross Weller also earned a silver medal in the 3,000
steeplechase, running the fifth-fastest time (9:34.82) in school history and the best in 16 years.
Women’s track and field (10th at CC Championship) Sophomore
Caitlin Mullarkey broke the College record in the 3,000-meter steeplechase (11:42) on April 15 and later took home the bronze medal
in both the steeplechase and the 800-meter race at the CC Championships. She just missed an NCAA provisional qualifying time in
the 800 at the Last Chance Meet hosted at Clothier Stadium, running the fourth-fastest time in school history (2:15.16).
—Kyle Leach
LAST CHANCE = FAST CHANCE
Two Villanova University speedsters ran sub–four-minute
miles as 20 track-and-field records fell at Clothier Stadium
during the annual Last Chance Meet, hosted by Swarthmore
on May 21. Athletes from 46 schools, representing Divisions I, II, and III, competed on the College’s four-year-old
Versaturf track. Much of the crowd stuck around to watch
the rare mile-long race. A lofty and rare goal in sport, the
sub–four-minute mile was first achieved by England’s Roger
Bannister in 1954. Swarthmore head coach Peter Carroll, a
Villanova alumnus, restructured the meet order to give Villanova’s Robert Curtis a chance to accomplish the sub–
four-minute mile. A pair of Wildcats served as rabbits for
the first couple of laps, forcing Curtis and teammate
Michael Kerrigan to keep up a blistering pace. Curtis hit the
line at 3:57 with his arms raised and Kerrigan tumbled
across two seconds later as the crowd roared.
—Kyle Leach
june 2007 : 15
WHEN
THE
GROUND
SHAKE∂
SWARTHMORE’S TAIKO PROGRAM
DANCES AND DRUMS ON.
By Elizabeth Redden ’05
Photographs by Eleftherios Kostans
16 : swarthmore college bulletin
Talking about taiko means
talking in rhythms—in patient
pulsations, rolling crescendos,
quickening heartbeats, and
sudden, sudden stops.
june 2007 : 17
“So many times I’ve heard the perfect sound
with the perfect movement at the right time,
and the result is that perfect moment hanging there—boom! And then, if that perfect
feeling continues for the entire piece, I am
nearly without any breath,” says Joseph
Small ’05, now in Japan as the only nonJapanese apprentice with Kodo, the world’s
most prestigious taiko group.
“It’s that beautiful.”
Swarthmore is one of a handful of colleges on the East Coast offering instruction
and performance opportunities in taiko, a
post–World War II Japanese art form
defined by Kim Arrow, an associate professor of dance, as “the perfect marriage of
music and drumming, of theater and
dance.” In moving around and among oversized, two- to three-foot–wide drums on a
stage, players dance in choreographed
rhythms—the role of dance being to expand
all that goes into the motion of striking the
drum and recoiling from the hit, then striking again, and so forth. “In order to move
correctly, you have to hit the drum correctly,” says Arrow, who teaches Swarthmore’s
repertory class in taiko and directs the performance-oriented Swarthmore taiko group.
“In order to hit the drum correctly, you have
to move correctly.”
“And all of a sudden, you’re dancing.”
Joseph Small ’05 (above, right) performs at Swarthmore’s Fall Dance Concert in
December 2006. Small is currently in Japan, serving an apprenticeship with Kodo,
the world’s most prestigious taiko group. Taiko is a relatively modern Japanese
art form that was developed in the 1950s. The Swarthmore taiko ensemble was
launched seven years ago by Associate Professor of Dance Kim Arrow.
18 : swarthmore college bulletin
Arrow started Swarthmore’s taiko program
in 2000, having discovered the form during
a stop-over with a community taiko group
in Napa. Upon coming home, he arranged
for Swarthmore to purchase four taiko
drums before beginning the long process of
building most of the program’s 14 drums
himself.
“Traditionally, they’re made of a single,
old-growth tree,” Arrow says of taiko drums,
which cost $10,000 to $30,000 when produced traditionally and $1,000 to $1,500
when produced commercially. Building the
drums himself out of wine barrels costs
about $300 and 30 hours of his labor. Hard
labor: Just pulling the cowhide over the barrel requires four carjacks and the exertion of
6,000 pounds of pressure.
Today, with the Lang Performing Arts
Center storing as many drums as there’s
space for, Swarthmore’s taiko program exists
in three main manifestations: a 10- to 14person repertory class open to students at
all levels; a performance ensemble that trav-
els to different Philadelphia-area venues
(including, in 2006, Citizens Bank Park for
a Phillies game); and more informal, student-led initiatives.
The program, although young, already
boasts some accomplished alumni. Small,
for one, received a Fulbright Grant to study
and research taiko in Japan before beginning his apprenticeship this spring on Sado
Island—once an island for exiles, now a
rich cultural arts destination boasting cherry blossoms, mountains, bamboo forests,
and the translucent Sea of Japan (not to
mention “prodigious amounts” of rice,
“It’s huge,
it’s loud,
it’s strong.
It’s like the
energy comes
from within
the drums,
within the
group.”
seafood, and sake). In early 2006, Small’s
classmate and former roommate Alex Hudson ’05 began his own apprenticeship with
the San Jose taiko group—where he and
Small had interned together one summer—
while making a home for himself in the
city’s Japantown.
“One of the facts of life with a collegiate
group, especially when it’s just getting off
the ground like Swarthmore’s was when I
was [on campus], is that there’s a dearth of
expertise. You take classes one year; then the
next year you have to start leading,” says
Hudson, an English major and Japanese
minor.
Hudson and Small complemented their
tutelage in taiko at Swarthmore through a
summer at Honolulu’s Taiko Center of the
Pacific (their studies, along with their
internships in San Jose, supported by
Eugene M. Lang Summer Initiative Grants)
and a semester-abroad program at Tokyo’s
Tamagawa University—Swarthmore’s sister
school in all things taiko. Within just two
weeks of arriving abroad, Hudson found
himself performing in front of a crowd of
22,000. He now regularly travels and performs with San Jose Taiko between working
as an office temp to pay the bills.
“It was one of those things where you
had to step up right away,” Hudson says—
of taiko at Swarthmore, at Tamagawa, and at
San Jose today.
“Taiko—it’s huge, it’s loud, it’s strong,” says
Yusha Hu ’08. “A lot if it is about energy. It’s
exhausting. We’ll be playing and playing,
and then you get a second wind; it’s like the
energy comes from within the drums, within
the group.”
Ensemble taiko grows out of this idea of
expansion, even explosion, says Arrow.
Although taiko itself simply means “fat
drum” and, historically, refers to a variety of
different types of traditional Japanese drumming, ensemble taiko, or kumi-daiko, is a
modern and, given its jazzy origins, necessarily globalized art form whose practitioners reach internationally to expand their
own possibilities, Arrow says. Developed in
the 1950s by Daihachi Oguchi, a Japanese
jazz drummer who encountered an ancient
taiko score and imagined a new way of
interpreting it, Oguchi not only initiated the
ensemble form but also literally expanded
the size of jazz drums, expanding the bass,
for instance, to a width of six to eight feet.
Some forms of taiko are more grounded
in dance than others, and some, says Arrow,
feature incredibly intricate arm movements
as the only deliberate motion. As a modern
dancer by training, much of Arrow’s interest
in bringing taiko to Swarthmore lies in
incorporating a diversity of cultural influences to complement the dance program’s
overall world dance emphasis.
But so too is taiko indelibly grounded in
modern Japanese history and a post-World
War movement to celebrate distinctively
Japanese art and culture. Many Swarthmore taiko students
and alumni, including
Hudson, who is halfFilipino, come to taiko
in part to find an avenue to express and celebrate their own Asian or Asian-American
roots.
Swarthmore’s Japanese program has likewise benefited from the program’s deep connections to Tokyo and the city’s Tamagawa
University. The director of the Tamagawa
Taiko and Dance Group, Isaburoh Hanayagi, came to campus to offer his expertise
when Swarthmore’s taiko program first
began, and he has come back every year
since. Students in Swarthmore’s Japanese
program maintain pen-pal relationships
with Tamagawa performers, getting the
chance to meet them on the dancers’ annual
performance tours to the Northeast.
Hanayagi will split duties between Swarthmore’s dance and Japanese departments as a
Cornell visiting professor in 2008–2009.
Meanwhile, over at Sado Island’s communal Apprentice Center, Small is growing
accustomed to a cultural exchange of the
most intense kind, waking up at 4:40 a.m.
each day only to sink to his knees to clean
the floor before a 5:25 a.m. speedwalk
switching partway through into an uphill
run by the sea. After breakfast (eaten by
apprentices with chopsticks held in the
non-dominant hand), Small and his peers
tighten the drums before morning, afternoon, and evening practices, with some vegetable-tending, craftwork, and, yes, meals
thrown in. (Once, Small says, he served up
buffalo wings for lunch: “They were declared
both delicious and way too spicy”).
“After a day of rehearsing, I feel worn
out—I definitely have had no trouble falling
asleep at night,” Small says. “Long after I’m
ready to collapse, I can still hear the melody
of the shinobue (horizontal bamboo flute)
through the thin walls.
“I can feel the floor vibrate from the
taiko.” T
Elizabeth Redden is a reporter for InsideHigherEd.com in Washington, D.C.
june 2007 : 19
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
JIM GRAHAM
For one week in February,
students representing all
the major religious
traditions opened their
worship services to the
public and shared their
customs and rituals.
This week of religion,
reflecting a swelling
interest in spirituality on
campuses nationwide,
was the first of its kind
ever held at the College.
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
DURING A WEEK OF EVENTS FOCUSED
ON RELIGION, FAITH BECOMES AN
UNUSUALLY HOT CAMPUS TOPIC.
Winter sunlight slants through leaded windows, falling on eight heads bowed in
prayer. Three rows of worshippers—a man
in front, three more behind, and four
women at the rear—stand barefoot on
brightly colored prayer mats. A snowy hijab
completely covers one woman; the other
women wear shorter shawls over their heads
and shoulders. Two of the men—one in a
striped, knit hat, the other with a white crocheted kufi—lead the service. The group
looks into a corner of the room, the one that
points to the East.
The mood is reminiscent of a mosque,
but this service is taking place on the first
floor of Swarthmore College’s Bond Hall
and is led by senior Nabil Khan and freshman Ruhullah Khapalwak. Five guests sit in
chairs along the walls.
“Allah-u-akbar!” Khapalwak exclaims,
calling the worshippers to prayer. He begins
to chant and sing, softly and melodically.
Minutes later, Khan, assuming the role
of imam, takes over. “Praise is due to Allah,
who has guided us to the righteous path,”
he says in Arabic. Switching to English, he
By Carol Brévart-Demm
welcomes the guests. Then, he delivers a sermon, in which he compares the Muslim
holy book, the Qur’an, to an unwritten
Qur’an whose message is evident in the natural, living world and to which the religious
text directs those who are wise.
“Every time we cast our eyes on the
changing colors of the trees in autumn and
we praise Allah for the stunning beauty
around us, we are actually reading another
verse from the Living Qur’an. Every time a
geologist studies a sample of rock or soil …
or a marine biologist examines the diseases
on edible fish in the oceans, he or she is
really reading another verse in the Living
Qur’an,” Khan says. He ends the sermon:
“Let us pray to Allah that … we should be
among those who read, understand, and
appreciate the signs of Allah that are written
boldly in everything around us….”
Khapalwak leads the group in prayer. At
various times they stand, kneel, or touch the
ground with their foreheads. Hands move
from sides to knees to faces, covering eyes or
ears, eliminating intrusions. Chanting alternates with periods when lips move silently
in prayer. The service is informal, yet solemn
and moving.
When the worship ends, the Muslim students answer their guests’ questions about
Islam.
This Muslim prayer session was one of the
first events of Religion and Spirituality on
Campus Week, held in early February, during which worship services in all the major
religious traditions as well as a Taizé chant
and meditation session were open to the
community. Other events included a
“Women in Religion” panel; a talk on
“Quaker Influences on Campus”; a student
panel titled “Practicing Faith on Campus:
the Transition to College Life”; a faculty
panel called “Balancing Faith in Academic
Life”; a “Veritas Forum on Science and Religion”; and an “Interfaith Text Study with
Faculty Scholars.”
The week of religion—the first of its
kind ever held at the College—was the
brainchild of the Rev. Joyce Tompkins, the
College’s Protestant adviser and unofficial
interfaith “go-to” person. She’s known by
june 2007 : 21
the campus community for her kindness
and willingness to listen—not to mention
her supply of snacks. The goal of the weeklong event was to enable student religious
groups to raise the profile of both organized
the College. Thanks to support from the
recently completed campaign, The Meaning
of Swarthmore, Tompkins became full-time
in the fall. Windhaus, also a full-time
employee serving Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr,
and Haverford colleges,
receives funding from the
Archdiocese of Philadelphia through the Newman Community. The
part-time position held
by Berkman, a graduate
rabbinical student, is supported by Hillel and also
by endowment funding
managed by the College.
Swarthmore Muslim
Association members
have no official adviser, although Assistant
Professor of Religion Tariq al-Jamil says he
is their de facto religious mentor. “It’s a role
I’ve come to be comfortable with,” he says.
The College’s Interfaith Center is located
on the edge of campus in Bond Memorial
Hall, a dignified and beautiful yet drafty old
building, whose heating system is noisy and
ineffective. (In winter, Tompkins, petite and
slender, is often found shivering in her
office, which, despite its bright and inviting
decorative touches, is invaded by cold air
penetrating its old, uninsulated windows.)
The religious advisers joke good-naturedly
about their location. Windhaus says: “I’m
Struck by similarities she
observed in the Muslim
prayers and the Shabbat texts,
Tompkins wondered, “How
can we not get along?”
religions and those groups of students practicing other types of spirituality—such as
meditation—and to promote dialogue and
understanding between them. The idea
evolved from discussions among the deans
of the College and the three campus religious advisers—Tompkins, Catholic Adviser
Father Ed Windhaus, and Jewish adviser
Jethro Berkman—about the current and
future roles of religion at Swarthmore and
on other free-thinking, secular campuses.
Tompkin’s position is supported by Partners in Ministry, a nonprofit Protestant
organization, with additional funding provided by an endowment that is managed by
22 : swarthmore college bulletin
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
JIM GRAHAM
Three campus religious advisers (right)—Father Ed Windhaus,
rabbinical graduate student Jethro Berkman, and the Reverend Joyce
Tompkins (left to right)—nurture students’ spiritual needs and contribute to their ethical and moral maturation. Tompkins estimates that
about half the student body practices some form of religious expression.
grateful to have an office—with a bathroom.
Joyce has the microwave, and Jethro has the
copier. We all use each other’s spaces.”
Under the supervision of Dean of Multicultural Affairs Darryl Smaw, Tompkins,
Berkman, and Windhaus nurture students’
spiritual needs and also play a role in their
ethical and moral maturation. They help
organize weekly programs such as Pizza and
Parable, Thursday-evening Bible study, and
communion and Shabbat services, plus lectures on religious topics, excursions,
retreats, and interfaith events.
When incoming students’ orientation
packages are mailed, Tompkins includes a
message listing the many campus religious
groups and their activities. About a third of
first-year students fill out and return the
short form indicating a religious affiliation.
Tompkins estimates that up to half of the
current student population practices some
form of religious expression, including
those who explore spirituality in nontraditional ways such as through meditation.
Smaw, an ordained American Baptist
minister who holds master’s degrees in
divinity and theology from Crozer Theological Seminary and master’s and doctoral
degrees in education from Harvard University Graduate School of Education, says that
liberal arts campuses, long reputed to deride
or ignore religion as irrational or nonintellectual, are experiencing a new interest in
religious and spiritual expression. “Many
students no longer want to divorce their
religious or spiritual commitment from their
intellectual pursuits. I think it’s part of the
global climate. Given the way many of the
major religions are influencing the way we
view ourselves and the world, we need to
learn and understand the differences among
them,” he says.
PERSONAL SPIRITUALITY
Confirming the swelling interest in spirituality among students, Tompkins contrasts
religious practice today with that of the
1950s and 1960s. “Back then, pretty much
everyone was associated with a religion. It
was like an identity. Today, it seems to be
heading more toward developing your own
sense of spirituality, shopping around, finding something that works for you,” she says.
“Some act that out publicly; some don’t.
Many students meditate on their own or
have their own private prayer way. Religion
week is not just to remind people that we
have religious groups on campus but also to
let them know that spirituality is much larger than that. There’s a lot going on here.”
Furthermore, Tompkins is eager to
encourage understanding between those
who are religious and those who are not.
“By promoting dialogue between those for
whom religious faith is important and those
who think it’s a crock, we can learn to
understand one another and work toward
common solutions to problems,” she says.
Now in his second and final year at
Swarthmore (he graduates from rabbinical
college this spring), Berkman senses a secular inclination within the campus community, “It’s not that I feel discriminated against
in any way. In fact, everyone has been nothing but supportive of what I’ve been trying
to do here. However, it is a very intellectual
place, and that’s great, but, whereas in much
of the United States being a person of faith
is self-evident, here it’s something that
needs to be explained.”
One of Berkman’s goals is to provide all
Jewish students—not only those who practice religion—with an opportunity to connect with their heritage. “Judaism is so
much more than a religion. It’s a civilization, it’s a people, and there are ways for
students to connect to Jewish culture even if
they’re atheists or they don’t like religion,”
he says. “I’ve experienced a connection to
my roots as a healthy thing in my own life. I
used to be much more disconnected from
my Jewish identity. When I was in college, I
don’t think I would have come to any of the
programs or events I help put on here.”
As for Windhaus, he is delighted by the
approximately 100 Catholic students who
subscribe to his listserv and their enthusiasm for his programs, which have included
trips to the Smithsonian’s
Freer Gallery exhibit of biblical manuscripts, excursions
to look at religious architecture, and an annual one-day
retreat. “They are genuinely
interested and interesting,”
he says. “You know what the
demands are here, and yet
they find the time.”
Windhaus also enjoys “lovely, friendly
chats” with faculty but says nonetheless:
“There’s really no letting the students know
that faith is important from the College’s
perspective, although they do let them know
that I’m here for them.” He too believes that
religion is gaining greater acceptance on
campuses, but he notices that students of
faith “tend to walk on eggshells so as not to
appear to be evangelically proselytizing,
telling people they’re going to hell if they
don’t do this or that. That ilk of right-wing
Christianity has not done anybody any
favors,” he says.
remain anonymous says, “It seems as if religion is important to those who don’t practice it, not as something they want to do but
as something they want to complain about.”
Then, there are those who simply do not
need it. As Hoa Pham ’10 said in a Feb. 2
Phoenix article: “To be perfectly honest, I
don’t hear many people casually talking
about religion. As Swatties, most of us are
socially conscious and are interested in the
“Many students no longer
want to divorce their religious
or spiritual commitment from
their intellectual pursuits.”
ANTAGONISTIC ATMOSPHERE
As discussions about religion week progressed, Dean of Students Jim Larimore was
concerned about the tendency of intellectually hypercharged campus communities like
Swarthmore to approach the notion of religion with varying degrees of indifference or
antagonism.
Religious students verify Larimore’s concern. Although many say that those with no
religious affiliation are simply uninterested
in the topic, others claim to have experienced hostility or criticism. Meena Elanchenny ’10, a Hindu, says: “There are atheists on campus who are hostile toward
believers, and some secular students say
things like, ‘Islam is a militaristic religion,
but Christianity is a peaceful religion.’ We
should seek commonalities and concentrate
on those.” Another student who wished to
religions of the world, but I don’t see many
of us being personally outward with our
thoughts. I like to think of Swatties as very
driven people, motivated and logical enough
to be their own support, [instead of relying
on] some invisible entity.”
So, faced with the challenge of allaying
antagonism, criticism, and indifference, a
committee that included 23 students representing the Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu traditions—and some
who wished simply to explore spirituality—
planned an extraordinarily diverse program
of 15 events as well as daily lunchtime discussion groups, from Feb. 1 to Feb. 11.
“I encouraged people to think about how
we could create a ‘safe space,’ an environment that would allow people to explore
religion in a more personal way and stimulate interfaith dialogue both between those
of different faiths and those who have
doubts, questions, or deep reservations
about faith.” Larimore says. “I was incredibly proud of the students for the way they
dove right into it. The way they approached
it was uniquely Swarthmorean. They looked
for a wide range of opportunities for people
to get together as human beings and recognize—in the Quaker spirit of this place—
the Light within each other. At the same
time, they ensured that there was intellectual discourse to lead to better understanding
rather than simply abstract perceptions.”
Smaw welcomed the opportunity to
investigate the “partnership” between faith
and reason and sees a similar desire in the
june 2007 : 23
students of faith whom he
mentors. In a community
where the life of the mind is
central, he says: “I’ve had conversations with students who
are deeply committed to a faith
tradition that nurtured and
sustained them before they
came to Swarthmore. They recognize that, for some in our
community, to be a person of
faith is to be seen as anti-intellectual—that’s not the way
they see themselves. Nor do I
see them that way.”
Almost all of the religiously affiliated
students interviewed for this article said
that their faith has become stronger during
their time at the College. Many find that it
helps them face the rigors of academic life.
Some find release in prayer. “Maybe because
this campus is so liberal, people see religion
as confining, but actually, even if you do it
for only a very short time, it’s very freeing,”
says Ailya Vajid ’09. Tabla player Deoroop
Matapersad ’09 agrees: “When I play music,
I get into my mode, a place where I can connect with God. It relaxes me, takes me away
from the stress of Swarthmore.” And Mark
Wallace, professor of religion, says, “I tell
students that, ironically, they will be academically more productive if they have a
healthy, productive, spiritual inner life.”
Smaw believes that practicing a religious
tradition may serve as a guide in ethical and
moral decision-making without interfering
with the ability to question, investigate, and
perform research. “There’s much reconciliation between religion and intellectuality,” he
says. “God wants us to discuss and question
our faith. It’s not supposed to be easy. Challenge God! She wants you to!”
‘Here’s your chance,” she says.
“You hear about this all the
time in the news, the controversy about Muslim identity. Here’s
an opportunity to ask questions—find out who is Sunni,
who is Shi’ite, whether it matters, and whether they can worship together?’ I was really surprised and would like to understand why more students didn’t
go to each other’s sessions.”
Struck by similarities she
observed in the Muslim prayers
and the Shabbat texts, Tompkins wondered,
“How can we not get along? Although there
were differences, the similarities in the
text were much stronger. When Jethro
explained that when they say the sh’ma
(part of morning and evening worship),
they cover their eyes to shut out distractions—well, the Muslims do the exact same
thing. I got chills when he said that,” she
says. “Interfaith dialogue and unity is really
my passion.”
Tompkins was able to indulge that passion during the 90 minutes of Interfaith
Text Study featuring Wallace; Helen Plotkin,
an instructor in religion and director of Beit
Midrash; and al-Jamil. At this event, attended by about 30, the three scholars analyzed
Creation stories in the Bible, Torah, and
Qur’an, concluding with a lively questionand-answer session.
“It was incredible that we could have this
really intense dialogue about a specific text
and make these connections between religious traditions that would not have been
obvious to us without our individual areas
of expertise,” al-Jamil says.
Plotkin and Tompkins are excited that
faculty members and students want further
opportunities for this kind of dialogue. A
group of students now meets regularly for
interfaith conversations and is seeking to
arrange another text study.
“It’s wonderful,” says Wallace, “because
that models for us how religious traditions
that some people want to pit against each
other can actually be friendly interlocuters.”
“Science was born in a
theological womb,” Alexander
asserted, explaining that many
of the founders of modern science,
such as Boyle, Descartes, and
Newton, were men of faith.
SHARING FAITH TRADITIONS
Hours after the Muslim worship, an Open
Shabbat, hosted by Ruach, the campus Jewish organization, took place in Bond Hall’s
Common Worship Room—an intimate
space on the second floor, almost like a living room, furnished with an old table, a buffet, chairs for about 25 people and a couple
of musty couches and armchairs. Radiators
provided clanking accompaniment as Berkman—curly dark hair topped by a yarmulke
and his friendly, boyish face radiating
24 : swarthmore college bulletin
youthful enthusiasm—led a service of
psalms, songs, and prayers. During one
song, all present turned to face the open
door to welcome the Shabbat, which, Berkman explained, is compared to a bride. He
spoke of the liberating aspect of Shabbat,
which strict observers perceive as a time for
“taking hands off the world, allowing it to
speak to us in a way it cannot when we are
interfering with it,” and reflecting on life in
the coming week. A discussion arose around
two texts containing scholarly interpretations of Shabbat, which were read aloud by
students. Standing to sing, many worshippers closed their eyes and swayed, transported by the moment.
After the service, all gathered to eat a
communal dinner prepared by the students.
Freshman Eric Holzhauer has been a regular
celebrant since the fall, after being invited by
two friends. Coming from a Unitarian Universalist background, he says: “I find the rituals comforting, and at the dinner afterwards, there’s a strong sense of community.”
Khan and Khapalwak also attended the
Jewish Shabbat, where they enjoyed the
communal meal. “It was interesting to learn
how important things like grapes, fruit, and
dried fruit are for the Jewish religion. I’m
interested in learning about Christians and
Jews and how they pray,” Khapalwak says.
“Although we can read books about it, it’s
good to hear it from real people and understand it.”
Khan recognized a similarity in the
importance of the foods and his sermon
about looking into nature for signs of God.
Tompkins, present at many of the week’s
events, was disappointed by the lack of participation of students from different religious groups at each other’s events—especially at the Muslim service. “I thought,
MIND AND SPIRIT
Plotkin sees a connection between the intellectually demanding interfaith study session
and the discussion of religion’s relevance in
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
Many students say that their faith has become stronger
since coming to college. Some say it helps them face the
rigors of academic life. Others find release in prayer.
“Even if you do it for only a very short time, it’s very
freeing,” says Ailya Vajid ’09.
an academic setting.
“My work at the Beit Midrash, teaching
the Hebrew Bible and Jewish interpretive
tradition, offers access to a literary and historical tradition that, by its nature, is meant
to be practiced by the whole person—not
just the mind abstracted from the spirit,”
she says. “This tradition shows how intellectual rigor can be used in the service of
religious, cultural, and national identities.”
She adds that a significant proportion of
the people attracted to the Beit Midrash are
non-Jews. “Teaching, learning, and studying
become much richer if you’re pursuing them
with people who take other interpretive
stances. And it strengthens all of our identities. Christian kids who have studied here
have gone on to divinity school, bringing
with them knowledge of the Jewish interpretive tradition, and they feel that it
strengthens their Christian work.”
Later in the week, during an evening session in the Science Center that drew an
audience of about 50 faculty, staff, and students, Denis Alexander, a biochemist and
professor of science and religion at Cambridge University, England, held a lecture
called “Beyond the Conflict: Similarities
Between Science and Faith.”
“Science was born in a theological
womb,” Alexander asserted, explaining that
many of the founders of modern science,
such as Boyle, Descartes, and Newton, were
men of faith. He cited from a survey of
notable natural scientists active between
1543 and 1680, performed by Rodney Stark,
University Professor of the Social Sciences
at Baylor University; it showed that 61 percent were devout; 35 percent were conventionally religious; and only 4 percent were
skeptics. Thus, he said, the historical conflict model lacks plausibility; in fact, far from
being diametrically opposed, the two fields
seem to need each other.
Arguing from a Christian perspective, Alexander
laid out four reasons for the
complementary existence of
science and religious faith,
investigating the cognitive
similarities between a life of
science and a life of faith.
He spoke of the quest for
coherence, which requires a
comprehensive system of
ideas that does not contradict itself, such as isolated
biological data being unified to form a whole or biblical data being
compiled to form a continuum. The ideas
should be refutable—evolution and Christ’s
resurrection are refutable but have not been
refuted. Using a similar parallel, he compared the prediction of religious and scientific phenomena, asking whether religious
belief makes predictions analogous to those
made by science. Finally, he noted the level
of commitment required to sustain the pur-
suit of both religion and science.
Distressed at the ignorance of science
among the religious community and that of
religion among the scientific community,
Alexander concluded by suggesting that
both be more curious about the other’s field.
Windhaus cannot conceive of any major
aspect of learning and culture without a religious basis, citing the Venerable John Cardinal Henry Newman’s Idea of a University and
“Students of faith tend to
walk on eggshells so as not to
appear to be evangelically
proselytizing—telling people
they’re going to hell if they
don’t do this or that.”
his tenet, “If perchance God does exist, then
the study of the things of God forms the
basis of all other disciplines.” Pursuing this
idea, he recommends Thomas Woods’ 2005
book How the Catholic Church Built Western
Civilization. “It traces science, art, philosophy, law, and so on, back to the only religious phenomenon that existed at that
time—the Catholic Church. These things
are all pre-Reformation. Did you know that
june 2007 : 25
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
“They recognize that, for some
in our community, to be a
person of faith is to be seen as
anti-intellectual, and that’s not
the way they see themselves.
Nor do I see them that way.”
the field of seismology was created by the
Jesuits? Or that there are 35 craters on the
moon named after the Catholic priests who
discovered them?” he asks, his bright blue
eyes twinkling mischievously, as he adds,
“It’s an audacious title, but it’s supportable.”
Not only is faith at the source of scientific history, Windhaus asserts, but it also will
need to serve as a support for human beings
as they are increasingly caught up in the
current of scientific progress. “Hearing people talk about the tremendous strides that
will be made in science, all I can think of is
the need to emphasize humanity with the
students. It’s becoming increasingly important to ask ourselves, ‘What’s good for
human beings?’”
CAUTIOUS OPTIMISM
By the end of Religion and Spirituality on
Campus Week, the mood among religious
students and advisers on campus was one of
cautious optimism. Wallace described the
week as a milestone in the College’s evolution toward a healthier and more robust
26 : swarthmore college bulletin
exchange of religious
ideas, saying that the
energy and vitality
displayed by the participants in the
events indicated that
religion is a topic
worthy of further
discussion.
The week surpassed her expectations, Tompkins says,
despite low attendance at some sessions: “The breadth and
depth of the programs and the level of the
conversation were very satisfying.” In the
weeks before and after the events, The
Phoenix published several thought-provoking and controversial
articles such as “Religion Week Irrational”; Religion,
Science not so Disjoint”; “Recognize
Boundaries of Science, Religion” as
well as pieces on a
controversial antiIslam advertisement
that had appeared in
the Feb. 8 issue.
Adam Koontz ’08, an Episcopalian who
plays a leadership role in many of the campus’s Protestant activities and worship sessions, says: “We talk about class and sexuality and that kind of stuff all the time—but
this is not something I’ve seen before on
such a large scale.”
Tompkins believes that both interfaith
The final event of Religion
and Spirituality on Campus Week
was a Taizé chant service—
also attended by members of
the congregation of Swarthmore’s
Trinity Episcopal Church.
The service was followed by a
communal dinner. In 1940,
Frère Roger de Taizé founded an
ecumenical monastic community
whose members focus their
lives around prayer and Christian
meditation in the belief that
chanting and singing prayers
repetitively leads to contemplation.
dialogue and individual groups benefited
from the week. Members of the Muslim Students Association, who had previously had
no fixed location to meet for worship,
requested permission to use Bond’s Common Worship Room and now meet there
regularly on Fridays to pray together. “Also,
two students came, independently of each
other, to talk to me about Buddhism,”
Tompkins says. “There’s no Buddhist group
on campus, although there is a regular
meditation group that has some Buddhists
in it. The Hindu group has also started to
meet more regularly. I think it gave them a
bit of a kick.”
At the end of March, the Hindu community celebrated the Holi holiday, during
which they performed a ritual to welcome
“Hearing people talk about the
tremendous strides that will be
made in science, all I can think
of is the need to emphasize
humanity with the students.”
spring called The Throwing of the Colors.
After attending an information session, exuberant students showered each other with
colored powders mixed with water. “The colors are symbolic of spring, and the powders
are also supposed to have healing, cleansing
properties. It’s a cathartic process,” says
Elanchenny. “Students of all faiths came
together and really enjoyed it.” T
AS
[YOU]
ARE
Swarthmore students today
Photographs by Eleftherios Kostans
Text by Jeffrey Lott
AS
[YOU]
ARE
Inspired by the “American West” photographs of Richard
Avedon, College Photographer Eleftherios Kostans set up a white background outside Parrish Hall and Sharples Dining Hall last fall, inviting
a random selection of students to step into the frame. We asked each
student three things: Tell us a little about what you are wearing today.
Tell us something that’s been on your mind today. Is there anything
interesting or unusual about you? The result, shown here, is a portrait
of a lively, diverse student body—Swarthmore students today.
1
Previous Page:
Naima Taaj Ajmal Brown ’08
St. Paul, Minn.
Wearing: “My Genocide
Intervention Fund green
bracelet and ‘halfro’”
2
1 Revan Williams '09
Maywood Park, Ore.
On his mind: Papers!
Says: “I've an anachronistic
song in my heart.”
2 Taleah Kennedy '10 (left)
New Castle, Del.
Thinking about: “My brother's
birthday”
Talent: Sings
Cory Benjamin '10 (center)
Monmouth Junction, N.J.
Thinking about: “Ice cream”
Plays: Four instruments
28 : swarthmore college bulletin
Sunny Cowell '10
Upper Marlboro, Md.
Thinking about: “The reading
and paper I have to do”
Plays: Viola
4
5
3
3 Jonathan Harris '08
East Hampton, N.Y.
Lydia Thé '08
Fort Lee, N.J.
Lydia: “My shirt's from
Amsterdam. Jonathan is in his
typical attire.”
Thinking about: The sociology
and anthropology class they
are taking together
6
4 Danielle Borgaily '07
El Paso, Tex.
Major: Studio art
Says she’s: Half Filipino, half
Lebanese
Thinking about: A trip home
to see friends and family
5 Sebastian DuncanPortuondo '08
Miami, Fla.
Wearing: Quilted jacket from
Goodwill. (“I sewed on
the red buttons.”)
On his mind: “How tightening
the [Cuban] embargo is an
affront to myself as a Cuban
immigrant and to Cuban sovereignty, while failing to effect
meaningful change in Cuba”
6 Lauren Walker '09
Fallston, Md.
Wearing: A cast (fractured
finger during soccer practice)
Unusual: Can solve a Rubik's
Cube in 3 minutes
Says: “That's not too unusual
around here.”
june 2007 : 29
AS
[YOU]
ARE
9
7
8
7 Emily Firetog '07
Brooklyn, N.Y.
Wearing: “Dad's old sweater”
Thinking about: Today's
honors seminar on
Shakespeare
Interesting: “My sister is
a freshman here. We're
building legacy.”
30 : swarthmore college bulletin
8 Emily Lowing '08
Willow, N.Y.
On her mind: Making a
play list for her WSRN
program tonight
Wearing: Her favorite shirt
(that she stole from her sister)
Unusual: “I can wiggle
my ears.”
9 Etan Cohen '07
From: Fairlawn, N.J., and Israel
Today: Had an exam. “I hope
I did well. And I can't wait
for lunch!”
Values: “Friends above
work and sleep”
10
11
10 Jackie Avitabile '09
Delmar, N.Y.
Holding: “My first greentea-blended creme from
the coffee bar”
Wondering: “How am I
going to take the 50-some
classes I'm interested in over
the next two-and-a-half
years?”
11 Athena Samaras '07
Annapolis, Md.
Elizabeth Richey '07 (right)
Hopkinton, N.H.
Wearing: “Fabulous boots”
Why? “We were taking soil
samples in the Crum Woods
for our ecology class and had
to cross the creek.”
12
12 Kofi Anguah '09
Tema, Ghana
Wearing: All black. “A friend
of mine in high school
just passed away, and I'm
mourning her death.”
On his mind: “I've been
thinking a lot about life….”
june 2007 : 31
14
13
13 Eric Christiansen '08
Carlsbad, Calif.
Major: Mathematics
Minor: Computer Science
Passion: “African dance. The
pose is from the Hun-Gway.”
32 : swarthmore college bulletin
15
14 Sally O'Brien '07
Orange, Conn.
Major: Greek and Latin
On her mind: “Been editing a
villanelle in my head”
Anything unusual about you?
“Uh, I mean, lots. The bike's
name is Bucephalus.”
AS
[YOU]
ARE
17
16
15 Camila HarriganLabarca '08 (left)
Silver Spring, Md.
Cristina Alva '07
Whittier, Calif.
On their minds: Differences
between American TV series
and those from Latin America.
Their secret: “We are undercover superhero ethnographers (in training).”
16 Chloe Noonan '10
Austin, Texas
Plan: Majoring in sociology
Wearing: “The necklace I
bought in the College bookstore. It's environmentally
friendly.”
17 Benjamin Thuronyi '07
(left) Silver Spring, Md.
Worrying: “Whether the
iodination reaction I'm
running right now is finally
going to work”
Ahmmad Brown '07 (right)
Sacramento, Calif.
Looking forward to:
Graduating and leaving
Swarthmore
june 2007 : 33
19
18
20
18 Jessica Barajas '10
Ontario, Calif.
Wearing: Green sweater, a
birthday present
Thinking about: “Writing a
paper on Machiavelli”
34 : swarthmore college bulletin
19 Xiaoxia Zhuang '10
Auburn, Ala.
Wearing: Warm clothes. “I'm
starting to get sick. It started
with a sore throat yesterday.”
Before college: Was an avid
unicyclist
20 Greg Albright '10
Treichlers, Pa.
Says: “Despite the fact that
Paige and I look like fast
friends, we met when we
walked into this photo shoot.
That kind of thing happens a
lot at Swarthmore.”
AS
[YOU]
ARE
22
21
21 Paige Gentry '07
Cheshire, Conn.
Says: “It was a beautiful day,
so I decided to dress up and
wear the giant earrings my
mother gave me.”
22 Kendra McDow '07
Washington, D.C.
Thinking about:
“Understanding today's
mathematics”
Unusual: Born with 12 fingers
23
23 Matt Thurm '10
Bronxville, N.Y.
Thinking about: “Eating”
june 2007 : 35
The Floating Pool Lady
DECADES OF PERSISTENCE PAY OFF IN A UNIQUE PUBLIC POOL
THAT BRINGS BACK A HISTORIC NEW YORK TRADITION.
B y Pa u l Wa c h t e r ’ 97
NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
MUSEUM OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK/JACOB RIIS COLLECTION
“The Floating Pool Lady” has two
meanings. It refers to an innovative public
swimming facility—one that floats on a
barge along the New York waterfront—and
to the Swarthmore-educated woman whose
vision and persistence made that possible.
The pool opens this summer. The lady,
Ann Lubin Buttenwieser ’57, will take a welldeserved bow, then keep on working for
swimmers in a city that, a century ago,
sported more than a dozen floating pools.
Almost 30 years ago, researching her
doctoral dissertation on the history of New
York City’s waterfront, Buttenwieser came
upon several references to floating swimming pools.
“Fewer than 10 blocks from today’s
South Street Seaport, the delighted shrieks
of several hundred wet New Yorkers echoed
from the Grand Street Floating Bath, one of
almost two dozen seasonally moveable pools
berthed in the middle of the economic life of
the city,” she later wrote in a New York
Archives magazine article.
The image of these floating pools, by
then long gone from the city’s shores, struck
a chord with Buttenwieser. She was a passionate swimmer who had spent childhood
summers in Annapolis, Md., the home of
the U.S. Naval Academy. She swam for Manhattan’s Dalton High School and also for
Swarthmore, where she competed in the
breast stroke and diving.
After college, Buttenwieser spent two
decades raising her family in New York, but
she never forgot the water. Enrolling in an
urban planning graduate program in the
1970s, Buttenwieser was less interested in
New York’s steel and concrete jungle than its
578 miles of waterfront. In a city whose
swimmers are underserved—New York had
the lowest number of public pools per capita
of 25 major U.S. cities surveyed in a 2000
study—wouldn’t it make sense to reintroduce floating pools, Buttenwieser asked in a
1980 op-ed in The New York Times.
“I got a lot of great feedback from that
article, and I figured if the Times liked the
idea, then it was probably worth doing,”
Buttenwieser says.
It took another 27 years for Buttenwieser’s idea to come to fruition. But now,
the finishing touches are being put on The
Floating Pool Lady, a $5 million barge
docked in the shadows of the Brooklynjune 2007 : 37
Top: The floating pool under construction in a New Orleans shipyard
Center: The pool deck nears completion.
38 : swarthmore college bulletin
GARY SMITH
New York’s earliest floating pools—known
as floating baths—were private. But after
the Civil War, as concerns about public
hygiene grew, pools came to be viewed as
indispensable for the health of all the city’s
residents. William Marcy “Boss” Tweed
opened the first public pools in 1870—
wooden structures floating on pontoons, in
which the swimming area drew its water
from the river. By 1895, 15 such public baths
were operating on Manhattan’s shores, serving more than 4 million people during the
June-to-October season.
But the notion of the floating pools as a
boon for public health began to change with
the increasing pollution of New York’s
rivers. In the early 1900s, city officials mandated several precautions: Floating pools
were not allowed near sewer outflows, lime
was added to the pool water, and fresh water
was piped in from the Catskill aqueduct.
Ultimately, it wasn’t health reasons that
brought an end to the city’s floating pools.
Rather, they were supplanted by the construction of many conventional private and
public pools in the 1930s and 1940s. Floating pools fell into disrepair. Even Robert
Moses, the city’s formidable parks commissioner, couldn’t secure the funds necessary
to sustain the last floating-pool complex,
Buttenwieser reported in New York Archives.
“The City did not fund them … the barges
fell apart, and there was no money to repair
them,” Moses acknowledged. (Although
some existed in Boston, the pools had been
TYLER HICKS/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX
Queens Expressway at Brooklyn’s Pier 2. If
all goes according to plan, “the delighted
shrieks” of a new generation of wet New
Yorkers will be heard from the floating pool
by this summer.
KENT MERRILL
Bottom: Arrival in New York Harbor,
October 2006
Buttenwieser found a barge docked near New Orleans.
The brunt of the work was done when Hurricane Katrina hit.
The barge was fine, but all the laborers were hired away by FEMA.
largely a New York phenomenon. None
remain in the United States, although there
are many in Europe.)
After obtaining a Ph.D. from Columbia University, Buttenwieser joined the City Planning Department, the first of several city
jobs in which she worked on waterfront
improvement and lobbied for the reintroduction of floating pools. Mayor John Lindsay commissioned a study, and Mayor Ed
Koch made a surplus garbage scow available
from the Department of Sanitation. “City
Planning is an operational agency, so we
had to look elsewhere for money,” Buttenwieser says. She would have needed about $1
million to transform the scow into a floating
pool. But before she could raise the money,
the Department of Sanitation called. “They
said it was at the bottom of the Hudson,”
Buttenwieser says. “There had been a leak,
and that was that.”
If she couldn’t bring floating pools back
to New York as a public employee, maybe
she could do it as a private citizen. In 2001,
Buttenwieser established the Neptune
Foundation, a not-for-profit organization to
“commission the design and construction of
a new generation of moveable waterfront
pools for recreationally underserved communities,” according to its Web site
(www.floatingpool.org). Through private
donors and grants, she raised enough
money to begin the search for a barge.
Meanwhile, the city, under Mayor
Michael Bloomberg, was becoming more
receptive to the idea of operating and maintaining a floating pool. New York has 63
public pools (51 outdoor), but it hadn’t built
a new pool in 30 years. Although it is about
to open a new swimming and skating facility in Queens, the cost of such projects—$70
million in this case—have grown prohibi-
tively high. Even restoring existing pools is
expensive. “We’re restoring a pool in Greenpoint that’s been closed for 30 years, and
that’s going to cost about $40 million,” says
Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe.
Buttenwieser’s pool could be built for $5
million, potentially a huge savings. “Floating pools also fit into Mayor Bloomberg’s
vision to recapture New York’s abandoned
industrial waterfront for recreational and
environmental purposes,” Benape says.
Buttenwieser found a barge docked near
New Orleans that suited her purposes. The
foundation purchased it for $450,000 and
hired architect Jonathan Kirschenfeld, who
had once designed a floating theater.
“It was hugely challenging,” Kirschenfeld
says. “Was it a building or a vessel? We took
on a pool consultant, a marine architect
consultant, lighting and electrical experts—
and I was the orchestra leader.”
The brunt of the work on the barge—
cutting out the floor for the pool, building
the dressing facilities—was done in a
Louisiana shipyard to save costs. But then
Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005.
“The barge was fine, but our laborers all
were hired by FEMA for cleanup work,” Buttenwieser says. “Understandably, we were
pretty low on the list of work that needed to
be done after the hurricane.” After six
months, work on The Floating Pool Lady
resumed, and in October 2006 she left for
New York, where the final touches—gutters,
lights, floor tiles—would be added.
Buttenwieser is hoping that The Floating
Pool Lady will open to the public on July 4,
most likely at the fledgling Brooklyn Bridge
Park, not far from its current location in Pier
2. “Most of the park hasn’t been built yet, so
the pool will be the first time the public
comes to the site,” says Marianna Koval,
president of the Brooklyn Bridge Park Con-
servancy, a nonprofit advocacy group for the
park. “And the great thing about the pool is
that it can dock here for a month and then go
somewhere else.”
Sites being considered are in the South
Bronx and Greenpoint, Buttenwieser says.
“We’re less flexible than we’d like because a
lot of the waterfront lacks the infrastructure—electricity, sewage, and water connections—needed to operate the pool.”
Another bureaucratic hurdle for pool
backers is to allay the concerns of the state’s
Department of Environmental Conservation
that the pool’s shadow might alter the
riverbed’s marine environment.
“Since we’ll be in one spot for only a
month or two, I think we can show that the
shading issues won’t be significant,” Buttenwieser says.
This summer, Asphalt Green, a not-forprofit organization that operates Manhattan’s only Olympic-standard swimming
pool, most likely will operate The Floating
Pool Lady. But eventually the Parks Department will oversee operations. “We hope to
have the pool open for free this summer,
from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.,” Buttenwieser says.
“We’re still working on the fees and program for the hours from 7 a.m. to 11 a.m.”
When The Floating Pool Lady opens,
Buttenwieser’s involvement will not end.
The Neptune Foundation has said it will
build three prototypes. “A lot depends on
financing and environmental permits,” Buttenwieser says. “My long-term goal is that
the city will clean up the rivers so that we
can build pools with open bottoms that
make use of the river water. But that might
be the work of another lifetime.” T
Paul Wachter is writing a novel set in Beirut,
Lebanon, where he lived for four years. He currently lives in New York.
june 2007 : 39
connections
Austin/San Antonio
The Austin/San Antonio book group, organized by America
Rodriguez ’78 and
Susan Morrison ’81,
recently met in Austin
to discuss Elif Shafak’s
book The Bastard of
Istanbul.
PAMELA ST. JOHN ZURER ʼ71
Swarthmore Connection chairs from eight
cities met on campus in April for a “Connection Summit.” They shared their ideas and
experiences of running events in their areas
and discussed how to use technology to
organize events and distribute information.
They also made plans for simultaneous
alumni get-togethers across the country.
Called “Welcome to the City,” these events
will enable each region’s established alumni
groups to meet each other as well as welcome recent Swarthmore graduates and
older alumni who have recently moved to
that area.
—Jim Moskowitz ’88
National Connections Chair
In May, Sue Willis Ruff '60 (center)—
flanked by Lolette Sudaka Guthrie '60
(left) and Cathy Good Abbott ’72—was
honored at a reception for her tireless
efforts as founder and leader of the
Washington, D.C., book group for the
last 10 years. Ruff has arranged countless
meetings, worked with faculty mentors,
and developed a robust community of
dedicated alumni, parents, and friends.
The College is extremely grateful to her
for her service and inspiration. The celebration was hosted by Abbott and her
husband, Ernie ’72. Guthrie, a friend of
Ruff’s since their freshman year, came
from North Carolina to be there.
40 : swarthmore college bulletin
New York On April 15,
Jeffrey Murer, associate
professor of political
science, gave a lecture
titled “Is All Terrorism
Local? Analyzing Communal Violence within Segway riders (left to right) Julia Stein ’87, John Goldsborough ’88, Paula Goulden-Naitove ’79, and Glen Moramarco
the Context of the
navigated around the Philadelphia Art Museum and nearby
Global War on TerrorBoat House Row at a Philly Connection event.
ism.” And although
that was the day when
almost eight inches of
NOMINATIONS SOUGHT
rain was recorded in Central Park, making it FOR HONORARY DEGREES
the second wettest day in the history of the
Do you know a classmate who should be
city, more than three dozen alumni sloshed
considered for an honorary degree? The
to the Goddard Community Center. Many
Honorary Degree Committee encourages
thanks go to Erika Teutsch ’42, who directs
you to submit nominations, c/o Maurice
the Center’s program for seniors and who
Eldridge ’61, Vice President’s Office, Swarthbraved the elements that day to be on hand
more College, 500 College Avenue, Swarthto extend her hospitality.
more PA 19081-1390, or by e-mail to
The Swarthmore community also came
meldrid1@swarthmore.edu. Please enclose
out in force on April 22 to see and support
complete background information including
Kendall Cornell ’86 and her Soon-to-beyour own reasons for choosing the individWorld-Famous Women’s Clown Troupe,
ual you nominate, and submit by noon on
which performed “Not Just For Shock Value:
Monday, Oct. 1. Please note that all nominaA Femmes Clowns Assemblage” on the
tions will be kept confidential, and it is not
Upper West Side. After the show, Kendall
good practice to inform the nominee. The
and her troupe answered questions from the
Committee will forward its recommendaSwarthmore group.
tions for faculty approval in mid-November.
Criteria used by the Honorary Degree
Philadelphia The Philadelphia Connection
Committee include: distinction, leadership,
recently had a young alumni happy hour in
or originality in a significant field of human
the city hosted by Amber Adamson ’01. In
addition, Connections Chair Jim Moskowitz endeavor; someone in the ascent or at the
organized two events: One was a “Chocolate peak of distinction, with preference to the
less honored over those with multiple
Fest” held on campus in Bond Hall. The
degrees; ability to serve as a role model for
“fest” featured a demonstration by a local
graduating seniors, as Commencement
master chocolatier, a chocolate potluck
where guests brought along homemade con- speaker, on a major occasion in their lives;
preference for (but not required) individuals
coctions (providing they contained chocowho have an existing affiliation with or
late), and a presentation by Swarthmore
some connection to the College community.
Professor of Biology Colin Purrington on,
The Committee seeks to balance choices
among other things, the natural history of
over the years from a variety of categories
the cocoa tree. And in May, more than 90
such as careers, gender, academic discipline,
area alumni visited the wonderful art at the
race, ethnicity, and public service.
Barnes Foundation in Merion.
JIM MOSKOWITZ ʼ88
Connections
Planning Ahead: Swarthmore 2020
ALUMNI COUNCIL PLAYING A ROLE IN COLLEGE’S LONG-TERM PLANNING
With the successful completion of The Meaning of
pany specializing in innovative approaches to idenSwarthmore and the upcoming accreditation
tifying and implementing business strategies. As a
review by the Middle States Association, the time
management consultant, Awuah brings experience
is right for the College to embark on a strategic
and a special set of skills to this effort as well as
planning process for the fulfillment of our educalong-standing commitment to the College. He
tional and institutional mission in the decades
served as College Advisory Support Working Group
ahead. (See page 4.) One of the Alumni Council’s
co-chair and was instrumental in the Council’s
long-standing objectives has been to play a conefforts to engage in research and provide construcstructive role in that process.
tive suggestions regarding the College’s long-term
During the past few years, the Alumni Council
planning process.
has worked closely with the Board of Managers
Participation in this planning process presents
and the administration to learn more about the
an unprecedented opportunity for the Council to
College’s planning process and identify ways that
play an active role in helping shape the vision for
alumni could be helpful. To this end, Council
the College. During the weeks and months ahead,
Kevin Quigley ’74
members met with Board member Frederick Kyle
alumni with relevant skills and experience will be
’54 during our spring 2006 Council meeting and,
invited to join working groups whose goal will be to
during the fall 2006 Council Weekend, with
advance this long-term planning process. During
Board members Barbara Mather ’65 (chair), Lawrence Shane ’56,
the next few years, the Council will have the opportunity to help
and Kyle as well as Maurice Eldridge ’61, vice president for College
develop a vibrant and resilient long-term plan that will enable the
and community relations and executive assistant to President Alfred
College to build on its strengths for the future.
H. Bloom.
As members of the Alumni Council and the College community,
In January 2007, a College Planning Steering Committee was crewe greatly appreciate the alumni response so far and welcome your
ated, co-chaired by Barbara Mather and President Bloom and
continued input into this process. Without you, it cannot succeed.
including faculty and staff members and students. President Bloom
Kevin Quigley ’74
asked the Council to nominate a representative, and it appointed
Incoming President, Alumni Association
Samuel Awuah ’94, principal partner of Acynonix Associates, a comChair, College Advisory and Support Working Group
Lifelong Learning
OFFERED IN
NEW YORK CITY
Tolkien’s Fiction and Its Roots
Craig Williamson,
Professor of English Literature
Wednesdays, 7 to 9:30 p.m.
305 Seventh Avenue (near 27th Street)
(Support Center for Nonprofit Management)
James Kurth
America and Islam
James Kurth,
Claude C. Smith
Professor of Political
Science
Mondays,
7 to 9:30 p.m.
Fascism in Europe
Pieter Judson ’78,
Professor of History
Mondays,
6:45 to 9:15 p.m.
Homer to Virgil
Gil Rose,
Susan Lippincott
Pieter Judson
Professor Emeritus of
Modern and Classical
Languages, Tuesdays, 6:45 to 9:15 p.m.
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
OFFERED AT
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
Now in its sixth year, Lifelong Learning at
Swarthmore offers small, seminar-style
classes taught by senior or emeriti faculty
members of the College. There are no
grades or academic credit—just learning
for learning's sake. Eight-week courses,
which are offered on campus and in New
York City, are open to alumni, their adult
family members, and friends. The on-campus program also welcomes residents of
the greater Philadelphia area.
Fall 2007 courses will begin the week of
Sept. 17. Tuition for the Swarthmore courses is $430 and for the New York courses
$530. For more information, go to www.swarthmore.edu/lifelonglearning.xml
NEW COURSES FOR FALL 2007
june 2007 : 41
class notes
Postcards
The simple act of always having a camera
at hand has changed Miles Skorpen,
a rising junior and Daily Gazette
photographer. “It has forced me to slow
down and to appreciate—the play of light
on railings and the graceful water droplets
on a leaf,” Skorpen says. “Swarthmore
has an incredibly beautiful campus
and is bursting with student life.”
He has captured the essence of it in
photographs that portray the motion and
drama, nature and color of the College.
42 : swarthmore college bulletin
profile
When Malaria Is a Fact of Life
JOHN ROBERT WILLIAMS
TERRIE TAYLOR ’77 DEVOTES HER LIFE TO SAVING CHILDREN FROM THE DEADLY DISEASE.
Terrie Taylor '77 cuddles one of her Malawian patients in the
overcrowded malaria ward in Blantyre, where she does
research on the effects of the disease for six months each year.
I
t’s 6 p.m. Blantyre, Malawi time. Terrie Taylor settles into a rocking
chair in her bedroom after 12 hours of caring for children in a hospital malaria ward. When asked how her day was, Taylor offers a
startling response via cell phone: “The ward is overflowing, one of
my best nurses died yesterday, and we have no electricity,” she says.
“It was a real African day.”
In Malawi, malaria is a fact of everyday life. Most adults get the
disease several times a year, but they have developed immunity so
their symptoms are treatable. Children, on the other hand, are at
great risk of more severe forms of the disease, such as cerebral
malaria. The young patients may fall into comas, often leading to
brain damage and death.
Taylor, a research physician in tropical medicine, spends six
months out of every year in Malawi, working to better understand
cerebral malaria and its severe effects on children. Myron Magen,
dean of the Michigan State University College of Osteopathic Medicine (MSU-COM), says, “Terrie is the top malaria expert in the world.
Her work has sparked a tremendous interest in tropical medicine.”
Taylor remembers the thrill of doing research during a fruit fly
experiment in Professor John Jenkins’ Biology I class. Jenkins
remembers, too. “Late one afternoon, I heard wild screaming in the
hallway; Terrie was leaping up and down screaming, ‘I got it! I fig-
ured it out!’ That love of discovery and enthusiasm for learning was
a clear indicator of a brilliant future.”
A Michigan native, Taylor divides her time between university
teaching in East Lansing and Malawi, where she leads an international team studying the effects of malaria. Despite the overcrowded
children’s ward and “the gaping black holes of need that I can never
fully meet,” Taylor is pleased with her career choice.
Her African adventure began in 1982, when Magen offered the
recent medical school graduate a job on a parasitology research project in the Sudan. She recalls: “Dr. Magen was interested in grooming osteopathic clinicians for careers in tropical disease research,
but I didn’t want to jump into anything prematurely. I thought I’d
see the world and have an adventure.” A few months later, while
watching some children kicking around a soccer ball made of twine
and discarded plastic bags, Taylor recognized that research might be
a way of stemming the never-ending stream of people needing care
and decided to take Magen up on his offer.
In 1985, Taylor met Malcolm Molyneux, the infectious disease
expert who would become her longtime collaborator, at the “trop
shop” in Malawi. She was there doing master’s research for the Liverpool [England] School of Tropical Medicine. By 1986, the two had
begun the Malaria Research Project, which was based in Queen
Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre, Malawi’s largest city.
Sadly, nearly two decades of work have not improved the survival
rate for Malawian children, but the research continues. In addition
to determining treatment schedules and uses for newer medicines,
she and Molyneux developed the Blantyre Coma Score, allowing clinicians to grade the depth of the coma—a crucial sign in malaria—
and patient progress. Because tissue samples are crucial to more
progress, Taylor and Molyneux launched an autopsy study 10 years
ago that should give scientists their greatest insights yet into how
malaria affects the body.
Early results reveal that a quarter of the children diagnosed with
pediatric malaria have another disease. And newly discovered physical findings in the back of the eye seem to indicate whether malaria
is present. The next step is the use of magnetic resonance imaging
(MRI) during and after the illness to determine what disease the
children have. Last month, Taylor learned that new grants and corporate funding would bring an MRI machine to the Blantyre hospital.
A year ago, Taylor took some rare time for herself when she married John Williams, a friend since eighth grade, who is now a professional photographer. He knew all about her work, “so he came into
the relationship with his eyes wide open.”
Taylor’s enthusiasm for the Malawi Research Project has never
waned. “I feel privileged to be doing this work. It’s exhausting, but
it’s a job with so many interesting facets,” she says. “I must be having the most fun of anyone in my medical school class.”
—Susan Cousins Breen
june 2007: 61
in my life
To Venture Out
Fearless
I CAN SEE ANOTHER LIFE BUT CANNOT BELIEVE—
DEEP IN MY BONES—THAT I WILL EVER GET TO LIVE IT.
By Susanne Monahan ’86
64 : swarthmore college bulletin
where he met my mother in 1961.
Mom had a journalism degree from Syracuse and a list of awards from college and
local papers. She was—and still is—beautiful. They met on an elevator as they covered,
for different newspapers, the opening of a
power plant at Niagara Falls. They knew
each other’s work, and before they got off
the elevator, Mom had agreed to a date.
Three weeks later, having heard that a
sportswriter in Buffalo was also interested
in her, Dad proposed, and she said yes. (He
insists the sportswriter had nothing to do
with it.)
As for why she married my dad, Mom
explained: “I knew if I married that sportswriter in Buffalo, I would spend the rest of
my life in upstate New York, but if I married
your father, I would go somewhere and do
something with my life.” Years later, faced
with a choice between vocation and security,
Dad lived up to the promise my mother had
seen. Together they jumped.
Dad worked sporadically while Mom
COURTESY OF THE MONAHAN FAMILY
Two summers ago, days before a grant proposal was due, I learned that another proposal had been rejected. Awash in budgets
and paperwork, I frantically alternated
between rereading reviews and writing the
upcoming grant, all the while sobbing, “I
can’t do this. But no one else will hire me.”
An image of my father surfaced: In his
mid-40s, he wore his best blue suit and a
forced cheerfulness as he embarked on
another day of job hunting. The power of
this memory reveals how much it has
shaped my life.
When I was 14, my mother quit her job to
go to seminary. Raised Catholic but disappointed by the Vatican II reforms, she
became Episcopalian in the late 1960s and
served as vestry member, usher, and lay
reader. She even delivered sermons. When
Episcopalians began ordaining women in
the mid-1970s, she left her job as an aide to
a New York senator and entered the Virginia
Theological Seminary.
Weeks later, Dad—a public information
officer for the federal government—was laid
off. There was a brief reprieve—when Mom
was offered another Capitol Hill job. But at
Dad’s urging, she turned it down. It was not
her calling, and Dad knew things would
work out. “Even if it’s not enough,” they
said, “it will be enough.” So my mom started seminary and my family began a fouryear journey through unemployment.
A few years ago, I asked Mom why she
had married my father. His Aunt Rose once
told me he was lost as a young man. He
parted ways with college after one semester.
He joined the Navy, but, one night, he
dozed off on patrol in San Diego and
walked off the end of a pier. The Navy spent
thousands of dollars to retrieve his gun, but
his naval career ended prematurely. He
returned to New York to work as a reporter,
went to seminary. I remember he sold longdistance phone plans to businesses in the
early days of deregulation. Once, he called
on the law firm where I was a receptionist—
this was the day he wore his good blue suit
and smiled, but I knew he was miserable. He
hated sales. He also worked temporarily for
the Federal Emergency Management Agency
(FEMA) helping Puerto Rico recover from
two hurricanes. He liked this better.
Later, he sat in FEMA’s emergency control room waiting for the “red” phone to
ring. Someone has to be there 24 hours a
day, so he worked odd shifts. Eventually, he
worked his way into regular hours, and then
into the IRS, and then into retirement.
Today, he works as a Santa in December and
spends Wednesday mornings with friends at
a local coffee house. Mom is also retired,
after 20 years as a parish priest.
During the unemployed years, my parents spent their retirement savings and our
college funds and maxed out Mom’s student
loans. I don’t recall feeling financially insecure, but I know we were. In the first year of
his unemployment, Dad sold their 1968
Chevy truck for $900. The buyer paid cash
and was short $20, but Dad did not care.
We took the money to the bank and
made the mortgage payment. During those
years, we ate every Wednesday night at the
seminary because, if you sang in the choir
after dinner, the meal was free. We all sang,
although only Mom can carry a tune. In the
second year of Dad’s unemployment, my
parents learned that we qualified for free
“Until recently, I thought I had emerged
unscathed from our family’s era of unemployment,” says Monahan ( top right ),
whose parents ( left ) thought that doing
the wrong kind of work was even worse
than being jobless.
COURTESY OF SUSANNE MONAHAN
I have lived my
parents’ mantra,
“If it’s not enough,
it’s enough.”
school lunches. My sisters and I demurred
and got jobs—babysitter, store clerk, receptionist—to pay for our own lunches.
I have no memory of actually believing
that we were poor. I don’t remember my parents being anxious about money or fighting
or blaming each other for our situation.
They seemed unruffled, confident in their
choices. In the third year of Dad’s unemployment, I applied to the University of
Michigan and Swarthmore. Neither I nor
my parents brought up how to pay for college, and I was lucky that Swarthmore
picked up the tab.
Until recently, I thought I had emerged
unscathed from our family’s era of unemployment. With small grad school stipends
and modest college professor’s pay, I have
lived my parents’ mantra, “If it’s not
enough, it’s enough.” I survived years in
California with just a bike—and today fantasize about putting 200,000 miles on my
car before replacing it. Mortgage aside, I live
debt-free and can buy anything—although
not everything—I want. With tenure, my
life is stable and comfortable; I have held a
job longer than anyone in my family.
But the voice inside that says, “No one
will hire you,” persists. I admit I don’t like
job hunting. When I was looking for an academic job, I only half-jokingly said I no
longer feared death because if I died I would
not have to look for a job anymore. After
three years, I finally found a tenure-track
position, although I know I was not their
first choice. So, yes, I am skittish, but the
truth is, I no longer want to be a sociology
professor. As much as I love universities, I
lack a passion for research and just don’t fit.
Some people are surprised to learn that
tenure can feel like prison. They wonder,
who would not want a job for life? But what
if it is not the job for you and “not enough”
now has nothing to do with money? Suddenly, “not enough” really isn’t enough.
Last spring, I spent a perfect day on an
Oregon beach. The sun was bright, the air
cool, and the sand hot and dry. I dozed on a
beach blanket and, for the first time, began
to imagine a different life. I could do other
work, live other places, be someone else.
Perfect days might come more often. I practiced new words: I quit. I quit. I quit. It was
liberating. Over time, I accumulated escape
fantasies: Nanny to teenagers? Obituary
writer? Clerk at Borders Books?
But I am also terrified: I can see another
life but cannot believe—deep in my bones
—that I will get to live it. No one will hire me.
I envy those who venture out fearless,
and I admire entrepreneurs, but I cannot
forget my father’s struggle. Nor can I reconcile that this smart, articulate, creative,
hardworking man could not find a job for
four years. Whenever I imagine quitting, I
see him in his blue suit, a forced smile on
his face, reduced to summoning enthusiasm
for selling long-distance phone plans.
What I saw for my father became my
fear—not poverty, but unemployability. And
when I contemplate change, I hear a relentless voice: “What would you do if you had to
look for work again? No one will hire you.”
My heart flutters. I cannot breathe.
When I tell people about my family, it
always comes out as the story of my mother.
But now, in the 29th year after his unemployment, I know that my father’s struggle
defines my world more.
He would protest that I absorbed the
wrong part of their story. Being unemployed
is not the worst thing that can happen.
Worse yet, my parents concluded, was doing
the wrong kind of work. That’s why, in 1978,
they jumped off a cliff together and landed
softly four long years later.
I, on the other hand, am still falling.
Tenure and a comfortable life do not protect
me from vertigo; security has not made my
work meaningful. Terrifying as it is, if I am
to apply the right lesson from my parents’
lives, I will have to step into the void. T
Susanne Monahan lives in Bozeman, Mont.,
where her avocational pursuits include fantasy
baseball, hiking, and bear and wolf watching.
june 2007 : 65
profile
In Search of Solitude
TIM LYDON
KEVIN HOOD ’91 MONITORS—AND SEEKS TO PRESERVE—THE ALASKAN WILDERNESS.
“A lot of people don’t know complete peace and quiet, a place
where you can sit for a day or a week and hear nothing but the
sounds of nature,” says Hood of his search for solitude.
K
evin Hood is in search of solitude. “It’s more rare than fresh air,
water, gold, or wild salmon,” Hood says. “It’s possibly one of
the rarest resources we have. The Wilderness Act of 1964 defines
wilderness, in part, as an area with outstanding opportunities for
solitude. Not just solitude but outstanding opportunities. So when you
think, where can you go such that the horizon around you holds no
reminder of humanity … those places are all but gone. There are
always jets overhead or light pollution.”
According to the Arthur Carhart National Wilderness Training
Center (www.wilderness.net) in Montana, there are only 702 wilderness areas in the United States that preserve less than 5 percent of
the land. On that list is the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park in Alaska; Pelican Island in Florida; Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge
in New Jersey; and Death Valley in California.
“Solitude is something we’re losing that people aren’t appreciating. New generations being born and immigrants coming to our
country are more and more removed from nature. To be able to walk
in any direction and to find old growth forest, to paddle quietly
amongst icebergs, or to see the Northern Lights is amazing.”
Since Swarthmore, Hood has spent two years in Latvia as a
teacher for the Peace Corps and 13 years as a wilderness ranger with
the U.S. Forest Service, including the last nine in Juneau, Alaska,
where he has taken on the responsibility of searching for solitude.
Aside from 40 miles of road around the city, Juneau is off the road
system. People must travel to and from the state capital by plane or
ferry.
“I live here because there is no road,” says Hood, a native Californian, who remembers the state’s congested traffic. “If a connecting road is built here it would mean paving through the largest
unblemished fjord in North America. It’s an incredible ferry trip to
see these mountains shooting up out of the water.”
As a steward for the wilderness, Hood’s primary responsibilities
are to educate people about public land, the value of wilderness, and
to be in the wilderness observing both scientific and anecdotal
changes to the environment.
“We monitor the watershed, habitats, campgrounds, seal and
amphibian populations, and glacier conditions. We check air quality
by collecting lichens, and we trail cruise ships to monitor their visible
stack emissions,” Hood says.
One of those monitored areas is the Tracy Arm–Ford’s Terror
Wilderness, 50 miles southeast of Juneau, in the Tongass National
Forest. Global warming, he says, driven by human agriculture and
industry—and especially by the burning of fossil fuels—is contributing to the rapid deglaciation of this wilderness. He wants people to
know that global warming is real. “Naysayers should show scientific
documentation that global warming is caused by something else and
should not just be representing some well-financed interest that has
an economic stake in the status quo,” he says.
“The glaciers in our area are the fastest melting in southeast Alaska. We take photos and measurements. But even that can be problematic. The main glacier we were studying receded so fast it went
out of the frame of our photos. So we’re chasing it,” Hood says.
The seal population is also at risk. Each May, the tidewater glaciers at the end of the fjords in Tracy Arm–Ford’s Terror Wilderness
serve as a pupping ground for harbor seals.
“They’ve been going there for centuries. All these pregnant seals
are spread out on the ice near the glaciers. But it’s also tourist season,
so there’s an increase in boats that want to push through the ice to
see the glaciers up close,” says Hood. While populations in other
parts of the state are in decline, for now, the seal population in the
Tracy Arm–Ford’s Terror Wilderness is stable.
“The question that’s continuously debated here and in the rest of
the United States is whether there is greater value in preserving the
sanctity of nature and our land—having biodiversity, fresh water,
fresh air, vast tracts of old growth forest—or a greater value in
extracting the resources we can from these areas. Often it’s a question of balance, but I’m impressed with how many people are so passionate about the need to preserve more land.”
—Audree Penner
june 2007: 69
books + arts
BIG
COURTESY DC JACKSON/DAMHISTORY.COM
DAMS
THE CONFLUENCE OF
ENGINEERING AND POLITICS
David Billington and Donald Jackson ’75,
Big Dams of the New Era: A Confluence of
Engineering and Politics (University of Oklahoma Press, 2006)
The history, engineering, design, and construction of the big multipurpose dams built
west of the Mississippi during the Roosevelt
era are described in rich detail in this comprehensive book by Donald Jackson, an
associate professor of history at Lafayette
College, and David Billington, Gordon Wu
Professor of Engineering at Princeton and a
National Academy of Engineering fellow. It
is Jackson’s third book about dams in the
United States.
A pioneering study of the nexus of technology, culture, and politics of that era, the
book further provides a fascinating look at
the interaction between the two principal
agencies of the federal government—the
Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps
of Engineers—that were responsible for the
design and construction of these massive
public works. The roles of the key personalities—politicians, engineers, bureaucrats,
and beneficiaries of these projects—are
woven into the narrative in a way that will
appeal to historians, engineers, and general
readers alike.
The two authors have a wealth of experiences that makes them perfectly suited to
write about this complex topic. Billington’s
notable book The Tower and the Bridge introduces the concept of the “structural artist—
the structural engineer whose work through
its function and expression is aesthetically
pleasing and meaningful enough to be
viewed as a legitimate work of great art.” It
clarifies the criteria for such distinction by
citing notable examples such as the Eiffel
Tower, the reinforced concrete bridges of
74 : swarthmore college bulletin
In October 1937, President Roosevelt visited the site of the Grand Coulee Dam to witness firsthand the progress in construction. From the east abutment, visitors were able
to enjoy a grand view of the upstream face of the dam.
Robert Maillart, the shell structures of Felix
Candela and Pierre Nervi, and the skyscrapers of Fazlur Khan.
Jackson, much younger than Billington
(and an engineer by training), also has
devoted his career to the history of technology and industry, concentrating on the significant developments in that field in the
American West. The senior author’s influence on Jackson is evident in the latter’s
1995 book Building the Ultimate Dam: John
Eastwood and the Control of Water in the West,
in which he views Eastwood as a structural
artist, using the criteria posited by Billington but applied to dams.
Following a short introduction in which
the authors provide their reasons for writing
Big Dams as well as its subsequent structure
and arrangement, a third of the book’s pages
are devoted to a fairly exhaustive but concise
study of the origins and development of the
Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps
of Engineers into their almost modern form.
Discussing not only the internal politics
and the major personalities of these organizations, using a study of earlier dams as a
framework, the authors explain the theory
behind the engineering design of these
dams. In a simple and elegant way (much
like their previous explicatory science-based
books), this one presents the mathematical
principles of the two types of masonry/concrete dams—the gravity dam and the thin
arch dam—“in terms used by the dam
designers of the era.” Data gleaned from
historical engineering records of several
actual dams illustrates the development of
two traditions in dam design that the
authors identify as the Massive Tradition
and the Structural Tradition, characterizing
the gravity and thin-arch forms, respectively.
In the perennial engineers’ argument
between solidity with its associated perception of safety and the innovative and structurally minimal—but proven safe mathematically—thin arch-form, perception usually wins. This was the case with the final
design choice of these dams. Not until
decades after the massive dams were built,
such as the Grand Coulee Dam, did the latter form achieve its rightful place in the
Glen Canyon Dam.
It is also fascinating to read about how,
through a gradual melding of the separate
objectives of flood control, navigation, irrigation, and power generation, determined
individuals both in and out of these federal
agencies succeeded in persuading the federal government to become involved in building power generation plants associated with
some of these dams, thus accelerating the
development of the West and Northwest.
In separate chapters, the remainder of
the book describes the design, construction,
and history of the dams on the Colorado
and Columbia rivers; the earth dams on the
Missouri River; and two most significant
dams of that era in California’s Central Valley Project. Filled with many technical
details, including the construction
sequences and procedures, these chapters
might appeal more to the engineering community, although there is enough nontechnical material to appeal to the general reader
as well.
Located in remote regions often with a
harsh and unforgiving climate, these projects were gargantuan, and the logistics of
providing housing and support for the
builders were daunting. The authors
describe the heroic efforts of the dam
builders to overcome these obstacles—some
natural, others man-made—using a narrative style that enables the reader to appreciate fully the vast undertaking that each of
these projects represented. At the same
time, they skillfully depict the interplay and
maneuverings among each project’s supporters and opponents—and President
Franklin Roosevelt’s extraordinary political
skills for keeping both sides happy while
achieving his objectives.
This book, with its successful combination of the engineering and political histories of the big dams, is both instructional
and a pleasure to read.
—Faruq M. A. Siddiqui,
Professor of Engineering
ing their emotions and perspectives on a
season of life where time is plentiful, and
yet, limited.
Jessica Fisher ’98, Frail-Craft, Yale University Press, 2007. This collection of poems won
the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Former poet laureate and judge of
the competition Louise Glück writes in the
Foreword that Fisher’s poetry is “haunting,
elusive, luminous, its greatest mystery how
plain-spoken it is. Sensory impressions,
which usually serve as emblems of or connections to emotion, seem suddenly in this
work a language of mind, their function neither metonymic nor dramatic.”
Richard Goodkin ’75 (editor), In Memory of
Elaine Marks: Life Writing, Writing Death, The
University of Wisconsin Press, 2007. This
moving and insightful celebration of the life
of Marks, a widely recognized authority on
French literature, feminist theory, and Jewish studies, also offers a valuable contribution to multiple academic disciplines. In 11
essays, some of the intellectual domains
that were central to Mark’s work—pedagogy,
feminism, lesbianism, women’s auto/biography, Jewish identity, community, memory,
mourning, isolation, and death—are
brought together.
BOOKS, ETC
Robin (Smith) Chapman ’64, The Dreamer
Who Counted the Dead, WordTech Editions,
2007. In this collection of poems with titles
such as “The Goodyear Blimp Goes By,”
“Georgia O’Keeffe, Napping at Ninety-Six,”
and “Hiking Out of the Picture near Muir
Beach,” the political is intimately personal,
and family and national history converge in
startling ways.
Robin Chapman ’64 and Judith Strasser
(editors), 75 Poems on Retirement, University
of Iowa Press, 2007. This collection includes
poems by men and women between the ages
of 50 and 80 from around the world, shar-
Scott Kugle ’91, Sufis and Saints’ Bodies:
Mysticism, Corporeality, and Sacred
Power in Islam, The University of North
Carolina Press, 2007. In the first full
study of Islamic mysticism as it relates to
the human body, the author examines
Sufi conceptions of the body in religious
writings from the late 15th through the
19th centuries, thereby refuting the
assertion that Islam is abstract, ascetic,
and disengaged from the human body.
Sasha Issenberg ’02, The Sushi Economy:
Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy, Gotham Books, 2007.
Exploring the history and allure of sushi
from a global perspective, the author
offers an up-close look at the dish that is
now enjoyed by more than 30 million
Americans.
David Jenemann ’93, Adorno in America,
University of Minnesota Press, 2007. In the
first in-depth account of 20th-century German social philosopher Theodor Adorno’s
15-year exile in America, the author examines Adorno’s confrontation with the
expanding American “culture industry” and
casts new light on his writings about the
mass media. Jenemann reveals that, far from
being disconnected from America and disdainful of its culture, Adorno was actively
engaged in American cultural and intellectual life during his stay in the country.
Joan (Moffitt) Larkin ’60, My Body: New
and Selected Poems, Hanging Loose Press,
2007. This book by a two-time winner of the
Lambda Literary Award for poetry comprises
june 2007 : 75
books + arts
selections from previous collections Cold
River, A Long Sound, and Housework as well
as a section of new material titled “The
Offering.” Fellow poet Marie Ponsot says,
“Joan Larkin’s high-wire poetic acts unite
both electric tension and steadfast balance.”
Alexander Nehamas ’67, Only a Promise of
Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of
Art, Princeton University Press, 2007. The
author reclaims beauty from the disdain of
20-century critics, seeking to restore its
place in art, re-establish the connections
among art, beauty, and desire, and show
that the values of art—independently of
their moral worth—are equally crucial to the
rest of life.
Eleanor Lincoln Morse ’68, An Unexpected Forest, Down East Books, 2007.
This novel, which begins with the erroneous delivery of 1,000 spruce tree
seedlings to a recently fired attorney, is
about family and the search for a life
that matters.
Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland ’81,
Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid, and
Reform, Columbia University Press, 2007.
This work offers a comprehensive and penetrating account of one of the worst famines
of the 20th century that killed as many as
one million North Koreans in the mid1990s. It examines the famine’s origins and
impact from the level of the individual
household to the high politics of international diplomacy.
Patriot, the winner of the 2003 American
Watercolor Society Gold Medal of Honor,
is one of the works by abstract watercolorist Helen Glenzing Dodd ’45 that are on
display from May 5 to July 25 at the
Beeville Art Museum in Beeville, Texas.
Ted Preston ’55, Judging the Lawyers: A Jurybox View of the Case Against American
Lawyers, iUniverse Inc., 2007. Using a trial
format that balances both sides of the argument, this work provides a vehicle for
exploring the case for and against American
lawyers and their handling of the civil justic
system and for examining the causes of the
tensions between the bar and the public.
Rishi Reddi ’88, Karma and Other Stories,
Harper Perennial, 2007. In this collection of
short stories, the award-winning author
weaves a multigenerational tapestry of interconnected lives, depicting members of an
Indian American community struggling to
balance the demands of tradition with the
allure of Western life.
Tyler Wigg Stevenson ’99, Brand Jesus:
Christianity in a Consumerist Age,
Seabury Books, 2007. The author
voices concern about the corruption
of American Christianity by modernday consumerism.
76 : swarthmore college bulletin
Natsu Taylor Saito ’77, From Chinese Exclusion to Guantànamo Bay: Plenary Power and
the Prerogative State, University Press of Colorado, 2007. Writing for a wide audience,
the author details the historic use of plenary
power—the doctrine under which U.S.
courts have allowed the exercise of U.S.
jurisdiction without concomitant protection—putting contemporary policies in historical perspective.
Ellen (Faber) Wright ’64, Pressing On:
The Roni Stoneman Story, University of
Illinois Press, 2007. The book tells the
story of the youngest daughter of the
pioneering country music family, from
her “way-beyond poverty-stricken” Appalachian childhood to becoming a TV personality on Hee Haw and “The First Lady
of Banjo.”
Q+A
Why is Sarah Willie
so delightfully tired?
B y E l i zabeth Redden ’05
Because she needs nine to 10 hours of sleep
a night and never gets it. Because she’s associate provost, associate professor of sociology, and mother of a toddler named Jeremy
“on the cusp of being potty-trained.”
Because, a sociologist by nature and nurture, she seeks to expose underlying structures even in the paintings and poems she
creates for her own satisfaction.
Because her research focuses on such
mind-bending issues as social inequalities
and the construction of knowledge.
Because she’s devoted her career to tackling head-on confrontational issues surrounding race, sex, and class. Because she
understands confrontation—“understood
as an exchange of values and perspectives
that have as much possibility of leading to a
consensual outcome as not”—at least in
part thanks to her experiences with Haverford College’s honor code as an undergraduate there.
Because her life is calling (and crying,
and giggling, and knocking on the door
during office hours).
Your dad was a sociologist too. What road trips
did your family take when you were a child?
Our annual vacations were always to the
American Sociological Association (ASA)
annual conference. Wherever they were
meeting, that’s where our family had our
vacation.
Will you be taking your family on vacations
there too?
I expect I will. Last year, I brought my husband and Jeremy with me to the ASA conference, which was in Montreal.
80 : swarthmore college bulletin
Now that you’re associate provost, tell me—do
faculty members bicker a lot?
(Laughs) I guess my question back to you is,
‘Compared to who else?’ People interact
with each other by virtue of their humanness, and conflict is just one of the outcomes of interaction. But so is humor and
compassion and zaniness. I do think that
college professors have stressful lives and
that much of that stress is hidden from students. But in general, we’re not a petulant or
bickering lot!
You believe, though, that confrontation can be
positive?
It’s not necessarily negative, it’s just part of
human social life, and most of the time confrontation and conflict are nonviolent. As
the College becomes more and more diverse,
we are going to have—at least momentarily—more conflict. And if we understand
that conflict is the natural outcome of living
in a diverse environment, then we can also
be a little bit more at peace with the fact that
conflict is a part of life. We just have to figure out how to do it better.
As associate provost, you have helped to organize workshops for the faculty and lead discussions about diversity on campus. How can
Swarthmore better prepare itself to embrace
even greater diversity?
We need to continue to think about ways to
make our exchanges with each other healthier, more regular, and more transparent.
Although doing things efficiently may mean
having one person make decisions, there’s a
trade-off. In an organization like ours—
which attempts to include its members in
governance and be clear about its various
processes—making sure that we’ve heard
from many voices may be more important
than making decisions quickly.
In your 2003 book Acting Black: College,
Identity, and the Performance of Race, you
write about subtle racism on college campuses.
What kinds of subtle racism do you see even at
a place like Swarthmore?
It’s important to acknowledge that there’s
no one who is free from having racist
thoughts, any more than there are people
who are free from having sexist and classist
thoughts in our society. We’re all deluged by
stereotypical images of groups of people,
every day. As human beings, we’re serious
and we’re funny and we’re uptight and we’re
relaxed; anytime we find ourselves under
stress, that’s going to be a time when cruel
comments about groups can come out.
How much do you sleep?
Not nearly as much as I used to. I always
identified with Langston Hughes both
because I’m a poet—even though I’m an
unpublished poet—and because he said he
needed a minimum of nine to 10 hours of
sleep a night. I always thought I needed
nine to 10 hours of sleep a night—which I
have not gotten in two years and eight
months—Jeremy is two years and eight
months old.
You married a librarian. Does he help you with
your research?
Oh my gosh, all the time.
Do you have a favorite spot on Swarthmore’s
campus?
It’s probably going to sound clichéd, but I
love sitting in the amphitheater when
there’s nobody else around. I just find that
extremely calming even if it’s a rainy day.
You sit in the amphitheater in the rain?
Yeah (laughs). I like sitting in the amphitheater, just to become centered.
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
BOB KRIST
EVERY STEP OF THE WAY
The Annual Fund makes a
difference in the educational
experience of each student who
crosses the threshold of Parrish
Hall. For generations, students
have benefited from the
generosity of Swarthmore's
community—alumni, parents,
and friends alike. This
philanthropic tradition allows
students to work closely with
faculty members as they explore
new ideas, challenge existing
assumptions, and develop
lifelong friendships.
give every year .
help every day.
Take your step today, and make a gift to the
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Swarthmore College Alumni Bulletin 2007-06-01
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
2007-06-01
54 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.