Swarthmore College Alumni Bulletin 2009-10-01

Standing Up Against Genocide

swarthmore
swarthmore college
bulletin | october 2009

campus view

Raindrops and sunlight
swim in autumn air
along Elm Avenue,
just outside the

Class of 1909 gates.
PHOTO BY ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS

parlor talk

Behind almost every educational,
social justice, or community venture
launched at or from Swarthmore
College for the past decade, you’re
likely to find Maurice Eldridge’s
quiet, steady presence.
Upland School of the Arts (CUSA) opened.
I was there on the first day of school, and the
spirit in that old building was amazing—
all sunshine and smiles and a lot of well
deserved “we did its” for the volunteers and
school-district officials who had shepherded
Alston’s dream into existence.
Another inspirational person celebrating
with Alston that day was Maurice Eldridge
’61, who has served Swarthmore as vice president for college and community relations
and executive assistant to the president since
1998, and who—as a private citizen—chairs
the board of The Chester Fund for Education
and the Arts, the private philanthropic side
of the innovative public-private partnership
that created and runs the school.

swarthmore

college bulletin

ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS

ONE OF THE THINGS I LIKE ABOUT SWARTHMORE
is the number of people here who inspire
me. After a hectic week of deadlines, there’s
nothing better than watching Associate Professor of Music John Alston lead the Chester
Children’s Chorus (CCC) rehearsals on Saturday morning. I usually take my camera so
it looks like I have a reason for being there,
but my words and pictures (see “Strong
Voices, Strong Minds, Strong Spirits” in the
April Bulletin) don’t tell the full story of
what Alston does each Saturday for more
than 100 Chester, Pa., children and teens.
Almost from the founding of the chorus
in 1994, Alston talked about the greater educational needs of children in poverty-stricken Chester. He dreamed of starting a school
there that would reach far more children
than the chorus, and, a year ago, the Chester

This month, the CCC, for which he also
serves as an ex officio board member, honored Eldridge at its 15th-anniversary gala. In
fact, behind the curtain at almost every educational, social justice, or community venture launched at or from Swarthmore College for the past decade, you’re likely to find
Maurice Eldridge’s quiet, steady presence.
Countless Swarthmore students with ideas
for educational or social-justice projects have
“gone to Maurice” for advice, encouragement, and sometimes a little start-up money.
Just ask Mark Hanis ’05, co-founder of the
Genocide Intervention Network (on this
issue’s cover, with the story on p. 16) about
how they started the group while at Swarthmore.
On opening day at CUSA, again toting
my camera, I met first-grade teacher Sara
Posey ’04—the only Swarthmore graduate
teaching at the school. Through her work
with the CCC both as a student and as a
young alumna, she too had been inspired by
John Alston. I thought I would visit her class,
interview her, and write a short magazine
story about her and the school. It wasn’t that
simple; the story became a yearlong project
with several visits and four interviews, resulting in one of the longest pieces I have written
for the Bulletin (“It’s Getting Better All the
Time,” p. 26). Plus, it added one more person
to my list of inspiring Swarthmoreans.
—Jeffrey Lott

editor
Jeffrey Lott
associate editor
Carol Brévart-Demm
class notes editor
Susan Cousins Breen
art director
Suzanne DeMott Gaadt, Gaadt Perspectives llc
staff photographer
Eleftherios Kostans
desktop publishing specialist
Audree Penner
publications intern
Katie Becker ’10
administrative assistant
Janice Merrill-Rossi
editor emerita
Maralyn Orbison Gillespie ’49
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Or e-mail: alumnirecords@swarthmore.edu.
The Swarthmore College Bulletin
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ON THE COVER
Mark Hanis ’05, co-founder of the Genocide Intervention Network. Photograph by Tony Deifell for the
interactive art project “Why Do You Do What You Do?” (www.wdydwyd.com). Used with permission of the
Echoing Green Foundation. Story on page 16.
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swarthmore college bulletin

in this issue

features

32

16
26

16: In the Face of Genocide
Called to action by death in Darfur, the
Genocide Intervention Network, led by
Mark Hanis ’05, stands up against genocide
around the world.
By Katie Becker ’10
20: Breaking Down Barriers
In Ecuador’s highlands, an education project
aims to “create a new fluidity and class
mobility,” says founder Katie Chamblee ’07.
By Elizabeth Redden ’05
24: Beyond the Emotional Turmoil
Gay psychiatrist Bertram Schaffner ’32
brings compassion and dignity to his
homosexual patients.
By Susan Cousins Breen
26: It’s Getting Better All the Time
Sara Posey ’04 wanted to teach in an urban
school where the kids needed her attention.
But it wasn’t an easy start for her or the
ambitious new Chester-Upland School of
the Arts.
By Jeffrey Lott

24
20
october 2009

34

32: Now That’s Intertainment!
Television is so 20th century! The advent of
Internet video has opened entirely new
channels for send-up acts such as God’s Pottery and The Gregory Brothers, each of
which offers its own take on the music,
media, and mores of our day.
By Sara Shay ’92 and Paul Wachter ’97

3

in this issue

departments

profiles

5: LETTERS
Readers voice their opinions.

52: Completing the Bard’s Canon
Julian Lopez-Morillas ’68 has played in or
directed every one of Shakespeare’s plays.
By Ken Bullock

40: CLASS NOTES
As the world turns—Swarthmore-style
46: IN MEMORIAM
Farewell to cherished friends and classmates
58: IN MY LIFE
My Layer-Cake Life
By Malka Kramer Schaps ’69
(formerly Mary Elizabeth Kramer)
62: BOOKS + ARTS
Uncertain Suffering: Racial Health Care
Disparities and Sickle Cell Disease
By Carolyn Moxely Rouse ’87
Reviewed by Sarah Willie-LeBreton
72: Q + A
Happily Hooked on China: Alan Berkowitz
By Carol Brévart-Demm

on the web
Swarthmore College Bulletin on the Web: This
issue and more than 10 years of archives are at
www.swarthmore.edu/bulletin.
Also on the College Web site, you will find:
President Rebecca Chopp’s Listening Tour Blog: Keep pace with the
president as she takes to the road to talk about what makes Swarthmore special and to discuss the College’s future with alumni, parents,
and friends of the College at http://bit.ly/chopp_tour.
Noted economist Alice Rivlin H’76 examined the policy challenge of
addressing capitalism’s downsides without destroying the productivity
of the market-based economy in this year’s Bernie Saffran Lecture. Listen at http://bit.ly/rivlin_lecture.
Watch Taiko: See Associate Professor of Dance Kim Arrow and his students perform what he calls a “perfect marriage of dance and drumming” at http://bit.ly/dance_drum.
Sing a Song of Science: Members of the Chester Children’s Chorus learn
to think like scientists in a summer program started by Swarthmore
professors and friends at http://bit.ly/CCC_science.

2

52

contributors

Entrepreneur and media
maker Tony Deifell, who shot
this issue’s cover image, is
president of Q Media Labs.
His book Seeing Beyond Sight
features photographs made
by blind teenagers whom he
taught. Deifell’s “wdydwyd?”
project (www.wdydwyd.org)
has led to collaboration with
artists worldwide. He lives on
a houseboat in San Francisco.

CLAUDIA SALAZAR

37: CONNECTIONS
Alumni around the country are invited to
meet President Chopp, and Garnet Sages
get to see Xi’an’s terra cotta warriors.

66: Innovative Thinking
Valerie Casey ’94 created the Designers
Accord and initiated a movement to help
industries become more sustainable.
By Audree Penner

ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS

14

14: FACULTY
EXPERT
Preventing Teen
Depression
A program based on
cognitive behavioral
therapy gives adolescents some tools to
stave off depression.
By Jane Gillham

58

MARDIE OAKES

7: COLLECTION
First there was Collection—then there was
First Collection. Enjoy a collection of stories
about Swarthmore today.

Sara Shay ’92 is a freelance
writer and editor in the
Philadelphia area whose recent clients include MIT’s
Technology Review, the Center
for Reproductive Rights, the
Coalition for the International Criminal Court, and
the parenting Web site BabyZone.com. She has a master’s
degree in journalism from
Northwestern University.
“Altar Egos” is her first article for the Bulletin.

Juan Víctor Fajardo ’09, a
native of Caracas, Venezuela,
majored in philosophy and
minored in Latin American
studies. While at Swarthmore, he studied photography with Jessica Todd Harper
and Ron Tarver. He spent
the summer in Ecuador,
where he worked as program
coordinator and photographer for the Village Education Project, and is currently
in Caracas preparing applications for graduate school
in investigative journalism.

swarthmore college bulletin

letters

WHAT MAKES A GOOD TEACHER?
Following primary and secondary school,
undergraduate education, graduate study,
and more than 20 years as a university faculty member, you might think I could provide
a simple answer to the question “What makes
a good teacher?” A sequence of physics
courses during my sophomore year at
Swarthmore illustrates the problem. By the
end of that year, I thought Mark Heald was
the best teacher I had ever had and that Paul
Mangelsdorf ’49 was the worst. [Both Heald
and Mangelsdorf are Morris L. Clothier Professors Emeritus of Physics.] I held onto that
opinion until halfway through graduate
school, when I decided that Heald wasn’t
very good and Mangelsdorf was terrific.

I think almost all of us hated that class;

with a problem on a Monday, he would start
in Boston and work his way to Chicago via
Atlanta. On Tuesday, examining the same
problem, he’d start out in Seattle and work
his way to Chicago via Dallas. By Wednesday,
he would start out in Miami and work his
way to Chicago via Denver.
I think almost all of us hated that class; in
fact, I think Mangelsdorf overheard our
complaints about it. The following spring, he
invited me to sit in on the same class and
make suggestions to him on how he could
teach it better. It was only years later that I
realized how much that helped me master
the material and, to this day, I cannot decide
if his request for my “assistance” was merely
clever psychology to get me to sit in on the
class or whether my learning was just a byproduct of his desire to improve his teaching.
In graduate school, I found that research
was much more in keeping with Mangelsdorf ’s approach. Good results never came
from going the shortest, most elegant distance from A to B—and so my admiration of
Mangelsdorf overtook my high opinion of
Heald. Since then, I have flip-flopped occasionally, but I eventually settled on the view
that Mark Heald taught me the ideal to
which scientists aspire—that a problem is
not solved and understood until you can
condense it to its essence or until you’ve
found the shortest, cleanest path from A to
B. But if you really want to understand how
to play the game, watching highlight films
won’t work. You have to do the dirty, inefficient work of practice—and Paul Mangelsdorf was allowing us to see him at practice.
Mark Milanick ’77
Columbia, Mo.

in fact, I think Mangelsdorf overheard
THANKS, KYLE

our complaints about it.The following
spring, he invited me to sit in on the
same class and make suggestions to
him on how he could teach it better.
Heald was always prepared and organized.
He distilled each problem to its essentials
and provided elegant, concise solutions. He
made the physics enjoyable. By contrast, if
you went to Mangelsdorf ’s office for help

october 2009

The Bulletin’s coverage of Swarthmore’s
adoption of the Phoenix as the College mascot (“Swarthmore Hatches a Big Red Bird,”
July 2008) was enjoyable to read, yet one
important fact was missing: Kyle White ’07,
mentioned briefly in the article as an emcee
of the competition to pick a person to wear
the costume, was the driving force behind
the mascot from the very beginning. As the
president of the Garnet Club, created in 2004
to promote school spirit, Kyle approached
the Student Athlete Advisory Committee
(SAAC) with his idea for a mascot. SAAC

From the beginning to the end, Kyle
White’s work was the reason we now
have the Phoenix as our mascot.
encouraged Kyle and convened a subcommittee that included Kyle, SAAC members,
and faculty. From that committee came a
variety of mascot ideas, which were then
voted on by the student body. From the
beginning to the end of the process, Kyle’s
work was the reason we now have the
Phoenix as our mascot. He should be commended for his efforts.
Gavin Nurick ’07
Stamford, Conn.
Editor’s Note: In photos of the Phoenix on the
cover and within that issue of the Bulletin, the
mascot costume is inhabited by none other
than Kyle White ’07, who indeed deserves great
credit for the existence and popularity of
Swarthmore’s mascot.

PRIVILEGED TO EXPRESS
OUR OPINIONS
When he writes of Ted Nelson’s [’59] singing
on the porch of Parrish Hall as an act of daring (“Our Own Mario Savio, ” Letters, July
Bulletin), I think that my friend Peter Gessner ’61 is misrepresenting the culture of the
College in the late 1950s. Yes, “The Rules”
seemed onerous to us and were strictly
enforced. But I do not remember ever being
afraid to voice an opinion, think a thought,
write a sentence—or sing a song. On the contrary, we were privileged to express our serious opinions along with our sophomoric illusions all day long to our great benefit and joy.
Jeanette Strasser Falk ’60
Carrboro, N.C.

A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE
A letter from Jim Weber ’84 in the July Bulletin expressed his opinion about President
Alfred H. Bloom’s role in the elimination of
the football program. I have a somewhat different perspective.
From 1982 to 1989, I was a member of the
Board of Managers, serving as chair of the
audit committee, vice chair of finance, and
Board secretary. In 1989, I joined the College
administration as vice president for business
5

letters
and finance. I worked for Al Bloom from
1991 until my retirement in 1995 and
admired his efforts to engage all stakeholders
on controversial subjects and to listen
carefully in the Friends’ sense of seeking
consensus.
The place of football at Swarthmore had
been a subject of discussion for many years
by the Board, faculty, staff, students, administration, and alumni. As I neared retirement,
that discussion seemed to be trending toward
the difficult decision to eliminate the program. Conditions were changing. Swarthmore had not grown in size as many small
colleges had when they became coed schools,
freshmen committed to the sport coming out
of high school were not all participating as
seniors, study abroad was impacting athletes,
and specialization was making it more difficult to attract multisport students. It is not
my purpose here to cover all the pros and
cons of this discussion, but despite the evolving difficulties in fielding a team, there
remained a number of very strong voices
among the alumni who opposed discontinuing the program.
After I retired, the decision was made
to begin a trial period of enhancements to
the football program with a new coach, increased recruiting, and financial support.
I know that Al Bloom anguished over doing
this, but with alumni pressure acting as critical catalyst, the decision was not his alone.
Although some success resulted from the
changes, it became clear that, in the long run,
a viable football program consistent with
Swarthmore’s drive for excellence in all

The decision was made to begin
a trial period of enhancements to the
football program. Although some
success resulted from the changes,
it became clear that, in the long run,
a viable football program consistent
with Swarthmore’s drive for

not been heard. They were indeed heard, but
their position was not convincing. Once
again, ending the football program was clearly not the decision of a single person.
I have always been a strong supporter of
athletics at Swarthmore. I was a starter in
baseball, basketball, and soccer, and received
the Quink trophy in 1951. I believe it is necessary to maintain a strong role for athletics
at the College. However, conditions change,
and the ability to make adjustments must be
a basic principle for a successful Swarthmore.
William Spock ’51
Brunswick, Maine

excellence in all endeavors would
LETTERS POLICY

not be feasible. I believe that a
mistake was made in beginning
such a trial but that at all points
there was full consultation.
endeavors would not be feasible. In 2000, the
trial was ended, which unfortunately meant
that there were coaches and students who
could not continue on paths they had expected. Again, there was broad consultation.
With this background, I believe that a
mistake was made in beginning such a trial
but that at all points there was full consultation. Sometimes, time does not allow for
complete consensus or even a “sense of the
meeting,” which is a better phrase—and
more appropriate in some situations. In this
case, some alumni felt strongly that they had

The Bulletin welcomes letters to the editor
addressing topics covered in the magazine or
issues relating to the College. There is no
guarantee that all letters received will be published. Some letters may be published on
only the Bulletin Web site, especially if there
are numerous letters addressing a single
topic. The suggested maximum length for
letters is 300 words and letters may be edited
for clarity and space. All letters must be
signed. The Bulletin will publish letters
responding to an article or issue and, in one
subsequent edition, letters responding to
those letters. After two issues, however, the
editors may choose to end the debate on any
topic. Letters from the same person will not
be published more often than once every two
years. Letters may be mailed to Editor,
Swarthmore College Bulletin, 500 College
Avenue, Swarthmore PA 19081-1390 or sent
by e-mail to bulletin@swarthmore.edu.

STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT, AND CIRCULATION
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.

Publication title: Swarthmore College Bulletin
Publication number: 0888-2126
Filing date: Oct. 12, 2009
Issue frequency: August, October, January, April, July
Number of issues published annually: 5
Annual subscription price: none
Office of publication: 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore PA
19081-1390
8. General business office: 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore PA
19081-1390
9. Publisher: Swarthmore College, 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore PA 19081-1390.
Editor: Jeffrey Lott, 500 College Ave., Swarthmore
PA 19081-1390
Managing editor: none
10. Owner: Swarthmore College, 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore
PA 19081-1390

6

11. Known bondholders, mortgagees, or other security holders
holding one percent or more of total amount of bonds,
mortgages, or other securities: none
12. The purpose, function, and nonprofit status of this organization
has not changed during the preceding 12 months.
14. Issue date for circulation data: July 2009
15. a. Total number of copies (net press run): 24,896
b. (1) Paid or requested mail subscriptions: 22,236
b. (4) Other classes mailed: 1,291 (ISAL)
c. Total paid and/or requested circulation: 23,527
d. (3) Free distribution by mail: 60
e. Free distribution outside the mail: 1,265
f. Total free distribution: 1,325
g. Total distribution: 24,852.
h. Copies not distributed: 44
i. Total: 24,896
j. Percent paid and/or requested circulation: 94.5%
swarthmore college bulletin

collection

Awe , Joy, and an Intense, Rewarding Adventure
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS

In her first public speech of the new academic year—and her newborn presidency—
President Rebecca Chopp (above) asserted
Swarthmore’s Quaker heritage and told
members of the Class of 2013 at their First
Collection that “Our founders believed that
everyone should tend his/her own conscience, to ‘mind the light’ within oneself.
Tonight, we induct you into the Swarthmorean tradition of minding the light:
Critical thinking, questioning your own
judgment and that of others, being skeptical
but not cynical, taking risks in your exploration of the arts, sciences, humanities, and
social sciences, and participating vigorously
in this intensely scholarly community.”
Chopp, who is a scholar of American religious movements, has steeped herself in College history since arriving on campus in July.
She told the first-year students about one of
Swarthmore’s famous founders: “She was 4
feet, 11 inches tall and weighed not quite 90
pounds. Over the course of her lifetime
october 2009

(1793–1880), Lucretia Mott would not only
help found Swarthmore College but also
shelter runaway slaves in her home, co-found
with her husband the Pennsylvania AntiSlavery Society, advocate for peace rather
than war, and sign the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiment at the first women’s rights
convention, which she and Elizabeth Cady
Stanton organized in 1848.”
Chopp read Walt Whitman’s poem “Beginning My Studies” from Leaves of Grass (1872):
Beginning my studies, the first step
pleas’d me so much,
The mere fact, consciousness—these
forms—the power of motion,
The least insect or animal—the senses—
eyesight—love;
The first step, I say, aw’d me and pleas’d
me so much,
I have hardly gone, and hardly wish’d
to go, any farther,
But stop and loiter all the time, to sing
it in extatic songs.

The new president concluded: “I hope you
share with the faculty, students, staff, and
alumni the awe and joy in the midst of the
intense and rewarding adventure that awaits
you. May your first step please you so much.”
First Collection has evolved in recent
years into a quiet ceremony held at dusk in
the Scott Amphitheater. (See page 8.) Following President Chopp’s remarks, Reid Wilkening ’10 welcomed the new class on behalf of
the student body; Associate Professor of
Sociology Sarah Willie-LeBreton spoke for
the faculty; and Garakai Campbell ’90, acting
dean of students and associate professor of
mathematics, presided over the closing ceremony—a symbolic passing of the light, candle to candle, until each member of the
entering class held his or her own light as
darkness spread under the canopy of trees.
Listen to all First Collection speeches
at http://bit.ly/first_collection09.

7

collection

First There Was Collection—N

BOARD LOWERS BUDGET ADJUSTMENT TARGET TO $8 MILLION
At its Sept. 26 meeting, the
College’s Board of Managers
took new steps in an ongoing
effort to bring Swarthmore’s
future spending in line with
expectations of future income. Although the College
will still need to reduce its
overall budget significantly,
the message from the Board
—shared with the campus
community in an e-mail from
President Rebecca Chopp—
indicated that the impact of
the decline in its endowment
may be ameliorated as the
economy and equity markets
recover.
The Board agreed on an
$8 million adjustment—little
more than half the $15 million
projected at the end of last
year—to be implemented in
a phased combination of
spending cuts and revenue
increases during the next few
fiscal years.
“It’s a testament to our
investment office and the investment and finance committees of the Board that we
have recovered so well in this
economy,” said Chopp, noting
that many of the College’s
peers have suffered endowment losses of up to 30
percent. Swarthmore’s endowment was down 16.8
percent from its peak of
$1.441 billion in summer
2007 to $1.129 billion at the
end of June 2009.
In December 2008, when
the scale of the global economic downturn became evident, the Board had assumed
that a 30 percent decline in
the value of the College’s endowment, when coupled with
an anticipated increase in financial aid needs, would require a budget adjustment of
$15 million.
8

An Ad Hoc Financial Planning Group, comprising faculty, staff, senior administrators, and Board members,
began to develop a series of
recommendations to revise
the College’s future budgets
accordingly. In the immediate
first phase of reductions, they
trimmed the 2009–2010
budget by freezing faculty
and staff salaries, cutting most
departmental operating budgets, and deferring capital
building projects.
The Board gave the Ad
Hoc group one year to develop a plan, guided by principles designed to protect the
College’s core values, including maintaining academic excellence and concern for the
Read President
Chopp’s entire
message to the
campus community at
http://bit.ly/college_finan
ces. Learn more about the
work of the Ad Hoc Financial
Planning Group and contribute your suggestions at
http://-

well-being of each member of
the community. The Ad Hoc
group has encouraged suggestions during open meetings and through its Web site.
Every College administrative and academic department
scrutinized expenditures, and
new revenue-generating
ideas, including targeted
fundraising for such fundamental programs as financial
aid, have been included in the
planning process.
Acknowledging the significant contributions of the oncampus community, Chopp
said, “Careful spending of de-

partmental budgets, widespread participation in the financial planning process; and
faculty, staff, and student acceptance of salary and payrate freezes have all been
crucial elements in the first
phase of our response to
these challenges.”
Chopp continued, “If the
positive economic environment persists, we hope to lift
the salary freeze for next
year, and we also hope to
continue to avoid layoffs.”
The new $8 million goal
“will allow us to continue to
implement what is necessary
to balance the budget while
sustaining the academic excellence that is the heart of
our mission,” Chopp wrote.
The $8 million in budget
adjustments will be reflected
in the plan being developed
by the Ad Hoc Group in consultation with all campus
stakeholders at a series of
meetings this fall. The group’s
plan will be flexible enough to
adapt up or down, depending
on external market conditions. Recognizing the instability of equity markets, the
group will also append the
more comprehensive $15
million plan to its December
report to the Board.
Of her first three months
of work with the College community, Chopp said: “It has
been tremendously gratifying
to witness firsthand the graceful way that this community
works collaboratively and vigorously to maintain its core
values. And we are all, of
course, indebted to the ongoing support of our alumni,
parents, and friends. We have
never needed their support
more.”
—Nancy Nowicki Nicely

On Aug. 26, members of the Class of 2013
gathered at dusk in the Scott Amphitheater
for an assembly that has become a rite of initiation for all Swarthmore freshmen for the
past 15 years—the First Collection.

In the late 1940s, campus life
included a weekly mandatory Collection, held in
Clothier Hall. Students were seated alphabetically,
so that absences could be easily noted.

First Collection in its current form was
introduced in 1994 by Andrew Feldman ’96,
now senior policy adviser in the office of
Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle. As the student leader of freshman orientation, Feldman borrowed the idea of passing candlelight from an event he had experienced earlier as a camp counselor. With the support of
then-Dean for Student Life Tedd Goundie—
who told Feldman, “I’ll support you on this,
but please don’t burn the school down”—
Feldman designed the ceremony that has
become a fully-fledged tradition.
“Swarthmore students can take their own
meaning from the candle-lighting ceremony
that concludes First Collection,” Feldman
says. “To me, the candles are a symbol of solidarity among the incoming class, but also a
symbolic reference to the College’s Quaker
roots—to the concept of ‘inner light,’—and
the unique set of beliefs that each individual
brings to the College.”
Although passing of candlelight at First
Collection is relatively new, the notion of
“Collection” at Swarthmore is decades old.
According to Christopher Densmore, curator
of Friends Historical Library, the Annual
Catalog of 1870–1871 mentions a form of
assembly at the end of each day for worship,
swarthmore college bulletin

—Now There’s First Collection

october 2009

Meet the Class of 2013
[A DEFINITION OF DIVERSITY]

NIGEL HOLMES

at which readings from Scripture were followed by a period of silence. Later catalog
entries mention daily meetings for religious
exercises and the “imparting of moral lessons
as circumstances seem to require.”
By 1933, these assemblies took place at 9
a.m., Monday through Friday. A “Collection”
was held every Wednesday in Clothier
Memorial Hall. This 15-minute meeting, at
which student attendance was required,
comprised speakers and music, preceded by
a period of silence in accordance with Quaker practice. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and
Fridays, a voluntary collection occurred in
Friends Meeting House.
The 1949 catalog, under the heading
“Religious Life,” described a weekly mandatory Collection at 10 a.m. every Thursday in
Clothier Hall, which lasted from “one-half to
three-quarters of an hour and included occasional musical, dramatic, and other programs.”
Vice President for College and Community Relations and Executive Assistant to the
President Maurice Eldridge ’61 recalls
“almost weekly meetings that we had to
attend. There was always a speaker. Sometimes, someone would come up with a prank
in an attempt to disturb the meeting, bringing in chickens or cows, and there was quite a
lot of reading of The New York Times.”
By 1970–1971, the traditional gatherings
had been cut back to three times a semester.
The length and style of the program remained
the same, but attendance was no longer
mandatory. A year later, the catalog referred
to a Collection that was “held at a regular
hour several times a term for addresses or
special events. Attendance is voluntary.” It
went on to say that “in 1971–1972, a series of
talks by College faculty members on topics in
their fields of professional interest and from
their own work … is planned as the principal
focus of Collection…. The president will address the first Collection each semester, and
there will be an opportunity in each semester
for programs sponsored by the Student
Council.” No reference was made to any type
of religious exercises at these later meetings.
Currently, all-campus meetings, still
called Collections, occasionally occur at no
fixed intervals, taking the form of meetings
to discuss current issues relevant to the
whole College community. Attendance is
voluntary.
—Carol Brévart-Demm

9

collection
weight identification bands on their legs to
allow them to be tracked in summers to come.
The data collected by Miniet and the children contributes to a long-term research
project to detect trends in lay and hatch dates
and whether more eggs hatch in Alaska’s rising summer temperatures. Her data and
those collected during previous years by
Daisy Yuhas ’09 “showed a significant trend
that’s taken place across the years, where lay
date seems to occur earlier and earlier in the
season.” says Miniet, whose internship was
funded by Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
According to Miniet, the rate at which
swallows are beginning to lay earlier in the
arctic is about 10 times that of the lower 48
states. Furthermore, birds that nest the earliest tend to result in failed nests. There is
some indirect evidence that earlier laying is
related to increasing global temperatures.
Now the task is to determine why early nests
are more likely to be unsuccessful.
“I inputted the data I collected into the
computer and refined Daisy’s data, updated
her graphs, and added to the paper she’d
started. It’s a work in progress,” Miniet says.

Swallows
Tree swallows are not rare birds. In fact,
they’re quite common across North America,
reaching farther north than any other swallow to nest and breed in Alaska. That’s where
two Swarthmore students studied them this
summer, performing separate but overlapping research projects near Fairbanks with
Assistant Professor of Biology Julie Hagelin.
Hagelin, an expert in avian behavioral
ecology, invited Ashley Miniet and Meredyth
Duncan to assist her in collecting data on the
behavior of the swallow, which finds Alaska
a particularly good place to raise its young.
“The birds can take advantage of the long
days and bug-filled air,” says Hagelin. “The
abundance and accessibility of tree swallows
in Alaska also make them an ideal species to
examine closely.”
10

Miniet, a senior biology major, worked
with the Alaska Bird Observatory (ABO), at
Creamer’s Field Migratory Waterfowl Refuge
in Fairbanks, on a nest-box monitoring study
that has been underway for more than a
decade. She also directed the ABO’s summer
program for elementary through high-school
students, leading the children and teens on
data-collecting expeditions, noting the location and orientation of about 100 boxes as
well as gathering information on the nests
and tree swallow breeding behavior. Later,
they reported on such observations, including how many chicks had hatched and
whether the chicks had fledged (taken flight
out of the nest) successfully. Miniet also
taught her junior ornithologists how to
measure the tiny chicks and place light-

WHATBIRD.CO./MITCH WAITE

a Summer
With the

Duncan, who had just completed her freshman year, aided Hagelin in her ongoing
research into the ability of birds to react to
scents and whether they can learn and
remember scents. Her work was funded by a
summer stipend from Swarthmore’s Natural
Science and Engineering Division.
“Olfaction in birds is a sensory modality
long overlooked by ornithologists and a subject that is yielding new insights into avian
behavior,” Hagelin says.
“Birds like swallows don’t have well-developed olfactory bulbs, so not a lot of research
has been done on whether they can and do
smell,” Duncan adds.
Using the nest boxes as testing locations,
they experimentally created some mintyscented nest boxes by hanging a small test
tube of mint-oil inside. This exposed eggs
and hatchlings to a known odor. Other nest
boxes, such as those nearby at the Alaska Bird
Observatory, contained no odors and so were
ideal for use as controls.
More on Hagelin’s summer research
with Miniet and Duncan at
http://bit.ly/summer_swallows

swarthmore college bulletin

MEREDYTH DUNCAN

’12

Money
Might Buy
You Grades,
But…
We know from the old Beatles
song that money can’t buy us
love, but might it buy better
attendance and grades in
school? According to some
school officials in cities such as
Washington, D.C.; Chicago;
and New York, paying students
for higher performance motivates them to increase their
effort and stay in school.
Not everyone agrees. In
an opinion piece in the July 2,
2007 New York Times, Dorwin
P. Cartwright Professor of Social Action and Social Theory
Barry Schwartz wrote: “The
assumption that underlines the
project is simple: People respond to incentives. If you want
people to do something, you
have to make it worth their
while. This assumption drives
virtually all of economic theory.”
However, Schwartz
believes that although students may perform academically at higher levels in return
for cash incentives at first, it
will be counterproductive to
success in school in the long
run—when the money runs
out, for example. And instead
of acting as a second motivation alongside those of curiosity, mastery of a subject, or love
of accumulating knowledge,
he says, the cash incentive is
likely to compete with and
diminish the appeal of the
inherent rewards of learning
for its own sake.
“What I find so troubling
about cash incentives in education is that the only question

being asked is ‘Do they
work?’” Schwartz says
in an interview. “If the
answer is ‘Yes,’
then the question
is ‘Can we afford
it?’ This approach
simply ignores the
possibility that cash
incentives could make
things worse by changing
both why students do their
work and how they do their
work. Thirty-five years of
research in psychology makes
it clear that this is not an idle
concern. If by ‘work’ we mean
improve performance on big
tests, then, sure, incentives
might work. If, however, we
mean ‘become an enthusiastic
learner for life,’ then there is
good reason to think they will
be counterproductive.”
Associate Professor of Economics Thomas Dee ’90 has
been examining a quite different approach: Instead of offering cash rewards to keep children in school, what happens
when you reduce welfare payments to the families of children who do not attend?
Dee recently completed a
research paper based on a random-assignment evaluation
among welfare recipients in 10
Wisconsin counties during the
Learnfare experiment, an initiative created and implemented
statewide in the 1980s. The
experiment included a reduction in welfare funding of families whose children were habitually absent from school. Evaluations of the experiment at
the time concluded that it had
not been successful, showing
little evidence that school
attendance had improved.
However, Dee recently uncovered flawed data that had
skewed the results of the
study. Stressing the impor-

ISTOCKPHOTO.COM

“When the chicks were about nine days
old, we took them out of their nests and held
them carefully while puffing different odors
[including mint] into their nares (nostrils),”
Duncan says. “We wanted to see whether the
chicks reacted differently to [odors] at either
of the two sites.” The project’s two goals are
to show whether: (1) nestlings have the
capacity to distinguish between different
types of odors, and (2) exposure to odors
(like mint) early in development can alter a
bird’s reaction later in life. The team already
has evidence of the former—despite vanishingly small olfactory anatomy, young swallows reacted differently to different odor
types. There is also some evidence of the latter— birds that were exposed to mint odor
early in life exhibited different reactions to
scents than control birds.
If early odor learning plays a role in
young birds, it may be that those returning
to breed at their natal site, following a long
migratory trip from the southern reaches of
the continent, might preferentially prefer to
nest in minty-smelling boxes. Such a result
would suggest that other “natural” odors that
birds are exposed to as young in the nest
impact breeding decisions later in life.
Duncan adds, “We are working toward a
paper” based on the exciting findings from
the summer. But “the return rate for swallows is about only five percent, so… the
research might take years and involve many
more sites of swallow nesting” to reveal the
intriguing details of how early odor learning
may impact adult breeding behavior.
—Carol Brevart-Demm

tance of implementation quality, he says: “Learnfare did not
have its intended effects in
Milwaukee County, where
poor data systems limited the
accuracy of the school attendance data, but it did have its
intended effects in the other
nine counties. Following Wisconsin’s example, most states
subsequently adopted Learnfare policies.”
Twenty years after Learnfare, Dee sees aspects of the
program that might be of use
to current experimental programs using cash rewards to
boost school attendance. In
keeping with current psychological thought on cash incentives, Dee believes that such a
program’s value lies in compensating for behavior rather
than test scores; tapping into
the human instinct to avoid
loss rather than seek gain by
imposing sanctions; and
involving the student’s whole
family rather than merely the
individual.
Schwartz concurs: “In the
case of Learnfare,” he says,
“they are targeting attendance,
not school performance, and
the incentives operate on the
parents. Though of course, the
parents can pressure the kids,
it seems to be that this indirect
approach can only help prevent the negative effects I
worry about.”

—Carol Brévart-Demm

Ashley Miniet examines a chick.

october 2009

11

collection

COURTESY OF SCOTT GILBERT

While attending festivities in Cambridge, England, in honor of Charles
Darwin’s 200th birthday,
Scott Gilbert was able to
share a bench with the
great man himself, rendered in bronze as a Cambridge undergrad in the
1830s pondering his still
uncertain future. Earlier
in the year, Gilbert was
also invited to speak at
a Vatican conference on
evolution.

Evolution Evolves
“It’s been a big year for Darwin!” says
Howard A. Schneiderman Professor of Biology Scott Gilbert. And it hasn’t been too bad
for Gilbert either. He has become a spokesperson for “evolutionary developmental biology,” a new discipline that studies how
changes in embryonic development can create new anatomical structures that can be
selected.
In March, in honor of the 200th birthday
of the naturalist whose 19th-century theory
of natural selection revolutionized biological
science, a papal conference, organized by the
Pontifical Gregorian University in collaboration with Indiana’s University of Notre
Dame, was held at the Vatican. Titled “Biological Evolution, Facts and Theories: A Critical Appraisal 150 Years After The Origin of
Species,” the conference assembled an illustrious collection of scientists, philosophers,

A Boost for
Swarthmore
ENGINEERS
Swarthmore has received a welcome boost from the George I.
Alden Trust in the form of a
challenge grant to purchase stateof-the art equipment for the
Department of Engineering’s
instructional laboratories.
12

and theologians, with the aim of promoting
a fair and productive relationship between
the three disciplines. Gilbert, one of the
invited speakers, talked about “Evolutionary Developmental Biology: Evolution by
Epigenesis.”
“This was a very worthwhile meeting,”
Gilbert says. “It focused on two problems,
the first of which is concerned with the relative roles of competition and cooperation for
the creation of a new species…. While competition is critical for the survival of the
fittest, the arrival of the fittest, i.e., the mechanisms by which such species are generated,
may have more to do with cooperation than
competition. The second problem concerned
whether there was any trait or character that
is strictly human and not found in at least a
rudimentary stage in nonhuman primates.
This was the challenge given to the physical
anthropologists [at the conference]. I came
away thinking that one thing that character-

The Alden Trust will match
every $2 raised by Swarthmore
with $1 of its own up to $100,000.
The terms of the challenge stipulate that matching funds come
from gifts made after the date of
the grant offer, May 20, 2009.
Since then, Swarthmore has realized $75,000 toward the Alden
challenge, leaving $125,000
still to be raised.

ized humans to the exclusion of other apes is
that they told and enjoyed good stories.”
In July, Gilbert was invited to the four-day
“Darwin 2009: A Festival,” held at Cambridge
University, England, where Darwin’s greatgreat-granddaughter Ruth Padel, a poet, was
also present. In a session titled “The Changing Views of Evolution,” Gilbert, with six
other scholars from around the world,
explored the role of organisms that, having
been selected by natural forces for survival
and reproduction, must continue to evolve
and produce descendants. Their goal was to
assess how current evolutionary theory can
explain organisms’ mate choices, adaptability,
and their ability to further evolve.
Besides pontificating in Rome and partying in Cambridge this summer, Gilbert has
received good reviews for the December 2008
book Ecological Developmental Biology: Integrating Epigenetics, Medicine, and Evolution
that he co-authored with David Epel, a
developmental biology professor at Stanford
University. Recognized as world experts in
the emerging field of “eco-devo,” the authors
discuss ways in which the environment
affects the origin and evolution of organisms, presenting an all-inclusive view of biology that illustrates the inter-connectedness
of ecology, development, health science,
molecular genetics, and evolution.
Gilbert’s most recent study with Judy
Cebra-Thomas, a developmental biologist at
Millersville University, resulted in the discovery of a genetic link in the evolution of the
heart from three chambers to four chambers,
illuminating part of the puzzle of how birds
and mammals became warm-blooded. The
research garnered them a cover story in
Nature magazine.
—Carol Brévart-Demm

Prior to the challenge, Swarthmore had received another
$40,700 in donations for new engineering equipment.
Swarthmore’s new equipment
is designed to enhance the classroom, laboratory, and research
experience for both engineering
and nonengineering majors. A total
of 22 pieces of equipment will be
installed in five laboratories:

mechanical and structural testing,
soils and construction, thermal
energy, electronics, and materials.
The Alden Trust was founded in
1912 by George I. Alden, an engineer, inventor, and educator. Its
grant-making focuses on independent undergraduate educational institutions and their capital
needs.

—Susan Clarey
swarthmore college bulletin

Meeting Off-Campus Study Needs

ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS

Students returning to campus
this fall found that the Foreign
Study Office has undergone several changes. In addition to relocating to Cunningham House,
the office has been renamed.
Now known as the Off-Campus
Study Office, it meets needs for
all study opportunities abroad.
Patricia Martin became the
new director of off-campus study
in July. With 25 years experience
working in international education, Martin will work with faculty
members and students on planning off-campus opportunities
and ensuring the health, safety,
and security of students in studyabroad programs.
“I know first-hand how important off-campus studies can be to
the academic and personal lives
of students,” says Martin. “As a
first-generation college student
at Williams College, I had the
opportunity to study in the Soviet Union. That opportunity
opened up the world to me.”
Sharon Friedler, Stephen Lang
Professor of Performing Arts and
director of the Dance Program,
has taken on the role of faculty
adviser for off-campus study. A
faculty member since 1985, she
is familiar with a variety of cultural norms because of the collaboration and travel involved with
her own research. She has
worked for years with Professor

october 2009

of Anthropology Steven Piker,
the first faculty adviser for Foreign Study, and Rosa Bernard,
who is now assistant director for
off-campus study.
Friedler played a major role in
setting up the College’s foreign
study program in Ghana, where
students can enroll in regular
courses at the University of
Ghana as well as study independently. She was also involved
in launching and maintaining the
Swarthmore program in Poland
and has become increasingly
involved with the Northern Ireland Program. “I’m passionate
about enabling global citizens,
and this job seems like a very
good way to encourage that in
our students,” Friedler says.
International students at
Swarthmore will also see some
changes this year, following the
unexpected death of International Student Adviser Gloria Evans
last December, after 50 years of
service to the College. Jennifer
Marks-Gold, an international student adviser at Cabrini College
for 16 years, has been named the
full-time adviser to international
students and scholars. She also
has assisted many area educational institutions as a consultant
on U.S. Citizenship and Immigration regulations.

—Susan Cousins Breen

The staff of the relocated Off-Campus
Study Office—(left
to right) Assistant
Director Rosa
Bernard, Director
Patricia Martin, Assistant Diana Malick, and Faculty
Adviser Sharon
Friedler—enjoy
their idyllic new
digs.

Arabic at
Swarthmore:
Gateway to the
Middle East
Jane Abell ’11 began learning ’ammiyah the moment she landed in
Damascus. After all, it was one reason
why she came.
“At Swarthmore, we learn fus’ha, or Modern Standard Arabic, the
dialect most frequently used in literary texts, media, and academia,”
Abell says. Colloquial’ Arabic—’ammiyah—refers to the many different
dialects of spoken Arabic in the Middle East. ’Ammiyah is the language
most often used in film, music, and daily life.
“If I truly want to learn to speak Arabic,” she continues, “I need to be
immersed—to read signs in Arabic, order food in Arabic, to hear Arabic and only Arabic for hours on end.”
Abell has joined the growing ranks of Swarthmore students who
broaden their study of Arabic by spending a semester in the Middle
East—in Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and other countries. Their
numbers reflect a burgeoning interest in Arabic language instruction.
Introduced in 2006, the program has expanded from a first-year and a
small intermediate class to four years of study.
Invigorated since 9/11 and the Iraq War by a personal need to try to
comprehend the sources of friction between the West and the Arab
World, Abell says, “My interest in Arabic stems from my belief that
mutual understanding and appreciation will be the building blocks of
a more cooperative and peaceful global society.”
Walid Hamarneh, assistant professor of Arabic, has been instrumental in developing the program. Last year, Hamarneh invited Mahdi
Alosh, associate dean for international relations at West Point and former professor of Arabic at Ohio State University, to conduct oral proficiency interviews of 14 randomly-selected first-year students at the end
of their second semester. Fully 50 percent “exceeded expectations,
showing aspects of advanced-level performance,” Alosh concluded.
Outside the classroom, Arabic is supported by a growing multimedia library (including the only complete collection of Arabic-language
Sesame Street DVDs in the United States). Students can watch movies
in Arabic, chat with native speakers, and meet weekly in Sharples Dining Hall to hone their language skills over lunch.
Both institutional and individual donors have made Arabic language
instruction possible. The program was launched with the help of a $2
million gift from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, made in 2005 to
the Tri-College Consortium.
In 2006, Swarthmore was awarded a $600,000, four-to-one challenge
grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create an
endowment for the teaching of Arabic. Thanks to significant gifts from
alumni and parents, the College met the challenge, raising $2.4 million.
Abell is looking ahead to a graduate degree in Middle Eastern Studies. “My career will undoubtedly require Arabic,” she said, adding
“insha’allah”—“if God wills it”—the Arabic phrase Muslims use whenever they plan for the future.
—Susan Clarey
13

faculty expert

preventing

teen

depression

A PROGRAM BASED ON COGNITIVE
BEHAVIORAL THERAPY GIVES ADOLESCENTS
SOME TOOLS TO STAVE OFF DEPRESSION.

ISTOCKPHOTO.COM

By Jane Gillham
Associate Professor of Psychology

14

DEPRESSION IS ONE OF THE MOST PREVALENT psychological disorders and, as such,
it is an important target for prevention efforts. Recent research has identified
several risk factors for depression, including genetic vulnerabilities, family
conflict, traumatic life experiences, pessimistic cognitive styles, and elevated
depressive symptoms, which has paved the way for a wide range of prevention
programs. Most of these are based on cognitive-behavioral treatments of
depression that teach clients skills for coping with stress and for challenging
negative beliefs.
Adolescence is a particularly important period for depression prevention
efforts. Rates of depression increase dramatically during adolescence, beginning at about age 13. In fact, by high school, depression is one of the most
common public health problems affecting approximately 5 to 10 percent of
adolescents each year. Even more adolescents suffer from high but sub-clinical
levels of symptoms, and these symptoms cause great distress and interfere with
functioning. In addition, depression is often recurrent, with first episodes
occurring most often during adolescence. Thus, prevention of depression during adolescence may help to prevent suffering across a person’s lifespan.
Early adolescents deal with a number of physical, cognitive, social, and environmental changes that often occur together and may increase their risk for
emotional and behavioral problems. Most children go through puberty at this
time. Social relationships become far more complex. Peer relationships
become more important, and vulnerability to peer pressure increases. The
transition from elementary to middle school is marked by increased academic
demands and often by a decrease in the individualized attention students
receive from their teachers. These changes may increase risk for a variety of
difficulties, including eating disorders, conduct problems, substance abuse,
and underachievement as well as depression.
During this same period, abstract reasoning and perspective-taking abilities
increase. As compared with younger children, early adolescents are better able
to reflect on their beliefs and to engage in hypothesis testing by examining evidence and considering alternatives. These meta-cognitive skills are at the heart
of cognitive-behavioral therapy, currently one of the most widely researched
and empirically supported treatments for depression.
Although effective treatments are available, it would be much better to prevent depression from occurring in the first place. Depression is associated with
considerable suffering and increased risk for substance abuse, academic failure,
and other serious problems. Depression is underdetected and undertreated.
Research suggests that most adolescents who are suffering from depression do
not receive appropriate care.
Much of our research team’s work focuses on developing prevention programs that target the early adolescent developmental period. We hope to give
young teens the cognitive skills and mental resiliency they may need to resist
the onset of depression just a few years later.
Our Penn Resiliency Program (PRP) is a group intervention designed to
teach a variety of cognitive and behavioral skills that are relevant to the wide
range of challenges and stressors that are common during the teen years. Using
a group format and a structured curriculum, the PRP can be implemented in
schools, after-school programs, clinics, and other community settings.
The PRP includes approximately 18 to 24 hours of content, usually delivered
in twelve 90- to 120-minute lessons. The program is typically delivered to
small groups—about eight to 14 students—by teachers, counselors, and clinicians who have received training in the intervention.
In the PRP, students first learn about Albert Ellis’s ABC model, which states
that beliefs and interpretations of events have powerful effects on our emotions and behaviors. In Ellis’s model, there is an Activating event or Adversity,
swarthmore college bulletin

which prompts an automatic Belief or interpretation of the situation; this in turn leads
to an emotional and/or behavioral Consequence. The model states that the Belief
mediates the relationship between the event
and the resulting Consequence.
The sessions begin with a discussion of
the Adversities of adolescence—students
make lists of the problems they encounter—
which prompts them to think about those
problems that are a normal part of life. The
next step is to establish the role of Beliefs
through skits that introduce the concept of
internal dialogue, or “self-talk.” The goal here
is to help students understand that “self-talk”
is a normal process and to encourage them
to be aware of their underlying beliefs. The
third step is to ensure that students are able
to label and describe emotional experiences
—one type of “C” in the ABC model. Initially, the conversation focuses on the most basic
emotions—happiness, sadness, and anger—
and then progresses to more complex emotions such as shame and guilt. Students
explore emotional intensity, sharing experiences and describing how intense they were
on a scale of one to 10.
The leader then teaches students about
the causal influence of cognition. Through
role plays and discussions, students learn
how self-talk can produce emotions and
behaviors. Students learn that different people often experience different emotions in
response to the same activating event—and
they are encouraged to consider the sources
of these different reactions. Students learn
about “self-fulfilling prophecies,” or how
pessimistic beliefs (“I’m stupid”) can lead to
behaviors (stop studying) that lead to new
activating events or adversities (fail an exam)
that seem to confirm the initial beliefs (“See.
I knew I was stupid.”). Students learn to
identify and challenge pessimistic beliefs by
examining evidence and generating more
realistic alternatives. Thus, the program
encourages students to think accurately and
flexibly about the problems they encounter.
In addition to these cognitive skills, the
PRP teaches skills for solving problems,
coping with uncontrollable stressors, and
being comfortable with a full range of emotions. Students also learn assertiveness,
negotiation, and relaxation techniques as
well as skills for overcoming procrastination. (See box.)
october 2009

Two components of the Penn
Resiliency Program aim to prevent
depression by teaching cognitive
and behavioral skills before
students encounter the challenges
associated with the transition from
childhood to adolescence.
Cognitive Component
The ABC Model
Recognizing Cognitive (“Thinking”) Styles
Cognitive Restructuring—Avoiding
Erroneous Beliefs
Decatastrophizing—Putting it in
Perspective
The Hot Seat—Challenging Negative

Thoughts
Social-Problem-Solving Component
Assertiveness
Relaxation
Problem Solving

THE PRP HAS BEEN EVALUATED IN AT LEAST 19
controlled studies, making it one of the most
extensively evaluated depression-prevention
programs. These studies have included a total
of approximately 2,500 children from a variety of socio-economic and cultural backgrounds. A recent meta-analytic review of
PRP studies found that PRP significantly
reduces and prevents symptoms of depression. In some studies, its effects have been
large. For example, the first study of the PRP
found the intervention halved the rates of
moderate to severe symptoms two years after
the program ended. The program is less
Read more about Gillham’s work
in U.S.News & World Report at
http://bit.ly/gillham_ usnews.
Learn more about the PRP at
http://bit.ly/teendepression.

effective when group leaders receive minimal
training or do not cover the intervention
content adequately.
Current work on the program focuses on
expanding and strengthening the intervention and achieving effective dissemination.
Studies are evaluating booster sessions for
students and a parallel intervention for parents that teaches them to use the PRP skills
in their own lives, so that they can model
resilience for their children. Research on the
effectiveness of the parent program is ongoing, but results from a pilot study indicated
that combining PRP with parent training
may more powerfully prevent symptoms of
depression and anxiety
Although initially developed to prevent
depression, the PRP is currently conceptualized as a program that teaches valuable life
skills. These skills are relevant to a variety of
academic, social, and family situations, and
are helpful to most children. This view of
PRP is supported by studies that evaluate
effects on outcomes. For example, several
studies have documented beneficial effects
on anxiety, behavioral problems, cognitive
styles, and hopelessness. Further evaluations
of PRP’s effects on positive emotions and
achievement that are currently underway
may help enrich our understanding of the
power of providing young people with cognitive coping skills that not only protect
them from depression, but lead them to
develop positive life skills that are not otherwise part of their expected education.
Jane Gillham’s research and clinical interests
are at the intersection of clinical psychology,
developmental psychology, and education. She
developed the Penn Resiliency Program with
Karen Reivich and Lisa Jaycox when they were
graduate students working with Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania. Since
that time, she has collaborated extensively
with Reivich and Seligman on several evaluations of the PRP, funded by grants from the
National Institute of Mental Health. She is
co-director of the Positive Psychology for Youth
Project, a joint project between WallingfordSwarthmore School District and research
teams at Swarthmore and Penn, which is
evaluating this curriculum with funding from
the U.S. Department of Education She received
a B.A. from Princeton University and a Ph.D.
from Penn.
15

In the Face of

CALLED TO ACTION BY DEATH IN DARFUR, THE GENOCIDE INTERVENTION
NETWORK, LED BY MARK HANIS ’05, STANDS UP AGAINST
GENOCIDE AROUND THE WORLD.
By Katie Becker ’10
THE GRANDCHILD OF FOUR HOLOCAUST
survivors, Mark Hanis ’05 grew up in Quito,
Ecuador, where he attended synagogue—the
only one in the country—in a community
that included other survivors. Showing the
numbers tattooed on their arms, the elders
told the temple’s children to never forget and
never let the atrocities of genocide happen
again. Hanis took them at their word and has
held firm to their injunctions ever since.
When he was a student at Swarthmore,
the edicts of his elders, combined with the
notion of ethical intelligence that imbues
campus life, compelled Hanis to spend
spring semester 2003 in Sierra Leone, where
he helped the Special Court there indict
Charles Taylor, warlord and former president
of Liberia, for crimes against humanity during the Liberian civil wars.
Back on campus, one evening, Hanis read
about the genocide in Darfur. Already familiar with mass killing and its consequences,
Hanis says he could not sit passively by and
let it happen again, no matter how far away
these atrocities were occurring. “If you saw a
6-year-old on your block fall or be pushed
and need assistance, you’d run for help, you’d
call 911. No one would question you for that,
and if you didn’t help, people would say,
‘What’s wrong with you? How could you
stand there and do nothing?’ To me, the same
motivation should apply to helping people in
the face of genocide and mass atrocities,”
Hanis explains.
That night in 2003 marked the birth of
the organization that was to become the
Genocide Intervention Network, whose
influence is now felt worldwide. Hanis and a
group of friends, including Andrew Sniderman ’07 and Sam Bell ’05, spent many hours
in McCabe Library, skipping classes to
research Darfur. They discovered Samantha
Power’s book A Problem from Hell: America
16

and the Age of Genocide and came away with
two goals: to raise money to protect civilians
and to organize politically. With a phone line
arranged for by Maurice Eldridge ’61, ducttaped computers from ITS, and space in the
basement of the train station—then being
used by the Lang Center for Civic and Social
Responsibility—the group started the Genocide Intervention Fund. Fueled by an
urgency that overshadowed graduation
requirements, they skipped more classes to
go to Boston and enlist Power, a professor at
Harvard University’s Kennedy School of

“We flooded the White House
with phone calls.”
Anyone can call the anti-genocide hotline (1800-GENOCIDE), enter a zip code, and connect to the office of state or nationally elected
officials for free. In 2005, when GI-NET
wanted Indiana Senator Richard Lugar, then
chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to recommend the Darfur Peace and
Accountability Act for consideration by the
House, they looked up his donor list and contacted every church or school group in his
district to ask these constituents to flood his
office with calls. Two weeks after the calling
began, Lugar placed it on the Senate’s agenda.
They made a similar effort after President
Obama took office. “We flooded the White
House with phone calls demanding that he
nominate a special envoy to Sudan so there
was a point person in his administration
whose job—24/7—would be to stop the
genocide in Sudan,” Hanis says. He attributes
Obama’s speedy appointment of General
Scott Gration to the pressure created by the
hotline conjoined with efforts by other advocacy groups.

—K.B.

HANIS: TONY DEIFELL / OPPOSITE PAGE: HELENE CAUX

Genocide

Mark Hanis (above) answered the question “Why do you
do what you do?" on his hand as part of the "wdydwyd?
Project," a worldwide participatory art project. You can
answer for yourself at www.wdydwyd.org. The Darfur
disaster (right) inspired Hanis and others to organize
against genocide while they were students.

Government, as a resource. At one point,
Hanis accidentally guessed Bill Gates’s personal e-mail address while searching for a
notable sponsor to lend credibility to an oped piece he wanted to publish. That led to
Microsoft contacting Swarthmore to find out
how Hanis had hacked into their system.
Their efforts proved beneficial as the group
steadily raised a quarter million dollars for
civilian protection in Darfur.
With the first goal—fundraising—well
underway, Hanis and three other members of
the group moved to Washington, D.C., after
graduation. Fund became Network, and they
kept running with the momentum they had
generated. Hanis says of the transition, “We
were already a registered nonprofit, 501(c3)
company—so the move to D.C. wasn’t that
tough.” Although some doubted the inexperienced group’s abilities, Hanis recalls the
many experts they attracted as a result of
their novel approach to abolishing genocide.
“We had an advisory board that included
John Prendergast and Gayle Smith—both of
them had worked at the National Security
Council for Clinton—and the first ambassador for war crimes David Scheffer. As we
developed expertise, we were guided by the
members of a high-caliber advisory board
swarthmore college bulletin

/// “Genocide “isn’t a natural disaster, where we have to brace for a hurricane or a tsunami.
We can proactively stop the people from being killed, tortured, and gang-raped.
We can stop them from being displaced from their homes.”

who were eager to help us.”
The students’ entrepreneurial approach
attracted influential donors as well, including
the Omidyar Foundation, a charitable agency
started by the wife of the founder of eBay. In
2004, Omidyar made a generous contribution that allowed what was now called GINET to obtain office space, hire a staff, and
launch programs. “A lot of people who
would normally just put us in the same
bucket as another do-good charity really
stopped to take a closer look at what we were
doing and offer support,” Hanis says.
In 2006, Hanis was awarded Echoing
Green and Draper Foundation fellowships

october 2009

that provided funding, training, and access to
networks of social leaders. In 2008, he was
named an Ashoka Fellow, and, in early 2009,
the World Economic Forum named him a
Young Global Leader. “The fellowships have
been amazing resources in various ways.
Each has a professional staff that is always
there to mentor or advise, so I didn’t have to
start from scratch,” Hanis says.
Hanis finds himself fueled by what he
calls the “two-sided coin” of genocide. “It’s
the urgency of the despair—people are being
systematically exterminated for who they are.
I find that to be an extremely compelling reason to give my time and attention. On the

other side, what keeps me going is the possibility that we can end genocide. It’s an
extremely empowering feeling to think that
we can abolish genocide.”
With the goal of politicizing the movement against genocide, the GI-NET team
began to develop consequences for inaction.
They launched DarfurScores.org, an online
scorecard that tracks politicians’ actions in
response to genocide, such as sponsoring legislation or visiting Darfur. To facilitate communication between citizens and their representatives, the team recruited Sherry Bellamy
’74 and Gerrit Hall ’04 to create 1-800GENOCIDE, “the 911 of stopping genocide,”
17

Darfur: The War Since the “Firestorm”
of 2003–2004
according to Hanis. These tools help
“democratize the fight to end genocide,” Hanis says, by providing pertinent information and making political accountability accessible. To further extend advocacy and education,
GI-NET merged with STAND (Students Taking Action Now–Darfur)
and expanded the organization from
200 chapters to now more than 800
chapters on college and high school
campuses across the country.
After start-up years marked by
rapid success, GI-NET has reached its
stride and is maturing as an organization. This year, GI-NET launched the
inaugural class of a training program
—the Carl Wilkens Fellowship Program. “I think people saw us in the
first couple years as just recruiting,
training, and organizing students,”
Hanis says, “So the big step in 2009 is
to expand the demographic we’ve
been organizing to include non-students.” The fellowships provide training in areas such as volunteer recruitment, conflict history, and legislative
policy, and the program aims to create
a network of grassroots activists. The
inaugural class has 20 fellows, but
their goal is to have one fellow in each
of the 435 congressional districts.
(One such fellow has already helped
with the passage of a contract prohibition bill in Georgia.)
In May, GI-NET launched the
Conflict Risk Network (CRN) to educate investors on the corporate practices of companies in which they
invest. The CRN broadens GI-NET’s
divestment campaign in Sudan, which
has already successfully influenced
divestments by 60 colleges or universities and 27 states. Additionally, 12
companies have pulled out or altered

Learn more about GI-NET’s work,
and find out how you can help
stop and prevent genocide at
www.genocideintervention.net.

18

their behavior. Hanis notes the relative rapidity of success in this area:
“The divestment campaign against
apartheid in South Africa took
decades. We’re seeing a lot more
movement in the speed and depth of
our divestment program in Sudan.”
The launch of the CRN reflects GINET’s transition over the years from
an organization that focuses solely on
Darfur to one that keeps watch over
multiple areas of conflict. Hanis and
GI-NET’s director of protection,
Chad Hazlett, penned an op-ed in The
Washington Post on July 18, highlighting American responsibility in Iraq if
ethnic violence re-emerges. In the
end, Hanis and GI-NET are moving
to “get people to go beyond being
Darfur advocates and really become
anti-genocide advocates,” he says.
The truly innovative twist to GINET’s mission lies in its perspective
on genocide. Hanis points out that
genocide “isn’t a natural disaster,
where we have to brace for a hurricane or a tsunami. We can proactively
stop the people from being killed, tortured, and gang-raped. We can stop
them from being displaced from their
homes.” GI-NET is firmly committed
to protecting civilians by funding programs that have the specific goal of
protection, rather than channeling the
money they raise to food or medical
aid. One such project in Burma provides villages with radios and training
so that villagers can receive advance
warning of imminent attacks and use
that time to flee.
Hanis combines this perspective
with an eye for technological innovation. “We’re surrounded by Web 2.0
and many innovative technologies,
and we embrace them,” he says. The
latest project involves a surprising way
to donate: text messaging. The donation appears on the sender’s cell
phone bill at the end of the month.
“People will literally, while I’m describing it, take out their phones, text
‘protect’ to 90999, and before I’ve finished talking about what people can
do, the majority of the audience has

The nature of the conflict in Darfur has changed dramatically
since Hanis first read about it in 2003. As Julie Flint and Alex de
Waal write in their book Darfur: A New History of a Long War
(Zed Books, 2008), the first two years of the conflict were
“firestorm” years. During this time, Janjawiid militias, composed of disaffected Darfur Arab tribes fueled by an Arab-supremacist ideology, raided the villages of African tribes with
the help of government military intelligence and the air force.
Though the African tribes in Darfur are Muslim, the Arab
tribes traditionally live nomadic lifestyles as animal herders, and
they migrate during the year through land occupied by the
African tribes. The government and the Janjawiid targeted civilians of these tribes as potential supporters of rebel groups that
were fighting the government. The attacks eliminated the possibility of living in these villages.
The raids displaced millions of civilians and led to long treks
to displacement camps, during which refugees were in danger
of further attacks in addition to suffering from hunger, thirst,
and lack of medical care. At the internally displaced persons
(IDP) camps, the government used bureaucratic means to impede foreign aid, and Janjawiid prevented the IDPs from collecting food or firewood. An estimated 200,000 civilians were
killed in 2003–2004.
The photographs on these pages by Hélène Caux depict
some of the results of these attacks. On page 17, Chadian inhabitants from Djawara village cover the remains of villagers
who were killed during an attack perpetrated by Janjawiid in
April 2006. More than 100 men were murdered and thousands
of cattle stolen. In 2004, internally displaced children in the
Abu Zar camp (opposite) drew what was happening in their
daily lives on the wall of one of the school buildings. This
drawing depicts United Nations World Food Programme
planes air-dropping food near the school.
According to Hanis, the U.S. government currently leads
the international community in humanitarian assistance and
peacekeeping. Such unprecedented response is undoubtedly
due to the public pressure GI-NET and other humanitarian
agencies have been able to incite. Yet at least 2.5 million Darfurian civilians remain displaced and the cumulative death toll is
estimated to be between 300,000 and 400,000. Peace agreements and ceasefires have consistently failed or been broken
by both the rebels and the government.
Though the United Nations (UN) traditionally does not send
in a peacekeeping force until a peace agreement has been established, a UN-led hybrid force in conjunction with the African
Union was authorized in July 2007. Despite an authorized force
of 26,000 peacekeepers, as of May, the force has only reached
16,000 due to bureaucratic difficulties.
In March, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest
warrant for President Omar al-Bashir. He responded by expelling all of the humanitarian aid agencies operating in the
country. Aid is slowly being restored but has yet to reach its
previous level of operations.
—K.B.
swarthmore college bulletin

/// In the end, Hanis and GI-NET are moving to “get people to go beyond
being Darfur advocates
and really become anti-genocide advocates,” he says.

already donated $5,” Hanis says.
Hanis hopes that GI-NET will eventually
be able to shift its focus to preventing genocide before it happens. He intends to remain
with GI-NET, building and maintaining a
permanent anti-genocide constituency, until
genocide is abolished. “This is a huge gap
that needs to be filled,” as he says. “Hopefully,
this will happen sooner rather than later, and
if we can help check off that box, then that
will be a time when I’ll see what else I can
do.”
With detailed information about genocide
and mass atrocities in eight areas of the
world at his fingertips, Hanis can readily
make suggestions on how every citizen can
become involved in stopping those acts. In
fact, he spends three weeks out of every

october 2009

month doing just that, traveling around the
country, speaking to potential donors and
engaging the media with GI-NET’s mission
and latest accomplishments. Hanis’s answers
have the practiced polish of a veteran public
speaker, and the gravity with which he speaks
reflects the urgency of his topic. His tone
changes only briefly from its steady instruction, when speaking about himself. “I spend
many more than 80 hours a week working to
advance our mission,” he says with a laugh
that quickly subsides.
Though Hanis, who currently serves as
president of the organization, works almost
every waking moment, he has friends by his
side to make sure he goes out every once in a
while. “I’ve been fortunate that a lot of my
colleagues—like Sam Bell, GI-NET executive

HELENE CAUX

director—are my closest friends,” Hanis says.
“I certainly recognize that there might be a
better work-life balance for myself.”
Despite the many hours that Hanis
devotes to GI-NET, he emphasizes that fighting genocide does not need to be a full-time
job for everyone. “Literally, for five minutes
every day, people could dramatically change
the way the United States responds to preventing genocide,” Hanis points out. “They
could do it without even having to stand up.
You’ve got 1-800-GENOCIDE, you can text
‘protect,’ and if everyone did that—there’s no
question—we would abolish genocide in our
lifetime.”
Katie Becker is a senior psychology major and
Bulletin intern.
19

breaking down

Barriers
IN ECUADOR’S HIGHLANDS, AN EDUCATION PROJECT
AIMS TO “CREATE A NEW FLUIDITY AND CLASS MOBILITY,”
SAYS FOUNDER KATIE CHAMBLEE ’07.

20

swarthmore college bulletin

By Elizabeth Redden ’05
Photographs by Juan Victor Fajardo ’09
The Village Education Project was built
on a simple premise. “What we’re sponsoring
is the opportunity to go to high school,” says
Kendal Rinko ’09, the nonprofit’s young
director of development.
Founded in 2005 by Katie Chamblee ’07,
the Village Education Project (VEP) covers
the costs of a high school education, on
average about $200 per year, for students
from six Ecuadorean villages. Here, in the
largely indigenous villages outside Otavalo—
a colorful market town about 50 miles north
of Quito that is frequented by tourists—
schools cling to the sides of mountains.
Against the soft green creases of the Andes,
snow-capped Volcán Cayambe looms. Here,
fathers work mainly as day laborers, farming
the surrounding haciendas; large families live
on little.
Here, “Our work focuses not on creating
new opportunities but on eliminating the
barriers that exist already in Ecuador,”
Chamblee explains in an essay for the online
magazine Policy Innovations. “Using the villages, schools, and curricula that are already
in place, we create a new fluidity and class
mobility.”
Chamblee started the VEP while at
Swarthmore, after a summer volunteering in
Ecuador through Global Vision International. Her then-host father, Gilberto Cifuentes
—a school principal and fellow founder—
manages the program’s in-country operations; a volunteer staff of Swarthmore students handles tasks like fundraising and
recruiting volunteers; and Chamblee, now a
first-year student at Yale Law School, serves
as a liaison between the two. “It’s challenging. I’m working with two staffs that I rarely
see, one in Swarthmore and another in
Ecuador,” Chamblee says in an interview.
The project also employs a year-round
tutor to support the students on scholarship.
Despite the virtual way it does business, the
VEP is, indeed, based on a village-wide or
community-wide ethos. Its stated mission is
“to empower underprivileged villages in
UPenn student Becca Rosen ’12 (top left) teaches a
young Ecuadorean girl as a participant in the Village
Education Project, founded 2005 by Katie Chamblee
’07. The Project helps provide children from six
Ecuadorian villages not far from Otavalo—a market
town 50 miles from Quito—with the opportunity to
attend high school.

october 2009

Ecuador by making education an accessible
and sustainable resource in community life.”
Scholarships covering matriculation fees,
books, and uniforms through the six years of
secondary school are available to any and all
students from the six villages under the project’s sponsorship.
In order to qualify for scholarships, students must pass an intensive summer course
in math and English, taught mainly by
American volunteers. “It’s not really that
hard to pass the course. We make the course
a prerequisite because we don’t want to send
people on who are under-prepared. We want
our students to do well,” Chamblee explains.
“As [summer] program coordinator, I
have the privilege of dealing with parents.

“The parents understand
that the cost of having a
child at home working instead
of at school is something no
one can afford.”
The first few weeks were somewhat overwhelming in that respect. We had lines of
parents at the office with questions about the
program and wondering if their child could
enroll,” says Juan Victor Fajardo ’09, who
managed this summer’s program after graduating with a major in philosophy and a
minor in Latin American Studies. “Parenthood in rural, indigenous communities is
nothing like parenthood in the city or in the
‘western’ world. The people who inhabit this
part of the world have a unique and millenary connection with the land. It manifests
itself not only in their history, in the way
they look, in their language and identity, but
also in their livelihoods. When a young child
is old enough to work in the field or at
home, that’s exactly what they do.
“In the past months, however, I have met
parents that are legitimately interested in
their son or daughter’s education. They
understand that the cost of having their child
at home working instead of at school is
21

something no one can afford, no matter
where you’re from. I specifically remember
one conversation I had with a father who was
in his early thirties. He had come to check up
on his daughter to find out how she was
doing. His daughter is one of the best students at one of the schools and that was not
surprising at all. It became obvious to me

The project is contemplating
building a high school of its
own—that is, the villages’
own. Now, the students walk
up to an hour from their
villages to attend one of five

colegios in Otavalo.
that part of the reason why she was doing so
well was because of the support she was
receiving at home. Her dream of going to
high school was one that she shared with her
whole family. After our conversation was
over, I remember thinking, ‘This is exactly
why I took this job.’” Fajardo says.
“The motivated students were very motivated,” says Anna Phillips ’09, who taught in
summer 2008 at a school called Mojandita,
in the village of Mojanda, a 15-minute drive
from Otavalo. “It feels much further away,
because it’s a 15-minute drive straight up the
side of a mountain,” says Phillips.
Phillips remembers the case of a 15-yearold student: “He was the oldest by far of the
students we were teaching, who were mostly
10- to 13-year-olds. Even though he lacked
the academic skills of most of the students—
and he really wanted to be the cool older
one—he realized this was his last chance at
an education. This is a huge motivator for
these kids. A lot of them want to be able to
provide more for their families. They want
to live somewhere with running water.”
In addition to teaching, Phillips—a
physics major at Swarthmore with minors in
education and math—carved out a role as
curriculum developer for the VEP, traveling
22

to Ecuador on a separate
visit to interview educators about the skills students lacked and would
most need in high
school. “Until last summer, volunteers had just
been making it up as
they went. I didn’t want
to let that happen anymore,” Phillips says.
The summer English
curriculum starts from
scratch—“with the
alphabet, hello, my
name is, can I do that, door, pencil—absolute
basics,” Phillips says. The summer math curriculum begins with fractions and decimals,
shifts to geometry and basic shapes, and ends
with negative numbers. “These things are
conceptually difficult. It’s really important
that they see them and at least get comfortable with them, even if they don’t completely
understand them before they get to high
school,” Phillips says.
Of her own students’ readiness for secondary school at summer’s end, Phillips continues, “I knew it would be hard for some
students, and I actually told them that I think
it’s going to be very hard for you to be in
high school, but if you get help—we provide
a year-round tutor for the students—and
you work hard, you can do it. There were
also students who I knew would be fine, the
ones who got 20 out of 20 on every quiz in
the summer program. On the whole, I think
that most students were ready for the challenge, even if they weren’t as academically
ready as they would be in an ideal world.”
“My role as a curriculum developer,”
Phillips adds, “has focused on making the
service we provide to the kids as valuable as
it can be and on making the project a sustainable one that improves every year. I’m
really convinced that there’s a forward
momentum now.”
The momentum has been propelled in
part by a three-year, $25,000 grant from
Project Pericles, a nonprofit founded by
Eugene Lang ’38 to support initiatives relatLea rn m ore about the VEP and view
additional photos at www.swarthmore.
edu/news/learning.

ing to social responsibility and participatory
citizenship on college campuses. In addition
to formalizing its summer curriculum, the
VEP has increased the number of villages
under its sponsorship, from four to six, and
the number of scholarships awarded, from
48 in 2006–2007 to an estimated 150 in the
current school year. The project is also contemplating building a high school of its
own—that is, the villages’ own. As of now,
the students walk up to an hour from their
rural villages to attend one of five colegios in
Otavalo.
“We still have a lot of details to work out,
but our idea is that the children who we
swarthmore college bulletin

sponsor to go to high school, instead of
going to different schools all over Otavalo,
will go to our school and stay together for
three years. This will make it a lot easier for
us to keep track of our kids’ progress and
will centralize our support of them,” says
Amber Wantman ’10, who researched the
cost of building a school while volunteering
as a teacher this summer.
“I think we’re really ready to do it,”
Chamblee says, reflecting on the growth of
the organization.
“You have to show people that you’re
working with what already exists. You’re not
out to change the community, and when you
do make changes, you want to do them very
incrementally. You want to grow at a rate that
can be incorporated into a community. We
started with a few kids, and now people
know that those kids have successfully gone
on to high school.”
With many development organizations
focused on scaling up, Chamblee believes
that VEP should instead focus on scaling in,
building on the existing program and exploring how to improve it.”

While speaking with a father interested in his daughter’s progress, program coordinator Juan Victor Fajardo
realized that part of the reason she
was doing well was because her dream
of attending high school was one she
shared with her whole family. “This is
why I took this job,” Farjardo says.
Clockwise from top left: VEP founder
Katie Chamblee spends time with students in the classroom; Harvard student Jocelyn Karlan ’12 works
one-on-one with a young boy on his
math paper; VEP students take their
lessons very seriously; yet there’s still
time for having fun; Swarthmore’s
Jake Ban ’10 leans in to offer some
gentle assistance.

Elizabeth Redden ’05, a former reporter with
Inside Higher Ed in Washington, D.C., studied abroad in Ecuador while at Swarthmore.
She is currently in the first year of Columbia
University’s MFA program in nonfiction writing.

october 2009

23

Beyond the Emotional Turmoil
GAY PSYCHIATRIST
BERTRAM SCHAFFNER ’32
BRINGS COMPASSION
AND DIGNITY TO HIS
HOMOSEXUAL PATIENTS.

The need to know what makes a person
gay and to understand how to live as a gay
man without suffering emotional turmoil
has been a driving force in psychiatrist
Bertram Schaffner’s life. For the past 60
years, the renowned physician has been in
the forefront of historic developments for
gays and lesbians. In 2001, the Journal of Gay
and Lesbian Psychotherapy recognized him as
a leader in the field who has made a major
impact on the treatment of homosexuals and
the work of gay therapists.
Schaffner’s world is small now—confined
by illness and age to his art-filled home overlooking New York’s Central Park. Comfortably ensconced on a small couch in his living
room—where a phone, calendar, paper and
pens, and a glass of cranberry juice are within easy reach—he still sees two patients and
graciously welcomes visitors to the thirdfloor apartment in which he has lived for 63
years. Clad in a pale green cotton robe and
pajamas, he is eager, after a moment’s hesita24

tion (born of a lifelong need for caution),
to talk about his life.
For most of his 97 years, Bertram Schaffner felt compelled to lead a closeted life,
never—until his 60s—voluntarily revealing
that he is gay. The self-imposed isolation and
admitted internalized homophobia led him
to the field of psychotherapy with the desire
to improve the lives of other gay people.
The Erie, Pa., native knew before entering
grade school that he was gay. “Somewhere
between the ages of 3 and 5,” he began to
think of himself as homosexual and remembers being very comfortable with his feelings
for other boys. In an interview with psychotherapist Stephen Goldman (“The Difficulty of Being a Gay Psychoanalyst during
the Last 50 Years” in the 1995 book Disorienting Sexuality), Schaffner described his feelings: “I never thought of it as pathological.
Rather, I always felt my feelings to be natural,
‘normal,’ and an intrinsic part of me.”
Normal, that is, until the parents of a

COURTESY OF BERTRAM SCHAFFNER

ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS

By Susan Cousins Breen

Born in 1912, just after Woodrow Wilson was
elected president, Bertram Schaffner grew up
haunted by internalized homophobia. He transferred from Harvard to Swarthmore in 1929,
thinking that being at a coed college might “cure”
his homosexuality. Schaffner later became a
psychiatrist, mentor to other gay therapists,
and an avid collector of East Indian art.
As an Army lieutenant during World War II,
Schaffner screened draftees for psychiatric
fitness, appointing himself protector and
caretaker of other young gay men faced with
military service.
swarthmore college bulletin

playmate found notes that their son and
Schaffner had exchanged about their interest
in sex. “His parents forbade us to ever see
each other again,” Schaffner says, “and I lost
a friend forever.”
“When my parents learned of my activities,” he explained to Goldman, “I was made
to feel wicked. I grew up feeling that I was
someone to be avoided. I became fearful of
being exposed as gay.” Although his father
came to accept his son’s sexual orientation in
the latter part of his life, his mother—living
at a time when mothers were blamed for
their sons’ homosexuality—was “morally
shocked” and never fully accepted his sexual
orientation.
“My isolation [as a child] was compounded by the fact that I was promoted three
years ahead of my age group,” Schaffner says,
“and sat in classes with 12-year-old children
who would have nothing to do with a boy of
only nine.” Later, as a freshman at Harvard,
the age difference still set him apart from the
other students, and the rejection intensified
when fellow students began to suspect that
he was gay. Convinced that he could “cure”
his homosexuality at a coed institution,
Schaffner transferred to Swarthmore in his
sophomore year. He found the College to be
friendly and warm, but he socialized little for
fear of revealing his homosexuality.
One encounter at the College, however,
changed his life. During his junior year, President Frank Aydelotte invited him to a tea
honoring Rhodes Scholars and introduced
him to a Central American physician who
was working at a nearby pharmaceutical
firm. Not only did the physician suggest that
the English literature and philosophy major
would make an excellent doctor, but the
two—mentor and student—fell in love and
had a relationship that lasted until the older
man returned to his homeland two years
later. “The cure did not take,” Schaffner
remarks ruefully.
As a young physician, Schaffner had his
first opportunity to help other gay men when
he was drafted into the Army in October
1940. He feared being an enlisted man. “I did
not know how I would manage living so
close to other men,” he says. “Would I be
accepted?” However by the time he was
called to active duty upon completion of his

october 2009

residency in April 1941, Army regulations
had changed so that enlistees with medical
degrees automatically entered as officers.
Lt. Schaffner, assigned to a base on Governor’s Island in New York Harbor, had the
task of screening draftees for psychiatric fitness and appointed himself protector and
caretaker of other young gay men faced with
military service. It was clear, he recalls, that
the Army wanted homosexuals identified
and excluded from military service. “If a gay
draftee was reluctant to serve in the army,”
he says of the 60-some recruits that he examined each day, “or if I did not feel confident
in his ability to do so, I would find a way to
disqualify him from active duty without
revealing his homosexuality. Also, when I
encountered gay men who specifically
wished to serve in the Army, I helped them
to achieve that goal.”
After World War II, Schaffner found
his homosexuality to be “a major, catastrophic liability” as he pursued his goal of becoming a psychotherapist. Being openly gay in
the 1940s, Schaffner recalls, would have
made returning to medical school impossible; during his medical training at Johns
Hopkins University, he “lived in constant terror of my homosexuality being discovered.”
(At the time, the American Psychiatric Association officially classified homosexuality as a
mental illness.) In 1949—after being refused
admission to both the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and the Columbia Psychoanalytic Institute because of his sexual orientation—he was accepted into the new, unorthodox William Alanson White Institute of
Psychoanalysis where he studied under Ralph
Crowley, Erich Fromm, and Frieda FrommReichmann.
Schaffner “yearned to be at peace with my
own gay life and to help others do the same,”
and so he dedicated his professional life to
that purpose. Haunted by internalized
homophobia, he was certain that if he
revealed his sexual orientation and built a life
with a male partner he would be ostracized
socially and professionally. And in fact, early
in his career, fellow psychotherapists who
suspected he was gay or objected to his treating homosexuals often tended to shun him.
Schaffner counseled his patients on dealing
with society and worked to improve the self-

esteem of both gay patients and other gay
therapists. His compassion and commitment
inspired several generations of psychoanalysts, according to Goldman, and prompted
Schaffner to be founding chairman of the
Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry’s
Committee on Human Sexuality; a member
of the United Nation’s Expert Committee for
Mental Health from 1948–1960; president of
the Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists of New
York in 1980; and—at age 82—the first
openly gay supervising analyst for the
William Alanson White Institute in 1994.
FROM THE ONSET OF THE AIDS EPIDEMIC,
Schaffner, although not infected himself, was
on the front lines, caring for gay men and
remaining in the forefront of psychiatrists
dealing openly with gay and lesbian issues. In
1985, he and colleague Stuart Nichols established bi-weekly support groups for Manhattan physicians with HIV/AIDS; one such
group continues to meet to this day in
Schaffner’s apartment.
News of Schaffner’s approach to therapy—making all of his patients feel accepted
and instilling in them the hope of leading a
fulfilled life—attracted patients. Colleagues
began sending gay patients to him, realizing
the potential importance of those patients
having a gay therapist. As his career progressed, Schaffner came to be recognized not
only as a pioneer in treating homosexual
patients but as a leading practitioner in his
field, irrespective of sexual orientation.
Today, his influence extends well beyond
national borders.
Schaffner is hesitant to say that he has
found a satisfying answer to the question of
what makes a person gay and how to live as a
gay man. Asked if anything has really
changed for homosexuals in the last 60 years,
he pauses—disappointment clouding his
bespeckled, translucent face—before
responding: “Much has changed, but fundamentally it’s still much the same.” Then,
reflecting on his observation, he mentions
that the American Psychiatric Association’s
declassification, in 1973, of homosexuality as
a mental illness was a positive change and
that the present movement toward gay marriage is a welcome sign of progress. Today, he
continues to look forward to even wider
acceptance of gay people in society.
25

“I WANTED TO BE IN AN URBAN SCHOOL WHERE THE KIDS NEEDED MY ATTENTION,” SAYS TEACHER SARA POSEY ’04.
BUT IT WASN’T AN EASY START FOR HER OR THE AMBITIOUS NEW CHESTER UPLAND SCHOOL OF THE ARTS.

Sara Posey (right) teaches first grade at the new artsbased school in Chester, Pa., started by Associate
Professor of Music John Alston (above).

IT’s GeTTing BeTteR
aLL The

ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS / INSET: JEFFREY LOTT

By Jeffrey Lott

IT COULDN’T GET MUCH WORSE.
A few weeks into her new job teaching first grade at the Chester
Upland School of the Arts (CUSA) in fall 2008, Sara Posey could
barely force herself to drive to work. “I felt ill, physically ill. I thought
the whole school project that I was so hopeful about and so passionate about was turning into a disaster,” she told me months later. It
didn’t turn out to be a disaster, but neither was it easy for Posey, who
cares deeply about her teaching.
Posey wasn’t some green first-year teacher. After student teaching
while at Swarthmore (where she was a music and education major
and vocal performer), Posey taught first and second grade for four
years at The School in Rose Valley, a private elementary school near
Media, Pa. But she had jumped at the chance to work at CUSA during its inaugural year. The school is the brainchild of John Alston,
associate professor of music at the College and founder of the
Chester Children’s Chorus (CCC). The school—housed in an old but
serviceable four-story school building in the heart of Chester, Pa.—
was starting its first year with students in pre-kindergarten through
grade two.
“I knew I would miss my kids at Rose Valley,” Posey said, “but they
ultimately would do fine without me. I wanted to be in an urban
school where the kids needed my attention. Rose Valley’s a child-centered school with a project-based curriculum, integrated across subject areas—just the sort of approach that the School of the Arts was
promising. People have said that won’t work for inner city kids, but I
can’t believe that’s true.”
The challenges proved to be greater than she imagined—both in
and beyond her sunny second-floor classroom. Although a handful of
her 20 students could read simple words and sentences, more than
half entered first grade not yet knowing their letters. By late September, the predictable chaos of the first day of school—the day that
Posey learned that her students had no experience sitting in a circle
on a classroom rug—had hardly abated.
“My kids were out of control—they couldn’t listen to each other,”
she remembers of those weeks in late September when she struggled
to make herself go to work. “My classroom assistant had quit, and
there was no replacement. I didn’t understand what was happening,
and I couldn’t go to my boss [the principal] for help, because it
turned out she didn’t know what was happening either. So I felt ill,
and I had to tell myself: ‘Okay, you made it to work. You drove all the
way here. Good job. Now you just have to make it until [the kids go
to] fine arts. Good. It’s 10:30. Congratulations! Now you have to get
from lunch to recess. Can you do it? Good. Another day. Now you get
to drive home, and you made it, see? You didn’t give up.’”
THE CHESTER UPLAND SCHOOL OF THE ARTS—which opened for its
second year last month with grades pre-K through three—exists
because, like Sara Posey, a whole lot of people didn’t give up. An
unusual public-private partnership that is neither independent nor
october 2009

time

charter school, CUSA began in the imagination of Alston, who
founded the Chester Children’s Chorus 15 years ago (see July 2009
Bulletin). Alston saw that the chorus was able to reach a small number of Chester’s children for just a few hours a week. Its Summer
Learning Program provided those same children with an intensive
five-week artistic and academic experience—but there was a deeper
need across Chester for innovative approaches to education.
Chester is the poorest city in Pennsylvania. Nearly 30 percent of its
36,000 residents live below the federal poverty line, currently $22,050
for a family of four. After years of declining enrollment and fiscal
problems, its public school system, the Chester Upland School District, was taken over in 1994 by the state, which placed several
Chester schools under contract with the for-profit Edison Schools in
an effort to improve test scores. According to Education.com: “After a
number of years, it was determined that Edison was not successful in
turning the district around. A number of incidents, including an allegation of sexual misconduct on the part of an Edison employee, and
policies such as not allowing students to bring books home, led to the
state’s decision to break its contract with Edison.”
Despite the fact that it annually spends about the same amount
per pupil as the highly rated Wallingford-Swarthmore School District—it continues to score at the very bottom of the state’s rankings.
In 2008, just 11 percent of Chester Upland’s high-school juniors were
at or above grade-level proficiency in reading and just 3 percent
reached proficiency in math.
In 2004, Alston recruited a small group of educators, community
leaders, and other professionals to help him open a new kind of
school in Chester—with the shoot-for-the-stars goal of “preparing
Chester students to enter the finest colleges and universities in America.” The proposed school would be arts-intensive, modeled after
such successful projects as the 45-year-old Harlem School of the Arts.
The group investigated forming a tuition-free independent school or
a charter school and found that the former would require daunting
sums of money and the latter was fraught with political problems
within the school district, where more than half of elementary school
students now attend charter schools, draining children and dollars
from the traditional public schools. Eventually, the group, with Maurice Eldridge ’61 as chair and Alston as president, formed The Chester Fund for Education and the Arts, a nonprofit corporation that
sought a new kind of relationship with the Chester Upland district.
The solution—reached only after new district superintendent Gregory Thornton was hired in 2007—was an unusual public-private
partnership. CUSA is a public school housed in a district-owned
building just two blocks from Chester High School. Children are
admitted to the school by lottery on the basis of parental interest. The
school’s staff members are district employees, and CUSA receives the
same per-pupil funding as any other public school in the district.
But The Chester Fund, through a memorandum of understanding
that Thornton enthusiastically endorsed, provides additional funding
27

that makes possible smaller class sizes (20 instead of 30 children); an
assistant teacher in each classroom; up-to-date instructional technology such as computers and smart boards; and an enhanced arts program that includes music, dance, and visual arts instruction. An
extended day program, mandatory for second grade and above, offers
small-group tutoring, academic enrichment activities, and specialized
arts instruction leading to performance opportunities.
After five years of work and planning—and several frustrating
trips down blind alleys—CUSA opened in fall 2008 with 200 students
in two sections each of five grades (pre-K3, pre-K4, K, one, and two).
Opening day was bright and sunny, and Alston was there, beaming
and leading all the students in song. Superintendent Thornton and
new principal Corinne Ryan were also on hand. It was a dream come
true—almost.
I SPENT A TUESDAY AFTERNOON IN EARLY November in Posey’s classroom. After the children left for the day, Posey said: “There are things
that are going better all the time—a lot is going better. But there are
still some things that aren’t great.” There had been the inevitable tensions with the school district that attend the start-up of a new kind of
public-private model, and Principal Ryan had departed. An interim
principal had been named—not a bad change, to Posey’s mind.
(Wendy Emrich, managing director of The Chester Fund, said
later: “Everyone involved with the principal selection did the best job
they could, but as the weeks and months went by, it just didn’t seem

In September, a handful of

Posey’s

more about music, they experienced an initial waning in their beliefs
about their musical competence, and then later a resurgence of this
music self-efficacy, all the while exhibiting greater confidence and
independence in and out of the choir. Posey and Renninger conclude
that “arts-based programs can be organized to provide a complex of developmental
opportunities for children...” and that the
“goals and expectations of the program
[clearly state] that
achievement will be
hard and also that
[chorus members] can
and are expected to
achieve. This programming provides participants with the kind of
counter narrative that
promotes identities of
achievement and
underlies the social
mission of the CCC.”

20 students could read simple words and sentences,

but more than half had entered first grade not yet knowing their letters.
to be a good match for the school or for the candidate.” In spring, a
search was undertaken for a new head of school for fall 2009, resulting in the appointment of new principal Janet Baldwin.)
Although a new classroom assistant had been hired in late October, Posey had gone weeks without one, and she was visibly tired.
We sat on little first-grade chairs, our knees nearly touching our
chins, as she showed me a student’s writing folder, citing “concrete
improvement.” She was teaching the children to write down the
sounds they hear when they pronounce a word: “Say ‘remember’ and
write down the sounds that you hear.” Sometimes what they wrote
actually looked like “remember,” and Posey saw progress in that.
As a Swarthmore student and after college, Posey had spent many
hours with John Alston’s Chester Children’s Chorus, helping out at
rehearsals during the school year and working as a counselor at the
chorus’s Summer Learning Program. As he is for many at the College
and in Chester, Alston has been an inspiration to Posey.
In 2002–2003, Posey teamed up with Professor of Educational
Studies Ann Renninger and others to design and run a research project to investigate children’s feelings of self-efficacy and learning in the
CCC. They learned through a series of interviews and sight-reading
assessments that chorus members were not only gaining musical
knowledge but also social skills and habits of learning. The kids—
especially the older ones who had been in the chorus for several
years—were learning how to think like musicians. As they learned
28

THERE’S GROWING EVIDENCE THAT COGNITIVE functions and learning
can be improved by arts study. In a Dana Foundation study released
in 2008, researchers from seven universities examined the question:
“Are smart people drawn to the arts, or does arts training make people smarter?” Among the researchers’ findings were:
• An interest in a performing art leads to a high state of motivation
that produces the sustained attention necessary to improve performance and the training of attention that leads to improvement
in other domains of cognition.
• Specific links exist between high levels of music training and the
ability to manipulate information in both working and long-term
memory; these links extend beyond the domain of music training.
• Correlations exist between music training and both reading
acquisition and sequence learning. One of the central predictors
of early literacy, phonological awareness, is correlated with both
music training and the development of a specific brain pathway.
• Learning to dance by effective observation is closely related to
learning by physical practice, both in the level of achievement and
also the neural substrates that support the organization of complex actions. Effective observational learning may transfer to other
cognitive skills.
According to a cautiously optimistic summary written by Michael
Gazzaniga, director of the Sage Center for the Study of Mind at the
University of California–Santa Barbara, who oversaw the Dana Conswarthmore college bulletin

A study last year confirmed for the first time that the brains of low-income
kids function differently from the brains of high-income kids.

JEFFREY LOTT

sortium research,
“The preliminary
conclusions we have
reached may soon
lead to trustworthy
assumptions about
the impact of arts
study on the brain.”
A significant portion of the report
focuses on emerging
neuroscientific evidence of correlations
between arts study
and cognition.
Although Gazzaniga
emphasizes the differences between
correlation and causation—and, further,
between “weak” and
“strong” evidence of
each—the report
concludes that with
certain kinds of arts
training, especially in
music and dance,
“cognitive improvements can be made to specific mental capacities such as geometric
reasoning; that specific pathways in the brain can be identified and
potentially changed during training; that sometimes it is not structural brain changes but rather changes in cognitive strategy that help
solve a problem; and that early targeted music training may lead to
better cognition through an as yet unknown neural mechanism.”
BUT AS INSPIRED AND PREPARED AS POSEY WAS, she said she had a lot to
learn about the first-graders in her CUSA classroom. The distance
between Swarthmore and Chester—or between The School at Rose
Valley and CUSA—is very few miles but almost impossible to fathom
in other dimensions, and it weighs on her. “I don’t know,” she said. “I
worked with the choir, and I hear John’s voice saying, ‘It’s just down
the road. It’s just 10 minutes.’ But there’s no comparison between the
preparation for school that first-graders have here [in Chester] and
the preparation they have in Swarthmore. But there are developmental things that are the same for every child. I’m very sensitive about
framing this community in terms of deficit. It comes off as snobbish
and classist and maybe even racist. People make a lot of assumptions
about children based on race and class.”
According to Kids Count, the student population of Chester
Upland schools is 80 percent black—but it’s poverty in Chester that
seems to have a more significant effect on school readiness. A study
last year by neuroscientists at the University of California–Berkeley
october 2009

confirmed for the first time that the brains of low-income kids
function differently from the brains of high-income kids. Nineand 10-year-old children differing only in socioeconomic status
(SES) were found to have detectable differences in the response of
their prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that is critical for problem solving and creativity. It had already been established that children from resource-poor environments have more trouble with the
kinds of behavioral control that the prefrontal cortex is involved in
regulating, but the new study found clear functional differences
among low SES kids.
“It’s a wake-up call,” said Robert Knight, director of the Helen
Wills Neuroscience Institute and the School of Public Health at
Berkeley. “It’s not just that these kids are poor and more likely to have
health problems, but they might actually not be getting full brain
development from the stressful and relatively impoverished environment associated with low socioeconomic status: fewer books, less
reading, fewer games, fewer visits to museums.”
Pediatrician and psychobiologist Thomas Boyce, who co-authored
the study with cognitive psychologist Mark Kishiyama, noted that
previous studies have shown that, by age 4, children from poor families hear 30 million fewer words than do kids from middle-class families. “In work that we and others have done,” Boyce explained, “it
really looks like something as simple and easily done as talking to
your kids” can boost prefrontal cortex performance.
THIRTY MILLION WORDS? REMEMBER HOW MANY questions 3- and 4year-olds ask? And if those questions are responded to seriously, children learn to listen too. “Listening is a big thing,” Posey explained,
thinking about the school day that had just ended when I next visited
CUSA, in February. “At Rose Valley, I could read almost anything and
hold the children’s attention. Here, I have to choose more carefully
what I read aloud. And then there’s the pouting.”
I had noticed this problem too. When a few of the children didn’t
get their way—sometimes on matters that seemed wholly inconsequential—there often ensued major pouting and withdrawal from
the group. Sometimes the child was angry, sometimes there were
tears, but more often it was a demonstration of body language and
facial contortions that said, “I’ve been hurt by this disappointment,
and I’m not going to participate any more.” To the point, Posey told
me, that this behavior was really holding them back.
“So I developed a little lesson on pouting,” she said. “I set goals for
each of the children. Many of my goals are behavioral—lining up, listening, quieting down. We’re trying to teach how to learn, not to
retreat, but to stay engaged. That’s one way I measure success.”
Other measures are more concrete and bureaucratic. As in all
schools these days, there is lots of testing at CUSA. Posey is philosophical about standardized measurements of the students’—and the
school’s—progress. (And, indirectly, her efficacy as a teacher.) The
curriculum for each subject in each grade is mandated by the district,
and teachers are expected to use the materials provided—what Posey
calls “boxed curricula”—such as “Everyday Math” or “Storytown.”
Teachers may create their own lessons or projects, but they must
29

think—and document—how each project is intended to achieve district and state standards. They must also reach certain curricular
milestones at set times during the school year, before testing occurs.
Lisa Smulyan ’76, professor of educational studies and associate
provost of the College, who volunteered in Posey’s classroom last
spring, said that the advantage of packaged curricula is that “they put
it all in one package for you, and they sequence it in a way that seems
to reflect what we know about kids’ learning.” But, she said, it’s difficult for the excellent, handpicked teachers such as those at CUSA to
create a rich, arts-integrated environment and still meet the curricu-

planned for right after lunch, had been postponed to last period of
the day. “Cranky time,” said Posey, making another face. (Like most
good first-grade teachers, her face communicates almost as powerfully as her voice.)
Posey spent a week preparing the children for the musical experience. They learned about how their ears work and how sound is one
of their senses. They learned the three important ways that vibrations
create sound and music in their ears—the shaped air of voices and
wind instruments, the induced vibration of strings, and the deliberate crash of percussion. Making a quizzical face this time, Posey asked

Research shows links exist between high levels of music training and the ability
to manipulate information in both working and long-term memory.
lum demands of the district.
“There’s no time in the teachers’ day in this country to do that
kind of work,” Smulyan said. “The kind of shared thinking and planning that would allow teachers to take more control over the canned
curricula takes time. I think it’s a huge problem everywhere—it prevents teachers from collaborating.”
The school day had been busy and complicated. I followed Posey
and her class into the CUSA computer room, which was bursting
with new Macintosh machines. The computer time was in lieu of
outdoor recess on a bitterly cold day, and the first-graders loved it—
a Mac for each of them, more evidence of The Chester Fund’s
enhancements of the CUSA experience. Later, accompanied by
Posey’s new teaching assistant, Michelle Freeman, I walked with
about half of Posey’s class to the dance studio, where full-length mirrors, a “sprung” floor, and a great sound system give the school’s fulltime dance instructor, Melisa Putz, the space and tools she needs to
teach groups of up to 20 children. There’s also a well-equipped art
room and a large music room—an overall set of arts facilities that
many public elementary schools in the country, and none in Chester,
can boast.
Still, as Smulyan points out (and Posey confirms), there’s little
time for the arts teachers to interact with the classroom teachers to
plan together. CUSA offers a rich program, but can it live up to The
Chester Fund’s idealistic description of a school “where all children
will sing, dance, and do visual arts every week as integral parts of the
academic curriculum and as separate subjects?”
AGAIN, POSEY DIDN’T GIVE UP. NO LONGER ILL, NO LONGER FORCING
herself to drive to work, she’s beginning to see what CUSA is and
what it can become. In late March, she tells me there’s a science unit
coming up in Pearson Science, the boxed curriculum, about sound.
The lesson teaches the children that sound is actually a vibration in
the air. So is music, Posey reasons, and off she goes.
On April 16, she and music teacher Helen Hagerty collaborated to
team-teach the penultimate lesson in a science unit. It’s not in the
district-supplied box; in fact, it’s way outside the box. I was invited,
but when I got there, Posey said, frowning, there’s “sort of a problem.” Hagerty’s regular second-floor music room had been commandeered by district officials for a VIP event. So the lesson, which was
30

the children, “What’s the
difference between noise
and music?” It’s a pretty
big question for first
graders, but after a few
hands were raised, they
arrived at the idea that
music is organized
noise. Then it was time
for direct experience
with musical instruments that make sound in these ways.
Her music room off limits, Hagerty had improvised in CUSA’s
“gym,” a large carpeted room in the basement. She created stations
around the room, each representing a different kind of sound production, each with a half-dozen instruments for the children to
experiment with. Most were sturdy enough for first-grade hands, but
a few seemed risky, like Hagerty’s own acoustic guitar and her homemade dulcimer. But she said, “I trust you to take good care of these.”
And the children did.
Each child—and here was the essence of the science/art lesson—
was armed with a clip board and worksheet that asked them to
record what they found at each station. What kind of instrument was
it? How was its sound produced? What vibrates? How can you change
the sound? As the children rushed from instrument to instrument,
the teachers and I—a former elementary-school art teacher caught
up in the excitement—kept bringing them back to the questions.
Since Newton, this has been the scientific method: What do I sense?
How did it happen? What does it mean?
To wrap the science unit up, the children made their own musical
instruments. Cigar boxes, rubber bands, lentils and beans, cans, paper
towel tubes, and other recycled materials were fashioned into homemade wind, string, and percussion instruments. At the CUSA spring
concert, the first-grade scientists got to play their own instruments in
the “orchestra.”
View a video of Professor John Alston talking about starting the
Chester Upland School of the Arts at http://bit.ly/alston_cusa.
Learn more about The Chester Fund and CUSA at
www.thechesterfund.org.
swarthmore college bulletin

JEFFREY LOTT

A FEW WEEKS LATER, with
the end of CUSA’S first
year in sight, Posey came
to the College (“it’s just
down the road, just 10
minutes”) to speak with
Thom Whitman’s [’82]
class Music, Learning,
and Arts Integration.
Comparing her experience at Rose Valley, where
many of the students had
observed, to CUSA, she
said, “At Rose Valley, you
have hardly any constraints. You know what
you’re responsible for
teaching, but you can create anything that is interesting to you and to your
students that addresses
these standards.” She
showed video of A Powerful Potion, an opera written by first- and secondgrade Rose Valley students in collaboration
with the music and art
teachers. “Teachers need
to justify and explain
when they do such
things,” Posey says. “But
this project, centered on
the study of opera, had
components of language

arts, music, art, social skills—even math.”
When she talked about CUSA, her frustrations were clear. Her
kids weren’t prepared for first grade. The boxed curricula are limiting. And, at the heart of the matter, there’s not enough time to collaborate, to integrate the arts into her teaching. She had hoped for a

Without

taught them enough. There were still people who couldn’t read well
enough, who couldn’t listen well enough. I felt really negative. But
now that it’s truly warm, I can say, ‘Okay, we’ll make it.” She seems
happy and confident, seasoned by the year behind her.
But it won’t be easy. Posey has learned that Michelle Freeman, her
“terrific, awesome” classroom assistant who has been her partner
since October, has just gone on maternity leave earlier than expected.
There’s testing coming up, and the kids will be “testing and testy”
because Freeman is not there. “They get so grumpy when their
worlds are disrupted. Really, really emotional,” Posey says. “It sounds
more judgmental than I mean it, but many of these kids don’t get
what they need emotionally. When babies and preschoolers and primary kids get the emotional support they need, they begin to act in a
more emotionally mature way.”
“Do you feel a sense of accomplishment about this year?” I ask.
Here’s where Posey described the problems with the first principal—
about barely being able to drive to work and making it through the
day one period at a time. But then she says “yes.”
“When did things start to get better for you?”
The turning point was a teacher-training session with a “really
good speaker who said to focus on one thing, not to feel like you have
to be excellent at everything. I wasn’t a first-year teacher, but obviously in many ways I was, because I hadn’t worked in an inner city
public school. Just having her say that the ‘good teachers of kids in
poverty don’t say, Well it should be this way and it should be that way.
The good teachers of kids in poverty say, This is what we have. Let’s
do something.’ That was freeing. It made me feel less emotional and
ill to feel like, okay, this is what it is and we’re going to move forward.”
The teaching staff at CUSA have been “awesome, committed, passionate, devoted to the children. I have so much respect for them.
Without that team, I personally wouldn't have made it, and the
school certainly wouldn't have made it,” Posey says.
She also feels very supported by The Chester Fund. “Without that,
we wouldn’t have arts. We wouldn’t have assistants. Our classes would
be 30 instead of 20. We wouldn’t have had smart boards. I went to
CUSA because I wanted to do arts and to be in a place that would
support me in treating children like people. I felt pretty secure, knowing John Alston as well as I do, that the children would be respected
and that we would be striving for the best in education.”

The Chester Fund, “we wouldn’t have arts.

We

Our classes would be 30 instead of 20,”
better-defined commitment to being an arts-based school. But there
are good things too. The families of her students have been “wonderful, extremely helpful and supportive.” And every one of the kids who
didn’t know his or her letters in September is now reading.
We meet again two weeks later. Posey has the worn-out look that
teachers get in the spring, as they count down to the end of school,
now just six weeks away. “The warm weather makes a big difference
in how psychically ready I am for it to be over. That false spring in
March was hard. It felt like all of a sudden it was spring, but I hadn’t
october 2009

wouldn’t have assistants.

Posey

says.

Sara Posey began her second year of teaching at CUSA on Sept. 8. “The
school year has started beautifully,” she reports. “Most of my kids went
to kindergarten here, and I keep thanking the kindergarten teachers for
preparing them so well. Many of them are reading already.”
By adding a new grade level each year, CUSA expects to be a pre-K3
through grade eight school by 2014. To date, The Chester Fund, an independent nonprofit unrelated to Swarthmore College, has raised more
than $3 million in support of the school. And the Chester Upland School
district hired two new student-support staff members for CUSA this fall.
31

NOW THAT'S

INTERTAINMENT!
TELEVISION IS SO 20TH CENTURY!
THE ADVENT OF INTERNET VIDEO

Altar Egos

CHANNELS FOR SEND-UP ACTS

WILSON HALL ’95 AND
KRISTER JOHNSON ’95 SPREAD
THE WORD AS A RELIGIOUS COMIC
SINGING DUO.

SUCH AS GOD'S POTTERY AND

by Sara Shay ’92

THE GREGORY BROTHERS, EACH

Gideon Lamb is perched on a stool,
wide-eyed and smiling, a guitar resting on
his lap. His bright orange T-shirt reads “Virginity Rocks!” and his slicked-down bangs
are an inch too short. To his left sits Jeremiah
Smallchild, feet encased in white socks and
leather sandals. He addresses the audience:
“If you’ve brought your partici-pants, put
’em on!”
Gideon starts strumming the guitar and
bobbing his head as Jeremiah launches into
one of the pair’s most popular songs, “The
Pants Come Off When the Ring Goes On,”
an anthem about a nubile “Christian princess,” her hot quarterback boyfriend, and
their decision to wait until their wedding
night to jump into bed.
Jeremiah and Gideon, also known as
God’s Pottery, are a Christian acoustic duo
whose catchy songs are meant to teach the
youth of America how to navigate the tricky
waters of temptation. Their playlist includes
“Jesus, I Need a Drink,” “Brand New Start
with Christ,” and “Team Jesus.”
But far, far offstage, Jeremiah is really Wilson Hall ’95 and Gideon is Krister Johnson
’95—information they don’t let slip very
often, and never while performing. As God’s
Pottery, they’ve toured the United States and
performed abroad, and in summer 2008 they
appeared on NBC’s Last Comic Standing.
This September, they published their first
book, What Would God’s Pottery Do? The
Ultimate Guide to Surviving Your Teens
and/or Being Successful!

HAS OPENED ENTIRELY NEW

OF WHICH OFFERS ITS OWN
TAKE ON THE MUSIC, MEDIA,
AND MORES OF OUR DAY.

32

Hall and Johnson inhabit their characters
so thoroughly that audiences aren’t always
completely sure how much is an act. On their
God’s Pottery blog, reactions to their elimination from Last Comic Standing—and there
were plenty—represented a mix of “haters”
(“You were not even remotely funny.”);
Christians who either enjoy them (“We loved
that you were able to bring God’s truth to so
many …”) or find them insulting (“I, for
one, am tired of people mocking my God for
a laugh.”); people who suspect that something’s up (“Are you guys really Christian?”);
and flat-out fans (“I am completely bummed
out that you got eliminated tonight … especially when you killed it!!”).
While they do not, in fact, subscribe to
the beliefs that their alter egos so earnestly
espouse, Johnson and Hall are not out to
bash religion. “We have never had any sort of
real agenda,” says Johnson. “The truth is,
we’re trying to be funny and funny in a
smart way…. A lot of evangelicals are big
fans. Certainly there are people who are
offended, but a lot of them feel that we are
doing God’s work even in spite of ourselves
because we’re talking about Jesus. Their attitude is, in whatever way and in whatever
context you can get people thinking and talking about Jesus, that’s a victory.”
Despite their spot-on parody, neither was
raised among the Jeremiahs and Gideons of
the world, though Hall did go to church
every Sunday. “It was and is a very liberal
church,” he says. “It wasn’t a very strict
Christian upbringing.”
Johnson came at religion from a different
angle. “I grew up with an informed respect
for religion and the Bible, without any of the
attendant beliefs,” he says. At Swarthmore, he
majored in religion and sociology/anthropology. “The reason I liked those
two majors together was that in some ways I
was interested in the dogmatic aspect of religion butting up against the realities of daily
existence,” he says. “That’s kind of the interswarthmore college bulletin

esting paradox that we’re playing with and
investigating. What makes a lot of these
[Christian] bands ripe for satire is that they
try to make these completely impractical
ideas cool.”
Now they’ve expanded on those impractical ideas to fill a self-help book. What Would
God’s Pottery Do? purports to offer faithbased insight on tough teen topics such as
drugs and alcohol, peer pressure, caring for
the planet, and “pubescence,” all written
from the perspective of Jeremiah and
Gideon. For example, on avoiding drug
users: “You can usually spot marijuana
smokers by their jean jackets, maybe with a
rock band scarf sewn onto the back panel.
Marijuana smokers laugh a lot, but inside
they are crying.” On sexuality: “Penis: It’s not
a dirty word! However, it is a word that
should never be spoken aloud.” And on technology: “The Internet is not inherently ‘good’
or ‘evil.’ It is a tool that can be used for either
purpose, like a gun, or the Koran.”

Hall and Johnson inhabit their
characters so thoroughly that
audiences aren’t always completely
sure how much is an act.

ABOUT 10 YEARS AGO, JOHNSON AND HALL,
aspiring actors who had regular office jobs in
New York, started exploring different characters and entertaining ideas. “Most of it was
absolutely for our own amusement,” says
Johnson. “There were certain one-off character things we would do at these small comedy
shows, and we started drifting toward the
musical aspect of coming up with something
funny. We started coming up with fake band
names and fake band genres.” Conservation
Conversation, for example, was conceived as
an eco-friendly two-man drumming circle,
and 3way (pronounced “Freeway”) was a
raunchy hip-hop group with unprintable
song titles.
They also created a pair of characters for
comedy shows in New York who weren’t
Christian and weren’t Jeremiah and Gideon
“but were pretty unctuous in the same way,”
says Johnson.
“It felt like we had something,” says Hall.
But what, exactly? That became clearer
Wilson Hall (left) and Krister Johnson made it to
the finals of the 2008 season of Last Comic Standing
with their ingenuous Christian characters, Jeremiah
Smallchild and Gideon Lamb. Their book, What Would
God's Pottery Do? The Ultimate Guide to Surviving
Your Teens and/or Being Successful! was published in
September.
© SETH OLENICK

october 2009

33

when they separately saw the same ad for a
Christian music compendium late one night
in spring 2003 and both came up with the
idea of forming a Christian acoustic duo.
They started writing song titles (such as
“Christmas Is About the Presence”), but this
time the perfect name for their group eluded
them. It was a fellow comedian who suggested God’s Pottery. “In my head I wanted
something that was indicative enough and
sounded enough like it was in the genre,” says
Johnson. “The truth is that these real Christian bands would never use the name God in
their group names. I thought it was a good
combination of letting people know but still
enough in the gray area that it left it kind of
intriguing.”
Hall vacationed in Italy that summer, and
after what he describes as a particularly satisfying dinner, he was moved to write opening
lines to go with one of their titles, “The Pants
Come Off…” “I had chords, lyrics, with two
hand-bells,” he says. “It was a very inspired
moment. I remember writing in my notebook, ‘This is our next show. This is how we
make our money.’” Says Johnson: “A great
combination of idealism and cynicism all
wrapped up.”
God’s Pottery evolved significantly after
Hall and Johnson met Olivia Wingate, a
British talent agent based in New York, who
spotted them in 2005 at an alternative comedy showcase in the East Village. She offered
to become their manager. “They made an

instant impression,” she wrote in an e-mail
message, “and I thought that they needed a
larger exposure.”
Wingate got them a gig recording their
songs for an episode of the British television
comedy series The World Stands Up. She also
encouraged them to flesh out their material
and their characters to sustain an hour-long
act, which they took to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world’s largest arts festival, in
the summer of 2006. Their originality scored
points with the international audience, and
they were nominated for the coveted Best
Newcomer award.
Back home they caught the attention of a
co-executive producer of Last Comic Standing, who invited them to audition for the
show’s 2008 season. They figured it was a
joke. “We thought they wanted us to audition
to make fun of us,” says Hall. “We said it’s a
shame we’ll never have a shot.”
During their run on the show, Johnson
and Hall remained in character whenever the
cameras were rolling, which didn’t always sit
well with their more traditional stand-up
competitors. “We were obviously kind of an
oddity,” says Johnson. “We got to play by a
different set of rules, and although some
were fine with it, some resented it. And I
understand it. We got to ham it up whenever
we wanted, and they were forced to play
along or be edited out.”
“We are a duo, so we’re automatically different,” says Hall. “People would say, ‘It’s not

POTTERY ADVICE FOR
SWARTHMORE STUDENTS

proper time for your midterms
once you start having babies.

Jeremiah Smallchild and Gideon
Lamb eagerly offered today’s
Swarthmore students advice about
living a clean, chaste life.

Q: Even if they maintain their virginity, college students are going
to want to date. Can you suggest
some activities that can help them
avoid being overcome by their desires while on a date?
Gideon: There are literally almost a
dozen ways you can distract yourself from your sexual desires when
dating. We cover this topic pretty
extensively in our book—some of
the activities a young couple on a
date can do include talking to each
other about past temptation and
how you overcame it …
Jeremiah: You can make butter

Q: Why is it important to maintain
your virginity as a college student?
Jeremiah: It’s actually not important to maintain your virginity as a
college student. It’s just important
to maintain your virginity until
you’re married!
Gideon: So if you want to get
married before you go to college,
that’s fine. Just be warned that you
may have difficulty setting aside
34

fair, I’m on my own.’ And with the character
aspect, we never really had to expose anything of ourselves.”
They made it to the finals, though they
were eliminated early. Johnson and Hall say
their turn on Last Comic Standing was the
biggest thing that has yet happened to them,
but they find it much more satisfying to
develop hour-long shows that are a piece of
theater. “That sounds kind of precious,” says
Hall, “but it allows us to put together everything we’ve worked on…. On Last Comic
people didn’t get to see the full extent of
what we do.”
“In the shows, we have funny lines in
songs that are punch lines, but it’s really a
slow burn, watching the relationship between
the characters,” says Johnson. On stage, Jeremiah has appointed himself Gideon’s older
brother or father figure, and Gideon is generally happy with this arrangement, though he
will occasionally rebel and challenge Jeremiah’s authority.
That relationship, rather than the content
of the songs or the book, is what keeps God’s
Pottery from being a one-joke wonder. “If we
didn’t put effort into making the characters
real people, it would be easy to dismiss the
act as a gimmick taking easy shots at a large
target,” says Johnson. “And what we’ve discovered as the act and characters have
evolved is that the dynamic between them
and their personal peculiarities are much
more interesting to us than their religious or

sculptures …
Gideon: Go looking for stray cats
and baptize them …
Jeremiah: Meet each other’s pastors … The possibilities are nearly
endless!
Gideon: Though they generally
end at around eleven.
Q: Is it OK to hook up with someone if one or both of you have
Read Sara Shay’s full
Bulletin interview with
Gideon and Jeremiah at
http://bit.ly/godspottery. Watch
God’s Pottery videos, and get your
own Virginity Rocks T-shirt at

been drinking? Why/why not?
Jeremiah: Goodness no! It’s wrong
to “hook up” with someone—and
it’s wrong to drink!
Gideon: This is one of the few
times that a double negative does
not equal a positive.
Jeremiah: Drinking is a really dangerous situation regardless of what
behavior you’re engaging in.
Gideon: Many of the Youth don’t
know this, but alcohol is actually a
drug (in liquid form). So Teens, ask
yourselves: Would I hook up with
someone if I were high on drugs?
Jeremiah: The answer, obviously,
is no, unless you want to get pregnant and go to jail. And maybe die.
Gideon: And then go to Hell.
swarthmore college bulletin

Tuning Up
the News

The Gregory Brothers
skewer the increasing
vapidity of both

WATCH OUT, KATIE COURIC. THE
GREGORY BROTHERS—INCLUDING
EVAN ’01 AND ANDREW ’04—MAKE
MASH-UP MUSIC FROM YOUR NEWS.

pop music and
television news.

By Paul Wachter ’97
SINCE ITS RELEASE IN 1997, AUTO-TUNE, audio
processing software that is used to correct
pitch, has revolutionized the music industry.
The tool’s primary use—in studios and on
stage—has been as a crutch, to easily and discreetly correct a singer’s off-key notes.
Quickly, though, artists began to recognize
Auto-Tune’s potential as an instrument in its
own right. Cher’s 1998 hit “Believe” widely
introduced the distinctive electronica-inflicted Auto-Tunes warble—now a staple of
many pop and hip-hop songs—to a wide
audience.
Recently, the technique even has crept
into evening news broadcasts and talk shows,
adding a melodious timbre to the voices of
Katie Couric and Sean Hannity, among others—although not in their work as originally
broadcast. Rather, it’s the tricky—and often
hilarious—digital handiwork of the Gregory
Brothers, a Brooklyn-based folk and soul
quartet that includes Evan Gregory ’01 and
Andrew Gregory ’04. Their video mash-ups,
Auto-Tune the News, have become Internet
sensations—and must be experienced to be
completely understood.
(If you can’t wait, you’ll find the Auto-Tune
series at www.youtube.com/user/schmoyoho.
Take a look, then come back and read the rest
of this article—or just keep reading and go
online later.)
The Brothers’ most popular skit, with
more than two million page views and
Andrew (standing, left) and Evan Gregory (seated,
with his wife Sarah) are the Swarthmore half of the
Gregory Brothers. Each of the Brooklyn-based
“brothers”—including youngest bro’ Michael,
with glasses—plays in at least one other band.
All are bemused by the success of their side project,
Auto-Tune the News.
DENNY RENSHAW

october 2009

35

counting, begins with a clip from ABC’s
Sunday morning news show This Week. As
Washington Post reporter Ruth Marcus
opines about gay marriage, she’s interrupted
by Andrew and Michael Gregory (the youngest brother, who went to Appalachian State
University). The brothers have spliced themselves into the round-table discussion. “Boring,” they drone, until Michael snaps his fingers, pulls out an electric synthesizer and
begins an Auto-Tuned duet with Marcus,
whose voice has now been given a digitally
modified singsong lilt:
Michael Gregory: You got to do it like this.
Shorty—ready, set, go.
Ruth Marcus (singing): This is a pretty
remarkable week on the gay marriage
front. First of all, to have a state like Iowa
—
Michael (interrupting): What you trying
to say about Iowa?
Marcus: Not an East Coast state.
Michael: (holding up three fingers in a
common hip-hop salute to the East
Coast): East Coast!
Marcus (picking up the beat): Not a Left
Coast state.
Michael: Left Coast! (Makes an L with his
hand.)
Marcus: In a decision written by a Republican —
Michael: Shorty, now you’re sounding so
fine. / Give me your number and we can
bump and grind. / Talking about politics
online. / Leaving the club in the morning
light…
The skit continues with other snappy
duets, including one pairing Sean Hannity
and an angry gorilla (played by a Gregory in
a gorilla suit) and another with Andrew Gregory and Katie Couric harmonizing a chorus—“very thin ice/very thin ice”—as Couric
reports on global warming. The Gregory
Brothers’ fourth member, Evan’s wife Sarah,
lends her stirring voice to other installments
of the Auto-Tune the News series.
The videos succeed on two levels. They’re
carried musically by the Gregory Brothers’
original compositions, witty lyrics, and precise vocal arrangements. And, as political
parody, they skewer the increasing vapidity
of both pop music and television news.
36

Find more press coverage of
Auto-Tune the News and links to
the Gregory Brothers’ videos at
http://bit.ly/gregorybros.

“The idea was Michael’s; he came up with
it during the presidential campaign,” Evan
told me recently over drinks in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. As Michael
explained to The New York Observer in April,
shortly after the videos went viral, “Some of
the vacuous punditry that was going on, I
found more funny than even watching, say,
Jon Stewart. I thought it’d be fun to make a
musical tribute.”
“We helped with the music, and it evolved
from there,” Evan says. In recent months, the
Internet success of Auto-Tune the News has
led to television and radio appearances for
the Gregory Brothers to discuss their work.
“We’ve also had a few TV people approach us
to see if we could do something for them,”
Evan says. “So far, they haven’t made us any
firm offers. It’s more like they say they’re
open to any ideas we might have.”
THE GREGORY BROTHERS GREW UP IN RADFORD,
Va.—not far from Washington, D.C. Their
parents, both college professors, “were musical; they played piano and guitar, but they
weren’t pros,” says Andrew.
Evan, the oldest of the brothers, was a
music major at Swarthmore and a pianist. “I
wasn’t involved in the band scene at all,” he
says. “I was more focused on the classical
stuff, and that training was invaluable.” He
was, however, in the a cappella group Sixteen
Feet, which Andrew also joined when he
came to Swarthmore. In college, Andrew
taught himself guitar and played in a twoman band alongside Joe Raciti ’05.
When he graduated, Evan moved to
Brooklyn and began working as a consultant
for Accenture, a global management consulting, technology services, and outsourcing
company. But he had an early flirtation with
musical stardom when he took a road trip to
Los Angeles and auditioned for American
Idol. He made it before the judges and sang
Otis Redding’s “Sitting on the Dock of the
Bay.”
“Simon [Cowell] said I sang like Rick Astley, which was meant as a compliment —this

was way before the ‘Rick Rolled’ phenomenon on YouTube,” Evan says. “I was sent on
to Hollywood but cut in the middle of the
week, as the semifinalists were being selected.
It was Idol’s second season, which featured
Ruben Studdard and Clay Aiken.”
A few years later, Michael also auditioned
for the show, consciously trying to make it
onto the blooper roll—a compilation of the
worst performances. He succeeded, and in a
clip from Season 7, you can see Michael,
dressed like a nerdy extra from an 80s geeksversus-jocks film, earnestly belting out “I
Wanna Love You,” by the R&B singer Akon.
The judges were aghast.
Ultimately, Evan’s younger brothers
joined him in Williamsburg and found work
as SAT-prep tutors. But music is largely the
focus of their lives, and each plays in several
bands. In July, I saw The Gregory Brothers
perform at a club in downtown Manhattan,
headlining a show that also featured Sarah
and the Stanleys, Sarah Gregory’s band.
Their music is very different from their
Auto-Tune fare. Though there’s the occasional comic verse, the band fits comfortably in
the soul-folk ensemble tradition.
“Our Auto-Tune videos have generated
some attention for the band, but I think it’s
viewed more as a separate thing, both by us
and our fans,” Evan says. “It’s very hard to
make a living as a band. There are 10,000
other bands out there, trying to make it.
Right now, our Auto-Tune work is reaching a
wider audience, which is fine.”
RECENTLY, THE HIP-HOP ARTIST JAY-Z RELEASED
a song called “D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune),”
in which he lashed out at fellow hip-hop
artists who relied on the audio processor. “I
just think in hip-hop, when a trend becomes
a gimmick, it’s time to move on,” said the
Brooklyn-born superstar, citing a Wendy’s
hamburger commercial that satirized the
Auto-Tune epidemic.
Take it easy, Jay-Z. Auto-Tune likely is too
convenient a tool to give up. But perhaps listeners will tire of its over-aggressive use. If
so, the Gregory Brothers’ musical ribbing
may be remembered among the era’s most
notable accomplishments.
Paul Wachter is a writer in New York with a
silky smooth voice in no need of Auto-Tuning.
swarthmore college bulletin

connections

COURTESY OF NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

GARNET SAGES MEET MEN OF CLAY
*Garnet Sage \`gär-net `saj\ n [fr. Tom Hallowell
’29, upon celebrating his 50th class reunion]
(1980): a graduate of Swarthmore College who
has celebrated his or her 50th class reunion.

Join the Garnet Sages at 11 a.m. on Thursday,
March 18, 2010 to tour the Terra Cotta Warriors exhibit at the National Geographic
Museum in Washington, D.C.
Soldiers. Charioteers. Archers. Musicians.
Generals. Acrobats. Nearly 2,000 years ago,
thousands of life-size clay figures were buried
in massive underground pits to accompany
China’s first emperor, Qin Shihuangdi, into
the afterlife. Their discovery outside the city
of Xi’an in 1974 was one of the greatest
archaeological finds of the 20th century.
Now, Swarthmore Sages can stand face-toface with these terra cotta warriors. The

october 2009

Sometimes referred to as “Qin’s Armies,” the terra
cotta warriors’ purpose was to help the emperor rule
an empire in the afterlife. The Terra Cotta Army excavation comprises three pits, which together are estimated to hold 8,000 soldiers, 130 chariots with 520
horses and 150 cavalry horses. Most are still buried.
According to legend, the warriors were real soldiers
who were buried with Qin to protect him from dangers
in the next world.

National Geographic Museum will host Terra
Cotta Warriors: Guardians of China’s First
Emperor, an exhibition featuring treasures
from the tomb complex including 15 life-size
figures, weapons, armor, coins, and more.
Don’t miss this chance to see the largest
collection of significant artifacts from China
ever to travel to the United States. All Garnet
Sages who have reached their 50th reunion
are eligible.
If you would like more information, please
contact Astrid Devaney at adevane1@swarthmore.edu or (610) 328-8412.

UPCOMING EVENTS
NOVEMBER
6–8, on campus
Fall Alumni Council Meeting
10, Boston
Reception, President Rebecca Chopp’s
Listening Tour
18, New York City
Reception, President Rebecca Chopp’s
Listening Tour
In early 2010, further stops on President
Rebecca Chopp’s Listening Tour are
planned for the following areas: Atlanta,
Denver, London, Los Angeles, Miami,
Portland, and Seattle. For more information, visit http://bit.ly/chopp_tour.

37

connections
President Chopp Embarks on a Listening Tour
It seemed appropriate that President
Rebecca Chopp should host the first
event of her Listening Tour series
right here on campus on Sept. 16.
The event began with alumni, parents, and friends mingling to chat
informally with the president over
delicious snacks in the foyer of the
Lang Performing Arts Center. Later,
the gathering moved to the PearsonHall Theatre, where the president
spoke briefly to a large audience
about her own impressions of
Swarthmore and then answered a
variety of questions.

Watch video of President
Chopp’s first listening
event, read her blog
of impressions gathered at each city,
and get the latest tour info at
http://bit.ly/chopp_tour/.
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS

Five Ways to Volunteer for Swarthmore

1.

MAKE A
CONNECTION
Swarthmore’s regional
alumni organizations are
called “Connections.”
Connection events range
from a guided tour to a
museum to a family picnic
in the park. The Alumni
Office seeks volunteers to
help organize and staff
Connection events.
For more information,
contact Geoff Semenuk at
gsemenu1@swarthmore.
edu at (610) 328-8453.

38

2. HAVE A

3. JOIN THE

4. HOST

5. HELP WITH

Did you graduate in a
year that ends in ’05 or
’10, or in 2008? If you
want to make Alumni
Weekend 2010 the best
ever, volunteer to serve
on your class reunion
planning committee,
planning and coordinating class activities,
and—most important—
encouraging classmates
to attend on June 4-6,
2010.
If you are interested
in helping, contact
Astrid Devaney at
adevane1@swarthmore.edu or (610) 328-8412.

The Alumni Council, the
governing body of the
Alumni Association,
supports students, alumni, and the College.
If you are interested in
serving on the Council,
or would like to nominate a fellow graduate,
contact Lisa Lee, director
of alumni relations, at
llee2@swarthmore.edu or
(610) 328-8403.

The Swarthmore Extern
Program, held during the
last week of winter break,
is a five-day job-shadowing program that enables
current students to
explore career fields of
interest. Alumni may volunteer to invite students
to their workplaces to
learn about their careers,
host student externs in
their homes, or both. The
upcoming extern week is
January 11–15, 2010. For
more information, contact Laura Sibson at
extern@swarthmore.edu
or (610) 328-8352.

Alumni Admissions Volunteers are a vital part of
the Admissions Office’s
outreach, recruitment, and
yield efforts. Volunteers
interview prospective students, represent Swarthmore at college fairs, and
serve as resources for
prospective and admitted
students and their families. For more information, contact Christine
Costello ’07 at ccostel1@swarthmore.edu or
(610) 328-8307.

GREAT REUNION

ALUMNI COUNCIL

AN EXTERN

ADMISSIONS

swarthmore college bulletin

Welcome to Swarthmore, Class of 2013

In Los Angeles, incoming freshmen gathered at the home of Deborah How ’89 to
get to know each other and meet alumni before flying cross-country to begin their
first semester of classes at Swarthmore. Send-off receptions were also held in
Denver; New York; Seattle; and Washington, D.C.

KAREN BERNIER

COURTESY OF DEBORAH HOW

They’ve been mugged!

Tuesday, Aug. 25, was the official move-in day for Swarthmore’s Class of 2013. Our
quiet campus quickly came to life with the first-year students finding their way
around, settling into their new dorms, listening to speeches, taking swim tests,
and beginning to experience what it’s like to be at Swarthmore. A couple of days
later, the Alumni Office welcomed the incoming class with its annual “mugging”
event. Freshmen stopped by to collect Swarthmore mugs, cool off with some ice
cream, and sign up to work in the Alumni Office.

Young graduates: Welcome to the city

LILY NG ’08

Did you remember your Swarthmore gear?

On Sept. 26, high atop a Manhattan skyscraper, George Hang '07, Ken Short '82,
Derrick Gibbs '76, and Arpita Das '08 joined more than 100 alumni in New York City
and 700 others in 21 other cities worldwide, when Swarthmore's third annual Welcome to the City events took place. Alumni and friends came together at local
bars, restaurants, parks, and homes to welcome recently graduated and relocated
Swatties, pass on information about their new locales, and socialize and network
with other members of the Swarthmore community.
Besides well-known hubs such as Philadelphia; Boston; Washington, D.C.; Los
Angeles; and San Francisco, volunteers also organized events in such places as
Hong Kong, London, Miami, New Haven, New Orleans, and a group of 34 in Madison, Wis. The successful, multi-city event would not have been possible without
the many alumni volunteers who coordinated each individual event.

october 2009

We want to know! As you
travel the world for business
or pleasure, snap a photo of
yourself in your stylish
Swarthmore duds and it may
land here in a future issue of
the Bulletin. Send digital
photos to
alumni@swarthmore.edu.
Please note who is in the
picture and when and where
it was taken.
Need some
Swarthmore
gear? Visit the
College Bookstore at
http://bookstore.-swarthmore.edu.

39

class notes

REGINALD “SANDY” FOSTER ’79, MICHAEL WEITHORN ’78, AND ANDREW SCHULTZ ’79 PERFORM DURING THE 1978 HAMBURG SHOW. COURTESY OF THE FRIENDS HISTORICAL LIBRARY.

40

swarthmore college bulletin

Alumni Profile
“In the practical experience of staging his plays, you
get an idea how Shakespeare works, how his plays
function in performance. That was ultimately what he
was up to,” says Julian Lopez-Morillas ’68.

UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO

he arrived at Swarthmore, Lopez-Morillas says he “was thinking I
was going to be an archaeologist.” He began acting halfway
through his sophomore year and decided theater would be his career. At the time, there was no theater major at the College, so,
after graduation, he went to Yale, eventually receiving
an M.A. in directing at Carnegie Mellon in 1972.
Lopez-Morillas soon moved to the Bay Area, where he has
lived at various times in San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley. In
the 1970s, he began a long association with the Berkeley Shakespeare Festival, now known as the California Shakespeare Theater
(CalShakes). “Without being associated with a festival long-term, I
never would have picked up all those performances,” he says.
During a period as associate artistic director, he directed Coriolanus, Timon of Athens, King John, “knocking off some of the
more obscure ones.”
“It really thrived in the ’80s,” Lopez-Morillas says of the festival,
which eventually built a 545-seat amphitheater in the hills above
Berkeley. He remembers a 1991 outdoor performance there of King
Lear: “The wind just howls out there and there were both cows and
coyotes on the hillside. If I came out as Lear and cried ‘Howl, howl,
howl!’ I didn’t know whether I’d be met by yips or moos. I guess the
yips were better; they sounded wild.”
This spring, Lopez-Morillas played Escalus, Prince of Verona, in
Romeo and Juliet at CalShakes, directed by artistic director Jonathan
Moscone—his first role with the festival since 2000.
“In the meantime, I’ve directed at San Jose State and Solano College and acted at Marin Shakespeare and San Francisco Shakespeare,
where I played the Earl of Gloucester in King Lear and Prospero, the
ousted Duke of Milan, in The Tempest,” Lopez-Morilla says. “If there’s
a role in Shakespeare I really feel proprietary towards, it’s Prospero. I
feel I bring something personal, something special to it.”
Lopez-Morillas blogs about his theater experiences on PlayShakespeare.com, a Web site created by actor and creative designer Ron
Severdia. One piece of correspondence he passed along from Robert
Hurwitt, theater critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. “Wouldn’t it be
funny,” Hurwitt wrote, “if newspapers, which have predicted the death
of theater for so long, went first?’”

Completing the Bard’s Canon
JULIAN LOPEZ-MORILLAS ’68 HAS PLAYED IN OR
DIRECTED EVERY ONE OF SHAKESPEARE’S 38 PLAYS.

Julian Lopez-Morillas ’68 has played in or directed every one of the 38
plays that make up William Shakespeare’s canon. He passed the mark
in June 2008 with a performance as Cardinal Wolsey in Henry VIII at
the Colorado Shakespeare Festival (above left).
“I started there in the summer of 1966—my first really professional
theater,” Lopez-Morillas says. “I went out to Colorado every summer
thereafter for eight or nine years.”
By 1984, Lopez-Morillas had done all but three or four of the Bard’s
plays. “I thought, why not go the whole hog? By 1988, I’d done
Timon of Athens; that left only Henry VIII. It took 20 years to find a
production.”
Speaking of his accomplishment, the Berkeley, Calif., actor is wry:
“It’s interesting that some people make a fuss over it. It is a curiosity.
[Actor and Oregon Shakespeare Festival dramaturg] Barry Kraft’s the
only other one in my acquaintance who has done it. We had a competition over it for a while; he got there first. I don’t expect people to
jump up and down. There’s nothing stellar about it.”
Being a little less dismissive, Lopez-Morillas says, “I do believe
being in a production of a play gets you to know it, rather than just
reading it. In the practical experience of staging his plays, you get an
idea how Shakespeare works, how his plays function in performance.”
Lopez-Morillas was born in Providence, R.I., where his father, a
Spaniard who emigrated just before the Spanish Civil War, founded
the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University. When
52

—By Ken Bullock. This article first appeared in The Berkeley Daily
Planet. It is reprinted with permission.

swarthmore college bulletin

in my life

My LayerCake Life

By Malka Kramer Schaps ’69
(formerly Mary Elizabeth Kramer)

58

What has been pushing my professional
life can be summed up in a single sentence:
My father was a university professor who did
not get tenure and a writer who never published a book. I didn’t quite grasp the significance of all this until I was a 16-year-old
honors student about to finish high school
and he told me, “Well, of course you will get
your Ph.D.”
Although that key sentence may describe
what I did, I never thought of it as defining
my aspirations, which I summed up on
request as a 15-year-old: I want to be the sort
of person people are happy to have known,
and I want to raise my children well. That
slant, I am sure, came from my mother. To
this day, when my daughters-in-law speak to
my mother on the phone, they hang up with
the feeling that they have just been talking to
me.
There is, however, a cream filling between
the career layer and the family layer of my
cake, which comes from somewhere deep
inside. One winter day during my senior year
at Swarthmore, I walked into one of the
rooms in Bond, wearing a turquoise dress,
with my auburn hair down to my waist. The
three Swarthmore professors in formal attire,
who were interviewing me for a Danforth
Fellowship, asked various questions about
my hopes of joining my husband David ’67,
in graduate school at Harvard, and continuing into university teaching. Then the chair
of the committee cleared his throat uncomfortably and the other two fidgeted in their
chairs. He leaned forward and asked, “Now,
Mary, for the Danforth, we have to ask. Do
you have any spiritual leanings or perhaps a
commitment to social action?” Everyone
hung on my answer.
“Oh, yes,” I said brightly. “I recently converted to Orthodox Judaism.”
All three members of the committee sank
back into their chairs with relief. It shows
how things have changed that, for a fellowship originally set up for Episcopalian boys,
this was a more than satisfactory answer.
This “cream filling” may seem like the
most un-Swarthmore-like thing I did at the
College, but it actually started in a very
Swarthmore-like way—with a search for
intellectual honesty. I was raised with a commitment to honesty in all its senses—telling
the truth, not stealing or cheating—but as I
worked my way through a self-imposed pro-

gram of reading one book by each of the
great philosophers, I was hard put to find a
solid reason for being “good” in modern secular philosophy.
I had a lot of Jewish friends, and their religion—even for the most assimilated among
them—seemed to have a staying power to
which the rather liberal Protestant denomination in which I had been raised did not
even aspire. One of them—a fellow female
counselor for the girls in a math summer
camp—even taught me how to sound out
Hebrew and passed on some of the fundamentals of keeping kosher and observing
the Sabbath.
In my junior year, I asked to speak at College Sunday—the first Sunday of winter
break—where college students active in our
church’s youth group were invited to address
the congregation about their college experiences. This was an unusual request, because
most upperclassmen have forgotten their way
to the church.
After two freshmen had, indeed, explained
that religion played no role at all in their college lives, I stood up with my “J’accuse.” We
had theoretically been taught about all the
major religions. We had visited a Catholic
church, a synagogue, and a mosque. However, the subliminal message had been that religion is a crutch, inappropriate for intellectuals. “You have made it impossible,” I claimed,
“for us to believe in G-d.”
My manifesto had three immediate consequences. The director of religious education
resigned, saying that I was absolutely right.
The minister resigned, having decided that
he would rather be a social worker. And I
asked myself, “Who are these people to
decide what I can or cannot believe?”
My actual decision to convert to Judaism
was made during the following spring, which
I spent as a foreign student in Germany, in
the shadow of the Holocaust.
A fancy cake like that, with two layers and
a cream filling, ought to have chocolate frosting, right? Here it comes. I had to race
through Harvard because my husband had
started two years before me, and we wanted
to get our Ph.D.’s together, in order to have a
better chance of solving the “two-body problem” of getting academic jobs in the same
city. We both got jobs in Israel, as we wanted,
but, like my father, neither of us got tenure at
our first jobs, for reasons which looked to us
swarthmore college bulletin

october 2009

KPH OTO.COM
C
ISTO

at the time like prejudice.
When I finally did get tenure at my second job, I spent the summer writing a novel
about prejudice. Over the following decades,
I wrote other novels about the kidnapping of
our foster baby, about conversion, about a
court case to protect a different set of foster
children, about arranged marriages, about
cultural divides. Most of them, in essence, are
about prejudices of various kinds and their
effects on people.
I publish in a “niche”—the thriving haredi
(ultra-Orthodox) publishing industry—and
write for no more than one hour in the
evening, to protect my mathematical
research time.
How do I manage my striated life? Mostly
by keeping the layers separated in time and
space. We live in Bnei Brak, a very religious
community across the highway from our
university. About 40 women get up at five in
the morning to pray in the synagogue down
the street (along with 200 men), and sometimes I join them. Many of the ladies don’t
know my name, but those who do surely
think of me as Rabbanit Schaps rather than
Professor Schaps. (A “rabbanit” is a rabbi’s
wife. It is an honorific: Raising a Jewish family on high scholarly standards is a project for
both husband and wife.) Those who know
that I work at the university can’t figure out
what I am doing there eight hours a day, five
days a week when I actually teach only six
hours a week, six months a year. I am also
“Rabbanit” to the men in the daily Talmud
class that David teaches.
Once I cross the highway on the pedestrian bridge, I land among a population equally
clueless about my private life. In Israel, you
cannot get dressed in the morning without
making a political statement, so everyone I
meet knows from my long sleeves and the
beret I wear over my wig that I am religious.
It is, in fact, a religious university, so this is
not even scandalous. I teach my classes, give
talks in seminars, serve on committees, all
without any reference being made to my religiosity. Once someone did ask my husband,
“How can you walk into an international
conference wearing a black hat and sidelocks?”
“Well,” David answered, “first I move my
right foot forward, and then my left. Before
you know it, I am through the door.”
My father passed away more than 30 years

This “cream filling” may seem like the most
un-Swarthmore-like thing I did at the College,
but it actually started in a very Swarthmore-like
way—with a search for intellectual honesty.
ago. Every year, on the anniversary of his
death, I light a 24-hour candle and take out
one of the files of his old letters or amusing
articles, like the one titled “Why I Won’t Send
my Daughter to College.”
When I stand on a podium at Hebrew
University, introducing former Secretary of
the Treasury Lawrence Summers to members
of the Harvard Club of Israel, does my
father know about it? When, as chair of the
Mathematics Department, I opened a new
program in financial mathematics, was he
somehow aware? Has he “seen” the covers of
my novels? I don’t know; but if he does, I’m
sure he is pleased, just as he was always
pleased when I baked a layer cake for Sunday
afternoon tea.

Malka Kramer Schaps ’69 earned a Ph.D. in
mathematics from Harvard in 1972, after
which she and her husband David ’67 took
university jobs in Israel. They have four children, two of them foster children who
remained with their family, and, currently, 12
grandchildren. David was a rabbi in the army
reserves and ended his 30 years of service with
the rank of captain. In addition to her professional publications, Schaps has published five
novels and two nonfiction works on the Holocaust. She is currently a professor and director
of the Financial Mathematics Program at BarIlan University, where David is associate professor and chair of the Department of Classical
Studies.
59

books + arts

An Ethnography of Sickle Cell Disease
Carolyn Moxely Rouse ’87 Uncertain Suffering: Racial Health Care
Disparities and Sickle Cell Disease,
University of California Press, 2009
With good reason, one should hesitate before describing an ethnography about those with an incurable
disease—and the broken health care
system that attempts to treat
them—as “wonderful,” but such is
the elegant scholarship of Carolyn
Moxely Rouse on the topic of sickle
cell, a disease that disproportionately affects African Americans in the
United States.
Uncertain Suffering is an ethnography—the study of a people. Most
of us assume that “a people” are
bound together by geographic space
or tradition, filial or religious ties.
The people of Rouse’s study are
bound by their association with
sickle cell disease (SCD), whether
they have the disease, are related to
persons that have it, or treat it. In
this study of SCD culture, we learn
how people with the disease cope
with pain, how they are treated by
others, how and why pain is occasionally uncoupled from suffering, what specifically is and is not
working for them in the health care system, and how a vulnerable but
unpitied group outside of hospital walls is treated when they meet up
with the supposedly objective and evidence-based protocols to treat
their disease found within hospital walls.
Rouse—like the best students I have had at Swarthmore—
attempts to accomplish two dozen things at once. She describes the
disease, the social location of those who suffer from it, the responses
from the professionals who treat them, and how treatment differs
when the racial makeup of a treatment center’s professional staff differs. She uses social theory to interrogate taken-for-granted medical
concepts such as “evidence-based” and “objective;” offers rich observations and nuanced quotations from her interviewees; and posits
recommendations for social philosophers, the federal government,
and the SCD community.
Precisely because Rouse accomplishes so much in this book, it will
have its detractors. Let me anticipate their complaints. The book
often reads like a weighty conversation in which quite a bit of background knowledge is assumed. As someone who’s done the background reading, it was a pleasure. That said, I want Uncertain Suffering to be read by policy wonks, physicians, nurses, and nonprofit
directors—and it’s pretty dense for a wide audience. Still, it’s crucial
62

reading for anyone in the helping professions.
Rouse also takes for granted the
intelligence, humor, and insight of the
mostly poor, all black, mostly adolescent patients that she got to know
during the course of this study. By taking their point of view as a starting
point, she treats those at the margins
as if they were at the center—reversing, upending, and overturning the
paradigms in which we’ve been
trained.
Rouse lays out her thesis early, and
some detractors will assume that she
reached her conclusion before she
began the research. To the contrary,
she brings readers along on her journey, revealing the limitations or errors
of her hypotheses along the way. She
writes, for example: “In spite of a
growing consensus that began in the
1980s that pain, particularly for cancer, should be treated aggressively,
almost 30 years later sickle cell
patients remain the exception….
Physician discretion still plays a key
role in patient access to medications.”
Her outrage is clear. But three pages
later, she writes, “After switching
research field sites, I was forced to challenge my rather two-dimensional perspective….”
Rouse comes to learn, she says, that helping patients manage pain
is the subject of much disagreement. SCD centers that have majority
black staffs have a different approach than those with majority white
staffs, but the differing approaches do not correlate with her initial
expectations. Increasing quality of life is not necessarily a conclusion
that can be reached via statistical analysis—and quality of life, rather
than pain eradication only, she learns, informs the approaches of
SCD clinics with majority black professional staffs.
For all of us struggling to understand how discourses of rationality, fairness, and compassion respectively could lead us to the Iraq
War, the response to Hurricane Katrina, or the health care reform
debacle, Rouse offers some complicated answers. She reminds us that
too often we live with competing contradictions while simultaneously forfeiting power to professionals whose prose confounds us. And
when we’re the professionals, we’ve often taken our own professional
baptism without remaining suspicious of our socialization and without continuing to question the art and science into which we’ve been
socialized.
—Sarah Willie-LeBreton,
associate professor of sociology and anthropology
swarthmore college bulletin

MORE BOOKS
Rio Akasaka ’09, A History of the
Swarthmore Fire Company,
lulu.com, 2009. Compiled while
the author—a passionate young
firefighter with a close attachment to the Borough of Swarthmore—was an undergraduate,
this work uses rare pictures,
anecdotes, and detailed stories to
depict the company’s history.

Michael Fairbanks, Marcela EscobariRose ’96,, Malik Fal, and Elizabeth
Hooper (editors), In the River They
Swim: Essays from Around the World on
Enterprise Solutions to Poverty, Templeton Press, 2009. This collection gathers a unique mix of participants who
reflect on their experiences portraying
the struggle to close the global development and poverty gap. The foreword
is by evangelist Rick Warren.

Jane Jaquette ’64 (editor), Feminist Agendas and Democracy in
Latin America, Duke University
Press, 2009. This collection
examines the response of Latin
American women to the dramatic political, economic, and social
changes of the last 20 years.
Meredith Anne Skura ’65, Tudor
Autobiography: Listening for
Inwardness, The University of
Chicago Press, 2008. Showing
that a writer’s thoughts and feelings can be traced in his or her

language, Skura offers a glimpse
into a range of lived and imagined experiences that challenge
assumptions about life and autobiography in the early modern
period.
Abbott Small ’67 D, Into the
Turquoise: Poems, Dennis Small,
2009. Through images of Nature,
fused with human needs,
hungers, fears, and joys, this poet
of faith transcends the Judaic
and Catholic avenues of his spiritual pilgrimage to attain insight
into both the terrors and rewards
of our common human heritage.
Cécile Whiting ’80, Pop L.A.: Art
and the City in the 1960s, University of California Press, 2006.
This award-winning work offers
an in-depth examination of Los
Angeles as a focus of and inspiration for art, photography,
painting, and sculpture.

Sarah Stolfa, The Regulars, with an introduction by Jonathan Franzen ’81,
Artisan Books, 2009. Franzen provides
a dazzling introduction to this book of
photographs by a former bartender
who found inspiration in the very setting from which she longed to escape.
Franzen starts: “I didn’t like these
pictures at first sight. They reminded
me of several personal defeats that I
prefer not to dwell on, particularly my
failure to survive in Philadelphia....”
Yet, he later continues: “Stolfa’s images have the quality, shared by the
city in which they were taken, of rendering the very concept of unsightliness nonsensical.”

OTHER MEDIA

Ann Buttenwieser ’57, Governor’s
Island: The Jewel of New York Harbor,
Syracuse University Press, 2009. Using
never-before–published photographs,
blueprints, architectural plans, and
interviews with former residents, the
author—an urban planner and waterfront historian—creates a striking
portrait of the island. The future of
Governor’s Island, which is owned by
New York City, is the subject of much
debate.
OCTOBER

2009

Victor Piñeiro Escoriaza ’00, Second
Skin, Liberation Entertainment Inc.,
2009. This film takes a fascinating look
at computer gamers whose lives have
been transformed by the genre of
games that allow millions of users
worldwide to interact simultaneously
in virtual spaces.

Bennett Lorber ’64 joined with three
other painters to show some new
paintings, including little gee 4, in an
exhibit titled 4 Artists—New Work in the
Muse Gallery in Olde City, Philadelphia,
during the month of August. Lorber,
the Thomas M. Durant Professor of
Medicine and Professor of Microbiology
and Immunology at Temple University
School of Medicine and Hospital, is one
of two physicians who exhibited works
in the show.

Abigail Donovan ’92 completed a
large-scale permanent sculptural installation for the University of Oregon’s
new HEDCO College of Education building. A public commission for the state
of Oregon, the piece is titled The Cloud
of Disquiet: Stanza Second.
63

Alumni Profile

JEN DESSINGER

“When people join the Designers Accord ... they
need to have a greater awareness of their design decisions. We don’t have the luxury of ignoring the issues around climate change.”

Innovative Thinking
VALERIE CASEY ’94 CREATED THE DESIGNERS ACCORD AND INITIATED
A MOVEMENT TO HELP INDUSTRIES BECOME SUSTAINABLE

Designer and creative director Valerie Casey ’94 has worked with
organizations around the world helping them launch new products
and services. Recently, she’s been devoting much of her attention to
motivating others in the design field to create positive social and environmental impacts.
It was out of personal frustration that Casey conceived a “Kyoto
Treaty” for the design community, now called the Designers Accord.
She sketched out the five-point agreement on sustainability on the
back of a notebook during a cross-country flight in 2007. She had just
left meetings with executives at two Fortune 50 companies, where she
hadn’t brought up the topic of sustainability but knew that she should
have. “I didn’t have the language or the knowledge to address the
issue. No one in the design community did, although we were all
acutely aware of our responsibility to play a role. There was a general
sense of frustration and helplessness,” Casey says.
The Designers Accord provides a structure for designers, educators,
and business leaders to integrate sustainability into their work.
Adopters of the Designers Accord commit to five guidelines that provide collective and individual ways to take action. The idea is that by
collaborating, creative professionals can more effectively tackle environmental and social issues. The notion of sharing best practices in
this way is counter to the traditional model of competition. Casey says
that in the design world, the idea of sharing a firm’s knowledge is
“unheard of.” Industry professionals are highly protective of their
intellectual property.
“When people join the Designers Accord, they are agreeing to begin
this journey. They don’t have it all figured out, but they do need to
66

have greater awareness of the impact of their design decisions. We
don’t have the luxury of ignoring the issues around climate change.
We have to apply our different skills to create more innovative solutions.”
“I think of design in the broadest sense, where all of us are ‘designers.’ When you wake in the morning, you ‘design’ your day, you
‘design’ what you’re going to wear, how you’re going to present yourself. These are all ‘design’ decisions,” she says. “By recognizing the
series of simple and complex choices each of us makes every day, you
can begin to think differently about the interventions you can make.”
Casey says she is also supportive of new movements being created
to tackle climate change because of her own struggle to find common
ground in her industry. When she created the Designers Accord,
Casey says it wasn’t out of the desire to start a new organization necessarily but rather to use design in a different way.
“For me, the truest measure of success of the Designers Accord is
the degree to which the sophistication around sustainability has
grown in the creative community,” she says. “Designers are truly integrating sustainability as a strategic, critical lens and as a result their
work is better and their clients and customers benefit.”
The concept has struck a chord and, today, there are almost
200,000 members involved in over 100 countries, representing all
design disciplines including industrial design, architecture, graphic
design, research, engineering, and strategy.
Casey has been recognized as a Fortune magazine “Guru” of the
year and a Fast Company “Master of Design” for her innovative thinking on sustainability and problem-solving, but she still recognizes the
challenges of fully embracing the principles of sustainability in all
aspects of her life. At her home in the San Francisco Bay Area, she and
her partner of 15 years, computer scientist Susan Housand often find
themselves making choices about sustainability, considering each
decision. “But with our 4-year-old twins, Harper and Frederick, sometimes the best answer is a plastic toy!” Casey says.
The Designers Accord is a five-year project—the first two years
have focused on raising awareness throughout the creative community; in the second two years, the focus will be on education of the next
generation of designers and professional development. In the fifth
year, priority will be placed on influencing government policy on sustainability issues. There is so much urgency around climate change,
Casey believes that designers should achieve the goals of the Designers
Accord in that time. “Designers bring great creativity and optimism to
the challenges before them. What could be better than focusing our
collective energies on the most critical issue of our time?”
—Audree Penner
L ear n m ore: www.designersaccord.org and www.valcasey.com.

swarthmore college bulletin

Alumni Achievements
Byron Waksman ’40
was recently honored by the Waksman Foundation for Microbiology with a reception at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Mass. The occasion celebrated Waksman’s life’s work in neuroimmunology— in particular his seminal discoveries in autoimmune disease such as multiple sclerosis, his
teaching at every level—from medical students to middle school children, and his continuing interest in the
public communication of science. In his honor, the Waksman Foundation has created the Byron H. Waksman Award for Excellence in the Public Communication of Microbiology; the inaugural prize was given to
the New York Hall of Science. In addition, the MBL has named a fellowship for the distinguished immunologist in its Science Journalism Program. According to his daughter Nan Waksman Schanbacher ’72, her father
was surrounded by former students, distinguished colleagues, friends, and family during the reception.

John Hopfield ’54
has been honored by the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society with the 2009 Frank Rosenblatt Award.
The award recognizes Hopfield’s seminal contributions to the understanding of information processing in
biological systems. His work combining neurobiology, physics, and electrical engineering bridged the gap
between biological processes and computer technology and serves as a basic paradigm in neuroscience for
understanding how the brain carries out its tasks. He is the Howard Prior Professor Emeritus of Molecular
Engineering at Princeton University. A fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences, and the American Physical Society, Hopfield has also received the Dirac Medal from
the International Center for Theoretical Physics, California Scientists of the Year Award, a MacArthur Prize,
and the Einstein Prize of the World Cultural Council.

Susan Cotts Watkins ’60
has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2009. A professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, her work focuses on the role of social networks in large-scale demographic and social change, such as
the AIDS epidemic in Africa. “My Guggenheim project, Navigating AIDS in Rural Malawi, draws on a particularly rich set of data about what rural Malawians say about AIDS to their friends, relatives, and neighbors, as
they try to understand and respond to the AIDS epidemic,” Watkins says. She is currently a visiting scientist
at the California Center for Population Research at UCLA. In 2005, she received the Irene Taeuber Award for
exceptionally sound and innovative research from the Population Association of America and has been an
elected member of the Sociological Research Association since 1994.

Alumni Achievements
Cécile Whiting ’80
has been selected to receive the 21st Annual Charles C. Eldredge Prize for distinguished scholarship in American art from the Smithsonian American Art Museum for her 2006 book, Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the
1960s. “Through Whiting’s analysis of the city of Los Angeles and its artists, the reader is persuaded that Los
Angeles was a natural birthplace of pop art in the United States,” say the jurors who awarded the prize. Since
joining the faculty at the University of California–Irvine in 2003, Whiting has served as director of the graduate program in visual studies, associate dean of graduate studies in the School of Humanities, and chair of
the Department of Art History. One of her current projects examines the way in which artists, writers, and
filmmakers revisited World War II in the 1960s. Her other works include Antifascism in American Art; A
Taste for Pop: Pop Art, Gender, and Consumer Culture; and “It’s Only a Paper Moon: The Cyborg Eye of Vija
Celmins” for the spring issue of the museum’s journal American Art.

Paul Crowell ’86
was recently named a fellow by the American Physical Society (APS). The nomination was made by the topical group on Magnetism and Its Applications, citing Crowell for “the application of elegant optical and
transport techniques to the study of spin dynamics and transport.” Crowell is a professor at the University
of Minnesota, where his research focuses on spin dynamics and transport in ferromagnets and ferromagnetsemiconductor heterostructures. In the past, he has been a McKnight Presidential fellow and a McKnight
Land Grant professor at the University of Minnesota as well as a Sloan Foundation fellow.

Joseph Palovick ’90
was inducted into the Ed Romance Chapter of the Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame in March. The annual
induction ceremony honors athletes and other individuals who have brought “lasting fame and recognition”
to the state of Pennsylvania through their sports-related achievements. A “true scholar-athlete,” Palovick
played three varsity sports in high school and graduated valedictorian. During his college football career, he
started for two years. Palovick, who has a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of
Pennsylvania, is a principal engineer for Formation, an avionics product company, in Moores-town, N.J., and
serves as statistician for the Moorestown High School football team.

Alexander Huk ’96
received a National Science Foundation Career award in 2008 for his research on the neural basis of the perception of motion through depth. The award supports junior faculty who exemplify the integration of education and research. Huk’s research seeks to under- stand how the nervous system processes information
and how those signals give rise to perceptual and cognitive experiences. The experiments funded by the
award aim to identify which pieces of binocular information are used to represent three-dimensional motion. Huk is an assistant professor of neurobiology and psychology at the University of Texas–Austin, where
he is also a member of the Center for Perceptual Systems and the Institute for Neuroscience. Previously, he
was a senior research fellow at the University of Washington–Seattle.

Alumni Achievements
Keetje Kuipers ’02
is the 2009 A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize winner for her first collection of poems Beautiful in the Mouth. Her
book will be published in March 2010 by BOA Editions Ltd. in the A. Poulin Jr. New Poets of America Series.
The same week that Kuipers won the Poulin prize, she learned that she had been selected as a Wallace Stegner
Fellow at Stanford University. In 2007, Kuipers was the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident.
She used the time to complete work on Beautiful in the Mouth, which contains poems currently published or
forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, West Branch, Painted Bride Quarterly, Willow Springs, and AGNI, among
others. Kuipers has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Oregon Literary Arts, and Soapstone and awards from Atlanta Review and Nimrod. Her poems have
been nominated three years in a row for the Pushcart Prize.

Kent Bassett ’04
wrote and directed the short film The Line, which has won the American Society of Cinematographers’
Lazlo Kovacs Heritage Award and the Brooklyn International Film Festival’s Spirit Award. A story about a
migrant father and son who run out of water while crossing the desert border, The Line is a narrative exploration of the the people and issues that intrigued Bassett about his home state of Arizona. More recently,
Bassett climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, the largest free-standing mountain in the world to make Beyond Limits, a
documentary film about Bonner Paddock, a man with celebral palsy, who made the eight-day trek to raise
money for charity. “This was an incredible journey in challenging conditions of altitude, freezing temperatures, and no electricity,” Bassett says. He currently lives in Los Angeles, where he works as an assistant editor on Bravo’s Top Chef while he sets up a new project.

Sa’ed Atshan ’06
was selected to be a 2008 Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow for New Americans. Hungarian immigrants wishing to
assist “young New Americans” in their education established the fellowship in 1997. Atshan was chosen as
one of 30 fellows from a pool of 700 applicants. A 2008 graduate of the Harvard University Kennedy School
of Government, Atshan is now pursuing a joint doctorate in anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies at
Harvard. He lectures in the Peace and Justice Studies Department at Tufts University, and Harvard has recognized his work as a head teaching fellow there with three awards of distinction. Atshan has worked for the
American Civil Liberties Union, the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, Human Rights Watch,
Seeds of Peace, the Palestinian Negotiations Affairs Department, and the government of Dubai.

q+a

Happily
Hooked
on China
By Carol Brévart-Demm
On the third floor of Kohlberg Hall,
the wide-open door to Alan Berkowitz’s
office is inviting. It’s hard to miss the newspaper clipping attached to its surface—about
Bhutan, the small Himalayan kingdom
whose monarchs prefer to measure quality of
life in terms of gross national happiness
rather than gross national product. It’s an
appropriate introduction to the cozy workspace where Berkowitz is happily hooked on
China and things Chinese.
An air of comfortable, colorful clutter
pervades the room. Wide shelves are packed
with rows of books standing two-deep, their
titles utterly unintelligible to non-initiates of
the language; more are piled atop the rows.
Stacks of course materials cover flat surfaces.
The walls display original Chinese art drawings and calligraphy, many created as gifts for
Berkowitz. Rising from a small, clay teapot,
the aroma of green tea—brought from Taiwan—scents the air.
Although Chinese language has been
offered at the College since 1975, Berkowitz,
who joined the faculty in 1989, was the first
tenured professor in the discipline. His fields
are Classical Chinese and Mandarin; he is
fluent also in Italian and French and reads
several other languages. Instrumental in
building the College’s Chinese program
within the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and as an integral part
of the Asian Studies Program, he is delighted
to report that currently more students major
and minor in Chinese than in any other language offered at the College.
Despite initial anxiety about being interviewed, Berkowitz appears serene and completely in his element. He lifts the teapot,
pours the steaming, fragrant liquid into two
small cups, and sits back, ready to chat.

72

swarthmore college bulletin

What sparked your interest in China?
Around 1973, I met a guy in a bar in Vermont,
where I was working on Food Stamp advocacy.
He was a teacher of Classical Chinese. I’d read a
lot about East Asian thought in translation, but
he advised me to read it in the original, for it was
very different. So I went back to college and
studied Classical Chinese with him at the University of Vermont. He was right. That’s how I
got into all things Chinese.
What’s the most useful language to learn?
That depends. There are about a billion speakers
of Mandarin Chinese, so for the purpose of
communicating with as many people as possible,
Mandarin Chinese would be a good one to
know. But for literature, there is probably more
written in Classical Chinese over the millennia
than all else combined—except perhaps e-mail.
What’s the most difficult aspect of learning
Chinese?
There’s no relation between Chinese and IndoEuropean languages—like English—no cognates,
no analogous grammar. And writing is usually a
stumbling block, because Chinese is not alphabetic, nor is it syllabic. You have to learn thousands of characters. Then, once you’ve mastered
the grammar and characters, the language relies
on cultural context. Instead of becoming easier
the more you know, it becomes increasingly difficult the deeper you go.

ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS

What level of fluency do Swarthmore students
of Chinese attain?
It’s pretty high. They can function in China
without difficulty. If they study abroad, then
they achieve a really high level. Immersion is key,
but even without spending time abroad, they
usually score high on international proficiency
tests. Many go on to use Chinese regularly in
their jobs.

october 2009

How do you spend your time when you’re
in China?
I do some research, but I also like to spend time
with friends, buy books, eat well, travel, and
climb mountains. Mountains are special there,
because they often have ancient stairways to the
top, cut out of the stone, leading to pavilions,
temples, or overlooks.

What’s been most fulfilling about your work at the
College?
To see how Chinese has grown and how Asian
Studies has become better represented in the
curriculum. Chinese grew slowly, but in the past
seven or eight years, it’s been pretty popular.
That’s because the crew is so good. You have to
have really good teachers at the introductory
levels, to get the students hooked. We have that.
What do you believe is your best quality?
I try to be a good listener.
How about your worst?
I see too many sides to a situation, so it’s sometimes hard for me to make a quick decision.
How do you believe your wife would describe you?
Someone who is really into his work; a nice person to hang out with; a person who likes culinary—although vegetarian—adventures; tolerant; open, except to eating meat.
What qualities do you value most?
Tolerance and humility.
What’s your favorite musical instrument?
The qin. It’s a seven-string, fretless Chinese
zither, about four feet long. It has a deep, resonant, yet not loud sound. I’m a member of the
New York Qin Society but don’t play as much as
I used to.
What’s the wackiest thing you ever did?
My wife, Titina Caporale, and I spent several
months in the mid-1980s traveling through the
Taklamakan Desert by public buses with no glass
in the windows, from Lake Kokonor through
Qinghai and Xinjiang. From Kashgar, we wanted
to continue down the Karakoram Highway into
Pakistan, but we missed the weekly bus from
Kashgar. So we rented one of the bus company’s
long-distance six-wheel-drive buses and drove
ourselves. We went to all kinds of crazy places.
Sometimes, the only available roads were made
of salt, so when it rained, the road would dissolve if driven on. We had to wait for hours until
it dried.

Alan Berkowitz is the Susan W. Lippincott Professor of Modern and Classical Languages and Chinese. More students
major in Chinese than in any other foreign language taught at the College.

The Phoenix
Gets Its
Gear On!
Clockwise from right:
The Phoenix
Your own little Phoenix. Custom-made just
for us. Choose from two sizes: about 7 inches tall or about 11 inches tall. $9.99 and
$16.99
The Hoodie
Imprinted on the front, sleeve, and back
(SWAT). 50% cotton/50% polyester. $39.99
Phoenix Ceramic Mugs
The Phoenix logo on one side and
“SWARTHMORE COLLEGE” on the other.
Choose black or garnet. $7.99
Swarthmore Afghan
An image of Parrish Hall on a beautiful day
woven into a soft 100% cotton
afghan/throw. Approximately 54 by 74
inches. $69.99
Vineyard Vines Ties
Designed exclusively for Swarthmore, with
Parrish Hall in a repeating pattern. Choose
Garnet or light blue background. $64.99

Swarthmore’s mascot dropped by the College Bookstore the other day to do
some holiday shopping, but you don’t have to come to Swarthmore to do yours.
It’s easy to SHOP ONLINE—or call (610) 328-7756 to place your order.

http://bookstore.swarthmore.edu

Waterwick Coasters
These coasters absorb moisture and have a
protective rubber backing. Imprinted with
classic campus images: Parrish Hall, Magill
Walk, Clothier Memorial Hall, and the Scott
Outdoor Amphitheater. Set of four $24.99
The Synthesis Jacket
Made from soft Olympian Polyknit, with a
featherlight, water-resistant Softex
Polyester overlay for wind protection.
Embroidered. $49.99
Prices do not include shipping.