Swarthmore College Alumni Bulletin 2011-04-01

six degrees of Jonathan Franzen

swarthmore
swarthmore college
bulletin | april 2011

departments

profiles

3: LETTERS
Readers react.

58: A Pillar in the Rubble
At Haiti Clinic, Neil Heskel ’74 and Kevin
Browngoehl ’78 provide free medical care to
struggling residents of Port-au-Prince.
By Mike Agresta

4: FROM THE PRESIDENT
The Character of Our Conversations
By Rebecca Chopp
6: COLLECTION
• Inn project moves forward
• New summer language program
• Top 10 Sharples “bars”—and recipe
• Tribute to Eugene Lang ’38
• How history changes the present
• Professor George Moskos dies
• Winter sports wrap-up
40: CONNECTIONS
• A passage to India
• Musical premiere
• New Alumni Council members
• Quizzo and chocolates
• Upcoming alumni events
42: CLASS NOTES
The world according to Swarthmoreans
45: IN MEMORIAM
Farewell to cherished friends
50: BOOKS + ARTS
Alumni Works
62: IN MY LIFE
28 Years Untouched
Opening cartons of old college papers
releases a flood of memories and
reveals surprising connections between
Swarthmore and what I do today.
By Noah Ephron ’82
72: Q+A:
“Not Self”
Donald Swearer, popular emeritus professor and renowned scholar of Buddhism
talks about religion and life.
By Jeffrey Lott

On the cover: Author Jonathan Franzen ’81.
Digital sculpture by Joel and Sharon Harris.
Story on page 18.

64: Like a Frying Pan to the Head
Kendal Cornell ’86 and her clown troupe
raise spirits and consciousness about
womens’ behavior.
By Audree Penner

68: From Rowdy Kid to
Public Historian
Perhaps because of disciplinary stops
during childhood road trips, Allison Marsh
’98 is now a public historian.
By Mike Agresta

in this issue

18

27

34

features
18: Six Degrees of Jonathan Franzen
Before the National Book Award, before
Oprah, before the Time cover—before
anything really, really big happened—
Jonathan Franzen ’81 taught fiction
writing at Swarthmore. His students
remember it well.
By Paul Wachter ’97
24: Possiplex:
Ted Nelson ’59 and the Literary Machine
Nelson’s ideas, once dismissed as utopian,
have become central facts of modern life.
But none of this is enough for him. The
computing world we know is but a dim
shadow of what might have been.
By Mark Bernstein ’77
27: Balancing Act
How do students achieve and maintain
balance while developing their intellectual
and personal potential? For many, it
involves active and intentional membership in community—both on and off
campus.
By Alisa Giardinelli
34: The Janitor and the Judge
Using empathy and intellect to make
humane and right decisions is the essence
of practical wisdom.
By Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe

Dolores Luis-Gmitter (center, in red skirt),
associate in dance performance, works with
members of the flamenco repertory class
during the College’s first annual Arts Weekend this month. The class focuses on zapataedo (footwork) and braceo (armwork).
Photograph by Eleftherios Kostans.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of Swarthmore’s Writing Associates
(WA) Program, a remarkable peer education system that helps students become
better writers. In campus parlance, a WA
is a trained student writing coach who
works across a wide variety of disciplines
with individuals and with entire classes.
WAs provide feedback that helps fellow
students examine the structural, organizational, and stylistic skills needed for
good college writing; they also help peers
analyze their writing and thought processes and improve the clarity
of their arguments. By lifting up writing as an essential skill for success in college and the world beyond, the WA Program, directed by
Associate Professor of English Literature Jill Gladstein, has become a
vital ingredient of a Swarthmore education.
Yet according to Kenneth Sharpe, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Political Science and co-author—with Barry Schwartz, the
Dorwin P. Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action—
of the new book Practical Wisdom (page 34), something else happens
in the WA process—and it happens to the WAs themselves.
Speaking at the writing associates anniversary celebration in
March, Sharpe said: “In most of the work we all do and in our lives
as friends and colleagues and citizens, we are constantly called on to
teach others. I think one of the unsung blessings of the WA program
is that it has caused you to learn to be better citizen-teachers [and] it
has done this by ‘causing you to learn’ the practical wisdom that good
teaching demands.”
Sharpe paused and returned to the phrase caused you to learn.
“Now there’s an awkward phrase any good WA would bring to my

Listen: In a campus talk on Islamist
activism in Britain, Jonathan GithensMazer '97 suggests that religion,
identity, and political behavior must
be disaggregated from discussions
about security and the nature of any contemporary terrorist
threat. http://bit.ly/Githens-Mazer
Listen: Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor of Philosophy
Richard Eldridge examines how, for both Kant and Benjamin, historical narrative plays an essential role in furthering the task of
(critical) philosophy. http://bit.ly/Richard-Eldridge

2

Mark Bernstein ’77 is chief
scientist at Eastgate Systems, Inc. He is the designer
of Tinderbox, a personal assistant for visualizing, analyzing, and sharing notes,
and writes on hypertext,
new media, and the future of
fiction. His most recent book
is Reading Hypertext, a collection of classic essays on
hypertext fiction, co-edited
with Diane Greco; and he is
completing a book on The
Natural History of Links.

Meredith Leich ’08 is a
Brooklyn-based words/
images artist, who works at
the Six Points Fellowship—
a project that supports
artists who create new work
exploring Jewish ideas and
experiences. She also plays
the violin and viola, writes
comics, and spends time in
Berlin as well as designing
websites. To see more of her
art, visit meredithleich.com.

jeffrey lott

Watch: Ninjagram delivery on Valentine's Day included a visit to the office
of President Rebecca Chopp.
http://bit.ly/ninjagram

contributors
meredith leich

Find this issue and more than 13 years of
Bulletin archives at
www.swarthmore.edu/bulletin.
Also on the College website:

attention,” he said. “Why not just say, ‘The WA program has taught
you to be good teachers’?”
The answer is that the one-on-one nature of the WA process
intentionally creates a learning environment that causes the WA to
learn through trial and error. “You have to get it wrong to get it
right,” Sharpe said. “And that is very painful.” Along the way, the WA
is constantly asked to reflect on the process, to recognize errors, and
“to learn to love what is best.”
The process of teaching
writing—and, I think, editing
The process of teaching
a magazine—requires constant
application of the elements of
writing—and, I think,
practical wisdom: guiding
someone while respecting
editing a magazine—
their freedom and autonomy;
challenging and questioning
requires constant application but respecting another person’s choices; being generous,
not just with your time but in
of practical wisdom.
your spirit of giving to another; balancing generosity with
fairness and making choices
about how to distribute your time; being empathetic and understanding of the other person’s feelings; and listening carefully and
knowing when to interrupt—and when not to.
Most of the Swarthmore alumni I know are good writers—and for
the past 25 years that’s been no accident. No matter which side of the
WA equation a student is on—learning to write more clearly or practicing the practical wisdom needed to teach that skill—the benefits of
learning to love what is best are enormous.
—Jeffrey Lott

linda thorsen ’77

on the web

june xie ’11

eleftherios kostans

parlor talk

Kenneth Sharpe (left) the
William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor
of Political Science, and Barry
Schwartz, the Dorwin P.
Cartwright Professor of Social
Theory and Social Action, are
both popular teachers and
prolific authors—of works including The Paradox of Choice
(2004) and Drug War Politics:
The Price of Denial (1996), respectively. They first cotaught a course (offered in
1989 and 1992) that explored
liberal individualism.

swarthmore college bulletin

letters
swarthmore

college bulletin
editor
Jeffrey Lott
associate editor
Carol Brévart-Demm
class notes editor
Susan Cousins Breen
art director
Phillip Stern ’84
staff photographer
Eleftherios Kostans
desktop publishing specialist
Audree Penner
publications intern
Madeline Williams ’12
administrative assistant
Janice Merrill-Rossi
editor emerita
Maralyn Orbison Gillespie ’49
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METZIDAKIS MEMORIES
I was saddened by the news of the death of
Professor Philip Metzidakis last November
(January Bulletin). I have him to thank for
fueling my interest during the early 1970s in
several of the “Generación del 98” Spanish
literary figures, particularly Miguel de Unamuno—his favorite, mine, and the favorite of
many. The article mentioned that Professor
Metzidakis studied at the Universidad de
Salamanca; this was in fact the university in
Spain where Unamuno was rector for many
years, almost until he died in 1936 in the
midst of the chaotic Spanish Civil War.
Professor Metzidakis was my faculty
adviser during my freshman year at Swarthmore, when I was still undecided as to my
major. I later chose history over Spanish and
so was assigned another faculty adviser in
that field. Nonetheless, I continued to take
courses in Spanish literature and remember
well Metzidakis’ often-present smoldering
cigar during class and other times. While initially I thought he had a gruff exterior, I
know now that it only housed a heart concerned with his students and with sharing his
love of the Spanish language and literature.
Roger Karny ’76
Denver, Colo.

YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE
It is curious that in the article “Inquiring
Minds” (January Bulletin), you write that scientist John Seely Brown “observes that the
teens’ attention span ranged between 30 seconds and five minutes, which [Brown writes]
‘parallels that of top managers who operate
in a world of fast context switching. So the
short attention span of today's kids may turn
out to be far from dysfunctional for future
work worlds.’”
Yet in “The Dances of Adele Diamond,”
[also January Bulletin] cognitive neuroscientist Adele Diamond ’74 is quoted as saying:
"Executive function skills, such as sustained
attention, are stifled by video games and TV
programs that assume short attention spans."
Perhaps Brown and Diamond should
communicate.
Dick Kirschner '49
Albuquerque, N. M.
We asked Diamond for her reply:
I do not agree with Brown. A short attention
span is never an advantage. You want to able

april 2011

to stay focused and attend for a long time
when you need to. For example, if you are
listening to a report on how your company
has been doing or the results of your latest
medical tests, you don't want to space out in
the middle—you want to be able to stay
present.
You also want to be able to quickly,
smoothly, and easily switch from one thing
to another, and back and forth if needed—
but that’s because you choose to switch, not
because you can't stay focused.
It’s one thing if you choose to switch
between a call on Line 1, a call on Line 2, and
a person in your office. It's another if your
attention keeps getting grabbed by a beep for
a new email, a new text message that pops
up, or when the screen changes to reveal a
different news story. Most teens are having
their attention grabbed, rather than their
learning to prioritize and choose to allocate
15 minutes here, three minutes there, an
hour here, etc.
Adele Diamond ’74
Vancouver, B.C.

FOR THE RECORD
In “Books & Arts” (January Bulletin), Justin
Kramon’s [’02] book Finny was incorrectly
described as a “young adult novel.” Random
House published it an adult literary/mainstream novel.

3

from the president

The Character o
eleftherios kostans

By President Rebecca Chopp

Menander, the Greek dramatist, once said,
“The character of a man is known from his
conversations.”
It is also the case, I think, that the
character of a college is often
reflected in its conversations. So, let
me describe, briefly, the conversations we are
having in our strategic planning process and
then share with you my sense of a few
emerging, commonly recurring themes.
The Alumni Council has hosted Connection events around the country in order to
elicit alumni perspectives on the core values
of the College, our strengths, and the opportunities and challenges we will confront in
the future. I have traveled to cities in Asia, to
London, and throughout the United States to
engage in dialogue with alumni, parents, and
friends of the College about strategic planning. Each of these stimulating events has
been filled with rich conversations on issues
such as the distinctiveness of our Honors
Program, the importance of science literacy,
the role of athletics in preparing our students, and the desire to preserve our needblind admissions process and the strength of
our financial aid policies, among many
others.
Since we formally kicked off the planning
process last fall, our website (www.swarthmore.edu/strategicplanning) has received
more than 150 blog postings from alumni,
parents, students, staff, and faculty. The volume alone is impressive, but the quality of
the content is even more so. On campus, faculty members have had numerous conversations in meetings and at ongoing weekly
lunches. Members of our staff have discussed
strategic planning in their divisional meetings and as participants in our working

4

groups. Students are engaging in fireside
chats, and Dean of Students Elizabeth Braun
and I are hosting open-table sessions with
them over lunch in Sharples Dining Hall.
Our strategic planning conversations have
been characterized by a diversity of opinions,
ideas, and suggestions on how best to continue our mission in the future, building upon
our considerable strengths and value-infused
traditions. While we are still in the William
James “let a thousand flowers bloom” phase,
we are listening attentively, gathering all the
insights and perspectives we can, and identifying common themes and opportunities as
well as challenges. I’d like to highlight three
of the common themes I see emerging
amidst the thousand flowers.
The first of these is the changing nature of
teaching and learning. The pre-eminent value
that has emerged across all of our conversations is that we should not, under any circumstances, compromise the excellence and
rigor of our academic program. It has also
become clear that 20th-century structures do
not provide adequately for all of our 21stcentury forms of knowledge. Knowledge in
the 20th century was organized, in large part,
into distinct disciplines, and the concentration of thought within each led to enormous
advances. But in the 21st century, we realize
that just as we must continue to mine knowledge within each of these disciplines, we also
need to work across them in order to advance knowledge in new and meaningful
ways and to effectively address contemporary
problems. The rate of change in knowledge
formation has dramatically accelerated in

swarthmore college bulletin

of Our Conversations

o

m

terms of consumption,
individuals, of our comproduction, performance
There is a deep longing for
munity, and of the world.
and expression, techStudents desire more
niques for experimentaand a need to find new ways spaces where they can
tion, investigation and
work together and coninquiry—and in sheer
to engage what we might call nect with one another in
volume. Collaboration
small groups, but they
and teamwork, problemSwarthmore’s global
also want a space for the
based inquiry, innovation
whole community to
and entrepreneurship in
knowledge network.
gather. Some students
nearly all fields, and the
have expressed interest in
blending of teaching and
re-imagining and reresearch are referenced
instituting Collection in
frequently in our
order to be together as a
conversations.
diverse, inclusive, and
Given this changing
engaged community,
context, how do we best
adding to the existing
support our faculty and
ways the community
students as they explore the
already gathers in smaller
.c
to
new landscape of knowing,
groups and affinity
o
ph
ck
teaching, and learning?
alliances. There is a deep
isto
Although this landscape will
sense that the College must
continue to include the 20th-century
enhance support of the physical and
quest to fully explore the depth of the discimental health of individuals—especially stuplines, it must also include new strategies for dents—and promote wellness, resiliency, and
pushing out the frontiers of knowledge. Stubalance. Nutrition, meditation, athletics and
dents and faculty will continue to work
fitness, the arts, spirituality, gardening, positogether in the traditional spaces of the class- tive psychology, and practical wisdom are all
room, the lab, and the studio but also
topics being raised under the canopy of wellincreasingly in community-based learning
being. We are also looking outward—dissettings in Chester and China, summer
cussing our ongoing commitment to the
research programs at Penn and in Poland,
well-being of the earth and other communiinternships in entrepreneurship in San Fran- ties around the world. We are in deep discuscisco and Singapore, field-based research in
sion about how our Quaker values and our
New Guinea and the Amazon, and arts procommitment to sustainability, and to the
grams in Ghana and Ireland. We must think
development of engaged, civic-minded, and
now about how problem-based learning will
visible leadership of individuals and of ouraffect the way we organize our time and
selves as an institution can most effectively
courses, our disciplines and resources.
contribute to the common good.
Another recurring theme shared among
A third theme is our community’s desire to
alumni, students, staff, and faculty members
be connected throughout the world. Although
alike is the need to attend to the well-being of Swarthmore’s essence is rooted in our beauti-

april 2011

ful campus, ours is a worldwide intellectual
community that likes to exchange ideas, perspectives, experiences, hopes, and concerns,
no matter where alumni find themselves
after graduation. There is a deep longing for
and a need to find new ways to engage what
we might call Swarthmore’s global knowledge network. Might we use technology to
offer webinars on critical topics of the day
among our alumni? Can alumni interview
our students via Skype or other forms of
technology to help them strengthen their
communication skills? We need to understand and engage members of our larger
community as responsible leaders and
thinkers in all parts of the world as well as on
campus. Can we become an institution that
convenes faculty, students, alumni, staff, and
visiting scholars to address the most pressing
issues of the day? Will the Town Center West
project (see page 6)—including a new inn
with small conference capacity—allow us to
host members of our knowledge network in
substantive ways?
These three common themes are dominant
among the many emerging from our conversations. I urge you to consider these ideas and to
share your own on the website at www.swarthmore.edu/strategicplanning or via e-mail to
strategicplanning@swarthmore.edu.
I believe that if Menander could join us in
our planning conversations, he would judge
our character to be robust, critical, creative,
inclusive, intense, rigorous, and thoroughly
enjoyable as we discuss together the future of
Swarthmore College.
Join the Web conversation about
Swarthmore’s future at
http://sp.swarthmore.edu.

5

collection

Picture a group of visiting scholars on campus attending a conference
on the future of the liberal arts. Or alumni gathering in a comfortable inn and
restaurant space on campus, meeting with faculty and students to discuss the College’s vision and
commitment to sustainability issues. Imagine faculty,
students, and staff mingling with Borough residents at an
inn, restaurant, and bookstore at the edge of campus. These
opportunities will soon exist for the Swarthmore community
as a result of the Board of Managers recent approval of a
plan that includes building a 40- to 45-room inn with conference space and a restaurant and relocating and expanding
the campus bookstore. Following more than a decade of
study, the project, named Town Center West (TCW), is
expected to be completed by late spring 2014 on a Collegeowned site adjacent to the athletic facilities and close to the
regional rail line.
President Rebecca Chopp noted that TCW would support
a number of College objectives including the need to create
the kind of spaces necessary for the “robust and evolving
intellectual life of faculty and students.” According to
Provost Constance Hungerford, faculty are eager to have
nonacademic spaces where they can meet with colleagues

6

photographs by phillip stern ’84

BOARD
GIVES GREEN
LIGHT TO INN
PROJECT

The College’s current softball field on the Town Center West site
will be moved closer to the Palmer Residence Hall and will remain
a natural turf field with dugouts, backstop, and fencing similar to
the one that exists today. Swarthmore’s 130-year-old barn will be
preserved. The new inn will honor the principles of the American
College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment, of which
President Rebecca Chopp is a signatory. This commitment includes
designing the project to the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED
Silver certification.

swarthmore college bulletin

more informally, and across departments, in
an increasingly collaborative and interdisciplinary intellectual landscape.
The inn, restaurant, and conference spaces
will also allow departments and the College
to host small conferences on campus during
the academic year for the first time in its history. During a time when many in the United
States advocate for a more vocational
approach to higher education, other countries are interested in replicating the liberal
arts model in which Swarthmore excels.
“Many alumni, faculty members, staff, and
students voice a long-held desire that we play
a more active and more visible role regionally, nationally, and internationally in order to
contribute in a more meaningful way to the
conversations about the future of the liberal
arts,” Chopp said.
TCW also meets another longstanding
objective—to help revitalize the Borough’s
commercial district and strengthen ties
between the College and Borough. The idea
for TCW first arose in a 1999 planning document titled “Swarthmore Town Center Revitalization Strategy,” prepared by Urban Partners with Kise Straw and Kolodner. This 34point plan was the result of study and analysis of current and projected economic conditions in the Borough and included input
from more than 900 individuals, including
members of the College community and
Borough residents. It has since served as a
blueprint for the Borough’s revitalization
efforts and many of its suggestions have been
implemented.
An inn would also help meet the practical
need to provide close, comfortable lodging
and dining options for alumni, prospective
families, visiting athletes, and friends and
family members of Borough residents.
“I’ve been waiting for this project to come
to fruition for many years,” said Sabrina
Martinez ’92, president of Alumni Council.
“I would love for our alumni to have a nice
place to stay on campus when they’re visiting. I also believe it would help the College
considerably in its recruitment efforts and in
april 2011

its capacity to host other scholars and
administrators.”
As is typical with development projects,
TCW has gone through an extensive vetting
process since it was first proposed in 1999.
After requesting qualifications and proposals
from potential developers in 2007, the College put the project on hold during the
financial crisis of 2008 and 2009.
In 2010, prospects for TCW were bolstered when the Borough received a $2 million grant from Pennsylvania’s Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program. (See July
2010 Bulletin.) After further study over the
course of this year, the College decided to
self-develop TCW, concluding that selfdevelopment would allow far greater control
with respect to meeting the project’s primary
mission to support College objectives as well
as more control over the management of its
lodging, restaurant, and meeting spaces. In
addition to the state funding, there has been
donor interest in the project because of its
potential to further the College’s educational
mission, according to Suzanne Welsh, vice
president for finance and treasurer. She
added that the College will have additional
opportunities to pursue grant funding and
will not tap into operational funds to finance
the project.
A steering committee, comprised of senior members of the administration and
Board members, is managing the project
through the formative stages. Last fall, the
Board of Managers appointed a TCW Ad
Hoc Advisory Committee, which included
faculty, students, and staff. The Committee
met throughout the year to act as a sounding
board for the steering committee and provide feedback from the College community.
The College also commissioned two independent market studies to guide decisions
about the appropriate size and amenities for
the inn, restaurant, and meeting space. Both
studies recommended an independently
operated three-star inn with 40 to 45 rooms,
a small business center, and a combined
restaurant/lounge with about 100 seats—

plus seating for outdoor dining in good
weather and an outdoor function space.
Community members and Borough residents alike have expressed interest in the
future shape the project will take. Borough
residents have shared concerns about traffic
patterns and environmental considerations,
among others. The student group, Swarthmore Labor Action Project (SLAP) has raised
the possibility of unionizing the hotel staff in
order to ensure positive working conditions.
To address some of the issues that have
been raised, the College hosted two forums
this spring, one on the hotel industry, featuring a presentation by a hospitality industry
expert, and another featuring a panel discussion on labor issues. Other public forums
will be held in the fall. The College has also
developed a website, which is frequently
updated with new information about the
project and provides answers to new questions as they arise.
In March, President Chopp reaffirmed the
College’s commitment to a positive work
environment for anyone working on Swarthmore’s campus and issued a statement of
principles in a guest column that appeared in
the student and local press. The College’s
principles include an unwavering commitment to ensure that every employee will
work in a safe and healthy environment; that
each person will be able to discuss issues
freely; and that every worker will be empowered to make their own choices about
whether or not to join a union. For the full
text of the guest column, please see
www.swarthmore.edu/x32226.xml.
The College and Borough continue to collaborate closely on TCW. The College will
begin the architectural design process shortly, and the Borough will undertake a series of
zoning and land use reviews before the project is considered fully approved.
—Nancy Nowicki Nicely
For more on the TCW, go to
http://bit.ly/towncenterwest.

7

collection

8

In addition to his long involvement with
Swarthmore, Lang founded the I Have a
Dream Foundation, a landmark program
supporting low-income students starting in
elementary school through college, and Project Pericles, a national organization of colleges and universities working to include
social responsibility and participatory citizenship as essential elements of their educational programs. For his far-reaching efforts,
Lang received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Bill Clinton in 1996.
At the dinner in his honor, President
Rebecca Chopp said, “Gene has supported and
inspired the heart of our campus—the faculty
and the students … he has been a prophet of
our aspirations, our hopes, and our dreams.”
Lang, who came of age during the Great
Depression, has demonstrated that aspirations need to be met with careful thought
and hard work. At the first Lang Scholars
breakfast in 1982, recalled Shuchman, Lang
asked “probing questions that left me thinking for many hours afterward.... As a mentor,
he didn’t tell me what to do, but through his
questions he sparked new ideas. The notion
that you can achieve what everyone tells you
cannot be done changed my life forever.”
That lesson motivated symposium panelists
Gayle Isa ’93 to launch Philadelphia’s Asian
Arts Initiative, Lourdes Rosado ’85 to pursue
public interest law, and John Alston, associate
professor of music, to found the Chester Children’s Chorus. Their Lang-funded work
begins to pay it forward, said Alston. “My stuWatch and listen to Eugene Lang talk
about his relationship to Swarthmore at
http://bit.ly/eugenelang.

eleftherios kostans

At Swarthmore, Eugene Lang ’38 is legendary.
His gifts have created three buildings—the
Lang Music Building, the Eugene and Theresa
Lang Performing Arts Center, and the Lang
Center for Civic and Social Responsibility—
as well as the Theresa Lang Garden of Fragrance, student financial aid funds, endowed
professorships and staff support, and the 30year-old Lang Opportunity Scholarships.
Lang funds not only the scholarships but
is also an active mentor, visiting the scholars
on campus one Saturday each semester, making himself available for advice by phone,
and maintaining close connections through
the decades with his former scholars.
“We all need heroes,” said Salem Shuchman ’84, one of the first Lang Scholars, “and
Gene is mine.”
To honor Lang, on Feb. 19, the College
hosted a lunch featuring speakers representing
the organizations he founded; a symposium
on social responsibility and artists as agents of
social change; and a celebratory dinner.
Maurice Eldridge ’61, executive assistant to
the president and vice president for community and College relations, led the committee
that planned the event. “Gene lives a life in
devotion to the well-being of others, an example of ‘letting your life speak,’” Eldridge said.
Scores of “Langs” attended, recalling with
gratitude the Lang Opportunity Scholarships
that set them on their life paths. The 30-yearold scholarships encourage students to design
and initiate service projects in the United
States and abroad. Also present were nine
members of Lang’s family, including his children Jane Lang ’67 and her brother, Stephen
’73, H’10; Jane’s daughter Jessica Lang
McGrew-Kosa ’92; and Stephen’s son Noah ’10.
Vincent Jones ’98, senior program officer
of the Liberty Hill Foundation in Los Angeles,
said the Lang Scholars program instilled in him
the value of “strategic philanthropy”—investing in young leaders and in projects that can
ripple outward to benefit many. As a champion
of young people who think big and are prepared
to act, Lang is a “thoughtful giver,” Jones said.
Indeed, the philanthropy of Eugene Lang,
a self-made businessman who led REFAC
Technology Development Corporation, has
launched generations of civic engagement.
The Lang Opportunity Scholarship Program
alone has funded 164 student projects in 30
countries since its inception.

phillip stern ’84

A THOUGHTFUL GIVER

At the Feb. 19 celebration, daughter Jane Lang ’67
applauds as Eugene Lang ’38 (center) is honored “for
making a significant difference in business and philanthropy” at Swarthmore. Lang was the first recipient of a new award created by the Alumni Council and
presented by Joy Charlton, professor of sociology
and director of the Lang Center for Civic and Social
Responsibility. In future, the award will be given as
the Eugene M. Lang Class of 1938 Impact Award.

dents are beginning to learn what it’s like to be
in charge, to tell the adult in charge what they
think,” he said. “They must have practice as
children at being in charge so they can talk to
mayors and other leaders in their adult lives.”
For Teya Sepinuk, associate in performance
in the Dance Program, the impact of social
change is rooted in storytelling. As executive
director of the Theatre of Witness Programme,
Sepinuk has told through performance art stories of the elderly, prisoners serving life sentences, and the people of war-torn Northern
Ireland. She has worked with Lang Scholars on
her projects and considers the sharing of stories “the chance for social change to begin . . .
when we hear with the ears of our hearts.”
Lang’s story starts with Swarthmore, which
he has called his “lodestar.” He credits the
College for considering visionary ideas and
says he is proud to have leaders from other
schools ask: “How does Swarthmore deal with
this problem? How does Swarthmore handle
it?” At the same time, Lang recalls his late wife
Theresa as a “constant source of inspiration.”
“Everything I’ve done,” he said, “I’ve done
because she was always by my side.”
—Jennifer Baldino Bonett
swarthmore college bulletin

eleftherios kostans

MISUNDERSTANDING HISTORY

Professor Sudharshan Seneviratne [above, left] assigned the students of his
Politics of the Past course to create posters depicting issues surrounding
ownership and interpretation of the past from various periods and countries. A March exhibit in Eldridge Commons stimulated relection and lively
discussion among visitors. “Heritage and liberal arts are gifts to humanity,” says Seneviratne. “So it’s incumbent on us to pass the best of what we
do to the next generation.”

When Sudharshan Seneviratne, a professor of archaeology at the University of Peradineya, Sri Lanka, first visited Swarthmore in 1990 to
give a talk, he found the area around Parrish Hall thronging with students, faculty, and staff members protesting against the Gulf War.
Although his talk had to be postponed until later that day, far from
being upset by the disruption of his schedule, Seneviratne—then a
Visiting Fulbright Professor at Cornell University—was impressed
cross-listed in classics and peace and conflict studies. Examining case
and delighted by the community’s enthusiastic antiwar stance.
studies from around the world, the class discusses ownership of the
“People are unbelievably engaged here,” he says.
past—“who has the right to own it, interpret it, whose past are we
Seneviratne, also director general of the Central Cultural Fund—a talking about, and how is the past linked to and an intrinsic part of
custodian organization for UNESCO World Heritage sites—is back at the present,” Seneviratne says. Museums come under scrutiny.
Swarthmore this year as the Cornell Distinguished Visiting Professor
“Whose histories are being shown, and whose are left out?” he asks.
in the department of religion. His fall course Buddhist Ideology and
“We also examined to what degree the past’s heritage can be used
Social Response focused on the multifunctional role of Buddhist idefor conflict resolution,” he added.” In Sri Lanka, for example, he says,
ology over the last 3,000 years with respect to social legitimacy, ecoa bloody war imposed 30 years of pain and suffering on his people.
nomic enterprise, state-monastery power dynamics, artistic expres“Thousands died because they misunderstood history—with
sion, and militant response to colonialism. The students explored its
imagined communities and political ownership deduced from the
impact on sixth-century B.C.E. urbanism and empire systems in
past and used to legitimize power over other people,” he says. “We
North India; mercantilism in Central and South Asia in the first cenneed healing processes—not just conflict resolution but reconciliatury B.C.E.; monastic feudalism in Sri Lanka; and 19th- and 20thtion.” He mentions South Africa’s Truth Commission and his own
century colonialism and postcolonial nationalism of South Asia.
country’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee.
“I think the students thought I was going to teach them about
“Both courses were problem-oriented, issue-related, and very
Buddhist philosophy—the romanticized notion of Buddhism that is
demanding,” Seneviratne says. “I pushed the students to work at a
generally known in the West,” Seneviratne says. “But I gave them an
graduate-course level, and they stood the test really well.” He is grateentirely different picture of how religious and social ideologies evolve ful to the College for support that allowed him to invite a variety of
over time, how very simple initial teachings become institutionalized
scholars from related disciplines to speak in his classes.
according to demand. You have an original, pristine ideal form, but
This type of far-reaching, multidisciplinary, liberal arts education
anyone who wants to use it in a certain way will do so. Really, the
is dear to Seneviratne’s heart—as is his passion for heritage, which he
flexibility of any religion is the secret to its
defines as a combination of culture that is nationally
Listen to Seneviratne’s lecture
survival.”
inclusive of all ethnic groups, custodianship of the
“Heritage Odyssey: Unfolding the
Several of the students who attended
past, environmental preservation, and looking forMultifaceted Personality of an
Seneviratne’s fall class also enrolled in his
ward to future generations.
Island Civilization” at
spring course Politics of the Past, which is
—Carol Brévart-Demm
http://bit.ly/seneviratne.

april 2011

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eleftherios kostans

LOVE THOSE PLANTAINS AND
OH, THOSE YUCCA FRIES!

The Sharples TOP 10 “Bars”
1. Caribbean Bar

5. Greek Bar

Chef Benton Peak’s claim to fame is jerk
chicken, “homemade with love,” featuring his
special sauce. Plantains, yucca fries, and
green beans almondine are among the fixings,
and jerk tofu is offered as a vegan dish.

Students can take a virtual trip to the Cyclades
thanks to a menu that includes dolmades
(stuffed grape leaves), Greek salad, spanakopita, baklava, and tzatziki.

“My favorite bar is Caribbean bar,” says Ashley Oudenne ’11. “Before coming to Swarthmore, I had never had plantains or yucca
fries, so trying them for the first time freshman year was exciting. Now, I always make
time to go to Sharples for Caribbean bar.”
Oudenne has company. In a not-so-scientific study of food “bars” at Sharples Dining
Hall, Caribbean bar has emerged as the most
popular choice among Swarthmore students.
“Caribbean bar is the best,” says Mary Klap
’11. “The plantains are amazing!”
For the uninitiated, Sharples food bars
offer a variety of mealtime selections around
a central theme. The theme can be regional
or ethnic—as in falafel and fajita bars—or it
can feature a particular type of food, such as
salad and even oatmeal. A regular lunch bar
(shown at left) is called Puppy Club Bar with
Texas Tommies. Bars are offered at breakfast,
lunch, and dinner, and they include vegan
and vegetarian choices along with meatbased dishes.
Between them, Sharples Executive Chef
Benton Peak and Menu Planner and Director
of Purchasing Janet Kassab have decades of
experience feeding Swarthmore students,
incorporating culinary trends along with the
tried-and-true.
—Susan Clarey

6. Thai Bar
2. Pho Bar
Vietnam’s treasured noodle soup is a Swarthmore favorite. Options include vegetable
along with traditional beef.

A culinary journey to Southeast Asia that
features pad thai, chicken satay, red curry
tofu, and red lentils.

7. Indian Bar
3. Oatmeal Bar
This Saturday morning breakfast delight includes three kinds of oatmeal (steel cut oats,
plantain oatmeal, and apple cinnamon oatmeal) and topping choices ranging from
brown sugar to blueberries.

Sophisticated spices flavor authentic dishes
including chicken vindaloo, samosas, palak
paneer, and raita served with hot nan.

8. Pasta Bar
Students queue up quickly for pasta with
three choices of sauces. Mangia!

4. Specialty Salad Bar
The tortellini and fresh fruit salads are perennially popular. The salad of choice features
nuts, goat cheese, and candied cranberries on
a bed of Romaine lettuce.

9. Asian Bar
Favorites from the Far East include dumplings,
lo mein, fried rice, and sauces.

10. Yogurt Parfait Bar
Ready for dessert? Yogurt Parfait Bar offers
three flavors and a heavenly assortment of
toppings. Peak and Kassab rank it No. 10.

10

Chef Peak’s
Jerk Chicken
To prepare dinner for
Caribbean Night at Sharples,
Chef Benton Peak marinates more than 350
pounds of chicken and 50 pounds of tofu.
Each piece of chicken and tofu is seared on
the charbroiler and garnished with dipping
sauce. “It’s the best tofu you’ll ever eat,”
says Janet Kassab, the menu planner. The
Sharples team also steams 60 pounds of rice
and 80 pounds of green beans. During the
meal service, 250 pounds of yucca and 300
pounds of plantains are fried.

swarthmore college bulletin

15

150 YEARS AGO:
THE DREAM OF A COLLEGE
The idea to create what we know today as
Swarthmore College was first raised at a
meeting in Baltimore in October 1860,
and, by spring 1861—coinciding with the
beginning of Civil War hostilities at Fort
Sumter—committees of Friends from Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York had
been organized to solicit subscriptions (on
forms such as the one shown right) for “the
purchase of a farm, erection of suitable
buildings, procuring school furniture,
philosophical, and chemical apparatus.”
The founders thought $150,000 would
be sufficient for the land and construction
of a main building able to accommodate
100 boys and 100 girls. When sufficient
funds had been subscribed, the individual
subscribers (who were actually provided
with stock) were to select 24 managers for
the new school, eight each—four men and
four women—from the Baltimore,

Philadelphia, and New York Yearly meetings. Subscribers were advised that “the
money subscribed and paid is to be considered a contribution, inasmuch as no
dividend, or return therefrom in any way
other than from the general benefits of the
institution, is contemplated or to be
expected.”
Three years passed before the chartering of the College (1864) and five
more before the College opened for
instruction (1869), but the movement had begun.
—Christopher Densmore
Curator, Friends Historical Library

friends historical library

This is the first of an occasional
series that will follow the work
of Swarthmore’s Quaker
founders leading up to the
sesquicentennial of the
chartering of Swarthmore
in 1864.

To make Peak’s Jerk Chicken or Tofu at home:

Puree ingredients in a blender or food processor. Add vegetable oil slowly to form a thick
paste.Combine marinade with 1 pound extra
firm tofu or chicken breast. Marinate
overnight, and grill.

april 2011

It was quite a night for Phineas the Phoenix
when he got to pal around with two college
presidents at the same time: While
Swarthmore’s Rebecca Chopp
(right) and her longtime
friend Bryn Mawr’s Jane
McAuliffe served as
honorary coaches at
the Garnet’s annual
WBCA Pink Zone game
to promote breast cancer awareness, ace
cheerleader Phineas was
never far away.
eleftherios kostans

Jerk Marinade
1 Spanish onion
1 fresh jalapeno or scotch bonnet pepper
to taste
10 sprigs of thyme
12 scallions
4 T grated fresh ginger
2 T chopped fresh garlic
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground nutmeg
1 T brown sugar
3 tsp balsamic vinegar
2 tsp kosher salt
2 tsp black pepper

11

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RICH IN TONE AND
JAZZ HISTORY

campus, the piano was moved to
Room 426. It bears a plaque
above the keyboard, identifying
it as “The Marks Piano (a Bill
Evans recording piano) given by
Anthony Marks ’81 in memory
of his father, Lawrence Marks,
J.D., M.D., December 2009.” A
restored photograph of Bill
Evans playing the piano is displayed in the room.
Professor of Music and
Department Chair Michael
Marissen says: “Our concert
manager, Geoff Peterson, has
taken to playing mostly Bill
Evans tunes on it—to the delight
of all. Our current students and
several prospective students have
been simply enthralled by the
opportunity to play this piano.”
—Carol Brévart-Demm

eleftherios kostans

Pianist Jonathan Cohen ’14
executes expert improvisation
on the Marks piano during the
lunch hour practice period.
“The piano is very smooth and
clean; it doesn’t stick. Very
easy to play,” Cohen says of
the instrument that once
served jazz great Bill Evans.

Practice Room 426 in the Lang
Music Building is the new home
to a beautiful old Steinway grand
piano, a gift to the College from
Anthony Marks ’81. According to
Bernadette Dunning, the administrative coordinator in the
Music Department, student
pianists vie to play the lovely old
instrument and enjoy its rich
tone. No less rich is the history
of the piano and the serendipitous path that brought it to
Swarthmore.
The piano, built in 1923, long
served influential American jazz
pianist and Down Beat Jazz Hall
of Fame inductee Bill Evans as
his recording piano. In a message
to Dunning, Marks wrote that
his father, Lawrence Marks—an

amateur jazz pianist who had
played with Billy Holiday, Al
Haig, and Dizzy Gillespie—purchased the piano in 1972 from
the New York studio where Evans
had made several of his recordings. Ten years later, it was placed
in storage with the Steinway
company, from where Marks
retrieved it in 2004.
“This piano meant a great
deal to my father. It would be
wonderful if it could find a place
at Swarthmore,” Marks wrote,
proposing to donate the instrument.
The piano came to the College in December 2009. It was
first placed in the home of Cornell Distinguished Visiting Professor and renowned jazz pianist
Hans Lüdemann. At the end of
Lüdemann’s yearlong tenure on

12

swarthmore college bulletin

Composing Nature

Bounty, 2007, mixed media on paper mounted on linen

Artist Andrea Packard ’84 describes her images as being not so much
about static places as they are states that are ephemeral, dynamic, and
subject to change.
In a solo exhibit in March at the College’s List Gallery—which
Packard has directed since 1995—visitors were treated to a sampling
of Packard’s richly textured collage works on
paper and panel, in
which fragments of
prints, papers, and fabric
are combined with pastel, gouache, and acrylic.
Resulting from observation and an experimental
collage process, the
works were inspired by
New England and MidAtlantic woods and wetlands that have been
threatened or destroyed
Refuge, 2008, mixed media on paper mounted on linen
by development. Far
from being literal repreListen to Packard’s talk
sentations of their subjects,
“Toward a Quaker Aesthetic” at
Packard’s art explores and
http://bit.ly/andreapackard.
evokes nature’s power to
inspire, hinting at the way natural forms, relationships, and perceptions change with the passage of time.
“In a world dominated by mass-produced imagery, I am fascinated by art that resists memorization and rewards a searching gaze.
Many of my works look more naturalistic at a distance but offer a
strikingly different experience up close where the cultural resonance
of the material takes precedence. I’m curious about how distinct ways
of experiencing the world can co-exist,” she says.
—Carol Brévart-Demm

SOLIDARITY WITH EGYPTIANS

april 2011

eleftherios kostans

Before marching across the campus on Feb. 1 to demonstrate solidarity for the Egyptian people’s nonviolent revolt against Egyptian
President Hosni Mubaruk, a group of about 60 students—plus several
members of the faculty and staff—gathered in Parrish Hall’s Shane
Lounge to watch a few minutes of news on Al-Jazeera, the Arabiclanguage news network that broadcasts worldwide also in English.
“This is a revolt of the people against tyranny,” Nidal Al-Ayasa
’11, a member of the Middle Eastern Cultural Society and of Students
for Peace and Justice in Palestine, told the Feb. 2 Daily Gazette. “Our
group wanted to call attention to this struggle and demonstrate support for people dying on the streets for freedom.”
Three days after the demonstration, faculty members Tariq alJamil, assistant professor of religion; Shane Minkin, instructor of
history; and Farha Ghannam, associate professor of anthropology
led a well-attended discussion and answered questions on the events
in Egypt.

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collection

When The Princeton Review’s selection of
100 Best Value Colleges was published
earlier this year, USA Today journalist Mary
Beth Marklein commented in a Feb. 22 article on fluctuations in the list during the
past three years, suggesting that, due to
the instability of the economy, many colleges are struggling to remain affordable.
For the third straight year, however,
Swarthmore held firm at the top of the list,
which comprises 50 public and 50 private
schools culled from 700 that were surveyed. Factors weighed were undergraduate academics, costs, and financial
aid—plus the percentage of graduating
seniors who borrowed from any loan program and the average dollar amount of
debt those students had at graduation.
Trailing Swarthmore in the private-college
rankings were Duke, Princeton, Caltech,
Harvard, Wesleyan University (Conn.),
Williams, Vanderbilt, Wesleyan College
(Ga.), and Yale.
—Carol Brévart-Demm

NEW PROVOST
TOM STEPHENSON
James H. Hammons Professor of Chemistry Thomas
Stephenson was recently
appointed by President
Rebecca Chopp on the recommendation of the faculty
to be the next provost of the
College. On July 1, he will
succeed Mari S. Michener
Professor of Art History
Constance Hungerford, who
has held the position for 10
years. Hungerford, an expert
in 19th-century French
painting, will return to fulltime teaching.
A faculty member since
1985 and a former chair of
the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry,
Stephenson has served as
associate provost for information technology at the
College as well as on the
Council on Educational Poli-

eleftherios kostans

SWARTHMORE “BEST VALUE”
FOR THIRD STRAIGHT YEAR

Tom Stephenson joined the faculty
in chemistry in 1985 and previously served as associate provost
for information technology.

cy, the Promotion and
Tenure Committee, the Faculty Procedures Committee
(on which he will also serve
as provost), and the Ad Hoc
Financial Planning Committee, among others.
As principal academic
officer of the College,
Stephenson will be responsible for overseeing the curriculum and the faculty. All
the academic departments,

the library, athletics department, and information and
technology services will
report to him. He will chair
the Council on Educational
Policy and the Curriculum
Committee and work with
the academic departments
on appointments, promotions, and academic program budgets.
“My role will be to provide structure, encouragement, and support for faculty and the academic program, and then get out of
the way,” Stephenson says.
“In addition, I’m sure that
the strategic planning
process will result in new
directions and initiatives in
the academic program.
Leading the efforts to implement them will be a major
focus of my work over the
next few years.”
—Carol Brévart-Demm

A POLYGLOT CAMPUS

middlebury college

curriculum that includes instruction in language and culture during daylong programs
Everyone knows that the best way to learn a
that run from 9 a.m. to 9:15 p.m. On arrival,
foreign language is to speak it—as much as
the students must take a language oath
possible. And that’s exactly what approxipromising to speak only in their target lanmately 200 high school students will be
guage for the duration of the program—
doing on Swarthmore’s campus this summer,
whether participating in language classes;
when the College becomes a host site for the
study halls; dining; activities such as sports,
Middlebury-Monterey Language Academy
ethnic cooking, or dance classes; chess; and
(MMLA). The MMLA offers the four-week
field trips. They must surrender their cell
residential language immersion program in
phones and laptops, receiving them only to
five other states across the country, teaching
contact their families at given times. ParticiArabic, Chinese, French, German, and Spanpants will live in Willetts residence hall,
ish. Students residing on Swarthmore’s camdivided into groups according to target lanpus will focus on Chinese, French, and
This summer, Swarthmore will become a host site for
guages and remaining together, except for
Spanish.
the Middlebury-Monterey Language Institute, a resiSaturday evenings, when all students gather
Patricia Maloney, the College’s director of dential program for high school students. The profor a social, at which dances representing the
summer programs says she’s delighted to
gram’s pledge “No English Spoken Here” ensures
various nationalities are performed.
have the MMLA on campus.
full-immersion foreign language learning for four
“This is really pretty hard-core language
“We’ve been trying for a number of years
weeks.
immersion,” says Maloney, adding that the
to find an academic program that matches
College stands to benefit both financially and from the presence on
the mission of Swarthmore—a sound, rigorous program with an
campus of a large group of students of the kind that could find a
excellent reputation—and we believe we’ve found that in the
good match with Swarthmore, as they make their college choices.
MMLA,” she says.
Children of Swarthmore alumni who wish to participate in the
According to Maloney, approximately 70 foreign language teachers
program are eligible for a discount.
and professors from high schools and colleges, including Swarth—Carol Brévart-Demm
more, have been encouraged to apply, says Maloney. They will cover a
14

swarthmore college bulletin

In February, the Board of Managers approved the promotion of
six faculty members from associate to full professorship: Allison
Dorsey, a historian specializing in
African American history, African
American women, American history, and the history of food.
Philip Everson, a statistician
whose research data include
football, basketball, and baseball
results; María Luisa Guardiola, a
Hispanist who specializes in 19thand 20th-century Spanish literature; Kathleen Howard, a
chemist/biochemist whose research focuses on the use of
magnetic resonance spectroscopy to investigate membrane-bound molecules; Aimee
Johnson, a mathematician who
researches dynamical systems
that arose in the study of systems
of differential equations and were
used to model physical phenomena; and psychologist Andrew
Ward, whose research interests
include self-regulation and control, negotiation and conflict resolution, and social perception.
Five faculty members were
promoted from assistant to associate professor with continuous
tenure: Pallabi Chakravorty, a
scholar of dance whose areas of
interest include Kathak dance,
dance theory, and dance and anthropology; Anthony Foy, an English literature scholar specializing
in black literary and cultural history; biologist Nicholas Kaplinsky,
an expert on plant temperature
stress responses and cell wall
biosynthesis; sociologist Lee
Smithey, a scholar of peace and
conflict, social movements,
Northern Ireland, and qualitative
methods; and political scientist
Dominic Tierney, a scholar of
American foreign policy and international security.
—Carol Brévart-Demm
april 2011

ADIEU À UN PROFESSEUR BIEN AIME
The College community mourns the Jan. 4 death
the Russian revolution, Bradley suggests that
of George Moskos, professor of French and James Moskos emerged from that experience with his
C. Hormel Professor in Social Justice. The College own postmodern theory (a reflection of his
has lost a dedicated and talented teacher, a scholar intense scholarly interest in contemporary literary
eager to explore new intelcriticism), seeing in this
lectual territory, and a
work, unlike his two colchampion of justice and
leagues, themes of gender
equality, wrote Maurice
bending and confusion.
Eldridge, vice president for
Bradley recalls that their
College and community
weekly three-hour prepararelations and executive assistion meetings were some of
tant to the president, in a
the best and most vital disletter to the College commucussions about art and polinity. Moskos was 62 and is
tics he experienced during
survived by his partner, Blair
decades at Swarthmore.
Gannon.
Beyond his academic role,
“George was intellectualMoskos served on the Foreign
ly vibrant and deeply
Study and Sager committees
embedded in French culture.
as well as on the Faculty-Staff
He spoke exquisite French,
Benefits Committee, where
and people often took him
he was instrumental in getfor a native speaker,” says
ting the College to support
Moskos wil be remembered for his inspiring
Sibelan Forrester, professor
same-sex partner health benteaching and concern for justice and equalof Russian and chair of the
efits. He was also a director of
ity—especially concerning sexual difference.
Modern Languages and Litthe College’s program in
eratures Department. HansGrenoble.
jakob Werlen, professor of German, adds, “I
In 1997, Moskos was appointed to the James C.
learned so much about teaching from George—
Hormel Professorship in Social Justice, a chair
the way he engaged all students in class discusthat recognizes a professor in any academic divisions allowed them to think expansively about the sion whose teaching and scholarship stimulate
readings they had just completed and about the
increased concern for and understanding of social
world.”
justice issues, including those pertaining to sexual
John Hassett, Susan W. Lippincott Professor
orientation. Carole Netter, a lecturer in French,
Emeritus of Modern and Classical Languages,
noted that the Hormel Professorship befitted the
describes George as an “incredibly gifted language way Moskos lived his life: “George treated everyteacher” with a deep commitment not only to
one with respect, gentleness, intellectual openteaching his first love—19th-century French narness, and from a perspective of concern for justice
rative—but also to the pedagogy of language
and equality. He was a great defender of women
teaching. “He was always looking for new and
and sexual difference.”
exciting ways to teach the language.”
The high regard for Moskos felt by so many of
Moskos joined the department in 1975 after
his colleagues across the faculty is captured by
earning a B.A. at Davidson College and a Ph.D. in one colleague and “buddy across the hall” for
French with a minor in art history at the Univermore than 30 years. Marion Faber, Scheuer Famisity of Wisconsin-Madison. A specialist in 19thly Professor Emerita of Humanities and Professor
century French literature, he often also explored
Emerita of German, describes him as an inspiring
themes of identity, gender, and sexuality, someteacher, charismatic and successful, loved not
times co-teaching with colleagues outside his dis- only by students but also faculty, hard working,
cipline and taking an active role in the comparahigh-spirited, and admired for his flair and sense
tive literature and women’s studies programs.
of style.
Thompson Bradley, professor emeritus of
College community members celebrated
Russian, saw Moskos’s approach to teaching liter- Moskos’s life at a Bond Hall gathering March 25.
ature change over the years. When, with Werlen,
—Adapted from a Jan. 10 message to the College
they both co-taught Red Star, a classic novel of
community from the President’s Office.
deng-jeng lee

SIX NAMED
FULL PROFESSOR;
FIVE ARE TENURED

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Women Show Strength in Basketball, Swimming
Men’s Basketball
(6-19, 3-15)
Will Gates ’13 put together
another spectacular season
to lead the Garnet during
the 2010–2011 campaign.
The sophomore earned
Centennial Conference
honorable mention honors
after leading the team in
scoring average (18.3),
rebounding average (6.5),
and three-point shooting
(33.1). With 851 career
jake mrozewski
points, Gates has scored
more points through his sophomore season
than any player in program history. He
scored in double figures in 23 of the Garnet’s
25 games during the 2010–2011 season,
including a streak of 39 consecutive games
spanning his first two seasons. Gates also
scored at least 25 points in five games during
the season, including a career-high–tying 31point performance against Moravian on Nov.
30. For his efforts during the season, he was
named to the Equinox Classic and NYU New
Year’s Classic All-Tournament teams as well
as MVP of the 11th Annual Wall-O’Mahony
game at Johns Hopkins, which is played in
honor of Johns Hopkins alumni Glen Wall
and Matt O'Mahony, both of whom died in
the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
As a team, the young Garnet started the
season strong before stumbling in Centennial
Conference play. Thanks to tight victories
over Widener (74-72) in the season opener
and Clark University (69-66) in the Equinox
Classic, Swarthmore began the year at 3-0 for
the first time since the 1996–1997 season.
Conference play was highlighted by a convincing 73-59 victory over Centennial Conference runner-up Dickinson and a thrilling
comeback win over Ursinus, in which the
Garnet stunned the Bears by rallying from
down nine points with less then 90 seconds
left to play.
Several first-years put together impressive
rookie campaigns, lending hope to the
future. Jay Kober (11.8 points per game), Jordan Federer (8.1 points per game) and Jordan Cheney (23 blocks) all showed promise
during the season and will be counted on to
play an even greater role in 2011–2012.
16

dave evans

Women’s Basketball (15-10, 11-9)
It was a season of milestones for the women’s
basketball team, which finished the season at
15-10, the program’s best record since the
2004–2005 campaign.
Swarthmore opened the season by winning eight of its first 10 games, capturing
championships at the season-opening Swat
Tip-Off Tournament and NYU Holiday Classic in the process. After struggling at the start
of Centennial Conference play, the Garnet
regrouped, winning three of its last four
games. Thanks to a thrilling 65-60 seasonending victory at rival Haverford, the Garnet
finished the season in a three-way tie for
fourth place in the Centennial standings.
Unfortunately, Swat missed out on a playoff
spot, losing out on tiebreakers for the final
two playoff spots to Ursinus and Franklin &
Marshall.
Leading the way for Swarthmore throughout the season was Kathryn Stockbower ’11.
The senior wrapped up one of the most decorated careers in program history by breaking several national, conference, and program records. On Feb. 5 at Johns Hopkins,
Stockbower recorded the 80th double-double
of her career, breaking the NCAA Division
III record. Just three days earlier, she became
Swarthmore's all-time leading rebounder in a
game against Muhlenberg. At the conclusion
of the season, Stockbower found herself as
Division III’s all-time leader in career double-doubles (83), Swarthmore’s all-time
leading rebounder (1,335) and third-leading
scorer (1,677) as well as the Centennial Conference’s fifth-leading scorer and secondleading rebounder. For her efforts, she was

Swimmer Daniel Duncan ’13 (above left) won four
medals at the men’s Centennial Conference championship. Basketball player Ryan Carmichael ’11 (above
right) helped his team to its first 3–0 season start
since 1996–1997; conference play was another story.

once again named to the All-Centennial
Conference First Team, becoming only the
second player in Conference history to be
named to the First Team all four years of her
career. Stockbower was just as impressive
academically, as she became the first Swarthmore student-athlete since 2005 to be named
to the Academic All-America College Division First Team.
Last but not least, Ceylan Bodur ’11
became the eighth player in program history
to reach the 1,000-point plateau—a milestone that would not have been possible if
not for a touching display of sportsmanship
from Tri-Co rival Bryn Mawr. After suffering
a career-ending knee injury on Jan. 29 with
999 career points, Bodur was allowed to
score the 1,000th point of her career on an
uncontested layup after the tipoff in the Garnet’s home finale against the Owls. Adding to
the aura of the game was the fact that President Rebecca Chopp and Jane McAuliff,
president of Bryn Mawr College, served as
honorary coaches for their respective schools
to show their joint support in promoting
breast cancer awareness during the Garnet’s
annual WBCA Pink Zone game.
Watch Ceyan Bodur ’11 score
her 1,000th career point at
http://bit.ly/ceylan1000.

swarthmore college bulletin

Men’s Swimming
(3rd in CC Championships)
Relying on depth across the board and contributions from members of every class, the
Swarthmore College men’s swimming team
recorded a milestone-filled dual-meet season
and finished third at the Centennial Conference Championships.
Daniel Duncan ’13 had a breakout sophomore year, recording the team’s top times
and cracking the Conference top five in three
events. He led the Garnet at the Championship meet with four medals, taking silver
in the 200 IM (1:57.91) and 400 IM
(4:12.33), and bronze in the 200 butterfly
(1:56.95) and as a member of the 400 medley
relay. John Flaherty ’14 and Samuel BullardSisken ’12 grabbed three medals apiece at the
Championship meet. Flaherty earned silver
in the 200 butterfly (1:56.66) and bronzes in
both IM distances (1:58.29, 4:13.01), and
Bullard-Sisken set a new school record on his
way to a silver in the 100 backstroke (52.73)
in addition to a pair of relay bronze medals.
Jake Benveniste ’13 accounted for Swarthmore’s final individual medal, touching third
in the 1650 freestyle (16:27.41); Tim Brevart
’12 tied the Swarthmore record in the 50
freestyle (21.23) in a fourth-place effort and
also took home a couple of bronze medals
along with teammates Bullard-Siskin, Duncan, and Stan Le ’14 in the 400 medley and
Bullard-Siskin, Le, and David Dulaney ’11 in
the 200 medley relays.
Travis Pollen ’12 continued his personal
assault on the S9 Paralympics record books,
taking down the American record in both the
50 (24.74) and 100 (54.73) freestyles at the

championships.
The dual meet season (6-2, 4-2) peaked in
a decisive victory over Franklin & Marshall
on Nov. 13, snapping the Diplomats’ 22meet Centennial Conference winning streak.
Women’s Swimming
(3rd in CC Championships)
One season removed from a fifth-place finish at
the CC championships, the Swarthmore
women’s swimming team rebounded, thanks
in part to an impressive group of freshmen, to
take third place this year.
During the dual-meet season, the Garnet
raced to a 6-3 overall record (5-2 CC), improving dramatically on last season’s 4-6 (2-5)
mark. Highlights of the season included wins
over rivals Dickinson and Ursinus and performances by the Class of ’14, with Rebecca
Teng, Erin Lowe, and Maggie Regan regularly
contributing top-point totals to the Swarthmore scores. Seniors Chelsea Brett, Sarah
Bedolfe, Stephanie Su, and Allison Bishop also
turned in successful final seasons.
At the Centennial Conference championship meet, Regan broke out in a big way,
taking gold in the 400 IM (4:39.55) and silver
in the 200 breaststroke (2:26.76). She also
placed fifth in the 500 freestyle (5:19.01). Teng
set the school record in the 200 IM (2:11.96),
earning a silver medal. Lowe touched second
in the 200 butterfly (2:09.69), and Hannah
Gotwals ’13 nabbed bronze (2:12.82).
Women’s Indoor Track and Field
(6th in CC Championships)
Kenyetta Givans ’12 defended her gold medal
in the 55 meter hurdles, crossing the finish

line in an NCAA provisional and schoolrecord time of 8.29, while also earning a
bronze medal in the 55 meter dash with a
personal-best time of 7.29 to highlight the
Swarthmore College women's indoor track
team’s performance at the Centennial Conference Championships. As a team, the
women finished sixth, improving by one
place on last year’s result.
Swarthmore earned a total of four medals
at the Championships, including Givans’ double-haul, as Rebecca Hammond ’13 took silver
in the 800 meter dash with a time of 2:22.07
and Chelsea Hicks ’14 picked up bronze in the
triple jump with a jump of 10.56m, which
ranks sixth in program history.
Hicks started off her collegiate career with
a bang, entering Swarthmore’s all-time Top 5
in both the 55 meter hurdles and the triple
jump at the season-opening Jack Pyrah Invitational at Villanova.
Men's Indoor Track and Field
(9th in CC Championships)
Chris Mayer-Bacon ’11 finished in sixth place
in the 55 meter hurdles with a personal-best
time of 8.56 to lead the Garnet at the Centennial Conference Championships at Haverford
College. Daniel Ly ’12 also performed
admirably at the meet, taking sixth place in
the triple jump (13 m) and eighth in the long
jump (5.97m). In the relays, the Garnet's best
finish came in the distance medley, as the
team of Henry Ainley ’12, John McMinn ’13,
Aidan DuMont-McCaffrey ’13, and Jake
Weiner ’14 took sixth place with a time of
10:59.59. As a team, Swarthmore finished in
ninth place at the championships. At the
Boston University Valentine Invitational two
weekends before the Centennial Championships, Jacob Phillips ’13 turned in one of
the team’s best individual performances of the
season, finishing the 5,000 meter run in a time
of 15:10.44, ranking eighth on the College’s
all-time performance list and nearly 40 seconds faster than his career-best time.
—Mark Anskis
Senior women’s basketball players Summer MillerWalfish, Kathryn Stockbower, Ceylan Bodur, and
Sarah Brajtbord and junior Brittany Schmelz sport
the pink socks their team wore in the annual WBCA
Pink Zone game promoting breast cancer awareness.
After defending her gold medal in the 55-meter hurdles at the CC championship, Kenyetta Givens ’12
went on to a ninth-place finish at the NCAA Div. III
Indoor Championships, capping one of the top individual seasons in program history. For more on
Givens, see page 27.

eleftherios kostans

april 2011

phil koonce

17

Six Degrees of Jonathan Fra

18

swarthmore college bulletin

nzen

Before the
NatioNal Book awarD,
before oprah,
before the Time cover—
before anything really,
really big happened—
JoNathaN FraNzeN ’81
taught fiction writing
at Swarthmore.
hiS StuDeNtS
rememBer it well.
By Paul Wachter ’97

I HAPPENED TO BE WALKING BY AN AIRPORT
the day in September that
Jonathan Franzen’s fourth novel, Freedom,
was released. It would have been impossible
to miss the advance press—a photo of President Obama carrying a copy, the author on
the cover of Time—but still I was surprised
to see the book so prominently displayed.
Twenty or so copies in a row, showing off the
cover: “FREIHEIT.”
I had just landed in Berlin.
Nearly a decade earlier, his third novel,
The Corrections, had received an equally
BOOKSTORE

april 2011

warm reception from the critics and the public. And Franzen’s past decade as a famous
literary writer makes it easy to overlook the
fact that for most of his writing life he had
toiled in relative obscurity.
During this earlier period, in spring 1992
and 1994, Franzen returned to his alma
mater to teach a writing workshop. He needed the money. “Those were tough times for
me, financially and personally,” he says. By
then, he’d published two ambitious novels—
The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong
Motion—which received a sprinkling of
19

decent reviews but were not widely read. “At
the time,” Franzen recently told The Paris
Review, “I assumed the problem was not the
writer but the wicked world.”
Most of the students who applied to
Franzen’s workshops hadn’t read his work
either. But they knew he was a professional
writer, and “I don’t think many of us had
met one before,” recalls Emily Chenoweth
’94, a 1992 workshop student. “And in that
sense, he was exotic to a lot of us.”
Chenoweth published her well-received
first novel Hello Goodbye in 2009. And she’s
not the only fiction writer to emerge from
the Franzen workshops. Adam Haslett’s [’92]
short-story collection You Are Not a Stranger
Here (2002) was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and
Esquire heralded his debut novel Union
Atlantic (2010) as “the first great novel of the
new century that takes the new century as its
subject.” And Christopher Castellani ’94 is
currently working on his third novel, following award winners A Kiss from Maddalena
(2003) and The Saint of Lost Things (2005).
That each of these writers credit Franzen’s
influence is perhaps unsurprising, but so too
do classmates who went on to pursue careers
other than fiction writing. “I’m a math education researcher, and, even in this field, I
draw on what I learned from Jonathan,” says
Ilana Seidel Horn ’93, a professor at Vanderbilt University. “There was a focus on narrativity, the structure of a story, in the class that
also applies to teaching better ways to learn
math.”

Paris Review. “We had our own little roundthe-clock M.F.A. program.” (Franzen and his
former wife have since divorced.)
The workshop’s structure was traditional.
Students turned in pages each week and took
turns presenting every month or so. Castellani presented the 1992 class’s first story—
“already, he was an unbelievably polished,
beautiful writer,” Franzen recalls. On that
first day of class, Franzen wrote two words

I WAS SURPRISED BY HOW VIVIDLY FRANZEN
remembers these classes. When I spoke to
him on the phone, he rattled off the reading
lists. Along with a story by his late friend
David Foster Wallace—“Here and There,”
which Wallace hated, Franzen says—he
assigned selections by Jane Smiley, Lydia
Davis, Charles Johnson, and Paula Fox,
among others. (“A lot of women, I now
realize,” Haslett says.)
Before 1992, Franzen hadn’t taught fiction
writing, and he’d barely studied it formally.
“At Swarthmore, I took a playwriting
workshop with [Professor Emeritus of Theater] Lee Devin and, during the spring of my
senior year, I had two sessions with a visiting
writer, Tom Farber,” he recalls. Unlike a lot
of aspiring writers, Franzen never attended
an M.F.A. program (though he was accepted
at Brown). “I got married instead to a tough
reader with great taste,” Franzen told The

lifelike features,

20

in The Corrections
and even to a fuller
extent in Freedom,
which chronicles the
sad dissolution of
a marriage, Franzen
manages to present
these experiences—
not directly, but,
“like with papier-mâché,
strip after strip,
molding ever more

in order to perform the
otherwise unperformable
personal drama.”

on the blackboard: “truth” and “beauty,” and
told his students that these were the goals of
fiction.
Haslett describes Franzen’s classroom
manner as “serious.” “He meant what he said
and didn’t suffer fools gladly.” But this seriousness was leavened by a “great relish for
words and writing,” adds Kathleen LawtonTrask ’96, a 1994 workshop student who is
now a writer and high school English teacher.
“People who teach fiction workshops aren't
always starry-eyed about writing, but he was.

He read our stories so closely that he often
started class with a rundown of words that
were not used quite correctly in stories from
that week’s workshop. (I still remember him
explaining to us the difference between
cement and concrete.) At the same time, he
was eminently supportive and sympathetic;
I don't remember those corrections ever feeling condescending.”
Which is not to say his students were deferential. “We were constantly challenging
him, and I’m afraid we were a contentious
bunch,” Castellani says. “At that time, English departments, and not just Swarthmore’s,
were dominated by theory, and academic
language had taken firm hold. So we were
often battling between two modes of discourse—narrative and theory.”
Franzen invited David Foster Wallace to
be the guest judge of the 1992 workshop, and
Haslett’s story “1952” was declared the winner. Paula Fox judged the 1994 competition,
won by Wendy Waesche Cholbi ’94, who is
now a Web designer. “Her story wasn’t flashy
in terms of prose, but I remember reading it
with shivers and tears,” Franzen says.
Outside of class, Franzen was generous
with his time. “Jonathan was a very generous
responder,” says Jeff Severs, an English literature professor at the University of British
Columbia. “We each handed in pages every
week, and he responded with lots of questions and comments. I remember his red-ink
check marks. He’d draw a 3-D check mark
for really good stuff.” Franzen’s office hours
were also very popular.
Of course, the more time he spent on his
students, the less time there was for writing.
“Jeff was turning in 20 pages a week,”
Franzen says. “It was a pain in the ass, but it
was also great stuff.”
“It’s a challenge most writers deal with,”
says Castellani, who occasionally teaches
M.F.A. courses and also directs Grub Street, a
Boston-based creative writing center. “Some
writers are good at striking a balance, like
Dave Wallace,” who taught at Pomona College, Franzen says. “But for most, including
myself, it’s a sacrifice.”
AFTER HIS 1994 STINT AT SWARTHMORE,
Franzen taught only one other class, a 1997
M.F.A. workshop at Columbia. “The atmosphere at Swarthmore, working with undergraduates, was playful, but when you’re in an
M.F.A. program, it’s about how to get published, how to make a career of it.”
swarthmore college bulletin

the students

Christopher Castellani ’94
“No good story could exist without conflict and
desire, Jonathan used to say, and I still use that
rubric when I examine my writing,” says Christopher
Castellani, author of two novels, A Kiss from Maddalena (2003) and The Saint of Lost Things (2005).
“We sensed he was struggling, living fairly close
to the bone. But that was by choice. He’d carved
out as much room as was possible for his writing,
and I admired him for it.”
In 2007, Castellani returned to Swarthmore to
teach a fiction workshop. “It was the very same
class in the very same classroom.”

Emily Chenoweth ’94
“I was a big reader by the time I came
to college, but writing hadn’t occurred to me,” says Emily Chenoweth, who published her first novel,
Hello Goodbye, in 2009, chronicling a mother
dying of cancer as her daughter comes into
adulthood.
“I was in the English department and saw a sign
for Franzen’s class, but it turned out submissions
were due that day at 6 p.m. So I went back to my
room and wrote a story in a few hours and submitted
it with a note saying as much. He let me in.”
“Jonathan was a great teacher. He was encouraging, but he could also be stern. He wasn’t afraid of
calling people out.” She also recalls that Franzen

Megan Cunningham ’95
“I applied as a freshman, butdidn’t get in,” says Megan Cunningham, founder of and CEO of
Magnet Media, a production company based in Manhattan.
“Jonathan called me and was very
kind. He encouraged me to
apply again. When he returned in 1994, I
applied and was accepted into the workshop.
The acceptance rate of the workshops was so
competitive, and I was so moved that he was
thoughtful enough to remember my freshman
ambitions that I felt like I had been invited to
qualify for the Olympics.”
The writers Franzen exposed the class
to—Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace,
—“were ones I didn’t come across in my English classes, where it was mainly the classics,”
april 2011

was a stickler for 12-point Courier font.
Since Hello Goodbye, Chenoweth has published
three novels pseudonymously for Alloy Entertainment, which produces young-adult literature such as
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and Gossip
Girl. She has also ghostwritten a young-adult novel
for another publisher and is working on a fourth for
Alloy. “That’s my day job to pay the bills,” Chenoweth
says.
Like many other writers, Chenoweth, who received an M.F.A. from Columbia University, also
teaches. “I’m teaching a workshop at Portland State,”
she says. “Of the 20 students in the class, I’d say that
one almost certainly will be published. But I wouldn’t
discourage any of them from trying to make a go
of it.”

Cunningham says. “Reading more contemporary, midlist writers [not big names commercially but of high quality from a literary perspective], and constantly referencing them
during our discussions, made us feel as
though we were part of a larger community
of writers.”
“Jon was brutally honest, but he was constructive,” says Cunningham, whose book of
interviews The Art of the Documentary: Ten
Conversations with Leading Directors, Cinematographers, Editors, and Producers was
published by New Riders Press in 2005. “I
remember one tip that’s stuck with me. He
said that you shouldn’t have any specific,
unhealthy rituals when you write. You shouldn’t smoke while you write, for example.
Because then, if you try to quit smoking,
you’ll find it increasingly challenging to write.”
21

Adam Haslett ’92
“Jon's greatest strength as a teacher was
the seriousness he brought to the task of
writing, to the idea of a life devoted to
writing, and for that I've always been
thankful because he treated me as a fellow writer, which allowed me to view
myself as one.”
“1952,” was picked by

Franzen’s friend David Foster Wallace as winner of
the workshop’s story contest. “Dave read that
evening from what would later be published as Infinite Jest,” Haslett recalls. “It was a high compliment
to get the prize from him—he told me afterwards I
had what they couldn’t teach, words I didn’t soon
forget. There’s no doubt that I owe some of my early
confidence as a writer to Jon and the
events of that semester back in ’92.”

Ilana Seidel Horn ’93
When Ilana Seidel Horn came to the
College, she was a classic Swarthmore
student—“not knowing what to
major in,” Horn says. She was put off
by the emphasis on postmodernism
in the English department and ended
up a math major but nonetheless applied for
Franzen’s fiction workshop. “Most were humanities

Kathleen Lawton-Trask ’96
“Overall, the thing I remember most about
Jonathan these days is his generosity,” writes
Kathleen Lawton-Trask, who teaches English at Episcopal High
School in Washington, D.C., and writes book reviews for Publishers Weekly. “Like many teachers, he was generous with his time
and his encouragement. But he was also generous with his experience. He wasn't afraid to tell us about how the writing life worried him, nor about how worthwhile he found it. For that realistic
portrait of a writer’s life, I am enormously grateful to him.”

“Jon's greatest strength
as a teacher was the
seriousness he brought
to the task of writing,
to the idea of a life
devoted to writing.”

22

Jeffrey Severs ’96
“Jonathan was a very generous responder,” says Jeffrey Severs, assistant professor of English literature at the University of
British Columbia and self-described Pynchonian. “We each handed in pages every
week, and he responded with lots of
questions and comments. I remember his
red-ink check marks. He’d draw a 3-D
check mark for really good stuff.”
A year after the workshop, Severs
wrote Franzen seeking advice. Franzen
replied with a “great, long letter that I really think of as an important contribution
to my literary/intellectual development,”
Severs recalls in an e-mail. “I remember
well a few lines from it in which he said
the undergrad thesis idea I'd described—
something having to do with race and pop
culture and paranoia (I was really into Pyn-

chon at the time)—
sounded safe and
small-minded. He
said that it seemed
likely enough to
earn me a Ph.D.
somewhere but
that I ought to be asking bigger questions.
“His suggestion was to compare Gravity’s Rainbow to [Charles Dickens’] Bleak
House (one of his favorites, I know—it
was all over the vibe of The Twenty-Seventh City) in terms of coincidence and
plotting. And, for a semester, I dutifully
tried to compare Pynchon and Dickens.
[I] sat reading Bleak House in Tarble and
Palmer for many an hour. Finally, I
figured out I'd only be able to really
work on Pynchon.…”

swarthmore college bulletin

By then, Franzen had begun writing for The
New Yorker, mostly nonfiction of an autobiographical bent. Many of the pieces turn up in Franzen’s
collection of essays How To Be Alone (2002) and his
memoir The Discomfort Zone (2006). “I could earn
as much money writing a piece for The New Yorker
as I could teaching for a semester,” Franzen says.
“And I felt like I was learning more writing than
teaching.”
But Franzen stayed in touch with his former
students, helping them out when he could. “He
wrote a recommendation for me when I applied for
an M.F.A.,” Severs says. At
Castellani’s first public reading,
Franzen introduced him.
majors, but I think Jonathan and I connected because
Chenoweth recalls bumping
he majored in German and also took some physics, I
into Franzen at parties in New
believe. We shared a certain nerdiness.”
York during her time as an
She also vividly remembers an encounter with
M.F.A. student at Columbia;
David Foster Wallace, when he visited the campus to
Horn once house-sat for
judge the workshop’s fiction contest. “He clobbered
Franzen’s plants. And Haslett
me at ping pong in Tarble.” Pre-graduation, she also
has become a close friend.
house-sat for Franzen’s plants.
Franzen’s first two novels
owed much to Don DeLillo and
Thomas Pynchon, whose reticulating, conspiracy-laden plots
often come at the expense of character. But The
Corrections, which won the National Book Award,
put character at the center with a close focus, in the
form of interwoven novellas, on the unhappy Lambert family. And if every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, the Lamberts’ squabbles and
grievances nonetheless resonated with a vast readership. (Part of the uncomfortable pleasure that
comes from reading Franzen is the recognition of
his characters’ worst traits in oneself.)
“When your first two novels haven’t found
much of an audience, it makes sense to stop and try
to figure out who might read a literary novel nowadays, and why they might be doing it,” Franzen
told The Paris Review. “I was a skinny, scared kid
trying to write a big novel. The mask I donned was
that of a rhetorically airtight, extremely smart,
extremely knowledgeable middle-aged writer. To
write about what was really going on in me with
respect to my parents, with respect to my wife, with
respect to my sense of self, with respect to my masculinity—there was just no way I could bring that
to the surface.” In The Corrections, and even to a
fuller extent in Freedom, which chronicles the sad
dissolution of a marriage, Franzen manages to
present these experiences—not directly, but, “[l]ike
with papier-mâché, strip after strip, molding ever
more lifelike features, in order to perform the otherwise unperformable personal drama.”

april 2011

“when people ask me,
‘should i pursue this as
a career?’ i feel it’s my
responsibility to be
maximally discouraging,”
Franzen says. “it’s such a
long shot to make a
sustainable living
writing fiction.”
A LARGE, GLOBAL AUDIENCE IS A RARE THING for a literary writer. For most, devoting one’s life to writing means years of hardship, as it did for Franzen.
“When people ask me, ‘should I pursue this as a
career?’ I feel it’s my responsibility to be maximally
discouraging,” he says. “It’s such a long shot to
make a sustainable living writing fiction.”
His students recall his advice slightly differently.
Franzen was never explicitly discouraging, says
Lawton-Trask. “He was the first person who talked
to me about my work as work, not practice—he
presumed I wanted to write as well as published
authors and talked to me as if I could.” But he
never sugarcoated the struggles of a writing life,
either. On the last day of class, Lawton-Trask
recalls, he brought in a box of mementos, including
a quarterly statement showing a very small amount
from his publisher and a hardback copy of his second novel that he’d found in a remainder bin.
It’s a point Franzen illustrated again in the 1996
essay “Scavenging,” in which one of his former
students makes a cameo:
“Not long ago, one of my former undergraduate
workshop students came to visit, and I took him on
a walk in my neighborhood. Jeff is a skilled, ambitious young person, gaga over Pynchon’s critique
of technology and capitalism, and teetering
between pursuing a Ph.D. in English and trying his
hand at fiction. On our walk, as I was ranting at
him, telling him that fiction is about refuge, not
about social change, we passed a delicious trash
pile. There was a paint and plaster-spattered wooden chair with a broken seat, and I found a scrap of
two-by-four to knock the bigger clumps of plaster
off. It was grubby work. Jeff said: ‘This is what my
life will be like if I write fiction?’”
Paul Wachter writes in New York.

23

POSSIPLEX:
n
1959 Halcyo

Ted Nelson ’59 and the Literary Machine
NELSON’S IDEAS, ONCE DISMISSED AS UTOPIAN, HAVE BECOME
CENTRAL FACTS OF MODERN LIFE. BUT NONE OF THIS IS ENOUGH
FOR HIM. THE COMPUTING WORLD WE KNOW IS BUT A DIM SHADOW
OF WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN.
By Mark Bernstein ’77
Sketches by Ted Nelson ’59
IN A WHARTON LOUNGE A LITTLE MORE THAN
50 YEARS AGO, a Swarthmore student named
Ted Nelson tried to compose a difficult seminar paper. He was overflowing with ideas and
awash in distractions, and he was intensely
frustrated that these ideas could not be easily
organized on paper. He wondered if the
recently invented computer might play a role
in solving the problem and sketched out
some ideas for how a literary machine might
facilitate better term papers, better libraries,
and indeed a better repository for the world's
documents. The pursuit of that idea changed
the world.
The computer of 1958 was not a likely site
for writing. Computers were scarce, expensive, and slow; even 20 years later, all of
Swarthmore’s administrative and academic
computing needs were satisfied by a single
computer with three 1-megabyte disk
drives—a machine less powerful than today’s
smartphones.
In 1958, computers were chiefly associated
with mathematical simulations for plotting
artillery and with large-scale tabulation of
census data. Occasionally, speculative articles
and science fiction stories had envisioned
intelligent and even literary machines. Alan
Turing’s 1950 paper on “Computing
Machinery and Intelligence” imagined discussing a sonnet with a computer:
Interrogator: In the first line of your sonnet,
which reads ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer's day,’ would not ‘a spring day’ do as
well or better?
Computer: It wouldn't scan.
Interrogator: How about ‘a winter's day’?
24

That would scan all right.
Computer: Yes, but nobody wants to be
compared to a winter's day.
Murray Leinster’s science fiction short
story “A Logic Named Joe” (1946) foresaw a
network of preternaturally helpful computer
terminals, spreading chaos in their eagerness
to provide answers to awkward questions.
But these were speculations about a distant
future; Nelson thought his system was imminently achievable and set out to build it.
Possiplex is Ted Nelson’s new autobiography—an account of “movies, intellect, creative control, my computer life, and the fight
for civilization.” It chronicles Nelson’s struggle to build a world of interconnected information that would be readily available to
nearly everyone, built upon a sustainable
foundation of justice toward writers. That
the Web we know comes close to Nelson’s
original vision strikes most of Nelson’s colleagues as remarkable. But Nelson views this
without satisfaction. It is all—he has long
warned us—all wrong.
SWARTHMORE’S ASSOCIATION WITH HYPERTEXT
runs deep. Nelson, who coined the term,
graduated in 1959 and returned as a lecturer
in 1977—where I first met him and first
caught the hypertext bug. His classmate
Andries van Dam ’59 earned one of the first
doctorates in computer science, was central
to the development of computer graphics,
and over the span of four decades has
worked on hypertext systems for creating
and reading electronic books. Five Swarthmore alumni from the 1970s started my cur-

rent employer Eastgate Systems, which has
published literary hypertexts and designed
hypertext writing tools since 1982. Justin
Hall ’98, while a freshman, started
www.links.net and crafted what was arguably
the first confessional weblog.
Possiplex makes it clear that Swarthmore
exerted and continues to exert a strong influence on Nelson. This starts with the College’s
foundational belief in the equal dignity of
swarthmore college bulletin

art, science, and engineering: All of Nelson’s
work emphasizes their unity. The omnivorous intellectual interests (and lengthy reading lists) long characteristic of Swarthmore
students are reflected in Nelson’s insistence
that reading is nonsequential, that each reader must be free to follow fresh paths as spirit
and understanding dictate. Where Vannevar
Bush foresaw the computer as a workstation
for elite scientists (assisted by a legion of
“girls” working at their keyboards), Nelson
insisted from the outset on “Computers for
the People,” proclaiming, “You can and must
understand computers now.”
AT A TIME WHEN ONLY LARGE INSTITUTIONS
owned computers, Nelson wrote about personal computing. His vision of ubiquitous
computers has become commonplace and
his dream of a docuverse of interlinked literature—a global library accessible from desks
and tablets and cell phones throughout the
world—is now real. The implementation of
these literary machines was deeply influenced by Nelson’s books, and many of the
engineers and entrepreneurs who designed
and built the pioneering systems saw themselves as Nelson’s followers. Nelson earned
fame among his colleagues, was knighted an
Officier des Arts et des Lettres in France in
2001, and obtained a Ph.D. from Keio University in 2002. His ideas, once dismissed
as utopian, have become central facts of
modern life.
None of this is enough for Nelson. The
computers we use and the Web we know
seem to him but dim shadows of what might
have been. Personal computing has often
merely simulated paper, letting people dress
up their typewritten reports with chart junk
and fonts. The docuverse Nelson proposed in
Project Xanadu® in 1960 would have had the

vation

Time and again, Nelson has been
tech museum of inno

This copy of a sketch by Ted Nelson
(inset top, in 1959, and right, in
2011) shows a “docuverse” based on
“hypertext”—both coined by the
computer visionary.

frustrated by investors, managers, and
colleagues who do not understand or
cannot quite believe his vision, and by
developers who stray from his designs.

april 2011

25

reach of the Web and yet might not suffer
many of the Web’s irritations and failings.
Links in Xanadu would never break, and old
pages would never disappear. Copyright controversies would be fewer, because Xanadu
would permit easy reuse with reasonable
compensation to the original creator. The
contemporary Web’s cacophony of advertising, its plague of link spam, its blights of
piracy and plagiarism, might all have been
reduced or avoided had the Xanadu
approach prevailed.
Possiplex records two recurring struggles:
Nelson’s struggle to be understood, and his
fight to retain “creative control.” Time and
again, Nelson is frustrated by investors, managers, and colleagues who do not understand
or cannot quite believe his vision, and by
developers who stray from his designs.
Nelson’s parents, actress Celeste Holm
and director Ralph Nelson, divorced soon
after his birth, and Nelson was raised by his
maternal grandparents. He was not close to
his parents (his mother is not mentioned in
this volume on advice of his attorney) but
one defining experience was a rare visit, at
age 13, to see his father direct the live television broadcast of a soap opera. Shortly after
the show began, one of the cameras failed,
and all the carefully rehearsed camera moves
were suddenly useless.
“Ralph, with military composure and the
ever-present cigarette, started talking on the
intercom, with one eye on his script and one
eye on the monitors that fed from cameras
two and three. ‘Camera three to the kitchen,
focus on Mama… Hold it there, camera three.
Switch to camera three. Camera two to the
kitchen, focus on Nels. Switch to camera
two.’”
This dream of art and command stayed
with Nelson and has shaped his vision of
how software ought to be created. “Most
software,” Nelson writes, “has no director—
nobody with the authority to decide and
change every part—and that’s why it’s all so
lousy.” His models are Frank Lloyd Wright
and Orson Welles, visionaries in command
of teams dedicated to implementing the
master’s imagination.
Nelson loathes interfering editors,
meddlesome managers, and disobedient
craftspeople.
“I have almost always worked with programmers that I like and respect—I won’t
26

mention the exceptions—and some have been
deep friends. About half of them have been
deeply faithful to my designs. Others, however,
often want to add their own ‘creative touches,’
which range from annoying to disastrous.”
Nelson’s vision of software created by
specification and implemented by subservient coders, once canonical, is now out of
favor. The pleasures of improvisatory coding
in the basement of Beardsley Hall, once a
shameful secret among Swarthmore students,
are today enshrined in Kent Beck’s Extreme
Programming Explained: Embrace Change
and in the Manifesto for Agile Software Devel-

opment, a collaborative effort in which Beck
was one of 12 co-authors.
Artisanal software is again esteemed; in
his recent book The Design of Design, Frederick Brooks Jr. observes that although there
are many ways to develop profitable software
products, the software that people truly
admire is usually designed by individual
auteurs or very small teams. But where Nelson expected developers to provide craft
services, like riggers and gaffers, software
designers more frequently implement the
work themselves and communicate with
their colleagues and subordinates through
program code.
Time and again, Nelson seeks out an
authority—Marshall McLuhan, Vannevar
Bush, Bill Gates, Jack Lang—to whom he
longs to explain his vision. Almost invariably,
their response fails to satisfy him. Nelson
recalls a party in 1961 given by John W.
Campbell, the legendary science fiction editor,
at which Nelson told Isaac Asimov that “soon
we’ll be reading and writing on computer
screens.”

“Yeah, sure…” said the great futurist.
Sarcastically.
Nelson was then a graduate student in his
mid-20s. Asimov, at 41, was about to abandon fiction. Campbell was a decade older, his
influence had peaked nearly 20 years before,
and his career was essentially over. Under
these circumstances, “soon” might have
meant one thing to Nelson and another to
Asimov, yet that skeptical sarcasm still
wounds.
NELSON HAS LONG AVOIDED EDITORS and publishers. In much of his writing, especially
the influential Computer Lib/Dream
Machines (1974), self-publication has yielded energetic, discursive, quirky books that
are instantly recognizable. In Possiplex,
Nelson again uses an assortment of running
heads and typographic gestures to represent
myriad intermingled threads of his intellectual life. This self-edited book is sometimes
rough, but small errors and infelicities
cause but a trifling distraction. Nelson has
always viewed writing as a living thing—
malleable and fluid; loose ends and missing
antecedents can be corrected in later
editions.
Though Nelson calls this volume an autobiography, it might be better to view it as a
guide to his papers. Those papers, scattered
in warehouses across the country, are voluminous, for Nelson was an inveterate taker
of notes. He took notes in conferences, he
took notes during coffee breaks. No discussion at dinner was too casual to memorialize, no late-night beer was unaccompanied
by pen and clipboard. In later years, Nelson’s
tape recorder and video camera supplemented the record, and an interview with Nelson
meant two tape recorders on the table: one
for the reporter and one for Nelson’s files.
This legendary trove of notes is so unwieldy
that Nelson himself has not used it in composing this volume, but Possiplex will be a
uniquely valuable guide for Nelson’s biographers. If only we had built Xanadu, Nelson
reminds us, those notes would be online and
not in boxes, each note would be accessible
for use, revision, and reuse, and we could easily trace who had used each excerpt. At 73,
Nelson continues to work to build Xanadu. In
a turbulent age that urgently needs better literary machines, each step toward that goal
matters.
swarthmore college bulletin

a balancing act
HOW DO STUDENTS ACHIEVE
AND MAINTAIN BALANCE WHILE
DEVELOPING THEIR INTELLECTUAL
AND PERSONAL POTENTIAL?
FOR MANY, IT INVOLVES ACTIVE
AND INTENTIONAL MEMBERSHIP
IN COMMUNITY—BOTH ON AND
OFF CAMPUS.

eleftherios kos

tans

DAVID OPOKU ’12 CREDITS THE LANG CENTER
for Civic and Social Responsibility with helping bring his dream of starting a library in
Ghana to fruition.
Sable Mensah ’11 is proudest of the literary magazine she produced with students she
tutored in Chester, Pa.
Charles Tse ’13 says the opportunities he’s
had to meet with alumni in the finance
industry will help him prepare for his future
career.
And highlights of Shelly Wen and Morgan
Bartz’s first year on campus include putting
together ambitious events that wouldn’t have
taken place had it not been for their decision
to make them happen.
No matter their class year, major, or background, Swarthmore students are driven by
their shared passion for fully developing and
exploring their academic interests. They are
also equally motivated to fitting—make that
cramming—as many opportunities and
extracurricular activities into their lives at
Swarthmore as they possibly can. While
some pursuits are purely for fun, others are,
perhaps not surprisingly, intimately tied to
their intellectual pursuits and achieving their
future goals.
"I feel like I’m getting a better sense of where the
line between happily busy and overwhelmed busy is,
for me," says Alex Cannon. "Each week seems to
drag, but looking back—whoa, my freshman year is
almost over. It’s freaky. And it makes me want to
make the most of my time.”
27

How do they do it? How do they keep
their energy up in the face of Swarthmore’s
daunting workload? How do they achieve—
and maintain—balance while developing
their intellectual and personal potential?
How do they establish and build on their
shared experiences in a community that is
diverse in so many ways? And, in an environment that so highly prizes intellectual rigor,
how are they getting the skills they need to
prepare them for fulfilling lives and to take
leadership roles in the world?
These are among the questions being
asked at Swarthmore this year as the College
continues its year-long strategic planning
process and engages alumni, faculty, students, and staff in conversation about its
mission, traditions, present strengths, and
future challenges.
Within that context, members of the
working group on the Evolving Mission, Values, and Goals of the College have been delving deeply into the quality and characteristics
of students’ lives, both in and out of the
classroom.
“It’s very clear to us that the power of a
liberal arts education lies in students being
fully immersed in an incredible learning laboratory,” says Dean of Students Elizabeth
Braun, the group’s co-convenor. “At Swarthmore, students learn a style of leadership that
is grounded in community, Quaker values,
and civic engagement. It’s a core part of our

ACHIEVING BALANCE
Making the transition to Swarthmore from
high school can be intimidating for many
students, even though the change is almost
always a welcome one. For Haydil Henriquez
’14 from the Bronx, coming to Swarthmore
was a relief after being with peers who didn’t
take academics seriously. “Half of my senior
class didn’t graduate,” she laments. “The
change in social atmosphere here was profound. People care about grades. They’re
hardworking and super diligent.”
Yet Henriquez struggled. “To be honest, I
found myself silencing myself in class,” she
says. “I was afraid to sound dumb. But there’s
a huge support system.” Establishing a bond
with her academic adviser, Assistant Dean
Rafael Zapata, she says, has been critical. “I
see him weekly, and he’s more like my life
adviser,” she admits. “Enlace and SASS [cultural groups for Latino and African American students, respectively] also did a great
job of welcoming the
entire class, telling us
there’s a place for
each of us here.”
Another key facet
of the academic
experience that
smoothes the transition to Swarthmore
is a first semester in
which students need
not worry about
grades—courses are
ungraded and
counted as either
“credit” or “no
credit.”
june xie ’11

Theater major Eva Amessé (right, with Nell BangJensen ’12) in Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women. The
acting honors thesis play is just one of Amessé’s many
“roles” at Swarthmore. She’s also a writing associate,
resident assistant, and senior class vice president.

identity and, in many ways, our work is to lift
up those positive aspects of life here and
build on them.”
Three common themes have emerged
from the group’s in-depth conversations and
those of others across campus, and beyond:
the need to provide outlets for achieving
greater balance and resilience; opportunities
to develop leadership and life skills, and the
means to affirm and enhance a sense of
community.
“The aspects of the Swarthmore experience that we want to reinforce,” says working
group chair Koof Kalkstein ’78, “will be
informed by—and will validate—the core
mission of the residential liberal arts college.”

28

“I can’t stress enough how important that
was for me,” says Alex Cannon ’14 from
Essex, Conn., who found himself last fall in
two plays that were performed on back-toback weekends. “Given the rehearsal hours
needed for each one, my schoolwork suffered.”
The takeaway? “Doing two plays at once is
probably not the best idea in the future,” he
says, smiling. “Without pass/fail, I would
have learned the same lesson, but at a much
higher cost.”
Despite an increased focus this semester
on his studies and a conscious decision to
cut back on his extracurricular activities,
Charles Tse still made time to attend a campus business mixer hosted by Alumni Council member Rob Steelman ’92, senior credit
analyst at Commercial Industrial Finance
Corporation. Tse, an honors economics
major and math minor from Hong Kong,
regularly seeks opportunities to meet with
alumni, especially those in the financial
industry. This year, he spent time with
research analyst Julian Harper ’08 at the
campus Lax Conference on Entrepreneurship as well as with Deutsche Bank’s Karan
Madan ’91 during an externship in New
York City during winter break.
“My time at Deutsche Bank was fabulous
and definitely got me more exposure to the
industry,” says Tse, who also interned at the
Hong Kong Monetary Authority last summer. “I mainly shadowed his analysts in sales,
trading, and structuring, but just being in the
environment benefited me. And I remember
thinking, ‘Wow, I’m on Wall Street. It’s the
American dream.’”
In response to student interest, campus
efforts are underway to provide additional
opportunities to promote greater balance in
their lives, including Pilates classes, nutrition
workshops, and yoga, qui gong, and aerobics
sessions. These and other programs are
planned by Worth Health Center nurse practitioner Suzie Long and students on the Swat
Wellness Awareness Team (SWAT).
“The energy and effort that I have invested in promoting health and wellness among
my fellow students ultimately stems from my
interest in medicine and my sincere desire to
help improve people's quality of life,” says
Zheng Zheng ’11, an honors biology major
and English literature minor from Wynnewood, Pa., who has been involved with
SWAT since its founding in fall 2009.
swarthmore college bulletin

Learning the value of time managem
ent

and of balancing commitments is per

philip koonce ’12

“When I applied to Swarthmore,
I thought, ‘I’ll focus on my academics, run track, and join SOCA
(Students of Caribbean Ancestry)
—that was it,” says Kenyetta
Givans ’12 (center). “But all
these amazing opportunities
came up. And I realized that if I
used my time well, then I could
do it.”

haps one of the biggest
lessons first-year students are introdu
ced to once on campus. Given their pro
pensity to become
involved in every group and activity the
y find interesting, it can be a steep lear
ning curve. Of course,
not every activity has to, or even sho
uld, inform or reflect academic interes
ts. Some are just for fun.

“I think it’s important for SWAT to provide these healthful opportunities and wellness programs to promote relaxation and
stress-reduction among Swatties, and to really give students the opportunity to attend to
their overall sense of well-being.”
Learning the value of time management
and of balancing commitments is perhaps
one of the biggest lessons first-year students
are introduced to on campus. Given their
propensity to become involved in every
group and activity they find interesting, it
can be a steep learning curve. Often, hard
choices are impossible to escape.
“It was awesome coming here, knowing I
wouldn’t have to give up lacrosse,” says Morgan Bartz, a potential cognitive science and
film and media studies major from Bethel,
Conn. Ultimately, she passed on the team’s
training trip to Colorado Springs during
spring break in order to accompany her documentary filmmaking practicum to the
Dominican Republic.
“Even taking the [film] class, I had to
decide to be late for practice once a week,”
she admits. “It’s a learning experience to juggle both, and in the future I probably will
schedule things differently. For now, the class
wins out.”
Upperclassmen confirm Bartz’s suspicions
april 2011

that, with better planning, things do improve.
“As a freshman, I did everything—and
you learn you can’t do that,” says Eva
Amessé ’11, a theater major from Staten
Island whose “roles” on campus also include
resident assistant, writing associate, and senior class vice president. “I couldn’t continue
in the College Chorus or Rhythm n Motion,
which I adored. But they just didn’t fit in my
schedule. I think the biggest challenge we all
face is knowing when we’ve taken on too
much.”
“In life, that’s also true,” agrees Camilia
Kamoun ’11, an Islamic studies special major
and pre-med student from Wynnewood, Pa.,
who played key roles in establishing the
Global Health Forum and the Middle Eastern Cultural Society. “It’s another skill you
learn. My choices of where to spend my time
are based on my future goals. I hope to
engage with these issues throughout my life.”
Establishing those close connections
between their academic and extracurricular
lives is especially meaningful for students

and often helps sustain them. Spring is the
favorite time of year for Judy Diep ’13, a
chemistry major from Brooklyn, because of
all the events planned for Asian and Pacific
Islander American (APIA) Month organized
by the Swarthmore Asian Organization
(SAO).
“SAO is a great resource that provides
motivation to work harder in your classes,”
says Diep, a co-president of the group.
“When you have an organization that excites
you, the energy and pride you invest in it
starts spreading to everything you do.”
Diep also credits an SAO-sponsored panel
of women faculty members last fall with
helping her in class. “They talked about
speaking in public and how they dealt with
self-silencing,” she says. “That helped me
reflect more on the ways I can approach
speaking up in my classes, as well as when I
share my opinions and ideas in my extracurricular activities.”
Of course, not every activity has to, or
even should, inform or reflect academic
interests. Some are just for fun. Ben DeGolia
’11, an honors philosophy and political science major from Palo Alto, Calif., has played
guitar for years, a practice he continues both
in the Swarthmore Mariachi Band and informally with hallmates in Wharton. When they
29

tson
stuart Wa

can get together in the dorm, the threesome—two guitars and
a fiddle—plays mostly folk and a little bluegrass.
“Guitar, exercise, meditation—they are all sources of stress
relief,” says DeGolia, who transferred to Swarthmore as a junior. “It’s a paradox: The more stressed you feel, the more
inclined you feel you should be in McCabe. But in general,
Swarthmore students are better than we tend to think at balancing work with extracurricular activities that help them destress.”
Still, the pull to combine the two is strong. Shelly Wen, an
SAO member from Mesa, Ariz., played violin in the orchestra
last fall, but decided this semester to form a trio with a couple
of friends—for credit.
“We really wanted outside criticism from a qualified coach
in order to be better,” she says. “So we approached the music
department and are now part of the Fetter Chamber Music
Program. But I still see it as extracurricular, sort of like how I
see my work in SAO as academic. There isn’t a clear one or
the other.”
The academic experience of many students—between 40
and 45 percent—includes a semester or more of study abroad,
coordinated by the College’s Off-Campus Study Office. On
their return, they are often rejuvenated and loaded with fresh
perspectives—both on life in general and on how to approach
life on campus.
Sable Mensah, a black studies major and history minor
from the Bronx who studied in Brazil, acknowledges that she
was overextended as a sophomore, most notably for combining her most academically rigorous semester to date with her
work in a Swarthmore Foundation–supported literary magazine project pursued through the Dare 2 Soar tutoring program in Chester.
“It was incredibly rewarding but intense, and it consumed a lot of energy and emotion,” she says. “I was at class,
then in Chester, then at class. Constantly moving
between the
wealth and
resources of
Swarthmore
and the lack
thereof in
Chester had
a profound
impact on
me.”
By the time
she returned
from Brazil,
Mensah had a
better understanding of
what she wanted from the
College. “I’m
really interested

30

in building a relationship with the frosh and mentoring
them so they can learn what I know now,” she says.
Kenyetta Givans ’12, a biology major from Conshocken,
Pa., also returned from her experience abroad—a field study
program in a remote section of Australia’s subtropical rainforest—with a renewed outlook.
“This semester is the most relaxed I’ve been,” she says.
“I’ve adopted the Queensland lifestyle. I used to stress before
every exam, but I realize now that’s counterproductive.
Going abroad and coming back helped me reassess how I
prepare. I’m doing more than I’ve ever done, but without
stressing.”
All of that activity, however, still can leave precious little
time to socialize and hang out with friends. So perhaps it is
no surprise that, with their highly developed time management skills, students often find themselves planning their
“free” time.
“Rhythm n Motion is a really great way for me to forget
everything,” says David Opoku, a biology major with a minor
in computer science from Ghana who dances with the group
every week. “In the studio, I just allow my body to move and
relax. It’s my ‘organized’ fun.
“People understand it’s healthy to balance everything,” he
adds. “I don’t know how they do it, or how I do it, but somehow we get it done. Academics or having fun—whatever it is,
it’s always driven by passion.”

LEARNING LEADERSHIP
For generations, Swarthmore alumni have assumed leadership
roles in society, fulfilling a raw potential that likely already
existed when they arrived at college. Opportunities to develop
those skills exist in numerous venues across campus, sometimes in not such obvious places.
For Opoku, who is
close to bringing to
fruition his dream of
starting a library in
Ben DeGolia ’11 (center),
who transferred to
Swarthmore as a junior,
says his campus experience has exceeded his
expectations. “I had
ideas of it being a rigorous, great place, and
assumed academics
would rule,” he says.
“But I definitely did not
expect it to be so balanced. It’s just really
important to the faculty and administration for the students
to have a rounded
experience.”

swarthmore college bulletin

Editor’s note: This article is the second in
a series that will highlight four areas of inquiry in the strategic planning process.
Conversations around these topics, which
are intended to be as wide-ranging and inclusive as possible, will culminate in a draft
planning document in summer 2011. After
this draft is presented to the Board of Managers in September, it will again be the subject of community discussions. It is expected
that a final draft will be presented to the
Board in December.
All members of the Swarthmore community are encouraged to participate. The College’s strategic planning website contains
questions, documents, links to resources,
and updates on the thinking of the various
working groups charged with creating the
plan. The site also presents many interactive
opportunities to contribute to the thinking
going on at the College. Find it all at
http://sp.swarthmore.edu.
Ghana, this is especially true. Opoku credits
applying for—and not getting—support
from the Lang Center for helping him learn
this lesson. “When I didn’t get the Lang
Opportunity Scholarship or Davis Project for
Peace grant, I felt boxed in and wanted to
give up,” he admits. “But it’s not really about
me getting a grant. It’s about helping other
people. So finding other ways got my hopes
up again.”
Instead, Opoku started a group—African
Development on Organized Reading Education—that recently received its charter from
Student Council, making it eligible for Student Budget Committee (SBC) funding.
“The plan is to hold book drives every year,
expand to other colleges, and have a conference for students interested in African development to tackle these issues,” he says eagerly. “It’s slow going, but ideas are becoming
more solid, with more potential than I
thought of.” After a successful campuswide
book drive and raising money for the shipping, Opoku plans to send his 1,000-plus
books to a school in Techinan, Ghana, in
May.
According to authors Steven Koblick and
Stephen Graubard in their book on the subject, the residential liberal arts college is a
distinctively American invention. And
although fewer than five percent of the baccalaureate degrees granted in the United
april 2011

States each year come from institutions like
Swarthmore, a disproportionate number of
liberal-arts graduates find their way into the
ranks of America’s political, professional,
economic, social, artistic, and intellectual
leaders.
Is it something in the water? Or do residential liberal arts colleges, by creating fulltime communities of learning, educate the
whole person in ways that help them grow
not just intellectually but as human beings?
From its founding, Swarthmore has been a
residential college where men and women
live and study together—a radical idea in the
1860s, but one that has stood the test of time.
“It just happens to us,” says Chris Geissler
’13, an honors linguistics and religion major
from Maple Shade, N.J., who as a member of
the fencing team handled logistics for the
largest collegiate fencing tournament in the
world when Swarthmore hosted the
USACFC National Championships his freshman year. “Taking something and running
with it seems to be something we’re good at,”
he says. “The culture here—so intellectual,
while also socially aware—is one in which we

“We help students find their own
definitions of leadership,” says
Dean Braun. “One way we think
about it is sort of non-traditional—
collaborative in many ways,
non-hierarchical, and group-based.”
see, look for, and find connections with other
people. And as we chug along, there’s often
some point when we run into a situation
where we can choose to take action—and we
often do.”
As a member of the environmental group
Earthlust, Bartz says she mostly just observed
last semester. “But then I saw the documentary Gasland [about hydrofracking gas
drilling],” she says. “I was so angered by the
blatant disregard for the environment after
seeing it, I agreed to plan an event that
brought the director to campus.” An attempt
had been made the year prior to have director Josh Fox visit, but it never panned out.

After two months of planning, Bartz
arranged for multiple campus screenings
leading up to his March visit this year, during
which he discussed his film and met with
students.
“I’m definitely not an expert on Marcellus
Shale drilling and hydrofracking,” Bartz says.
“But I’m passionate about learning as much
as I can on the subject, and I want other students to learn about it as well.”

COLLABORATION AND TRUST
Leadership takes many forms in a residential
college—and many natural leaders gravitate
to campus jobs designed to help their fellow
students. Three such positions—resident
assistants (RAs), student academic mentors
(SAMs), and counseling advisers (CAs)—
may seem quite different but, during orientation, work together in teams.
“This approach not only benefits the new
students, but gives the RA, SAM, and CA a
chance to learn from each other and their
unique leadership styles,” explains Assistant
Dean for Residential Life Rachel Head. “At
the same time, we also encourage leaders to
become followers, depending on the issues
being dealt with.”
Additional positions in which students
directly serve each other are found all over
campus and are also known by their
acronyms. As a science associate (SA), Givans
attends every intro Bio 2 lecture and meets
regularly with the professor to discuss his
goals for the given week. She also meets with
fellow SAs to talk about effective ways to
teach. “It’s not about ‘telling’ students what
to know,” she says, “but working on how
they can come up with the answers themselves.”
Eva Amessé does similar work as a writing
associate (WA), working with students in
one-on-one conferences. “Writing a paper
doesn’t have to be something scary you do by
yourself in your room,” says Amessé, who
has also worked as the program’s outreach
coordinator. “It’s okay to ask for help.”
For Amessé, theater provides another
opportunity to use her leadership skills, also
within a collaborative model. Each fall, senior theater majors must be involved in a production with limited involvement from the
faculty. It’s known as Senior Company and
by design is different every year.
“We were five actors, so we collectively
directed by doing a lot of table work and
31

Will Hopkins ’11 believes there is
value in a return to how the College
historically institutionalized its Quaker
heritage: “A reconstituted Collection
keeps popping up in my mind as a
way for the campus to come together
and reflect on how we can be
stronger as a community.”

LIVING IN COMMUNITY
For many students, the desire to seek leadership positions is directly tied to their decision
to actively and deliberately contribute to the
community, both on campus and off. It’s
their way of giving back.
Li, an honors economics and computer
science major from Columbia, Md., puts it
plainly. “I care a lot about the SAO community and I want it to succeed,” he says. “If I
don’t do my part, it won’t. We are a welloiled machine in some ways and other
groups come to us for event planning advice,
or help in how to run board meetings. So I’m
driven to keep it that way.”
For Lang Center intern David Opoku,
having a bird’s eye view of the projects his
peers are involved in is a perk of the job.
“As an intern, I get to learn what other
students are doing in Chester, Philadelphia,
and all over the world,” he says. “There are so
many opportunities to take lessons from
class and try them out. It doesn’t always have
to be successful, but it gives you the confidence to try.”
Camilia Kamoun’s work with Global
Health Forum is one such project. As a fresh-

june xie ’11

assigning scenes to each person to develop,”
says Amessé of her class’s decision to produce Ovid’s Metamorphoses. “In the beginning, we weren’t sure we could do it successfully, but we drew on everyone’s strengths
and talents—music, movement—and spent a
lot of time solidifying our common vision.
And it’s one of the productions I’m most
proud of. We decided what to put on, how to
spend the budget—it exemplifies Swarthmore’s commitment to doing things nontraditionally and letting students lead.”
Similar leadership and skill-building
opportunities for students abound—whether
in working closely with their faculty mentors,
presenting their research at campus poster

to build leadership among clubs on campus,”
he says. “It’s also hard to find funding at other
schools, but we’re well funded. Here, they let
students decide where the money goes.”
For Bartz, who had never organized a
major event at Swarthmore before, successfully bringing Gasland’s Josh Fox to campus
helped expand her thinking about the role
she imagines playing here in the future.
“Now I know I can have an impact and
can have a say in helping different groups on
campus,” she says. “I feel like his visit and the
Gasland screenings could be the beginning of
something. There’s no group yet on campus
that deals with hydrofracking, but who
knows? The whole point of the event is to be
a catalyst for something.” [An anti-fracking
group has since formed and now meets
weekly.]

sessions or national conferences, or in allocating funding for groups through SBC or
the Social Affairs Committee (SAC). At their
core is trust.
“We help students find their own definitions of leadership,” says Dean Braun. “One
way we think about it is sort of non-traditional—collaborative in many ways, nonhierarchical, and group-based.”
That approach fosters an environment in
which all students have the opportunity to
pursue leadership roles in well-established
programs—or create new ones. After Shelly
Wen and a friend noticed they had both
stayed on campus during fall break, they
thought “it would be cool” to do “something
special” during spring break.
As a result, they planned a science outreach project and, with a grant from the
Swarthmore Foundation, conducted a series
of experiments with children at a Dare 2 Soar
site in Chester. “We heard later from people
there that students would ask, ‘When is science time going to start?’” she says. “This was
the first time I coordinated something that
had never been done before. I created the
template, and it was really great.”
Even when the template exists, as SAO copresident Kevin Li ’13 has found, help from
the administration can play a much-appreciated role. “Dean Braun is coming to APIA
events this month and is talking about how

32

David Opoku ’12 enjoys his work at Cornell Library,
not just for the views of the woods it provides, but for
the chance to learn how to manage such an important
campus space. “Students close the library at night,”
he says. “The librarians train us well and that sense of
responsibility is really great. I’ve gained the skill of
taking charge of a building—it’s a really good skill.”

swarthmore college bulletin

april 2011

brought in outside information. When I’m a
senior, I hope I can bring whatever I decide
to major in into the conversation.”
For Sable Mensah, who has made that
transition, feeling comfortable in seminar is a
hard-earned accomplishment. “I spent three
and a half years getting to know my own
voice,” she says. “You also still need to make
sure you’re comfortable with pushback and
to be cautious and real. But it’s nice to say
something with no disclaimers. It’s taken me
a while to get there.”
Additional community-building opportunities have been proposed in the conversations prompted by the strategic planning
process. “My RA wants to bring Collection
back, and it could be of use to enhance the
sense of community on campus,” says Sam
Sellers ’11, a political science major and public policy minor from Bainbridge Island,
Wash. “If done the right way, it would slow
people down and get them to appreciate the
amazing, diverse community we have. That
awareness is often lost when students are
busy doing what they do.”
Indeed, Sellers’ RA is Will Hopkins ’11, an
honors psychology and English literature
major from Newark, Del., and self-described
“somewhat-lapsed Quaker” who believes there
is value in a return to how the College historically institutionalized its Quaker heritage.
“Quakerism has a lot to offer that doesn’t
require you to affiliate,”
says Hopkins, who last
fall helped rekindle
interest in a student-led
weekly meeting. “A
reconstituted Collection
keeps popping up in my
mind as a way for the
campus to come together and reflect on how we
can be stronger as a
community. As a tool to
encourage contempla-

tion and to promote discourse that is face-toface, reasoned, and civil, it would be useful.”
As much as community is deliberately
fostered among students, both by the administration and by the students themselves, it’s
clear to students that the Swarthmore community also extends well beyond campus.
The more they interact with alumni, the
more they see how real those bonds are.
Ben DeGolia experienced this first-hand
when working last Alumni Weekend. “Talking to alums, you definitely feel there’s something you share,” he says. Chris Geissler sees
it when giving admissions tours to alumni
who bring their kids. “There’s definitely a
sense,” he says, “of ‘we are of the same stock,’
we are ‘of Swarthmore.’”
Recent alums often also provide muchappreciated perspective. “My friends tell me the
madness of Swat does end, but don’t run out
the door, you will miss things,” says Mensah,
who externed this winter with Elizabeth Vogel
’07, a New York City middle school teacher.
“Talking to her and seeing how her Swat sensibilities are balanced with her lived experience
as a teacher in the landscape of educational
reform—it’s an inspiration to me.”
Alisa Giardinelli is associate director of news
and information at the College and a longtime
contributor to the Bulletin.

Haydil Henriquez ’14 recently performed at an open
mic sponsored by a new spoken word collective, OASIS
(Our Art Spoken in Soul),
she helped co-found. The
group’s board equally
distributes work among its
members.

june xie ’11

man, she helped successfully apply for the
Project Pericles grant, administered by the
Lang Center, that the group needed in order
to expand. Reflecting on her last four years
with the group, she sees the cyclical nature of
the work and how it pays off.
“We made an impact,” she says, “not just
in collecting insecticide-treated bed nets in
Uganda and distributing them, but also in
preparing ourselves to be effective agents for
change in the global health field. I came in
and learned a lot. Now, as new members
jump in, it’s exciting to see them reach new
levels of understanding.”
Amessé is also in the position of seeing
her work as a WA come full circle. “Three of
my freshmen are applying to be WAs next
year, and they’re texting me about the
process,” she says excitedly. “It’s all about
passing the torch and being encouraging. It’s
the reason I wanted to be a WA—because I
had great conferences. So if I can inspire others, it will sustain the community.”
Community, of course, takes on many
forms, applies to many spaces, and is fostered
in many ways. That is perhaps most literally
true in residential life.
“I love how the halls are organized at
Swarthmore,” says Li, who will be an RA in
Willets next year. “They’re close, with all classes represented, and the RAs are really the glue
that holds them together. I like event planning
and for people to have fun with something I
planned. So I’m really excited and looking forward to making sure my hall is cohesive.”
Kenyetta Givans is also a “rising” RA and
will live in Wharton this fall. “I really want to
help freshmen make that transition into college,” she says. “It was really helpful to me
when I was a frosh. And I was surprised—
there’s no distinction between the classes
here. You could be in a class with seniors, eat
with them, it doesn’t matter. I learned a lot
from the upperclassmen I met.”
Sometimes, though, those cross-class conversations can be challenging, as Morgan
Bartz found out on her trip to the Dominican Republic. Travelling with a number of
seniors, she had to learn to adapt.
“People in the documentary class represent a lot of majors—soc/anth, poli sci,
econ—and each one brings a different lens,”
she says. “When we talked about state formation of the Dominican Republic, each

33

The Janitor and the Judge

USING EMPATHY AND INTELLECT
TO MAKE HUMANE AND RIGHT
DECISIONS IS THE ESSENCE OF
PRACTICAL WISDOM.
By Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe
Illustrations by Meredith Leich ’08

When, in spring 2003, Dorwin P. Cartwright
Professor of Social Theory and Social Action
Barry Schwartz and William R. Kenan Jr.
Professor of Political Science Kenneth Sharpe
announced that they would be teaching a
new course titled Practical Wisdom, students
clamored to enroll. The course’s goal was to
help the students learn to navigate everyday
problems and dilemmas by making “right”
decisions based on the use of good judgment
and values rather than sterile sets of rules and
conventions that typically disregard the individual, the particular, or the discrete. The course,
which, Schwartz and Sharpe say, took “three
years to plan and a lifetime to arrive at,” was
an immediate hit and still is. A book was
planned.
Last year, Schwartz and Sharpe, friends and
colleagues for more than three decades, published Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to
Do the Right Thing (Riverhead Books, 2010).
Starting from the premise that human beings
are born with the capacity to be wise, they share
their thoughts on the importance of developing
the kind of wise decision-making skills that evolve
from a combination of experience, empathy, and
intellect and their value every day in all walks of
life. An excerpt follows.

34

swarthmore college bulletin

WHAT WISDOM IS
Luke (we don’t know his last name) works as a
custodian in a major teaching hospital. In an
interview with social scientists interested in
studying how people structure their work, Luke
reported an incident in which he cleaned a
comatose young patient’s room—twice. He
had already done it once, but the patient’s
father, who had been keeping a vigil for
months, hadn’t seen Luke do it and had
snapped at him. So Luke did it again. Graciously. Why? Here is how he explained it:
Luke: I kind of knew the situation about his
son. His son had been here for a long time and
… from what I hear, his son had got into a
fight and he was paralyzed. That’s why he got
there, and he was in a coma, and he wasn’t
coming out of the coma … and I heard how he
got that way. He had got into a fight with a black
guy and the black guy really, well, you know,
because he was here. Well … I went and
cleaned his room. His father would stay here
every day, all day, but he smoked cigarettes. So,
he had went out to smoke a cigarette and after I
cleaned the room, he came back up to the room. I ran
into him in the hall, and he just freaked out—telling me I didn’t do it. I
didn’t clean the room and all this stuff. And at first, I got on the defensive, and I was going to argue with him. But I don’t know. Something
caught me and I said, “I’m sorry. I’ll go clean the room.”
Interviewer: And you cleaned it again?
Luke: Yeah, I cleaned it so that he could see me clean it … I can
understand how he could be. It was like six months that his son was
here. He’d be a little frustrated, and so I cleaned it again. But I wasn’t
angry with him. I guess I could understand.
At first glance, the need for wisdom is not built into Luke’s work as a
custodian. Indeed, look at his job description:
Operate carpet shampooing and upholstery cleaning equipment ~
Operate mechanical cleaning and scrubbing equipment ~ Strip and
wax floor surfaces ~ Maintain entrance area by performing such
duties as sweeping, salting, and shoveling ~ Clean grounds and area
by performing such duties as picking up paper or trash ~ Unplug
commodes, urinals, and sink drains without dismantling the fixture
~ Wet mop floors and stairways ~ Operate vacuum cleaning equipment ~ Clean and wax furniture, cases, fixtures, and furnishings ~
Clean mirrors, interior side of exterior glass, and both sides of interior glass ~ Clean toilet rooms and fixtures ~ Stock restroom supplies
~ Dust venetian blinds while standing on floor or stool ~ Clean
patient bedside equipment ~ Make beds and change linen ~ Collect
and transport waste materials to central location ~ Wet mop small
areas of floor or stairs to clean up such items as spilled liquid or food
~ Replace burned-out incandescent lightbulbs ~ Move and arrange
furniture and furnishings ~ Collect and transport soiled linen to
central location
Luke’s job description says nothing about responsibility or care for

april 2011

patients. He has a long list of duties, but not a single item on it even
mentions another human being. From this description, Luke could
be working in a shoe factory or a mortuary instead of a hospital.
If Luke were doing this job, it would have been reasonable for him
to have simply explained to the father that he’d already cleaned the
room and, perhaps, to have brought in his supervisor to mediate if
the father remained angry. Luke might have ignored the man and just
gone about his business. He might have gotten angry himself.
But Luke was doing a different job. That’s what a team of research
psychologists found when they conducted in-depth interviews with
Luke and other hospital custodians about their jobs at a major midwestern academic hospital. The researchers had asked the custodians
to talk about their jobs, and the custodians began to tell them stories
about what they did. Luke’s stories told them that his “official” duties
were only one part of his real job, and that another, central, part of
his job was to make the patients and their families feel comfortable,
to cheer them up when they were down, to encourage them and
divert them from their pain, to give them a willing ear if they felt like
talking. Luke aimed to do something different from mere custodial
work.
What Luke aimed at would have grabbed Aristotle’s attention.
Aristotle laid great stress on the importance of the aims—the telos—
of practices like medical care. The aims of the practice—promoting
health, curing illness, relieving suffering—need to be embodied in
the institution where that practice takes place. Hospitals need to
make promoting health their primary aim; it’s the soul of the organization. The practitioners—the hospital staff—need to understand

35

that aim and be encouraged to make it their
aim too. To make wise choices at work, these
practitioners need to aim at caring for the
patients; they need to be motivated by this
aim, as Luke was. Aristotle would have talked
about the importance of practitioners desiring the right thing if they were to do their
work well. Aiming at the right thing doesn’t
tell them exactly how to do it—that takes
practical skill, not just will. But knowing
what to aim at frames and guides their choices—it enables them to choose wisely.
The amazing thing the researchers discovered about Luke and many of his coworkers
was that they understood and internalized
these aims in spite of their official job
description, not because of it. The job they
were actually doing was one they had crafted
for themselves in light of the aims of medical
care. Mike, another custodian, told the
researchers how he stopped mopping the
hallway floor because Mr. Jones, recovering
from major surgery, was out of his bed getting a little much-needed exercise by walking
slowly up and down the hall. Charlayne told
them about how she ignored her supervisor’s
admonitions and refrained from vacuuming
the visitors’ lounge while some family members, who were there all day, every day, happened to be napping. These custodians crafted their jobs with the central purpose of the
hospital in mind. They were not generic custodians; they were hospital custodians. They
saw themselves as playing an important role
in an institution whose aim was to see to the
care and welfare of patients. So when Luke
was confronted by the angry father and he
had to decide what to do, he could not look it
up in his official job description, because the
rules that defined his job said nothing about
situations like this. What guided him was the
aim of the job he had crafted.

Michael was guilty,” said Forer. She needed
to mete out punishment. She turned to the
state’s sentencing guidelines. They recommended a minimum sentence of 24 months.
The law seemed clear. Until Forer looked at
the particular circumstances. The gun that
Michael brandished, Forer explained, was a
toy gun.
Further, this was his first offense:
Although he had dropped out of school to
marry his pregnant girl friend, Michael later
obtained a high school equivalency diploma.
He had been steadily employed, earning
enough to send his daughter to parochial
school—a considerable sacrifice for him and
his wife. Shortly before the holdup, Michael
had lost his job. Despondent because he
could not support his family, he went out on
a Saturday night, had more than a few
drinks, and then robbed the taxi.
Judge Forer thought that the 24-month
sentence was disproportionate. But the sentencing guidelines allow a judge to deviate
from the prescribed sentence if she writes an
opinion explaining the reasons. “I decided to
deviate from the guidelines,” she explained,
sentencing Michael to 11½ months in the
county jail and permitting him to work outside the prison during the day to support his
family:
“I also imposed a sentence of two years
probation following his imprisonment conditioned upon repayment of the $50. My
rationale for the lesser penalty, outlined in
my lengthy opinion, was that this was a first
offense, no one was harmed, Michael acted
under the pressures of unemployment and
need, and he seemed truly contrite. He had
never committed a violent act and posed no
danger to the public. A sentence of close to a
year seemed adequate to convince Michael of
the seriousness of his crime.”

JUDGMENT DAY

LUKE’S CHOICE OF HOW TO CONFRONT THE
ANGRY FATHER and Forer’s choice of the
appropriate punishment for Michael
couldn’t seem more different. Forer’s work as
a judge demands that she interpret general
rules in particular circumstances. She needs
to know when and how to make an exception. She needs to know how to craft a punishment to fit a person and the circumstances. Wisdom is at the heart of what she
does, if it is to be done well. It’s what we
need, and what we expect, in judges—the

“Michael’s case appeared routine,” explained
Judge Lois Forer. When he was brought
before the Criminal Division of Philadelphia’s Court of Common Pleas, he was “a
typical offender: young, black, and male, a
high-school dropout without a job. . . . And
the trial itself was, in the busy life of a judge,
a run-of-the-mill event.” The year before,
Michael had held up a taxi driver while brandishing a gun. He took $50. Michael was
caught and tried. “There was no doubt that
36

swarthmore college bulletin

ability to exercise judgment. And judicial
wisdom is profoundly practical. Forer could
not do her work well without it. And neither
could Luke.
Forer was committed to finding a just
punishment for Michael, but there were
competing aims—all legitimate ones—that
she had to sort out and balance. It was right
that Michael receive a punishment that fit
the crime and that the community be protected from any danger he might pose. But it
was also right that Michael be rehabilitated
so that he would not commit another offense
upon release. And it was important that
Michael’s sentence do minimal harm to his
wife and children, and to his chances of
being reintegrated into the community. For
Lois Forer, judging was a balancing act. She
had to balance retribution, deterrence, and
rehabilitation. She had to balance justice and
mercy.
And when the angry father confronted
him, Luke also had to sort out conflicting
aims. There were other legitimate things he
might have chosen to do. Be honest: tell the
father he had cleaned the room already. Be
courageous: stand up to the father’s anger
and refuse the unfair demand to clean the
room again. But Luke had to determine how
to balance these competing aims in this
circumstance.
ARISTOTLE KNEW THAT FIGURING OUT WHAT TO
DO in situations like the ones faced by Luke
and Judge Forer demanded more than just
knowledge of “the facts.” It demanded more
than knowledge of the law and the rules and
the job description. It demanded more than
knowing how to deduce the right thing to do
from a set of abstract principles about truth
or justice or freedom or goodness. There was
no general rule or principle to which Forer
or Luke could turn to balance or choose
among several good aims that were in conflict. To do this kind of balancing and choosing, Luke and Forer needed wisdom. They
needed practical moral skill.
Aristotle emphasized two capacities that
were particularly important for such practical skill—the ability to deliberate about such
choices and the ability to perceive what was
morally relevant in a particular circumstance. Good deliberation and discernment
were at the heart of practical wisdom. Forer
articulates how she deliberated about
april 2011

Michael’s case. A good judge needs to do
this all the time in publicly defending her
decisions, and in Michael’s case the law
demanded that she explain why she was
deviating from the recommended sentence.
Luke’s deliberation took place in radically different circumstances—in a situation in which we largely expect neither
wisdom nor nuanced accountability—but
it is equally important, if not more
important, to consider both how he deliberated and how he talked about his decision. He figured out that the confrontation with the father was not one that
should be framed in terms of honesty and
integrity, nor as a defense of Luke’s rights.
Although Luke was tempted to react to
the father’s demands as an issue of injustice, he quickly saw that something else
was at stake—helping to comfort and heal
the sick and injured. So Luke framed the
issue as one of how to care for and sustain
the relationship of this father and this son
at this particular trying moment in their
lives. Justice and fairness could wait for
another day.
And Luke’s deliberation went further. He
also had to figure out what courses of action
were possible in this situation. Should he
calmly explain to the father that he recognized the father’s pain and understood?
Should he offer to sit down and discuss the
situation? Luke chose not to make an issue of
it, not to fuel the father’s anger. He decided
that the best and most practical way to handle the situation was to clean the room again
and to let the father think he’d accomplished
something for his son. Luke had the skill to
respond generously and with good grace.
When we think about deliberative skills,
the first image that often comes to mind is a
process in which we lay out the options,
weigh the pros and cons, and then pick what
seems best. All of us have deliberated this
way. Courses in business and management
schools often teach this method as the model
of good decision making. This kind of decision making can be particularly useful when
we are faced with new or tough problems
and have the time to ponder them. But
Luke’s behavior makes us think about other
kinds of deliberative skills.
Luke did not lay out conflicting aims or
weigh the pros and cons of all the options.

What was important for Luke was how to
frame the situation. The unreasonableness of
the request and the father’s anger may have
tempted Luke to frame the situation as one
about honesty, rights, or justice, but instead
he framed it in light of the job as he had
crafted it, the way he saw the purpose of
being a hospital custodian. And Luke’s ability
to do this was enabled by a capacity he had
for good storytelling. Luke could tell himself,
and the interviewer, a narrative about this
patient who “had got into a fight” and about
an upset father who had been visiting him,
caring for him, for months. This story, and
the frame it provided, enabled Luke to discern what to do. Luke wasn’t laying out
options. And he wasn’t simply deducing
what to do from some general principle of
proper behavior (like “be kind to patients’
families”). The story Luke told explained
how the father came to be yelling at Luke to
clean the room again, why the anger made
sense, and why it was forgivable. And this
story helped Luke figure out his role in the
evolving narrative. Our ability to frame situations well and tell good stories is critical to
practical moral skill. So, too, is the ability to
use analogies and metaphors to draw on our
37

past experiences. Luke knew what to do not because he had done
exactly the same thing before, but because he could draw on previous
experiences that were something like the current situation. He knew
what the consequences had been of actions he had taken in these
past cases. He wasn’t just repeating what he’d always done; he
was crafting something new from what had or had not worked
in the past.
This may seem like making a lot of Luke’s instant decision, but Judge Forer used the same deliberative skills. To
interpret the law in Michael’s case she needed more
than the facts, more than the legal guidelines, and
more than the ability to make logical deductions.
She needed to create an accurate narrative that made
sense of Michael’s actions and his intentions in light
of his character and circumstances—his stable family
and work history, the job crisis and the depression he
was going through, the nature of the crime and choice
of weapon, the harm done—all this to judge the seriousness of his crime and the severity of his punishment.
She understood Michael by drawing on her past experience, by interpreting the similarities and differences he
shared with other criminals she had judged.
Aristotle tells us that “in matters concerning action and
questions of what is beneficial, the agent must consider on
each different occasion what the situation demands, just as
in medicine and in navigation.” Figuring out what is appropriate in a particular situation rests on moral perception. “A
man of practical wisdom,” argued Aristotle, must “take cognizance of particulars.” Particular facts are the “starting points” for
our knowledge of “the goal of action” and, to deliberate and choose
well, “one must have perception of particular facts.” Every day in
court, Judge Forer had to sort through a deluge of information about
the lives of the defendants and the nature of their misdeeds. To determine motives, to parcel out responsibility, to understand how this
crime was different from or similar to others, to determine the future
danger to the community—these tasks demanded an ability to pick
what was significant out of a lot of background noise. These tasks
demanded an ability to see the nuance—the gray—of a particular situation, and not simply the black-and-white of the legal and the illegal.
Luke, too, was faced daily with patients who were upset, confused,
disoriented, troubled; who were experiencing multiple and contradictory emotions. When he was confronted with choices about how
to care for such people, just like judges, doctors, lawyers, therapists, or
teachers, Luke had to sort through a welter of information and figure
out which things were the most important to deal with in the
moment. A critical part of the context that Luke had to perceive was
what the father was thinking and feeling. If Luke had been unable to
discern this, he wouldn’t have had a clue about what the problem
was, what the options were, or what the consequences of his response
to the father might be. Luke had to imagine how arguing with the
father would affect the man’s feelings of anger and frustration, and
his ability to remain hopeful and to maintain his vigil day after day.
Moral imagination—the ability to see how various options will play
themselves out and the ability to evaluate them—is thus critical to
38

perception. It represents,
philosopher John Dewey
explained, “the capacity
to concretely perceive
what is before us in light
of what could be.”
Not surprisingly, then,
empathy—the capacity to
imagine what someone
else is thinking and feeling—is critical for the perception that practical wisdom
demands. Such empathy involves
both cognitive skill—the ability to perceive the situation as it is perceived by
another—and emotional skill—the capacity to understand what
another person is feeling. Luke had to put himself in the shoes of the
father even though he knew the father was wrong. Luke could not
have provided the narrative he did without this capacity for getting
himself into the heart of the father. And the same was true of Judge
Forer. To find the right sentence, she needed the empathy to put herself in Michael’s shoes and to imagine the likely consequences of letting Michael work outside of prison during the day. She asked herself:
Was this an irrational crime? Was there wanton cruelty? Is this a hostile person? Can this person control himself?
Emotion is critical to moral perception in another way. It is a signaling device. The emotion of the father—“he just freaked out”—signaled to Luke that something was wrong. With that kind of anger, the
signal was not subtle, but often it is. Reading the facial expressions,
the body language, the tone of voice of another alerts us that something is wrong and that we need to make choices about how to
respond. Our own feelings of anger, guilt, compassion, or shame signal us to reflect, to pay special attention to what is happening. This
may sound obvious, but all too often the rules and incentives that
govern our lives are all about removing emotion from our decision
making—about not trusting the signal we’re sending ourselves. Luke
recognized his own frustration and rising anger as well as the father’s
and was alerted to consider whether this confrontation was about
Authors Schwartz and Sharpe will deliver a talk titled “Practical
Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing” on Alumni Weekend.
Their talk is one of three faculty lectures that weekend. For more
information, visit http://bit.ly/alumniweekend2011.
swarthmore college bulletin

Luke or about the father and his situation.
There is a long history of suspicion that emotion is the enemy of
good reasoning and sound judgment, and rightly so. Emotions can
often control us instead of the reverse. “The devil made me do it.”
Emotions can prejudice us toward people we love, and against those
we don’t. Emotions can be unstable and therefore unreliable as
guides. Emotions are sometimes too particular: we can feel so passionately about something that happened to us, or about this
wronged patient or that ill-fed child, that our judgment is clouded
about “what is just” or “what is fair” in general. And emotions almost
got the better of Luke. For a moment, he felt angry at the injustice of
the father’s demand. But emotion also served Luke well. He felt compassion for the father: “It was like six months that his son was here.
He’d be a little frustrated, and so I cleaned it again. But I wasn’t angry
with him.” So emotion was critical in guiding Luke to do the right
thing. Luke’s emotions were not random—unstable and uneducated.
He was compassionate about the right things and angry about the
right things. And he had the self-control—the emotion-regulating
skills—to choose rightly. Emotions properly trained and modulated,
Aristotle told his readers, are essential to being practically wise: We
can experience fear, confidence, desire, anger, pity, and generally any
kind of pleasure and pain either too much or too little, and in either
case not properly. But to experience all this at the right time, toward
the right objects, toward the right people, for the right reason, and in
the right manner—that is the median and the best course, the course
that is a mark of virtue.
Sizing up the situation, figuring what’s relevant in this particular
case and these particular circumstances, imagining what someone else
is thinking and feeling, recognizing the options and imagining the
consequences—all these skills are part of being perceptive. It is this
perception that enables us to recognize the uniqueness of a particular
situation. Such perception is “a process of loving conversation
between rules and concrete responses, general conceptions and unique
cases, in which the general articulates the particular and is in turn further articulated by it.”
Practical wisdom demands more than the skill to be perceptive
about others. It also demands the capacity to perceive oneself—to
assess what our own motives are, to admit our failures, to figure out
what has worked or not and why. We get a glimpse of the importance
of such self-reflection in Luke. “At first, I got on the defensive, and I
was going to argue with him. But I don’t know. Something caught me
and I said, ‘I’m sorry. I’ll go clean the room.’” Such self-reflection is
not always so easy when, like Luke, we feel we’ve been wronged. And
it’s also difficult when we’ve been wrong—thoughtless, careless, too
self-interested. Being able to criticize our own certainties is often a
painful struggle, demanding some courage as we try to stand back and
impartially judge ourselves and our own responsibility. For Luke to be
a good hospital custodian, and Forer a good judge, they needed the
ability to recognize their mistakes so they could do better next time.

2. A wise person knows how to improvise, balancing conflicting
aims and interpreting rules and principles in light of the particularities of each context.
3. A wise person is perceptive, knows how to read a social context, and knows how to move beyond the black-and-white of rules
and see the gray in a situation.
4. A wise person knows how to take on the perspective of another—to see the situation as the other person does and thus to understand how the other person feels. This perspective-taking is what
enables a wise person to feel empathy for others and to make decisions that serve the client’s (student’s, patient’s, friend’s) needs.
5. A wise person knows how to make emotion an ally of reason, to
rely on emotion to signal what a situation calls for, and to inform
judgment without distorting it. He can feel, intuit, or “just know”
what the right thing to do is, enabling him to act quickly when timing
matters. His emotions and intuitions are well educated.
6. A wise person is an experienced person. Practical wisdom is a
craft and craftsmen are trained by having the right experiences. People learn how to be brave, said Aristotle, by doing brave things. So,
too, with honesty, justice, loyalty, caring, listening, and counseling.
Reprinted from Practical Wisdom by Barry Schwartz and Kenneth
Sharpe by arrangement with Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin
Group (USA) Inc. Copyright © 2010 by Barry Schwartz and Kenneth
Sharpe.

LUKE AND JUDGE FORER HELP US UNDERSTAND some of the key characteristics of practical wisdom. To summarize:
1. A wise person knows the proper aims of the activity she is
engaged in. She wants to do the right thing to achieve these aims—
wants to meet the needs of the people she is serving.
april 2011

39

connections

courtesy of Lisa Lee

The 22 travelers on Swarthmore’s Alumni College
Abroad journey to India in March visited the Taj
Mahal (above) and the Red Fort complex of Agra on
the banks of the sacred Yamuna River and explored
many other sites such as the Jama Masjid, the expansive Mughal period open-air Friday Mosque in old
Delhi; Akbar’s Fatepur Sikri, a 16th-century city of red
sandstone built in a mixture of Hindu and Muslim
styles; the Hawa Mahal or “Palace of the Winds” in
Jaipur; the Chandela Temple Complex in Khajuraho;
and Sarnath, the birthplace of Buddhism. They spent
a memorable evening and dawn on a boat rowing past
the bathing ghats and temples that line the shore of
the holy Ganga river in Varanasi. They rode elephants
to Amer Fort in Jaipur and camels to a Meena village
in rural Rajasthan; saw a Bengal tiger in the
Ranthambore Tiger Preserve, a 512-square-mile natural preserve and the former hunting grounds of the
Maharajah of Jaipur; and heard a sitar performance
by master Benarsi musician Deobrat Mishra. Faculty
tour guide Steven Hopkins, professor of religion, gave
presentations on Hindu, Buddhist, and Sufi traditions, including readings from Sanskrit, Pali, and
Urdu poetry and examples of qawwali, the ecstatic
songs of Sufi saints. Participants arrived home
with a tremendous appreciation of the ancient and
contemporary wonder that is India.
Want to join a future Alumni College
Abroad? Check out upcoming trips at
http://bitly/alumnicollege.
40

GARNET SAGES ACTIVITIES

RECENT EVENTS:

The Garnet Sages have planned several
events this year. John Alston, associate professor of music and director of the Chester
Children’s Chorus, was the guest speaker at a
lunch on April 16, as part of the College’s
Arts Weekend. Following
lunch, the Sages had the
option to see a senior art
ASK ME G.
exhibit; enjoy a concert;
ANYTHIN
I’M A GE. or listen to Los Angeles
A
S
GARNET
Times film critic Kenneth
Turan ’67 talk about how
“Swarthmore Made Me: The
Secret Life of a Critic” and how his experience at Swarthmore shaped his career as a
critic.
Future events include a tri-college visit to
tour the Beth Sholom Synagogue in Elkins
Park, Pa., the only synagogue designed by
Frank Lloyd Wright, followed by lunch; in
June, a tour of Hillwood Estate in Washington D.C., the former home of Marjorie Merriweather Post; and in September, a day at
Auburn Heights in Yorklyn Del., home to the
largest single collection of Stanley Steamers
in the world.

Atlanta: At an Atlanta Connection “Swarthmore Cares” event on March 12, Swarthmore
alumni gathered at MedShare International
to help collect surplus medical supplies and
equipment from hospitals, medical distribution companies, and individuals in order to
redistribute them to qualified healthcare
facilities in the developing world. Afterwards,
the group headed to the Brickstore in
Decatur for some food and drink.
Los Angeles: Thirty alumni and friends
attended the West Coast premiere of Borromean Rings by composer James Matheson
’92 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. A reception with Matheson followed the concert—
and the Swarthmore group was the last to
leave the hall.
New York: Many thanks to those who attended yet another successful Alumni Variety
Show at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. More
than 100 alumni and friends attended the
event.
Rob Steelman ’92, who started the
Swarthmore Business Network on LinkedIn,
swarthmore college bulletin

courtesy of jim moscowitz

syeda tasnim ’08

New York Variety Show: Back row: Luis Rodriguez ’09,
Humzah Soofi ’10, John Boucard ’10, Omar Ramadan
’08, Kinei Braithwaite ’08, Twan Claiborne ’08, and
Philippe Celestin ’10. Front row: Taleah Kennedy ’10
and NYC Connection co-chair Lily Ng ’08.

Swarthmore Victorious: Philly Connection Chair Jim
Moskowitz ’88 (left) led a Swarthmore team to victory
over Williams and Amherst—at Quizzo. Jay Dahlke ’84
(far right) was joined by Allison Eck, a Bryn Mawrter
who joined forces with the Swarthmore team.

organized a get-together on March 2 at the
Wheeltapper Pub in the Fitzpatrick Hotel.
Fifty-two people attended, and many reported back to Rob that they had a terrific time
networking and socializing.

“defend the honor of your alma mater, put
your storehouse of arcane and sometimes
useful information to good use, and have a
great evening,” a few dozen Swarthmore
alumni answered the challenge and were successful. The game was Quizzo and the opponents were Philadelphia-area alumni from
Williams and Amherst. It was a close match,
but Swarthmore was ultimately victorious
and everyone had a great time.

Philadelphia: Swarthmore versus Williams
versus Amherst—but not in U.S. News &
World Report! Billed by Philadelphia Connection Chair Jim Moskowitz ’88 as a chance to

ALUMNI COUNCIL
WELCOMES NEW
MEMBERS
The following alumni will join
the Alumni Council in fall
2011 for a three-year term:
Zone A
Sarah Mooers ’88
Ambler, Pa.
Associate director of
quality systems
Merck & Co., Inc.
Kevin Wilson ’92
Gettysburg, Pa.
Associate professor,
Gettysburg College
Zone B
Nicole O’Dell Odim ’88
Bellport, N.Y.
Journalist, Medi-i
John Randolph II ’97
Brooklyn, N.Y.
Executive vice president
of real estate
Sciame Development Inc.

april 2011

Zone C
G. Demetrios Karis ’74
Still River, Mass.
Research psychologist
Verizon Communications
Anne McGuire ’80
Cambridge, Mass.
Dept. of Human
Evolutionary Biology
Harvard University
Zone D
Juan Gelpi ’84
Virginia Beach, Va.
Surgeon, Coastal Surgical
Specialists
Rakhee Goyal ’93
Olney, Md.
Executive director
Women’s Learning
Partnership
Zone E
Thomas Scholz ’81
Iowa City, Iowa
Professor of pediatrics
University of Iowa

Cynthia Hunter Spann ’75
Dallas, Texas
Program director
Integrated Minority
AIDS Network
Zone F
Janet Erlick ’88
Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Executive artistic director
Fort Lauderdale Children’s
Theatre
Mark Shapiro ’88
Miami, Fla.
Partner
Akerman Senterfitt
Zone G
Kennette Banks ’06
Oakland, Calif.
Program associate
First Graduate, San Francisco
Walter Luh ’99
Sunnyvale, Calif.
Co-founder and CEO
Ansca Mobile

On March 28, Congressman Rush Holt
(D–N.J.) presented a Swarthmore perspective
on Capitol Hill. Holt, who taught physics at
the College in the 1980s and researched
fusion power at the Princeton Plasma Physics
Laboratory in the 1990s, has been a member
of the House of Representatives since 1998.
Recently, he became the first human to beat
the Watson computer in a Jeopardy match.

UPCOMING EVENTS
Philadelphia: Chocolate Night Goes to Catalonia, when Chocolate Night returns for a
fourth time on Thursday, May 5. As an educational as well as confectionery evening celebrating that dark delicacy, the scholar for
the evening will be Professor of Spanish
María Luisa Guardiola, who will talk about
the important role that chocolate plays in the
culture and rituals of her native Catalonia.
Then, master chocolatier Chris Curtain will
share insights into the process of making different types of chocolate from raw ingredients. As appetites peak, the evening will end
with participants sampling from a potluck of
chocolate desserts that each has brought
(They need not be homemade, but they must
contain chocolate!).
Behind the scenes at the American Philosophical Society. One of Philadelphia’s littleknown treasures, the American Philosophical
Society was founded by Benjamin Franklin
in 1743 with the aim to “improve the common stock of knowledge . . . for the benefit of
mankind.” Its extensive collections focus on
early American history and the history of science. On March 18, head of conservation
Anne Downey and conservation intern Lisa
Nelson ’06 will lead us on a behind-thescenes tour of their conservation lab and
show us some of the treasures held by the
Society, including the journals of Lewis and
Clark. The curator of the museum’s new
exhibition Of Elephants and Roses: Encounters
with French Natural History, 1790-1830 will
then lead us on a tour of the exhibit.
Pittsburgh: Connection chair Barbara Sieck
Taylor ’75 gathered a group for a casual
happy hour at the Walnut Grill on Jan. 16.
Originally planned for Jan. 15, the event had
to be rescheduled (happily) due to a Pittsburgh Steelers playoff game. Barbara reported that the event was fun and well-attended
and that the Steelers won!

41

class notes

A BLOOMING BEVY OF VIOLET AND WHITE CROCUSES WELCOME SPRING 1982 TO CAMPUS. PHOTO BY STEVEN GOLDBLATT ’67

missing the seminar experience? discuss topics of interest at olc.swarthmore.edu >>> wonder what your
42

swarthmore college bulletin

books + arts
BOOKS
Courtney Bender ’91 and Pamela E. Klassen
(editors), After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagement, Columbia University
Press, 2010. This multidisciplinary, scholarly
essay collection investigates the meaning of
religious diversity in a variety of settings,
examining its effect on legal decisions and
political and social interactions.
Debra R. Comer ’82 and Gina Vega (editors),
Moral Courage in Organizations: Doing the
Right Thing at Work, M.E. Sharpe, 2010.
Through a compilation of essays, the authors
examine the factors in the workplace environment that influence ethical behavior and
also guide the reader on how to foster moral
courage through organizational change.
Michael Dorsch ’90, French Sculpture Following the Franco-Prussian War, 1870-80: Realist
Allegories and the Commemoration of Defeat,
Ashgate, 2010. The author explores how
French sculptors interpreted the history of
war and defeat in France during the second
half of the 19th century. He also investigates
shifts in gender roles during this period and
the manner in which military defeat in

Carolyn Burke ’61, No Regrets: The
Life of Edith Piaf, Alfred A. Knopf,
2011. The author traces the life story
of iconic French singer Edith Piaf, beginning with her childhood on the
streets of Paris and continuing
through her rise to international
fame.

50

France affected gender relations.
John Fischer ’81, Cheese, Delmar Cengage
Learning, 2011. Compiled by an associate
professor in table service at the Culinary
Institute of America (CIA), this book, which
is part of the CIA’s Kitchen Pro series, serves
as a guide to the identification, classification,
and use of different types of cheese. In addition to practical culinary instruction, this
guide also provides a history of cheese making and consumption.
Muriel R. Gillick ’72, Once They Had a
Country: Two Teenage Refugees in the Second
World War, The University of Alabama Press,
2010. The author captures the story of her
parents, Hans and Ilse, as they flee for safety
as teenage Jewish refugees during World War
II. Backed up by rigorous historical research,
the book reconstructs the human narrative
of the refugee experience.
Christopher GoGwilt ’83, The Passage of Literature: Genealogies of Modernism in Conrad,
Rhys, & Pramoedya, Oxford University Press,

John Fischer ’81 and Lou Jones,
Bistros and Brasseries: Recipes and
Reflections on Classic Café Cooking,
The Culinary Institute of America,
2008. The authors embark on a tour
of French and French-inspired bistro
cuisine, combining recipes with instructive cultural and culinary histories. The book includes full-color
photographs and useful cooking
techniques and tips.

2011. This is a comparative study of three
diverse modernisms—English, Creole, and
Indonesian—as represented by authors seldom compared to each other. Joseph Conrad,
Jean Rhys, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer all
wrote about the colonial condition but did so
in widely separated times and places.
I.A. Il’in (author) and Philip Grier ’64 (editor and translator), The Philosophy of Hegel
as a Doctrine of the Concreteness of God and
Humanity, Northwestern University Press,
2011. According to Grier, this book is
“regarded as one of the major early 20thcentury commentaries on Hegel.” Prior to
this translation, the complete work has only
been available in Russian.
Jacob Howland ’80, Plato and the Talmud,
Cambridge University Press, 2011. Exploring the relationship between Athens and
Jerusalem in light of the Talmud and the
Platonic Dialogues, this work adds to the
small but growing body of work in the secular academy in which a basic knowledge of

Richard H. Frost ’51, I Never Saw A
Silver Swan: Poetic Introductions to
Madrigals of the Renaissance, 15301630, Tapestry: The All-Centuries
Singers, 2009. The author, an emeritus history professor and “bard” for
the chamber choral group Tapestry
in Clinton, New York, has penned an
extensive set of introductory poems
intended to be read aloud at madrigal performances. These verses serve
to maintain variety and interest during madrigal concerts.

Jeannette Balantic, Andrea Libresco
’80, and Jonie C. Kipling, Every Book
Is a Social Studies Book: How to Meet
Standards with Picture Books K-6, Libraries Unlimited, 2011. The author
provides a guide for teachers and educators to incorporate social studies
into almost every subject, a task that
has grown in importance since the
No Child Left Behind Law has led
many school districts to cut social
studies from the curriculum.

swarthmore college bulletin

the great rabbinic corpus of the first millennium of the common era is fundamental to
teaching and scholarship in the humanities.

identifying all types of birds in a variety of
environments, and countless facts about the
different species.

David Patton ’86, Out of the East: From PDS
to Left Party in Unified Germany, SUNY
Press, 2011. The author chronicles the history and transformations of the Communist
party in East Germany from the collapse of
the Berlin Wall through the era of democracy.

Michael Westgate ’61, Gale Force: Gale Cincotta: The Battles for Disclosure and Community Reinvestment, Harvard Bookstore, 2011.
The author captures the legacy of Gale Cincotta, an activist and organizer who led the
attack on community disinvestment, predatory lending, and redlining and contributed
to the passage of the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) and the Community
Reinvestment Act (CRA)—measures that
greatly contributed to diminishing housing
discrimination in the United States.

David Schaps ’67, The Invention of Coinage
and the Monetization of Ancient Greece, University of Michigan Press, 2004. The author
traces the importance of the appearance of
coinage in ancient Greek society and the new
themes, paradoxes, social classes, and
processes that came along with it.
Lillian and Donald Stokes ’69, The Stokes Field
Guide to the Birds of North America, Little,
Brown, and Company, 2010. This field guide
includes more than 854 species of North
American birds, along with 3,400 color photos,
a CD with more than 600 bird sounds, tips for

Teresa Nicholas ’76, Buryin’ Daddy:
Putting My Lebanese, Catholic, Southern Baptist Childhood to Rest, University Press of Mississippi, 2011. A
descendant of immigrants and
sharecroppers, the author, now a
successful New York City career
woman, recounts how she embraces
her roots and reconciles with her
family when she returns to her former Mississippi home upon the sudden death of her father.

april 2011

OTHER MEDIA
Stanley Cowell and Sunny Cowell ’10 (The
Stanley Cowell Quartet), Prayer for Peace, Steeplechase, 2010. Sunny Cowell and her father
Stanley’s jazz album includes vocals, piano,
bass, drums, and viola. The album marks Stanley’s return to the recording studio after a
decade-long break.

Julian and Betsy Seifter ’69, After
the Diagnosis: Transcending Chronic
Illness, Simon & Schuster, 2010. This
book addresses the everyday challenges and emotional toll of managing a chronic illness today. The
authors emphasize that patients are
more than their illness and provide
strategies not only for coping with
illness but also for thriving under
and living with illness.

Lynn West Salvo ’71, Product Parfait: A Deliciously Fun Multiplication Game, Didax, Inc.,
This card game works backwards—aimed at
children from 3 to 5 years old, players start
with the product in order to figure out its factors—to teach multiplication facts in a unique
and fun way. The game developed out of the
creator’s dissertation.

Susan A. Glenn and Naomi B.
Sokoloff ’75 (editors), Boundaries
of Jewish Identity, University of
Washington Press, 2010. This
interdisciplinary collection of
essays examines the question,
“Who and what is Jewish?” The
writings probe this complex issue
through the lenses of law, anthropology, history, sociology, literature, and popular culture.

Mark Vonnegut ’69, Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More
So: A Memoir, Delacorte Press, 2010.
More than 30 years after the publication of his memoir The Eden Express, the author continues his
compelling story—of a life fraught
with the trials of coping with bipolar
disorder while attending Harvard
Medical School, at age 28 and after
19 rejections; then running a pediatric practice—with honesty and
humor.
51

Alumni Profile
“It may seem on the surface that a lot of organizations
and communities have different conditions and goals.
But I think that the deeper goals are similar: justice,
sustainability, and a more humane world.”

photo courtesy of neil heskel ’74

neighborhood served by Haiti Clinic. Even before the disaster, residents
lacked water, electricity, and basic sanitation. Those factors complicate
the project of running a clinic in such an underserved area, but they
were not enough to discourage Browngoehl. Since joining Haiti Clinic
just over a year ago, he’s taken on considerable responsibility, leading a
health education outreach project and an acute malnutrition program for
children.
“It’s very exhausting and very rewarding at the same time,” he says.
“When I get on the plane to go home, it’s an unbelievable experience to
sit in a comfortable seat and have someone bring you food that you can
eat without being afraid of it. You realize that your problems, though
they seem important to you, are actually quite inconsequential.”
Browngoehl credits his time at Swarthmore for getting him hooked on volunteering. “It left me with a lot of intellectual curiosity,” he says. “It showed
me that life was more than a straight and narrow career. Service was a part of
what you were going to do with your life.” Heskel echoes this sentiment, recalling an undergraduate ethics seminar with longtime Professor of Philosophy
Hans Oberdiek as a key juncture in his formation as a young doctor-to-be.
Both doctors hope to encourage other service-minded alumni to get involved with Haiti Clinic. “The trips are usually four days—go on Friday morning, go back Monday,” Heskel says. “We take care of transportation, housing,
food, and security. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You can spend your
time doing what you’re good at.” He adds that volunteers need not be doctors.
Browngoehl’s co-leader of the health education project, for instance, is a high
school administrator from Philadelphia.
None of the Americans involved in Haiti Clinic draw a salary. Recently,
Haiti Clinic has begun to add a Haitian staff, training doctors and nurse practitioners to run the clinic in between volunteer visits. Heskel’s long-term vision is a clinic run by Haitians, augmented by periodic assistance from abroad.
In these trying post-earthquake circumstances, however, Heskel remains
the glue that holds Haiti Clinic together. “He provides a lot of inspiration just
by his example,” Browngoehl says. “This particular organization attracts people who are a lot of fun to work with. We have some humor, which is good—
you need humor. It’s actually a very light and uplifting spirit on clinic days. A
lot of people smiling, happy, even in the face of all this suffering.”
If Heskel’s optimism has helped him attract and keep more recent volunteers like Browngoehl, he says it’s all part of the job description. Amid so much
devastation and poverty, and in the wake of a major natural disaster, a doctor
has to focus on the small successes—the pregnant mother saved from cholerarelated dehydration, or the child who receives medicines his family could not
otherwise afford.
“You have to be hopeful,” Heskel says. “There is a lot of work to do, but
we’ve shown that some work can bear fruit, because our clinic has borne fruit.
That’s a very optimistic thing.”
—Mike Agresta

A Pillar in the Rubble
AT HAITI CLINIC, NEIL HESKEL ’74 AND
KEVIN BROWNGOEHL ’78 PROVIDE FREE MEDICAL CARE
TO STRUGGLING RESIDENTS OF PORT-AU-PRINCE.

Early last year, Kevin Browngoehl, a Philadelphia-area pediatrician, was
preparing for his first medical mission abroad. He’d recently met Neil Heskel
at a Swarthmore Alumni Council meeting, and the two struck up a conversation about a free clinic that Heskel (pictured above right in scrubs) directs in
Haiti. Impressed, Browngoehl volunteered to help. He booked a plane ticket to
Port-au-Prince for February. Then, on Jan. 12, a massive earthquake
hit Haiti’s capital.
Suddenly, the world’s attention shifted to Haiti, if only for a short time. A
country already struggling to climb out of poverty became fodder for nightly
news reports of spectacular suffering. Organizations like Heskel’s Haiti Clinic,
with boots already on the ground, took the natural disaster as a new opportunity for service. “I was receiving e-mails from all over the world asking how
people could help,” says Heskel, a Florida-based dermatologist. “We became a
conduit to get food and medication down there. It really became a big job.”
Browngoehl’s trip was delayed by the earthquake, but only briefly. When he
did touch down in Haiti, he was humbled by the everyday need that he saw at
the clinic. “It’s just a nonstop flood of people,” he says. “Then at some point,
they cut off the line, and hundreds more people are sent home.” Many of the
serious cases he saw stemmed from common problems left untreated for far
too long.
“Haiti Clinic is not a disaster relief project,” Browngoehl clarifies. “It’s a
way for the residents of the worst slum in Haiti to get medical care. A lot of
these people have never seen a doctor.”
The earthquake may have exacerbated Haiti’s poverty problem, but extreme
privation is nothing new for the residents of Cité Soleil, the Port-au-Prince

swarthmore college bulletin

in my life

28 Years Untouched
ON SORTING THROUGH MY COLLEGE PAPERS

YANAI RUBAJA

By Noah Efron ’82

After graduation in May 1982, I rented a
U-Haul, filled it with my stuff, and unloaded
the cartons in my parents’ basement. Weeks
later, I flew to Jerusalem to play in a rockand-roll band and study Arabic—and from
there to Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco,
and Ethiopia on a Watson Fellowship. At the
end of the Watson year, I returned to the
States to hire a shipper to move my cartons
and guitars to the kibbutz in Israel where I’d
decided to live.
Not long after the shipping container
62

arrived, I was drafted into the Israeli Army.
After I was discharged, my new wife Susan
and I took off to motor across America on
our honeymoon. By the time we came back,
we’d decided to quit the kibbutz for Tel Aviv,
where I was to start graduate studies and she
medical school. Only days after finishing my
dissertation—and a day before Susan finished her internship—we had our daughter
Dara.
Soon, we moved to Boston for four years
of postdoc fellowships for me and residency

“It wasn’t long before the sensual enchantment of
these old things gave way to nostalgia—and then to
thoughts about how they help make sense of my life,”
says Efron.

for Susan. Three weeks before we returned to
Israel, our son Micha was born. And so it was
that two big cartons, hastily packed during
Senior Week at Swarthmore in 1982,
remained untouched until late 2010 when,
fulfilling a very old promise to Susan, I
resolved to sort through their contents. I
found myself slicing through the browned,
swarthmore college bulletin

The life that I live now—

MY FIRST IMPRESSIONS WERE SENSUAL. The
physicality of the papers—their very stuff—
was familiar and foreign at once. My senior
thesis had been typed on the campus mainframe computer and printed on great swaths
of green and white striped tractor paper, of
which some untrimmed pages remained.
Carbon copies of each of my honors
exams—what I had used to prepare in the
brief interregnum between the written and
oral portions of the test—were neatly stapled
stacks of thin yellow paper covered with blue
type. Old photocopies were slightly oily,
slimy, and curled. On some, the type had
turned sepia, the words barely legible. A good
many academic essays were typescripts.
Some were reproduced in blue mimeograph.
I found dozens of seminar papers, many
poorly typed—some carbon copies, some
photocopied. Several were written in longhand. There were syllabi that reached 25
pages with annotations for the assignments
and detailed questions “to keep in mind
while reading.” Among the papers were
dozens of notes, reminders, and announcements, folded in half, with my name written
on the back above the letters “CM,” which
only after puzzled minutes I remembered
stood for “campus mail.”
Soon the sensual enchantments of these old
things gave way to nostalgia. As I sat on the
bedroom floor and read copies of seminar
papers by people I recognized as one-time
friends—and some I recognized as people who
had never quite been friends. I was pricked by
memories of familiar turns of phrase and attitude at once smart and smart-ass.
Craig Tyle ’82, a congenial cynic who
devoted much of his senior year to writing a
radio soap opera of thick and intricate
intrigue and after Swarthmore went to Harvard Law and became a stunningly successful
finance genius, titled his paper on Herbert
Dreyfus’ What Computers Can’t Do, “What
Dreyfus Can’t Do,” referring to the great
artificial intelligence pioneer gamely as “Mr.
Dreyfus” throughout his rattling critique.
Reading those four typed pages from Oct. 21,
1981, the crispness of Tyle’s intelligence—
always just this side of mocking but filled
april 2011

what I think, teach, and write
and what I hope
to accomplish—was all in
those cartons.

YANAI RUBAJA

brittle packing tape I’d bought in the campus
bookstore in Parrish Hall basement and confronting all that I had saved from seven
semesters of Swarthmore.

with bonhomie—is alive and brisk and
inviting.
Such pangs of nostalgia were followed by
an odd shock of recognition. In a spiral notebook marked “film,” I discovered a scribbled quotation of T. Kaori Kitao, the art historian who taught us about movies: “In a
way, even bad movies today are good; there’s
a level of artistry and technical excellence in
every film that makes it to a movie theater.”
Only days ago, camped before our TV playing a DVD, I had plagiarized this idea, offering it to my 11-year-old son as homespun
wisdom.
There was more. I found that the first six
weeks of Rich Schuldenfrei’s syllabus for philosophy of science was very nearly the same
as the first month and a half of a syllabus I
later wrote for a graduate seminar in science
studies that I now teach. I also found a photocopy of the same chapter of Robert Merton’s 1933 dissertation on the Protestant origins of modern science that I had taught the
week before. In a roundtable at a think tank
I’m helping to get off the ground—just last
Thursday—I cited a paper called “Operant
Psychology as Factory Psychology” by Barry
Schwartz, Rich Schuldenfrei, and Hugh
Lacey. Asked for the reference, I admitted I
had no idea how to find the essay. A copy of
it was at the top of the second carton. And
reading over my own hastily composed hon-

ors exams, filled with typos and hatched with
cross-outs, I came across sentences that,
through some alchemy, had reappeared in
papers I’d written only recently.
Taken on their own, these coincidences
are uncanny, but they also point toward
something deeper. Alongside family, my time
is stretched now between teaching the history
and philosophy of science, launching the
think tank, serving on city council, and my
havura, or egalitarian worship community.
The life that I live now—what I think, teach,
and write and what I hope to accomplish—
was all in those cartons. Some of what I
found in the papers I had written or read 28
years ago I could now see as a crude anticipation of what I think and do today. But much
of it was neither crude nor mere anticipation. Much of it was fully formed back then,
or at least no less fully formed that what I am
capable of today.
I know I was not a blank tablet when I
arrived at college. The case can be made
that all Swarthmore did was help me become
a better-realized version of who I was always
destined to be—and that the intervening
years have done much the same. Looked
at from that angle, perhaps the sharp sense
of recognition that comes from sorting
through my college papers is to be expected.
There is something to this, but as I unpacked
those cartons, I saw that this is not a full
explanation.
The whole story must acknowledge that
the tens of thousands of pages of books and
essays that I read as an undergraduate and
the hundreds of honors papers written by
kids like me, and the thousands of hours of
lectures I heard, and the tens of thousands of
hours of talk—idle and intense—all these, it
turns out, are what I’ve been using, magpielike, to make sense of my life, to make my life,
ever since. There’s content to my character—
and a lot of it, it turns out, was in two cartons that sat for 28 years untouched.
Noah Efron teaches in the graduate program in
science, technology, and society at Bar Ilan
University in Israel. He is a contributor to
Counterbalance, a nonprofit educational organization working to promote public understanding of science and how the sciences relate
to ethical and religious concerns. His book
about religion in Israel, Trembling with Fear,
is forthcoming from Basic Books.
63

Alumni Profile

VANESSA LENZ

“I went to see a physical comedy workshop being
taught by David Shiner. Seeing the workshop was
like a frying pan to the head. I said, ‘I have to do this!
I don’t know what this is, but I have to figure it out!’”

Like a Frying Pan to the Head
KENDALL CORNELL ’86 AND HER CLOWN TROUPE RAISE SPIRITS AND
CONSCIOUSNESS ABOUT WOMEN’S BEHAVIOR.

Some women use surgery to change their appearance as they struggle with society’s expectations of how it thinks they should look or behave. As creator
and director of the all-female clown troupe Clowns Ex Machina, Kendall Cornell often just uses a red foam rubber nose. In fact, she finds amusement in
playing off those expectations to create theatrical clown stories most
audience members never see coming.
Working with the female clowns is “phenomenal,” says Cornell, from her
West Village apartment in New York City. “The minute the women come on
stage, the audience is blown over. The clowns have such a life force, and the
women are all different sizes. We don’t see women like that much. Usually,
women are portrayed as caricatures. But this is raw vitality on stage. We arrive
for a performance ready to have fun with the audience. Together, the troupe
has an impact that is very strong.”
Cornell’s clowns are reminiscent of the comedic styles of Lucille Ball,
Danny Kaye, and Guilietta Masina. Through research, Cornell has found that
female characters don’t translate to the formulaic male comedy situations. But,
she says, if you take away the men and the scenarios and it’s just the women,
there are many more possibilities.
The troupe’s name, Clowns Ex Machina, is a play on the Greek theatrical
term deus ex machina, which means a person, thing, or event that appears unexpectedly and impacts the storyline in an often larger-than-life or magical
way. Cornell’s motivation for creating the ensemble in 2006 is similar. She

wants the pieces she creates to have an unexpected impact on audiences’ expectations of women.
A recent example of this was performances of fairytales and Gothic romances with a twist, such as Cinderella. In this piece, Cinderella is primarily in
love with shoes that don’t fit her, says Cornell. “She rejects each man who cannot get the shoe on her foot with a series of shoe puns and moves onto the
next destined-to-fail suitor. In the end, she chops her own toes off,” Cornell
says. “This piece is more about vanity.”
Cornell (center in photo) encourages her troupe to lose their inhibitions
and find the funny in all emotions through improvisation, comic timing,
imagination, and a variety of other skills. She offers the same principles to
participants in her two-day, all-women clown workshops, which are open to
the general public.
The moment in 1993 when Cornell realized that clowning was her calling
is etched clearly in her psyche.
“I went to see a physical comedy workshop being taught by David Shiner,
who was then on Broadway doing a show with Bill Irwin called Fool Moon. It
was a silent comedy show except for music and was a huge Tony Award–winning hit. Seeing the workshop was like a frying pan to the head. I said, ‘I have
to do this! I don’t know what this is, but I have to figure it out!’ I even started
to cry. It was like a culmination of what I had been working toward,” she says.
Soon after her revelation, and throughout the 1990s, Cornell spent time
studying clowning in Europe with Philippe Gaulier, considered the Western
world’s foremost clown teacher. She also taught clowning and modern dance
in Europe and New York. She continues to take acting and dance classes to
keep in shapes for performing, and knits to relieve stress.
Cornell says her current troupe of 11 women, ranging in age from 30 to
mid-50s, spends a lot of time laughing in rehearsals but the work is often emotional and exhausting. “You have to practice having a light spirit, being resilient and bouncing back, because clowns always bounce back. To be a great
clown means to be a great actor,” Cornell says.
The numbers Cornell creates for herself and her troupe have an evocative
sense. “People are transported. There’s a sophistication to what I’m doing,” she
says. “It’s funny, and you can laugh, but there are a lot of layers and intellect.”
In addition to the ensemble shows, in 2006, Cornell created a “clown extravaganza” for a one-night Cirque du Soleil event. The troupe has often performed at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, in New York City, and will do
so again in 2012.
Her Quaker heritage also informs her work. “I don’t know whether
Quakers approve of clowns, but I sometimes consider how clowning
relates to the space of silent worship,” Cornell says. “The space that a clown
steps out of is a deep void. It’s similar to a Quaker meeting where, when you
have something you want to say, it comes out of silence—to be shared with
others. There’s a way a clown comes onto a stage and from that emptiness
creates something to share.”
—Audree Penner

swarthmore college bulletin

Alumni Profile

courtesy of allison marsh

“We’d all pile out of the car, and my dad would knock
on the door and say, ‘We need a tour,’” Marsh chuckles. “That’s how we toured all sorts of bizarre places
like the tunnels of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.”

From Rowdy Youngster
to Public Historian
BECAUSE OF IMPROMPTU STOPS DURING CHILDHOOD
ROAD TRIPS, ALLISON MARSH ’98 IS NOW A PUBLIC HISTORIAN.

Allison Marsh ’98 stumbled upon industrial America while playing in the
backseat of her family’s station wagon during road trips. To quell the rowdy
youngster and her sisters, their father would stop the car to visit factory sites
and public monuments along the highway.
“We’d all pile out of the car, and my dad would knock on the door and say,
‘We need a tour,’” Marsh chuckles. “That’s how we toured all sorts of bizarre
places like the tunnels of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.”
Little did Marsh know that these impromptu pit stops would dictate much
of her future career as a professor of public history at the University of South
Carolina (USC). An expert on 20th-century technology, Marsh’s research specializes in the cultural and industrial significance of factory tours in American
history. Marsh, a double major in engineering and history, also teaches modern U.S. history and the history of science and technology to undergraduates
and supervises the museum studies program for graduate students.
Marsh’s research explores a broad spectrum of industrial and public facilities that offer regularly scheduled tours. She has studied their rise, which
began in the 1880s, visiting factories in multiple industries such as food, automobile, and mail-order catalogues, in addition to dams, canals, and mines.
“What I’m very interested in is a factory where you go out onto the factory
floor and see people working,” says Marsh (left in photo with colleague Gabi
Kuenzli, preparing to tour the silver mines of Cerra Rico in Potosi, Bolivia).
Growing up in Richmond, Va., Marsh was no stranger to industrial manufacturing and the mass production that spread through the state capital during her childhood.
“A big second-grade field trip in my elementary school was the Philip Morris cigarette factory,” Marsh recalls. “I can’t imagine that happening now.”
A couple decades later, an older Marsh found herself researching court
documents in the archives of tobacco companies under litigation. “It was a
goldmine,” she says. “The tobacco companies documented their factory tours
as marketing tools.”

“They had different tours marketed to different age groups,” added Marsh.
“With schoolchildren, the tours were about tobacco as a crop, about the economy, about how things were made, without actually talking about cigarettes
themselves.”
Not surprisingly, her research has revealed that industrial tourism ties into
the reputation building and management in which companies have engaged
historically. “The tours are not particularly eye-opening, because companies
are so conscious of their image and of potential hazards that the tours are sanitized,” she explains. “The purpose of the tours on behalf of the company has
always been to sell their image.”
“Aside from the technical question, what my final work comes out as is a
history of public relations and advertising,” Marsh concludes about the crisscrossing of professional fields that emerged in her research.
A passionate globetrotter in her leisure time, Marsh has set foot on six continents and dipped her toes in all four oceans (still trying to get to Antarctica),
finding that wanderlust has expanded her mindset beyond American borders
and culturally enriched her research projects. On a recent vacation in Bolivia
to visit a colleague, she toured the local mines for a current book project.
“Because Bolivia doesn’t have the regulations that the United States has, I
wanted to see what the working conditions were there,” Marsh says. “They
were horrendous and really quite remarkable. I was having tremendous difficulty breathing. For a while there, I feared a little bit for my safety.”
According to Marsh, outsourcing labor to poor, regulation-lax countries
has thoroughly impacted the socio-cultural dynamics of factory production.
“The further that we get away from these types of working environments, the
more disconnected we are from where our products come from.”
“But I’d be careful not to overstate that, because we forget how much of
our country is actually involved in this labor force,” she adds, citing a tiny
steel-rolling mill located just down her street in Cayce, S.C. “There are a lot of
people out there still making things in small factories.”
When Marsh is not conducting research or continent-hopping, she tries to
invoke the liberal arts experience in her 100-person lectures at USC, a large
state university. Swarthmore has informed her teaching style to emphasize
critical thinking and thoughtful dialogue in class.
“I ask open-ended questions and offer creative assignments and discussions,”
she says. “I expect everyone to learn through voicing their positions, challenging others and their responses.”
“Students either love me or hate me,” she chuckles, explaining that her
end-of-the-year evaluations are often “bipolar.” According to Marsh, her students often remark that her lecture was the first one that made them think.
“You either get the students who have their eyes opened to a broader world or
those people who are fighting against that night and day,” she says.
Marsh is currently working on a book titled The Ultimate Vacation: Watching Other People Work, a history of factory tours in America from 1890–1940
that aggregates all of her research. In addition, she is conceptualizing a museum exhibit in support of the book, which is slated to open in January 2012.
—Maki Somosot ’12

swarthmore college bulletin

Alumni Achievements
Frederick Keller ’64
CoUrtesy of ohsU sChooL of mediCine

has received two international awards for his contributions to interventional radiology—the CIRSE (Cardiovascular and Interventional Society of Europe) Gold Medal, awarded to individuals who have devoted
their talents and energy to the advancement and quality of medicine, patient care, and interventional radiology, and the 2010 International Cooperative Award from the Chinese Society for Interventional Radiology for his contributions to the field in China. A physician and professor at Oregon Health and Science
University (OSHU), Keller, who also serves as director of the Dotter Interventional Institute, Cook Professor of Interventional Therapy, professor of surgery, and chair of diagnostic radiology, is only the second
American physician to be honored with the Gold Medal by CIRSE. Keller’s students, residents of both the
radiology and internal medicine departments, have named him outstanding teacher and best radiology
discussant, and he has been recognized for his clinical expertise in interventional treatment. Past honors
have included the Gold Medal of the Society of Interventional Radiology; distinguished fellow of CIRSE; an endowed chair, the
Frederick S. Keller Chair of Interventional Radiology, established in his honor at OHSU; honorary professor at the Third Beijing
University School of Medicine; and professor titular of the faculty of medicine, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences last fall, in recognition of her cutting-edge
research and scholarship. A Brown University professor of biology and environmental studies, Schmitt is
also director of the Environmental Change Initiative and the Stephen T. Olney Professor of Natural History. According to Dean of Faculty Rajiv Vohra, “[Johanna’s] work, which bridges physiology, genetics,
and evolutionary ecology, is truly unique, extremely ambitious, and worthy of national recognition.”
Schmitt, who joined the Brown faculty in 1982, studies how plants change over time in response to their
environment. She and her research group use the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana—a member of the
mustard family—to study how genetic variation in sensitivity to environmental cues such as day length
and temperature affects reproductive success in different regions and climates. A fellow of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science and member of the National Academy of Science, Schmitt received a Humboldt Research Award in 2007. She is also president of the Society for the Study of Evolution
and past president of the American Society of Naturalists.

CoUrtesy of brown University

Johanna Schmitt ’74

Amy Sinden ’84
Joseph LaboLito, tempLe University

has been recognized for an environmental article that she co-authored with David M. Driesen in 2009.
The piece “The Missing Instrument: Dirty Input Limits” was chosen as one of the top five environmental
law articles by a national panel of law professors and environmental scholars. The article originally appeared in the Harvard Environmental Law Review and was reprinted in the 2009–2010 edition of the
Land Use and Environmental Law Review, an anthology representing the most insightful thinking on a
wide range of current and emerging issues relating to environmental and land use regulation. In addition
to environmental law, Sinden, a Temple law professor, has taught, lectured, and written in the areas of
natural resources law, regulatory design, cost-benefit analysis, human rights, and climate change. “The Missing Instrument” argues for placing regulatory limits on the inputs that constitute the root causes of pollution, in addition to/instead of the polluting outputs themselves. Previously, Sinden served as senior
counsel for Citizens for Pennsylvania Future and associate attorney for EarthJustice Legal Defense Fund in Seattle. In 2006, she
received the Friel/Scanlon Prize for Outstanding Scholarship.

Alumni Achievements
Dawn Porter’s [’88],
heLga sChaefer / hCCreatives

first documentary, Gideon’s Army—a film about new public defenders working in the Deep South under
the auspices of the Southern Public Defender Training Center and founder Jonathan Rapping—has been
selected for the Tribeca All Access producing program. Only five documentary projects were chosen for
the yearlong Tribeca Film Institute program, which includes an initial grant and mentorship by a member
of the Producers Guild of America. To date, Porter, a Georgetown University-educated attorney turned
filmmaker, has financed the film with a six-figure Ford Foundation grant. Gideon’s Army has also been
selected for two other competitions—Hot Docs at the Toronto doc Festival and The Good Pitch, part of
the Sundance Doc Institute. Owner of Trilogy Films, Porter is also producing a film about the Mississippi
Sovereignty Commission and efforts to stop the civil rights movement for the Smithsonian Channel and
recently directed and produced a biography of Chef Alexandra Guarnaschelli for the Cooking Channel.
She became interested in documentary filmmaking at A&E Television, where she says, “I worked on other people’s films until I
received the Ford grant, allowing me to work on my own project. It’s a dream come true!”

was selected last summer for the University of Oregon (UO) High School Teacher Award. The award is
given in appreciation of the fine teaching that has prepared students for the university. A science teacher at
Catlin Gabel High School in Portland, Ore., since 1998, Wynne was nominated for the award by 2010
Catlin Gabel graduate Becky Coulterpark. “I am delighted by Becky Wynne’s dedication to excellent teaching,” says UO biology professor Karen Sprague. “I am especially gratified to those who’ve introduced students to the chemical and physical underpinnings of biology.” In addition to chemistry, Wynne has also
taught physics, biology, and—despite being the daughter of two Cornell mathematicians (both members
of the Swarthmore Class of ’61) and having emphatically told her mother, “I will never become a math
teacher.”—math. Previously, she worked at Lakeside School in Seattle, Oregon Health Sciences University,
and Oregon Museum of Science and Industry.

a is a photography inC.

Rebecca Henderson Wynne ’86

Dan Rothenberg ’95, Quinn Bauriedel ’94, and Dito van Reigersberg ’94

Jason frank rothenberg

have been named recipients of the USA Knight Fellowship, which includes a $50,000 grant from United States Artists (USA) and an additional $5,000 to engage local residents by conducting workshops, talks,
or other events. The three men are the co-artistic directors of the Pig
Iron Theatre Company, which they founded in 1995. Based in Philadelphia, the company has won two OBIE Awards and has been lauded by
The New York Times as “one of the few groups successfully taking theater in new directions.” The company is dedicated to forging original,
ensemble-created performance works. Together, they have created 25
works in a variety of styles, including black comedies, melodramas,
gallery installations, clown shows, and simulated economic environments. Pig Iron has toured festivals and theaters in England, Scotland,
Poland, Lithuania, Brazil, Peru, Ireland, Italy, Romania, and Germany
and has collaborated with such luminaries as director Joseph Chaikin,
composer Cynthia Hopkins, and designer Anna Kiraly. In October, the
company will open the Pig Iron School for Advanced Performance
Training, a two-year program to train physical-theater actors, with Bauriedel serving as the school director. Following graduation with degrees
in theater studies, Bauriedel (right) and Rothenberg (left) studied theater in Paris at Ecole Jacques Lecoq, while van Reigersburg
(center) studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in New York and at the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance.

Alumni Achievements
has been honored by the National Women’s Health Network (NWHN) with its Barbara Seaman Award for
Activism in Women’s Health. The award recognizes an unwavering insistence on listening to women, a
dogged determination to see abuses correctly, and bridge building between generations. “I’m flattered to be
honored by an organization whose mission has been to serve as a watchdog for women’s health,” says
Pérez, whose work in founding Radical Doula.com was cited specifically by the NWHN. An editor with
Feministing.com, Pérez is also an organizer and advocate for Latina women, most recently in her role as
the e-communications manager for the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health. In 2010,
she was chosen as a Lambda Literary Foundation Emerging LGBT Voice in Nonfiction. She is also the recipient of a 2009 Young Woman of Achievement Award from the Women’s Information Network. Her
writing has appeared in Bitch Magazine, The Nation, and The American Prospect as well as the anthologies Click: When We Knew We Were Feminists (2010) and Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power
and A World Without Rape (2008).

emiLy goodstein

Miriam Pérez ’06

q+a

Not Self
DONALD SWEARER ON BUDDHISM,
RELIGION, AND COMPASSION.
Interview conducted and edited by Jeffrey Lott.

jeffrey LOTT

Before he retired from the Swarthmore
faculty, Don Swearer would stop by my
Parrish Hall office to tell me about his travels. His research in Thai Buddhism took
him—and his wife and longtime editor
Nancy Swearer—to Thailand as frequently as
they could manage, particularly to the northern city of Chiang Mai. So when I visited
Southeast Asia with my son earlier this year,
we flew to Chiang Mai instead of Bangkok
because Don and Nancy were there. Before
we left, I crammed a bit, reading two of his

books; touring Buddhist temples with Don
Swearer is like a little seminar in Theravada
Buddhism, and you have to be prepared.
Swearer, 76, the Charles and Harriet Cox
McDowell Professor Emeritus of Religion,
retired a second time last June as director of
the Center for the Study of World Religions
at the Harvard Divinity School. Always a
popular teacher at Swarthmore, Swearer is
widely known for his scholarship—especially
his books and translations that illuminate
Buddhism’s impact in Southeast Asia.
He first went to Thailand in 1957, after a
rocky first year at the Yale Divinity School,
where he had gone to study for the Presbyterian ministry after graduating from Princeton. His first encounter with Buddhism came
that summer, while teaching English at
Bangkok Christian College. He returned to
Yale and completed a B.D. and a master’s in
72

jOSePH LOTT

Donald Swearer at Wat Umong, Chiang Mai, Thailand,
February 2011, where he was studying Buddhist economics and Thailand’s sufficiency economy on a senior Fulbright research grant.

swarthmore college bulletin

sacred theology but decided on a career in
teaching rather than parish ministry. Swearer
was already teaching at Oberlin College when
he completed a Ph.D. at Princeton in 1967.
Today, after 34 years at Swarthmore (1970–
2004) and many sabbaticals and summer visits, he is fluent in Thai language, religion,
and culture.
I interviewed Don amid the trees and
birds of Wat Umong, a “forest” monastery at
the edge of Chiang Mai associated with Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, the influential 20thcentury monk whose modern interpretations
of Buddhism have been a steady Swearer
interest. In the 1930s, Buddhadasa (d. 1993)
es-tablished Suan Mokkh, a forest monastery
in southern Thailand, which became a center
for socially engaged Buddhism—a “pristine”
form of Buddhism that he said was meant to
“drag humanity out from under the power of
materialism.” When I spoke again with

jeffrey LOTT

Tell me about a long-held theory or belief that
you no longer hold.
I might ask, “Which fundamental ideas that
you once held has your study of Buddhism
radically transformed?” To go right to the
heart of it, our conventional understanding
of the Christian God as a Ground of Being
who created the world—something fundamental to Biblical faith—has been fundamentally challenged and altered. Buddhism
offers a very different way of understanding
the nature of the world, of notions regarding
ultimate reality and transcendence which, in
my case, served to transform my understanding of Christian theology.

Trees draped with saffron robes—“ordained” by the
Wat Umong monks to give them sacred status.

Swearer after his return to the United States
this spring, he was preparing to move to
Claremont, Calif., where he anticipates more
opportunities for him and Nancy to enjoy
their family and community. Yet the pull of
scholarship and the classroom hasn’t abated.
He’s considering graduate teaching opportunities and, with characteristic zeal, wants to
finish an ongoing study of Christian identity
in Buddhist Thailand and a translation of a
chronicle of a major northern Thai monastic
lineage.
I began by asking him a favorite question.
He replied, of course, by reframing my question and giving a surprisingly frank answer.

What elements of Buddhism have you adopted
in your personal or spiritual life?
I studied meditation with teachers in Sri
Lanka, Thailand, and Japan, then brought
two of them to Oberlin to work with my students during a January term practicum. That
led to a book, Secrets of a Lotus: Studies in
Buddhist Meditation. My work on Buddhadasa has led to an empathetic worldview—a word I use instead of philosophy—
that embraces the Buddhist critique of selfishness and self-centeredness, emphasizing
compassion and generosity. These virtues are
highlighted in Buddhism, but they are universal. This teaching—often translated as
“not self”—is difficult for westerners to grasp
because it’s seen as being negative and world
denying. A better way of thinking of it is “to
uncenter the self.” That’s very much linked
with the interconnectedness of all things—a
fundamental principle of Buddhist thought.
You’ve been working on a project called Buddhist Economics and Thailand’s Sufficiency
Economy? What does “sufficiency” mean in
this context?
It’s usually parsed in Thai as “having enough
to live and to eat.” Sufficiency has been promoted throughout the long history of Thailand’s current king [who has reigned since
1946]. “Sufficiency” acknowledges the
importance of strong, diverse local
economies, especially in agriculture as a
counter to mono-agricultural crops that are
subject to the vagaries of the global market.
How does Buddhism relate to sufficiency?
Sufficiency is the inverse of excess—especially excess driven by accumulation or greed—

and that’s linked to Buddhist concepts of
non-attachment and interdependence. The
monastic orders themselves provide an
example by living simply in community—
and King Rama IV was a monk for 27 years
before he became king. This is not to say that
sufficiency economics has not been critiqued
as a way for urban elites to keep the rural
poor in their place. But the examples in my
research—a community, a farmer, a business,
a school—have embraced the philosophy of
sufficiency, and I think Buddhism has something to do with that.
What are some common elements of all religious traditions?
Religions envisage human existence in a
broad framework. Despite how they vary
across the horizontal dimension in ways that
they frame this or define that, there’s a vertical dimension that engages notions that can’t
be empirically verified. That’s where god language comes in, for example, but it’s more
universal in engaging notions like infinity or
transcendence. Those ideas are particularly
distinctive to the religious worldview.
Does such a worldview require belief in something that defies empirical understanding?
Buddhism doesn’t have a god concept the
way Christianity does. Many Buddhists will
tell you that unlike Christianity, which
depends on faith, theirs is a rational religion.
What’s the future of Buddhism?
Max Weber, who looked at world religions
through the lens of Protestant materialism,
saw Buddhism as other-worldly mysticism—
all about being a monk in a monastery. But
modern, socially engaged Buddhism as envisioned by Buddhadasa, Thich Nhat Hanh,
and the Dalai Lama addresses worldly problems. These Buddhists care about the environment; they work to end human trafficking; they seek economic justice. This is not
uncommon among all religious traditions
today, but more people of all faiths are taking
on global problems from their religions’ perspectives. If Buddhism—or Christianity for
that matter—is to remain relevant in the
modern world, it has to engage the world
with values of selflessness and compassion.
“Not self,” right?
Not self. Exactly.

Come home to Swarthmore.

Reminisce, reconnect,
and make new friends.

ALUMNI WEEKEND 2011 JUNE 3–5
This year’s Alumni Weekend will include:
• Performance by the legendary Doc Watson with David Holt, sponsored by Swarthmore Folk
• Collection speaker June Rothman Scott ’61
• Reading and performance of selections from Messiah, conducted by John Alston
For more information and to register online: http://bit.ly/alumniweekend2011