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good food, good earth, good ideas
swarthmore
swarthmore college
bulletin | october 2011
campus view
Kick your shoes off and pull
up two chairs. There’s sun and
grass—and autumn’s in the air.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
departments
profiles
5: LETTERS
Readers react.
52: A Humanist in Medicine
More than a half-century of research and
progress and DeWitt Baldwin ’43 still has
more to do.
By Susan Cousins Breen
76: Playtime With a Snap
Woodworking artisans John and Jane
Greenberg Kostick ’88 have created Tetraxis,
a magnetic geometry puzzle for all ages.
By Andrea Hammer
70: Write Out Loud for All to See
By a simple public act of compassion, Ruth
Sergel ’84 spurred a whole city to action.
By Maki Somosot ’12
On the cover: Harvest time at Essex Farm. Photograph
by Michael Forster Rothbart ’94. Story on page 18.
6: FROM THE PRESIDENT
Stewarding Swarthmore
By Rebecca Chopp
8: COLLECTION
• A draft plan for the future
• A hurricane moves through
• The Class of 2015 by the numbers
• 9/11 remembered
• From Kandahar to the College
• Single-stream recycling
• A new sustainability coordinator
• Is the Quaker matchbox a good idea?
• Garnet soccer on the move
47: CONNECTIONS
• Relive history along the Danube
• New award named for
Eugene Lang ’38
• Alumni welcome newbies
• Send-offs for new students
• Connections and more Connections
50: CLASS NOTES
The world according to Swarthmore
55: IN MEMORIAM
Farewell to cherished friends
58: BOOKS + ARTS
Mara Hvistendahl ’02, Unnatural
Selection, PublicAffairs, 2011
Reviewed by Gwynn Kessler, assistant
professor of religion
66: IN MY LIFE
A Country. Not a War.
Forty-three years after being wounded in
Vietnam, Bill Ehrhart and his friend and
fellow Marine take a nostalgic and eyeopening journey.
By W.D. Ehrhart ’73
80: Q+A
A Tightly Choreographed Life
There’s more to Professor of Political
Science Carol Nackenoff than just politics.
By Carol Brévart-Demm
Below: Tina Johnson is director of a food co-op in a
city where fresh, nutritious food is hard to come by.
Photograph by Jim Graham. Story on page 26.
in this issue
features
18: Good Food, Good Earth—
Good Ideas
Not many are taking “local” and
“sustainable” as far as Mark Guenther
Kimball’s [’94] Essex Farm.
By David Pacchioli
18
32
26: Eat Well, Seek Justice
In Chester, Pa., urban prophets and
activists are offering good food, building
community, and generating social capital
at the Chester Co-op.
By Mark Wallace
36
31: Hands in the Soil
“You shouldn’t eat anything from a farm
you don’t like to visit,” says Arthur Upshur
’83. He and Carol Merten Upshur ’83 have
a farm worth visiting again and again.
By Joan Smith ’76
32: When Eating, Just Eat
Jan Chozen Bays ’66 has a mindful
prescription for reordering our disordered
relationship with food.
By Elizabeth Redden ’05
35: The Wine Guy
John Fischer ’81 delights clientele with
perfect combinations of food and drink—
and teaches his students to do the same.
By Carol Brévart-Demm
36: The Amazing Swarthmore Network
The College’s heart may be located on
campus, but its reach is everywhere.
Here are 10 ways to plug in.
By Susan Cousins Breen, Carol BrévartDemm, and Jeffrey Lott
44: America’s Guarantee: Peace or
Promises?
German political commentator Josef
Joffe ’65 says the United States must
resist self-inflicted blows—such as the
invasion of Iraq—that will blunder away its
supremacy.
By Paul Wachter ’97
26
parlor talk
In a few weeks, I’m making a conference
presentation called “50 Ways to Love Your
Magazine—and Make Your Readers Love
It Too.” To prepare for my talk, I spent a
couple hours perusing the magazine racks
at Barnes & Noble (alas, not Borders,
which always had a better selection). I was
searching for magazines honored by the
American Society of Magazine Editors
(ASME) as the best in their categories this
year. Overall, the ASME “magazine of the
year” is National Geographic, but other
titles were honored for excellence as news, food, fashion, literary,
business, and lifestyle magazines. I can’t say that I love them all, but I
greatly admire what they do to serve their particular readers.
As a magazine editor for nearly 25 years, I’ve come to love
this medium so much that it makes me cringe to hear people say,
“Print is dead.” In fact, although daily newspapers and the weekly
newsmagazines have been struggling of late, the magazine industry is
healthy and growing. Between 2000 and 2010, the National Directory
of Magazines reported a 19.7 percent increase in the number of titles
published in the United States. The six fastest growing categories
were ethnic, travel, regional, medical, real estate—and college alumni
magazines. Among alumni magazines, 127 new titles were added
during the decade. Ninety-three percent of adults read magazines,
and that figure increases as the audience gets younger: Under 24
years of age, it’s 97 percent.
Most successful magazines serve readers who share an interest
such as cooking, backpacking, or business. The Bulletin is also a
shared-interest magazine, published for Swarthmore alumni, parents
on the web
of Swarthmore students, and members of the campus community—
about 24,000 of us overall. A College community might seem like
a cohesive target audience, but consider the challenges of serving a
broadly educated readership such as ours. Just as they reside all over
the world (we send the Bulletin to 107 countries), their occupations
and passions span the intellectual map. And although the median age
of alumni is 47, the College has hundreds of alumni in their 90s and,
currently, 11 over age 100.
You might think these differences create real challenges for the
alumni magazine editor who aims to select stories that appeal to
all. Yet as a medium, magazines provide such a deft combination
of words, images, design, and packaging that they are familiar,
accessible, informative, and entertaining to almost everyone. Thus,
the Bulletin can be a general-interest magazine for a liberal-arts
college audience without worrying that our readers cannot—or will
not—want to explore new ideas and learn new things. Ultimately,
what pulls Bulletin readers together isn’t the specific people or
subjects treated in its pages, but Swarthmore itself. The same
common interests that weave together the far-flung Swarthmore
community—a shared experience, intellectual outlook, and
emotional attachment to a time and place—are the warp and weft of
this magazine.
Look inside the front cover and you’ll feel it. Find more evidence
in the passions of Mark Kimball ’94 (p. 18), the peace of Jan Chozen
Bays ’66 (p. 32), the wisdom of Josef Joffe ’65 (p. 44) or the new book
by Mara Hvistendahl ’02 (p. 58). Then look for your own connection
to this place in “The Amazing Swarthmore Network” (p. 36).
Are we National Geographic with Class Notes? Probably not. But I
love magazines in more than 50 ways, and apparently, you do too.
—Jeffrey Lott
contributors
This issue and more than 13 years of
Bulletin archives are at www.swarthmore.
edu/bulletin. Also on the College website:
MICHAEL GLUK ’12
Watch: Studio art major
Christie DeNizio ‘12 recently
installed two large paintings
in Sharples.
http://bit.ly/denizio
Listen: “I think every book
of poems tells a story,”
says Professor of English
Literature Nathalie Anderson,
reading from Quiver, her latest collection.
http://media.swarthmore.edu/faculty_lectures
Watch: Jed Rakoff ‘64 presents the 2011 Constitution
Day lecture, “My Neurons Made Me Do It: How
Neuroscience is Challenging the Law’s View of Criminal
and Moral Responsibility.”
http://media.swarthmore.edu/video
4
Bill Ehrhart ’73 is author or
editor of 19 books of prose
and poetry, most recently
a collection of poems, The
Bodies Beneath the Table
(Adastra Press, 2010). He
teaches English and history at
the Haverford School and lives
in Philadelphia with Anne, his
wife of 31 years, who—along
with their daughter Leela—is
a major inspiration for his
poetry.
David Pacchioli writes about
science, the environment,
history, and food from central
Pennsylvania, where he lives
with his wife and son. His
work has appeared in Discover,
Runner’s World, Pennsylvania
Heritage, and various
university magazines. When
he’s not at his desk or out with
the dog, he is cooking, eating,
dozing by the fire, or running
long distances very slowly.
Joan Smith ’76 is the former
books editor of the San
Francisco Examiner. Now a
freelance writer, her work
has appeared in Salon.com,
The New York Times Book
Review, The Washington Post
Book World, the Los Angeles
Times, the San Francisco
Chronicle, Vogue, and O: the
Oprah Magazine. She lives on
Maryland’s Eastern Shore with
her husband Richard and Alex
the Wonder Poodle.
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
Audree Penner
publications intern
Maki Somosot ’12
administrative assistant
Janice Merrill-Rossi
editor emerita
Maralyn Orbison Gillespie ’49
contacting swarthmore college
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Or e-mail: alumnirecords@swarthmore.edu.
The Swarthmore College Bulletin
(ISSN 0888-2126), of which this is volume
CVIX, number 2, is published in August,
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Swarthmore College Bulletin, 500 College
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Swarthmore College.
Printed in U.S.A.
october 2011
MAKING SWARTHMORE BETTER
ONE ISSUE AT A TIME
I’d like to raise a toast to Jeff Lott, who
steps down in January as editor of the
Swarthmore College Bulletin after more than
21 years of service. Under his leadership,
this magazine has matured with alumni and
with the College, keeping us informed and
interconnected.
I’ll never forget the day, 14 years ago,
when my son was a newborn and I finally
found some time to take a nap; but a nearby
issue of the Bulletin caught my eye. Soon,
thoughts of a 30-hour labor and my son’s
worrisome time in the ICU disappeared as
I read the issue nearly cover to cover, from
the article about the College’s legendary
folk festivals in the 1940s and 1950s to the
essay by James Michener ’29 on the need
for educational reform. When I looked up
again, I felt I as if I had just been reading an
especially good issue of The New Yorker. I
remember thinking—such literary quality in
an alumni magazine?
A year later, when I came to work at
Swarthmore, I was not surprised to learn
that the Bulletin had won numerous awards
for excellence in content and design. And I
was delighted to get to know Jeff, who—even
at Swarthmore—stands out as an especially
smart, generous, and inspiring colleague.
Whereas many college or university
periodicals are drab and unabashed
marketing tools—not much more than a
succession of cheeky photos, advertisements,
and sales pitches—under Jeff ’s leadership,
the Bulletin has remained relatively free
of agenda-driven or sycophantic articles.
A sampling of articles from the July 2011
issue offers a glimpse of the Bulletin’s
range and civic engagement: “Chernobyl
Witness,” described Michael Rothbart’s
[’94] documentation of the aftermath
of nuclear disaster; “Juvenile Injustice”
profiled Edgar Cahn’s [’56] efforts to reduce
youth incarceration; “Style and Substance”
described some of the challenges faced by
Cindi Lieve ’88 as editor in chief of Glamour
Magazine; and in a modest news story we
learn of the Bulletin’s most recent national
award, this time for Best Article of the Year.
Such articles reveal much that is worth
examining, not just on campus, but in all
alumni communities. I think the best way
to honor Jeff ’s remarkable career and legacy
will be to ensure that the Bulletin remains
intellectually free and creative as a vehicle for
communal inquiry and engagement.
Jeff graduated from Middlebury with a
degree in studio art, but he wholeheartedly
embraced Swarthmore’s culture, represented
it as well as anyone could, and greatly
enhanced an appreciation of the importance
of the arts here. Under his leadership, the
Bulletin has reminded us of Swarthmore’s
rich history; described its evolving campus,
curriculum, and outlook; and inspired us
to broaden our perspectives. Thank you,
Jeff, for your creative vision, wisdom, and
collaborative spirit. You didn’t sell the
College to us; you helped realize a collective
vision. In doing so, you made Swarthmore a
better community.
Andrea Packard ’85
Wallingford, Pa.
ARISTOTELIAN WISDOM:
VIRTUE FOR THE HAVE-NOTS
In an excerpt from their book Practical
Wisdom (“The Janitor and the Judge,” April
Bulletin), Barry Schwartz and Kenneth
Sharpe seek to deepen our understanding
of ethical choice in contemporary life by
combining examples, the social actors’ own
reflections, and Aristotelian philosophy.
What they actually offer, however, is a
warmed-over version of a 19th-century
ethic, familiar from Victorian novels and TV
movies. It’s the narrative of the magnanimous
underling, the wife/mother/servant/Jewess/
slave/poor-but-honest-worker who rises
above societal injustice. In that narrative,
virtue for the have-nots consists in looking
with charitable understanding at the haves;
it does not include the strident temptations
of socialism, trade unionism, feminism, or
demands for racial equality.
Pushing the morality of virtuous
suffering in today’s America has ideological
implications, as workers’ rights shrink and
employers’ demands intensify. The authors
offer Aristotle as an ethical guide for this
America. In assessing the value of such
guidance, it’s worth noting Aristotle’s belief
that some of us are natural slaves, others
natural aristocrats, and that society’s benefits
should be distributed accordingly.
Jonathan Dewald ’68
Buffalo, N.Y.
5
from the president
Stewarding
STRATEGIC DIRECTIONS FOR SWARTHMORE COLLEGE REFLECTS THE
COLLECTIVE WISDOM FROM OUR YEARLONG CONVERSATIONS AND
PRESENTS SOME PRELIMINARY IDEAS MEANT FOR DEEPER AND WIDER
CONSULTATION AMONG ALL COMMUNITY MEMBERS.
By Rebecca Chopp
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
6
Swarthmore College—as any Swarthmorean knows—is a very distinct community. We are distinct in the clarity of our
mission: We teach only undergraduates, and
we believe passionately in the power of ideas.
We are also distinct in the clarity of our
values, which are held firmly and expressed
consistently in our practices: respect for
the individual, consensus decision making,
simple living, generous giving, the peaceful
settlement of disputes, and what our Quaker
founders called the amelioration of suffering,
or what we now describe as setting the world
aright and anew.
In 1854, Martha Tyson and Benjamin
Hallowell began convincing their fellow
Hicksite Quakers of the need to found a
college in order to prepare citizens to be
both intellectually and practically trained to
meet the challenges of that time. This nascent
idea prompted a rigorous series of meetings
and conversations that ultimately led them
to conclude that: “The best interests of our
Society demands an institution where our
children can receive an education, in its true
sense, by the simultaneous cultivation of
their intellectual and moral powers.” These
words fully express the long legacy inherited
by each new class that enters Swarthmore
College.
Ten years following this landmark
statement, Swarthmore was officially
chartered in the Commonwealth of
Pennsylvania, which means that in 2014
we will be celebrating the College’s 150th
anniversary—its sesquicentennial. Such
a significant milestone offers us a distinct
opportunity to reflect on our rich traditions
and most deeply held values. It also affords
us the chance to imagine what the future can
be and what Swarthmore must do to embrace
the challenges before us and before all of
higher education in the coming years.
Last year, we undertook a communitywide strategic planning exercise. We
began by looking carefully at external
factors that would play a significant role
in determining our future direction—such
as trends in technology; changes in the
nature of teaching, learning, and research;
and the uncertain economic climate we
now confront. Throughout the process, we
continually returned to one fundamental
question: How can we best educate our
students to become stewards and citizens
dedicated to the pursuit of a more just, civil,
and sustainable world?
We asked hundreds of students, faculty,
staff members, and alumni which values they
most closely associate with Swarthmore.
The responses were remarkably similar.
Our shared values include a commitment to
rigorous inquiry and imaginative thinking;
providing students the opportunity to
learn about self and the world; a moral
commitment to make the world a better
place; facilitating access to a Swarthmore
education; and upholding our historic
values.
Noted educator Parker Palmer observes
that higher education at its best is “centered
on knowing the great things of the world.”
Swarthmore’s heart and soul is about
knowing the great things—large and small—
of this world and beyond. Our students may
become fascinated by recording a vanishing
language. They may discover a gift they didn’t
realize in computational physics or organic
swarthmore college bulletin
Swarthmore
Noted educator Parker Palmer
observes that higher education at
its best is “centered on knowing
chemistry. Or perhaps they will awaken a
passion for Balinese music or Shakespeare
that will be nurtured, encouraged, and honed
here.
Swarthmore is unabashedly and
forthrightly an intellectual community with a
deep passion for ideas. Learning, we believe,
is intended both for the development of the
individual and for the betterment of society.
Our motto “Mind the Light” expresses our
belief, again, that you must search your
conscience, develop your own ideas, and
express your own opinions and perspectives.
In addition to knowing and discovering
great things, we are also drawn to living in
great ways together. Since 1864, we have
inspired intellectual discovery and growth,
and we have also cultivated the moral sense
of how to live in a community engaged in
the world. Members of our community are
asked to listen respectfully and carefully to
others and to engage in civil discourse at all
times, no matter the vigor of their beliefs
or the depth of their passions. We embrace
the view that others will help us refine our
ideas by expressing perspectives we have
never heard before and by questioning
deeply held beliefs that have never been
challenged before. Here at Swarthmore,
we are exposed to an abundance of talents,
passions, and worldviews—all within a closeknit community where it’s safe to explore
and imagine new ways of looking at and
experiencing the world.
Another of our most deeply held values
is the College’s longstanding commitment
to access—to ensure that all admitted young
men and women have the opportunity
to attend Swarthmore. We value access
october 2011
the great things of the world.”
Swarthmore’s heart and soul is about
knowing the great things—large and
small—of this world and beyond. In
addition to knowing and discovering
great things, we are also drawn to
living in great ways together.
because it provides the opportunity for
individuals to benefit from this distinct
college and for all community members
to be enriched by the experience of living
and learning in an inclusive and engaged
community. Whether participating in a
course on economic development, creating
robots in engineering, or understanding the
philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, hearing
perspectives and questions from a variety of
different individuals not only enhances but
also —in many ways—defines the liberal arts
education.
Students flourish here because of the
superb learning experiences they have in
classes and labs taught by exceptional faculty.
In addition, students hear the hopes and
dreams, thoughts and questions of people
who are different when they participate in
a project at the Eugene M. Lang Center for
Civic and Social Responsibility, play on the
soccer field, organize a social event, direct a
play, or have yet another random middle-ofthe night conversation in a dorm. Learning
to live with those who are different from
ourselves, learning to live in a community
that cares for itself and that engages with the
world, and learning to live in a sustainable
fashion with the earth represent the
opportunities we most want to present to our
students in order that they become leaders,
stewards, and citizens of the world.
This fall, we are considering the draft
plan presented to the Board of Managers
in September. This document, Strategic
Directions for Swarthmore College,
reflects the collective wisdom from our
yearlong conversations and presents some
preliminary ideas meant for deeper and
wider consultation among all community
members. We have also written a briefer
report that sumarizes the plan. Each of
these drafts seeks to identify strengths,
challenges, guiding principles, and initial
recommendations intended for further
comment. In the last 50 years, there has
been no time more challenging to higher
education. We must take the opportunity
and accept the obligation to make sure
we are stewarding Swarthmore in the best
possible way. We look forward to vigorous
conversation about the proposals in the
draft plan. Your input this fall is critical, as
we wish to further develop and build upon
the good thinking that has occurred so far,
with the aim of incorporating it into the
strategic plan we present to the Board for its
consideration this winter.
Read and comment on a
summary of the draft plan at
http://bit.ly/draftplansummary
7
Even those with no yen for horticulture can’t help
but be drawn to Swarthmore’s campus, with its
stunning color extravaganza of lovingly tended plant
collections and rolling acres of woodland graced by
lofty trees. Watered by a meandering river running
through it, the verdant campus provides a perfect
setting for its staunch stone buildings—both old and
new—that nestle among its greenery.
No surprise, then, that the campus caught the
attention of a group of university architects,
campus experts, and students asked by editors of
Forbes magazine which schools “turned their heads
and why.”
Forbes noted not only Swarthmore’s beauty but
also the sustainability programs initiated by the
College.
And, as confirmation, Travel & Leisure magazine
included Swarthmore’s campus on its list of
“America’s Most Beautiful College Campuses,” citing
its “idyllic gardens of hydrangea, lilacs, and tree
peonies” and “courtyard devoted to fragrant trees
and shrubs” as well as public classes on horticultural
topics offered by the Scott Arboretum.
PHILLIP STERN ’84
collection
“THIS HOUSE WOULD LIGHT A QUAKER MATCH”
MARIAM ZAKHARY ’13
In their second straight victory over the Peaslee
Debate Society, President Chopp and Dean Braun
convinced the audience to “light a Quaker match.”
“Successful marriages depend on sharing
common values and the couple being able
to negotiate peacefully the settlement of
disputes,” she said. Peck contended that
sharing values would become tiresome.
Marrying someone with different values
might help Swatties better understand the
world.
From there, it was Dean Braun’s
show. Braun asked Swatties to consider
the environmental impact of the Quaker
Matchbox. She argued that it is “good for
sustainability because it results in a reduction
in paper with each couple only getting one
copy of the Bulletin, only one of any College
october 2011
mailing, and, of course, a reduction in our
carbon footprint by creating a built-in
carpool to any alumni event.”
Peck tried a different tactic. Quaker
Matchbox marriages might marginally
improve the environment, but didn’t Swatties
deserve to marry attractive individuals, and,
if so, were the president and dean aware of
how rare attractive people are on campus?
Chopp responded with the put-down of
the night, inquiring whether a non-Swattie
would even want to marry Richard Peck.
Said Peck: “I don’t really have a problem
with Swatties marrying each other. But I
do think two Swatties running a household
together could be a bit too intense.” Indeed,
Peck provided a chilling hypothetical:
“A kid growing up with two Swattie
parents would have it rough. Imagine if he
asked for something from Abercrombie.
The response would be something like…
‘No, Athanasius. We are non-conformists in
this house. Now pack up your didgeridoo
because you have a lesson in a half hour.
After that, you have cross-country unicycling
practice. But don’t worry, then you get some
scheduled free time … during which you will
read Joyce, and only Joyce.”
As the debate concluded, Peaslee
President Linnet Davis-Stermitz ’12 asked
audience members to indicate which team
they felt had won. A quick vote resulted in
the second straight victory for Chopp and
Braun in the now-annual event.
“Dean Braun and I are humbled by this
victory,” said Chopp afterward, “but since
neither of us had the opportunity to attend
Swarthmore, the real victory goes to the
students who may marry a Swarthmore alum
someday—even one they may not know
currently—and become a Quaker Matchbox
couple dedicated to improving the world
while having a satisfying marriage.”
Peck characterized the outcome
differently. “Although we might not have
done the best debating, President Chopp did
tell me, ‘Richard, I will go to the Outback
Steakhouse with you….’ So I would call the
debate a win.”
—Patrick Ross ’15,
Adapted from Daily Gazette, Sept. 8, 2011
COLLEGE HIRES FIRST
SUSTAINABILITY COORDINATOR
COURTESY OF CLARA FANG
Members of Swarthmore’s Amos J. Peaslee
Debate Society faced off against President
Rebecca Chopp and Dean of Students
Elizabeth Braun in early September for their
second annual public debate. The proposition
was “This house would light a Quaker match”
or “Should Swarthmore students marry one
another?” Chopp and Braun argued for the
Quaker Matchbox; Debate Society members
Richard Peck ’12 and David Mok-Lamme ’14
argued against the proposition.
Chopp stated that Matchbox couples
(defined as two married Swarthmore alums)
donate greater amounts to the College on
a more consistent basis. Peck and MokLamme responded that Swarthmore grads
are more preoccupied with saving the world
than making money, and few Swatties
pursue lucrative careers. By encouraging the
courtship of non-Swatties with “real jobs,”
Swarthmore would receive more donations,
they argued.
Chopp, lightning-quick, pivoted.
Clara Changxin Fang has been appointed for
the academic year 2011–2012 to serve as the
College’s first environmental sustainability
coordinator. She will
assist in the creation of
the College’s climate
action plan—a guide to
reducing Swarthmore’s
greenhouse gas emissions in alignment with
the American Colleges
and University Presidents Climate ComClara Fang
mitment
signed by President Rebecca Chopp
in May 2010. As a staff member of the Lang
Center for Civic and Social Responsibility,
Fang will work closely with the newly
created Climate Action Planning Committee
to complete an updated greenhouse-gas
inventory that shows Swarthmore’s energy
use and carbon emissions in different sectors
from 2005 to the present. In addition, Fang
will work with the College’s Sustainability
Committee on other projects, conduct
outreach efforts, and serve as a resource for
students and community members interested
in environmental issues.
The new position is the result of a year’s
effort by the Sustainability Committee, the
Lang Center, student environmental groups,
and other community members to create
a more unified and consistent approach to
managing sustainability efforts on campus.
Before coming to Swarthmore, Fang
worked as sustainability coordinator for the
City of Albany, N.Y., where she helped to
develop the city’s greenhouse gas inventory
and climate action plan.
She received a master of environmental
management from Yale University,
where she also worked for the Center for
Environmental Law and Policy and the
Office of Sustainability. In addition, she
has worked for a consulting company that
helps businesses and institutions develop
renewable energy projects and expand the
clean energy market.
Fang has a B.A. from Smith College,
where she received the Outstanding Student
Leader Award for her work on campus
sustainability.
9
collection
Wide Discussions of Draft Strategic Plan
The process of setting strategic directions for the College has
Strategic Directions lists several serious challenges to the
continued this fall in classic Swarthmore fashion—with lots of
Swarthmore model and the liberal arts: “rapidly expanding
thought, questions, and discussion. Beginning with a review by the
knowledge and changes in teaching and learning, often driven by
Board of Managers of a draft plan at its September meeting and
technological advances; demographic trends that are changing
continuing with a series of conversations
the profile of the traditional college-age
both on and off campus in October and
population; changing attitudes about
November, the process is aimed at producing
higher education, including concerns about
Five Principles for
a final document to be considered by the
the practical value and cost of a liberal
Swarthmore’s Future
Board in December. If the plan is approved,
arts education; [and] unstable financial
the College will then develop an overall
conditions in the domestic and global
• Swarthmore acts to advance
prioritization and implementation plan for
economy, resulting in, among other things,
uncompromising excellence in the
its recommendations.
increasing need for financial aid.” These
study of the liberal arts, embracing
“The Board had a vigorous discussion
challenges “underscore the need for critical
both rigorous inquiry and
of the plan and was enthusiastic about the
inquiry, creative thinking, and ethically and
imaginative thinking.
initiatives proposed,” said Board Chair
socially responsible leadership,” the plan says.
Barbara Mather ’65 of the Managers’
The summary also provides a set of
• Swarthmore cultivates an intentional
September meeting. “Board members felt
principles and opportunities in five distinct
substantive community in order
strongly that it was important to preserve
but interdependent areas of College life and
to shape engaged and thoughtful
access to the College and the intense
concludes with a section expressing the
leaders who will contribute to a
interaction with the faculty that is one of
importance of lifelong alumni relationships
more just, civil, and inclusive world.
the hallmarks of a Swarthmore education—
with the College. Each of the five principles
and to encourage more cross-disciplinary
(see box) is followed by a short list of
• Swarthmore recognizes that
experimentation in the curriculum. There
recommendations. The full plan,
the faculty is critical to ensuring
was also appropriate concern about the need
from which the summary is drawn,
the excellence of the academic
to be careful and deliberate as we implement
contains more detail on these
program. Our professors should
recommendations, given the current
recommendations; it is also available
be dedicated to teaching
financial climate.”
at the strategic planning website.
undergraduates while pursuing
A robust strategic planning website has
The draft plan states that Swarthmore’s
research, scholarly writing, and
encouraged engagement in the process from
community “is strengthened considerably
creative production in the arts.
both near and far. A summary of the current
by enduring engagement with our alumni.”
draft of Strategic Directions for Swarthmore
It proposes to create greater opportunities
• Swarthmore strives to enroll
College is now on the Web, inviting further
for alumni to connect meaningfully with
students who will thrive
comment from alumni and others.
students and proposes a Lives in the Liberal
intellectually, socially, and
Beginning with a set of core values that
Arts Fellows Program that will demonstrate
personally while helping enrich our
emerged consistently through the planning
to students how alumni have put their
community. We value access as an
process, the draft addresses Swarthmore’s
liberal-arts education into practice.
individual opportunity for students
strengths and the challenges it faces. The
In addition, it envisions more
and as an institutional responsibility
core values, derived from the College’s
opportunities for alumni to provide
to educate students who—
Quaker heritage, are identified as respect
“expertise and leadership in areas such as
collectively—represent the world.
for the individual, decision-making by
admissions, career services, development,
consensus, simple living, social responsibility
and other areas that benefit greatly from
• Swarthmore maintains its tradition
and justice, generous giving, and peaceful
alumni support.”
of bold leadership in undergraduate
settlement of disputes.
The Board of Managers is expected to
education in order to create
The draft plan describes the College’s key
evaluate a final draft during its December
practical, visionary solutions to the
institutional commitments as “academic
meeting. If the plan is approved, next steps
most complex issues confronting
rigor and creativity; our desire to support
will include setting priorities and writing
our world.
access and opportunity for all students,
implementation plans that will include a
regardless of their financial circumstances;
campus facilities master plan, a financial
Read and comment on a
our commitment to a diverse and vibrant
plan, and a diversity and inclusivity plan.
summary of the draft plan at
community of students, faculty, staff, alumni,
It is anticipated that a capital campaign will
http://bit.ly/draftplansummary
and parents; [and] our belief that we have a
follow.
responsibility to improve the world.”
—Jeffrey Lott
10
swarthmore college bulletin
MAJOR LEAGUE
Garnet soccer star Morgan Langley ’11, who
was recruited to the Harrisburg City Islanders
after graduation, has continued to be a
standout even at the professional level. In
mid-September, after a successful season
with the Islanders, during which he earned
10 starts and scored two goals—including
one that clinched a spot in the playoffs
for his team—major league soccer team
Philadelphia Union signed the midfielder to
its roster.
In a September interview with the
Delaware County Daily Times shortly after
his debut with the team, Langley said, “To
be standing here in the Union locker room
right now, and to just get my first appearance
for the Union, is something that, four or
five years ago, I don’t think I would’ve ever
dreamed.”
Watch Morgan Langley talk
about how his experiences at
Swarthmore prepared him for
a life in professional soccer.
http://bit.ly/langley11
october 2011
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From Connecticut To Swarthmore—Via Kandahar
ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS
Even as a young boy growing up in Hamden,
Conn., first-year student Thomas Fortuna says he
was moved and disturbed by news reports of
atrocities occurring in various parts of the world.
He began to envision himself as an officer in one
or another branch of the Armed Forces, running a
special operations group to help combat genocide.
Adamantly against killing, he was encouraged and
intrigued by reports of new research in the nonlethal weapon development industry, such as that
being explored by the Department of Peace Studies
at Bradford University, U.K.
After five years in a Marine non-combat unit—including
service in Afghanistan—Tommy Fortuna is pleased to be
at Swarthmore, taking courses on happiness, non-violent
conflict resolution, philosophy, and cosmology; playing
rugby; and participating in the Dare to Soar program,
Model United Nations, and volunteer fire fighting.
In 2005, during the summer after Fortuna’s
junior year of high school, at a time when
reports of mass executions and other acts of
violence against the Iraqi civilian population
were flooding the national news, the 17-yearold signed up to join the Marine Corps after
finishing high school.
12
“I joined up in the hope of becoming a
firefighter, helping to save lives and contributing
to the stabilization effort,” he says.
After enduring three months of boot camp,
instead of firefighting, he was assigned to
aviation ordnance, for which he spent eight
months training, followed by almost two years
in Yuma, Ariz., as an ordnance technician upand downloading ammunition to and from
aircraft guns and troubleshooting problems with
planes. Within his first 18 months of service, he
received three merit promotions and attained
the rank of corporal.
Two years into his five-year stint as a Marine,
Fortuna decided to apply to the Naval Academy
in Annapolis, but shortly after sending in his
application, he was deployed to Kandahar,
Afghanistan, where he served as a work center
supervisor for a weapons ordnance shop.
“I worked 14 hours a day in the center.
Sometimes I slept there,” Fortuna says. “Days
run into each other—you work, you sleep, that’s
all. That’s the life of a support Marine.”
He’d been in Afghanistan for only two
months before being accepted by the Naval
Academy and was sent back to the States early
to attend the Academy’s Preparatory School.
“By the time I was ready to actually go to the
Naval Academy, though, I’d decided to apply for
conscientious objector (CO) status,” he says.
“It’s a very long process,” he adds, “so, while
they dealt with my application, I was sent to
Okinawa, Japan.” Fortuna spent a year in Japan,
including participation in the tsunami relief
effort in Iwakuni. One month before his fiveyear contract with the Marines was up, his CO
status was approved.
“Thinking back on my decision to join up,”
Fortuna says, “I’ve been using the analogy of
Don Quixote—someone who believes he’s going
to change the world, then slowly realizes that it’s
much more complex than he thought. I’m still
trying but in a different way.”
Seeking an intellectual environment with an
emphasis on social and ethical responsibility,
Fortuna found his way to Swarthmore,
where, he says, he’s had an easy adaptation.
“I absolutely love it,” he says. “This is where I
should have been from the beginning.” And yes,
he’s finally training to be a volunteer firefighter.
—Carol Brévart-Demm
THE CHESTER FUND PLANS
A CHARTER SCHOOL
The Chester Fund for
Education and the Arts—a
private foundation conceived
of and funded by members of
the Swarthmore community,
including John Alston, associate
professor of music and director
of the Chester Children’s
Chorus—has announced plans to
open a charter school in Chester,
Pa.
The charter school will build
upon and expand the successful
arts-centered program currently
offered at the Chester Upland
School of the Arts (CUSA),
a public elementary school,
founded in 2008 through the
fund’s partnership with the
Chester Upland School District.
This year, 281 children in pre-K
through 5th grade are enrolled at
CUSA. Financial support from
foundations, corporations, and
individuals enables The Chester
Fund to provide arts enrichment
programs, technology programming, teaching assistants in
every grade, and an after-school
program for the upper grades at
CUSA.
CUSA has achieved an
Adequate Yearly Progress rating
on the Pennsylvania System
of School Assessment tests for
the past two years. Last year,
fourth-graders made 20 percent
gains in reading and 15 percent
gains in math proficiency—a
marked improvement on their
performance as third-graders.
However, massive state
government cutbacks in schooldistrict funding in 2011 have led
to reductions in both staffing
and educational programs. As
a result, administrators of The
Chester Fund have decided
to terminate the partnership
with the school district at the
end of June 2012 and apply to
swarthmore college bulletin
DONORS HONORED IN
ELECTRONIC REPORT
Generous contributions from
alumni, parents, and friends
ensure that Swarthmore can
continue to offer a world-class
liberal arts education—and the
opportunity for all qualified
students to attend regardless of
their financial circumstances.
Swarthmore donors and
volunteers are recognized each
year in the Report of Gifts, now
produced electronically to save
money and natural resources.
If the College has your email
address, in the coming weeks,
you will receive a message with
a link to the July 1, 2010 to June
30, 2011 Report of Gifts on the
College website. To protect your
privacy, the report will not be
accessible to Web search engines.
If you’d like to receive the
report and the College does
not have your email address,
please send it to alumnirecords@
swarthmore.edu. To receive a
printed copy of the report, please
send a request to giftreport@
swarthmore.edu or call (610)
328-8568.
—Susan Clarey
october 2011
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
open a new charter school in
order to protect its teachers and
programs.
In a press release, Alston
said: “We deeply appreciate the
partnership we’ve had with the
Chester-Upland School District
over the last three years, but we
also recognize that to continue
educating Chester children, we
have to be able to design our
own programs and hire and keep
the best teachers. And the only
way to do this is to apply for a
charter.”
Pending approval of the
application, the new school,
which will be called the Chester
Charter School for the Arts, will
open in September 2012.
The art of Orit Hofshi—internationally known as a
printmaker but whose work also includes paintings, inked
and carved woodblocks, and tusche crayon rubbings—is
bold, dramatic, and disturbing but simultaneously
conciliatory and inspirational. Hofshi grew up in Israel in
the kibbutz Matsuva, the daughter of Holocaust survivors
who helped to found the kibbutz—one of Israel’s first.
Her childhood was shaped by conflicts over territory,
ideology, and national boundaries.
Director of the College’s List Gallery Andrea Packard
’85, who has known Hofshi since 1986, when they
were students at the Pennsylvania Academy of the
Fine Arts, was instrumental in bringing the artist’s
exhibit Resilience to the gallery from Sept. 8 to Oct.
22. “Hofshi’s haunting vistas of ruins and rugged
landscapes respond to both the sublime forces of nature
and the consequences of war,” Packard writes in her
essay “Realism and Resilience in the Art of Orit Hofshi,”
which appears in the catalog accompanying the exhibit.
“Through her art, she seeks commonalities of experience
that transcend nationalism and sectarianism. Addressing
the prevalence of violence and dislocation, she asserts
the need for reflection, persistence, and understanding.”
Remnant, 2008 (above), one of the exhibited works,
is an ink drawing on carved wood panels, 103 x 141.7
inches.
—C.B.D.
Watch Orit Hofshi discuss her exhibit at
http://media.swarthmore.edu/video
MOST POPULAR FILMS AT McCABE LIBRARY
All-time top
circulated films
Big Lebowski
The Cook, the Thief, his
Wife and her Lover
Chocolat
Amadeus
Love’s a Bitch (Amores Perros)
Love Actually
Last Temptation of Christ
The Godfather (original)
Mulholland Drive
Amélie (Le Fabuleux Destin
d’Amélie Poulain)
Last year’s most
circulated films
Lion King
Up
Burn After Reading
Mulan
Big Lebowski
Revolutionary Road
Twilight
Milk
The Godfather (original)
Hercules (Disney)
Hot new films
Harry Potter and the
Half Blood Prince
The Fighter
The Prophet (Un Prophète)
Harry Potter and the
Deathly Hallows
The King’s Speech
Top new TV series
The Wire
Vientos de Agua
All-time popular TV series
Sex and the City
The Sopranos
—Linda Hunt, McCabe Library
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150
Upperclass students were making their way back to the College and first-years
just completing their final orientation activities in late August, when Hurricane
Irene—ironically, the name of the ancient Greeks’ goddess of peace—blasted in
from the South. Roaring with 85 m.p.h. winds through campus, the storm dumped
seven inches of rain onto ground already waterlogged after the wettest August
on record. Crum Creek spilled out of its banks and transformed Crum Meadow
into a lake that almost covered the standing stones of the Henge (see above). To
protect the residential area of the campus, College facilities and environmental
staff members, in anticipation of the storm, had cleaned gutters, downspouts,
and drains to allow maximum runoff and placed sand bags and hay bales at the
ready to ward off floodwater. They also cleared the floors of flood-prone indoor
areas—such as the College Bookstore storage room—and pumped repeatedly to
keep the water at bay. Thanks to the thorough preparations, no buildings suffered
major damage. And by Monday morning, with Irene careening northward, leaving
brilliant sunshine in her wake, some pools of water on Parrish lawns, masses
of various-sized branches and leaves carpeting the ground, and one uprooted
catalpa tree were the only visible signs that this Irene—not living up to her name—
had come and gone.
—C.B.D.
RECYCLING MADE SIMPLE
To simplify the lives of the
College’s community of
passionate recyclers, a new
single-stream-recycling system
has been introduced this year,
which enables all recyclable
materials to be
deposited into
the same bins.
Recycling
containers
around campus
that were previously
limited to receiving only
one type of material are
now depositories for
all paper and cardboard
that are not contaminated by
food, including envelopes with
clear address windows, metal
clasps, and string ties; aluminum
and bimetallic cans; glass of all
14
colors; and most types of plastics
except for types 3, containing
vinyl or PVC, and 6, containing
polystyrene, all of which
may release toxic breakdown
products when
heated.
All recyclable
matter is being
sent for sorting to
Philadelphia-based
Blue Mountain
Recycling. “Many
local municipalities,
including the
Borough of
Swarthmore,
are turning to single-stream
recycling,” says Jeff Jabco,
director of grounds and
coordinator of horticulture.
—C.B.D.
In 1861, the founders of Swarthmore had a plan—and they had
a problem. The subscription campaign to raise money for the
new school got off to a good start in January. Friends loved the
idea.
Then came April. The country was at war. In May 1861, the
Committee charged with raising subscriptions in Philadelphia
Yearly Meeting reported that “Everywhere throughout the
country business of all kinds not concerned in the prosecution
of the war has suffered greatly, securities have fallen in
value and not a few merchants and businessmen are already
threatened with the loss of their all. As a consequence, every
measure not pertaining to the public security or to the relief
of the anticipated suffering has been for the present thrown
into the shade. This Committee have therefore with the utmost
reluctance postponed the important and interesting work
committed to them with the urgent desire that the sorrow and
difficulty, which at present environ us and which must claim
our thoughts and interest for some time to come, may not
wholly obliterate the deep concern for the advancement of
[the] moral and intellectual amongst us; and may we not hope
that many of those already enclosed in this scheme of a Friends
Boarding School may yet aid in its successful establishment
after the present unhappy difficulties in our country are at an
end.”
Fortunately for the founding of the College, this was a bump
in the road rather than a full stop. Subscriptions continued to
come in, and Friends continued to see the need for a Quaker
college. By the end of 1862, the founders would be working
even harder to realize their dream.
—Christopher Densmore
Curator, Friends Historical Library
NATIONAL ARCHIVES
CRAIG KNAUER
150 YEARS AGO: FRIENDS, WE HAVE A PROBLEM
swarthmore college bulletin
Post–9/11: A Compassionate World,
JIM GRAHAM
a More Secure World
Ten years after the attacks on the World
Trade Center, the College held a series
of campus events that commemorated
the tragedy and emphasized nonviolent
resistance against terrorism.
On Sunday, Sept. 11, students, staff,
and community members gathered at
Friends Meeting House for a period of
silent reflection and remembrance in the
Quaker tradition. Students from different
religious traditions offered Buddhist, Jewish,
and Christian prayers that each evoked the
central theme of finding peace in times of
discord and conflict. Participants decorated
and wrote personal reflections of 9/11 on
prayer flags, which were later placed in the
Shane Lounge in Parrish Hall.
Junior Quitterie Gounot described
the memorial service as “subdued” and
“reflective” but “overwhelmingly positive.”
According to Gounot, the Quaker
tradition of community was “particularly
well suited to the occasion,” encouraging
everyone to come together at a vulnerable
time when “our values, our sense of collective
and individual identity, and our feeling of
safety are challenged or threatened.”
In her remarks, President Rebecca Chopp
spoke about first finding a “discipline of self ”
before embarking on a “journey of peace”
and healing in today’s post-9/11 age.
Associate Professor of Sociology Lee
Smithey and Assistant Professor of Statistics
Lynne Steuerle Schofield ’99 gave moving
speeches that appealed to the vision of a
more “equitable” and “compassionate” world.
Scholfield’s mother was a passenger on the
october 2011
American Airlines flight that crashed into
the Pentagon. (The lone casualty among
Swarthmore alumni that day was Jonathan
Randall ’82, who died on the 95th floor of
the North Tower of the World Trade Center.)
Schofield pointed out that the focus on
our own victimization has bred even more
hatred in the wake of grief and tragedy.
“Hatred cannot be an enduring response,”
Schofield said, adding that what she will
always remember about the dark period
following her mother’s death is the “network
of rebuilders” that served as her essential
emotional and moral support. But even
more easily, she recalls the “compassionate
response” in the numerous social works that
arose around the families of the 9/11 victims.
Smithey referred to the “resilience of
these families,” enabling them to “channel
their grief into programs at a social level.”
According to Schofield and Smithey, keeping
a sense of social initiative alive helps the
community to move on from its collective
grief. Instead of building on grief, people
should start to refocus their energies toward
participating in concrete, empowering social
activism for the long-term good of the
community.
Smithey and Schofield as well as Visiting
Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies
George Lakey, who is also a research fellow
of the Lang Center for Civic and Social
Responsibility, explored the specific nature
and values of this form of activism at a teachin on nonviolent resistance the following
day. Focusing on the question of the strategic
potential of nonviolent campaigns against
Ten years after the attacks on the World Trade Center,
the campus community came together to discuss
nonviolent conflict resolution and remember the loss
of life caused by the terrorist attacks.
state terrorism, they pointed out that,
statistically, nonviolent campaigns are 53
percent more successful than violent means
in achieving their causes.
Lakey drew on the example of Norway
after its recent terrorist incident, after which
Norwegians “reasserted core Norwegian
values of openness, democracy, and
tolerance” instead of resorting to the violence
and paranoia that pervaded post-9/11
American society.
“True security comes from making a more
compassionate world,” Schofield reasserted,
emphasizing that individuals should
start from the micro level to contribute
to a greater vision of peace in the world
community.
Other events in honor of the anniversary
involved a panel discussion about the lasting
impact of media coverage around Sept. 11,
and the official launch of Lakey’s Global
Nonviolent Action Database.
—Maki Somosot ’12
Watch President Chopp lead a panel
discussion on the aftermath of 9/11
and the role of government on the
global stage: http://media.swarthmore.edu/video.
Browse the Global Nonviolent Action Database at
http://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu.
15
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Kicking Around Europe
Swarthmore’s women’s and men’s soccer teams went international this
summer, crossing the Atlantic to test their skills in a preseason series
against European teams.
Spending nine days in Germany, Belgium, and The Netherlands
in July, the women’s team worked with a Dutch coach from the
Royal Dutch Football Association and played a couple of games—
first against a German team from Bad Neuenahr, made up of
first- and second-division professional players; and then Borussia
Mönchengladbach, one of the best women’s professional teams in
the country. Although the Garnet lost both games, they managed to
score against both teams.
Sightseeing trips to the medieval town of Rothenburg ob der
Tauber, business hub Frankfurt, picturesque Amsterdam, and the
scenic River Rhine provided fascinating down time, but the highlight
of the Garnet’s trip was the opportunity to attend the FIFA Women’s
World Cup Finals in Frankfurt and cheer on their own national
women’s team in a breath-snatching match against Japan.
The Garnet men took their turn in August, spending 13 days
in Greece, dividing their time between the spectacular island of
Crete and the ancient city of Athens, where they played five games,
including three against teams from the Greek Superleague—young
players with modest professional contracts who undergo full-time
intensive training and preparation for participation in the top
national team. The Garnet finished up with three wins, one draw, and
one loss. Off the field, they visited the ruins of the Minoan palace of
Knossos, where legend places Theseus’s defeat of the minotaur; the
Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion; the Acropolis; and the Temple
of Apollo at Delphi. They also participated in community service
projects, volunteering at the Institute of Children with Special Needs
in Athens and cleaning up trash in a beach park near the city of
Marathon.
—Carol Brévart-Demm
For more on the Garnet women’s soccer Europe trip, go to
http://bit.ly/garnetwomen; and for the men in Greece,
visit http://bit.ly/garnetmen.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALYSSA BOWIE ’12
Clockwise from top: There’s no better way to see
Amsterdam than by bicycle. Alyssa Bowie ’12 displays
an impressive variety of chocolate after a visit to the
Lindt Chocolate Factory Outlet near the quaint town
of Valkenburg in The Netherlands. Before the Garnet’s
first match of the tour, Garnet captain Samantha
Song ’12 exchanges pennants with the captain of
Soccer Club 07, Neuenahr, Germany.
16
swarthmore college bulletin
PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARK ANSKIS
Clockwise from top: The Garnet men, visiting
the Acropolis in Athens, pose in front of the
Parthenon. A young Malia supporter may have
switched allegiance after receiving a Garnet
soccer scarf from the Swarthmore players and
coaching staff. Garnet goalkeepers Peter Maxted
’14, David D’Annunzio ’12, and Jake Tracy ’13 can
hardly believe that the sea below the Temple of
Poseidon at Cape Sounion could be so blue.
october 2011
17
Good Food, Good Earth—
Good Ideas
THE LOCAL FOOD MOVEMENT HAS TAKEN OFF AROUND
THE COUNTRY. BUT NOT MANY ARE TAKING “LOCAL” AS FAR AS
MARK GUENTHER KIMBALL’S ESSEX FARM.
By David Pacchioli
Photographs by Michael Forster Rothbart ’94
swarthmore college bulletin
Steering carefully up the rutted driveway, I look to the house
for signs of life. It’s just past the dinner hour, a rare moment of pause
on a farm in midsummer. The North Country air is cool as I step
from the car, and the view is east. Under the blue wash of Vermont’s
distant mountains, Essex Farm’s 500 acres spread out lush and green.
Before I can turn around, Mark Guenther Kimball ’94 is
bounding out to greet me, no room for doubt in his rapid stride. He
is 38 but looks younger, a rangy six-foot-four, grizzled with three
days’ beard. “Your timing is perfect,” he says brightly, leading me
into the house. Not two minutes later, I’m sitting down to the meal
he’s placed before me. It’s a simple supper, chicken and greens and
a neighbor’s bread, but the freshness of the food, its plain goodness
here in the farmhouse kitchen, is almost shocking after the long trip.
As I sit and savor the unexpected bounty, Mark attempts to bring me
up to speed.
It was a wet spring. The wettest ever. Crazy wet, in fact, with
flooding so high the bathing beaches on nearby Lake Champlain are
still underwater and the ferry to Vermont shut down for a month.
The vegetables are weeks behind—“you may have noticed coming
in”— and the corn and wheat are a total loss. But things are mostly
righted now. A stretch of sunny weather has boosted crops and
buoyed spirits, and Essex Farm is gearing up for a big weekend of
haying. If the weather holds out, they hope to bring in 3,000 bales.
The eating over, Mark proffers bread and fresh-churned butter for
my motel breakfast—and he’s on his feet, headed for the barn.
“I have to do my evening rounds.”
I had recognized that barn from the jacket of Kristin Kimball’s fine
2010 memoir The Dirty Life, which chronicles how she and Mark
met and fell in love and survived their first eventful year together
here in upstate New York. Though it makes much of her sudden
transformation from trendy Manhattan journalist to Carharttwearing farm wife (“From City Girl to Hog Butcher” is the way
All Things Considered put it), the book is also a vivid portrait of the
deep joys and constant rigors of a particular, and venerable, type
of farming.
In the book, Kristin describes Essex Farm as “either antique
or very modern depending on who you ask.” Or where you look:
Though the farmyard is littered with rusting old plows and ironwheeled cultivators, the pasture beyond the barn hosts a large array
of solar panels. The latter provide all the farm’s electricity. The former
are for hitching up to horses, who supply most of the rest of the
horsepower.
Sparked by concerns for nutrition, food quality, economics, and
the environment, the local food movement has taken off around this
country. “Locally sourced” and “locally grown” are all the rage at
restaurants. The number of farmers’ markets has tripled in 15 years.
Community-supported agriculture organizations, or CSAs, in which
members purchase a share in a farm’s production, now number more
than 4,000 nationwide, according to the USDA.
Not many are taking “local” this far, however. Using organic
methods for soil improvement and pest control, relying mostly on
The 500-acre farm relies on horsepower for most field work, like raking hay into
windrows in preparation for baling. A good haying will yield about 3,000 bales.
october 2011
It’s August and tomato season at Essex Farm. On Fridays (“Distribution Day”),
members of the community-supported farm can take as much food as they want
for the coming week. Members pay one price annually but have no fixed share—
and Essex supplies a complete healthy and satisfying diet: beef, chicken, pork,
eggs, maple syrup, grains, flours, dried beans, herbs, fruits, and 40 different
vegetables. “We get to see what people take, and we can adjust what we’re
growing. It’s a self-correcting system,” says Mark Kimball.
horses instead of tractors, the Kimballs aspire to nothing less than a
whole-diet model of agricultural production. They raise everything,
that is, from pastured beef to sunflowers—not just for their family,
as their great-grandparents might have done, but for a whole
community. Members pay one price annually, around $3,000 per
adult, and each week they take whatever and as much as they can eat
of “beef, chicken, pork, eggs, maple syrup, grains, flours, dried beans,
herbs, fruits, and 40 different vegetables,” as Kristin lists it. “Our goal
is to provide everything they need to have a healthy and satisfying
diet, year-round.”
There are no typical days on a diversified farm. What’s typical is
running headlong into the next crisis—and if you’re lucky somehow
solving it. That’s one of the things Mark Kimball (he took Kristin’s
surname when they married) loves most about farming. “The more
I can get my hands on something, figure it out, the more excited I
am,” he says. This morning that means puzzling out the west barn
electrical panel to replace a faulty breaker.
It isn’t that far from the way he was raised. As a boy, Mark
explains: “I lived on a homestead with my parents, who had left New
York City. They dropped everything and moved to the country. What
I’m doing is sort of an extension of that.”
He has apparently always been remarkably self-possessed,
driven, and sure of himself. Arriving at Swarthmore as a teenager,
he remembers: “I became disillusioned very quickly with the cost
of education. It wasn’t just Swarthmore—
among the liberal arts colleges, Swarthmore
is incredible, great—but I saw people still
playing with drugs and sex, paying that kind
of money—and it seemed really crazy to
me. Almost immediately I thought about
dropping out.” Supportive deans and a
semester working in economically blighted
Chester convinced him to stay. By senior year
he was class co-president.
“Ironically,” Mark reflects, “Swarthmore’s
ability to spend large amounts of money is
one of the foundations of my entrepreneurial
zeal. There were opportunities there to
use resources without a lot of oversight
other than ‘Spend it well,’” he explains. “So,
for instance, I helped a friend start a bike
repair shop. I could see the power of what
money can do, and that you could make
mistakes and still survive. That economics is
fascinating to me.”
His path into agriculture became clear
during junior year via former biology
professor Mark Jacobs. “He was so old
school,” Mark remembers. “I loved the
way he taught. For his crop plants class,
he arranged these weekend field trips to
innovative farms and places like Linvilla
Orchards and the Rodale Institute. And I
thought, ‘This is amazing. Hard physical
work and cool science!’ And that was it.”
Senior year, Kimball bicycled across the
country, stopping to work at farms along
the way, reporting on each experience. He
wrote a thesis: “A nitrogen primer for curious
farmers.” After graduating, he pursued
apprenticeships, traveled to Venezuela and
India, learning all he could about different
ways of farming. When it was time, an
opportunity arose in central Pennsylvania,
and he found himself running a CSA. Before
long, however, his frustration with the
standard model led him to think bigger.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he says. “I love the
CSA model. I think it’s absolutely awesome
that people are doing anything at all to be
more conscious about what they eat—I
absolutely love that. But why stop with
vegetables? What about meat and eggs and
grain? Nobody gets all their calories from a
CSA.”
The idea of a fixed share also irked him.
“Your share comes in a box, you get what
the farm is producing, period. But you
don’t eat 12 more beets just because the
farmer grew more beets that year,” he says.
“If it’s really about the food, it shouldn’t be
that way.” Instead, “We wanted to do what
Kristin calls eating like a farmer: ‘Let’s go
out and grab what we want.’ So we set it up
like a supermarket, where you take what you
want. We get to see what people take, and
we can adjust what we’re growing. It’s a selfcorrecting system.”
He stops working at the circuit box, flips
a switch. There’s a rattling noise overhead—
it’s the sound of the conveyor that will
carry bales of hay the length of the barn for
stacking. He smiles. “That should save us 50
hours this weekend.”
a program to defray the costs of organic
certification and another that increased
spending for organic research. These
concessions, embedded for the first time
in the legislative document that guides
the nation’s food policy, have heartened
some supporters of local agriculture, as has
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s voiced
commitment to promote local and regional
food systems and farm-to-school nutrition
programs. In all, however, support for local
producers amounts to just a tiny fraction
of the total bill, which continues massive
subsidies to large-scale grain producers.
Even so, in the run-up to the 2012 version,
there has been considerable backlash from
supporters of conventional agriculture.
By the most generous estimates, “local
foods” make up only two to three percent
of total U.S. food production, according
to Brian Snyder, executive director of the
Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable
Agriculture (PASA). But, “We’re big enough
It was Kim Tait, owner of Tait Farm Foods
in Centre Hall, Pa., who gave Mark his
early chance. Tait’s is a third-generation
family farm that includes, in addition to
the thriving CSA Mark started, an on-farm
processing plant that produces more than
50 organic specialty foods, and a retail
store that supports more than 100 regional
food producers and artisans. Kim Tait’s
recent appearance before the U.S. Senate
Committee on Agriculture is a mark of how
far the local food movement has come, and
how far it has to go.
In hearings preliminary to the drafting
of the 2012 Farm Bill, Tait told the Senate
committee how her farm had benefited
from provisions in the 2008 bill, including
If some criticize the local food movement as elitist, the province of “foodies”
alone, to Mark that’s a source of frustration. “I would love to find a local
food distribution system that doesn’t just market to true believers,” he says.
“I’d love to see a good cheeseburger made with local ingredients.”
20
swarthmore college bulletin
now to be seen as competition,” Snyder says.
With more than 7,000 members from 40
states and seven countries, PASA, based in
rural Millheim, Pa., is one of the largest and
most influential local food organizations in
the country. Founded in 1990, its original
educational mission has grown increasingly
to include advocacy. “There’s more and more
pressure from our members to engage in
policy,” Snyder says, “making sure the people
who write the laws understand how they’re
impacting small farmers.”
Some of the issues Snyder works on are
region-specific: fertilizer run-off into the
Chesapeake Bay and the increasing impact
Bring your spoon—it’s time for ice cream—but
first Kristin (opposite page) has to milk the cow.
Kristin Kimball met Mark Guenther (below, third from
left) when she was assigned to write a magazine
article about his farm in central Pennsylvania.
A year later, they leased 500 acres in the Champlain
Valley and founded Essex Farm together. She never
wrote the article.
october 2011
of Marcellus shale drilling on Pennsylvania’s
rural communities. Others are broader in
scope. But the single issue that has occupied
most of his time over the past two years is
one of the hottest battlegrounds in today’s
agriculture: food safety. Increasingly
frequent, large-scale food contamination
incidents—such as a recent nationwide recall
of 36 million pounds of ground turkey—have
spurred tighter federal regulations aimed
at protecting consumers. Unfortunately,
Snyder notes, these heightened restrictions
disproportionately impact small growers.
“There’s an assumption—in industry, in
government, and among the general public—
that the path to safer food is to bring it all
into one place, treat it, and send it back out,”
he told a recent interviewer. “The fact that
the assumption doesn’t change, even though
contamination keeps happening, is scary.” A
safer food system, Snyder contends, would
take advantage of the diversification and
sense of personal responsibility inherent in
local and regional operations. “Small farmers
can make bad decisions too,” he says, “but
when that happens, statistically, the damage
is minimal and the cause is quickly clear. On
balance, you’re going to get a cleaner product
that’s not as widely distributed and whose
origins are easier to trace.”
Weekday lunch on Essex farm. The smoky
tang of frying beef mingles with the lush
fragrances of tarragon and basil. By ones and
twos they show up at the open-air pavilion,
strolling on foot or ditching bicycles—the
dozen or so young farmers who make up
Mark and Kristin’s current team.
Their backgrounds are varied and
impressive. Chad, the horseman, studied
forestry at nearby Paul Smith’s College
and last worked at horse-drawn logging in
Virginia. Courtney, the butcher, came to
Essex after finishing welding school. (“It
was either this or join the pipefitter’s union,”
she says.) Racey, in charge of chickens,
21
spends two months a year in Africa on
development projects for the World Bank.
Asa, the vegetable foreman, is also a stone
mason; and Nathan, who runs the dairy,
is a seismic engineer. Then there are the
short-timers: Mo, a Harvard Ph.D. student
in music theory; and Matthew, who teaches
high-school in inner-city Chicago. The latter
are here just for the summer, but most of the
others hope to move on someday to farms of
their own.
The local-foods movement has galvanized
a whole new generation of back-to-thelanders, a vital influx in a country where
the average age of a farmer is 57. But the
obstacles to starting out are substantial, and
access to affordable land is chief among
them. Organizations like PASA are beginning
to help, with innovative pilot ventures like a
land-lease program, says Kristin Leitzel Hoy
The farm has grown from seven members in 2004
to 170 today. Members pay about $3,000 per year,
with a discount for additional members of the same
household—and children under 13 are free. “There’s no
better place in the world than behind the team’s willing
haunches, smelling the good smell of their sweat,
listening to the hypnotic thunk of the big feet,” Kristin
wrote in New Farmer Journal in 2005.
22
swarthmore college bulletin
’07: “The idea is to connect aspiring farmers
to landowners who want to see their land
farmed.”
Hoy’s duties at PASA include managing
the organization’s showcase event, the annual
“Farming for the Future” conference, which
draws some 2,000 attendees from around the
country. She grew up on a farm five miles
from PASA headquarters. “I’ve always had
this sense of being connected to my food,
that the lamb chop on your plate was the
sheep that bowled you over that morning,”
she says. “At Swarthmore, I developed a
greater awareness of the societal importance
of reconnecting to our food supply.” When
she returned home to central Pennsylvania
after graduating—“because connection to
place is very important to me,” she says—“it
was really wonderful to find this organization
so close by.”
In addition to her work for PASA, Hoy is
a regional coordinator for “Buy Fresh, Buy
Local,” a statewide program aimed at linking
local producers with consumers.
One of her program partners is Martha
Hoffman ’07, who is also in Millheim, on her
own local-foods adventure. “Kristin brought
me up here for a visit, and I fell in love with
this valley,” Hoffman explains. “The sense of
community and mutual support made me
want to give something back.” In February,
she opened a coffeehouse on Main Street,
serving food mostly from local providers.
Learning on the fly, she has already built up
a network of farmers and customers—and
an affinity for barter. “It’s been great to see
people who have lived here all their lives
recognizing the resources that are right
around them,” she says.
Keefe Keeley ’06 is also part of the broader
movement. Keeley was born and raised in the
Driftless region of southwest Wisconsin, long
an organic hotbed. During his senior year
at Swarthmore, he was awarded a Watson
fellowship to study international agriculture.
Returning home, he started a small orchard
on his family’s land.
Now he works with friends who are
running a CSA and also runs a technical
assistance program for small farmers for
the state of Wisconsin. In the fall, he’ll start
a graduate program in agro-ecology in
Madison—close enough, he says, that he can
still tend his trees. “It’s important to me to be
a part of a community that’s living close to
the land.”
Essex is certainly an organic farm, from
Essex is certainly an organic farm,
from the composted manure and
cover crops to the labor-intensive
weed control. But like a growing
number of farms in the local food
movement, it is not USDA Certified
Organic. Instead, Kristin says,
“We can show people everything
we’re doing and answer their
questions directly.”
october 2011
the composted manure and cover crops to
the labor-intensive weed control. But like a
growing number of farms in the local food
movement, it is not USDA Certified Organic.
“That’s primarily because of the paperwork
and fees involved,” Mark says. “I’m glad
[certification] exists, but it’s a federal
bureaucracy. It’s very hard to do diversified
farming that way.” Instead, he and Kristin,
like others, rely on building relationships
with their members. “That’s the nice thing
about direct marketing,” Kristin says. “We
can show people everything we’re doing and
answer their questions directly.”
Certified or not, the essential commitment is to good food, the best they can
produce. Mark and Kristin are both avid and
accomplished cooks; their mutual love of
eating well, and the desire to share that love,
underlies Essex Farm as much as anything
else does. Mark was mastering Julia Child in
middle school; Kristin prepares sumptuous
feasts for the weekly team dinner and has
written for Food & Wine magazine. Yet if
some criticize the local food movement as
elitist, the province of “foodies” alone, to
Mark that’s a source of frustration. “I would
love to find a local food distribution system
that doesn’t just market to true believers,”
he says. “I’d love to see a good cheeseburger
made with local ingredients.”
“Good food should not be out of reach,”
agrees PASA’s Snyder. “It should not be a
luxury. And often it is.” To Snyder, that’s
largely a matter of misplaced priorities,
seen in both the increasing regulatory
burden placed on small producers and the
continuing subsidies for commodity grains.
“Take a look at the new USDA nutritional
guidelines,” he says. “Shouldn’t we be
subsidizing crops the USDA says people
should eat?”
At its best, it would seem, the return to
older ways of farming—and eating—is a
way not of separating but of re-connecting
to food, to the Earth, and to one another. At
Essex Farm, at least, that return is not sobersided or doctrinaire, but a conscious choice.
This much becomes clear in the reasons
Kristin gives for relying on horsepower
instead of diesel. It isn’t a matter of efficiency,
although horses are “scalable” and don’t
get stuck in the mud. It isn’t even so much
environmental friendliness, although horses
harvest their own fuel. “The best reason
23
to use horses,” Kristin says, “is if you like
horses.”
Mark, for his part, may eschew email
and even computers generally (“I try to
stay away from screens,” he says), but,
“There’s nothing inherent about modern
ways that I don’t support,” he once told the
environmental writer Bill McKibben. “I’m
trying to find out ways to increase the quality
of my life, and I think, by extension, the lives
of those around me.”
Friday. Distribution day. The weekend’s
haying has started, and out in the far field,
a gang of six, led by Mark, works steadily
at baling, stacking, and bringing in the
loaded wagons. At the barn, 20-year-old
Joe, a summer hand from Baltimore, has
been slinging the 60-pound bales onto the
conveyor all afternoon, and his neck and
arms and reddened face are spackled with
dust and sweat. “You ought to try this work
for a day,” he says, stifling an impish grin.
Meanwhile, at the pavilion, Racey is
hustling to finish the weekly set up. Crates
full of oversized vegetables crowd the rows
of wooden tables. The freezer is stocked
with freshly killed chickens. Luscious red
raspberries, just coming in this week, take
their place front and center as the members
begin to arrive.
Kristin Kimball works at a table in the
shade, washing eggs, and a steady stream
of members wander back to see her, to
chat. One would like a book signed for his
sister. Another asks about a barter—family
portraits for food? Several offer to come
and help with the haying, and each offer is
gratefully accepted.
The first-year sign-up for Essex Farm’s
bounty was seven hardy families. Now in
their eighth season, Mark and Kristin are
feeding 10 times that—170 people. It’s still
early in the rebirth of this once dormant
landscape, but already it’s a remarkable
achievement. “I was shocked we could come
into an area this small with an idea as radical
as this farm was and have it succeed,” Kristin
says. “The community has been behind us
from the start.” More recently, the success of
The Dirty Life has bumped up membership
substantially—and also drawn flocks of
visitors. Promoting the book, she admits,
takes her away from the farm—and the
Kimballs’ two young children—somewhat
more than she would like.
Growth means change, and the prospect
has her a little wary. “The demand has been
strong,” she acknowledges. “But I enjoy it
when it’s small. The excitement for me comes
from getting better at what we do, rather
than bigger. Mark, though…he’s a classic
entrepreneur. He loves something new,
which right now means expansion.”
Indeed, “I could see it growing infinitely,”
Mark had told me the day before. “We could
feed 800 people on this land, in terms of
calories.” He’s working on plans for a new
distribution center, including a bakery. “That
will solve some of the larger farm problems,”
he says confidently. “But this is an issue we’re
wrestling with, and we definitely need to
resolve it in a way that’s comfortable for both
of us.”
“There’s nothing inherent about
modern ways that I don’t support,”
Mark once told the environmental
writer Bill McKibben. “I’m trying
to find out ways to increase the
quality of my life, and I think,
by extension, the lives of those
around me.”
Freelance writer David Pacchioli’s most recent
contribution to the Bulletin was “Rock and
an Old Place: A Family Farm Rich in History
Faces the Relentless March of Natural Gas
Drilling” (Oct. 2010).
He lives in the mountains of central
Pennsylvania.
Essex Farm includes two large barns, a stateinspected milk house, a greenhouse, a distribution
pavilion, and a butchery. It has three full-time
employees, four year-round part-timers, plus
seasonal workers and volunteers—especially at
haying time.
24
swarthmore college bulletin
october 2011
25
Eat Well, Seek Justice
IN CHESTER, PA., URBAN PROPHETS AND ACTIVISTS ARE
OFFERING GOOD FOOD, BUILDING COMMUNITY, AND
GENERATING SOCIAL CAPITAL AT THE CHESTER CO-OP.
By Mark Wallace
Photographs by Jim Graham
“Mark! Do you want these asparagus? If you don’t take them,
they’ll go bad,” says Tina Johnson. “Sure,” I reply, knowing that the
asparagus had already endured a final round of weekly sales activity
and, without refrigeration, probably wouldn’t last another week.
It was a year ago, and the end of my Saturday morning volunteer
shift as a cashier at the Community Grocery Co-op, a market in
Chester, Pa., a downtrodden post-industrial city of 35,000 people. The
Co-op is an experiment in food democracy and sustainable living.
Tina Johnson, its director, purchases wholesale fruit and vegetables—
much of it locally grown—and, at that time, retailed her goods twice
weekly in a jazz club in downtown Chester. It’s the only grocery store
in Chester open on a daily basis because the supermarket chains have
redlined the city as too great a financial risk.
In poor, minority communities awash in chronic environmental
and health problems, services like the Co-op are a lifeline for
residents where fresh, affordable food is not easily found. In these
settings, food security—ready access to reasonably priced and
nutritious food for healthy living—is a form of environmental
justice. Chesterites like Tina Johnson, a longtime community activist,
partner with local farmers to support regional food production
without relying on the fuel-intensive and land-depleting agriculture
that underpins the globalized food economy.
The Co-op also increases Chester’s social capital by uniting the city
around good eating, but it lacks the financial capital to fully support
its mission. Without a steady source of income, the Co-op must
purchase foodstuffs one week with the proceeds from what it sold
the week before. A year ago, it could not afford the basic trappings
of most grocery stores: shelving, signage, carts, even refrigeration.
And without refrigeration, a lot of the produce quickly spoiled. So on
that spring morning, after a good day of strong sales, I was happy to
take home some leftover asparagus at the end of my shift—but also
sad that an enterprise so vital to the health of the community is so
marginal that it can’t afford to bind over week-to-week its principal
product, fresh produce.
The lack of access to good food in many inner-city communities
is an environmental justice problem embedded within a host of other
social and economic issues. Only a holistic analysis of the systemic
forces that tie together seemingly disconnected social pathologies can
make sense of—and provide solutions for—the eco-crisis in urban
communities today. The quest for eco-justice and sustainable living in
blighted communities is inextricably linked, for example, to the need
for good schools and workforce development. Chester has become a
poster child for small U.S. cities that have all the problems of big city
life with few of the resources to tackle them. The quest for sustainable
eco-justice in Chester—and other inner-city communities—only
makes sense in relation to a deeper understanding of the historic,
economic, and political forces that have fueled the crisis.
In Chester, the “American Dream” has failed struggling individuals
and families mired in failing schools; dangerous environmental
conditions; and low-paying, dead-end jobs—or no jobs at all. But I
and others live in hope that the city’s dire conditions will change.
HOPE AMIDST DESPAIR
In 2003, I forged a covenant relationship among clergy and activists
in Chester and nearby Swarthmore. I’d heard about some of Chester’s
urban prophets, and I wanted to be part of the transformation and
hope that these agents for change were bringing to the city. Chester
is a gritty urban community. Swarthmore is a leafy green college
town. My Chester colleagues and I have crossed racial and cultural
divisions in order to make our collaboration work. This has not been
easy.
swarthmore college bulletin
ministers infamously told African slaves that the object of Christian
hope is not changed conditions in this world but blissful existence in
the world beyond. Today as well, many clergy counsel the faithful to
avoid large-scale justice movements in favor of personal salvation and
morality. But this type of politically indifferent, otherworldly religion
has nothing to do with the message of Jesus. At the inauguration of
his public ministry in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus quotes the Book of
Isaiah, saying, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach good
news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight
to the blind, and to set free all of those who are oppressed” (4:18-19).
Remembering Paul’s mandate to have the mind of Christ, the real
Christian message is clear: be like Jesus through solidarity with the
poor, the incarcerated, the disabled, and all others who are oppressed
in any way. This revolutionary social theme is the essential thread
that ties together the whole Bible.
THE SHREDDED FABRIC OF CHESTER
As in many blighted, drug-infested areas, the social and economic
fabric of Chester has been shredded by three equally powerful
forces: a school-to-prison educational system, ecological violence,
and poverty pimping—profiting from the misfortunes of others by
appearing to act on their behalf.
Chester’s schools are among the worst in Pennsylvania. City
residents have the lowest literacy rate in the state, and the school
district is consistently ranked 499th or last among the 500 school
systems in Pennsylvania according to standardized test scores.
During the past two decades, the school district has been managed by
At dawn on a summer morning, the Chester Co-op lights up the street with hope.
a for-profit “education” vendor that propelled the schools’ downward
This year, the organization moved from borrowed space in a local jazz club to a new
slide and then later by a politically appointed part-time overseer
facility with proper shelving and refrigeration to remain open six days a week.
with a track record of financial misconduct and political cronyism.
The result is that most students from grades one through 12 cannot
Mistakes have been made and misunderstandings have arisen.
read at grade level, the high school dropout rate is 50 percent, and
The central message of the Christian gospel is straightforward:
almost as many high school students commit crimes and become
incarcerated as graduate and go to college (about five to six percent in
Follow Jesus by committing oneself to radical personal and social
both cases).
transformation. St. Paul writes in Philippians: “Have the mind of
But there is hope amidst the despair. Both the for-profit school
Christ, who was in the form of God, but emptied himself, became
a servant, and suffered death on a cross—and therefore, God raised
manager and the corrupt overseer were thrown out in favor of a
him up” (2:5-9). The Christian way is
new state-appointed oversight board.
The community worked tirelessly to
to follow Jesus through self-emptying
bring down the previous manager
and resurrection hope. Self-emptying
Many clergy counsel the faithful to avoid
and overseer and is guardedly
means abandoning self-gratification in
optimistic that the new school board
order to serve the interests of others.
large-scale justice movements in favor of
will move away from the “plantation”
Resurrection hope is the confidence
management style of the past to fully
that God is able to raise up everyday
personal salvation and morality. But this type
incorporating the voices and interests
people to revolutionize systemically
distorted structures, no matter
of politically indifferent, otherworldly religion
of teachers, parents, and children in
how hopeless and entrenched these
the decision-making process.
structures might appear to be. I cannot has nothing to do with the message of Jesus.
Chester’s environmental crisis is
work in Chester without such hope.
a twofold problem that stems from
For me, the dysfunction is too deeply
chronic poverty. On one hand, food
entrenched, the pain and suffering too
security looms large in impoverished
long-standing to be overcome without it.
neighborhoods where groceries must be bought on the cheap. On
Yet tragically, Christians are notorious for translating the language the other, the degradation of Chester’s physical environment is now
of hope into vapid pie-in-the-sky foolishness. Antebellum white
firmly established because its economy is partially dependent upon
october 2011
the management of toxic wastes within the
city. In economically distressed communities,
the waste industry’s assurances of a stabilized
tax base and jobs for unemployed residents
are impossible to resist. But what is the real
cost of such promises? Four waste-treatment
facilities now make Chester their home—a
sewage treatment plant, a metal-recycling
plant, a regional incinerator, and a medicalwaste autoclave (currently not operating).
The clustering of waste industries only a few
yards from residential areas has brought
about an infestation of rodents, noxious
odors, hundreds of trucks a day at all hours,
and toxic air emissions.
Resurrection hope propels me and other
area residents to resist the imposition of
environmental hazards on Chester. We
march in the streets, meet with community
officials, and attend regulatory hearings to
fight against toxic racism. In recent years, at
the urging of local citizens, the state did not
approve the siting of a soil treatment plant,
a local paper mill was not allowed to burn
tires for fuel, a biotech firm that would have
increased overall pollution in the area was
kept out, and the sewage treatment plant
was successfully sued by nearby residents
for violating federal and state air and water
pollution laws.
Finally, Chester boasts a spectacular
waterfront along the Delaware River—once
home to shipbuilding and manufacturing
jobs. But the industrial base collapsed two
generations ago, rendering the riverfront a
wasteland of empty factories and crumbling
infrastructure. Recently, the waterfront has
been designated an economic development
zone, attracting, among other industries,
a Harrah’s casino and major league soccer
stadium—which promised to make lots
of tax-free money for its developers, since
new businesses in development zones have
been exempted from property taxes until
2013. Instead of being required to make
measurable commitments to workforce
development as a prerequisite for setting
up shop, the casino, stadium, and other
developers are grabbing up valuable
riverfront real estate and offering little to
local workers in exchange.
Community activists and clergy formed
the Fair Deal Coalition to pressure city
government and new developers (e.g.,
Harrah’s) to finance the workforce and skills
development necessary for Chester’s poor
28
swarthmore college bulletin
to compete in the economic boom the new
waterfront growth promises. But in light
of the city’s broken schools, the economic
benefits of the casino and stadium will not
flow toward residents without a focused
effort to train and employ its underserved
population. Unless city officials can be
persuaded to fund sustainable economic
development for disadvantaged residents,
Chester’s new economic order will be built
on the backs of low-income, minority
residents.
The Chester Co-op both is and is
not about food. Its mission is to
provide fresh nutritious food at
affordable prices. But it also helps
develop the community’s sense of
pride and leadership.
A NEW ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEM
In recent years, a new environmental
problem has confronted communities such
as Chester: epidemic levels of obesity and
diabetes among both adults and children.
At one time, poor diets in urban areas led
to underweight residents. Today, poverty
and food insecurity mean more Americans
are becoming overweight—and suffering
from obesity-related diseases—by relying
on added high-fat and high-sugar diets.
The alarming rise in obesity rates is evident
in body mass measurement data since the
1960s. By the year 2000, 65 percent of the
U.S. adult population was overweight, and
the climb in obesity among children has been
even more alarming.
Since the 1960s, the rate of obesity among
children and adolescents has more than
tripled, and the current rate of overweight
and obese children is roughly 30 percent.
Of even greater concern, 15 percent of
preschoolers aged 2 to 5 are overweight.
Overweight children can experience low
self-esteem, poor body image, and isolation
from their peers. And medically, serious
lifelong disabilities such as diabetes and
cardiovascular disease can be caused by
obesity. Indeed, the surge in cases among
children and teens of type-2 diabetes is
particularly alarming, because type-2
used to be considered primarily an adultonset disease. This form of diabetes is
not a congenital condition and is entirely
preventable by eating a healthy diet and
getting regular exercise.
But the very social conditions that
make healthy eating and exercise part of a
child’s life have rotted away in many urban
settings. Adult caregivers feel pressured
and distracted; healthy food options are
limited and often expensive; and leisure
time—especially in neighborhoods with
high crime rates where children are at risk of
injury—is now more devoted to sedentary
indoor pursuits such as watching television
or playing video games than to outdoor play
and activities. These factors conspire to keep
kids hooked on low-quality, high-fat diets
of junk calories and fast food that create
the false sensation of having one’s hunger
satisfied.
At first glance, the urban food problem
may not seem like an environmental issue.
When we think about “environmentalism”
we often think about wilderness preservation
or battling big polluters in urban settings.
But food insecurity, along with the
concomitant health problems it spawns, is
just as much an environmental problem as
saving forests and wetlands or protecting city
neighborhoods from polluters.
Yes, it is wrong for waste haulers to dump
and process trash in disempowered cities that
have been hoodwinked by the promotional
pitch that the waste industry can revitalize
these particular areas. But it is just as wrong
for supermarket chains—the primary
providers, for good or ill, of basic nutrition
for most Americans—to redline a whole city
by declaring it off-limits to grocery store
investment. In the case of the waste industry
and the food industry, the real driving force
is obeisance to the god of the market. Market
forces dictate what forms of development can
and cannot take place in America’s struggling
cities.
Many believe that the government’s legal
apparatus should be pressed into the service
of insuring education and health coverage
for most citizens—especially for children.
But most Americans do not think that
clean ecosystems or access to good food is
a natural right. For this reason, I think the
Opposite: Co-op director Tina Johnson selects fruit
at the Philadelphia Wholesale Produce Market. She
has also developed relationships with local farms
that directly supply the Co-op with meat and produce.
Right: Johnson completes her purchases as Jeff
Cao ’10, a Co-op intern, looks on.
october 2011
29
eco-justice crisis today is twofold: It stems
from the dangerous clustering of biohazards
in communities already suffering from ill
health—and it consists of the total absence,
as is the case of Chester, of any viable food
sources to nourish city dwellers.
The Chester Co-op both is and is not
about food. On the one hand, its mission
is to provide fresh nutritious produce
at affordable prices to local residents by
establishing good relations with local farmers
to supply the store. But on the other, it helps
develop the community’s sense of pride and
leadership.
Obesity and diabetes haunt urban
neighborhoods cut off from mainstream
retail stores. Chester has not had a
supermarket for more than a decade.
Residents have had to travel out of town
to shop and many do not have their own
transportation for this purpose. The Co-op
addresses the problem of food security and
the health crisis with an elegantly simple
business model: Members own and run
the store themselves. This keeps prices low,
stops the loss of inventory through theft and
spoilage, and generates few administrative
overhead costs because “member-owners”
contribute to the venture by working in the
store three hours per month.
The Co-op teaches residents how to
manage a for-profit business. The store
makes a direct investment in human capital,
strengthening urban-rural ties to area farms
as well. It develops residents’ life skills
and management potential in a convivial,
democratic work environment. The Co-op’s
oversight board and membership meetings
are run by local folk, many of whom have
never held positions of responsibility. At a
recent meeting, the convener began with
the following: “I have never spoken before a
group before and want to thank Tina and the
rest of you for giving me the opportunity to
lead this meeting.”
The emerging field of sustainability
economics speaks about the “triple bottom
line” in successful green businesses for the
21st century. Such enterprises not only
produce financial capital but also develop
human and environmental capital through
just management-employee relations and
sustainable relations with the natural
world. The Chester Co-op is an eco-justice
experiment that has made healthy nutrition
a living option for hard-working urban
dwellers.
As an eco-justice–seeking enterprise,
the Chester Co-op market is an exercise
in sustainable agriculture. It provides
an alternative model of healthy food
consumption and just relations with our
human and animal neighbors. Its wholegrain bread is produced by a local bakery,
its eggplants are harvested down the street
through an urban garden project, its peaches
and corn come from nearby farms in
Adult caregivers feel pressured
and distracted; healthy food
options are limited and often
expensive; and leisure time—
especially in neighborhoods
with high crime rates—is now
more devoted to sedentary
indoor pursuits than to outdoor
play and activities.
Pennsylvania’s Amish country. The Co-op
cannot get all of its produce locally, but it
continues to strive to offer shoppers positive
food choices that are not dependent on the
high-fat, high-sugar products the global
food system delivers to low-income families,
posing health risks that are now reaching
epidemic proportions.
Today, the Christian gospel has been
co-opted by politicians and preachers who
trumpet personal morality at the expense of
fighting against the structural conditions that
lock down America’s underclass in depraved
and dehumanizing urban environments.
This is a betrayal of the Christian message.
The defining feature of Jesus’ ministry was
solidarity with the poor and oppressed. To be
a revolutionary Christian today is to follow
in Jesus’ steps and care for the marginalized
and forgotten in a world hell bent on
unsustainable agricultural and economic
policies. When despair for the world
overwhelms me, the problems of Chester
and the wider planet seem impossible
to overcome. But then I recall Jesus’ life
of compassion and liberation, and I am
empowered to live to fight another day.
Mark Wallace is professor of religion. This
essay is adapted from his book Green
Christianity: Five Ways to a Sustainable
Future, © 2010 by Fortress Press. It is
reproduced by permission of Augsburg Fortress
Publishers. All rights reserved.
Frozen meats are also offered at the Co-op, which
is staffed by member-owners who contribute three
hours per month of their time.
30
swarthmore college bulletin
Hands in the Soil
They’ve lived in many places—Europe
and Canada, on the West Coast, and in New
England—but Arthur and Carol Merten
Upshur ’83 have always returned to the
southern tip of Virginia’s Eastern Shore,
where Upshurs have lived and worked for
nearly 400 years.
“This is a longtime dream,” says Arthur of
the small organic farm he and Carol created
four years ago on a neck of land stretching
from the town of Machipongo, Va., into the
Chesapeake Bay.
A 1.5-acre vegetable garden and another
6.5 acres of hay, which they cut and bail for
mulch, is the extent of their working farm.
But their community supported agriculture
(CSA) business now supplies 45 families in
the region with fresh, chemical-free produce.
They named their business Copper
Cricket Farm—a conflation of Arthur’s
nickname “Cricket” and the surname of their
business partners and neighbors, Bob and
Melody Copper. Bob works across the Bay
in Virginia Beach during the week, but helps
on weekends. Melody is a schoolteacher and
works on the farm all summer.
To get to Copper Cricket Farm, visitors
turn off the main highway and travel to the
end of a gravel road called Solitude Trail,
where the first thing they see is the red
New England–style barn the Upshurs built
by hand using their own fallen trees and
donated wood and other scrap materials—
with lots of neighborly advice. In the
foreground is the garden, surrounded by a
tall, sturdy fence of wire and wood to keep
out deer, rabbits, and other pesky critters. In
october 2011
Jennifer Trinh ’11 (left, center), enjoyed working on
Copper Cricket Farm (above) with owners Arthur and
Carol Merten Upshur last summer.
JOAN SMITH
By Joan Smith ’76
JOAN SMITH
“YOU SHOULDN’T EAT ANYTHING
FROM A FARM YOU DON’T LIKE TO
VISIT,” SAYS ARTHUR UPSHUR.
HE AND CAROL MERTEN UPSHUR
HAVE A FARM WORTH VISITING
AGAIN AND AGAIN.
the background are golden fields of hay.
Each week, the farm delivers to their
lucky subscribers’ overflowing crates—made
by hand from scrap wood and gorgeously
arranged—of freshly picked flowers
and herbs and every kind of vegetable
imaginable. Depending upon the season,
there are wild raspberries and blackberries
from bushes along the wooded path from
the gardens to the Upshur homestead, which
overlooks the great mouth of a creek that
empties into the Chesapeake. Here, the
Upshurs raise oysters and hunt for crabs.
With their children Elizabeth ’07, Raleigh,
and Mary Alice ’12, the Upshurs have been
coming to this place every summer since
they bought the house in 1994. “Our kids’
childhood memories are of coming down
here and playing on the water,” Arthur says.
When an adjacent farm became
available, they decided to sell their house
in Connecticut and quit their jobs—Carol
was a middle-school math teacher; Arthur
was what he calls a “corporate handyman,”
an executive for the French food products
multinational Groupe Danone—to become
full-time farmers. “It’s hard to explain to
people,” says Arthur, “but growing food is a
very satisfying thing,”
The couple is passionate about good
food. Arthur likes to say “you shouldn’t eat
anything from a farm you don’t like to visit.”
Jennifer Trinh ’11, who interned on the farm
this summer, says the food was so good she
was afraid she’d suffer withdrawal when she
left for graduate school at the University of
Santa Cruz in the fall.
Copper Cricket is “more than organic,”
Trinh wrote on her blog, The Buff Tree. The
Upshurs eschew all pesticides and fertilizers,
using instead “just their bare hands to hunt
for pests, and they attract beneficial insects
(who kill the nasty ones) with flowers and
other plants.”
Jen and fellow intern Tilly Philbrick
(Tufts ’11) spent many a morning stretched
out alongside a 50-foot row of tender young
plants (Carol says they’ve found that 50 feet
is a nice, manageable length for a morning’s
weeding or debugging) feeling for bugs, then
squishing them—not an easy chore for a
confirmed vegetarian.
Jen says the work was “hard, but utterly
rewarding. It’s a great feeling to see crops go
from seeds to plants and finally bear fruit.”
It’s the same kind of quiet joy that inspires
the Upshurs, who rise every morning at 5,
happily planning the day’s work and baking
the bread that will serve as the foundation for
delectable meals from the day’s harvest. Most
days they work until dark.
They farm intensively and strategically,
practicing crop rotation and companion
planting. They compost and use drip
irrigation, with taps on timers at the end of
each bed. They weed by hand, endlessly.
But for all their care, the work of a farmer
is vulnerable—to drought and storm, to
plagues of insects. Last spring, they lost every
squash plant they’d grown to an explosion of
squash bugs and cucumber beetles.
“The plants were just overwhelmed,” says
Arthur ruefully. “But that’s the way it is. We
just start new ones. We just keep going.”
When Eating, Just Eat
JAN CHOZEN BAYS ’66 HAS
A MINDFUL PRESCRIPTION FOR
REORDERING OUR DISORDERED
RELATIONSHIP WITH FOOD.
ISTOCKPHOTO.COM
By Elizabeth Redden ’05
32
It is not just whether you are hungry, but how. There are seven
kinds of hunger, writes Jan Chozen Bays ’66, a pediatrician and Zen
teacher, in her recent book, Mindful Eating: A Guide to Rediscovering
a Healthy and Joyful Relationship with Food. There is eye hunger, and
there is nose hunger, motivated by the visual appeal and aromas of
food, respectively; and there is mouth hunger, driven by the tongue’s
desire for new sensations or textures. “I call the mouth a cavern of
desire,” says Bays. It is never satiated. “Has your tongue ever told
you, ‘Stop, stop, I don’t want to eat more?’”
There is hunger of the mind, fueled by thoughts about what
you should be eating—or should not be eating—and hunger of the
heart, fueled by a feeling of loneliness, of emptiness.
There is stomach hunger, which everyone
recognizes, but there is also a deeper and
more profound bodily hunger than that—
cellular hunger, a call for specific nutrients that
the body needs, which manifests in a desire for
red meat, say, if you’re anemic, or orange juice if you
have a cold.
“If we are to return to a healthy and balanced
relationship with food, it is essential that we learn to turn
our awareness inward and to hear again what our body
is always telling us about its needs and its satisfaction,”
Bays writes. “To learn to listen to cellular hunger is the
primary skill of mindful eating.”
Mindfulness, as Bays defines it, “is the act of paying
full, nonjudgmental attention to our moment-to-moment
experience…. Through mindful eating we can learn to be
present when we eat. It seems so simple, to be aware of
what we are eating, but somehow we have lost track of
how to do it. Mindful eating is a way to reawaken
our pleasure in simply eating, simply drinking.”
At the Great Vow Zen Monastery in Clatskanie,
Ore., where Bays lives and teaches, at least one
meal a day is eaten in accordance with the Zen
ritual of oryoki, which translates roughly as “just
enough.” The meal is eaten in silence, save for
chanting, out of a special set of black bowls
of varying sizes that stack together. The
biggest bowl is generally reserved for grain
such as rice or quinoa; the second contains a
bean, egg, or tofu dish; the third holds salad or vegetables;
and the fourth is filled with tea. For utensils, there is a lacquer spoon,
a pair of chopsticks, and a spatula with a cloth tip that the diners
use to clean their individual bowls when they are done. “[Oryoki]
includes not just mindful eating but careful attention to all aspects of
the meal,” Bays writes. “There is a precise way to lay out the nested
swarthmore college bulletin
eating bowls, to serve and receive food, to hold the bowls and utensils
Bays remains on the staff of the Children’s Hospital at Legacy
while eating, to clean the bowls, to dry and wrap them up again.”
Emanuel in Portland, Ore., and regularly provides training on
Bays began practicing Zen meditation in 1973, during a year
recognizing child abuse. But she has largely scaled back her medical
in Australia between her pediatric internship and residency.
practice, and today, she says, “Pretty much my life is a Zen life.”
Immediately, she loved it: “I think the reason I loved it
She and her second husband, Laren Hogen Bays, are the
is that it reminded me of my childhood. We lived in a
co-abbots and were among the founders of the Great
rural area when I was growing up, and I would spend
Vow Zen Monastery, which they converted from an
Saturdays outdoors in the forest by myself, very
“When you
elementary school in 2002: It sits on 21 acres of land,
meditative, trying to be so quiet that the animals
encompassing forest and meadow, an organic garden,
wouldn’t detect me.”
eat, you want to
and two 20-by-80–foot greenhouses. The school
She grew up mostly in upstate New York, where
library is the meditation hall; the classrooms are
her father was a professor of library science at
turn off the thinking
dorm rooms. The music room is now the practice
the State University of New York–Albany. (“We
space for the monastery’s marimba band.
had a house full of overdue library books,” she
mode and turn on the
The monastery, which has a resident
says.) But she had spent her early childhood
community ranging from 12 to 25 and hosts
years in Alabama, where her father taught at
awareness mode and just
up to 60 people during retreats, is one of just
the historically black Talladega College, and
a handful following the Japanese Zen tradition
two of her teenage years in Korea.
be fully present with
in the United States. “One of the reasons we
Bays majored in biology at Swarthmore
founded it was that Zen Buddhism was becoming
and attended medical school at the University
the food, without
quite popular in the United States, but there’s a
of California–San Diego. With her first husband,
tendency for it to get diluted,” says Bays. “It’s widely
she had two sons before and during medical school
anxiety.”
accessible, but there’s also a need to anchor the deep
respectively and later adopted a daughter from
end of spiritual practice.”
Vietnam. After working as a general pediatrician,
A typical day at Great Vow begins with the wakeshe switched to an exclusive focus on child abuse and,
up bell at 3:50 a.m. and includes meditation in both
in 1987, helped found the CARES (Child Abuse Response and
morning and evening with two work periods and temple cleaning
Evaluation Services) Northwest Center, where doctors work in
in between—plus five rounds of chanting a day. Six days of each
coordination with professionals from law enforcement and child
month are spent in silence. As for oryoki, the ancient formal eating
protective services. The center sees about 120 patients per month for
ceremony, Bays writes that it “has significance both in the mundane
suspected abuse or neglect. “To be in the midst of so much human
world and the world of mystery that interpenetrates it. In the
suffering every day is very tough,” Bays says. “I couldn’t have done it
mundane world, it is eminently practical—a way to feed the hundreds
if I hadn’t had my meditation practice to help clear my mind of all of
or even thousands of monks who gathered in the monasteries of
the horrible things I heard during the day.”
China and Japan with a minimum of dishes to wash.”
Oryoki Recitation:
“The first portion is for
the Three Treasures.
The second is for our
teachers and parents.
The third is for all
nations and all beings.
Thus we eat this food
with everyone. We eat
to stop all harming,
to practice serving,
and to accomplish
the Awakened Way.”
WWW.ORDINARYMIND.COM
october 2011
33
“We wouldn’t think of eating out of bowls, day after day, that have
food and eating” at what she sees as its source—the mind and the
never been washed,” Bays writes. “And yet we try to function with a
heart. “The mind has two modes—thinking and awareness. When
mind that is never washed clean of thoughts. They pile up endlessly
you eat, you want to turn off the thinking mode and turn on the
upon each other like decaying bits of food, stirred around by each
awareness mode and just be fully present with the food, without
newly added thought…. In the world of mystery, oryoki reminds us
anxiety.”
that emptiness is fundamental.”
“If you’re really present while eating you’ll enjoy it more, you’ll
Mindful Eating represents a fusion of Bays’ backgrounds in
have a richer experience, and you’ll probably eat less, if that’s your
meditation and medicine. Although she was inspired by the
goal. You’ll feel more satisfied.
enthusiasm for mindful eating retreats hosted by the monastery, her
There’s an old Zen saying, ‘When
book is written with a much more general audience in mind. As
eating, just eat.’”
“We wouldn’t think of
she writes in the first chapter: “This book is written for all those
who would like to improve their relationship to food. Whether
Elizabeth Redden ’05 is
eating out of bowls, day
you have a moderate tendency to overeat, as many of us do, or
a freelance writer and
whether you are struggling with obesity, bulimia, anorexia,
instructor of undergraduate
after day, that have never been
or other such problems, this book is for you.” The book is
writing at Columbia
accompanied by an audio CD with guided exercises on
University.
washed. And yet we try to function
mindful eating and includes many practical tips (see
box).
with a mind that is never washed clean
Above all, Bays wants to take on what she describes
as a “serious epidemic of disordered relationships to
of thoughts. They pile up endlessly upon
each other like decaying bits of
MINDFUL
EATING PRACTICES
food, stirred around by each
newly added thought.”
• Eat until you are two-thirds full, then
take a drink and rest a bit.
• Eat slowly, savoring each bite. Find ways of
pausing as you eat, such as putting down your
fork or spoon between bites.
• Chew your food thoroughly. This not only allows you
to derive more pleasure from the textures and flavors, it also
enhances nutrient absorption.
• Above all, know when it is not the body but the heart
that is asking to be fed. Give it the nutrition that
fills it up—whether that be prayer or exercise,
or time with friends, family, or pets.
From Mindful Eating: A Guide to Rediscovering a Healthy and
Joyful Relationship with Food (Shambhala Publications,
Boston, 2009) by Jan Chozen Bays ’66. The book
was edited at Shambhala by Eden Steinberg
‘90 and incorporates research done by Jean
Kristeller ‘74. “So it was really a collaborative
Swarthmore girls’ project,” says Bays
(right, with husband Hogen Bays).
34
swarthmore college bulletin
The Wine Guy
JOHN FISCHER ’81 DELIGHTS
CLIENTELE WITH PERFECT
COMBINATIONS OF FOOD AND
DRINK—AND TEACHES HIS
STUDENTS TO DO THE SAME.
By Carol Brévart-Demm
As the wine guy—“not sommelier,
because that’s French”—at the
internationally acclaimed Culinary Institute
of America (CIA) in Hyde Park, N.Y., John
Fischer ’81 is used to hearing enthusiastic
and grateful comments from clients who
visit any of the institute’s five restaurants. But
even he was surprised when a female diner
jumped up from her table in the elegant,
award-winning Escoffier Room—the CIA’s
French restaurant—and hugged him. She’d
just finished her meal of duck confit with a
sauce incorporating walnuts and currants,
accompanied by a Belgian-style Maudite
brown ale from a Montreal brewery that
Fischer had recommended.
“She was not inebriated—just besotted
with that combination of food and drink,”
says Fischer, adding, “It’s important for me
to try to get wine and food together in front
of people in a way that they can experience
both the way they should be experienced.”
Author of three books on table service,
bistros and brasseries, and cheese, Fischer
insists that he entered the food business
quite by accident. His route to the CIA was
circuitous, and, although he didn’t realize it
at the time, he actually found his direction
as a Swarthmore undergraduate. He jokes
that his only marketable skill on graduating
from the College was the bartending he’d
learned while working at events organized
by the Office of Alumni Relations or by
his fraternity Phi Psi. A psychology major
also came in handy. “After all, bartending is
counseling and medicating, but using bar
stools instead of a couch,” he jokes.
After Swarthmore, in the course of a
number of what he believed at the time to
be stop-gap jobs—“while I looked for a so-
october 2011
called real job, possibly in business”—Fischer
learned butchering and clam and oyster
shucking, continued to tend bar and also
served as a waiter. Realizing that he enjoyed
this work, he began to envision a “real job” in
the field of restaurant management.
In 1986, he enrolled in a two-year
Associate in Occupational Studies in the
Culinary Arts degree program at the CIA—
which he refers to as “the mother ship of
American food and cooking”—to learn to
cook. “Everyone there thought I was nuts
to spend two years and a lot of money if
I didn’t want to be a professional cook, but
I knew that, for me, this experience would
unlock the black box of the kitchen, which
I thought of as a miraculous place where
pieces of paper went in and food came out.
It was here that I learned what went on in
between,” he says.
A field externship at Le Bernardin—a
Zagat, Michelin, and New York Times
top pick—at the end of his first year and
networking during his second year ensured
that he had no problem finding work after
graduation. He advanced quickly to become
wine-and-beverage director or front-ofhouse manager in several high-class New
York City restaurants and wine bars.
“Being a wine guy in New York City is still
one of the favorite parts of my career—being
in the wine industry in what is arguably the
greatest wine city in the world,” he says.
Fischer returned to the CIA in 2000 as an
instructor/lecturer. Since then, he has spent
time at Camp David, training staff in wine
and service. In 2005, he completed an M.S.
in education. Now an associate professor
of hospitality and service management, he
teaches advanced wine and beverage courses
One of the restaurants at the CIA is a showcase for
exclusively local meats, fish, produce, wines, and
beers, also used in the other campus restaurants as
far as is practical. In beverage management courses,
students learn about local wines, beers, and spirits,
often during field trips to wineries, breweries, and
micro-distilleries. “Wine in the absence of food is all
well and good, but for it to be used to its best effect,
it should be with food,” says John Fischer (above).
and a freshman experience course. For seven
years, he was the “maître d’” instructor in
the Escoffier restaurant that—like all CIA
eateries—also serves as a classroom for
students pursuing a culinary arts degree.
“Beverage management is becoming very
popular among our graduates as a career
choice,” Fischer says. “It’s an almost perfect
hybrid of front- and back-of-house tasks. I
love it, because you’re involved in both sides
of the restaurant. You’re dealing with product
and flavor and taste, you’re also in charge of
purchasing and maintaining inventory—and
you’re on the floor talking to guests, selling
wines, and making cocktails. Being the
guide, allowing them to enjoy the experience
at a greater level than they ever would
have without your help is very satisfying—
especially when they get up from the table
and hug you.”
The Amazing
Swarthmore
Network
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THE COLLEGE’S HEART MAY BE
ON CAMPUS, BUT ITS NETWORK
REACHES EVERYWHERE.
“In traveling around the world meeting
alumni,” says President Rebecca Chopp,
“I’ve come to think about them as part of a
worldwide Swarthmore network. Its heart
may be located on campus, but its reach is
everywhere. Swarthmore is as real for alumni
in Hong Kong and San Francisco, in New
York and New Delhi, in Rwanda and Rio de
Janeiro, as it is for those in Swarthmore, Pa.”
The strategic plan that is being discussed
at the College this fall aims to make this
Swarthmore network more visible, more
engaged, more connected—and then to use
it to foster significantly more engagement
between alumni everywhere and people at
the College. “I’d love to see alumni think of
Swarthmore as a kind of home base—a place
to come back to, a place to connect with, a
place to engage,” Chopp says. “I’d love to see
them use their experiences and knowledge to
give us ideas and suggestions about how we
can best equip our students with the critical
intellectual tools they’ll need to thrive in
tomorrow’s world.”
Traditionally, alumni have contributed
36
By Susan Cousins Breen, Carol Brévart-Demm, and Jeffrey Lott
Illustrations by Jason Marz
their ideas and expertise by joining the
Alumni Council or the Board of Managers. These remain important avenues
of connection—as do the numerous
Swarthmore Connection groups in cities
around the world. So do the more than
800 alumni interviewers who serve the
Admissions Office each year. But there are
many other ways for Swarthmore alumni
to engage with each other and, importantly,
with the College.
As envisioned in the plan, fostering this
kind of engagement requires three things:
First is connecting alumni to what’s going on
at the College today—through this magazine
and other communications, via the Web and
social networking; and by inviting alumni
to campus not just for reunions or themed
events but to play a greater part in the
education of undergraduates.
Second is strengthening the College’s
far-flung alumni networks, facilitating
them both in real time and virtually.
“Being in the same room is great, but it’s
becoming possible to share the same kind of
experiences over the Internet,” Chopp says.
The third level is engagement with
students, taking advantage of the strong
interest that alumni have in students and
their shared experience of Swarthmore. “This
is one of the real opportunities we have as a
liberal arts college,” Chopp says. “Alumni are
eager to answer questions, to mentor, and to
share common projects with students and
younger alumni. We need to do whatever
we can to make that an ongoing part of the
student experience at Swarthmore. We quite
intentionally don’t offer professional-school
training like a large university. But what
we truly have to offer our students is even
better—we have our alumni.
“I have not had a single conversation in
which more than two or three alumni are
in the room that hasn’t been an amazing
experience—an intense seminar on whatever
topic comes up,” Chopp says. “And I know
this happens whether I am there or not.
Whenever alumni get together, no matter
what the purpose, they enjoy getting
connected to one another.”
—J.L.
swarthmore college bulletin
1
people she’s ever known. “The class
has a really nice culture about it,”
says Felix. “We get along well, care
about each other, and have a lot
of memorable shared experiences.
Our class motto is ‘Anywhere else,
it would have been sun,’ because we
arrived [as freshmen] and left as
new grads in the rain. But we won
the award for percentage of the class
giving to the Annual Fund for the
first 10 years after we graduated.”
—S.C.B.
Be True to Your Class
PARTY ON, 1983
This year, as most ’83ers turn 50, many have added a
new shared experience to their cache of Swarthmore
memories. Beginning with a 50th birthday party in
the Washington, D.C., area, groups of classmates have
been celebrating the half-century mark.
Regina Hanlon Barletta proposed the first
50th birthday celebration and, from her home in
Pennsylvania, sent out invitations, tracked RSVPs,
and arrived in Maryland, says Debra Felix ’83, with an
“awesome” cake for the celebration. Meanwhile, Sabina
Beg, Anna Reedy Rain, and Felix pulled together food,
housing, entertainment, and places to gather during
the July 4th weekend. Seventeen classmates arrived from Maryland,
Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and
Wisconsin for the three-day party—some with spouses and children.
In Boston, another group of ’83ers have held a summer party
for years. This year, the July party hosted by Don Twomey; his
partner, Michael Davison; and their sons Seth, 11, and Luke, 10, was
also a celebration of 50th birthdays. A summer party is “a joyous
tradition that seems to have more meaning as time goes on,” says
Twomey. “With these friends, we talk about our real lives, our real
joys, and our real sufferings,” he adds. “That’s what I love about the
Swarthmore that stays with me.”
In September, Sue Kost of Delaware, Suellen Heath Riffkin of
Utah, Lisa Yahna Shortell of Georgia, and Ellen Singer of Great
Britain—four ’83 classmates who lived with or near each other all
four years during college—hosted a birthday weekend at the Jersey
Shore for more than 15 classmates. “We shared a floor in Worth our
senior year,” says Riffkin. “Since then, several of us have seen each
other but we’ve not all been together at once,” which is why the four
women treated themselves to two days together before the rest of
their classmates arrived.
Felix has always said that her classmates are the nicest group of
2
Hit The Books
JUST NOT FOR CREDIT
For 15 years, using the academic year for
a calendar and a Swarthmore professor as
their guide, alumni in the Washington, D.C.,
area have come together over books. This
year’s theme is “Memoirs of Africa,” with a
reading list compiled by Professor of History
Timothy Burke, who will visit Washington
three times for a fall introductory lecture, a
midwinter check-in, and a wrap-up in the
spring. This month, the group is reading
october 2011
MORE CLASS ACTS...
• Even with the growing popularity
of social media, Class Notes—the oldest resource for connecting
classmates—are still the most read section of the Bulletin. When the
Bulletin arrives in mailboxes, alumni can be sure that along with all
the other features and College news, they can immerse themselves in
news about classmates.
• Last spring, Class of ’85 secretaries Tim Kinnel and Maria Tikoff
Vargas posted a “desperate plea” on the College’s passwordprotected Online Community (OLC) for news to fill their next
Class Notes column. Sixty ’85ers replied in one week, more news
than Kinnel and Vargas typically receive in six months and providing
enough copy to fill their next column as well. On the OLC, alumni
and students can connect and network with fellow Swarthmoreans,
create a profile, read and submit Class Notes, post resumes, keep up
with friends, and make new ones. Of the 57 classes that have set up
discussion groups on the OLC, 30 have more than 200 subscribers—
and the 1961 and 1971 discussion groups tally more than 250
postings each. To explore Swarthmore’s Online Community, log onto
olc.swarthmore.edu.
Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs
Tonight. The list of eight memoirs will wrap
up with George Packer’s Village of Waiting in
May.
Swarthmore book groups are also found
in New York (also reading memoirs of Africa
with Burke this year), Philadelphia, Boston,
Chicago, Tucson, and Seattle. Although not
all have the benefit of a visiting professor,
members find that the discussions often
recreate the give-and-take of the Swarthmore
classroom.
Pamela St. John Zurer ’71 has coordinated
the Washington book group for the past
four years, taking over from Sue Willis
Ruff ’60, who got it started in the mid37
1990s when Philip Weinstein, the Alexander Griswold Cummins
Professor of English Literature, offered a series focused on character
development in fiction with Madame Bovary. Today, there are more
than 400 potential readers on the email list and up to 150 actually
participating in 10 different “discussion sections” that meet monthly
in private homes throughout the DC area. Plenary sessions with the
professor are often held at Politics and Prose, one of Washington’s
best independent bookstores.
Zurer says the DC book group has “really cemented my ties with
the College.” The success of the Washington group, she says, can be
laid squarely on the unusual model developed by Ruff, in which a
volunteer professor creates a syllabus that often “introduces us to
works that I don’t think we would have discovered on our own,”
Zurer says, crediting the professors for “really making it an incredible
experience.”
“I also love the fact that the book groups are intergenerational,”
Zurer says. “They give young alumni a chance to stay connected to
their Swarthmore experience when they move to Washington and
give us older folks some really fresh approaches to reading.”
—J.L.
3
• Keep up with academic life at Swarthmore through one of the
Facebook groups that have formed around various disciplines.
Three examples: “Swarthmore College English Literature Majors”
was started this year by William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English
Literature Peter Schmidt. It has about 300 “likes” and contains a
running wall of comments about what people are up to English-wise
and otherwise. The “Swarthmore Student–Alumni Japan Interest
Group” was started by Associate Professor Will Gardner. It’s a
“closed” group, but if you have an interest in Japan and Japanese, by
all means ask to join. With nearly 100 members, “Swarthmore College
Art History” describes itself as “for art history majors and minors—
past, present, and future.”
Get Down to Business
BAY-AREA BUSINESS
The idea for a Swarthmore business group in
the San Francisco Bay Area took root in fall
2009 during the depths of the recession. In
January 2010, more than 75 Swarthmoreans
attended its inaugural event at the San
Francisco Friends School. Swarthmore
College Bay Area Alumni in Business
(BAAB) piggybacked its opening meeting on
a Swarthmore Connections event, featuring
38
YOUR VIRTUAL CLASSROOM...
• No book group where you live? A new blog invites alumni
anywhere to take part online in this year’s New York–Washington
groups. You’ll find the reading list for “Memoirs of Africa,”
introductory remarks by Professor Burke (an inveterate blogger
who built the site), notes and discussion suggestions on each of the
books—even “further reading!” (This is so Swarthmore that it hurts.)
The discussion has already started, so check it out right away at
http://blogs.swarthmore.edu/alumni-book-club.
Professor of Economics Mark Kuperberg.
“Several of us were getting calls for career
advice and about job openings,” says Sohail
Bengali ’79, “and thought it would be a good
idea to have a professional business group in
the Bay Area.” He joined Bay Area residents
Gus Alverelli ’00, Seth Brenzel ’94, Harold
“Koof ” Kalkstein ’78, and Autumn Quinn
’04 in launching the BAAB with the goal
of helping alumni grow their professional
networks and share ideas, insights, and
opportunities from their collective business
experiences.
With a list of more than 200 interested
alumni and the ongoing help of the Alumni
Relations Office, the group is preparing for
its fourth panel discussion this fall, which
will focus on the creative arts and digital
media.
Previous panel discussions, featuring
alumni presenters, have included Asset and
Wealth Management—an Insider’s View;
Entrepreneurship in Technology; and Life
Sciences: Facing the Challenges of Doing
Well, While Doing Good. More than 45
alumni attended each event.
Interested alumni can contact Bengali at
sohailbengali@gmail.com.
—S.C.B.
CONFERENCE CALLS...
• The Lax Conference on Entrepreneurship, supported by a bequest from the
late Jonathan Lax ’71, has brought alumni,
students, and friends of the College
together for a day of panels and roundtable
discussions each spring since 1999. Recent
conference themes have included Social
Entrepreneurship and Sailing in Any Wind:
Risk and the Entrepreneur. Co-sponsored by
the Offices of Alumni Relations and Career
Services, the Lax Conference is free and
open to the public. The 2012 Lax Conference
will be held on March 18.
• Alumni business-interest socialnetworking sites are gaining popularity.
H.G. Chissell IV ’96—director of strategic
development with Viridity Energy, a smartgrid energy company, and former alumni
representative on the Swarthmore Sustainability Committee—initiated the Swarthmore
Sustainability Network on LinkedIn. With
133 members currently and still growing, the
group discusses general and College-related
sustainability issues. Interested in joining?
Just search for “Swarthmore sustainability”
on LinkedIn.
swarthmore college bulletin
4
the West Coast premiere of
Borromean Rings, a chamber
work by James Matheson ’92,
performed by members of the
Los Angeles Philharmonic
at Walt Disney Concert Hall.
The evening concluded with
a meet-up and reception
with the composer in the
greenroom after the concert.
“With eVite, you can see who
else is coming, and that’s a
big draw—both to attend a
great concert and to see your
friends and meet new people.”
This fall, How was at it
again. The second annual
Student and Alumni Composers Concert was held on
Oct. 29 in Lang Concert Hall.
—J.L.
Go Online
A NETWORK OF NOTE
When Deborah How ’89 joined
the Alumni Council last year,
she wanted a specific project. A
professional pianist and teacher
in Los Angeles who coaches
“competitive piano,” How knows
how important it is to have a
wide network of professional
connections in the music
world, so she used her personal
Facebook page to start a network
of Swarthmore musicians—her
friends posting to their friends
and their friends … you get the
picture—all with an eye toward
mounting a campus concert
featuring student and alumni
performers playing works by
Swarthmore composers.
It worked. In November 2010, a remarkable event was born: the
Student and Alumni Composers Concert. Nearly 30 students and
alumni participated—most in person and others via recordings and
videos. You can see the resulting performances at the concert website:
http://bit.ly/swatmusic2010. This event was followed by a facultystudent composers concert in spring 2011.
How says that the networking she’s done has led to other
Swarthmore music connections as well. She used the Internet service
eVite to organize an alumni group to attend a concert featuring
5
Identify
BE WHO YOU ARE
For Matt Armstead ’08, being openly gay
at college was not such a big deal. He was
active in the Swarthmore Queer Union
(SQU) throughout his four years at the
College. Now, in addition to his work as
director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and
Transgendered (LGBT) Center at Princeton,
Armstead reaches back to Swarthmore to
continue to support the current generation
of queer and questioning students. And,
increasingly, he is trying to build a larger
network of LGBT alumni.
So is Seth Brenzel ’94, who attended
Swarthmore at a time when openness about
october 2011
FIND A FRIEND...
• A Facebook group was created for the Class of 1997 by Duleesha
Kulasooriya and Kim Killeen last spring when they volunteered to
gather news for ’97 class secretaries—and new mothers—Wendy
Cadge and Lisa Ginsburg Tazartes. “We received an overwhelming
response—nearly 100 lengthy posts in all,” says Kulasooriya. So many
responses, in fact, that, when compiled, the Class Notes copy was
two times longer than the Bulletin could accommodate in one issue.
At least 25 alumni classes have Facebook pages.
gender and sexual orientation was expanding
the comfort zone for LGBT students. Brenzel,
who was president of the Alumni Council in
2008–2009, has also remained in touch with
LGBT students since his graduation in 1994.
“That’s the easy part,” says Brenzel, “because
there have been organizations like SQU all
along as part of the Intercultural Center,
which was created when I was a student. But
it’s often harder to connect with those alums
who were either unable to self-identify as
queer in college or who did so later in life.
They need to have a certain comfort level
about the College before they will reach out
to other queer alums.”
Armstead, who interned in the Alumni
Relations Office after graduation, has helped
organize the annual LGBT gathering at
Alumni Weekend. “There are lots of ways to
39
connect with people at reunions, and this is
just one of them,” he says, “but it’s been great
to meet people from across generations.” He
enjoys hearing “the ways that being gay have
played out in our lives” from alumni such as
Charles Jackson ’60 and Bill Bradford ’66.
“The current student who has been out
since middle school and the older alum
who came out after a divorce—that’s really
different,” Armstead says. “For some, being
queer is a large part of their identity; for
others, it’s largely tangential.”
Tatiana Cozzarelli ’08, now a teacher in
Providence, R.I., says that since graduating,
she has attended two of the Sager Symposiums—annual campus conferences on
6
LGBT issues—and found “a lot of other
alums there.” Some years, she says, there
has been an alumni dinner gathering at the
symposium.
Cozzarelli and Armstead would both
like to see LGBT alumni connect more in
the cities where they live, doing projects,
marching at pride rallies, or merely
socializing. He sees Facebook and other
social networking tools as a way to make
this happen: “I love the fact that I can have
an open and exciting conversation with
other queer alums. It’s just another of the
many shared experiences we have from
Swarthmore.”
—J.L.
Feed Old Passions
AND PASS THEM ALONG
Acclaimed singer Vaneese Thomas ’74 has come a long way since
1970, her freshman year at Swarthmore, where she says she had a
“miserable” time dealing with the racial polarity on campus as well as
the College’s legendary academic rigor. Her campus experience was
saved, however, by singing.
Yet, according to Thomas, neither she nor other black student
40
TEAM SPIRIT...
• Were you a student athlete? Many
coaches keep former athletes connected
through regular newsletters, email “blasts,”
invitations to return to campus as instructors
for camps and clinics, and annual alumnistudent matches or games in some sports.
With the help of an alumna, Lacrosse Coach
Karen Borbee is currently constructing
a Facebook page for players. Coach Eric
Wagner asks soccer alumni in far-flung places
to go watch prospective recruits in action
and maintains personal relationships with
many alumni, even some he never coached.
singers at the time were comfortable participating in the College
Chorus—and Peter Gram Swing, then chair of the Music
Department, saw little value in performing gospel music—so the
black singers founded their own choir. Thomas, the late James Batton
’72, and Terrence Hicks ’73 took turns accompanying about 35
singers on the piano.
“Anywhere there was a piano, we’d gather and sing,” Thomas says.
“We all came from different church backgrounds but were all raised
in the gospel tradition. Singing together became our sanctuary. We
didn’t need the College Choir, because we had our own—and we
needed that bond.”
Each semester, the new Gospel Choir performed on campus to a
packed house—“standing room only, people in the aisles,” Thomas
says. “The campus loved it!”
By the time Thomas graduated, the choir was more than 40 strong.
With a teaching job in the Philadelphia area, she continued to serve
as its accompanist until 1979.
In 1986, when the Gospel Choir celebrated its 15th anniversary,
Thomas and other former members returned to campus to support
the campus choir.
“We realized how much we loved and missed it,” Thomas says,
“and that’s how the Alumni Gospel Choir was born. We used to come
back to perform on campus more than we do now—life gets in the
way—but we come at least once a year. And those from areas close by
come more often to sing with the campus choir and support them in
any way we can.”
Even today, Thomas says, black student singers still seek and find
refuge and comfort in the Gospel Choir.
Next year, the student and alumni gospel choirs will sing
together in celebration of their 40th anniversary on campus, and the
alumni choir will travel to China in May as part of an international
performing arts program sponsored by The Brockman Institute.
“We’re looking for folks to join us, if they wish,” says Thomas.
Contact her at vaneese@optoline.net.
—C.B.D.
swarthmore college bulletin
DON’T GIVE UP ON THE FUN...
• The Swarthmore Warders of Imaginative Literature (SWIL),
a science fiction club, has an extensive social network that has
been connecting hundreds of alumni since SWIL’s founding in
1978. Electronic channels now keep members informed of online
discussions or events. The club organizes group vacations to places
including Alaska and Acadia National Park, Maine; as well as working
trips such as one to carry out an environmental project in Louisiana.
About 40 members publish a monthly group magazine—the most
recent, their 336th issue, had 114 pages. In April, they celebrated
their 32nd reunion, in honor of which they published a SWIL Alumni
Cygnet. Want to know more? Contact Jim Moskowitz at alumni@
jimmosk.com.
7
Keep Up the Good Works
SWARTHMORE CARES
The inspiration for Swarthmore Cares—an
Atlanta Connection outreach program—
emerged from a strategic planning
conversation about alumni engagement that
Atlanta Swarthmoreans had with Alumni
Council member Amy Lansky Knowlton ’87
last January.
An alumnus’s interest in seeing the
Atlanta Connection do something as a
group sparked interest in volunteering. “We
decided on community service—something
that would make an impact—and then to
move onto something social afterwards,”
says Connection Chair Emily Nolte ’07. This
fall, Swarthmore Cares will hold its third
community service event, helping with the
maintenance of one of the city’s parks.
Swarthmore Cares plans to do three
projects a year, focusing on healthcare,
the Atlanta Community Food Bank, and a
green event. In March, the group launched
its first project, devoting three hours to
sorting supplies for MedShare International,
8
Help a Student
SOMETIMES IT’S WHO YOU KNOW
Swarthmore’s Extern Program yields more
than just a work experience. Thanks to an
externship placement, Marty Spanninger
’76, now a producer, writer, and director for
october 2011
• Alumni Geoffrey ’71 and Cecily Roberts Selling ’77 both served
as chairs of the Folk Dance Club while at Swarthmore. They’re
still dancing. The Sellings and many other folk-dance alumni work
to sustain the traditional English-Scottish Ball, held for the first time
in their senior year and annually—usually in February—since then.
Drawing large numbers of area dancers, tri-college alumni, and
current students, “It quite fills Tarble-in-Clothier,” Geoffrey Selling
says. With the help of dancers from the area, Swarthmore, Bryn
Mawr, and Haverford alumni have also helped keep alive a Scottish
and English dance class for decades, after it was dropped from the
Physical Education Department’s regular schedule. It now meets off
campus. Contact the Sellings at geoffreys@gfsnet.org.
a nonprofit that collects surplus medical
supplies and equipment and redistributes
them to qualified healthcare facilities in the
developing world. Afterwards, the alumni
headed to the Brick Store Pub in Decatur,
Ga., for food and drink, says Nolte. On
July 7, alumni volunteered at the Atlanta
Community Food Bank, sorting 5,252
pounds of frozen meat that was used for
3,501 meals.
Atlanta Connection co-chair Linda
Valleroy ’72 suggested the name Swarthmore
Cares for the volunteer service group. “I very
much admired an arm of the Penn Alumni
Association called Penn Care, in which we
did fun and helpful things in Atlanta,” says
Valleroy. “Emily ran with the idea, creating
a Swarthmore version of the community
service program.”
“These events have been a lot of fun,
an easier way for Atlanta-area alumni to
connect, and a very organic Swarthmore
thing to do,” says Nolte. “We’re able to
give back and enjoy each other’s company.
broadcast news and documentaries, palled
up with the late actor Christopher Reeve.
As a theater major (offered at the time as a
concentration in the Department of English
Literature) in 1973, Spanninger had signed
up for the program—only a year old at the
time—in the hope of meeting actual working
actors.
Spanninger externed with Ike Schambe-
Overall, the Atlanta Connection has
more active members since we’ve started
Swarthmore Cares.”
Both Valleroy and Nolte urge other
Swarthmore Connections to explore the
formation of a Swarthmore Cares in their
own cities. “It’s a good way to bring out
alumni,” says Nolte.
—S.C.B.
lan ’61, then a director at the Equity Library
Theater on the Upper West Side. While
distributing script pages to actors auditioning
for one of Schambelan’s productions, she
ended up chatting with Reeve, a Cornell
graduate who was anxious to supplement his
soap opera role with serious theater.
Years later, Spanninger, who went on to
be a TV news producer, ran into Reeve—by
41
then a celebrity—while working for ABCTV on a special about AIDS. It was after he’d
played Superman.
In recent years, Spanninger, currently
executive producer for the Futuro Media
Group, which produces Latino USA for NPR
and news and documentary segments for
PBS and BBC, has served as a frequent
extern host to students interested in
broadcasting, but one of her favorite
experiences happened when she was helping
place Swarthmore externs in other positions
in New York City.
“One young woman, Amanda Brown-Inz
’06, was interested in writing and theater—a
perfect match for New York Times theater
critic Ben Brantley ’77. But he wasn’t signed
up as an extern host.”
Spanninger called him anyway, and he
readily offered to talk shop with Brown-Inz
Brantley and Spanninger. “Amanda is from
Brooklyn, so the three of us have had dinner
when she’s been in town,” says Spanninger,
who also remains friends with Schambelan.
“These kinds of connections could
happen all over the place, if people just took
a minute to think about it and get engaged
and make a phone call,” she says.
—C.B.D.
over lunch. Although Brown-Inz decided
eventually to go to China and learn Chinese,
she has remained in touch with both
9
MEET YOUR MATCH...
• In its first year (1972), the Extern
Program matched about a dozen student
externs with hosts in New York City, Boston,
and the DC/Baltimore area. In 2011, 184
students were matched with a possible 217
externship opportunities offered by hosts
in New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, DC/
Baltimore area, and San Francisco. To host,
write to careerservices@swarthmore.edu.
Be Generous
STEVE LLOYD’S THREE “Cs”
Stephen Lloyd ’57 says he “kinda hooks his life into” three things:
his church, his community, and his college. He calls them “The
Three Cs.”
Lloyd, who turns 76 this month, is a retired vice president for
a public-management–consulting firm. With his wife, Elizabeth,
an ordained Episcopal deacon, he’s involved with the church. He
serves his Park Forest, Ill., community as chair of the Board of Fire
and Police Commissioners and plays violin in the local community
orchestra.
And Lloyd has remained connected to Swarthmore through
service on the Alumni Council and as class agent for the ’57ers
and chair of his class’s 50th reunion fundraising, for which he
spearheaded a record effort that enabled his class to set up a
scholarship named for the late Associate Provost Emeritus and
Associate Dean of the College Gilmore Stott. A regular and generous
donor to the Annual Fund, Lloyd’s support of the College includes a
scholarship established by Lloyd and his family—including daughter
Anne Lloyd ’87— to honor his mother, May Brown Lloyd ’27.
Ask Lloyd why he gives so generously to Swarthmore and he talks
enthusiastically about his many ties to the College. His mother grew
up in the Ville, so, when the time came, she “just walked up the hill to
the College,” he says. Almost three decades later, so did he, although
from further afield, from his father’s hometown, Joliet, Ill., where
Lloyd’s parents settled after May Brown graduated and they married.
“I had a lot going for me: I was a legacy, a musician, and an
42
swarthmore college bulletin
athlete,” he says, admitting that, as a member of the football,
basketball, and baseball teams as well as a violinist in the College
Orchestra and a member of Kappa Sigma fraternity, he had trouble
maintaining good grades that first year. Dropping football and
basketball helped. “I stuck it out, progressed in my studies, and
graduated—and I lettered in baseball,” he says, chuckling.
Lloyd also continued to play in the orchestra and has fond
memories of Stott, a fine violist, who hosted small musical gatherings
in his home. “Gil Stott was one of the highlights of my Swarthmore
experience,” he says. “It’s not that I’ve modeled my life after him, but
he was definitely one of the people who helped me along in life.”
“So why do I give? It’s the whole experience—the professors,
friends, music, athletics. I’m nowhere close to being a millionaire, but
giving to the College—as it is with my other two “Cs”—is a labor of
love.”
—C.B.D.
10
Go Far Away
AND SWARTHMORE’S THERE TOO!
Rebekah Yang ’12 and Sophia Pan ’09 met
for the first time when they were engineering
students—Yang, a freshman, and Pan, a
senior—and members of the Swarthmore
Christian Fellowship. Two years later, Yang
was deciding on a study-abroad program
and contacted Pan when she remembered
that the recent graduate had spent a semester
abroad in South Africa. And, in fact, Pan
was back in Cape Town pursuing a master’s
degree in civil engineering at the University
of Cape Town (UCT).
“My connection with Sophia was very
valuable in adapting to the country and
october 2011
HONOR A FRIEND...
• Carolyn Champ, director of the Philip Evans Scholarship
Foundation, and Beverley Nalven, program officer, serve not only
as advisers to Evans Scholars but also further interaction among
them by publishing a triannual newsletter of alumni activities as well
as organizing an Outward Bound excursion for incoming first-year
scholars; trips to New York City and Washington, D.C.; welcomeback, holiday, and farewell-to-seniors parties; and several study
breaks throughout the year. Jerome Kohlberg ’48 initiated the Evans
Scholars Program in 1986 to honor his College friend and roommate.
• The campus McCabe Scholars Society organizes various campus
social events, including the McCabe Lecture and an annual dinner
that brings past and current scholars together. Thomas McCabe ’15
endowed the McCabe Achievement Awards in 1952.
the program,” says Yang. “Her insight and
experience helped me decide to study abroad
in South Africa.”
In spring 2011, Yang began a semester
in Cape Town with a distinct advantage
because Pan shared her experience of
living communally with the other program
participants, gave her advice about where
to shop for groceries, explained how the
public transportation system worked, and
suggested which civil engineering classes
to take. As a Chinese American, Yang was
also concerned about security issues. “I had
heard that previous study-abroad students of
similar ethnicities initially felt uncomfortable
in Cape Town due to certain cultural
perceptions,” says Yang. “Learning about
Sophia’s experiences was a great help in
preparing to deal with these issues.” During
her semester abroad, Yang shared several
meals with Pan—braais (barbecues) at her
communal home and an Easter lunch at Pan’s
apartment.
The Off-Campus Study Office helped Yang
when she was applying for the program and a
study visa and provided her with “a plethora
of contact information and support before
she departed” for South Africa.
When Pan returned to Cape Town for
graduate school, she contacted several
alumni who offered advice; she found their
contact information through Rosa Bernard,
assistant director for off-campus study, as
well as through the online alumni directory.
“Swarthmore alumni and students share
a special educational experience, which I
think incites a level of loyalty and creates a
bond between them,” says Pan. “When I have
reached out to other alumni, they are almost
always more than happy to offer their advice
or assistance.”
—S.C.B.
INTERNATIONAL FLAVOR...
• Named for the form required for a student
visa, The I-20 Club establishes a bond
among international students from their
first day on campus with programs such as
iSibs, which links each first-year student
with an upperclassman for direct studentto-student support, and weekly dinners in
a small room in Sharples Dining Hall. The
club also encourages camaraderie with
monthly programs such as trips to buy
winter coats and pot luck dinners to which
each international student invites a faculty
member.
• The first International Alumni Student
Gathering: Employment in the United States
for International Students welcomed recent
international graduates back to campus
last January to share their experiences
finding employment in the United States.
The program helps international students
maximize their work options following
graduation and explains hiring complexities,
U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services
regulations, visa strategies, and the timeline
for obtaining Optional Practical Training.
43
1
#
On the ninth anniversary of the Sept.
11 terrorist attacks, I met Josef Joffe ’65
for lunch at the Grand Elysée, a five-star
hotel in the center of Hamburg. Joffe is the
editor-publisher of Die Zeit, Germany’s
most widely read weekly newspaper, but
he’s also a presence in American letters,
penning columns and articles on foreign
policy for The New Republic, Foreign Policy,
and The American Interest. In a few days,
he’d be off to teach in Stanford’s political
science department, where he is also a senior
fellow at the Freeman-Spogli Institute for
International Studies and Abramowitz Fellow
at the Hoover Institution.
Hoover might suggest a political
affiliation, at least in foreign policy matters,
with the conservatives. But Joffe has also
written for the left-leaning New York Review
of Books and, in his latest book Überpower:
The Imperial Temptation of America (W.W.
Norton and Co., Inc, 2006), he faults
President George W. Bush’s decision to
invade Iraq as “the wrong war in pure
realpolitik terms,” which backfired by
emboldening the most destructive force in
the region: Iran.
Even more seismic shifts in the Middle
East were ahead. A revolutionary wave
swept across the Arab World, toppling
authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and
Libya. As of this writing, the Assad family
in Syria is struggling to hold on to power.
Osama bin Laden, the charismatic face of al44
America’s Guarantee:
Peace or
Promises?
GERMAN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR JOSEF JOFFE ’65 SAYS THE
UNITED STATES MUST RESIST SELF-INFLICTED BLOWS—SUCH AS THE
INVASION OF IRAQ—THAT WILL BLUNDER AWAY ITS SUPREMACY.
By Paul Wachter ’97
Qaeda, was finally hunted down and killed in
Pakistan.
But historic as such events were, they
barely affected the international balance
of power, which, ever since the collapse
of the Soviet Union, has been a one-man
show. So far, Joffe says, the United States
has managed to hold onto this historically
unique role, even as it remains bogged down
in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Can you think of
any other country that could fight two wars
simultaneously and not even raise taxes?”
Joffe asks.
This new world order, with the United
States as a “usually placid elephant,” is the
subject of Überpower. Though the title
suggests a critique of U.S. foreign policy, the
text inside provides only a mild one. Much of
the book is spent defending the United States
from the long tradition of anti-Americanism
that, Joffe demonstrates, began long before
George W. Bush assumed the presidency.
Joffe, now 67, grew up in Cold War West
Berlin, the child of Eastern European Jews
who survived World World II. “I grew up
in the most adventure-filled playground in
the world—bombed out Berlin,” he recalls.
“But we also lived in a place where every
year, things got better. My daughters, who
wouldn’t go where Daddy went, graduating
from Stanford and Oxford, can’t count on
that anymore.”
In high school he had a rebellious streak.
“Every semester or so, they threatened to
kick me out,” Joffe says. He applied to be an
exchange student through a group called
Youth for Understanding and landed in
Grand Rapids, Mich., in 1961—the year the
Berlin Wall was erected. “I was dropped
into a middle-class, suburban family, and I
still consider them my ‘American parents.’
It was a wondrous experience for a kid
from postwar Berlin. Eating meat every
day. Taking a shower every day. Washing
machines. My first lobster.”
But Joffe wasn’t always happy in suburban
Michigan with its very strict moral and
sexual codes. “It was Calvinist,” he says.
“There was very little unsupervised time like
you found in the big cities.” Nonetheless,
he found a girlfriend, Janice from Detroit,
who “was by Western Michigan standards
totally cool,” Joffe remembers. “She wore
black turtle necks, had a Joan Baez hairdo,
played guitar, wrote poetry, and smoked
Benson & Hedges cigarettes.” Janice was
applying to Swarthmore, and Joffe, who was
excited about what he read about the College
(“bad football, leftish politics, high-powered
academics”) followed suit. But only Joffe
was accepted, with a scholarship. “I only had
1220 on the SAT, but perhaps the German
quota wasn’t exactly oversubscribed.”
Joffe calls his early days at the College a
“traumatic encounter with excellence.” At
first, he struggled academically and socially.
“They put me in Wharton, which was the
swarthmore college bulletin
october 2011
A U.S. Marine corporal covers
the face of a statue of Saddam
Hussein with an American flag
on April 9, 2003. Moments
later, the flag was removed and
the statue was pulled down
by American troops and Iraqi
civilians.
AP PHOTO/LAURENT REBOURS
jock dorm,” he says. “The first year was
tough.” For his first philosophy paper—
comparing Descartes and Leibniz—he
received a C- from the professor, Richard
Brandt. Joffe asked what he had done poorly
to deserve such a grade. “Nothing,” Brandt
said. “The others were just better.”
But then his grades improved. Joffe
entered the Honors Program, majoring
in political science with a healthy dose of
economics and philosophy. “It was natural,
coming from Berlin, that I’d be drawn to
international politics,” he says.
Socially, he was “swept up” in the leftist
politics that dominated the campus, joining
the Swarthmore Political Action Group. “I
can’t quite figure out if we were Stalinists or
Trotskyites—probably Trotskyites.” He was
also a member of Students for a Democratic
Society, and he agitated for civil rights in
Chester. “One day, we occupied City Hall,”
he recalls. “We all got arrested. Today, if
that happened, they’d deport me on the
spot. Back then, it wasn’t like that. They just
asked for my name and address, not for my
passport.”
The American student movement was
different from the European one, Joffe recalls:
“The most brutal and most radicalized
student bodies arose in the post-Fascist
countries. There was a totalitarian feel to it.
In the States, it was politics, sex, grass, and
music—civil rights and Vietnam. Here, in
Europe, it was revolution. It was a humorless
movement and ultimately turned violent in
both Germany and Italy.”
“Cathy Wilkerson [of the Weather
Underground] was in my class,” Joffe
continues. “But [it turned out] she didn’t
really know how to build a bomb or rob
a bank. Unlike European radicals, they
didn’t go to these Palestinian Liberation
Organization training camps.”
The classroom was a more conservative
setting. “It was a good balance,” Joffe says.
“Yes, you could go protest and go to jail, but
inside the classroom, it was ‘Now, let’s take
your Marxism and apply bourgeois standards
of evidence and logic.’ We were forced to
think really hard and appreciate scientific
rigor.
“Today, in the humanities at least, there
is so much identity politics, too many good
intentions and not enough ‘how do we
know?’ We, too, wanted a better world, but
Joffe sees the Iraq invasion as
an example of the type of selfinflicted blow that diminishes
the United States’ status in the
world. “The single-most critical
difference between the Afghan
War and Iraq II consists of one
word: ‘legitimacy.’”
we had teachers who kept us intellectually
honest.“
After graduating, Joffe earned two advanced
degrees—from the College of Europe in
Belgium and from Johns Hopkins—and
worked for a couple years at a think tank
outside Munich. Then, he went to Harvard
for a Ph.D., writing a dissertation on the
domestic sources of foreign policy, with a
focus on West Germany. From here, a career
in the academy would have been a logical
step, but Joffe thought otherwise: “I wasn’t
too happy with the idea of seven years as an
assistant professor and the lottery of tenure.”
Fortuitously, he bumped into the editor
of Die Zeit, who offered Joffe a top writing
position at the German weekly in 1976 (30
years after its founding). “That’s how I got
into journalism, at the top floor,” Joffe says.
“It suited my temperament better. Who reads
you when you’re slaving away as an assistant
professor? In journalism, the gratification is
almost instant.”
Though his focus was on Germany’s
(mitigated) place in the world—“Germany,
rich and big, is more like Sweden now,” he
tells me over lunch—it was only natural that
in his writings he would move on to the
United States.
In an influential 1984 article for Foreign
Policy, Joffe coined the term “Europe’s
pacifier” to describe the United States’
presence in Western Europe. By then, it was
apparent that the Soviet Union’s expansionist
ambitions (both physical and politicalcultural) were failing, and many in Europe
and the United States—including an unlikely
alliance of the European Left and American
neoconservatives—wanted the United
States to disengage from the continent. Joffe
disagreed:
America’s role in the containment of
the Soviet Union is familiar enough.
What is widely neglected, however, is the
protector’s role as pacifier—as the key
agent in the construction of an interstate
order in Western Europe that muted, if
not removed, ancient conflicts and shaped
the conditions for cooperation.
45
The most important condition was the extension of an
essentially unilateral American security guarantee to Western
Europe. That guarantee is normally seen only as a cornerstone
of the global Soviet-American balance, with the United States
providing a counterweight to Soviet power that the West
Europeans were unable to provide for themselves. Yet by
extending its guarantee, the United States removed the prime
structural cause of conflict among states—the search for an
autonomous defense policy.
But even terrorist attacks are unlikely to dislodge the United States
from its perch. Meanwhile, China’s rise may be the biggest threat to
American hegemony, but it’s a challenge that remains decades ahead.
Still, the United States could dislodge itself by alienating the rest of
world, many of whose actors, for all their complaints, prefer a strong
(if benign) United States to the fractious, balance-of-power politics
that came before. Joffe sees the Iraq invasion as an example of the
type of self-inflicted blow that diminishes the United States’ status in
the world. “The single-most critical difference between the Afghan
War and Iraq II consists of one word:
‘legitimacy’,” he writes, continuing:
Had Saddam committed aggression
against the United States or any other
country? No. Did he harbor terrorists as
proxies? No, the “Baghdad connection”
could never be established. Was he
stockpiling, or about to produce, nuclear
weapons and other paraphernalia of mass
destruction? That assumption was dubious
to begin with, given the destructive
efficiency of the U.N. inspectors in the
aftermath of the first Iraq War, and it
proved utterly false once the second was
over. Did he defy the U.N. sleuths during
the run-up? In a passive-aggressive way,
he did, but not systemically enough to be
nabbed for obstructing justice.
Read Josef Joffe’s address to the Class of
WERNER BARTSCH
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the
United States’ dominion now spanned the
entire globe, and, like its role in Western
Europe, Joffe largely sees this new, larger
hegemony as salutary. In Überpower, he
approvingly cites President Bill Clinton’s
1996 proclamation, “Because we remain
the world’s indispensible nation, we must
act and we must lead,” a position that’s been
reaffirmed by his successors George W.
Bush and Barack Obama.
Of course, the rest of the world often
takes exception to American hegemony.
But in Überpower Joffe demonstrates that
the roots of anti-Americanism came long
before the country had assumed greatpower status. Often the critique is cultural,
2002 when he received an honorary doctorate
portraying the United States as having little
of humane letters: http://bit.ly/joffe02
to offer the rest of the world. The French
Among conservative ranks—and Joffe
diplomat Talleyrand described the country
counts himself a conservative—Iraq
as having “32 religions and only one dish
produced a split. In many ways, Joffe’s view
to eat.” (The late historian Tony Judt added, “Talleyrand’s statement
of the conflict now resembles President Obama’s, who was against the
anticipates ‘two centuries of European commentary.’”) Or as Hitler
invasion but, as commander in chief, has followed the path laid down
put it, “A single Beethoven symphony contains more culture than all
by his predecessor. In a 2008 article for The American Interest (a
that America has ever created.” The postwar rise of American “soft
magazine largely created by a split over Iraq among the conservative
power” has only amplified this criticism. “Look outside,” Joffe tells me contributors to The National Interest), Joffe argues for staying in Iraq:
in Hamburg. “Everyone dresses American, talks American, watches
“America brought war to Iraq. America should now bring peace to
American.”
that tortured country.”
Often the criticism of the United States is motivated by more
Three years later, Iraq is almost an afterthought, and it’s the U.S.
pernicious beliefs. In 1915, the German writer Werner Sombart
involvement in Afghanistan that’s being questioned—especially with
dismissed the United States as a “Jewish land.” Today, the Arab world
the killing of Osama bin Laden in a compound not in Afghanistan or
is the main font of anti-Semitic conspiracies involving the United
the adjoining mountainous environs of Pakistan but in the Pakistani
States, including the canard that Jews working in the World Trade
city of Abbottabad, possibly with the full knowledge of Pakistan’s
Center called in sick on 9/11.
leaders. And the Arab Spring has yet to play out to its conclusion.
Formal resistance against the United States comes in myriad
But for all these new wrinkles, America’s fundamental role in
forms, Joffe writes. There are cautionary declarations from reputed
the world should not change, Joffe argues. The challenge, then, will
allies: “Though America is the sole superpower in this world,
be for the United States to not blunder away its supremacy. “With
the administration does know that it needs friends and allies,” warned great power comes great responsibility,” Joffe writes in the final
German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in the run-up to
section of Überpower. “As long as this unbound giant lives up to its
the Bush-led invasion of Iraq. Institutional forces also align to
responsibility—or enlightened self-interest—envy and resentment
take on the United States, which often finds itself isolated on issues
will not escalate into fear and loathing.”
such as the elimination of land mines and environmental accords.
There is also balancing by terror. “The most economic and efficient
Paul Wachter is the co-founder (with Phil Ryan ’96) of the discerning
attack came from totally unexpected quarters,” Joffe writes, in
news aggregator againstdumb.com.
reference to al-Qaeda.
46
swarthmore college bulletin
connections
The Danube River and the Hapsburg Empire
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Alumni College Abroad with Professor of History Pieter Judson ’78—June 14–27, 2012
Travel in the company of Professor of
History Pieter Judson ’78, alumni, and
friends as we journey through the heart of
Central Europe—once the glorious realm
of Habsburg empire. Here, in the land of
exceptional natural and man-made beauty,
soaring Gothic cathedrals tower above
medieval cities, ornate Baroque churches
look out over peaceful country towns, and
the Danube River carves its way through
lush hills, valleys, vineyards and forests.
Our 2012 itinerary explores six Central
European countries and includes visits to
six UNESCO World Heritage sites. Enjoy
accommodations aboard the M.S. Amadeus
Royal and in deluxe hotels while exploring
the well-preserved, historic city centers of
Vienna, Budapest, Ceský Krumlov, Prague
(shown above), and Kraków. For both new
and repeat travelers to the Danube valley
and Central Europe, this unique itinerary
provides a fresh perspective on a region of
wonderful cultural riches and diversity.
october 2011
Your experience will be enhanced by
a comprehensive schedule of exclusive
guided excursions, a special lecture on the
Habsburg Empire, a private organ concert
in Melk and a memorable private music
performance in Vienna. Judson, your faculty
travel leader, centers his research on the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, Germany, and
Eastern Europe in the period 1848–1948,
and he is the author of four books on the
history of East-Central Europe.
Contact Swarthmore Alumni College
Abroad at (800) 789-9738 or via email at
alumni_travel@swarthmore.edu for more
information or to register for this wonderful
opportunity.
Note: Be on the lookout for information about
the upcoming African safari in October 2012.
The itinerary should be available early next
year.
NOMINATIONS OPEN FOR
EUGENE LANG ‘38 IMPACT AWARD
In March, the Alumni Council president
Sabrina Martinez ’92 presented Eugene
Lang ’38 with its first Impact Award. This
award, to be called the Eugene M. Lang ’38
Impact Award, will be presented annually on
Alumni Weekend to an alumnus or alumna
who, in his or her vocation, has made an
impact on society at large. In naming this
award for Lang, the Council recognized his
impact in both his business career and his
philanthropy.
The recipients of future awards will be
selected by the Executive Committee of the
Alumni Association. Over time, they will
represent many fields of endeavor and a
variety of personal backgrounds. Priority
for consideration in any given year goes
to candidates who are celebrating a class
reunion that year.
Alumni are encouraged to nominate
candidates for this award by sending the
nominee’s name and a brief description of
their achievements to alumni@swarthmore.
edu. Please do not inform the nominee.
47
Ve r mo n t
RECENT EVENTS
Philadelphia: How can you
defend the honor of your alma
mater, put your storehouse of
arcane and sometimes useful
information to good use, and
have a great evening, all at the
same time? Quizzo, of course!
The combined team of Yale and
Swarthmore lost in an extra tiebreak round against Harvard, but
a good time was had by all.
Tucson, Ariz.: The Tucson
Connection Book Group is still
going strong. Among recent
books under discussion were
Joseph Nye’s The Future of Power
and Michael Gruber’s The Good
Son. For more information,
contact Laura Markowitz at
lmarkowitz@aol.com.
Sh a n gh a i
Washington, D.C.: The
Swarthmore alumni community
in Washington, D.C., invites all
area alums to attend a happy
hour downstairs at the Laughing
Man Tavern at 6 p.m. on the
first Friday of every month.
The tavern is located at 1306 G
Street Northwest, close to the
Metro Center. Be sure to spread
the word to other alumni and
friends of the College, and feel
free to contact Wuryati Morris if
you have suggestions for alumni
events in the future. (See contact
information on opposite page.)
UPCOMING EVENT
Philadelphia: The Philadelphia
Connection continues its busy
schedule this fall. Associate
Professor of Anthropology
Farha Ghannam spoke on
WELCOME TO THE CITY 2011
This year marked the fifth annual Welcome to the
City, an opportunity for alumni to gather on the
same day in cities around the world. Designed
to welcome those hundreds of young alumni
settling in new locations to pursue new jobs or
graduate programs, the event drew 800 registrants
to 25 participating cities. WTTC spanned three
continents and eight decades, with attendees
from the classes of 1942 through 2011. This year,
traditional locations such as Boston; Chapel Hill,
N.C.; Madison, Wisc.; and New York City were joined
by Eugene, Ore; Honolulu, Hawaii; Prague, Czech
Republic; Sacramento, Calif.; Shanghai, China; and
Singapore.
London
48
swarthmore college bulletin
“Egypt and the Arab Spring,”
and the Connection celebrated
Halloween with “Terror Behind
the Walls,” a visit to Eastern
State Penitentiary. At the end
of the month, they will joined
the campus community for the
Student and Alumni Composers
Concert organized by Deborah
How ’89 (see story on p.39). In
mid-November, Connection
members are invited to an
insiders’ tour of the Brandywine
River Museum. Contact Philly
Connection chair Jim Moskowitz
’88 for more information.
Euge ne , O re .
NEW STUDENT SEND-OFFS
Last summer, Swarthmore
alumni, current students, and
parents welcomed entering
students and their parents in
six cities. They told stories and
answered questions as members
of the Class of 2015 prepared
for their move to campus. More
than 100 people participated
in the festivities this year. We
are grateful to our alumni hosts
for their time and hospitality:
Susan Corcoran ’72 (Boston);
Ellen Daniell ’69 (S.F. Bay Area);
Deborah How ’89 (Los Angeles);
Lucinda Lewis ’70 and Robert
Reynolds P’09 (Washington,
D.C.); Horatiu Stefan ’01 (Seoul,
Korea); and Daniel Werther ’83
(New York City).
swarthmore connection chairs
National Chair
David Steinmuller ’56
dsteinmul@msn.com
Los Angeles
Deborah How ’89
dhhow@musette.org
Atlanta
Emily Nolte ’07
emily.anne.nolte@gmail.com
Metro New York City
Win Ling Chia ’06
winlchia@gmail.com
Linda Ann Valleroy ’72
lav0@cdc.gov
Lily Ng ’08
lily.ng7@gmail.com
Boston
Gina Salcedo ’10
gina.salcedo@gmail.com
Minneapolis/St. Paul
Rebeka Ndosi ’97
rndosi@gmail.com
David Wright ’69
dwrightmusic@earthlink.net
Chapel Hill
Julia Knerr ’81
juliasknerr@alum.swarthmore.
edu
George Telford III ’84
gbtelford@gmail.com
Chicago
Marilee Roberg ’73
mroberg@ameritech.net
Paris
Anäis Loizillon ’95
swatinparis@gmail.com
Philadelphia
Jim Moskowitz ’88
jimmosk@alum.swarthmore.
edu
Metro-DC/Baltimore
Wuryati Morris ’04
wmorris@alum.swarthmore.edu
Pittsburgh
Barbara Sieck Taylor ’75
btaylor@gwpa.org
Nina Schichor ’02
ninaschichor@yahoo.com
Houston
Susan Schultz Tapscott ’72
tapscotts@pdq.net
Lester Tran ’04
lester.tran@gmail.com
october 2011
Central New Jersey
Timothy Johnson III ’07
timothy.johnson.iii@alum.
swarthmore.edu
Denver
Erin Trapp ’92
emtrapp@gmail.com
Hilary Rice ’02
hilaryjrice@gmail.com
De n ve r
New Haven
Caitlin Koerber ’08
caitlin.koerber@yale.edu
San Francisco
Autumn Quinn ’04
autumn@alum.swarthmore.edu
Singapore
Angelina Seah ’07
angelina.seah@gmail.com
Tucson
Laura Markowitz ’85
lmarkowitz@aol.com
London
Abby Honeywell ’85
abbyhoneywell@yahoo.co.uk
49
class notes
IT IS FALL 1979, A STONE’S THROW FROM SHARPLES DINING HALL. A STUDENT GLIDES THROUGH THE CRISP AUTUMN AIR AS A COMPANION LOOKS ON. .
50
swarthmore college bulletin
Margaret Ball Dellmuth ’33,
COURTESY OF NANCY DELLMUTH
a member of the Swarthmore College Board of Managers from
1950 to 1952, died on June 10. She would have been 100 on
Oct. 28. After graduating with high honors in the humanities,
Dellmuth worked with Provident Mutual
Life Insurance Company. According to
her family, Dellmuth treasured her years
as a Manager and, in addition to that
role, was happy to take on any campus
assignment to assist the College. She was
dorm mother for Pittinger Hall for three
years in the mid-1940s, served as cochairperson of the suburban Philadelphia area for the 1947–1948 fundraising
campaign, and was a member of the Women’s Dormitory Committee during that time. She was a member of the 1935 and
1948 class reunion committees and the Swarthmore Alumni
Club of Philadelphia. In the town of Swarthmore, Dellmuth
was the grade chairperson for Swarthmore Public Schools, a
member of the Brownie Troop Committee, and an active member of the Protestant Episcopal Church. She and her husband,
Carl Dellmuth ’31, had two children, Carl and Nancy ’60.
october 2011
51
COURTESY OF DEWITT BALDWIN
class notes
A Humanist in Medicine
MORE THAN A HALF-CENTURY OF
RESEARCH AND PROGRESS AND DEWITT
BALDWIN ’43 STILL HAS MORE TO DO.
52
“I doubt if anyone in my class or on the faculty at
Swarthmore would have ever predicted an academic career for me,” says DeWitt “Bud” Baldwin. Yet the work of the pediatrician, family
practitioner, and psychiatrist turned medical professor and researcher has garnered him two honorary doctoral degrees and numerous national
and international awards for his pioneering and
innovative work in medical and interprofessional
education and healthcare.
Now in his 90th year, Baldwin still works full
time as scholar-in-residence at the Accreditation
Council for Graduate Medical Education in
Chicago, conducting research on the experience
of residents in training and what makes a good
physician. “Becoming a physician is not just
about good scientific and clinical training,” says
Baldwin. “It’s also about developing fully as
human beings and professionals.”
(Baldwin, center in photograph, confers with
members of his research team on a structural equation model of the resident working-and-learning
environment).
He is also a professor emeritus of psychiatry
and the behavioral sciences at the University of
Nevada School of Medicine and an adjunct professor of clinical psychiatry at Northwestern University School of Medicine.
In addition to having served as president of
Earlham College, Baldwin has held professorial
positions in eight schools of medicine and helped
found new medical schools at the universities of
Nevada and Connecticut.
During a career spanning nearly 60 years,
Baldwin has remained dedicated to improving
how health professionals are trained and how
healthcare is delivered to patients, believing that
“As teacher is to student, physician will be to patient.” He was among the first to advocate for the
teaching of ethics as well as the social and behavioral sciences in the medical curriculum. In the
early 1950s, Baldwin became involved in interprofessional education at the University of Washington, where a team of nine different health
professionals in the pediatric clinic each brought
their students together to learn and work.
In 1972, he introduced an interprofessional
health sciences program at the University of Nevada, Reno, in which entering pre-professional
students in 11 different health fields were taught
swarthmore college bulletin
“Becoming a physician is not just about good scientific and
clinical training,” says Baldwin. “It’s also about developing
fully as human beings and professionals.”
in the classroom and in the clinic by a practicing
clinical interprofessional faculty team. “From day
one, students were exposed to health issues in the
community and patient care, learning and working together—and often being graded—as teams,
gaining interviewing and patient care skills early,
which they later practiced as undergraduates and
upper-level health professionals in student teams
seeing patients in faculty-supervised clinics,” says
Baldwin. A later study of medical students who
had participated in the program showed that
twice as many went on to become primary-care
physicians as did their traditionally trained
classmates.
Devoted to advocating a humanistic approach
in medical training and treatment, Baldwin conducted pioneering empirical research on how
medical students and residents were being sub-
october 2011
jected to mistreatment and abuse during their
education and training. His studies demonstrated
the disturbingly high prevalence of sexual harassment, racial discrimination, and psychological
and physical abuse of medical students and residents as well as the fact that much of this was
considered “just part of the process.”
Fortunately, leaders in medical education
have acted decisively to redefine the nature of the
teacher-learner relationship, and Baldwin’s research over the last two decades has shown consistent reductions in these problems as well
as improvements in the learning environments
of both undergraduate and graduate medical
education.
Baldwin’s seminal work in the field of interprofessional education, research, and practice,
was recently recognized with a special supple-
ment of the international Journal of Interprofessional Care and the creation of the Baldwin
Award. His many honors have included the Gienapp Award in Graduate Medical Education, the
Pellegrino Medal in Healthcare Ethics, the McGovern Award for Distinguished Service in the
Health Sciences, and the Gorin Award for outstanding achievements in rural health.
Ironically, despite all he has accomplished in
research, Baldwin believes that mentoring has
been one of his most significant contributions.
“When young people work with me, I try to enlist their interest and passion in the human experience of helping others in need,” says Baldwin.
“One of my most treasured comments was by
some students who said, ‘Other doctors teach us
what to do to patients. You teach us how to be with
patients.’”
When asked why he continues to work, Baldwin says, “I can’t quit yet. I’ve got too many assignments on my desk and too many stories to
tell.” This fall, in fact, he has three book chapters
to get out, and expects to complete four more research papers by the end of the year.
—Susan Cousins Breen
53
IN MEMORIAM
Alumni death notices received by the College
from May 13 to Aug. 31, 2011
1933
1934
1935
1937
1938
1940
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
1946
1947
1948
1949
1950
1951
1952
1953
1954
1956
1959
1961
1962
1963
1965
1969
1971
1998
october 2011
Margaret Ball Dellmuth
Stephen Clark
Sarah Smith Sheffey
Richard Storr
Helen Hornbeck Tanner
Virginia Vawter Storr
Edward Jakle
Louise de Montalvo Jones
Otto Pribram
Barbara Beckjord Batten
Elaine Gerstley Fuld
Helen Tomlinson Gibson
Robert Walter
Thomas Evans
Anne Pike
B. Sheldon Sprague
Barbara Thatcher
Cynthia Swarthley Zimmer
Elinor Griest
Barbara Harrison Melick
Natalie Robbins Corbin
Frank Johnson
Elmer Talcott Jr.
John Yost
Hiram Budd
Stephen Edwards
Karl Schmittle Sr.
Albert Lengyel
Horace Breece Jr.
Jean Munn Lowry
Virginia Hood Rogers
Kenneth Snyder
Helen Hill Caughey
Jane Gross Corson
Thomas Saunders
David Stolberg
Frank Beldecos
Esther Jones Bissell
Clare Whittlesey Weigel
Arra Garab
Christine Meyers Jameson
John Reynolds
Paul Buerkle
Alice Stover Pickering
Gail Lankenau Woodward
Barbara Starfield
Thomas Phelps Jr.
Shawna Tropp
Peter Sales
Richard Fink
Daniel Bonbright
Robert Hawkinson
Michael Hattersley
Mabry Chambliss Debuys
Tara Schubert
June 10, 2011
May 31, 2011
Aug. 7, 2011
April 17, 2011
June 15, 2011
2011
May 20, 2011
June 27, 2011
Aug. 10, 2011
June 9, 2011
June 16, 2011
May 17, 2011
June 21, 2011
June 16, 2011
June 27, 2011
July 20, 2011
May 24, 2011
June 4, 2011
Aug. 4, 2011
July 16, 2011
May 21, 2011
Sept. 13, 2009
July 19, 2011
April 2, 2011
May 25, 2011
Feb. 28, 2006
June 15, 2011
Aug. 9, 2011
July 20, 2007
Dec. 9, 2010
May 6, 2011
July 9, 2011
July 20, 2011
June 10, 2011
Dec. 31, 2010
May 24, 2011
May 23, 2011
May 7, 2011
July 1, 2011
Aug. 22, 2011
July 21, 2011
April 26, 2009
July 28, 2009
June 23, 2011
Aug. 19, 2008
June 10, 2011
July 28, 2011
July 17, 2011
July 28, 2011
June 15, 2011
June 3, 2011
May 22, 2011
May 30, 2011
June 6, 2011
April 4, 2011
55
books + arts
160 Million Women “Gone Missing”
Mara Hvistendahl ’02, Unnatural
Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the
Consequences of a World Full of Men, Public
Affairs, New York, 2011.
Population control. Masculinization.
Communism. Fertility. Human trafficking.
Sex selection. Technology. Tradition.
Imperialism. Demography. Abortion.
Economics. All of these—and more—
are brilliantly woven together by Mara
Hvistendahl in her compelling exposé about
the seemingly disconnected but ultimately
intricately interwoven factors that contribute
to a world with girls “going missing.”
“If 160 million women were missing from
the U.S. population, you would notice—160
million is more than the entire female
population of the United States,” writes
Hvistendahl, who is currently a Beijing-based
correspondent for Science magazine. Yet this
is the number of potential girls and women
who have already gone missing in Asia alone,
due in large part, according to Hvistendahl,
to the combination of ultrasound and
abortion—technologies exported from the
West over the past few decades.
Hvistendahl notes that a certain amount
of gender imbalance appears to be natural;
birth ratios historically weigh in at about
105 boys to every 100 girls. An unnatural
balance, however, has been on the rise. The
book reports that in the 1980s, South Korea,
Taiwan, and parts of Singapore registered
sex ratios at birth of 109 boys to 100 girls;
currently, India has a ratio of 112:100 and
China records 121 boys for every 100 girls.
Gender imbalance, moreover, is neither
a local nor regional problem confined to
South and East Asia. It reaches the Caucasus
countries and Eastern Europe as well as some
populations in the United States. It is a global
issue. We are all facing an “epidemic” of
gender imbalance, Hvistendahl says.
What are the causes of such imbalance?
What are the consequences? And who is to
blame? These are the questions addressed in
Unnatural Selection.
Unsatisfied with conventional
explanations for the imbalance that attribute
it to “deeply-rooted cultural traditions”
and “the low status of women in society,”
58
Hvistendahl introduces Unnatural Selection
as “a book about information that some had
hoped to keep hidden, about misguided
theorists focused only on the big picture
and scientists with tunnel vision, and about
population, technology, and abortion.”
The book exposes the incompleteness—
even wrongheadedness—of looking only to
traditional cultural prejudices for the cause
of such imbalance at birth. Hvistendahl
writes, “Tradition cannot be the whole
explanation for a phenomenon that has
only appeared in the past 30 years,” and her
research compellingly exposes the links
between—and the melding of—tradition
and technology left underexposed if not
altogether missed in much work on this
topic.
The book’s three parts introduce the
reader to important aspects of the issue
through key figures and a narrative style
that invites you into the story in a concrete
and personal way. Part one, “Everyone Has
Boys Now,” illustrates the nature of the
problem from multiple angles including
demographics, economics, politics, and the
personal factors that contribute to “missing
girls.” We learn that in many locations a
“skewed sex ratio at birth was an outgrowth
of economic progress, not backward
traditions.”
Part two, “A Great Idea,” details the
beginnings of sex-selection abortion—the
“great idea” that the United States exported
to other countries during the 1960s and
1970s, spurred largely by its own fears
of overpopulation (and concomitantly
Communism). We see the World Bank,
the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller
Foundation, and the Planned Parenthood
Federation of America all playing a part
in advancing the dissemination of such
technology in the name of “population
control.”
(Hvistendahl notes the contrast
between 1980s American politics and the
seeming ease with which sex selection was
championed not only for its presumed
effectiveness at population control but also
as “one of the most rational and ethical
methods out there.” Given today’s political
climate, her observation that “the list of
abortion’s early champions reads like a
directory of the Republican Party” is quite
striking.)
Part three, “The Womanless World,” deals
with the consequences of a global surplus of
men: The “marriage squeeze” leads to a range
of trafficking in women, from international
brides for purchase, to prostitution, to
forced marriage, to child marriage, etc.
Some scholars think that a “masculinized”
world may also lead to increased violence
and social instability. Here Hvistendahl aptly
navigates the rough terrain—well known
from the beginnings of feminist theorizing—
between essentialist and constructionist
stances on gender differences.
Unnatural Selection is an eye-opening
book, one that paints a vivid portrait of an
important global issue. It makes it hard to
look at gender, birth, politics, science, and
technology—and their global knottiness—in
the same way ever again.
—Gwynn Kessler
Assistant Professor of Religion
Watch Mara Hvistendahl discuss her
book when she came to campus this fall
http://media.swarthmore.edu/video
swarthmore college bulletin
BOOKS
Elizabeth Anderson ’81,
The Imperative of Integration,
Princeton University Press, 2010.
Anderson demonstrates that
despite the progress that has
been made toward racial equality
since 1964, African Americans
remain disadvantaged. Through
extensive social-science findings
and political theory, the author
provides a compelling argument
in favor of reviving the ideal of
racial integration to overcome
injustice and inequality, exposing
the deficiencies of racial views on
both the right and the left, and
exploring ways for integration
to lead to a more responsive
democracy.
Diana Bailey Harris ’64,
Reflections of a Civil War
Locomotive Engineer: A GhostWritten Memoir, CreateSpace,
2011. This true story is based
on long-forgotten letters that
the author’s father found in a
100-year-old trove he discovered
in 1988. From these letters, the
author tells the story of John and
Francis, brothers who served in the
Civil War and went on to become,
respectively, a locomotive engineer
and a police officer. John recounts
the events of their lives to find
the secret to Francis’s happiness
despite great personal tragedy.
october 2011
Peter Bart ’54, Infamous Players:
A Tale of Movies, The Mob
(And Sex), Weinstein Books,
2011. Daily Variety editor Bart
tells the story of his whirlwind
experiences at Paramount as a
studio executive in the late 1960s
and early 1970s. This golden era
for the studio also came with
plenty of chaos and company
turmoil—drugs, sex, runaway
budgets, management infighting,
and even the Mafia—making
Paramount one of the most
bizarre studios in all of movie
industry history.
Tony Holtzman ’55, Axton
Landing, Cloud Splitter Press,
2011. In the harsh conditions
of the Adirondack Mountains,
disease and death stalk the
lumberjacks in the winter of 1858.
Cyrus Carter and Jared Mason
forge a lasting friendship amidst
the harsh conditions at their
logging camp at Axton Landing.
This action-packed novel displays
all the dangers of the lumberjack
lifestyle as well as the moral
dilemma brought on by the arrival
of a fugitive slave.
Octavio Gonzalez ’97, The Book
of Ours, Momotombo Press,
2009. Gonzalez chronicles his
early life in the Dominican
Republic and his move to New
York City through a brave and
memorable collection of poems.
Using different moods and tones
to convey an immigrant’s story,
a gay man’s story, a Dominican’s
story, a New York story, and
many more, the author relates
his painful personal history.
Michael Seidman ’72, The
Victorious Counterrevolution:
The Nationalist Effort in the
Spanish Civil War, The University
of Wisconsin Press, 2011. This
book examines how General
Francisco Franco maintained
a highly repressive and tightly
controlled regime that combined
with pro-Catholic and anti-Jewish
propaganda to manage the Spanish
economy and reinforce solidarity
in the Nationalist zone. By avoiding
inflation and shortages of food
and military supplies—and with
the support of elites and middleclass Spaniards—the Spanish
Nationalists achieved victory over
the Spanish Republicans and the
revolutionary Left.
Justin Powell ’92 and John
Richardson, Comparing
Special Education: Origins
to Contemporary Paradoxes,
Stanford University Press, 2011.
The authors focus on special
and inclusive education in
the United States and Europe,
showing that the expansion of
special education is one of the
most significant educational
developments of the past
century.
Jan Hahn ’73, Voices,
AuthorHouse, 2010. Physician
Hahn has worked in big city
emergency rooms, tertiary-care
intensive care units, jails, an Indian
hospital, a small rural hospital,
nursing homes, and a small town
medical office, listening to his
patients’ stories. These moving
poems chronicle the thoughts
and feelings of men and women
of all walks of life who try to cope
with misfortunes and resolve the
challenges confronting them,
all with the same desire—to be
heard.
OTHER MEDIA
Freebo (Daniel Friedberg) ’66,
Something to Believe, Poppabo
Music, 2011. The 11 songs in
this selection—most by the
artist with some co-written
with co-producer and engineer
Robert Tepper—take listeners
along a path that is strewn with
profundity, beauty, delight,
amusement, and pathos—Freebo
at his best.
—Capsule reviews
by Lauren Weiler
59
in my life
A Country.
Not a War.
FORTY-THREE YEARS AFTER
BEING WOUNDED IN VIETNAM,
BILL EHRHART AND HIS FRIEND
AND FELLOW MARINE TAKE A
REWARDING AND EYE-OPENING
JOURNEY.
66
COURTESY OF W.D.EHRHART
The weapon that got Ken Takenaga and me was an RPG, a
rocket-propelled grenade. You’ve probably seen RPGs in news
footage of Afghan mujahedeen or Taliban fighters. The launcher is a
long thin tube the gunner rests on his shoulder like a bazooka, and
the projectile sticks out the front of the tube like a bulbous coneshaped piece of nastiness. We didn’t call them RPGs back then. We
called them B-40s. But a rose by any other name still has thorns,
and whatever you call it, one B-40 can screw up your whole day. It
certainly screwed up ours.
Ken got the worst of it: a huge gash in his scalp and a shattered
right arm. He was evacuated immediately, first to Da Nang, then to
Hawaii. I got some small shrapnel wounds a doctor cleaned out, slept
for a few hours, then went back to the war, stone-deaf but otherwise
reasonably functional. This was Hue City during the Tet Offensive.
If you could walk, see, and shoot, you stayed. There were guys a lot
worse off than me.
It took me 32 years to find Kenny again. I didn’t even know his
real first name (Kazunori) or which country he lived in (Japaneseborn, he was still a Japanese citizen in 1968). He’d come to the United
States in the midst of the Vietnam War, as a permanent resident alien
was subject to the draft, got drafted, and chose to join the Marines
instead, thinking he was joining the Navy. When he got to Parris
Island, he asked the drill instructors, “Where are the ships?” But that’s
another story.
I finally tracked him down in 2000 (yet another story), and, since
then, we’ve renewed our friendship as if no time at all had passed.
These days, he shuttles between Japan and New York, and we get
together several times a year. Ken has spent his entire adult life in
the travel and tourism industry, so when he suggested a trip back to
Vietnam, he didn’t have to ask twice.
This was not my first trip to postwar Vietnam. I’d been back in
SACHIKO AKAMA
By William Ehrhart ’73
Forty-three years ago, Marines
Bill Ehrhart (above, right) and
Ken Takenaga, fought together
in Vietnam (left) until both were
wounded by the same rocketpropelled grenade—Ken so seriously
that he had to be evacuated.
Their experience forged a bond
that has lasted until the present.
They returned to a Vietnam rich in
memories— but now also filled with
beauty, tranquillity, and new life.
1985 and again in 1990. But this trip was special for two reasons: I’d
be able to take my wife, Anne, with me this time, to share with her a
place she had only—but endlessly—heard about during our 30 years
of marriage. And I’d be traveling with my buddy, my comrade, who’d
literally been where I’d been and knew what I knew and needed no
explanations.
Our journey began, however, not in Vietnam, but in Japan. Ken
spent the first 15 years of his life in the city of Yatsushiro, Kyushu,
where he was raised by his maternal grandparents. Having seen
where I grew up in Perkasie, Pa., Ken wanted to show us where he’d
come from. We stood on the walls of the ruined feudal castle where
Ken had climbed and played as a child. We saw the local jail where
Ken’s grandfather had once been locked up for “overspending” on
election day (long before Ken was born). Though the house Ken grew
up in has been replaced by a newer structure, just across the street is
Kangyo-ji, the Buddhist temple where his grandparents’ graves are,
and where his will be some day.
We spent eight days in Japan, walking across the famous five-arch
swarthmore college bulletin
Kintai Bridge at Iwakuni (near where I had been stationed postin 43 years—but we found it. Completely renovated and refurbished,
Vietnam in 1969), touring magnificent Kumamoto Castle, luxuriating the house is now the business office for the four-star, six-story Duy
in a private onsen (hot springs spa) at Tsuetate, making rice paper art
Tan Hotel. The yard is a tiled driveway and parking area for the hotel
at Shirakawa Spring, enjoying a Shinto wedding we happened upon at with a motor-scooter rental operation and an outdoor coffee shop.
Aso Shrine, being decked out in traditional kimonos by a dressmaker Only the configuration of the windows and the location of the house
and her two teenaged daughters (the process takes nearly an hour),
itself allowed me to be certain we had the right place.
dolphin-watching in Hayasaki Strait, walking amidst the awesome
Indeed, aside from the ubiquitous cemeteries for the war dead
effects of the 1990 volcanic eruption of Mt. Fugendake.
and the occasional monument or statue, one has to look hard to find
Among the coolest things Ken and I did together was to give a talk any evidence of the American War (as the Vietnamese call it). The
about the Vietnam War and its aftermath to
population, doubled since 1975, is young,
the congregants of Toko-ji Zen Temple in
dynamic, and ambitious. There is new
Amakusa. Five years ago, at the request of
I’d be traveling with my buddy, my
construction everywhere. Roads, bridges,
Morinobu Okabe, 31st priest of the temple,
in the cities, in the countryside, 20-story
Ken and I had translated and adapted a poem comrade, who’d literally been where
office buildings, single-family homes.
by the late Shinmin Sakamura, which OkabeGrass-thatched roofs have been replaced by
san makes available free for visiting English
I’d been and knew what I knew and
ceramic tile. Most farmers plow their paddy
speakers. A good 50 people showed up for
fields with motorized if primitive tractors.
the talk, listening attentively for an hour, and needed no explanations.
Roads are paved, cars are commonplace,
then we all had a multicourse feast washed
and motor scooters and cell phones abound.
down with beer, sake, and shochu.
The beaches up and down the entire coast
of Vietnam are lined with resort hotels. VietBank and PetroVietnam
Then it was on to Vietnam. After a night in Saigon—where the
are juxtaposed with Hyundai and Sheraton. The gap-toothed bridge
street scene can only be described as “motor-scooter madness”—we
over the River of Perfumes that the Viet Cong blew up during Tet
flew to central Vietnam, the area between Hoi An and the 17th
has been rebuilt, and is lit nightly with an array of colored floodlights
parallel, where Ken and I had been stationed. We drove over the Hai
that makes the lighting on Philadelphia’s Ben Franklin Bridge look
Van Pass, a spectacular ride that had been charged with danger the
anemic.
first time we’d taken it in 1967. We climbed Marble Mountain, where
Anne, Ken, and I, together with photographer Sachiko Akama,
throughout the war the Viet Cong had maintained a field hospital
who traveled with us, visited a fish farm and an aquarium on Hon
right under the noses of the Americans at Da Nang. We drove over
Mieu, the Cham-built Hindu temples of Po Nagar (the oldest dating
the bridge that had once connected the rest of Hieu Nhon District to
back to the eighth century), the summer palace of Emperor Tu Duc,
the small fishing village of Phuoc Trac, displaced now by a string of
and the tomb of emperor Khai Dinh. We went swimming in the
luxury beach resorts.
turquoise waters of Nha Thang Bay, took a sunset cruise on the Song
In Hue City, the old Imperial capital of the Nguyen Dynasty, we
Cai, and ate a barbeque of fresh prawns, squid, beef, tomatoes, and
visited the Citadel, made famous by the Tet Offensive of 1968, and
cucumber on Hon Mun.
the Holy Lady Pagoda, where we saw the actual Austin automobile
One evening in Hue, we went for a boat ride on the River of
that Thich Quang Duc rode to Saigon in before immolating himself
Perfumes, accompanied by eight singers and musicians in traditional
to protest Ngo Dinh Diem’s suppression of Buddhists in 1963. (The
dress performing traditional folk music. One can hardly imagine,
car is visible in the iconic photo by Malcolm Browne ’52.) We drove
let alone describe, the beauty, the profound tranquility, of such an
up to the old DMZ and descended into the tunnels of Vinh Moc,
experience—especially for two ex-Marines who had nearly died next
where an entire village of 70 families had lived underground for six
to that river so many years ago.
years to escape U.S. bombardment.
Later that night, Ken and I stood on a hotel balcony overlooking
But the most amazing experience was finding the very building
Hue. We could see the university that had been used as a refugee
where Ken and I had been when we were wounded. During the
center, the roof of the building we’d been in, now dwarfed by the hotel
war, it had been some bigwig’s mansion—the mayor or provincial
built around it, the roofs of what had been the MACV compound.
governor—a two-and-a-half story house surrounded by a yard and
But the streets were crowded with noisy, jostling, energetic people.
a wall. The bigwig had skipped town when the shooting started, so
The river flowed with colorful tour boats. The bridge glowed yellow,
we Marines had moved in and were using it as a battalion command
then green, then blue. We did not speak. There was nothing to say.
post. We’d spent several days trying to dislodge some North
This is what we had come to see. A country. Not a war.
Vietnamese from the houses across the street and were just marking
time that morning, waiting for flame tanks to come and burn the
Bill Ehrhart ’73 teaches at the Haverford School in suburban
block down. Ken and I were posted in a second-story bedroom. I was Philadelphia. His latest book is The Bodies Beneath the Table (Adastra
making a cup of C-ration coffee, and he was cleaning his rifle when a
Press, 2010). To read a fuller account of his trip, with additional photos,
North Vietnamese soldier put a B-40 through the window.
go to “Ken and Bill’s Excellent Adventure” at www.wdehrhart.com.
It took some work to locate the house—a lot can and does change
october 2011
67
Robert Odenweller ’59
JUSTIN BAITER
was awarded the Royal Philatelic Society London Crawford
Medal and the Royal Philatelic Society of New Zealand Collins
Award for the book The Postage Stamps of New Zealand,
1855–1873—The Chalon Head Issues, in
2011. Uniquely, he was awarded both in
2005 for the book The Stamps and Postal
History of Nineteenth Century Samoa .
Odenweller received the world’s highest
philatelic honor, signing the Roll of Distinguished Philatelists (RDP) in 1991.
Other major awards include the Smithsonian Philatelic Achievement Award,
the Alfred F. Lichtenstein Memorial
Award, the American Philatelic Society
(APS) Luff Award, and both the FIP (Fédération Internationale
de Philatélie) Research Medal and its Medal for Service. His exhibits have won both the APS Champion of Champions and
the FIP Grand Prix d’Honneur. Odenweller has long been a
special overseas representative for the Royal Philatelic Society
London, is the society’s first and only Honorary Fellow from
the United States, and is a member of the National Postal Museum Council of Philatelists. He edits the prestigious journal
The Collectors Club Philatelist.
october 2011
61
Terese Loeb Kreuzer’s [’64],
COURTESY OF TERESE LOEB KREUZER
reporting on the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act and its passage by Congress in December 2010 after
eight years of struggle, won Downtown Express, a weekly Manhattan newspaper, an award for political
coverage from the New York Press Association. One of the judges said: “I was
struck by the deep reporting that went
into both the human-interest and procedural coverage of the Zadroga bill. I felt
like I was on the bus with the activists
who went to DC to lobby for its passage.”
Founder of the Travel Arts Syndicate,
Kreuzer previously thought of herself primarily as a travel writer—not a political
reporter—but said, “I found that my travel writing experience
helped me to convey the anxiety, weariness, determination and,
finally, the euphoria that gave life to the Zadroga story.”
Kreuzer continues to write travel articles and to publish photographs in newspapers, magazines, and books around the world.
She is co-author of the book How to Move to Canada: A Primer
for Americans (2006).
october 2011
63
class notes
Roy Weintraub ’64
DUKE UNIVERSITY PHOTOGRAPHY
has been named a Distinguished Fellow of the History of Economics Society (HES). Weintraub, a Duke University faculty
member since 1970, was nominated for “promoting an awareness of … the larger social and intellectual context in which economics
developed.” The award citation notes that
his primary research and influential historiographic approach constitute an exceptional lifetime achievement and
concludes that “few modern scholars
have traversed the terrain from mathematics via economics into the humanities.” Originally a mathematician,
Weintraub turned to history and the investigation of how economics evolved into a mathematical science later in his career. He is also one of few economists
honored with a National Humanities Center fellowship. Weintraub has published 10 books, including How Economics Became a Mathematical Science (2002), which won best book
awards from both the HES and the European Society for the
History of Economic Thought.
64
swarthmore college bulletin
Connecting Class Notes
and Social Media
Alongside the growing surge of social media’s popularity, Class Notes are still the most-read section of the
Bulletin. Increasingly, however, your class secretaries
are finding a valuable connectivity between the two.
Some class secretaries are using Facebook and the
College’s password-protected online community to
gather news about their classmates; others are creating
class websites. Alumni with Facebook group pages
have found that the venue is a powerful way to
reconnect and to support each other. The interplay
between Class Notes and social media is also strengthening that bond.
Each serves a purpose. Resources such as Facebook
keep you and your classmates connected all the time.
And yet, when you pull the Bulletin from your mailbox
each quarter, you can be sure that along with all the
other College news, you will be able to immerse yourself
in news about your classmates and the other alumni
included in Class Notes.
In future issues, we will begin to incorporate the
Facebook icon into class headings as your secretaries
notify us that they rely on Facebook for news or that
your class has a Facebook group page. In their columns,
the secretaries are also encouraged to let classmates
know that they cull news from the Swarthmore online
community. And of course, emails—sent directly to
your secretary—are still a welcome way to share news!
october 2011
65
class notes
Arlene Zarembka ’70
LIFETOUCH
is the recipient of the ACLU–Eastern Missouri Civil Liberties
Champion Award for defending civil liberties and rights
through her law practice. Her many awards include the 1998
Clarence Darrow Public Interest Advocate Award, 2008 ACLU–Eastern Missouri Extraordinary Volunteer Service
Award, and 2009 Social Justice Hero
Award. Zarembka was one of the leaders
of the Privacy Rights Education Project/
PROMO from 1987–2006, drafting and
advocating for numerous bills involving
privacy rights, LGBT rights, reproductive rights, and hate crimes. She is a
member of the National Academy of
Elder Law Attorneys, ACLU-Eastern Missouri Legal Committee, and Alzheimer’s Association Public Policy Committee.
She is a cooperating attorney for ACLU-Eastern Missouri and
the National Center for Lesbian Rights. She is author of The
Urban Housing Crisis: Social, Economic, and Legal Issues and
Proposals (1990) and co-author of To Establish Justice: Citizenship and the Constitution (2004).
68
swarthmore college bulletin
Wilma Lewis ’78
TAMI HEILMAN, V.I. DEPT. OF THE INTERIOR
has been nominated by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the United States Senate to serve as a federal district
court judge in the U.S. Virgin Islands. She is the first woman to
serve as a federal judge in the Virgin Islands. This is the fourth presidential appointment for Lewis, who hails from the
Virgin Islands. Lewis was the United
States Attorney for Washington, D.C.,
from 1998 to 2001. Since 2009, she has
served as the assistant secretary for land
and minerals management in the U.S.
Department of the Interior. From 1995
to 1998, Lewis was the inspector general
for that department, the first African American to hold the position. Her many awards include the Janet Reno Torchbearer
Award, Charlotte E. Ray Award, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Dream Keepers Award, Bethune-Dubois Institute Award, and
the National Black Prosecutors Association Founders’ Award.
In 2003, Lewis was featured in Harvard Law Bulletin as one of
50 female graduates who used their legal education to “take
them to extraordinary places.”
october 2011
69
ERIC MICHAEL JOHNSON / THE NEW YORK TIMES / REDUX
class notes
Write Out Loud
For All to See
BY A SIMPLE PUBLIC ACT OF
COMPASSION, RUTH SERGEL ’84
SPURRED A CITY TO ACTION.
70
Nineteen-year old factory worker Beckie
Neubauer could have had no idea that she would
draw her last breath on March 25, 1911, when
fire consumed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in
Lower East Side, New York City. That day, 146
workers—mostly young, female immigrants—
burned alive or jumped to their deaths as firemen
scrambled to reach the blazing floor.
A hundred years later, Beckie is memorialized
in an intricate, pink-and-blue sidewalk chalking,
showing her age, address, and death date—adorned
with flowers, birds, and hearts—all drawn with a
careful, caring hand.
It is by chalking that Ruth Sergel (www.streetpictures.org) honors the lives of Beckie and all the
other victims of New York City’s deadliest workplace tragedy before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Sergel, a Lower East Side resident and native
to the area now known as Tribeca, grew up with
stories of the fire, but it was only after reading the
book Triangle: The Fire That Changed America
that she discovered how many of the victims had
once lived close to her home on East Third Street.
“I’ve always been interested in how cold, im-
personal facts like an address can evoke the most
emotional response,” Sergel says. So on the anniversary of the fire in 2004, Sergel and her
friends chalked victims’ names, ages, and addresses in front of their former homes all across
downtown Manhattan. Since then, this simple act
of remembrance has grown into a burgeoning
public art project named “Chalk!”
“Chalk!” has caught on with everyone—
mothers, daughters, teachers, schoolchildren, and
even the occasional descendant of a Triangle victim. “Once you chalk a building,” Sergel says.
“you identify this building with a life and a death.”
Dispelling the misconception that big cities
such as New York are anonymous and impersonal, “Chalk!” reveals what has been there all
along: a “compassionate” community with a conscience and a long memory.
Sergel discovered that people were already
“intensely passionate” about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire; “Chalk!” simply provided the outlet.
History also played a role. The fire occurred
after the 1909 “Uprising of the 20,000,” when
young, immigrant shirtwaist workers went on
swarthmore college bulletin
Sergel is founder of the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition, a
national network of more than 250 partners for educational, activist,
and artistic actions that commemorate community tragedies.
strike against inhumane working conditions
until, says Sergel, the “city turned its back on them.”
“It was an easily preventable tragedy,” she
continues. “It’s heartbreaking that these young
strikers were brave enough to come to the United
States and work long hours to make life better for
themselves and their families. But nobody cared
enough to put sprinklers—readily available at the
time—in the building.”
The fire sparked outrage from the national
labor movement, manifested through strikes and
sit-ins and the emergence of a new political will
for change. Politicians previously indifferent to
these issues took them on, improving factory
working conditions, including fire safety regulations. But Sergel believes that these “old forms” of
dissent—although not necessarily ineffective—
need reform. Her passion is to help recreate this
october 2011
old stamina for change by providing opportunities through projects such as “Chalk!”
“People hunger for constructive civic engagement,” Sergel says. “Going from thoughts and
ideas to action is a muscle that must be exercised.”
To Sergel’s delight, people continue to flex
their civic muscles yearly. Downtown New Yorkers participate in chalking. Community organizers in other cities such as Los Angeles, San
Francisco, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., have
already appropriated the project to remember
similar tragedies in their communities.
Before starting “Chalk,” Sergel was involved in
a people’s video and oral history project called
“Voices of 9.11.” In a private video booth, witnesses from New York; Pennsylvania; Washington, D.C.; and the Pentagon recounted their
memories, creating a complex narrative and fill-
ing gaps in the communal memory.
“If one forgot a detail in their testimonial,
someone else would fill it in,” Sergel says.
Although the actual parallels between 9/11
and the factory fire are few, the cause of death in
both cases has an eerie similarity and the act of
witnessing and the feeling of helplessness are
similar. “Seeing these people coming out of the
windows—and the little that we could do at that
point—was horrible,” Sergel says.
It is a sense of community empowerment and
strength in solidarity that unifies both projects.
“We can feel very isolated in our political and
social beliefs. You learn to censor yourself,” she
says. “But when you’re participating in a project
like ‘Chalk,’ you’re busting open that taboo.
You’re in a very public act, on a city street, writing out loud for everyone to see. Then you realize
other people are doing the same thing.
“If you make a work of art with other people
about something you’re trying to understand, it’s
very powerful—a tiny part of a much larger engagement that people need.”
—Maki Somosot ’12
71
class notes
Darko Tresnjak ’88
ROGER CASTONGUAY
has been named the fifth artistic director of Hartford Stage, a
theater known for its production of original and classic shows
for nearly 50 years. Renowned for his direction of theater and
opera, Tresnjak has received awards
from the San Diego Theatre Critics Circle for outstanding direction of Cyrano
de Bergerac, The Winter’s Tale, and Pericles as well as an award for excellence in
artistic direction. This year, he directed
a national tour of The Merchant of
Venice, featuring F. Murray Abraham as
Shylock; and Titus Andronicus at the
Stratford Shakespeare Festival. Tresnjak’s work has been seen at the Royal
Shakespeare Company, The Old Globe, Los Angeles Opera,
Joseph Papp Public Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival,
Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, Huntington Theatre Company,
Theatre for a New Audience, and Williamstown Theatre Festival, among others.
72
swarthmore college bulletin
Sabrina Martinez ’92
DEBI WALLACE, BARFIELD PHOTOGRAPHY
is the recipient of Houston Woman Magazine’s 2011 Broad
Shoulders Award, for which she was nominated by AVANCE
Houston, an organization that promotes the value of education, better parenting, and health to influence the lives of low-income families.
Martinez has been on the AVANCE
board since 2009, drawn to the organization because of its commitment to
Head Start—an early childhood education program that she was enrolled in as
a child. She is the chair of AVANCE’s
Human Resources Committee and
helped develop diversity, succession, social media, and employee-wellness policies for the organization. She is also senior adviser for global
workforce-planning in the Human Resources Department at
ConocoPhillips and previously has been involved in vendor
management, retiree benefit management, health and welfare
benefits design, and recruiting. Martinez is vice chair for the
United Way of Texas Gulf Coast Young Leaders Program and
past president of Swarthmore’s Alumni Council.
october 2011
73
COURTESY OF ARTSPHORIA
class notes
Playtime with a Snap
WOODWORKING ARTISANS JOHN AND
JANE GREENBERG KOSTICK ’88 HAVE
CREATED TETRAXIS, A MAGNETIC
GEOMETRY PUZZLE FOR ALL AGES.
76
Inviting the inner child to re-emerge for playtime, the colorful displays at Toy Fair 2011 in
New York enticed industry professionals to play
hide-and-seek on three expansive floors.
During mid-February, toy creators and merchants at the Jacob Javits Convention Center
dazzled potential buyers with eye-catching gimmicks—from an inflatable remote-controlled flying fish to a shiny red, miniature piano and an
oversized LEGO-constructed car. In a basementfloor booth, John and Jane Kostick encouraged
visitors to play with their magnetic Tetraxis
geometry puzzle. (Pictured at left: The Kosticks’
son James plays with the Tetraxis ® toy).
“If you put the pieces together in less than
one minute, you’ll win a free one,” Jane said to
Tom Cutrofello, mechanical puzzle correspondent for Games Magazine.
Twelve identically shaped sticks, in four colors, magnetically connect in the Kosticks’
hands-on learning puzzle, which enhances the
exploration of symmetry and color combina-
tions. The toy increases spatial understanding;
problem-solving skills; intellectual and manual
dexterity; and intergenerational, interoffice, and
intercommunity connections.
On the first day of the fair, the crowd around
the Kosticks’ table cheered Cutrofello and others,
who claimed their prizes after solving the puzzle.
Some recalled solving other math-based puzzles
and used that experience to handle the Tetraxis
challenge.
“That’s a fun toy, especially when you get the
method down,” says Jon Goehring, who runs
Toyworks in Santa Rosa, Calif., with Cristi
Ronchelli.
The Tetraxis design, first crafted as bronze
and wooden sculptures, is just one of the geometric constructions that the Kosticks have created. Their customized furniture, cabinetry, and
garden accessories are also based on geometric
configurations.
“Many of the skills we’ve acquired as builders
and craftsmen—to think in details and problem
swarthmore college bulletin
Twelve identically shaped sticks, in four colors, magnetically
connect in the Kosticks’ hands-on learning puzzle, which
enhances the exploration of symmetry and color combinations.
solve—have been critically important in developing the toy version and overseeing production.
But the fabrication process is different, because
Tetraxis is manufactured out of injection-molded
ABS (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene) plastic, a
more high-tech process than we are accustomed
to and one we really knew very little about when
we began developing the product in 2009,” Jane
says. “We could never have done it without the
help of the product development firm in Watertown, Mass., called DaTuM3D: Design to Manufacture. We worked closely with the company’s
industrial designers and engineers to develop
our product.”
Designers and woodworking craftsmen with
october 2011
an interest in mathematics, the Kosticks officially
launched their new company, KO Sticks LLC, in
August 2010. A pilot run of 2,000 toys, in the fall,
quickly sold out. The next production in Xiamen,
China, delivered the second batch in March for
distribution in Switzerland and Australia, where
the puzzle was displayed at another toy fair. A
small community of artists, primarily furniture
makers who work in cooperative studios in an
old industrial building—where the Kosticks are
based in Medford, Mass.—offered input on the
package design.
Patricia Marx, who gave Tetraxis a top rating
in the category “Educational Toy That Could Pass
for a Real Toy” wrote in The New Yorker (Dec. 6,
2010): “It’s challenging but not throw-it-acrossthe-room challenging. Bonus points for knowing
that the structure is arranged along directions
common in nature, similar to carbon or silicon
atoms. This factoid also makes for a dandy conversation stopper.”
Some game players have even completed the
puzzle blindfolded.
“Once you learn the puzzle, it gets easier and
easier,” says Marx. “It always surprises me when I
see people struggle with it at first. Then, when
they get good at it, they are surprised they initially found it hard.”
“The toy continues to be satisfying to assemble even after it becomes easy,” she says. “One of
John’s friends wrote me this morning and said,
‘I keep mine on my kitchen table, and everyone
who comes over has to pick it up and put it together again. Yes, it’s like an exercise in life—
things fall apart and then you have to build it up
again stick by stick. It works. It’s a meditation.”
—Andrea Hammer
77
STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT, AND CIRCULATION
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
Publication title: Swarthmore College Bulletin
Publication number: 0888-2126
Filing date: Oct. 13, 2011
Issue frequency: August, October, January,
April, July
Number of issues published annually: 5
Annual subscription price: none
Office of publication: 500 College Avenue,
Swarthmore PA 19081-1397
General business office: 500 College Avenue,
Swarthmore PA 19081-1397
Publisher: Swarthmore College, 500 College
Avenue, Swarthmore PA 19081-1397.
Editor: Jeffrey Lott, 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore PA 19081-1397
Managing editor: none
Owner: Swarthmore College, 500 College Avenue,
Swarthmore PA 19081-1397
Known bondholders, mortgagees, or other security
october 2011
holders holding one percent or more of total
amount of bonds, mortages, or other securities:
none.
12. The purpose, function, and nonprofit status of
this organization has not changed during the
preceding 12 months.
14. Issue date for circulation data: July 2011
15. a. Total number of copies (net press run): 25,492
b. (1) Paid or requested mail subscriptions: 22,598
b. (4) Other classes mailed: 1,352 (ISAL)
c. Total paid and/or requested circulation: 23,950
d. (3) Free distribution by mail: 22
d. (4) Free distribution outside the mail: 1,417
e. Total free distribution: 1,439
f. Total distribution: 25,389
g. Copies not distributed: 103
h. Total: 25,492
i. Percent paid and/or requested circulation: 94.3%
79
q+a
A Tightly Choreographed Life
By Carol Brévart-Demm
The relationship between Carol Nackenoff
and her field of scholarship was by no
means a case of love at first sight. As an
undergraduate at Smith College, she
considered a major in English, but her
father talked her out of it. She thought about
music, history, and French but rejected
each. Ultimately, a charismatic professor of
political philosophy lured her into the field
she has been researching and teaching for the
past 19 years at Swarthmore and, before that,
on the faculties of Rutgers University and
Bard College.
Now Richter Professor of Political
Science, just completing terms as coordinator
of the Environmental Studies Program and
division chair for interdisciplinary studies,
the vivacious Nackenoff is passionate about
her research, which examines late 19th- and
early 20th-century phenomena such as the
relationship between Americans’ economic
and employment experiences and their
belief in the American Dream, competing
notions of citizenship, and the role organized
women played in building the American
state. These interests are reflected in
Nackenoff ’s publications, which include her
book The Fictional Republic: Horatio Alger
and American Political Discourse (Oxford,
1994); and Jane Addams and the Practice
of Democracy (University of Illinois Press,
2009), for which she was both a contributor
and co-editor.
Passionate about music, Nackenoff
learned piano and violin as a small child, and
thanks to the voice lessons she took starting
in graduate school, she sings first soprano—
both as a soloist and chorist—in operatic,
early music, and classical performances. In
retirement (for which she has no firm date),
she plans to build a harpsichord and fulfill
a desire she’s nurtured since sixth grade—to
learn to play the oboe.
80
swarthmore college bulletin
What appeals to you most about political science?
I’m drawn to great questions of political philosophy—such as the
relationship of the individual to community—as well as questions
of justice and how to design a political system that people willingly
consent to. I appreciate that political science attends to history and
historical patterning. I want to make sense of political fears and
struggles of other eras and love showing how they left ideational and
institutional legacies.
What are you working on currently?
I’m examining Americans’ perceptions of citizenship during the
period from 1875 to 1925—a time of intense conflict over inclusion
of women, African Americans, Native Americans, and immigrants
in the polity. I like to unpack archival materials to try to reconstruct
political culture and world views. In this project, activist groups
in which women are heavily involved figure in virtually every
chapter. After teaching law for so many years, I’ve also been able to
incorporate a dimension on court battles and legal struggles into my
work. I’ve also been publishing a bit on constitutional law issues in
recent years.
What is your favorite course to teach?
My honors Constitutional Law seminar has become a favorite. I
began teaching constitutional law around 1990 and, in the early years,
didn’t know much more than what was on the syllabus, but law just
kept getting more interesting for me. I also love teaching my newest
course Environmental Politics and Policy. That has become a real
passion.
If you could have had another career, what might it have been?
I’d like to run away and join the Metropolitan Opera Chorus. If
I didn’t think I were too old to do it, my fantasy would be to sing
professionally.
If you were given the chance to write someone’s biography, whose would
you choose?
Probably a biography of Associate Supreme Court Justice David
Souter. I found him to be an intriguing, active member of the
Court—often one of the few recent justices who thought in ways that
made sense to me. I’m sorry he retired.
If you were to host a TV show, which would it be?
One of the MSNBC news shows. The Rachel Maddow Show would
be fun.
If you could switch places with any head of state in the world, who
would you choose?
I’d rather be on the Supreme Court. People believe that chief
executives have much more power than they really do. I believe we’ve
fallen into making far more political promises than any individual
in one branch of government can deliver on. On the Court, you have
the chance to think out loud about legal principles and their meaning
and to try to reason about the meanings of terms that may be
aspirational—like equal protection—while still adhering to bounds
set by law and precedent.
At age 8, Carol Nackenoff took her first trip west with her family. Quite the
cowgirl, she evidently felt comfortable astride this bucking bronco at a
Colorado ranch. So what if the bronco isn’t real?
What’s the craziest spontaneous action you ever took?
I’m less spontaneous than I’d like to be, but some years ago, I had
the idea of turning off my upstairs neighbors’ electricity. I lived in an
apartment, and their music was too loud and they wouldn’t turn it
down, even late at night. I came up with the idea but didn’t have the
guts to execute it. My husband did that. And the neighbors didn’t
have a key to the room where the circuit breakers were. They had to
call the janitor. We did it several times before they realized what was
happening (they finally were evicted for nonpayment of rent). I’d like
to be more spontaneous, but my life is pretty tightly choreographed.
What are some of your other interests?
I’m somewhat maniacal about getting my 1,000 lap shirt at the
Swarthmore Swim Club every summer. I did it in nine days this year.
I also like to make my own herb-wine–based vinegars, bake, read
really good novels. I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by Jonathan
Franzen. I also love to travel. In July, I visited Central Europe to look
at the programs our environmental studies students attend there—in
Krakow and a new program in Brno, Czech Republic—and then I
stayed on and went to Vienna, Budapest, and Prague on vacation
with my husband. I’ve often said that I will travel anywhere where no
one is shooting at me.
New at the
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New Swarthmore LEAGUE® Collegiate Wear is sported by (individual photos,
clockwise from top left) Sean Bryant ’13, Genny Pezzola ’12, Noah Sterngold ’14,
Mariam Vonderheide ’13, Marc Rogalski ’12, and head coaches Eric Wagner (men’s
soccer) and Renee DeVarney (softball). The clothing features super-soft fabrics
for that “ultimate vintage feel.” Plus it’s made by a local company in fair-labor
workplaces. Shipped anywhere. Order online or by phone at (610) 328-7756.
Swarthmore College Alumni Bulletin 2011-10-01
The Swarthmore College Bulletin is the official alumni magazine of the college. It evolved from the Garnet Letter, a newsletter published by the Alumni Association beginning in 1935. After World War II, college staff assumed responsibility for the periodical, and in 1952 it was renamed the Swarthmore College Bulletin. (The renaming apparently had more to do with postal regulations than an editorial decision. Since 1902, the College had been calling all of its mailed periodicals the Swarthmore College Bulletin, with each volume spanning an academic year and typically including a course catalog issue and an annual report issue, with a varying number of other special issues.)
The first editor of the Swarthmore College Bulletin alumni issue was Kathryn “Kay” Bassett ’35. After a few years, Maralyn Orbison Gillespie ’49 was appointed editor and held the position for 36 years, during which she reshaped the mission of the magazine from focusing narrowly on Swarthmore College to reporting broadly on the college's impact on the world at large. Gillespie currently appears on the masthead as Editor Emerita.
Today, the quarterly Swarthmore College Bulletin is an award-winning alumni magazine sent to all alumni, parents, faculty, staff, friends of the College, and members of the senior class. This searchable collection spans every issue from 1935 to the present.
Swarthmore College
2011-10-01
76 pages
reformatted digital
The class notes section of The Bulletin has been extracted in this collection to protect the privacy of alumni. To view the complete version of The Bulletin, contact Friends Historical Library.