Swarthmore College Alumni Bulletin 2012-01-01

Rebranding the Republican Right

swarthmore
swarthmore college
bulletin | january 2012

campus view

Dusk falls silently on the Ville.
The new town clock marks time
as the Michael’s sign on the
half-timbered tower whispers
stories to Swarthmoreans.
Another year is upon us.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS

departments

24

5: COLLECTION

• Strategic plan approved
• TEDx to come to Swarthmore
• Quaker revival for the College?
• Occupy movement reaches campus
• A new face at the Bulletin
• Garnet sports news

37: CONNECTIONS
•
•
•
•

Alumni Council hard at work
Lax Conference—save the date
Sign up for Lifelong Learning
Souvenirs of Garnet Weekend

42: CLASS NOTES

The world according to Swarthmore

47: IN MEMORIAM

Farewell to cherished friends

52: IN MY LIFE
It Was in Another Lifetime.
A letter from Afghanistan
By Gregg Davis ’80

62: BOOKS + ARTS

Stephen Tignor ’92, High Strung: Björn
Borg, John McEnroe, and the Untold Story
of Tennis’s Fiercest Rivalry, Harper 2011
Reviewed by Michael Mullan

72: Q+A:
Why is Bob Barr So Deeply Affected?
There’s a new scholarship in his name.
By Jeffrey Lott

profiles
56: The Thrill of the Hunt

Edward Frost ’73 knows exactly where
to look to uncover the juiciest facts.
By Andrea Juncos ’01

68: She’s Got the Beats

Ashley Brandt ’07 moves through the
worlds of music and medicine to her
own rhythm.
By Audree Penner

16

in this issue

features
16: Homage to the Past,
Invitation to the Present

Craig Williamson creates a bridge
across centuries with a new translation
of Beowulf.
By Carol Brévart-Demm

20: Fashion’s Darling

Joseph Altuzarra ’05 has emerged
as a hot New York designer.
By Elizabeth Redden ’05

32

24: What Is Africa To Me?

Forty years after serving in the Peace
Corps in Gambia, Clinton Etheridge took
his family on a pilgrimage to Africa.
By Clinton Etheridge ’69

32: Rebranding the Right

The Tea Party and its sympathizers are
virtually one and the same as another
highly visible political movement with low
approval ratings: the Christian Right.
By Tom Krattenmaker

20

JIM GRAHAM

Left: During Fashion Week in New York, designer
Joseph Altuzarra ’05 presented his Spring 2012
line. His models—even this blue-eyed blond—
sported painted-on dark eyebrows. To see
some of the clothes, turn to page 20.
On the cover: The Republican Party has taken a big
gulp of tea this year, but will the Tea Party boat stay
afloat through November? Illustration by Nancy
Harrison. Story on page 32.

parlor talk
After more than 21
years working on this
magazine, I’m handing
it over to a new editor,
Sherri Kimmel, this
month (see p. 13). This
is my 85th and final
issue of the Swarthmore
College Bulletin.
It’s with mixed emotions that I relinquish
this job—even though it was my choice to
do so. After all these years, there’s still a thrill
in cracking open the carton and pulling out
each new issue, all shiny and smelling like
the printing plant. When this edition arrives,
I’ll savor that moment with full attention.
I’ll miss working with the great team in
the Communications Office and the many
fine writers—including numerous alumni,
a few of whom I mentored as students—
whose work has appeared in these pages.
My interactions with our creative designers,
photographers, and illustrators have also

STUART WATSON

on the web
Listen: Political scientist
Keith Reeves ’88 says the
magnitude of the black
prison population is a crisis
that has profound
consequences for the social
fabric of urban families and
neighborhoods. http://
media.swarthmore.edu/faculty_lectures/   

been exciting and rewarding. Together, we
have brought you the stories of Swarthmore.
I have to keep reminding myself that I’m
not leaving the College. I don’t have to hand
in my I.D. card just yet; I’m just moving
across the lawn to a desk in the Friends
Historical Library, where I will write and edit
a new book about Swarthmore. Look for it as
we begin our sesquicentennial celebration in
2014.
Editing the Bulletin has been the source
of countless interactions with Swarthmore
faculty and staff members, with students, but
particularly with alumni. You have not only
been our readers, you are also contributors,
critics, and friends—and in all of these roles,
you have enriched this magazine and the
life of the College. I don’t think I will miss
the quarterly deadlines, but I will surely
miss serving you, the readers. Thanks for
everything.
—Jeffrey Lott
Listen: Biologist David Page ’78 discusses how
recent genomic studies have revealed the Y
chromosome’s architectural beauty, evolutionary
dynamism, and critical role in male fertility.  
http://media.swarthmore.edu/featured_events/
Listen: Classicist Grace Ledbetter examines how
George Ballenchine’s ballet Apollo, with a score
by Igor Stravinsky, provided a new foundation
for ballet in the 20th century by transforming
the Greek myth of Apollo and merging ballet
with Greco-Roman classicism. http://media.
swarthmore.edu/faculty_lectures/

contributors
Clinton Etheridge ’69 was a central figure in the early days of SASS, the AfricanAmerican student group. His 2005 Bulletin article “The Crucible of Character” described
the black student occupation of the Admissions Office in January 1969. He recently
retired from a career in banking and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he is
planning to write a longer memoir about his African experiences.
Andrea Juncos ’01 is the editor and director of communications at New York Law School
in Manhattan. She is also the vice chair of the board at Girls Write Now, a writing-based
mentoring program for high school girls, where she had the privilege of serving as a
mentor for seven years. She lives in Brooklyn and participates in a local writers group
regularly.

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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Phone: (610) 328-8435
Or e-mail: alumnirecords@swarthmore.edu.
The Swarthmore College Bulletin
(ISSN 0888-2126), of which this is volume
CVIX, number 3, is published in August,
October, January, April, and July by
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Swarthmore College.
Printed in U.S.A.

Tom Krattenmaker is a regular contributor to USAToday’s “On Religion” commentary
page, where he writes about religion and public life. His work has also appeared in
recent years in Salon, the Los Angeles Times, The Oregonian, The Huffington Post, Beliefnet,
and the Philadelphia Inquirer. His book about the influence of evangelical Christianity in
professional sports, Onward Christian Athletes, was published in 2009. From 1995 until
2006, Krattenmaker was director of news and information at Swarthmore.
4

swarthmore college bulletin

collection
MAKING ART

Watch a time-lapse video
of the installation at
http://bit.ly/eakinsredux.

january 2012

ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS

Early December visitors to the Old
Tarble art studio were startled to
find a looming three-dimensional
rendering of the Thomas Eakins
painting The Gross Clinic—created by
students in Assistant Professor of
Studio Arts Logan Grider’s first-year
seminar Making Art. The students
reclaimed a week’s worth of cast-off
cardboard from campus Dumpsters,
then used utility knives, hot glue,
and black and white paint to build the
16-foot-high interpretation of the
painting.
In preparation for the assignment,
one student had studied Eakins’
painting in Scheuer Family Professor
of Humanities Michael Cothren’s firstyear seminar Making Art History. Then
the class viewed the actual work on
display at the Pennsylvania Academy
of Fine Arts and visited the Inova
Heart and Vascular Institute, near
Washington, D.C., to observe and
sketch a double-bypass surgery.
To create the images appearing
in the painting, students made
photocopies of their own faces, which
they fashioned into three-dimensional
figures for the piece. Both sections of
the course worked on the sculpture,
which resulted in some students’ work
being altered or even taken apart by
members of a later class.
Taking about two weeks to
complete, the result was aweinspiring and decidedly sinister—
dominated by the huge figure of Dr.
Samuel Gross, who seemed to step out
of the work brandishing a huge scalpel
like a weapon. By mid-December, with
glue beginning to loosen its hold, the
ephemeral work was ready to be taken
down—“otherwise, it will come down
by itself,” Grider said—and returned
to the Dumpsters whence it came.
—Carol Brévart-Demm

5

collection

PHILLIP ST

ERN ’84

STARTING FROM STRENGTH

BOARD APPROVES STRATEGIC PLAN

At its December meeting, the Board of Managers approved a comprehensive set of strategic directions that builds on the College’s acknowledged strengths and emphasizes its core values.
The strategic plan’s six major recommendations encourage curricular innovation while preserving intellectual rigor; envision
Swarthmore as a model residential community for the 21st century;
support faculty excellence in teaching, scholarship, and artistic production; affirm the College’s commitments to admit and support a
diverse student body; urge the creation of an Institute for Liberal Arts
to strengthen liberal arts education at the College and in the world
beyond; and seek to engage alumni throughout their lives—especially
through greater alumni-student involvement.
Adoption of the plan follows more than 18 months of research
and self-study that drew faculty, staff, students, and alumni into
hundreds of conversations about the College’s position in American
higher education, its sources of strength, and the uncertain economic
and higher education environment that Swarthmore faces today and
in the future.
“Scores of faculty, staff, students, and Board members invested
untold hours in our strategic planning process,” said Gil Kemp ’72,
chair of the Strategic Planning Council. “Why? Because we believe
that doing so will make Swarthmore an even stronger institution as it
embraces the challenges and opportunities of the next decade.”
All of the major recommendations are underpinned by more specific suggestions that will be explored in an implementation phase
beginning in the first half of 2012. Some, such as a mandate to create
6

a comprehensive diversity plan,
will be undertaken forthwith; others will be studied to determine their
feasibility and cost.
It is expected that a major fundraising campaign will be mounted in the
near future to finance and implement
the plan. “We must be vigilant about our
finances, grateful for the support of our
alumni, and realistic about our plans,” the
document states. “So as we move forward,
two principles will guide implementation
of this plan: 1) pay as we go, and 2) start
small, evaluate progress, and slowly grow
any programs or initiatives that require
significant resources only when we can afford to do so.”
Swarthmore’s values were central to the creation of the plan, and
every aspect of the process was designed to keep these in the forefront of the discussion. The final planning document describes these
values as having been “derived from our Quaker founders.” They are:
“respect for the individual, decision-making by consensus, simple living, social responsibility and justice, generous giving, and the peaceful settlement of disputes.”
The College’s key strengths as an educational institution are listed
as:
• Our singular commitment to academic rigor and creativity
• Our desire to provide access and opportunity for all students, regardless of their financial circumstances
•
Our diverse and vibrant community of students, faculty,
staff, and alumni
• Our conviction that applied knowledge should be used to improve
the world
“I’ve been involved in other strategic planning efforts but never
have I seen such a consensus of opinion about an institution’s core
values,” said President Rebecca Chopp. “It was remarkably affirming
to go through this exercise together and emerge with a clear set of
guiding principles and values to help shape our future direction.”
As the plan was developed during 2010 and 2011, the current financial and educational environment weighed heavily on the minds
of members of the planning council. The council comprised more
than 25 members of the Board, faculty, staff, and the alumni and
student bodies. It oversaw the work of four working groups, each of
which included members of the planning council and other members
drawn from the College community who brought special interest
or expertise to the area being studied. In all, more than 80 persons
served on one or more of these committees. It is estimated that well
over 1,000 people participated in a face-to-face conversation about
the College’s strategic direction. Hundreds more submitted comments and questions online.
The plan acknowledges several “significant issues that Swarthmore
must address.” These include not only the uncertain financial environment, which requires additional financial aid for many families
but also changing demographics and differences in preparation for
college, the demands of environmental sustainability, and “domestic
critiques of the liberal arts, even as international interest grows.”
swarthmore college bulletin

To support liberal arts education at
Swarthmore and strengthen it both in the
United States and abroad, the plan proposes the creation of an Institute for the Future
of the Liberal Arts at the College. It states
that “higher education on the whole has
done very little generative thinking about
its future. At Swarthmore, we are committed to encouraging and taking part in this
important work.... As a leader in liberal arts
education, we must be vigilant in analyzing
the pressures and opportunities for liberal
arts education.”
The recommendations conclude with an
acknowledgement of the critical role that
alumni play in “the College’s future and its
place in higher education. Our ability to
provide an outstanding academic experience for our students, to maintain and enhance our position of leadership in liberal
arts education, to promote our reputation
and identity worldwide, and to raise money
to support these objectives necessarily depend on alumni engagement and concomitant philanthropy.”
The definition of “alumni engagement”
is considerably broadened in the plan—and
although financial support of the College
remains key, there is also a commitment to
offer alumni “deeper, more generative relationships with the College and each other;
more enriching academic experiences;
and more active connections with current
students, thus enhancing the intimacy and
excellence that defines Swarthmore.”
The plan is said to be “an organic document that can adjust both to additional
community input and new challenges or
opportunities as they arise.” In the months
ahead, existing committees such as the
Council on Educational Policy and the
Sustainability Committee, as well as the
Alumni Council will begin to act on relevant recommendations, articulating each
project’s goals, providing “maps for implementation activities,” and establishing ways
to measure progress. At the same time,
in addition to the diversity and inclusivity plan, a campus facilities master plan, a
financial plan, and a capital campaign plan
will be developed additional other working
groups.
—Jeffrey Lott

january 2012

Recommendation 1: Through structures
and incentives that encourage innovation,
Swarthmore should foster a curriculum of intellectual rigor and creativity that combines disciplinary strength and flexibility.
• Support teaching, learning, and research
initiatives to cultivate traditional and new
competencies and to support students who
come to Swarthmore with a range of preparations.
• Provide high-impact learning experiences.
• Strengthen the infrastructure and mechanisms for helping students navigate the curriculum, discover opportunities, and manage
their choices.
• Support curricular innovation, especially
interdisciplinary teaching and programs,
with helpful structures and additional faculty
positions.
• Address facilities needs for academic programs.
Recommendation 2: Swarthmore should
draw on its traditions and strengths as a community to serve as a model for purposeful communities in the 21st century.
• Develop a comprehensive diversity, inclusivity, and engagement plan that will transform
the College into a model workplace and
residential learning community in an increasingly complex global world.
• Support the common good and civil discourse.
• Invest in sustainable environmental practices, including minimizing greenhouse gas
emissions from the College’s own operation
and preserving the Crum Woods.
• Create a comprehensive approach to leadership development including a Center for
Innovation and Leadership for students.
• Support athletics, including recreational,
varsity, and club sports, and continue to address associated facilities needs.
• Develop a comprehensive wellness program
for students and other members of the
College community.
• Continue to recruit and support staff members whose contributions and devotion to
the Swarthmore community makes a profound impact on our students and others.
• Protect and create common spaces to support our objectives for the community.
Recommendation 3: Swarthmore should continue to encourage and support faculty excellence, embracing exceptional teaching, active
scholarship, and artistic production throughout
an individual’s career.
• Recognize and support the traditional and
new ways that faculty members teach.
• Recognize the value of faculty research and
artistic production and support it vigorously.

• Renew efforts to increase the diversity of the
faculty, especially in tenure-track appointments.
Recommendation 4: Swarthmore should recruit, admit, and support a varied and dynamic
student body through its admissions and financial aid policies.
• Raise funds specifically for financial aid to secure restricted endowment support for the
existing program, increase funds for future
growth in aid, and expand aid for international students.
• Expand the number of international students
and the percentage of international students
who have access to aid.
• Promote liberal arts education locally, nationally, and internationally with renewed vigor,
affirming that Swarthmore’s commitment to
access for all qualified students is essential
for the best liberal arts experience.
• Establish a Board of Managers Committee
on Admissions and Financial Aid to review
and monitor admissions practices, policies,
and guidelines.
Recommendation 5: Swarthmore should
create an Institute for Liberal Arts to study and
expand liberal arts education at Swarthmore, in
the United States, and around the world.
• Foster exploration and curricular innovation.
• Enhance support for intellectual rigor and
creativity, signal our identification with those
values, and lead in strengthening the liberal
arts in today’s global community.
• Facilitate conversations between liberal
arts institutions and those who live “liberal
arts lives,” especially between Swarthmore
faculty, students, staff, and alumni on topics
related to the future of liberal arts.
Recommendation 6: Swarthmore should nurture lifelong relationships with alumni and foster
greater alumni-student engagement.
• Create more opportunities to engage alumni
as volunteers.
• Build bridges to bring students and alumni
together in ways that are rewarding for all.
• Introduce new programs that reach across a
broad spectrum of interests.
• The College should produce high quality,
provocative Swarthmore talks for the Web—
similar to the popular TED series—designed
to showcase the talents, knowledge, and
expertise of faculty and alumni. Similarly, an
online experts bureau would allow knowledgeable faculty and alumni to share expertise and serve as resources for the College
and the broader public.
• Implement a social media strategy to promote more effective communications and
build community.
7

FRIENDS HISTORICAL LIBRARY

collection

150

150 YEARS AGO:
MARTHA ELLICOTT TYSON
PROPOSES A NEW SCHOOL

Martha Ellicott Tyson (1795–1893) had a long-standing
concern for Quaker education. It was at her home in Baltimore,
Md., in 1860, that a group of Quakers decided it was time to begin
the campaign that would lead to the creation of Swarthmore College.
Tyson was a remarkable woman. As a young girl, she came to know an
elderly African-American named Benjamin Banneker, who often attended
the local Quaker meeting. This was the same Banneker who, in his late 50s,
taught himself the mathematics of predicting eclipses with the help of books
loaned to him by Martha’s father, George Ellicott, and then went on to calculate and publish almanacs, correspond with Thomas Jefferson, and help lay
out Washington, D.C. After he died, the Ellicott family preserved his papers,
and, later, Tyson prepared Banneker’s first biography. She wrote on local history and Quaker work with Native Americans as well as articles on the need for
Swarthmore College. She was named an elder in the Society of Friends and was
later acknowledged as a minister, serving as clerk of Baltimore Yearly Meeting
of Women Friends. When she wrote for the Friends Intelligencer about the
need for a new school, she rhetorically asked how many Friends, who might
have been “bright and shining lights,” had passed their days “so obscured by
ignorance” that their talents were lost to the world. Perhaps she thought
of her old neighbor Benjamin Banneker, who, with help of a few books,
transformed himself from a farmer into a scientist. She may even have
thought a bit about herself, a woman with no more than a common school education who wrote books and ultimately
would create a college.
—Christopher Densmore
Curator, Friends Historical Library

With a lifelong concern for Quaker education, Martha Ellicott Tyson
was a driving force in the campaign to create Swarthmore College.

Professor Emerita of Physical
Education Eleanor Kay “Pete”
Hess, died on Dec. 14 at age 87.
A fierce advocate for women’s
athletics at a time when women
were not provided the same
opportunities as men in collegiate sports, Hess changed the
lives of countless female studentathletes at Swarthmore during
her 33 years as a coach and
administrator.
As a coach, Hess guided four
different sports at Swarthmore:
field hockey, women’s lacrosse,
badminton, and tennis. She
coached the field hockey team
from 1957 to 1984, leading the
Garnet to 140 victories, the most
by any coach in program history.
She is also all-time leader in badminton, with 286 victories during two stints as head coach.
As an administrator, Hess
chaired the Department of
8

Physical Education and Athletics
for Women from 1965 to 1979,
then served as the associate chair
for the combined department of
physical education and athletics
from 1979 to 1990.
Her hard work and determination played an integral role in
the growth of women’s lacrosse
and field hockey at the college
level across the nation. Inducted
into the Pennsylvania Lacrosse
Hall of Fame in 2000 and the
National Lacrosse Hall of Fame
in 2002, Pete was a lacrosse umpire for more than 30 years (she
umpired games well into her 80s)
and served in a variety of leadership roles, including president
and treasurer of the Philadelphia
Women’s Lacrosse Association.
Current women’s lacrosse
coach and former field hockey
coach Karen Borbee acknowledges Hess’s influence in

FRIENDS HISTORICAL LIBRARY

FAREWELL TO AN ADVOCATE FOR WOMEN’S ATHLETICS—”PETE” HESS

As coach of four College sports, “Pete”
Hess set all-time records in women’s
field hockey and badminton.

women’s athletics and in her own
personal coaching philosophy.
“Pete was an authentic pioneer
for women in athletics. She
showed me the right way to edu-

cate women through sport. She
was an icon in the field hockey
and lacrosse worlds and everyone knew and loved her for her
kind words and friendly smile. It
wasn’t long ago that you would
see Pete out on the field hockey
field, officiating youth programs.
Those girls had no idea that the
reason they were able to play
was because the older woman
who was officiating their game
had paved their way. Pete was
happy to stay in the background
and enjoy being a catalyst for the
women and girls who followed.”
Hess retired from the College
in 1990. In her honor, the
Eleanor Kay Hess Award is given
to the sophomore woman who
demonstrates a love of athletics,
leadership, hard work, fairness,
and objectivity.
—Mark Anskis
swarthmore college bulletin

YOU’RE INVITED—
TO TEDxSWARTHMORE

Only those individuals recognized as the
world’s greatest thinkers receive an invitation
to speak at the annual TED Conference in
Long Beach, Calif. The four-day gathering,
whose name is an acronym for technology,
entertainment, and design, draws intellectuals, CEOs, entrepreneurs, designers, and
scientists from around the world to present
ideas they believe can change the world. They
speak to an audience, whose members currently pay $6,000 a year to be able to attend
and receive mailings, networking tools, and
conference DVDs. Since 2006, the talks have
also been accessible for free on the TED,
YouTube, and iTunes websites. By June 2011,
the talks had more than 500 million online
views.
It stands to reason that a conference
populated by brainiacs would sooner or
later attract the attention of the Swarthmore
student community, especially when one of
their own—Dorwin P. Cartwright Professor

of Social Theory and Social Action and
Professor of Psychology Barry Schwartz,
author of The Paradox of Choice—is a threetime TED speaker.
So, move over, Long Beach, because here
comes TEDxSwarthmore. In the interest of
ideas worth spreading, TED created TEDx,
a program operated under license from TED
of local, independently organized events that
bring people together to share a TED-like
experience. At TEDxSwarthmore, TEDTalks
video and live speakers will combine to spark
deep discussion and connection.

On Saturday, March 31, as the result of a
student group initiative, the Lang Performing
Arts Center will provide the venue for a
group of 12 speakers—comprising faculty
members, alumni, one parent, and one student—who will engage an audience of staff,
faculty, students, and guests in a discussion
of “What Makes a Good Society?” Schwartz
is serving as faculty adviser for the group.
For more information, visit
www.tedxswarthmore.com.

“GIVE YOUR PARENTS GRAY HAIRS”—KRISTOF

“In some past life I’m pretty sure I was a Swattie,” said Nicholas
Kristof, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times columnist, who says he is a huge fan of Swarthmore.
Referencing Swarthmore student initiatives, including those sponsored by the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, Kristof
stressed that traveling abroad—daring to step out into an unfamiliar
environment—plays a transformational role in students’ ability and
motivation to become involved in “the world’s fight.”
“It’s important to get out of your comfort zone. And if you’re having a wonderful time, then that’s not exactly right. You want to be in
over your head. You want to give your parents gray hairs.”
Kristof ’s interest in human rights has been driven by personal encounters, he said. He was galvanized to report on human trafficking
when he heard the story of two girls in Cambodia, tricked and kidnapped on their way to school by an old woman who wanted to sell
them to a brothel. He went on to emphasize that, although the human
trafficking situation in the United States is better than the situation in
Cambodia, there is still much to do here at home.
In addition to emphasizing local activism, Kristof underscored
the importance of choosing a cause that has personal meaning and
relevance. “Students ask me, ‘There are so many issues, what should I
get involved in?’ And the answer to that will depend on where you’ve
traveled, what issues speak to you the most, what resonates with you.”
He noted that, in reference to social entrepreneurship, he has “become increasingly sympathetic to the notion of starting something
particular.”
“When my generation was active, we tended to protest against
things, we tended to seek systemic global change, and, often, the fojanuary 2012

Columnist and activist Nicholas Kristof (left) spoke to a packed house in November.

cus of our protests was kind of symbolic. My generation would have
protested for some kind of global covenant to get every kid in the
world in school. Your generation is much more likely to start a particular school somewhere. It may not solve the global problem, but
for kids in that particular school, it is completely transformational.”
—Kat Clark ’12, adapted from the Daily Gazette. Nov. 17, 2011
Watch Kristof’s talk at http://media.swarthmore.edu/video.

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collection
Should the College Revive its Quaker Roots?
Yes, Students Say, but Via Grassroots

Junior Ben Goossen enrolled at

In a shining example of civil discourse on
campus, two students engaged last fall in
a four-week exchange of op-eds in The
Phoenix, producing a series of reflective articles on Quakerism that began in disagreement and ended in consensus—or close to it.
Junior Ben Goossen enrolled at
Swarthmore in large part because of the
College’s Quaker heritage. “I was interested
in attending a school with an affiliation to a
historic peace church,” he says, “and I loved
the combination of academic rigor and the
College’s ties to the Society of Friends with its
connection to both religious and secular activism.” Goossen was further drawn by current manifestations of Quakerism on campus such as the Friends Historical Library,
the Peace Collection, and the Quaker
Meetinghouse. Since his arrival on campus,
although still excited about the potential for
growth of Quakerism on campus, he is disappointed by what he believes is a waning role
for the religion.
In late October, Goossen—who identifies
with the Mennonite peace faith—published
an op-ed in The Phoenix, in the form of a
letter to President Rebecca Chopp, proposing that, despite some positive steps, such
as visiting speakers on Quaker activism; the
Global Nonviolent Action Database; and
the founding of a Young Quakers Group
(of which he is a cofounder)—campus

of the College’s Quaker heritage.

STUDENTS FIND VOICE
IN OCCUPY-STYLE
GENERAL ASSEMBLY

10

Quakerism should be more actively promoted. For example, he would welcome
increased faculty and student activism and
stronger commitment to Quakerism by the
College administration; a full-time Quakerin-residence position, similar to one that
already exists at Haverford College; closer
ties between the College and the Quaker
Center at Pendle Hill; the reinstatement of
Collection; moving the Peace Collection
from its “undignified location in McCabe
basement” to a more prominent location;
and print and electronic publications clarifying the College’s relationship to Quakerism.
A week after releasing Goossen’s column, The Phoenix published a response by
sophomore Sam Zhang, who wrote of his
own discomfort at the state of Quakerism on
campus. In the article “Why Quakerism at
Swarthmore is Counterproductive,” Zhang
described situations in which he had experienced the phrase “Quaker values” being
applied cynically and inappropriately to
describe simple acts of generosity or used in
a “culture-cleansing” capacity, wherein fear
to offend eliminates passion or excitement.
Zhang cited the problems inherent in an enhanced role for Quakerism in a multicultural
campus society: “Having moved from the
fringe of white Christian society to the center
of multiculturalism, Quakers have subtly
redefined themselves as the border guards

That night, shortly after dinner in Sharples Dining Hall,
Swarthmore students held their
first “General Assembly (GA).” It
may seem surprising that Occupy

“I was interested in attending a
school that had an affiliation to a
historic peace church,” he says.
between the Christian and multicultural
worlds. With an impeccable record of diversity, Quakerism is the most legitimate heir to
this position…. It views itself as a negotiator
who works on behalf of minority groups to
lower the cost of cultural entry into mainstream Christian society.
“The assumption that minority students
want to assimilate is patronizing in its own
right, let alone that we should be grateful for
their assimilation….”
Goossen responded by highlighting the
vibrancy of the Swarthmore culture, suggesting that any “lack of spontaneity and
excitement” is due to students being engrossed in their schoolwork and further that
Quakerism’s origins do not prevent its being
compatible with non-Quakers. “It is no accident that contemporary Quakerism is a global religion, represented on every continent in
any number of culture groups,” he wrote.
In a later conversation with the Bulletin,
Zhang described a Tri-College diversity

came so late to the College. Yet numerous students and alumni were
participating in the Philadelphia
and New York protests. Plus, one
of the architects of the Wall Street

ZEIN NAKHODA ’12

In the early hours of Thursday,
Nov. 17, New York City police
cleared Occupy Wall Street
protesters from Zuccotti Park in
Manhattan, suspending, at least
for a time, the first phase of a
movement that by November,
had launched dozens of Occupy
protests and encampments around
the country. Some had been dispersed, sometimes violently, by
police; some lingered passively
into the late fall.

Swarthmore in large part because

The first General Assembly in Sharples Dining Hall as the Occupy movement came
home to Swarthmore. An alumnus has been a force in Occupy Wall Street.

protest was Micah White ’04, who
worked with Adbusters founding editor Kalle Lasn and other
activists to propose the Occupy
strategy in a series of emails last
spring. A self-described “mystical
anarchist,” White was interviewed
in a Nov. 28 New Yorker article
on Occupy Wall Street written by
Mattathias Schwartz ’01, who reported that “After earning a B.A. at
Swarthmore, [White] wrote a letter
to Lasn, whom he had never met,
saying that he would be arriving
in Vancouver in a matter of weeks
and wanted to be put to work.”

swarthmore college bulletin

workshop he’d attended as a freshman. “It
was sterile,” he said. “We were all very politically correct, as if we were afraid of our own
potential to offend. The workshop ended in
a gathering, which, we were assured, was not
a Quaker Collection, but it really was…. We
had to stand in silence until someone was
moved to speak. That even the ceremony
of Quakerism would be used for a political
agenda takes away from what Quakerism is
all about and makes me apprehensive about

what Ben is endorsing without certain checks
to ensure that this doesn’t happen.”
At the end of the four-week exchange,
Zhang conceded that it was his Tri-Co experience—“more like the initiation of a political
ideology of inoffensiveness rather than an
exploration of spirit”—that had impacted his
feelings toward Quakerism. By ultimately
acknowledging that the Tri-Co experience
was not a truly Quaker one, he was able to
find common ground with Goossen, say-

ing that the faith should be encouraged on
campus—albeit through grassroots rather
than institutional methods. He suggested
the creation of publications that clarify
and challenge the College’s relationship to
Quakerism.
Goossen and Zhang are not in complete
agreement on how the creation of a Quaker
movement on campus should proceed, but
they are, for sure, in favor of exchanging
ideas and working on them—together.

Swarthmore
College

Weekend

Celebrate the Arts!
Back in Sharples, tables were
pushed back and chairs rearranged
in the “big room,” as dozens of
students began a collective conversation using the “human microphone” method pioneered at the
Zuccotti encampment.
Predictably, the students’
targeted the established order at
Swarthmore—“the administration.” Like the Occupy movement
itself, Swarthmore’s GA did not put
forward a specific set of demands.
The Daily Gazette reported that
students voiced frustration with
what they saw as “a behind-closed-

january 2012

doors attitude” on matters such as
College’s budget and investment
practices.
Finger twinkles—described in
the Gazette as “a wiggly-fingered
hand gesture the audience adopted to communicate excitement
and solidarity”—greeted several
speakers as they put forward such
complaints.
Also garnering “a significant
amount of attention” was last fall’s
proposal by a group of women students to reinstate campus sororities and the “ensuing brouhaha”
it caused among other students.

IAN BRADSHAW

Arts Weekend offers the entire College
community—alumni, parents, students,
faculty, staff, and friends—the chance to
enjoy an exciting, three-day program of arts
offerings including music, dance, studio and
visual arts, and more.
Please mark your calendar for Friday, April 13
through Sunday, April 15, 2012 and look for upcoming announcements about Arts Weekend events.
More information will be available soon on our Arts
Weekend website: www.swarthmore.edu/artsweekend

April 13–15, 2012
“Though no one went so far as
to suggest banning Greek life on
campus,” the Gazette reported,
“a handful of speakers called
[sororities] an essentially genderdiscriminatory institution. Others
expressed support of the sorority
idea.”
The first Swarthmore GA ended
with mutual agreement to hold
another gathering soon, and the
debate went on—as campus debates often do—in the comments
section of the Gazette.
Whether or not to continue
using the “human microphone”

was a big question, and when the
General Assembly reconvened
on Dec. 1, with about 75 students
in attendance, the conversation
started with:
“Should we use…”

“should we use!”
“the human mic…”

“the human mic”
“or an electric mic?”

“or an electric mic!”
Use of the human mic was reaffirmed by a show of hands and the
students’ experiment in “direct
democracy” continued.
—Jeffrey Lott

11

collection
Love of Learning Reaffirmed for Mid-Career Teachers
Long after the usual start of their workteaches fourth grade at Nether Providence
day, 15 teachers drawn from schools in the
Elementary School, and Eleanor Salgado
Wallingford-Swarthmore School District
’03, chair of the Strath Haven Middle School
gathered last October in Bond Memorial
English Department, the location was a faHall. Fortified by coffee and pastries, they
miliar one. Salgado said, “It’s great to be able
settled into a space that was illuminated by
to have this break to think as a student, time
soft light through leaded-glass windows and
to think and talk as an adult,” a sentiment
furnished with a grandfather clock, cushechoed by all the teachers.
ioned armchairs, and round tables. Lines
White led the discussion but encouraged
from Emerson carved over the large fireplace interaction with the teachers, who had rewelcomed the group: “All things through
ceived suggested readings in advance. “This
thee take nobler form and look beyond the
is the quintessential ‘global’ topic,” she said.
earth.” But on this day, and again two weeks
“There’s something for everyone.” With the
later, the teachers would look at the earth,
world population reportedly surging past
in the seminar Global Demographics, led
seven billion, the subject was timely. “As
by Swarthmore Professor
much as people talk today
of Political Science Tyrene
about overpopulation,
White.
they are really just asking
The seminar was the
The courses are “an
variations of questions
first to occur at the College
that were being asked 150
under the auspices of the
opportunity for the
years ago,” White said.
Teachers As Scholars (TAS)
She showed that today,
program, funded for two
teachers to learn
despite lower birth rates
years by the Woodrow
in developed countries,
Wilson National Fellowship
something new and
the biggest concern for
Foundation in partnership
policymakers is how to
with the College and the
wonderful and rich, but
support vastly increased
school district. Established
aging populations. She
at more than 25 universities
also to re-ignite their
also discussed global
nationwide, the program
migration, the HIV epiwas suggested by District
passion for learning—to
demic, and sustainability.
Superintendent Richard
Teachers contributed a
nourish their minds again.” constant stream of obNoonan to encourage professional development for
servations and questions
teachers in collaboration
based on their own classwith local colleges. TAS allows teachers of
room studies as well as their personal readany grade level and subject to participate in
ing and travel experiences.
discussions of scholarly issues during several
Sixth grade social studies teacher Claudia
full-length school days that include lunch. In Carlsson said: “These opportunities energize
addition to White’s seminar, the Swarthmore
you. I wrote to Dr. Noonan, ‘I haven’t experiprogram will offer the class Natural History
enced anything like this in 24 years.’ It’s really
in the Crum Woods by Professor of English
a treat.” She anticipates reviving a Population
Literature Betsy Bolton in spring. Next year,
Day event using materials from the course.
four seminars are planned, with teachers
But the response to TAS doesn’t always
from multiple school districts.
translate into classroom action—nor is it
“The course was designed as an opportumeant to. “It’s important for teachers to be
nity for teachers to learn something new and educated beyond their area of teaching,”
wonderful and rich, but also to re-ignite their said middle-school German teacher Valerie
passion for learning—to nourish their minds Rouse.
again,” says TAS coordinator Catherine
In this program of scholarly fellowship,
Dunn ’93, who taught English in the
with its informal setting and easy exchange
Wallingford-Swarthmore school district for
between teacher-scholars and professor, the
14 years. For Kelly Hines Yiadom ’01, who
teachers found their love of learning reaf12

Grant Wood’s American Gothic may be the
most widely recognized, reproduced—and
parodied—work of American art. A search of
Google Images reveals thousands of takeoffs
on the 1930 painting, many hilariously funny.
So when Mike Kappeler, Web content coordinator for Information Technology Services,
was asked to make a poster for November’s
Academic Technology Fair, he turned to Wood’s
iconic Iowa farmers for inspiration—then used
his considerable Adobe skills to create this notquite-Gothic image. (Parrish Hall’s dome actually quotes the French Empire style.) The annual
one-day fair shows off the latest software,
hardware, and other digital tools that are—
or may soon be—available in the College’s
classrooms, labs, and offices. This year’s hit
was a three-dimensional printer on loan to the
College that was turning out little scale models
of Parrish Hall that it had created in white gypsum. Engineering students, of course, could see
practical applications, while artists’ minds reeled
with other possibilities.
—Jeffrey Lott

firmed. Middle School social studies teacher
Bernadette Smith explained it this way: “You
have been introduced to an expert in her
field. You have time to be thoughtful—which
you don’t have during the school day. You
have a chance to converse with other professionals about how to incorporate [new ideas]
in your curriculum. It broadens your world
view.”
—Elizabeth Vogdes
swarthmore college bulletin

Five new Managers were appointed to fouryear terms at the May 2011 meeting of the
Board of Managers; their terms began in
September. They are:
• Sohail Bengali ’79, managing director of
Stone & Youngberg in San Francisco
and a founding member of the Swarthmore College Bay Area Alumni in
Business group
• Nathaniel Erskine ’10, a candidate for
medical and doctoral degrees at the
University of Massachusetts Medical
School and, most recently, a medicinal
chemist with GlaxoSmithKline R&D in
the Singapore Research Center in China
• Thomas Hartnett ’94, managing director
and head of rates for North America at
Deutsche Bank in New York City
• Lucinda Lewis ’70, consultant and senior
adviser under the auspices of The Brattle
Group in Washington, D.C., and economic consultant for Competition Economies
Inc. in Weston, Mass.
• James Lovelace ’79, a member of the
board of directors of The Capital Group
Companies (CGC), senior vice president
of Capital Research and Management
(CRMC) Company (a subsidiary of CGC)
in Los Angeles, Calif., and principal executive officer and vice chair of the boards
of two mutual funds managed by CRMC.
—Susan Cousins Breen

NEW FACE AT THE
BULLETIN

Of her new assignment,
Kimmel says, “It’s a great honor to
be moving into the editor’s seat
After a national search
at this exceptional liberal-arts coland selection process lastlege. I’m looking forward to geting several months, the
ting out on the road and around
College appointed Sherri
campus to meet the Bulletin
Kimmel, former direcreaders—those alumni, parents,
tor of editorial services
students and community members
at Dickinson College, to
who are passionately and intelthe position of director
lectually engaged in issues of the
of editorial and creative
Bulletin editor Sherri Kimmel
day, particularly as they pertain
services and editor of the
to Swarthmore. I’m eager to hear
Swarthmore College Bulletin.
their insights about this college that they love
Kimmel assumed the position this month,
and about the magazine, whose mission it is
succeeding Jeffrey Lott, former director of
to tell the Swarthmore story as it has evolved
College publications and Bulletin editor for
for nearly 150 years.”
the past 21 years.
—Carol Brévart-Demm
As senior editor of Dickinson’s award-winning alumni magazine for 12 years, Kimmel
led two major magazine redesigns, including
WEINSTEIN’S FAULKNER STUDY
a conversion from tabloid to magazine format; RECEIVES “BEST BOOK” AWARD
researched and implemented a more sustainThe Society for the Study of Southern
able publishing program; and introduced mul- Literature (SSSL) has chosen Becoming
timedia features on the magazine website.
Faulkner by Philip Weinstein, the Alexander
In 2004, she was promoted to director of
Griswold Cummins Professor of English
all the college’s external publications.
Literature, as the best book on Southern
Preceding her tenure at Dickinson, Kimmel literature written in 2010. He will receive the
served with the Pennsylvania Bar association
Hugh Holman Award from SSSL in March. “It
as editor of The Pennsylvania Lawyer; as asso- was shockingly good news,” Weinstein says.
ciate director of public information at Western “Totally unexpected and totally appreciated.”
Maryland College; and as a feature writer,
The book was published by Oxford University
photographer, and page designer for the daily Press.
Evening Leader, in St. Mary’s, Ohio.
—Jeffrey Lott
CARL SOCOLOW

FIVE JOIN BOARD OF MANAGERS

ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS

The Department of Theater and Senior Company
2012 chose an unusual yet appropriate mise-enscène for their production of playwright Maria Irene
Forbes’ Obie Award–winning Fefu and Her Friends
about a group of eight old college friends who get
together to rehearse a theater education project
but simultaneously reveal their various fears,
unhappiness, idealism as well as affection and humor.
The play ends with the death of one of the characters.
The students staged the play off campus, in a
Swarthmore home whose interior was in keeping
with the 1930s, the time in which the play is set. The
audience, small due to space constraints, moved from
room to room as the action progressed.
Student actresses (the cast was all-female,
except for Fefu’s husband, who remains invisible
and silent throughout the action) included Ryane
Disken Cahill ’12, Michelle Fennell ’12, Lori Barkin
’12, Katie Goldman ’14, Maddie Charne ’14, Elliana
Bisgaard-Church ’13, Hannah Kosman ’14, and Jessica
Cannizzaro ’12. Assistant Professor of Theater Laila
Swanson was responsible for sets and costumes, and
the faculty adviser for the production was Assistant
Professor of Theater Elizabeth Stevens.
—Carol Brévart-Demm
january 2012

13

collection

Men’s Cross-Country (3rd CC)
Jacob Phillips ’13 became the first
Swarthmore men’s cross-country runner
since Marc Jeuland ’01 to qualify for the
NCAA Division III Championship Meet,
highlighting an outstanding season for the
men’s team.
Thanks to Phillips and a deep squad
of talented runners, the team finished
third at the Centennial Conference (CC)
Championship Meet and seventh at the
NCAA Mideast Regional Meet. Phillips led
the way for the Garnet in both races, earning 10th overall with a time of 27:34.90 at
the snowy CC meet—Swarthmore’s best
individual finish since 2003—and seventh
at the NCAA Regional meet with a time of
25:43 to earn automatic qualification to the
national championship meet. At nationals in
Wisconsin, Phillips finished 114th out of 279
runners with a time of 25:23.68.
Several other runners had outstanding seasons. Aidan DuMont-McCaffrey
’13 finished 20th at the CC meet (28:13.3)
and 38th at the Mideast Regional (26:45),
just missing All-Region status. Robert Fain
’14 was the Garnet’s third-place finisher in
both the CC and Mideast Regional, and
Jonas Oppenheimer ’15 earned a spot on
the Mideast Region All-Freshman team
(68th/27:24).

Jacob Phillips ’13 helped the Garnet cross-country
team to a third-place finish at the CC championship
meet.

14

Womens’ Cross-Country (6th CC)
The women’s cross-country team finished
sixth at the CC championship and 13th at
the NCAA Mideast Regional, with Melissa
Frick ’12 pacing the team in each event.
At the CC meet, Frick finished 22nd
in 25:38.90. Stephanie Beebe ’12 was the
Garnet’s next finisher, crossing the line in
26:07.10, good for 35th. Rounding out the
scoring runners for the team were Katie
Gonzalez ’12 (40th/26:28.1), Margret Lenfest
’12 (51st/26:47.6), and Emma Saarel ’14
(52nd/26:49.7).
At the Mideast Regional Meet, Frick put
up her best performance of the year, finishing 17th in 23:39, earning her All-Region
honors and missing qualification for the
NCAA Championship Meet by just two seconds.
At the Seven Sisters Meet in October,
Swarthmore finished third, with Jen Johnson
’12 placing seventh in the 5K with a fast
19:45.21.
Field Hockey (8-10, 6th CC)
The field hockey team took a turn for the
better during the 2011 season, barely missing the CC playoffs in the final game of the
year. The steadily improving squad notched
as many CC wins in 2011 as it had in 2008,
2009, and 2010 combined.
Highlights from the regular season included wins over NCAA-participant Eastern
College, ECAC-participant McDaniel, and
Johns Hopkins. A 3-1 loss to Haverford on
the season’s final day ended the Garnet’s
playoff hopes, but the team, which graduates
no seniors, has much to look forward to next
year.
Nia Jones ’14 and Beth Johnson ’15 tied
for the team lead in points, with 21. Jones
led the team with nine goals, ranking 10th
in the CC in both goals and goals per game.
Johnson and Anne Rosenblatt ’14 tied for the
second-highest assist total in the CC, with
seven. Goalie Gabriella Capone ’14 turned in
a breakout season as well, notching 119 saves
(6th in CC) and a 2.49 GAA (7th in CC) in
her first season as a starter. Jones and captain
midfielder Sophia Agathis ’13 also earned
spots on the All-CC Second Team.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF ATHLETICS DEPARTMENT

Rewarding season for Swarthmore athletes

Field hockey player Nia Jones ’14 co-led the team in
points, with 21. With a nine-goal tally, she ranked
10th in the CC in total goals and goals per game.

Women’s Soccer (12-7, 3rd CC )
A perfect mix of young stars and experienced
older players made for a breakout season,
with the Garnet women returning to the CC
playoffs for the fifth time in six seasons and
reaching the semifinals.
Road wins over Scranton and Cabrini
highlighted the early part of the season,
which included a five-match winning streak
through September. That streak ended at the
hands of CC champion Johns Hopkins, but
not before the Garnet gave the unbeaten Blue
Jays its best test of the regular season, falling
3-2 in the final two minutes of play.
The team rebounded from the loss to
Hopkins with another long winning streak,
taking five of its last six games to close out
the regular season. The playoff clincher
came on the final day of the regular season
against rival Haverford, as Emma Sindelar
’15 headed home the game-winner in the
86th minute of play to give the women a 2-1
win. The victory propelled the team to the
CC semifinals, where it fell to Gettysburg
1-0. The Garnet’s 12-win season earned it
the No. 3 seed in the ECAC South Region
Tournament, but it succumbed in the opening round to Albright, 1-0.
swarthmore college bulletin

Much of the credit for the Garnet’s turnaround season goes to Sindelar. The first-year
forward from Salt Lake City recorded one of
the best offensive seasons in program history,
scoring 11 goals, dishing three assists, and
tallying 25 points. For her play, Sindelar was
named to the All-CC First Team, becoming
just the 22nd freshman to earn first-team
honors. She was joined on the first team by
midfielder Alexa Ross ’13, who was named
All-Centennial for the third time in
her career. Rounding out the team’s
All-Centennial selections with an
honorable mention was defender
Ari Spiegel ’13.
Men’s Soccer (13-6-1, 6th CC)
The team began the season poised to repeat as CC
champions and
reach its fourthconsecutive NCAA
Tournament, but an unexpected late-season slide caused
the squad to miss the CC playoffs. Despite this disappointment, the team rallied during the
ECAC Tournament, defeating
Frostburg State, Alvernia, and
Medaille to win first place.
By capturing the ECAC South
Region championship with a 1-0
(2OT) victory over Medaille
College, the men’s soccer seniors
wrapped up one of the most
successful four-year runs in
program history. Fittingly,
senior captain Micah Rose
scored the game-winning
goal, as his curving ball off a
free kick in the104th minute
hit the far post and went into
the back of the net. With the
win, the nine seniors finished
their Garnet career with two
CC championships (2008, 2010),
three NCAA playoff appearances
(2008, 2009, 2010), an ECAC
South Region Championship
(2011), and 62 victories.
Two seniors in particular—Rose and goalkeeper

january 2012

David D’Annunzio ’12—left their
mark with spectacular final seasons.
Rose became the first player in program history to make the All-CC
First Team three times in a career.
D’Annunzio, an All-CC Second
Team selection, finished his career
with a program-record 29 shutouts,
surpassing the previous record of
25 clean sheets—set by Andrew
Cavenagh ’92—with a shutout
of Manhattanville. Rose and
D’Annunzio were also honored for their performance off the
field as each was named to the Capital
One/CoSida Academic All-District IV
First Team. Rounding out All-CC selections for the team were David Sterngold ’12
(second team), Noah Sterngold ’14 (second
team), Fabian Castro ’12 (second team) and
Kieran Reichert ’13 (honorable mention).
Volleyball (24-8, 4th
CC)
It was a season of milestones for the volleyball team, which
reached the CC
and ECAC playoffs for a thirdconsecutive
season and tied
the program record for wins in a
season.
The season began with the
Garnet dominating the field at the
annual Garnet Classic, dropping
just a single set in four matches
to three-peat as champions.
Following strong showings
at non-CC tournaments at
York College and Moravian,
the team opened CC play
with heartbreaking five-set
losses to playoff-bound teams
Johns Hopkins, Franklin &
Marshall, and Gettysburg but
bounced back to win its final
nine matches to close out
the regular season. The ninematch winning streak earned
the team its first NCAA Mid-

Women’s soccer player Emma Sindelar ’15 recorded
one of the best offensive seasons in the history of
Swarthmore women’s soccer, securing 11 goals and
three assists for a total 25 points.

Atlantic regional ranking in program history.
Unfortunately, the winning streak ended in
the first round of the CC playoffs, when rival
Haverford upset the team 3-1. Still, the team’s
fantastic regular season earned them a spot
in the ECAC South Region playoffs, where
they reached the semifinals for the secondconsecutive season.
Just as the volleyball team saw success
in 2011, individuals on the squad broke
records and finished illustrious careers.
Genny Pezzola ’12 completed the greatest
four-year career in Swarthmore volleyball
history. She finished as the program’s alltime leader in career kills (1,372) and second
all-time in career digs (1,542), breaking the
kills mark previously set by Jennifer Wang
’08 (1,171) in a win over Centenary on Sept.
23. The outside hitter also became the first
Swarthmore volleyball player named to the
American Volleyball Coaches Association’s
All-Region Team (honorable mention) and
first Swarthmore player named to the AllCentennial Conference First Team three
times (2009, 2010, 2011). The team’s other
two seniors—Hillary Santana and Lisa
Shang—also reached milestones during the
season, both joining the exclusive 1,000 dig
club in the same match against Ursinus.
Pezzola and junior Allie Coleman were also
honored for their performance in the classroom, as each was named to the Capital One/
CoSida Academic All-District IV First Team.
—Mark Anskis

Senior Genny Pezzola—record holder in career kills and
career digs—completed the greatest four-year career in
Swarthmore women’s volleyball history.

15

H

omage to the Past

© BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD CRM:00743705

16

swarthmore college bulletin

Invitation to the Present
CRAIG WILLIAMSON CREATES A BRIDGE ACROSS CENTURIES WITH A NEW TRANSLATION OF BEOWULF.
By Carol Brévart-Demm

Professor of English Literature
Craig Williamson was
encouraged by members of
a Lifelong Learning class to
complete the translation of
Beowulf that he had started
years earlier. A fragment of the
poem from the British Library
is shown behind Williamson
as he reads to students in
his Chaucer and Medieval
Literature seminar.

C

raig Williamson compares the act of translation to a kind of
dance with a partner from a different world. Each partner’s

rhythms and expectations are different, yet they share a sense of rhythm.
Both possess a brain and legs, enabling them to process music, rhythm,
and movement. And each dances a different dance, driven by common
mental and physical impulses—a shared movement back and forth across
a bridge between their worlds.
In August, Williamson published an acclaimed new translation of a
work from a very different world—the Anglo-Saxon classic Beowulf and
Other Old English Poems, released by the University of Pennsylvania
Press.
Williamson loves language—his own and others. He writes poetry and
is interested in the poetry of others. Now the Alfred H. and Peggi Bloom
Professor of English Literature, he has taught at the College for 40 years.
In the mid-1960s, as a graduate student at Harvard, Williamson
believed that modern English literature was his calling. Almost half
a century later, he is a well-known scholar of medieval literature who
regularly and happily transports himself back more than 1,000 years to
Anglo-Saxon England, reading, teaching, translating, and even bringing
to life in song and chants the works of Old English poets.

S

o what steered Williamson from modern to medieval?

The answer is actually easier than most solutions to the AngloSaxon riddles on which he spends much of his time: Drafted in 1966 to
fight in the Vietnam War, Williamson, a conscientious objector, went
instead to Tanzania and performed alternate service with the American
Friends Service Committee. There, he became fascinated by African
literary traditions—the stories, proverbs, and riddles that were then
just beginning to transition from oral to written forms—in Swahili and
English in East Africa, and French in the West.
Williamson returned from Africa with a new research interest: the
bridge between oral and written literature in his own language.
“This meant I had to go back to the Anglo-Saxons and the language
they wrote in. It was my first contact with Old English,” he says, later
amending this statement by adding that his introduction to Old English
style and themes had actually occurred years earlier, when he read the
works of J.R.R. Tolkien. Not merely a novelist but a scholar and teacher of
Anglo-Saxon literature, Tolkien opened the door to Old English literature
for Williamson, weaving into his Middle Earth novels numerous riddles
whose intricacies resemble those of Old English riddle poems—and
characters that smack of those in Beowulf.
“Back in the 1930s,” Williamson says, “Tolkien wrote one of the
most important articles about Beowulf, revealing it as a valuable literary

january 2012

“Moving back and
forth between my
own English and
the English of about
750 CE was like an
intimate conversation
between two poets,
two languages, two
cultures, carried on in
a space that one critic
calls ‘great time.’”

17

work—a combination of epic and elegiac poem—
rather than a mere linguistic exercise.” Williamson
dedicated his new edition of Beowulf to Tolkien,
among others.

W

An eighth-century drawing
of David composing the
Psalms (right) shows a lyre
similar to what would have
been played by minstrels
performing Beowulf. The
lyre below, which resembles
the one in the drawing as
well as another found in
an Anglo-Saxon grave, was
reconstructed for modern
players by Messrs. Dolmetsch.

VEN

STE
ETT

UNK
J. PL

18

hen Williamson began to translate Beowulf
from Old English in 2006, he found the

degree of difficulty so time-consuming that he
almost abandoned the project after the first 200
lines. Fortunately for Anglo-Saxon scholarship, he
didn’t—although he did leave it untouched for a
while.
Not that Williamson wasn’t already an
accomplished scholar and translator of Old
English, the language spoken in England between
ca. 500 and 1000 CE. After returning from Africa
in the late 1960s, he again
took up graduate research,
this time at the University
of Pennsylvania, where
he worked on some of
the Anglo-Saxon riddlepoems—riddles in the
form of poems—preserved
in a manuscript housed
in Exeter Cathedral
Library. This resulted in
the 1977 publication of
what is today considered
the definitive edition of
The Old English Riddles of
‘The Exeter Book.’ In 1982,
Williamson’s translation
and scholarly edition of all
90 extant Exeter riddles
was published. Titled A
Feast of Creatures: AngloSaxon Riddle-Songs, it was
re-issued this year by the
CREATIVE COMMONS
University of Pennsylvania
Press.
But Beowulf—a book-length medieval poem of
heroism, monsters, fratricide, power, treasure, and
revenge—presented a more complex challenge.
Estimated to have been written in the eighth
century CE, Anglo-Saxon England’s best-known
literary achievement challenges the translator
with its complicated sentence structure, highly
alliterative language, and densely packed imagery.
“Those first 200 lines took me almost a year,
and since there are 3,182 lines in the poem, I
reckoned it would take me about 15 years to finish
it. So I kind of gave up on it,” Williamson says.
It took Swarthmore parent Thomas Koellhoffer
(father of Jayne Koellhoffer ’07), who participated

in Williamson’s 2007 Lifelong Learning course
on the literature of J.R.R. Tolkien, to change the
medievalist’s mind. An earlier Beowulf translation
was one of several assigned readings for the course.
Koellhoffer says he found Williamson’s command
of Old English and Norse mythology impressive,
particularly his animated and entertaining
renderings of the poem in the original Old
English. But, Koellhoffer adds, the accompanying
translation was “somewhat ponderous and not so
entertaining.” So when Williamson offered to read
some passages from his own translation of the first
200 lines, Koellhoffer and his classmates were all
ears.
“The entire class was awestruck by what we
heard that night. When Craig finished his first
reading, we erupted into
spontaneous applause. His
translation was accessible,
engaging, and entertaining;
it flowed beautifully and
created pictures in the mind
the way a good story is
supposed to,” Koellhoffer
says. When the reading
ended, he flung the assigned
Beowulf translation to the
floor as a dramatic homage
to Williamson’s prowess,
the poetry of his words, and
his infectious enthusiasm
for his subject. The entire
class encouraged their
teacher to push on with his
translation.
Williamson recalls:
“The class members said
to me, ‘You ask us to read a
number of pages. Now, we
ask you to read us a number
of lines at each class.’
Although a little startled by the suggestion, he
thought, ‘We have another five weeks in the course.
I could give it a try.’”
By the end of the five weeks, Williamson had
completed another 200 lines, and he just kept
going.
“I’m really grateful to Tom and this class for
urging me on,” he says.
The Beowulf translation took him five years.
After completing all 3,182 lines, Williamson
decided to include a number of additional poems
in his new book—some related to Beowulf, others
demonstrating different types of poetry, and some
that he had wanted to read as an undergraduate.
swarthmore college bulletin

He introduces each poem with a brief essay. To
ensure that the level and tone are appropriate for
undergraduate and general readers, he also sought
his students’ help.
“If there was something they didn’t understand, they asked me, and I made changes
accordingly. Thanks are due to all my classes—
young and old—for helping me find the right level
for readers,” he says.
As for Koelhoffer, he remained a driving force:
“My classmates and I continued to communicate
with Craig about his progress long after the class
ended,” he says. “And I bought a copy of the book
as soon as it became available.”

T

he translator must know the language

well enough to comprehend superficial and
deeper meanings, “like the waters beneath the
surface,” Williamson says, and combine both into
a modern English that will reflect similar levels
of meaning. “That’s difficult,” he says. “The more
you’re able to read Old English and understand
it without necessarily having to translate it in the
life of your own mind, the closer you’re getting to
going back in time and putting on the cloak of the
Anglo-Saxon scop (poet or singer), to being there
in the mead hall when the songs are being sung, to
being a listener, possibly a singer in that fashion.
Sometimes, it seemed as if I were channeling the
voice of the Anglo-Saxon poet. Moving back and
forth between my own English and the English of
about 750 CE was like an intimate conversation
between two poets, two languages, two cultures,
carried on in a space that one critic calls ‘great
time.’”
Williamson calls the translation an homage
to the past and an invitation to the present. His
students read Beowulf through the lens he has
created, traveling back over the bridge of time
that he has built. “It’s a thrill to see them reading
the poem,” he says. “At the end of the poem,
Beowulf ’s body—his ‘bone-house’—lives on.
The story has survived the passage of time and
the transformations of telling for more than a
thousand years. It will probably be recounted in
some unimaginably beautiful and terrifying form
after another thousand. I am pleased to be part of
that endless retelling.”

K

oellhoffer and his classmates may have
been Williamson’s first and possibly
most motivating reviewers, without whose

encouragement the book might never have come
to fruition, but they are by no means his only fans.
Senior Katharine Clark, an English literature
january 2012

and studio art major who read Beowulf as an
assigned work for Williamson’s Senior Majors
Colloquium, says: “Professor Williamson presents
Beowulf in the context of other Anglo-Saxon
poems, and his introductions make the English
more accessible. His love for both the story and the
language comes through, and that makes the poem
come alive.”
And Benjamin Bagby, a performer of Beowulf
and director of the medieval music ensemble
Sequentia, who came to the College last year
and delighted the campus community with a
performance of Old English chanting, reviewed
Williamson’s work: “These are renderings with bite
and muscle, full of chewy sounds to delight any
ear or voice, entering the mute reader’s eye and
resounding within, at times filling a raucous hall,
at times gently whispering into an interior fold of
woe, of memory. In those resonant spaces, we hear
again the scop’s voice.”
With the release of Beowulf, Williamson can lay
claim to having translated and published a total
of 6,000 lines of Anglo-Saxon verse. “I was kind
of bereft when I was done,” he says. “I really didn’t
want to be done.” So he got to thinking: “There are
30,000 lines extant of Old English poetry. Nobody
has ever thought to translate them all, either into
prose or poetry during the 150 years that this field
of scholarship has existed. I’ve already translated
24,000 of them. It’s a fantastic project—making
available every poem that every Anglo-Saxon
poet ever wrote that we still have from beginning
to end.” It will be about 1,500 pages, in several
volumes.
Williamson is scheduled for a sabbatical next
year. There’s little doubt as to how he’ll spend it.
Watch Craig Williamson sing in Old English
from Beowulf to his students at http://bit.ly/
singBeowulf.

Moor stalker,
wasteland walker,
Demon of the fens, he
dwelled in marshes,
In monstrous lairs,
unhappy, unhoused....
A stalking mouth, he
quickly seized
Thirty thanes, hauled
them home,
His precious plunder,
his proud slaughter...
-A description of Grendel,
as translated by Williamson

Fanciful monsters battle and bite
in this ninth-century English
frieze. One reviewer says of
Williamson’s translation: “These
are renderings with bite and
muscle, full of chewy sounds to
delight any ear or voice….”

Fashion’s Darling

JOSEPH ALTUZARRA ’05 HAS EMERGED AS
A HOT NEW YORK DESIGNER.
By Elizabeth Redden ’05
Photographs by Jim Graham
A fashion show is a fast thing, experienced in
impressions. A tight black dress of perforated leather.
Long, light, white jackets, silky and sheer or sleeveless. A
puckered white belted dress with a black plastic buckle
and black leather panels padding the shoulders. A pop of
color: A tropical bird print, parrots and parakeets. Chunky
canary and moss knits. A brief excursion into cream and
rust red, quilted motorcycle jackets and skirts with racing
stripes. Black and white again for the finish—hard leathery
looks comingling with soft ones, a white dress with a
flouncing hem. When the designer, Joseph Altuzarra ’05,
comes out for his customary wave, he, too, wears black and
white, and jeans.
Altuzarra describes his spring 2012 collection as sport
and utility wear melded with a kitschy, tropical vibe. At
the show, held at the Chelsea Art Gallery during New
York Fashion Week, models with thickly painted eyebrows
walk against a backdrop of greenery to a pulsing techno
beat. “I wanted to create this weird tension between
something that’s hyper-urban and something that’s almost
exaggeratedly natural,” Altuzarra says.
The 28-year-old Altuzarra has emerged as a major
figure in the fashion industry, his designs in the pages
of Vogue and on Jennifer Aniston on the cover of Marie
Claire. Mary J. Blige, Kim Kardashian, and Emma Watson
have worn his clothing. A maple coat of coyote fur from
his fall 2011 collection sells at Barneys for $21,375.
Compare this to seven years ago when Altuzarra was

20

swarthmore college bulletin

Seven years ago, Altuzarra
was showing his designs
in the Tarble All-Campus
Space and the Lang
Performing Arts Center—
and the pieces were on sale
for prices that started at $50.
A coat from his fall 2011
collection now sells at Barney’s
for more than $20,000.

Altuzarra (above and right) presented his spring 2012
designs during New York Fashion Week in September.
He says he was going to major in art history at
Swarthmore but switched to studio art and decided to
teach himself fashion design.

january 2012

I think fashion gets
a bad rap, for being a

showing his designs in Tarble All-Campus Space and
Lang Performing Arts Center (LPAC). A Phoenix
very superficial industry
article on his third and final Swarthmore show during
his senior year ends by noting that the collection
and for being very cut
would be on sale, his pieces starting at $50.
“I came to fashion design through the back
off from reality ... but
door of art history at Swarthmore,” Altuzarra says.
“A lot of my papers centered on advertising—how
it’s a multimillion
fashion advertising was drawing on very classical
art-historical iconography.”
dollar industry that
“As I went forward at Swarthmore, it
became more and more apparent that fashion
supports a lot of craft.
was something that I really was interested in.
I was going to be an art history major, and I
switched to art and decided to just teach myself
fashion design.” He did it through the costume
workshop in the Theater Department, taught
by Susan Smythe.
“He just appeared in the costume shop
like Athena out of the head of Zeus,” says
Smythe, who was managing director of LPAC
and costume shop manager from 1994 until
2006. (She is now Swarthmore’s Americans with
Disabilities Act program manager). “He had a
really strong eye and a natural ability, but he had no
idea how to sew.”
He learned quickly. “He was very self-motivated
and driven,” Smythe recalls. “You so rarely see someone
going after what they want to do so clearly.”
His senior year, Altuzarra left Swarthmore a week
before graduation to begin an internship at Marc Jacobs
in New York, later moving to Paris, his hometown, to
work as a design assistant for Givenchy. In 2008, he
returned to New York to launch his own line and was
immediately, in the words of The New York Times,
“lionized, and scrutinized” by celebrities and editors
“all eager to embrace him as fashion’s Next New Thing.”
As early as January 2009, Style.com called Altuzarra
“fashion’s new one to know” and described his designs
as “a reason to look forward to Fashion Week.”
“When I first saw his clothes, I was pretty much
flattened by them,” says Cindi Leive ’88, the editor-in-chief
of Glamour magazine.
“There’s a confidence about his clothes,” she explains.
“There’s an over-styled, over-girlyness about a lot of fashion
right now, but his clothes have a very simple, strong quality
about them. They don’t need to be tricked up with a million
things or over-styled. They speak for themselves.”
In November, Altuzarra (left) won the Council of Fashion Designers/
Vogue Fashion Fund award, which honors promise among emerging
designers. The prize, which comes with $300,000 and mentoring,
was announced at a dinner that featured Calvin Klein, Diane Von
Furstenburg, Anna Wintour, and other industry luminaries.

22

swarthmore college bulletin

In speaking of his design aesthetic, Altuzarra says:
“I wanted to dress women of different ages. A big part
of the market today is geared toward making 20-yearolds look really sexy, and ultimately there are not that
many 20-somethings who have the cash to buy those
clothes. Women who are 40 and 50 and 60 today
also want to feel seductive and sexy.
“There is something really womanly about the
clothes—very, very feminine, but really, really
interesting.”
To rewind a few seasons, his spring 2011
collection defined and delineated the female
body, “almost abstracting it” with pointy
conical bras, Altuzarra says. Inspired
by the disjunction of the Internet, the
proliferation of images, of random
referents, the collection combined
primal python with futuristic metallics
and traditional couture fabrics, like
duchess satin. For fall 2011, Altuzarra’s
inspiration was the 1990s, Kate Moss,
Oasis-mania: fur-lined parkas over silk
slip dresses.
His most recent collection, for spring
2012, with its focus on outerwear, utility,
sport, and print, represented the first
time, he says, “that we’re really evolving
our language from one season to the next, as
opposed to revolutionizing it.”
Altuzarra describes his design process as
primarily two-dimensional. “I’m much more about
drawing than I am about constructing something on a
form.” During the weeks he is drawing, he works from
5 p.m. to 5 a.m., barely emerging from his apartment
except to walk his schnauzer, Bean (who, incidentally,
sported her own version of an Altuzarra fox fur-lined
parka last fall in a Bergdorf Goodman fashion show
for dogs).
“I think fashion gets a bad rap, for being a
very superficial industry and for being very cut
off from reality—because the clothes are so
expensive, and we’re trying to sell things to people
they don’t really need,” Altuzarra says. “But I
think fashion is very important, because it’s a
multimillion dollar industry that supports a lot
of craft, ultimately. In France and Italy, there
are communities that specialize in very specific
crafts, and fashion is really the only industry that
is supporting them, that is allowing them to still
thrive and live on.”
Elizabeth Redden is an instructor of composition
and a freelance writer. Her articles and essays
have appeared in a variety of publications including
Gastronomica, Inside Higher Ed, and Orion.
january 2012

23

What is
Africa
to Me?

FORTY YEARS AFTER SERVING
IN THE PEACE CORPS IN GAMBIA,
CLINTON ETHERIDGE TOOK HIS FAMILY
ON A PILGRIMAGE TO AFRICA.
By Clinton Etheridge Jr. ’69

24

swarthmore college bulletin

JEFF PFLUEGER

What is Africa to me;
Copper sun or scarlet sea,
Jungle star or jungle track,
Strong bronzed men, or regal black
Women from whose loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his fathers loved,
Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,
What is Africa to me?
—from “Heritage” by Countee Cullen (1903–1946),
Harlem Renaissance poet
In summer 1971, my girlfriend Deidria Martin visited me in
Gambia, West Africa, where I was teaching math as a Peace Corps
volunteer. Because of our relatively light brown skin, Gambians thought
Deidria and I looked like members of the Fulani tribe and affectionately
gave us Fulani names. I was Lamin Jallow and she was Cumba Jallow.
After Deidria and I married in 1974 and started a family, we often
talked about going back to Gambia with our children—but Deidria ran
out of time. She died of a stroke in August 2008 at age 59.
About a year later, I proposed to my three adult children—Neil,
Clinton III (or “CAE”), and Lauren—that we travel to Africa as a family
in summer 2011, taking my 4-year-old granddaughter Brianna with us.
Ostensibly, the trip would fulfill the dream Deidria and I had for our
family of returning to explore our roots and links to Africa as black
Americans. But at a deeper emotional level, the real purpose would
be to strengthen our family bonds now that our wife, mother, and
grandmother had passed away.
25

In Gambia, I could show my family Latrikunda School, where I
taught from 1970 to 1972. I could show them the African compound
in Mintehkunda in Bakau, where I lived as a Peace Corps volunteer
and where Deidria stayed when she visited in 1971. And like many
black Americans before us, we could visit two sacred shrines of
slavery: Goree Island in the harbor of neighboring Dakar, Senegal,
and Juffureh Village in Gambia, to which Roots author Alex Haley
had traced his African ancestor, Kunta Kinteh.
I was overjoyed and excited about going back to Africa after 40
years. I trusted that Gambians would be the same warm, friendly,
hospitable people I knew decades earlier—even though development
in the ensuing years would have produced a busier, more populous
country. I expected that my adult children would experience a heady
mixture of culture shock and wonderment. But it was harder to know
what Brianna would be thinking
and feeling. After all, she was
only 4 years old. I first went to
Africa at 23; compared to me, my
granddaughter was a tabula rasa
on which her African experience
could be written with virtually no
preconceived notions.
We made that trip last July, and
it was very much a pilgrimage—in
the sense of a journey of great
moral or spiritual significance.

every baby and play with every child she encountered in Africa.
Unfortunately, it seems this capacity erodes as children mature
and learn to be influenced by things like race, religion, language,
dress, and country of origin. I wonder whether Brianna will mature
differently because she visited Africa at age four?

LESSONS LEARNED

Returning to Africa made me realize that I learned several important
lessons there as a young man—commonsense universal truths that an
intense personal experience first taught me.

26

© CLINTON ETHERIDGE

Lesson one: People are more alike than they are different.
When I scratched the surface and got to know Gambians and
Senegalese as friends, I found the Africans had the same dreams
and hopes and fears for themselves
and their children as Americans. I
shared this common humanity with
my African friends, even though I
was born and raised in one of the
world’s richest countries—a land of
relative opportunity that offered many
more “life chances.” By contrast, my
African friends were born and raised
in countries of extreme poverty and
limited opportunity. Yet last July, I saw
the pride with which my Gambian and
Senegalese friends spoke about their
sons and daughters, who were bettering
WHEN GRANDDADDY
themselves by studying or working in
COMES
the United States, England, France,
When my daughter Lauren
Sweden, or Denmark.
first told Brianna about going
Etheridge (left) made friends with Hayib Sosseh, a fellow teacher at
I was reminded of Shylock in Shaketo Africa, she showed my
the Latrikunda School, who invited the Peace Corps volunteer to spend
speare’s
Merchant of Venice. In Act
granddaughter an Internet
time at his family compound. There, he met Hayib’s cousin, Ousman Njie
III,
Scene
1, the Jewish moneylender
picture of the Sheraton Gambia
(right). “They welcomed me into their African world,” Etheridge says.
He
taught
math
for
two
years
at
the
school,
where
he
was
photographed
declares:
beachfront hotel at which
“Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath
(opposite) in 1971.
we would be staying. All my
not a Jew hands, organs … senses,
immediate family members—
affections, passions; fed with the same
both sons, daughter, and
food, hurt with the same weapons,
granddaughter—now live in landlocked Huntsville, Ala., about
subject to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means … as a
halfway between Nashville and Birmingham. Brianna had only
Christian is?
seen a beach on TV or in a book—never in person. Lauren helped
“If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not
conceptualize the trip for her by saying, “When Granddaddy comes,
laugh?”
he is going to take us to the beach.”
For days afterwards, Brianna put on her little bathing suit and
Lesson two: Respect for Islam
wandered around the house asking yearningly, “When is Granddaddy By living in predominantly Muslim Gambia for two years, I learned
coming to take us to the beach?” Lauren told me she even found
that Islam is one of the world’s great religions. Besides seeing devout
Brianna sleeping in her bathing suit one night.
Muslim friends pray five times a day, I twice experienced Ramadan—
Of course, we won’t really know what Brianna thought of the
the high holy month of fasting, during which Muslims refrain from
family pilgrimage to Africa until she is much older. (We took plenty
eating, drinking, and smoking during daylight hours in order to
of pictures to refresh her memory.) But I observed a child who was
practice patience, spirituality, humility, and submission to Allah.
seeing and experiencing so many new and interesting people, places,
Christianity is a positive force in the world and in the lives of most
and things—like the bemused Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, who tells Christians. Islam is also a positive force in the world and in the lives
her dog: “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.”
of most Muslims. After 9/11, I was surprised and disappointed to
I believe children have some innate democratic capacity to engage see Islam portrayed as a “terrorist religion” in some quarters of the
with other children—and, with a child’s heart, Brianna tried to hug
United States. Because of Peace Corps Gambia, I knew better.
swarthmore college bulletin

january 2012

27

© CLINTON ETHERIDGE

ER
JEFF PFLEUG

Dié Sylla, the wife of Sambou Toure,
sewed African garments for Etheridge
family members. Clinton received an
elegant netti abdou—a three-piece outfit.
“People say I look regal in the garment
Dié Sylla tailored for me,” Etheridge says,
“almost like an African prince.”

America by storm. In many respects,
Alex Haley put Gambia on the map and
made Juffureh Village a worldwide tourist
attraction. Yet Alex Haley and I are both
African-American tubaabs. But we’re also both
beloved by the Gambians—he in a big way and
I in a smaller one—because we came to Gambia,
“three centuries removed” in the words of Countee Cullen, to
give back and to serve.
The unusual geography of Gambia—it is bordered only by Senegal—stems
from the colonial era, when the British occupied the river valley and the
French colonized the surrounding countryside. Language differences persist
among educated Gambians and Senegalese, whose common language is Wolof.

Lesson three: I am a tubaab—but a beloved African-American tubaab
like Alex Haley.
In the 1960s, many young African-Americans were “black and
proud”—and fascinated with Africa. We sought to identify with
Africa by wearing our hair in afros and dressing in dashikis. It was
a heady, intoxicating time. This was the world view that led me to
Peace Corps Gambia in 1970; I was grappling with the burning
question posed by Countee Cullen: “What is Africa to me?”
As a black Peace Corps volunteer 40 years ago, I fell in love with
Africa. But I didn’t know quite how American I was until I went
there. With anguished disappointment, I learned that too much time
and space had separated me and my African-American ancestors
from Africa. Although my heart and spirit wanted to be African, my
American upbringing said otherwise. When I walked around the
Gambian capital Banjul with my Peace Corps friends, children in the
streets would say to us: “Tubaab, tubaab, may ma buréy.” Tubaab,
tubaab, give me a penny.
In the Wolof language of Gambia and Senegal, the word tubaab is
frequently translated as “white man.” But it is better defined as “nonAfrican,” which is what the white European colonialists were—the
British in Gambia and the French in Senegal.
In Gambia, I happened to meet Alex Haley in 1972, while he
was researching Roots, the book and TV-miniseries that later took
28

Lesson four: Judge people as individuals rather than as members of the
group you believe they represent.
I taught math at Latrikunda School five days a week for the ninemonth school year. Although I believe I was a conscientious and
effective teacher, I had a lot of time to read and to think about my
life—and about the United States and Africa. In general, the Peace
Corps tends to be a reflective, introspective time for volunteers.
One of the books I read during my Peace Corps days was
about the founding of the NAACP (National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People)—I cannot remember the title of
the book after 40 years. I learned the NAACP was founded in 1909
as an anti-lynching organization. I remember reading a gruesome
litany of lynchings one Sunday evening, with graphic descriptions of
the hideous nature of these crimes—including burning at the stake,
dismemberment, and castration. One particularly egregious lynching
in 1892 stands out in my memory: Three black men (Thomas Moss,
Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart) were lynched in Memphis,
Tenn., because they opened People’s Grocery, a store that competed
too effectively with the white-owned grocery across the street. One
night, a group of armed white men attacked People’s Grocery. Moss,
McDowell, and Stewart—who defended their property and shot some
of the white attackers—were arrested by the authorities. A lynch mob
broke into the Memphis jail, dragged them away from town, and
brutally killed them. None of the white lynchers was ever brought to
justice.
I got sick to my stomach that Sunday evening, unable to read any
more from that book. My blood was boiling about the lynching of
those black people. I had a hard time sleeping that night.
swarthmore college bulletin

The next day, a Monday, I was subdued
as I taught math to the schoolboys at
Latrikunda. After school, I took a taxi into
Banjul and went by the Peace Corps office to
check for mail. In those days, everybody else
in Peace Corps Gambia was white. I probably
shouldn’t have gone to the office that day, for
my blood was still boiling.
Then Vince Ferlini, who taught math at a
secondary school in Banjul, walked into the
office. Vince grew up in an Italian-American
family in Hartford, Conn., and had gone to
Notre Dame before joining the Peace Corps.
We were both members of the Peace Corps
Gambia basketball team. During our two
years there, Vince became my best friend in
the Peace Corps.
But at the office in Banjul that afternoon,
I tried to avoid speaking to Vince, until he
plaintively looked me in the eye. I realized
then that Vince knew nothing about
the lynchings of Thomas Moss, Calvin
McDowell, and Henry Stewart. Vince had
no connection to the gruesome litany of
lynchings I had read the night before. He
was just my friend and fellow Peace Corps
volunteer.
After leaving Gambia, I didn’t see Vince
for nearly 40 years—until we met at the
Gambia Mission to the United Nations in
New York—where my family obtained our
visas the day before we flew to Africa. Vince
and I arranged our reunion through emails
and phone calls. When we first saw each
other, we smiled and hugged affectionately;
we were like two long-lost brothers.

The “Dark Continent” image of
Africa has been programmed into
the Western psyche. Through
Peace Corps Gambia, I learned that
the “darkest” thing about Africa is
our ignorance of it.

at the airport in Dakar, Senegal, in August
1970, I was surprised that the porters were
speaking French—a mark of sophistication
in the United States. I was also surprised to
find tall buildings in Africa, albeit just 10
stories. I was forced to confront my own
stereotypes about Africa and to wonder why
those stereotypes die hard.
Malcolm X provided his viewpoint on
this question in a 1965 Detroit speech:
“Having complete control over Africa, the
colonial powers of Europe had projected
the image of Africa negatively … jungle
savages, cannibals, nothing civilized.” This
is the “Dark Continent” image of Africa
that has been programmed into the Western
psyche, for example, by Tarzan movies
and novels like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness. Through Peace Corps Gambia,

however, I learned that the “darkest” thing
about Africa is our ignorance of it. To be
sure, Africa suffers from poverty, famine,
disease, war, and genocide—stark realities
that are part of Africa today. But these
are not the whole story. There is a more
complex reality to Africa that is frequently
obscured or eclipsed by the stereotypes and
the clichés. For example, many Americans
would be surprised to learn that Ghana, in
West Africa, has enjoyed one of the world’s
highest economic growth rates over the last
few years: 8.4 percent in 2008, 4.7 percent in
2009, and 5.7 percent in 2010—according to
the CIA’s World Factbook.
Since there is no substitute for experience,
and because stereotypes about Africa die
hard, I believe every black American should
go to Africa at least once—if only for a
little while. Only by doing so can a black
American get a reality check on the burning
question posed by Countee Cullen: “What is
Africa to me?”

MY GAMBIAN FRIEND HAYIB SOSSEH
Hayib Sosseh and I met as fellow teachers
at Latrikunda School, where we formed a
ready bond that has lasted a lifetime. He is a
thoughtful, elegant gentleman and a gifted
teacher, perhaps because he descended from
the griot class within the Wolof tribe—the
storytellers and the keepers of the oral
tradition.

The Etheridge family’s pilgrimage to Africa included
a visit to Gorrée Island off Dakar, Senegal, where
enslaved Africans were put aboard ships for the
Middle Passage to the Americas.

january 2012

© CLINTON ETHERIDGE

Lesson five: Stereotypes about Africa die hard.
My Peace Corps training provided me with
a very good cultural introduction to Africa.
Wolof instructors taught us the basics of
the language. We saw pictures of Gambia
and Senegal and heard tapes and records
of traditional African music played on the
kora—a stringed instrument sometimes
called an “African guitar.” Moreover, the
previous summer (1969), I had worked with
a Gambian college student and a Frenchspeaking Senegalese student. But there is
no substitute for experience. When I landed

29

Hayib welcomed me into his African
world—as did his Gambian friends and
relatives. I spent long hours and weekends
at Hayib’s compound in the Half Die section
of Banjul—sleeping overnight, eating
communally, drinking ataya (an African
tea that men drink as they sit around the
compound and talk), and generally imbibing
Gambian culture.
Peace Corps Gambia encouraged
volunteers to “live at the level of the people”
and avoid the expatriate enclaves for which
the British colonialists were noted. But
because of Hayib, I was able to experience
Gambian society at a deeper, richer level than
most of my fellow Peace Corps volunteers.
I was in Gambia less than six months
when Hayib took me to neighboring Dakar,
Senegal, for Christmas 1970 to visit his
Senegalese cousins, the brothers Sambou
Toure and Ndary Toure.
Hayib and his cousins, like many
Senegalese and Gambians, speak Wolof,
a major language of the region, and have
friends and relatives on both sides of the
border.
But because of colonial history, educated
Senegalese tend to speak French and
educated Gambians tend to speak English.
In 1970, Sambou was a premed student
at the University of Dakar and his brother
Ndary was a high-school student at a lycée in
Dakar.
Some 40 years later, my family and I met
the Toure brothers in Dakar. Sambou is
now a Senegalese politician—the president
of the regional assembly in Kaolack, one of
Senegal’s larger cities. As a regional politician
in a predominantly Muslim country, Sambou
Toure now wears khaftans and marakiis—
pointy Moroccan-style slipper shoes. Ndary
Toure serves as deputy chief justice of the
Senegalese Cour Supreme (Supreme Court)
and wears Western-style clothes, like most
cosmopolitan Senegalese.
In Dakar, both brothers showered my
family with African hospitality.
Sambou hosted us for dinner at his
compound in Dakar with a sumptuous
feast of Senegalese benachin, domodaa, and
chicken yaasa prepared by Sambou’s wife,
Dié Sylla. Neither my French nor my Wolof
is any good, but thankfully Sambou and
Ndary now speak English well enough to
communicate with the African-American
30

As a black Peace Corps volunteer
40 years ago, I fell in love with
Africa. But with anguished
disappointment, I learned that too
much time and space had separated
me and my African-American
ancestors from Africa.
tubaabs in the Etheridge family.
We visited Ndary at the Cour Supreme,
where I reminded him how we first met in
1970 when he was a student at the lycée.
Using an American colloquialism, I then told
Ndary: “I knew you when you were kneehigh to a grasshopper, and now your name
is up there in lights.” He laughed when I told
him he had become a “big boss, a patron.”

A TRIBUTE TO “TEACHA”

My three adult children have known me
all their lives. I was in the delivery room to
witness each of them come into the world.
Over the years, as a father, I tried to love and
nurture each as best I could.
But when Deidria, my wife of 34 years,
died tragically of a stroke at age 59 in 2008,
I was thrown into a life crisis. Suddenly,
I became a widower living alone in the
Oakland house in which our children grew
up and from which they left the nest. I
realized I needed my children and their love
as much as they needed me. I solemnly told
myself, “I’m the only parent they have now!”
I was determined to spend as much quality
time with them as possible.
Some 40 years ago, someone took a photo
of me teaching the Gambian schoolboys
at Latrikunda. Several months before our
family pilgrimage to Africa, my daughter
Lauren was looking at a copy of the picture
and called me “Teacha.” (“Teacha” or
“Teacher” was the respectful form of address
with which the Gambian schoolboys spoke
to their teachers back then.) On the last day
of our trip, as I was bedding down in the
hotel in Dakar before our 8 a.m. flight to
New York, my three children knocked on
my door. To my surprise, they entered and

presented me with a large oil painting of that
classic classroom picture.
Lauren told me the “Teacha” painting—
which they commissioned from a
Dakar street artist—was a token of their
appreciation for me and the pilgrimage. In
two weeks in Africa, she said they learned
how the formative experience of Peace Corps
Gambia—about which they had heard for
much of their lives—had helped shape me
into the man they knew.
This tribute to “Teacha” was one the
greatest experiences of my life. I knew then
our family pilgrimage had been a success;
my children had bonded more deeply with
their single-parent father, and my children
had come to appreciate my links and ties to
Africa—and their own too. My children had
grappled with and found their own tentative
and preliminary answers to the burning
question “What is Africa to me?” After
they left, I stared at the painting in silence,
basking in Etheridge family love. I cried.

“CLINTON, DOO FI ÑÓWATI WAAY?”

In addition to 200,000 ordinary visitors a
year from around the world, dignitaries
such as Pope John Paul II, Nelson Mandela,
President Bill Clinton, and President George
W. Bush have visited Gorrée Island in Dakar
and its infamous Slave House.
At the center of the Slave House is the
“Door of No Return,” a coffin-sized portal
that looks onto the Atlantic Ocean at the
closest point on the African continent to the
Americas. According to legend, the “Door
of No Return” was the last foothold captured
Africans had on the Motherland before
embarking on the Middle Passage. Like
Kunta Kinteh of Roots, my chained African
ancestors symbolically passed through their
own “Door of No Return” into slavery on an
American plantation.
As I was leaving Gambia in summer 1972,
after two years there in the Peace Corps,
many Gambian friends were saying in Wolof,
“Clinton, doo fi ñówati waay.” “Clinton, you
won’t be coming back here anymore, will
you?”
But last July, standing in the “Door of No
Return” at the Slave House in Dakar harbor
(with family nearby, overcome with emotion
and close to tears) I gave a resounding “yes”
to “Clinton, doo fi ñówati waay?” Yes, I have
come back! I have come back!
swarthmore college bulletin

PHOTOGRAPHS © CLINTON ETHERIDGE

Top: Etheridge’s granddaughter
Brianna Erskine made friends easily
with Gambian children—exhibiting
“an innate democratic capacity.”
Above and right: Etheridge’s three
children—Neil, Lauren, and Clinton III—
commissioned a painting of Etheridge
based on one of two extant photos
showing him teaching math to Gambian
boys as a Peace Corps volunteer. (The
other photo appears on page 27.)
JEFF PFLEUGER

january 2012

31

32

swarthmore college bulletin

Re-branding the Right
THE TEA PARTY AND ITS SYMPATHIZERS ARE VIRTUALLY ONE AND THE
SAME AS ANOTHER HIGHLY VISIBLE POLITICAL MOVEMENT WITH LOW
APPROVAL RATINGS: THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT.
By Tom Krattenmaker
Illustrations by Nancy Harrison
The name and the story evoke a stirring
chapter from the country’s past.
Good, patriotic Americans become fed up
with a distant, out-of-touch, over-reaching
tyrannical government. From a wellspring of
discontent arises something wholly new and
spontaneous, a broad-based popular uprising
determined to throw the rascals out of
power, like so much tea into Boston Harbor.
This portrayal of today’s Tea Party and its
genesis has proven irresistible to the media
and popular understanding—as well as one
of the nation’s two predominant political

january 2012

parties, which in the run-up to the 2012
national elections seems ever more in the Tea
Party’s sway.
One problem: The story is largely false.
Leave it to Robert Putnam ’63 to spoil the
party. In view of Putnam’s career—his unique
penchant for cutting through political fog
and academic inscrutability to describe
America—it hardly seems a surprise that
this high-profile Harvard professor and
best-selling author would play a major role
in debunking the Tea Party myth, and, in
so doing, contribute to a deeper public
understanding of what’s happening in
the body politic approaching the next big
election.

“In most respects the evidence from our
research tells a very, very different story
about the Tea Party’s origins than what the
Tea Party says about itself,” says Putnam,
the Malkin Professor of Public Policy at
Harvard University. “People—including the
mainstream media—have been too much
taken in by this story, which in almost every
respect is flawed. Given what we have found,
the notion that the Tea Party should be seen
as a driving force in this election year is,
frankly, nuts.”
Putnam and his collaborator and coauthor, David Campbell, laid out their
eye-popping conclusions in a New York
Times op-ed in August, the summer’s debtceiling drama still fresh in the public’s mind.
“Crashing the Tea Party,” read the headline.
Crash the party it did, declaring, “The Tea
Party is increasingly swimming against
the tide of public opinion: among most
Americans, even before the furor over the
debt limit, its brand was becoming toxic.”
The Times piece previewed a more lengthy

33

Those who ended up becoming Tea Party supporters
were overwhelmingly white Republicans with a
predilection against immigrants, a coolness toward
blacks and other minorities, and, most significantly,
a conviction that religion—Christianity, to be exact—
should infuse politics.
analysis that appears in the paperback edition, released in January, of
Putnam’s and Campbell’s award-winning 2010 book American Grace:
How Religion Divides and Unites Us. (Putnam gave a talk by the
same name on campus last semester.) Not only did the Times piece
point out the surprisingly low approval ratings of the Tea Party—20
percent, according to their surveys, as against 40 percent who
disapprove—but it cited new evidence that the Tea Party is anything
but the grassroots uprising many thought.
Mining a database comprising some 3,000 interviews conducted
for American Grace, Putnam and Campbell controlled for various
factors—attitudes on immigration, racial minorities, the role of
religion in politics, and so on—and gleaned an important insight.
The Tea Party and its sympathizers are virtually one and the same
as another highly visible political movement with very low approval
ratings: the Christian Right.
A myth and a re-branding strategy—exposed and debunked,
with important implications for voters’ decisions and both political
parties’ strategies in a presidential election year. Not a bad day’s
work for a political scientist. And not the kind of outcome one could
have foreseen for an aspiring mathematics and physics major named
Robert Putnam who arrived on the Swarthmore campus in 1959.
“Swarthmore was the most important thing that ever happened
34

to me, period,” Putnam says. “Swarthmore is where I met my wife,
where I became intellectually open and alive, and where I became
involved politically and socially. That intense interest in public service
and public affairs is an extremely powerful part of the Swarthmore
culture, and I drank that in.”
Putnam met his future wife, Rosemary Werner ’62, in a political
science class. On their first date, she took him to a Kennedy-forPresident rally. On their second date, Putnam, whose politics then
ran in a Republican direction, returned the favor and took her to
witness a Nixon motorcade working its way along Chester Road
at the foot of the Swarthmore campus. It was only fitting that they
would make a train ride to Washington, D.C., that following January
to attend the Kennedy inauguration.
“We heard it with our own ears when Kennedy said those famous
words, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you
can do for your country,’” Putnam recalls. “I know it sounds awfully
trite, but at the time, and even right now, that was an enormously
important moment for me. The hair on the back of my neck stands
up when I think about it. I don’t want to say that moment alone
changed my life, but being at Swarthmore in those years did change
my life. I moved from physics and mathematics to taking courses in
political science and history, to majoring in psychology. I became
more and more convinced that it was my duty to apply what skills
and talents I had to studying things that would be relevant to public
life.”
Today, if you ask close observers of American culture and politics
about Robert Putnam and his impact on the culture’s understanding
of itself, you will often hear echoes of this comment by pollster and
religion analyst Robert Jones, who has also done groundbreaking
work on the overlap between the Tea Party and Christian Right. “It’s
one of Putnam’s gifts,” says Jones, CEO of the Washington-based
Public Religion Research Institute, “that he can write books with
really rigorous methodologies that can stand up in any academic
circle but that have memorable phrases that are immediately
understandable to wider audiences and encapsulate a whole complex
set of sociological findings. That’s the mark of someone who’s a real
public intellectual.”
Bowling Alone. That was one eminently memorable and telling
phrase coined by Putnam, and also the title of his 1995 best-selling
book. Putnam struck a chord with his chronicling of the dissipation
of face-to-face social interactions (such as those that take place in
bowling leagues), and the measureable correlations with declining
levels of civic participation. Through its use of that haunting term
“bowling alone,” the book, in retrospect, seems to foreshadow the
rise of the hyper-individualism that has found its political expression
more recently in political phenomena like the Tea Party.
Also near the top of any list of classic Robert Putnam phrases
must come “The Aunt Susan Principle.” Used to great effect in his and
Campbell’s American Grace, the term does a great deal to explain the
apparent paradox posed in the book’s subtitle: “How Religion Divides
and Unites Us.”
Think of it this way: Aunt Susan is the person in your life who
might have vastly different religious ideas but whose simple decency
and kindness make it impossible for you to demonize her and
that “other” group of which she is part. “All of us have an Aunt
swarthmore college bulletin

Smart GOP game-planners,
Putnam says, will realize that the
attributes that give the Tea Party
clout in the nomination process—
money, intensity, high levels of
commitment—do not carry over
well to a general election.

Susan in our lives,” Putnam explains, “someone who is just
wonderful, but who happens to be of a different religion from mine.”
Imagine that you are an evangelical Christian and your “Aunt
Susan” is an agnostic. Even though the orthodoxy in your religion
tells you she is in the dark and barred from heaven—perhaps even
someone who should be kept at arm’s length lest she exert a bad
influence on you—your experience and your heart tell you something
quite different. And you come to realize that you do not believe she
is bad or destined for hell. Putnam and Campbell, through their
exhaustive interviews and analyses for American Grace, discovered
that this is how America has become increasingly tolerant on matters
of religion even in the midst of a highly visible culture war.
“The more Aunt Susans you have in your life,” Putnam explains,
“the more tolerant you become of all religions. These ties, which
have grown a lot in the past 50 years, have produced this remarkable
level of religious tolerance in America despite religion, in some other
respects, becoming more polarizing.”
His knack for ultra-revealing phrases like the Aunt Susan Principle
is not something Putnam traces back to an aunt, but to his motherin-law.
“Zelda, who is no longer alive, sadly, was smart but not
particularly well educated,” Putnam says. “She had an extremely low
tolerance for social science. Thirty years ago, I vowed I was going to
write as much as I could in language that Zelda would understand.
So, quite consciously, I spend a lot of time thinking, ‘How can I
explain my research to Zelda, my mother-in-law?’”
Richard Valelly ’75, Claude C. Smith 1914 Professor of Political
Science, calls Putnam the rare political scientist who is interested
in, and able to capture, the non-political contexts that affect politics.
“Most of us who study American politics study conflict, political
parties, public opinion, the evolution of the filibuster and its
implications for policy-making, and the like,” Valelly says. “That
stuff is fascinating and important. But the broad societal context
is often missing—and Putnam has pioneered ways to understand
that context and to analyze its evolution and meaning for the
quality of life in America. He is interested in how seemingly nonjanuary 2012

political phenomena—the linkages between social capital and
trust, the religiosity of Americans and its connection to tolerance
of differences—create the background context for a fundamental
concern, namely, American greatness.”
Were someone looking for a homespun phrase to explain the
implications of Putnam’s latest research, he or she might well end up
with “the tail that wagged the dog.” Judging solely from the media
fascination with the Tea Party and the large amount of coverage
devoted to it, and considering the way the Republican presidential
contenders spent fall 2011 catering to it, one might conclude that
support for this movement was broad and deep—a true force to be
reckoned with. And, as revealed by Putnam and his political science
collaborator from Notre Dame, one reaching this conclusion would
be deeply mistaken.
It’s putting it mildly to say the Tea Party is unpopular; as Putnam
and Campbell find, its approval ratings turn out to be lower than
Muslims and atheists—two social groups that appeared to have
staked permanent claim to the bottom rungs of the ladder in
American public opinion. As the research pair pointed out in their
New York Times op-ed, it was telling that the Christian Right also
emerged as one of the lowest-scoring cohorts when they asked
people to evaluate such groups as blacks, Hispanics, Democrats,
Republicans, etc.—telling, because it turns out that the Tea Party and
Christian Right are closer to being one and the same than researchers
and journalists had previously realized.
To explore the complex dynamics of the Tea Party and its true
origins and motivations, Putnam and Campbell returned to the
people they surveyed in 2006 and 2007 for American Grace, probing
this time for their views of the Tea Party. By controlling for various
factors, the researchers found that the most significant predictors
of Tea Party affinity were not stuff of Tea Party myth, not some new
disgust with big government, national debt, and a reeling economy.
Rather, they were the same factors that predicted Christian Right
affiliation before there even was a Tea Party or a Barack Obama
in our national politics. Those who ended up becoming Tea Party
supporters were, back in 2006 and 2007, overwhelmingly white
35

Republicans with a predilection against
immigrants, a coolness toward blacks and
other minorities, and, most significantly, a
conviction that religion—Christianity, to be
exact—should infuse politics.
“The religious right has been around in
Republican politics for a long time,” Putnam
says. “The Tea Party turns out to be, by and
large, the same folks. Frankly, it’s a different
label for the same old group.”
A different label, to be sure. But another
important difference is the political context.
Now, unlike in 2006 or 2007, the country is
gripped by a tenacious economic downtown
and, moreover, the White House is occupied
by a Democrat who has become a focal
point for otherwise inchoate anger about
the dysfunctions of the federal government.
William Saletan ’87, a longtime politics
writer for Slate, points out that the Tea Party,
as often happens with political movements,
can partly attribute its sudden rise to being in
the right place at the right time. If not for the
economic downtown, Saletan says, the Tea
Party would have nowhere near the media
visibility and political clout it now enjoys.
“The Tea Party is the angry movement
that happened to be standing there as the
recession deepened,” Saletan said in an
interview. “Were it not for the recession,
people would be relatively happy with the
U.S. government. The troops are coming
home from the unpopular wars. Foreign
policy is not going badly; people are feeling
more secure. There’s not a big outrage about
social issues. If the economy were OK,
there would not be this great anger at the
government. And the Tea Party would make
no sense.”
Putnam believes his and Campbell’s
findings are highly relevant to Republican
strategies for 2012—and well beyond. Smart
GOP game-planners, he says, will realize that
the Tea Party has far narrower appeal than
surface appearances might suggest, and that
the attributes that give it clout in the GOP
presidential nomination process—money,
intensity, high levels of commitment—do
not carry over well to a general election.
“Although candidates like Michele
Bachmann and Rick Perry are perfect for
the Republican nominating constituency,”
Putnam says, “they are perfectly awful for the
general election.”
But the implications extend well beyond
36

this next big election. Putnam points out that
the signal markers of the Tea Party, in terms
of its supporters’ demographic profile and
their attitudes on issues and social trends, are
on the wrong side of the shifting historical
tides. The country is becoming more
racially and religiously diverse. Younger
members of the majority are themselves
becoming more appreciative of tolerance
and pluralism. Those who identify strongly
with the Tea Party, Putnam notes, tend to be
significantly older. While that helps account
for the outsize sway they currently exert—
older citizens tend to out-hustle younger
Americans in the political arena, both in
their donating and voting—it also suggests
that the movement probably lacks staying
power. “We can see from the data,” Putnam
says, “that the views that distinguish the Tea
Party are on their way out.”
Even if it pays off in the 2012 election,
if the Republicans allow themselves to
be defined by the Tea Party they could

experience a fate similar to that which befell
Democrats following the 1972 presidential
contest, Putnam warns. He sees a parallel
between the Republicans’ relationship with
the Tea Party today and the relationship
the Democratic party had with the antiVietnam War movement in the early
1970s—a relationship that was cemented
by George McGovern’s nomination. While
it brought energy to the party, it also
alienated larger numbers of moderates and
left the Democrats vulnerable to damaging
characterizations that Republicans used to
great advantage over subsequent years and
decades.
“If Republicans allow the Tea Party’s views
to define their image,” Putnam warns, “they
risk smearing their party’s brand for a very,
very long time.”

swarthmore college bulletin

connections

A BUSY WEEKEND FOR ALUMNI
COUNCIL

Members of the Alumni Council worked
nonstop at their recent fall meeting. As
always, much of the weekend was focused
on engagement with students. The Council
sponsored receptions with students and
faculty members in three academic areas:
biology and medicine; classics, English
literature, and modern languages and
literature; and economics. Students also met
with alumni composers both in a master
class and at a networking reception after the
Alumni and Student Composers Concert on
Saturday evening (see Alumni Events, below).
Council members recorded video answers to
career questions, in a project co-sponsored
by the Career Services office, which will
be launched later this winter online. And,
according to longtime members, Saturday’s
career networking dinner with students was
the most successful in recent memory.
The other important focus of the weekend
was the College’s strategic plan (see p. 6).
Members arrived on campus, having read
the draft and other supporting materials.
Over the weekend, several guest speakers—
President Rebecca Chopp, Provost Tom
january 2012

Stephenson, Professor of Economics Stephen
O’Connell, and Vice President for College
and Community Relations and Executive
Assistant to the President Maurice Eldridge—
provided perspectives on the plan. By the
end of the weekend, the Council had formed
several ad hoc task forces, in addition to
their standing working groups, to support
implementation of aspects of the plan. These
task forces will focus on the Institute for
Liberal Arts, the Center for Leadership and
Innovation, admissions, career services, and
communications.
—Lisa Lee ’81
Director of Alumni Relations

RECONNECT!

With your Swarthmore connections,
you already know that Swarthmore is a
wonderful place. Reconnect to the wonder!
The campus bookstore sells T-shirts and
sweatshirts online to allow you to get your
Garnet on without trekking all the way back
to campus. Check in with current student
activities by adding the Daily Gazette or
The Phoenix to your RSS feed, or become a
student again by listening to one of the many
streaming lectures available on Swarthmore’s

On the clear, blue Sunday morning of Garnet
Homecoming and Family Weekend, about 20
stalwart souls participated in a Fun Run. Starting
and finishing at Parrish portal, runners navigated
a winding three-mile course through the campus,
designed by cross-country team member Zachary
Gershenson ’12.

website. Come to a Connection event, or
start a Swarthmore book group in your
town. Chat virtually with other alumni about
current issues facing the College and the
world on the Swarthmore discussion boards.
Share the wonder, and someday, you’ll have a
great conversation in a grocery store parking
lot thanks to that Swarthmore bumper
sticker on your car.

ALUMNI EVENTS

Boston and Seattle Philip Weinstein,
Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of
English Literature, discussed “Dark Twins:
Faulkner and Race” as part of the Faculty on
the Road program. The talk was based on his
most recent book Becoming Faulkner, which
was just chosen by the Society for the Study
of Southern Literature as the best book on
Southern literature written in 2010.
Continued on next page.
37

Boston The Boston Connection hosted
a Broadway sing-along, featuring pianist
George Lakey, former Visiting Professor of
Peace and Conflict Studies and Lang Center
for current Civic and Social Responsibility
Research Fellow. Lakey hosts similar
singalongs regularly on campus, including
during Alumni Weekend. Organized by Sue
Turner ’60, the event was held at the home of
Doug Spence ’93—many thanks to both.

Washington, D.C. The event in San Francisco
coincided with an Evening with the President
reception. These events provide an occasion
for students to network with local alumni
and offer an opportunity to recognize the
alumni extern sponsors and hosts who make
the program such a success. We thank James
Gregory ’85, Donald McMinn ’86, Peter ’60
and Barbara Hopf Offenhartz ’58, and Marc
Sonnenfeld ’68 for hosting these events.

Philadelphia The Philadelphia Connection
participated in a tour of the Brandywine
River Museum with Mary Woolson Cronin
’83, the museum’s supervisor of education.

NOMINATIONS SOUGHT FOR
ARABELLA CARTER AWARD

Swarthmore The second annual Swarthmore
Student and Alumni Composers Concert
drew a solid audience despite the October
snowfall. Organized by Deborah How
’89, the program featured compositions
by Mark Alburger ’79, David Barnes ’88,
Elizabeth Mountford Corson ’92 and
Gabrielle Daniello ’92, Myles Louis Dakan
’10, Roxanna Glass ’91 (arranged by Lisa
Wildman ’84), Elizabeth Hoffman ’85, Lacy
James ’84, Ben Kapilow ’13, Leland Kusmer
’11, James Matheson ’92, Peter Schickele ’57,
Alejandro Sills ’13, Sophia Uddin ’11 and
Gabriel Riccio ’11, Niels Verosky ’14, Lisa
Wildman ’84, and Becky Wright ’11.
Tucson The Tucson Connection has
instituted a salon, where members can see
and discuss documentary videos, the first
of which was poet David Whyte’s The Three
Marriages: Work, Self, and Others.
Extern Week 2012 As part of Extern Week,
the second week in January, events for
alumni and students were held in Boston,
New York, Philadephia, San Francisco, and
38

Do you know of a classmate or another
Swarthmore alumnus/a who goes above
and beyond the call of duty in his or
her volunteer work? Honor them with a
nomination for the Arabella Carter Award.
Arabella Carter was one of the great
unsung heroes who worked for peace and
social justice in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting
in the early 1900s. She never sought publicity
or recognition for her work and was largely
forgotten by all but Friends Historical
Library archivists, who saw her hand in
Quaker peace and social justice work over
three decades. She appears to have received
no monetary compensation for all these
services, living simply on family money.
The award, established in 1997 by the
Alumni Council and presented each year
at reunion, honors alumni who have made
significant contributions as volunteers in
their own communities or on a regional or
national level. The Council hopes to honor
alumni whose volunteer service is relatively
unknown. If you know such a person—
especially if his or her class is having a
reunion this year—please contact the Alumni
Office at (610) 328-8402 for a nomination
form or visit www.swarthmore.edu/alumni/
arabella_form.htm.

DANUBE RIVER AND THE HABSBURG
EMPIRE WITH PROFESSOR PIETER
JUDSON ’78
June 14–28, 2012

There is still time to join this exciting
exploration of Eastern Europe. Travel in
the company of Professor Pieter Judson,
alumni and friends on a unique journey
that combines a seven-night cruise on the
Danube River with three nights in each of the
historic cities of Prague (below) and Kraków.
Come explore the medieval spires, honeycolored cathedrals, and cultural treasures of
the former Habsburg Empire—one of the
most prolific in all of European history—as
we are introduced to six Central European
countries and visit seven UNESCO World
Heritage sites. Discover the spectacular
legacy of art, music, and culture of the
Habsburgs that thrived for over six centuries
and explore Prague and Kraków, whose
medieval architecture was spared destruction
during World War II.
Habsburg Empire gems include Prague’s Old City
Square and Melk Stift, an Austrian Benedictine abbey
with a magnificent library .

IMAGES COURTESY OF GOHAGAN TRAVEL COMPANY

Mark Your Calendar Now for the
2012 Jonathan R. Lax ’71 Conference on
Entrepreneurship
Sunday, March 18th
Swarthmore College Science Center
Keynote Speaker David Gelber ’63
Co-Founder of Roaring Fork Films, Co-Creator and
Co-Managing Director of Years of Living Dangerously, an
innovative multiplatform, multimedia project on climate change,
and former long-time producer for CBS’s 60 Minutes

swarthmore college bulletin

LIFELONG LEARNING
SPRING 2012
Offered at Swarthmore
Deciding, Designing, Predicting:
Mathematics in Everyday Life
Deb Bergstrand, professor of mathematics
and statistics
Meets Mondays, 7–9:30 p.m.
Feb. 6 to April 2 (but not March 5)
How surprised should we be by amazing
coincidences? Can we always determine
the true winner of an election? How safe
is air travel? How can we fairly divide
desirable goods, like cake or land? Can
we tile the bathroom floor so there is no
repeated pattern? Is there a difference
between insurance and gambling in
Atlantic City? Mathematics helps us answer
questions both serious and frivolous and
even gives us tools to determine when a
question has no exact answer.

january 2012

Renaissance and Baroque in European
Art
Michael Cothren, Scheuer Family
Professor of the Humanities
Meets Wednesdays, 7–9:30 p.m.
Feb. 8 to April 4 (but not March 7)

struggled to understand and reveal the
deep split in the Russian personality and
to discover its causes. Authors will include:
Aleksandr Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoevsky,
Andrei Bely, Nikolay Gogol, and Anna
Akhmatova.

This course surveys major works of
European art from the 14th through the
17th centuries, concentrating on the artists
who pioneered, established, and developed
the cultural movements we refer to as
Renaissance and Baroque.

Offered in New York City at the Support
Center for Nonprofit Management, 305
Seventh Avenue
James Joyce’s Ulysses
Philip Weinstein, Alexander Griswold
Cummins Professor of Literature
Meets Thursdays, 6:45–to 9:15
March 15 to May 3
Arguably the supreme novel written
in English in the 20th century, Ulysses
delights even as it daunts. Our aim is to
grasp, increasingly, how it “moves,” what it
is about, and why it matters.

Murder, Madness, Insurrection: Tragic
Schism in Russian Society
Thompson Bradley, Professor Emeritus of
Russian
Meets Thursdays, 7–9:30 p.m.
Feb. 9 to April 5 (but not March 8)
This course will explore how the Russian
writers of the 19th and 20th centuries

39

GARNET
From top to bottom: Cheers from an excited
crowd echoed around the town on Saturday
evening during the men’s soccer game, in
which Johns Hopkins edged the Garnet, 2–1.
Chemistry major Neil Palmer ’12 was one of
several science students who presented their
summer research projects to enthusiastic
visitors. An evening pep rally (left) drew a
large crowd of athletics supporters, including
the mysterious Garnet Man. Right: The Garnet
women’s soccer team took on City College of
New York ’s women for a 9–1 victory.

40

Watch some highlights from Garnet Weekend at http://media.swarthmore.video.

swarthmore college bulletin

Weekend

HOMECOMING AND FAMILY

Clockwise from top left: Young visitors hung
out with Phineas Phoenix. Assistant Surgeon
General Anne Schuchat ’80 delivered a riveting
McCabe Lecture to a packed house, sharing her
reflections on more than two decades at the
Centers for Disease Control. Quitterie Gounot
’13 and her parents Françoise and Denys
Gounot chatted with President Rebecca Chopp
at the 1864 Society reception. And, beneath
splendid fall foliage, friends caught up with each
other, parents enjoyed their children, and new
friendships were forged.
Watch Anne Schuchat’slecture at http://media.swarthmore.video.
january 2012

41

class notes

El efth erios K ost ans

Students make their way along the Metsequoia Allée—the walkway between the Lang Performing Arts Center and Kohlberg Hall—following a 2009 snowstorm.

42

swarthmore college bulletin

class notes
Nancy Grace Roman ’46
­ ­

Olin Mills

has been honored by NASA for her contributions to the
creation of the Hubble Space Telescope with the establishment
of a fellowship in her name. The Nancy Grace Roman
Technology Fellowship in Astrophysics encourages the use of
innovative technology in the scientific
exploration of the universe’s origins and
planets outside the solar system. It will
also help recipients develop leadership
skills in astrophysics projects and
investigations and support astronomical
instrument builders in the early stages of
their careers. Roman became NASA’s first
chief of astronomy in 1959, setting up
a committee of astronomers and NASA
engineers who would eventually design
the Hubble. “The mother of the Hubble” lobbied Congress
to secure funding for the telescope’s planning and structure.
Since retiring from NASA in 1979, Roman has spent her time
consulting, teaching, and lecturing across the country as an
advocate for science and to interest girls in the STEM (science,
technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields.

44

swarthmore college bulletin

IN MEMORIAM
Alumni death notices received by the College
from Sept. 01 to Nov. 15, 2011
1933
1934
1936

1937
1940
1942
1943

1944
1945

1946
1947
1948
1949

1951

1954
1957
1960
1962
1966
1981

january 2012

Mary Vlachos Barden
Grace Snyder Stuart
Esther Pierson Wagner
Walter Hickman
Charlotte Jones Newman
John Sinclair
Joan Kelley Fowler
Marian Edwards Mukerji
Phyllis Tait Dunham
Thomas Ford
David Curtin
Emily Glossbrenner Diamond
Rena Levander Van Nuys
Robert Young
Tomomi Murakami
Ralph Sonnenschein
Bernhard Bang
Audrey Kemp Bowyer
John Kelly
Milan Cerstvik
Russell Christie
William Hollinger
Grisella Hall Kerr
Helena Jourdan Boutillier
Ernst Epstein
Robert Sadacca
Walter Miller
Robert Myers Jr.
David Trout
Sheila Mills Richter
Ellanor Peiser White
Davida Young Teller
I. Omogi Calleb
Peter Hendley
Kevin Wilson

Oct. 29, 2011
Oct. 9, 2011
Oct. 19, 2011
Aug. 22, 2011
Nov. 5, 2011
Sept. 16, 2011
Sept. 19, 2011
Nov. 1, 2011
July 18, 2011
July 30, 2011
July 31, 2011
Sept. 16, 2011
Oct. 2, 2011
Oct. 1, 2011
Sept. 7, 2011
Aug. 5, 2011
Aug. 1, 2009
July 30, 2011
Oct. 1, 2011
Oct. 2, 2011
Oct. 23, 2011
May 14, 2010
Sept. 2, 2011
Aug. 20, 2011
Jan. 7, 2011
Oct. 6, 2011
Oct. 22, 2011
Aug. 30, 2011
Aug. 31, 2011
Oct. 11, 2011
Oct. 13, 2011
Oct.12, 2011
Jan. 1, 2000
Aug. 30, 2011
Sept. 24, 2011

47

class notes
J. Parker Hall III ’55,

PUBLICATIONS OFFICE ARCHIVES

a member of the Swarthmore College Board of Managers
from 1984 to 1987, died on Sept. 22 at age 78. Parker was
president of Lincoln Capital Management Company for nearly
30 years, overseeing the growth of the firm’s assets from less
than $50 million to more than $80 billion. He also wrote
and published extensively on finance and investment in the
Financial Analysts Journal. In 2000, Parker’s professional
accomplishments earned him the
first-ever Hortense Friedman Award
from the Investment Analysts Society
of Chicago. His service to the wider
community included chairing the
investment committees of Swarthmore
College, the University of Chicago, the
Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Ravinia
Festival, and the YMCA of Metropolitan
Chicago. He was also a trustee of the
Nature Conservancy of Illinois, a board
member of the La Salle Street Fund, and
an adviser to the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation.
Parker and his wife, Julie Lange Hall ’55, were honored for
service and philanthropy, together receiving the University of
Chicago’s Medal of Honor, the ACLU’s Roger Baldwin Award
and the North Shore Country Day School’s Foster Hannaford
Recognition. Parker enjoyed tennis, jazz piano, the great
outdoors, and color photography. In addition to his wife, he is
survived by three children and eight grandchildren.

48

swarthmore college bulletin

class notes
John Cratsley ’63

COURTESY OF JOHN CRATSLEY

was recently awarded the Judicial Excellence Award by the
Massachusetts Judges Conference and the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Frank J. Murray Inn of the Court for 34
years of judicial service in the District and Supreme courts of
the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
While on the Superior Court, he served
as regional administrative judge in
Norfolk and Suffolk counties and as chair
of the Supreme Judicial Court’s Standing
Committee on Dispute Resolution.
Cratsley recently reached the mandatory
judicial retirement age of 70 but continues to teach at both Boston College and
Harvard Law School. He also plans to
work with Harvard Law School’s student
clinics and to join JAMS, an international
company specializing in the mediation and arbitration of
complex disputes. Cratsley’s son, Kelo, graduated from
Swarthmore in 1994, and his father, Edward Cratsley, was the
College’s vice president for administration from 1950 to 1978,
receiving an honorary degree in 1978.

50

swarthmore college bulletin

Russell Fernald ’63

LINDA CICERO, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Science.
The Benjamin Scott Crocker Professor of Human Biology and
professor of biology at Stanford, Fernald’s research is focused
on how social interactions among individuals produce specific
changes in the brain. His research asks how social interactions
are transduced into specific cellular
and molecular mechanisms in the brain
using cutting-edge techniques from
behavioral observation to molecular
probes. He received a Javits Neuroscience
Investigator Award from the NIH for
investigators who have a distinguished
record of substantial contribution in
neurological science. In 2004, Fernald
received the prestigious Rank Prize for
work that he did with collaborators on
understanding how vertebrate lenses
function. He has done research at the University of Oregon,
the Medical Research Council for Cell Biophysics in London
and the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology in
Germany. He has been recognized for his contributions to
innovative undergraduate teaching, education, and mentoring.

january 2012

51

in my life

It Was in
Another
Lifetime
A LETTER FROM AFGHANISTAN
By Gregg Davis ’80

52

Gregg Davis (left) has spent
16 years in the Naval Reserve
and currently serves as a a
senior analyst and cultural
adviser in the AfghanistanPakistan Hands Program.
He has been deployed to the
Middle East three times—
most recently to Helmand
Province in Afghanistan. The
desolate desert landscape that
surrounds his base is seen
from the loading ramp of a
Marine V-22 Osprey (above).
Davis is scheduled to end his
current tour this month.
COURTESY OF GREGG DAVIS

It’s been a long time since I sat with some
of you waiting to receive our diplomas in
the Scott Amphitheater—a lifetime ago,
you might say. Parts of that day are clear as
I look back: the ping-pong balls we handed
to President Dorie Friend, the raucous
trumpets when Peter Schickele ’57 received
his honorary degree and sang his address.
Other things fade, but never the lessons
of thought, consideration, and value that I
honed through so many experiences shared
with so many of you. Shared too with some
who are no longer with us—Judy, Fred, Drew,
and too many others. You are sorely missed.
So here I am three decades later in a role
I couldn’t have imagined during those days
we shared so long ago. Somehow, being in
Afghanistan in 2011 makes Swarthmore
sense in a James Michener kind of way,
although it’s perhaps far stranger for some
of you to see that I am here in uniform.
Yes, the military. I’ve spent 16 years in the
Navy Reserve, a chief petty officer; I was at
the Pentagon on September 11. Since then,
I’ve been part of three mobilizations, with
two years in Bahrain and—by the time this
is published—a year in Afghanistan. Yes, a
far cry from the person you may remember
from that lifetime ago.
What am I doing here? In April 2010,
I was accepted into the AfghanistanPakistan Hands Program—AfPak Hands
for short, known also as Afghan Hands
here in Afghanistan. The idea is to train
a cadre of experts on this region who can

then advise the Department of Defense
and other branches of government. Before
deploying here, we were given extensive
language training in addition to cultural
and counterinsurgency training. I work as
a senior analyst and cultural adviser for the
Stability Operations Information Center, part
of Regional Command Southwest (RC-SW)
at Camp Leatherneck.
At RC-SW, we are concerned with just
two provinces—Helmand and Nimroz.
Although Afghanistan has many spectacular
mountains, here at Camp Leatherneck we

have desert—and when the dust clears,
occasional views of craggy hills reminiscent
of the Mojave.
I divide my time between work on base
and trips to Nimroz, where my Dari (such
as it is) is much more useful. I find that the
small amount of the language that I speak
opens communication much more than
my basic Dari conversational skills should
logically accomplish. I’ve seen this before; it
seems to be a common reaction to someone’s
making an honest effort to understand
something about another culture.
swarthmore college bulletin

Many foreigners coming here
believe that the statement
“Afghanistan is a Muslim country”
explains everything they need to
know—which might be closer to
the truth if they understood Islam
in the first place.

Of course, language is just a beginning—a
fact lost on many in the AfPak Hands
program, unfortunately. Many of our
problems in this war come—as Mike
Scheuer, former CIA Al Qaeda analyst,
and author of Imperial Hubris and Through
Our Enemies’ Eyes commented early on—
from a failure to study and understand the
fundamentals of Afghan culture. Many
foreigners coming here believe that the
statement “Afghanistan is a Muslim country”
explains everything they need to know—
which might be closer to the truth if they
understood Islam in the first place.
However, to most Americans, all Islam
and all Muslims are the same. They fail
to understand that Islam has three major
divisions—Sunni, Shia, and Sufi—and there’s
a great deal of debate about what Sufism
is. There are many subsects within those
divisions. Indonesia, Turkey, Iraq, Tunisia,
and Mali are all Muslim nations—and that
means something different in each one.
The Afghans I have met (and this has held
true for all the major ethnic groups—Tajiks,
Pashtuns, Hazaras, and Baluch) interact
differently from our norm. First, there is the
value attached to “small talk,” which is really
quite common outside our American culture.
Beyond that is a subtle way of discussing,
where disagreement is not voiced as such and
correction is offered in analogy and story.
Expressions of belief are neither direct nor
straightforward, but at the same time, beliefs
are firmly rooted and deeply held.
january 2012

It’s all very confounding to our Western
way of conversing, and especially our
intellectual traditions. It’s almost as if our
Western tradition is a boxing match where
discussants are seeking to knock out the
opposing argument. In stark contrast, the
Afghan sees the disagreements as a dance—
with differences to be harmonized so that
the two (or more) can move where they
want together. It’s very Sufi, an influence
I see everywhere, and seems as natural as
breathing for the Afghans.
Afghans also believe that they know far
more about being Muslim than anyone else.
Boston University anthropologist Thomas
Barfield says in his history of Afghanistan:
Few peoples in the world, particularly the
Islamic world, have maintained such a strong
and unproblematic sense of themselves, their
culture, and their superiority as the Afghans.
In abstract terms all foreigners, especially nonMuslims, are viewed as inferior to Afghans.
Although the great powers might have been
militarily, technologically, and economically
stronger, because they were nonbelievers,
or infidels, their values and way of life were
naturally suspect.
Afghanistan’s Muslim neighbors, however,
fared only slightly better in (Sunni) Afghan
eyes. The Uzbeks must have been asleep to
allow the Russians to occupy Central Asia
for over a century; Pakistan is a suspect land
of recent Muslim converts from Hinduism
(Pashtuns and Baluch excepted) that should
never have become a nation; and Iran is a nest
of Shiite heretics who speak Persian with a
ludicrous accent.
Convinced they are natural-born Muslims,
Afghans cede precedence to no one in matters
of religion. They refused to take doctrinal
advice from foreign Salafis, who claimed they
had a superior vision of Islam, coming as they
did from Islam’s Arabian heartland. Instead,
even under the Taliban, Afghans continued
to bedeck graves commemorating martyrs
with poles and flags, made pilgrimages to the
shrines of saints reputed to cure illnesses or
help women conceive, and placed magical
charms on their children and valuable
domestic animals to ward off the evil eye.
Afghans responded to any criticism of
these practices by arguing that since there are
no purer or stronger believers in Islam than
themselves, their customs must be consistent

with Islam. Otherwise they would not practice
them. Islamic Sufi orders (Naqshbandiya and
Chisti particularly) are also well established
in the country and give a mystic turn to what
sometimes appears to be an austere faith.*

I am learning more about this country,
its people, and myself every day that I am
here. Being away from friends and family
for a year at a time is difficult—more than I
could possibly describe. But the friends one
makes on deployments are deep—in many
ways like some of the friendships forged so
long ago along the banks of Crum Creek. As
at Swarthmore, intensity, sleep deprivation,
and being far from home combine for an
experience that produces relationships that
may not be a constant part of your life, but
revive instantly on contact.
Humor is part of it for us as well,
but the humor is dark and, in any other
circumstance, I would call it sick. Here,
especially for doctors treating trauma, the
horrific becomes commonplace. One can
either make bizarre jokes or go completely
(and dangerously) insane. Think of it like
M*A*S*H*, but without the whisky still or so
much wild behavior.
We too joke about body parts—but not
medical jokes. Instead our jokes are about
subjects so grim I really can’t explain them
without making us sound like ghouls. A
(mild and inadequate) explanation comes
from the way that suicide bombers end
up, quite literally, all over the landscape—
frequently only their heads are intact. People
make comments like, “Let’s give failed suicide
bombers a hand.” See what I mean? Reading
about the grotesque things humans inflict on
each other changes you. Counterintuitively,
we use the grim humor to keep ourselves
from becoming ghouls.
It really does seem that Robert Hunter
said it best: “What a long strange trip it’s
been.”
Since graduating, Gregg Davis has worked in
bookstores, banks, and as a high school social
studies teacher. In 1995, he joined the Naval
Reserves as a way to give back to the country
he loves and that has given him so much.
“Once I was in the intelligence program, I
realized I had found my niche,” Davis says.
* Barfield, Thomas, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political
History, Princeton University Press, 2010, page 42.

53

Randy Holland ’69

credit
COURTESY
OF DELAWARE SUPREME COURT

recently received the Seventh Annual Dwight D. Opperman
Award for Judicial Excellence, which honors one state trial or
appellate judge for years of distinguished judicial service. He
was the youngest person to serve on the Delaware Supreme
Court when he was first appointed at
age 39 and is the first Justice in Delaware
history to be appointed to a third 12year term. According to Indiana Chief
Justice Randall Shepard, chair of the
selection panel, Holland is “an icon
among American lawyers and judges
and the nation is a more decent place
because of his commitment to the cause
of justice.” Holland’s leadership roles
at the national level include serving as
president of the American Inn of Court
Foundation from 2000 to 2004, chairing the American Bar
Association Committee on Lawyer Regulation, and chairing
the AJS Judicial Ethics Advisory Committee. He is the author
of numerous appellate decisions that are landmark precedents
and has authored or edited seven books, including three
related to the Delaware court system.

january 2012

55

j ay frederick

class notes

The Thrill of the Hunt
Edward Frost ’73 knows
exactly where to look to
uncover the juiciest facts.

56

Most of us know how to dig up a few facts
about someone online. But for corporate private
investigator Edward Frost ’73, Google is a gold
mine—and just one of the many tools he uses to
track down information needed to crack a case.
Frost is a senior director with Alvarez &
Marsal (A&M), a global professional services firm
headquartered in Manhattan. A self-described
“sucker for startups,” he joined the firm in June
2011 to build its new business intelligence services
group, bringing more than 30 years of experience
as a private investigator (PI) and a legal journalist.
His assignments include fraud investigations;
witness development; asset searches; and background checks of executives and companies
before mergers, acquisitions, or financing deals.
One of his recent projects involved an earlystage company whose owners had hired a team
of brokers they found online to help them
raise $50 million. Many months and broken
promises later—and after the company owners
had advanced $1 million of earnest money—
they turned to A&M to check the brokers out.
The company gave Frost the names of several

people from around the world involved in the
loss—people it thought might have the money.
But court files and public records told a different
story: two were in foreclosure, another had just
filed for bankruptcy, and documents tied others
to financing scams and criminal convictions—
including running a drug ring.
“It was unbelievable that this group of bad
people could all get involved in the same deal by
coincidence,” Frost says. “I remember sitting at
my computer and coming up with that federal
drug indictment and conviction and . . . my jaw
literally dropped open, and I thought, ‘What?! Are
you kidding me?’” Needless to say, his report to
the European firm concluded that it would not be
likely to recover any funds from these suspects.
But Frost’s eureka moments don’t always
happen in front of his computer. He ran his own
PI firm before joining A&M, and in one case, he
and two ex-NYPD cops were staked out in front
of a New York City pharmacy. He was trying to
determine if the store was connected to another
pharmacy that had closed shop and disappeared
without paying a supplier several million dollars

swarthmore college bulletin

class notes
David Johnson ’73

COURTESY OF PENN RELAYS

has recently been inducted into the Delaware County Athletic
Hall of Fame for his many contributions to the local sports
community, which includes his long-established relationship
with the media. In addition to serving as the Frank Dolson
Director of the Penn Relays for 15 years, Johnson has
been a journalist or public address
production coordinator in most summer
Olympic Games and all summer World
Championship track meets since 1983.
He has served in similar roles at all U.S.
National Championships, Olympic
Trials, and NCAA championships for
more than 30 years. Johnson is chairman
of the steering committee for the
National Track & Field Hall of Fame,
executive vice president of the U.S.
Track Meet Directors Association, and
chair of the men’s subcommittee for
the Bowerman Award, which is comparable to the Heisman
Trophy. Previously, he was the statistical editor of Track &
Field News and a consulting statistician to the International
Association of Athletics Federations. Johnson is the recipient
of numerous awards and honors, including membership in the
Pennsylvania State High School Track and Field Hall of Fame
and Strath Haven [Pa.] High School’s Wall of Honor.

58

swarthmore college bulletin

books + arts

Physical Grace, Rare Deeds, Creative Genius
To reflect upon a work about untold tennis
stories, I had only to turn to the weathered
photographs on the cinder-block walls of
my tennis office at Swarthmore, and there
he is: All-American Stephen “Tigs” Tignor,
on the Ed Faulkner Courts, May 1990,
leading his team to an NCAA National Team
Championship in Division III. With long
hair flowing, well-worn blue baseball cap
turned irreverently backwards, tossing arm
gracefully and perfectly extended, he stands,
racket poised to strike his biting lefty serve.
I recall saying to him before that crucial
semi-final against Kalamazoo College: “Tigs,
let’s play it safe, get the ball in play and look
for a secure opening before attacking”—a
style that had always worked for him. Tigs
ignored my advice and hit for the lines,
taking huge risks by advancing forward
to net, winning in straight sets, and shyly
exiting the court almost before his teammates
had finished their warm-ups.
That was Tigs on the court—creative,
unpredictable, eschewing obvious norms in
favor of riskier alternatives. In his new book,
we see something of this athlete as artist, the
discipline behind the craft, the writer’s eye for
detail and skill at invoking image, the respect
for journalistic accuracy, and the scholar’s
reliance on historical and social research.
Tignor’s approach in High Strung is
reminiscent of Norman Mailer’s literary
journalism, such as his epic psychological
analysis of Muhammad Ali in The Fight
(1975). In the hands of Mailer, Ali becomes
a figure of immense intellectual gifts. So do
Tignor’s subjects—McEnroe, Connors, and
Borg—all come to assume an interior life
of complex motives and drives; a world of
intentions, doubts, and emotions; a psychic
framework of immense complexity sketched
in and revealed by the observations and
soaring imagination of the author.
Often, admired athletes live their lives
of physical grace and rare deeds without
ever giving expression to the creative genius
inside, leaving it to outsiders and sideline
admirers to supply the voice that explains the
62

BETTMAN/CORBIS/AP IMAGES

Stephen Tignor ’92, High Strung: Björn
Borg, John McEnroe, and the Untold Story of
Tennis’s Fiercest Rivalry, Harper, 2011

John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors shake hands after
McEnroe wins the men’s singles at Wimbledon 1984.

self. Tignor, a writer who has experienced the
emotional void of real competitive tennis, has
taken the novelist’s risk of linking action with
insight, athletic brilliance with personal fears,
biography with public excellence.
Many sport books portray stars and their
singular lives. High Strung pays its debt to a
reading public thirsting for the superficial
reality of stardom, but it also becomes a
starting place for broader discovery—that of
historical and social analysis. We encounter
a somewhat crude, reductionist pairing of
social class and tennis to explain complex
personalities: Thus, Jimmy Connors is labeled
“brash” because he is from working class East
St. Louis, Ill., where the Victorian gentleman’s
code of sportsmanship was unknown.
Sport historians see a break in the ethos
of modern sport occurring somewhere in the
1880s, when the working class expropriates
modern sport, displacing Victorian manners
with a new partisan ethos that was aggressive,
commercial, and loud—sport as open conflict.
The history of tennis as socially exclusive
—with its roots in British aristocracy,
extended worldwide through the empire—
explains the isolation of a sport that,
according to Tignor, did not enjoy mass
consumption until the 1970s and 1980s.
Connors, McEnroe, and Borg became
emblems of this new image—more media
stars and commercial icons than sport
warriors parading a leveling democratic

message. These glimpses into the social
history of sport and tennis—asides to the
drama of the center court—inform and
educate the reader, elevating this work above
simple sport histories or biographies.
It took many decades before the new ethic
fully penetrated the Ivy walls of the tennis
establishment—an historical journey Tignor
describes in his narrative. Jimmy Connors
was the first player to shatter the amateur
façade of “gentility, of class, of gentlemanly
diffidence,” replacing it with tennis as psychic
combat in a public arena.
John McEnroe was at first shy and prone
to self-doubt but soon learned to apply an
appallingly boorish style, borrowing on
the security of his background of privilege
and nouveau elite roots. Borg developed a
singular, baseline tactical approach to tennis
derived from his childhood socialization into
the sport, the lonely hours of hitting ball after
ball against his garage door in his workingclass neighborhood in Sweden. These
individual differences are interesting, but
their connection to sociology as explanation
is less compelling.
Yet, the descriptive historical narrative
of on-court actors Borg and McEnroe,
supplemented by forays into the players’
mental states, seems completely appropriate.
We also learn much about tennis—the
contrasting playing styles of the serve-andvolleyer and the baseliner; the equipment;
court surfaces; and codes of ethics, on and
off court, of the players. This rich blend of so
many factors adds to our understanding and
appreciation of the sport, its actors, and the
location of the institution in our society.
Just as Tigs broke the rules to win a
championship back in the 1990s, Tignor
seems to have shattered a few literary norms
with this dense, complex book, an historical
journey into the psychic dimensions of the
exposed, singular athlete, chasing individual
achievement while courting failure. His
admiring old coach would like to reveal
that he knew Tigs would eventually find his
voice—a discovery of which all of us are
beneficiaries.
—Michael Mullan,
Professor of physical education and sociology
and men’s tennis coach
swarthmore college bulletin

Leo Braudy ’63, The Hollywood Sign,
Yale University Press, 2011. Erected
in 1923 as an advertisement to
tout the real estate development of
Hollywoodland, the gigantic sign of
white blocks set into a steep hillside
evolved into an emblem of the movie
mecca, international symbol of
glamour and star power, and icon of
American culture. As he traces the
history of the sign, Braudy also offers
a fascinating look at the rise of the
movie industry from the silent-movie
era through the development of the
studio system that helped define
modern Hollywood.

BOOKS

Michael Casher and Joshua
Bess ’00, Manual of Inpatient
Psychiatry, Cambridge University
Press, 2010. This compact
clinical manual is convenient
for use on the psychiatric
ward. With chapters organized
around the diagnoses found in
psychiatric units, it addresses
the common questions and issue
that clinicians face in day-to-day
psychiatric work with inpatients.
Ken Hechler ’35, Soldier of the
Union, Pictorial Histories, 2011.
Civil War letters from George
and John Hechler, ancestors of
the author and soldiers in the
36th Ohio Volunteer Infantry,
describe the tribulations of
the war, from camp life at
Parkersburg and Summersville,
january 2012

Robin Chapman ’64, The Eelgrass
Meadow, Tebot Bach, 2011. Poet and
scientist Chapman offers a collection of
beautiful and moving poems, in which,
according to Jesse Lee Kercheval, “her
tone glides between elegy and rallying
cry, delight at discovery and sorrow at
what is to come. This book will inform
and transform your vision of our shared
world.”

to the brutal battlefields
of Lewisburg, Antietam,
Chickamauga, and others. The
Ohioans’ letters described the
valiant efforts of the regiment as
well as the people and places in
what would become the State of
West Virginia.
The Fight for Coal Mine Health
and Safety, Pictorial Histories,
2011. In November 1968,
Congressman Hechler willingly
set aside his own personal safety
and jeopardized his political
career by standing up for the
coal miners in his district and
throughout the nation who
faced danger and death in the
workplace. Hechler pushed
through Congress the most farreaching occupational health and
safety legislation ever enacted.
Stephen Henighan ’84
(translator), The Accident, by
Mihail Sebastian, Biblioasis,
2011. This translation of one
of the most celebrated modern

Pamela Haag ’88, Marriage
Confidential: The Post-Romantic Age
of Workhorse Wives, Royal Children,
Undersexed Spouses and Rebel
Couples Who are Rewriting the Rules,
HarperCollins, 2011. Haag writes about
the untold side of marriage—the semihappy ambivalence that lurks below
the surface of most marriages and the
truth that one or both partners may
feel as if something very important
is missing. With in-depth research
and doses of humor, the author tells
firsthand accounts as well as stories
of contemporary marriages where
spouses seem more like friends than
lovers and where romance and passion
are assailed from all sides.

European authors tells a story of
love and emotional devastation,
beginning when a young woman
is rescued from an accident by
a troubled young man and she
decides to rescue him back.
Ambassador James Hormel
’55 and Erin Martin, Fit to
Serve: Reflections on a Secret
Life, Private Struggle, and Public
Battle to Become the First Openly
Gay U.S. Ambassador, Skyhorse
Publishing, 2011. In this
thoughtful narrative, the author
describes his journey from lost
boy to openly gay man—his daily
struggle with life in the closet, of
being a professional with a wife
and children, and of his despair

Helen Schneider ’91, Keeping the
Nation’s House: Domestic Management
and the Making of Modern China, UBC
Press, 2011. Rattling the assumption
that home economics training lies
far from the seats of power, this book
reveals how Chinese women helped
to build modern China one family at
a time. Focusing on the vision and
aspirations of the women who shaped a
discipline, Schneider offers a gendered
perspective on the past and reveals
how women intellectuals dealt with
the transition from Nationalist to
Communist eras.

and that of his loved ones, then
the freedom of finally coming
out, becoming an antiwar
activist, battling homophobia,
losing friends to AIDS, and
becoming an ambassador during
the Clinton administration.
Caitlin Murdock ’94, Changing
Places: Society, Culture, and
Territory in the Saxon-Bohemia
Borderlands, 1870–1946, The
University of Michigan Press,
2010. This transnational history
depicts the birth, life, and death
of a modern borderland—the
cross-border region between
Germany and Habsburg Austria
and, after 1918 between German
and Czechoslovakia—and
of frontier people’s changing
relationships to nations, states,
and territorial belonging.
63

class notes
Kuzman Ganchev ’03

d aniela nik

ol tchev a

has been awarded the John Atanassoff Award by the President
of Bulgaria for his work in machine learning and natural
language processing. Ganchev has 22 publications in the
field of computational linguistics and machine learning. His
research focuses on machine learning
with side information—encoding
knowledge related to the problem in the
model or learning procedure. Ganchev
began working for Google Research
in 2010 after completing a Ph.D. in
computer and information science at
the University of Pennsylvania. He
previously worked for StreamSage, Inc.,
a D.C.-based research and development
company that analyzes, searches, and
indexes audiovisual content. The company was founded by
Seth Murray ’98, Michael Morton ’97, and Sibley Verbeck ’98.

66

swarthmore college bulletin

eleftherios k

ost ans

class notes

She’s Got the Beats
Ashley Brandt ’07 moves through
the worlds of music and
medicine to her own rhythm.

68

A bass beat pulses through the floor and up into
the bodies of nightclub guests. The powerful
pounding rhythm brings them to the dance floor.
On this night at Sisters Nightclub in
Philadelphia, [Kathryn] Ashley Brandt ’07 (aka
DJ K.ASH) is the disc jockey responsible for
providing a music mix that resonates with club
guests.
“It’s all about the beats,” says Brandt, who
pulls her music from multiple servers and has
an estimated 20,000 mp3s in her playlist that
includes everything from hip hop and rap to Top
40, reggaeton, and electronica.
Brandt plays music through a complicated,
computerized, and visually mesmerizing virtual
DJ program called Serato on her laptop, which is
connected to a mixer and turntables comprising
a multitude of knobs and channel sliders for
mixing beats, adding effects, and adjusting the
syncopation and volume. Her arms cross and
uncross as she quickly manipulates the dials and
buttons to get the sound mix exactly right. She

tilts her head to the left holding the headphone
between her shoulder and ear to cue the next
song, all the while conversing with guests and
checking her Blackberry for text messages.
Her computer monitor emits a colorful
lightshow of audio waves, amplitude scales, and
virtual spinning discs. Two real turntables with
diamond-head needle tone arms are used for
mixing and to create the scratching sounds.
Brandt, recently nominated for Best DJ in 2011
by the Philadelphia Gay News—she was the only
female out of six nominees—prides herself on her
ability to mix music. Mixing is the ability to blend
two songs seamlessly and simultaneously. Then as
one of those songs is about to end, the next mp3
is streamed in so that guests don’t experience an
interruption to their dancing. “When people in
the club hear the baseline they should not be able
to tell they are hearing two songs,” she says.
Although Sisters is her main DJ residency
(an ongoing gig) in addition to two other
circuit parties at Stimulus Philly and the Scene,

swarthmore college bulletin

Although Sisters Nightclub is her main DJ residency, Brandt will soon
have another—as a third-year medical student at the Pennsylvania
College of Osteopathic Medicine.
Brandt will soon have another—as a third-year
medical student at the Pennsylvania College of
Osteopathic Medicine. Brandt feels fortunate to
have found a residency program that combines
the two specialties in which she has an interest:
emergency medicine and women’s health. She
appreciates the quick pace of an emergency
room. “However, I really am very invested in
women’s health and also in having long-term
relationships with patients, which is something
you don’t get in the ER,” she says.
“I always like to joke that medicine and DJing
have three things in common,” she says. “Your
skill set is worthless without a residency, both
provide equal access to drugs, and you’re up until
the early hours of the morning.”
Although Brandt understands her club DJing
may have to slow down to accommodate the long

january 2012

days and nights of a medical internship, she does
not think it needs to stop.
“I believe it’s possible that I can DJ one or
two nights a month for major events. I was told
prior to starting medical school that it would be
impossible to DJ and do well in school, which
is something that I’m proud to have disproved,”
says Brandt, who maintains an A average. “I can
get home at 2:30 in the morning and be up for
an 8 a.m. class.”
At some point, though, she’d also like to have
children, leave the club DJ scene, and produce
music from a home-based recording studio. “It’s
something my family could also participate in, if
my kids enjoy music and want to learn. And at
the very least, I’d be at home with them instead
of out at a club into the late hours of the night.”
But for now, the DJing is lucrative. “Let’s put

it this way,” says Brandt, her eyes opening wide
and a smile appearing on her lips. “I didn’t need
to take out a Grad PLUS loan for med school.”
Brandt, who is a primarily self-taught DJ,
began doing gigs on campus at Paces. Shortly
after she was accepted into medical school, she
won Best Female DJ in the first competition she
entered in Philadelphia in 2009. In addition to
Sisters, Brandt has DJed at other clubs along the
Northeast Corridor and was also asked to DJ at
Club Haute in Los Angeles for an episode of the
television show The Real L-Word while it was
filming there.
“DJing is very much a game that always
changes, where I’m forced to react to what people
want to listen to or are responding to. It’s also a
challenge each time—trying new techniques and
attempting to blend all different genres,” Brandt
says. “At the end of a long day in a hospital, it’s
nice to have this kind of break, where I get the
chance to be creative. It keeps me very balanced
in the long run.”
—Audree Penner

69

class notes
Erin Heaney ’09

cour tesy of erin heaney

was recognized by the Huffington Post as the “Greatest Person
of the Day” on Sept. 6, 2011 and was named to Buffalo’s
20th annual Business First “40 Under Forty” list for her
leadership of the Clean Air Coalition of Western New York,
which is based in Buffalo. The area
ranks among the highest in New York
State for air pollution because of the
concentration of 53 industrial plants. As
executive director, Heaney oversees the
coalition’s operations, builds coalitions
with external stakeholders, and provides
strategic guidance to campaigns that
advance environmental justice and public
health. In 2009, Heaney led a full-scale
protest at Tonawanda Coke, a foundry
coke plant whose emissions were contributing to benzene
levels that were 75 times higher than the New York State
guideline. The pressure generated by the coalition has resulted
in 20 federal criminal indictments and an EPA-mandated cleanup at the plant. The successful campaign was recently featured
on NPR’s investigation Poisoned Places: Toxic Air, Neglected
Communities.

70

swarthmore college bulletin

q+a

Why is
Bob Barr
so deeply
affected?
I sat down with Bob Barr ’56 in
November at the small but comfortable
cottage at Foulkeways at Gwynedd—a retirement community north of Philadelphia—
that he shares with his wife, Nony Moore
Barr. Bob, whom I have known for two
decades, has always looked younger than his
years. At 77, he still exhibits the open, boyish air that has always made it easy for him
to connect with young people. Then again,
when he returned to Swarthmore a year after
graduation to work with Gilmore Stott in the
newly formed Admissions Office, he was, at
23, barely an adult.
Barr, who majored in political science,
later served Swarthmore as dean of men
from 1962 to 1970. He remembers President
Courtney Smith telling him, “Bob, I’m just
giving you the job of holding the student
community together. We’re in for some difficult years.”
Following Smith’s death in office in early
1969, Barr seriously considered being a
college president himself. He explored this
idea during three years as assistant to the
president of Chatham College in Pittsburgh,
eventually deciding that he “didn’t want to be
a president, even if someone wanted me to
be. There were just too many constituencies
to please—too much emphasis on development. I missed the contact that I’d always had
with students.”
In 1977, after a stint as dean of students
at Dickinson College, Barr returned to
Swarthmore, this time to stay. “The admissions operation had fallen on difficult times,”
he says. “We had to expand our travel to
secondary schools, upgrade our publications,
and improve the morale of the staff, which
needed more contact with the faculty and the
rest of the community. I was in a good posi72

ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS

Interview conducted and edited by Jeffrey Lott

tion to build those bridges.”
Barr served as dean of admissions until
1994, when he moved to a position in development. He retired in 1996—“one of the
most difficult decisions I ever made,” he says.
“But the morning after it was accomplished,
I wondered why in heaven’s name I hadn’t
done it 10 years earlier.”

Former Dean of Men and Dean
Emeritus of Admissions Bob Barr
’56 has been honored by an
endowed scholarship in his name.

swarthmore college bulletin

In retirement, Barr remains busy. For
about a decade before moving to Foulkeways,
he and Nony lived on Cape Cod and in
Swarthmore. They travel and work on various volunteer causes. He is on the boards
of both Germantown Friends School and
Foulkeways, and they spend as much time
as possible with their two sons and four
grandchildren.
Recently, three alumni spearheaded an
effort to raise more than $100,000 to endow
a new Robert A. Barr Jr. Scholarship. Jeffrey
Krieger ’86, Steven Sell ’89, and Vivek Varma
’88 described the scholarship as “a fitting way
to honor a man who gave much of his life to
Swarthmore.”
Although fundraising continues in order
to increase the size of the award, the scholarship was announced in October and will be
awarded for the first time this month to a
student “with strong academic credentials
who also shows promise of making substantial contributions to the co-curricular life of
the campus.” For its many donors—including
members of the Barr family—the scholarship makes manifest what’s been the singular
focus of Bob Barr’s life: helping young people
achieve their highest potential.
Who were your mentors at Swarthmore?
[Richter Professor Emeritus of Political
Science] Roland Pennock [’27] was stern, but
once he thought he saw something worth encouraging in a student, he was indefatigable.
In fact, sometimes his standard for me wore
me out.
I never played tennis more than just recreationally, but I got to know [tennis coach] Ed
Faulkner, and we spent a lot of time together.
What I learned from Ed was patience—that
things worth working for seldom come
quickly or easily.
And [President] Courtney Smith, a mentor and friend for many years, got me started
in college administration, supported and
encouraged me every day, and challenged me
to reach farther and higher than, at times, I
thought was possible. I don’t know what my
life would have been like without his influence, but I can’t believe it would have been as
satisfying and—I hope—useful.
What have you wanted to excel at in your life?
Helping people grow out of whatever limitations they were facing.

Finally, Everett turned to my father
and said, “Can we now let the
young man answer some questions
for himself?” And I thought, “This
is where I’m going. He’s the first
person who ever stood up to my
father that way.”
What quality do you have that helps you be
successful at this—at least sometimes?
Successful sometimes, you’re right. I’m a
good listener. I’m not judgmental. But also,
I’m pretty good at knowing when to move
from passive to active.
What do you mean by that?
Listening and gathering information is the
passive side of counseling someone, but once
you’ve defined the problems, you need to
figure out strategies and tactics to overcome
them. I’m pretty good at finding the right
moment to ask, ‘What have we learned, and
what are we going to do about it?’”
Do you remember your Swarthmore admissions interview?
I interviewed with Gil Stott the summer before my senior year in high school. I guess he
thought it had gone well, because he took me
in to meet [Dean] Everett Hunt.
In those days, your parents would accompany you, and my father—who was a great
salesman and pretty self-confident—went
in with me. Everett asked me half a dozen
questions, most of which my father answered
before I could open my mouth.
Finally, Everett turned to him and said,
“Can we now let the young man answer some
questions for himself?” And I thought, “This
is where I’m going. He’s the first person who
ever stood up to my father that way.”
How did college admissions change from the
1970s to the 1990s?
When I first started, students would apply
to three or four colleges. Secondary schools
didn’t put so much emphasis on college guidance and researching choices. It was much
more anecdotal—kids would show up for an
interview because an uncle had mentioned

Swarthmore over Thanksgiving dinner. The
process was not irrelevant, but it was pretty
easy to get through it.
It became much more competitive—with
more choices and more pressure. One of
these pressures is the notion that “there must
be one college out there that’s the right match
for me.” A lot of my job was saying: “That’s
bull. There are any number of colleges that
would fit your needs and interests.”
Assuming comparable academic qualifications,
is it fair to give preference to certain students
on the basis of athletic ability?
I think it’s fair to give preference to kids
whose interests and accomplishments—such
as music, athletics, community service, or
leadership in student government—would
enrich our community.
Speaking of preferences, the new Barr
Scholarship states that “when appropriate,
preference will be given to sons and daughters
of alumni.”
I think this is an honorable thing because
such legacies are about our future, about
having a core of interested and committed
Swarthmore people among us—and about
the importance of the past.
Fill in the blank: “For students, the college
admissions process is …
… daunting. Mysterious. Painful.”
“To me, Swarthmore College is …
… a magical place.”
“I wish I had been able to …
… spend more time with my family. I don’t
want my kids to read this and think they
were gypped. I hope this is something I feel,
not something they feel, but it was a career
that took almost every minute. Or would
have, had I let it.”
Do you have a guilty pleasure?
Right now, it has to do with the scholarship.
It’s involved me so much emotionally—summing up so much of what I tried to do in my
personal and professional life—that I feel a
little guilty about it. I’m worried that people
might say, “That Barr, he must have an enormous ego.” And, you know, there may be
some truth to that. The recognition feels terrific, and I’m deeply affected by it.

you

are their future.
In libraries and laboratories,
classrooms and playing fields,
Swarthmore College offers its
students a transformative
experience distinguished for
its academic rigor and commitment to social responsibility.
Each generation of Swarthmore
students depends upon our
alumni, parents, and friends
for support. Thanks to your
contributions, today’s students
can enjoy the singular benefits
of a Swarthmore education.
To support
Swarthmore students,
call (800) 660-9714 or go to
www.gifts.swarthmore.edu.