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WINTER 2016
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VOLUME
CXIII
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
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BATMAN!
Flying Blind
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WINTER 2016
LAST YEAR, 8,585 ALUMNI, PARENTS, STUDENTS, AND FRIENDS MADE MORE POSSIBLE.
Do more at gift.swarthmore.edu
EXONERATING
ETHEL
ROSENBERG
p24
in this issue
34
A NEW VIEW
American Family,
American Dream
A Smithsonian exhibit honoring
the legacy of Denise Dennis ’72 and
Darryl Gore ’79’s family includes
artifacts such as their great-great
grandfather Henry W. Dennis’s
glasses,
ALFRED B. FOR, COURTESY OF THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION
ca. 1860-82.
MOMENT IN TIME
Vivek Ramanan ’18 and
Aamia Malik ’18 celebrate
Diwali, the “festival of lights.”
18
24
30
FEATURES
Flying Blind
Finding endangered bats
helped Don Mitchell ’69
find himself.
by Jonathan Riggs
Correcting the
Record
Time is eroding the
espionage claims against
Ethel Rosenberg.
by Carrie Compton
The Poetry of Pen
and Ink
A Swarthmorean ode to
the romantic, remarkable
fountain pen.
2
DIALOGUE
Editor’s Column
Letters
Community Voices
Lynne Steuerle
Schofield ’99
Rewind
Betsy Kreuter Rymes ’87
Books
Global Thinking
Marcia Grant ’60
9
COMMON GOOD
Swarthmore Stories
Learning Curve
Margaret Nordstrom ’70
Liberal Arts Lives
Wiley Archibald ’10
Jean Kristeller ’74
39
CLASS NOTES
Alumni News and
Events
Profiles
72
SPOKEN WORD
Braulio Muñoz
WEB
EXCLUSIVES
BULLETIN.SWARTHMORE.EDU
PEN PALS
Watch video of professors
Tomoko Sakomura, Logan Grider,
and Alexandra Gueydan-Turek
demonstrating their expertise
with and love of fountain pens.
IN STYLE
Read Miles Skorpen ’09’s
account of the Alumni Council
meeting and professional clothing
drive they held for students.
GREEN EGGS AND ACTIVISM
Author Ann Berlak ’59 shares
some of her favorite socially
conscious children’s books.
#VALSMITH15
Explore the fun and farreaching full range of social
media responses to President
Valerie Smith’s inauguration.
MASTERPIECE THEATER
Watch Thom Collins ’88 deliver
his 2015 Garnet Weekend
McCabe Lecture, “Somewhere
Better Than This Place: The Art
Museum and Alternative Social
Experience.”
ON THE COVER
Illustration by Erica Williams
Alan Gordon ’82
Thom Collins ’88
by Elizabeth Vogdes
WINTER 2016
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
1
dialogue
EDITOR’S COLUMN
LAURENCE KESTERSON
THE SPINNINGS OF SPIDERS
impressive work runs throughout
our website and magazine, including “The Poetry of Pen and Ink”
feature and video.
A thoughtful, artistic marvel,
Phil Stern ’84 is our designer. His
care and creativity are on full display in every page of this publication, particularly in “American
Family, American Dream.”
An intellectually curious organizational dynamo, Michelle
Crumsho is our administrative/
editorial assistant. Her technical
expertise, enthusiasm, and Excel
wizardry keep our magazine moving gracefully forward.
REMEMBER Charlotte’s Web?
As for me, I’m a longtime writer
That eloquent arachnid came to
and editor hailing from Dartmouth
mind as I searched for the best
(by way of the University of
words with which to introduce
Southern California, by way of the
myself.
University of Kentucky). Before I
“Some pig” was tempting—and
left New England, I interviewed
perhaps accurate—but Charlotte’s
Don Mitchell ’69 for “Flying
“Salutations!” seems best. Not just
Blind,” which was the best introfor this occasion, but for the tone I
duction imaginable to
hope to set for our magamy new role and my new
zine: hopeful, intelligent,
by
life.
whimsical, exuberant,
I’m delighted to make
kind.
my Swarthmore debut
So: Salutations,
with this issue, which
Swarthmore! I am honwe’ve spun in honor of
ored to be your new
Charlotte and others
Bulletin editor.
like her (and I daresay
We’ll have a long time
you): selfless dreamto get to know each
ers who use their gifts to
other—and I’m really
change the world.
looking forward to that—but first,
Swarthmore, I’m finding out
I want to reintroduce you to our
every day, is full of such spinteam. They might be new to me,
ners, whom even the most remarkbut they shouldn’t be new to you,
able spider would be proud to call
and I want to ensure they receive
friend. Read all about them in this
their due.
issue—and every one after.
A purple-penned copy editor
extraordinaire, Carrie Compton
is our acting associate editor and
Gratefully,
class notes editor. As passionate
about social justice as she is about
pursuing a story, Carrie wrote the
powerful “Correcting the Record.”
A country boy with big-city talent, Larry Kesterson is our staff
P.S. I’d love to hear from you!
photographer/videographer. His
jriggs2@swarthmore.edu
JONATHAN
RIGGS
Editor
2
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
WINTER 2016
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
Editor
Jonathan Riggs
Acting Associate Editor and
Class Notes Editor
Carrie Compton
Designer
Phillip Stern ’84
Photographer
Laurence Kesterson
Editorial Assistant
Aaron Jackson ’16
Administrative/Editorial Assistant
Michelle Crumsho
Editor Emerita
Maralyn Orbison Gillespie ’49
Website: bulletin.swarthmore.edu
Email: bulletin@swarthmore.edu
Telephone: 610-328-8435
Facebook: www.facebook.com/
SwarthmoreBulletin
We welcome letters on subjects covered
in the magazine. We reserve the right to
edit letters for length, clarity, and style.
Views expressed in this magazine do not
necessarily reflect the opinions of the
editors or the official views or policies of
the College.
Send letters and story ideas to
bulletin@swarthmore.edu
Send address changes to
alumnirecords@swarthmore.edu
The Swarthmore College Bulletin (ISSN
0888-2126), of which this is volume
CXIII, number II, is published in October,
January, April, and July by Swarthmore
College, 500 College Ave., Swarthmore,
PA 19081-1390. Periodicals postage
paid at Philadelphia, PA and additional
mailing offices. Permit No. 0530-620.
Postmaster: Send address changes to
Swarthmore College Bulletin, 500 College
Ave., Swarthmore, PA 19081-1390.
Printed with agri-based inks.
Please recycle after reading.
©2016 Swarthmore College.
Printed in USA.
REMEMBERING
FRIENDS
ANNETTE NEWMAN
MEG SPENCER
“Meg was dedicated, energetic, and passionate in helping students, maintaining and developing a vital collection of resources, and
creating a welcoming atmosphere in Cornell Science Library. She made Valentine’s
Day cards, cooked lemon chicken soup for
sick friends, remembered birthdays, gave us
a laugh with her unique sense of humor, and
cared deeply about us and our families. We
were lucky to call her our friend.”
—TERRY HEINRICHS, Cornell Science Library and PAM HARRIS, McCabe Library
ANTHONY CHIARENZA ’18
LETTERS
Kindness of ‘Strangers’
About 15 years ago, I traveled to Boston for a surprise visit with
my two daughters and young granddaughter. After climbing off
the bus, I began searching for the right “T” train to take to their
hotel. A gentleman, seeing my confusion, said that he was going
in the same direction and would show me the way. At some point,
I realized that he was Michael Dukakis ’55, former governor of
Massachusetts, but even more important to me, a graduate of
Swarthmore College! Our shared “T” ride was much too short. I
will always remember this “happening”—meeting someone from
Swarthmore whose life seemed filled with integrity, courage, and
compassion. Are there more of us?
—JANE TOTAH DAVIS ’50, Sorrento, Maine
FYI RE: LBJ
I read with great interest the latest Bulletin, especially the gripping stories of the participants in the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the
’60s. However, there is an error in the article about the heroic Mimi Feingold Real ’63.
Lyndon Johnson’s motive behind the Civil Rights Act of 1964 cannot have been the disappearance of Cheney, Goodman, and Schwerner.
Johnson signed the legislation almost exactly at the time the three disappeared. I was working with SNCC at that time in Columbus, Miss, and we
were almost simultaneously handing out copies of The New York Times
front-page summary of the Act and looking for the three CORE workers.
Perhaps the author meant that their disappearance was a motive for his
pushing the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
—PAUL MARCUS ’55, New York, N.Y.
NEW BEGINNING
COURTESY OF THE CHIARENZA FAMILY
DECK THE
MAIDEN
FAIR
“Anthony brought great joy into the lives
of his many friends and acquaintances. He
was a remarkable young man and a humble,
deeply cherished member of this community who brought light and warmth to everyone he knew. His ability and willingness
to love profoundly and fully transformed
friends into family. His spirit will continue
to inspire us all. His loss is immeasurable.”
—VALERIE SMITH, President
+ READ THE FULL TRIBUTES
bulletin.swarthmore.edu
I enjoyed the article on large-scale
campus art, and I was glad to know
such works are taking their place
on campus.
The title of the article, “Art and
Nature Thus Allied,” was taken
from W. S. Gilbert’s song for the
operetta Mikado, its first line being
“Braid the raven hair.”
I think Gilbert deserves a footnote for that milestone in English
poetry: “Art and nature, thus allied,
go to make a pretty bride.”
—DAVID DUNCAN ’69,
Rushville, Ill.
Love the new Bulletin.
Staunch and gray gives way
to style and color. Your presentation of President
Valerie Smith is a wonderful way to introduce our new
leader and teacher to your
loyal alumni. Thank you, and
keep up the good work.
—JOE CHARNY ’50,
Pittsburgh, Pa.
+ WRITE TO US
bulletin@swarthmore.edu
WINTER 2016
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
3
dialogue
COMMUNITY VOICES
PETER ARKLE
GRIEF AND GRATITUDE
Despite our losses, we should never lose sight of one another
A
S YOU MAY know,
four women who play the role of grandthe end of 2015
mother rather than the two they would
wasn’t easy for the
otherwise have had. These women—
Swarthmore commy maternal aunt, my mother’s best
munity. We had a diffriend, my stepmother, and my mothficult few months
er-in-law—have all carved unique
where three of our beloved members
places in the space my mother left
died unexpectedly—Professor Alan
behind.
Berkowitz in July, Cornell Science
None of them has tried to fill her
Librarian Meg Spencer in September,
shoes—they are too enormous to fill,
and sophomore Anthony Chiarenza
despite the fact that she stood only
’18 in October. Even now,
5 feet 3 inches. Rather,
with time to reflect, so
these women have quiby
much loss so quickly
etly and lovingly prohas me, perhaps like
vided my children—and
you, wondering what we
us all—with pieces of
should make of it all.
themselves and pieces of
’99
I am no stranger to loss.
my mother in countless
My mom died when I was
ways. In the wake of grief,
only 24. And yet when I
I find myself incredthink of her now, I focus
ibly grateful for their
less on my own loss, and much more
presence.
on my children’s in never knowing her.
It may seem strange to talk about
It is inconceivable to me that the two
gratitude in the face of grief, but I
most important women in my life—my
think we should.
mother and my daughter—have never
Cicero once said, “Gratitude is not
met and never will. I often wonder, too,
only the greatest of the virtues but
how my mother’s unique perspectives
the parent of all others.” And in arguand wisdom would have influenced my
ing that “[We] cannot be mindful withson.
out being grateful,” Brother David
But what I realize now is that my
Steindl-Rast associates gratitude with
children are really quite lucky. Because
the very attitude toward others and
of my mom’s death, my children have
toward learning and life that we here at
LYNNE STEUERLE
SCHOFIELD
Professor
“It may seem strange to talk
about gratitude in the face of
grief, but I think we should.”
4
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
WINTER 2016
Swarthmore hope to foster.
Gratitude and grief can be closely
linked. Professors Lawrence Calhoun
and Richard Tedeschi of the University
of North Carolina at Charlotte termed
the phrase “post-traumatic growth”
to refer to “the positive psychological
change experienced as a result of the
struggle with highly challenging life
circumstances.” They find that individuals often appreciate their good fortunes not in spite of but because of
their trauma and loss.
My hope is that our community can
do the same. As difficult as it is to be
grateful in the face of so many tragedies, I urge us all to focus on the many
ways, small and large, where we can
respond to our grief with compassion
and generosity. After all, even those
who have suffered most attain more
post-traumatic growth if they have
strong networks and supports—a lesson for any community, family, nation,
or campus.
Ultimately, it is up to us as a community to find ways to honor those whom
we have lost. Maybe we can follow the
example of the wise, warm women
in my life and try to lovingly occupy
the spaces Alan, Meg, and Anthony
left behind. Although we can never
fill their shoes—their shoes, like my
mom’s, are unique and theirs alone—
we can be grateful for them and good to
one another.
LYNNE STEUERLE SCHOFIELD ’99
is an associate professor of statistics.
LAURENCE KESTERSON
her experience living in a cabin alone for a year, cut off from
her social circle. When I mentioned this to a friend, he
scoffed: “You can’t compare great literature to an everyday
New York Times column!” But I was convinced. I had read
something contemporary that made Moby-Dick meaningful
to me, and I knew I could communicate that connection to at
least one careful reader.
It worked. This time, the professor used her red pen only
for praise.
So began my career of connection-making at Swarthmore.
In my Renaissance Epic seminar, I connected the theme
of “The Fall of Man” to a May Sarton poem, “The Beautiful
Pauses,” told from the perspective of a hotel window overlooking busy city streets.
When I spent a summer working on a ranch in Wyoming, I
wrote a column for the local newspaper, The Douglas Budget,
connecting the challenges faced by ranchers who choose to
“rough it” in a world of convenience to being a Swarthmore
student choosing to spend weekends in the library.
Drawing these unexpected connections was more than
just a creative exercise—it helped me decide my career
path and see the world in a different way. This became even
clearer after I took a literary theory seminar at Swarthmore
and realized that the difference between “literary” and
“everyday” language was a social construct, not an objective
distinction. When I moved to Los Angeles after graduation, I
carried that idea with me.
By day, I taught English as a second language to junior high
school students; by night I taught it to adults. I went on to
graduate school and wrote a dissertation on the stories told
by high-school dropouts. Making connections between the
lives I studied in Los Angeles and what I learned in my liberal arts education at Swarthmore helped me realize that
there was value and joy in analyzing the everyday conversations of teenagers as carefully as one might a Shakespearean
soliloquy.
Today, I research language in classrooms and teach
about talk in schools. I am a professor at the University of
Pennsylvania, but I also work with teachers at Strath Haven
High School, just steps away from Swarthmore. We have
been introducing concepts from the fields of sociolinguistics
DURING MY FIRST semester at Swarthmore, I took an
and linguistic anthropology to encourage students to make
English literature course called Ruin and Rebegetting—
connections between the complex, layered communication
a theme that might also describe my experience as a
among peers and the language they are learning to interpret
writer in that course.
in literature.
My first paper came back covered with voluLanguage, for me, makes all connections—
by
minous red notes, which my professor genereven the most unexpected—possible. I’m
ously spent an eternity going over with me in
fortunate to have gone to a school that recogher office. While her critique was pointed, she
nized this, and that allowed me to develop the
never criticized any of my ideas or suggested
courage, knowledge, and skill to make cre’87
I lower my ambitions. Miraculously, I left that
ative connections between disparate worlds
extended critique feeling like my perspective
and ways of thinking. And every day since, I
mattered.
work to pass along that ability and insight to empower stuWhen our next assignment came up, an essay on Melville’s
dents and teachers to do the same.
Moby-Dick, I mulled over ideas for a few days, then made a
Betsy Kreuter Rymes ’87 is an associate professor in educational linguistics at the
serendipitous connection: I would compare Ahab and his
University of Pennsylvania. Visit her blog: citizensociolinguistics.com
quest with an essay I had just read in The New York Times.
In that essay, a woman wrote about solitude, describing
REWIND: ON MAKING
CONNECTIONS
A liberal arts worldview draws us—and
everything—closer
BETSY KREUTER
RYMES
WINTER 2016
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
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dialogue
BOOK REVIEW
WE ARE THE MUSIC MAKERS
by Andrew Hauze ’04
WHETHER IT’S AN elementary school opening night or the longest-running Broadway blockbuster, a
Tony Award-winner or a train wreck,
anyone who’s attempted to produce a
musical knows how complex and sometimes messy the process can be. Joseph
Church ’78 knows better than most.
His breadth of experience—from
a Swarthmore student production of
West Side Story in Clothier Hall to the
original production of The Lion King
on Broadway—makes him the perfect authority to pen Music Direction
for the Stage: A View from the Podium
(Oxford University Press), a comprehensive, generous primer that inspired
me from start to finish.
Reading Church’s work feels like
settling in for a long, intimate conversation about the lessons he’s learned,
the disasters he’s survived, and the triumphant premieres he’s led.
Perhaps the most precious passages
are those in which Church delves into
the realities of a musician’s life. I have
never seen our varied, unpredictable
work so thoroughly described. Both
musicians and music lovers will be
grateful that Church has given us such
a vivid picture of the romance—and
reality—of musical living.
This book need not only appeal to
musicians. While much of it is about
putting on a show, Church’s passion,
work ethic, and broad liberal arts mentality will inspire anyone interested in
the arts.
Whether you’re involved in musical
theater, or just appreciate what it takes
to bring it to life, Church has much to
offer, including setting professional
and personal standards we all would do
well to model.
After all, according to Church,
a music director must be humble,
proficient, and collaborative—rare
traits to find in equal measure in
almost anyone, let alone those of us
who fancy ourselves conductors!
ANDREW HAUZE ’04 is a lecturer in
the department of music and dance.
HOT TYPE: NEW BOOKS BY SWARTHMORE GRADUATES
Shelley Fisher Fishkin ’71
Writing America: Literary
Landmarks from Walden
Pond to Wounded Knee
Rutgers University Press
6
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
WINTER 2016
“Places, like works of
literature, are open to
multiple interpretations,”
states Fishkin in this guide
to the physical places and
imaginative terrains of
many of America’s greatest
authors. Through the prism
of more than 150 National
Register historic sites, this
eclectic, essential work
honors authors’ voices both
mainstream and underrepresented. Thought- and even
tear-provoking, Writing
America will leave you in
awe of the writers whose
worlds and words comprise
our country’s canon. Lovers
of American lit, commence
salivating.
Ellen Mutari ’78 and
Deborah M. Figart
Just One More Hand: Life in
the Casino Economy
Rowman & Littlefield
Inspired by a simple question—“Could you build a life
working in Atlantic City’s
booming casinos?”—Mutari and Figart investigate
the complex answer’s very
human face. Underpinning
their analyses with real-life
experiences of casino housekeepers and cocktail waitresses, pit bosses and poker
dealers, they find the gaming
industry—and the economic
footing of its employees—in
flux, an apt lens for a new
economic order. “Our study
participants are living in a
casino economy,” they write.
“But, increasingly, so are the
rest of us.”
AUTHOR Q&A
WRITING A JUST AND JOYFUL WORLD: ANN BERLAK ’59
Ann Berlak ’59 believes in literature that empowers readers
of all ages to think about inequality and activism. Her new
children’s book, Joelito’s Big Decision/La gran decisión de Joelito (Hard Ball Press), is the bilingual tale of a fourth-grader
who discovers how the low wages his favorite restaurant pays
its workers is impacting his friends’ families.
LYDIA DANILLER
Why did you write this book?
Children are yearning to discuss political
and social justice, but there is vast silence in
schools about issues such as why people are
poor, how the rich get rich, whether the vast
inequalities we see around us exist everywhere, or whether anyone can do anything to
create more justice. This is my first attempt
to write a book for children that is captivating, beautiful, and could be used to spark
these conversations.
How have children’s reactions been?
There have been many inspiring moments,
but also some discouraging ones, too. In response to the question about how people get
so rich, one fourth-grader asked, “If I grow
up, join the Army, offer to give my life for my
Edward Dallam Melillo ’97
Strangers on Familiar Soil:
Rediscovering the ChileCalifornia Connection
Yale University Press
Beginning with a potato—brought from Chile and
introduced to California by a
French expedition in 1786—
and ending with the 2008
visit of Chilean President Michelle Bachelet to the Golden
State, Melillo explores the
reciprocal relationship that
shaped both places and
their people. He draws on a
remarkable array of source
material, including maritime
bills of lading, letters from
gold prospectors, and notarized debt peonage contracts.
Ultimately and most intriguingly, the author concludes,
“California and Chile appear
quintessentially American in
its broadest sense.”
Gail Rodney ’68
country, and don’t get killed, is that a good
way to get rich?” The teacher and I made eye
contact—the classroom should be a place to
discuss more important things than “collegeand career-readiness.”
What is the book’s ultimate takeaway for
kids, teachers, and parents?
I hope they will begin connecting the dots
between private troubles and public issues.
When students read and talk about Joelito and books like it, I want them to understand how unjust conditions affect their and
others’ lives, and instead of “blaming the
victim,” to empathize and think about possibilities for social action.
+ READ THE FULL INTERVIEW with
Ann Berlak ’59 and her picks
for socially conscious kids’ books:
bulletin.swarthmore.edu
A Martha’s Vineyard &
Chappy Sketchbook
Vineyard Stories
“I did not suspect in 1975
that I was marrying Chappaquiddick,” writes Rodney in the introduction to
this watercolor valentine
to island life. Her love is
evident in every delicate,
wry line of this charming
sketchbook, which evokes
the squiggly warmth of
Roz Chast. Accompanying
portraits of snapping turtles
and used-bookshop browsers are testimonials from
28 Vineyarders about what
makes this area so magical.
Our favorite? “It’s still a
beautiful place to share with
a good dog.”
WINTER
WINTER 2016
2016
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
7
dialogue
GLOBAL THINKING
THE INTERNATIONALIST
Marcia Grant ’60 takes a global view of liberal arts
by Michael Agresta
ONE OF THE REASONS Marcia
Grant ’60 applied to Swarthmore was
the Peaslee scholarship, which allowed
students to spend a junior semester abroad in Peru. Not only did she
get into Swarthmore, but she got the
Peaslee—not to mention the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of her
maternal grandfather, who had gone on
an expedition to Iquitos in the 1920s.
This experience opened the world
to Grant. Invited to Cuba as part of the
National Student Association in the
summer of 1959, she and other youths
met with Fidel Castro and witnessed
the dawn of the Cuban Revolution.
“I missed my junior honors exams
because of the Cuba trip,” she says,
“but Swarthmore allowed me to write
an article for the Bulletin about my
experience there.”
Learning how to innovate while
absorbing a different model for learning through the liberal arts, Grant
credits Swarthmore’s honors program
for giving her structure and direction.
After graduation, Grant spent the summer as an Operation Crossroads Africa
volunteer in Cameroon. She went on
to earn a master’s degree from the
Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy
at Tufts University and a Ph.D. in
African politics from the London
School of Economics.
Swarthmore, however, was never
far away, and her experiences here and
at Oberlin College—where she taught
African, Latin American, and international politics—came in handy in 1999,
when Grant was invited to serve as the
founding dean of Saudi Arabia’s first
liberal arts college for women.
“When I was asked by Princess
Lolowah al-Faisal to start a university,” Grant says, “I was surprised to
find a liberal arts university in my
8
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
WINTER 2016
head already, an architecture that was
established at Swarthmore.”
The result was Effat University in
Jeddah, which has changed the landscape of higher education for Saudi
women. Unlike the coed national university, where women must sit in separate rooms from their male classmates
and professors, the all-female Effat
aims for an atmosphere of conversation and collegiality, including the
first-ever college sports program for
women in Saudi Arabia.
More recently, Grant’s international
expertise in establishing liberal arts
colleges in developing nations brought
her first to the Aga Khan University
in Karachi, Pakistan, then to Ashesi
University near Accra, Ghana, where
she is now provost.
“Liberal arts education is of such
interest to the rest of the world at
the very time it is under attack in the
United States,” says Grant.
Ashesi is an institution with deep
Swarthmore ties. Founder Patrick
Awuah ’89 was a scholarship student
from Ghana who worked at Microsoft
after graduation. He then returned to
Ghana with the dream of building a
world-class liberal arts university—
and opened Ashesi in 2002.
“I thoroughly believe in Patrick’s
vision to transform Africa by educating ethical and entrepreneurial leaders,” Grant says. “This is possible using
MARCIA GRANT ’60, H’07
Educator, administrator
the liberal arts model that we experienced at Swarthmore.”
As a resident of Ghana and France
(where she set up her home base in
2001 after leaving Saudi Arabia), Grant
continues to cross-pollinate ideas
internationally. In October, Grant traveled with the president of Ghana, John
Mahama, to sign accords between
French and Ghanaian universities.
She also hired Nathalie N’Guesson, a
Franco-Ivoirian, to teach French at
Ashesi so that its students will be able
to move freely between Anglophone
and Francophone Africa.
“Sometimes the most creative academic work I’ve done,” she says, “is
simply taking an idea from one context
and planting it in another.”
+ READ Marcia Grant’s address to Swarthmore’s Class of 2007: bit.ly/GrantAddress
“[We can] transform Africa
by educating ethical and
entrepreneurial leaders.”
common good
SHARING SUCCESS AND STORIES OF SWARTHMORE
ON
THE
WEB
RE-VISION
Lang Scholar Fatima
Boozarjomehri ’17
brings sustainable
eyewear to Afghan
refugees in Iran.
+ SEE
bit.ly/SwatRe-vision
BRIDGE OF SPIES
Emeritus Professor
Frederic Pryor recounts
his time as a prisoner in
East Germany, dramatized in a feature film.
+ DISCOVER
bit.ly/PryorRecounts
SWARTHMORE FROM
ABOVE
Enjoy stunning autumn
views of our most iconic spaces.
NAKED HEART
On Veterans Day, Emeritus Professor Harold
Pagliaro discussed how
his memoir helped him
come to terms with
his military experience
during World War II.
+ READ
bit.ly/NakedHeart
LAURENCE KESTERSON
+ FLY
bit.ly/AboveSwarthmore
YOU’RE INVITED
Join Our
Conversation
Meet Valerie Smith, 15th
president of Swarthmore
College
by Randall Frame
“WHAT HAVE BEEN your biggest surprises on
the job so far?”
“What’s your favorite book?”
These were the kinds of questions asked by
the 200 alumni and parents attending the New
York City stop of “Changing Lives, Changing the
World: A Conversation with President Valerie
Smith.” She’s already visited New Haven, Conn.;
Los Angeles; and San Francisco, with more stops
around the country—and world—to come.
+ FOR DATES AND CITIES
swarthmore.edu/conversations-with-val
WINTER 2016
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
9
1
2
DEA / G. NIMATALLAH / GETTY IMAGES
BEN EWEN-CAMPEN
TREACLE-DOWN ART CRITICISM
Ren-whaa?
I
n 1919, the last year of his life,
Pierre-August Renoir shared
his thoughts on art.
“For me, a painting,” said the
leading French impressionist,
“should be something to cherish, joyous and pretty; yes, pretty!”
He failed on all counts, according to picketers
outside Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and New
York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Making headlines around the world, the
Renoir Sucks at Painting (RSAP) movement
counts three ’06 grads among their ranks—
Harvard scientists Ben Ewen-Campen, Arpiar
Saunders, and John Tuthill—carrying signs like
“Treacle Harms Society” and chanting rhymes
like “Put some fingers on those hands! Give us
work by Paul Gauguin!”
Whether you consider these protests tonguein-cheek trollery or an artistic cri de coeur,
they’ve drawn reactions from prominent critics, countless Internet commenters, and even
Renoir’s great-great-granddaughter, Genevieve.
That’s mind-boggling and thrilling, EwenCampen, Saunders, and Tuthill say, especially
since the protest literally took 20 minutes
during a lunch break from their respective labs.
10
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
WINTER 2016
“I’ve received emails from art academics and
artists who were stumped about how to get people to care and think about issues of the art
establishment,” Saunders says. “Sometimes it’s
easier to drop the hammer as outsiders, especially when it—or Google image search—unveils
a simple, undeniable truth.”
“Everyone should proudly enjoy whatever
art they love, and always remember that the
idea of hierarchy in art is totally made up. Don’t
get me wrong—criticism, scholarship, theory,
and curation done well are art forms,” EwenCampen says. “But they’re certainly not the
definitive rulebooks for what is ‘good’ and what
is ‘bad.’ If you believe that, say, the best part of
Renoir’s career was when he stopped painting,
you don’t need anyone else’s permission to feel
that way. Especially in this case, because it is
correct.”
—JONATHAN RIGGS
1. When Arpy Saunders
’06 (left) isn’t protesting
alongside fellow scientists like Fenna Krienen,
he’s winning prestigious
biology postdoctoral
honors like the Helen
Hay Whitney Foundation
research fellowship.
2. Portrait of Genevieve
Bernheim de Villiers
by Pierre-Auguste
Renoir: Masterpiece or
“sharpie-eyed mutant
Cthulhu”? You decide.
“When your great-great-grandfather paints anything worth $78.1
million … then you can criticize.”
—Genevieve Renoir, in response to protestors
SADIE RITTMAN ’16
IT WAS AN EMBARRASSMENT of riches when the inauguration weekend of
President Valerie Smith serendipitously
corresponded with the 2015 Consortium for
Faculty Diversity (CFD). (Both were historic occasions, since Swarthmore, a founding
member institution of CFD, had never hosted the annual meeting.)
“I thought this was an awesome coincidence, actually,” laughs Sunka Simon, the
consortium organizer and associate provost
for faculty development. “What better opportunity for our fellows who want to know
how to succeed in academia than to see
someone with a career path like Val’s?”
Happily, Simon was right, as the consortium and inauguration echoed each other,
kicking off with a Friday evening welcome
address from President Smith. In fact,
CFD’s mission, of increasing the diversity of students, faculty, and curricular offerings at liberal arts colleges, dovetailed with
one of the major themes of Smith’s inaugural address.
“When we commit to diversifying our
institutions, we improve our institutions
as well,” Smith said.
Attendees agreed, with this year’s event
drawing more CFD fellows than ever before.
Ultimately, this event serves as a planning
and networking conference for early-intheir-career academics by connecting them
with small liberal arts colleges.
In addition, CFD attendees spent Saturday in two panel discussions—“From Fellow
to Faculty” and “Liberal Arts Colleges and
Diversity in Institutional Culture, Teaching,
and Research”—then a lunch discussion, to
which Swarthmore’s nine Mellon Mays fellows were invited.
Afterward, attendees adjourned to a
series of workshops on campus visits and
offer negotiations, mock interviews,
getting published, and the first 10 years of
career development. The day wrapped up
with dinner at the Justice Roberts Library
one block from Philadelphia City Hall.
Despite the effort inherent in coordinating a complicated event during the same
weekend as an even larger and more complicated event, it was well worth it, according to Simon.
“The way it all came together sent a
very strong message that diversity is
important both to Swarthmore and to Val,”
she says. “It made our mission come alive.”
PUG LIFE: Alumni Council sponsored a series of events for students, including a
professional clothing drive and a “pet your stress away” party, around the November
2015 meeting.
+ READ ALL ABOUT IT: bulletin.swarthmore.edu
BRYN MAWR SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
Advocating
Diversity
Maria Mitchell: comet-discoverer, professor, equal-rights crusader
‘THE MATHEMATICIANS
OF SWARTHMORE ARE
NOT ALL CONFINED TO
ONE SEX’
In 1871, a friend of Swarthmore
College donated a portrait of mathematician and astronomer David
Rittenhouse to hang in the boys’ parlor.
President Edward Magill accepted
the gift, saying that the “noble example of this self-taught mathematician
should inspire our boys with renewed
zeal in their mathematical studies.”
President Magill continued, “But it
must be remembered that the mathematicians of Swarthmore are not all
confined to one sex.” If the boys could
be inspired by example, he reasoned,
then the girls also needed a companion
portrait of “our distinguished fellow
country-woman,” astronomer Maria
Mitchell of Vassar College.
It should be noted that, at this
time, math was taught by Susan J.
Cunningham, who served from the
College’s opening in 1869 until 1902.
Presumably, the portraits of
Rittenhouse and Mitchell burned in
the Parrish Hall fire in the early 1880s,
but President Magill’s message lives
on.
—CHRISTOPHER DENSMORE
WINTER 2016
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
11
common good
#VALSMITH15
photos by Dan Z. Johnson
Despite the rain, Valerie Smith’s smile shone during
her inauguration as Swarthmore’s 15th president.
With 81 colleges and universities represented,
friends, family, parents, faculty, staff, students, and
alumni united for the weekend’s various celebrations,
including the inaugural ceremony Saturday, Oct. 3,
2015. Marked by several impromptu standing ovations, the event proved just how eager the Swarthmore community was to welcome its new leader, who
returned the affection with warmth and an inspiring
vision for the College.
From the outpouring of excitement and support sparked by Smith’s ascension, we’ve excerpted a handful of our favorite Twitter tributes to
#ValSmith15.
White House Af-Am Ed
@AfAmEducation
Congratulations Dr.
Valerie Smith on being
installed 15th president!
Avril Nibbs
Somerville ’93
@SomerEmpress
How full a moment this
is for us! Not overdue
as much as it is timely.
#ValSmith15
Will Hopkins ’11
@willjhopkins
Looking forward to
seeing what
#ValSmith15 brings
to @swarthmore. The
community needs new,
strong engagement and
listening.
Rowan Ricardo
Phillips ’96
@RowanRicardo
As a @SwatAlum I wish
I could have been there
for President Smith’s inauguration. Congrats to
@swarthmore for a truly
12
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
great get. #ValSmith15
Khadijah White ’04
@khadastrophic
Sitting in my house
clapping like a fool.
President Smith is
speaking on live
stream of
@swarthmore’s
inauguration!
Kelvin Sauls
@jabulani1125
Processing into
Fieldhouse @swarthmore
#ValSmith15 walks in
tradition of transforming
lives with LOVE as guide.
Louis Lainé ’16
@Blckintellect
Val Smith’s swag/sense
of style is on another
level. Like, my God!
#ValSmith15
+
FOR COMPLETE
COVERAGE of the
inauguration and to
read all of the event’s
tweets, go to bit.ly/
SmithInauguration
WINTER 2016
1
“I hope that each of you will
take a moment to consider
what story the campus tells
you. I hope that you, too, will
be inspired by this place and
that it unlocks in all of us
what we need to soar.”
—Valerie Smith, 15th President of Swarthmore College
2
3
1. Community members and institutional delegates gather to celebrate. 2. President Valerie Smith processes. 3. The Chester Children’s
Chorus performs. 4. Retired educators Will and Josephine Smith
watch their daughter’s inauguration.
4
WINTER 2016
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
13
common good
Worthy Goals
by Roy Greim ’14
+
MEET THE CAPTAIN: bit.ly.EmilyGale16
FIELD HOCKEY
Erin Gluck ’16
named to AllCentennial
Conference
Second Team after
scoring 16 goals
this season.
14
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
MEN’S SOCCER
Reached the
Centennial
Conference
tournament for the
third time in four
seasons.
WINTER 2016
ORRY DUBOIS
LAURENCE KESTERSON
For the first 725 minutes of the season, no one
scored on the Swarthmore College women’s soccer
team. They opened with eight consecutive shutouts
—the last squad across all three NCAA divisions to
allow a goal in 2015.
Under the direction of longtime head coach Todd
Anckaitis, Swarthmore made its deepest run in the
NCAA Division III Tournament; set program single-season records with 18 wins, 83 goals, and 16
shutouts; and achieved its highest national ranking
ever, reaching 10th in the National Soccer Coaches
Association of America (NSCAA) poll.
The Garnet’s success is not surprising. The
Swarthmore women’s team qualified for last year’s
NCAA Tournament as the Centennial Conference
champion and has posted 10 consecutive winning
seasons.
“We walked onto that field from the first day of
preseason knowing what our amazing team is capable
of and wanting to prove it,” says senior captain Reba Magier ’16.
“We all knew our team was going to be talented
during the spring,” adds senior captain Amanda Bosworth ’16. “We had a large number of returners and a
skilled freshman class.”
That talent was on display in a 3-0 win over Rowan University Sept. 10. Rowan was one of the final 16
teams in the NCAA Tournament after beating Lynchburg, the 2014 national champion.
The program matched on-field success with its 11th
straight NSCAA Team Academic Award, which recognizes teams that average a GPA of 3.0 or higher
during the academic year. The women’s soccer team
embodies the Division III mission by emphasizing both
sides of the student-athlete equation.
“Our entire team understands that we are here to
get an education and we are choosing to play competitive soccer at the same time,” says senior captain
Emily Gale ’16. “This is something we are very proud
of and will continue to work towards.”
Swarthmore volleyball got its first ECAC title with a 3-1 win over No. 25
Carnegie Mellon Nov. 14.
WOMEN’S CROSS
COUNTRY
Tess Wei ’17 and
Indy Reid-Shaw ’17
earned All-Region
honors; the team
was fifth at the
NCAA Mideast
Regional meet.
MEN’S CROSS
COUNTRY
Corey Branch ’17,
Mike McConville
’16, and Paul Green
’16 placed in the top
35 of the regional
meet, earning AllRegion honors.
MEN’S SWIMMING
Took its first national
ranking, placing 24th
in the CSCAA Top 25
poll Nov. 11.
LEARNING CURVE
FROM PLIÉS TO POLITICS
In the dance of life and career, Margaret Nordstrom ’70 is leading
LAURENCE KESTERSON
by Elizabeth Redden ’05
MARGARET NORDSTROM ’70 jokes
that the 20 years she spent teaching children ballet proved to be good
preparation for her second career in
politics.
“You can’t say, ‘Go away, darling, you
have no talent,’” she says. “You have to
work with anyone who comes through
the door and get the best out of them.”
Nordstrom, a political science major
at Swarthmore, originally planned to
be a professor.
“I got my master’s at Rutgers and
was working on my doctorate when I
decided I just didn’t want to be there
anymore,” she says. “I floated around,
did a whole bunch of other things, got
married. I had danced my entire life,
and I went back seriously to dancing,
and eventually I was asked to teach.”
Even as she taught dance,
Nordstrom grew concerned about
increasing suburbanization in the
Highlands region in northwestern New
Jersey where she lived. So when she
was asked to run for office, she did.
A self-described Rockefeller
Republican, Nordstrom spent 12
years on the governing committee for
Washington Township, including six
as mayor. She is particularly proud
of negotiating the purchase of development rights to preserve a 740-acre
farm.
In 1999, she ran for county government, winning a seat as a freeholder—New Jersey’s term for a
county commissioner—for Morris
County until 2012. Today, Nordstrom
is executive director of the Highlands
Council, a governmental body charged
with implementing the New Jersey
Highlands Water Protection and
Planning Act of 2004.
This latest chapter in her political
life has served as a reminder that, for
Nordstrom, growth occurs as gracefully as if it were choreographed.
“I’ve reinvented myself every 15, 20
years or so,” she says, “and it’s worked
out very well.”
“I’ve reinvented myself every 15, 20 years or so.”
WINTER 2016
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
15
common good
WILEY ARCHIBALD ’10
PINNIPED TECHNICIAN
Wiley Archibald ’10 holds a days-old Antarctic fur seal pup (note the umbilical cord). Photo
was taken by Mike Goebel (NOAA) pursuant to National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS)
Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) permit # 16472-02.
LIBERAL ARTS LIVES
SOUTH POLE SCIENTIST
Wiley Archibald ’10 works to protect Antarctica
and its animals
by Matt Zencey ’79
16
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
WINTER 2016
Hundreds of miles away from civilization,
Wiley Archibald ’10 starts his day shoveling
endless amounts of snow in howling winds.
He slogs through rain and boot-sucking
mud, wrestles with slippery animals who
often want to bite him, and sifts through
poop.
And he loves it.
He should—ever since getting a B.A. in
biology from Swarthmore and then an M.S.
from Humboldt State—studying and caring
for marine mammals has been his dream.
Today, Archibald is a pinniped technician
who spent the last North American winter
in Antarctica and returned this fall for another five-month stay. (Pinniped refers to
fin-footed marine mammals such as seals,
sea lions, and walruses.)
From a seasonal base in the South Shetland Islands, off the Antarctic Peninsula, Archibald studies the four kinds of seals
found there, while his colleagues examine
three kinds of penguins, although there is a
lot of crossover.
As you can imagine, working in Antarctica isn’t easy, and not just because he’s busy
seven days a week, eight to 12 hours a day.
“The distance is tough. You can’t just
call or Skype home any time you want,” Archibald says. “I had to miss the wedding of
one of my best friends.”
It’s hard to complain, though, with constant reminders of what’s at stake, whether it’s walking outside and seeing a penguin
staring at you, or finding baby seals playing
at your doorstep.
Archibald’s fieldwork is part of federal
research into how climate change and commercial fishing in Antarctic waters are affecting key species in the region.
“Hopefully, our work here informs people
on what is happening to this ecosystem and
allows managers to make decisions that will
one day protect all the species here, and
throughout the Antarctic,” he says.
+ MORE ANTARCTIC ADVENTURES
wileyarchibald.blogspot.com
TONY CAMPBELL
LIBERAL ARTS LIVES
Eating—and living—mindfully can be delicious, according to Jean Kristeller ’74.
MIND OVER
MACAROONS
To eat better, says Jean
Kristeller ’74, know
yourself better
by Robert Strauss
WHEN SHE WAS a sophomore,
Jean Kristeller ’74 decided to spend
her junior year in Japan. She wanted
to explore it because her parents
had lived there after World War II—
not because she was interested in
meditation.
“Still, people kept asking me about
that, so I looked into meditation, and
as a psychology major, became fascinated,” she says. “I returned to
Swarthmore to delve even deeper by
taking courses on Buddhism from Don
Swearer. This was the beginning of
what I am still doing today.”
Kristeller, a professor emeritus in
psychology at Indiana State University
who earned her doctorate from Yale, is
the author of The Joy of Half a Cookie:
Using Mindfulness to Lose Weight
and End the Struggle with Food and
co-founder of The Center for Mindful
Eating. In the book, she uses her expertise in mind/body research to explain
why eating mindfully serves readers
better than dieting.
“It helps you create a new relationship with your eating that has
to do with tuning into your hunger and making choices about food
while, at the same time, fully enjoying it,” says Kristeller, who, with colleagues at Duke University, Ohio State
University, and the University of
California, San Francisco, has received
four National Institutes of Health
related grants. “You learn to stop
when you have had the right amount,
rather than stuffing yourself. That
way, you don’t have to cut out anything
completely.”
That is the point, she says, of “half
a cookie.” For example, a cookie-lover
who swears off the sweet treat may
soon binge and then feel guilty. By eating mindfully, however, that cookie-lover discovers that half that (large)
cookie is satisfying without any guilt
and with much more enjoyment.
“Practicing meditation is core
because it is a powerful way to train
mindfulness,” says Kristeller. “You
are learning how to quiet down,
observe your experiences, and analyze how your body feels, without overreacting and plunging into negative
self-judgment.”
It’s a learning process, admits this
onetime meditation neophyte, but it’s
more than worth it: Ultimately, “the joy
of half a cookie” is the joy of knowing
oneself.
JEAN KRISTELLER ’74
Psychologist, author
WINTER 2016
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
17
18
Swarthmore College Bulletin / WINTER 2016
FLYING BLIND
Finding endangered bats
helped Don Mitchell ’69
find himself
ERICA WILLIAMS
by Jonathan Riggs
WINTER 2016
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
19
O
N A SUMMER NIGHT in 2012,
Don Mitchell ’69 leaned forward,
scarcely daring to breathe. These
were his 150 acres of Vermont
farm, fields, and woods—had been since 1972—but tonight,
they felt different.
He felt different.
Three years earlier, he’d surprised himself by agreeing
to work with state fish and wildlife officials to help a rare
Vermont population of Indiana bats recover—a species that
had been federally declared endangered since 1967.
The idea was to thin his forest canopy around shagbark
hickories, a favorite summer roosting place, so that the bats
could more easily hunt, sleep, and raise their young.
Before the trees could be cleared, however, officials tasked
Mitchell to spend two years removing invasive plant species—not for the bats’ welfare, but for that of native plants.
It was ludicrous, really: him, of all people, with his lifelong
distrust of authority, crawling through underbrush to uproot
garlic mustard and chainsawing spiky buckthorn, only to
present his forestry work for approval by bureaucrats who
likely spent more time behind a desk than out in the field.
But he had done it all, and now they were here, checking
gossamer-thin mist nets by moonlight to see how many bats
they could tag and release.
“Bat!” shouted one of the team members. They lowered the
net and began the delicate process of using a pencil’s sharpened point to untangle the tiny, squeaking creature.
20
Swarthmore College Bulletin / WINTER 2016
Mitchell’s heart raced; he had never seen a bat up close
before.
But there she was, hissing in a biologist’s gloved hand. Any
bat would be a welcome catch, but this was an Indiana bat,
the reason behind it all. Best of all, she was pregnant.
Staring into her beady eyes, Mitchell felt a wondrous and
wild shock: part recognition of a fellow mammal, part recognition of himself.
Could it be possible, he wondered, that she and he were
thinking the same thing in that moment: “How did I get
here?”
TAKING FLIGHT
At home on his farm in Vergennes, Vt., Mitchell is eager
to discuss that night as well as his book, Flying Blind:
One Man’s Adventures Battling Buckthorn, Making Peace
with Authority, and Creating a Home for Endangered Bats
(Chelsea Green).
His voice is soft; his hair is wild. Walking with a slight
limp—he just had his first surgery, ever, a minor procedure—
he sits down, surrounded by books. Everything about his
manner is quiet, but there is force in his speech and a flash in
his eyes.
Mitchell grew up in southern New Jersey, a self-described
“straight-arrow conformist all-star student” who was his
high school’s valedictorian. When he chose Swarthmore for
its bohemian, beatnik atmosphere, his teachers wept.
“They never really forgave me,” he remembers. “They told
me I was going to a pinko school, and I’d never live it down.”
At Swarthmore, he met his wife, Cheryl Warfield ’71 (“a
truly uninhibited spirit with a wide sense of possibility for
herself and for others”) when he crashed a freshman mixer at
Sharples. After hitchhiking to San Francisco for the Summer
of Love in 1967, they built a makeshift shelter in Crum
Woods and lived in it that autumn.
Their adventures inspired him to write Thumb Tripping,
“The New Novel That Says All There Is To Say About The
Marijuana Society,” per its jacket. Published shortly after
Mitchell’s graduation, the novel impressed film executives, who hired him to adapt it. Although the 1972 movie
would become a cult favorite—don’t miss Bruce Dern as a
knife-wielding motorist—the experience rang hollow.
“Hollywood turned out not to be my cup of tea. For one
thing, I don’t like being told what to do—and a 22-year-old
screenwriter was destined to be told what to do by a wide
array of colleagues and collaborators,” he writes in Flying
Blind. “Cheryl and I recognized, too, that there were contradictions between our professed countercultural values and
the über-materialism of the film world.”
Forsaking Los Angeles and their new yellow Porsche, the
two moved to Vermont to join the thousands of young idealists buying up old farms to milk goats, grow organic vegetables, and otherwise participate in the “greening of
America”—a movement that would transform the state from
a conservative to a liberal bastion.
Naming their land Treleven—in honor of Mitchell’s
father’s last name by birth—Don and Cheryl started a family.
As they built a life together on the farm, they also developed
ETHAN MITCHELL ‘99
DIGITAL IMAGE COURTESY OF THE GETTY’S OPEN CONTENT PROGRAM
Left, an illuminated manuscript’s depiction of a nightingale and bats, dating to 1250–60. Don Mitchell next to one of his shagbark hickory trees.
separate careers outside of it. From 1984 until 2009,
Mitchell taught creative writing, film, and environmental literature at Middlebury College—simultaneously daunted and
inspired by his lack of a Ph.D.
But what about the bats?
“Ah, the bats,” he says. For the first time in the interview,
he smiles.
WHITE-NOSE SYNDROME
Over the years, Mitchell has made improvements to Treleven
Farm by designing and constructing more than a dozen lowcost, energy-efficient buildings and structures as well as
developing the land itself.
He first realized there were bats on his property in the
1980s, after he dug a new pond. Twilight sent them swooping
and dipping out of the adjacent woods, skimming the water
in search of mosquitoes.
“They had these herky-jerky, skittering maneuvers. Now
you see it, now you don’t. Our kids would be fascinated, but
we told them that once the bats had started coming out it was
a sign for us to head up to the house,” he writes. “Humans
and bats, we told them, don’t really mix.”
As plentiful as they seemed, the bats would soon face the
worst wildlife disease outbreak in North American history.
In 2006, experts detected a strange phenomenon among
certain hibernating bats. Caves carpeted with bat bones and
bodies revealed weakened survivors clinging to the ceiling,
their muzzles, wings, and bodies dusted white.
Dubbed white-nose syndrome (WNS), the epidemic is
caused by a fungus that flourishes in the cold caves and
mines where hibernating bats winter. Transmitted by body
contact, the fungus ravages bats’ skin and wings, causing
them to awaken early and often from hibernation, depleting
their fat reserves before they’re able to feed again.
Scientists believe that human cave visitors carried this
fungus from Europe—where bat populations have had generations to adapt—to North America, where native bats lack
any such evolutionary defenses.
With no cure and 90 percent mortality in certain hibernacula, WNS cases have been confirmed in 26 states, five
Canadian provinces, and even northeastern China. It has
caused the death of an estimated 6.7 million North American
WINTER 2016
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
21
BATS IN BRIEF
6 inches–6 feet
50 million
20–30
1,331
range of wingspans, from Thailand and Burma’s bumblebee
bat to the Philippines’s giant golden-crowned flying fox
years in existence. Modern humans are only 200,000
years old.
year lifespan
of 5,400 known mammalian species are bats.
Alas, most human hearts
seem immune to the
charms of Chiroptera—an
order that means “handwing”—despite the exuberance of their enormous
ears, the leathery wonder
of their wings, the pink of
their puppylike tongues.
Perhaps the instinctual horror many feel toward
bats, however, lies within rather than without. As
Theodore Roethke writes
in his poem, “The Bat,” we
are afraid upon seeing a bat
up close, “For something is
amiss or out of place/When
mice with wings can wear a
human face.”
22
MERLIN D. TUTTLE/GETTY IMAGES
According to Micaela Jemison of Bat Conservation
International (BCI):
• Bats save us up to $53 billion a year in pest control
• One bat can eat up to 1,200 mosquitos in an hour
• Bats pollinate agave plants, from which we derive
tequila
• Crucial seed-dispersers, fruit bats help regenerate
human-razed rainforests
“Ugly” is in the eye of
the beholder. Just ask this
pygmy round-eared bat.
Swarthmore College Bulletin / WINTER
WINTER 2016
2016
bats, endangering several species. In fact, during the winter
of 2008–09, the overall Indiana bat population declined by
approximately 17 percent.
Recovery, at best, will be difficult and slow, since bats are
among the slowest-reproducing animals in the world for
their size.
THE BAT PROJECT
Against this backdrop, Vermont Fish and Wildlife officials
identified Treleven for its unique geography as a site of interest in 2009 and offered Mitchell money—not much, but
some—and technical resources to optimize the enormous
potential of his forest.
During the summer, Indiana bats prefer to live under loose
tree bark, like that found on Treleven’s remarkable number
of shagbark hickories. In fact, an excellent roost tree can host
several hundred mother bats and their pups.
Swallowing his distaste for authority, Mitchell acquiesced
to the demands of the state officials, whose dependence on
protocol frequently conflicted with the reality and scope of
the work.
They insisted that, with every step he took, Mitchell had
to be careful not to upset the forest’s ecological balance,
which meant crawling on his hands and knees through 5
acres of woods, day after day, acquiring tick scares and scars,
as he painstakingly identified then culled invasive plants.
Although Cheryl and some friends helped when they could,
Mitchell completed the lion’s share of the job alone.
As laborious as the process was, Mitchell discovered that
it was ultimately a gift. Devoting himself, mind and body,
to physically working his land in service of bats felt like an
opportunity to honor the vision that first called Cheryl and
him to New England.
And faced with an abundance of time and an endless,
monotonous task to perform, he found himself clearing away
psychological and emotional brush and brambles, including
repressed memories of abuse by his grandfather.
Weeding, both externally and internally, helped him analyze the formation of his personality, and as he worked, he
began to recognize parallels between the way he—like these
threatened bat populations—had to fight and evolve.
FLYING BLIND
In preparation for this piece, Mitchell reread Flying Blind
while reflecting on his alma mater.
“It’s a very unusual piece of work that, I think, shows I
went to a college like Swarthmore,” he says. “I emerged from
that pressure cooker with a sense that I could do anything,
and the book comes across that way, too—moving pretty
effortlessly between evolutionary biology, theological philosophy, and the metaphor of chainsawing.”
When Mitchell reflects on the bat project, he looks back on
his journey. Each step has been seemingly random—raised
as a conservative Baptist, then becoming a right-wing highschool student who worked for Nixon, then developing into a
notorious countercultural figure, then a farmer, then an academician of his own devising, and then, at last, an environmental steward.
DIGITAL IMAGE COURTESY OF THE GETTY’S OPEN CONTENT PROGRAM
“WE’RE MORE
LIKE BATS THAN
WE CARE TO
ADMIT ... OUR
LIVES MIRROR
THEIR UNGRACEFUL YET UTTERLY
EXTRAORDINARY
FLIGHT.”
–DON MITCHELL ’69
Starting in the 12th century, artists began to depict Satan with batlike instead of feathered wings, as
seen here in William Blake’s 1795 work, Satan Exulting Over Eve.
We’re more like bats than we care to admit, he says, and
our lives mirror their ungraceful yet utterly extraordinary
flight. Fragile yet ferocious, we share an immense will to survive and to find our own way.
Looking back on the night that the team tagged the pregnant Indiana bat, Mitchell sees it as a turning point. Not only
was it gratifying to know that his forest work has helped
ease, however slightly, these bats’ long and uncertain road to
repopulation, but it proved that his life choices have brought
him exactly where he always wanted to go—even when he
didn’t quite know it yet.
“Befriending bats had been a means to figure out, against
all odds, where in the world I actually was. And exactly who
I was,” he concludes. “And to participate—thankfully, joyfully—in the wild party that keeps going on around us.”
+
DISCOVER MORE: treleven.wordpress.com
Ethan Mitchell ’99
drew this map of Treleven, which serves as home
to Don and Cheryl as well
as Ethan and his wife
Susannah McCandless
’98. The bat zones are
circled.
WINTER 2016
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
23
CORRECTING THE
RECORD
Time is eroding the espionage claims against Ethel Rosenberg
by Carrie Compton
L
AST YEAR new
developments roused
our country’s crisis of conscience visa-vis the trial and
execution of Ethel
Rosenberg.
Michael Meeropol ’64 (nee
Rosenberg) and brother Robert,
orphaned in 1953 by the execution of
their parents, Julius and Ethel, served
up a New York Times op-ed column in
24
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
WINTER 2016
August. “Exonerate our mother, Ethel
Rosenberg,” they wrote, addressing
President Obama. Their plea was published a month after original grandjury testimony was unsealed that
reaffirmed perjury by the prosecution’s
star witness, Ethel’s younger brother,
David Greenglass.
Then in the fall, the New York
City Council also took action on the
issue of Ethel’s innocence. Sept. 28—
on what would have been her 100th
birthday—spokesman Daniel Dromm
read from a proclamation signed by
13 fellow council members. “The government wrongly executed Ethel
Rosenberg,” declared Dromm on the
steps of City Hall to a crowd that
included Michael, Robert, and their
families.
These developments in the
Rosenberg case prompt an important
question: Is our country ready to exonerate Ethel Rosenberg?
ASSOCIATED PRESS
The day after
Julius’s arrest, Ethel
invited press into their
Lower East Side apartment to demonstrate
the family’s ordinary
way of life. She was
arrested less than one
month later.
WINTER 2016
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
25
MICHAEL AND ROBERT were 10
and 6, respectively, when their parents went to the electric chair June
19, 1953. They have spent their entire
lives demanding justice for Julius and
Ethel, though their perspectives have
shifted over the years as new evidence
emerged. “We always said the truth is
more important than any of our positions. Sure, we had opinions, but we
really wanted to know what happened,”
says Michael.
What happened to the Rosenbergs
was carried off in the spirit of the
times—perhaps America’s most dystopian era. In 1950, when the couple was
arrested, Cold War paranoia prevailed
throughout politics and in the news
media. The Soviets now had an atomic
bomb, and the U.S. had just entered the
Korean War—a conflict steeped with
fears that a war with China, or worse,
Russia, was next. It was a time of
unparalleled xenophobia and unease,
driven by demagoguery that culminated with Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s
fearmongering and, especially applicable here, the dangerous machinations
of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
The FBI first arrested David
Greenglass, in connection with Soviet
operatives collecting and relaying
atomic information to the KGB.
Greenglass admitted that he had provided sketches based on what ultimately amounted to inaccurate and
rudimentary knowledge gleaned from
his Army post at the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico during the
Manhattan Project. A month later,
Julius Rosenberg, a working-class
electrical engineer from New York’s
Lower East Side, was arrested and
accused of relaying his brother-inlaw’s drawings to the Soviet’s spies.
In his ensuing grand-jury testimony,
unsealed in July, Greenglass unequivocally disassociates Ethel from the spy
ring.
A memo to then-Attorney General
Howard McGrath, dated two days after
Julius’s arrest, however, suggests that
Hoover was desperate to get Julius
talking: “Proceeding against the wife,”
he wrote, “might serve as a lever in this
matter.”
After her testimony before the grand
jury in early August 1950, the FBI
arrested 33-year-old Ethel as she left
the courthouse. Bail, which she had
requested so she could find accommodations for her two young sons, was set
at $100,000, almost $1 million when
adjusted for inflation. She spent the
rest of her life—three years—behind
bars. During that time, the boys would
be bounced around among relatives—
and, briefly, a boys’ home—before Anne
and Abel Meeropol, a childless couple
acquainted with the Rosenbergs’ lawyer, adopted them.
As the Rosenbergs awaited trial,
Greenglass reversed his earlier claim
of his sister’s innocence. He now cast
Ethel as Julius’s typist and willing
co-conspirator. In exchange for his testimony, Greenglass earned his wife,
Ruth, immunity for her role in his spying activities, and a lesser sentence for
himself. (He spent only nine-and-half
years in prison.) His reversal, a boon
for the prosecution, aligned perfectly
with testimony from the only other
witness against Julius, fellow Soviet
informer Harry Gold, who was jailed
near Greenglass as they awaited trial.
Many, including Meeropol, believe
these accommodations provided ample
opportunity for collusion. Greenglass
recanted his trial testimony during
interviews with the press more than
once before his 2014 death.
“THERE ARE MANY judges, including
myself, who think that the case was not
well handled,” says Jed Rakoff ’64, U.S.
“THE JUDGE SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN MORE
IMPACTED BY THE PRESSURE OF THE TIMES
THAN WAS THE JURY AND BENT TO THOSE
PRESSURES IN A WAY THAT DOES NOT
DO HIM CREDIT.”
—JED RAKOFF ’64
26
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
WINTER 2016
THE YEARS SINCE the Rosenbergs’
executions have been laden with informational bombshells: In the ’90s came
the Venona decryptions, deciphered
communications between the KGB
2
COPYRIGHT BETTMANN/CORBIS / AP IMAGES
1
ASSOCIATED PRESS
district judge for the Southern District
of New York, the same court that
tried the Rosenbergs. Rakoff, a classmate and friend of Meeropol, believes
there is “ample basis” to request a
statement of exoneration for Ethel.
For Rakoff, the couple’s problems
at trial—even beyond the false testimony and the hysteria of the times—
were manifold. He cites inadequate
counsel and calls prosecutors Roy
Cohn and Irving Saypol “some of the
least honorable ever to be a part of
the Southern District of New York.”
Rakoff continues, “And Judge [Irving]
Kaufman was brilliant but abrasive. I
think most people who knew him felt
he lacked a judicial temperament.”
At the trial, which lasted three
weeks in March 1951, the prosecution presented only three witnesses
against the Rosenbergs—most damagingly for Ethel, the uncorroborated claim of the Greenglasses’ that
Ethel typed Julius’s notes for the
Soviets. The prosecution had only
five pieces of physical evidence—considered dubious by most scholars of
the case—but nevertheless Julius and
Ethel were pronounced guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage.
“I think the jury probably gave a
reasonable verdict, given what they
saw, because they didn’t get a fair
picture,” says Rakoff. “Ironically,
the judge seems to have been more
impacted by the pressure of the times
than was the jury. Judge Kaufman
bent to those pressures in a way that
does not do him credit.”
April 6, 1953, Kaufman sentenced
the couple to death, asserting that
their transference of atomic secrets
helped start the Korean War. In his
sentencing he assigned them responsibility for “casualties exceeding 50,000
and who knows but that millions more
innocent people may pay the price of
your treason.” He was the first judge
to issue a death sentence in civil court
for a conspiracy charge.
1. The brotherly bond remains strong between Robert, left, and Michael Meeropol shown here
in 1953 just before their parents’ execution. Robert, a lawyer, founded and directed the Rosenberg
Fund for Children, an organization that provides aid to the children of targeted activists.
2. Julius, second to left, and Ethel are escorted to their courtroom by U.S. Marshals. Their 1951
trial lasted from March 6–28.
WINTER 2016
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
27
LAURENCE KESTERSON
Michael Meeropol ’64 near his home in Putnam County, N.Y. In addition to the 13 council members’ proclamation of Ethel’s innocence, Gale Brewer, Manhattan Borough president, declared Sept. 28, 2015—Ethel’s 100th birthday—the Ethel Rosenberg Day of Justice in the Borough of Manhattan.
and its U.S.-based agents who worked
with American informants, including
Julius’s small spy ring. It was revealed
that Greenglass and Julius had KGB
code names and were active informants. Ethel was never given a code
name—in the communications she is
rarely mentioned and only ever in relation to Julius.
For the Meeropols, this was the
first convincing evidence they’d seen
against their father. “With the Venona
decrypts, my brother and I recognized
the very strong possibility that [the
charges against Julius] weren’t just
CIA misinformation,” says Michael.
A few years later, the Rosenbergs’
co-defendant, Morton Sobell, who
28
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
WINTER 2016
received a 30-year sentence, admitted
to his and Julius’s involvement with
Soviet intelligence gathering.
“When Morty told The New York
Times he was involved with my father,
that was it. We changed our position
completely,” says Meeropol.
Meeropol continues, “The government had had its eye on my father
[before his arrest]. … The death penalty and indicting my mother was a
way to get him to talk.” Meeropol adds
that Julius steadfastly protected fellow informants and that while Ethel
probably knew about his activities,
in the absence of a KGB code name,
her involvement was likely negligible. “I don’t think my father was being
loyal to Communism; I think he was
being loyal to his friends who’d gotten
involved with him.”
IT’S IMPORTANT TO PLACE progressives in the context of the times, says
Editor Emeritus of The Nation Victor
Navasky ’54, who has written about the
case. “Growing up [in New York] when
the newsreels showed FDR and Stalin
during World War II, there was always
applause,” he says. “Russia was our ally,
and they were losing lives at Stalingrad.
Then came the Cold War immediately
after World War II, and suddenly the
Russians were the enemy.”
Rosenberg proponents often note
that Russia was a U.S. ally when Julius
“ETHEL WAS A HOSTAGE
THAT THE GOVERNMENT
MURDERED.”
—MICHAEL MEEROPOL ’64
worked with the Soviets, but Rakoff
roundly rejects the point: “Where
in the law does it say it’s OK to spy
for allies, but just not for enemies?
Today’s allies may be tomorrow’s enemies.”
Navasky adds that in post-Depression New York, class inequalities were
vast, radicalizing forces. Many politically minded people thought Sovietstyle socialism could save the working
class, he says. “Whether or not [the
Rosenbergs] were guilty of espionage,
they thought they were doing something that helped mankind.”
SO WHY DIDN’T ETHEL cooperate
and save herself ?
“She would have had to testify
against her husband and then live
a certain kind of a life in the eyes of
her children, her own eyes, and in
the eyes of the world—and I don’t
think she wanted that,” says Miriam
Schneir, whose works, co-authored
with her late husband, Walter, include
Invitation to an Inquest and, the book
that the Meeropol brothers believe
solves it, Final Verdict: What Really
Happened in the Rosenberg Case. “I
think, too, Ethel and Julius always
hoped right up until the end that something would happen that wouldn’t
result in the electric chair.”
There were attempts to derail the
death sentence, including two ignored
pleas for clemency submitted to
President Eisenhower. There were
appeals. There was even a stay of execution filed by Supreme Court Justice
William O. Douglas, which was ultimately undone by a 5–4 vote of the
Supreme Court—a ruling Meeropol
says Justice Hugo Black later argued
was unconstitutional.
Privately, Supreme Court Justice
Felix Frankfurter lamented the ordeal
for years: “The manner in which the
court disposed of [the Rosenberg]
case,” he wrote 1956, “is one of the
least edifying episodes in modern
history.”
With the exception of still-classified
U.S. records and Soviet-era documents
locked away in Moscow, Meeropol
believes that—for his lifetime, anyway—the public has seen all it ever will
of the evidence against his parents.
“I believe we know what happened,”
he says. “Ethel was a hostage that the
government murdered.”
In 2001, New York Times reporter
Sam Roberts interviewed William
Rogers, the deputy attorney general
at the time of the Rosenbergs’ trial.
Rogers revealed that, as outlined in
Hoover’s note, the FBI intended to
leverage the death sentence against
Ethel to elicit Julius’s cooperation.
Roberts asked him what went wrong.
Rogers replied, “She called our bluff.”
RAKOFF, WHO OPPOSES the death
penalty, believes that where Ethel is
concerned, the system got it wrong. “I
don’t want to overstate it, but our system makes mistakes, and if you recognize that a system makes mistakes, you
cannot have a penalty that can never
be corrected.”
Schneir, who has studied the case for
50 years, believes that the country is
more prepared than ever to reconsider
Ethel’s case.
“The historical record now very
strongly points to Ethel’s innocence,”
she says. “Also, as public opinion on
the death penalty gradually becomes
less favorable, I think that the execution of the Rosenbergs seems increasingly unwarranted.”
Rakoff believes that the information
that Julius likely stole was “not overwhelmingly important.” He thinks a
20-to-30-year sentence would have
been more appropriate.
“With respect to Ethel, she knew
that [Julius] was up to no good, but
that’s about it,” he says. “But assuming
she helped him out, I don’t see giving
her more than five years, at the most.”
He adds, “And, of course, I personally
think she should be exonerated.”
TODAY MEEROPOL, a retired economics professor, is a vocal opponent of the death penalty but primarily
occupies himself as his grandsons’
Little League coach. He’s not sure
about the next step to exonerating his
mother, but he’s hopeful that President
Obama’s background as a constitutional lawyer will help his cause.
“There’s still a lot of pushback
online,” he says. Recent articles about
the Meeropols’ efforts to exonerate
Ethel are unfalteringly followed by
commenters’ screeds decrying liberals,
Jews, and Communists.
Still, on the steps of New York’s City
Hall in September, Meeropol delivered
yet another message to the president:
“We call upon Attorney General Lynch
and President Obama to acknowledge
the injustice done to Ethel Rosenberg
… as a way of learning from our past in
the hope that similar injustices will be
avoided in the future.”
“Now,” Meeropol says, 62 years after
his mother’s execution, “we wait.”
+
WATCH: Michael Meeropol’s 1996
debate with Joyce Milton ’67 at
bulletin.swarthmore.edu
WINTER 2016
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
29
MIGHTIER THAN THE
SWORD
Behold the lovely and
life-changing fountain pen.
30
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
WINTER 2016
A Swathmorean ode to the romantic, remarkable fountain pen
LAURENCE KESTERSON; TITLE HANDWRITING: TOMOKO SAKOMURA
by Elizabeth Vogdes
“YOU HAVE TO LEARN not to gesticulate when holding a fountain pen,”
cautions Tomoko Sakomura, associate professor of art history, who once
ruined a colleague’s shirt with splattered ink.
However, many Swarthmoreans
consider the occasional stain a small
price to pay for the beauty and power
this writing implement bestows. In
fact, when Sakomura arrived on campus in 2005, she was surprised to discover so many fellow aficionados.
Chief among them, perhaps, was the
late Ed Fuller, McCabe’s witty and erudite reference librarian. He was “center stage on the College fountain-pen
scene,” says Helene Shapiro, emeritus
professor of mathematics. Fuller once
described himself as carrying “the
bulk of his wealth” in his jacket pocket,
which contained multiple fountain
pens, often with solid-gold nibs.
Decent starter fountain pens, however, can be had for the price of a good
cup of coffee. Recently, there’s been
a widespread resurgence of interest
in the pens among all ages. Michael
Cothren, art history professor, first
noticed them as a child in his school
store; half a century later, future art
history major Damien Ding ’18 learned
about them online.
“Fountain pens are like people,”
says Richard Binder, a nationally recognized nibmeister, aka a master pen
repairer. “Every one has a unique
personality.”
“It’s as if I’m divulging a part of
myself through the writing,” says
Alexandra Gueydan-Turek, associate
professor of French and Francophone
studies. “There is an individual
quality to using fountain pens, as
nibs are shaped by one’s particular
handwriting.”
They can make lines of varying
thicknesses, lending great personal
character to one’s handwriting.
Sakomura agrees: “Though I am only
one person, with fountain pens I can
write in a range of styles.”
It is easy to write with fountain
pens, which don’t require hand pressure with subsequent cramping the
way a ballpoint can. Binder describes
fountain pen action as a “controlled
leak.”
Ding says, “You just glide it across
paper.” The pure physical pleasure of
fountain pen use is a recurring theme
among enthusiasts.
In addition to the loveliness of the
WINTER 2016
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
31
lines they produce, fountain pens
are also prized among users for their
exquisite craftsmanship.
“I really love the beauty of the
object,” says Cothren as he discusses
his two handmade, natural-lacquered
Japanese Nakaya pens.
Pens come in multiple shapes, colors, sizes, and materials; inks, too, offer
countless options. Sakomura has a
dark teal ink that, when dry, sparkles
gold. Logan Grider, assistant professor of studio art and a self-described
“materials geek,” has made a deep
sepia ink from black walnuts collected
on campus. Ding’s inks come in beautiful containers that he compares to perfume bottles.
HISTORY
“Some of the most interesting technology of the past two centuries has
gone into the development of fountain
pens,” says Binder.
They evolved from dip pens, which,
as the name implies, demanded frequent, laborious dipping into a separate ink container. Fountain pens, with
their own internal reservoir of waterbased liquid ink, proved much quicker.
A combination of gravity and capillary action draws the ink through
a feed, transferring it to the nib and
thence to the paper. Many iterations of
this basic system were improved over
time, and during the course of the 19th
century, multiple fountain-pen patents
were established.
The actual pen components can be
broken down into basic parts: the body
(the barrel by which you grip the pen
and which holds the ink reservoir), the
ink-filling system (which varies from
pen to pen), the feed (which connects
the reservoir to the nib so that ink can
pass from one to the other), and the nib
(the writing tip of the pen).
The modern feed, patented in 1884
by Lewis Waterman, dramatically
improved airflow and minimized blotting. By the first half of the 20th century, when fountain pens were in more
general use, Mark Twain wrote about
his Conklin Crescent Filler—so named
for the crescent-shaped filling device
that prevented it from rolling—for an
ad: “I prefer it to ten other fountain
pens, because it carries its filler in its
own stomach, and I cannot mislay it
even by art or intention. Also, I prefer
it because it is a profanity saver; it cannot roll off the desk.”
The best-selling fountain pen in
the U.S. in 1945, the Wahl-Eversharp
Skyline, was created by celebrated
American industrial designer
Henry Dreyfuss; the pen bears a
strong scaled-down resemblance to
Dreyfuss’s streamlined Twentieth
Century Limited locomotive design.
This was the first type of fountain
pen owned by Scott Gilbert, emeritus
professor of biology. Sakomura, too,
has a collection of these particular vintage pens, each with a different kind
of nib.
By the 1960s, disposable ballpoint
pens—which used thicker quick-drying ink and worked at high altitudes—
became very inexpensive, overtaking
“IT’S AS IF I’M DIVULGING A
PART OF MYSELF THROUGH
THE WRITING.”
—ALEXANDRA GUEYDAN-TUREK
32
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
WINTER 2016
fountain pens for everyday writing in
the United States. Fountain pens are
still more commonly used by young
students in Europe, and they are a popular gift in Japan, where some of the
finest fountain pens are made.
Though their technology is older,
fountain pens remain far more environmentally sustainable than
ballpoints. A fountain pen can be continually repaired, lasting for years.
WRITING
Users frequently mention the surprising joys of slowing down the writing
process that the fountain pen imposes.
Cothren speaks of the pleasure he
derives from rewriting notes, saying “it’s a more reflective kind of writing,” a sentiment that Gueydan-Turek
echoes. Additionally, Cothren feels
that the need for “really slow looking and patience” when studying art is
reinforced by the more measured writing process.
“You pay more attention to what
you’re drawing,” agrees Grider. He uses
a fountain pen for his study sketches
preparatory to painting. In this sense,
any handwriting could be viewed as a
kind of drawing. Arabic script, which
Gueydan-Turek writes with a fountain pen, is “commonly used as an art
form,” she says, “in not only Islamic
but also popular art.”
Writer Stephen King notes that
composing his nearly 900-page book,
Dreamcatcher, “with the world’s finest word processor, a Waterman cartridge fountain pen … put me in touch
with the language as I haven’t been in
years.”
Recent neuroscientific research
reinforces this anecdotal evidence.
Psychologists have reported that students learn better when they take
notes by hand than when they type
on a computer. One explanation is
that writing by hand is slower. Since
words cannot be transcribed verbatim
as they can be on a keyboard, the student absorbs and reshapes them. In
effect, they’re recreating ideas, requiring more mental energy and engaging
more mental circuits.
There is also some evidence that
learning cursive, as opposed to printing, can be helpful for certain kinds of
LAURENCE KESTERSON
Tomoko Sakomura, left, and Alexandra Gueydan-Turek know fountain pens, inside and out.
dyslexia and can improve brain development in terms of language, thinking,
and working memory. And fountain
pens are particularly well suited to
cursive writing.
As Canadian writer Josh Giesbrecht
observed in The Atlantic, “Fountain
pens want to connect letters. Ballpoint
pens need to be convinced to write.”
TODAY
“The fellowship of users,” as Cothren
calls it, continues to grow, with fountain pen sales rising in recent years.
There are crowded fountain pen
shows in cities around the world. The
Philadelphia Pen Show is held every
year in January. Attendees can take
pens out for a “test write,” purchase
new and antique pens, have their grips
analyzed, and listen to—and share—
fountain pen history.
Nibmeisters like Binder will also
tune or grind a nib. For example, he can
grind a medium-point pen into a stub
so that a pen will write with wider lines
or he can smooth out a scratchy nib.
“It’s quite magical,” Sakomura says.
“There’s always a long queue for his
work.”
Social media, too, has been instrumental in spreading the old-fashioned word about fountain pens, with
Twitter users clicking a quill pen
icon to tweet. The Internet has also
worked to counteract a certain historical snobbery still associated with
some brands—a recent Adweek headline: “Meet the $935 Pen That Turns a
Scribble Into a Status Symbol”—while
an element of fascination with the
retro may also add to their allure.
There are hundreds of websites
focused on fountain pen use, both commercial and non-, along with blogs and
forums. The biggest is The Fountain
Pen Network, which serves users,
repairers, collectors, and sellers.
Since 2012, Fountain Pen Day
(which paradoxically uses a highly
stylized computer logo) is celebrated
yearly on the first Friday in November
to encourage individual acts of pen
promotion, such as writing letters.
In Philadelphia, there are periodic
events called Pub Letters, organized
by a fountain pen user who was tired
of seeing people in bars hunched over
their smartphones. Providing free stationery and stamps, leader Michael
McGettigan says in Philadelphia magazine, “A decent letter should take about
as long [to write] as two good drinks.”
For many people like Grider, fountain pens are highly valued on a largely
utilitarian level. For others, fountain pens stimulate the collecting
impulse—Sakomura says she doesn’t
purchase jewelry, but instead buys
carefully chosen pens.
She, like others, talks about the
attachment she’s developed for individual fountain pens, and the stories behind each. Sakomura loves the
fact that, for example, her vintage
Eversharp Skylines have the names
of the former owners on them, though
technically that decreases the value.
Gueydan-Turek says when she emigrated from France to the U.S., her
fountain pens “were among the few
reminders of home that I was able to
bring with me.”
In her diary, Anne Frank wrote an
affecting entry, “Ode to My FountainPen In Memoriam,” which describes
the life and death of “one of my most
priceless possessions.”
Ultimately, as Ding explains, a fountain pen is something that “builds history and belongs to you.”
Nowhere is that more obvious than
on Swarthmore’s campus, where
the feather weathervane mounted
on Parrish’s central cupola—echoed
in brass on its staircase landing—is
actually a quill pen. In fact, McCabe
Library is considering making a set of
fountain pens available for the College
community to try out later in the
school year.
Try one out to see if you agree with
Damien Ding who says simply, “It’s a
joy to use a fountain pen.”
+
SEE TOMOKO SAKOMURA, LOGAN GRIDER,
AND ALEXANDRA GUEYDAN-TUREK using
and discussing their fountain pens:
bulletin.swarthmore.edu
WINTER 2016
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
33
Sumner B. Dennis (1866–1950) and wife
Mary Kinslow Dennis (1869–1957); the back
of the Dennis farmhouse in the 1940s, when
it served as a summer home.
AMERICAN FAMILY
ALFRED B. FOR
AMERICAN DREAM
A new Smithsonian exhibit honors the legacy of Denise Dennis ’72 and
Darryl Gore ’79’s family and farm
by Jonathan Riggs
WINTER 2016
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
35
T
HE ELEVATOR WAS SLOW.
By the time it delivered Denise Dennis
’72 to the second floor, the other guests
at the preview gala for the “Through the
African American Lens” exhibition had already entered the
Smithsonian National Museum of African American History
and Culture (NMAAHC) gallery space.
When Dennis caught up with them, the curators were
describing the first exhibit.
Hers.
“I took that chance to stand in the back and hear our family’s history—something I’m usually explaining to people—described by curators,” she says. “It was very moving.
Many people think there’s only one narrative about AfricanAmericans—the slavery narrative—but our family’s goal in
sharing our history is to expand that.”
Dennis and her brother Darryl Gore ’79 are direct descendants of the Perkins-Dennis family, which traces its history back to 1700. Not only did their forebears always live
freely in New England, but they passed down a 153-acre
Pennsylvania farm across the centuries and generations.
“Simple people can have so much importance in the history of this country,” Gore says. “When I tell people that
we still have land in our family that has been with us since
George Washington was president, no one can believe it.”
“This isn’t land that a white slaveowner gave to his slave
children,” Dennis adds. “This is land that this free AfricanAmerican family bought and cultivated by and for themselves at a time when owning black people was the law.”
Purchased for 6 pounds in 1793 by Prince Perkins, a
Connecticut-born African-American who may have earned
his freedom fighting in the Revolutionary War, the farm, in
rural Hop Bottom, Susquehanna County, Pa., reached its current acreage in 1858, when granddaughter Angeline Perkins
and husband Henry W. Dennis purchased 100 additional
acres.
Thanks to the family’s determination, today, the Dennis
Farm has been listed on the National Register of Historic
places as a site of national significance and was declared a
Pennsylvania historical landmark. And as they continue to
work toward their goal of restoring the farm into a full-scale
educational and cultural site, programs and public tours are
already underway.
Their preservation effort has been both a labor of love as
well as a family affair.
“We’re proud, but that’s not what our family is all about—
we know our history is special but we’re also very humbled by it,” Gore says. “I gladly give Denise all the credit for
“THIS IS LAND THAT THIS FREE AFRICANAMERICAN FAMILY BOUGHT AND CULTIVATED
BY AND FOR THEMSELVES AT A TIME WHEN
OWNING BLACK PEOPLE WAS THE LAW.”
—DENISE DENNIS ’72
36
Swarthmore College Bulletin / WINTER 2016
2
ALFRED B. FOR
COURTESY OF THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION
1
1. The exhibit in the Smithsonian. 2. Pennsylvania historical and museum commission marker dedication ceremony, Dennis Farm Symposium,
Oct. 7, 2015. From left: Linda Ziemba, Trace Design Group; Maria Madison, Robbins House African-American History Interpretive Center; Denise
Dennis; Patricia Brooks, National Endowment for the Humanities; Jennifer Scott, Jane Addams-Hull House Museum.
keeping our focus, because she’s done the work with all her
heart and soul, the way big sisters do.”
“I am the eldest of the seventh generation and you can
tell,” Dennis concedes with a laugh. “But Darryl is indispensible—he has been so supportive. Every trip I make to the
farm, he’s been there.”
Dennis serves as president of the Dennis Farm Charitable
Land Trust, which she co-founded with her great aunt,
Hope Dennis, a guidance counselor who steered her to
Swarthmore.
“She really did us a favor—Swarthmore was so good for
Darryl and me. You come out of there knowing and believing
in yourself,” Dennis says. “You have to, in order to survive!”
Much of the siblings’ self-confidence comes from their
family’s long and proud history. Although they grew up hearing these stories, visiting the farm, and handling heirlooms
like the family Bible, it wasn’t until Dennis began her
exhaustive research to collect documentation that they realized just how remarkable their history truly was.
She uncovered proof that Henry W. Dennis’s father, James
Dennis, was a teamster in the War of 1812 and three of his
nephews fought in the Civil War. She also discovered that
her great-great grandfather, Ralph Payne, who was in the
United States Colored Troops, the 41st regiment, was one of
2,000 African-Americans present when Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Va.
Ultimately, the records she compiled reflected her family’s
tenacity, including an affidavit from the early 19th century
where Henry W. Dennis proved a store clerk had overcharged
him and James Dennis’s petition to Congress to receive back
pay he lost when a blustery day blew his papers into the snow
before the Battle of Plattsburgh.
WINTER 2016
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
37
ALFRED B. FOR
“In history and in a family, we each have a role to play and these were ours,” say Darryl Gore ’79 and Denise Dennis ’72.
In fact, when Smithsonian curators first approached
Dennis about contributing to the exhibit, they were floored—
not just by the wealth of artifacts she had, but by her wealth
of knowledge.
“Often, you’ll come across something wonderful and
there’ll be some information, but not enough really to situate
an artifact properly,” says Jacquelyn Days Serwer, NMAAHC
chief curator. “But Denise is a force of nature. She had done
such in-depth research on the family and the pieces that it
was extraordinary to hear her talk about them.”
Sharing their story brings a fire to Dennis’s voice, as she
describes how, while reading Jon Meacham’s 2012 biography Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, she was struck by
the irony of Jefferson’s belief that free African-Americans
wouldn’t know how to manage their own land.
“He said that at a time when my family was already on
the farm,” she says. “It’s very important that stories like this
come out. Not just my family’s story, but again, stories that
show the longevity of African-American self-determination. The American Dream was not designed with AfricanAmericans in mind, and it’s still a struggle.”
The Perkins-Dennis farm and family exhibit will remain at
the beginning of the “Through the African American Lens”
exhibition, with its Bible dating back to 1863 situated across
38
Swarthmore College Bulletin / WINTER 2016
from the shawl Queen Victoria sent to Harriet Tubman, until
fall 2016, when the new NMAAHC building will be complete.
Then, it will receive its permanent home among such iconic
displays as the dining room table around which the Brown v.
Board of Education case began.
Rather than personally take credit for her family’s inclusion, however, Dennis dedicates this honor to the generations who came before her, “who bought the books, paid the
taxes, wrote the documents, and saved everything against
great odds.
“When Daddy—Norman Henry Dennis—would tell me the
story of our family when we were up at the farm or show me
their names in books, it gave me my first sense of history,”
she says. “I saw my family as this long continuum of people,
joining hands across time and eternity, and I was one person
in that long chain of people.
“They knew that there was a larger story to be told, which
is why our artifacts were so lovingly passed from one generation to another,” she says. “It is an honor—that is the best
word—an honor to know that our story, and stories of families like ours who beat the odds when the nation was new,
will be shared for posterity.”
+ LEARN MORE: thedennisfarm.org
1
3
2
4
5
6
7
GARNET HOMECOMING AND FAMILY WEEKEND, OCT. 23–25
1. Celebrating athletes of all stripes—and species. 2. Students—not to mention chairs—are kind of a big deal around here. 3. Come on in, the Garnet
Weekend’s fine! 4. Garnet Weekend’s a great time for “selfie”-reflection. 5. Putting the “pep” in pep rally at the Garnet Athletics Hall of Fame induction.
6. President Val Smith makes friends wherever she goes. 7. Families enjoyed art activities hosted by the Women’s Resource Center.
WINTER 2016
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
47
MICHAEL PEREZ © THE BARNES FOUNDATION
ALUMNI PROFILE
A native of Media, Pa., Thom
Collins ’88 told Philly.com that
“the Barnes holds a special place.”
MASTER OF ARTS
Thom Collins ’88 brings his visionary touch
to the Barnes Foundation
by Elizabeth Vogdes
THOM COLLINS ’88, the new executive director and president of Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation, has big
plans.
“I keep joking that we moved into
this new building but we still haven’t
unpacked,” he says about the world-famous art collection’s move to the city
three years ago from its original suburban
home.
“Unpacking” is a herculean concept,
however, when you’re thinking about the
museum’s contents, which encompass
a staggering number of impressionist,
postimpressionist, and early modern
paintings, along with many other works,
including one of the first significant collections of African art.
“I would argue that we can talk about
every important idea in the modernization of the West using the Barnes collec-
tion,” says Collins, citing examples such
as the changing views of gender, race,
ethnicity, and the natural environment.
He envisions the Barnes, with its
iconic artworks intended from the outset
to be teaching tools available to all, as an
educational forum.
Collins believes that art collections,
unlike other performance-based cultural
expressions such as theater, are similar to
the Internet, in which learning can occur
in a self-structured, visually oriented
manner.
Last Garnet Weekend’s McCabe
lecturer, Collins has honed this belief ever
since he fell in love with curating during
a three-year fellowship at the Museum
of Modern Art in New York. Gravitating
towards jobs that, he says, offer “growth
and change” rather than “maintenance,”
he has worked in museums all over the
country, most recently as director of the
Pérez Art Museum Miami.
Starting from “a rigorously academic
place,” Collins hopes to connect stories to
the Barnes’s artwork that enhance their
meaning through historical and modern
contexts, building on the foundation’s
original method of teaching purely visual
literacy.
Take, for example, the collection’s 1876
painting by Claude Monet called The Studio Boat. It depicts the painter in the titular watercraft. But what the viewer may
not know is that the boat was specially
constructed with openings that enabled
Monet to frame views of nature at the
edge of Paris, screening out evidence of
rapidly encroaching industrialization.
This is the kind of story that Collins
plans to advance by developing new
handheld audio/video touring tools and
online materials, along with the more
established educational routes of books,
lectures, symposia, films, and community
outreach programs.
He developed his deep appreciation
for art at a very young age when he and
his brother—Chris Collins ’90—visited
Philadelphia-area art museums with
their father, a social studies teacher and
football coach who understood paintings
not only as pleasing aesthetic experiences
but also as conveyors of social meaning.
That lesson became even more compelling to Collins at Swarthmore, where
he was an art history honors student
with a religion minor. He raves about
his teachers, calling them “really smart,
and just so engaged and so available.” He
loved his work-study job in the art gallery,
where, among other tasks, he organized
receptions, unwittingly preparing for his
future. Collins also sang in the a cappella
group Sixteen Feet, and indeed still enjoys singing in nightclubs or, in his words,
“anyplace louche.”
His education dovetailed very well
with his upbringing in which, he explains, he was “already attentive to lots
of the dynamics around difference, class,
race, gender, and how they play out in
representation in some nuanced way.”
It is a mission he now enthusiastically
advances at the Barnes.
+ WATCH Thom Collins ’88’s 2015
McCabe lecture: bulletin.swarthmore.edu.
WINTER 2016
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
61
spoken word
WORDS FOR A
WARRIOR
BORN IN PERU, BRAULIO MUÑOZ
is the College’s Centennial Professor of
Sociology as well as a successful novelist who has been published around the
world in English, Spanish, and Italian.
Even when it seems as if humanity is
more fractious and fraught than ever,
he maintains that art has the power to
unite, elevate, and even save us. Here,
he explains why to Bulletin editor
Jonathan Riggs.
How does art connect people within
and across all cultures?
Art is a window into human communality as well as differences. Through
the beauty of African masks, Peruvian
huaco pottery, or the different Les
Demoiselles d’Avignon, we come closer
to the people who produced it. Art helps
72
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
WINTER 2016
us overcome our preconceived ways of
seeing, hearing, tasting, and touching—
even of understanding our place in the
cosmos. In an increasingly disenchanted world, art nurtures the sacred found
in all cultures.
What lines can you trace through
your own art?
I believe I have been writing the same
book all my life. My work is a halting
dance around a set of questions: How
do we make sense of the strictures
and freedoms which contemporary
life gives us? What happens when,
because of forced or chosen exile, we
come to lose our moral compass? How
complex are our shifting identities and
how fragile? What is the price paid
for allaying our fears by embracing
ever-new identities?
Who are some of your favorite artists whose work epitomizes what it
means to navigate—or even create—
what it means to be American?
Juan Felipe Herrera, poet laureate
of America: a teacher/poet child of
Which literary characters have
influenced you the most?
Moncada, a crazy black man who
appears in José María Arguedas’s last
novel, The Fox from Up Above and the
Fox from Down Below. Moncada is a
truth-teller who connects us to the
Andean notion of the upa—someone
who speaks truth to power in riddles or
in silence—and to the Western concept
of logos.
Sherlock Holmes, whom I read of
when I was a child discovering Peru.
It helped me focus on the minutia of
the world at a time when the sky that
had held for me the map of all possible
paths was dimming.
Frédéric Moreau, of Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education. I read it
in Paris when I was still an impetuous
young man who allowed himself to
feel the lure of turbulent feelings amid
social turmoil.
How has a Swarthmore student inspired you with his or her own art?
A few years back, I met Haydil Henriquez ’14, an impressive Latina student with a deep and sweet voice. She
was sitting on our department lobby’s
sofa, looking inward. To lift her spirits,
I said to her: “I love your voice. Don’t
lose it.” With her eyes, she told me she
had understood the double meaning of
my words.
A couple of years later, Haydil read
one of her poems as part of the welcoming ceremony for incoming Latino
students.
Near the end of it, she writes:
You looked at me with gleaming eyes
And I swear I was transported into
the ancient times
Before all our lands were colonized
And you were a medicine man
With the words for a warrior …”
A most precious gift. I will cherish it
until I can no longer write my book.
LAURENCE KESTERSON
LAURENCE KESTERSON
migrant farmers, and Cesária Évora,
a Cape Verdean singer who used to
perform shoeless. Her song “Sodade”
touches the heart of those among us
who seek a future in a new land while
never forgetting what we have left
behind.
in this issue
34
A NEW VIEW
American Family,
American Dream
A Smithsonian exhibit honoring
the legacy of Denise Dennis ’72 and
Darryl Gore ’79’s family includes
artifacts such as their great-great
grandfather Henry W. Dennis’s
glasses,
ALFRED B. FOR, COURTESY OF THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION
ca. 1860-82.
MOMENT IN TIME
Vivek Ramanan ’18 and
Aamia Malik ’18 celebrate
Diwali, the “festival of lights.”
WINTER 2016
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Swarthmore College Alumni Bulletin 2016-01-01
The Swarthmore College Bulletin is the official alumni magazine of the college. It evolved from the Garnet Letter, a newsletter published by the Alumni Association beginning in 1935. After World War II, college staff assumed responsibility for the periodical, and in 1952 it was renamed the Swarthmore College Bulletin. (The renaming apparently had more to do with postal regulations than an editorial decision. Since 1902, the College had been calling all of its mailed periodicals the Swarthmore College Bulletin, with each volume spanning an academic year and typically including a course catalog issue and an annual report issue, with a varying number of other special issues.)
The first editor of the Swarthmore College Bulletin alumni issue was Kathryn “Kay” Bassett ’35. After a few years, Maralyn Orbison Gillespie ’49 was appointed editor and held the position for 36 years, during which she reshaped the mission of the magazine from focusing narrowly on Swarthmore College to reporting broadly on the college's impact on the world at large. Gillespie currently appears on the masthead as Editor Emerita.
Today, the quarterly Swarthmore College Bulletin is an award-winning alumni magazine sent to all alumni, parents, faculty, staff, friends of the College, and members of the senior class. This searchable collection spans every issue from 1935 to the present.
Swarthmore College
2016-01-01
45 pages
reformatted digital
The class notes section of The Bulletin has been extracted in this collection to protect the privacy of alumni. To view the complete version of The Bulletin, contact Friends Historical Library.