Amid mortarboards decorated with the requisite trappings of Commencement--happy faces, origami, pinwheels--hundreds of families and friends gathered to cheer the seniors receiving their degrees on Memorial Day.
In addition to the Oak Leaf, Ivy, and McCabe Engineering awards, the presentation of a new special award was added to the ceremony. Established by Eugene Lang '38, the Lang Award is given by the faculty to a graduating senior in recognition of outstanding academic accomplishment. Jacob Krich, a Rhodes Scholar, is its first recipient. Of the 377 graduates, 359 collected the bachelor of arts degree and 21 the bachelor of science. Highest honors were awarded to 10, high honors to 52, and honors to 37.
"We decided long ago never to walk in anyone's shadow," said senior-class speaker Rhiana Swartz, a political science major from Amherst, Mass., paraphrasing a line from a song. "Swarth-more gave us all an inner drive stronger than we had ever experienced before. It is this that will stay with us."
The first to receive one of three honorary degrees was Ian Barbour '44,
a theologian and physicist internationally recognized for his pioneering efforts to forge a dialogue between science and religion. An emeritus professor of religion at Carleton College, Barbour won the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in 1999. In his many books, he has also explored social, environmental, and
ethical issues related to technology, energy policy, and genetic engineering.
Before beginning his prepared remarks, Barbour reminisced about curfews and physics labs in Trotter Hall. He also recalled witnessing as a freshman John Nason's inauguration as president and expressed gratitude that, at age 95, President Nason was in attendance for the day's events.
But Barbour's real message was about the future, not the past. He suggested to the graduates three ways in which new discoveries would challenge their thinking: "Molecular biology will vastly increase our understanding of biological phenomena, and we will be tempted to think that it will be able to explain everything.… Astron-omy will challenge our ideas of God.… Technology and the application of science will raise new ethical issues.…
"As you leave Swarthmore, you will be under various kinds of pressure to specialize. Some of you will be in competitive jobs in which your success is judged by narrow criteria. Others will be in graduate programs requiring intensive specialization, and it will be tempting to think that your discipline has all the answers. So let me encourage you to keep an interdisciplinary perspective as you encounter the discoveries of the new millennium. I hope you will reflect on the ethical issues arising from your work and seek ways to express your concern on your job and through public interest groups, community organizations, and political processes. My wish for you is wisdom and commitment in working for justice and sustainability on our amazing and beautiful planet."
Extemporaneous remarks from a self-described "48-year-old radical" clearly resonated with graduates. In a rich baritone, acclaimed dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones began by singing a verse from a spiritual, then commented:
"Lovely, isn't it? It's lovely, but it's almost too easy ... good old-fashioned religion. You know, they say African Americans can sing the phone book, and it sounds profound. It can be a cheat, and excuse me in front of such an august company of thinkers to come out with such a performative strategy. I am a performer. And in my world, sometimes [being] a performer means you are lacking intellect. I am a performer. And words like performer equate with narcissism, self-indulgence, alienation, self-involvement--all qualities that have been exorcised from the curriculum of your school, I understand."
"So I say to you, what can I charge you with?" Jones asked, then presented his own philosophy of life: "I'm gonna dance in one door; I'm dancing out the other. I want my dance to be bigger and more generous, and you know what? When people say to me at cocktail parties, 'Oh, I have two left feet; I'm too fat; I'm too old,' I'm saddened by that. Dancing is like your voice…. It's a gift to you. Everyone can do it. I danced with a woman with no arms and legs three years ago in Vienna. What was that dance? It was sexy. It was real. And if dancing is a symbol of what it means to be alive, I dare you to dance bravely. I dare you to be fierce, and I dare you to be outrageous and generous."
To conclude, Jones sang again, this time part of the chorus from "Brass in Pocket." And then his long frame became a whirlwind of twirling academic robes as he danced across the stage and bowed.
Elizabeth "Betita" Martínez '46, a lifelong advocate for civil and political rights, received an honorary doctor of laws degree. In her remarks, she noted how proud she is to be the College's first Latina graduate. "My father, who immigrated to the United States from Mexico, would be so proud. But I am even prouder of the fact that there were seven more Swarthmore graduates named Martínez in the 1990s! So let me give a special salute to the Latina and Latino graduates here today and all their familias."
Recalling her childhood in Washington, D.C., Martínez said she learned about racism and the common experience of blacks and Latinos. She also said that World War II, which started when she was 14 years old, taught her similar lessons about anti-Semitism and the dehumanization of Asian peoples during the internment of Japanese Americans in U.S. concentration camps.
"The great social movements of the 1960s, which I quickly joined, confirmed that people did not have to lie down and let such injustice roll on forever. Women like Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer, men like Corky Gonzales and César Chávez--those are all people who taught that truth and whom I must thank.
"Those were years of great courage, personal sacrifice, and real achievement. But we should also recognize that being part of the global human struggle for social justice can bring a sense of personal fulfillment and happiness. I deeply hope all of you graduates may someday know that kind of happiness."
--Alisa Giardinelli
Before
you set out further into the world, let me draw your attention to a
habit of mind that Swarthmore has reinforced in you and that will be
critical to the leadership you provide--namely, your readiness to see
beyond differences to the astounding commonality in conceptual,
emotional, and ethical life, which similar genetic codes, combined
with fundamentally similar experience, have conferred on all human
beings--a commonality that has become all the more encompassing as
global communication and contact have spread common aspirations, and
common modes of thinking and valuing, more broadly than ever
before.
You have come to recognize that, although the particulars of what is learned will be different, except in case of severe impairment, all human beings share the ability to learn, to stretch conceptual categories, to discriminate among them, to build new ones, to think with words and beyond words, and to combine the words of their own language to capture ideas expressed in another.
You have come to recognize that, although emotions may be expressed or suppressed differently, all human beings share the capacity for being amused or bemused by irony, for being inspired by beauty or heroism, for appreciating a pat on the back or a wink of an eye, for engaging in conscious deception or well-intentioned white lies, for feeling respect in the presence of an admired teacher, or stage fright in the face of a large audience, or a mixture of elation and anxiety at a ceremony marking the passage to a new stage of life.
And you have come to recognize as well that, although virtues and responsibilities will be defined differently, all human beings share a sense of moral obligation to social groups or to religious or ethical principles beyond themselves; judge moral conduct on the basis of both intentions and actions; value qualities akin to integrity, fairness, and trust; expect appropriate reciprocity; appreciate generosity; and resent treatment they deem oppressive or unjust.
You have built that recognition of fundamental human commonality through exploring the universalities of human physiology, psychology, language, and behavior; through discovering the similar ends for which human institutions, across time and cultures, have been designed; through becoming aware of the contributions that diverse cultures have made to universal advances in mathematics, technology, and science.
You have built that recognition of commonality through being moved intellectually, aesthetically, emotionally, and ethically by the voices of other cultures, times, and circumstances, as ex-pressed in their art, literature, music, and philosophy; and by realizing how often those voices speak to ideas, sentiments, and values that are meaningful to you.
You have built that recognition by witnessing in your own engagement with other languages and cultures how many of the subtleties of other worlds can ultimately be understood, precisely because we share the underlying foundations of our conceptual, emotional, and ethical lives.
And I would suggest that no experience has been more critical to developing that habit of recognizing commonality than living and working together in a diverse community, dedicated to shared goals. It is often harder and more transforming to recognize similarity across divides closer to home--over race, class, sexual orientation, ability, disability, accents, interests, beliefs, or lifestyle--than across more distant and thus less threatening divides. And the diversity of this community has allowed you, in one instance after another, to discover how much you share beyond those socially constructed, initial perceptions of difference.
In a world of unprecedented wealth and opportunity, your readiness to recognize human commonality makes clear that those who have not benefited from that wealth and opportunity are not fundamentally different from yourselves or fundamentally less deserving.
And that recognition prompts you to use your voice and talents to awaken collective responsibility to create conditions that allow everyone the real chance to achieve a better life.
In a world that tends to dismiss humane approaches to conflict resolution as weak or naïve because it perceives those on other sides of international cultural divides as responsive only to threat and punishment, your recognition of human commonality makes clear that responsiveness to extensions of generosity and trust--and capacity to be moved by shared vision--are as distributed in other societies as in our own; and that the results human commonality achieved through affirmative, and particularly mutual, initiatives are more likely to be lastingly embraced than those that are unilaterally imposed.
And that recognition prompts you to use your voice and talents to insist that approaches based on the constructive attributes we share have been adequately tried.
In a world in which single-dimensional human differences are so readily inflated into stereotypes that distance and discount the other as a whole, your recognition of fundamental human commonality compels you, in your personal interactions with individuals and groups, to refuse to define others by their difference and rather to reach for the common ground you know you share.
And that recognition prompts you to use your voice and talents to lead our societies both to respect difference and to understand how easily exaggerating difference can destroy community and undermine justice and peace.
I believe there is no stronger argument for diversity on college and university campuses than its crucial role in developing that internalized recognition of fundamental human commonality.
You, the Class of 2000, have been the most diverse class in the history of this College and have drawn on that essential context to respect what each other brings and to see beyond it to what you share.
In so doing, you have each developed a habit of mind that transforms you into an agent of connection among the individuals and across the groups and societies of our world. And you have collectively defined a clearer standard of distinctive achievement for all future Swarthmore classes to meet.
Thank you, Class of 2000, for that central contribution to this institution's remarkable educational legacy and for the multiple additional ways in which you have helped Swarthmore to become an even finer institution as it enters the 21st century.
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Janet Smith Dickerson, who served as dean of the College from 1976 to 1991, has been named vice president for campus life at Princeton. She has served as vice president for student affairs at Duke University since 1991. Dickerson will be the first African-American woman to reach the level of vice president at Princeton. "One of the things that appealed to me about this position was my recognition that Princeton was probably somewhere between Swarthmore and Duke in its size, spirit, culture, and intellectual nature," Dickerson said from her new office. "Swarthmore was a very seminal experience for me." |
For the past three years, Swarthmore has hosted postdoctoral teaching fellows in several fields in the humanities, such as religion, classics, and philosophy. Now a $1.5 million matching grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will help endow the program.
"By creating an endowment for the program, we will be able to continue to attract a more diverse faculty," says Provost Jennie Keith. "We will also be able to enrich the curriculum, especially in small departments in which certain fields may get little or no attention."
The Mellon Foundation also continued its support of a fellowship program intended to increase the number of minority students in Ph.D. programs in the arts and sciences. With funding assured through 2005, an additional 20 Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellows will be able to participate in the program.
A committee appointed by the Board of Managers has met four times since February to review the intercollegiate athletics program at Swarthmore and address concerns raised in recent years by the Admissions Office as well as coaches and student athletes.
The Athletics Review Committee is charged with assessing "the health of the intercollegiate athletics program"--in particular, the quality of experience it offers to student athletes--and of "the relationship between that program and the mission of the College." Members of the committee will decide which areas need improvement and make recommendations in December.
"The overall goal is for us to have a strong intercollegiate sports program," explains Provost Jennie Keith, chair of the committee. "There have been tremendous changes in college athletics in recent years, and we are trying to understand the impact these changes have had on our program."
Committee members include the president, the dean, the dean of admissions, five members of the faculty, five members of the Board of Managers, and four students. "We're hoping that the work of the committee will strengthen the quality of the athletics program and the experience it provides student athletes as well as the quality of the College's admissions," Keith says. "It's an incredibly broad charge."
Teaching emerging diseases and using computer technology in science education were some of the subjects tackled in the first issue of Microbiology Education, a new quarterly journal put out by the American Society for Microbiology, published in May. Amy Cheng Vollmer, associate professor of biology, spent several years helping to develop the journal and now chairs its editorial committee.
Pro football is back in season, which means ultrabusy Sunday afternoons for Ted Chan '02. Besides watching a couple National Football League (NFL) games at a time on television, Chan can be found monitoring another half-dozen matches via the Internet. Who's piling up the yardage and touchdowns? Who's been injured? Who's earning a one-way ticket to the bench?
It's more than football fanaticism that drives Chan to keep track of the NFL the way day traders watch the market. Despite his mere 20 years of age, Chan is a nationally known pro-football sage, part of a team that writes The Guru Report for the growing legions of fantasy football enthusiasts across America. The report has its own Web site (www.gurureport.com) and is also seen by thousands on ESPN.com, one of the most popular sports sites on the Internet.
"Most readers don't know my age," says Chan, a Boston-area native and New England Patriots fan who became a "guru" at 15. "The editor of The Guru Report didn't know for the first two or three years I wrote for him." By the time he found out, Chan was a senior writer with a big following.
For the uninitiated, fantasy sports are a wildly popular spin-off of real sports that allows fans to form and run their own teams and compete against one another. "Owners" accumulate points based on the real-life performances of players they acquire in their leagues' annual draft or auction. Although fantasy basketball, baseball, and football leagues have been around for decades, the pastime has grown exponentially since the advent of the Internet, with a satellite industry of league management tools and inside information sources booming alongside it.
Game-day action is only one part of the seven-day-a-week, year-round job of staying on top of pro football. Midweek, Chan, an Honors history major and member of the varsity wrestling team, is busy keeping track of roster moves and analyzing upcoming games. How will the Colts' Edgerrin James perform on natural grass Sunday? How effective does the San Diego defense figure to be against the Browns?
Chan, known to many of his fellow Swarthmore students for his outspoken sports columns in The Phoenix, was first introduced to fantasy sports in seventh grade when two math teachers at his school started a basketball league to teach students about statistics. "My best friend, who's now at Harvard, took part in the league with me, and we both got completely hooked," Chan says. "Within two years, I was doing football, baseball, hockey, and basketball on the Internet and in local leagues."
By the time he was 15, Chan was specializing in his favorite, fantasy football. Also interested in journalism, he wrote a sample article for the fledgling Guru Report and submitted it to founder and publisher John Hansen, who quickly brought him on board. This season, he is fielding questions for the call-in segment of a Sunday pregame radio show broadcast in St. Louis.
"People say I have a knack for seeing talent well in advance," Chan says. "Watching a lot of college football helps me spot talent. I also read football insider reports and absorb any other information I can get."
Chan has developed his own pet theories about how best to build a fantasy football team. His advice in one recent Guru Report column: If you can't get a big-name quarterback in the first or second round of your draft, wait until much later--you can probably get someone good on the cheap. Not so with wide receivers and running backs; the field of top performers is not as deep. Chan advises getting pass catchers and ball carriers early or risk being stuck with comparative deadbeats at those key positions.
His approach is being put to the test this fall in one of the biggest and most high-profile challenges of his fantasy sports career. Chan is running The Guru Report's franchise in a new superleague that is pitting the top insider reports against one another. Going head-to-head against such rivals as Pro Football Weekly, The Sporting News, and Rotonews can be a little daunting, he admits. "I don't want to let The Guru Report down," Chan says. "A lot of money and visibility are at stake. You also realize that when you're dealing with such top-notch competition, much of it will come down to luck."
Despite his apparent career track, Chan does not plan to pursue sports-writing after Swarthmore; the field offers too little security, he says. He is more likely to become a technology entrepreneur, he says, and, toward that end, has already started a Web design and marketing company. Not that he wouldn't love to find a professional niche in sports. His dream job: owner or general manager of a real major league sports team.
--Tom Krattenmaker
When a "Green Team" was formed to advise on the environmental aspects of the College's new science center--an 80,000-square-foot complex projected to begin construction next June--its members did not have birds in mind. The group was to research and report on such matters as recycling building materials; reducing storm water runoff outside and energy usage inside; and the cost-effectiveness of wind turbines, ground-source heat pumps, and solar hot-water heaters.
Now, minimizing bird deaths has been added to the list. It seems that the center's Science Commons, designed, in part, by Margaret Helfand '69, an architect of Kohlberg Hall, will involve two stories of plate glass looking out on Crum Woods. There, students and faculty members will be able to relax and observe, firsthand, the natural sciences at work.
But plate glass can be hazardous to the wildlife it makes so beautifully accessible. This fact was evident in a report forwarded to the Green Team last spring by Guido Grasso-Knight and Michael Waddington, then senior biology majors who had conducted a study of bird deaths on campus for an ornithology class taught by Professor of Biology Timothy Williams '64.
Although they found only one dead bird during their research, reports from around campus and smudges on windows led them to estimate that about 100 birds die each year from hitting the windows of College buildings. Another six birds were found dead and four seriously injured under windows last spring that were not recorded in the study, Williams adds. Downed birds are quickly eaten by other animals, the students reported, so evidence of collisions is difficult to track. Although they admit their methods of recording evidence were "less than optimal," their findings leave no doubt that the danger zones for birds are Kohlberg Hall and the Cornell Science and Engineering Library, both of which sport large plate-glass windows. Kohlberg alone accounted for 75 of the 100 estimated deaths.
Soon after reviewing this study, the Green Team invited Dr. Daniel Klem Jr., a professor of biology at Muhlenburg College, to lecture on bird collisions, a topic on which he has written dozens of papers. Klem estimates that "window mortality" claims as many as 975 million birds in North America--10 percent of the bird population--each year. The evolution of flight among birds, he explains, has not yet adapted to man-made phenomena like tall buildings, artificial light, and large expanses of glass.
Two years ago, five hummingbirds were found dead in Kohlberg Hall's Cosby Courtyard, a garden surrounded on three sides by plate-glass windows. Associate Professor of Biology Sara Hiebert '79, who studies hummingbirds, says that those five represented a substantial part of the hummingbird population on campus.
"The Scott Arboretum staff had planted certain bushes in the courtyard to attract birds and butterflies," says Professor Williams. "They didn't realize that they were actually attracting the birds into a death trap. After they realized the problem in 1999, they removed the nectar-producing bushes, and we only had one or two hummingbirds killed that year."
Now the Green Team has begun its own research into the problem. Their primary concern is how to prevent the College's newest building from becoming another "death trap." Carr Everbach, associate professor of engineering and chair of the Green Team, explains that "either birds are looking through the glass to the other side and trying to fly through, or they see a reflection of trees and sky and fly into it."
"Hawk silhouettes," the black bird-shaped deterrents that adhere to windows, are useless at warning birds off, Everbach adds. Unfortunately, he concludes, bird collisions are "a problem without a perfect solution. Klem has made a plea for nonreflective matte-finished glass, but this is very expensive and would be impractical for this project," he says. "Any window larger than 4 square inches looks like an opening to most birds. If birds think they're seeing a path, however narrow, they will try to fly through. The only real solution is to build buildings with no windows, but that won't happen."
"In fact, birds rarely collide with any window smaller than 1 foot across, although it does happen," Williams adds. "The windows of other buildings such as Parrish and Martin rarely have bird collisions. It is only since the construction of Cornell that there have been reports of collisions at the College. Kohlberg was the first building on campus to bring the bird mortality to crisis levels and the first to use massive open-glass areas."
Among the bird-friendly measures being considered, Everbach says, is the proper placement of bird feeders. "One of Klem's observations is that if bird feeders are placed two to three feet from the glass, birds won't get up enough speed, flying from the feeder, to be seriously injured," Everbach says. Feeders placed 10 or more feet from the glass, on the other hand, are deadly. "So item 1 is to put feeders up against the glass of the new building--which will also be nice for people who want to watch the birds."
Another idea the Green Team is considering is the placement of finely woven, transparent mesh about a foot from window exteriors. "A bird would hit a trampoline, essentially, and bounce off," Everbach explains. "The netting would be mostly invisible from inside the building. It would help during the bird migration season but would have to be removed during the fall and winter when leaves and snow would stick to it. Our idea is to have motorized rolls of this flexible mesh that roll out under the eaves, then retract during winter." (More information on the Green Team's research--and a detailed look at current plans for the entire science building--is available at http://sciencecenter.-swarthmore.edu.)
--Cathleen McCarthy
While parts of the College campus are deserted during the summer, the athletic fields are bustling. Look closely, however, and you notice that the athletes are often smaller than usual.
Summer is sports camp time at Swarthmore, when coaches find themselves teaching children the tricks of the game. This summer, four Swarthmore coaches ran sports camps. Women's basketball coach Adrienne Shibles and men's lacrosse coach Pat Gress each ran 5-day day camps, for 8- to 14-year-olds. Wrestling coach Ron Tirpak taught wrestling to high schoolers in the evenings for two weeks in June. And Karen Borbee, coach of the women's field hockey and lacrosse teams, ran two 5-day camps for 10- to 15-year-olds: one for field hockey and one for lacrosse.
Borbee started her sports day camps at the College seven years ago, aiming at middle school students. "Now I work with students as young as 8--if they're really interested--and as old as high school freshmen," she says. "My philosophy is to teach the beginner and intermediate. These are introduction camps. We provide the equipment and let children try out the sport and see if they like it.
"Teaching girls this young is fun in a different way," Borbee says. "You're introducing a sport to a child. But the funny thing is, as different as these kids are in age and experience from college students, they're also very similar. I use the same philosophy that I use on my college students. Basically, I want it to be fun. I want them to learn the skills and basic strategies, but mostly I want them to enjoy playing a sport. If it's not fun, they won't continue--and we want them to continue."
Borbee says Swarthmore is an ideal location for sports camps. "We have beautiful fields, and we're centrally located to so many schools where lacrosse and field hockey are popular," she says. "With kids starting sports younger and younger, associations and youth clubs are springing up all over the area. Working parents are looking for places to send their kids in the summer and trying to be more specific about their interests."
She can see the effects of sports camps on her college student athletes. "You can tell the kids who've gone to camp. They have good basic skills because that's what camps emphasize. Those who just jump into scrimmaging and game situations are often missing that."
--Cathleen McCarthy
The following faculty members have recently been promoted to the rank of associate professor with tenure: Sara Hiebert, biology; Haili Kong, Chinese; Lisa Meeden, computer science; Philip Jefferson, economics; Nora Johnson, English literature; Patricia White, English literature; Timothy Burke, history; Michael Brown, physics; Cynthia Halpern, political science; Frank Durgin, psychology; Sarah Willie, sociology; and Maria Luisa Guardiola, Spanish.
I think about
breath
all the time. the breath
of sky on our hands,
breath of wind turning
this red autumn
into another half-moon
memory.
this city eases me
into smaller days,
sun falling in-between
the hours and I watch
the breath of air along
my back.
this city cringes
letters back at night
and writes an encrypted
message: the mystery
of our ancient hearts.
I touch stones,
hands skimming wet,
broken rock and feel
the loss of another
city, each town returned
to oblivion.
maybe it's how death
storms. or the threat
of (another) war
but I'm tired of writing
these letters
that crumble at the touch.
I've heard the echo
of endless grief and what
it means to be eternal.
I can't call this
the eternal city yet.
I'm too young and stories
that rise out of milkshops
and cemeteries only make me tired.
this fall cools summer's
slum as I watch a river gleam
with the memory of mythic babies.
eternal. this place.
it shifts words back into a language
I thought I knew but autumn
has turned this fall into ruins,
the breath of wandering.
--Lena Sze '01
Lena Sze is a classics major from New York City. She was studying in Rome last fall when she wrote this poem. It was first published in the winter 1999 issue of Small Craft Warnings, a student literary magazine.
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