C. Kemal Nance '92 adds an exuberant dance as Vaneese Thomas '74 directs the Swarthmore College Alumni Gospel Choir during its 25th-anniversary concert on Black Alumni Weekend in March. Thirty-six members returned to campus for the concert that featured pieces from the choir's new recording, Hallelujah! Amen.
Experts say that many languages, chiefly those of Native Americans and forest people, are dying tongues. Paul Platero is determined that Navajo won't be among them.
As this year's Eugene M. Lang Visiting Professor of Social Change, Platero is spending the semester as a member of the Linguistics Program, teaching the structure of Navajo to Swarthmore students, who are becoming more proficient in the language than most preschool Navajo children. Former director of an education program administered by the Navajo nation, Platero is concerned that the majority of Navajo children do not know their own language.
"I did a recent study and found that about 55 percent of these children have English as their only language," he said. "About 17 percent are growing up monolingual speakers of Navajo, and roughly 24 percent are bilingual. And my guess is that in the next 10 years the percentage of English-only speakers will increase considerably if the Navajo people do not reverse the present trend."
Platero's study, he says, came as a "wake-up call" to his tribal government. "I believe the Navajo government is taking steps to require that preschool children be taught in Navajo. If they are not Navajo speakers now, they will have it introduced to them as a second language so they can at least have some experience hearing and speaking a few words."
The loss of native speakers may mean a loss of the history of the entire tribe. Although Navajo started to be recorded phonetically by enthnographers more than 100 years ago, the tribe never developed its own written language. Like many Native American nations, teachings are passed orally from generation to generation.
A native of New Mexico, Platero lives with his wife and 14 children in Arizona, where the entire family is involved in a commercial printing business. And although he taught at the college level for five years after receiving a doctorate in linguistics from MIT, this year has been his first back in an academic setting since 1983.
"I was drawn away slowly from my area of training," he says, "and I didn't realize how much I missed linguistics until now. It's exciting to see these young students grasping the complex theoretical issues of a non-Indo-European language."
College Librarian Michael J. Durkan and Barbara Yost Stewart '54, professor of biology, will retire at the end of the academic year.
Durkan came to the College in 1976 after working for 10 years in rare books and technical services at Wesleyan University. Prior to that he worked in various libraries in his native Ireland, where he received a B.A. from St. Patrick's College in Maynooth and a graduate diploma in library studies from the National University of Ireland, University College, Dublin.
In alternate spring semesters, Durkan taught (and will continue to teach) the course Introduction to Anglo-Irish Literature. He nominated internationally renowned Irish poet Seamus Heaney for an honorary degree, which the College bestowed in 1994. In October 1995 Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. During his 20 years at the College, Durkan oversaw the building of the Cornell Science Library, the establishment of the support group Associates of the Library, the automation of the Library catalog, and the subsequent installation of Tripod, a computerized catalog that links library collections at Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, and Haverford.
Stewart, who taught courses and seminars in the molecular biology of membranes, came to Swarthmore in 1967 as a half-time teaching assistant. While working at the College, she obtained a master's degree in molecular biology in 1972 and a Ph.D. in lipid biochemistry in 1975, both from Bryn Mawr College. For the past 12 years, she has been the associate chair of the Department of Biology and the College's health science adviser. In these roles she advised more than 500 biology majors and helped more than 330 premedical students apply to medical school.
Both Durkan and Stewart have been granted emeritus status by the Board of Managers.
More than 300 people filled the Lang Performing Arts Center Cinema on April 13 to hear a debate between Michael Meeropol '64 and Joyce Milton '67 on the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed in 1953 for conspiracy to commit espionage.
Meeropol, a son of the Rosenbergs and co-author of the autobiographical We Are Your Sons and editor of The Rosenberg Letters: A Complete Edition of the Prison Correspondence of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, maintains his parents' innocence against the charge, saying that his parents were part of a "politically motivated frame-up" in the climate of the Cold War and Mc-Carthyism. Milton, co-author of The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth, believes the Rosenbergs received a fair trial and that the guilty verdict was justified.
The debate also included Victor Navasky '54, publisher and editorial director of The Nation, who served as commentator, and Meta Mendel-Reyes, assistant professor of political science, who moderated. "The government used my mother as a lever against my father when she and my father refused to cooperate," Meeropol said. "They held her as a hos-tage in a life-and-death game of chicken, and when the end came they killed her knowing she was not guilty."
"I don't think the Rosenbergs were heroes because they didn't name names," Milton asserted. "Quite the contrary.... This whole idea that it's somehow heroic to remain silent I find repugnant."
I arrived at Swarthmore in August 1978, literally the day after I handed in the final version of my doctoral thesis at the University of Oregon. This summer, almost 18 years later, I will leave my tenured professorship here to take a position in agroecology and sustainable agriculture at the Royal Agricultural University in Copenhagen. I have to credit my students for encouraging me to try something that I have always wanted to do.
In December 1993 I met with seven students to discuss possible topics for the first-ever Capstone Seminar in Environmental Studies. This was to be an advanced interdisciplinary seminar within a major area of environmental studies, involving work in at least two, and preferably within all three, of the College's academic divisions. I saw the seminar as an opportunity for me to explore areas outside of biology, to learn more than to teach. I had no idea how it would contribute to changing my life.
Several topics were discussed during that meeting, but only one emerged with both enthusiastic and unanimous support: sustainable agriculture. At first it might seem surprising that seniors at a small liberal arts college would be so interested in agriculture, but upon reflection it's not surprising at all. Agriculture is the basis of modern civilization, the ultimate example of conscious human alteration of the natural world. It is the most fundamental technology. Furthermore the environmental degradation and resultant non-sustainability of farming are among the most important environmental problems facing the world.
The decision to focus on sustainable agriculture could not have suited me more. My interest in agriculture, specifically agricultural ecology, goes back more than 20 years. I had considered going into agricultural botany when I entered graduate school in the 1970s, but the worlds of "pure" biology (represented by the research universities) and applied biology (at land grant universities) are historically very separate. I chose to enter the world of academic science because it offered a more rigorous and broader training. After coming to Swarthmore-which is about as different from an agricultural university as an institution can be-my involvement in agriculture was limited to discussing it in my courses and seminars and writing a chapter on plant population biology and agriculture for a book on agroecology a few years ago. Now I would at least have the opportunity to study agriculture in a serious way with my seminar students. And though I knew quite a bit about agricultural biology, the Capstone Seminar would also concern itself with the social, political, and economic context in which agriculture occurs. I would have much to learn.
The seminar was very successful in analyzing agriculture from many different perspectives. By the end of the semester, it became apparent to me that agricultural ecology is the field I most want to study. It is not only interesting, but important, and I think I may have something special to contribute. My interest was apparent to the students, and they asked me: Why don't you do agricultural research if you are so interested in it? It simply didn't seem possible. While my research on plant population biology was conceptually and methodologically very close to crop research, I could not pursue serious agricultural research at a liberal arts college without an experimental farm. I had been at Swarthmore for 18 years. In another 18 I would become professor emeritus with a comfortable pension. So why should I become distracted by a fantasy to change fields? Swarthmore is an outstanding institution and has been good to me, but after many years of teaching, research, and administration, it became clear to me that undergraduate liberal arts education had not become my calling. I have great respect for this type of career and can find little to criticize at Swarthmore. I have done the best job I could, but it is not what I most want to do for the rest of my life. Botanical research, pure and applied, is.
Several months after the Capstone Seminar, I saw an advertisement in Nature for a position at the Danish Royal Agricultural University. The job description was straightforward: basic and strategic research in agricultural ecology with the goal of contributing to the development of more sustainable agricultural systems. Although my research is internationally known within plant ecology, I didn't think I would have a chance to get this position because I have little direct experience in agricultural research. I spent an entire day writing my application letter, describing my interests and the type of research I would like to do. I discussed my book chapter on agroecology and some ideas from the Capstone Seminar. Seven months later I was quite surprised to be offered the position.
My decision to enter this new and quite unknown world was difficult-not difficult to make but to accept. The change will be enormous: leaving friends and family behind to go off to a new country with a strange language, into a new field, working at a totally different type of institution with a very different job description. While it could be a huge mistake, it was clear that if I didn't go, I would always regret not having taken the chance. I realized that combining my scientific interests with my environmental and social values to help make agriculture less destructive of the environment is probably the only real ambition I have ever had. This summer I leave for Copenhagen to try it.
Nobel laureate Derek Walcott presented a selection of his poems and plays during a reading on campus April 19. Born on St. Lucia in the West Indies, Walcott is the acclaimed author of numerous volumes of poetry, including The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory, for which he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. Considered a poet of immense power, skill, and intellectual depth, he was called "the best poet the English language has today" by the late poet Joseph Brodsky. Walcott teaches at Boston University.
Peter Gram Swing, professor emeritus of music, died Feb. 15 at his home of chronic myeloid leukemia. He was 73.
He joined the Swarthmore faculty in 1955 as the first full-time music professor and director of the chorus. He headed the department from 1958 to 1974, remaining choral director throughout his 34-year career. Prof. Swing was the first recipient of the Daniel Underhill Chair of Music.
The conductor and organizer of innumerable music events, Prof. Swing annually directed the community Christmas presentation of Handel's Messiah. He also conducted the Swarthmore College Chorus in works by P.D.Q. Bach, the alter ego of Swing's former student Peter Schickele '57, and led the College Chorus in performances with the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Contributions in his memory may be made to the College's Friends of Music and Dance.
Former Board of Managers member Barbara Brooks Smoyer '37 died March 19 of a cerebral hemorrhage.
Active in many civic organizations in Princeton and statewide New Jersey government, she also served as president, secretary, class agent, reunion committee members, and class notes secretary for her class. In addition she chaired the Annual Funds Committee and served as an admissions interviewer.
Mrs. Smoyer was a nationally ranked senior woman amateur tennis player, and she, along with her husband, Stanley, received the Chamber of Commerce Citizen of the Year Award, the United Way Lambert Award, and the Humanitarian Award of the National Conference of Christians and Jews.
The women's swim team sent seven swimmers to the National Championships in Atlanta, and all returned All-Americans. Skye Fulkerson '96 earned honors with a sixth- place finish in the 100-yard breaststroke. Jill Belding '99 also earned individual All-American status with a sixth- place finish in the 200-yard butterfly, while Jenny Harvey '99 earned Honorable Mention All-American status with a 15th-place finish in the 200-yard breaststroke. The 200-yard medley relay team of Alanna Roazzi '99, Fulkerson, Cathy Polinsky '99, and Janine Gent '99 earned an All-American bid with a seventh place finish. The 400-yard medley relay team of Kristen Robertson '98, Fulkerson, Polinsky, and Harvey earned Honorable Mention status with a 12th-place finish in a school record time of 4:03.86; and the 200-yard freestyle relay team of Fulkerson, Polinsky, Gent, and Harvey finished in 16th place in a school record time of 1:43.47 to earn Honorable Mention status. The team finished with a 13-2 overall record, 6-1 in the Centennial Conference.
The men's swim team finished the season with an overall record of 9-4 and went 5-1 in conference for a second- place finish. Andy Robbins '98 and Kendrew Witt '96 represented Swarthmore at the National Championships.Robbins brought home Honorable Mention All-American status finishing in 11th place in the 200-yard backstroke in a school record time of 1:54.44. Justin Herring '97 earned a spot on the GTE Academic All-American All-District II at-large team. Herring also earned All-Conference honors along with Robbins, Witt, and Carl Sanders '97 as a member of the Centennial Champion 200 and 400 medley relay teams. Witt also was a double Centennial champ in the 100 and 200 breaststroke as was Robbins in the 100 and 200 backstroke. Mark Friedberg '98, Alex Huk '96, Fulkerson, Witt, and Herring were named to the Conference Academic Honor Roll.
The men's basketball team closed a frustrating season on a winning note. The Garnet edged division champion Haverford 56-55 on the strength of a Craig Rodner '96 free throw in the game's final seconds. Swarthmore finished the season with a 9-15 overall record and a 5-8 conference mark. Ben Schall '97 led the squad in scoring, steals, and rebounding, posting 14.1 points, 38 steals, and eight rebounds per game. Colin Convey '97 set a school mark with 56 three-point baskets and the team set a conference mark with 94 three-pointers. Mark Pletcher '96, A.J. Shanley '97, Rodner, and Schall made the Academic Honor Roll.
The women's basketball team also struggled this season, compiling a 7-17 overall record and a 4-11 conference mark. However, the squad came on strong winning five of their final eight contests including a sweep of Haverford. On senior day it was fitting that Nancy Rosenbaum '96 was the star. Playing in her last game, she recorded her 1,000th rebound and hit the game-winning basket with four seconds remaining. Rosenbaum ends her career leading the Garnet with 1,003 rebounds and 281 steals. She also was named to the Centennial Academic Honor Roll. Freshmen Holly Barton and Erin Greeson made their mark on the College record books. Barton connected on 27 three pointers to shatter the single-season mark and tie the career mark while Greeson set the season mark with 39 blocked shots.
The wrestling team battled to a 3-11-1 mark as injuries depleted the squad. The Garnet jumped out to a promising start, posting a 2-1 record, but lost six consecutive matches before a 24-24 tie with Johns Hopkins. At the Centennial Conference Champion-ships, Pete Balvanz '98 came in second place at 142 pounds. Alec Stall '98 finished in third at 150 pounds, and Tirian Mink '98 posted a fourth-place finish at 134 pounds. The Garnet finished in fifth place, collecting 27 points. Chaz Teplin '96 earned a spot on the Centennial Academic Honor Roll.
The badminton team posted a 5-3 record, winning its first four contests. Thanh Hoang '97 earned a second- place finish at the Northeastern Regional Collegiate Championships and the doubles team of Vanya Tepavcevic '97 and Hoang finished in third place. The doubles team of Erika Johansen '99 and Jennifer Chen '99 earned the first-place prize at the PAIAW Championships.
The men's and women's indoor track and field teams posted successful seasons. The women, with a 10-1 record, ranked 24th in the final U.S. Track Coaches Association Poll. The men, with a perfect 11-0 record, were ranked as high as 16th during the season but did not make the final poll. Both teams finished in third place at the Centennial Conference Championships. Mike Turner '96 set school and conference records in the 200- and 400-meter dashes and was part of the 800- and 1,600-meter relay teams that broke school records. Senior Scott Reents established the school mark of 3:59.1 in the 1,500 meter. On the women's side, Danielle Duffy '98 set the school and conference mark in the 200-meter, and Jill Willdonger '97 eclipsed the school and Centennial mark in the 400 meter. Also, Catherine Laine '98 set the school mark in the 55-meter dash of 7.4 seconds, and Shoshannah Pearlman '98 broke the school's 5,000 meter mark in a time of 18:21.58.
Hood Trophy Update: The Hood Trophy battle is tied at 4.5 each. Swat earned a full point with the women's basketball sweep and a point from the wrestling victory while splitting a point in men's basketball.
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