Swarthmore College President Alfred H. Bloom and philanthropist Eugene Lang '38.
Eugene M. Lang '38 has pledged the largest single gift ever received by the College&emdash;$30 million&emdash;for a "Fund for the Future." Lang, emeritus chairman of the Board of Managers, said that he and his family will work with College administrators over the next several years to determine the ultimate designations of the gift. "There is no college that more effectively challenges students intellectually while nurturing active social conscience," Lang said. "I have confidence that this investment in Swarthmore students will help them become the kinds of leaders that our country and world most need."
In announcing the gift, President Alfred H. Bloom (seen above left with Lang) said, "Gene Lang's extraordinary vision and financial support have consistently reaffirmed the College's deepest values and allowed it to build on these values in new, vital educational directions."
Lang's gift brings his total giving to Swarthmore over the last three decades to $50 million, including the Lang Music Building, the Eugene and Theresa Lang Performing Arts Center, endowed professorships and support for faculty scholarly research, and the Lang Opportunity Scholarship Program.
Photo: See Eugene Lang '38 with some of the current Lang Opportunity Scholars.
A set of recommendations on the future of information technology at Swarthmore was released in March by the Librarian Search Committee. Initially formed last summer to create a job description and to begin the search for a new College librarian to replace the late Michael Durkan, the committee decided instead to spend the current academic year seeking answers to three major questions:
In a 15-page report that also included a draft job description, the committee recommended:
The committee will begin the search for the new librarian this summer and plans to have the position filled by summer 1998.
Mighty Mouse ... Swat Bot, a robotic mouse programmed by a group of College engineers, captured first place in two intercollegiate contests this spring. The robots are programmed to explore a variable maze, return to the starting point, then follow the fastest path through it. Final scores are based on the time each robot takes for its fastest run, plus a penalty for the total time spent exploring. In a meet held in March at Drexel University, Swat Bot worked its way through the maze in 51 seconds, obliterating the second-place team, which posted a time of 2 minutes, 39 seconds. The second win was at Princeton in April (although the College was not an official entrant). Swat Bot is shown here with its creators (l to r) Noah Salzman '98, Silvio Eberhardt, assistant professor of engineering, John Rieffel '99, and Ross Dickson '97.
In the Bulletin's special issue on The College Today (December 1993), we introduced four members of the Class of 1997 and the admissions essays that "worked" to help get them into Swarthmore. We thought you might like to know how each has fared.
Three were graduated this month and one a year ago.
Martin Carrillo was drawn to the College because of "the chance to do frontline work" in lighting, set design, and construction in the Eugene M. and Theresa Lang Performing Arts Center. A double major in theater and sociology, he'll be staying on campus for another year as the center's production intern.
Carrillo, originally from Miami, then plans to head to California to reconnect with the San Francisco Mime Troupe, with which he spent the summer between his freshman and sophomore years. "Right now I'm suffering from 'senioritis,' he said in May, "partly becoming nostalgic for being a student and partly wanting to get out and become independent."
Andrea Gibbons graduated in 1996 with a degree in sociology and anthropology. Because she received advanced placement credits and took one extra course every semester, she completed her degree in three years. "I really have missed my classmates," she said by phone from her home in Tucson, "and I'll miss graduating with them."
A native of Arizona, Gibbons spent the last six months working at an orphanage in Guadalajara, Mexico, helping tend 130 children. "Only 20 of the kids were really orphans," she said. "Most of the rest came from single-parent families that simply couldn't afford to take care of them."
She returned to Arizona in late May and hopes to work for an immigration lawyer until she enters graduate school in public policy.
Shithi Kamal, a native of Bangladesh, completed a bachelor of arts degree with a double major in economics and political science and a concentration in public policy. And in true Swarthmore fashion, she's changed her mind on a career. "Right now I'm looking into hydrology. My country is a delta formed over the last 10,000 years from soil washed down from the Himalayas. Fresh water is a big concern."
Kamal will take a year off to be with her family, take her GREs, and look for an internship in hydrology before starting graduate school. "Swarthmore helped me grow a lot," she says, "and it will always be a frame of reference for me. But I'm ready to leave."
Alec Zimmer from Danville, in central Pennsylvania, came to Swarthmore with a twin love for engineering and his F horn and never deviated from either interest. He spent all four years as a member of the College's wind ensemble and in April gave a senior recital.
Zimmer did try the debate club and cross country&emdash;and even ultimate frisbee&emdash;for a while, but "engineering took over my life." He will enter Stanford University in the fall to pursue a master's degree in structural engineering. "I think I worked harder than I had anticipated, but I've enjoyed being here," he said. He now joins his father, William '68, and grandmother Cynthia Swartley Zimmer '42 in the ranks of Swarthmore alumni.
Moving on ... Dean of the College Ngina Lythcott has announced her resignation effective June 30. "I have had five wonderful years at Swarthmore working with an outstanding staff, extraordinary faculty, and amazing students," wrote Lythcott in a letter to the campus community. "Working with individual students on their academic advisement and personal development is what I loved most about being here. Swarthmore is a community that has demanded a great deal but has given a great deal back, especially in the areas of intellectual engagement, values-based decision making, and a warm sense of community." The letter went on to say that Lythcott would be "exploring a variety of career interests" and that she wanted to "create more time to nurture my inner life and valued personal relationships."
President Alfred H. Bloom said: "We will miss Ngina greatly. Her leadership has markedly strengthened Swarthmore's ability to prepare students for a complex and pluralistic world. The vision she brought to us will be a sure guide to the goals we must continue to seek."
Robert J. Gross '62, associate dean for academic affairs, will become acting dean of the College while a national search is conducted for Lythcott's replacement.
Moving up ... Full professorship has been awarded to Nathalie Anderson, English literature; Joy Charlton, sociology; Sharon Friedler, dance; Frank Moscatelli, physics; Michael Mullan, physical education; Faruq Siddiqui, engineering; and Robin Wagner-Pacifici, sociology. Appointments with continuous tenure and promotion to associate professorships were granted to Thomas Hunter, mathematics; Robert Paley, chemistry; and Micheline Rice-Maximin, modern languages and literatures.
Moving in ... The College received a record 4,269 applications for the Class of 2001. Of those, 981 students (including 150 early-decision admittees) have been accepted. As of this writing, 392 have been admitted. The admitted students represent five continents, 40 nations, and 46 states.
Washington Post writer and political analyst Juan Williams spoke to a capacity crowd in March on objectivity in the media.
The media, Williams said, strive "to dramatize news, to make everything into a crisis" in order to secure readers and viewers. By focusing on theatrics, he said, the media ignore the real power processes of politics, disregard long-standing problems, and encourage interest-group politics. "These biases are dangerous when the media become a mirror for skillful, manipulative politicians" who use such theatrics to give Americans subconscious impressions of politics and public figures.
Williams, a past political analyst for CBS News, is a panelist on CNN's Capital Gang Sunday. He is currently writing a biography of former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.
His talk, followed by a student panel discussion on liberal/conservative issues at the College, was this year's second McCabe Memorial Lecture. Paul Verkuil, former dean of the Tulane Law School and special master in the case New Jersey v. New York over the sovereignty of Ellis Island, was the first McCabe lecturer in February.
Associate Professor of Political Science
When Jane Addams argued for women's participation in public life in the early decades of the 20th century, she did so as what we would now term a "difference feminist." She supported protective legislation for women and argued that women spoke in what Carol Gilligan ['58] would term a "different voice." It seemed then women's nature or their experiences with home and family, when combined with their broader community experience working with poor and immigrant populations in America's cities, could lead the way in transforming public values and the state.
Along with many of her compatriots, Addams offered a stinging critique of materialism, militarism, selfishness, and the industrial ethic. A firm believer in progress, she fought for women's political incorporation not on the grounds that women were like men, but rather because they brought
something different&emdash;and yes, better&emdash;to public life. Women might not monopolize the social ethic, but they were, at least so long as they remained connected to the experiences that gave rise to this ethic, the driving force behind its expansion.
New forms of consciousness have sometimes emerged from what appear to be defensive or rearguard actions. Some feminists in Jane Addams' cohort were quite explicit about the defense of their traditional responsibilities as they argued for expanding women's public voice. Increasingly, Addams and Charlotte Perkins Gilman argued, Americans were becoming interdependent. The private sphere was shrinking, leaving women with diminished influence, and women were losing control of functions once performed by them in the home. Food and clothing production, education, sanitation, health, and
philanthropy were increasingly socialized. Thus women needed to move into the public sphere in order to safeguard their traditional domains of concern and also to bring their wisdom and experience to public tasks. In fact what was modern government but extended public housekeeping?
Addams envisioned bringing women's brooms, caretaking skills, empathy, and wisdom into the definition of mature, ethical democratic citizenship. She challenged the power and utility of the pervasive model of citizenship based in autonomy and independence, arguing that modern life negates self-sufficiency. The good citizen was no longer the independent man. An alternative vision of citizenship stressed not only human interdependence but mutual responsibility for the well-being of other members of our community. Addams and her fellow travelers offered up a different and broader conception of the state&emdash;a conception that helped prepare the emergence of some form of the American welfare state.
Early 20th-century "difference feminists" sought something more than liberal theory provided. Addams' vision extended beyond overturning restrictions on women's rights. She supported an inclusive citizenship in an age of exclusion and hoping that citizens could come to envision their own well-being in conjunction with the well-being of others.
Difference feminism is again a hot issue at the end of the the century. Is a '90s feminist who stresses gender differences a radical or a conservative? The answer is anything but simple. It depends, I would suggest, on the public vision into which the imagery of women's special knowledge is pressed. Feminists who emphasize women's maternal instincts celebrate the private sphere and wish women would traffic less in the corruption, materialism, and competitiveness of public life. Others, more in tune with Jane Addams, believe the personal is political and that the boundary between public and private is artificial and negotiable. Addams saw this boundary as a "wavering line" that was increasingly blurred.
Difference feminism has been attacked as a trap for women. In this view, arguments for a "different voice" emphasize biological difference, rehabilitate gender stereotypes, and enshrine women's second-class status. If women are more nurturing and less competitive than men, then they cannot be expected to succeed in a man's world; their marginalization in the economic structure is, then, nothing with which we need have any reason to be politically concerned since it reflects women's own choices and how they have been socialized.
One current legal scholar, Joan C. Williams, has even suggested that a major source of difference feminism's appeal to feminists and progressives is that its critique of capitalism is less likely to be discredited than other incarnations of radicalism. It is, she suggests, Marxism to take home to mother. But she insists that it brings far more trouble than benefit to women seeking equality.
I don't deny the possibility that difference feminists run the risk of having their weapons turned against them by punitive courts and policymakers. To the extent that they offer alternative visions and values for public life, they can surely expect to be met with resistance. But language and political narratives are always objects of struggle, and sometimes the most potent weapons are those that speak to tradition, history, and sentiment while transforming possibilities at the same time.
Jane Addams is being rehabilitated&emdash;and she deserves to be. This effort is more than just another attempt to elevate an important voice in American political thought to the position she deserves. Liberalism is in the midst of an identity crisis. Addams understood the impoverishment of public values and the failure of the liberal state in her day, and modern-day Americans have much to learn by rethinking her world view.
Carol Nackenoff teaches constitutional law, feminist theory, gender and politics, American politics, and political theory.
Photo: Sixteen Feet
Sixteen for 16 ... A reunion concert featuring nearly every past and present member of the a capella singing group 16 Feet was held April 5 to celebrate the 16th anniversary of its founding. Former members returned from as far away as Los Angeles and Argentina to join current members in selections of the group's greatest hits. Here Jorge Oria '94 takes center stage before a capacity crowd in the Meeting House with "Swarthmore Girl" (to the tune of the Beach Boys' "Surfer Girl").
The College has launched an effort to examine how Swarthmore should prepare to move into the future and to develop a set of College priorities for the coming decade. The planning process, which was initiated
by President Alfred H. Bloom and the Board of Managers, will be coordinated by the College Planning Committee (CPC), an 18-member campus-wide group of Managers, faculty and staff members, and students.
"While planning goes on here every day," said Paul Aslanian, vice president for finance and planning and a member of the CPC, "from time to time it's appropriate to take a longer view, to be more deliberate, and to expand our horizons. Right now Swarthmore is in a very strong position academically, financially, in admissions, and in its overall reputation. It is from this position of strength that we are beginning the process."
Studies of academic issues began a year ago in the faculty-based Council on Educational Policy. Eight other planning groups were formed this spring to study the student experience, financial aid, admissions, facilities, technology, staffing, the College's relationship with the local and regional community, and Swarthmore's visibility and leadership in higher education. Concurrently the Student Council will constitute the core of an additional group that will focus on student government and student activities.
The planning groups will aim to bring to the CPC by May 1998 a set of up to three priorities in each of the eight areas that are believed to be most important for the College to pursue. After broad consultation the CPC will draw up a final plan.
The men's basketball team made its first-ever post season appearance with a trip to the semifinals of the ECAC South Tournament&emdash;informally recognized as the NIT of Division III. The Garnet finished the season at 16-11, reaching the Centennial Conference Championship game (the Garnet lost 90-59 to Dickinson). Senior co-captain Ben Schall led the squad, averaging 15.2 points per game. Schall became the all-time steals leader with 137 and finished his career with 1,075 points, 566 rebounds, 208 assists, and he became the only player in Swarthmore's 97- year basketball history to record the feat of reaching 1,000 points, 500 rebounds, 200 assists, and 100 steals. Schall also excelled in the classroom and was named a member of the GTE Academic All-American regional squad. Senior co-captain Colin Convey finished his career as Swarthmore's all-time assist leader with 283 and became the first Swarthmore player to receive First-Team All-Centennial Conference recognition. Convey led the conference in assists and three-point baskets with 105 and 63 respectively.
The women's basketball team posted a 7-16 record this past season, matching the win total of the previous season. For the first time in Swarthmore history, the Garnet posted victories over Dickinson and Western Maryland. Co-captain Lisl Cochran-Bond '97 led the scoring, averaging 14.2 points per contest. Co-captain Pia Houseal '97 led the squad in rebounding, averaging nine a game. Holly Barton '99 led the squad with 25 three-pointers, netting 53.
The badminton team posted a 6-2 mark and a fourth- place finish at the Northeastern Collegiate Championships. Thanh Hoang '97 and Vanya Tepavcevic '97 led the Garnet. Hoang earned a trip to the national championships, while Tepavcevic posted a team best 4-1 record at No. 2 singles. At the PAIAW Championships, the doubles team of Becky Fischer '97 and Wendy Kemp '99 won the "B" Flight Championship over teammates Herrin Hopper '98 and Jennifer Klein '98, while Catherine Chomat '97 was a runner-up in the "B" Flight Singles Championship.
At the Centennial Conference swimming championships, both the Garnet men's and women's swimming teams finished in second place. The women established three conference bests and nine new school marks at the conference meet, sending Claire Arbour '00, Kristen Robertson '98, Cathy Polinsky '99, and Jill Belding '99 to the NCAA Championships, where Swarthmore finished 29th. Belding earned All-American honors in the 200-yard butterfly with an eighth place finish. Arbour finished in 10th place in the 200 freestyle to earn All-American Honorable Mention recognition. The entire foursome took 12th place in the 800 freestyle and 16th in the 400 freestyle to garner All-American Honorable Mention recognition.
At the Conference Championships, the Garnet men, led by Brandon Walsh '00, broke five College records. Walsh set a school and conference record in the 200 butterfly (1:53.46) and set school records in the 200 individual medley and the 100 butterfly. At the NCAA championships, Walsh placed 18th in the 200 butterfly and 27th in the 100 butterfly. Andy Robbins '98 also qualified for nationals, where he finished 17th in the 200 and 21st in the 100.
The women's indoor track and field squad won its first-ever Centennial Conference championship at Haverford College. The Garnet topped eight other squads to grab the title. Danielle Duffy '98 earned Co-Outstanding Performer of the meet honors after winning the 200- meter dash and running legs on the winning 4 x 225-meter relay with Catherine Laine '98, Jill Wildonger '97, and Wonda Joseph '00 and the 4 x 400-meter relay with Laine, Wildonger, and Stephanie Herring '99. The 4 x 400-meter relay squad broke the conference record in a time of 4:12.24. Laine earned a trip to the NCAA Championships with a record-breaking leap in the Triple Jump, where she jumped a distance of 38' 8.25" to break the school, meet, and conference records. Laine was also victorious in the 55-meter hurdles. Head coach Ted Dixon was named 1996&endash;97 United States Track Coaches Association Mideast Region Women's Indoor Coach of the Year.
The men's indoor track and field team posted a 7-1 record and finished in second place at the Centennial Conference championships. Pole Vaulter Nate Mason '99 was the lone first-place finisher in the Garnet's balanced attack&emdash;he cleared 13' to win the competition. Swarthmore posted second-place finishes in the 4 x 225-meter relay, 4 x 400-meter relay, and a third place in the 4 x 800-meter relay. Individually, Mason Tootell '99 placed second in the 55-meter hurdles followed by Reuben Canada '99 in third. Co-captain Eric Pakurar placed second in the 400-meter run, and Steve Dawson '00 placed second in the high jump.
The wrestling team posted a 6-13 overall record and a 3-3 mark in Centennial Conference matches. At the conference championships the Garnet finished sixth. Pete Balvanz '98 earned Swarthmore's top finish, placing third in the 150-pound weight class, while Sean Lewis '99 placed fourth in the 190-pound class. During the season Adrian Wilson '99 led the team with a 17-5 record, collecting six pins in the 134-pound class. Wilson finished seventh at the NCAA Division III East Regional.
Swarthmore College. All rights reserved. 1997