When
CBS legend Mike Wallace arrived on campus in March, Assistant
Professor Cindy Halpern's political science Ethics and Public Policy
class was ready, having spent the preceding week discussing
euthanasia. Wallace, after 31 years on 60 Minutes, was in the media
glare again, this time for his reporting of a recent "mercy
killing."
In November, Wallace aired a videotape of "suicide doctor" Jack Kevorkian administering a lethal injection to Thomas Youk, a Michigan man dying from Lou Gehrig's disease, followed by interviews with the doctor and patient's family. The program drew heat from Catholic leaders, and several television stations refused to air it. As a result of the tape, Kevorkian was convicted of second-degree murder.
Joined by CBS executive producer David Gelber '63, Wallace's visit kicks off the new Media Fellows program of Swarthmore's Visibility Task Force, just a week before the trial begins. Wallace takes a seat in a Trotter classroom and loses no time in clarifying his own opinion of the controversy. Kevorkian's decision to assist in Youk's suicide was "appropriate," Wallace tells Halpern's class. "He was in serious pain."
Physician-assisted suicide happens in hospitals every day, Wallace argues, whenever doctors quietly administer extra morphine or turn off the respirator--"But, shhh, don't say anything. He could lose his license!" The recent backlash was due to people's squeamishness about death, he maintains. "Some 1,400 pieces of coverage were generated by this piece, and there wasn't an intelligent discussion among them. Where do we have a serious discussion of death?"
He is obviously hoping to have one here. "OK, have at me," he tells the students, after detailing the case. When no one pipes up, he teases: "What a namby-pamby crowd! Is this Swarthmore struck dumb? One of the toughest schools to get into?" Smiling mischievously, he adds: "Just thought I'd stimulate a little nastiness."
A heated debate then takes off, with Wallace putting the students on the spot as often as they do him. When Halpern cites the common criticism of the show--"using death to sell toothpaste"--Wallace brushes it off as "mindless crap," and when a student refers to the "commodification of suffering," he shoots back: "What the hell is the 'commodification of suffering'?"
"Do you believe in an afterlife?" Wallace then asks a student. "And where will you be going?"
"I couldn't say," the student replies. "I haven't been to confession in a while."
"I wish I believed," the 80-year-old anchorman says. "I don't ... and I'm getting closer."
Wallace confesses that he suffered three bouts of serious depression. "And in the last one, all I wanted to do was do that," he says, slashing a finger across his throat. "But thank God I didn't." He goes on: "There are times when you feel so bad. You young people haven't had that kind of pain yet." He tells them his sister, Ruthie, is in a nursing home with Alzheimer's disease. "I'll bet you Ruthie--knowing the kind of person she was--would want to go. But she can't," he says, adding, "I believe every human being has the right to choose to end their own unnecessary suffering."
"And who decides who's suffering enough?" a student asks. "I don't know if I trust most doctors to make that decision."
"Excellent question," Wallace says.
If we legalize physician-assisted suicide, Professor Halpern adds, "we risk making it easier to kill people who are more vulnerable: the aged, the handicapped..."
"That's the slippery slope," Wallace says. "I believe the public should see executions because it's public policy, we vote for it. What is wrong with seeing Tom Youk disappear--serenely? It's the same process as lethal injection."
He turns to Jennie Hounshell '99. "You've been smiling and not saying a word. What do you think of this?"
Hounshell, it turns out, is planning to go to medical school and writing her senior thesis on euthanasia. "I'm more confused than ever," she admits. "The closer I get, the more I imagine I will be one of those physicians who will quietly give people extra morphine and not tell anyone about it."
In the end, Wallace is pensive. He admits he doesn't have all the answers to this sticky issue, he just wants to stimulate questions: "The only way we'll arrive at any conclusions is to engage in exactly the kind of conversation that's going on around this table. This was fascinating to me."
As the students rise and gather their books, Jenny Yang '00 turns to Wallace. "Did we turn up the heat enough for ya?"
"Naaah," he says, but he wears a look of satisfaction.
It's Monday night swing dance practice at Tarble in Clothier. Royal Crown Revue is blasting from the sound system, and dance instructors are demonstrating the East Coast swing and the "half-moon," a term that describes the arc made when the male tosses his crouched partner through the air.
Even with midterms in full throttle, 30 students have torn themselves from their books for a few hours of raucous twirling. Twice as many showed up for the previous week's practice. Because of popular demand, a second weekly session has been added on Thursdays. Until student activities funding becomes available, students seem willing to pitch in for a sound system and instructors.
Stimulated by a Gap commercial that aired last summer featuring young couples lindy hopping to a popular tune, a jitterbug epidemic has swept the country. Swarthmore was not immune. When Yura Shubin '99 called a meeting last October to see if anyone was interested in starting a swing dance club, a couple hundred students showed up. It immediately became the most heavily attended club on campus.
Tonight, men outnumber women, leaving female dance partners in feverish demand. Shubin makes a beeline for Olga Rostapshova '02--but alas, she is usurped at the last moment, and he is stranded midfloor, watching longingly as the other dancers East-Coast and half-moon to Big Bad Voodoo Daddy.
As the evening progresses, pairs form and reform, with quick breaks to complain about the music. A volunteer student DJ manned the controls last semester but quit because of a scheduling conflict. Tonight it's a free-for-all. Taste seems divided between fans of original swing, those of the current electric swing, and at least one guy who prefers jitterbugging to salsa music.
Shubin finally succeeds at cornering Rostapshova and proves a very ambitious dancer. He frequently leans in to whisper in her ear. She listens earnestly, and soon after is hoisted onto his back, tossed through the air, or bent so far backward that her braid dusts the floor. Shubin is obviously interested in the big moves.
Allan Friedman '02, on the other hand, boogies nonstop in his goatee and fedora, even when he has no partner. Friedman is a regular, having taken on the role of organizing practices. His dancing is uninhibited, with much cool-daddy gesturing and occasional Astaire-like kicks. At one point, he spins Lindsey Newbold '02 so enthusiastically that her skirt goes completely horizontal. Caught without partners, the men try their more athletic moves on each other. One of these involves Friedman pulling Shubin through his legs, a move that leaves Shubin lying, repeatedly, facedown on the floor.
For the most part, the dancers are still in the experimental stages here, a little awkward at times but delightfully game. Now and then, a sublime moment occurs, grace and timing come together, skirts fly, and Tarble is suddenly transformed into a 1940s dancehall.
Venerable Clothier rarely enjoys a quiet evening these days, what with one dance club after another commandeering its hallowed hall. Some have bucked the swing trend, preferring to waltz and cha-cha at Tuesday-night ballroom practices. Others favor the hot-and-spicy samba of Wednesday-night Latin dancing. With all these flavors to choose from, this may be the first generation in three decades who will know how to dance cooperatively by the time they're 21. Imagine: Women will be able, once again, to follow and men to lead--at least on the dance floor.
Spring
is in the air--which means it's promotion time. Amanda Bayer in
economics, Syd Carpenter in studio art, Yvonne Chireau in religion,
and Bruce Grant in sociology and anthropology received tenure and
became associate professors. John Caskey of economics, Rachel Merz of
biology, and Thomas Stephenson of chemistry became full professors.
Professor of English Literature Craig Williamson (below) has been
appointed associate provost of the College, to serve a three-year
term. Williamson previously coordinated the Honors Program, steering
it through a major revitalization that began in 1994 and has resulted
in an increase in the number of students graduating with some level
of Honors from 10 percent of the Class of 1996 to 30 percent of the
Class of 1999.
By Hillary Thompson '99
Due to what I now know was staggering ignorance, I was not aware of Swarthmore's reputation for liberalism when I applied for early admission in 1994. I was also unaware that my own views would be labeled by many as conservative. I was quickly educated in both facts, and that education was harsh. I ran headfirst into discussions in which I was seriously outnumbered and hopelessly outargued. These episodes did not ease my transition to college. I requested transfer applications but realized that any place I was willing to apply (other small liberal arts colleges) would have the same "fault."
When my despair was almost complete, along came a group offering salvation. I was taken to lunch by two representatives of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), the Wilmington, Del.&endash;based conservative group that funds Common Sense, Swarthmore's now nearly defunct conservative newspaper. They told me I was right, that the hegemony of liberal ideology is destroying the free exchange of ideas on college campuses. Then they offered to help me "fight back." Along with a few other conservative students on campus, I inherited the bloated budget for Common Sense. I received invitations to all-expenses&endash;paid conferences around the country. My mailbox was constantly stuffed with free conservative hardcover books, magazines, and journals.
I agreed with these people on what I thought was the only point that mattered: Swarthmore is diminished by a lack of open and diverse political dialogue. I will never forget approaching a professor, frustrated that class discussion on a controversial issue was so one-sided. I expressed concern that it was difficult to have a balanced discussion since all the assigned readings supported liberal positions. Her response was: "Yes, I know. I want it that way." With opposition like this, I decided I needed all the help I could get. I began attending the conferences, writing articles, and editing Common Sense.
I always knew I was more moderate than my ISI benefactors. At first, I was prepared to deal with that. I tried to leave certain issues off the table during my conversations with their staff. I did this not because they would have stopped funding me but because the tactics they supported often angered and offended me. An ISI-supported conservative campus newspaper at another college, in response to the gay and lesbian group's "wear-jeans-if-you-support-homosexual-rights day," posted signs announcing "wear-shoes-if-you-support-the-agenda-of-the-Ku-Klux-Klan day." Their goal was to show the absurdity of linking a common item of clothing to a political position--but their response implicitly associated them with the KKK. To make matters worse, a division of ISI sent Common Sense several editorial cartoons to run in the paper. One of them was a split box with the KKK on one side and an abortion doctor on the other with a caption reading: "Which one kills more blacks?"
After a while, I didn't blame liberal students for hating conservatives. I hated them myself. I had hoped that I could take ISI's money and perks and ignore their tactics. I rationalized that Swarthmore students would listen to me, one of their own, with consideration and seriousness, even if they could not accord the same respect to people from certain outside organizations. I wanted to have it both ways: to be a rational, thinking conservative and still have access to ISI's resources. However, by my senior year, I realized that I could no longer associate myself with a group whose tactics were keeping me from achieving my own goals and, on a more fundamental level, were counter to the community values of respectful dialogue. I still believe that the conservative viewpoint is valid and that it should be expressed on this campus, but by working with the ISI to promote conservative views, I sold out my own principles.
It's not easy being a conservative activist at Swarthmore. I have faced many hostile liberals, and I understand why a few other conservative students continue to accept the support of ISI, but I think there is a better way. For my views to really be a part of campus dialogue, I have to be a member of the community, not attack it from the outside. This has meant building relationships and trust with liberal students--even though this trust is initially frightening. Because I do this, I think I have been able to offer crucial balance to both academic and community discussions.
Going it almost alone has taken some personal strength, but good rebels have always needed strength to buck the status quo. What I don't need is the support of conservative crusaders who want to change Swarthmore for their own purposes--purposes that are not what this college is about, or what I want to be about.
Celebrating the publication of Following Fred Astaire, her first "complete volume of poetry," English professor Nathalie Anderson reads to a room packed with students and faculty. Her poems, she explains, are divided into four sections: childhood/desire, aging/loss, isolation--and bad love. (The last one she drawls with a bluesy twang that makes her students giggle.) "I know that list sounds grim," she tells the audience, "but I hope the poems are wry, bemused, even delighted."
That they are--something that becomes obvious as Anderson reads, looking up frequently to smile, underscore a pun or metaphor, and all but wink at her audience. She brings down the house more than once, particularly with her ironic take on the mating ritual. In one poem, this take involves her blue eyes, "where every married man sees the wild blue yonder, the azure, the way out of there, and every bachelor the bone-rimmed blue pools at Labrea, the there to be out of...."
In a series of "phobia poems," she explores bizarre obsessions like aulophobia (fear of flutes), nephophobia (fear of clouds), and pogonophobia (fear of beards)--"not so much of other people's beards but of having a beard," she explains, adding: "One of the things I'm attracted to about anxiety is not knowing if things are going to turn out spectacularly well or spectacularly disastrously."
As one would expect of a book with Astaire in the title, many poems allude to hoofing. Anderson was taking ballroom dancing lessons while writing the poems and was struck, she says, by "how potent an idea dancing is--from Jane Austen's novels to the movie Strictly Ballroom."
Prognosis looks positive for seniors applying to medical schools this month--if last year's results are any indication. Not a single med school applicant from Swarthmore was turned down for fall 1998 entrance.
Medicine continues to be a popular career choice at the College. This year, the Health Sciences Office worked with 339 students--a quarter of the school--as well as 45 alumni. Eleven seniors and 23 alums are med school applicants and 13 juniors, 12 seniors, and 16 alums plan to apply this summer.
A total of 865 students were accepted into the Class of 2003, roughly 20 percent of the 4,200 who applied. Swarthmore expects this group to yield about 360 first-year students in September. Those accepted hail from six continents, 42 nations, and 49 U.S. states, with New York producing the most, 14 percent, beating out Pennsylvania and California, with 9 percent each. The median combined SAT-I verbal and math score for admitted students was 1,440.
Most of the international students accepted are from Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore, followed by Canada,
Malaysia, and Kenya. "This year's was the strongest international applicant pool we've ever seen at Swarthmore," says Susan Untereker, associate dean of admissions, "both in terms of academic strength and geographic diversity."
Gerald Levinson, professor of music, has received the 1999 Arthur Honegger International Prize for Musical Composition for his orchestral composition "Five Fires." The nine-minute piece pays homage to the music of Bali, where he studied as a Luce Scholar and Guggenheim Fellow in the early '80s. Awarded
every two years by a committee of composers and conductors through the Fondation de France, the prize--FF 50,000 or about $8,000--honors contemporary music composition.
Though "Five Fires" was written four years ago and made the semifinals in another international competition last year, it has yet to be performed in a live concert. "It requires a professional symphony orchestra," Levinson explains. "It also requires a music director who is excited by the idea of performing new music--and not all feel that way." Recognition like this probably won't hurt.
'Saturday morning' has long served as a shorthand epithet for culture judged to be juvenile, low-quality, moronic, mind-numbing, or cut-rate," begins Saturday Morning Fever, the recently published book by Timothy Burke, assistant professor of history, and his brother Kevin. "We have two words to the folks who think this way: Piss off."
Somehow, we suspect that actor Ben Affleck's mother hadn't read this book when she told Harper's Bazaar recently that she wished her son had become "a history professor at Swarthmore." Mrs. Affleck would probably expect something more high-minded from the College's expert on African history. Unless, of course, she has visited Burke's Web page on the Swarthmore site (www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/tburke1), which features a shot of the Johns Hopkins Ph.D. wearing a nun's habit. The book's deliberations on Scooby-Doo and The Adventures of Jonny Quest (Burke's personal favorite) seem more in line with his Internet diatribes--like "geek chronicles," "cranky restaurant reviews," and "boiling oil: messages from the ivory tower"--than his earnest research on the tribal chiefs of colonial Zimbabwe.
But don't let the irreverent language fool you. The Burkes believe those hours spent glued to the tube in the '70s gave their generation a shared sensibility. "It gave us a common set of experiences, cultural reference points," Burke says. "It's the same thing really as radio shows or movies were to earlier generations."
TV watching is not as harmful as many people think, say the Burkes. "What children really need is fuel for their rich imaginative lives, and that fuel consists of the same things that drive adults: sadness, loss, violence, ambiguity, desire, love, and death," they write. "Kids aren't robots who will learn 'values' merely because some Pod Person radiating unreality out of every pore stiffly voices such values."
How does all this relate to Tim Burke's other claim to fame? "Writing the book had an impact on what I do as an African scholar--which is not as different from this as you might think," he insists. "It has made me realize the intellectual distance scholars keep from popular culture." He has also become more critical of academic jargon. "This book required learning to write again in a mainstream, accessible, vivid way. I'm less patient with the halting, fairly dull quality of most scholarly work now. It's striking that academics don't take more chances. There's a place for doing serious, controlled, scholarly work, but working on this book has made me rediscover a sense of fun, I want to continue with that in whatever subject I work on."
Holly Baker is graduating in style, with a civil and environmental engineering degree in one hand and athletic honors in the other. As captain and top scorer on both the lacrosse and field hockey teams, Baker won the Gradys Irish Award for senior athletes and was voted to First Team Regional All-American in both sports two years running.
She finished with an impressive win-loss record of 66&endash;17 in field hockey and 40&endash;26 in lacrosse, placing third in Swarthmore history for goals and points (201 and 278) and second for assists (77).
To hear her tell it, Baker owes all this to her team and her coach. "You don't play a team sport as an individual," Baker says. You also don't become captain and top scorer of two teams without being an exceptional player and individual. "She has tremendous skill and incredible game sense," says Karen Borbee, her coach on both teams. "She knows what to do on the field, makes very good decisions--and big plays. She was our penalty stroker. She always came through in the clutch."
But that's not what sets Baker apart from other college athletes, Borbee adds. "Holly has a very mature perspective on the roll that sports play--not only in the life of a college student but in general. Holly plays because she loves to. Therefore, she's had a much more positive experience than more goal-oriented people."
Baker also found time to tutor high school students in math, assist at the Registrar's Office, and serve as secretary for the student chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers. She has a job lined up in an insurance company and hopes to coach some day.
The accomplishment she cherishes most? "Making it to the NCAA tournament in field hockey," she says. "That was great."
Jen Pao '01 captured the Centennial Conference Individual Singles Championship in tennis.
The men's tennis team made the NCAA Tournament for the 23rd year in the 25-year history of the tournament. The Garnet was ranked as high as sixth in the nation during the season. Greg Emkey '99 qualified for the NCAA Individual Championships in singles play and in doubles play with Peter Schilla '01.
The golf team posted a 10-2 record in quad-match play to equal the school record, set in 1987, for victories in a season. James Dolan '02 recorded the highest Garnet finish in Centennial Conference Championship play with a ninth at this year's tournament.
In club sports, the "Warmothers," Swarthmore's women's Ultimate team, defeated Princeton in the eastern regionals to advance to the Ultimate Players Association's 12-team national tournament in Boulder, Colo., in late May.
All-Centennial Roundup: Baseball: junior pitcher Steve Farneth '00, Second Team. Men's Lacrosse: defender Tucker Zengerle '00, First Team; attack Mark Dingfield '01 and midfielder Blake Atkins '02, Second Team. Women's Lacrosse: attack Holly Baker '99 and defender Kristen English '01, First Team; attack Katie Tarr '02, Honorable Mention. Softball: first-baseman Jean Quinn '99, Honorable Mention. Women's Tennis: Jen Pao '01, First Team Singles; Pao and Laura Swerdlow '02, First Team Doubles; Fran Simonds '02, Second Team Singles.
|
Overall |
Centennial Conference |
|
|
Baseball |
11&endash;18 |
6&endash;12 |
|
Golf |
10&endash;2 |
7th |
|
Men's Lacrosse |
2&endash;12 |
0&endash;6 |
|
Women's Lacrosse |
8&endash;8 |
4&endash;5 |
|
Softball |
1&endash;24 |
1&endash;15 |
|
Men's Tennis |
10&endash;6 |
|
|
Women's Tennis |
8&endash;6 |
7&endash;3 |
|
Men's Track & Field |
3&endash;8 |
5th |
|
Women's Track & Field |
6&endash;7 |
9th |
Everyone has always suspected that there's something a little disturbing about student volunteer firefighters. Yesterday the Psychology Department confirmed it by announcing that for the past four years, the fire department has been part of a massive, clandestine experiment based on Pavlovian principles. Each time the "honker" has gone off, the Psychology Department has been there, writing in their little books and looking smug....
Said Prof. Barry Schwartz, "We actually accumulated all the results we needed two and a half years ago, but now we all just get such a big kick out of watching them run down the hill in bad weather that we keep the study going."
--Front-page "news" by Nick Attanasio '00 'in The Phoenix April Fool's issue
Those of us praying that we'll get a job sweeping classroom floors after six or seven years of graduate school (provided that we get in) must resent the person who waltzes off to Wall Street with a B.A. in hand, supposedly ends up sipping martinis from a terrace with a view of Central Park, and retires at the ripe age of 45. Sure, we can always take some comfort in the fact that these people live stressed, soulless, alienated, stodgy, tooling lives.
--From a story in the student satire magazine Spike, fall 1998, by Todd Hedrick '00
Readers of plant labels (that's just about everyone at Swarthmore) were surprised to find a few new species on campus the morning of April 1. Pranksters had simplified the identification of hundreds of campus trees, shrubs, and perennials. New plantings included "Green Plant," "Round Bush," and the ubiquitous "Short Tree."
Other pranks included 5,000 nitrogen-filled balloons waist deep in the Clother Hall snack bar and a mock "toxic spill" in Martin Hall, during which white-clad students with masks escorted members of the Biology Department faculty out of the building through a "decontamination tent."
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