To the Editor:
Outstanding. Absolutely outstanding. "Swarthmore on the Line of Scrimmage" (December 1998) was the first Bulletin article that I have read slowly (and twice) in years. The true meaning of "diversity" is so often lost at Swarthmore. Football--no, make that football players--add a dimension to the College community that should be valued, not derided.
President Bloom, coach Peter Alvanos, and all of the members of the Garnet football team certainly have my wholehearted support.
David Thoenen '69
Raleigh, N.C.
To the Editor:
As a member of three Swarthmore championship football teams (you remember those halcyon days when we won games, received some national press, and then ran the most successful coach in Division III off campus), I was buoyed by some of the comments of administrators and faculty. John Caskey's question asking if we "want Swarthmore to be all tree-hugging liberals" and Jennie Keith's comment warning of "a disdain for things not intellectual" were positive signs. In the end, talk is cheap. Football proponents such as Professor Tom Blackburn and Board member Neil Austrian '61 have been around for years, and we're still having the same ridiculous debate about football at Swarthmore.
What has never changed is the attitude espoused by our athletic director and president in this article: "a successful team need not be defined by a winning season." This is a dangerous state of mind for a student-athlete playing a grueling collision sport. If the score of a football game is inconsequential, then why do students get grades in the classroom?
Simply fielding a team is not enough. Giving these student-athletes every chance to win each week is the least the College can do. With athletic facilities that haven't seen a decent upgrade since the 1950s, can we really say that we support any of our sports as well as the other top liberal arts schools U.S. News & World Report measures Swarthmore against each year? The answer is no.
Tony Cianci '86
Malvern, Pa.
To the Editor:
I arrived at Swarthmore in 1968, and knowing no other way, I played football.
In 1969, another way began to dawn on me. Maybe it was Woodstock, maybe falling in love. In any case, at football camp that summer I found I didn't like hitting people anymore, which creates a certain liability for a linebacker. So I quit, took modern dance, learned to meditate, and marched against the war.
Yet two years later, I wrote to Coach [Lew] Elverson, asking to rejoin the team. Despite all that had opened up for me in other dimensions, I had left something important on the field.
We played hard that year, with abandon. Our last game was against Haverford--the last football game the Fords played. I have never felt anything more intensely than the desire to win that game. We lost that game and every other one that season, starting a losing streak that didn't end until 1975.
Why does football still arouse such passion in me?
• Football invokes the desire for initiation. Good coaches and good teammates provide the mentoring and bonding that young men need to grow up. Though initiation is a more spiritual than physical experience, football and other sports can play a part.
• Football invokes archetyp-al warrior energy. True warrior energy, which is way out of fashion in our feminized society, is neither savage nor brutal, but disciplined, skilled, passionate, and loyal. We could use more of this energy (channeled, of course, by the intellectual skills Swarthmore hones so well) in tackling the problems our planet faces.
Under good coaching and with the proper perspective, football is a crucible in which important energies are forged into disciplined action--an intensification of life that is hard to find elsewhere. It can be deeply satisfying, not only from winning but from finding qualities in yourself you doubted.
Bill Prindle '72
Silver Spring, Md.
To the Editor:
Two of our children were students at Swarthmore in the 1980s when the College fielded "good teams." Our recollections of Swarthmore at that time don't jibe with Associate Provost Barry Schwartz's reference to "sub-rosa warfare between the football team and the rest of the campus."
What's wrong with being successful in a host of endeavors? John Caskey and Tom Blackburn express faculty views that we as alumni share: Don't lower standards, but do attract the academically qualified student-athletes who frequently matriculate at Amherst, Williams, Hamilton, or Middlebury.
We applaud Al Bloom's decision to rebuild the football program.
Tom Jones Jr. '53
Vera Lundy Jones '58
Bay Head, N.J.
To the Editor:
One evening in my first semester at Swarthmore, I was swimming in formation as one of the hunters in a water ballet performance of "Peter and the Wolf." Just as we reached the end of the pool, I looked up and gasped to see President Courtney Smith smiling down at me.
Unlike football, water ballet will probably never embody any of the quintes-sential questions for Swarthmore. Yet this tiny poolside event was an illumination for me. I thought: "This is the kind of place where the president doesn't rule out the very idea of spectating at a water ballet."
So I took great pleasure in Garret Keizer's "Swarthmore on the Line of Scrimmage." I love the fact that President Alfred Bloom is "delighted by that entire process" of being unguardedly engaged by a perspective outside his background. This is what sets Swarthmore apart--that Al Bloom knows the joy of being taught and changed.
Now I, too (who attended maybe one football game in four years), could get passionate about football at Swarthmore. I, too, "want these guys to win."
Jean Warren Keppel '68
Tucson, Ariz.
To the Editor:
Your article on values, Swarthmore, and football brought the following experience to mind: One of the attractions of choosing a small college was that I would be able to play football. I was not large or fast enough to consider a "big" football school, but I had played football in high school and loved it. The Swarthmore football program had fallen on hard times, and a rebuilding effort was under way.
On my first day as a freshman, showing up a week early for football, the trainer took me in his office. He told me that I had not been recruited, and that though I might practice for four years, I would never get into a game. Why didn't I try another sport, like soccer? Maybe he honestly felt I wasn't good enough, and this was an attempt to politely dissuade me from trying. Yet in high school I had come back from having cancer to play football, and so I was ready to try to defy expectations.
That evening, I went to my first team meeting. My only memory is the coach telling the players that if they get in trouble with the authorities, come to him first. He said that there had been an incident the previous year, and that he couldn't do anything to fix the problem if the administration heard about it first. That was the clincher for me.
I remain friends with some people who played on those teams, and they recall a much more upbeat and supportive atmosphere. Maybe it was just a bad first day at college, but this was not the environment that I had wanted when I chose Swarthmore.
Oh, the rebuilding effort was a success. Several years later, the team played for the Division III championship.
Greg Davidson '83
Redondo Beach, Calif.
To the Editor:
It disturbs me when I hear that football is incompatible with an "academic" or "intellectual" environment. Am-herst and Williams colleges are surely the academic and intellectual equals of Swarthmore, and year after year they have good football programs. Larger universities such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford also stand out in both academics and athletics.
In the late 1930s, when Swarthmore was developing its present academic reputation, the College suffered through some losing sports seasons. Some concerned alumni, including the late Thomas McCabe '15, decided to do something about it. They organized alumni to recruit "scholar-athletes," established scholarships, and hired some outsanding coaches, including Lew Elverson.
I was offered such a scholarship. I was impressed by the alumni who encouraged me to go to Swarthmore, and many of my Swarthmore cohorts had similar experiences. Over the years, we have been active alumni.
I have always been supportive of Swarthmore's emphasis on diversity. Working-class kids (I guess I was one) represent diversity too, and I learned more about its real meaning from my sports teammates than I ever could have learned in the classroom. I am greatly encouraged by the article and its implications, and I urge like-minded alumni to get behind the programs described.
Jack Dugan Jr. '43
New Vernon, N.J.
Editor's Note: Though the College actively recruits scholar-athletes (just as it seeks other qualified students with special talents), members of Division III of the National Collegiate Athletic Association are prohibited from offering athletic scholarships. Swarthmore's financial aid is need based.
To the Editor:
As a tree-hugging liberal egghead, vintage 1949, I had no interest in football. I still am, and I still don't--except for its impact on stadium-building cities like mine. To me, all athletics was--and still is--terra incognita.
Imagine my surprise and pleasure, therefore, in finding Garret Keizer's article to be absolutely brilliant. In the course of his writing, some of the Swarthmore "thing" has obviously rubbed off on this non-Swarthmorean. He touched so many bases so concisely and told me so many things I didn't know.
Ted Bromwell '49
Pittsburgh
To the Editor:
It's both comforting and disquieting to note that some things never change--such as the football debate at Swarthmore.
The answer 40 years ago was the same as it is today and will be far into the future: Swarthmore College needs football and team sports like it to keep itself attached to the earth. Without them, like a helium balloon, it would float higher and higher until it exploded of its own expanding gaseousness. Intense, physically demanding team sports bring an immediate reward-punishment schema that balances out the heady thinking fostered by pure academia.
The rounded person needs a synthesis of both perspectives. It's really not a question of values; it's a question of relevance.
William Boehmler '60
Reading, Pa.
To the Edtor:
I hope Michael Marissen's essay ("Is religious faith incompatible with academic life?" December 1998) turns out to be the first shot in a much-needed philosophical battle at Swarthmore. Marissen poses big questions that were practically taboo during my time at the College and presumably remain so today: "Is it so difficult to imagine that intelligent, psychologically stable people might ... be inspired by genuine religious beliefs?" Then, "are our students really free" to believe and develop intellectually?
Many intellectually honest, faithful students and professors answered "no" to Marissen's second question during my time at Swarthmore. Perhaps I can shed some light on why.
At Swarthmore and in mass youth society, tentative agnosticism and mystic spiritualism are in; "organized" religion is out. Individual truth is in and so is "group truth." Universal truth, upon which most religious faiths rely, is considered socially and intellectually imperialist.
But Swarthmore should be interested in universal truth. Not only does it exist; it can liberate.
I recall one friendly debate in 1995: "How can you believe that Christianity is true and other religions are wrong?" my agnostic-atheistic companion exclaimed. "That's totalitarian!" But by my friend's own standard--"no single truth can prevail"--atheism (which is nothing more or less than a universal viewpoint) is just as totalitarian.
Fellow students also reminded me that organized religion has a nasty, violent history based on claims of universal justice. It is threatening, they said, so it must be a bad thing. I sympathize with that perspective but only historically, not philosophically. Universal truth has been abused as justification for massacres, hatreds, and tyranny--but this only proves that human beings can be deceitful and nasty. It says nothing about truth.
Marissen's essay points out that German academics say Geisteswissenschaften (spiritual/ intellectual knowledge) while Americans say "humanities." If Swarthmore could somehow get past these prejudices and break out of the "humanities" trap, the College could be positioned to lead philosophical thought in academia and society. Can anyone observing the lame stalemate of the current culture war doubt that this is necessary?
Eric Jansson '96
Racine, Wis.
To the Editor:
Trust Ted Nelson to create legends about his undergraduate years. He has not lost the impishness that characterized him then. After a series of acts of vandalism in Wharton, I asked students not to protect those who were causing discomfort and inconvenience to all. If Ted really distributed the "confession" forms that he describes, no word of it reached Parrish Hall. Certainly no one returned them--much less "a couple of hundred." This is vintage Nelson!
William C.H. Prentice '37
Westport, Mass.
To the Editor:
Ted Nelson's Xanadu project ("Searching for Xanadu," December 1998) failed for reasons that are implicit in its name. In the 1990 edition of his manifesto, Literary Machines, Nelson rather disingenuously says he chose "Xanadu" for "its connotations in literary circles" as Coleridge's symbol for a "magic place of literary memory." But most readers of "Kubla Khan" remember the poem's pleasure dome instead as one of our culture's preeminent metaphors for the transfiguring power of the individual imagination. Overweening romantic individualism makes for great poetry but lousy software; Nelson never invented the World Wide Web because he never really learned to collaborate.
The world's most popular Web server software (Apache) and the operating system it is most often run under (Linux) were developed the way so much of the Internet was, as collaborative projects with freely available protocols and source code modified in response to the input and needs of a multitude of users and developers.
Ted Nelson will always deserve honor for helping prod the computer world to invent workable hypertext. His single-vision approach to design is somewhat less Quakerly than the vast meetinghouse of software designers out of whose consensus has emerged one the greatest triumphs of pragmatic tinkering in the history of technology.
David Sewell '76
Tucson, Ariz.
To the Editor:
As readers of Bill Kent's excellent article, "Dr. Brown's Remedy" (February 1996) may recall, Thomas McPherson Brown '29 was a controversial but highly successful Washington, D.C., rheumatologist who believed that arthritis, lupus, scleroderma, and similar disorders all derived from some kind of systemic infection.
In a 50-year career, Dr. Brown treated about 10,000 patients, about 90 percent of whom experienced improvement or remission with his therapy, which consisted principally of oral tetracyclines (usually minocycline and doxycycline). Brown's success in treating pernicious connective-tissue diseases was rewarded by fierce loyalty among his patients, despite his being disparaged as a heretic in the field of rheumatology.
Several significant developments have occurred since the publication of the Bulletin story. There have now been seven major studies of minocycline in rheumatoid arthritis (RA), each more promising than the last, and the drug is now certified by the USP as a standard therapy for RA. Positive results have also been reported for osteoarthritis, and now the British medical journal The Lancet has re-ported a study at Harvard Medical School of this same therapy for the usually fatal disease of systemic scleroderma, with 82 percent of the patients substantially improved and two-thirds of those who completed the study in remission after 48 weeks.
The Harvard study was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and The Road Back Foundation, which takes its name from Tom Brown's book The Road Back, which we co-authored in the last year of his life. I can hear Tom's familiar chuckle even now--warm, gentle, and, yes, infectious.
Henry Scammell
Orleans, Mass.
Editor's Note: Henry Scammell is author of The New Arthritis Breakthrough, which incorporates information from The Road Back. He is also the author of Scleroderma. Both books are published by M. Evans.
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