I would like to reinforce the understated sentiments about Professor Peter Van de Kamp expressed by Professor John Gaustad in "Barnard's Wobble" (March Bulletin). He stated that "in terms of the rest of Van de Kamp's career, he did very important, accurate work."
Indeed, it is almost impossible to identify a scientist alive today with the foresight and fortitude of Professor Van de Kamp, who in the late 1930s began a systematic search for extrasolar planets, knowing it would not pay off for decades. The fact that it took until the 1980s for "other observatories" (many of which were staffed with Van de Kamp's own students) to begin to publish their own results is a testament to the advanced state of his research program at Swarthmore.
Only the naïveté of a starry-eyed freshman during a pilgrimage to the home of the legendary retired professor more than 20 years ago could have caused me to ask him if he had plans to write an autobiography. Even today, I am skeptical of his reply that there would be little interest in his story. I can well imagine that there would be considerable interest, both inside and outside Swarthmore, in the saga of someone who was--and probably remains--the College's most famous professor. The sad but captivating tale of Barnard's star and the falling-out between Van de Kamp and Professor Wulff Heintz is but one small chapter of a full and rich story.
Douglas Braun '83
Boulder, Colo.
I read "Barnard's Wobble" with great interest and some sadness. I'm sure most Swarthmoreans of my generation remember Peter Van de Kamp with high regard and fondness. His pioneering research at the Sproul Observatory was only one aspect of a true Renaissance man, combined as it was with his teaching, his directing of the College orchestra, and his Charlie Chaplin seminars. It is a shame that disappointment and controversy haunted him in his final years.
The final sentence of the article alludes to "entirely different methods and instruments" that are today being used to accomplish what Dr. Van de Kamp thought he had accomplished in 1963--the detection of extrasolar planets. Preeminent among these is the Hubble Space Telescope, specifically its fine guidance sensors (FGSs). Two of Hubble's three FGSs provide the signals to keep the telescope pointed at individual stars with unprecedented accuracy for hours at a time. The third FGS serves a dual purpose--as a guidance backup and as an additional science instrument that can detect and resolve binary star components as dim as magnitude 17, with only a few milli-arc-seconds of separation. That Wulff Heintz was right concerning Van de Kamp's work on Barnard's Star has, in fact, been demonstrated most recently and definitively by the Hubble FGSs.
However, as Dr. Otto Franz, astronomer at the Lowell Observatory and member of the Hubble Astrometry Science team, said to me after reading the Bulletin article, "Van de Kamp's failure regarding Barnard's star does not nullify or even diminish the astrometric achievements attained at the Sproul Observatory by him and his associates, notably the work published by Sarah Lee Lippincott '42 and her collaborators on astrometric (unseen) low-mass stellar components to nearby stars." He went on to say that Swarthmore astrometry has played a seminal role in formulating astrometric projects for the Hubble FGSs.
My keen interest in all of this derives not only from my association with Swarthmore but from the good fortune that I had to be able to spend seven years of my engineering career contributing significantly to the manufacture of the Hubble FGSs. Although I've worked on many interesting and highly fruitful aerospace projects, I would have to rank Hubble at the top for its challenge, accomplishments, and unique connection to my years at the College.
Robert Rowley '61
Danbury, Conn.
In the interest of clarifying a misconception about the College's affiliation with the Maryland National Bank Association (MBNA), I want to assure our alumni and parents that their names were not sold to MBNA for the affinity credit card offer. The College provided a list of names and addresses to print on a brochure. MBNA is prohibited from using that data for any other reason.
There's no denying that this is a business proposition for MBNA, but the bank has also offered an attractive interest rate to Swarthmoreans and a means, for those who are interested, to identify their ties to the College. In return, the College receives a small royalty that supports the financial aid endowment.
We realize this program does not appeal to all as a way to demonstrate support of the College but trust that, as with everything else, there is room for differing opinions. However, we do acknowledge and thank the hundreds who have subscribed to the credit card and whose purchases are providing an additional stream of income for student scholarships.
Diane Crompton
Director of Development Operations
Say it ain't so, Al Bloom! Swarthmore College, with one of the nation's oldest football programs, cannot be casually tossing that program in the dustbin, can it? Now I know how three million Dodger fans felt when the O'Malley family tore the heart out of Brooklyn in 1957.
Intercollegiate athletics exist at Swarthmore in their purest sense. Whether it is football, wrestling, or badminton, well-rounded scholar-athletes play for the joy of the game. That football survived for more than a century and was on an upswing is something to celebrate and cherish.
I do not attribute ill motives to President Bloom and the Board of Managers. However, I do greatly question their judgment and the process, which, by all ac-
counts, took place largely behind closed doors. In America, when a group has its rights threatened or is about to lose something of value, we have a basic concept of fairness, involving notice and an opportunity to be heard. That was not the case here. Certainly by involving all interested parties, other viable, less draconian options could have been found.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said of the generation of leaders that came of age during the Civil War: "In our youth, our hearts were touched with fire." Football, in a lesser sense, provides similar tests to young men, and fires their hearts and imaginations. Hundreds of Swarthmore players have gone on to be leaders and contributors in their communities. It is easy to let a tradition and a program die. It takes real conviction and vision to preserve and sustain it.
Marc Peterson '78
Media, Pa.
On its face, the Board's decision to cap athletic recruiting (and thus drop football) is obviously correct. Swarthmore is and has always been about academics. Besides, this decision doesn't diminish, but rather guarantees, the continuation--and even enrichment--of a more broadly equitable (including for women) athletic program. Further, it is also obvious from Dulany Ogden Bennett's ['66] thoughtful letter ("Letters," March Bulletin) that the issue was dealt with in a serious and deeply responsible way by the Board, given the exigencies of timing.
So what is one to make of the not-so-mini-firestorm of controversy? The tone of several letters in the Bulletin is not only intemperate but genuinely bizarre. Take the twisted argument made by more than one alum that eliminating football somehow vitiates Swarthmore's commitment to "diversity." I know we were sometimes myopic in the '60s, but I missed the part where it explained how football players were an oppressed minority.
The overheated tone of these cris de coeur is striking: "Swarthmore's reputation as an effete institution is not its strongest asset." "[T]his college excludes and does not esteem the physically robust." And then there's the persistent undertone of wounded defensiveness, as if maintaining an athletic recruitment rate three times that of the University of Virginia were proof that Swarthmore treats student-athletes as "outcasts."
Get a grip. A rational decision was made to maintain appropriate balance. I, for one, was shocked to read that football was eating up 10 percent of the entering male student body. The Board's act was not an expression of cloistered intellectualism, nor was it precipitous. It was high time.
Mike Wing '70
Brooklyn, N.Y.
I have read with a combination of embarrassment, pity, amazement, and amusement of the ongoing football skirmish. It's all over but the shouting, but when will the shouting be over?
I write with what I hope is undisguised impatience to comment on what the controversy really appears to be about. It is not about the ennobling discipline, dedication, and depth that come from participation in athletics. On the contrary, the football enterprise that Swarthmore has disengaged from has been toxic to all other athletic endeavors on most campuses.
Big football is good for big men. Big football is also good for little men who would like to be big men. It is good for proud parents of big men. It might even be good for their girlfriends. But big football is best for middle-aged folks who get off on injecting their own egos into a demolition contest among the young men on the field.
It is critically important to the vocal minority that big football be made to sound more like "big" than like "football." Otherwise, they are exposed as people advocating that dozens of spaces in incoming classes be reserved for large men willing to spend a lot of time running into each other, while women, smaller men, men culturally or temperamentally averse to running into other people, the physically challenged, foreigners, and geniuses in all categories compete for the remaining slots.
Many have considered supporting the football minority because they link football with being "well rounded," but football has not been demonstrated to make anybody well rounded. Some sports broaden the minds of participants, but this is not a frequently observed effect of college football. Even if it could be shown to do that, it wouldn't matter. Plenty of colleges are out there looking for the well-rounded people. The well-rounded always have someplace to go, but the remarkably talented need someplace to go, too. Swarthmore has been dedicated to that unusual but vitally important mission, and the football fuss is an attempt to drag the College off that course.
Big football has an opportunity cost that no one who values Swarthmore's history since 1930 and its promise for the future can really condone. There are things that matter in the world, like biology and chemistry and economics and language and religion and history and physics. And there are things that do not matter, of which football is the first that comes to mind. If football had a fraction of the importance that the minority is now claiming, there would be endowed Professorships of Football at all the Ivy League universities. There would be a Nobel Prize for Football.
Because education means giving people the skills to separate the trivial from the important, Swarthmore cannot continue on its educational mission without bidding football a respectful but firm good-bye. I congratulate the president and the Board of Managers on having the courage to make a necessary but personally troublesome decision--one that does not change Swarthmore's historical trajectory but keeps it loyally on course.
Pamela Kyle Crossley '77
Norwich, Vt.
Wilma Lewis '78, newly elected to the Board of Managers, was incorrectly identified as "an attorney in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia" ("Collection," March Bulletin). In fact, Lewis served as the U.S. Attorney for D.C. during the Clinton administration--one of the most important legal jobs in the nation.
In the same article, new Manager Salem Shuchman was identified with the wrong class. Shuchman is a Class of 1984 member.
In the Crum Woods illustration ("A Walk in the Woods," March Bulletin), Alligator Rock is identified incorrectly as Wissahickon schist; rather, it is a mafic gneiss, a metamorphic rock.
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