To those who know him, it is no surprise that Michael Mullan's second home is on the tennis court. How ironic, then, that the most natural spot on campus for Swarthmore's longtime tennis coach also doubled as the last place he can usually be found--at the center of attention. But on April 29, he had no choice.
With
more than 100 friends, family, and men's tennis team alumni from
around the country in attendance, Mullan reluctantly accepted the
plaudits extended to him at the official opening of a new indoor
tennis center named in his honor. "By lending his name to this
facility," said President Alfred H. Bloom, "Mike Mullan has allowed
the center to be associated with dedication, modesty, and generosity
of spirit, combined with intellectual passion, passion for sport, and
exemplary teaching and coaching."
Bloom was the first to offer remarks at the dedication of the Michael Mullan Tennis Center, which featured keepsake tennis balls imprinted with the name and date of the occasion. Others included Robert Williams, the Marian Snyder Ware Professor of Physical Education and Athletics, and J. Lawrence Shane '56, chair of the board of managers.
The
28,300-square-foot facility, located behind Ware Pool off of
Fieldhouse Lane, houses three tennis courts with championship-caliber
surfaces, lighting, and above-court viewing for approximately 100
spectators. In addition to the tennis courts, the $3 million facility
houses a 4,000-square-foot fitness center, including cardiovascular
and resistance weight machines.
The center is the gift of longtime College supporter--and tennis fan--Jerome Kohlberg '46, who also spoke at the dedication. "Tennis is a wonderful sport for Swarthmore," he said. "It combines the various aspects of intellectualism and athletic ability and teaches students how to be competitors and good sports. In all of those things, it exemplifies the Quaker tradition."
It is at Kohlberg's request that the center is named for Mullan, professor of physical education, professor of sociology, and coach of Swarthmore's tennis program for more than 20 years. Under his direction, Swarthmore has won three NCAA Division III championships; has reached the Final Four nine times; and has, as former team member Andrew Dailey '91 noted in his remarks, "more regional championships than Mullan can remember."
--Alisa Giardinelli
Swarthmore's popular mathematics education Web site, the Math Forum, was sold in April to WebCT, an education company based in Vancouver, B.C. Begun six years ago by Eugene Klotz, the Albert and Edna Pownall Buffington Professor of Mathematics, www.mathforum.com quickly outgrew its origins in a DuPont Science Building seminar room. Now the site is run by technology and education expert Steve Weimar and operates out of a building near campus with a staff of 25. Klotz continues to work on research and development.
A $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation in 1996 ran out in March. WebCT acquired Math Forum a month later in an all-stock deal and plans to incorporate the site into its course-management system, which college instructors use to create Web components for courses.
Math Forum gets more than 13 million hits per month from educators, students, parents, and math buffs around the world. Interactive features like the "Problems of the Week" and "Ask Dr. Math" are particularly popular with students. Although they won't get help on their math homework, students can e-mail math-related questions and receive thought-provoking responses from any of 200 math experts, some world renowned. Most common problems range from "general solutions to cubic and quartic polynomial equations" to "Why do we need to learn math? When are we ever going to use it in real life?"
Annie Fetter '88, a former student of Klotz's, runs the site's geometry "Problem of the Week." A recent question was inspired by a gift she bought for her father, a "global positioning system" device that uses signals from satellites to pinpoint locations on earth. "What percentage of the face of the earth can each satellite see?" she queried, adding that the Earth is a perfect sphere with a radius of 6,374 kilometers and that satellites orbit at 20,200 kilometers. In one recent month, more than 13,000 people sent answers to Fetter's brain teasers.
Educators are more likely to refer to the site's Internet library--now an 800,000-page database--or access its global on-line community via discussion groups. Both Klotz and Weimar say the Math Forum will remain in Swarthmore but may be due for expansion. Klotz says, with a wry smile, that he expects the Math Forum to become "the second largest employer in the borough after the College."
--Cathleen McCarthy
Robert DuPlessis, the Isaac H. Clothier Professor of History and International Relations, was named a Guggenheim Fellow this year, one of only a few professors at liberal arts colleges selected for this prestigious honor.
DuPlessis plans to spend his fellowship, during the 2000-2001 academic year, studying the history of consumption in the early modern Atlantic world. His work will take him throughout the Americas, the Caribbean, and Western Europe as he traces the origins of consumer culture and the effects of changes in consumption on economic development.
"Studying these two fields will allow us to rethink our ideas about the origins of modernity, through the lens of changing consumer cultures," DuPlessis says. He is especially interested in textiles, such as cotton and linen. "They were fundamental to both economic growth and cultural definition. After food, people in the preindustrial world spent most of their income on cloth and clothing."
As a Guggenheim Fellow, DuPlessis is in familiar company. Also chosen this year for the honor is Marc Forster '81, one of his former students and currently an associate professor of history at Connecticut College. Last year, another former student, Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia '77, a history professor at New York University, was also selected.
DuPlessis' reaction to the news? "I'm astonished that we're all back on the same page," he laughs.
--Alisa Giardinelli
Carl Grossman, associate professor of physics at Swarthmore College, received a Fulbright grant this semester to study at L'Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Techniques Avancées in Saclay Scientipôle, a region of France known as a center of scientific research.
Grossman's unique use of lasers allows him to study the changes molecules exhibit after exposure to light. In the case of molecules at room temperature, these changes can occur over extremely fast intervals--roughly 1,000 billion times faster than a millisecond--and Grossman's measuring techniques are the only ones known to record them.
Grossman joined the Swarthmore faculty in 1990.
--Alisa Giardinelli
A fund has been set up that will eventually endow a scholarship in honor of John Gaustad, the Edward Hicks Magill Professor of Astronomy, who retires this semester, and his wife, Gail.
The John and Gail Gaustad Scholarship will benefit needy and deserving students and was set up through the Annual Giving Office by 19 international alumni and friends of the Gaustads. More than $22,000 has been pledged to date.
Ali Usman '91 spearheaded the project. Like everyone on the list, Usman lived with the Gaustads for a while. Unlike most, he also took a class with the professor.
The Gaustads began housing international students in 1984 during periods when the dorms were closed. They enjoyed it so much that they continued to invite them. "I would say 120 international students have stayed in our house over the years," he says. "Many became good friends of ours."
The fund was announced during a surprise retirement party held for Gaustad on Easter weekend. "I walked in on a lot of people I hadn't seen in five or six years," he says. "I was very touched. The scholarship is a wonderful thing--much more meaningful to me and Gail than any material object they could have given me as a retirement present."
--Cathleen McCarthy
Last Day In the gray morning The life of the school is Later that day I put -by Kunthea Ker '02 Poem and photograph (by Lauren Tobias '02) appeared in
the spring issue of Scarlet Letters, a student
literary magazine.
I close the door on Michelle sleeping,
move out into the quiet drizzle
where paper becomes soft and pliant
in the humid air.
subdued now, people taking their leaves
and closing doors on a year
of living. I sit on the steps
of the dorm and smoke a cigarette.
parts of myself into cardboard boxes,
making the most efficient use
of packing space. Debris
litters the carpet, leftovers of two girls.
The following faculty members have recently been promoted to the rank of associate professor with tenure: Sara Hiebert, biology; Lisa Meeden, computer science; Philip Jefferson, economics; Nora Johnson, English literature; Patricia White, English literature; Timothy Burke, history; Maria Luisa Guardiola, Spanish; Haili Kong, Chinese; Michael Brown, physics; Cynthia Halpern, political science; Frank Durgin, psychology; and Sarah Willie, sociology.
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Ian Rogers '92 was among the 19 alumni members of Vertigo-go, the College's comedy improvisation group, who joined current members in a reunion performance. Held in Lang Concert Hall on April 15, the show celebrated Vertigo-go's 10th year. About half the alumni members, including an extra on Saturday Night Live, continue to ply their comedic trade in the entertainment industry. |
|
Like
many college students, seniors Peter Murray and David Zipper paint
houses on the side. But they don't do it for their own spending
money. They're training North Philadelphians to become
entrepreneurs--to do what cash-poor college students have often done:
tap into the wealth of the suburbs.
Zipper became familiar with North Philly while volunteering for projects run by Sister Carol Keck, executive director of the Norris Square Neighborhood Project, a community center in a low-income area of North Philadelphia. Under her guidance, Zipper and other Swarthmore students tutor children, renovate buildings, and clean up the parks of North Philly.
"I started thinking that what the area really needs is jobs," Zipper recalls. He and Murray, his best friend and fellow economics major, came up with the idea of hiring local residents and training them to work as professional house painters.
Neither student knew much about house painting, let alone running a business. So they solicited the advice of local contractors and painters and learned not only how to paint but how to make estimates and market a business. In the spring of 1998, they applied for and received a $10,000 Lang Opportunity Grant from the College--and Empowered Painters was born. Since then, the project has received nearly $30,000 in grants from the U.S. Department of Justice, a local bank, the Philadelphia Foundation, and the Samuel E. Fells Foundation.
Along with the homes of Swarthmore professors and administrators, the Empowered Painters work on suburban sites in Landsdowne, Lower Merion, and other Mainline neighborhoods. "The idea is to provide local residents with sustainable jobs that aren't available elsewhere, to provide a broad-scale way to channel money from the suburbs back into the inner city," Zipper says of their nonprofit organization. Earnings will go to community groups in North Philly.
Empowered Painters has employed as many as eight workers at a time but experiences a rapid turnover. Employees range in age from 25 to 45, which means that Zipper and Murray often find themselves managing men old enough to be their fathers. So far, that hasn't been a problem. "They trust us," Zipper claims. "We are very professional in the way we deal with them. We make our expectations clear about standards and appearing for work on time. In North Philly, a lot of workers haven't held long-term jobs. We try to build the work ethic, but we don't always succeed, quite frankly."
There have been exceptions, however, including two men who have recently been named crew managers. "They're very solid and reliable," Zipper says. "That's when it really feels good, when you realize you're helping someone who has the right work ethic and just needs to find a sustainable job."
"Inner-city residents don't generally think of job opportunities in the suburbs because they don't go there," he says. "But that's really where the jobs are." The business subsidizes workers' transportation to the suburbs, provides advances when emergencies arise, and pays wages that Murray describes as "more than competitive." They work almost exclusively with unemployed or underemployed men, many recently released from jail or coming off drug problems, or both.
Empowered Painters also runs monthly volunteer projects where students paint houses near the group's base in the Kensington area of North Philadelphia. Murray and Zipper have both lived in the neighborhood and claim it's not particularly dangerous. "People think of Kensington as a dangerous ghetto, but it's a family neighborhood," Murray says, adding with a laugh: "The biggest noise problem we have is from the churches around there."
Zipper and Murray plan to soon hand over a self-sustaining business to the local community, with surburban connections and trained local men at the helm. Zipper, who received a Harry S. Truman Scholarship (for students going into public policy), will work for the Housing Department of Urban Development this summer. Murray plans to stick around North Philly for the next few years, shifting his focus to the Empowerment Group, a spin-off organization he and Zipper set up with Swarthmore alums Mandara Meyers '99, Murray's brother Seth '98, and Benson Wilder '99. The Empowerment Group will eventually own and manage Empowered Painters, making sure it keeps its community focus.
The group hopes to build a community center in Kensington. Along with day care, job training, and placement services, the center would encourage local spending with eateries, performance spaces, and a cinema. "Most community development groups in the inner city focus on housing and social services," Murray says. "We wanted to focus on job creation and community building."
--Cathleen McCarthy
by Joshua Lewis ’00
The
Gulf War started on my 12th birthday. On Jan. 15, I was allowed to
stay up really late on a school night for the first time, till
midnight or 12:30 a.m. In this little leapfrog into adulthood, I
listened to the dead silence that occurred when Iraq failed to meet
the U.N. deadline for withdrawing from Kuwait. Everything froze, and
over the backdrop of a bare night desert the words "To Be Continued"
appeared in my mind.
On Jan. 16, when Marlin Fitzwater proclaimed, "The liberation of Kuwait has begun," no amount of TV-commercials-for-the-Marines-style music could have made the moment more anticipatory. As U.S. warplanes attacked Baghdad, you could, if you leaned your head out the window of your black-shuttered, white-aluminum-sided command center, hear Kenny Loggins' "Danger Zone" playing on the wind.
But you couldn't make a movie of the Gulf War because the Gulf War was a movie from the start. Starring Tom Berenger, Cuba Gooding Jr., and William Hurt as "Wolf Blitzer," it glued us, glued me, 12 years old, to the screen. It was the best miniseries ever. I sat there, too old to pretend it was just a game yet still too young to reconcile both how real it was and how fake it looked. It was an orchestrated drama that demanded the attention span of a child, and that's exactly what it got. Doogie Howser <click> … Three's Company rerun <click> … War <click> … basketball <click>…." The adults I overheard were scared: films of Israel being bombed, "smart bombs" hurling chaotically around supposed chemical weapons factories, and a mustachioed, bereted supervillain laughing and calling Bush "The Great Satan" and killing his own people just to show how evil he really was. I wasn't even fazed. That wasn't scary. I'd seen Apocalypse Now, man: now that was scary.
It's difficult to believe the amount of reality-based television we watched in junior high school. I mean, I watched all of the Anita Hill coverage. All of it. But even by then, I was already a little desensitized. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the massacre at Tienanmen Square had, when I was 10 years old, so thoroughly exemplified the pinnacles and depths of human experience that the Gulf War played like a video game. Even the fall of the Soviet Union in the same year felt detached and unreal. Without any clear climax or end point, it was like wandering into some World War II film in the middle third--all shouting and chaos and foreign accents but no real action. And so I flipped the channel.
The war movies of our generation, the courtroom dramas, the government thrillers, are all straight to TV. It's less important that the news has turned into entertainment or that entertainment has turned into news than that we just don't care about the difference anymore. Both everyone and no one seemed shocked when we didn't glue ourselves to the Clinton impeachment coverage. We all had an advanced copy of the script: officials brought down, sex scandal, lying, cheating, tapes--boooring. For God's sakes, they're going to have to do better than a rerun of All the President's Men with some porn thrown in.
In the "Trial of the Century," we watched one of the biggest football celebrities of our childhood accused of Murder One, then exonerated with a bitter twist at the end. One of the longest celebrity trials ever, it captured our collective attention for months. It's a small wonder that the nation was unwilling to immediately throw itself into the next high-profile court drama. But I can't blame the death of the news-entertainment event on the O.J. trial. We had long been in training for this eventuality. Watching heroes brought down before us can be fun, but it does get wearying after a while. The scripts are wearing thin; the secrets are becoming less shocking; the villains are becoming less diabolical than sad. As reality becomes sensationalized, the choice between the movies and the news becomes less one of what's important than what's entertaining and new. If the media's going to throw a news event at us, it better have every ounce of explosion, scandal, and drama that Hollywood can offer--and even then, it's not guaranteed that we'll watch for long.
Joshua Lewis '00, from Wilmington, Del., majored in computer science. This essay was adapted from the spring 2000 issue of the student magazine Spike.
A total of 863 students were admitted as prospective members of the Class of 2004--roughly 22 percent of more than 4,000 who applied. Swarthmore expects the group to yield a first-year class of about 370 for next year.
Along with 47 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, accepted students come from 6 continents and 38 nations. The highest concentration hails from California, home of 14 percent, and New York, with 13 percent, followed, in order, by Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland, Texas, Virginia, Illinois, Ohio, and Florida. Brazil, with five students, is the most common country of origin among international students. Four are from Singapore and three each from Germany, Ghana, Japan, and Malaysia.
Of the admitted students who come from high schools that report class rank, 37 percent are valedictorians or salutatorians. Fifty-seven percent are in the top 2 percent of their high school class and 92 percent in the top decile. Fifty-nine percent of the admitted students come from public high schools, 30 percent from private independent schools, 4 percent from parochial schools, and 7 percent from schools overseas.
Forty-four percent of the Americans identify themselves as students of color. Asian Americans make up 17 percent; African Americans, 14 percent; and Latino students, 13 percent.
--Tom Krattenmaker
In March, Swarthmore joined Haverford and Bryn Mawr colleges in supporting the NAACP boycott of South Carolina over the issue of continued display of the Confederate flag. The College was one of seven to join the boycott, with most from Pennsylvania.
"We discussed the boycott at the president's staff meeting and decided that in good conscience and in view of our commitment to a just and inclusive society, we should support it," says Maurice Eldridge '61, vice president for college and community relations and executive assistant to the president.
As a result, several athletic teams found themselves scrambling to reschedule their spring games. Six of nine spring teams--women's tennis, women's lacrosse, women's softball, men's and women's track and field, and men's golf--had games scheduled in South Carolina.
For women's tennis, it meant canceling matches with four opponents in South Carolina and heading instead for Arizona. "The College generously offered to make up the difference in the added expense of traveling to Arizona," says Dan Sears, coach of the women's tennis team. "That was true of several teams that had to change their plans."
"In effect, the College put its money where its mouth was," says Tom Krattenmaker, director of news and information. "The Athletic Department didn't have to bear any of the cost, and the College spent $24,000."
"Predictably, it caused some disappointment in the coaches and teams we were scheduled to play originally," Sears adds. "That schedule was planned carefully over the course of a year, after assessing the strength of each team. The alternative games were hastily scheduled, and the results were pretty lopsided. But we agreed with the cause 100 percent."
--Cathleen McCarthy
Ted Sherer '01 was named a double All-American at the men's Division III Swimming Nationals at Emory University. He placed seventh in the 100-meter breaststroke, setting a new College and conference record, and 16th in the 200-meter breaststroke for an All-American Honorable Mention.
As an individual, Sherer scored more points at nationals than any Swarthmore student in history, giving the College its highest national placing ever. He is the first male Swarthmore swimmer to achieve the top eight All-American honors since Robert McKinstry '75.
|
Baseball |
8-20 |
4-13 |
|
Golf |
10-5-1 |
6th place |
|
Men's lacrosse |
8-6 |
2-4 |
|
Women's lacrosse |
10-7 |
5-4 |
|
Softball |
5-22 |
3-13 |
|
Men's track and field |
0-1 |
9th place |
|
Women's track and field |
1-0 |
5th place |
|
Men's tennis |
8-7 |
-- |
|
Women's tennis |
9-5 |
9-1 |
The men's lacrosse team posted an 8-6 record, reaching the Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC) South Region Championship game. Defender Tucker Zengerle '00 was named first-team All-Centennial Conference (CC).
At the CC men's track and field championships, Marc Jeuland '01 won both the 5,000 and 10,000 meter runs.
The women's lacrosse team posted a 10-7 record this season, reaching the ECAC semifinals. Defender Kristen English '01 earned first-team All-CC and national All-American honors. Goalkeeper Jane Kendall '00 was a first-team All-CC selection and second-team regional All-American. Leading scorer Katie Tarr '02 received second-team CC honors.
The men's tennis team posted an 8-7 record on the season, making the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Tournament for the 22nd consecutive year.
The golf team posted a 10-5-1 record. Matt Kaufman '01 scored a CC record 71 on the final day of the CC Championship, becoming the first Garnet golfer to earn first-team All-CC honors.
At the CC women's track-and-field championships, Imo Akpan '02 set a school and CC record and qualified for the NCAA Championships with a time of 56.66 in the 400-meter dash. Desiree Peterkin '00 captured the triple jump and set a school and CC record in the long jump (18'6.5"), qualifying for NCAA Championships.
All-CC Roundup: Softball: shortstop Heather Marandola '01, Second Team, outfielder Stephanie Wojtkowski '02, Honorable Mention. Women's tennis: Jen Pao '01, First-Team Singles, Pao and Laura Swerdlow '02, First-Team Doubles.
--Mark Duzenski
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