Neil Austrian '61 shows off a replica of his 1961 football jersey.
Neil R. Austrian '61 was honored by the College on December 6, when he stepped down after eight years as chairman of the Board of Managers. "Neil's trust in this institution-in its faculty, students, and staff-and his readiness to step forward at critical moments to instill confidence and clarify direction, model both the great teacher and the great Board chair," said President Alfred H. Bloom.
During Austrian's term as Board chairman, the College completed the $90 million Campaign for Swarthmore, which Austrian chaired, and raised an additional $27 million to construct Kohlberg Hall and to renovate Trotter Hall. Other accomplishments under Austrian's watch include the completion of an extensive deferred maintenance program, a major renewal of the Honors Program, substantial increases in the applicant pool and in the diversity of the student body, and increased focus on international and intercultural perspectives.
Former Swarthmore Board Chairman Eugene M. Lang '38, who had recruited Austrian to serve on the Board, called Austrian "my biggest and most significant contribution to Swarthmore." Surprise guests at a reception for Austrian were his wife, Nancy, and their six children (including Neil Jr. '87) and their families.
Austrian has served as president of the National Football League since 1991; he was previously managing director of Dillon Reed and Co., chairman and CEO of Showtime/The Movie Channel, and president and CEO of Doyle Dane Bernbach International Inc.
Succeeding Austrian as Board chairman is J. Law-rence Shane '56, former vice chairman of the Scott Paper Co. Shane, a resident of Swarthmore, was first elected to the Board of Managers in 1970 and has served as its vice chair since 1987.
That is the finding of a survey of Swarthmore students conducted via e-mail in November by senior Andrew Groat.
"I was struck by how many of these college guides are out there and the way they're constantly evaluating and ranking all these schools," Groat said. "I thought it would be interesting for us to evaluate them for once, and it seemed especially appropriate for someone at Swarthmore to do it this year, since we've been ranked No. 1 by U.S. News."
Survey responses from 105 students found U.S. News the most popular college guide among Swarth-more students; it was used by 60 percent of respondents. The Fiske Guide to Colleges was second, with 52.4 percent, and the Princeton Review was third, with 37.1 percent.
To measure the influence of the college guides relative to other factors, the Swarthmore survey asked respondents to rank the influence of six different factors: campus visits, general reputation, parents/family, guidebooks, high school counselors, and friends.
Campus visits had an average score of 1.9. The next best score went to reputation (2.6), followed by parents/family (3.7), guidebooks (3.9), counselors (4.6), and friends (5.1).
Groat, a political science and economics major from Bowling Green, Ohio, said his survey was inspired by the sheer number of college guides crowding a shelf in Swarthmore's Office of News and Information, where he works part time.
Under an agreement just signed with the university's College of Arts and Sciences, up to five students from each institution may enroll on a full-time nondegree basis. The first Swarthmore participant, Yuhki Tajima '99, is studying in Tokyo this semester.
This collaboration was developed through the initiative of Ken Matsumoto '58 of Tokyo. "Ken has had a longtime commitment to raising Swarthmore's visibility in Japan, to creating educational links between Swarthmore and Japanese institutions, and to encouraging Japanese higher education to draw from the liberal arts tradition he experienced at Swarthmore," said President Alfred H. Bloom.
In developing the exchange program, Matsumoto received strong support from President Bloom and two faculty members: Maribeth Graybill, associate professor of art history at Swarthmore and a specialist in Japanese art, who met with University of Tokyo officials while she was conducting scholarly research in Japan, and Steve Piker, professor of anthropology and director of foreign study, who made sure academic arrangements would meet the expectations of both institutions.
Last summer, returning from an American Friends Service Committee trip he led to North Korea, President Bloom met with the university president, dean of faculty, and several faculty members to confirm the principles of the agreement. He credits Matsumoto's painstaking efforts and the diplomatic skills of Makoto Watanabe '61, who helped achieve consensus on the program's final design through a visit to campus for his reunion and later meetings in Tokyo.
"During my visit with the president of the University of Tokyo," President Bloom said, "I learned that the university is in the midst of a major initiative to strengthen its liberal arts curriculum and make that curriculum, for the first time, the core of its undergraduate program."
Bloom reported that President Hiroyuki Yoshikawa praised Swarthmore as a model of how to foster intellectual flexibility, interdisciplinary perspective, and social consciousness, rather than simply developing discipline-specific and career-oriented skills.
Swarthmore students currently can study Japanese in a Tri-College arrangement with Haverford and Bryn Mawr. Two years ago Tsuyoshi Mitarai '98 organized the Pacific Rim Organization (PRO) to help students study and celebrate the cultures of Japan and other Asian nations. Last semester PRO introduced a student-taught, noncredit course in Japanese. Working with Professor Graybill, PRO has been able to offer beginning, intermediate, and advanced courses this semester for academic credit. So many students applied that enrollment had to be determined by lottery.
The instructors in addition to Mitarai are Takuji Aida '97 and two University of Tokyo graduates, Naoto Nakahara and Yukio Saita, who are special students under the sponsorship of the Japanese Foreign Ministry. This is the same program that brought Makoto Watanabe to Swarthmore almost four decades ago.
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