In a recent issue of Glamour magazine, Vassar alumna Victoria Balfour complained that her college magazine's Class Notes are nothing but "bubbly laundry lists of accomplishment" that portray lives in which "everyone has the spouse of their dreams, a job they adore, perfect children, and enough money to refurbish old Victorian houses." She argued that alumni magazines should give Class Notes a shot of reality by including more of the challenges and struggles of everyday life, such as career problems, illness, depression, difficulties with children, or the loneliness of old age.
Though Swarthmore's Class Notes aren't just the rosy recitations of accomplishments that Balfour decries, she does have a point: the notes do tend to paint generally positive pictures of our lives. But that's not because the personal experiences she wishes to see in print have been excised by cheerful class secretaries or Pollyanna editors. They are less frequently submitted in the first place--a fact that may be even more significant than Balfour's initial complaint.
Any discussion of the verisimilitude of Class Notes raises a larger question: How can the Bulletin best fulfill its communications and public relations mission for Swarthmore and at the same time be honest and true for its readers?
Our first responsibility, of course, is to tell you the story of the College, to bring you the student experience, the research, the debates, and the educational challenges that are the lifeblood of Swarthmore. Second, from its vantage point on campus, the Bulletin looks outward, bringing you stories of alumni who engage and sometimes change the world with their ideas and deeds. But not everyone's a CEO, a computer genius, or a teacher of the year. Not everyone changes the world.
We've long had an idea on our story list called "Ordinary Lives." As we conceived it, such an article would affirm and celebrate alumni who get up in the morning, put on their shoes, and go forth to deal with jobs, kids, money, traffic, grocery shopping, relationships--the stuff of everyday life. But "Ordinary Lives" has yet to appear, and I'm beginning to think it never will. That's because it's impossible to identify anyone who's truly an exemplar of the ordinary. One of the values that Swarthmore imparts is the simple Quaker idea that each person is truly extraordinary.
Thus, a third, almost paramount goal emerges for those of us who edit the Bulletin: to relate all of the ideas, accomplishments, challenges, and struggles that are Swarthmore College to the lives of our readers. To help meet this need, we have launched a new section of the Bulletin called "In My Life," which we hope will give individual voice to the authentic experiences of living. See page 42 for the inaugural essay.
We trust that you read this magazine not out of some sense of obligation to the alma mater but because you find in it something that adds value to your own experience, something that stimulates your thinking, illuminates your journey, and, once in a while, touches your heart.
--Jeffrey Lott
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