"I declare to you this morning: We have been baptized by an education
that would have killed a large pony."
It began much like any other Swarthmore commencement, with seniors fishing roses from buckets of water and posing for pictures in the rose garden. Unlike recent graduations, however, relentless sunshine took the place of showers. Mingling in front of Parrish Hall before the ceremony, faculty dabbed at their faces, and many students wore their robes open, exposing signs of the times: clunky black platform sandals, nose rings, Nike sneakers.
Many carried balloons, handing them off to President Alfred H. Bloom as they took their diplomas. Engineering students carried handmade traffic signs instead--"dead end," "deconstruction zone"--alluding to renovations going on around campus.
Gathered
in the dappled light of the Scott Amphitheater, students cheered for
Tyler Stevenson, a religion major from San Diego chosen to address
his classmates this year. Stevenson got things off to a rousing
start, reducing the crowd to near hysteria with a satirical
Armageddon speech. "We are at the eve of the millennium. And I do not
speak of VCR failure, of e-mail apocalypse, of this foolish Y2K
concern. Today we sit here as a desperate hope, as a body that has
survived four years of the life of the mind, as a body grown strong
through labor and tuition....
"We have lived with each other for four years; have broken bread; have shared beds. Together we have staved off the plague, grief, duress, and those unlit police 'stealth' bikes. We know how to take care of our own. The question is whether or not we can carry this compassion into the dark valleys outside, where backyards are not arboretums, and there is no cappuccino bar in the living room.
"Swarthmore is a wonderful teacher for relativism and discussion, but comets and brimstone will not be halted by dialogue. We are at the End of All Things Known, and it does not need a response board; it demands action. So, to all of you who had something to say about majoring in religion: ha! I have learned to see the future, and though it is jobless, I will be ready.... I declare to you this morning: We have been baptized by an education that would have killed a large pony."
As the cheers subsided, Stevenson abruptly changed the mood with a dramatic eulogy for several deaths that had touched this class, including Carl Wartenburg, the late dean of admissions; Michael Durkan, the late College librarian; Gabriel Cavallari '97; Duncan Kirkpatrick '98; and 13-year-old Josh DuBee, brother of classmate Alex DuBee '99.
Attempting
to modernize a remote hospital in Papua New Guinea, she noticed the
village leaders wore necklaces of bamboo rods, commemorating
donations they had made. "In Seattle, where I live, Bill Gates would
be a big chief," she said. "In our society, individuals are revered
for what they ... keep, not what they give away. Now, which of the
two societies is the most primitive culture?"
As a surgical resident at Stanford, she set out to teach a gorilla sign language, only to find the gorilla knew more signs than she. "Many of you may have visions of helping others in your life," she concluded. "Instead of helping people, you need to be striving to learn ... from every situation, to become the perennial student. This attitude will make you wise. Unfortunately, it also means you'll never really graduate."
"When
you meet someone and exchange pleasantries about where each of you
went to college, struggle as best you can to be humble," instructed
Christopher F. Edley Jr. '73. "I have failed at this," he said. Edley
Jr. went on to become a professor of law at Harvard University, where
he edited the Harvard Law Review and co-founded its Civil Rights
Project, which he now co-directs. He served under Jimmy Carter,
worked in the Office of Management and Budget for the Clinton
administration and as special counsel to the president. There, he led
the review of affirmative action, producing his "mend it, don't end
it" policy, and he is now helping Clinton write a book on racial
justice.
At Swarthmore, Edley Jr. said: "I learned to face the limits of my intelligence, without fear. I learned what it means to really understand something hard, only to realize that I was dead wrong, or that there was another, perhaps better way to understand it.... And I learned that when there is trouble, find a grove of lilac bushes, lie down, get drunk on the fragrance, and think about important things."
He recommended his own passion, public service. "There are more hard problems than there are good people," he stressed, adding: "Return to Swarthmore often. Come in the spring and smell the lilacs. Bring money with you. And if you should wander off and settle in some strange land, like Equitorial Guinea or California, and you can't get back to campus, just send the money."
President
Bloom called Robert Kuttner's "one of the most clarifying and
appreciated voices in the arena of American social commentary."
Kuttner, who edits The American Prospect, has written for The Village
Voice, The Washington Post, Business Week, and The New Republic,
founded the magazine Working Papers for a New Society, and served as
chief investigator for the Senate Banking Committee. Unlike the other
speakers, Kuttner did not graduate from Swarthmore but from
Oberlin--which gave him an added edge when he said: "I want to take a
moment to commend to you the role of outsider."
"My own career has followed a twisting path, the path of what Albert Hirschman called the trespasser," he continued. "I write books and articles about political economy and play an economist on television, having taken exactly one economics class.... I am finishing a book about psychology and family relations, whose concepts I learned mostly from my wife.
"But there is something exhilarating about being an outsider. Thinking outside the box becomes second nature because you are never in the box.... Most of you will pursue more conventional career paths than I did. But even within the professions, you can be constructive, ecstatic outsiders, and benign subversives--by holding on to what matters."
In
my inaugural talk seven years ago, I identified ethical intelligence
as one of the distinctive goals and triumphs of a Swarthmore
education. Since that time, the term has gained some currency in this
community, and I have seen consistent evidence from the Class of
1999, and from each of its predecessors, of the development of those
very habits of person and mind to which that term refers. I thought
it important to speak to you today about what I mean by ethical
intelligence and about why Swarthmore takes such pride in its
students'--and its graduates'--practice of this highly constructive
and responsible approach to ethical decision-making.
The roots of your own practice of ethical intelligence lie in the analytic abilities and values you brought with you to Swarthmore four years ago--credit for which goes in large measure to the careful nurturing supplied by those wonderful people sitting behind you. Then your academic training and your experience of this intentionally ethical community began to wield their formative effects.
Amid the rigors and exhilarations of your academic work, you developed a prodigious knowledge base and an extraordinary range of intellectual skills, including the ability to draw subtle distinctions, the ability to gain perspective from others' perspectives, and the ability to identify the conclusions that a body of evidence does and does not support--each of which plays a critical role in the practice of ethical intelligence.
You also developed two additional, perhaps less obvious, intellectual habits that are fundamental as well--namely, the readiness to suspend certainty and to engage ambiguity in the search for truth and the determination to ask of yourselves contributions of significance.
As you sought to explain experimental results, define the causes of historical events, clarify complex philosophical arguments, or interpret an artist's intent, you repeatedly came up against a world in which the choice of the right explanation or the right interpretation was not as clear as you may have expected it or wanted it to be--a world in which your initial assumptions were challenged by complicating information and unanticipated perspectives and that offered no clear-cut solutions in their place.
In response to these salutary encounters with ambiguity, you developed the habit of approaching intellectual problem solving through suspending certainty and proceeding to identify, engage, and test the full range of possible explanations or interpretations of the data at hand, before making a judgment. Further, you came to recognize that even after that work is done, the evidence you have gathered will likely not resolve all ambiguities and that, therefore, you, rather than the data, must bear responsibility for the judgment you make.
Moreover, that recognition of ambiguity and that acceptance of
responsibility have not diminished your commitment to the advance of
knowledge. Rather, they have only heightened your
appreciation for the tolerance of uncertainty and for the embrace of
complexity that intellectual advance exacts.
Over the past four years as well, you have consistently asked of yourselves that you not only add, but add in some fresh and important way, to what has already been thought, expressed, or proved. Through responding to that continuing challenge, you have refined your own sense of which intellectual questions are most meaningful to ask and your own criteria for deciding which insights and findings count as significant.
The intellectual habits you have thus developed--suspending certainty, engaging ambiguity, and distinguishing significance--represent, I believe, the central contributions of fine academic training to the practice of ethical intelligence. And, prompted by a community that identifies itself as much by its commitment to values as by its commitment to intellectual quality, you have applied these very habits to ethical practice.
By suspending certainty regarding ethical positions that you once defended without qualification, you have allowed yourselves to discover that ethical decision making is far more complex than you expected or wanted it to be. You have seen in the actual dilemmas of ethical life that, more often than not, the principles that motivated your initial stands compete with other principles you value as deeply and that actions you defended on the basis of a single principle alone have been compromised in their ethical integrity by questionable effectiveness or by the harm they visited on other values that you did not recognize were also at play.
In response to these salutary encounters with ethical complexity, you have developed the habit of approaching ethical decision making through eliciting, identifying, and engaging the full range of principles at stake as well as the constraints and opportunities inherent in the situation at hand, before making a judgment. And you have come to expect that, even after that work is done, your judgment will likely still require a complex act of evaluation, synthesis, and creativity, including the shaping of a response that not only respects the principle of highest priority, but also reflects to the extent possible the other principles at play and is most likely to succeed in generating the consequences you intend. Your judgment will be one for which you, rather than any single ethical principle, must bear responsibility.
Furthermore, your recognition of this ambiguity and acceptance of this responsibility have not diminished your ethical resolve but rather anchored that resolve in a context of examined complexity that only strengthens its resilience.
In turn, you have brought these developed habits of ethical judgment to bear on issues we face as citizens of this nation and the world, on issues ranging from whether our society should prescribe preferences based on race in the short term to promote equal opportunity in the longer term; to whether it has the right to interfere with an individual's decision to take his or her own life or to assist another in that act; to under what conditions the use of force can be justified in the international arena and whether a nation that tolerates unconscionable poverty at home can presume to ethical leadership abroad; to how a developing nation should balance commitment to the environment against responsibility to open economic opportunity; to how free science should be to experiment with the creation and design of life.
You have also brought these responsible habits of ethical judgment to issues facing our own community, to issues ranging from how this College should balance a commitment to equity in its offers of financial aid against a need to respond to market pressures; to whether and when it should support activities in which participation is restricted along the lines of gender, race, or ethnic group; to whether respect for diversity in religious beliefs requires deleting the phrase "in the year of our Lord" from the Swarthmore diploma.
And, by working through these dilemmas of ethical principle and practice, you have defined more clearly for yourselves the ethical ends you see as most important to pursue; and you have, as in the intellectual realm, begun to factor that clearer sense of significant ends into the particular judgments you make.
By your practice of ethical intelligence, you will distinguish yourselves from those who subordinate ethical concern to their own self-interest; and you may very well find yourselves dismissed by such individuals as impractical and idealistic. But you know that ethical vision and resolve can change the world--just consider the progress in racial, gender, and sexual orientation equity achieved over the past 30 years.
By your practice of ethical intelligence, you will also distinguish yourselves from those who argue from single-principled stands and who, in often adversarial and alienating ways, protect what they see as the "ethical purity" of their positions by refusing to consider confounding complexities and alternative views. And you may very well find yourselves branded by these individuals as indecisive, ethically weak, or too willing to compromise.
But responding to multidimensional issues in multidimensional terms is not compromise. Failing to examine the full value implications and consequences of a position is.
Furthermore, your readiness and responsibility to appreciate the ways in which other points of view speak to truth will equip you particularly well for reaching out to those who argue from single-principled stands and for establishing with them areas of common ground--common ground from which you can then draw them toward that greater acceptance of ambiguity and complexity that turns contentious advocacy into constructive dialogue.
As you assume positions of leadership across the spectrum of American and international life, your practice and modeling of ethical intelligence will help sustain our societies and world on courses that are at once effective and ethically responsible. And you will demonstrate the fundamental contribution that fine undergraduate education makes, not only to both success in careers and to intellectual advance but also to distinguished ethical leadership.
Warmest congratulations, Class of 1999! Swarthmore is deeply proud of your intellectual, ethical, and personal achievements and wishes you every satisfaction and happiness as you build upon them.
In what President Alfred H. Bloom called "a meeting of historic importance," the College's Board of Managers on May 1 endorsed a long-range plan that includes the modernization of the College's science facilties, the long-awaited renovation of 135-year-old Parrish Hall, the construction of a new residence hall, and several important initiatives in academic and student life.
The plan, which was completed by the College Planning Committee (CPC) in the spring, is the result of two and a half years of study by a broad-based group that included members of the faculty and staff, students, alumni, and members of the Board. In presenting the major elements of the plan, Bloom told the Board: "We must do this … to sustain and advance the quality of this institution."
The CPC plan will likely commit the College to raise more than $200 million in new funds, well over half of which will go to academic programs and facilities. Among the highlights:
• The DuPont Science Building, first opened in 1958, will be renovated and expanded to become a state-of-the-art teaching center for Departments of Chemistry, Physics and Astronomy, and Mathematics and Statistics. Renovations to Martin Hall, home of the Biology Department, would complete the upgrade of the College's science facilities.
• The College will dramatically increase its support for faculty leaves, which give professors time away from the classroom to concentrate on scholarship and curriculum development. Most tenured or tenure-track faculty members receive a single semester of leave every fourth year, but only eight are currently eligible for College-funded two-semester leaves. The ambitious CPC plan increases that number to 25. It also envisions College support for what is being called the "Swarthmore Institute," a program that would bring leading scholars to campus for speaking and research.
• The plan calls for Swarthmore's curriculum to be enhanced by the addition of new teaching positions in such areas as computer science, education, and political science--disciplines where increased enrollment has put pressure on existing programs. New curricular areas to be explored include cognitive studies, Islamic studies, film and media studies, and Japanese language instruction.
• McCabe Library, opened in 1968, would see significant renovations to improve its capacity to serve students in a technology-based learning environment.
• Other academic proposals include increased support for the revitalized Honors Program, for student summer research, for athletics, and for efforts to recruit and retain a more diverse faculty.
Under the heading of "student life," recommendations adopted by the Board include the renovation of Parrish Hall, the College's most historic building. Under the plan, Parrish would remain a multipurpose building, with student residence halls, administrative offices, an admissions center, and increased space for student activities and organizations.
Before renovation of Parrish could begin, the CPC determined, a new residence hall would need to be built to house the students who currently live in the upper floors of Swarthmore's original structure. Once students moved back into a renovated Parrish, the new dormitory would be used to alleviate crowding in some current residence halls and to eliminate undesirable rooms in areas such as the basement of Mary Lyons. Additional residence hall beds would not mean an enlargement of the student body beyond its current average of 1,375--an enrollment target affirmed by the Board in March. Other "student life" proposals include the following:
• Further renovation of Tarble in Clothier, the hybrid student center that currently occupies most of 80-year-old Clothier Hall.
• New programs to support campus diversity and intercultural understanding, including funds for an Interfaith Center and other religious activities not currently funded by off-campus resources.
• Increased support for the Office of Career Planning and Placement, including new outreach to potential employers and increased use of job-search technology.
• A campus "Learning and Teaching Center" that would coordinate academic support for students and offer encouragement for pedagogical innovation by members of the faculty.
A final "institutional" section of the CPC plan addressed several College-wide needs. It called for a significant investment in endowment for the periodic replacement of crucial computing, instrumentation, and media resources. It also designated new funds to maintain the College's historic commitment to need-blind financial aid and to enhance the ability of the Admissions Office to reach new populations of potential Swarthmore students.
No exact timetable was announced for the implementation of the long-range plan, but Dan C. West, the College's vice president for alumni, development, and public relations, said that work is under way toward a capital campaign that would extend over five years. Architects and engineers are currently studying building options and developing cost estimates, with the first phases of construction likely to begin within three or four years.
President Bloom closed his remarks to the Board with a call to action: "This College, through its very success, offers proof that institutions and societies can ask of themselves the most demanding and significant goals--and that they can achieve them. We have spent two and a half years identifying the elements essential to sustaining and advancing the quality and preeminence of Swarthmore College. We cannot fall short in meeting its needs."
Girls--especially white, upper-class girls--learn early on that their angry responses are unacceptable," Lyn Mikel Brown, author of the book Raising Their Voices: The Politics of Girls' Anger, told the audience at a recent campus conference. "Good girls are supposed to be calm and quiet. They don't directly express anger; they don't shout." It seems the rites of passage haven't changed dramatically since Rebel Without a Cause hit the cinemas--except that Natalie Wood is acting out instead of cheering on Jimmy Dean.
At
least, that's what Brown, associate professor of education and human
development at Colby College, would like to see. So would the women
who coordinated this conference, called "Lean on Me: Educating and
Mentoring Adolescent Girls," two weeks after graduating in June, long
after most of their classmates were gone. Six were freshmen when they
came up with the idea for the Summer Community Learning Project
(SCLP), a mentoring program for adolescent girls. For them, the
conference was as much a culmination of their four years at the
College as Commencement had been.
In 1995, Nicole Breazeale, Chloë Dowley, Kirstin Lindermayer, Andrea Meller, Mandara Meyers, and Erica Turner, then freshmen, set out to form a community of local girls from all socioeconomic backgrounds and help them establish positive gender identification and self-esteem. In the process, they designed a formal (and sometimes not so formal) summer curriculum, put on an original performance piece using the girls' voices and stories, painted a mural and wrote a book commemorating "the community of Swarthmore women," taught an education course called Educating and Mentoring Adolescent Girls, and presented their work at local conferences and community meetings. Over the years, SCLP received several grants and this spring was awarded the Naomi Kies Award for community service.
About 40 people filed into the Friends Meetinghouse for the conference, only two men among them. Most seemed to know the SCLP coordinators. Many had teenage daughters who had been enrolled in the summer program, and others had consulted with them regarding their own programs.
Brown's solution to repressed teen anger is one that the SLCP has made the basis for its work: Encourage girls to understand and embrace their emotions, then express them constructively instead of turning them inward.
Of course, it's one thing for a college professor to teach that lesson. It was a little harder for a group of college students, fresh from their own teen angst--and in many ways, as they discovered, still immersed in it. "What we learned about most was ourselves and one another," says Mandara Meyers '99. "We were forced to reflect on our own adolescence and work it out with each other, before we could help girls 10 years younger than us. We set out to create a community of adolescent girls, and in the process, we created our own."
One of the first audience members to speak out at the conference was Idahlia Carter, a dormitory housekeeper. Last year, Carter enrolled her granddaughter, Ebony, in the summer project. "She was very angry," Carter told the audience, "but since she's been involved with SCLP, she's become a different child. She has learned to mingle with blacks and whites. At SCLP, these girls can explain themselves to one another."
The middle school years are the most formative time in girls' lives, the students discovered, the point where young women begin to lose a well-developed sense of self and descend into a spiral of silence and self-doubt. "We decided to look for a group of rising fifth- through seventh-grade girls, aiming to find individuals old enough to think critically and maturely but young enough to be just feeling the effects of their coming of age," the women wrote in the introduction to a book documenting their work on the SCLP. Like their interactions with the girls, both the class and conference focused on issues the group had found, through research, to be the most critical for adolescent girls: gender, body image, sexuality, school experiences, peer interactions, and identity.
It's not easy to establish and run such a program at a demanding school like Swarthmore, but the students managed to meet weekly, and in the summer put in as many as 16 hours daily on the project. Early on, they came up with a group mantra that they repeated to each other when frustrations arose, a quote by Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever does."
Whether or not their work will lead to world change, they made the way a little easier for girls like Idahlia Carter's granddaughter. "I think she has learned that you have to see the other person's side, not just your own," Carter said, adding, with a glance at the new graduates: "God bless these girls as they go their way."
On a sunny July morning, children's voices rise sweetly from the stage of the Lang Music Hall. It sounds like ... Italian opera?
That's right. While their friends frolic in the sun, 15 children are learning opera from John Alston, associate professor of music at Swarthmore and director of the Chester Boys Chorus and campus day camp. He directs a training chorus of mostly fourth graders, but the singers here today belong to the concert choir. Most are African American from poor Chester neighborhoods, between 8 and 14 years of age. There are two girls among them today. Few of these kids are used to strict discipline and none to opera. But they show up at this camp six days a week--and that means two to three hours of choir rehearsal a day.
Two baby grands have been pushed aside. Beside the choir, the arboretum woods glow through a wall of plate-glass windows. The kids have trouble standing still. Except for his ponytail and spectacles, Alston is dressed as they are, in T-shirts, shorts, and sneakers. He picks out the melodies on an electric keyboard, singing along in a sort of falsetto, several octaves above his usual bass.
Alston knows what it means for a kid to give up his summer days to sing. He did it himself as part of the Newark Boys Choir. As a boy growing up fatherless in a tough neighborhood, it was the best thing that ever happened to him. Five years ago, he had the inspiration to start his own boys choir. It has been his consuming passion ever since.
Today the choir is learning three-part harmony. Alston runs them through bits of Giordani's Taro Mio Ben, Pergolesi's Magnificat, and Mozart's Exultate Jubilate. "Say it, altos: languisce il cor," he says, rolling his r. "That means my heart, my heart. Sing it out. No fear, like the commercial says.... You can't be an Italian unless you have a lisp.... Sopranos, be quiet.
"Slow," Alston says, as they sing a line from the Mozart. "Don't confuse slowly with wimpy. Could it be soft and a little bit dancy? Soft but strong--alleluia, then we dance." A girl in the back row takes him literally and bounces to the next line, doing a little Whitney Houston hand motion. "Who sings this? Mary. What's she so happy about? They just said, 'You're the one.' And what she really said was, 'I'm too young for this. Take my sister.' But they couldn't write that. … Don't improvise, brother," he tells a small boy in the front row. "You're supposed to be singing, not doing karate."
The boy is 8. "His name is Nkenge, which means 'brilliant' in some African language," Alston tells me later. "He is brilliant--a musical genius. Nkenge loves music; he really hears it. He's already improvising on the piano. We call him Bruce because he looks like Bruce Willis and behaves like Bruce Lee. Bruce loves karate."
Right on cue, at 11:30, karate instructor Stuart Bryant strides into the room, a muscular man with shaved head and tattoos. The class snaps to attention as he launches into a rapid-fire military question-response.
"What's up?" he barks, smiling.
"You are sir."
"What's happening?"
"We are sir."
"How's your karate?"
"Huuuuge, sir!"
"He's also a blues musician," Alston whispers. "And the greatest karate instructor in the area." The children file out behind Bryant for a "nature appreciation tour" of the arboretum before he runs them through their moves. Later this afternoon, the boys will play baseball on DuPont field.
How do baseball and martial arts fit into a boys choir? "In a lot of ways, this camp is everything that I love to do," Alston says. "There are probably other things I should be teaching them, but I don't know those things. I understand music really well, and I understand martial arts." He discovered Kung Fu during a sabbatical in 1994 and soon progressed to tai chi, which he practices religiously. Two of the older boys now study karate in a program Alston paid for with money received as a wedding gift. Max, the oldest, is about to get his blue belt.
"Karate teaches them discipline," Alson says. "If I call them to attention the way they're called in karate, they snap to immediately--even in front of 200 people." He pauses for a bite of cereal, eating on the run as usual. "I'm just beginning to learn how to handle the kids' temper tantrums--without just being louder and stronger. There are 17 different personalities. One kid was born addicted to cocaine. I have to find the right way to deal with each one."
About the two girls in this boys choir, he says: "It just happened. They would come to pick up their brothers, and I started having them sit next to the troublemakers. That was very effective." Naturally, they started singing along, their voices at this age indistinguishable from the boys'. Alston admits he's not sure whether to make the choir officially unisex. "In this day and age, there's probably no excuse not to include girls, especially since the boys have such an advantage as adults. But as children, the boys are at a disadvantage. We have three fathers in this whole group. They do not have role models. And it does make a difference.
"I sure wish my father had been around--and that's definitely part of the motivation. I don't have any fantasy about being their father. I just want to provide a little joy and structure in their lives. Who knows? For some of these guys, this might be the ticket to a career."
Alston's dream is to open a school for the performing arts in Chester, but just now he's finding it a challenge to keep the camp and choir going. Thanks to an anonymous gift last year, he has a new program director, which saves him time, and, in the summer, buses shuttle the kids to and from the College on weekdays. But on Saturdays, Alston still drives the van to pick them all up. "It takes from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. to run an-hour-and-a-half rehearsal on Saturday," he says. Camp lasts from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. in the summer. During the school year, Alston drives to Chester twice a week to rehearse the choir.
"I probably make about 50 cents an hour on average running the choir," he laughs. "But I'm not complaining. We're paid well at Swarthmore. Teaching music to the most enlightened students in the nation, and getting to play Bach? That's not work, it's play! I'm lucky&endash;and I've got to share it. It's the right thing to do."
The swing tree is gone--and it made its own decision about when to hit the ground. The large red oak near Sharples Dining Hall, which had suffered in recent years from rotting limbs and dying roots, was scheduled to be removed in mid-August because of safety concerns. But on Aug. 6 it "took matters into its own limbs," according to Larry Schall '75, vice president for facilities and services, and fell without the aid of a chain saw. The century-old tree, had reached the end of a normal life span for its species. No plans have been made for the relocation of the swing.
For the third time in five years, Swarthmore has topped U.S. News & World Report's ranking of national liberal arts colleges. Amherst came in second, followed by Williams and Wellesley, with Haverford and Middlebury tied for fifth. The top five national universities were the California Institute of Technology, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, and Yale. President Alfred H. Bloom told The Philadelphia Inquirer that the popular but controversial list provides important national exposure for Swarthmore, raising the number of applicants and thus the College's selectivity. He also happily pointed out that the president of Cal Tech, the top-ranked university, is a Swarthmore grad--Nobel laureate David Baltimore '60.
Two faculty members retired in June after more than 25 years at Swarthmore. H. Searl Dunn first joined of the Department of Engineering in 1973, and Robert Roza became a member of the Department of English Literature in 1966.
Now alums can tune into WSRN from anywhere in the world--providing they have Internet access. WSRN has begun Web-casting its programs live, including blues, classical, folk, hip-hop, jazz, rock, ska, world, and talk. To listen in, visit the WSRN Web site at http://wsrn.swarthmore.edu.
Article of the year
"Swarthmore on the Line of Scrimmage" by Garret Keizer, the cover story of the December 1998 Bulletin, has been honored by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) as one of the four best articles of the year in a college or university magazine. The feature, which explored the role of football at Swarthmore, was chosen by a panel of three judges from The Chronicle of Higher Education, which sponsors this category in CASE's annual awards program.
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