UNFAIR

I must take issue with your titles for the two very critical letters about Teach for America (“Letters,” December Bulletin). The original article (“Teaching for Change,” a profile of Kevin Huffman ’92, September Bulletin) pointed out changes in the program about which Patrick Runkle ’98 was very derisive. The title of Runkle’s letter (“Foul Stench”) was unfair, in my opinion. A second letter from Nathan Myers ’99 was more balanced. But there again, you emphasized “hypocrisy.”

I confess I’m prejudiced because a granddaughter has been in Teach for America for four years, and a grandson is in his second year.

CAROLYN KEYES CADWALLADER ’36
Newtown Square, Pa.

After reading the letters “Foul Stench” and “Hypocrisy” about Teach for America (TFA), I feel compelled to set the record straight on a few key points.

Endemic to much of the criticism that TFA has received over the years is a disturbing tendency to rely on unproven theory and isolated anecdotes. These two letters fall into this trap. The facts are pretty clear that most of TFA’s corps members are successful. In a recent independent survey of the school principals of TFA corps members, nearly 80 percent of principals rated them as more effective than other beginning teachers with whom they had worked. And in a study by Stanford University’s Center for Research in Educational Outcomes, the students of TFA corps members in Houston recorded gains as great or greater than students of non-TFA colleagues in every grade level and subject area.

About 87 percent of TFA corps members complete their two-year commitments in their original placement schools. Patrick Runkle conveniently failed to note that he was one of the few TFA participants who quit the program without honoring their commitments. Runkle’s bizarre willingness to make sweeping (and damning) generalizations about the community in which he was placed runs counter to TFA’s most basic philosophies. After spending one year in teaching, he apparently was able to determine (1) that “education will get you nowhere” in rural Louisiana and (2) that these districts are “beyond help” and “not interested in change.” The fact that he would actually refer to his former school district as “beyond help” cuts against everything I believe about public education. Many of us who taught in dirty trailers in low-income neighborhoods left the corps with diametrically opposite perspectives, having seen firsthand that our students could exceed grade-level expectations and outperform their more affluent peers.

Nathan Myers’ letter furthers the strong tradition in public education debate of framing issues in black and white: Either you get a Swarthmore-quality certification program, or you get thrown to the wolves; either you give low-income families experienced and highly trained teachers or ill-prepared novices. I see the same tautologies constructed in nearly every other education reform debate—school choice, charter schools, high-stakes testing, and multicultural curricula.

I suppose at the end of the day, we have two choices. We can, as Runkle’s letter suggests, look at the centuries of poverty and racism that have created the current inequities, throw up our hands in despair, and declare that the schools serving our poorest citizens are beyond repair. Or we can roll up our sleeves and work tirelessly to address the inequities head-on.

KEVIN HUFFMAN ’92
Vice President and General Counsel
Teach for America
New York

REFUGEES

I appreciated very much the article on midcentury faculty émigrés (“Émigré: The College as a Place of Refuge,” December Bulletin).

By the late 1940s, as World War II began to recede in day-to-day life, the Swarthmore campus was home to not only these faculty members but also to several students who were refugees.

We fled the Nazi onslaught on Europe as youngsters. By 1950, we were more or less Americanized, but there still was (I speak only for myself) a sense of being outsiders and uprooted—albeit enormously fortunate, saved by fate, miracles, and pure random events or the prescience, wisdom, and capability of parents who brought us out of the Holocaust. Each of us had a story, but we were only vaguely aware of how the others survived.

THOMAS REINER ’52
New York

NOT THE WHOLE STORY

The December Bulletin article about the participation of Marcia Grant ’60 in the development and launch of a women’s college in Saudi Arabia (“Liberal Arts in a Conservative Land”) was absolutely amazing for what it left out.

Saudi Arabia is a nation with, shall we say, a somewhat spotty human rights record. The country is ruled by a corrupt monarchy; human rights there are largely nonexistent. Although, as Marcia Grant points out, it is simplistic to think that women are oppressed simply because of Islam, they are unquestionably oppressed. This is a nation that once held the West hostage with an oil embargo and has put a great deal of money and effort into trying to destroy Israel. To quote the Human Rights Watch World Report 2001:

The report also points out that the Saudi regime has provided a new home for Idi Amin, the Ugandan dictator whose regime was responsible for the deaths of several hundred thousand people in the 1970s. Working closely with a government like this (Ms. Grant worked directly with a member of the Saudi royal family) to develop a “liberal arts college” raises troubling questions that the article completely ignored. There’s a lot of cheery writing about the excitement and value of educating women, but the basic morality of assisting a regime like this isn’t even an issue. I’m not necessarily criticizing Ms. Grant’s work, but I am astounded that in a world that is filled with violence, hatred, and oppression—a fair share of which is provided by Saudi Arabia—the article did not even touch on some of the moral issues raised by working with, legitimizing, and implicitly supporting a regime like this one.

PETER DARLING ’84
San Carlos, Calif.

I may be the only Swarthmore alumna who also graduated from Dar al-Hanaan, the private girls’ school founded by Queen Effat, and my father has taught at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, for more than 20 years. So I was pleased to learn that two Swarthmoreans have played an instrumental role in establishing Effat College in my hometown (“Liberal Arts in a Conservative Land,” December Bulletin). Saudi Arabia’s new private colleges mark a milestone for the country, giving Saudis—particularly women—a new range of choices in higher education.

I was disappointed, however, to note a few factual errors in the story. The most glaring was the statement that female students at the public King Abdul Aziz University “are taught in separate rooms from the male students, where they watch the professors (also male) on closed-circuit televisions,” and that Queen Effat “imagined a college environment where women could interact directly with their teachers.”

In fact, female professors and lecturers teach almost all of the classes at King Abdul Aziz University’s women’s section, located on a separate campus adjacent to the men’s campus. Yes, male professors occasionally teach female students via closed-circuit TV. My father has taught classes that way and reports that it’s quite disconcerting not to be able to see his students. But he has only taught female students when no female professor is available or qualified to teach the material.

Non-Saudis might be surprised to learn that Saudi Arabia has an exception to its rule against coeducation: Male and female medical and dental students learn and train together. So, although private women’s colleges like Effat College are helping to change higher education in Saudi Arabia, they are only one part of a complex picture.

EMAN QUOTAH ’95
Washington, D.C.

COMPETING CLAIMS

In his December letter to the editor, Jeremiah Gelles ’63 compared Israeli settlement [in the West Bank] with American settlement in the West or German settlement in Eastern Europe.

The first comparison is a compliment to the Israeli settlers. The European conquest of North America gave the United States the power to save the world from tyranny several times during the last century. The world is deeply indebted to American settlers for their role in giving us the strength to do great good.

The second comparison is inexact: The Germans, who had settled for most of a millennium in Eastern Europe, were expelled en masse because they preferred to join in on German territorial expansion and German genocide rather than recognize the competing moral and legal claims that the newly born nations of Eastern Europe possessed to the same land. If a comparison with Israel is appropriate, the situation of the Germans is more akin to that of the Palestinians. Indeed, if the Palestinians are ever expelled, it will be because the Palestinian appetite for genocide and their refusal even to recognize Israel’s legal and moral claims to its pre-1967 boundaries make any sort of coexistence impossible. The Israelis will then join the Czechs and the Poles as one of the peoples who realize that justice, not mercy, is essential to survival.

DAVID RANDALL ’93
Brooklyn, N.Y.

BAGELS AT MIDNIGHT

In the December issue of the Swarthmore College Bulletin, I noticed a pattern of conflict to which I believe there is a solution. In the solution I propose, I must confess my enormous indebtedness to the work of Ken Wilber, Clare Graves, Don Beck, and Christopher Cowan. Different letter writers complained of a tendency within our community to preach inclusiveness while actually consigning to the outer darkness those misguided souls with the temerity to advocate other viewpoints, such as libertarianism, conservatism, and Republicanism.

Wilber, Graves, et al. (whose thoughts I shall now brutally condense and simplify) suggest that individuals and societies develop roughly similarly to biological organisms by differentiation of new capacities and integration of both old and new, a transcend-and-include process. For human beings, this involves differentiation and integration of worldviews and values, which can be color coded for convenience.

Skipping the beige level and starting at the purple level, there is precious little differentiation, much magical thinking, and a certain proneness to human sacrifice and cannibalism. At the red level, the disadvantages of overdoing the herd mentality are seen, and heroic values of individual courage and generosity emerge, along with a certain amount of outlawry. At the blue level, the disadvantages of outlawry are seen, and the emphasis is on order and tradition (which is where most adults in most present-day societies operate). At the orange level, the disadvantages of excessive reliance on tradition are seen, and values of individualism, rationality, constitutional democracy, free markets, and scientific enterprise emerge. At the green level, the disadvantages of overreliance on science and individualism are seen, and values of inclusivity, multiculturalism, pluralism, egalitarianism, environmentalism, and sensitivity become prominent, often (unfortunately) accompanied by a rejection of science and individualism, Western civilization, and so on.

On close inspection, one may note that each color has something to offer as well as some shortcomings. Even purple has something to offer: magical thinking, which (if understood properly) can be both instructive and a joy (if you don't believe me, meet some small children). Green, whose positive values may be self-evident to many at Swarthmore, has the distinct disadvantage of tending to reject Western civilization, which, despite its many ghastly failings, has given us the concepts of human rights, civil liberties, and several other blessings that help minimize the number of green people burned at the stake or tossed in jail in the U.S. and other constitutional democracies. A shared problem all of these colors have is that they cannot appreciate their own limitations very well, nor can they appreciate the values of the other colors. They tend instead to get locked into battles for dominance.

There is hope, though, the solution of which I wrote: At a second tier of colors (yellow and turquoise), people can see how human values and worldviews are integrated and have particular strengths and limitations. The tendency to dismiss contemptuously the worldviews of others as worthless, subhuman, or demonic evaporates in favor of an ability to see a far more inclusive vision that can honor and use creatively the contributions of all levels (while accounting wisely for the dangers inhering in the different levels). Second-tier thinking vastly improves the capacity to distinguish baby from bathwater. And we, my friends, can engage in it! Just think what a radical reduction in mutual contempt might mean to us all!

In closing, I cannot resist a plug for a technique that appears to enhance second-tier capacities enormously: meditation. In one study, the practice of meditation appeared to boost the proportion of second-tier thinkers from 1 percent at pretest to 38 percent at post-test, a rather astonishing result.

Peace, love, and bagels at midnight,

DAVID KERRIGAN ’79
Falls Church, Va.

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