Haverford Magazine Fall 2024

Building Futures Scott Peltzer ’82 teaches job hunters a lost art

Winning Strategy

Inside the Haverford Athletics Action Plan

50 Years Later

A College president’s legacy lives on

Certified Smile Maker Dentist Christina Carter ’96 provides inclusive care

Fall 2024

Editorial Director

Dominic Mercier

Editor

Jill Waldbieser

Class News Editor

Mara Miller Johnson ’10

Copy Editor

Colleen Heavens

Photographic Director

Patrick Montero

Graphic Design

Anne Bigler

Associate Vice President for College Communications

Chris Mills ’82

Vice President for Institutional Advancement

Kim Spang

Contributing Writers

Charles Curtis ’04

Lini S. Kadaba

Eils Lotozo

Patrick Rapa

Ben Seal

David Silverberg

Contributing Photographers

Gabbi Bass

Holden Blanco ’17

Grace Fang ’27

Dan Z. Johnson

Sabine Mejia ’25

Ryan Murray

Paola Noguerars

David Sinclair

Haverford magazine is published three times a year by College Communications, Haverford College, 370 Lancaster Avenue, Haverford, PA 19041, 610-896-1000, hc-editor@haverford.edu ©2024 Haverford College SEND

Haverford College 370 Lancaster Avenue Haverford, PA 19041 or devrec@haverford.edu

Tell Us More

Christina Carter ’96: Certified Smile Maker.

By Eils Lotozo

26 Game Changer

The Haverford Athletics Action Plan aims to elevate the field of play, and not just for student-athletes.

By Charles Curtis ’04

32 Working Class

Fifty years ago, former Haverford president Jack Coleman spent his sabbatical working manual labor jobs across the country, then wrote a book about it. As the golden anniversary of its publication passes, his work is still as poignant as ever.

By Lini S. Kadaba

38 Building Futures

Through Brooklyn Woods, Scott Peltzer ’82 is teaching job hunters a lost art and self-sustaining skills for life.

By Ben Seal

CORRECTIONS:

In the Spring/Summer 2024 issue of Haverford, Bill Harris’ class year was incorrectly listed as ’47 in the feature “Return on Investment.” His class year is ’49.

In the photo essay “A Journey of Reconciliation,” a caption incorrectly states that Martin Luther King Jr. was shot the morning following his final speech. Dr. King was assassinated in the evening.

ON THE COVER: Women’s soccer player Abigale Baker ‘26. Photo by Ryan Murray.

BACK COVER: Family Fun Fair at Alumni Weekend. Photo by Paola Nogueras.

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Office Hour

Professor of Environmental Studies Jonathan Wilson is perfectly content to linger in the past. In his Sharpless Hall lab, Wilson’s focus is on the coevolution of plants and the environment over the past 475 million years. Using mathematical models, chemical analysis, and even experimental plant physiology, Wilson probes ecosystems’ responses to major events, like mass extinctions and climate change.

After receiving his Ph.D. in Earth and planetary sciences from Harvard, Wilson joined Haverford in 2011 to contribute to the College’s environmental studies and biology programs. He has since led the team that established the Bi-Co environmental studies major and department, which has quickly become one of the most popular majors at both schools.

Last spring, Wilson was promoted to full professor on the heels of receiving a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation. The grant allows Wilson, along with colleagues at Baylor University and Trinity College, to continue his investigation of ancient plant structures and the paleoclimate record. The work, he says, is critical as the world grapples with the existential threat of climate change.

“Understanding our vegetation and climate history helps us understand how to make better models of the past and the future, but it also helps people learn what’s happened on the planet in deep time,” Wilson says. “Knowing how different scenarios in the Earth’s history ended is important for understanding what humanity could be staring down.”

1 Promotional photograph of Laura Dern: In 1993’s Jurassic Park, Dern plays Dr. Ellie Sattler, a role Wilson believes is the only instance of a paleobotanist being portrayed on the silver screen. Wilson often points to Dern’s character when he meets new people to help them understand his research. “She’s an icon for my field,” he says.

2 Oblique Strategies:

Developed by musicians Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt in 1975, Oblique Strategies is a deck of 100 cards with short suggestions or courses of action intended to spur creative thinking. Wilson leaves them on the table in the middle of his office for students, though he often turns to the deck himself for inspiration. “When I have a student who comes and is stuck on

something, I’ll hand the deck to them,” he says. “This doesn’t give you the answer, but it might just get you to think differently.”

3 Replica Pip-Boy: The fictional wristband computer is a fan favorite from the post-apocalyptic video game series Fallout, which has been a hit since the first installment debuted in 1997 and was recently spun into a hit Amazon Prime show. Wilson has played the games since he was a teenager. “I’ve had this in my office for years,” he says. “Most people don’t notice it, but the students who do say, ‘Wow, you’re a real person!’”

4 CDs in Wilson’s lab: When any student begins working in his lab, Wilson asks them to select an album, which he pur-

chases, labels with the student’s name, and adds to the growing collection. They range from David Bowie—one of Wilson’s favorites—to obscure indie bands. “The only rule we have in the lab is that if you pick Queen, we’re only allowed to listen to ‘We Are the Champions’ once per day,” Wilson says

5 Cacao pods from Trinidad: Over spring break, Wilson takes students in his botany classes on experiential learning trips to Trinidad and Tobago, where they can see firsthand the role plants play in our biological, social, and cultural history. Throughout the week, the students see the plants they’ve studied in Wilson’s lab flourishing in their natural habitat. “When we go to Trinidad, we

look at cacao agriculture,” he says. “Inside are actual cacao beans, which are what are processed into chocolate.”

6 A 2.7-billion-year-old rock: Wilson's office has oodles of fossils and rocks from around the world. He picked up this one, a sample of banded iron formation, in Western Australia. “It was formed before there was oxygen in the atmosphere, so that’s why it looks like a little brick wall,” Wilson says. The different layers are iron and silica, which are mined to fuel the country’s steel industry.

7 Champagne bottles and Tibetan prayer flags: The empty bottles atop a bookshelf in Wilson’s office each denote a

major milestones in his career, from tenure to his receipt of major grants. The most recent was popped when he became a full professor last spring. Woven between them is a set of traditional Tibetan prayer flags Wilson acquired during a 2019 trip to Southern China along its border with Tibet.

8 A photo from Mistaken Point, Newfoundland: One of Wilson’s first field trips while he was an undergrad at Johns Hopkins University was to Newfoundland. Mistaken Point, which juts into the North Atlantic Ocean, features countless fossils of early animals, some formed as long as 580 million years ago, scattered across its surface.

—Dominic Mercier

Main Lines

10 THINGS That Make Us Happy

A pair of prizing-winning robotic dogs For seniors Willow Kohn ’25 and Deep Patel ’25, man’s best friend is more plastic than fur. In the lab of Professor of Physics and Astronomy Suzanne Amador Kane, the pair has been exploring the next generation of robotic locomotion with two small robotic canines made by the company Petoi. Over the summer, they won a social media contest for a video they created that shows a day in the life of their dogs, which includes their ability to backflip and chow down on a slice of pizza. Their prize was a robotic cat. Here’s hoping they all get along.

Recalling a significant moment in peace activism The second season of the iHeartRadio podcast SNAFU, hosted by comedic actor Ed Helms, explores the College’s connection to the 1971 break-in of a Media, Pa., FBI office that exposed the agency’s secret surveillance of antiwar activists, African Americans, and more. As you may have read in this magazine in its 2014 feature, Professor of Mathematics William Davidon played a significant role in the caper.

A PROMISING NIH GRANT

This fall, Professor of Chemistry Lou Charkoudian ’03 received a threeyear, $462,351 grant renewal from the National Institutes of Health to continue her decade-long research on bacteria and the complex molecules they create. It is believed that this research could lead to groundbreaking medical advancements in antibiotics, anticancer medications, and sustainable biofuels.

THE PAWPAW TREES’ FIRST FRUITING

After nearly five years of patience and care, the 22 pawpaw trees planted around campus bore their first fruit this summer. For the uninitiated, pawpaws are native to the eastern United States and, despite the temperate climate, they boast a tropical flavor that is often described as a mix of mango, banana, and citrus. Pawpaw season is sadly quite short and lasts only about a month.

An alum-developed board game

After discovering an interest in board games during the pandemic, Matthew Denton ’24 created the card game Insurgent Algeria as a student. Now an alum, Denton has sharpened his game development skills and introduced his newest creation, Road to March, this fall. The game, which features visual elements by Luca Ponticello ’24, was supported by the Haverford Innovations Program’s summer Innovation Incubator and puts players in the shoes of college basketball coaches looking to dominate the NCAA tournament.

Neurodivergent art Next year, the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery will mount a pair of exhibitions titled “LOOK HERE”, which will highlight the work of neurodivergent visual artists and the progressive studios that support them. The exhibitions, a comprehensive publication, and an accompanying symposium in Philadelphia were made possible by a $360,000 project grant from the Pew Center for Arts and Humanities.

A NATIONAL CONVENTION OF HONOR COUNCILS Supported by the KianTat Lim 1987 Fund for Strengthening the Honor Code, Caroline Yao ’27 and Callie Rabins ’25 traveled to Davidson College in North Carolina this fall for a national convening of honor councils. They were joined by Dean of the College and Vice President John McKnight and Dean of Student Life Scott Wojciechowski and returned ready to consider how Haverford’s Honor Code can grapple with the rise and use of artificial intelligence across higher education.

More successful guide dogs Through her summer experience as a Marian E. Koshland Integrated Natural Sciences Center intern, Aileen King ’27 conducted a principal component analysis of nearly 4,000 puppies with the hopes of bolstering the number of successful guide and service dogs working across the nation. In high school, King volunteered for a nonprofit that provides guide dogs free of charge to those with vision loss, and two of the dogs she worked with moved on to successful careers in Connecticut with the police and state capitol building.

Real hope for sustainable seafood Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Talia Young is featured in episode three of PBS’ documentary series Hope in the Water. The series explores the work of conscientious fishers, aqua farmers, and scientists who are harvesting aquatic species to feed the planet while also saving our oceans, a feat once viewed as impossible. In addition to teaching at Haverford, Young is the founder and director of Fishadelphia, a youth-centered community seafood program based in Philadelphia.

Haverford’s first-ever GEM fellow In June, Seun Eisape ’24 became the College’s first-ever GEM fellow and is now pursuing his Ph.D. at University of California, Berkeley. The fellowship, provided through the National GEM Consortium, seeks to increase the participation of underrepresented groups at the master’s and doctoral levels in engineering and science. Eisape is studying brain-computer interfaces, direct con nections between the human brain and technology that can decode and stimulate neural activity.

Main Lines

Get in the Game

This year, participants in VCAM’S Design + Make Summer Fellowship learned about video game design—and then made their own fun. BY

As far as project objectives go, “have fun” sounds like an easy one. But as the four students who participated in this year’s Design + Make Summer Fellowship in Haverford’s Visual Culture, Arts, and Media (VCAM) facility discovered, there’s a lot more to that task than meets the eye.

Over the eight-week course, students were challenged to design and build an original video game, complete with graphics, music, and controls. “Coding was just a part of it,” says Kent Watson, VCAM’s arts, education, and programs manager, who has overseen the fellowship since its inception in 2020. Each year, he selects a different theme that immerses students in design and prototyping. In the past, students have built prosthetics, toys, and chairs

JILL WALDBIESER

This was the first year, Watson says, that the output wasn’t something you could hold in your hands. He enlisted Sarah Fay Krom, a visiting artist and assistant professor of practice of interactive media, to develop a curriculum. “Learning by making is sort of a motto of game courses throughout the world,” she says. “Kent was thinking in this direction and could see there was a connection to the Maker Arts Space. He understood the potential of that space. The creative spirit gets stretched when it’s approached from a space like VCAM.”

Although the games themselves would be confined to a computer screen, the basic principles of good design remained in play. “The fellowship started off with a broad theoretical exploration of games—where they come from, why we play them, what makes a good one,” says Watson. “This laid the groundwork for our skill-building throughout the rest of the fellowship.”

In the first two weeks of the program, students studied game theory and played and built board games to learn to think from a designer’s perspective and answer questions like: What are the rules? How much of winning depends on luck and how much on strategy? What makes it fun?

“I thought I knew what’s fun because I play games,” says

Will Betts Cope ’26, one of four students who was selected for the fellowship. “But game theory ended up being really helpful.” In particular, he says, the importance of premise stood out. “It may be that the core mechanics—how your player moves and what they have to do—are fun, but if your premise is bad, none of the rest makes sense,” says Betts Cope ’26, who is double majoring in computer science and music.

Members of the Haverford community were invited to play the games and give feedback ABOVE, while game makers look on, OPPOSITE, FROM LEFT: Assistant Professor Sarah Fay Krom, Teri Ke BMC ’24, Lina Luo ’27, and Will Betts Cope ’26.

Students had one week to brainstorm concepts, then spent the remainder of the fellowship developing their games, soliciting feedback on them, and refining them. “Everybody went in such vastly different directions, and that was really fun to see,” says Watson.

Betts Cope modeled his game after a classic guitarist’s problem: The player is a lost guitar pick trying to find the way out of an acoustic guitar. Another one of the video games, developed by Lina Luo ’27, who has not yet declared a major,

focuses on a main character who can move only by jumping from shadow to shadow. Called Shadow Journey, the game requires players to figure out how to manipulate light sources to cast shadows in the correct path.

One Friday in late July, members of the community— including students who participated in the fellowship in years past—gathered in VCAM’s Maker Arts Space to take the video games for a test drive. “Based on the attendance and reaction of people who were playing, it appeared to go quite well,” says Krom. “It was a very lively couple of hours.”

For their part, the students enjoyed the opportunity to see their games tested in real time. “It seemed like people enjoyed playing it,” Betts Cope says. “A few people who never played before beat it, and that was very satisfying because I had worried that it was too hard.”

Luo, meanwhile, discovered that Shadow Journey might be harder than she expected for many players. “A few people won,” she says, although the game currently only has two levels, all she had time to create.

The immersive nature of the Design + Make Summer Fellowship offers students a unique opportunity to take a theme and run with it, Watson says, and each of this year’s four fellows walked away very much appreciating what goes into the design of a playable experience.

“It was great to be learning with other people, and in such a small group,” says Betts Cope. “It wasn’t just me alone pulling my hair out over figuring this out. I thought about making a game but never had the motivation or drive to do it on my own.”

As for the future of his guitar pick game, Betts Cope says he’s considered putting it up on a free games website, but also “wouldn’t be upset if I kept it for myself as a cool thing I did one summer.”

Fun accomplished.

COOL CLASSES

Course Title: “Introduction to Environmental Anthropology”

Taught by: Spielman Professor in the Social Sciences Joshua Moses

What Moses has to say about the course: Broadly defined, environmental anthropology is the study of humans and their complex interactions with the environment. The social science, which traces its origin to the 19th century, is primarily concerned with understanding how we shape the environments we live in and, in turn, how those environments have defined cultures and social organization.

Moses took over the class when he arrived at Haverford in 2013 and saw an opportunity to reshape it in a way that encourages students to engage with today’s most pressing challenges. “I try to get students thinking about inequality, the climate crisis, and authoritarianism as our current—at least from my point of view—most important intersecting crises,” says Moses. He intertwines the humanities and sciences in his class, which reflects the multidisciplinary approach of the Bi-College Department of Environmental Studies. Students explore literature by anthropologists and poets alike. And true to Haverford’s commitment to experiential learning, the class includes numerous opportunities for students to explore the environment.

“We all sit too much,” Moses says. “Whenever I can, I try to get us all outside to find different ways to engage our senses.” This fall, Moses’ class was treated to a three-part lesson on foraging food from around Haverford’s campus led by Lynn Landes, founder of Wild Foodies of Philly. Students identified and later sampled pawpaw seeds, pine needle tea, and Moses’ favorite, the odoriferous berries that fall from Ginkgo trees.“

They’re intense and particularly memorable,” he says.

Cool Classes is a recurring series on the Haverblog. For more, go to hav.to/coolclasses.

Students in Moses’ class prepare foraged foods in the Visual Culture, Arts, and Media building’s kitchen.

Main Lines

WELCOMING NEW FACULTY

Reginald “RB” McGee joins the Department of Mathematics and associate professor. McGee studies computational immu nobiology to develop models and meth ods of data analysis to address questions of scientific and clinical interest. His interests lie in blood disorders, health disparities, signal transduction, immune responses, and autoimmune disorders. McGee received his Ph.D. and master’s in mathematics from Purdue University. His disser tation is titled “Modeling, Analysis, and Control of Syk-Mediated Signaling Events and Associated Cellular Response for B Cells.” He joins Haverford from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., where he was an assistant professor of mathematics. McGee teaches “Calculus: Dynamics and Integration” this semester.

Steve A. Ndengué, an assistant profes sor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy , received his Ph.D. in condensed matter and radiation phys ics from Université Grenoble Alpes in Grenoble, France. With research focused on theoretical atomic and molecular phys ics as well as theoretical physical chemistry, his dissertation, titled “Photodissociation of Ozone: Isotopic Selectivity,” explores the role of photolysis in the anomalous composition of atmospheric ozone. Currently, his research interests are in the modeling and simulation of processes using quantum molecular dynamics for astrochemistry, atmospheric chemistry, and catalysis applications. Prior to his arrival at Haverford, Ndengué was a visiting assistant professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., and a scientific staff at the ICTP-East African Institute for Fundamental Research, a UNESCO Category 2 institute focused on research and development in Africa with an affiliation as a senior lecturer at the University of Rwanda. Ndengué currently teaches “Fundamental Physics II.”

Nguyen was a graduate research assistant, lead lecturer, and graduate teaching assistant at Brown. She was born and raised in Hanoi, Vietnam, and attended Vassar College for her undergraduate studies. This semester, Nguyen teaches “Foundations of Data Science.”

Gordon Peterson’s research explores the ways the crystalline structure of inorganic materials affects their physical properties by leveraging insights drawn from solid-state chemistry, materials science, physics, and computer science. Now an assistant professor in the Department , Peterson received his Ph.D. from the University of WisconsinMadison and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Houston and an Argonne scholar in Argonne National Laboratory’s material science division before joining Haverford. Peterson also taught introductory chemistry as an adjunct professor at Dominican University. This fall, he teaches “Chemical Structure and Bonding.”

Vijay Singh joins the Physics and Astronomy professor. Singh, who received his Ph.D. University, is interested in understanding signal processing in bio logical systems. To advance that knowl edge, he develops theoretical and compu tational models to better understand how systems like cellular/receptor networks process chemical signals. He also explores visual color perception in humans and has previously worked on phase transitions in complex hierarchical networks. Singh joins Haverford from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, where he was an assistant professor of physics. This semester, Singh teaches “Classical and Modern Physics I.”

assistant professor in the ment of Computer Science Nguyen’s research is motivated by a desire to develop robotic assistants to help humans with their daily tasks in their homes and offices. Much of her work is focused on improving robots’ natural language and visual understanding for more effective interactions with humans and task completion. Nguyen received her Ph.D. and master’s in computer science from Brown University with a dissertation titled “Human-Guided Robot Object Search.” Prior to joining Haverford,

Assistant Professor Paul Anh Tran-Hoang logic, the philosophy of logic, and the philosophy of mathematics. Much of his work explores the nature of translation, equivalence, and reduction, which runs alongside his serious research interests in the philosophy of science and the history of 19th- and 20th-century philosophy. Tran-Hoang is also passionate about prison education and translating Vietnamese Department of Philosophy after receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame, where he also completed his master’s in philosophy and mathematics. This semester, Tran-Hoang teaches “Historical Introduction to Logic.”

Teach for the Stars

For her latest book, Professor of Astronomy and Physics Karen Masters compiled a reading list of the best titles in—and about—the universe.

The universe is expanding, and so is our knowledge of it. Fortunately, Karen Masters, a professor of astronomy and physics, has cataloged all the essentials of the past 800 or so years in her latest book, The Astronomers’ Library: The Books that Unlocked the Mysteries of the Universe (Liber Historica), which came out this spring.

Masters kicks off the collection with a description of teaching class in the library of the College’s Strawbridge Observatory, a fitting depiction of the intersection of two of her passions: astronomy and books.

“I was the kind of kid that loved going to the library,” she says. “I always would get out this huge stack of books.” Despite her love of reading, Masters was always drawn to the sciences more. She recalls winning a copy of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time which, naturally, is included in her collection— as a prize for excelling at physics in school. She didn’t begin to think of herself as a writer until grad school at Cornell University, when she was a teaching assistant in the astronomy department and got involved with the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines.

Masters has taught in Haverford’s writing program as well, in addition to her regular classes in physics and astronomy. “For me, getting to write a book about astronomy was pretty awesome,” she says. “My aim was to write it in a way that’s accessible and people understand.” The collection offers, in chronological order, concise summaries of the top astronomy titles from the past 800 years, including some medieval books Haverford has in its special collections.

While Masters wanted to be thorough, she also wanted to avoid focusing too much on what she calls “the usual suspects”: books written by white male Europeans, which admittedly, are “incredibly important to the arc of astronomy and understanding,” she

says. Readers can find a section on Indian astronomy, which has a lot of connections to astrology, and plenty of works by women. “I was really struck by how many textbooks, particularly in the 19th century, were written by women for women, when I had sort of grown up with this idea of astronomy and physics as a very male subject,” Masters says.

Clearly, that is changing. Masters has seen an influx of women and men in her classes, so much so that teaching in the library, with its stacks of books and round communal table, may not be possible much longer.

“I love teaching in that space. It’s a really delightful space,” she says. “But a lot of our classes these days are too big to fit in there. We just had this huge explosion in the number of [astronomy] majors.”

Clearly, the universe isn’t the only thing that keeps expanding. —JW

Professor of Astronomy and Physics Karen Masters calls the library of the Strawbridge Observatory “a very collaborative space to have a class,” and refers to it in the introduction of her new book, The Astronomers’ Library.

Main Lines

Meeting the Moment

The College-wide initiative encourages “ethical engagement” with the community and world at large, and offers resources for achieving that goal.

fter a summer of intensive and collaborative planning, Haverford introduced Meeting the Moment: Community in Dialogue at a pivotal moment for higher education this fall. This new, College-wide initiative has evolved Haverford’s enduring commitment to a campus of open dialogues to equip the College community with the necessary tools and resources to contend with complex global issues, including the continuing tragedy in the Middle East and the turbulent U.S. political landscape.

ASince 2020, higher education as a whole has been charged with discovering effective ways to foster a sense of welcome and belonging for everyone who lives and learns on campuses across the country. Meeting the Moment builds upon the College’s previous work in this arena to provide a robust, yearlong slate of programming informed by a range of perspectives, experiences, and narratives, says its organizer, Assistant Vice President for Institutional Equity and Access Sayeeda Rashid.

“Throughout the past year and at pivotal moments in history, we have witnessed the ways institutions of higher education are confronted with

fundamental questions about ethics, integrity, and responsibilities intrinsic in learning and teaching, as well as ‘heart work’ that is a vital process for sustaining our ecosystem,” says Rashid. “Meeting the Moment serves as one of the platforms through which our College community members may engage, as we individually and collectively build on our knowledge, move through collective grief, and actively participate in solidarity movements.”

Much of the programming, says Rashid, was developed through cross-divisional collaboration with representatives from offices and divisions from across campus. It has included a series of community gatherings and facilitated discourses, trainings, talks and panels, and opportunities to pursue civic engagement.

“Meeting the Moment is a Collegewide initiative, which means that we are all invited to learn with and from one another through programs, conversations, and educational opportunities,” says Vice President for Institutional Equity and Access Nikki Young. “To explore and expand our sources for learning, we have approached this initiative as a project of deep collaboration, anchored by conversations across

divisions, departments, and programs. Such an effort represents—and calls for—a connection-based approach to learning in community.”

Above all, Young says, Meeting the Moment isn’t intended to be prescriptive and will remain nimble in its programming to ensure success throughout the academic year and, hopefully, beyond. That’s why Meeting the Moment’s organizers view its programming slate as a scaffold for ethical engagement by Haverford community members, who are encouraged to identify any additional events they might wish to see happen on campus. Proposals for activities focused on deepening understanding of pressing issues, providing contextual understanding, and building religious and cultural literacy in the context of diverse viewpoints can be submitted online and considered for funding.

A Community in Dialogue

Meeting the Moment hinges on a series of facilitated dialogues focused on grief, the conflict in Israel and Palestine, and critical inquiry. The events have encouraged community members to participate in open, honest conversations with one another

Recent programming addressed issues of global concern, ABOVE, FROM FAR LEFT: A vigil was held in Founders Great Hall for those affected by the horrific attack on Oct. 7, 2023; promoting equity for individuals with disabilities is a priority; and sound immersion and meditation sessions can be a way to cope in stressful times.

about racism, faith, and spirituality as they process our current geopolitical climate and overarching historical narratives. So far, they have included remembrances of the lives lost since the events of Oct. 7, 2023, and a series of trainings and workshops that explore antisemitism, Islamophobia, U.S. presidential politics, and activism.

Books have also played a central role in Meeting the Moment, and in September the College welcomed celebrated author James McBride, whose The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store was selected as the annual Campus Read. Additional author events included a conversation with Wendy Pearlman, whose The Home I Wanted to Make draws on interviews with hundreds of displaced Syrian refugees, and Maya Wind, author of 2024’s Towers of Ivory and Steel This December, Haverford’s version of Reading Rainbow, a program that invites students, faculty, and staff to present books that have profoundly impacted their lives, celebrates 10 years. Similar programming is planned for the spring term, says Rashid.

To learn more visit hav.to/mtm.

The Club Life @

THE HAVERFORD OUTDOORS CLUB

WHAT: The Haverford Outdoors Club, HavOC for short, aims to provide every student with meaningful opportunities to engage with the outdoors, no matter their experience or financial circumstances. Since it was established, the club has ensured that anyone interested in lacing up a pair of hiking boots, strapping on skis, or picking up a canoe paddle gets a chance to do so. The group runs numerous trips throughout the academic year, including day hikes, ski excursions, multiday backpacking trips, and polar plunges at the Jersey Shore, and provides free wilderness first-aid training for students.

HavOC also maintains a gear locker in Gummere Hall’s basement with more than 600 items so participants can get fully outfitted before departing. “You really don’t need to own anything. We have boots, socks, shirts, pants ... we have all you could ever need to go backpacking or camping,” says club co-head Brisa Kane ’25.

WHERE: Nearly all trips are within a day’s drive, at most, from the College, says cohead Owen Cross ’25. Past trips have included day hikes in local state and national parks and backpacking trips in the Adirondack Mountains and the Shenandoah Valley National Park. Recently, HavOC has been partnering with other student affinity groups to offer social events and workshops on campus on topics like mushroom hunting and tie-dyeing with natural materials.

WHY: “The outdoors is something that so many people love, so many people deserve to be able to go,” says Cross. Since taking over the club during their first year at Haverford, Kane and Cross have channeled their energy into broadening HavOC’s trip offerings while maintaining a high level of accessibility. They also oversee the Pre-Customs Outdoors Program (PCOP), which sends about 50 incoming first-year students into the woods for four days and three nights before returning to campus for the start of Customs.

“It’s a really great opportunity to get to know your fellow students,” Kane says. “And they’re also learning outdoor leadership skills.”

WHO: HavOC maintains a website that lists its upcoming offerings and also sends email notifications to nearly 500 people who have signed up for its mailing list. The club’s trips are so popular—a recent canoe trip received more than 100 signups for just 20 spots—that often, a lottery system is required. The lottery prioritizes first-time participants, a nod to HavOC’s commitment to making the outdoors as accessible as possible.

Main Lines

Big Changes at the Bookstore

Over the summer, Haverford’s bookstore received a facelift and now sports a broader array of College-branded merchandise. The book-purchasing process has also been simplified.

Tucked into its cozy space on the lower level of Whitehead Campus Center, Haverford’s bookstore has been the prime spot for students, alums, and their families to deck themselves in Haverford swag or to grab a quick snack or a few ibuprofen between classes. This summer, the bookstore underwent a facelift, introducing a wider array of Haverford-branded merchandise and a simplified book-purchasing process.

As students enjoyed a much-deserved break, Lydia Whitelaw and John Rheiner, the bookstore’s manager and assistant manager, respectively, were hard at work envisioning the space as it reverts to a self-run operation. For the past four years, the bookstore has been managed by Barnes & Noble. It’s an arrangement many institutions of higher learning seek because of its cut-and-paste, streamlined operation, but Whitelaw says that’s not reflective of Haverford’s nature.

“Because we are such a unique and charming campus, it’s important that the bookstore reflects that,” says Whitelaw. “Throughout the years that I’ve been here, students have said to me that the bookstore was among the reasons they chose to attend Haverford. It was the cherry on top of their decision, they’ve said, because they felt comfortable and seen here. That’s what I’m hoping to restore.”

Under the store’s previous arrangement, Barnes & Noble was the sole decision maker regarding what merchandise would be featured in the store, and inventory would remain until it sold out. That often included incongruous options, like fishing gear. Now, Whitelaw says, she and Rheiner will have the flexibility to stock the store with the exact merchandise customers are looking for. Much of the feedback she’s received comes from the bookstore’s student workers, who Whitelaw says are fully vested in the store’s success.

Student feedback drove changes to make the bookstore and its merchandise more personal to the Haverford experience.

“We could tell them our school colors and how to spell Haverford, but that was about it,” Whitelaw says of the bookstore’s previous arrangement. “Moving forward, all of our merchandise, whatever we’re bringing in, we’ll have control over. We’ll be able to get what people are asking us for.”

Among the most requested items, Whitelaw says, are pennants. For years, she’s been fielding phone calls, emails, and requests from visitors for the felt manifestations of school spirit.

The bookstore’s new level of flexibility will also allow it to meet customers at different price points, says Senior Director of Auxiliary and Administrative Services Mike Boyle. There will still be space for items from high-end retailers like Patagonia and Under Armour, but Boyle says, “We also want to be able to provide $25 to $30 Haverford sweatshirts to those looking for them. If someone just wants to pop in and buy some College swag without breaking the bank, we want to be able to help them out.”

For textbooks, the College is partnering with the online outlet eCampus. Students will still be able to pick up and return their purchased or rented books at the bookstore. The shift makes sense, Whitelaw says, since students, just like most people, do the majority of their shopping online. Students can log in to Haverford’s custom eCampus bookstore and opt for digital or print versions of their books. The latter arrive via free two-day shipping.

The bookstore will still retain a section of books penned by Haverford-affiliated authors, school supplies, and its sundry selection of health and beauty options. Its small corner of grocery items will be moved upstairs to The Coop, Boyle says, where extended hours will make snacks even more accessible. In addition, he says, it’ll minimize food waste in alliance with the College’s commitment to sustainability.

Boyle says many of the decisions driving the bookstore’s transformation, particularly the switch to eCampus, came from recommendations made by a 15-member committee comprising faculty, staff, and students.

“We are super open to feedback,” he says, “and that’s to hammer home the point that we can now change. This isn’t a static operation anymore. We want the bookstore to represent what our community wants and needs at the College.” —DM

IN THE COLLECTION

Spotlighting the holdings of Quaker and Special Collections

ost people have heard of Charles Darwin’s seminal work, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection , which has been causing a furor since it was published more than a century-and-a-half ago. That first printing famously sold out within days. Haverford is the proud owner of one of those copies, which it obtained in February 1970.

MThe book, which is widely considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology, makes a regular appearance at the end of “Development and Evolution,” a class taught by Rachel Hoang, The Elizabeth Ufford Green Professor in the Natural Sciences, Associate Professor of Biology, and Director of the Marian E. Koshland Integrated Natural Sciences Center.

“We begin with a brief review of developmental biology and evolutionary theory, from a historical perspective,” says Hoang. “Darwin’s work is, of course, foundational to this part of the course.” After a semester spent delving into the molecular genetics of developmental biology and examining how evolution has shaped developmental processes to create the remarkable diversity of animal life we see today, Hoang returns to Darwin on the final day of class.

With the assistance of Sarah Horowitz, curator of rare books and manuscripts and head of Quaker and Special Collections, students explore a curated display of course-related materials, including the first edition of On the Origin of Species . As part of the experience, each student reads the book’s famous final paragraph—a passage that deeply resonates with the class’s subject:

“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

Main Lines

Customs

Students gather in Founders Great Hall to listen to Haverford's student acapella groups during the last day of Customs.

SCHOLARSHIPS AT WORK

With assistance from The Charles A. Dana Scholarship Fund and the Magill-Rhoads Scholarship Fund, Erick Iraheta ’26 is able to study history, participate in the Chesick Scholars Program, and co-lead the EDHFords club for Magic the Gathering fans.

“ It is an absolute joy to be a part of this vibrant community. I recognize that financial aid is what makes my incredible experience at Haverford possible, and I am forever thankful for the contributions of generous donors. ”

To support current-use financial aid, visit hav.to/give. To learn about endowed scholarships, contact Matt Keefe at mkeefe@haverford.edu or (610) 795-3377.

PHOTO: PAOLA NOGUERAS (CUSTOMS DAY)

Mixed Media

Weird Science

Sociology major Alec Moore ’99 breaks into the movie biz with his screwball comedy Advanced Chemistry.

BY PATRICK RAPA

ew people would have pegged Alec Moore ’99 as a future screenwriter— including him. As an undergrad, he switched majors from English to sociology so he wouldn’t have to do so much writing. “Now, here I am, a writer,” he says.

FMoore’s first feature-length indie comedy Advanced Chemistry just landed on Amazon and Apple to rent and buy, after enjoying a bunch of

one-off screenings across the country. In addition to writing the film, he produced and acted in it.

As an undergrad at Haverford, he took what few film courses were available, but never landed the lead in a school play, so he figured his chances of becoming a professional actor were slim. “I tabled any dreams of possibly doing that and went into the corporate world,” he says.

For the next decade-plus he worked in sales

Alec Moore ’99, who plays a minor role as the Chicken Man in the film he wrote and coproduced, says comedy is the only genre he’s interested in.

Mixed Media

and marketing, first with a Connecticut baseball team called the New Britain Rock Cats, and then at several larger firms in New York City. It turns out he did enjoy writing, as long as it wasn’t term papers on English literature. He started working on pilots for TV shows in his spare time, and while none were produced, the results were encouraging. He wrote a spec script for the show 30 Rock that garnered enough attention to get him a manager.

The cast, BELOW, includes, left to right, Samba Schutte, Kiran Deol, Sarah Burns, Chaunte Wayans, and Iqbal Theba. As the lead, Schutte’s Allen, BOTTOM, mixes up sexual hijinks.

The road to Advanced Chemistry began in 2012 when he moved to Los Angeles and enrolled in UCLA’s screenwriting MFA program. By the time he graduated two years later, he had an early draft of the screenplay (then called Sexy, Sexy Science) and a connection with Etana Jacobson, who would direct the film. He also met and married Jane Miller Moore, who co-produced it.

Inspired by comedies like The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Shakespearean switcheroos a la A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Moore’s film is a wild farce about endearingly awkward biochemist Allen, played by Samba Schutte of the cult-fave pirate series Our Flag Means Death on Max. Allen is working on a drug that compels “instant monogamy” in its test subjects—an idea Moore says was inspired by real-life research in voles. Studies conducted on the rodents found the brain chemistry of some to be naturally monogamous, while others got around a lot more. When scientists swapped genes between the two populations, they saw changes in these behaviors. “I was like, ‘That’s really interesting. What if we could do this with people?’” says Moore.

In the film, after Allen begrudgingly agrees to inject the drug into his best friend Marcia (played by standup comic Chaunté Wayans), a compulsive cheater who asks for help staying faithful to her wife, chaos and sexual hijinks ensue.

The rest of the cast is rounded out by several recognizable faces, including standup comic Kiran Deol, Sarah Burns (Barry), T’Keyah Crystal Keymáh (That’s So Raven, In Living Color), and Iqbal Theba (Glee, The Brink, Community). As for Moore, he plays the Chicken Man, a shaggy, substance-abusing forest dweller who pops up for a little mayhem before the denouement. Moore did not have himself in mind when he created the role, but he was happy to join in the fun on the scrappy three-week shooting schedule.

While he is currently busy promoting the film on social media, Moore has several new scripts completed—all comedies. “Comedy is the only thing I would have wanted to do,” he says. He’s hoping that attention on Advanced Chemistry will lead to opportunities to make some of those other films, and if the current feedback is any indication, that’s not an unlikely scenario.

The film, which Moore calls “silly and smart” has garnered several nice reviews and what he describes as “big laughs” during the screenings, including several attended by his fellow Haverford alums. Its lighthearted tone is a refreshing change from a lot of the dark comedies and dramedies of recent years, even given the science-driven premise. “The success of Oppenheimer proved that audiences are interested in stories about scientists,” says Moore. “And our movie is even funnier than Oppenheimer!”

A music education teacher at a Montessori school south of Boston, Grace Coberly ’21 also sings with Lilith Vocal Ensemble and the Boston Cecilia, and in their spare time, writes commissioned pieces for other choirs. Even with all these accomplishments, Coberly says one of their most memorable compositions was written and performed at Haverford during their sophomore year. On kazoos.

“I wrote a piece as a joke,” Coberly says, but soon the Haverford Kazoo Chorus (or Kazorus) became a reality, performing its single show in the Visual Culture, Arts, and Media building with audience members joining in on their own kazoos.

This kind of support was instrumental in getting Coberly’s now-thriving career in music off the ground. Haverford has no formal music education program, and the music department was tiny at the time—Coberly was one of just four music majors. “But everyone was so down to help me forge my own path,” Coberly says. “They’re ready to go on the journey with you.”

A native of the Chicago suburbs, Coberly had dabbled in music early on, but always considered it nothing more than a hobby. “I thought I was going to be a Bryn Mawr creative writing major and stats minor,” they say. A few music classes and a winter break spent assisting in a children’s music classroom later, and a new path had emerged.

Today, Coberly attends classes to earn a master’s in music education while teaching fulltime, singing in two choirs, and composing on demand. Among other honors, they were named a finalist for the American Prize in Composition for a piece composed while still attending Haverford.

Coberly credits their time singing in Haverford ensembles with helping them prepare for a career in music education “in

‘‘ I NEVER WROTE MUSIC JUST TO WRITE IT. I ALWAYS WRITE FOR PEOPLE. I LIKE RELATING TO OTHER PEOPLE THROUGH MUSIC. ’’

Grace Coberly ’21 says learning to play the ukulele and guitar are just “things you pick up as a music teacher.”

a way that no class could.” From their leadership role with the Bi-Co Chamber Singers, Coberly learned how to fix a pitchy chord without hurting anyone’s feelings, and how to maintain morale during a chilly outdoor rehearsal in the rain.

In the Mainliners (a now-defunct, mixed-voice, Haverfordonly a cappella group), Coberly heard their own arrangements performed several times a semester. “This was my first experience workshopping my own music with a live group,” they say. “While my formal training has certainly helped me as a composer, I credit the Mainliners with teaching me how to write music for the human voice.”

That remains a major tenet of Coberly’s work. “I never wrote music just to write it,” they say. “I always write for people. I like relating to other people through music.”

Composing, teaching, and performing are all different ways they do that, and while it can be difficult to balance all three, Coberly maintains that they love them all equally.

“The beauty of a kid finally realizing they can keep a steady beat—that’s such a joyful thing,” they say. And commissions feel “more like awards than someone giving me a piece of paper. It’s people saying your work is valuable and interesting.”

Coberly especially likes commissions for choirs, where they know a live human is going to sing their work. “These days, one of the most meaningful experiences I can have is to write music for my own ensembles,” Coberly says.

This fall, an 80-voice choir in the Boston area will perform “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” a piece Coberly originally wrote for the Bi-Co Chamber Singers and had only ever seen performed six feet apart and masked at Bryn Mawr due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “We premiered it at my final concert, which was released on YouTube,” Coberly says. “For several years, I’ve only had a recording to remind me of that moment. It’s so thrilling to watch this piece, perhaps my favorite of my own compositions, grow up and step out into the world.”

That, Coberly maintains, is where it belongs. “I don’t think music is something that anyone should do alone,” they say. “It’s designed to be shared.” —Jill Waldbeisser

Mixed Media

BOOKS

Q&A: Jack Schneider ’02

To say Jack Schneider ’02 is obsessed with education is an understatement. The Dwight W. Allen Distinguished Professor and director of the Center for Education Policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has written books on how grading undermines education, why standardized tests

are a poor way to measure a school’s performance and, most recently, how culture wars have infected today’s K-12 public schooling system.

Schneider co-wrote The Education Wars: A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual with freelance journalist Jennifer C. Berkshire, with whom he co-hosts the podcast Have You Heard. The book, which invites readers to see book bans, defunding petitions, and parental paranoia over trans-friendly classrooms as a strategic path to damage public school boards and push students to private schools, couldn’t be timelier.

What is at stake for parents, teachers, and students is immense, the writers contend. The introduction notes, “… today’s deep divides make the role of schools as places where kids learn together, regardless of background or family belief, more essential than ever. There is no way that we will ever realize the

potential of a multiracial democracy without a public education system that brings young people together.”

Schneider spoke to Haverford magazine writer David Silverberg about his new book.

David Silverberg: What are some of the main messages you and Jennifer wanted to convey in Education Wars?

Jack Schneider: I think the book will help people who have perhaps only been paying occasional attention to the culture war understand why it has played out, but also how it is related to something else, which would be the introduction of private school vouchers in about a dozen states. They have been a policy aim among hardline market-oriented conservatives for more than half a century. Ronald Reagan tried to introduce a private school voucher back in the 1980s but Americans aren’t really interested in private school vouchers. They, by and large, understand the importance of educating every young person by doing it on a relatively equal basis, and of trying to produce outcomes that benefit all of us, and not just individuals. Every time a private school voucher has ever come up for a public vote, for instance, it has lost.

Ninety percent of American students are in public schools, and polling consistently suggests that people are satisfied with the education that their own children are receiving. Our schools are not in crisis. They aren’t failing. Despite the rhetoric, the sky is not actually falling. But if your goal is to privatize the public education system, you need to convince people that the schools have gone off the rails, [that] woke teachers are on the march, and our kids can’t read.

DS: For someone outside the education system, it can seem like the negative sentiments lobbed at the public education system are gaining press or attention, but I’m curious how you assess the conversation now. Are those more hardline and extremist voices overpowering those who don’t have those same issues with the education system?

JS: I think we’re at an inflection point where, in red states, the vitriol has become so pervasive that the only way to cool off the rhetoric is with conversation grounded in reality, which requires ordinary people of all political persuasions to begin talking back to this radical narrative.

In this book, we want to show people some of the ways that small acts of courage can be really useful in protecting a system that, despite all its flaws, represents the single greatest commitment we make to young people in this country.

BOOKS

The radical right has a long way to go before convincing Americans that teachers really are villains, that schools really are government indoctrination projects, or that this whole project has been a waste of time.

DS: You write about book bans, so what’s your position on how effective these bans really have been?

JS: One of the things that we need to pay attention to is the fact that there are 13,000 school districts in this country and that’s where a lot of the political action is happening. We can’t really talk about the nation’s schools, and we can barely talk about the schools within a state, because so much of public education is locally controlled. At the local level, we have seen how in some cases book-banning efforts have produced a backlash that has united people behind their local schools, teachers, [and] librarians who don’t want to ban books.

But there are plenty of places where these book challenges have been a key element in a radical media and social media ecosystem that isn’t dependent on reality for its sustenance. As long as people continue to assert that there is pornography in the library, for instance, and as long as there are people on talk radio repeating that message—along with people on Facebook posting about it—they are doing real damage.

MORE ALUMNI TITLES

FREDRIC JAMESON ’54: The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present (Verso)

DS: What motivated you to dive deep into education history and policy once you graduated from Haverford?

JS: Some of it is just chance. The job I got out of Haverford was as a high school teacher. So education quickly became the thing I knew best. I’ve seen how education matters to so many people, and how it can change the course of one’s life. Also, if I have to work in a field, I want to believe that the work I’m doing is making at least a small difference in the world. I don’t know what my impact is, and it may be zero, but maybe the things I’m doing are making the world just a little bit fairer. —David Silverberg

David Silverberg is a journalist and writing coach based in Toronto who has been covering digital media and technology for more than 20 years.

The last work of the famed literary critic before his death, this book is a posthumously published compilation of lectures the author gave on French theory in the post-World War II era. France at that time has been compared to Athens in terms of being in a golden age of political and cultural ideology, and Jameson, a leading Marxist critic, explores

themes of existentialism, structuralism, post structuralism, feminism, and, of course, Marxism, with readings from notable philosophers of the time including Sartre, Barthes, and Foucault. It has been called Jameson’s most accessible work, with relatable anecdotes and an almost conversational tone, but embodies Jameson’s long-standing tradition of rigorous literary criticism.

ANDREW BUDSON ’88 P’19: Why We Forget and How To Remember Better: The Science Behind Memory (Oxford University Press)

Anyone who has ever crammed for an exam, had to reset a forgotten password, or struggled to remember a new

co-worker’s name can benefit from this book, which examines how human memory really works, the many factors that affect it, and why it sometimes goes awry. Budson, a neurologist who made a career out of studying the brain and diseases like dementia, and his co-author, a professor and chair of the department of psychology and neuroscience at Boston College, are well qualified to call themselves memory experts, and provide a thoroughly researched answer to the titular ques-

Mixed Media

MORE ALUMNI TITLES

tion, and many others related to memory, as well as practical, easy-to-implement strategies for improvement. The book also delves into the latest science of memory, including climbing rates of dementia, how mental health affects memory, and what we know about COVID-19-induced brain fog.

MEGAN WILLIAMS ’91: One Bad Mother: One Mother’s Search for Meaning in the Police Academy (Sibylline Press)

Many people would consider going through IVF and then giving birth to and raising twins enough of a challenge for one lifetime. Not Williams, who decided a midlife career change from English professor to police officer was in order. This entertaining memoir chronicles her journey as she applies for and is accepted to the predominantly male Philadelphia Police Academy, a position that she writes has an acceptance rate on par with Princeton or Yale. The achievement and recognition she strives for, however, ultimately turns into a deeper reckoning of motherhood, cultural norms, and identity.

DONALD BERGER ’81: Great Communication: A Guide for Teachers (self-published)

Communication has never been as simple and straightforward as it should be, and changes in technology and culture have only added to those inherent challenges. Teachers routinely face these issues, not only in helping their students grasp difficult concepts and manage classroom behavior, but

also in having to communicate with parents, colleagues, and administrators, across a range of media. This instructional guide offers brilliant solutions using clear instructions and a variety of examples of effective—and not-so-effective—communication. Educators at any level, and with any amount of experience, can benefit from these lessons, which include written and verbal conversations about grades, placement, behavior, and more. It’s a much-needed resource that can help foster better relationships among everyone involved in education.

DANIEL SERWER ’67: Strengthening International Regimes: The Case of Radiation Protection (Palgrave MacMillan)

trous effects on human health and the environment, came to be, he also expounds on how that same process could serve as a model for addressing other problems requiring a worldwide consensus, including climate change, pandemics, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Serwer draws on his background in international affairs, including a stint as minister-counselor at the U.S. State Department, to illustrate the importance of diplomacy in public policy.

BILL FITZGERALD ’83: The Craft of Research, Fifth Edition (University of Chicago Press)

Getting a worldwide consensus on anything is a near-impossible task, but there is one striking and little-known example in history of when doctors and scientists around the globe came together to push forward a policy that remains in place to this day. This intriguing tale of the ultimately successful effort to implement international standards for permissible exposure levels to harmful ionizing radiation is more than just a history, it also serves as a possible model for addressing other global concerns. While Serwer devotes much of the book to explaining how and why international standards for ionizing radiation, which can have disas-

If research is part of your studies or career, you’ll benefit from the revised edition of this best-selling guide. In it, you’ll find the same practical, easy-to-follow fundamentals of good research that helped sell more than 1 million copies of this title to date, such as choosing meaningful topics, asking useful questions, evaluating sources, and building logical arguments. The updated version also brings the research process up to date with modern examples across industries, a new chapter on effective ways to present research, and a discussion of new technologies like generative artificial intelligence and how to use them. Fitzgerald and his cohort of editors also expanded the section on ethics to address the roles and responsibilities researchers have when conducting their work, what ethical research entails, and the way the quality of research can impact communities. It’s important and timely information for any researcher at any level, from high school student to professional.

DREW

KELNER ’76: Taming Cancer: 21st Century Biology and the Future of Cancer Medicine (self-published)

The long sought-after cure for cancer seems like a mythical quest, but Kelner, a biochemist and immunologist with 37 years of experience working with cutting-edge therapies, injects some welcome optimism into the discussion with this book. While a cure is still on the horizon, new medications and technologies including immunotherapy are showing significant promise for improving patient outcomes, shrinking tumors, and enhancing quality of life. Kelner follows two centuries of discovery and innovation in cancer treatments to

the most promising present-day techniques, and explains them in layman’s terms. He also discusses the relatively new use of engineered viruses, cells, and antibodies—what he refers to as “living drugs”—to target cancer cells and encourage the immune system to find and destroy tumors. It is a fascinating and encouraging look at the science behind one of the world’s most insidious diseases, and a useful read for anyone who has been touched by it.

DAVID RUDLIN ’80: Left Unsaid (self-published)

The latest novel from this prolific author is a thriller set in Silicon Valley. In an opening scene akin to the unveiling of the first smartphone, the company CEO makes a sweeping announcement about a literally life-saving technology, which is set to take the world by storm—but comes as

news to his team of engineers, who know nothing about the development of such a device. The rest of the book is spent unraveling the corporate mystery of whether such a product was ever intended to make its way to market. Below the surface of this suspenseful plot is a smart commentary on the balance between substance and showmanship that has overtaken the business world, and why it’s necessary to pay attention to what isn’t being said.

 FORD AUTHORS: Do you have a new book you’d like to see included in More Alumni Titles? Please send all relevant information to hc-editor@haverford.edu.

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Ford Games

Major League Mindset

Dali Pomfret ’25 started out wanting to play professional baseball. After an eye-opening internship, he’s now got his mind set on an even loftier goal. BY CHARLES CURTIS ’04

Ever since Dali Pomfret ’25 can remember, he’s been focused on making it to the major leagues. The economics major is a pitcher for Haverford’s baseball team, but he may eventually realize his goal in a different way than he anticipated.

Thanks to a Baseball Operations internship with the Hyannis Harbor Hawks of the Cape Cod Baseball League—which plays over the summer with some of the big names from colleges all over the country—and his work with Major League Baseball’s Development Center in China, Pomfret

is one step closer to the pros when he graduates in 2025—just maybe not as a player.

Pomfret spoke to Haverford magazine about his baseball dreams, his incredible experiences in China, and how he got a scouting 101 lesson in Cape Cod.

Haverford’s baseball connection was one big reason why he chose to attend the College. When looking at colleges, I found out that Haverford has an incredible alumni network of front office members within Major League Baseball, and working in professional baseball has been a dream of mine as

long as I can remember. The ultimate goal at first was to play the sport, but then I watched the movie version of Moneyball before reading the famous Michael Lewis book. It inspired me. Working in a front office was a way to be involved with the game past my playing career.

His connection to China gave him the opportunity to help there. I was born in China and shuttled between there and the United States when I was younger. I kept in touch with my old pitching coach in China and, before the summer of 2023, my dad suggested I get back in touch with him when I didn’t get any MLB internships I had applied to. My former coach put me in touch with Ray Chang, MLB’s director of operations in China, who also runs the national team. I was an assistant coach for a program that brings in kids from all over the country into a kind of high school in the suburbs of Shanghai. It’s a halfday of baseball practice and half-day of classes. It was rewarding to see how I could impact the lives of these kids and was my real introduction to working in baseball. It sparked a passion in me for the potential of growing the game in that country and what China could be in the baseball world. There’s a pretty small baseball community there, but it’s growing.

‘‘ THE HOPE IS TO WORK AS A PRESIDENT OF BASEBALL OPERATIONS SOMEDAY. IT’S PROBABLY HARDER TO DO THAN PLAY IN THE MAJORS. THERE ARE ONLY 30 OF THOSE JOBS IN THE ENTIRE WORLD.

”

Cape Cod gave him a preview of life in the front office. Internships with teams are unpaid because the league is non-profit, so I got a second job working at a boating hardware store. In the mornings, I’d work there and then go work for Hyannis in the afternoon. We wrote advance scouting reports for the teams playing Hyannis that night: what opposing hitters slug against certain types of pitches and where they hit balls on the field. We would also study video of pitchers and write up the velocity and movements of their pitches. I’d also scour roster pages of college baseball teams when we needed replacement players since some of the college athletes would leave in the middle of the summer. That’s where I’d get into debates with other interns and I’d have to argue why the player I picked is a better fit for the team than their choice. It forced me to think more critically about baseball and my player analysis and scouting skills improved significantly.

The Haverford and MLB connection continued to pay off. One of my baseball teammates and I decided to attend MLB’s Winter Meetings event in Nashville last year. We met up with several alumni who work for MLB teams. They told me: “If you can’t get a job in MLB, go work on Cape Cod.” It turns out working there is a huge resume booster. I think I’ll look back at those three days at the meetings as some of the most formative in my professional career.

What’s next? An attempt to make his dream come true. The hope is to work as a president of baseball operations someday. It’s probably harder to do than play in the Majors. There are only 30 of those jobs in the entire world, so I know how much the odds are stacked against me. I could see myself running my own department in a front office, like a director of international scouting. I know that in order to get to that role or others in baseball, there’s a good amount of fortune involved, which I know I can’t control. If I put the work in, I can’t be upset with whatever happens.

Charles Curtis ’04 is assistant managing editor for USA Today’s For the Win and an author of the Weirdo Academy series, published by Month9Books.

Few kids know what they want to be when they grow up, but Christina Carter ’96 got a glimpse of her future career path early on. “My father is an orthodontist, and when I was little I would always be in his office,” she says. “I saw how he had fun with his patients. He would always tell me how he loved helping increase self confidence in children who were concerned about their teeth and their appearance. That just kind of left a mark on me.”

A biology major who captained the fencing team, Carter went on to dental school, and then completed a two-year residency in pediatric dentistry, followed by a second residency in orthodontics, then a fellowship in cleft, craniofacial, and surgical orthodontics. Being trained in all three areas is rare.“There are a handful of people in the country with my training,” she says.

The combination is useful for Carter’s dental practice in Madison, N.J., where she

TELL US MORE

CHRISTINA CARTER ’96: Certified Smile Maker

specializes in treating children with special needs. She is assisted by Callie, a toy poodle and certified therapy dog.

Carter, who lives in Short Hills, N.J., and is also an avid golfer and student of interior design, talked to Haverford magazine about her outside-the-box approach to dentistry.

How did you become both a pediatric dentist and an orthodontist?

During my residency in pediatric dentistry I spent a lot of time atNew York University’s Institute of Reconstructive Plastic Surgery, where they treat children with cleft lip, palate, and craniofacial syndromes. That rotation changed my life. I thought, “This is exactly the kind of work I’d like to do.” But that required me doing another residency in orthodontics. I never thought I would spend five more years in training after finishing dental school, but that’s what I did.

Being a pediatric dentist who is also an orthodontist was rare when you started. Is it still?

It’s still rare to have one person who is dual trained, but the colocation of the two specialties in one office is the fastest-growing segment in the orthodontic world. People are learning that comprehensive care starts with the pediatric dentist and weaves into orthodontics, identifying problems early. Not only can we combine appointments for cleanings the same day as an adjustment for braces, for the child, we’re already familiar faces when it’s time for orthodontics. It takes away some of the stress and anxiety that is really on the rise with children these days.

Your practice is known for treating many children with special needs. How did that start?

More than 40 percent of my patients have special needs or some kind of disability. I first was inter-

‘‘ SOME CHILDREN HAVE A HYPERSENSITIVITY TO TASTE, SOUND, OR TEXTURE. WE ACCOUNT FOR ALL OF THAT AND WE WORK AROUND IT. I LOVE FIGURING OUT WHAT WORKS BEST FOR EACH CHILD.

’’

ested when I was in my pediatric residency. You’re treating all different sorts of children, including ones with special needs. I loved empowering them and they liked me.

Are there different tools and techniques you need to work effectively with this population?

It starts at the front door. We have a bunch of patients with wheelchairs, so we have no steps at our entry. Also, our treatment rooms are larger to accommodate wheelchairs, so I can either move the patient into the dental chair or sometimes I can treat them in their wheelchairs. We have things like [anxiety calming] sensory balls that they can hold onto and squeeze, and we have earplugs that can block out sounds—or they can use their own headphones. With children on the autism spectrum, you have to try to understand how they communicate, what they tolerate—to get into their world and work on their time. Sometimes we start by having them come in for 10 or 15 minutes to just walk into the waiting room and get used to it. And then we slowly build up to them coming into the treatment room. We also start with sensory integration and desensitization. So if I’m using a brush, I brush it on their finger so

they know what it feels like. We’ll let them hear the suction and feel it on their hand. And since many of these kids do best with routines, we always schedule them for the same treatment room.

Even if they’re not on the autism spectrum, some children have a hypersensitivity to taste, sound, or texture. We account for all of that and we work around it. I love figuring out what works best for each child.

How did you get started using a therapy dog in your practice?

I had heard of an orthodontist in Connecticut who had a dog, and I thought, “I need to do that.” Callie is an apricot toy poodle and she looks like a little teddy bear. I trained her with a group called Creature Comfort in Morristown, N.J.— “cold noses, warming hearts” is their motto—and we started out by going to nursing homes, college campuses during finals, and libraries, where children would read to her.

Today, she usually works two days a week in the practice, greeting people at the front door and roaming the office visiting all the children. She seriously knows which children she can be a little more playful with, and which children she needs to be super calm with and maybe not jump up onto the chair with them, but just sit right next to it while they put their hand down to touch her. It’s really amazing.

It sounds like she’s a very popular member of the staff.

Oh yes! We have pictures of Callie that children can take home and so many parents have said, “That picture of Callie sits on her nightstand,” or, “My child put it on the mantle,” or, “That picture sits in the bathroom and we brush our teeth with Callie.” She has far exceeded my wildest dreams.

—Eils Lotozo

CHANGER GAME

Team sports have always been a key part of a liberal arts education at Haverford, CLOCKWISE FROM FAR LEFT: women’s basketball player Kayla Robinson ’23 faces off against opponents; the men’s fencing team practices in the Alumni Field House; members of the men’s squash team huddle; and lacrosse player Sean Mowatt-Larssen ’22 competes in the 50th anniversary game against Dickinson.

The HAVERFORD ATHLETICS ACTION PLAN aims to elevate the field of play, and not just for student-athletes.

BY CHARLES CURTIS ’04

n its long history, Haverford has had its share of Centennial Conference-winning teams, Division III tournament participants, and even national champions. But what if the College could go even farther on the field of play? What if an investment in athletics could mean even more trophies to add to the cases in the Douglas B. Gardner ’83 Integrated Athletic Center? And what if that investment didn’t just mean student-athletes would benefit, but so would the rest of the student body, including those who play on intramural or club teams? What if winning had multiple definitions?

That’s where the Haverford Athletics Action Plan comes in. Developed by a steering committee made up of students, athletes, alumni, coaches, and administration from both the College and the Athletics department, the Athletics Action Plan is a comprehensive guide to how Haverford will invest in its facilities and personnel to transform the College into even more of a competitor in the Division III world. Beyond that, it documents Haverford’s unique philosophy regarding its athletics programs and their impact.

The plan is ambitious, but that’s the point. John

McKnight, vice president and dean of the College, helped spearhead the plan with Athletic Director Danielle Lynch and summed up the effort’s ambitions with five simple words. “Ultimately,” he says, “we want to win.”

PRE-GAME PREPARATIONS

Winning in this context doesn’t just refer to victories on the field. There have been plenty of those in the past: Almost every one of the school’s 23 varsity teams has been ranked nationally at some point, and the 2010 men’s cross country team was a national champion. Haverford also has had representation in NCAA championship tournaments and, as of this story’s publication, an incredible 295 All-American athletes. Now, however, intramural and club sports and more than 400 students (both athletes and nonathletes) stand to benefit as well.

The Haverford Athletics Action plan, which aims to be fully executed by 2030, was a long time in the making. There were conversations and drafts of the plan before 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic delayed things. After Lynch took over as head of the Athletics department in 2022 and McKnight was hired as dean of the College in 2021, conversations about strategic planning resumed, this time with a new focus.

“We were new and fresh and wanted to identify strengths and opportunities of the department,” says McKnight. “We felt the time was right to imagine the future of Haverford athletics.”

The two administrators didn’t write the plan alone. They formed a committee of athletes (both current and alumni), students, coaches, and administrators to address all aspects of what the College needed to work on, and solicited feedback from alumni and parents of current athletes.

“It was important to us that we include many voices and perspectives since a central goal of the plan is to more fully integrate athletics into the overall student experience at Haverford,” McKnight says.

Those conversations brought up all kinds of hopes for what Haverford athletics could look like, but McKnight could discern one consistent theme. “They wanted the level of excellence in athletics to match the excellence that we have academically as an institution,” he says. “There are nuanced views of what that means—how integrated athletics are with the rest of campus, how we should define wins and losses. Overall, we want to succeed at a higher level.”

One of the plan’s goals is to integrate athletics into the overall student experience, LEFT; OPPOSITE: Alice Creed ’24 takes the women’s track and field team to new heights during a meet in the Alumni Field House, TOP ; and squash player Quinton Crawford ’23 challenges an opponent from Vassar, BOTTOM.

“A student who’s healthy in mind

and body

…

and provided with opportunities to exercise and de-stress, they perform better in the classroom and better in life. Athletics is here to support everyone. The plan is meant to make that more transparent. ”

—

ERIN SCHONEVELD, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES AND VISUAL STUDIES

“ We want everyone to feel included and empowered by this plan.” —KIRA CHANEY ’27

A THREE-PRONGED APPROACH Ultimately, all that research laid the foundation for the plan’s vision statement: “To be a premier NCAA DIII athletic department producing champions in academics, athletics, and ethical leadership while fostering positive and inclusive communities.”

Achieving that vision relies on three main pillars.

1

ELEVATING THE STUDENT EXPERIENCE

The overarching concept for this pillar is that health and wellness aren’t just something varsity athletes focus on. It was important that this plan ultimately benefit the entire campus.

That means improving the sports and wellness offerings for the college’s physical education requirement and creating a position known as “Assistant Athletic Director for Recreation, Wellness, and Physical Education” to help with that programming. That future hire would also improve the organization and development of intramural sports like basketball and club sports like badminton, crew, and ultimate frisbee.

Those nonvarsity teams and leagues currently operate within Student Engagement, but having them under the Athletics umbrella will make sure they’re getting the same attention varsity sports receive.

The hope is, rather than separate athletics from the liberal arts education, to make it a central focus. Health and wellness for both body and mind are now codified in

the plan as priorities, and they’re not just offered to those who play on a varsity team.

“We really wanted to make sure athletics at Haverford is not only providing an exceptional experience for the varsity student-athletes who compete in intercollegiate sports, we [also] want to give a more holistic, comprehensive program that looks at health and wellness across the board,” says McKnight.

That’s how Kira Chaney ’27, a member of the women’s volleyball team and of the athletics plan committee, sees it. She pointed out that sharing the same gym and facilities with the entire student body can be intimidating for nonathletes, but the plan is meant to break down that barrier.

“We want everyone to feel included and empowered by this plan so that the campus feels more accessible and less intimidating to everyone and provides multiple spaces for all of us as students to build healthy, lifelong habits and find our own ways of staying active that fit our interests,” she says.

Erin Schoneveld, an associate professor of East Asian languages and cultures as well as visual studies at Haverford, was involved in the formation of the plan as part of her job as faculty athletics representative to the NCAA, a position that earned her NCAA Faculty Athletics Representative Association (FARA) Newcomer of the Year in Division III this fall. From her perspective, the plan is all about making athletics, health, and well-being less separate from the idea of a well-rounded education.

Haverford’s winning strategy includes good sportsmanship and infrastructure, FROM LEFT: tennis player

Abhinav Nallapareddy ’23 shakes his opponent’s hand, soccer player Celia Page ’23 is cheered on by her teammates; Walton Field, which is natural grass, hosts the soccer teams, but additional artificial turf fields are part of the plan.

“It’s really making a case for the importance of athletics in a liberal arts education,” she says. “So not just thinking about the importance if you’re a varsity athlete, but in all facets of your life here at Haverford. A student who’s healthy in mind and body, who’s eating well, sleeping well, and provided with opportunities to exercise and de-stress, they perform better in the classroom and better in life. Athletics is here to support everyone. The plan is meant to make that more transparent.”

2

BUILDING STRONG AND INCLUSIVE COMMUNITIES

Much like the College’s academic mission, the plan seeks to support the campus community and the one that surrounds it. There’s a focus on continuing to “bridge social divides” with learning and development opportunities for all, and improving communication with alumni and student-athlete families. There’s also an emphasis on engaging with the community surrounding the College on the Main Line. The goal? To instill “a sense of pride across campus and in our surrounding communities,” as the plan states.

“One of our recent graduates started a program called Ardmore Hoops that welcomes middle school-aged students from multiple districts to campus for a basketball lesson, an academic lesson, and a meal,” says Lynch. “We’re allowing our students to lead in that way and engage with the community.”

The College also wants to strengthen its relation-

ship with the Centennial Conference and the NCAA. One proposed way to do this is by forming an Athletics Advisory Board, which would liaise between the collegiate governing body and the College, helping, as Lynch says, “serve as a recommending body for intercollegiate athletics on policies and procedures that relate specifically to student-athlete welfare and the success of Haverford’s varsity athletic programs.”

3

MAXIMIZING OUR COMPETITIVE SUCCESS

To ensure Haverford Athletics’ continued success, the action plan focuses on recruiting, expanding personnel, and making improvements to facilities all over campus. It’s all about bringing in more trainers, having full-time assistant coaches for every team, and creating more artificial turf fields.

“We have one lighted artificial turf field and that is where several teams are trying to get practice and competition in,” Lynch says. One or two more fields would allow multiple teams to play simultaneously, which would streamline the experience for students and allow them to keep up with their academic work without having to change the times they need to practice.

“Scheduling can be difficult for student-athletes at Haverford, and having one turf field is a big scheduling barrier,” says Zoey Despines ’25, a member of the field hockey team and the plan’s steering committee. “More fields will allow student-athletes to be fully present for both classes and practice without conflict.”

The plan includes a long list of projects, including replacing the tennis courts, adding seating to the softball field, and building an expanded fitness center at the Gardner Integrated Athletic Center.

GOOD WINNERS

Along with these three pillars, another consideration has involved how to reconcile an athletics plan that’s all about winning with Haverford’s nonhierarchical ethos. The answer, for many, is included in—and central to—the College’s strategic plan, Haverford 2030. “Boldness and humility,” says McKnight, “aren’t antithetical. We can be proud of our accomplishments and wave the banner about what we do, but it’s not a winat-all costs mentality,” he says.

Ultimately, the Athletic Action Plan encompasses the desire to win, in myriad ways—both on and off the field. “Being able to excel academically and athletically is what this action plan speaks to,” says Lynch. “It’s almost holistically excellent. You can be proud of who you are and the things you can do and be a community member. You can be fierce on the field of competition. You can be all of those things.”

Jack Coleman wanted to experience blue collar life, and even what it was like to live on the streets, firsthand. CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Coleman in a New York City subway; the photo of him collecting trash that made the front page of The New York Times; and putting in long hours as a street sweeper.

Working Class

FIFTY YEARS AGO, former Haverford president Jack Coleman spent his sabbatical working manual labor jobs across the country, then wrote a book about it. As the golden anniversary of its publication passes, his work is still as poignant as ever.

BY LINI S. KADABA

When he was 12 years old, Steve Coleman P’27 picked up The New York Times outside his mother’s Long Island home. Splashed across the front page was a photo of a man who looked like his father, John “Jack” R. Coleman, president of Haverford College from 1967 to 1977—except this man was dressed as a garbage collector, a trashcan hoisted on his shoulder.

“I was disbelieving initially,” recalls Steve Coleman, now 64 and executive director of the nonprofit Washington Parks and People in Washington, D.C. But then he realized that this is what his father had been doing on his sabbatical over the previous few months of 1973. For those who knew Jack, it made sense. “He liked to dive into things and try to walk in the shoes of others,” says Steve.

Jack Coleman turned this and other working-class experiences into the 1974 book Blue-Collar Journal: A College President’s Sabbatical, which chronicles his leave from Haverford to explore jobs around America and what he saw as the

Jack Coleman saw the divide between academia and manual labor as “troubling.”

troubling divide between academia and manual labor.

Part diary, part memoir, part philosophical musings on the dignity of physical work, class consciousness, and ambivalence toward time off, the book was a sensation. It garnered attention in major newspapers and national notoriety for Coleman, who died in 2016 at the age of 95. In 1976, Blue-Collar Journal was turned into a made-for-television movie, The Secret Life of John Chapman, which starred Ralph Waite, best known as the father on The Waltons

Fifty years after the book’s publication, the legacy of Coleman’s experiment lives on in profound ways, having impacted both individuals and the Haverford educational experience.

Students, including Coleman’s children, took what they considered transformative time off, following his example. Coleman gave legitimacy—through words, but more importantly, through actions—to experiential learning and its value in the context of a liberal arts

“Haverford is not just passing on information. Haverford is doing something much deeper in lifting up models and possibilities of how we can live in this world.” — STEVE COLEMAN P’27

education. “He felt we are a very divided society,” Steve Coleman says, “and that we all have so much to learn from each other.”

|| Undercover Boss

Jack Coleman cited an incident that took place on May 8, 1970, when construction workers attacked peace marchers in the Wall Street area in New York City, as inspiring his journey. He wrote that he wanted to “understand more of what both sides were saying and feeling.”

“I wanted to get away from the world of words and politics and parties—the things a president does,” he explained in that 1973 Times story. “As a college president you begin to take yourself very seriously and think you have power you don’t. You forget elementary things about people. I wanted to relearn things I’d forgotten.”

In the spring semester of 1973, Coleman, who also chaired the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, labored as a ditch digger in Atlanta, a dishwasher and short-order cook in Boston, and, yes, a trashman in Rockville, Md.—each interrupted after a couple of weeks by Federal Reserve meetings he had to attend. He once switched from his grimy work clothes to a suit and tie in a gas station bathroom.

To maintain authenticity, Coleman had told no one of his experiments other than his eldest son, John Coleman ’75, then a student at the College and now a retired corporate lawyer. None of his colleagues at Haverford or the Reserve knew, and neither did his ex-wife or four other children.

Jack Coleman adopted the style of undercover reportage by the likes of George Orwell, who chronicled poverty after living it firsthand in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). The record Coleman kept of his experiences laid the groundwork for others, serving as a precursor to Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America.

“[Blue-Collar Journal] was a remarkable book,” says Steve Klineberg ’61 P’86, a professor emeritus of sociology at Rice University who served on Haverford’s Board of Managers for two decades. “It really captured the two worlds he moved back and forth in. The work of a garbage collector is just as dignified and meaningful as the work of the chairman of the Board.”

|| Experience vs. Education

Though Coleman’s field work may seem almost conventional now, it was groundbreaking at the time. “Experiential learning was in the air,” says Linda Gerstein, a professor of history who knew Coleman

Steve Coleman P’27, BELOW, holds a first edition of his father’s book, which bears a personal inscription to him, RIGHT. He has tried to carry on some of the work his father started when he wrote Blue-Collar Journal.

Working Class

well, having served on the search committee that hired him in 1967 and then on the Board of Managers when he resigned in 1977 over the refusal to allow full coeducation. (He was awarded an honorary degree from the College in 1980.) “In the mid-’70s, Haverford was introducing the idea that it’s valuable to do hands-on learning,” Gerstein says. “We were talking about being other than academic and theoretical in the classroom. What Jack was doing was exactly that.”

Coleman’s exercise, in fact, predated the College’s Eighth Dimension (8D), an office started in 1978 to integrate experiential learning into the curricula and culture. It was an important addition to Haverford’s education dimensions, made up of natural science, quantitative analysis, social and behavioral sciences, laboratory, history, literature, and field/artistic experience, according to the College. (In 2018, 8D was renamed the Marilou Allen Office of Service and Community Collaboration in honor of the founding director of the Women’s Center and the College’s Serendipity Day Camp. Allen herself was deeply inspired by Coleman’s

sabbatical and book, as she reminded him when they last saw each other at Alumni Weekend 2016.)

Coleman wrote that he found manual labor freeing and a way to escape the isolation of the “ivory tower.” He regularly urged students to experience the whole world, to cross lines of class and race and occupation. “Most students who have interrupted the long march from kindergarten to graduate school,” he wrote, “seem to get more out of college than those who go straight through in lockstep.”

It’s an idea that echoes the concept of “the invisible college,” a term that historian and Quaker scholar Rufus Jones used in his 1933 book Haverford College: A History and an Interpretation to explain the influence of learning outside books and classrooms. “Throughout its history,” Jones wrote, “the invisible college has always outrun the visible one.”

As a political science sophomore at Haverford, David Hackett ’76 was one of the students who heeded Coleman’s advice. He was eager to take time off from his education to broaden his horizons and challenge himself. When he told his parents, they were taken aback and uneasy. Coleman called them and reassured them, and Hackett spent the year in Washington, interning with a member of Congress and at the Environmental Protection Agency. “It was life-changing,” he says. The experience led him to pursue environmental law, and today he is a senior counsel at the Chicago-based firm Baker McKenzie.

Steve Coleman also took his father’s advice to heart, taking time to volunteer at the American Friends Service Committee in New York and leading a statewide effort to pass a resolution calling for a bilateral freeze on the nuclear arms race. He started out studying American history at Haverford and transferred to New York

Even after his term as president of Haverford was over, Jack Coleman continued to work the occasional blue collar job, often those that were related in some way to causes he was fighting for. While working on prison reform, for instance, he stood in as a guard at a penitentiary.

University, but eventually left school to pursue a job as a Washington lobbyist opposing the arms race.

Although Steve Coleman didn’t complete his degree at Haverford, he credits the College with helping him find his path. “Haverford is not just passing on information,” he says. “Haverford is doing something much deeper in lifting up models and possibilities of how we can live in this world.” Today, Steve Coleman’s organization leads greening initiatives across Washington, D.C., while supporting marginalized communities. He says he feels that he carries on some of the work his father started.

“To use the Quaker expression,” he says, “let the light within shine out and be the change you want to be.”

|| Living His Values

As president of Haverford, Jack Coleman was a man of the people who insisted students call him by his first name and who opened the President’s House for teas and classes. He also famously shut down the College for a day in 1970 to take some 700 students, professors, board members, and alumni to Washington to speak out about the Vietnam War.

His decisions were not always popular. Some faculty thought his sabbatical should have been spent on deep economic study. “Some professors thought they should get more attention,” says Joe Quinlan ’75, who briefly served as Coleman’s assistant before becoming a journalist and then producer for PBS’s MacNeil/Lehrer Report and NewsHour. Coleman, he says, preferred paying attention to the grounds crew and kitchen staff. “He knew them by their first names.”

Post-Haverford, Coleman continued to dip into the work-a-day lives of others, including as a street sweeper in New York. “He wasn’t doing it for show,” Quinlan, who lives in Manhattan, says, remembering the time he went to a cocktail party at Coleman’s apartment and met his sanitation worker buddies. “There are jobs that make the world happen—and we don’t hold up enough. [Blue-Collar Journal] opened my eyes, and they continue to be open.”

Others who knew Coleman also saw firsthand his authenticity. “Jack had empathy,” says Ghebre S. Mehreteab ’72 of West Chester, Pa., who was awarded an honorary degree from Haverford in 2007. “The word is overused. But Jack had it. It was not fake.”

That quality, Mehreteab says, allowed Coleman to move seamlessly between the worlds of academia and labor. It also reflected the way he treated students. In 1971, Mehreteab led the Black Students’ League in protesting the administration for what it argued was

“There are jobs that make the world happen— and we don’t hold up enough. [Blue-Collar Journal] opened my eyes, and they continue to be open.”— JOE QUINLAN ’75

lack of support for Black Fords. Mehreteab remembers meeting with Coleman over the group’s demands and pointing out that the College lacked a Black house, Black counselors, and Black professors.

“He was not defensive,” says Mehreteab, who currently advises the Ford Foundation. “Others were saying, ‘What do you want? We’re not racist. We’re Quakers, after all.’ Jack seemed to get it. Jack seemed to put the burden on the College.”

After Coleman stepped down from Haverford, he continued to practice what he preached. While working on prison reform, he insisted on stints as a prison guard and even spent time incarcerated to experience living conditions firsthand. He lived on the streets of New York for 10 days one cold winter when his foundation was seeking to respond to skyrocketing homelessness, and served for years as an Auxiliary New York City Police captain and emergency medical technician, patrolling the neighborhood just below Harlem as he sought ways to tackle crime and violence. Later, he became a justice of the peace, presiding over some of the nation’s first same-sex civil unions.

All these years later, Coleman’s deeply held belief that blue collar work should be held up as full of dignity, just like any other work, may remain elusive, but is nevertheless a worthwhile goal. Though his father pursued many different occupations, ultimately, Steve Coleman says, he was doing the same work throughout his life: “Trying to have ideals be something you can actually live.”

Journalist Lini S. Kadaba is a frequent contributor who lives in Newtown Square, Pa.

FUTURES BUILDING

Through Brooklyn Woods, Scott Peltzer ’82 is teaching job hunters a lost art and self-sustaining skills for life. BY

BEN SEAL | PHOTOGRAPHY BY GABBI BASS

The wooden benches outside the Oculus at the World Trade Center bend and swoop as if they’re in motion. There are a dozen of them, each built by hand, bringing warmth and comfort to an otherwise austere pedestrian plaza.

On the day the benches were installed this spring, passersby stopped to admire their beauty. Here was real skill on display: Each of the black locust boards had to be steamed at just the right temperature and bent to shape to achieve the benches’ distinctive curve.

For Scott Peltzer ’82, director of Brooklyn Woods, the nonprofit that partnered with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey on the project, the moment was less about the benches than it was about the group of individuals who had built them—all of them formerly incarcerated, most of them brand new to the process of woodworking. Just 10 weeks earlier, when they began this project, they were rookies. Most had hardly even touched a hammer. But with Peltzer’s training and guidance, they quickly developed the skill to create something special. As the seven men and one woman set to work assembling the benches on-site, Peltzer felt

SCOTT PELTZER ’82 FOUNDED Brooklyn Woods, in part, to fill the void of vocational and technical training that schools used to offer. Students get hands-on experience building funiture, even if they’ve never picked up a hammer.

Building Futures

A TEAM OF EIGHT BROOKLYN WOODS STUDENTS, most of whom were novice woodworkers, made and installed 12 of these black locust benches at the World Trade Center Oculus. The boards used to assemble the benches had to be steamed and bent to achieve their distinctive curve.

palpable excitement from them. Then, as compliments from strangers came rolling in, he says, “You could see all the participants well up with pride.”

This was Peltzer’s ultimate goal when he co-founded Brooklyn Woods 25 years ago. His intention was that the nonprofit would offer free woodworking and fabrication training to New Yorkers who faced barriers to other kinds of employment. Peltzer ended up not just building furniture, but building up people. Today, through hands-on education, he and his colleagues teach students an appreciation for craft, the knowledge to build things by hand, and the tools to find stable work.

SAWDUST AND SECOND CHANCES

Eric Pagan was among the group who built and installed the Oculus benches. Just months removed from an eight-year prison sentence when he joined Brooklyn Woods, Pagan had carpentry experience but had never been in a woodshop before. The chance to learn a new trade—one that would let him put his hands to work—caught his attention. He was accepted into Brooklyn Woods’ selective program (only 15 out of around 50 applicants make the cut) and got to work. By the end of the project, Pagan knew just how much he had to offer.

Woods program, students must go through a series of interviews and tests to ensure they’re ready to take advantage of the program.

Peltzer and his colleagues at Brooklyn Woods teach students how to use handheld power tools and standard woodworking machinery, such as a drill press, band saw, planer, and jointer. They also provide education in math and measurements, as well as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration certification required to work on a job site. Perhaps as important as anything else, the training, which typically lasts seven weeks and is held quarterly, includes a job-readiness component that addresses resume building and workplace basics. It culminates in a series of mock interviews

“We’re really trying to place people into careers—jobs that have a career ladder and that can put them on the road to self-sustainability, a living wage, and support for their families.”

—Scott Peltzer ’82

In their 10 weeks with Peltzer, Pagan and his classmates learned the safety, measurement, and hand skills necessary to find full-time employment in woodworking, cabinetmaking, or fabrication, all while building pieces as elegant as the Oculus benches. The process of turning raw wood into a refined finished product—creating something out of nothing—was restorative for Pagan. “I felt like part of me was being recreated,” he says. “Going through this program, I was revived.” Now, he can see that he has a place in society. “There’s so much out there for me,” he says.

Pagan is in good company. More than 1,000 students have graduated from Brooklyn Woods’ training program since Peltzer, a furniture maker and teacher, started the organization with Patricia Manzione, who later departed. Many of the students who walk into Peltzer’s shop have an inconsistent work history, low level of education, or experience with the criminal justice system in their recent past—the types of employment barriers that New York’s workforce development funding aims to help people overcome. To be accepted into the Brooklyn

with employers—some of whom are actually ready to hire. Brooklyn Woods supports students with job placement for two years after graduation.

“We’re really trying to place people into careers— jobs that have a career ladder and that can put them on the road to self-sustainability, a living wage, and support for their families,” Peltzer says. “That is of paramount importance to us.”

CARVING A NEW PATH

Peltzer grew up making things with his hands in Eugene, Ore., where his favorite high school classes all took place in a shop. He majored in art history at Haverford—a precursor, in his mind, to a career in architecture—and structured his independent studies around furniture making and wood carving. After college, he moved to New York, where he apprenticed with a cabinetmaker for a few years before earning a master of fine arts in sculpture at the State University of New York at Purchase in Westchester County. He spent time teaching and working at an architectural millwork shop, until he was hired in the early 1990s to develop a woodworking training program for a Bronx-based nonprofit that made furniture out of recycled pallets.

Through that experience and his time in the profession, Peltzer realized there was a dearth of vocational training available for young woodworkers. As high schools became laser-focused on preparing students for college, the classes and programs that had once inspired him were going by the wayside, even in his own high school. He still remembers walking into schools in New York with “beautiful metal and woodshops” that lay vacant. “There was a real need to be filled,” he says, and he stepped up to do so.

Peltzer launched Brooklyn Woods as a nonprofit in 2000, and he now trains 60 people a year in the program. In 2006, it merged with Brooklyn Workforce Innovations, a separate nonprofit that now houses eight different job training programs with similar aims.

Early on in its run, Brooklyn Woods partnered with Habitat for Humanity to install kitchen cabinets in the housing units it was building, which led Brooklyn Woods to spin off a for-profit arm—Peltzer calls it a “social venture”—that builds accessible kitchens and bathrooms for developers across the city. Combined with the training program, it’s expanded the organization’s reach and given graduates a place to continue honing their skills for pay. Since 2009, it has paid close to $1.2 million in wages to 139 Brooklyn Woods graduates on the path toward more sustainable long-term work, including Pagan, who is now part of an eight-person team fabricating 68 kitchens for an affordable housing development.

Jeff Barron, whose company, Barronarts, builds custom stretcher frames, strainers, and panels for artists, museums, and galleries, has been hiring Brooklyn Woods graduates for more than 15 years. Six of his eight current employees are alumni of the program, which Barron says is “an incredibly direct conduit” between developing woodworkers and the businesses that need their skills. And its emphasis on those who might otherwise struggle to find work makes it all the more meaningful.

“To be able to work with unemployed, underemployed, and formerly incarcerated New Yorkers who are

really striving to find a new career path for themselves— many of them with almost unimaginable hardships thrown in their way—there’s nothing more rewarding than being a part of something like that,” Barron says. “Brooklyn Woods is an extraordinary organization and the kind of nonprofit that all should aspire to be.”

For Pamela Jennett, who graduated from Brooklyn Woods 10 years ago and has worked at Barronarts for nearly all that time, the training was a pathway to professional stability after what she calls a “varied and nontraditional” career before the program. Brooklyn Woods’ target population includes those facing longterm unemployment, Peltzer says. Two years ago, Jennett worked on the handcrafted wood panel that holds Michelle Obama’s White House portrait. “I was honored to be a part of that,” she says.

“[Brooklyn Woods] allows people to see that there are options,” she continues. “It allows people to survive and fend for themselves.”

ELEVATING THE CRAFT

Peltzer’s journey to Brooklyn Woods—and the change it’s brought to so many lives—began during his time at Haverford. A photography course with William Williams, the Audrey A. and John L. Dusseau Professor in the Humanities and a professor of fine arts, served as his first critical interaction with the arts. Peltzer went on to take several more classes with Williams, who helped him engage with making things “in a more intellectual, thoughtful, and creative way,” he says. The experience inspired him to pursue an MFA, and laid the groundwork for a career as a teacher.

In addition to his work with Brooklyn Woods, Peltzer has been a part-time assistant professor at the New School’s Parsons School of Design for 27 years, where he teaches model-making and woodworking. While he enjoys both vocations, he says, “Understanding college kids and the privileges they have does really drive me to stay with the population of Brooklyn Woods.”

When Peltzer decided to study art

Peltzer realized there was a dearth of vocational training available for young woodworkers. As high schools became laser-focused on preparing students for college, the classes and programs that had once inspired him were going by the wayside, even in his own high school.

PELTZER SHOWS BROOKLYN WOODS graduate Gina Colon how to apply a white wash finish to a custom kitchen panel. Peltzer and graduates of Brooklyn Woods who are building kitchen cabinet doors for a supportive housing unit check the dimensions, BELOW LEFT ; constructing picture frames is one of the basic projects that teaches students how to use a table saw, BELOW RIGHT .

Building Futures

history at Haverford, an adviser urged him to enter an upper-level seminar on William Morris, the 19th-century English designer, craftsman, and poet whose romantic notions about the meaning of labor and the importance of craft took root in Peltzer’s mind. He was inspired by conversations in the class about the nobility of working with one’s hands, and carried with him that sense of purpose as he embarked on his career. His time at Haverford was “a real awakening,” he says.

“If you asked my family what my love language is they’d probably say acts of service, so in some ways, I was predisposed for this kind of work,” Peltzer says, “but being at Haverford and drinking in the philosophy and culture of the place really solidified a lot of things for me. It really pointed me toward a career of service.”

SPRINGBOARD TO SERVICE

T“If you asked my family what my love language is, they’d probably say acts of service, so in some ways, I was predisposed for this kind of work. Being at Haverford and drinking in the philosophy and culture of the place really ... pointed me toward a career of service.” —Scott Peltzer ’82

and the social venture, he’s a busy man. But he still shows up every day ready to make a difference.

he hundreds of people who have learned at his hand and used their training as a springboard to a new career demonstrate the results of that service. Although seven weeks is just “a heartbeat” compared with the years-long apprenticeships common in Europe, Peltzer says, his students walk away with all the fundamentals necessary to grow into their new trade.

Natasha Goodlow is one of many who have found stability following their time at Brooklyn Woods. Like Peltzer, she was interested in making things from a young age, and fell in love with woodworking in middle school. In a woodshop, she found herself fulfilled, working with her hands and putting in the effort to hone her craft. In her early 30s, she was working as a hotel engineer at a major chain in San Antonio when the pandemic hit. She was laid off, along with nearly all her colleagues, and forced to confront an uncertain professional future. She moved to New York City in November 2020 to live with her now-wife, in need of work. After a long stretch of unemployment and on the verge of a deep depression, she learned about Brooklyn Woods and eagerly applied.

Now, Goodlow is the foreperson at Elle Woodworking, which mills wood for commercial and residential artisans and was one of three companies to offer her full-time employment before she had even graduated. She’s fallen in love with woodworking all over again, and is passionate enough that it feels more like play than work, she says.

Peltzer’s character shines through just as much as his craft, Goodlow says. Between the training program

“For them to provide this space to go, these people to talk to, these skills to hone, and then the job—my dream job—they change people’s lives,” Goodlow says. “I don’t know if they truly realize what they do for people. I’m living proof that they change lives.”

Although the training lasts just seven weeks (Pagan’s cohort was an exception) and is designed to get students working for pay as soon as possible, Peltzer says his students tend to bond quickly. “It started to feel kind of like a family for me, and family’s very important,” Pagan says. “This program helped fill a gap for me.” Coming into the shop every day felt something like therapy, he says, and in the end it instilled him with hope and confidence.

Brooklyn Woods’ work—its ability to inspire that kind of change in students—is about much more than technical training. “It all starts with a culture of acceptance and respect,” Peltzer says. Over the course of the program, that foundation builds camaraderie as each group of students takes on the personality of its individual members. By the end, “graduations here can be emotional,” he says.

So, too, is the experience of seeing what his students go off to accomplish after completing the program—the sense of joy Peltzer feels when he walks into someone else’s shop and sees several of his graduates working there, years later, and taking on positions of authority and responsibility.

“It’s a great feeling to be able to see the progress and the changes that we’ve been able to make in people’s lives,” he says. “It’s super rewarding and makes it all worthwhile.”

Ben Seal is a freelance writer who covers psychedelics, environmental policy, and academic research.

HAVERFORD IN SEASON

PHOTO: HOLDEN BLANCO ’17

ROADS TAKEN and Not Taken

By Eric Jimenez ’04

Shortly after attending my class’s 20th reunion this past June, I returned to campus to attend the week-long Quaker conference known as “The Gathering.” It was organized by Friends General Conference, the national organization of Quaker meetings in North America, and drew about 1,000 Quakers to campus.

“The Gathering” is a time for retreat, reflection, connection, and fellowship among Quakers from all over.

I was assigned to Gummere, which happened to be my first-year dormitory back in 2000–2001. Returning to the cinderblock residence hall brought back fond memories of late-night chats with fellow hallmates from my Customs group that year. That entire week on campus, I slept in my firstyear dorm, ate in the Dining Center, wrote in the (new) main library, and walked the 2.5-mile nature trail every morning, reminiscing about my time as a student at Haverford, where I was first introduced to Quakerism.

Haverford was my first-choice school, and I know I am blessed and privileged to have spent my undergraduate days here. Haverford’s motto is: “Not more learned, but imbued with better learning.” My friends, classmates, professors, dean, and support staff created the conditions for such a special and nurturing learning environment. It is here where the values of trust, concern, and respect for others were ingrained in me, and they continue to impact how I interact with people. As such, many of my peers from Haverford have become friends for life.

I attended Quaker meeting for worship only three times during my time at Haverford: the first during my Customs Week, the second during a memorial service for a friend’s Honor Code Orienteer, and the third on September 11.

Sitting in silence for 40 minutes

was initially uncomfortable because I didn’t know what I was supposed to do or think during this time, but indeed, it laid a foundation. Many community decisions were made by committee consensus. Some professors began their classes with moments of silence. If you saw an injustice, you were encouraged to speak up. Observing the Honor Code promoted integrity in this academic setting, thus creating an environment where we succeeded in an honest and fair way.

When I graduated from Haverford, I thought that was going to be my last interaction with Quakers. I majored in Spanish with a concentration in Latin American and Iberian studies and was passionate about sharing my knowledge through teaching. I was excited when I landed my first job after college as a sabbatical replacement at a boarding school in rural Connecticut. After that one year of teaching, I pursued my masters in Spanish at Middlebury, spending a summer in Vermont and an academic year in Madrid.

When I returned to the United

States, I accepted an offer to teach at a Friends school in Philadelphia. While not under the care of a Friends meeting, the school was steeped in the Quaker testimonies of simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality, and stewardship. In my eight years at this Friends school, I attended weekly Quaker meeting for worship with my colleagues and students. Sitting in silence for 40 minutes with the occasional message provided me an oasis of peace I didn’t know I needed in my life. When I left classroom teaching and moved to northern New Jersey to be closer to family, I missed the Quaker tradition.

Realizing the faith tradition I was born and raised in was no longer speaking to my condition, I longed to be part of a Quaker community. I found a meeting only 15 minutes north of where I currently reside and started attending Quaker meeting for worship every Sunday. Four years later, at the start of the 2020 pandemic, I was nominated to be clerk of meeting. In that capacity, I chair the monthly business meetings and help discern where spirit is moving the meeting. I have overseen and witnessed the growth of our meeting and how it has proven to be vital and viable when many Quaker meetings around the country are shrinking in size. It’s a true honor to serve my Quaker community this way.

Attending “The Gathering” in June was a lovely homecoming to where my Quaker journey began 24 years ago. It reminded me of such an impressionable chapter of my life. I consider Quakerism a fundamental part of my identity and I am grateful to Haverford for being the stepping stone to a life with Friends and for shaping my life profoundly.

Class News

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Due to privacy concerns, the Class News section is not included in the digital edition of Haverford Magazine.

Author James McBride had a Q&A with students prior to his talk in Marshall Auditorium earlier this fall.

FORDS IN THE NEWS

JULY

Reuters reported that Thomas M. Dijwandono ’00 was named Indonesia’s Deputy Finance Minister.

AUGUST

Max Weintraub ’93, president and CEO of the Allentown Art Museum, got a spotlight in The New York Times for his leadership in relinquishing a valuable 16th-century portrait that had entered the market when its original owners, a Jewish family, were forced to flee the Nazis.

SEPTEMBER

The Guardian featured distinguished playwright Ken Ludwig ’72’s £1m donation to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust to save Hall’s Croft, the home of William Shakespeare’s daughter in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. It was the largest private donation in the Trust’s history.

NOVEMBER

The New York Times reported that after co-leading President-Elect Donald Trump’s transition team, Howard Lutnick ’83 will be nominated to serve as the nation’s next Commerce Secretary.

Due to privacy concerns, the Class News section is not included in the digital edition of Haverford Magazine.

Class News

Alumni Obituaries

47

Dick Rivers died peacefully on Feb. 18, weeks before his 99th birthday. After Haverford, Rivers studied and taught physics at Texas A&M University before returning to Louisville, Ky., where he grew up. He worked at the American Air Filter Company designing air filtration and cleaning systems and eventually became director of research. He was a fellow of the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air Conditioning Engineers and the author of more than 30 technical publications. Rivers was an intrepid traveler who conversed in French, German, Spanish, and Italian, while also picking up some Greek, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, and Swahili. His deep knowledge of history, art, literature, and science made him a remarkable tour guide for his companions. Until late in life, Rivers was an avid runner and outdoorsman who loved to sail and backpack. His devotion to his wife, Martha, especially after she suffered a stroke, inspired those around him. Rivers was predeceased by Martha; their son Bruce Bardin; and siblings including Joe Rivers ’37. He is survived by sons Robert Bardin and Douglas Rivers and by three grandchildren.

PLEASE SEND ALUMNI OBITUARIES to: alumni@haverford.edu. Or, mail to : Haverford College c/o Alumni and Constituent Engagement, 370 Lancaster Ave., Haverford, PA 19041

50 Jim Wood died on Aug. 11 in Montana, where he had lived since last year with his son and daughter-inlaw. He served on the Haverford College Board of Managers and was a member of the Corporation for many years. Wood joined the United States Navy Reserve before college, and later studied at New York University and the University of Michigan while working at the Bank of New York; Prescott, Ball and Turben; and Smith Barney until retiring in 2002. In addition to Haverford, he spent years on the boards of Bryn Mawr College, the Kellogg Foundation, the American Bible Society (of which he was president for 10 years), and other organizations. In 2005, Wood and his wife moved from Mount Kisco, N.Y., his hometown, to Sleepy Hollow, N.Y., where the couple were founding members of the Kendal on Hudson retirement community. Wood enjoyed baseball, tennis, skydiving, and rafting, and loved nothing more than to spend time with family and friends, traveling the world to see many of them. He was predeceased by his wife of 70 years, Frances “Twink,” and is survived by their daughter, Emily Crofoot; son Steve; six grandchildren; and several great-grandchildren. His father was Levi Wood 1896 and his grandfather, James Wood 1859

52 Peter Kohler, 95, of Bryn Mawr, Pa., died at his home on May 27. Born in Stuttgart, Germany, he earned a medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania in 1956. He was predeceased by his beloved

wife, Marjorie. Kohler is survived by his daughters, Ellen, Karen Elbert, and Susan Patterson; seven grandchildren; and a great grandchild.

54 Fredric Jameson died on Sept. 22 at his home in Killingworth, Conn. He was 90. Jameson was a prolific author, professor, and influential literary critic whose work on Marxism, postmodernity, and capitalism is world-renowned. After earning his undergraduate degree in English from Haverford, the Cleveland native went on to get a doctorate in literature from Yale. Throughout his long teaching career, he held positions at Yale, Harvard, the University of California, and Duke University, where he was a professor of comparative literature and the chair of the Duke Center for Critical Theory’s Master of Arts program at the time of his death. Jameson authored more than 30 books, including Marxism and Form, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, and The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present , which was released in October. He also contributed to many journals, and some of his writings have become required reading for graduate students. He is survived by his wife, Susan Willis, and three daughters, Charlotte, Jennifer, and Cassie.

Rod Rothermel, 91, of Newtown Square, Pa., died on April 26. He was a beloved husband, father, brother, and grandfather who served his country for several years as a

Alumni Obituaries

military intelligence specialist in the U.S. Army. Rothermel was an active member of the Hearth Club of the Union League of Philadelphia, the Right Angle Club, and St. Luke Lutheran Church. He also served on the board of Muhlenberg College. He is survived by his wife, Paula Cucinotta; his daughters, Kristin (Rothermel) Edwards ’86, Lenore Spohn, and Megan Donadio; and six grandchildren.

56Charlie Lane died July 10 at age 90 from colon cancer diagnosed earlier in the year. A lifelong Quaker, he served as a conscientious objector in Austria before starting his career in the U.S. with an industrial scale company and, later, a chemical company. Both roles afforded him travel opportunities to more than 25 countries altogether, where he put his admirable language skills to use. He met his wife, Marga, in Germany, and the couple settled in New Jersey. They later moved to Lancaster, Pa., where he became a stalwart of the Lancaster Friends Meeting and the local peace movement. He loved nature and could build anything from wood or metal, but his greatest joy was connecting with people of all sorts, often bonding over his knowledge of politics and history, extraordinary memory for names and dates, and quirky interests like the sport of cricket. He is survived by Marga; sons Dave Lane ’92 and Daniel; and two grandchildren. He was part of a four-generation, 112-year family tradition at Haverford, including father Richard Lane ’28, great-grandfather Charles Bredé 1880, and brother Dick Lane ’53, who predeceased him; as well as brother Pete Lane ’62, P’92, and nephew Ben Lane ’92, who survive him.

Lewis Woodham, 89, beloved husband, father, community member, and recycling coach, died July 16. Following draftee service as an army specialist in social services at Fort Lee, Va., and in Dallas, Texas, he completed a master’s degree in social work at the University at Buffalo in 1961. He began a social work career with the New York State Dept. of Social Services and Division for Youth, working in both institutional and community-based services for 32 years. With his wife, Ann, he

IN MEMORIAM

ROBERT STIEFEL

Robert Stiefel, an assistant professor of German at Haverford from 1969 to 1975, died on July 20. He was 83. Stiefel graduated from Oberlin College and Harvard University, where he earned his Ph.D. studying Germanic languages and literature and music history. After his time as a professor, Stiefel obtained an M.Div. at Wisconsin’s Nashotah House Theological Seminary in 1978 and was ordained in 1979. In the decades that followed, he served as a priest, rector, chaplain, and teacher in Colorado and, later, New Hampshire.

“Throughout his life, Robert found ways to guide and help people, whether through pastoral care, activism, teaching, or friendship,” read an obituary provided by friends. “During their marriage of 52+ years, Robert and Jennifer explored the relationship between a gay man and a straight woman in love.” With the support of his wife, who was also a church leader, and other local clergy, Stiefel came out as gay in 1997. He had become an active supporter of LGBTQ+ rights in New Hampshire years earlier. Stiefel’s wife, Jennifer, predeceased him. He is survived by many nieces and nephews and their families.

retired to Chapel Hill, N.C., where he was passionately involved in community environmentalism. Woodham is survived by Ann; their children, Lilla, Daniel, and Stuart; and one grandchild.

57John Gruber, a retired professor of physics who achieved international recognition in laser and optical technology, died Jan. 23. For more than 52 years, he worked for the government, academic institutions, and private organizations, and earned numerous awards for his contributions to the field. One of his notable achievements was his research into night vision devices for the U.S. military. He worked on the Apollo moon missions for NASA, served in special operations for the U.S. assistant secretary of defense, and authored hundreds of articles, books, patents, grants, and contracts. He won the 1998 Outstanding World Leadership in Science Award from the Academy of Sciences in Poland. Gruber earned his Ph.D. in chemistry and chemical physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and worked briefly in Germany before continuing his academic and administrative career at universities across the U.S., including UCLA, Washington State, North Dakota State, Portland State, San Jose State, and the University of Texas. His many involvements outside of academia

included the Boy Scouts of America (he was an Eagle Scout), the symphony, community libraries, and the Presbyterian Church. He is survived by his wife of 63 years, Judith; three children; and three grandchildren.

58

William Bertolet died on April 27 at the age of 87. He earned an M.A. in art history from the University of Pennsylvania and lived for 50 years in his beloved home on Rittenhouse Square, which he shared with his late friend, David Crownover. Soon after graduation, Bertolet began working with Alfred Bullard, a Philadelphia antiques dealer specializing in English furniture. In the 1960s, he bought the company, which he owned and ran until retiring in 2014. Bertolet was one of the great gentlemen of the trade, exhibiting at major shows in their heyday, including Boston, Newport, Houston, and the Winter Antiques Show. He and Crownover were involved with the Ball in the Square and frequently entertained at their Rittenhouse home. Bertolet also participated in archeological dig expeditions in Egypt and the Near East organized by the Penn Museum. He was devoted to the opera and enjoyed attending the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. He made numerous and extensive visits to Europe that combined antiques buying with long-lasting friendships.

Alumni Obituaries

Bertolet was predeceased by his brother, Frederick Bertolet ’59. He is survived by siblings including brother John Bertolet ’62 and by many nieces and nephews.

62

John (Doc) Bower , age 83, died on July 12 at a hospice house in Ocean Pines, Md. He earned his M.D. at Jefferson Medical College and dedicated his professional career to bringing joy into the world as an OB-GYN in private practice in Wyomissing, Pa. He was the chief of gynecology at the Reading Hospital and Medical Center and a past president of the Berks County Medical Society. In his free time, he was a competitive powerlifter and enjoyed deep-sea fishing, golf, bridge, and reading. He was a cherished member of the Wicomico River Friends Meeting in Salisbury, Md. He is survived by his loving wife, Jill; his sons, John Bower ’93 and William; brothers including James Bower ’69; and three grandchildren.

64

Bill Macan died peacefully, surrounded by his family, on June 20. He graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1967, where he earned Order of the Coif honors and was an editor of the Law Review. He served as a clerk with the United States Tax Court before joining Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, where he spent more than 30 years, splitting his time between Philadelphia and New York and leaving as senior partner in 2000. Macan spent the final years of his career with international law firm Allen & Overy (now A&O Shearman) as senior partner and retired as counsel in 2007. He loved spending time with his family, particularly his adored grandchildren. He spent summers in Harvey Cedars on Long Beach Island, N.J., and winters skiing in Vermont. At the time of his death, Macan lived on the mountain at Sugarbush Resort in Waitsfield, Vt. Macan is survived by Jane, his wife of 58 years; his children, Sandi and Andy; and three grandchildren. His father was William Macan ’36.

71

Bob Schwartz died on Oct. 8 at his home in Center City, Philadelphia. He was 75. Schwartz, a longtime lawyer, author, lecturer, and visiting scholar, was

the co-founder and executive director emeritus of Juvenile Law Center, widely regarded as the nation’s oldest nonprofit public interest law firm for children. For nearly 50 years, he wrestled with issues surrounding juvenile incarceration, probation, foster care, and parental rights as he and the center represented children in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and the U.S. Supreme Court. At the 1996 conference for the National Association of Counsel for Children, he asked his colleagues: “What are we trying to achieve for children? What are we building?” His answer was “Each child’s case offered an opportunity for reform.” Schwartz’s work garnered accolades from the Philadelphia Bar Association, National Legal Aid and Defender Association, and the College, which bestowed upon him an honorary degree in 2011. He is survived by his sister, Lari, and other relatives. A celebration of his life was held at the College in late November.

75Harry Levit of Amherst, Mass., died peacefully on Aug. 12 at the age of 71. He played tennis at the College and remained an avid tennis player throughout most of his adult life. Upon graduating from Haverford, he worked as an intern with then President of the College John R. Coleman. This experience led Levit to attend the Graduate School of Education at Harvard, where he earned his master’s degree before joining Yale as assistant director in the Office of Undergraduate Admissions. He continued at Yale for the rest of his career, serving subsequently as associate director of admissions, and only taking a few years away while earning his doctorate in education at Harvard. He was dedicated to social justice and proud to be a voice for underrepresented, disadvantaged, and first-generation applicants. Despite his accomplishments, he was utterly unpretentious. He was soft-spoken, gentle, and patient until the end, despite his advancing Alzheimer’s dementia. Even when he could only speak a word or two, he would place his hand gently on the face or back of his caregivers to convey his gratitude and warmth. Levit is survived by his brother, David, and by several nieces and nephews

83 Toby Fleming, filmmaker, businessman, and travel entrepreneur, died on July 28 in Philadelphia following a sudden illness. He was 63. Fleming earned an M.A. in visual anthropology at the University of Southern California, where his and a classmate’s graduating film project—Gang Cops, a documentary about the Crips and Bloods of Los Angeles—won a Student Academy Award and put them in the running for Best Documentary Short Film at the 1988 Oscars. “It was a memorable family outing for the Fleming clan with parents and brothers donning red carpet outfits to attend the celebration,” read a family obituary. Fleming worked in video production and family business projects until 2002, when he and his wife, a yoga instructor, opened Twisters Wellness Centers in Erdenheim and Ambler, Pa., and eventually began organizing yoga retreats in Central America and Europe. The new business, T&T Travel, was founded on Fleming’s love of exploring the world. He is survived by his wife of 31 years, Patricia; daughters Amanda Fleming ’16, Julia, and Sarah; and brothers including Christopher Fleming ’74 His father was Thomas Fleming ’49.

21Chatawate (Flame) Ruethaimetapat died unexpectedly in August. A double major in mathematics & statistics and fine arts at Haverford, Flame was a fourthyear graduate student in the Department of Mathematics at Tufts University. He will be remembered for his radiant creative spirit, his love of the natural world, and his gift for friendship. His creative expression took many forms: drawing, printmaking, and painting; playing the flute in the Bi-Co Flute Choir; making elaborate, artfully presented meals and desserts; creating inventive and engaging lesson plans for the math classes he taught. Flame sought out plants and green spaces and could identify an astonishing range of trees, shrubs, and herbs; he also foraged for and cooked with daylilies, mulberries, and other foods he found growing in the neighborhood. Flame was devoted to his wide circle of friends, and indeed his fine arts senior thesis, “Like the Stars,” took the form of portraits of his friends in the Tri-Co. Please see the Class of ’21 note in Class News for memorial information.

This sundial, one of four on campus, marks the site of John Gummere’s 1830s observatory near Lutnick Library. The sundial’s gnomon—the triangular piece that casts the shadow—has been stolen twice, most recently in 2000, before it was recovered two years later on eBay. It is now safeguarded in the Arboretum’s offices. AND

Classmates and lab partners Willow Kohn ’25 and Deep Patel ’25 put a modern spin on the sundial when they 3D printed a temporary replacement gnomon this summer. They designed it based on photos of the original gnomon and printed it using polylactic acid filament in Haverford’s Maker Arts Space. Though secure, this hightech gnomon was attached with no glue or any kind of fastener. “It’s just a really good fit,” says Patel.