The April 2013 issue of the Bulletin featured an advertisement for “a tour of timeless Israel” [Oct. 15–26] from the Alumni College Abroad office. This tour violates the growing international boycott/divestment/sanctions (BDS) movement to bring the Israeli government into compliance with international law. The movement—recently supported by British physicist Stephen Hawking—is for a comprehensive economic, [...]
Kudos to Danielle Charette ’14 for her courageous piece in May 16’s Wall Street Journal in which, sadly, she makes clear that not much has changed since I graduated in 2000. Swarthmore’s “liberalism” remains strictly intolerant of opposing views, and its particular kind of “diversity” leaves no room for any divergent voices, especially not any [...]
It’s good to know that Small Craft is flourishing, as noted in the April Bulletin. However, the magazine that gave rise to it was actually titled The Nulset Review (not The Null Set Review). While Jonathan Franzen ’81 may have jettisoned the name for its “antic nihilism,” the void it referenced was real.
A few years [...]
Having recently removed my self-imposed estrangement from the College, I once again enjoy reading the Bulletin (with the aid of my video magnifier!). It continues its high quality of content and production.
I was especially interested in the January articles on sustainability (my dictionary doesn’t define this, but I assume it’s related to “conservation,” a subject [...]
Although Laura Wilson Porter ’83 wrote from Scotland to testify “personally and professionally that health and social care is better than in the USA,” data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development on health care show otherwise. Women’s mortality rates from strokes are 29 per 100,000 in the United States, 39 per 100,000 in [...]
The October issue of the Bulletin mentions a book by Diana Furchtgott-Roth ’79, which “sets its sights on the ‘green energy revolution’ championed by Obama.” Allow me a moment to set my own sights on Madam Furchtgott-Roth.
“We now have 200 years’ worth of inexpensive natural gas,” she says, so why even talk of solar and [...]
I want to thank Diane Anderson for her review in the January issue of Fletcher Wortmann ’09’s book Triggered, about struggling with obsessive-compulsive disorder. She likens the load he carried to the burden of a Fifth Course. I suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder when I was at Swarthmore. I had no name for what I was [...]
My parents and I read the recent Bulletin article on Kappa Alpha Theta making a comeback at Swarthmore, and on behalf of my late paternal grandmother, Eilene Galloway ’28, we were very excited. Grandma Eilene became a Theta in 1923 at Washington University in St. Louis, before she transferred to Swarthmore, where she continued her [...]
In the January Bulletin, President Chopp addressed the divestment issue that has gotten so much attention: “Some believe that the College should divest from fossil-fuel companies while others of us think change should come about through activism aimed at long-term policy changes at the state and federal levels,” she wrote. The idea that we must [...]
In all the 66 years since I graduated, [the January 2013 issue] has been the Bulletin I have enjoyed the most, and I read most of it. It is great to know that Swarthmore is taking all these steps to be more sustainable. Keep up the great work!
Doris Bye Ferm ’46
Bellingham, Wash.
Thanks for sharing your [...]