Visitors to the Swarthmore campus often make the Welcome Center in the Benjamin West House their first stop. Helpful staff members, neat stacks of literature, and the faint hum of a police radio greet newcomers to campus. Often, they also encounter the Public Safety Department’s affable new director, Michael Hill.
An Army reservist for more than [...]
Still sparse enough that it echoes, Satya Nelms’ newly renovated office is the polar opposite of its inhabitant who is warm, inviting, and given to bubbly, infectious bursts of laughter. Nelms, the College’s first wellness coordinator, emits a glow from within that makes even the most hugging averse shrug and go with it when she [...]
Donna Jo Napoli leads a double life: as a college professor and an author of children’s fiction. Typically, her identities never intersect, but this summer, Napoli found them in perfect harmony when she was extended an invitation to Trinity College Dublin as a Long Room Hub Fellow. The fellowship is humanities based, and an invitation [...]
It’s hard to believe Randall Exon, professor of studio art, is approaching his 30th year of teaching at Swarthmore. His looks—especially his lush locks—his energy, and his forward momentum as a teacher and painter suggest it just couldn’t be so.
A proud product of the Great Midwest, Exon exhibits an unguarded nature that is typical of [...]
Karlene Burrell-McRae’s voice has a beguiling lilt that reveals her Jamaican origins, and her clothing displays boldness—in style and hue.
She became the director of the Black Cultural Center and dean of the junior class in July, after serving as the University of Pennsylvania’s Black Cultural Center director since 2000. She immersed herself in all things [...]
I sat down with Bob Barr ’56 in November at the small but comfortable cottage at Foulkeways at Gwynedd—a retirement community north of Philadelphia—that he shares with his wife, Nony Moore Barr. Bob, whom I have known for two decades, has always looked younger than his years. At 77, he still exhibits the open, boyish [...]
The relationship between Carol Nackenoff and her field of scholarship was by no means a case of love at first sight. As an undergraduate at Smith College, she considered a major in English, but her father talked her out of it. She thought about music, history, and French but rejected each. Ultimately, a charismatic professor [...]
Mike Mullan’s office is, to put it kindly, a bit of a mess. The one presumed “guest” chair has a half-case of bottled water barely hugging its seat. A desk is filled with tennis balls, balancing as they can, with various bandages and wraps intertwined. There are old Swarthmore pennants and well-worn books and tennis [...]
BEFORE HE RETIRED FROM THE SWARTHMORE FACULTY, Don Swearer would stop by my Parrish Hall office to tell me about his travels. His research in Thai Buddhism took him—and his wife and longtime editor Nancy Swearer—to Thailand as frequently as they could manage, particularly to the northern city of Chiang Mai. So when I visited [...]
ONE DAY IN THE EARLY 1990s, while out playing with her two young daughters in Triangle Park in Rutledge, Pa., Diane Anderson, then a K–12 curriculum director in New Jersey schools, chatted with a man who was also in the park with his child. Anderson—now an associate professor of educational studies—made a deep enough impression [...]