And what about gorillas and rules? Try figuring that out in real time with a 500-pound animal. When researching them, Amy Vedder ’73, H’23 and Bill Weber ’72, H’23 quickly established the importance of setting boundaries between their own desires to learn as much as they could about the endangered apes and the needs (and rights) of the gorillas to live unperturbed.

The couple’s work over decades has resulted in a masterpiece of conservation that continues to evolve, changing rules along the way about the understanding of interdependence between wildlife and the people surrounding wild places. Endangered species need advocates in the humans who share space and resources with the animals. Deciding to look at communities holistically changed the way Vedder and Weber practiced conservation — and now — how they teach it.

G. Raymond Rettew, Class of 1926, loved the rules of chemistry. But German proved too much for the humble chemist from West Chester, Pa. Though he failed his German courses twice, he was committed to aiding his national community in the war effort. The leading practical expert on mushroom spawn, Rettew helped to develop a rapid process for mass production of penicillin during World War II.

For Mary Rowe ’57, change making meant deciding to jump into the complexities of workplace rights. As an organizational ombuds, Rowe has written a set of guiding principles that continue to elevate fairness across higher education.

A decision to sail across the world after graduation led Janice Robb Anderson ’42 to a lifelong love of language and learning. The 103-year-old still volunteers, deciding that being a part of a community has enriched her perspective. So has eating her vegetables, by the way.

Music is definitively built on rules. But Stephanie Hsu ’08 decided it’s OK to break them and hasn’t looked back. As founding executive director of Yakima Music en Acción, Hsu says mistakes are proof her students are engaged in the process of learning.

For Swarthmoreans, experiences shape decisions about what is important. That often changes in the midst of learning. Asking the questions they did in their lives and careers helped these alumni forge paths unforeseen. Now others follow, and more than likely, will ask a new set of questions about ‘who decides’ and why.

This national prize for best book on teaching literature at the college level is bestowed biennially by graduate faculty in the Department of English and Philosophy at Idaho State University. Each nominated book is judged by a committee of external and internal reviewers.

Buurma’s and Heffernan’s book delves into the history of teaching literature in the 20th century. The co-authors examine syllabi, course notes, lectures, and assignments from key literary critics and authors such as T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, Caroline Spurgeon, and Simon J. Ortiz.

“It’s especially meaningful to us because the prize — like our book itself — elevates and draws attention to the everyday teaching of literature,” says Buurma.

But this raises another problem. The dominant narrative describes the United States as a “nation of immigrants” — a telling that ignores and erases the stories of those who were here before the arrival of Europeans, who arrived on our shores in chains, who were incorporated into the American people as the nation expanded overseas, and who were removed from the U.S. after their arrival. To construct a more inclusive national narrative, my colleague Professor Alexandra Délano (associate professor of Global Studies at The New School), and I sought contributions from academics, writers, photographers, poets, and activists. The result is New Narratives on the Peopling of America: Immigration, Race, and Dispossession, just published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

Mary Rechner ’90

Marrying Friends
Propeller Books

Though he’d majored in economics at Swarthmore, received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, taught economics at Cornell University, and worked for the Congressional Budget Office, he’d left to pursue his dreams of making a living as a writer and actor.

n a warm, hazy, Sunday morning, members of the Class of 2024 received their degrees at Swarthmore College’s 152nd Commencement ceremony May 26.

Of the 413 graduates, 399 received the Bachelor of Arts degree and 28 the Bachelor of Science in engineering degree. Fourteen received dual degrees. A total of 68 students received a level of Honors. Nora Sweeney ’24 offered remarks as the senior class speaker.

After receiving their degrees on stage, the graduating engineers created and closed out on a “Zoom call” for the Swarthmore Engineering Class of 2024 — a nod to the graduates ending their high school experience and beginning college during the pandemic.

In fact, conservationist Bill Weber ’72, H’23 not only survived said unimaginable circumstance, but still blames himself for it.

Recalling the early ecotourism encounter that unfolded on Rwanda’s Virunga Mountain Range in 1979, Bill crosses his arms and slowly shakes his head. He was leading a group of 20 French tourists to view gorillas when one of the tourists fell and screamed. The noise startled the troop of gorillas, who melted away into denser foliage. When Weber crawled ahead through a tunnel of vegetation searching for a better vantage point, he encountered a lone silverback male who, displeased with the intrusion, pursed his lips, slapped the ground, and charged Weber to put a fine point on the matter.

After the attack, Weber needed to make it back down the rough terrain for aid, without his glasses, which had been crunched in the melee. Eventually, he was treated at a Ruhengeri hospital for the two incisor bite wounds and several broken ribs. A few inches to either side of his neck could have led to a disastrous spinal cord injury.

In the early 20th century, a “crossword craze” was sweeping the nation, and women were at the forefront. Housewives, suffragists, and flappers shaped the puzzle in its early days, and, as a result, it was labeled a feminine “distraction” from more “useful” intellectual pursuits.

Although the crossword remains highly popular today, its cultural associations have undergone a radical transformation. Solving The New York Times crossword confirms one’s status as a serious thinker, and published constructors are overwhelmingly male.

t was February 1973, and Mary Rowe ’57, a shy and quiet feminist trained as an ivory tower research economist, was about to be thrown into practice in a new job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

As a confidential and impartial resource, Rowe was to hear concerns and ideas from members of the MIT community and do her best to help develop, and offer, both informal and formal options for resolution. By the end of 1973, she had received hundreds of visits about every kind of workplace issue from every corner of MIT: faculty, staff, students, a past president, custodians.

Some of what she heard surprised and concerned her.

Their mission was threefold: to capture large-scale photographs of the corona, to test Einstein’s theory that rays of light passing near a massive body in space would be visibly bent as they followed the curve created by the body’s mass, and to learn about the chemical composition of the corona and its motion.