“Animated Drawings for a Glacier” a stop-motion projection on Root Glacier near Kennicott, Alaska. Photo courtesy of Meredith Leich ’08

Barbara Stubbs Cochran ’67 is doing her part. “The First Amendment is the unique American innovation to codify freedom of the press as part of our Constitution,” says Stubbs Cochran (pg. 25), who is leading efforts to build a monument to honor fallen journalists. “You’ll read the words, and then you’ll look up and see the Capitol dome rising above this glass wall, which symbolizes journalism as a pillar of democracy, and also the role of journalists as watchdogs over the government.”

Watchdogs in science are crucial as well. You don’t make money studying Tuberculosis, says molecular biologist Elizabeth Campbell ’92. “It’s not profitable,” she says. “The patient population can’t afford expensive drugs, and they tend to be neglected.” But Campbell, the Corinne P. Greenberg Women & Science Professor at Rockefeller University, is working to defeat the disease and is committed to advancing diversity in science. “When I would go to seminars and meetings, a lot of times, I was the only woman of color,” Campbell says. “So I’m trying to see if we can fix that, too.” Other stories of alumni, students, faculty, and staff who seek light — who work for it — include World Wildlife Fund’s Andreas Beckmann ’90. “I have learned that it is important to find your meaning, to live in truth,” Beckmann tells us (pg. 4). “We need to do what we think is important, to do what gives our fleeting lives meaning. For me, that truth is to treasure nature — because it is wonderful, awe-inspiring, and because we depend on it for our very well-being and existence.”

Newly graduated Dylan Scollon ’25 — the first in his family to attend college — found his path through a summer internship: “I want to bring greenery to urban spaces where it’s been systematically removed or underappreciated,” he says (pg. 5). “It’s about reconnecting people with nature for their own sake and for the benefit of the environment.”

Language is the keeper of memory, Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o said. We’re cautious with our language now. What and how much we say. How we say it. Who we say it to. A bracing academic culture that thrives on engagement, debate, and discourse is wary. But read this issue and know that Swarthmore here — and afar — remains steadfast in its support of free academic inquiry, equity, and pursuit of the light that knowledge brings to us all.

—DANA CARROLL ’65, Salt Lake City, Utah

Havel’s example pushed me to question my own truth. The Ph.D. in East European history I had started at Stanford was intellectually interesting, but seemed ever more distant from my concern regarding the state of the natural world. While doing my research in Prague, I took the courage to follow my conscience. I volunteered for different organizations and eventually ended up at an environmental foundation.

They were released when the war ended, but not every journalist Cochran has worked with has been so lucky. In 1990, she co-founded the International Women’s Media Foundation with a group of fellow women journalists who called themselves “the founding mothers.” “We began with an award for courage in journalism that we presented to three or four women from around the world every year,” says Cochran. “Some of the people that we had honored with the Courage Award were killed: Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist who was murdered by Putin’s regime, and Marie Colvin, who was killed covering the civil war in Syria.” But the deadliest attack on American journalists was a 2018 mass shooting in Annapolis, Md. “[The shooter] stormed into the newsroom of the Capitol Gazette, and began firing around their newsroom, killed five people who worked there, and wounded two others.”

Elsewhere, illuminated root systems snake into the grass, tiny points of light skitter, bug-like, across another tree, and the serrated grooves of bark — jagged patterns formed over a century — are traced in light.

This is the first night of Arborlight, an immersive outdoor art installation by watercolorist, animator, and video artist Meredith Leich ’08.

Through shifting projections and subtle visual storytelling, Leich invites viewers into a layered experience of time: scientific time, emotional time, ecological time, and artistic time. She plays with the vastly different scales of each, inviting them all to converge here, briefly, in Swarthmore’s familiar nocturnal landscape.

We are constantly exposed to chemicals called endocrine disruptors, particularly in plastics, but also in other products including pesticides, clothing, and cosmetics. They interfere with our hormones, critical chemicals that regulate brain chemistry, metabolism, and immune function. Hormones are particularly important during fetal development and puberty.

Even if you haven’t heard of endocrine disruptors as a group, you’re probably familiar with some individual examples.

The first to generate a public outcry was DDT, a widely used pesticide that was banned in the United States in 1972 because it interfered with the reproduction of birds. DES, a synthetic estrogen that was for a while prescribed to pregnant women, was banned in 1971 after it was linked to cervical cancer in their daughters, who were exposed to DES in the womb. More recently, you may have heard of bisphenol A or BPA, which was banned in baby bottles in 12 states during the 2010s.

atthew Bertuch ’14 could befriend anyone in minutes. Outgoing, charming, and empathetic, he made people feel instantly welcome in his presence.

A star pitcher for Swarthmore’s baseball team, he nurtured deep friendships with his teammates and fraternity brothers.

“He was one of the most confident, outgoing, and genuine individuals that I had the pleasure to know,” says Rory McTear ’13, who played baseball alongside Matt. “He was unafraid to put himself out there, to go the extra mile. He challenged us to be better players, and ultimately to be better individuals.”

After graduating with a degree in economics, Matt pursued a career in management consulting, reaching the ranks of senior analyst and product manager at a top consulting firm specializing in game-theory applications in business. As he moved from achievement to achievement, Bertuch’s career blossomed in Boston and then San Francisco. But he loved traveling back east to spend summers with family in Long Island, N.Y. An expert tuna fisherman, he spent much of these visits off the Montauk coast fishing with his closest friends. It just so happened that the bluefin tuna’s annual trans-Atlantic migration aligned neatly with his family visits.

iologist Sönke Johnsen ’88 has had a glowing career. After all, he co-discovered the first bioluminescent octopus and even figured out how a frog can be invisible.

This Duke University oceanographer has seen it all. His specialty is vision in animals and biophysics — how they use such things as light, mirrored surfaces, or ultra-black color to attract a mate, find food, or hide themselves.

“Nature is this amazing family story,” says Johnsen. “The natural world is like War and Peace going on for four billion years.”

“There’s always another new animal evolving some completely new, strange way of doing things. It’s random, crazy, and funny, and that’s what kept me in my field — this endless story and its humor.”

The Long Ride Home catapulted to Amazon’s #1 New Releases in Individual Photographer Monographs and Black & African American History books. It sold out in 30 days and is now in its second printing.

Caroline “Carrie” Burnham Kilgore (1838-1909), who would spend her last years living near Swarthmore, was one such woman. Born in Craftsbury, Vt., Kilgore had an extensive career as an educator before moving to the Philadelphia area and setting her sights on the legal profession. Although she was rejected from the University of Pennsylvania Law School upon applying in 1871, Kilgore would spend the next 10 years lobbying for the right to attend lectures, becoming the first woman to be admitted to the law school in 1881.

It was during this time that she married Damon Kilgore, who became one of her most ardent supporters. Their two daughters would later attend the College. Kilgore’s and Damon’s marriage contract, in which Kilgore asserts her rights and autonomy as a “feme sole,” can be found in the Friends Historical Library, along with drafts of Kilgore’s autobiography about her legal career.

How do you approach your current courses?

A large percentage of students take Introduction to Economics at some point during their time at Swarthmore. It’s of course meant to prepare students for further work in economics, but we also want students who never end up taking any more economics to have a meaningful experience where they learn something that they carry forward in their lives. In the past few years, I’ve reworked my section of Introduction to Economics to use active learning, which has been fun. I’m currently also co-teaching Introduction to Environmental Studies with [Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies] Jennifer Pfluger. That’s an interdisciplinary class designed to expose students to the array of issues, tools, and perspectives that fit under the environmental studies umbrella. We want them to leave with a deep understanding of the science, policy, history and human experience of key issues like climate change, for example, no matter their background.

How did you arrive at the emphasis on active learning?

That switch was really prompted by COVID-19. I’d always been interested in active learning, and found that lecturing over Zoom is just the absolute worst, for everybody — so I switched things up. I made slides and recorded my lectures, and used class time for hands-on, interactive problem solving.