Even in the shadow of atomic dust, art and the human spirit persevere.

With nations embroiled in wars and conflicts across the globe, our aim was to elevate. And nature led the way. Illustrator Mayuko Fujino’s crane inspires us to remain in a place of hope. “Seeing Change” (pg. 22) shares the stories of alumni working to “be the change they want to see,” committing to making it real in their daily lives. Offering insight across disciplines on the ongoing debates around war in the Middle East, our faculty ask difficult questions in “The Emotional Weight of Words” (pg. 38). They encourage students to do the same. Stories on art, at the end of this issue, refocus our conversations with an opera about Malcolm X and an exhibition on migration and war.

With so many earth-shaking concerns, a small moment with students this fall sustains. On a freezing Friday night in November, the Swarthmore Bird Club gathered at the Willistown Conservation Trust in neighboring Chester County. The van ride through lightless, twisty back roads brought about 15 students to a field station to explore how banding ­(a way to to identify and collect data) helps us understand more about the elusive northern saw-whet owl. With the staff’s guidance, the students learned about the species’ habitat, conservation status, and migratory behaviors. Then they had the chance to gently hold one of the diminutive raptors. They marveled, they smiled, they gazed into the bird’s round eyes.

But it was the release that was something to behold.

At the end of the night, the group tramped out into the dark field following the staff member who was holding the owl. They stopped near the woods’ edge. The rule was no talking. Not a sound. In frigid air, they waited for the tiny northern saw-whet to make its move. It was magic, in a way, to realize the students were so invested in learning about something new, and small, and often invisible — and that they were willing to gather in a field in silence to wait to watch the journey begin.

Then, soundlessly, the bird lifted off and flew headlong into the night.

I expected the worst, of course. I was based at a fancy university in a big city and read all the highbrow newspapers deploring the usual suspects.

My work is about racism in Canada against Indigenous Peoples. It is tempting to give up on those who seem stuck in their thinking — we change our minds with difficulty, our biases and opinions so often calcifying over time.

Cleveland Justis ’91 and Daniel Student

Don’t Lead Alone: Think Like a System, Act Like a Network, Lead Like a Movement!
Fast Company Press

In addition to her work for Scholars at Risk, a New York University-based organization focused on global academic freedom, Kapit also works closely with the Norwegian Students’ and Academics’ International Assistance Fund, for which she produced a recent report highlighting four mechanisms of supression of student protesters. One of these is delegitimization — “the framing of students as troublemakers, rabble-rousers, violent criminals.”

Based in Rome, she is supporting the World Food Programme’s (WFP) efforts in Sudan, Chad, Gaza, and DRC, she says. “I have deployed members of my rapid response team to those locations and I attend bi-weekly operations meetings to discuss what is needed.” The WFP won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2020. Its relief efforts in 120 nations reached 160 million people in 2022. Oman Lawi’s humanitarian work began at Swarthmore, where she had a special major in anthropology, sociology, and religion. “I called it peace studies,” she recalls. While a sophomore, the amount of food wasted at the former dining hall troubled her. Soon she began taking plastic tubs full of leftovers to a Chester homeless shelter in her Chevy Tracker. Later, she created a feeding program on 69th Street in Philadelphia.

“I was very young, maybe 4 or 5,” says Johnson, who also teaches in the Black Studies and Peace & Conflict Studies departments. “But I remember very vividly [a man] who had been incarcerated. He was somebody my father mentored and loved deeply. When he came home from Attica, he stayed with us. We just adored him. So it was never something that I was afraid of. My parents taught that we cannot be reduced to our worst moment. We are all so much more. More importantly, it isn’t about the choices we make, it’s about the choices we have. The outcomes we are seeing are the result of the social, political, and economic conditions that have been created by those in power.”

Multiple things can be true at the same time: Hamas is a brutal and extremist group that committed appalling atrocities, and Israeli governments have made choices that oppressed Palestinians and closed off pathways to a Palestinian state.

We should beware a “zero sum” view of grief where admitting the sorrow felt by the other side is seen as diminishing the moral clarity of the “cause.” Otherwise, good people can end up apologizing for atrocities and seeing truth in terms of who it benefits.

HE DAY after he retired from his job as an insights director for a market research firm in Manhattan, Christopher “Kip” Davis ’75 wasn’t worried about being bored.

Instead, he rushed downtown to attend rehearsals for the opera he’d helped to write in the mid ’80s. X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X opened at the Met on Nov. 3, 2023.

The project was inspired by his years at Swarthmore. Davis had taken Chuck James’s African American Autobiography course in the spring of 1974. “We read an amazing array of books, but I was especially taken with The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” he says.

He called his older brother, Anthony, who was studying music at Yale, and said, “We’ve got to write a music theater piece about Malcolm. There’s so much music in his story.” Davis saw parallels between Malcolm X’s spiritual journey and the spiritual journeys of jazz musicians in the late ’50s and early ’60s.