Haverford Magazine Fall 2025

Magazine of Haverford College

SEARCH STAR

How Haverford’s extraordinary strength in astronomy is powering an unprecedented survey of the cosmos

• The Fords Making Transit Make Sense • The Kim Institute Brings the Heat

Fall 2025

Editorial Director

Dominic Mercier

Editor

Brian Howard

Class News Editor

Mara Miller Johnson ’10

Copy Editor

Colleen Heavens

Photographic Director

Patrick Montero

Graphic Design

Anne Bigler

Vice President for Marketing and Communications

Melissa Shaffmaster

Associate Vice President for College Communications

Chris Mills ’82

Vice President for Institutional Advancement

Kim Spang

Contributing Writers

Shaunice Ajiwe

Eric Butterman

Emma Copley Eisenberg ’09

Charles Curtis ’04

Sari Harrar

Lini S. Kadaba

Patrick Rapa

Ben Seal

David Silverberg

Contributing Photographers

Holden Blanco ’17

Steve Magnotta

Paola Nogueras

Mac Sanders ’24

Contributing Illustrator

Melissa McFeeters

Haverford magazine is published three times a year by Marketing and Communications, Haverford College, 379 Lancaster Avenue, Haverford, PA 19041, 610-896-1000, hc-editor@ haverford.edu © 2025 Haverford College

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Advancement Services

Haverford College 370 Lancaster Avenue Haverford, PA 19041 or devrec@haverford.edu

Features

26 Tell Us More

Jason Patlis ’85: The Life Aquatic By

Eric Butterman

28 From Haverford to the Stars

Fords have long played an outsized role in studying the cosmos. Now, that includes contributions to the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time—the world’s most ambitious survey of the universe. By Sari

Harrar

36 An Ethical Approach to AI

As artificial intelligence permeates society, many in the Haverford community are working to figure out what role—if any—it should play in higher ed. By

Lini S. Kadaba

42 Easy Riders

Philadelphia’s public transportation system has long had a reputation for being confusing and difficult to navigate. Two Fords are on a mission to change that. By Ben Seal

42 Detail of a new, Ford-powered wayfinding system for Philadelphia transit

during 2025

Inbox

GOOD FELLOWS

As another Ford living with Parkinson’s disease, I was particularly pleased by the last cover story, “Building a New Brain Trust: How one alum’s journey with Parkinson’s disease is fueling ethical inquiry in Haverford’s blossoming neuroscience program” (Spring/Summer 2025). The alum in question, Shamir Khan ’96, has funded a fellowship in neuroscience at the College, a marvelous new program that will lead to increased knowledge of the way Parkinson’s develops, its causes, and, hopefully, better and more effective treatments. The article, by Dominic Mercier, struck just the right balance between the depressing and seemingly intractable nature of Parkinson’s and hope for the future in terms of ending this miserable, demoralizing illness. Congratulations to the magazine for focusing on the promise of the end of Parkinson’s, and a hearty thanks to Shamir Khan for turning his own personal tragedy into a positive development at Haverford.

—Ed Sikov ’78

Thanks for Dominic Mercier’s article “Building a New Brain Trust.” I don’t ever remember seeing anything about Parkinson’s disease before in the alumni magazine. Kudos to Shamir Khan and all Fords navigating and studying PD. I was diagnosed at age 50 and am grateful to know of the College’s work in this field. I am particularly curious about one of the lesser-known symptoms, dystonia, which I have.

—Shannon Slater ’91

ULTIMATE OMISSION

I enjoyed reading the latest edition of the alumni magazine but was disappointed to see that the Sneetches were not included in “Fords for the Win” (Curran McCauley, Spring/Summer 2025), the highlight reel for sports accomplishments for the 2024–2025 academic year.

in Division III who are selected by their peers. This award is the highest honor in ultimate for a D-III college player, and Zoe is the first recipient from the Sneetches.

—Christina Herold ’97

DROP US A LINE

Ask a question or offer a comment on one of our stories. Tell us about what you like in the magazine, or what you take issue with. If your letter is selected for publication, we’ll send you a spiffy Haverford College coffee mug.

Email: hc-editor@haverford.edu

Or send letters to: Haverford magazine

Marketing & Communications Haverford College

370 Lancaster Ave.

Haverford, PA 19041

The Sneetches are Haverford and Bryn Mawr’s Bi-Co ultimate frisbee team. They play in the women’s division, but it is noteworthy that the team is open to all marginalized genders, including women, nonbinary people, and trans men.

In the spring, the Sneetches competed in the Women’s Division III College Championship and they came in second, falling to Wesleyan’s Vicious Circles. This was not their first appearance at the D-III College Championship tournament, but I believe that it was the first time that they advanced to the final game.

Also of note is that team captain and senior Zoe Costanza BMC ’25 won the Donovan Award for 2025. The Donovan Award is awarded annually to one women’s and one men’s player

The editor responds: You’re absolutely right. The Sneetches had an incredible season, and Zoe’s recognition is a big moment for the team. Because of space limitations and our production timeline, we made the difficult choice to feature only varsity sports in that particular piece. But the Sneetches’ achievement is undoubtedly worthy of recognition. See the inside back cover for more.

CORRECTION

In the Spring/Summer 2025 issue, a note about the incoming Class of 2029 stated that Haverford was welcoming students from Ecuador for the first time. That was incorrect, as pointed out by Christopher Dunne ’70, who notes that his classmate Johnny Czarninski ’70 arrived at Haverford from Ecuador in 1966.

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The Fabric of Life

This year’s Design + Make Fellowship encouraged participants to explore our deep relationship with textiles.

BY SHAUNICE AJIWE

Design + Make Fellowship co-leads Manasi Eswarapu and Kent Watson (center) with, from left, fellows Eliza Duff-Wender BMC ’27, Maia Roark ’25, Zora Kuehne ’28, and Mary-Grace Culbertson BMC ’25.

Many of us don’t consider the role that fabric plays in our daily lives beyond, perhaps, laundry day or the latest landfill-clogging fast-fashion trend. But an increasing number of younger people are seeking a more hands-on, inquisitive experience with the world of textiles. This summer, four students who participated in the Design + Make Fellowship through Haverford’s Visual Culture, Arts, and Media (VCAM) facility got one.

The annual eight-week program at VCAM’s Maker Arts Space focused this year on textile art, and immersed the fellows in a variety of techniques, from popular crafts like crochet and sewing to intensive practices like dyeing and felting.

“What’s exciting about Maker Arts Space is that it’s this space where creativity and utility

exist next to each other,” says Kent Watson, co-lead of the fellowship and VCAM’s maker arts, education, and programs manager. “We are playing and making art, and at the same time, engineering and designing and prototyping things. It’s so valuable to do that thing that art does, where it has these bursts of creativity, of making, while we’re learning these skillsets that are really used in industries.”

This year’s fellowship came together, Watson explains, with the help of co-lead and Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities Post-Baccalaureate Fellow Manasi Eswarapu. A regular face at the Maker Arts Space, Eswarapu began leading a weekly workshop called Weaving Wednesdays last spring. Based on students’ interest in not only that, but in thrifting, upcy-

cling, and environmentalism as well, the subject of this round of the program quickly took shape.

“I think there’s this notion that hobby is a very unserious thing,” Eswarapu says. “I wanted to push them to see how much engaging in crafts could connect them with other people around the world and also with our past. These are really old techniques that have existed for centuries, and they become part of a larger history by engaging with them.”

The fellowship has tended to revolve around tangible subjects, such as chairs or toys. Watson emphasizes the opportunity for students to think deeply about the “built and designed world” and how it can be improved upon. The fellows heard from visiting lecturers on knitting patterns and designing for disability, took a trip to Thomas Jefferson University’s archive to study historical garments, and visited an alpaca farm to learn about sustainable production using their wool.

“I often don’t have time to do creative things, so this was nice to be able to do that and kind of expand my life out in terms of creativity and actual physical work,” says fellow Eliza DuffWender BMC ’27, a political science major.

It all led up to a Friday in late July, when the Maker Arts Space was transformed into a gallery displaying the fellows’ final projects—four new textile creations with a practical element, each involving skills learned throughout the summer.

For Duff-Wender’s project, over the course of two and a half weeks she crafted a protest banner incorporating a traditional Palestinian embroidery technique called tatreez. Another project—a knit cape designed by Maia Roark ’25, a history major—was inspired by foliage in the Haverford area. The others were a dinosaur-themed weighted blanket by Zora Kuehne ’28, a prospective English and psychology double major, and a set of woven placemats colored with natural dyes by MaryGrace Culbertson BMC ’25, a history of art major.

“What is so special to me about textiles is that anyone can do it,” Culbertson says. “Whatever you want to call it, outsider art, amateur art, folk art—it is a powerful form of art.”

The July gathering was a lively and tactile one, with all four projects and their materials laid out to touch and lift to see closer. Many interactive elements were incorporated, such as a yarn winder, a loom, and an indigo dyeing station.

As for the future of their pieces, the fellows plan on keeping them and, ideally, incorporating them into their daily lives. The same goes for the abilities and new perspectives on textiles that they gained during the fellowship. “I know that this creation is going to remain a big part of my life,” says Kuehne. “I still haven’t really decided what I want to do [professionally], but I do know that as I get older, I’ll probably find a way to use these skills and contribute to a community.”

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10 THINGS That Make Us Happy

CURBING FOOD WASTE Through a self-designed summer experience supported by Haverford’s Center for Peace and Global Citizenship, environmental studies major Darren Belanger ’26 worked with Philadelphia nonprofit Sharing Excess to divert tons of edible but cosmetically imperfect food from the landfill to families in need. For Belanger, this connects directly to issues of sustainability while also reinforcing his professional aspirations: “I want to do good work. If I stay late, it’s because my work will be positively affecting the community, not just the company.”

Small but Mighty A new study published by the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities of Pennsylvania confirms what Fords already know: the College punches well above its weight economically. In 2023, Haverford contributed an estimated $233.6 million to the state’s economy, an outsized imprint for a college with fewer than 1,500 students. That impact—factoring direct spending and demand for goods and services—supported 1,556 jobs across sectors from dining and retail to healthcare, and generated $18.7 million in state and local tax revenue.

Debugging Post-Travel Depression

Jory Lee ’26 and close friend Hudson Rha, a junior at Case Western Reserve University, are tackling what many of us feel but don’t name: post-travel depression. Their answer is Traverse, a scrapbooking app that helps users relive their journeys. Born from a project in Visiting Assistant Professor of Visual Studies Ronah Harris’ “Design for All” course and shaped at the Haverford Innovations Program’s Summer Incubator, Traverse lets you upload photos and journal entries and pin them to an interactive map.

From Campus to the Capital

Political science major Holly Vincent ’26 is turning her curiosity about civics into action as Haverford’s newest Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress Fellow. The national program brings undergrads to Washington, D.C. to study leadership and policy. Vincent's project will explore how the media influences public perception of presidential debates. On campus, she’s put civic engagement into practice, having founded the 2024 Tri-Co Voting Challenge, which inspired some 700 consortium students to pledge to vote.

NATURE'S NAVIGATORS In Professor

Suzanne Amador Kane’s biomechanics lab, spiders are helping Fords uncover the secrets of movement and resilience. Using high-speed cameras and machine learning, Kane and her team of student researchers are studying how spiders adapt when faced with injury or complex terrain. Their findings show that even after losing a leg, which can result from a poor molt, predator attack, or becoming stuck in a crevice, spiders adjust their gait to stay quick and steady. This feat could inspire advances in robotics and prosthetics design.

From the Ocean to Your Medicine Cabinet The search for better human health has led researchers to unlikely places, but few are as unexpected—or as promising—as the microscopic world that surrounds phytoplankton in the ocean. That’s where Associate Professor and Chair of Biology Kristen Whalen (below, left) and Post Doctoral Investigator Amanda Platt are focusing their efforts, thanks to a three-year, $442,710 grant from the National Institutes of Health. In the search for therapeutics to aid in the fight against drug-resistant bacteria, Whalen, Platt, and the Haverford students they work with are focused on a marine bacterium called Pseudoalteromonas sp. A757

How Does Your Garden Grow?

Associate Provost for Faculty Development and Professor of Political Science Craig Borowiak is using data to enact grassroots change. With Beyond Land Precarity, a project backed by the William Penn Foundation, he’s mapping, documenting, and protecting Philadelphia’s vast network of community gardens. The project, which he is co-leading with Villanova University Associate Professor of Geography and the Environment Peleg Kremer, will build an interactive database that tracks land ownership and highlights at-risk sites, arming gardeners with the tools they need to advocate for long-term stability for their pockets of green space.

Fords in Fiction Keen-eyed viewers may have spotted Mark Ruffalo’s character, Tom Brandis, sporting a Haverford College T-shirt while gardening during the closing moments of HBO’s prestige drama Task in mid-October. The series comes from Philadelphia-area writer and producer Brad Ingelsby, whose Mare of Easttown famously brought the joy that is the Delco accent to the wider world. We’re still waiting to hear whether Tom is a Haverford admirer or an official Ford. If he is, he’ll join the pantheon of fictional Haverford alums that includes Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan, Twin Peaks), Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe, State of Play), Astrid Farnsworth (Jasika Nicole, Fringe), and Brian Callahan (Jonathan Franzen’s 2001 novel The Corrections).

WELLNESS FOR EVERY FORD

Haverford has planted the seed for a holistic culture of well-being on campus thanks to a generous gift from Carolyn Risoli P’24 and Joe Silvestri P’24. Their earlier support funded the GameTime THRIVE 900 outdoor fitness installation (aka the “adult playground”) between the Gardner Integrated Athletic Center (GIAC) and Whitehead Campus Center. Now, the newly established Risoli-Silvestri Holistic Student Wellness Endowment Fund will sustain mental and physical health initiatives in an ongoing way. Risoli and Silvestri’s vision isn’t to prescribe onesize-fits-all fixes, but to empower Haverford’s experts to respond to student needs dynamically.

A Heavy Hitter With a .428 batting average, 23 home runs, 77 RBIs, and a 1.034 slugging percentage, Harry Genth ’25 dominated Division III baseball last year. After his record- shattering senior season earned him four NCAA statistical titles, Genth signed as an undrafted free agent with the Minnesota Twins organization, where fellow Ford Jeremy Zoll ’12 is general manager. Genth’s rise from small-college stand out to professional ballplayer was anything but easy, but he’s become the seventh Haverford alum to ink an MLB contract.

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Where the Moving Image Meets Inquiry

In the intensity of the Flaherty Seminar, Haverford students grapple with questions of truth, ethics, and the power of film.

BY BEN SEAL

hen Aby Isakov ’24 arrived at the Flaherty Film Seminar in New York in June 2023, she was ready to be surprised. The weeklong gathering of artists, scholars, programmers, and film enthusiasts has developed a reputation over its 70 years as an intense and illuminating exploration of documentary film in all its forms.

WJohn Muse leads a sound recording workshop with students in his “Capstone for Visual Studies Minors” class in the Visual Culture, Arts, and Media facility.

For the past decade, John Muse, assistant professor and director of the visual studies program at Haverford, has been involved in bringing two students each year to the seminar, where they participate in screenings and discussions that probe the deepest corners of documentary film. Haverford’s participation was initiated by Vicky Funari, Muse’s wife and a fellow visual studies instructor at the time. The students are typically accompanied by Muse and a Haverford faculty and staff member.

“Everything that’s compelling and weird about telling true stories—whatever that might

mean—is on display there,” Muse says.

Isakov, a filmmaker who graduated with an independent major in visual studies, found herself surrounded by 150 equally curious minds, all eager to engage with the work and with one another in conversations about the form, function, theory, and practice of documentary filmmaking. Isakov was brimming with questions and practically jumping out of her seat to ask them. And although the Haverford students at Flaherty are typically its youngest participants, she joined in the discussions, alongside directors and other industry veterans. Given the connection she felt to the films being shown, from Barbara Hammer’s pioneering forays in queer cinema to Theo Jean Cuthand’s explorations of the effects of resource extraction on Indigenous cultures, she had little choice.

“The films at Flaherty physically, viscerally, mentally, and emotionally move you,” Isakov says. For Muse, seeing students participate in an experience often reserved for their elders is the great appeal of the Flaherty. After he and Funari were each invited to attend as artists years ago, they began returning annually with Haverford students and staff. He describes the Flaherty as “mind-expanding, world-expanding, and profession-expanding,” an opportunity for students to fully immerse themselves in nonfiction film culture for a week. The theme of the seminar changes each year—2023 was focused on “Queer

World-Mending,” and this year’s one-word title, “Onward!” oriented the seminar both to its legacy and to its future—but every iteration features dozens of screenings of unannounced films.

When students return to campus, they’re asked to curate a fall screening open to Haverford and the broader community, which Swagnita Das ’28, who attended this summer’s seminar, calls a “mini Flaherty.” Das was inspired to apply to the seminar after taking a spring course focused on documentary cinema, which gave her a taste of the deeper discussions that happen at Flaherty. By watching films about environmental, social, and gender injustice, she learned to tangle with the complex feelings documentary cinema can stir up.

“Going into Flaherty, I was equipped. If I’m feeling uncomfortable with something I’m watching, it’s not enough to just say I’m uncomfortable,” Das says. “You have to sit with that and explore what made you so uncomfortable.”

Considering the “pressure-cooker” atmosphere Muse describes at the Flaherty, he’s deliberate about the kinds of students he brings, ideally those who can sustain their curiosity and inspiration over the course of a rigorous week. It helps, he says, that Haverford students tend to be well prepared by on-campus explorations of the issues that arise at the seminar, including “what it means to make a better world.” The overlap between the two institutions’ missions is nearly one-to-one, he says. “The Venn diagram is just a unity.”

For Isakov, the seminar turned out to be just as surprising as she expected. It taught her to grapple with documentary film and the context in which it’s created, as well as how to synthesize her varied responses in search of a deeper understanding. In many ways, she says, it felt like a continuation of the work she’d been doing at Haverford all along.

“We’re always thinking about who we are, our place and situation,” Isakov says. “We’re constantly trying to contextualize ourselves in the larger world, understanding we’re in a bubble, but we have to reach outside of that. It’s a good foundation for experiencing something like the Flaherty.”

As Muse sees it, the seminar is a reminder that critical thinking about how to live and work ethically carries on outside of academia, particularly among those who believe in the power of persuasive media and the beauty of image-making.

“There’s a place where what we’re striving to do here at Haverford goes on and doesn’t stop when you graduate,” he says.

COOL CLASSES

“Site Work: The Art of the Table Read”

This practicum-style English course invites students to analyze and perform screenplays, revealing how film storytelling takes shape through collaboration, performance, and interpretation.

In Visiting Assistant Professor of English J. Felix Gallion’s hands-on course, students explore the table read as a site of creative experimentation and literary analysis. Blending elements of screenwriting, directing, and acting, the class invites students to dissect and perform scenes from popular films.

COOL CLASSES

Tell us about your class. What do you hope students will take from it?

A table read is the moment a film cast and crew get together and read the entire film script from front to back. We focus on the table read as a specific site where story, dialogue, and performance are workshopped and refined, and where everyone in a film’s production does some form of literary and performance analysis in order to do their job on set.

The class is structured as a practicum, or a class focused on gaining specific skills based on observation and practice. Students learn the fundamentals of screenwriting, acting on screen, and directing through studying and performing scenes from three films: Jordan Peele’s horror magnum opus Get Out, John August and Daniel Wallace’s fantasy Big Fish, and Rachel Sennott and Emma Seligman’s hit high-school comedy, Bottoms.

My hope is that students will take away an understanding of how films are made, the importance of narrative theory to the film production process, and practical skills for a career in the industry.

Why did you want to teach this class? What drove you to create it?

The first line of the syllabus says, “This course is what happens when a theater kid gets a Ph.D. in English.” I went to film school as an undergrad, and my interest in English was always about finding unique ways to tell stories.

As a scholar, filmmaker, and performer, I wanted to create a class where students could learn about storytelling, TV and film production, and performance simultaneously. For me, all of these things come together at the moment of a production’s table read, the moment when everyone involved in telling a movie’s story gets together to work out the details.

What makes your course unique to the English Department?

The class is unique in approaching screenplays themselves as literary texts for analysis. Literary studies love to analyze theatrical plays and experimental literature, but the screenplay as a piece of literature is left to the wayside. This class tries to change that perspective by showing that the form of a screenplay is the most literary of works by allowing many different kinds of people with different artistic and technical jobs to collaborate through individual and collective interpretation. I think it’s also unique in that the class is very much about embodiment and actively exploring a written story through performance. There is a lot of doing and a lot of play, as all of our analysis gets translated into the final table read performances. —DM Cool Classes is a recurring Haverblog series. More at: hav.to/coolclasses.

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NEW FACES on Faculty

The College welcomes four new tenure-track faculty members whose teaching and research strengthen Haverford’s commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship and global perspectives.

VATSAL NARESH

Assistant Professor of Political Science

Vatsal Naresh specializes in democratic theory, political violence, and constitutionalism. His current book project develops a new theory of majoritarian domination by interpreting the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville, W. E. B. Du Bois, and B. R. Ambedkar.

Naresh’s scholarship includes a recent article in the American Political Science Review and co-edited volumes such as Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism: India, Pakistan, and Turkey (Oxford University Press, 2021) and Constituent Assemblies (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Before joining Haverford, he taught in Harvard University’s Social Studies program from 2022 to 2025. He earned his Ph.D. in political science at Yale University, studied political science at Columbia University, and completed his undergraduate degree in history at Delhi University.

SWETHA REGUNATHAN

Assistant Professor of Visual Studies

A Philadelphia-based filmmaker and writer, Swetha Regunathan creates character-driven fiction films that explore themes of nostalgia, longing, and shifting identities. Her work frequently engages hybrid docuforms and mixed-media techniques to expand the on-screen representation of South Asian Americans. Regunathan holds a B.A. in English from Columbia University, an M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Brown University, and an M.F.A. in film production from New York University (NYU).

Her feature film Burnout was selected for both the 2023 NYU Purple List and the NYU Production Lab Development Studio, while her screenplay Sundarbans was developed in the Cine Qua Non Storylines Lab and the inaugural 1497 South Asian Writers Lab. She produced Between Earth and Sky, which was shortlisted for a 2023 Academy Award for best documentary short subject, and her short films have screened at Tribeca, Aspen Shortsfest, True/False, and other prestigious venues. Regunathan has also been recognized with awards from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Peter S. Reed Foundation, and the BlueCat Screenplay Competition.

YIMING WANG

Assistant Professor of Chemistry

Yiming Wang discovered a passion for nanoscience while completing her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Captivated by the beauty of nanocrystals under the electron microscope and their unique properties at the nanoscale, she has since built a career at the forefront of materials chemistry.

Wang previously held postdoctoral appointments at Harvard University and at Boston University. Her teaching experience includes labs in analytical chemistry. At Haverford, she is currently teaching Superlab, an inquiry-based lab course for junior science majors, and will engage students in projects at the intersection of nanomaterials, catalysis, and biomedical innovation.

TALIA YOUNG

The William H. and Johanna A. Harris Professor of Environmental Studies and Entrepreneurial Studies

A longtime member of Haverford’s community, Talia Young previously served as a visiting assistant professor of environmental studies before stepping into her new role. Young’s scholarship has traced aquatic food webs from New Jersey to Mexico to Mongolia, examined adaptation and resilience among northeastern U.S. fishing communities confronting climate change, and explored the broader implications of alternative seafood supply chains, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Young is also the founder and director of Fishadelphia, a Philadelphia-based community seafood program that connects diverse families with regional seafood producers. Young’s co-authored publications with Haverford students and alumni highlight the impact of inclusive practices in alternative food programs and shifts in seafood consumption habits. Her teaching covers cultural foodways, fisheries modeling, and community impacts of seafood. Young earned her B.A. at Swarthmore College, her teaching certification at the University of Pennsylvania, and her Ph.D. in ecology and evolution from Rutgers University.

Trash to Treasure: A new composting system near the Haverfarm is transforming up to 2 cubic yards of organic waste collected at the Haverford College Apartments into batches of nutrient-rich soil for the farm and Arboretum. Proposed by Claire DuBois ’22, Ally Edwards ’22, and Ellie Kerns ’22 as part of their environmental studies capstone, the project is supported by a gift from Douglas Johnson ’71.

IN THE COLLECTION

Spotlighting the holdings of Quaker and Special Collections

Claim to Flame

A humble funerary urn recalls an elaborate and controversial late-19th-century campus ritual.

In the College’s Quaker and Special Collections sits a curious funerary artifact: a small, dark cremation urn that holds the remains not of a person, but of a book. The vessel is the final resting place for a copy of William Paley’s A View of the Evidences of Christianity , a dense two-volume treatise on the foundation of Christianity first published in 1794. For many Fords in the late 19th century, it was a book synonymous with academic tedium.

IFrom the 1860s through the late 1880s, sophomores ended each academic year with a somber tradition: the ceremonial cremation of their least favorite textbook. Paley’s Evidences received the dubious honor of “most hated” text for many years until, as one chronicler notes, “it was difficult to defend a Quaker College burning the book which was supposed to safeguard the faith.” Eventually, Paley’s theological writings gave way to more practical victims, and mathematics textbooks by Henry Nathan Wheeler and George Wentworth were later sent to their ashen rest.

But the cremation ceremony was neither crude bonfire nor cen-

sorial book burning. It allowed students to channel scholastic misery through an elaborate ritual complete with professionally engraved invitations, costumes, and choreographed proceedings akin to a state funeral. After a procession into the woods, the students would condemn and defend the text—typically in Latin—before sentencing it. As the flames consumed the tome, classmates would sing exaggerated hymns of mourning. The practice became so popular that it was relocated from the woods to the front of Barclay Hall, allowing a larger audience, many of whom dressed in costume, to witness the spectacle.

Haverford and its community, of course, have long revered books, so this playful tradition wasn’t amusing to all. Worried that the rite sent the wrong message about scholarship and the College itself, President Isaac Sharpless banned the practice, and the last recorded ceremony was held in June 1889. This urn, however, remains as final witness to the end-of-the-century tradition and serves as a reminder that the voice of students—however subversive or satirical—has always been integral to the College’s history.

—DM

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Can Ethics Take the Heat?

Throughout the academic year, the Michael B. Kim Institute for Ethical Inquiry and Leadership confronts the human cost of a warming world. BY

DOMINIC MERCIER

When temperatures soared above 100 degrees and broke historical records in Philadelphia this summer, Shalae Clemens BMC ’27 couldn’t help but think about home. The Tempe, Ariz., native has seen firsthand how relentless heat shapes daily life. It’s not uncommon, for instance, for their father to return home from his job cleaning swimming pools with hands blistered from handling hot metal tools.

Now, as a Bi-Co environmental studies major, they are determined to make heat the focus of their career. “It’s not an opinion anymore because the science is there,” Clemens says of climate change. “What has been lacking is the ability to apply the science and make real change based on it. That’s really what I’m passionate about.”

Their growing interest in the ethics of climate change found a natural home at Haverford’s newest academic hub, the Michael B. Kim Institute for Ethical Inquiry and Leadership, where the inaugural programming theme for

the 2025–26 academic year is extreme heat. Established in 2024 through a transformative $25 million gift from Board Chair Michael B. Kim ’85 P’17, the institute is a central component of Haverford 2030, the College’s strategic plan.

For Associate Professor of Anthropology and Environmental Studies and faculty fellow Josh Moses, who co-leads this year’s institute programming with Assistant Professor of Health Studies Anna West, heat offers a unique venue to explore individual and systemic ethics. “It’s one lens to view many other social and environmental problems that we’re facing,” Moses says. “And it’s one that I think most of us feel viscerally.”

Jill Stauffer, associate professor of Peace, Justice, and Human Rights, who serves as one of the institute’s two faculty advisors alongside Professor of Computer Science Sorelle Friedler, sees the ethical potential in heat’s immediacy. Everyone is impacted by human-caused climate change and the instabilities it causes, especially students, whose futures will be irrevocably shaped by it.

“It also connects to so many other areas of ethical import: inequality, migration, conflict, health, resource management, and so on,” Stauffer says. “Heat seemed like a great way to show that ethical concerns are not abstract.”

The stakes of climate change are undeniable. According to the World Health Organization, extreme heat was responsible for the deaths of approximately 489,000 people worldwide between 2000 and 2019. A 2023 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report found more than 2,300 Americans died that year from heat-related causes, the highest number ever recorded. The effects of heat often land unequally: tree cover, infrastructure, and access to cooling frequently align directly with race and income.

For environmental studies major Makayla Coleman ’26, those disparities hit close to home. Coleman’s mother, a longtime U.S. Postal Service worker in rural North Carolina, has been hospitalized for heat stroke while delivering mail. “We need to protect our workers,” Coleman says. “The USPS has a motto of delivering the mail no

Continued on p. 14

4

Questions

for Maura O’Brien ’05

After spending nearly 15 years advancing U.S. international development goals around the world, Maura O’Brien ’05 has returned to Haverford to serve as coordinator for the Michael B. Kim Institute for Ethical Inquiry and Leadership. A former foreign service officer with U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), O’Brien brings a global perspective on ethics, resilience, and collaboration. Here, she reflects on lessons learned from development and diplomacy work around the globe and how she hopes to inspire Haverford students to confront the ethical and environmental challenges of a rapidly warming world.

Welcome back to Haverford, Maura. How do you think your impressive background with USAID will influence your approach to building the Kim ethics institute’s programs and partnerships? Working closely with individuals and institutions with significant political power has driven home for me the importance of maintaining a strong commitment to my values. I see the Kim ethics institute supporting Haverford students as they grow in their commitment to their own values and learn to rely on them as they navigate the world.

9/11 happened at the very start of my first year here. That horror, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the assault on civil liberties and human rights all fundamentally shaped my worldview. Long before I could have articulated my personal belief in the importance of ethical leadership, I felt its absence and understood the resulting catastrophic consequences.

Why is it important for Haverford’s students to engage with the concept of heat, the institute’s inaugural theme, through an environmental and ethical lens?

As a country, we’re abandoning our global leadership role in creating a safer, greener, more sustainable future. The world is desperate for a new generation of leaders, and that vacuum presents space for any Haverford student looking for meaningful ways to engage with some of the planet’s most urgent problems. Heat is a particularly compelling way to think about climate change because it highlights one of the ways the climate crisis ex-

acerbates inequality: The most vulnerable people and communities are the hardest and first hit by rising temperatures and sea levels.

How have your work with USAID and your Haverford experience shaped your understanding of ethics and leadership?

Working in a wide variety of contexts has taught me that what most people want from their leaders in a practical way is pretty universal. When I first started supervising team leaders, it was almost two decades ago, working with and for people experiencing homelessness in Philadelphia. I had no idea what I was doing, but I started from the basis of explaining that teams need their leaders to be principled, predictable, and pleasant. I was relying on the alliteration as much as I was on any real professional expertise.

During my last overseas post with USAID in Pakistan, I found myself using the same concepts. One of the women I worked with made the excellent suggestion of adding accessible to the list. As elementary as “principled, predictable, pleasant, and accessible” may sound, that list has served me well because, as a leader, you always want to foster an environment where people feel safe, respected, and engaged so that they can grow in their work and their own leadership.

What lessons do you hope to pass on to students?

When I interviewed for a job with Project HOME in Philadelphia, I had been working at another nonprofit for less than a year. I worried that leaving a job I’d had for less than a year would break some kind of professional norm. The two people from Project HOME who I would report to were my interviewers, and after spending just a couple of minutes together, I realized that getting to work with them was more important to me than anything else because of how much just watching them in action could teach me. That was about 19 years ago, and they are now both among my closest friends.

Similarly, I left a comfortable overseas post to follow the USAID mission director I was working for first to Iraq, then to our West Bank and Gaza mission—nearly entirely because I loved the way she treated other people. So if I have one piece of advice, it would be to make space in your life for the best people you meet. —DM

Main Lines

CLIMBING CLUB

The Club Life @

WHAT: The Haverford Climbing Club is a student-run organization perfect for Fords looking to give indoor rock climbing a try, experienced gym rats wanting to scratch the climbing itch, and anyone in between. Climbing can be cost-prohibitive, but thanks to funding from Student Life , the club covers gym passes, equipment rentals, and even transportation. No carabiners or specialized knowledge are required. The club has created a welcoming, low-pressure environment for students to test out a new sport, gain a bit of confidence, and, for many, discover a lasting hobby. “We emphasize that you don’t need any experience, you don’t need to pay for any of your equipment or for the day pass for the gym,” says club co-leader Harrison West ’26. “Just show up with your friends and try out a new fun activity.”

WHERE: Club outings are held in nearby Radnor at the Gravity Vault, a gym known for inclusivity and attracting supportive climbers. “The Gravity Vault, in particular, has a really special community,” West says of the gym’s focused programming, which features options like LGBTQIA+ meetups and weekly climbing events for those with Parkinson’s disease. “That’s a

Continued from p. 12

big part of why this club’s able to promote community the way it does. The gym really fosters that.” The 16,000-square-foot facility offers climbers nearly 100 different roped routes that reach heights as high as 40 feet, as well as options for bouldering, a less gravity-intensive form of climbing that doesn’t require safety gear.

WHEN: During the academic year, the club runs three trips for up to 12 students to the Gravity Vault every week, though the club takes breaks for holidays and finals. “Our purpose is very simple,” says co-leader Nora Salem ’26, who discovered her own interest in climbing through the club. “We have one goal, and that’s to get people to climb.”

matter the weather. I think that might be an outdated motto.”

With support from the institute, Coleman spent this summer researching occupational heat exposure, focusing on delivery drivers. “When my mom gets sick, it’s all, ‘You should have been drinking more water,’” she says. “But the organization never responds with effective acclimation programs or appropriate breaks.”

Work like Coleman’s, Moses says, demonstrates how students are translating their ethical reflections into real-world action. “Students are learning how to do research in partnership with people who are experiencing the effects of heat directly, and how to see that as part of their ethical responsibility,” he says.

Throughout the academic year, the institute will extend those conversations campuswide. The 2025 Campus Read selection, marine biologist and policy expert Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures, set the tone for the year by inviting the community to imagine climate solutions rooted in hope. Upcoming events include lectures by environmental justice leaders, community workshops,

WHY: At its core, the club is all about connection. “Climbing is the medium through which we socialize,” says Salem. It’s not uncommon for participants to celebrate classmates’ achievements, like finally completing a challenging route, while forging new friendships. “The people that you meet on a climbing trip can become regular friends you see around campus,” he says. “That’s probably the most tangible benefit of the club beyond just the fact that it’s good for your fitness.” —DM

and creative projects developed through Moses and West’s Heat and Health Design Action Lab, a Tri-Co Philly course focused on social practice art in response to the health impacts of extreme heat.

Clemens, who is enrolled in the class, is particularly excited about the course’s collaboration with multidisciplinary artist Li Sumpter and the North Philadelphia Peace Park, a community-managed urban farm. The class will work with Sumpter to create heat-related informational materials, including a podcast. “I think some of the most powerful efforts are the ones that come from the community and are horizontal in that way: mutual aid efforts, sharing air conditioning, or just checking in on one another,” Clemens says.

Stauffer believes this multidisciplinary approach makes the Kim ethics institute’s mission distinct. “The urgent and intractable problems that we face as human beings are not likely to be solved by one methodology or discipline,” she says. “Our greatest hope for new possibilities comes from collaboration—people working together, cooperating, challenging each other, disagreeing or seeing things differently, building new structures out of those productive differences.”

Fords Go Forth

Following President Wendy Raymond’s call to “unleash intellectual curiosity” at Haverford’s Convocation ceremony Sept. 2, members of the Class of 2029 exit Marshall Auditorium. The event, a new tradition for the College, capped off Customs and officially marked the start of the academic year for the newest Fords.

SCHOLARSHIPS AT WORK

Scholarship support from THE JOANNE V. CREIGHTON SCHOLARSHIP

FUND has allowed Kayona Campbell ’28, an English major on a pre-law track, to immerse herself in Haverford’s energetic community and enthusiastic academic culture.

“ Because of your support, I have the opportunity to grow academically, engage in meaningful experiences, and work toward my goals with confidence. Thank you for investing in our futures and making Haverford’s transformative education accessible to all! ”

SUNSET BEHIND SWAN FIELD, PHOTOGRAPHED AT 6:50 P.M., SEPT. 30, 2025.

BY PATRICK MONTERO

CAMERA: SONY A9

LENS: FE 24-70MM F2.8 GM II

ISO: 400

APERTURE: F/3.5

SHUTTER: 1/200

Mixed Media

Amplifying Voices

As the new executive director of the Leeway Foundation, Pia Agrawal ’05 does what she’s always done: stand up for artists in overlooked communities. BY EMMA COPLEY EISENBERG ’09

Agrawal (above and opposite) in her Leeway Foundation office, where Leeway-supported artist Betsy Z. Casañas’s 2007 painting “Behind Those Eyes” hangs by the door.

Pia Agrawal ’05 spent many college nights taking the train into Philadelphia to see punk and indie music shows. “I know what it feels like to find yourself through some sort of artistic expression,” she says. But rather than become a musician, Agrawal became a tireless champion for artists, most recently as the executive director of the influential Philadelphia arts organization the Leeway Foundation. The foundation distributed grants worth about a half million dollars to 120 recipients in the Greater Philadel-

phia area in 2024, and is on track to match this number in 2025. “This advocacy,” she says, “is my creative practice.”

Agrawal grew up in Staten Island as the daughter of immigrants from India. “The path really did start at Haverford for me,” she says, noting that Philly’s music scene was how she found friends, a community, and a deepened sense of self. After graduating, she took a job at performing arts nonprofit Fringe Arts, where she rose from being an assistant to the head of her department in under two years. “I really

identified Philly as a place where I could get my hands dirty,” she says. She soon moved on to Austin—because of her obsession with the TV show Friday Night Lights, she jokes—and then to the University of Houston, where she curated the school’s site-specific interdisciplinary arts festival, CounterCurrent.

As Philadelphia is to New York City, so Houston is to Austin: a city that can sometimes be overlooked in the national arts conversation in favor of its neighbor. When Agrawal moved home to work for the arts council of Staten Island during the pandemic, this underdog mentally crystallized. “I have lived in a lot of communities that live in the shadow of another place,” she says. “Staten Island is the forgotten borough. I can’t escape this narrative. I advocate for artists in overlooked communities.”

When Denise Brown, Leeway’s executive director of 20 years, announced she’d be stepping down from that role, Agrawal applied for this “dream job.” The Leeway Foundation began in 1993 with a gift from artist and philanthropist Linda Lee Alter as an advocacy organization for women artists. It has since expanded its purview to also support trans- and gender-nonconforming artists working at the intersection of art and social change—which means Leeway’s communities are often overlooked by the arts funding model. “Leeway is a hyperlocal organization with a mission to fund Philly art for social change. Art for social change is about building community. It’s not just about supporting beautiful art, but supporting art that has a broader impact on the place where it’s being made.”

It’s also been personally impactful for Agrawal to plug into an organization that has always fought against the oppressive ways that marginalized artists have been excluded from exposure and resources. “As the child of immigrants, I was looking for work that fights against systemic racism. It truly feels like an honor to build upon the work

the organization has already done, and has really changed my ability to imagine what is possible.”

In a national moment where, Agrawal says, immigrant artists, transgender artists, artists of color, and disabled artists are under profound attack, she feels the urgency, and that this moment is unlike any other she’s ever seen. But, she says, the marginalized artists being targeted under “Trump 2.0” are not new to the Leeway community. What’s new is that they are being forced to take unprecedented risks to continue to make their art. Agrawal sees her job as helping to provide a sense of community and safety for artists whose quests for self-expression and community impact have become all the more vital during these fraught times.

“Leeway isn’t going anywhere,” Agrawal says, confident in a mission-focused funding stream that is not reliant on federal dollars. “We are not going to get pushed to the side, we are not changing our funding model, we are going to keep taking up space. … We’ve been preparing for this fight for decades.” She laughs. “Come at me, let’s go.”

‘‘ Art for social change is not just about supporting beautiful art, but supporting art that has a broader impact on the place where it’s being made. ’’

Mixed Media

FICTION

Counter Clock Wise

The author of two novels that play with our sense of chronology, Hilary Leichter ’07, in her new role as a Columbia University professor, is helping the next generation navigate a challenging timeline. BY PATRICK

RAPA

“ The decision to become an artist in this particular moment feels fraught. I did not know that these were the questions we were going to be asking, like: Does it matter if art is made by humans? ”

“I don’t sit down and think, ‘I’m gonna mess with the time-space continuum today,’” says author Hilary Leichter ’07. “It’s just something about the time that we’re living in—it’s something about writing while having to do other things, and live a life.”

Most people who read Leichter’s witty, intimate, slyly dystopian novels seem to love them, but they don’t always agree on how to talk about them. Her first book, Temporary (Coffee House Press/Emily Books, 2020), bends the laws of time and space, with its protagonist ping-ponging through a multiverse interpretation of the gig economy. In her second, the multi-point-of-view novel Terrace Story (Ecco, 2023), a young mother discovers that the closet door in her tiny apartment opens up to a bucolic but disconcerting outdoor space—but only sometimes.

What are we looking at here? Sci-fi? Magical realism? Romance? When a Reddit user asked for book recommendations that pulled readers into “otherworldly places” and “liminal spaces,” the decidedly gore-free Terrace Story popped among a sea of horror titles.

“I love that reading of it,” laughs Leichter. “If you sort of release control over what you’ve written, it can allow for a hot take like that, which I find so exciting. I didn’t write it as a horror novel, but who am I to say it isn’t?”

The way she looks at it, Temporary and Terrace Story are now beyond her control. “I’ve been lucky enough to have critics and other writers I respect really respond to my work in ways that echoed my intentions, and that’s a wonderful feeling,” she says. “But that’s really the most you can hope for.”

Leichter was an English major at Haverford, but involved in the a cappella group Outskirts and the theater. “I was in all of the productions on campus, and it was just a magical place to grow up,” she says. “It really felt like summer camp for nerds. It was just idyllic.”

After graduating, she moved to the Big Apple and produced a play for the New York International Fringe Festival. She had Broadway dreams and went on a few auditions competing with conservatory kids, but soon realized she wanted to create her own work.

“I started writing fiction, and it felt so different from everything I had done before. There was so much freedom and power to do anything, and to make anything happen.” Leichter earned her M.F.A. at Columbia University, where she recently joined the tenure-track faculty. Now she teaches undergrads and grad students in that same program, helping a new generation hone their writing skills.

“The decision to become an artist in this particular moment feels fraught in ways that I did not anticipate when I was their age,” she says. “Maybe that’s naive of me, but I did not know that these were the questions we were going to be asking, like: Does it matter if art is made by humans?”

It’s already hard enough to be a writer in this competitive environment, she says, without throwing robots into the mix. Which is partly why she’s been blown away by the way her students treat each other. “I don’t remember thinking of my generation as unkind,” she says, but these kids are especially good listeners and quick to forgive. “They’re so just cognizant of the fact that this is a room of people who have experienced all different things, and having a kind of awe and respect for that.”

At Columbia, Leichter is known for her undergrad seminar called “Time Moves Both Ways.” It explores the concept of “time travel,” but of course it’s not precisely a sci-fi thing. They’re just as likely to read Muriel Spark as Ursula K. Le Guin while they investigate the way time can be manipulated and rearranged in storytelling. “I wanted the students to leave the class not being able to read any book without thinking about time travel.”

BOOKS

Q&A: Gene Ludwig ’68

On the economist’s quest to develop financial data that paints a clearer picture of Americans’ prosperity.

BY DAVID SILVERBERG

From the halls of the Clinton White House to a namesake nonprofit dedicated to financial research, Gene Ludwig ’68 has spent much of his life working to advance the economic prosperity of millions of Americans.

As the Comptroller of the Currency under President Bill Clinton, Ludwig encouraged banks to increase lending to marginalized communities that had been historically obstructed from securing loans—or charged more than white customers when they did. His work led to hundreds of billions of dollars of bank money over time flowing into lower-income communities. His office brought 27 fairlending cases that led to tens of millions of dollars in fines against violators, the nation’s first major assault on lending discrimination.

As the founder of the nonprofit Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP), he’s worked to improve the economic well-being of low- and middle-income Americans. LISEP, for instance, developed a new calculation: True Weekly Earnings, which offers a more comprehensive overview of the nation’s job market quality by including in its computation unemployed workers seeking employment and part-time workers.

Today, his quest finds him delving into government statistics that he claims are antiquated and that often lead politicians and the media to paint misleading pictures of American prosperity. Figures like unemployment rate, gross domestic product (GDP), and the consumer price index (CPI) are put under the microscope in Ludwig’s new book, The Mismeasurement of America: How Outdated Government Statistics Mask the Economic Struggle of Everyday Americans (Disruption Books).

Ludwig’s book compiles both grievances and possible solutions in an attempt to connect dots that previously floated alone in space.

Ludwig spoke to Haverford’s David Silverberg about what inspired the book, the root problem with how government statistics are calculated, and what he found most rewarding about his years at Haverford.

Was there a light-bulb moment when you decided to provide clarity on the economic figures we read about daily?

I slowly began to see the deterioration of the middle class. Everybody’s smiling in upper classes, but other folks are not

smiling. Political figures were whistling Dixie, saying how GDP was surging, but how can the numbers continually look so good? So, I analyzed the numbers more. Middle America was hanging on by its fingernails. That inspired me to do some deep research, hire some of the best young economists I could get my hands on, and come up with the real numbers that reflected a reality barely anyone was talking about.

Why don’t current government economic statistics accurately reflect the real experience of middle- and low-income Americans?

They are put through a filter, so I wouldn’t say they are inaccurate, exactly, but more misleading. The concepts for these statistical definitions were locked in since the 1930s but now, almost 100 years later, those definitions hadn’t changed even as the times did.

A headline statistic is CPI, which sounds rigorous and bipartisan, but it reflects a basket of goods and services of around 80,000 things. Now, if you’re earning a wage in middle America, you’re not paying for 80,000 goods and services, but a much narrower bunch of products that mean something to you, like your rent and transportation and food. I’d say around 200 items max.

We can prove that over the last 20 years—and we suspect that it’s been the case over the last 40—that smaller basket of things that are most meaningful for middle- and low-income Americans has been inflating faster than those 80,000 total items the CPI is based on. That’s what we call the True Cost of Living.

You wrote that, in essence, with improved stats, policymakers can better evaluate the bang-for-the-buck of

been killed in a car accident. Grief and trauma collide as Davis confronts the legacy of a father who never accepted his identity. With luminous prose that plumbs the emotional depth of her characters, Norris deftly intertwines themes of love, race, and the gravitational pull of family.

VIRGINIA ADAMS O’CONNELL ’86: Remission Quest: A Medical Sociologist Navigates Cancer (Temple University Press)

With Remission Quest, O’Connell brings her training as a medical sociologist to bear on her personal journey with primary bone lymphoma. Before her 2019 diagnosis, O’Connell had studied the healthcare system and those navigating serious illness, but during her diagnosis, treatment, and recovery, she confronted the theories she’d studied to make sense of her own experience. O’Connell examines the burden of responsibility often placed on cancer survivors and the anxiety of living with uncertainty, crafting a work that blends scholarship and memoir.

DAVID KOTEEN ’67: Gratitude & Compassion (self-published)

With this follow-up to his creative biography of dancer Nancy Stark Smith—a founder of contact improvisation, a movement-based dance form rooted in touch and spontaneous collaboration— Koteen shifts from documentation to reflection with co-author Christie Svane. With an ocean and much of the U.S. between them (Koteen lives in Oregon’s woods, Svane in Southern Spain), they connected via email after the 2020 death of their mutual friend, Stark Smith. Gratitude & Compassion compiles their correspondence, which explores Stark Smith’s influential presence in their lives, stories from their youth, and their current challenges, including Koteen’s mysterious head wound and the life-threatening surgeries he’s endured.

ELANA RESNICK ’05: Refusing Sustainability: Race and Environmentalism in a Changing Europe (Stanford University Press)

Resnick, an assistant professor of anthropology at University of California, Santa Barbara, presents a provocative rethink-

ing of what sustainable development looks like in Europe, especially along racial and economic lines. Drawing on her ethnographic research on Bulgaria’s Roma people, Resnick challenges narratives by asking who performs the labor powering green economies and development, and at what cost? Through stories that explore democratic failures, mutual aid, and the power of women’s friendships, Refusing Sustainability shows how people viewed as discardable resist the systems that both rely on and exclude them.

TOM BRETL ’68: Fractal Picturebook (self-published)

In this picture book, which the author has made freely available online, Bretl invites readers to explore a rich gallery of fractal images created with computer programs he developed. Visuals are accompanied by information on how each was created, presented without technical jargon. An accessible bridge between art and mathematics, Fractal Picturebook makes geometry both intelligible and beautiful for readers of all stripes.

KAREN KOHN ’00: Accessing Academic Library Collections for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (Bloomsbury)

With this timely and practical guide, Kohn offers academic librarians and scholars a clear framework to evaluate and enhance library collections. Accessible and backed by clear data, Accessing Academic Library Collections for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion arrives at a pivotal moment as institutions across the country turn a critical eye to their collections. Kohn provides four different methods to analyze collections by subject matter, along with their advantages and disadvantages. Three chapters by guest authors also provide insight from successful assessment projects.

FORD AUTHORS: Do you have a new book you’d like to see included in More Alumni Titles? Please send all relevant information to hc-editor@haverford.edu.

Mixed Media

Continued from page 21

policies, and truly understand their impact. Do you think there’s a strong chance there will be any kind of shift? My next book will likely be called Pathways Out of the Swamp, which looks at how to improve our economic prosperity. This is hard, really hard.

We should measure with some rigor the programs that the federal government wants to put in place. We don’t measure over time whether they’re successful or not. We just measure grossly how we’re doing or not doing, and even that, as I’ve just indicated, has kind of been messed up.

Going back to your Haverford years, how did your time here impact or influence you?

What I really loved about Haverford was its rigorous academic environment and high-quality professors. The faculty, uniformly, were terrific and they really cared about their students. They were willing to listen to us no matter our views, whether they agreed with them or not.

I listened to a podcast where you recounted that at the time of your Clinton administration confirmation hearing, you were asked about lending discrimination, and you said, “I promise that I will pull it out by root and branch.” And you did. What did you find most gratifying about focusing on that issue when you were Comptroller?

Back then, my worry, principally, was for low-income Americans, and particularly Black Americans, who had been discriminated against in the lending sector.

Once I brought those cases of discriminatory lending to the court, and fined the perpetrators millions of dollars, I think the banking industry changed markedly after that.

Also, I remember one bank that got hit very hard by fines decided to hire its first senior Black officer in charge of the mortgage department because they decided it was time for a change. But I saw to it that the banking industry did more than just hire Black managers—they made sure that people were being treated equitably.

Is everything perfect? Nothing’s perfect. But things are much better than they used to be.

David Silverberg is a journalist and writing coach in Toronto who has been reviewing books and interviewing authors for more than 15 years.

MORE ALUMNI TITLES

SAMUEL MARKIND ’79: Music Between Your Ears: How Musical Engagement Powers the Human Brain

(Johns Hopkins University Press)

Blending neuroscience, psychology, and narrative, Markind, a neurologist, explores how music can impact the brain at every level, from memory and motor function to emotion and identity. Drawing on his extensive clinical experience and research, Music Between Your Ears explains why melody and rhythm are integral parts of the human experience and what music reveals about our cognition and consciousness. Throughout, Markind’s straightforward approach invites readers to view active participation in music as much more than a source of entertainment, but rather a neural superpower that can improve well-being.

WILLEM DEVRIES ’72 (CO-EDITOR): Sellars and Davidson in Dialogue: Truths, Meanings, and Minds (Routledge)

In this edited volume, deVries gathers essays that probe the affinity and critical tensions between two of the most influential figures of 20th-century analytic philosophy: Wilfrid Sellars and Donald Davidson. Both thinkers challenged the mentalistic conception of meaning, advocating instead for holistic and socially rooted accounts of mind, action, and language. The contributions featured in the book analyze convergence and divergence across semantics, epistemology, ontology, and normativity, illustrating how Sellars and Davidson each erased the boundary between philosophy of language and philosophy of action. The book is ideal for scholars and advanced students interested in the history of analytic philosophy.

DENNE MICHELE NORRIS ’08: When the Harvest Comes (Penguin Random House)

In her debut novel, heralded by The Boston Globe as “achingly beautiful,” Norris tells the tale of Davis Freeman, a Black violinist set to marry his beloved Everett. As they prepare for the ceremony, Davis learns that his father—a Baptist minister—has

Ford Games

Field and Screen

Mena Kazista ’28 lent her experience as a defender on the field hockey team to a sports movie shot by her filmmaker mother and aunt. She’ll bring lessons from the set back to the pitch.

BY CHARLES CURTIS

’04

Kazista (above and opposite, in gray) on the set of The Next Play

For Mena Kazista ’28, art, life, family, and sports all converged in one fortuitous summer. The Nazareth, Pa., native’s mother, Koula Kazista, and aunt, Katina Sossiadis, wrote a script— The Next Play—that focuses on a high school field hockey player struggling with mental health. Mena, who’s a defensive midfielder for Haverford field hockey, wore multiple hats during the Meritage Pictures production which wrapped in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley this past summer. From acting as an extra to consulting on the

sports side of the script to working with actors as a production assistant, she did a bit of everything. She spoke to Haverford magazine about how she enjoyed life on set and what experiences will transfer back to the field hockey pitch.

Field hockey is in her blood. My mom played the sport in high school. When I was in second grade, she suggested I try it. I tried so many sports between then and now, and this one is my favorite. Softball was too slow, and field hockey is collaborative and continuous, where mistakes felt

like they were more accepted. I think part of it was that my mom was so into it—her excitement made me excited, too. We’d watch college and pro games together. I wasn’t sure I wanted to play in college, but when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, I practiced in my driveway and realized I couldn’t sit with the fact that I wasn’t playing games at all. That’s when I realized how much I liked the sport and got more serious, practicing more and working harder with my club team.

Her mom and aunt wrote what they knew—and asked about what they didn’t. They made their first feature, Epiphany, about a father-daughter relationship, in 2019. For their second script, their producers told them to try something different. So they focused on field hockey since I play and both my cousins do, too. The plot focuses on two girls at a boarding school. One takes the spotlight from the other who then struggles with mental health. When I read it, I could tell every character they had created was based on someone in our real life. They consulted me on the field hockey action. “We need something really high-stakes— what could be happening in a game?” Or “What should this character say on the field?”

The movie isn’t just about sports. My mom and aunt saw how sports can impact everybody mentally. Field hockey has taken a toll on me in some ways as I’ve battled anxiety and perfectionism. There hasn’t been much conversation about that side of sports until recently. The movie is called The Next Play because it’s something we always say on the field if someone messes up: “That’s OK! You’ll get them on the next play.”

The movie earned her multiple film credits. I’m a featured extra who plays a member of the boarding school team. I have a couple of lines, but I’m in the background of a lot of scenes. I also joined the film as a production assistant. I got moved up to what’s called “first team”—I promise my mom wasn’t responsible for it, it wasn’t nepotism!—which is working with the actors. When they would arrive in the morning, I was with them through hair and makeup and wardrobe. I was in charge of making sure they were where they should be if they were on

camera. It was a really good experience and I was honored to be trusted with that.

It was fun, but Hollywood isn’t in her future. Being on set made me want to be in the movie industry for about two days … and then not. There were some long days—we’d sometimes start at 6 p.m. and didn’t finish until 6 a.m. I hated not having a routine. I plan on being a political science major and to go to law school. I really do enjoy helping people, especially those who are unable to help themselves or are put at a disadvantage. I think I could make a great impact that way.

She found a way to connect her cinema experience to Haverford’s field hockey squad. I asked the assistant directors why they picked me for first team production assistant. They told me I was a doer, that I have leadership skills, and I’m a people person. That’s what Haverford stands for and what being on a team means. Through the filmmaking process, I saw team-oriented scenes and events. I kept asking myself, “Is this realistic?” So I’m able to bring that back with me, where I can look at what I saw in my “fake” field hockey team and apply it to my real team. I’ve also struggled with my confidence in field hockey, and that was definitely a part of the movie. I was talking to my mom about the upcoming season recently and she said, “You have to be confident. Didn’t we just make a whole movie about this?” The point of the film is: In the end, it’s all going to be OK.

Charles Curtis ’04 is managing editor for USA Today’s For the Win and an author of the Weirdo Academy series, published by Month9Books.

‘‘ They told me I was a doer, that I have leadership skills, and I’m a people person. That’s what Haverford stands for and what being on a team means.

”

TELL US MORE

JASON PATLIS ’85

The Life Aquatic

When he took the helm of the Maritime Aquarium at Norwalk in November 2019, Jason Patlis ’85 joined a beloved Connecticut institution facing existential threats. A major federal construction project was impacting the aquarium’s buildings. Then, four months later, came a global pandemic. Upon emerging from those two threats in 2022, Patlis could then turn to more philosophical questions about what an aquarium could—and should—be in the 21st century.

For Patlis, navigating these challenges and opportunities interlaced many threads of his career. After a short stint on Wall Street upon graduating Haverford, Patlis turned to law and conservation, worked for the executive and legislative branches of the federal government, received a Fulbright scholarship to study governance and

conservation in Indonesia, and then six years later—after serving on a number of U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and World Bank projects— returned to the U.S. for influential roles with the World Wildlife Fund and the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Now, as the president and CEO of one of Connecticut’s largest family attractions, Patlis has embarked on a new, 10-year strategic plan to create “an aquarium without walls,” expanding beyond traditional exhibits to new programming along the coast and on the water. For Patlis, the goal is to redefine the role an aquarium plays not only as a local attraction and conservation leader, but as an institution that enriches the lives of people in the community.

He points to the College as the place where he honed the communication skills that power his advocacy and built the scientific and ethical framework that shapes his

work today. Haverford spoke with Patlis about his role, the importance of aquariums, and how he finds joy.

What fills the day of the CEO of a beloved aquarium?

On a day-to-day basis, I define my job as making everyone else’s job easier. Whether that’s dealing with fundraising, operations, strategic thinking, or budgeting, I offer guidance to help my team navigate complications. It takes a cohesive, dedicated, talented team to make a place like this a success. Long term, I work with the team to craft and implement the vision, mission, and goals that shape our future direction, and create opportunities for that ambition.

Let’s talk about those complications and opportunities. What are the biggest challenges you’ve encountered? Complications existed before I started the job. A $1.3 billion federal railway project literally bisecting the aquarium’s facilities jeopardized our very survival. The state provided us funding to replace some of the major exhibits and the IMAX theater that we were forced to close, so we survived that, just in time to deal with the global pandemic. And the pandemic required us to close our doors for three months, furlough workers, address financial challenges—all the while caring for the 8,000 animals that needed food, husbandry and veterinary care, functioning habitats, and operating life-support systems. But, thanks to a great team and lots of support, we emerged even stronger.

In terms of opportunities, a lot of zoos and aquariums have conservation programs to complement their own living animal collections. The Maritime Aquarium didn’t have a formal conservation program when I started, but since then, we’ve grown from less than $100,000 to more than $2 million in funding. We’ve also expanded our educational program-

ming to now reach 60,000 students and children in the region. Last year, we developed our forward-thinking strategic plan to build “an aquarium without walls” that re-imagines what an aquarium can be.

What attractions are community members most drawn to?

Our focus is the local biodiversity of Long Island Sound, and our most popular species are the seven-foot sand tiger sharks and harbor seals native to local waters. All told, we have more than 8,000 animals— which is a lot for an aquarium— comprising more than 320 species. We specialize in jellies, and cultivate them for aquariums around the nation. Because we are housed in a building that dates back to 1867 and was originally a steel factory, our footprint is small, and we cannot have, like newer aquariums, large tanks with millions of gallons of water. So we seek to create more immersive, interactive, and intimate experiences with local marine animals, rather than overwhelm visitors with large exotic marine animals. We do it with touch tanks, feedings, animal encounters, and volunteer and educator engagement. We also have Connecticut’s only mob of meerkats.

How did your experience at Haverford inform your career path?

Haverford instilled a profound sense of responsibility for promoting the welfare of others and conducting oneself in an ethical way, both personally and professionally. The Honor Code played an enormous role in my thinking. Academically, I was an English major and my professors were tough, giving me writing and communication skills that were instrumental throughout my career. I was also very heavy into the sciences—I took organic chemistry and the Biology Department’s Superlab, which gave me an important scien-

tific understanding that helps in the path I’ve chosen.

What does the future hold for aquariums?

In the present day, they are fun family attractions, conservation leaders, education centers, and economic engines of local communities. But looking to the future, they can also serve as critical pillars of society, as a voice leader and community resource to bring people together and inspire a stronger connection to each other and to the natural world on which we depend.

What lessons from prior positions did you take into this one?

In working as a lawyer for the government, I saw the power of law, regulation, and public policy, but I also saw the limitations in that approach. In working for two of the largest conservation organizations in the world, I saw that the key to their success was not so much their global reach and scale, but rather their intense commitment to and presence in the local communities where they worked. It comes down to changing knowledge, attitude, and ultimately behavior. Both public policy and private action are needed to effectuate change for the better. And I see an institution like the Maritime Aquarium bridging both of those towards a more sustainable and more ethical future.

What do you do for fun when you’re not immersed in the aquarium world?

I love to be out in nature, primarily cycling and hiking. Years ago, I cycled across Europe and through the Andean, Himalayan, and Karakoram mountains. Not much marine life on those trips, but once, while solo hiking through the central mountains of West Papua in Indonesia, about 10,000 feet in altitude, I found a fossilized seashell. A reminder that the ocean is everywhere.

—Eric Butterman

FROM HAVERFORD TO THE STARS

Fords have long played an outsized role in studying the cosmos.

Now, that includes significant contributions to the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time—the world’s most ambitious survey of the universe. B Y SARI HARRAR

From Haverford to the Stars

ON THE SUMMIT

of Chile’s 8,800-foot Cerro Pachón, Peter Ferguson ’12 walked out of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory one winter night in 2023. Rocks crunched under his boots, a chilly wind blew, and compressors that heat and cool the facility’s groundbreaking super telescope, still under construction at the time, hummed. But he barely noticed.

Billions of stars were gleaming in the clear black sky.

“It was super spectacular,” says Ferguson, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington’s Institute for Data Intensive Research for Astrophysics and Cosmology. He spent a year in Chile testing and verifying data—a process called commissioning—from the huge telescope, notably equipped with the largest digital camera ever constructed. “I could really see the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds, dwarf galaxies circling the Milky Way that we can’t see at all from the Northern Hemisphere. The view was amazing.” That star-studded show was just a slice of the vast, deep universe the $800 million Rubin Observatory, a project of the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, will survey over the next 10 years. Peering out through dry, nearly cloudless night air remarkably free of light pollution, the telescope will probe some of the biggest mysteries of the cosmos. Scientists hope it will revolutionize what we know about outer space and, in the process, transform how research in astronomy and other sciences is performed.

Fords like Ferguson have played roles throughout the history-making Rubin’s 20-year development. Now, they’re poised to mine its treasure trove of discoveries and broaden access to its immense stores of data. The Rubin connection illustrates Haverford’s outsized role in the relatively small fields of astronomy and astrophysics, says Karen Masters, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Haverford.

“There’s a long history of astronomy at Haverford,” Masters explains. “American astronomer John Gummere was one of the founders of the College and built the first observatory here. [It was replaced by Strawbridge Observatory in 1850.] Astronomy was part of the Quaker ethos of understanding God better by studying nature.”

A STRONG FOUNDATION

Fords have made their mark in astronomy in many ways. Astrophysicist Joseph H. Taylor Jr. ’63 won the Nobel Prize in 1993 for co-discovery of a new type of pulsar star that provided a test of general relativity. Michael Werner ’63 is project scientist for the Spitzer

Space Telescope at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. As project scientist for mirror polishing at the University of Arizona’s Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab, Hubert “Buddy” Martin ’78 makes some of the largest telescope mirrors in the world. Still more hold posts at universities and research centers and have done game-changing research—from discovering ultra-faint dwarf galaxies to documenting the collision of distant star systems to taking some of the first measurements of the big bang’s lingering cosmic microwave background radiation.

Masters estimates that out of the 200 Ph.D.s awarded in astronomy and astrophysics each year in the U.S., two go to Haverford alumni. “One percent may not sound impressive, but it’s about two orders of magnitude more than you’d expect,” she says. “I run into Haverford graduates at astronomy meetings frequently, including students I’ve taught, and many more from earlier generations taught by Haverford’s many notable astronomy professors.”

The reason for this prominence starts with some foundational elements of a Haverford education.

“Good liberal arts colleges like Haverford punch above their weight at preparing natural science researchers,” says Bruce Partridge, emeritus professor of astronomy at Haverford. “To be a good scientist, you need the ability to think and interact and write, not just do science.” His research on cosmic microwave background radiation led to his induction this October into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. “The other factor,” adds Partridge, “is that Haverford puts a high premium on students doing real research. It gives students the flavor of what it’s really like to be a scientist.”

Now, it’s go time for Rubin. By early 2026, the observatory’s 27.6-foot-wide telescope and 3,200 megapixel digital camera, the world’s largest at about the size of a small SUV, will be snapping 1,000 images a night. Ultimately, the pictures will form a “movie of the sky” featuring 20 billion galaxies, 17 billion stars, and 16 million other space denizens such as exploding supernovas, hurtling asteroids, and star-gobbling black holes. The project, called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), will produce the widest and deepest views ever of the universe.

WIDENING THE ’SCOPE: Peter Ferguson ’12 (top) with Rubin’s groundbreaking LSST Camera; the camera (right) shortly after darkness on April 15, 2025; a detail (background) of a Vera C. Rubin image of the open star cluster Messier 21.

“I

got to really try research out for the first time at Haverford,” says Peter Ferguson. “Haverford gave me the opportunity to work closely with professors doing interesting science, and to take a large role because there weren’t grad students.”

“There’s a long history of astronomy

at Haverford,” says Karen Masters. “Astronomy

was part of the Quaker ethos of understanding God better by studying nature.”

EYES ON THE SKIES: (clockwise from top) Professor of Physics and Astronomy Karen Masters, Ian Dell’Antonio ’89, and Kian-Tat Lim ’87. An image of the Trifid and Lagoon nebulae (background)—both several thousand light-years from Earth—made up of 678 individual images taken by the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory.

Here’s how six Fords are contributing to this astronomical feat—and how their Haverford experiences launched their journeys to the stars.

REALLY, REALLY BIG DATA

Kian-Tat Lim ’87 oversees the development and testing of software to manage LSST data. Lim, notably, never took an astronomy class while at Haverford.

An undergrad chemistry major with a Ph.D. in computational chemistry from California Institute of Technology, Lim was a software architect in the Strategic Data Solutions Group at Yahoo before going to work on Rubin in 2007. Lim says he was intrigued by the possibility of applying large-scale commercial data management to one of the biggest data projects in science. He is now the software architect for data management for Rubin and the LSST, based at the Department of Energy’s Stanford-run SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, Calif.

“The tradition had been that science was doing big computational work and commercial enterprises would adapt things [from that],” Lim says. He saw “an opportunity for a reverse flow, where things developed in the commercial world could help out doing bigger science.”

The amount of data Rubin produces is enormous: 20 terabytes, comparable to the content of all of the books ever written, per night, according to the American Physical Society. Over 10 years, the downloaded and processed data will amount to about 500 petabytes—roughly equal to about 250 trillion printed pages. Every year, all data gathered to that point will be processed to make the faintest, furthest objects in the sky more visible and serve the project’s goals of mapping the Milky Way, cataloging our solar system, and uncovering new information about dark matter and dark energy. “By the end, we will process 10 years of data in one year,” he says. “We are hoping the world’s semiconductor makers keep on delivering faster and faster computers. So far, they have.”

But the data is also moving fast. A major challenge Lim and his team tackled involved crafting ways to review images accurately in less than a minute apiece each night, so the LSST can issue alerts—nightly news bulletins about happenings in the universe. “Anything that changes by brightening, dimming, or moving” could trigger an alert, Lim says. “So that’s supernovae and asteroids, but also variable stars.” Astronomers can then train other telescopes on the spots of interest and also use Rubin’s multiple images, taken over time, to track changes. “Basically no other telescope in the world can really replicate that capability,” he says.

Lim says Haverford’s liberal-arts-informed focus on

From

Haverford to the Stars

curiosity fueled his own interest in “a wide variety of topics” when he pivoted from commercial computing to science. “I was constantly growing in the job [at the LSST], aided by wanting to know what other people were doing, wanting to know about other parts of the project,” says Lim, who often met with astronomers to learn more about their work. And the Quaker value of consensus—“leading by convincing,” he says, “not dictating”—defined his approach as a team leader. “I was a student member of the search committee that hired the very first computer science professor at Haverford,” he says. “I got to see how the process worked.”

DARK ENERGY AND DARK MATTER

Ian Dell’Antonio ’89 hopes the LSST’s measurements of light gravitationally distorted by distant galaxies will yield clues about dark energy, one of the most enigmatic forces in the cosmos.

“As far as we can tell, dark energy makes the universe expand faster and faster and faster,” says Dell’Antonio, an observational cosmologist and professor of physics at Brown University since 1999. “But we know little about it.” As a postdoctoral researcher at Bell Laboratories, Dell’Antonio was at a conference table at the Aspen Center for Physics in 1998 during the earliest conversations about the Rubin Observatory. Later, he was a member of the LSST collaboration’s weak lensing working group and headed the galaxy clusters working group of the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration.

This summer, Dell’Antonio co-authored a study that made news in astronomy—led by Anthony Englert, a Ph.D. candidate in Dell’Antonio’s research group at Brown—showing a diamond necklace-like bridge of stars stretching between merging galaxies 700 million light-years from Earth. The first-ever images came from the Dark Energy Camera on a mountaintop near Rubin. The study authors say Rubin’s even-better imaging abilities will soon reveal much more about distant galaxy clusters—likely including plenty of unexpected discoveries. “One of the things about Rubin that makes it powerful is the survey nature, covering almost the entire Southern sky deeply and repeatedly, so even faint galaxies show up,” Dell’Antonio says. “The exciting thing is, we don’t know what will be found.”

Meanwhile, one thing he, Ferguson, and many others expect are new hints about dark matter, which along with dark energy makes up 95 percent of the contents of the universe. Right now, little is known about this substance that seems to shape and hold star systems together like invisible glue.

“At this point, I think astronomers have really become

From Haverford to the Stars

experts in what dark matter isn’t,” says Ferguson, who will be studying dark matter as LSST data becomes available. “It does not appear to interact with light or with normal matter in any measurable way, other than through gravity. But some galaxies seem to have 100 times more dark matter than normal matter. One thing the LSST will do is help us identify faint satellite galaxies near the Milky Way. We think each has a dark matter halo around it.”

Dell’Antonio and Ferguson both studied physics and astronomy at Haverford and credit small classes with astronomers actively engaged in research with sparking their own graduate work and careers. “I took several classes with three or four students in them, which meant I had these amazing professors essentially to myself,” Dell’Antonio says. “Because they were active researchers, you could participate in their projects. And you could go talk to and work with the scientists they collaborated with, which helps launch the careers of professional astronomers. Those are some of the reasons Haverford is incredibly over-represented in astronomy.”

Close mentorships at Haverford inspire his own work with students, Dell’Antonio says. “The level of attention and care toward students is a value that Haverford instills in its astronomers,” he says. “It’s something you can see in the professors who are Haverford grads in the various other institutions.”

Ferguson’s favorite professors at Haverford were astronomers. “I got to really try research out for the first time at Haverford,” he says. “It turned out it was really my thing. Haverford gave me the opportunity to work closely with professors doing interesting science, and to take a large role because there weren’t grad students. My senior thesis was on stellar streams, which is a lot of what I work on now.”

CITIZEN SCIENCE

You don’t have to be an astrophysicist to contribute to research using LSST data, notes Haverford astronomy professor Masters. As principal investigator for the Zooniverse citizen-science project Galaxy Zoo, she is working with the Galaxy Zoo team to add LSST images to the site in the near future. Masters’s project enlists everyday people to identify galaxy shapes. Swirling spirals, blob-like balls, and elliptical forms are big clues to a star system’s past and present, she says.

“It’s really valuable to have human eyes on these images, rather than just relying on computers and machine learning,” she says. “A computer will answer what you ask it, whereas humans are curious and sometimes spot things we never thought to ask about.” Since its start in 2007, Galaxy Zoo has contributed data to, or been mentioned in, over 294 published research papers

including 59 authored or co-authored by Masters.

“We have 130,000 active volunteers on the current phase of Galaxy Zoo,” she says, adding that many more have participated over the project’s 18 years. “They’re dedicated and excited to be part of science—and they’re really helping.”

It’s an example of the values of inclusion and collaboration that Haverford prioritizes—and of their rewards, especially in the era of the Rubin Observatory and big data in astronomy, Masters adds. “Several million galaxies have been classified so far by Galaxy Zoo citizen scientists,” she says. “To do visual classifications of this many galaxies would be really impossible for professional astronomers on their own.”

THE NEXT GENERATION

The conventional way astronomers gather information is a nail-biter: They typically book time on a telescope’s crowded schedule then pray for clear skies. But Rubin and the LSST are different. Researchers in the U.S. and Chile, as well as others with data rights, can log in to the Rubin Science Platform’s online portal to access its growing inventory of survey data. Never before has so much astronomical data been so widely available.

“This enormous playground of beautiful data creates the conditions to democratize astronomy and, by extension, other fields of science,” says Beth Willman, a professor of astronomy at Haverford from 2008 to 2015 and now CEO of LSST Discovery Alliance, the nonprofit whose mission is to maximize the impact of the LSST.

The LSST Discovery Alliance aims to support diversity and inclusion in astronomy by making dataprocessing software and expertise available to “anyone with a great scientific question for the LSST, ensuring they have the resources to answer it,” Willman says.

Willman has worked on Rubin in a variety of roles since 2008, including as chair of its international Milky Way science collaboration from 2008 to 2015 and as deputy director from 2015 to 2018, planning the handover from construction to operations. She calls LSST’s coming surge of data “truly extraordinary, a once-in-alifetime opportunity for change.”

To that end, the Discovery Alliance is connecting astronomers around the globe—from Africa to Poland to a community college in Detroit—with resources that in the past were easier to access at large and well-funded elite colleges and research universities.

The Discovery Alliance contracts with a team of software engineers who collaborate with astronomy researchers so they’re ready to analyze complex LSST data, for example. “This kind of teamwork is the forefront of science,” says Andrew Sturner ’12, program

“This enormous playground of beautiful data creates the conditions to democratize astronomy and, by extension, other fields of science,” says Beth Willman.

manager for the Discovery Alliance. “Many astronomers have really creative ideas, but they may not have the skill set to scale up to Rubin-sized data.”

The Discovery Alliance is also supporting postdoctoral researchers with mentors and networking groups through a program called the Catalyst Fellowship. “Postdocs can feel very isolated,” Sturner says. “We provide ongoing mentoring and networking opportunities so they can strengthen ties and build support to be successful, to become the next generation of astronomers.” Fellows also do projects based in their own communities.

The organization has also set up childcare at meetings so scientists with young families can attend.

Sturner studied physics and astronomy at Haverford. As a University of Colorado grad student he worked on magnetospheric plasma physics and started a program aimed at retaining undergraduate astronomy majors through mentoring and opportunities to share their knowledge with schools in their

home communities. “It’s really important for me to understand and be a part of making astronomy more equitable,” he says. “Fundamentally, I think astronomy is for everyone.”

Willman says her years at Haverford provided ample opportunities for research and early contributions to Rubin—and sharpened her awareness of the barriers to advancement in science that she now seeks to overcome at the Discovery Alliance. “The LSST gives us a chance to break cultural barriers, so astronomy research isn’t just happening at a few well-funded institutions,” she says. “Brilliance is everywhere in humanity,” she says. “If we want the best discoveries to come out of the LSST, we need a diverse, inclusive, global community working on it.” It’s a mission that’s Haverfordian in nature, and that’s radiating out into the cosmos. H

Sari Harrar is a freelance writer who covers health and science for national publications.

An Ethical Approach to AI

As artificial intelligence permeates society, many in the Haverford community are working to figure out what role—if any—it should play in higher ed.

By Lini S. Kadaba

• Illustration by Melissa McFeeters

In music professor Richard Freedman’s syllabus for “Encoding Music: Digital Approaches to Scores and Sound,” he teases the possibilities of generative artificial intelligence (AI). Perhaps, he suggests, the technology could be used to query eye-witness testimonies about musical performances for clues about the events themselves. Or ask for insights into the writers of music treatises. Or produce reports that categorize people, places, ideas, and sounds described in texts and then analyze the data.

For the first time, the Renaissance music scholar and John C. Whitehead 1943 Professor of the Humanities has added to the class an entire module on AI, thereby exposing Haverford students to the latest tool for the analysis and research of music. He’s even invited a data scientist from the University of Melbourne (Australia) to guide the exploration. “We want to teach them how it works,” Freedman says, “but also how it fails, how to evaluate it. The responsible educational approach is how to use a tool intelligently and critically.”

Elsewhere on campus, Professor of Political Science Craig Borowiak allows his students to use AI to produce snapshots of the state of the field for short assignments—as long as they cite the prompts and the model used—but not for longer essays or exams, he says. Professor of Chemistry Alexander Norquist and his student lab assistants regularly use machine learning to detect patterns in data and to augment under-

standing of experiments, he says, adding that the advent of large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, offers another tool for advancing research into new materials.

Meanwhile, Professor of Computer Science David G. Wonnacott permits students in his “Introduction to Computer Science” course to ask an AI assistant for help when they’re stuck.

All this, even as colleague and AI ethics expert Sorelle Friedler draws a bright line. She maintains that LLMs have no business in higher education, except in classes about AI, such as her course this past spring on “Artificial Intelligence and Society.”

“It’s our job as professors to teach students to learn to think, be creative on their own, learn how to learn new things,” says Friedler, the Shibulal Family Professor of Computer Science. “I don’t think that’s possible if students are outsourcing a bunch of their thinking to a machine.”

The dialogue around AI seems to reflect a broader uncertainty about the role of the technology in so many aspects of contemporary life, as individual faculty find their way through the complex, perpetually changing world of generative AI and its promises and perils. And like other colleges and universities, Haverford, as an institution, is wrestling with how to navigate this rapidly evolving reality.

Over the past three years, ChatGPT, Gemini, and other LLMs have captured the imagination of many, including those in higher ed. Some colleges and universities are swiftly incorporating the technology: the Georgia

An Ethical Approach to AI

Institute of Technology and Harvard University, for example, have designed their own AI teaching assistants; Western Governors University is building tools to provide to other schools, and Rollins College includes courses that require the use of AI. Institutions of all types are experimenting at various paces.

But here, at this liberal arts school rooted in Quaker values, where a small community is grounded by its foundational Honor Code, the conversation has unfolded in measured ways, deliberatively, analytically, humanistically—and always with a strong throughline of ethical examination.

If any school is positioned to thoughtfully and holistically address the challenge AI presents to higher education, it might just be Haverford.

As far back as 2018, Fords investigated AI in the student-designed seminar “From Frankenstein to Alexa: A Humanistic Inquiry into the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence.”

In the intervening years, the College continued its exploration, sending administrators and faculty to workshops convened by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, and holding lunch-and-learn events, all geared toward getting a handle on how best to engage with this technology looming on the horizon.

This academic year, the technology has increasingly taken center stage as the College launches various projects. They include a new Community of Practice focused on generative AI in pedagogy that Libraries and Instructional and Information Technology Services is organizing; a new faculty AI Working Group; and a Dec. 2 Founders Porch virtual event, The Ethics of AI, with Friedler and alum Max Hjelm ’11, senior vice president of revenue at AI cloud-computing company CoreWeave, in conversation with President Wendy Raymond. And before the school year even started, a workshop on drafting AI-use statements for syllabi was held.

In addition, Haverford is offering faculty and staff AI Ready, a monthly webinar about leveraging generative AI

developed by the Council for Independent Colleges. The College also is piloting Amplify GenAI, an open-source platform out of Vanderbilt University that gives secure access to ChatGPT, Claude, Mistral, DeepSeek and other LLMs. About 150 people will have access to the portal, and it will support AI-powered projects, funded with Haverford’s Teaching with Technology grants, in three physics classes, senior thesis work in computer science, and the “Narrating Ourselves: The Power of Storytelling” English course.

“We’re hoping to build a foundation this year so faculty can really thoughtfully engage across disciplines,” says Provost Helen White, also the William H. and Johanna A. Harris Professor in Environmental Studies and Chemistry. “What we’re doing is guided by our values as a college around integrity, academic excellence, and ethical engagement with AI.”

AI is a broad, difficult topic to address and resistant to narrow definition. Fifty-seven percent of nearly 800 higher-ed survey respondents viewed the technology as a strategic priority, according to the nonprofit association EDUCAUSE’s “AI Landscape Study” released in February of this year. Still, only 22 percent reported implementing institution-wide AI strategies. For the majority—55 percent—AI policy was being established as needed within colleges and departments. Ethical concerns abounded, with 91 percent

“It’s our job as professors to teach students to learn to think, be creative on their own, learn how to learn new things. I don’t think that’s possible if students are outsourcing a bunch of their thinking to a machine,” says Sorelle Friedler.

voicing concern about increased misinformation; 90 percent, about use of data without consent; and 88 percent, about the inability to evaluate AI-generated content.

At this point, Haverford has no plans for a top-down, blanket policy, says Benjamin Le, senior associate provost for academic affairs. Instead, the College is supporting a collaborative process, helmed by faculty and staff, that includes working groups, pilot programs, and community dialogue to develop guidance aligned with the College’s core values. While the Honor Code also doesn’t state an explicit AI policy, its core values of trust and respect across both the social and academic spheres are certainly informing the conversation. Rather than imposing a stringent policy, White says, the College continues to respect the autonomy of each department and individual faculty members to develop discipline-specific approaches to AI’s place in their classrooms. The result is a range of approaches, from required usage for some classes and assignments to outright bans— and everything in between.

Professor of Chemistry Alexander Norquist and his student lab assistants use machine learning to detect patterns in data and augment understanding of experiements. He views large language models as another research tool. “AI can read more papers than I ever can,” he says. “ChatGPT is a calculator for words, and it works very effectively.”

“We’re not thinking about it in terms of technical training,” says Le, who is also a professor of psychology. “I’m sure students will learn that along the way. … The interesting question is, ‘What can we learn from philosophy, psychology, anthropology about how to think about these tools, manage these tools, make these tools humanized in ways they can work with people?’”

He describes this exploration and implementation as being guided by a fundamental question: “How can people drive the tool rather than the tool driving people?”

Ultimately, Provost White says, Haverford is looking to establish best practices, particularly the principled use of AI, and lead in this space. The College has a long history of putting an ethical frame on the issues of the day, and its new Michael B. Kim Institute for Ethical Inquiry and Leadership provides another avenue to steer the conversation.

“We engage students to be critical thinkers,” she says. “We ask students to be creative. This is an opportunity not just to adapt to the world, but to help shape it, especially around the ethical questions AI raises.

“What does it mean to engage with AI ethically at Haverford?” she adds. “How can Haverford model ethical approaches to AI? The value of a liberal arts education becomes even clearer. It’s about how we think and engage with the world, even as it changes.”

Early this semester, Wonnacott surveyed some 50 students across two sections of his intro computer science course on their desire to learn about AI tools. A whopping 90 percent expressed interest. On a Thursday afternoon in September, he spent the last 20 minutes of class demonstrating AI coding tools.

First up was Anthropic’s Claude platform, meant for collaboration. When Wonnacott prompted the tool, “I want to write a Python function that tells me if two rectangles overlap,” it spat out the code in a second.

“How much did I learn?” he posited. “I’ve learned a little bit.” Wonnacott likened it to learning violin by watching a master violinist. “I’d know something, but I would not be able to play the violin.”

Then Wonnacott put his prompt into CS50.ai, the Harvard University-developed coding tutor adapted from ChatGPT. “That sounds like an interesting problem! How are you currently thinking about approaching it?” responded the AI assistant.

An Ethical Approach to AI

“I’d like to try a top-down design,” Wonnacott typed.

“Great! Top-down design is a useful approach,” the assistant said, offering guidance but not the outright answer.

Until this semester, Wonnacott had banned the use of AI for assignments. But when he noticed students struggling to start their lab problems, often staring at the screen, Wonnacott wondered whether remote learning during the pandemic may have led to an over-reliance on online tools to solve problems. “They didn’t have that flow of learning without doing online searches,” he says. “I wanted to make sure, if they don’t have the habit to do anything but talk to AI, that they do so in a way that doesn’t prevent their learning.”

That’s where CS50.ai comes in. Of course, Wonnacott and five human TAs are still available for questions—but not necessarily at 4 a.m. The bot is. “Sometimes it’s a little overly helpful,” he allows. “But not egregiously.”

Sophomore Celeste Nelson ’28 of Canton, N.Y., is one of the doubters of AI assistants in Wonnacot’s class. The philosophy and classics double major figured she could best the tech’s output. In one class, Nelson says Associate Professor and Chair of Classics Matthew Farmer demonstrated ChatGPT’s inability to provide information about ancient Greek. (The database is too small.) “It also can’t

reliably distinguish ancient Greek from modern Greek,” she adds. “I don’t have any reason to think it’s more useful for coding.” Besides, Nelson continues, “I think I’m better served as a student doing my own learning.”

But what about mastering a technology that has become ever more pervasive with each iteration? What about practicing a tool already prevalent in many workplaces? And what’s the point of banning usage when students are going to use it anyway?

For Friedler—who served in the Biden administration’s White House Office of Science and Technology and coauthored the federal AI Bill of Rights—AI stunts learning. That’s why the builder of AI systems adamantly opposes students using the technology in most educational settings, even for brainstorming, a popular and permitted use at many colleges. “If ChatGPT generates ideas, are you learning to generate ideas?” she asks. “I want them to gain the tools. It’s not about how can you most efficiently generate some text.”

Friedler also contends that AI is losing its luster in many workplaces, creating more hassle than it’s worth to factcheck its output. But should it become widespread, then she argues that employees who can think for themselves become even more essential. “How else,” she asks, “are they going to differentiate themselves from the AI slop that’s produced?”

Richard Freedman, John C. Whitehead 1943 Professor of the Humanities, has added an AI module to his class “Encoding Music: Digital Approaches to Scores and Sound.” “We want to teach them how it works,” he says, “but also how it fails, how to evaluate it.”

The Kim Institute co-director also says learning the impact of the technology— how it works, how it hallucinates information, how it provides only one perspective, and so on—doesn’t require constant use. Instead, she suggested Haverford offer more classes on AI’s impact on society, where students can think deeply about the technology.

She understands that many of her colleagues are using AI but trusts that they’ve carefully considered the ethical implications and issues specific to their fields. As for the question of whether it’s pointless to ban students from using the technology: “That’s like saying you can’t keep students from cheating. No. You can tell them what’s acceptable and not and draw a line.”

Alvin Grissom II, a computer science associate professor, spoke in February on “Demystifying Large Language Models: What They Are and Why I Rarely Use Them.” He argued that “LLMs are a parody of soulless inauthenticity” and went

“The interesting question is, ‘What can we learn from philosophy, psychology, anthropology about how to think about these tools, manage these tools, make these tools humanized in ways they can work with people?’” says Benjamin Le.

on to list AI’s many downsides. “Fluency is not the same as accuracy,” he said in the talk. “They’re automatic, errorprone encyclopedias.”

Grissom, who is the chair of the faculty AI Working Group, cites one Massachusetts Institute of Technology study that found students who didn’t use AI had the best recall of information; those who Googled had the next best; those who turned to ChatGPT remembered the least.

“I don’t think an LLM has a place or much of a place,” he says. “Why do you need a model to summarize an article for you? Just read the article. There is value in slowing down and struggling through something. It forms neural connections.”

Friedler and Grissom’s skepticism isn’t rooted in a fear of technology—they are both computer scientists, after all—so much as a respect for the learning process. Both express concerns that an overreliance on AI could erode critical thinking, but see value in ensuring students understand how these tools work and their limitations.

Across campus, other faculty members acknowledge those pitfalls but are finding ways to use AI productively when it aligns with their pedagogical goals. Norquist, for one, appreciates generative AI’s ability to summarize research. “AI can read more papers than I ever can,” he says. “ChatGPT is a calculator for words, and it works very effectively.” While he doesn’t allow AI in his “Introduction to Chemistry” class, where newbies to the field need to learn fundamentals, Norquist says he plans to introduce prompt engineering in his senior-level “Solid State Chemistry” course this year to help students master the dense, terse style of chemical literature. “I think we need to broaden exposure to some of these pedagogical techniques.”

At the same time, Norquist voices concern that the rapid advance of the technology is outpacing discussion of appropriate and inappropriate uses. “It’s a conversation that needs to happen all the time,” he says. “As new capabilities come up, we need to be able to address them as quickly as we can.”

As Haverford focuses more resources on AI and its place not only on campus but in education and the larger society, it continues to find ways to make that conversation long and deep, as is its practice.

In the summer of 2024, Borowiak, who is also the associate provost for faculty development, helped coordinate the

three-day Reed College “Liberal Arts in the Age of ChatGPT” workshop, which the Alliance to Advance Liberal Arts Colleges funded with the purpose of facilitating discussions and collaborations among researchers from small colleges. (Notably, the workshop proposal specified that it was crafted with the help of ChatGPT.)

“What came out of the workshop was a commitment to interdisciplinary and interdivisional learning and a strong commitment to ethical learning, to honor codes, civic education, all things Haverford does,” he says. “Those things put liberal arts in a unique position to grapple with all of the humanistic and ethical conundrums AI is generating.”

Sophomore Charlie Cross ’28 of Redlands, Calif., is TA-ing “Encoding Music.” The computer science and music double major is thrilled that Freedman has added the unit on LLMs, an emerging field within musicology that allows investigation of unstructured data (PDFs of music reviews, for example) that was nearly impossible to handle at scale before the technology hit, he says.

“It’s awesome that students will get to learn about LLMs formally,” he says. “Students will get the chance to design their own AI-driven data analysis programs.”

While Cross acknowledges ethical issues, particularly generative AI’s high energy use, he says the ubiquitous nature of the technology underlines the importance of exposing students to “what is going on behind the scenes, what the concerns are, and how to use AI efficiently and responsibly. I think it’s really exciting that this course gives students room to explore hands-on, while still thinking about the bigger ethical issues.”

Freedman agrees. Like many professors at Haverford, he’s orienting his pedagogy, his class, and his syllabus, to account for these AI times in his own way. “How do I distinguish AI’s suggestion from my thoughts?” he says, citing key questions. “How do I evaluate results? How do I use it as an assistant and not an authority?

“This,” he says, “is a teachable moment.” H

Journalist Lini S. Kadaba, a former Philadelphia Inquirer staff writer, is a frequent contributor based in Newtown Square, Pa.

Riders Easy

Philadelphia’s public transportation system has long had a reputation for being confusing and difficult to navigate. Two Fords are on a mission to change that.

By Ben Seal

Photography by Holden Blanco

’17

On a Friday afternoon in early September, Will Herzog ’19 and Katie Monroe ’12 head south down Broad Street, Philadelphia’s central artery, searching for, well, a sign.

As they weave through the commotion of workers grabbing a late lunch or cutting out early on one of the last gloriously sunny summer weekends, they cross Chestnut Street and see it in the distance. Herzog’s pace quickens. He’s spotted a physical manifestation of the work he’s poured years into—the work he’s been preparing for ever since he was an undergraduate at Haverford.

At the entrance to the Walnut-Locust subway station—one of the busiest on the Broad Street Line, which runs the north-south length of the city—Herzog calls out a pylon, freshly adorned atop the subway entrance. It’s beaming in the midday sun, SEPTA’s familiar S logo rendered in vivid black on a white background. The upgrade is part of a long-awaited overhaul of the wayfinding system that helps riders get around the region—a seemingly simple change that

Easy Riders

Herzog and Monroe expect to have an outsize impact on the people who rely on the sixth-largest transit agency in the country.

In the early 1960s, passenger railroads and privately owned transit companies were collapsing, so the state legislature created the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority to coordinate transit throughout the region. Because the system emerged from the wreckage of several failing entities, including the Philadelphia Transit Company and the Pennsylvania and Reading railroads, it spent its first six decades operating more like a messy amalgamation of parts than a single cohesive entity. For many riders, the system’s regional rail lines, buses, trolleys, subways, and high-speed line all seemed distinct—in part because the agency’s branding and wayfinding methods presented them as such. But Herzog and Monroe have helped lead a redesign that seeks to unify all of SEPTA’s lines and leave that confusion in the dustbin of history.

“It holds back our region and our ridership in tremendous ways that are hard to articulate until you really dig into it and start to see it,” Monroe says of the outdated scheme. “And then it’s quite easy to see once you start rolling out a new system.”

Before the redesign launched in early 2025, SEPTA’s signage was confusing and incoherent, according to Herzog, the agency’s manager of wayfinding. Some stations shared names—a relic of that tangled history, when multiple lines had their own

SEPTA’s new signage seeks to overcome what Monroe calls “little inconveniences and confusions that add up to something so much bigger about the accessibility of our system.”

discrete stops at Spring Garden or Girard, for example. The century-old Market-Frankford Line—one of the system’s two subways—was still described by its historic name, despite the fact that, according to SEPTA research, some 70 percent of Philadelphians know it as the “El,” owing to its elevated nature outside of Center City. The trolley lines seemed to be numbered haphazardly. It amounted to a series of “little inconveniences and little confusions that add up to something so much bigger about the accessibility of our system,” says Monroe, SEPTA’s project manager for service disruption communications.

“It can be difficult, even for somebody who’s lived in Philly their whole life, to navigate a new part of SEPTA. So imagine what that’s like for somebody who’s brand new or someone who doesn’t speak English,” says Lex Powers, the agency’s deputy chief

communications officer and supervisor to both Monroe and Herzog. “There was a lot to clean up.”

The solution: SEPTA Metro, a unified, simplified, and clarified vision for the system’s frequent, aroundthe-clock rail service, which includes subways, trolleys, and a high-speed line. Each line has been given a bold and distinct color, along with a single-letter name—“L” for the El, “B” for the Broad Street Line, and so on—to help longtime and first-time users alike navigate the network. The rebranded signage and terminology began rolling out at stations in early 2025, including Walnut-Locust in September.

or Herzog, this is a project years in the making. He first got involved with SEPTA in 2013, when he was in high school and became a member of its Youth Advisory Council (YAC), which advocates for public transit and rallies young people to the cause. Growing up near Haverford on the Main Line, he was passionate about civic engagement and knew he wanted to learn more about geography, sociology, and public policy, specifically in relation to the city of Philadelphia. In the summer before his freshman year at Haverford, he emailed the head of the Growth and Structure of Cities program to express his interest in the major. The chair was surprised. “Nobody knows that before you go to college,” Herzog recalls being told.

F“They hadn’t met Will,” Monroe says with a laugh.

Paul Farber, a former visiting assistant professor of history at Haverford who is now director of Monument Lab, a nonprofit at the intersection of history, public art, and design, says Herzog was among the most civically engaged students he’d met.

“Public transit was already his passion on day one, and that was nourished by his greater studies in civic design, culture, and history,” Farber says. “Seeing him step up into his latest role as a transit leader and public servant is a great joy to behold.”

Herzog stayed on the YAC through his time at Haverford, then took an internship at SEPTA, where he met Powers. After grad school at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a master’s in city and regional planning, he helped the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia launch Transit Forward Philadelphia, convening organizations aiming to build a better transit system. In 2021, he joined SEPTA as Powers’s first employee to start realizing that vision from the inside. “It’s an incredible story of dedication to public service,” Monroe says of her colleague.

In getting the SEPTA Metro redesign off the

“ Will and Katie are not only putting their brilliance and care to work on the redesign, they are inviting us to compose with the city, too,” says Paul Farber.

ground, the agency spent nearly two years on public engagement, seeking to understand the challenges riders faced navigating the system and the solutions that could simplify the process. Herzog was central to that listening tour. It included research which outfitted dozens of Philadelphians with high-tech glasses that tracked their eye movements as they worked to understand the outdated wayfinding signage. During that study, Herzog and his colleagues noticed a rider who spoke only Mandarin tracing the M in MarketFrankford onto his palm as a cue to remember the words, which helped inspire the transition to identifying lines with a single letter or number.

Throughout SEPTA’s listening tour, Herzog organized pop-ups to hear riders’ concerns. He even turned his cellphone into a 24-hour hotline for feedback. More than 2,500 public comments poured in, guiding the

Easy Riders

agency’s overhaul. Along the way, he became SEPTA’s subject-matter expert on signage, Powers says. “We didn’t have one before, which is part of the reason we were in the situation we were in,” he adds.

Monroe’s path to SEPTA was more circuitous, though not totally dissimilar. A Virginia native, she majored in anthropology with a concentration in gender and sexuality studies at Haverford. She fell in love with Philadelphia while interning with the Bicycle Coalition, immersed herself in the biking community, and wrote her thesis on the intersections between gender and bicycle subcultures. She helped launch Indego, Philadelphia’s bikeshare program, then earned a master’s in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School. Her journey detoured to Montreal for three years, where she worked on the Transit app used in many cities around the world. When she came back to Philadelphia, she joined SEPTA.

“ It’s an incredible story of dedication to public service,” says Katie Monroe of her colleague.

“I used to say a bicycle is the key to the city, and now I say a bicycle and a working knowledge of the SEPTA system are your key to the city,” Monroe says.

Like Herzog, she was driven to use everything she had learned to make Philadelphia—and its transit system—work better for residents and visitors. As part of the Metro overhaul, she went to every cashier booth on the lines that were changing name or color, speaking with each employee she met about their work, their perception of the system, and the redesign itself.

“In a very personal, one-on-one way, she converted so many people into supporters,” Powers says. “It speaks to her ability to understand people. She spent weeks doing that because she’s so driven to help.”

For Monroe and Herzog, being a part of the change taking place at SEPTA is about much more than signposts and navigation. It’s about being part of something bigger than themselves.

“I have the privilege every single day to support something that’s vital to accessing opportunity and daily needs for myself, my family, my neighbors, and lowering the barrier for all,” Herzog says. “That’s something I feel is a direct fulfillment of the work that I wanted to do—and what Haverford stands for.”

It’s critical work, too, given the challenges the agency has faced since the pandemic. Metro ridership is down 30 percent since 2019, and SEPTA has spent much of 2025 embroiled in a fight over funding.

“We live in a time where we absolutely cannot take our public transit, amongst other public services, for granted,” Farber says. “This redesign is a reminder that riders don’t only go from point A to B on transit. We rely on SEPTA as a life force for the region. Will and Katie are not only putting their brilliance and care to work on the redesign, they are inviting us to compose with the city, too, to see ourselves as part of a region where we guide each other as a way of getting through our lives.”

There are many ways to have a positive impact on the world, Monroe says, but working at a government entity like SEPTA is a “sweet spot.” The work is tangible—just like the pylon at Walnut-Locust—and has an immediate impact on people’s lives. Whenever she speaks with undergraduate students, she sings the praises of such direct civic engagement.

“I always wanted to help make Philadelphia a better place and I’ve gotten to do that in different ways,” Monroe says, “but this chapter is just the coolest. I feel so lucky to be a public servant.”

Class News

TACTILE EXPERIENCE:

Visitors to the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery engage with a touchable work of art during the opening of LOOK HERE. The multisite exhibition, which grew from a collaboration between the College and the Center for Creative Works, featured work by neurodivergent artists and provided new perspectives on creative practice and exhibition accessibility.

Due to privacy concerns, the Class News section is not included in the digital edition of Haverford Magazine.

Class News

MAY

FORDS IN THE NEWS

The New York Times reviewed Dave Barry ’69’s latest book, Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass: How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up.

JUNE

Mark Levine ’91 earned coverage in Politico and other outlets for his win in the Democratic primary election for New York City comptroller.

JULY

Forbes named Nick Chanock ’05, an executive vice president in the baseball division at Wasserman, one of the Most Powerful Sports Agents of 2025.

Big Ten Conference commissioner Tony Petitti ’83 was quoted in Philadelphia Inquirer and New York Times articles, among those in other outlets, about potential changes to the college football playoffs format.

AUGUST

Actor Daniel Dae Kim ’90 was interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air by contributor and producer Ann Marie Baldonado ’94. (Hearing “the Class of 1990’s Hollywood hero” on the air “prompted a round of texts among classmates during the show,” writes class correspondent Phoebe Walker ’90.)

The Inquirer, the Delaware County Daily Times, and the Sporting News highlighted the signing of baseball standout Harry Genth ’25 with the Minnesota Twins organization.

Due to privacy concerns, the Class News section is not included in the digital edition of Haverford Magazine.

Class News

Due to privacy concerns, the Class News section is not included in the digital edition of Haverford Magazine.

Alumni Obituaries

51 Anthony (Tony) Morley died on Sept. 1 at the age of 95. After Haverford he was a Fulbright Scholar in Vienna, Austria, before studying and working within the Episcopal Church

 PLEASE SEND ALUMNI OBITUARIES to: alumni@haverford.edu.

Or, mail to : Haverford College c/o Alumni and Constituent Engagement, 370 Lancaster Ave., Haverford, PA 19041

in New York and Missouri. In 1972, he moved to Minneapolis as part of the National Program for Educational Leadership and served as principal of the Minneapolis Public School’s K–12 Free School. He was later an editorial writer for the Minneapolis Tribune, with a focus on foreign policy, education, and healthcare; an advocate for writers of color with the Minneapolis Urban Coalition; and a co-founder of Minnesota’s Journal of Opinion by Writers of Color. He

enjoyed living and working in the north woods of Hovland, Minn., with his wife Ruth Anne, with whom he shared a vibrant, blended family of seven children. (He was previously married to Jane Augustine; the couple divorced in 1972). He is remembered as a man of remarkable intellect and wit who was always eager to learn and build connections among friends. He is survived by his wife Ruth Anne Olson, children Marguerite, Continued on p. 79

Alumni Obituaries IN MEMORIAM

DALE HUSEMÖLLER (1933–2025)

Professor Emeritus of Mathematics Dale Husemöller passed away on Aug. 30, 2025, surrounded by family members at his home in South Hadley, Mass. He was 91. The grandson of German immigrant farmers and the son of a factory worker and a Lutheran church leader, Husemöller discovered a talent for mathematics during his high school years. He went on to an internationally recognized academic career, authoring widely read books that brought some of the most arcane achievements of postwar mathematics to a broader audience of students and teachers.

He was a devoted father to five children, grandfather to 10 grandchildren, and uncle to 10 nieces and nephews. All five of his children graduated from Haverford: Carl Husemöller Nightingale ’81, Anna Husemöller Jeretic ’83, Erich Husemöller ’84, Kurt Husemöller ’85, and Greta Nightingale ’86.

Husemöller was born Nov. 17, 1933, in Austin, Minn. His parents, Florence Husemöller (née Buck) and Oscar Husemöller, both grew up on farms in nearby areas and moved to Austin when Oscar, along with several of his siblings, began work at the George W. Hormel meatpacking company. In high school, thanks to correspondence courses through the University of Minnesota, Husemöller discovered his talent for theoretical mathematics and physics. He graduated from the university with his bachelor’s degree after a year and a half and was accepted into Harvard’s physics department as a graduate student at age 19. After his advisors told him that he had a more mathematical mind, he transferred to Harvard’s mathematics department. There, he completed his master’s degree in 1956 and his Ph.D. in 1959 under the direction of Lars Ahlfors. Jobs at Rochester University and Penn State University followed. In 1962, Husemöller accepted a position as assistant professor at Haverford, a

decision that he later regarded as a pivotal step in his international career. In Mexico City, during his first international math conference, Husemöller met key players in K-theory, a ground-breaking approach within the field of algebraic topology that was pioneered by Alexandre Grothendieck, a refugee from Nazi Germany living in France, and Friedrich Hirzebruch, who led the postwar rebuilding of German mathematics.

Haverford allowed Husemöller to embrace this new field and expand his circle of professional colleagues. Through the College’s Philips Fund, Husemöller was able to invite many great mathematicians into his classrooms, including both Grothendieck and Hirzebruch. At Haverford, he introduced advanced math majors to K-theory with a course on fiber bundles, a type of topological space that elucidated many of the latest developments in topology. Based on the course, he published the book Fibre Bundles in 1966. It was widely read in the math world, was reissued in second and third editions in the 1970s and 1990s, and was translated into Russian and Japanese.

Fibre Bundles cemented Husemöller’s reputation as a scholar who could explain especially challenging concepts to specialists in other fields across the math world. For 1968–69, Grothendieck invited him to spend his first sabbatical year as a member of the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques near Paris. He also participated regularly in Hirzebruch’s Mathematische Arbeitstagungen at the University of Bonn, Germany.

Over the next two decades, he regularly traveled across the Atlantic with his whole family to Europe, including for a second

sabbatical year in Germany during 1975–76 and a semester at the University of Nice, France, in 1978. He collaborated with mathematical greats like Pierre Deligne, John Milnor, and Enrico Bombieri and published a second book, Elliptic Curves, in 1987. He served as professor and chair of the Mathematics Department at Haverford before his retirement, after which he continued his research at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn. Husemöller married Jeanne Nightingale in 1959, and they had five children together. The whole family regularly decamped for Europe, living for several periods at the Résidence de l’Ormaille for overseas scholars associated with Grothendieck’s Institute and in the Bonn area. After Haverford, their children pursued careers in law, business, the arts, and academia. Following their divorce in 1984, Husemöller lived in Europe in the 1990s and 2000s with his long-time partner, Christiane Geisen. When his health began to fail in the late 2010s, he moved back to the U.S. to live closer to his children and grandchildren.

In retirement, he regularly looked back on his life with wonder and satisfaction, recounting the many twists and turns that led from his small-town roots to the ethereal world of theoretical mathematics, and mused about how his family life and professional path intertwined. He was predeceased by his parents and his two brothers, Robert and Roger. He is survived by his children, his partner, Geisen, his former wife, and many members of his extended family. Members of his family, friends, and colleagues gathered to celebrate his life at a ceremony on Sept. 13, 2025.

Alumni Obituaries IN MEMORIAM

MARTHA HOLLIS CALHOUN WINTNER (1937-2025)

Long-serving professor and dean Martha Hollis Calhoun Wintner died July 9 at age 87. She arrived on Haverford’s campus in 1968, and over the ensuing five decades, she served as a visionary teacher, mentor, and administrator whose support of firstyear and often first-generation students in cultivating their skills and voices as writers deeply informed the ethos of the Writing Program and led to the institution of the Writing Center. Her work with programs such as the Multicultural Scholars Project and the Mentors as Student Teachers programs, from the 1980s through the 2000s, prepared the ground for and presaged the success of initiatives like the Office of Academic Resources and the Chesick Scholars program.

The black-and-white composition book that contains Martha’s handwritten notes from her tutoring sessions during the early days of the Writing Center details her exchanges with future oncologists, theoretical physicists, professors of education, heads of school, and college presidents parsing through their emerging ideas about Phaedo, A Room of One’s Own, The Woman Warrior, and On the Origin of Species.

The Francis B. Gummere Professor of English Kim Benston, a colleague of Martha’s in the English Department, remembers that “Martha always had an affirmative vision of her students … She had the ability to see in every student their promise.” He recalls that, in working to reimagine the Writing Program curriculum, Martha worked across divisions and institutional hierarchies by “navigating those chasms as if there wasn’t a divide—she straddled those divisions by naturalizing a rapport that strengthened connections.”

Martha was born in Boston in 1937 to Helen Fordham Webster and Dr. John Alfred Calhoun. Raised in Swarthmore,

Pa., Martha was a straight-A student who set out on an overnight train to Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., where she majored in German and was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study in Berlin from 1959 to 1960.

While at Yale for her masters in German, Martha met Professor Emeritus of Chemistry Claude Wintner, an only child of immigrants who was welcomed into Martha’s family of four siblings and 24 first cousins. They married in 1967. As they raised their sons, Edward and Thomas, on Duck Pond Lane, Martha and Claude would coordinate handoffs of the boys between Martha’s sections of German and then of freshman writing and Claude’s chemistry lectures. After crossing the Duck Pond to settle at 25 Railroad Ave., the Wintners opened their home to students, faculty, and staff for informal luncheons, convivial dinners, and legendary annual holiday sing-alongs.

In moving from her role as an instructor in the German Department to that of senior lecturer in the English Department, with occasional stints in the Dean’s Office, Martha’s extraordinary work reshaping foundational aspects of the College

unfolded alongside her intensive work as a teacher of writing.

In a Professional Activities Form (PAF) from the mid 1990s produced on a dotmatrix printer, Martha offered an account of a spring semester during which she was selecting and training new Writing Center tutors; overseeing a 10-week Saturday writing course as part of the Mentors as Student Teachers program (for which Martha supervised a dozen Haverford students in creating weekly writing assignments for the 60 high school students who were also engaging in lab experiments under the purview of Martha’s close collaborator, Professor of Biology Slavica Matacic); and also teaching intensive writing sections for which she was reading and annotating 30 papers every other week.

Martha’s investment in this work was emblematic of her understanding that “a writing requirement is a statement of the College’s commitment to the development of students’ individual capacities for communication … [and] habits of thought.” She added that this development is supported by “frequent, individual attention from professors as students develop papers through an interactive process of drafting

and revision” that fosters “the skills and habits of analysis, invention, expository clarity, [and] self-critique.”

In one of her last PAFs, Martha reflected: “(i)n the 30 years I have taught and worked at Haverford, from German language instruction to freshman seminars to freshman writing programs, from faculty advisor to temporary dean to administrator of various support programs, I have experienced the greatest challenge and reward in helping students who felt initially disadvantaged, for whatever reason, recognize and begin to realize their potential.”

Rob Bonner ’90 recalls a conversation with Martha and Garry Jenkins ’92 at a picnic table on campus. “I remember the feeling I had as I watched Martha talk about students at Haverford. This was a softspoken woman with a commanding intellect and a welcoming smile … She welcomed what Garry and I had to say and spoke to us earnestly. This was Martha’s way with everyone. I remember imagining what it would be like to see her and her husband, Claude Wintner, talking together, as her children might have experienced them. She was so gracious and warm, contrasted with his slightly austere, fastidious, and scientific precision. What a pair! Martha made everyone feel heard, supported, and more ssenriched in understanding.”

Martha passed, having just composed an email written in German, sending birthday greetings to one of Claude’s first cousins. Martha always made the time to follow up good intentions with words and acts of love. Martha is survived by her two sons and their families: Ed, Jen, Anya, and Sasha Wintner of Hudson, Mass., and Tom, Sue, Virgil, and Emily Anne Wintner of Cambridge, Mass.

A public Memorial Service for Martha was held at the Church of the Redeemer in Bryn Mawr, Pa., on Oct. 11. On the same day, the College hosted the North Eastern Philosophy of Education Scholars Conference on “The Beloved Community,” which was dedicated to Martha.

Janette, Jefferson, Patrick, Kent, and Lloyd, 13 grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. He was preceded in death by a son, Thomas.

53Daniel Fascione died on Sept. 16 at the age of 93. He earned an M.A. in social psychology from Columbia and worked for the U.S. government for more than 30 years, retiring in 2003 from the Department of Health & Human Services. In 2010, Fascione was awarded the College’s William E. Sheppard Award for his exemplary service in alumni activities. He served as president of, and an active volunteer with, the Scarlet Sages and was a member of PHAN (Philadelphia Haverford Alumni Network). For his 90th birthday, his family honored him with a black gum tree planted on Haverford’s grounds. Fascione was a world traveler and wine and food enthusiast. He had a passion for telling stories, listening to stories, creating his own life story filled with lively conversation, building consensus, and stimulating curiosity in others. He was a Phillies and Eagles fan who cherished his South Philadelphia roots and continued to do his “food” shopping, for himself and others, in his beloved family neighborhood. He enjoyed Broadway and opera performances and, most of all, he cherished his time with family and friends. Fascione is survived by his wife, Dell, children Alexandra, Christian, and Nina Marie, stepchildren Kristin Tulisiak and Brian Fioravanti, grandchildren including Allie FascioneHutchins ’18, and step-grandchildren. He enjoyed attending many of Allie’s hockey and social events on his beloved campus.

56

Marshall Greenberg of Lafayette Hill, Pa., died on Aug. 15. After earning his Ph.D. in mathematical psychology at the University of Michigan, he taught at the University of Minnesota and worked for Procter & Gamble before joining National Analysts, where he

became president, and later its parent company Booz Allen & Hamilton, where he was senior partner. He also coauthored two books about public television, and retired in 1998. He enjoyed playing tennis and golf into his 70s and 80s, and was proud to have shot three holes-in-one. He loved spending time with his extended family at their beach house in Stone Harbor, N.J. A wonderful husband, brother, father, stepfather, and grandfather, Greenberg is survived by his wife of 46 years, Addy Sugarman; his son David Greenberg ’86, stepdaughter Karen Sugarman and stepson Ken Sugarman; and three grandchildren. He also had, and missed greatly, a daughter Paula who died at age 40 in 2001.

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Tom Beggs died quietly at Holland Hospital in Michigan on May 10, 2024, after illnesses of many years: loss of vision due to wet macular degeneration, Alzheimer’s disease, strokes, brain damage leading to falls, and broken bones. His official cause of death was congestive heart failure. Beggs and his wife, Florence, married since 1962, retired and moved to Holland, Mich., in the summer of 2003, and found great joy in caring for their granddaughters. He remained at home under Florence’s care until three days before his death in the hospital. Beggs is survived by Florence, daughters Jane and Anne, and granddaughters Katie and Mariel.

Owen de Ris died Oct. 17, 2024. He was a teacher, eurythmist, craftsman, artist, and translator of the mantras of Rudolf Steiner, who founded the anthroposophy movement and Waldorf education. After his third year at Haverford, de Ris enlisted in the U.S. Army, rather than being drafted, before becoming a conscientious objector and eventually receiving honorable discharge. He then studied and taught Waldorf school, eurythmy, art, and woodworking across the United States and Europe for decades, living in Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York, New

Alumni Obituaries

Hampshire, England, and Germany. He was predeceased by his wife, Linde, and was a father of four, a grandfather, and a great-grandfather.

72 Ghebre (Gabe) Selassie Mehreteab, age 76, died on Aug. 7. A leader in affordable housing and an advocate for community development, he coped with serious medical issues but, according to friends, you wouldn’t know that to watch him travel and keep up with loved ones. Mehreteab was a child in Ethiopia when he made an impression on Peace Corps member Harris Wofford, who recruited Mehreteab to SUNY College at Old Westbury where Wofford was president, and then to Haverford when Wofford became Bryn Mawr’s President. At Haverford, Mehreteab was a funny friend to all, and supersmart. After graduation, he worked for the Ford Foundation and later led the National Housing Partnership Foundation for 20 years, creating lowand no-income housing that went into overdrive for New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. At Haverford with the Black Students League protest and later during Haverford’s George Floyd protests, he was a convincer for Quaker values of honesty and collegiality. He was your friend while sharing truths. In a YouTube interview describing the clever ways he deals with racism, he says, “There are many, many wonderful white people. If we don’t want to be lumped, we should not lump them.” Among 300 attending Mehreteab’s funeral were his transcendently loyal brother Efrem Mehreteab ’77, Juan Williams ’76, Grady Lights ’73, and Bruce Davidson ’73. He is survived by 25 nieces and nephews and two beloved grandchildren, and was preceded in death by his wife, Sally.

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David Oliver died Sept. 7. at St. Luke’s Hospice in Kansas City, Mo., after dealing with stage 4 kidney cancer for nearly three years. He participated in a clinical trial in St.

Louis, which though it did not ultimately help him, may help patients in the future. With a J.D. from Boston University, he practiced law for many years, specializing in commercial securities, product liability, and medical malpractice litigation, and eventually co-founded his own firm. He went on to a second career as co-founder of PLX Corporation, where he helped companies strengthen and diversify their boards. Oliver’s civic work also included service in pediatric health, education reform, the arts, journalism, and nonprofit leadership development. He met “his first love and partner for life,” Mary Elizabeth Gresham, in high school. He also loved horses, competing in shows, three-day eventing, and foxhunting on his horse Happenstance. He rode cross-country with Mary in Ireland, Scotland, and New Zealand. David also loved to ski and tackled many black-diamond runs with Mary as well as their nephew, Alexander Louis Gresham, whom David loved very much as if he were his own son. David also leaves a sister and many nieces, nephews, and loving cousins.

94Timothy Ketchum of Portland, Ore., died June 19. He was “pure magic,” in the words of a family obituary, loved for his incandescent personality and infinite kindnesses. At Haverford he developed friendships that became his core community for the rest of his life. He also had the distinction of playing on the men’s basketball team at a time when they were hoping to avoid the longest losing streak in college sports. (This feat was documented in a 2014 article in Sports Illustrated.) Ketchum worked as a teacher and archaeologist in Italy and across the United States, and later in finance. He married his wife, Carolyn, in 2001, and in 2021 shifted his career to help manage hers as a food blogger and cookbook author. The additional time with his wife, children, and a growing menagerie of pets brought him contentment, and having time to

travel with family and friends continued to be central to his life. In his final months, he went to Argentina with his family and to Boulder, Colo., with his friends. He had trips to Spain and Ireland planned for summer and fall of 2025. He was on a trip to Lake Tahoe with some of his closest friends when he suddenly became ill and required surgery to repair a ruptured abdominal aorta. Tragically, he did not survive the surgery. In fitting with a lifetime of generosity, he left behind organ donations, including his corneas. He is deeply missed by Carolyn, children Austin, Celia, and Margaret, several nieces and nephews, and many friends.

95 Nathan Suter died suddenly on May 13 while running with friends in Montpelier, Vt. He was 52. After Haverford, where he excelled in track and cross-country and studied photography, he earned an MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute and co-founded Root Division, a nonprofit art center that remains vital today. He also taught for a time at Eastside College Preparatory School in East Palo Alto. After moving to Vermont with his wife, Morgan Lloyd ’98, Suter directed the Helen Day Art Center (now The Current) in Stowe for a decade. In 2016 he co-founded BUILD Consulting, helping organizations and individuals develop strategic plans to achieve their missions. Nathan was a board member for Migrant Justice and treasurer of the Peace and Justice Center in Burlington. He coached track and assisted with the cross-country and Nordic skiing teams at the Montpelier Roxbury public schools. An adventurous traveler, he built friendships especially throughout Central America. Those who knew him remember that he made them feel loved, appreciated, and worthwhile, and that he challenged and inspired them to be their best selves. Nathan is survived by his wife Morgan, their daughter Amani Suter and son Asa Lloyd, as well as his sister Katherine (Suter) Fisher ’01 and her family.

Members of the Sneetches, the Bi-Co ultimate frisbee team, after a 1997 match—just three years after being founded by Matissa Hollister ’94. A soccer player, Hollister had never played ultimate before coming to Haverford. Seeking an off-season activity, she joined Haverford’s men’s team (which has had numerous names over the years and is now called Big Donkey Ultimate). When she became an ultimate captain in her senior year, more women started showing up, and the idea for the Sneetches (named for a Dr. Seuss book) was born. The early teams were “focused on having fun and promoting the spirit of the game,” says Christina Herold ’97, who shared this photo. “I’m proud of what we started, and even prouder of what the Sneetches have become.”

Three decades on, the Sneetches still embrace their “fun-tensity” ethos, which informs their annual costumed Haverween tournament, and has propelled the team to numerous appearances in the Division III National Championships. In the spring, the team advanced to the finals before losing narrowly to Wesleyan’s Vicious Circles. Captain Zoe Costanza BMC ’25 was also the first Sneetch to be recognized with the Donovan Award, presented annually to a player who demonstrates exceptional skill and leadership in the national ultimate community.