Tom Tritton, President

On Cooperation
Most of us enjoy the spirit of competition we have with other colleges and universities. Regular readers of this magazine will immediately recognize our indecorous lack of restraint in boasting about this College. Numerical counts are especially attractive when displaying our competitiveness: the number of books in the library; the SAT scores of our students; the quantity of computers on campus, etc. Less quantitative, but no less appealing, are the famous and accomplished alumni whose stories we love to recount in our publications. This president is also prone to crowing about the scholarly awards, prizes, grants, papers, books, and other accolades garnered by the faculty. And of course, who can resist the outcome of athletic competition as a surrogate for determining the better school on any given day (FYI: Haverford has won the coveted Hood Trophy for four straight years).

Beguiling as statistics, figures, records, victories, and related competitive comparisons might be, in the cold light of reflection most of us also realize the enduring value of cooperation. Franklin Roosevelt had it about right when he said: “Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation, is the thing we must strive for today.” Or as the Beatles put it: “All you need is love.”

Academic cooperation abounds. Most recognizable to alumni (and equally attractive to prospective students) is the long-standing collaboration with Bryn Mawr College. It seems nothing short of miraculous that the two colleges manage such a thriving cooperation without contracts, memoranda of understanding, or other legal niceties. Without the slightest doubt, each of our well-earned distinctive characters is not in the least bit threatened by close partnership. We have multiple models: joint departments (e.g., French, Career Development) where a single unit serves both colleges equally; counterpart departments (like chemistry, philosophy and a host of others) whose dual existence extends the intellectual community for students and faculty alike; and non-counterpart departments (e.g., astronomy, geology, religion, art history, among others) that a small school might be unable to sustain without dividing the tasks. This approach makes so much sense and adds so much to the experience here that I’m surprised more places don’t emulate us. Maybe our Quaker roots provide better lubrication for successful interaction than those with lesser origins!

Tri-college cooperation is also important. Although Swarthmore is a bit further away than Bryn Mawr, we all nonetheless realize that there are big gains to be made through collaborative projects. We do so in Magill Library via a single electronic card catalog for the three collections; in academics through a unified tri-college online course listing; and in technology by sharing a high-speed Internet pipe for all our data and networking with the outside world. Blue Bus service was escalated a couple of years ago to facilitate student movements among the three campuses. We also realized—and it seems so obvious in retrospect—that it is more efficient to move one faculty member than 15 students, so we trade course assignments with faculty on the other campuses to enrich student experience with new professors (I think of it irreverently as “Swaps with Swat”).

Faculty members with complementary interests commonly teach courses jointly. We also have some interesting juxtapositions of administrators with faculty, who collaborate on imaginative courses that would be much more difficult for either party to create alone. One example that comes to mind is Athletic Director Greg Kannerstein ’63 and History Professor Alex Kitroeff, who teach “Sport and Society,” which examines the evolution of sport during the 19th and 20th centuries. As you might imagine, the course is immensely popular since it deals with the intersection of social change, spectacle, and high performance. Another sample of collaboration is Provost David Dawson and English Professor Steve Finley, who are offering a new course through the Humanities Center called “Interpretation and the Other: Meaning, Understanding, and Alterity.” This multidisciplinary course focuses on classical perspectives on language and meaning, and examines case studies of interpretation that embody, amplify, or challenge these concepts. The course gives special emphasis to the ethical dimensions of the reader’s experience, as students are invited to ponder literary critic Hillis Miller’s hopeful admonition that “literature is the most serious and responsible form of writing,” for it often seeks to serve “the democracy to come.”

I’ll confess that I have a hankering to teach a course some year on science fiction, possibly with an emphasis on biology and life science in the SF literature. In the spirit of cooperation, English Professor Maud McInerney (herself a medievalist) and I have discussed doing this course collaboratively and even have developed a few surreptitious ideas for the content and syllabus. Do you suppose that the College’s Educational Policy Committee will approve?

Assuming that comparisons are useful, I’ll close by noting that, whereas in competition we seek to gain an advantage over someone else, in cooperation we work together. Admittedly, each approach has an appropriate time and place. Yet, there is a flavor of equity about cooperation that is at once both very Quakeresque and very Haverfordian—the right kind of training/education for students working on “peace and global citizenship” or “integrated natural sciences” (or for that matter for those simply planning to get along with others). So, the next time you are on campus, please go to an athletic event or an interscholastic debate and cheer for Haverford to win, but be sure to also go to a class and give an even bigger cheer for the win-wins of cooperation.