Gift for my 80th Birthday

Anticipating my 80th birthday, which comes on 30 January 2013, I decided to celebrate it with an extravagant gift as I had never dreamed of receiving.

I taught at Swarthmore College exactly 35 years.  I started in 1966 as Assistant Professor.  I already had three-year experience teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI; but I finished my doctoral dissertation only then which I had promised in the interview in January.  I was promoted to Associate Professor two years later and to Full Professor in 1975, appointed the chair the Art Department at the same time.  In 1993 I was awarded the William R. Keenan, Jr., Professorship.  I retired in June 2001.  My career as an art historian was my tenure at Swarthmore. 

It is an overstatement to say that Swarthmore made my career, as a friend warned me.  Still, I say that Swarthmore allowed me to shape and develop my career the way I wanted, and I am deeply indebted to the institution for this reason.  I was given a free rein to teach new subjects of my own invention, like “City,” “Cinema: Form and Signification,” “Philadelphia: City and Architecture” “Hollywood 1939,” “Everyday Things,” and “Streets,” aside from the standard subjects in Art History: “Michelangelo and his Times,” Rembrandt and his Times,” “Florence,” and “Roman Heritage.”  I was trusted to organize the Department according to my design; I made Studio Arts, formerly extracurricular, into a creditable program and brought it together with Art History into one Department of Art.  

A good college prides itself on its superior faculty, and I enjoyed wonderful colleagues in all departments.  But it is the students that endow a college with distinction, and I had the fortune of having had remarkable young people in my classes.  It is my belief that there is no better way to learn a subject than teaching it, and nothing inspires me more than inquisitive and imaginative minds that challenge me hard continually.  They made my day-to-day duties a tremendous pleasure.  Moreover, many of them remained fast friends for years and decades after graduation and remain so to this day and form the circle of my best friends, near and far.  I owe Swarthmore more than a successful career and far-reaching education through teaching; so much of my happy life was nursed and nurtured by the College and its students.  This is what prompted me to make endowment donations to Swarthmore College.

Such donations are normally made after one’s demise by the bereaved -- relatives and friends -- in memory of the beloved.  I chose to give on my own while alive, not without an ulterior motive; I wanted to have a measure of control over the use of the income from the endowments to promote those areas of intellectual endeavor which represent my interests that I had held while teaching and which also represent my belief that these are the areas the College has been neglecting and/or needs strengthening or expanding.  I wanted to oversee the use of the fund as best as I can because it is my hard-earned money that I had saved by exercising frugal living through my career.  

I started with a smaller endowment of $25,000 “to support a visiting lecture or lecture series in the Mathematics and Statics department colloquium with a preference for topics in geometry, topology, and history of mathematics,” the subjects motivated by my desire to fulfill my alternative ambition for a career in mathematics which never materialized.

The second proposal was another smaller endowment of $25,000 for Silent Cinema, an important cultural artifact of ever expanding importance in scholarship, preservation and public interest; its resources are global. I wanted to support public showing of silent films, eventually the annual Silent Cinema Festival that should make Swarthmore known for it nationwide, a sequel to my pioneering effort in creating Cinema Studies.  The proposal met some resistance, however, and I agreed to expand the scope as the endowment to support “curricular, scholarly and public events that explore history of cinema, especially silent cinema, such as the annual public screening of silent films from worldwide sources, in recognition of its historical, cultural and cross-cultural importance.”

Then, for the Endowment for the List Gallery I donated $100,000 to support “a variety of educational initiatives, “ including “a student fellowship in curatorial studies, the publication of exhibition catalogs for emerging artists, on-site sculpture and installation projects, and the hiring of technical and administrative assistants.”

Finally, I contributed a $125,000 fund for Humanities Research Fellowship to support “students in the humanities by providing grants to encourage and facilitate historical research, original scholarship, and professional development, with a preference for Italian Studies, Japanese Studies, and Performing Arts.”

The approval of the donations and their documentation have now been completed, and I am ecstatically happy to have accomplished the giving, by which I am leaving behind tracks of my teaching career for decades to come in the form of a modest effort to assure the Arts and Humanities, the essential core of Liberal Arts Education, into the distant future.  For this reason I consider my Endowment program the most extravagant gift to myself in celebration of my upcoming 80th birthday.

Back in May, it occurred to me that I crossed the Atlantic 60 years ago; and coincidentally I discovered my diaries from those years which made me reflect on the extraordinary course my life had taken me through.  This, in turn, prompted me to think of my  80th birthday and the idea of making a big occasion of it with this gift.