Expanding Haverford's Global Outreach
Brian Rose ’78 reflects on his inspiration for supporting international programming through the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship.
Only recently did I realize that it was time to make a will and to consider what I could do to strengthen Haverford’s international programming. I wanted my contribution to tie into the College’s global outreach since most of my professional life has been spent overseas. I was an American Field Service exchange student to Italy in high school which introduced me to archaeology, and I majored in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology at Bryn Mawr, which sparked my interests in Turkey and in antiquity. I’ve now been digging in Turkey for the last 40 years, which included 25 years of co-directing excavations at Troy, and now 13 years directing work at Gordion, the capital city of King Midas. This four-decade record was broken by the pandemic, so I experienced my first summer in the States since 1979.
Directing an excavation in the remote highlands of Turkey requires a series of skills that I hadn’t originally anticipated. You’re running a hotel and restaurant for a professional staff of 33, and serving as a therapist due to the social and intellectual pressures of life in a close-knit and isolated summer community. There have been many times when I drew on my experiences at Haverford, especially the College’s emphasis on empathy, emotional support, and the maintenance of the community no matter what was happening—and needless to say, a lot was happening around us in the 1970s.
Being an archaeologist also involves an inordinate amount of teaching and lecturing, and in many respects I’ve never stopped going to school. Immediately after Haverford I earned my Ph.D. from Columbia, and I’ve spent the last 33 years as a university professor, first at the University of Cincinnati, and now, for the last 15 years, at the University of Pennsylvania. One can’t successfully deliver an archaeological lecture to a large class or public gathering without injecting a certain amount of humor, and I will never regret what I learned about comic timing during three consecutive Haverford Class Night performances.
I’ve been a regular donor to Haverford for the last decade, primarily through annual 1833 Society gifts, but in making my estate plans this year I wanted to consider a truly transformational gift to the College. I realized that the most effective contribution I could provide would be one that enabled Haverford students to have access to the same international experiences from which I had benefited.
“…this is the time to research the program at Haverford that resonates most with the journeys you’ve traveled, and consider it as a component of your gift planning.”
There were particular reasons why I chose Haverford’s Center for Peace and Global Citizenship as the recipient of an endowment that would be linked to my planned gift. I suppose the principal reason is that I had come to embrace Quaker principles of non-violence in college, even though I was not a Quaker. But an equally pressing issue was that I had come face to face with armed conflict during the last two decades, as has every archaeologist working in the Near East and the eastern Mediterranean. Ancient sites have been destroyed, museums have been plundered, and an archaeologist at the Syrian site of Palmyra was executed when he refused to reveal the location of antiquities coveted by ISIS soldiers.
This widespread destruction of cultural heritage began in 2003, with the looting of the Baghdad Archaeological Museum, and as president-elect of the Archaeological Institute of America, I started receiving urgent calls for solutions to the steadily expanding destruction of ancient sites. In the end, I started a cultural heritage training program for U.S. soldiers who were deploying to zones of conflict, which brought us to U.S. military bases and, occasionally, to Iraq and Afghanistan.
As you can imagine, this was a kind of outreach I never expected to be doing, but I like to think it resulted in fewer lootings at archaeological sites and better protection for museums that were at risk of rocket damage. There’s nothing like war to turn your mind to peace, so Haverford’s Center for Peace and Global Citizenship quickly became in my mind the ideal destination for my planned gift, especially given the fact that its endowment remains small even after 20 years of operation. We still, ideally, have a lot of years ahead of us, but I hope you’ll realize, as I did, that this is the time to research the program at Haverford that resonates most with the journeys you’ve traveled, and consider it as a component of your gift planning.