Big Ben reps Swiss classroom

There is something on Ben Roethlisberger’s mind these days – and it’s not football. It’s his… There is something on Ben Roethlisberger’s mind these days – and it’s not football. It’s his roots.

This past May, Roethlisberger left Pittsburgh for Switzerland to explore his family’s heritage. Now he’s helping to bring a part of Switzerland back to Pitt, in the form of a classroom.

Pitt’s Swiss Nationality Room Committee has recently named Roethlisberger as an honorary member, and some of its other members are hoping that his fame will bring more community support to the project.

“Once Ben Roethlisberger wins some more games he will do something,” said E. Maxine Bruhns, the director of national rooms and intercultural exchange programs at Pitt. “He’s one of the more prominent spokesmen.”

The Swiss room is just one of nine nationality rooms at Pitt that are currently in the process of being funded or completed, Bruhns said. Others include a Turkish Room, a Latin American Room and a Korean Room.

“This is the only program in the world that has classrooms that are gifts from the communities that represent their heritage,” Bruhns said.

Each nationality room has a committee that is responsible for raising the necessary money to build and furnish a classroom, Bruhns said. They have to hold fundraisers, choose a design, find authentic building materials and install the required technology, like projectors and loudspeakers.

The Swiss committee chose to design a room evocative of a Swiss classroom from the 1500s, said Fred Carlson, the Vice Chairman of the Swiss Nationality Room Committee.

“That might seem a little redundant in a room like the Cathedral,” said Carlson, “but we felt that the theme of education would unify us.”

Fittingly enough, the future room 321 will feature portraits of famous Swiss philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, who was one of the first people to advocate education for children.

The room will have a carved wooden ceiling, a display case and leaded glass windows inlayed with small of symbols of the first three Swiss cantons, or states.

The room will also seat 26 students; the 26 chairs will symbolize the number of cantons in Switzerland today, and the backs of each chair will be engraved with a cantonal ensign, Carlson said.

Talks about building a Swiss nationality room at Pitt had gone on for years, Carlson said, but the project didn’t take off until 1998, when Carlson consulted Dr. Heinz Kunz, Pitt emeritus faculty and honorary Consul for Switzerland in Pittsburgh.

“We felt it was an oversight,” Carlson said. “It was time.”

When immigrants from Switzerland arrived in the United States, Carlson said that many of them kept to themselves or were sometimes overlooked because they arrived alongside many German immigrants.

But there has been nearly 300 years of Swiss presence in the United States, and it has influenced American citizens in many ways. Swiss concepts about republican citizens had a profound influence over the Founding Fathers’ visions for our country, especially Thomas Jefferson’s.

“At the time of the Revolution, there were 13 colonies here and 13 cantons in Switzerland,” said Carlson in an e-mail, “a pretty interesting parallel.”

Now that the Swiss room’s design is complete and its furniture largely chosen, the final construction is solely dependent on the fundraising. Currently, the committee has raised around $110,000 out of the projected $250,000 total cost of the room.

Since the committee’s formation, more than 150 people and 15 institutions have donated to the project. This year, the committee increased their funding by 30 percent because they have been attracting wealthier individual donors.

Although Roethlisberger hasn’t made a donation yet, Carlson said he has lent his name and signatures to auction items.

“He is a very generous person of Swiss descent,” Carlson said.