Swarthmore College is a private, independent, liberal arts college
in the United States with an enrollment of about 1,500 students. The college is located in
the borough of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania,
11 miles (17.7 km) southwest of Philadelphia.
The school was founded in 1864 by a committee of Quakers who were members of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious
Society of Friends. Swarthmore dropped its religious affiliation and became officially non-sectarian in the early 20th
century. The college has been coeducational since its founding.
Swarthmore is known for its rigorous academics, symbolized and maintained by the faculty's resistance to grade inflation. [1] [2] The college is, after normalization for institution size, the third largest baccalaureate source of doctoral degree recipients in the United
States, and the largest such source with a liberal arts curriculum. [3] It has consistently
ranked among the top three liberal arts colleges in the U.S. News and World
Report rankings since the rankings' inception.
"Swarthmore" can be pronounced with the first "r" either vocalized or dropped due to differences in rhotic and non-rhotic accents.
Swarthmore's campus is home to the Scott Arboretum.
History
The name "Swarthmore" has its roots in early Quaker history. In England, Swarthmoor Hall in Cumbria was the home of Thomas and Margaret Fell in
1652 when George Fox, fresh from his epiphany atop Pendle
Hill in 1651, came to visit. The visitation turned into a long association as Fox persuaded Thomas and Margeret Fell and
the inhabitants of the nearby village of Fenmore of Friendly, and Swarthmoor was used for the first Friends' meetings.
The school was founded in 1864 by a committee of Quakers who were members of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious
Society of Friends. Edward Parrish was its first president. A more detailed history of Swarthmore can be found at Swarthmore.edu.
Solomon Asch and Wolfgang Köhler were two noted
psychologists who were professors at Swarthmore. Asch joined the faculty in 1947 and served until 1966, while Köhler came to
Swarthmore in 1935 and served until his retirement in 1958. The Asch conformity
experiments took place at Swarthmore.
Academics
Parrish Hall contains the admissions, housing, and financial aid offices, along with dormitories on the upper floors.
In its 2008 college ranking, U.S. News & World Report ranked Swarthmore as the number-three liberal arts
college, with an overall score of 98/100, behind Williams and Amherst, respectively. Swarthmore is regularly cited as one of the "Little Ivies." Swarthmore's endowment (at the end of FY2006) was about $1.245 billion[4], ranking 45th amongst all institutions of higher education in the
United States. Endowment per student is $766,500, 12th in the U.S. ("The Rich Get Richer". Inside
Higher Ed. Retrieved on 2006-06-25.).
The school is particularly notable for its Oxford tutorial-inspired Honors Program, which allows students to take double-credit seminars from their junior year
and often write extensive honors theses. Seminars are usually composed of four to eight students.
Students in seminars will usually write at least three ten-page papers per seminar, and often one of these papers is expanded
into a 20-30 page paper by the end of the seminar. At the end of their senior year, Honors students take oral and written
examinations conducted by outside experts in their field. Around one student in each discipline is awarded "Highest Honors";
others are either awarded "High Honors" or "Honors"; rarely, a student is denied any Honors altogether by the outside examiner.
Each department usually has a grade threshold for admittance to the Honors program.
Unusual for a liberal arts college, Swarthmore has an engineering program; at the end of
four years, students are granted a B.S. in Engineering. Other notable programs include minors in peace and conflict studies, cognitive science, and
interpretation theory.
Swarthmore is a member of the Tri-College Consortium (or TriCo) with nearby
Bryn Mawr College and Haverford College,
which allows students from any of the three to cross-register for courses at any of the others. The consortium as a whole is
additionally affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania and students are
able to cross-register for courses there as well.
Though students and faculty tout the College's relative lack of grade inflation,[5]
Swarthmore's average undergraduate GPA increased from 2.83 in 1973 to 3.24 in 1997[6]. Swarthmore argues that the
methodology overstates the change [7].
Since the 1970s, Swarthmore students have won 25 Rhodes Scholarships, 8
Marshall Scholarships, 135 Fulbright
Scholarships, 21 Truman Scholarships, 13 Luce Scholarships, 68 Watson Fellowships, 3
Soros Fellowships, and 1 Mitchell Scholarship.
Tuition and Finances
The total cost of tuition, fees, room, and board for a student entering in the fall of 2006 was $43,532 (tuition and fees were
together $33,232).
Swarthmore's endowment at the end of FY2005 was approximately $1.169 billion, ranking 45th amongst all institutions of higher
education in the United States, and fifth amongst liberal arts colleges. Endowment per student was $766,500 for 2004-2005, 12th
in the U.S. amongst all institutions of higher education and ahead of both Amherst and Williams. ("The Rich Get Richer". Inside
Higher Ed. Retrieved on 2006-06-25.).
Operating revenue for the 2004-2005 school year was $104,489,000, over 42% of which was provided by the endowment. As is the
case with most every elite institution of higher education, actual costs as measured on a per-student basis far exceed revenue
from tuition and fees, and so Swarthmore's endowment serves to offset ever-rising costs of education, subsidizing every student's
education at Swarthmore--even those paying full tuition. For the 2005-2006 year, tuition, fees, and room & board charges
($41,280) fell well short of the actual cost of education per student, which was approximately $70,300.
Swarthmore recently completed a $230 million capital campaign, christened "The Meaning of Swarthmore" and underway officially
since the fall of 2001. President Bloom declared the project completed on October 2, 2006,
three months ahead of schedule. 87% of the college's alumni participated in the effort.
Campus
The campus consists of 357 acres, based on a north-south axis anchored by Parrish Hall, which houses numerous administrative
offices and student lounges, as well as two floors of student housing. The campus radio
station WSRN-FM broadcasts from the top.
From the SEPTA Swarthmore commuter train station and the ville of Swarthmore to the south, the oak-lined
Magill Walk leads north up a hill to Parrish. The campus is also coterminous with the Scott Arboretum, cited by some as a main
staple of the campus's renowned beauty. [citation needed]
The majority of the buildings housing classrooms and department offices are located to the north of Parrish, as is Woolman
dormitory. McCabe Library is to the east of Parrish, as are the dorms of Willets, Mertz, Worth, Alice Paul, and its currently
under construction twin, David Kemp Hall, due to open Fall 2008. To the west are the dorms of Wharton, Dana, and Hallowell, along
with the Scott Amphitheater. The Crum Woods generally extend westward from the campus, toward the Crum Creek. South of Parrish
are Sharples dining hall, the two non-residential fraternities (Phi Psi and Delta Upsilon), and various other buildings. Palmer,
Pittenger, and Roberts dormitories are south of the railroad station, as are the athletic facilities, while Mary Lyon dorm is
off-campus to the southwest.[8]
Clubs and organizations
There are more than 100 chartered clubs and organizations at Swarthmore, in addition to many other unchartered groups. Clubs
and organizations are a fundamental part of the College, and the center of many students' energies and social life. This
extracurricular involvement contributes to the frequent characterization of Swarthmore students as both motivated and
overworked.
Academic Clubs
The Amos J. Peaslee Debate Society, named after a former United States Ambassador to Australia, is one of the only independently endowed
organizations on campus. Swarthmore's College Bowl team was considered one of the best in
the country during the late 1990s and early 2000s - it won the 1998
Division I Undergraduate NAQT tournament. The club hosted two
well-attended tournaments each year, but it lost its charter due to inactivity during the 2006-07 school year.
Greek Life
Only two Greek organizations exist on the campus in the form of the fraternities Delta
Upsilon and Phi Omicron Psi. The latter of the two is a non-national Greek society which broke away from Phi Kappa Psi following disagreements with national policies. Notably lacking are sororities, which were
abandoned in the 1930's following student outrage to discrimination within the sorority system.[9] Interest in resurrecting
sorority life has recently returned with an all-female student group known as LaSS (The Ladies Soiree Society) organizing campus
wide charity events and social functions.[10].
Sports
Swarthmore offers the full panoply of sporting teams. Varsity teams include badminton, baseball, basketball, cross country, field hockey, golf, lacrosse,
soccer, softball, swimming, tennis, track and
field and volleyball. Notably lacking among these teams is football, which was
controversially eliminated in 2000, along with wrestling and initially badminton. The Board of Managers offered a number of
reasons for eliminating football, including lack of athletes on campus and difficulty of recruiting.[11][12]
Swarthmore also offers a number of club sport options, including rugby, frisbee, cycling, and fencing.
Publications
The main student newspaper at Swarthmore is The Phoenix[13], a weekly school-sponsored newspaper
published every Thursday, except during exam and vacation time. Some staff positions are paid a token amount. The newspaper was
founded in 1881, with online editions beginning in 1995. Its current
tabloid format is more similar to a newsmagazine than a newspaper, with a color front cover. Two thousand copies, free of charge,
are distributed across the college campus and to the borough of Swarthmore. The
newspaper is printed at The Delaware County Daily Times in Primos, Pennsylvania. Its online website is hosted by the Swarthmore College Computer Society, with bandwidth-search engine capability
provided by the Swarthmore College Information Technology Services. In 2000, The Phoenix was
an Online Pacemaker for the Associated Collegiate Press award.
The Daily Gazette[14] is another student
newspaper; unlike The Phoenix, it is a daily electronic "paper" and is independent of both the administration and student
government. Its coverage includes news, arts, and daily sports reporting. The first issues were distributed through e-mail during
the fall semester of 1996, with an online edition soon following. In recent years, the circulation
of the Daily Gazette has surpassed the Phoenix, with 2300 subscribers. The Agora is another small student newspaper with a
liberal, activist outlook, though it is published only sporadically.
There are a number of magazines at Swarthmore, most of which are published biannually at the end of each semester. One is
Spike, Swarthmore's humor magazine. The others are literary magazines, including Small Craft Warnings, which
publishes poetry, fiction and artwork; Scarlet Letters, which publishes women's literature; Enie, for Spanish
literature; OURstory, for literature relating to diversity issues; Bug-Eyed Magazine, a very limited-run science
fiction/fantasy magazine published by Psi Phi, formerly known as SWIL; Remappings (formerly "CelebrASIAN"), published by the Swarthmore Asian Organization;
Alchemy, a collection of academic writings published by the Swarthmore Writing Associates; Mjumbe, published by the
Swarthmore African-American Student Society; and a magazine for French literature. An erotica
magazine, ! (pronounced "bang") was briefly published in 2005 in homage to an earlier publication, Untouchables.
Most of the literary magazines print approximately 500 copies, with around 100 pages.
Radio
WSRN 91.5 FM is the college radio station. It has a mix of indie, rock, hip-hop, folk,
world, and classical music, as well as a number of
radio talk shows. At one time, WSRN had a significant news department, and covered events such
as the "Crisis of '69"[15] extensively. Many archived recordings of musical and spoken word performances
exist, such as the once-annual Swarthmore Folk Festival.[16]
Today WSRN focuses virtually exclusively on entertainment, though it has covered significant news developments such as the
athletic cuts in 2000[17] and the effects of 11 September 2001 on campus.
Activism
Swarthmore is also known as a center of social and political activism.[citation needed] The college has recently received significant coverage due to two student
groups founded in 2004, the Genocide Intervention
Network (now an independent non-student group) and War News Radio. Swarthmore's political
landscape is generally considered fairly left-wing, though student activism is far less than it was in the heyday of the protest
culture of the 1960s. Recent high-profile campaigns included a living wage organization (Swarthmore Living Wage & Democracy
Campaign), actions surrounding the electronic voting machine manufacturer
Diebold Election Systems by campus groups Students for Free Culture and Why War?, and a
"Kick Coke" campaign aimed at replacing soda machines offering Coca-Cola with alternative
products. The Kick-Coke campaign had a recent victory in November 2006 when the College agreed to cut its contract with
Coca-Cola.
Alumni
-
Swarthmore's alumni include five Nobel Prize winners (second highest number of Nobel
Prize winners per graduate in the U.S.), including the 2006 Physics laureate John C.
Mather '68, the 2004 Economics laureate Edward Prescott '62 and the 1972
Chemistry laureate Christian B. Anfinsen '37. Swarthmore also has eight
MacArthur Foundation fellows and hundreds of prominent
figures in law, art, science, business, politics, and other fields.
Other prominent alumni include Congressman Christopher Van Hollen, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan (1956), musical composer and satirist Peter Schickele (1957),
astronomer Sandra M. Faber (1966), The
Corrections author Jonathan Franzen (1981), Caltech president and Nobel laureate
David Baltimore (1960), Georgetown
University Law Center Dean T. Alexander Aleinikoff (1974), and
Justin Hall (1998), widely considered to be the first blogger.
Wall Street magnate and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts
& Co. founder Jerome Kohlberg, Jr. (1946) founded the Philip Evans Scholarship Foundation in 1986 at Swarthmore. Suffragist and National Women's Party founder
Alice Paul graduated in 1905.
Points of interest
See also
External links
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