Encyclopedia
Swarthmore College is a private
liberal arts college in the
United States with an enrollment of about 1450 students. The college is located in the borough of Swarthmore,
Pennsylvania, 11 miles 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" 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 .
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
In its most recent college ranking,
U.S. News & World Report is a weekly newsmagazine [i]. ...
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 was about $1.169 billion, ranking 45th amongst all institutions of higher education in the United States. Endowment per student is $766,500, 12th in the U.S. .
The school is particularly notable for its
Oxford tutorial-inspired Honors Program, which allows students to take intense, 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 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, Swarthmore's average undergraduate GPA increased from 2.83 in 1973 to 3.24 in 1997. Swarthmore argues that the methodology overstates the change .
Since the 1970's, Swarthmore students have won 135 Fulbright Scholarships, 25
Rhodes Scholarships, 8 Marshall Scholarships, 13 Luce Scholarships, 68 Watson Fellowships, 21 Truman Scholarships, and 1 Mitchell Scholarship.
Tuition and Finances
The total cost of tuition, fees, room, and board for a student entering in the fall of 2005 was $41,280 .
As previously mentioned, Swarthmore is currently ranked third among all liberal arts colleges . Since the inception of the rankings, Swarthmore has consistently ranked first, second, or third in what has become a predictable rotation among Williams, Amherst, and Swarthmore, schools sometimes referred to as "
Little Ivies." 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. .
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 fell well short of the actual cost of education per student, which was approximately $70,300.
Swarthmore is currently engaged in a $230 million capital campaign, christened "The Meaning of Swarthmore" and underway officially since the fall of 2001.
Campus
The campus consists of 357 acres in Swarthmore, Pennslyvania, 11 miles southwest of Philadephia. It is based on a north-south axis anchored by Parrish Hall, which houses the office of admissions, the dean, and the registrar, 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.
The majority of the buildings housing classrooms and department offices are located to the north of Parrish, as is the quaint Woolman dormitory. McCabe Library is to the east of Parrish, as are the dorms of Willets, Mertz, Worth, and Alice Paul. To the west are the dorms of Wharton, Dana, and Hallowell, Sharples dining hall, the Scott Amphitheater, the two non-residential fraternities , the athletic facilities, and the Crum Creek in the sprawling Crum Woods. Palmer, Pittenger, and Roberts dormitories are south of the railroad station, while Mary Lyon dorm is off-campus to the southwest.
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.
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, largely due to a lack of suitable athletes on campus.,
Publications
The main student newspaper at Swarthmore is
The Phoenix, 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 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. Currently, the Daily Gazette has 1700 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 SWIL;
Remappings , 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,
! 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 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" extensively. Many archived recordings of musical and spoken word performances exist, such as the once-annual Swarthmore Folk Festival. Today WSRN focuses virtually exclusively on entertainment, though it has covered significant news developments such as the athletic cuts in 2000 and the effects of 11 September 2001 on campus.
Activism
Swarthmore is also known as a center of social and political activism. The college has recently received significant coverage due to two student groups founded in 2004, the
Genocide Intervention Network and War News Radio. Swarthmore's political landscape is generally considered fairly left-wing, though student activism is far less a part of student culture than at other schools, or in the heyday of protest culture in the 1960s, a period of activism that prompted former vice-president Spiro Agnew to label the College the "Kremlin on the Crum." Recent high-profile campaigns included a living wage organization , actions surrounding the
electronic voting machine manufacturer
Diebold by campus groups
FreeCulture.org and Why War?, and a "Kick Coke" campaign aimed at replacing soda machines offering
Coca-Cola with alternative products.
Alumni
Swarthmore's alumni include eight MacArthur Foundation fellows and four
Nobel Prize winners, most recently
Edward C. Prescott, who graduated in 1962. In addition, hundreds of prominent figures in law, art, science, business, politics, and other fields have attended Swarthmore.
The most famous Swarthmore graduates are probably
Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis , who was the Democratic candidate in the
1988 presidential election, and novelist
James A. Michener , both of whom graduated with highest honors. Michener left his entire $10 million estate to Swarthmore.
Other prominent alumni include
Senator Carl Levin of
Michigan , astronomer Sandra M. Faber ,
The Corrections author Jonathan Franzen ,
Caltech president and Nobel laureate David Baltimore , and
Justin Hall , widely considered to be the first
blogger.
Wall Street magnate and
Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. founder Jerome Kohlberg, Jr. founded the Philip Evans Scholarship Foundation in 1986 at Swarthmore. Suffragist and
National Women's Party founder
Alice Paul graduated in 1905; students voted to name a newly completed residence hall after her in 2005.
Astronaut Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, attended but later transferred to
Stanford University to major in Physics and English.
Points of interest
See also
External links
