BY RACHEL ACKOFF

In print | Published November 3, 2005

Before divulging a piece of gossip in Sharples, it’s necessary to look over first your right shoulder and then your left. Called the “Swarthmore swivel,” this practice is ubiquitous. Searching Paces for a random, anonymous hookup? Good luck. Chances are he made out with your best friend’s best friend last weekend.

We love to hate just how small and incestuous Swarthmore is. But the truth is, the vast majority of us chose Swarthmore because it is an intimate community. We looked forward to small classes, meaningful interaction with professors, recognizing friendly faces all over campus, and going to parties where we knew and liked everyone there. We cringe when our friends at big schools describe walking across campus without seeing a single familiar face to attend a 500-person lecture taught by a TA.

Currently, Haverford is in the midst of a decision-making process about the size of their school. They’re considering increasing the size of the student body by several hundred students. While I cherish Swarthmore’s intimate community, I think 200, 300, even 500 more students would only improve the place.

With just under 1,500 students, we’re the smallest school of the top five liberal arts colleges ranked by US News and World Report. Williams has 1,991 students, Amherst 1, 638, Wellesley 2,289, and Carleton 1,951. With increased size come more course offerings, more faculty and more academic programs. Imagine — with 500 more students, in order to maintain our current student to faculty ratio of 8:1, we would hire 63 new faculty. How often have Swarthmore students wished there was an archaeology, journalism, or geology class offered on campus? And we all know our offerings in Jewish Studies, Film Studies, and Peace and Conflict Studies are pitiful. A larger Swarthmore would allow us to hire more profs in popular majors like Poli Sci while simultaneously allowing us to be academically experimental. If Middle East Studies is a burgeoning field, we could follow that trend and provide our students with a program that allowed them to reach fluency in Arabic.

And while academically the advantages are clear, the social advantages are also apparent. More Swatties means more potential best friends and more parties thrown on the weekends. It also means more students for our sports teams, our newspaper, our activist and service organizations, our performing arts, etc. The stereotypical Swarthmore student simultaneously sings in an a cappella group, is captain of the Frisbee team, writes for The Phoenix, and saves the world. We joke about it but it’s true — and it contributes to our misery culture. With a couple hundred more students helping to fill out our teams and organizations we might lose a little of our workaholic tendencies and gain a few hours of sleep. And not only would there be more of us to play on our sports teams and act in our productions, the teams and productions themselves would be stronger both because there’d be a larger pool of talent to draw from and because we would all be focusing on our central passions and perfecting our skills in those areas.

When we think about growth, what comes immediately to mind are the limiting factors — housing, dining services, land. What we tend to neglect is the excess capacity. At Worth, we offer beds to sick students 24 hours a day, but most nights the beds are far from full. Small departments like Classics and Russian could certainly use a few more students.

Some of us fear that an increase in students would dilute Swarthmore’s unique character. But our college’s character is no more a product of the kids it attracts than the culture they assimilate into. Our character is self-reproducing. Every year, upperclassmen label the freshmen class as “more mainstream.” Every year. The pattern demonstrates how freshmen come straight out of American high schools, immerse themselves in Swarthmore’s culture of intellectual passion and ethical intelligence, and become less mainstream and more Swattie as time goes by. Futhermore, while the overarching character of Swarthmore is strong, our community is also composed of various subcultures. More students would produce more subcultures translating into a more vibrant, diverse Swarthmore.

At first glance, adding a few hundred more kids might seem radical. But just 15 years ago, Swarthmore had 1,275 students. On the Facebook, we may join the group “Fuck a Real Education, I’m transferring to Harvard,” but deep down, none of us want Swat to become an Ivy. Swarthmore’s intimate community is one of the qualities that sets it apart, but 2,000 students is nowhere near 19,500, and Swarthmore is not at risk of becoming Harvard.

Rachel is a junior. You can reach her at rackoff1@swarthmore.edu.

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