The song “Over the Rainbow,” as performed by the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square, ought to be played alongside this piece.
I exit from Sharples on a beautiful sunny day and walk the long, winding path that runs to Magill Walk halfway up its extent. A small golf cart-like vehicle passes along the asphalt as I walk under the dappled sunshine. I then head up Magill, enter past the columns of the storied Parrish Hall, pick up a full manila envelope from the post office, and then cross through Kohlberg Courtyard to sit in the quiet afternoon of the commons. The sun winks at me as I move across the space. Once in the commons, there are just three other students in the room, but the coffee bar is still open for me to pick up gluten-free desserts. I have an hour before I plan to meet up with a friend.
This is an idyllic image. We live on a gorgeous campus and have many wonderful resources around us. Campus services are exceptional and academic support is comprehensive for a school as rigorous as Swarthmore.
And yet, something is wrong. Many students report feeling that the campus provides insufficient support for them. There are no effective, normalized channels for students to pursue when they have complaints outside astonishingly specific categories (Title IX and bias reports); the school has no ombudsperson. (An ombudsperson is an official assigned to act as an “advocate”: to investigate and rectify complaints, whether against students, faculty, or administrators.) 64% of students actively distrust the administration to make decisions in the best interest of the college and its students, according to previously unreleased results of polling commissioned by The Phoenix last spring.
The problems are even more pervasive than this. In the past year, the school has faced Title VI complaints for both anti-semitism and Islamophobia. 78% of students actively disapprove of the administration’s response to the conflict in the Middle East, as indicated by the above poll.
Many days, many students wish that there was not so much trouble at Swarthmore.
In the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, the main character Dorothy says: “Someplace where there isn’t any trouble. Do you suppose there is such a place, Toto? There must be. It’s not a place you can get to by a boat, or a train. It’s far, far away… Behind the moon… Beyond the rain.”
Swarthmore is not that place today. There are too many lawsuits and complaints, as well as cases of people being hurt and not receiving recompense. Justice is not here, today. But that doesn’t mean that justice doesn’t exist somewhere, someplace.
And that is why I yearn to fly over the rainbow.
As the song says: “Somewhere over the rainbow, way up high / There’s a land that I’ve heard of once in a lullaby. / Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue / And the dreams you dare to dream, / Really do come true.”
Somewhere over that rainbow, the Swarthmore I believe in still exists. The future lies over that rainbow. And it is what every Swattie deserves, whether student, staff, faculty, or administrator.
