“Life with all its Possibilities”: Swarthmore and its Quaker Founders

Swarthmore was founded as a Quaker school; anyone who has read my history articles should know that. You might also know that Swarthmore officially disaffiliated from Quakerism in order to get pensions for its teachers in the 1930s. When Andrew Carnegie established the first professor pension program, one of the requirements was that schools be non-sectarian, i.e., not associated with any religious organization. It was not until 1938 that any non-Quakers served on the board, however. In trying to figure out what to write about in my last Swarthmore history article, I realized that as I have been writing them, one question has been in the back of my mind the whole time: “What would Swarthmore’s founders think if they saw the school today?” With Swarthmore’s history of ethically compromising investments, historic and current protests, and the general absence of Quakers on Swarthmore’s campus, they might be horrified.

However, I do not think that is the case. Swarthmore has changed with the times, but at the same time, Swarthmore was founded as a radical institution devoted to imparting an excellent education, and I think, in spite of its flaws, it still fulfills that mission.

The key goal of founding Swarthmore outside of Philadelphia was to provide an educational institution removed from the “corrupting influences” of the city. In that regard, Swarthmore has been wildly successful: I doubt there is a single student who wishes they went to Philly less. In the 19th century, Swarthmore students needed a permission slip to go to Philly; today students need free time, which might be harder to get. At the same time, Swarthmore is, I think, home to the “healthful country living as well as intellectual and moral training” that its founders were looking for. While the town of Swarthmore is no longer agricultural, our Arboretum offers something that most city and many non-city campuses do not have. Swarthmore students have the opportunity to escape the campus into nature. Nature and the natural sciences were an important part of the Quaker ethos on which Swarthmore was founded.

Quakers, especially of the Hicksite sect that founded Swarthmore, believed that understanding the natural world was just as important as understanding literature or history. As a history major, I sometimes lament the presence of STEM students on campus, but they also offer a marked contrast to the subject I study and the life I live. My Swarthmore experience is richer for having friends who study subjects outside of history and German studies, and I am grateful for the fresh perspectives they bring to my topics. 

Lots of schools claim to offer a liberal arts education, but I believe that Swarthmore truly does offer liberal arts, and furthermore, it benefits from that offering. When I was working in the admissions office and interviewed a prospective student, they told me that they thought the liberal arts were “poetry and stuff like that.” While poetry is a part of the liberal arts education, so too are biology, engineering, and anthropology. Swarthmore’s strength, in part, is its ability to produce well-rounded _____s. What that means is a chemist graduating from Swarthmore would be just as able to understand and quote Cervantes in the original Spanish as a graduating English teacher would be able to run a regression. When Swarthmore was reviewing its curriculum in 1967 as part of Superweek, one of the major questions was whether to split off engineering into its own school like other colleges and universities, or to restructure the curriculum to allow engineers to have more time in their schedule to take other classes. The conclusion was that “…engineering is a profession that mediates between knowledge and society,” and as such, engineers need a liberal arts education to allow them to be more effective engineers. Some of my friends from high school who study engineering at the University of Maine lament the non-engineering classes they have to take. At Swarthmore, the opposite is true; my friends who study engineering wish they had more time to take other classes.

The Quakers who founded Swarthmore were radicals within a sect that was already seen as radical by much of the United States. Quakers’ focus on equality meant that they fought for equal rights and the abolition of slavery long before those were mainstream ideas in the United States. Did Quakers execute those ideas perfectly? No. There were Quaker slaveholders, and a quick glance through Swarthmore’s history indicates that women were often treated unequally. However, Swarthmore’s founders were radicals. 

I will admit, the environment at Swarthmore often feels tense. People hold strongly to their beliefs and sometimes equate disagreeing with those ideas as an attack on them. However, the Quakers who founded Swarthmore held that it was “the individual’s responsibility for seeking and applying truth and for testing whatever truth one believes one has found.” While the college has moved away from making decisions by consensus, which is a loss, the focus on debating and standing by one’s ideas is still a central part of the Swarthmore experience, and that process, more than any conclusion it reaches, is integral to the Swarthmore experience. 

The college’s first president, Edward Parrish, was a traveling pharmacist who believed that education was key to creating a more meritocratic society. Parrish believed that Swarthmore ought to work to help the United States part with “the aristocratic idea of an educated class.” Swarthmore’s continued commitment to financial aid and supporting students makes education attainable for a whole host of students who do not have the resources to afford higher education. Lots of Swarthmore students admit that they came here because of financial aid. While that may seem like a negative comment, I think it is Swarthmore staying true to its original, radical values.

Furthermore, Swarthmore was committed to equality and social justice from its inception. When the college was first organized as a joint stock company, it had an equal number of men and women on the board. At the time, involvement by women in higher education at all was a rarity, and it was practically unheard of for them to sit on the board. In Pennsylvania, women could not sit on the board of a corporation, which Swarthmore was. Swarthmore got the law barring it amended to allow women to sit on its board. Furthermore, many of Swarthmore’s founders were anti-slavery activists, prison and school reformers, and advocates for peace and religious tolerance. Swarthmore’s second president, Edward Magill, had been a conductor on the Underground Railroad. If they came back today to see the protests on campus, they might not understand the issues at play, but I think they would be proud of Swatties for standing up for what they believe.  

The founders intended that at Swarthmore, “an education may be obtained equal to that of the best institutions of learning in our country.” I think they were wildly successful on this account, as the Swarthmore academic reputation is well known, but their commitment went further than just offering an excellent education. They sought to prepare Swarthmore students with an education that would allow them to do whatever they wanted. Swarthmore’s liberal arts curriculum, its commitment to supporting students, and its radicalism are all part and parcel of that history. As I graduate and prepare for life after Swarthmore, I am incredibly grateful for the time I have spent here, the friendships I have made, and the opportunities Swarthmore has given me. I will leave you with a quote from Edward Parrish that I think, in spite of its failings, Swarthmore lives up to today.

“We claim a higher mission for Swarthmore College than that of fitting men and women for business. It should fit them for life, with all its possibilities.”