In The Phoenix’s final edition of the year, we wanted to reflect, as the opinions editors, on a busy and productive semester and share our hopes for the future of the section.
In our view, the primary purpose of The Phoenix’s opinions section is to provide a window into the perspectives and beliefs of the Swarthmore community. More specifically, our hope is to offer an admittedly incomplete but still valuable snapshot of the campus. This approach, while aimed primarily at giving our current readers an understanding of the campus zeitgeist, will also serve as a contribution to Swarthmore’s institutional memory for future generations to read and learn from. In many ways, the details of Swarthmore’s history — and especially the record of what the community was concerned with or wondering about at any given moment in time — are surprisingly sparse. Hopefully, one of the functions of the opinions section (and The Phoenix as a whole) will be to fill in those gaps — to provide a partial insight into what life on campus is like for those looking back years from now.
With this in mind, we have been attempting throughout the semester to cultivate an opinions section that not only deals with national and international political questions (which we certainly agree are fascinating and essential components of our section), but is also focused on issues directly affecting members of the Swarthmore community. For example, the opinions section has featured student pieces on Swarthmore’s farm prototype, Karine Jean-Pierre’s controversial visit to campus, this year’s SEPTA funding debacle, and the pervasive issue of sexual violence on campus. We are also proud of our weekly column, Swat Says, which we introduced last spring in an attempt to capture — in a more informal manner — the thoughts and feelings of students about happenings around campus.
The Swarthmore community, though, is not limited to students. In order to better reflect the sentiments of the campus, it is important to showcase a wider variety of perspectives. Given this, and especially since the majority of our regular writers are students, we have attempted to focus on bringing forth the voices of faculty and staff. To this end, we have recently introduced two new regular columns with such a purpose in mind: Office Hours and In Troubled Times.
In Troubled Times aims to garner a range of perspectives from students, faculty, and staff alike who discuss the uncertain and tumultuous environment on campus and across the country. The inaugural edition of this column (published last spring) was a contribution from journalist and Visiting Professor for Social Change Ted Gup on how the college itself should navigate these trying times and aid community members in doing the same. Throughout this semester, we have published contributions from the Swarthmore Meeting of Friends on campus protest and quaker values, McCabe Research and Instruction Outreach Librarian Abigail Weil on libraries as a place of resistance, student Jonah Sah ’27 on the purpose of Swarthmore’s endowment, and, most recently, Interfaith Center religious advisors Michael Ramberg, Sabrina LaBelle, and Umar Abdul Rahman on spirituality as a resource for mitigating stress and navigating a chaotic world.
Our newest column, Office Hours, was originally inspired by an article in The Michigan Daily collecting faculty and staff submissions on what qualities UM’s search committee should look for in a new President. Our inaugural Office Hours article addressed the broad topic of the role of professors in the liberal arts. In subsequent editions, we asked professors to share their thoughts on grading practices and grade inflation, Swarthmore’s hiring, retention, and tenure practices, and most recently, about the implications of generative AI for higher education. We have been thrilled to receive a wide range of responses on these topics from many members of the faculty and intend to continue this column next semester.
The Phoenix as a whole also aims to understand the evolving perspectives of the campus community with our campus-wide surveys. While, in collaboration with our news section, we have only begun polling students and faculty in the past couple of semesters, we hope that future iterations of the Editorial Board will continue to collect this quantitative data in order to gain perspectives on shifting campus opinions in the long term. We believe this sort of long-term public data is extremely valuable, especially alongside collections of perspectives on similar relevant topics in the form of our three columns and stand-alone op eds.
Together with the rest of The Phoenix, we hope that this approach to the opinions section will help to create a more complete image of campus attitudes in our current moment, as well as the long term.
