On Dec. 5, early Friday morning, the Inn at Swarthmore was vandalized in protest of Swarthmore’s Board of Managers, who met there for their quarterly meeting over the weekend. Red graffiti on the side of the building read “Board of Butchers.” The spray paint was quickly power-washed off by the college facilities and staff. The Swarthmore Police and the college’s Public Safety are investigating the incident. No one has been identified yet.
“Anyone found to be responsible for the vandalism will be held accountable,” Vice President for Communications and Marketing Andy Hirsch wrote to The Phoenix.
A day before the vandalism and the arrival of the board, Swarthmore Students for Justice in Palestine sent an email to the campus community with the subject line “BREAK THE BOARD OF BUTCHERS.” The email demanded the board’s divestment from companies tied to Israel, such as the college’s internet provider, Cisco, and the investment company Vanguard.
“We must pressure the board by every means necessary to drop their investments in genocide,” SJP wrote.
In The Phoenix’s Fall ’25 campus student body poll, the Board of Managers received the lowest net approval rating of any of the institutions in question at -38%.
Students on campus noticed that some buildings, like the Dining and Community Commons, were locked at times when they were usually open. Friday evening, pamphlets were distributed in the dining hall protesting the board; the cover featured an image of board members targeted by a crosshair with the text “Public Enemy No.1.”
As the board met at the Inn, staff at the dining hall were left to deal with the protest and the college’s reaction. J.S., a dining hall staff member who requested to be referred to by their initials, said that the building lockdown inconvenienced some of the workers. The back-of-the-house staff on the loading dock, for example, had to unlock the door every time they brought in supplies.
He also said a manager ordered them to clear the pamphlets immediately once they found out, which were distributed on tables all throughout the dining room.
“When this sort of stuff happens, especially at the dining hall, I can’t stress enough, it just kind of disrupts the staff more than anything,” he said.
Hirsch condemned the violent imagery in the pamphlets and pointed out the inaccuracies in the content. Some of these inaccuracies, he said to The Phoenix, were so far-fetched that it’s reasonable to question whether they came from someone outside the college.
He responded to two statements in the pamphlet that SJP used as arguments for “WHY YOU SHOULD HATE THE BOARD”: that the college has cut financial aid and that funding cuts have cost faculty and staff their jobs. Neither, he said, was accurate.
According to Hirsch, over the past ten years, the college has increased financial aid by over 120%. This year, the financial aid budget was increased to $66 million — a 7.1% increase from last year. He also acknowledged another claim by SJP that the college’s increased endowment has resulted in fewer resources for research and educational services.
“In fact, the opposite is true: the endowment supports approximately 60% of our operating budget and enables us to fund priorities central to our mission,” Hirch said.
The manager of the Inn has not responded for comment.
Why didn’t this article interview anyone sympathetic to the protest? Why say “violent imagery,” instead of being critical of that perspective? Why not ask SJP their source instead of presenting one side and being a mouthpiece of the administration?
There was some talk of the value of ideological diversity within the faculty in the recent polls the Phoenix published. How about some ideological diversity in the board? Does the board’s ideology really need to be almost entirely confined to private equity and proximity to private equity? Does this need to be reinforced by an opaque, undemocratic, and unaccountable board structure? I think not. Restructuring the board is the first step toward recentering the college on its values, and away from finance.
We have in this article an anonymous quote from a dining hall staffer. Good. But shouldn’t this person have a voice on the board itself? Why are there no members of Swarthmore College staff on the board?
Over the last number of years we have seen a lot of pieces here about protest, the administration, the college’s response to our fascist federal government, free speech, Quaker values, the endowment, divestment, surveillance, and everything in between. Whatever you think about the methods of the protestors, they have identified the blockade in the way of progress on all of these fronts: an unaccountable, undemocratic, nontransparent board that is disproportionately connected to private equity, which is neither representative of nor responsive to the broader college community, and which stands as an emblem of the systemic rot of higher education at the hands of corporate finance.
If Swarthmore College is ever going to live up to its purported values and fulfill its mission, it is going to have to confront this glaring problem. Its board needs to represent the college, not corporate finance. Living up to your values means acknowledging that the endowment exists to serve the college, including those values. The college does not exist to serve the endowment at the expense of those values.