Dear Members of the Swarthmore Community,
As another semester on campus begins, I hope this letter finds you as excited as we are to work toward stronger futures for the many communities that make up the fabric of Swarthmore. As Editor-in-Chief of The Phoenix this semester — our 161st volume — I firmly believe our paper can achieve its highest potential as crucial infrastructure for that work.
Over the past few semesters, it’s been an absolute honor to work with incredible editorial teams on some transformative projects in service of our campus. Together, we’ve devoted ourselves to the task of making The Phoenix a harder-hitting, more probing, more varied, and more substantial institution: in short, an invaluable college resource. This work is not — and never will be — finished, but it continues to be our guiding ideal.
Last fall, our news team continued to capture the regular drumbeat of academic and extracurricular life at the college, while also committing itself to explaining matters that might go overlooked in the whirlwind of campus life. These critical areas for exploration included the changing admissions landscape, high-stakes federal lobbying against Trump’s endowment tax, complexities of construction, Val Smith’s presidency, ongoing athletic policy controversies, developments in Swarthmore’s surrounding local communities, and public opinion among both the faculty and the student body that is necessary to inform better campus decisions.
Opinions maintained its tradition of publishing thoughtful perspectives on hot topics from Swatties, while taking real steps to grow as a true hub for campus commentary. This meant establishing regular columns in which community members try to make sense of our Troubled Times, as well as providing a forum for faculty to apply their expertise to the issues most affecting college life. This work was, and will continue to be, in the hopes of capturing and representing a broader range of sentiments on campus.
The Phoenix remains a home for our strong arts and sports communities, sharing the triumphs and achievements of talented classmates while also offering thoughtful reflection on what it means to be part of those communities in an ever-changing world. We look forward to continuing our coverage of those spaces that our peers contribute to and to do so more expansively. In the spirit of exploration, we remain excited about incorporating unconventional and creative responses in our features section. As we develop this section, we invite the community to share their inspirations!
All of this work has been in service of a journalism that works to empower the imaginations of the community it serves, but William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English Peter Schmidt perhaps captured how we see our role better than we could. “Journalism is like a phoenix: it teaches us how to understand the cause of a fire, but also to see what may be born out of fire,” he offered in an Office Hours column on the role of professors in the liberal arts.
The Swarthmore community is trying to understand a world that is, in many ways, mostly figuratively but sometimes literally, on fire. Just in the last month, the shocking violence of the federal government’s interactions with its own cities has infiltrated our streets, and there is real fear that this violence may soon spread closer to campus. Last year, the Trump Administration shook the foundation of American higher education, upending the longstanding conventions and practices that had governed campuses across the nation. And, as we begin 2026, our social justice-oriented college finds itself facing a myriad of devastating systemic issues of environmental damage, inequality, injustice, discrimination, violence, and oppression now compounded by a weakened social safety net and a hampered public sector.
As Schmidt writes, however, we are all obligated not only to understand and raise alarm to the fires that our world (even before 2025) has never been without, but to imagine a future that can emerge from their ruins. My vision for The Phoenix is for our articles to make that tall task of figuring out what a stronger future looks like slightly more possible with every issue. To do this, we will work harder to turn over the rocks that some might prefer left alone, believing that those having conversations about the college’s future must first have a firmer grasp on its most fundamental workings. We will seek to empower the voices and share the perspectives of a wider range of community members, recognizing that our contemporary world needs more venues for ideas and arguments to be truly tested and examined against one another. And, we will provide more avenues for our readers to give us feedback this semester, understanding that for a press to serve as an institution of accountability, it, too, must be held accountable.
All of this will be hard work, but we have the right team to do it. I am beyond excited to welcome several new peers to our Editorial Board and to collaborate with many new writers! But readers can also play a part. Familiarize yourself with our masthead, and stop one of us in the hallway or dining hall to share your idea for something on campus that warrants examination. Read our articles, for sure, but go a step further and interact with them — leave a comment, send them to a friend, or respond to them in an opinion piece. Take matters into your own hands and write for us, whether that means offering the campus your hot take, taking many weeks to investigate something you feel the community needs to know about, writing about an art show or sports game that inspired you, or any of the other ways you can contribute. Overall, though, we hope you’ll also join us in the important work that good journalism can allow for: not just writing the “first draft of history,” but beginning to think about a very early, very rough draft of the future.
Sincerely,
Daniel Perrin
Editor-in-Chief
