On February 24, Swarthmore President Val Smith announced that she would end her time as president in June 2027. The transition will conclude her twelve-year term, a period longer than most campus leaders stay on in the current chaotic higher education landscape. Smith has presided over the college through times of uncertainty and upheavals across the country, as well as intense changes at our school.
Certainly, Smith — the first Black president of Swarthmore — has left her mark on the college. She came to the college with the goal of significantly expanding the school’s financial aid capacity, and it has grown substantially under her tenure. She saw Swarthmore through the COVID pandemic, which uprooted almost every aspect of campus life. Smith herself has reflected on the lasting harm the pandemic has caused to the school’s social fabric, but, ultimately, the college emerged on the other side having escaped the precarity that haunted many other institutions and without having to lay off any employees or reduce its offerings. While Swarthmore’s To Zero By Twenty-Thirty Five plan for carbon neutrality and the construction of the Dining and Community Commons, Singer Hall, and Martin Hall have torn up the landscape, those projects have garnered respect for their embrace of climate sustainability and reflect care in planning and execution.
Despite these successes, Smith’s time at Swarthmore has also included clashes with members of the community. Coupled with her limited presence on campus, this friction has come to define Smith’s reputation for many, especially current students and recent graduates, whose Swarthmore careers were marked by protest activity and administrative reactions. Pro-Palestinian student activism spanning several semesters has generated conflict between the student body and the administration, culminating last spring with the arrest of nine individuals by local law enforcement, who were called to campus by Smith. Students, faculty, alumni, and other Swarthmore community members have criticized this decision, as well as other disciplinary efforts taken against students engaging in protest actions.
Beyond these specific incidents, it’s clear that the administration and the rest of the college are in an era of decreased trust. In the remainder of her time at the college, Smith should make an effort to rebuild a positive relationship between the administration and the campus, focusing on affirmative leadership grounded in open communication.
Smith’s February announcement made clear that the remainder of her time as president would be devoted primarily to implementing “Swarthmore Forward.” The strategic plan, launched in 2024, focuses on “educating the whole student”; its components are at varying stages of completion. Smith’s announcement and focus on the strategic plan offers the campus the perfect opportunity to reflect on what the next sixteen months should look like, especially given the ways that the plan is emblematic of what many see as shortcomings in the school’s recent administrative style.
In recent years, administrative communication about the college’s major efforts has come almost exclusively in the form of campus-wide emails. While Smith, in her fall interview with The Phoenix — her first in over a decade — said she felt that this format allowed for a wider reach than more on-the-ground campus-wide forums, the community’s understanding of “Swarthmore Forward” seems to challenge this.
For a plan with such massive long-term implications for our college, very few people seem to know much about it. Beyond the anecdotal conversations in which a friend or trusted professor can’t conjure up many of its components, The Phoenix’s polling in 2025 revealed a campus community that was, at best, ambivalent about and, at worst, largely removed from the plan. In the fall, equal portions of faculty respondents (22% each) voiced approval, disapproval, and lack of knowledge of the plan. Almost three-quarters of student respondents lacked awareness (38%) of the plan or were neutral (34%) about its quality.
Whether the widespread lack of knowledge about strategic planning stems from failures in the college’s efforts to involve the community or from a lack of institutional memory of those efforts, the administration must now prioritize meaningfully involving the student body, faculty, and staff.
We, The Phoenix’s Editorial Board, feel that this problem speaks to a broader disconnect between the administration and the campus community. While Swarthmore’s administration continues to oversee a college offering a world-class education and expansive resources to many, the governance of these operations and other major decision-making is increasingly distanced from the day-to-day work of its constituents.
These dynamics come at a time when both faculty and student respondents have expressed strong disapproval of the college’s Board of Managers, students have disapproved of the college’s administration at large, and faculty members voiced that they had only a small (and decreasing) amount of governance in the college’s decision-making process.
Just this week, The Phoenix looked into the history of the President’s house on campus — the Courtney Smith House — and found that it serves far less of a community-building role than it once did. The college’s recent application report to the New England Commission on Higher Education itself acknowledges these communicative struggles, listing “better understanding between the President’s staff and the faculty” as a key area for improvement.
Both to make the most out of her remaining time at Swarthmore and to set a strong example for her successor, Smith should spend the next few semesters taking real steps to create more accessible and stronger avenues for communication, debate, and good governance across campus.
This work can certainly happen as part of the implementation of “Swarthmore Forward.” As Smith’s last main ambition for her work at the college, we would like to hear more from her about what the next steps of its implementation will look like and, more broadly, what its components mean for the college community. As many students aren’t familiar with the plan, we ask that Smith use this time to show up more for “Swarthmore Forward,” but also for other issues she cares about on campus.
Smith’s remaining time presents a window of opportunity to be more public about her final initiatives as president. Drawing on student and faculty perspectives, both from Phoenix polling and coverage, we have some ideas for what we would like to see from Smith during the rest of her time.
- The Phoenix found that under Smith’s predecessors, the college president’s house was more open to the campus community, hosting memorable gatherings for longtime faculty and past students. We would like Smith to honor this historical precedent. This could include potential open houses, along with dinners and events for indispensable members of our community, particularly those who don’t regularly receive as much celebration, such as Environmental Services technicians and dining hall workers who have had a difficult start to the semester.
- Currently, students can only consistently speak to Smith by scheduling a fifteen-minute appointment through her administrative assistant. To live up to the importance of a leader in touch with her campus and a Quaker commitment to listening, Smith should either regularly hold larger, more open opportunities for students to talk to her, or significantly expand her office hours — but preferably both.
- While we don’t yet know what our next president’s background will look like, Smith’s position as a prominent scholar speaks to the core academic values of a Swarthmore education. In 2020, she taught her first class at Swarthmore: a seminar on Toni Morrison. As a powerful testament to the college’s commitment to the liberal arts, it would be valuable for Smith to teach a final class on campus.
- We want to hear more about what President Smith does on a day-to-day basis. For example, what does the work of implementing “Swarthmore Forward” look like? Who is involved, and what are the current major challenges? We would like to see this transparency as part of a broader move to a more democratized decision-making process, one that ensures broader community engagement in the college’s self-governance. Smith should pursue new opportunities to share about the issues she regularly navigates with the campus. In doing so, the community will get a better sense of her decision-making process and priorities, and Swarthmore might be able to begin its next era with a culture of greater trust and understanding.
- We hope that Smith’s announced resignation will give her more freedom to weigh in on the important issues our community members think about on a regular basis, making specific, affirmative commitments to the progressive values in which the college takes pride or the social and civic obligations of elite institutions in politically unstable times. As a leader in higher education administration and scholarship, Smith should use her platform to speak on these issues with lectures, opinion pieces, and advocacy.
In the sixteen months that Smith has left at Swarthmore, The Phoenix’s Editorial Board, in the interest of the campus community, feel that an increased presence from Smith is imperative. In the anticipation of a new president and uncertain times, the precedent Smith sets during her remaining time will show Swarthmore’s next leader how to support our complex community.
