As part of our regular Opinions series, “Office Hours,” we aim to feature a range of faculty voices on higher education and specific questions relating to Swarthmore College. We gather responses by reaching out to the entire Swarthmore faculty over email. Each contribution is edited for clarity and syntax only. We believe that students, staff, and other faculty can greatly benefit from reading professors’ diverse perspectives which many in the community may not have ever considered. In our fifth edition of this column, we asked professors to share their thoughts the following question:
With the search for President Smith’s successor officially underway, what would you like to see from Swarthmore’s next president? This can include what you hope from the next president in terms of their personal qualities, philosophy of higher education, approach to campus leadership, vision for the direction of the college in general, or any other trait that you feel is important for the job.
Syon Bhanot, Associate Professor of Economics
I’ll keep it short and sweet!
I think it is important that we have a president who: 1) is charismatic and engaged with campus life; 2) has a strong appreciation for Swarthmore’s history of academic excellence; 3) has a clear vision for what they want Swarthmore’s identity to be and a fearless commitment to achieving that vision; and 4) who is brave in making hard decisions. This is an important moment in higher education, and at Swarthmore in general, and I hope we find the right leader for this time.
Sibelan Forrester, Sarah W. Lippincott Professor of Modern and Classical Languages
I want the next president of Swarthmore to be a scholar, to have meaningful experience of that *essential* side of higher education. All the other good things too, but serious engagement with academic life!
Donna Jo Napoli, Professor of Linguistics and Social Justice
There are so many things to address here, because the president of the college is a leader across the board. So I want everything from that person. And I would be remiss if I didn’t add that I adore Val Smith and will forever be grateful for what she has done for us.
But here I want to zero in on just one thing: support for the creative arts that use our bodies. Right now we are in a period where many think the solutions to our problems lie in support for the natural sciences. I am all for supporting the natural sciences. (To my mind mathematics is the ideal undergraduate major — which many may say is not a natural science, but a branch of philosophy — see? Mathematics is a foundation for just about everything.) But if you look across our students, including our science majors, you will see that many take multiple courses in the creative arts that use their bodies — whether they major/minor in them officially or not. I’m not talking about putting pen to paper (though I love poetry and fiction) nor about art that is digitally created (though I spend a lot of my time on video work and I cherish the hope that my work here helps people).
I’m talking about dance, theater, painting, sculpture, music performance, and the like. Using your body to create offers an emotional and intellectual outlet that can help keep us healthy and sane, and perhaps even happy. It offers a balance to the intense work of the rest of our educational program in which we might use only very few parts of our body (hands, eyes) and perhaps even sit at a desk all day long sometimes. We know this. Yet we don’t back up that realization with the proper support. We support athletics (which I heartily applaud) and we support music. But the support for music comes from donations to the department — it is not a reflection of the college’s overall acknowledgement of the crucial nature of the bodily creative arts on campus. We must support dance. We must support theater. We must support painting and sculpture (and bring back ceramics — oh, please). We must not let the teaching faculty in these units give their time disproportionately vis-a-vis the teaching faculty in other units simply because they are dedicated to their students and their arts. We must increase the number of faculty engaged in the bodily creative arts and ask of each person only what we know is fair.
This has nothing to do with counting majors and minors. This has to do with what our students need and want — as they show us in every performance and every exhibit across campus in Lang Music Concert Hall, the Lang Performing Arts Center, the Frear Ensemble Theater, the corridors of Whittier Hall, the McCabe Library tables, Old Tarble, the List Gallery, the Kitao Art Gallery, and I don’t know where all else.
Our students need it. Our faculty needs it. I hope our next president will make this a priority.
Sunka Simon, Professor of German and Film and Media Studies
I want the next president to get to know and check in with all parts of the academic community on a frequent basis throughout their administration’s duration. The next president needs to be a champion for the concept of the liberal arts AND have the courage to protect it against both external and internal forces too often driven by market trends or enrollment pressures. In addition, the new leader should embrace, encourage, and actively support innovative and rigorous teaching, learning, and research.
Jonathan Washington, Associate Professor of Linguistics
Among many, many other things, I would love to see the college’s next president lean into the Quaker roots of the college enough to reject war, militarization, and violence against everyone, including first and foremost us — the people who make up the Swarthmore community.
Upon installation, the next president of the college should immediately withdraw Swarthmore from any and all association with the Chamberlain Project — a mysterious partnership that the majority of faculty rejected, to no avail. This will also help return determination of curricular matters to the faculty.
The next president of the college should oversee a reorganization of Public Safety so that it may uphold its name. PubSafe leadership and officers should maintain safety on campus, protect members of the community, and not profile, surveil, harass, or assault us on behalf of their overlords.
The next president of the college should stand up to weaponisation of the Student Code of Conduct, and should establish guardrails that prevent any dean from nonsensical crusades such as accusing students of violence and threatening expulsion for distributing the results of their anti-violence research.
The next president of the college should also initiate a review of campus policies that have the potential to signal the college’s support for violent causes, violent rhetoric, and hate, such as when the flag atop Parrish Hall is flown at half-staff.
And the next president of the college should never, ever call in armed law enforcement officers against students who are doing no harm. Ideally they will also never send one-sided emails about campus events that spread lies told to them by certain VPs that endanger the safety of individual community members.
I think it would also be nice if the next president of the college could find it within themself to represent large campus constituencies to the Board of Managers by, for example, suggesting they consider divesting the college’s endowment from violent and harmful enterprises, such as weapons manufacturers, for-profit prisons, and fossil fuels.
Is a president of Swarthmore College who rejects violence too much to hope for?
