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 sixth edition of this column, we asked professors to share their thoughts on the following question:
How has Swarthmore changed during your time here? Feel free to focus on changes related to the college’s direction as a whole, the academic program, administrative/faculty governance, the student body, or any other change(s) you find notable.
Sam Handlin ’00, Associate Professor of Political Science:
The student experience at Swarthmore is very different than it was in the late 1990s, when I was an undergraduate. Explanations are complex, with broad societal changes, trends within higher education, and college policy choices all likely contributing. But the differences are dramatic and worthy of reflection.
The college regulates, surveils, and polices student behavior to a degree that was simply unthinkable in the past. We did not have convoluted speech codes regulating how we could talk with each other, there were no cameras or card swipes tracking our movement, and the student Code of Conduct fit onto a handful of pages in the College Bulletin. It was trivial to get approval to throw a party (and to get the college to pay for alcohol) and perfectly normal to hold more spontaneous gatherings in dorms and courtyards. Public Safety did not meaningfully police the use of alcohol or drugs and generally only showed up if somebody called and wanted help. The college did not treat us as adults so much as give us the space to learn how to become them, entrusting us with the responsibility to respect certain boundaries but leaving us to make our own choices — good and bad — within those limits. Now, the college treats students as adolescents who must be protected from the world, each other, and themselves. Most importantly of all, they and their parents are to be given no grounds to sue.
Activism played a much smaller role in campus life in the late 1990s and the major student protests were almost all targeted at outside actors and institutions, like the U.S. military or government. Students did not target the college administration because we knew that the truly meaningful things were occurring beyond the campus and that the college had no power over them. While waves of inward-targeted activism famously occurred further in the past (e.g., in the late 1960s and early 1980s), these episodes have been more the exception than the rule in Swarthmore’s history. The trend over the last decade toward regular inward-oriented student activism is a marked departure.
Swarthmore has also become a less rigorous, and arguably less intellectual, place. Students are asked to read significantly less and it is far easier to earn an A or A- grade. To be clear, I don’t believe that students today are any less intelligent. But they enter Swarthmore having read fewer books while growing up and we ask less of them once they arrive. As a result, the average student today knows less about history and is less familiar with famous novels or canonical texts of social and political theory. Swatties in the 1990s had the usual preoccupations of college students, such as music, pop culture, and social life. But we spent a lot of time in idle intellectual discussion — the difference between early and late Marx, the causes of World War I, the films of the French New Wave, etc. I hope those kinds of idle conversations, albeit likely on different topics, are still happening on campus.
Finally, the student body is much more diverse today than it was in the 1990s, along many dimensions — racially, socioeconomically, geographically, and in terms of nationality. I met my wife at Swarthmore: a first-gen, low income, immigrant. Her profile was so uncommon that the college had not even invented categories like FLI to refer to students like her, much less developed programs and student affinity groups to support them. Swatties today are much more diverse and, in many ways, worldly — huge positive development. But I worry whether the overall student experience has the same value it once did.
Tim Burke, Peggy Chan Professor of History:
1. The college has very much substantially lived into its aspirations to have a diverse student body and to have a more diverse faculty and staff compared to how it was when I arrived over 30 years ago. I don’t think our institutional culture has entirely caught up to the implications of that shift, but it’s notable nevertheless.
2. The role of the faculty in setting institutional directions and defining institutional values has substantially diminished in a variety of ways. Some of that change is a deliberate outcome resulting from leadership decisions and some of it is a product of shifting conditions in academia and in professional workplaces more generally. (It parallels, for example, the diminishing authority of medical professionals over shaping medical outcomes for their patients.) As in other professional institutions, this shift sometimes means it is harder to discern what our abiding values actually are and what we would or would not do to be in alignment with those values.
3. Somewhat following on that shift, there is vastly less sharing of information in much work and governance in the college, a change that started near the end of Al Bloom’s time as president and accelerated through the presidencies of Rebecca Chopp and Valerie Smith. People generally know far less about what is happening or why changes in process or procedure are being introduced. I think as a result, there is low-level pervasive mistrust and an inclination to think that real motivations or interests are being concealed.
4. In most (though not all) offices, the staff is considerably larger proportionately to the faculty than was the case in the early 1990s. This is not unique to Swarthmore: it has happened all over academia.
5. The role of concerns about liability and risk management in driving many decisions is considerably larger than it was in the 1990s.
6. Perhaps relatedly, the college [as an institution] is considerably wealthier on a per-student basis than it was in the early 1990s, but it also has more fixed costs and increasing burdens, many of which we have little control over.
7. Student choice of majors has shifted significantly towards STEM departments and a handful of departments in the social sciences, but students also double major more than they used to.
8. Interest in the Honors program has declined somewhat from when I arrived, but I arrived right after a significant redesign of Honors that increased interest in the program for a substantial period of time.
9. Fewer faculty live close to campus for a variety of good reasons, but that has changed some aspects of the campus culture. The pandemic intensified some of that shift.
10. Students have fewer distinctive rituals and the ones that survive feel considerably less owned or controlled by students.
11. In general, we’ve shifted from an era where students were largely presumed to be adults in charge of their own lives and responsible for their own decisions to something much closer to what is called “in loco parentis,” where the college operates as an extension of the style of heavily involved parenting that many current students have experienced growing up.
12. The Board of Managers is more distant from the faculty, most of the staff, and the student body. That’s an outcome of a lot of cumulative shifts, including the Board being targeted more aggressively by successive periods of activism, but it’s a noticeable difference between the early 1990s and now. The Board also seems less hands-off in influencing the operations of the college than it used to be.
13. What has not changed: the institution remains serious about intellectual work, serious about learning, and committed to the idea that one outcome of a Swarthmore education is what Al Bloom called “ethical intelligence,” a sense of social responsibility.
14. Maybe as a result of our “Quaker tradition,” faculty will go to considerable lengths to avoid making a decision where a majority gets its way and the remainder are forced to accept an outcome that they strongly oppose. I think that often led to a sort of compromise where everyone was vaguely dissatisfied but no one was grievously unhappy. Lately, faculty are a bit more tangibly factionalized and I feel as if groups are working to take end runs around the overall faculty community, but maybe that’s just a passing phase.
15. We have more buildings and bigger ones than when I arrived. I think the changes in the campus physical plant are almost entirely for the better. The Arboretum continues to make the campus a very pleasant place to see and be.
16. The faculty remain very dedicated to teaching. The student body remains very talented as a whole and in specific and is a delight to teach.
David Cohen, Professor of Astronomy:
The biggest change I’ve seen in my 26 years at the college is the racist and reactionary backlash to the diversification of the student body twenty years ago and more recently, of the faculty. Despite a professed commitment to equality, some faculty (and students) interpreted unequal access to high school opportunities — structured by race and class — as evidence of inferiority. The hostility toward anti-racist faculty and toward efforts at anti-racism come from both faculty and administrators — and Board members for that matter — and are manifest in coded language about grade inflation, rigor, and civility as well as in more direct verbal attacks against individuals and unequal access to resources. It is difficult to imagine a college president from an earlier era snubbing Angela Davis, lowering the flag for Charlie Kirk, or sitting on the board of a major hydrocarbon polluter. It’s no surprise that Zionism has increasingly become the main organizing principle of the board and administration as it’s an ideology in which liberal commitments coexist with fascist policies.
Syon Bhanot, Associate Professor of Economics:
I started as a professor at Swarthmore in 2015. I think the college has changed in a lot of ways since 2015. Of course, the world has also changed dramatically since then, with COVID as a major turning point. A couple of notable changes at Swarthmore, in my eyes, are:
1) I think the college has seen a decline in academic standards. I should stress that this is not unique to Swarthmore — I have heard the same from professors across the best colleges and universities. It is hard to pinpoint just one reason for this. COVID and its impacts across both the secondary and higher educational landscape are a major factor, though. Social media and the rise of AI have also not been positive contributors. I also think that a number of decisions (particularly post-COVID) have been made that, while they were understandable at the time, arguably undermined academic excellence. These include moving to and staying with test-optional admissions, an acceptance of grade inflation, and a slight reorientation of college programs towards the non-academic aspects of the college experience. Obviously, this is only my view, and opinions will differ on these issues amongst well-intentioned people. But I feel it is important to discuss these dynamics openly, not only at Swarthmore but across higher education. Pretending this trend isn’t happening, when most faculty can clearly see it, helps no one.
2) I feel a collective spirit and collegiality has been eroded. Faculty do not get along as well as they used to, across our myriad differences, and people seem to gather less and enjoy each other’s company less. I know there are many (good) reasons for this — the world is an anxiety-inducing place. I am not naive to that. But, that said, all of us are here together and enjoy a great privilege to engage in the life of the mind with smart people at a distinguished institution and on a wonderful campus. Surely we can do more to find joy in that, even when we don’t see eye to eye or when the world tests us.
3) Students have become much more grade-oriented, and arguably more pre-professional in their outlook, than they used to be. For the first five years here, I think I talked about grades with individual students only a handful of times. Now it is a constant topic of conversation. As anyone over the age of 25 can tell you, your college GPA is nowhere near as important as many of our students seem to think — you delete it from your CV much sooner than you realize. The peak of most of our current students’ careers will probably be in the 2050’s (!). Taking a class that is important for your personal development and getting a B is not the end of the world —- it’s an important part of the journey, and I hope more students will appreciate that over time.
Donna Jo Napoli, Professor of Linguistics and Social Justice:
I came in 1987. The student body has become far more diversified, especially with regard to socioeconomic status of families — which is something I attribute to carefully deliberated action on the part of our administration and which is something for which I personally love Val Smith. We have so many societal problems based on so many factors — but in my eyes, socioeconomic situations are among the most tragic because they are among the most changeable in obvious ways (such as, of course, access to well-supported education) — yet most of society has not cared to change them. Hurrah for Swarthmore.
And the student body is as unrelenting in its demands for knowledge as it ever was. That’s why I love my job: I learn so much from my students.
As for matters beyond the students, I have seen changes that I deplore, but I have no idea how widespread they are across the college. I wear the blinders of my field and my experience with various departments — whether I try to throw them off or not. But I have seen a tendency toward homogenization. For example, if there’s a required course and different people teach it in different years, there’s a tendency to say it must include A, B, C and be taught with X, Y, Z methods. Maybe in some fields this is necessary because maybe “truth” is agreed upon — I don’t know. But in many fields “truth” is elusive and, at best, all we can hope for is that it is constantly evolving. I value academic freedom; I value the quirks and strengths and even weaknesses of those striving to grapple with the issues of their field. I believe our students will be better off if at least some fields drop this perhaps well-intended but probably hegemonically instigated tendency.
Another problem I’ve seen is out-and-out competition between departments for students, sometimes based on silly things, like parties. This I attribute (admittedly in my limited understanding of the workings of the college) to the overuse of numbers in making important decisions about supporting departments — such as the faculty-student ratio in classes and the faculty-majors ratio in a department. It’s a perversion.
There is plenty good to be said about the faculty, though. We have far more diversity now than we had when I came — diversity across obvious demographics. And many of the more recent hires (in the past twenty years, in particular) do really wonderful research, often with students. This is happening across the country, of course — but Swarthmore has certainly gone with this trend. I’m so very grateful.
Steve Wang, Associate Professor of Statistics:
I’ve noticed many apparent changes in my 25 years at Swarthmore. However, as a statistician, I’m trained to be skeptical of anecdotal impressions. After all, I swear that time is going by faster as I get older — each year seems to pass by more and more quickly — but obviously it’s not. So I am cautious in taking any apparent trends at face value.
Ayse Kaya, Professor of Political Science:
I’ve had difficulty fully articulating the scale of change this institution has undergone during my seventeen years here. I do appreciate that both the student body and faculty have become more diverse. At the same time, I have to be honest: it still isn’t an easy place to be a woman from a different cultural background — even though I did not encounter the same challenges working for the U.S. government.
Why might that be? My sense is that Swarthmore has an assimilationist tendency. We often speak of “the community” as if it were singular and uniform, even as people hold a wide range of views on critical issues and as polarization has increased. We are an educational institution and a professional community, first and foremost. But, I think our notions of community are more ambitious than that.
What puzzles and concerns me most, however, is that despite the significant resources invested in and by this institution, I cannot confidently say it is a better place than when I first arrived. That realization is deeply disheartening. As someone who studies institutions — and understands how profoundly they shape incentives, morale, and experiences, not only for those here now but for those who will come after us — I find this especially troubling.
It has also become personally harder for me to see the academic vision through all the noise. Looking ahead, I believe Swarthmore needs to rearticulate a clear and compelling core academic mission.
