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.
The juxtaposition of Professor Cohen’s contribution with a number of the others is pure gold.
Also that “difficulty of seeing the academic vision through all the noise” and those “trends in higher education” and how “a collective spirit and collegiality has been eroded” or the way “fewer faculty live close to campus for a variety of good reasons” and of course “the role of the faculty in setting institutional directions and defining institutional values has substantially diminished in a variety of ways” or how “I have seen changes that I deplore,” which specifically includes “a tendency toward homogenization,” and even the observation that “students have become much more grade-oriented, and arguably more pre-professional in their outlook” or “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” all has a name. It’s called private equity.
All these little, seemingly disparate, things that you can’t quite put your finger on… they’re all the same thing. The financialization of everything. The assetization of everything. Congratulations, your home is an asset (or, if you’re new around here, too bad that home you would like to move into is an asset and you will never be able to afford it). YOU are an asset so you damn well better conform to principles of optimization. Your institution is an asset with a titanic endowment that can be leveraged for financial gains, so don’t even think about rocking the boat. Not even a little. Oh, what’s that? You have student loans? Well if you want a job in finance, the only remaining career path where you have a prayer of ever paying them off, see above about how you are an asset, and be sure to max out your GPA.
When I first came to Swarthmore, we did not have a building named for a pioneer in private equity. When I left, we did. I would like to say this was a harbinger, and it is a fitting irony that Swarthmore College is now being eviscerated by private equity via a board that is dominated by private equity, venture capital, and investment banking, but this is in no way unique to Swarthmore, and campuses are falling prey to finance regardless of whether they have buildings named after the luminaries of private equity. Swarthmore could push back against this. The faculty could demand better. They could organize alongside students and staff (and even a good number of alums!) for a college that prioritizes values over valuation. But it is clear from the majority of the responses to this survey, which taken together depict a divided and alienated faculty whose attention has been diverted to side quests, that is not going to happen.
Really good points made, thanks for sharing.
Prof. Handlin’s diagnosis is right on. The administration was laissez-faire in the 90s — students could drink, take drugs, camp out in the Crum, climb the Parrish roof to infiltrate the ballroom, and otherwise explore with minimal, if any, interference. Campus security more or less did nothing, which should be its role. Now, from what I hear from recent grads, the mall cops pace through the dorms looking to bust students — even 21-year-old students! — for drinking amongst themselves. Socially, at least, Swat doesn’t sound much better these days than Bob Jones.
Bob Gross > Bob Jones, am I right?
But seriously, the question is WHY, isn’t it? Why is Swarthmore becoming yet another outpost for surveillance capital? Why did Public Safety used to warn students when Ville cops were about to show up on campus so students could put their bongs away, but now they’re part of the surveillance apparatus being deployed against students? And if we can reason out why, HOW does the community go about demanding Swarthmore stop doing this?
Instead of musing, as Prof Handlin did, that “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,” which strikes me as a weird couple of sentences to put next to each other and close out a statement like this, what about identifying the culprits behind these changes (The Board of Managers) and holding them accountable?
I would imagine a big reason for the college being less permissive than in the old days is that society has become more litigious. If the college were knowingly looking the other way on underage alcohol use or drug use, and someone did something dumb and hurt themselves or others, the college would have a big lawsuit on their hands. That was less true 20 or 30 years ago, I’m guessing.
You know what, good point. I should sue the Board of Managers for negligence, for somehow driving this institution into the shit-tier of being ranked 4th. 4th! What the hell is going on that the college that was number one back in the mid to late 90s is now effectively turning into the Washington Wizards of liberal arts colleges?
And lest you think this is unfounded or nonsensical, let us not forget that Quaker Values include Stewardship. Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality, and Stewardship. We can see very clearly from the faculty responses in the article that Swarthmore is failing on Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, and Equality. And we can see from Swarthmore’s inability to compete with its former peers in the top 3 how the Board of Managers has epic failed as stewards of this institution.
So, again, if the college wants to go around touting Quaker Values, how about the board and administration exhibit some. Instead of spending a bunch of money on a surveillance apparatus to suppress student dissent under the guise of security, which if we’re being honest will probably lead to more lawsuits than it prevents when someone’s privacy is inevitably violated or a data breech occurs, how about focusing on academic excellence and kicking out for some PHYSICS SYMPOSIA (do they still have those?), the absolute peak experience Swarthmore College has to offer. Where else can you listen to an expert in the field talk about nuclear fusion or molecular clouds, then afterwards go enjoy some of Delaware County’s finest moderately upscale dining options?
You want to sue the Board because Swarthmore dropped to 4th in the US News rankings? I hope you’re being sardonic, but the reason Swarthmore fell to #4 is US News’s inexplicable decision to classify the Naval Academy as a liberal arts college. Otherwise, Swarthmore has been number 3 just about every year the rankings have been published, with Williams and Amherst #1 and #2 in some order. Fluctuations in the rankings from year to year are almost always due to methodological decisions by US News, and have little to do with actual changes in the schools. I’m no fan of the Board, but it is ludicrous to blame Swarthmore “dropping” to #4 on the Board.
There’s nothing inexplicable about some jingoistic rag wanting to big up military schools. But that’s no excuse. Amherst and Williams overcame this obstacle just fine. Why couldn’t Swarthmore? I’ll tell you why: the Board of Managers has FAILED in its stewardship of Swarthmore College, allowing this debacle to happen on their watch.
I do not believe in this “fluctuation” model you propose. I was barely tolerant of Swarthmore “fluctuating” down to 3rd and then just camping out there for decades, but 4th is a bridge too far. That’s not even a podium finish. No medal. This is getting dangerously close to Haverford territory and none of us should stand for it or make excuses for the board’s subpar performance.
Maybe I’m being sardonic. Maybe I’m not. But this is clearly yet another element of a broader trend that reveals the board to be in need of improvement.
Don Draper: THAT’S WHAT THE MONEY IS FOR!
The college has the money to take a position of naiveté.
Despite the name, I am being serious. This is all Dean Kaplan’s fault! She’s policed the F out of students and even her dissertation treats the students like lab rats. I feel less free to explore myself on Swarthmore’s premises than in public. Hopefully, things change for the future Swatties and Swarthmore actually considers the feedback from their students. I had a great time at Swarthmore but I know there are many things we can improve! Roll Tide, Go Voles!
Professor Handlin’s assessment of Swarthmore’s eroding social culture is on point. For decades, the campus functioned as a safe space where students were trusted to socialize freely—within reasonable boundaries, as mentioned. Swat has never been a party school, but it did offer consistent opportunities to gather, have a few drinks, listen to music, dance, and build relationships beyond the classroom.
Today, the situation feels reversed. Public Safety appears increasingly empowered to patrol and police student life under the banner of security. Students (even those of legal drinking age) can face disciplinary action for something as minor as holding a drink or playing music too loudly, resulting in formal reprimands and performative punishments like writing short essays on the dangers of alcohol.
The downstream effect is predictable: students no longer feel they have a safe, on-campus outlet to unwind. Instead, the College effectively pushes social life off campus, where risks are often greater.
The administration and Board should take a hard look at how campus culture has shifted, and consider how to restore a sense of trust, autonomy, and joy to student life.
I seriously doubt it has anything to do with Public Safety being somehow “empowered” to act as a beat cop cracking down on student drinking in a materially different way. There was apparently a big spike in “reported liquor law violations on campus” in 2024, but these appeared to come out of a few big gatherings rather than public safety marching down dorm hallways.
There certainly appears to be a lot less partying on campus, and of course people whose only tool is a hammer are going to see nails everywhere (the nail here being blaming “the Board” and “Private Equity”), but really, it seems quite clear that a couple of things happened.
One was that the “DJ Fund” being eliminated around 2013 effectively killed off Paces and Olde Club parties that were a staple of the campus social scene 2-3 decades ago. You can make a case for the policy– you create a ton of legal exposure if actively and certainly knowingly providing alcohol to kids results in serious injury or worse. But the fact that the DJ Fund enabled the egalitarian party scene many of us experienced is beyond dispute.
The other was killing the frats. Now, you can make an even better case that killing the frats was good, for reasons that don’t need to be rehashed. But they were also a nexus for the campus party scene. It’s also beyond dispute that the frats were a place to go if you wanted to party on any given night.
That’s a much more nuanced story than “the Board of Managers killed fun” or whatever, but it has the benefit of being accurate. So that would be the conversation the school community needs to have.
Um, excuse me. We have two tools: both the hammer and the sickle.
But yeah, really mysterious how a spike in violations occurred in the wake of an increase in surveillance and policing. It’s not like that’s a phenomenon we have observed literally everywhere in the US since the dawn of modern policing. And I’m sure killing off the DJ Fund (prisons don’t need a DJ Fund, so why should Swarthmore?) was in no way associated with the administration or the board, and I’m sure the increase in surveillance also isn’t, right? There must be a more nuanced take, where the blame can be placed on DEI somehow.
Also hard disagree about the frats being the nexus of anything or being relevant to broader student life. What’s beyond dispute is I was able to go years w/o ever engaging the frats and had no shortage of opportunities to party on any given night.
As you may or may not be aware, the overwhelming majority of the 2024 spike in “reported liquor law violations” was attributable to… responses to complaints, not Public Safety proactively going out to look for issues. https://swarthmorephoenix.com/2026/03/19/over-400-increase-in-alcohol-referrals-from-2023-to-2024-latest-report-shows/
And, even in real time, RAs and PAs reported that they were encouraged to be more proactive in calling public safety when there were potential health issues. https://swarthmorephoenix.com/2016/05/13/new-swarthmore/
Now, as you again may or may not be aware, there was a reason the DJ fund was scrapped when it was. And it had something to do with the fact that the school was under investigation for Title IX complaints related to sexual assault on campus. It was a very real issue. And you create very real liability when those assaults happen at events where students, both perpetrators and victims, are drunk off of alcohol that the institution more or less knowingly pays for.
Again, these aren’t disputable things; they’re well documented, both now and in real time. It might make you feel good to pop up in the comments and yell self righteously about “the Board” and “private equity”, but it’s not at all useful if the goal is to identify and discuss real issues.
You declaring highly disputable things “indisputable” never gets old. There can be no disputing that it’s a great catchphrase for you. Anyway, to your points:
“According to Associate Director of Public Safety John Bera, the spike was largely driven by a “small number of incidents involving large groups of students.””
Sure, OK. Always good to let the police police themselves, right? Also “driven by” is ambiguous.
But let’s take a closer look at those numbers, shall we? “Bera said the majority of referrals, 173, resulted from Public Safety responding to calls or complaints. The remaining 41 were from five incidents that “Public Safety personnel proactively identified.”” So 41 of the violations in 2024, which is more violations than the 40 total there had been in the previous year, were from public safety proactively identifying violations (read: surveilling students).
It’s fatuous to say this has nothing to do with the board, and it’s equally fatuous to say the board has nothing to do with private equity, seeing as how private equity, venture capital, and other areas of finance are vastly overrepresented on the board compared to other industries.
It’s also not in keeping with a basic understanding of reality to suggest that policies pushed on RAs and PAs have nothing to do with the board or the administration. Do you think those policies arise of their own volition from the ether?
This is textbook surveillance capitalism. And here you are, surveillance capital’s strongest Phoenix comments section warrior, ready to give the board, the very same board that has driven Swarthmore from the top tier into the realm of mid on metrics of academic eliteness, mind you, a pass on all of this.
I’m familiar with one Title IX complaint from 2013-2014, but I don’t recall seeing anything about the DJ Fund in those. Nowhere in any of the complainant’s statements with which I am familiar was there any mention of Paces, but there was plenty of mention of Swarthmore providing inadequate resources for adjudication, being opaque in its decision-making process, and having a history of not enforcing its own rules and failing to hold violators accountable.
Once again, this falls on the board and administration, whose solution was to blame Paces. Laughable, and an attempt to control students instead of engaging in the more laudable work of repairing structural deficiencies in the college itself.. What’s the “real issue” if management not only destroys Swarthmore’s academic reputation, but also consistently denies justice to victims and props up injustice in the form of suppressing dissent, applying carceral logic to student life, and refusing to apply basic Quaker values criteria to its investments? What’s the “nuanced take” on the so-called “real issues” here if not a pattern of mismanagement by an administrative apparatus captured by private equity?
And why are a bunch of finance people running an academic institution, anyway? Why does the board appear to have zero ideological diversity with regard to capital? People are always going on about ideological diversity this, ideological diversity that, but is there a single anticapitalist on the board? There certainly are a good man among the student body, the staff, the alumni, and the faculty. Why not the board? Why must it comprise only a narrow slice of Swarthmorean ideological diversity?
You’re right about one thing, though. It does feel good to pop up in the comments and drag the board. I encourage more people to do it. I mean, sure, I would rather the board just act right, but they don’t, so here I am.
There are a lot of words here. What there isn’t is any evidence of critical thought, or indeed any connection to the real world. We could start with investments (which betray a complete lack of understanding of how the college’s endowment works), but that would require actual interest in understanding that. It’s all publicly available. You don’t know not because it’s not, but because you don’t care to know.
So, I mean… you’ll continue to go on these diatribes, and continue to act outraged that no one cares to listen, and continue to insist that it’s because they’re evil and bad, and not because they’re incoherent. But… only thing you need to know– it’s because they’re incoherent. Perhaps we can have a fruitful discussion if you actually bother understanding the first thing about the things you purport to critique. Until then… you’ll keep yelling into the wind.
Textbook appeals to technocracy. Appeals that have been rebutted repeatedly in the body of academic work on this issue, and in the broader discourse. But here’s the thing: investing is not that complicated. It’s dead simple to not invest in a company. There are thousands of companies I do not invest in. You can’t snow me with this technocratic flimflam because I actually do know how to invest in and divest from things.
This is not a question of can. It is a question of will. It is a question of moral fortitude.
Virtually nothing about how the board operates is public. It is an opaque, non-democratically selected body composed disproportionately of people in the fields of finance and white-shoe law.
You’re the one using terms like ‘evil.’ I use more specific terms like ‘aligned with capital.’ Or, in context, “The Swarthmore Board of Managers lacks ideological diversity, as all of its members are aligned with capital.” They’re not aligned with Quaker values, as I have demonstrated multiple times in this and other comments sections; they have deprecated equity and prioritized private equity, putting financial valuation over moral values.
Every policy decision that occurs at Swarthmore College is downstream of the Board of Managers and the administration, and the sum of those decisions have contributed to the ennui and dissatisfaction expressed by the faculty members who contributed to this Office Hours piece. The board is also where the buck stops vis-à-vis Swarthmore performing horribly in prominent external evaluations of academic excellence.
It’s been reiterated a million times, but just for posterity– no, you don’t understand how investing a pile of money works, in a very basic way.
Here’s how it works– Swarthmore is not a hedge fund. It doesn’t have an office of investment professionals who decide which companies/assets to invest the endowment in. What it does instead is allocate capital to external managers. Just to make sure you grasp it, that means, for your purposes, what you do when you buy interests in a mutual fund. The mutual fund manages funds and in turn charges the college fees. Those fees vary. When you ask a manager to “divest,” it means creating a custom account just for you that follows your specific investment instructions. That results in… higher fees. And the college pays those higher fees. So you end up with lower investment returns because… you’re paying money managers to perform a specific function. That leaves less money for things like financial aid and academic programs that are, ultimately, the core mission of the college.
And that’s important not just for what it says about the process, but for what it underscores about your complete lack of understanding here. Because the “interests of capital” that you keep blathering about would be best served by… paying money managers higher fees. It’s literally how they make their money. But the Board are acting not in their role as stewards of investors’ capital– they’re acting in their role as trustees of an academic institution. So what they’re doing is quite literally not taking cash out of student programs to make a toothless political statement. Not because climate change isn’t important, but because the substance of change is what matters, and shooting your students in the face to no obvious effect is not a useful way to address climate change.
And all of this underscores the need for technocracy– because to solve and address problems, the first step is understanding them. The fact that you’ve shown that you have literally no understanding should be… quite alarming for you, right…? This would be a good moment for some introspection– you’re showing that you have less than zero understanding of issues, and you quite clearly know it. Isn’t that a good time to take stock and think about changing approach…?
Well, well, look who’s got “a lot of words” now. Unfortunately, it’s all capitalist apologia.
Here’s how it really works: the Board of Managers gets to decide how it works. It can work as you describe, or it can work as it does in places like USF, CalArts, or Berea. The structure of investing at Swarthmore has not been decreed by immutable laws of the universe, and in fact “structures are the progeny of power that is in place.”
You’re just not on my level in this discussion. You buy into the framing the board presents as unchangeable reality, and that an overabundance of technocratic financial expertise is needed to run an academic institution. But that is an illusion deployed to stifle critique of management’s decisions, and it will obviously not work on me. And besides, Swarthmore is ostensibly still an academic institution, not a bank.
And just to put it plainly: Swarthmore College is 100% capable of not investing in Cisco, and anyone who spends more than two seconds thinking about this issue has no choice but to agree. To suggest otherwise is laughable. The decision to not divest from Cisco is a matter of will.
Yes, Swarthmore could theoretically run its endowment as an in-house hedge fund the way Harvard or Yale do. But I have a strange feeling that’s not what you mean when you say that you don’t want the college to be run as an arm of financial interests. Especially when you discover that those managers are paid millions of dollars to manage those endowments (which are also an order of magnitude bigger than Swarthmore’s).
Swarthmore could invest in broader market indices, too. Problem being that broader market indices also include ExxonMobil and Cisco. Or Swarthmore could hire you or some other schmo off the street to manage its endowment and only invest in what you decide are “ethical” companies. The problem there being… random schmos off the street hugely underperform the market. And the purpose of the endowment is… to fund college programs. So I suppose taking away kids’ financial aid is a price you’re willing to pay for the purpose of your high holy symbolism. But… the Board is actually supposed to run the institution for the benefit of its students, so it takes a different tack.
Again, all of these things aren’t debatable… they’re basic facts about this industry; the issue here is you plainly have no understanding how any of this works. Contrary to your claims, the Board has been very transparent about how this works. The problem, as ever, is that you demand the conclusion that you want to hear to questions that you are intellectually and/or temperamentally incapable of understanding. It’s a bad combination.
I hear you about the frats and the DJ fund, but I think this goes beyond a few big parties or nostalgia.
As a parent of a recent alum, I’m aware of multiple instances where Public Safety stepped into casual dorm socializing, and it led to formal disciplinary action.
When normal college gatherings are treated as violations, it changes behavior. Students don’t feel like they can hang out on campus, so social activity moves elsewhere.
There are clearly multiple factors involved, but enforcement today does seem meaningfully different, and that’s part of the problem.
The differences in enforcement are the result of crackdowns on a few big gatherings to which Public Safety was called. They wrote about this here. https://swarthmorephoenix.com/2026/03/19/over-400-increase-in-alcohol-referrals-from-2023-to-2024-latest-report-shows/
Certainly there has been a big shift from the see-no-evil approach of the 90s and 00s. But the impetus for that was the school facing a Title IX investigation. That wasn’t a case of a weaponized DOJ being sprung on perceived ideological enemies, like the Trump DOJ is doing; rather, it was the result of a reckoning around campus sexual assault that was very real and long overdue. I think it’s very very obvious that the college did not see a surge in sexual assault in the 2010s; rather, it was a long festering issue that finally had to be addressed. That’s the dark underbelly of the more permissive attitude toward alcohol that the college had in place prior to 2013. That’s something that’s inescapable when we talk about erosion of the social scene at Swarthmore.
Is anyone else shocked to read a Swarthmore professor writing “Zionism has increasingly become the main organizing principle of the board and administration”?
I’ve read dozens of different definitions of Zionism, from secular to religious, from enthusiastic to horrified, etc. What all of these definitions have in common is something about Jews and land in the vicinity Jerusalem/Hebron/Safed/Tel Avia/Tiberias. None of these definitions have ANYTHING to do with the Swarthmore Board of Managers, except perhaps that the Board contains some Jews.
Professor Bhanot, do you seriously not realize the connection between points 1 and 3? It is stupidly fascinating how little Swarthmore, and apparently certain Swarthmore faculty, listen to the educational studies (one of the strongest departments on campus) faculty on their area of expertise. Any professor that attempts to make a connection between the diversification of campus and a “perceived” lack of academic integrity is disingenuous. I would also bet money that these arguments often come from departments that saw increased enrollment correlating with the increasing neoliberalization of American education. The call is coming from inside the house.