A Look Inside Swarthmore’s 350+ Camera Surveillance Network

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Maps contributed by Devin Gibson ’28. Data collection by Walker, Perrin, Gibson, Ellen Stewart ’27, James Shelton ’28, Reina Jones ’27, and Zephyr Weinreich ’28.

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Editors’ Note: The map of campus cameras above and the associated information were created by Phoenix writers and editors each assigned a section of campus to examine and is therefore not a comprehensive or exact representation. It is a catalog of the minimum possible number of cameras on campus rather than a definitive count, and does not offer any indication of the cameras’ vision or reach. The Phoenix does not have access to all parts of campus, such as restricted buildings, areas currently under construction, and staff spaces, and therefore was not able to fully document cameras in these areas.

A Phoenix investigation of closed-circuit television (CCTV) camera presence on campus has revealed that Swarthmore College uses at least 363 cameras to “passively” monitor almost every part of campus. A compiled map of the college’s coverage shows cameras in most academic buildings, outside of every residential hall, at most building entrances, on many campus pathways, and on the roofs of some buildings. The Phoenix also found cameras in staff-only hallways, near exercise machines in the Matchbox gym, in the Crum Woods, and near the baked goods and salad bar stations in the Dining and Community Commons (DCC). 

The map of campus camera locations revealed notable details of the college’s surveillance network. Many of the buildings on campus with the most cameras installed on their exterior or interior are those most recently constructed: Martin Hall (built in 2024 with 26 cameras), the DCC (2022, 27), and Singer Hall (2020, 27). The building with the most cameras (34) is Parrish Hall, the administrative center of campus and the site of an escalated sit-in protest last year. A table of internal and external cameras by building can be found at the end of the article.

In email communication with The Phoenix, Vice President of Communications and Marketing Andy Hirsch said that newer buildings have more cameras than older buildings because it is cheaper to install cameras during construction and renovations.

Information about when and where cameras have been added on campus is scarce, and the college did not respond to a question about when CCTV cameras had been installed over recent years. Some longtime faculty members said they had observed the expansion of cameras on campus largely during the last twenty years, if not less, and Associate Director of Public Safety John Bera told The Phoenix last spring that the college has used CCTV for “over a decade.” 

Tim Burke, Peggy Chan Professor of Black Studies in the history department, referenced an event in 1998 during which, after a defiling of the InterCultural Center that was at first suspected to be a racist incident but later proven to be a drunken accident, then-President Al Bloom offered to install a camera in the space. When students and faculty vehemently opposed the idea, however, Bloom’s administration was happy to abandon it.

The first cameras in the Crum Woods were installed about three years ago. Mounted on a roughly twenty-foot pole, equipped with two solar panels and a speaker, two Verdaka telephoto bullet cameras watch Crumhenge, a several-acre meadow where students retreat from campus. 

Hirsch said the college put up the cameras in response to concerns about vandalism and other incidents in the woods, “mostly involving high schoolers or others unaffiliated with the college.” 

According to Hirsch, Public Safety is asked to respond to events in the Crum more than any other part of campus. He said the cameras are meant to serve as additional safety tools “given the limited staffing and the size of campus” that Public Safety needs to cover. He also noted that the cameras are helpful at night, when it’s more difficult for officers to patrol the area. 

After two students had a run-in with the camera tower, community members expressed concerns  about the extent of the college’s cameras, and whether places like the woods warranted surveillance.

Notably, the college does not publish a list of camera locations or any information about the extent of camera coverage on campus. While many of Swarthmore’s peer institutions (Williams, Bryn Mawr, Amherst, Pomona, and Bowdoin Colleges) also do not publish such information, Haverford College, a nearby peer and member of the tri-college consortium, reports the number of cameras it has across campus each year in its annual Fire and Safety report.

Additionally, the University of Pennsylvania, a Quaker consortium member with its campus just ten miles away in West Philadelphia, has a policy to publish a list of all its external camera locations across the city on a semi-annual basis, which totaled 309 most recently.

Swarthmore also releases very little information about how it decides to install cameras into its CCTV network. In the same communication last spring, then-Interim Director of Public Safety Colin Quinn said that installation decisions are based on regular assessments of “various factors.” 

Hirsch seconded Quinn’s explanation in email communication for this article, clarifying that those factors could include “when new buildings come online or as part of building renovations or when we identify areas of campus with little to no coverage.”

The quantity of cameras added each year is also a fluctuating variable. Hirsch wrote that the school typically adds five to eight cameras each academic year, though this ebbs and flows according to other considerations, like the creation of construction sites. 

When asked why Swarthmore doesn’t publish a list of external locations like UPenn or a count of the total number on campus like Haverford, Hirsch said that providing that level of detail about Swarthmore’s technology “could undermine the very purpose of the cameras and could potentially equip individuals who may have bad intentions with information to act on them.” 

Still, he clarified that CCTV was only one piece of the college’s safety approach and that the college’s budget for cameras has not significantly increased over the last several years beyond inflation or changing sale prices.

Hirsch said that while the “sole purpose of the security cameras” is to keep the community safe, their most common use is to find missing belongings. He shared that CCTV helps Public Safety recover lost belongings with a 60% success rate.

Burke, who has studied and taught classes on the history and politics of surveillance, connected the extent of the college’s monitoring to the “in loco parentis” doctrine increasingly governing higher education institutions in the last several decades. The doctrine — bolstered by legal rulings that increase college liability for events that happen on campus — pushes colleges to operate “as an extension of the style of heavily involved parenting that many current students have experienced growing up,” Burke wrote in a recent Office Hours column on how Swarthmore and higher education had changed over time. 

Swarthmore’s CCTV Policy 

How the college’s regular camera assessments are done, who is involved with them, and which factors are included is not clarified in Swarthmore’s policy. Hirsch said that campus services, including Public Safety and Facilities, “handle where and when to add cameras.”

The Phoenix heard from several longtime faculty members who said they didn’t know of any way that faculty had input over the decision to install cameras on campus. Similarly, Student Government Organization President Abby Guise ’26 said that, as far as she knew, neither SGO nor its leaders were consulted for these decisions. 

“Decisions about surveillance measures across campus are made without consulting the student body, and we take issue with a lack of explicit communication from administration on decisions that directly affect students,” Guise wrote in a statement to The Phoenix on behalf of SGO.

“SGO encourages the administration to increase its transparency regarding decisions made that implicate students, and we encourage them to provide opportunities for student feedback.”

The only information from the college about its CCTV guidelines is published on its policy online, which states that the college “employs CCTV to enhance campus safety, security, and overall well-being by integrating best practices with advanced technology.” 

The policy emphasizes that cameras will not violate a “reasonable expectation of privacy,” sometimes referred to in legal discourse as the “right to be left alone.” 

The policy indicates that CCTV is intended as a tool to deter crime, and the guidelines also allow for its usage to “assist the Public Safety Department in providing for the security and safety of individuals.” It emphasizes that monitoring will take place only in an ethical manner and prohibits targeted monitoring of individuals for their “race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, or other protected classifications.”

The policy regulates the storage of CCTV recording, allowing default storage of tapes up to 90 days. This was a change made in 2024, prior to which these recordings could only be stored for up to 30 days unless involved in a court proceeding or approved for retention by the Director of Public Safety. Hirsch said the change “was prompted by the fact that many incidents aren’t reported until 30 days after they occur.”

The problem with the cameras, Burke told The Phoenix, is that “they prevent us from seeing our students as having agency, maturity, responsibility” and therefore especially harm students relative to other people on campus because of their need to grow and develop. 

“There’s a sense in which it walks away from the primary responsibilities of education, which is to treat students as bundles of potential and as the primary agents in charge of their potential. In turn, that means there’s a kind of autonomy and independence necessary for learning,” he cautioned. “If students’ learning is the job of colleges, to be involved with pervasive surveillance is to do our job poorly.”

Compared to Other Institutions 

Swarthmore exists on a spectrum of CCTV transparency in higher education. While some institutions lack any formalized policy on CCTV use, like the one Swarthmore has, the guidelines of others, like Williams College, emphasize that surveillance is a last resort and specifically write that they aim to keep it to a minimum to respect individual liberties. Most peer institutions also do not have a dedicated policy for camera technology use.

While Bryn Mawr and Haverford both provide some updates on CCTV use, Swarthmore is the only college in the Tri-Co with a formalized CCTV policy. Swarthmore’s policy says that cameras are not used in residential halls; The Phoenix found cameras in some dorm lobbies, but not in residential hallways.

Haverford also lacks a CCTV policy outside of reporting the number of cameras in their safety report. In 2025, they reported a total of 85 cameras on campus, despite having only a slightly smaller student body.

UPenn has relatively more transparent CCTV practices. In addition to publishing a list of all their external cameras, the university also has a CCTV Monitoring Committee. The eight-member body, composed of faculty, staff, and students, reviews and approves proposed camera locations. Hirsch said the college could not comment on practices at other institutions.

In email communication with The Phoenix, Associate Professor of Political Science Sam Handlin ’00 said it was “preposterous” to suggest that safety and security concerns justify the extent of surveillance on Swarthmore’s campus, citing the consistently low violent crime rate — at least 75% lower than the national average, depending on the source and the year — of Swarthmore Borough and other nearby communities. 

“That [lack of crime prevention justification] doesn’t mean, however, that there is a nefarious ulterior motive. There are more prosaic explanations for how these things drift out of control,” Handlin wrote.

Still, he emphasized the threat that ubiquitous surveillance poses to campus life. 

“People often act differently, and usually more reservedly, when they know they’re being watched. That’s one of the oldest insights of surveillance studies and its a point to really think about in terms of the effects on Swarthmore,” he said. “The college may view these cameras as innocuous, but if they have a subtle, sterilizing effect on student life and behavior, then the cost is actually very high.”

CCTV Footage in the Disciplinary Process 

Hirsch wrote that student conduct incidents represent a very small fraction of how and why cameras are used. However, the college’s use of CCTV cameras has become a bigger part of campus conversations as footage has been used in recent disciplinary actions against students, including those for behavior related to pro-Palestine protests. 

Over the past several semesters, The Phoenix has interviewed numerous students who have been sent or shown footage of themselves as part of the disciplinary process for charges against them, much of which includes footage beyond the timeframe of the alleged act. 

According to interviews with topics spanning from charges for the distribution of allegedly violent zines to shaking a camera pole in the Crum, college deans have sent footage to students of themselves conducting everyday activities like walking around campus or drinking water. 

Other students facing charges have expressed that staff in charge of disciplinary action were not clear or consistent with them about which footage would be involved in their cases. Many students have told The Phoenix that they had to seek counseling due to an unshakable feeling of being watched.

The student conduct administrator for a given disciplinary case has authority from the Student Code of Conduct to decide which documentary evidence is “relevant and material” and therefore included in the case. There is no mention of “cameras” or “CCTV” in the Code of Conduct, and therefore no clear outline of how recordings are used in the proceedings. 

Handlin feels that the college’s continuous use of CCTV footage to police violations of the Code shows that cameras are not just used for safety or as crime prevention tools. “Indeed, I would argue that in practice the college regularly violates portions of its own CCTV policy statement (ex: ‘Information obtained through video monitoring will be used exclusively for safety, security, and law enforcement purposes.’).”

The Cameras 

Both Verdaka and Axis Communications operate on hybrid cloud CCTV models. While “closed-circuit” means that a camera can only transmit video signals to a specific recording location, cloud-based systems transmit video feeds to remote servers on the internet. The hybrid allows local recording, but provides access to video streams on the cloud from anywhere. 

While more accessible, cloud-based security poses security risks. Verdaka has been implicated in multiple lawsuits over data breaches.

In 2021, a hacker collective gained live access to 150,000 surveillance cameras, including sensitive video feeds from psychiatric hospitals and elementary schools. In 2024, the Federal Trade Commission sued the company, alleging failure to secure customer data. The hackers’ motive in the 2021 breach was to show how easily cloud-based surveillance systems could be compromised. 

The college did not respond to a question regarding any possible concerns about the security risks associated with a large CCTV network. 

While Public Safety maintains that the cameras are primarily used for passive monitoring, some of the Axis cameras have more active capabilities, many of which are “AI-powered,” meaning they are equipped with hardware that can analyze, classify, and interpret video and audio data from their environments. 

In response to a question asking what capabilities Swarthmore’s cameras have, Hirsch wrote that none of the cameras use AI facial recognition, but did not specify whether any of the cameras have any other analytics, like audio support, thermal imaging, or behavioral analytics.

The Phoenix could not identify specific camera serial numbers, but were able to broadly identify camera categories. Exact camera models also differ by building, as newer or higher-traffic buildings are more likely to have updated technology. We identified four camera types produced by Axis Communications throughout the main campus, including inside and outside buildings and walkways, several cameras made by Uniview on Clothier Fields, and one model from Verdaka in Crumhenge.

Dome 

Found inside and outside buildings, the dome is the most prevalent camera on campus. They are relatively compact and discreet, and the dome casing hides the direction in which the camera inside is pointing. Most of Axis’s more recent domes are AI-powered and equipped with AI-based analytics. 

Panoramic

Swarthmore’s walkways are monitored by panoramic cameras mounted on top of emergency call boxes, also known as blue light phones. Often used in large, high-traffic areas, panoramic cameras are intended to capture wide fields of view. 

We identified models from Axis’s P37 and P47 Panoramic Camera Series. The P37 are multi-directional, meaning they can provide 360° coverage through multiple camera heads that can be positioned independently. While the P37 only sees in two directions, the P47 sees in four. Newer models of both have support for AI analytics. The P37 is most concentrated in Martin Hall. 

Bullet  

Designed for long-range monitoring, Bullet’s cylindrical camera bodies are popular outdoor cameras, though there are more domes than bullet cameras outside campus buildings. While the bullet is less common than the dome at Swarthmore, we did find an interior usage of them: three bullets overlook the Singer atrium from the second floor. Axis’s recent bullet camera models are AI-powered.

Verdaka Bullet 

Two Verdaka bullets are mounted on the solar-powered surveillance tower in Crumhenge. The Phoenix could not identify the exact model; however, Verdaka advertises their bullets as “featuring next generation processors supporting powerful AI analytics.” If supported and enabled, Verdaka’s bullet series can perform AI-powered searches, allowing users to search for specific descriptions.