Editors’ Note: While The Phoenix’s editorial policy does not generally permit the publication of articles anonymously, we do allow exceptions if there are credible threats to the author(s) should their names be publicized. The writers of this compilation detailed those threats to The Phoenix, which granted anonymity. The authors have included only their initials and majors below.
Dear prospective students, current students, staff, faculty, and alumni,
We are a coalition of seniors within the graduating class of 2026, and we write to you anonymously. This is not a choice we make lightly, but we have settled on it to protect ourselves as vulnerable students. For many of us, this institution has been a source of harm and violence rather than protection.
What authorizes us to write is not our names, but our experience. Over four years at this institution, we have lived inside the dynamics we describe. We are Palestinians. We are anti-Zionist Jews. We are immigrants and the children of undocumented people. We are disabled students, student-athletes, and those who have sought accountability through Title IX processes, or sought that accountability through community and interpersonal care.
We write because we have been failed by this institution and insist that there can and must be a better Swarthmore College. Below are five pieces that speak to our experiences and the change we want to see at the college.
The Coalition of the Class of 2026:
R.A. – Peace and Conflict Studies
K.K. – Peace and Conflict Studies
N.L. – Peace and Conflict Studies
J.V. – Political Science
E.D. – English Literature
J.S. – History
M.C. – Environmental Studies
K.E. – Environmental Studies
M.G. – Environmental Studies
J.S.B. – Environmental Studies and Engineering
C.X.V. – Sociology and Anthropology
Swarthmore’s Ivory Panopticon
We were sophomores when the genocide in Gaza began in October 2023, and our peers engaged in organized dissent essential to the culture of our campus, putting their names and bodies on the line. The college would soon engage in a draconian response to this dissent, simultaneously reinforcing its repression and surveillance apparatus. There would be no consultation of students, faculty, or the larger Swarthmore Community to inform these additions, and each addition would be framed either in the neutral language of administrative efficiency or in that of safety.
On the night of Sept. 8, 2024, anyone using the digital OneCard on their phone would find their physical card deactivated. Students would be subject to fines and referral to the student conduct process if found lending their OneCard to others, and would only have it returned “on application to the Student Life Division.”
Associate Vice President Anthony Coschignano had sent an email informing us that this change would take place while we were all away in August, during the quiet of summer. Those of us who were present for recent actions knew what implications this change would have. We had watched the previous academic year as our peers used the old dual-format (physical OneCard plus digital OneCard) system to move through the December 2023 sit-in and the April 2024 encampment without leaving individual traces in the college’s access logs. The summer policy change served to make the kind of collective protection established by student activists impossible.
After the February 2025 Parrish sit-in, in which students demanded the dropping of charges against their peers, the college required all students, faculty, and staff to scan their OneCard to enter academic buildings during regular business hours. Spaces that had always been freely accessible now required the showing of institutional identification at every entry. The campus had stopped being a community home and had become a controlled territory, with borders that expanded and contracted based on the college’s assessment of threat.
In May 2025, during the Hossam Shabat Liberated Zone and the second encampment, eight Delaware County police departments, led by the County Sheriff’s Office, coordinated the arrest of students and activists on Trotter Lawn. One of our underclassmen peers who was among those arrested wrote afterward about what it felt like.
He described how Colin Quinn, now the Director of Public Safety, testified against students at the preliminary hearing after the institution chose to maintain the charges it had brought. The community is now organizing a petition to demand that Swarthmore College drop the charges. Public Safety is supposed to protect students. At Swarthmore, during our four years, the department became one of the administration’s central instruments of our persecution.
This surveillance infrastructure does not fall on students evenly. It is important to name the ways it has been concentrated on BIPOC members of our community. In May 2024, during the same period as the first encampment, Black@Swat called for the termination of Public Safety Officer Brendan Duke after he racially profiled a Black student on two consecutive dates.
In Duke’s harassment of the student, he told them that the Black student was “the most distinguishable out of everyone.” Duke is not an anomaly, nor is he independent of the institution that hired him, despite having a record of stop-and-frisk charges during his time as an NYPD officer.
The consequences of this culture extend beyond individual encounters and the trauma embedded in them. In our senior year, The Phoenix reported that only 39% of the discrimination and harassment incidents students experienced were reported to college officials. When students do not feel safe from the institution’s own personnel, they do not report harm caused to them.
The majority of our peers who faced disciplinary charges were students of color. A first-generation, low-income member of our class was suspended and faced housing insecurity. An international student peer, on probation, expressed fear that the charges would affect their work authorization and expose them to deportation under the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement. One faculty case manager said of the students she was assigned to support that it was “really hard to overstate how cruel the college administration has been to these students.” The cruelty was a strategy to deliberately set the cost of organizing high for us.
Faculty case managers documented racial profiling embedded in the process. One of our Palestinian-Muslim peers received an investigation letter for a demonstration she had not attended. During the conduct hearings, this same student was questioned on whether her national flag constituted a political protest. The Phoenix also reported on the Campus Climate Survey, which found that 70% of Muslim student respondents experienced discrimination or harassment at Swarthmore, far above the 34% average at comparable institutions, and dramatically higher than the percentages reported by students of other religious identities on our own campus.
When the negotiations of the 2024 spring encampment ended due to the administration’s failure to bring the Board of Managers toward students’ demands, the administration sent out an email accusing those students, three of whom were Palestinian, two Black, and one white, of creating an intimidating and threatening environment. The rise in Islamophobia and xenophobia on campus has been cultivated to serve the College’s agenda and the repression and surveillance apparatus essential to it. It becomes easier to surveil and repress someone once you have dehumanised them.
The disciplinary machinery built to process closed-circuit television (CCTV) footage and Public Safety reports was something none of us recognized from the Student Handbook. Law firms Montgomery McCracken Walker and Rhodes LLP and Cozen O’Connor PC investigated students and produced evidentiary reports exceeding two hundred pages.
In a recent investigation, The Phoenix found that Swarthmore College maintains at least 363 cameras for the purpose of “passively monitoring” the campus. Unlike peer institutions, Swarthmore is not transparent about its CCTV camera practices, claiming that disclosure “could undermine the very purpose of the cameras.” The college insists it uses cameras to “enhance campus safety, security, and overall well-being.” This is difficult to accept when CCTV footage was used as evidence against students in conduct processes, and when the fear and trauma of that experience have been documented among those who were shown footage of themselves.
We are graduating from a campus that is less free than and practically unrecognizable from the one we arrived at. The cameras are still recording. The OneCard logs are still running. The external law firms are still on retainer. The Student Code of Conduct continues to be revised. As members of the graduating class of 2026, we understand that there can and must be a better Swarthmore College, and that it requires dismantling the surveillance and disciplinary apparatus built across three years of anti-genocide dissent organizing.
The Neoliberal College: Swarthmore, the Board of Managers, and the Managed
In September 2025, a United Nations commission found that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza since October 2023. A peer-reviewed study published in The Lancet estimated that total deaths, including indirect causes, likely exceeded 186,000 by mid-2024. UN experts documented what they named scholasticide: the systemic destruction of education through the killing of teachers, students, and staff, and the demolition of educational infrastructure. More than 80% of schools in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. Over 625,000 students lost access to education. Every university in Gaza sustained severe damage or was demolished entirely.
Three days after the Al Aqsa Flood and the beginning of the genocide on Oct. 7, Swarthmore College President Val Smith sent a campus-wide email on Oct. 10, 2023, titled “Violence in the Middle East.” Smith wrote that “words cannot capture the grief many of us are feeling in the wake of this weekend’s horrific attacks by Hamas against the people of Israel.” She named Hamas and the people of Israel. She did not name Palestinians or the 78-year illegal Israeli occupation that had claimed hundreds of thousands of Palestinian lives even before Oct. 7.
What followed was mass student organizing on our campus demanding that Swarthmore sever all ties to Israel and its genocide. The administration reacted with brutal, draconian repression that included an interim suspension of a first-generation low-income student with no access to alternative housing, the routine harassment of at-risk students by Public Safety, and the coordination of more than thirty police officers to arrest a group of student activists on Trotter Lawn. Swarthmore College acted and continues to act in direct contradiction to its stated mission, particularly with regard to their false commitment to peace, equity, and social responsibility.
The language of institutional dysfunction is insufficient to describe what we have witnessed as graduating seniors. Three years of evidence insists that what appears to be poor decision-making or leadership failure in regards to the handling of anti-genocide student activism is instead the institution operating precisely as its neoliberal governing logic intends. We must therefore explicitly name Swarthmore College a neoliberal college – a higher education model that operates like a business, focusing on marketization, commercialization, and vocational training over traditional liberal arts. As a neoliberal college, what would come to characterize Swarthmore College, as revealed by its governing logic are the following:
1. Marketization and Commodification
2. Managerialism and Corporate Governance
3. Audit Culture and Metrics Obsession
4. Stratification and Inequality
5. The “Civility” Weapon
6. Recasting Dissent as Disorder
7. Donor Power and Institutional Dependency
8. Producing Docile Subjects
9. Surveillance and Accountability as Control
10. Corporate Groupthink vs. Critical Exchange
To understand that governing logic, we have to understand who actually runs Swarthmore College, which is not President Smith, who wrote that email. Rather, it is the Board of Managers who hold final legal authority over the endowment, the budget, major policy, and the appointment and removal of the president.
Every decision that matters at Swarthmore is ultimately a Board decision, or is made within parameters the Board has established. What the Board is, in practice, is a governing body whose members’ financial interests are structurally bound to the industries of empire, including private equity, defense contracting, Israeli venture capital, and the financial infrastructure that funds genocide. The endowment is the institution’s actual mission, around which the performance of Quaker values and social justice is organized to generate the reputational capital that endowment returns alone cannot produce.
As a non-profit organisation, Swarthmore College is obligated to file a 990 form to the IRS. In the 2024-2025 fiscal year, it is shown that Swarthmore College holds $959 million in private equity investments managed through venture capital groups, including Highland Capital Partners VIII, which manages a fund that Swarthmore owns 65.333% of.
Through Highland, the college is invested in Gigamon, a network analysis company authorized to operate in the US Department of Defense’s Joint Regional Security Stack, with direct partnerships with Raytheon Technologies and Lockheed Martin, two of the corporations most complicit in the genocide in Gaza. Through Starent Networks, now Cisco (used by Swarthmore College as the institutional VPN), the college is invested in a company whose Israeli subsidiary establishes technological hubs in occupied Palestinian territory, holds direct business partnerships with Lockheed Martin and Boeing, and provides networking and security services to the military.
The Board members themselves make this structural alignment concrete. Harold Kalkstein served as managing director and senior vice president at the Boston Consulting Group, which employed Benjamin Netanyahu as an economic consultant, maintains a branch in Tel Aviv, profits through its Aerospace and Defense division from weapons deployed in Gaza, and is the group behind the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the corporation that established fake humanitarian checkpoints to massacre Palestinians searching for essential aid.
Kalkstein’s successor as Board Chair, Gustavo Schwed, spent six years as a managing director at Morgan Stanley, a firm that invested $35 million in Israeli venture capital during his tenure, and directed Finnovate Acquisition Corp., a shell corporation based in the Cayman Islands focused exclusively on Israel’s financial technology sector. He contributed over $20,000 to J Street, a nonprofit organization that advocates for Zionist policies.
Asahi Pompey is currently Global Head of Corporate Engagement at Goldman Sachs, which became the single largest global contributor of war bonds to the Israeli government, totaling over seven billion dollars between October 2023 and February 2025.
Sujatha Srinivasan is Principal Global Head of Investment Management and Finance Risk at Vanguard, the largest institutional investor in Caterpillar and the second largest in Lockheed Martin and Elbit Systems, an Israeli weapons manufacturer that did not respond to UN experts’ call to stop sending arms to Israel in 2024.
Gaurav Seth manages capital at Warburg Pincus, a private equity firm that describes itself as an active investor in Israeli companies, including Claroty, a cybersecurity startup running an intelligence unit for the Israeli Occupation Forces.
This is the composition of the governing body of Swarthmore College. Undeniably, the endowment portfolio and the personal financial interests of the Board’s members are expressions of the same ideological commitments, made legible through the specific industries in which capital has been placed.
The student zine “Public Enemy No. 1,” produced and distributed in December 2024 by an anonymous group of students, was charged by the administration as threatening and intimidating imagery. What was actually threatening about the zine was its public and transparent accounting of the Board’s financial composition as rigorous as any Swarthmore community member has produced, doing the work of transparency that the institution itself refuses to do. The administration understood, and the charges confirmed, that the document was dangerous not because it threatened violence but because it named the governing class and its interests with enough specificity to make denial impossible.
After students forced the college to divest from South African apartheid, the Board imposed a prohibition on considering ethics in investment decisions, ensuring that no future student movement could compel a similar outcome. The 1991 ethical investment ban makes the Board’s structural function explicit in policy form. That ban was essentially a constitutional document of the neoliberal college, written in direct response to student power, designed to place capital permanently beyond the reach of the community the institution claims to serve.
The Board’s suppression of anti-genocide organizing has two inseparable dimensions. Its members hold financial stakes in the industries profiting from the genocide, and sustained visible organizing threatened to make those stakes publicly undeniable. At the same time, Swarthmore’s institutional authority depends on the performance of Quaker values, diversity, and progressive commitments as a brand, the thing that draws students, commands tuition, attracts donors, and generates reputational capital.
Beyond challenging specific investments, Palestine organizing exposes the fundamental contradiction between what the institution says it is and what it actually does, threatening the legitimacy through which the Board’s authority is reproduced. Repression served both dimensions at once. The surveillance apparatus, the external law firms, the police coordination, and the criminal charges against the Swarthmore 9 were all, to an extent, the Board protecting its portfolio.
The class of 2026 applied to Swarthmore believing, to varying degrees, the illusion that the institution is committed to the social justice values it claims. Those illusions have been shattered before our eyes. There can and must be a better Swarthmore College, but that requires that students, faculty, and staff refuse the neoliberal framework that allows the institution to absorb critique without changing its governing logic, the framework that turns demands into task forces, organizers into conduct cases, and genocide into a matter of “multiple perspectives.”
It requires confronting the Board of Managers not as a body that has made mistakes, but as a governing class whose interests are structurally opposed to the community they claim to steward. It requires dropping all charges against every student who organized against the genocide, and in particular, the criminal charges against the Swarthmore 9. And it requires building, from whatever remains of this institution’s better possibilities, something that does not need a surveillance apparatus to protect itself from its own students.
The Precarity of Existing as an Undocumented Student at Swarthmore
For undocumented students at Swarthmore, surveillance, fear, and uncertainty have become the harmful reality of everyday life. On Dec. 2nd, 2016, President Val Smith and the Board of Managers released a statement pledging sanctuary protections for undocumented students. While the college’s declaration helped ease some of the concerns of immigrant students at the time, there wasn’t much done to actually address the fear, frustration, and lack of resources available to students – that is, until the last year.
Access to education is granted by Swarthmore’s sanctuary status, but it is never fully detached from the conditions of legal exclusion that shape life beyond campus boundaries. Opportunities that appear to be individual academic choices are in fact structured by external constraints, shaping who can participate in internships, travel programs, or forms of labor that are often taken for granted by U.S. citizens.
Undocumented students have had to navigate this institution in a state of limbo, in which opportunities are unattainable or unavailable, and institutional support is scarce. Beyond the lack of access to resources, the sheer number of faculty, staff, and students unaware of the existence of undocumented students at Swarthmore leads to a constant state of isolation. We become responsible for educating those who are supposed to guide us, advise us, and mentor us. We hold the responsibility of not only finding opportunities, but also the mental toll of hiding who we are and the difficulties of building trust with our community.
The need to constantly explain oneself, to anticipate misunderstanding, and to navigate spaces where a sense of belonging is unattainable becomes another facet of our lives as students. Even everyday interactions, from advising meetings to internship conversations, can become sites where status must be managed indirectly, sometimes through omission or silence rather than open acknowledgment and understanding.
Existing as an undocumented or DACAmented student at Swarthmore envelops these experiences and transforms them into resistance and resilience. We become passionate about vouching for ourselves and each other because the institution does not. We begin to fight for the pursuit of resources, opportunities, and change. We work to hold the institution accountable for its actions that keep the oppression of immigrants alive, and also one that calls for Sanctuary to be holistic.
At its core, the defining element of Sanctuary, as policy or a pledge, is the safety of the community. But can Sanctuary or safety be true if undocumented, DACAmented, and any non-U.S. citizen in our community lives with so much uncertainty and fear? Beyond a pledge, Sanctuary should guarantee a healthy state of mind and their existence at Swarthmore without the presence of invasive surveillance and retribution when wanting to speak out against the institution’s complicity.
This becomes more complicated when discipline enters the picture. Surveillance tools and reporting systems do not operate evenly across campus life. They are activated in ways that often reflect broader political pressures and institutional priorities, particularly around student activism. The result is a pattern where some forms of organizing are absorbed into campus tradition, while others are more quickly documented, investigated, or escalated. That unevenness shapes how students understand what kinds of expressions are safe to engage in and what kinds carry real consequences.
That same push for silence imposed by the government and immigration officials is then reflected in campus culture. Surveillance becomes the norm, and the silencing of our peers who speak out against injustice pushes us to hide. We have become fearful of expressing who we are and what the resources we need to succeed look like. As a result, similar to most marginalized students on campus, Swatties for Immigrant Rights (SIR) has taken the responsibility of advocating not only for ourselves, our families, but also our peers, neighbors, and friends, domestic and abroad.
Through SIR, the immigrant community has been able to advocate and secure certain protections and resources from the College and the Borough, but the process has not been easy. Through collective action, we now have an undocumented advisor, an active Sanctuary Committee, and emergency resources — all of which symbolize student sacrifice. These initiatives were all spearheaded by the same students who didn’t have these opportunities or protections, even while the college deems itself as a Sanctuary.
Often, advocating for these types of protections and bringing an institution’s shortcomings to light requires exposing your status. This should not be the only way to do so, especially at an institution that prides itself on diversity, equity, inclusion, and sanctuary. Immigrant and undocumented students have repeatedly been used as a means to justify administrative action towards our peers who fight for Palestinian liberation — a movement that is intrinsically connected to the fight we have experienced our entire lives.
We must note that the repression of our peers engaging in protest does not and will never ensure our immigrant community is safe. The constant striking down of activism and advocacy on campus has created fear within our community, and our undocumented peers do not feel safe in the very place that once vowed to provide sanctuary to us. We have been used as pawns for the administration’s disregard of the Quaker values on which the institution was founded in the first place, while at the same time being showcased as trophies of diversity for the college’s propaganda.
Collaborating with the police and implementing lockdowns of residential buildings, like Parrish Hall in the Spring of 2025, does not and has not provided sanctuary or granted us peace of mind, but rather releases waves of distrust and fear in the institution that has promised to protect us. The place in which we confided to provide sanctuary to us then becomes the same place that allows for the cycles of intimidation, frustration, and oppression to continue.
What emerges from these accounts is not a narrative of singular failure, but a structural pattern. Sanctuary exists as an institutional claim, but its reality is much more theoretical than what is put into practice. The result is a lived experience shaped by contradiction, where confusion, isolation, frustration, and exhaustion become the key takeaways of the Swarthmore student experience. The Swarthmore experience remains that way and only changes when the students marginalized and in need of protections and resources decide to speak out and fight for what was promised in 2016.
There can be a better Swarthmore College. There could be an institution that provides non-employment-based opportunities in all disciplines and programs to ensure that we do not feel the burden of our status every day. Swarthmore could be an institution that educates its students, faculty, and staff about the existence of undocumented students, and allows us to only worry about being students, not educators, mentors, and protectors. The college could be an institution that provides sanctuary, not just state it.
A Culture of Complacency: Where Do We Go From Here?
After four years of college life and athletics at Swarthmore College, we have an intimate understanding of the athletic community and assault culture, as one of us is a survivor of rape. Swarthmore athletics seems to be a hub for various types of Title IX allegations and cases, which can be linked to misogynistic and destructive lines of conversation from those in power, including coaches, athletic staff members, physical trainers, etc.
Because Swarthmore has a very troubling history of high per capita rape cases, it can feel numbing to hear once again about how Title IX, our rape or assault culture, and even the athletic community are perpetrating this occurrence, in turn affecting the athletic community as well. However, as seniors, we feel a grave necessity to speak about our four years to shed light on some of these systemic problems and the ways in which Swarthmore might seek to reckon with them.
We know that this is not a new story. In the past, the college has faced federal Title IX investigations, public lawsuits, and student uprisings demanding accountability. What is perhaps less known is how little has changed inside the locker rooms, on the sidelines, in the offices of coaches who remain employed here, and for survivors alike. We are writing because we are tired of that silence, and because the students who come after us deserve better than what we were given.
Swarthmore’s troubled history with Title IX is not a recent or secret development. In 2013, the college became one of the first institutions named in a federal Title IX complaint filed by students, drawing national attention to what survivors described as a pattern of cases being dismissed, perpetrators being allowed to remain on campus, and survivors feeling pressured into silence.
A Department of Education investigation would follow, and Swarthmore would enter into a resolution agreement that was supposed to reform how it handles sexual misconduct. Unfortunately, this was not an institutionalized transformation, but rather procedural adjustments that resembled accountability without dismantling the structures that had enabled harm in the first place.
By 2018, student frustration had reached a breaking point. Organizing for Survivors (O4S) staged a sit-in in Parrish Hall and at some of the frat houses in hopes of confronting administrators directly with demands, including greater transparency, better survivor resources, and meaningful consequences for faculty and staff who were involved in or had knowledge of these crimes.
Some concessions were made, like the disbanding of Phi Psi and Delta Upsilon fraternities, but, as we will detail, the athletic department and informal social norms have remained largely insulated from the accountability that students had fought for. Continuous cases of various Title IX cases, micro- and macro-level violence against women, and other dangerous behaviors may seem to be secluded in protected corners of campus, tucked away in and around Lamb-Miller Field House or in specific friend groups, but they are alive whether they appear to you or not.
To fully understand the issues with Title IX, one must also grasp the athletic department’s culture from the inside. What we have witnessed and experienced over four years of collegiate sports is not a series of isolated events but an ecosystem in which behavior is swept under the rug, modeled and remodeled, and tolerated in protection of student athletes’ reputations, or more so, that of their families.
It is important to note why the college allows for this behavior to go unchecked: athletes, largely male-identifying ones, provide something for the college. They provide a sense of athletic prowess for donors, they cultivate a distinct, often isolated sense of community among each other, and they give a semblance of party-life to outsiders, even the Board of Managers.
In the locker rooms, one finds a typically patriarchal, sexist atmosphere that is prevalent in male-dominated spaces. We are not so naive as to think that this is specific to Swarthmore, and yet, this does not legitimize the behavior. We have become aware of sports group chats in which nude photographs of women, Swarthmore students, were shared without those women’s knowledge or consent. We know of frequent conversations about the intimate details of sexual interactions with various women in locker room spaces, where the conquest in question was regarding a woman’s body.
This is not rumor but lived experience; we know these people, we hear from those within locker room spaces. Yet it continues, it goes unreported, unaddressed by fellow players or coaches, because the social cost of speaking up inside the crucible of athletics that valorizes this kind of talk is steep, and because athletes here have rightly understood that the institution will protect the program over the woman most of the time. As stated above, coaches, other players, and even sports administrators often justify this as simply “locker-room talk” or turn a blind eye in hopes of retaining donor funding for and from athletes, athletic alumni, or athletic-affiliated parents.
This protection extends upwards to coaches. We have spoken to Swarthmore staff members who have acknowledged, in so many words, that there are active or recent perpetrators (not suspects), of sexual assault and rape on certain (mostly male) rosters, actively still starting and playing.
These are not frivolous allegations that they could not substantiate—these were active or closed Title IX cases. We know of people in the Athletics Department who have harmed women, and yet they continue to practice, to compete, and to represent our school. Some even garner accolades seasonally, nominated by their coaches or fellow teammates.
Certain male sports programs in particular have been named to us in conversations about coaches whose behavior toward players has been described as both racist and sexist, creating an environment in which women and athletes of color are made to feel like inferior, disposable bodies only here to throw or kick a ball. When those in power set such a tone for a program or department, it does not stay contained to a singular player or team. It communicates to all athletes, coaches, and teams alike that this behavior is acceptable and that it will not be punished. This is how group-think or departmental apathy is created and sustained.
Furthermore, over the years, the Title IX process has lost some of its legal teeth. We have been told, and we believe it to be true, that the anonymization of the Title IX proceeding is in no small part a response to former lawsuits of defamation from wealthy families connected to the athletic program who, when their child was identified as a perpetrator, threatened the college. The result of this is one in which patterns cannot be tracked, perpetrators are not named publicly, and survivors are left to navigate their campuses alone, which strips perpetrators of a public or social-shaming process that could actually, fruitfully reintegrate them into social spaces more healthfully.
The culture of apathy extends past mere players or administrators and into coaching spheres and the problems of female-identifying players at Swarthmore. This cancer is built into the very DNA of the relationships between athletes and their coaches. And this, of course, is reflected in how athletes’ bodies are surveilled.
Our own experience makes this clear. When one of us sustained a substantial bone breakage injury, one of the women’s sports head coaches told other people, including staff, that the injury was not real – not that it was minor, but that it was being faked. This was a skepticism that was not confined to his inner psyche, but it was communicated laterally, in a way that shaped how sports medicine staff and her teammates viewed the injury. The aggregate effect was that a female student athlete was made to feel that she was exaggerating an injury, that her bone’s distress was an issue of credibility, not physiology.
Around this same time, she realized she had lost her menstrual cycle for over an entire calendar year, a grave medical red flag that is associated with chronic overwork and underfueling, and an issue that can have lasting effects for the athlete’s bones, hormonal levels, and overall fertility. However, this was not treated as an emergency by her coach, who brushed it aside, even gossiped about it behind her back to other admin and players. It was, similar to many issues that arise in the Swarthmore athletic department, never followed up on. The coach never asked how the athlete was, physically or mentally.
Crucially, this apathetic culture that runs rampant in the athletic department also permeates into the larger student body, allowing for male students to feel emboldened to treat and speak about female-identifying bodies in violent and sexual ways. Allowing for Swarthmore coaches, students, and other staff alike to do as they please without facing any real repercussions sets a dangerous precedent.
You may be wondering how this connects to Title IX; well, this is a Title IX issue at its core. Federal regulations require that schools provide equal athletic treatment to women, including equitable access to medical care and genuine attention to women’s athletes’ overall, holistic health. But Title IX in practice also speaks to something else: a pattern of how women’s bodies are regarded inside college athletic departments.
At Swarthmore, we have become privy to the horrific stories of coaches controlling athletes’ food intake via google sheets, making recurring comments about players being “big boned,” “fat,” or not having certain physical archetypes to run fast or pass fitness tests, with a callousness that signals entitlement and the privilege to control or surveil a woman’s body at their whim.
This deeply-ingrained approach does Swarthmore no favors in contending for conference titles. Female athletes are routinely told their pain is suspect, that their bodies do not fit a conception of a certain “BMI”, or build for a certain position. Female athletes often feel that they are treated differently by trainers, sometimes saying they are “creepy.”
The common denominator here is a palpable sense of apathy. Swarthmore’s athletic department has decided that the burden of proof for female athletes’ pain is much higher than it should be. And further, the consequences for a coach who crosses a line are lower than they should be. This is simply a product of years of non-accountability, of a Title IX process that protects institutions over individuals, and of a broader culture that has never faced a serious reckoning.
This behavior is not acceptable at Swarthmore nor any college alike; it never has been, and it never will be. This can no longer be acceptable on an institutional level and Swarthmore College must act in conjunction with the morals that its student body has and will continue to fight for. Student-athletes of all sexes and genders should be able to participate freely. Title IX perpetrators should not be able to play in their athletic season, and coaches (supposed mentors) should never be allowed to surveil nor comment inappropriately about a woman’s body. These actions need to have consequences, and Swarthmore College, in particular the Athletics department and Title IX Office, should have to address these very serious concerns.
The coaches whose behavior I have described above remain in their positions. The Title IX process has remained opaque. O4S moved the needle on the surface of the institutions, some of its official policies and public-facing language usage, but we are left with dangerous norms still intact. This is precisely what was intended by the institution — visible reform is easier than firing coaches, firing administrators, forcing older people to change their habituated language, and forcing star players to sit out seasons.
We feel that the students who jeopardized their enrollment at Swarthmore to organize and sit-in with O4S earned better than this. We do too, as women, daughters, survivors, and allies. So does every single female-identifying person who will walk onto one of these teams next fall, or interact with any athletes on this campus, or go through the arduous Title IX process. We must make progress, we cannot roll over and become apathetic to “locker room talk,” thus allowing our athletic department to continuously act unjustly. There can and must be a better Swarthmore College.
Conditional Inclusivity
In my freshman year introductory education studies course, Pedagogy and Power, we studied the ten principles of disability justice developed by Patty Berne and Sins Invalid, a disability justice-based performance project centering disabled Black, brown, and Indigenous people. The ten principles are: intersectionality, leadership of the most impacted, anti-capitalist politics, cross-movement solidarity, recognizing wholeness, sustainability, cross-disability solidarity, interdependence, collective access, and collective liberation.
The framework of disability justice is essential to any liberatory movement, but is missing from the political consciousness of most students and faculty. Even within self-proclaimed radical spaces on campus, ableism underlies and sustains Swarthmore’s culture of individualism, surveillance, and academic competition.
One way in which institutional ableism manifests itself is the lack of COVID safety and airborne awareness on campus. Swarthmore’s choice to limit masking requirements over the past four years and the subsequent lack of access to high-quality masks and tests abandoned disabled and immunocompromised students and community members.
On March 24, 2022, the semester before the senior class arrived on campus, President Val Smith announced that Swarthmore would no longer require individuals to wear masks indoors and had lifted capacity limits for indoor events. Smith mentioned the importance of “sensitivity” to “varying levels of comfort and anxiety,” but did not explicitly acknowledge how changes in policy would inevitably impact immunocompromised and disabled students.
As seniors, we have not experienced a Swarthmore College that took COVID precautions seriously. The institution has acted as though our college experience has taken place in an era entirely “after” COVID, where we are “back to normal.” The institution has ignored the fact that there have been multiple devastating surges of COVID nationally, in Pennsylvania, and even on our own campus throughout our four years here. The majority of students in our year have tested positive or known someone who has tested positive for COVID on Swarthmore’s campus.
Because 50% of COVID cases are asymptomatic, but people can still be contagious before they are symptomatic, it is impossible to have institutional data because of the lack of regular high-quality testing. What would have happened if the first wave of the ongoing pandemic had led to transformative institutional and interpersonal change? What if instead of lifting all restrictions and prioritizing the ableism of “normalcy,” the institution continued to make testing and masking easily accessible and supported mask-required community spaces on campus?
Instead, Swarthmore’s accommodations and infrastructure remain deeply ableist. Swarthmore’s accommodation processes are limited by bureaucratic red tape that can further exhaust and exclude disabled students. Students have to reapply for housing accommodations every year and renew academic accommodations every semester. The burden of documenting or “proving” disability falls on disabled students, who struggle to navigate our convoluted healthcare system and obtain the necessary documentation. While Swarthmore does provide some support to students through the college’s counesling and psychological services, finding specialists who are affordable through students’ health insurance can feel like an insurmountable workload.
Many professors prioritize in-person attendance without any kind of hybrid option and without understanding that this compromises the well-being of all their students. Students experiencing chronic illnesses that can lead to absences often find themselves invalidated or misunderstood by professors who require attendance.
Additionally, students often come to class while sick without masking, which can spread disease and further disable immunocompromised and chronically ill students. Disabled students face additional challenges navigating campus, which can exponentially increase the amount of time it takes to get from class to class. Professors and administrators often do not take into account the additional challenges of navigating campus as a disabled person.
The burden of discussing with each professor individual academic accommodations and how they will be implemented in the course falls on us. These conversations can often lead to retraumatizing conversations, as we can feel pressured to disclose personal medical information or face unchecked ableism from professors.
Swarthmore’s infrastructure reflects historical and ongoing exclusion of and disregard for disabled students. In 2007, the Justice Department audited Swarthmore to assess compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. The audit found that many buildings on campus were inaccessible to wheelchair users. These buildings have been renovated in the last two decades, supposedly with accessibility in mind, but they are not always well-maintained or consistently accessible. There are certainly accessible renovations that can and should be made an institutional priority, but there is also the underlying truth that Swarthmore – institutionally and architecturally, was built to exclude disabled students.
The ongoing campus construction has inconvenienced the Swarthmore community as a whole, forcing everyone to find new routes through campus. For disabled students, the sensory overload and frustration of navigating accessible paths through unpredictable campus construction mean that completing daily tasks requires extensive planning. Disabled students have the added stress of carefully checking for emails about access barriers from the ADA manager, or relying on one another to report back about how best to make it to class or work on any given day.
While the campus shuttle has adjusted its schedule and route in an effort to be more efficient and accessible, disabled students still face delays that can limit their ability to make it to class on time and without additional stress and physical pain. Students who need the shuttle for accessibility reasons often have to reach out to Public Safety officers. Public Safety is the first point of contact for coordinating transportation around campus for students with temporary or ongoing sickness or injury. The department maintains a list of students who need ongoing transportation support. Direct contact with Public Safety means disabled students, particularly students of color, face further surveillance. Students have faced ableist comments and remarks from officers, intrusive questions, or demands that they prove their disability in order to access services.
Student organizations such as Swarthmore Disability Association (SDA), chartered in Spring 2024, provide necessary community space for disabled students and support disabled students in navigating academic and housing accommodations and transportation on and around campus. For decades prior to SDA’s chartering, disabled students have advocated for improved accessibility on campus, which in turn improves the everyday life and safety of all students.
Disabled community members consistently reported feeling dissatisfied with institutional support and experienced significantly higher rates of discrimination and harassment on campus, according to a campus climate survey conducted in Spring 2025.
In the context of increased surveillance and student identification, masking is perceived as hiding rather than a necessary practice in order for immunocompromised and disabled people to engage in public life. For example, when I asked a question of our top administrators during an open Q&A at Garnet Weekend in Fall 2024, I was met by a senior administrator accusing me of trying to hide my identity and avoiding “good-faith dialogue” by wearing a mask. My mask had absolutely nothing to do with my question.
In response to the Vice President Stephanie Ives talking about how much she values student mental health, I asked how Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian students can feel safe in an institution that funds the genocide of their communities. They dismissed my concern just as they have dismissed hours of negotiations, protests by students, an organized alumni pressure campaign, letters from faculty and staff, a sit-in, and two encampments. Not only did a senior administrator pressure me to remove my mask in a crowded indoor room, but he also talked over me when I tried to explain that I wear a mask to protect myself from COVID and other airborne illnesses.
Rather than understanding my decision to mask as a public health practice, Swarthmore’s administrators seemed to view me as a threat and an instigator. They deemed me incapable of “good faith dialogue” and refused to provide a direct response to my question, simply because I was wearing a N95 respirator. I saw clearly the ableist irony of senior administrators discussing students’ mental health while publicly disrespecting and belittling my public health precautions.
My brief interaction was one of many instances that reinforce my conviction that there is no good-faith dialogue as long as this institution oppresses, silences, and surveils its students.
Two years later, in a major misconduct case against me, Public Safety specifically noted my mask in my case file when they tried to identify me for an act of free expression and student protest. My experience is not an isolated event, but a manifestation of structural ableism on Swarthmore’s campus that regularly perpetuates violence against disabled students.
