This summer, Swarthmore’s Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) created a new position for a Survivor Services Specialist on their team. The role, which is intended to provide counseling support specifically for survivors of sexual trauma, was the result of a student petition organized by the Swarthmore Survivors’ Collective (SSC) student group. On Wednesday, Sept. 23, SSC founder Patricia Quimby ’28 sat down with The Phoenix to discuss the history of the group’s founding and its recent advocacy campaign.
Quimby recalls the moment she first recognized the need for more robust survivor support on Swarthmore’s campus:
“It was our second week of freshman year, and we accidentally walked up to DU, [the former Delta Upsilon fraternity house]. Many freshmen don’t know that the post office was formerly a frat.”
As she began to research the history of the defunct Swarthmore fraternities, Quimby was surprised to realize how much of the organization’s controversial past went unmentioned on campus:
“I kind of fell down this rabbit hole of looking into the history of sexual violence at Swarthmore and realizing how little I knew and how bad it was.”
As Quimby learned, Swarthmore’s two fraternities, Phi Psi and Delta Upsilon, disbanded in May 2019 amidst widespread backlash to leaked Phi Psi documents containing misogynistic, homophobic, and racist remarks. The documents, which dated from 2010 to 2016, also included several joking references to sexual violence perpetrated by fraternity members, as well as mentions of a “rape tunnel” and fraternity “rape attic.”
After The Phoenix released the organizational documents in April 2019, students led by the campus group Organizing for Survivors held a series of protests and sit-ins calling for the expulsion of Greek life from campus. Phi Psi and Delta Upsilon announced their decisions to disband following unanimous votes by their members.
Quimby found some of the support she was looking for in the Gender and Sexuality Center (GSC). She began to spend time there during her freshman fall and has been affiliated with the center ever since. During her sophomore year, she became an official member of the GSC’s student staff.
“The way jobs at the GSC work is that we each pick a ‘passion project,’ which is just something that you really care about, that you’re going to put time into doing. A lot of times that’ll look like organizing our pride events or organizing our women’s history month events, but I just ended up starting the Survivors’ Collective. I was planning to start it anyway, but it was definitely helpful to have it as a job.”
The collective meets weekly on Thursday afternoons. Sessions are informal: rather than structured activities, members gather to share their feelings and listen to their peers.
“It’s not therapy,” Quimby says. “It’s very much ‘for survivors, by survivors.’ We hang out and talk, but there are also people who have come every time and haven’t said anything because they don’t feel like they have to. Sometimes we talk about trauma and what happened to us and how we’re working through it. Other times we don’t, and we just talk about school and classes and friends.”
Quimby says that safe spaces like these play a crucial role in creating a campus culture in which survivors feel understood and cared for.
“There’s a lot of students on campus who have faced these issues, but aren’t comfortable enough, maybe even calling themselves a survivor … [Stepping into] a space that’s for survivors [is] a big deal.”
As they discussed strategies for improving Swarthmore’s campus culture this spring, Quimby and her fellow SSC members were struck by the fact that CAPS lacked a staff member “specially trained to support survivors of sexual misconduct, and aware of the Title IX process, [but also someone] who is not directly affiliated with Title IX.” While the Title IX Office provides survivors with incident-reporting resources, the office is not equipped to offer mental and emotional support.
In order to address the issue, SSC collaborated with the GSC and the Title IX Office to host Swarthmore Survivors Week, a campus event that has not taken place since the 1990s. The week’s activities included a student petition for a survivor specialist position on campus. After collecting roughly 400 student signatures, SSC sent the petition to administrators. Quimby said that the aim of the petition was to highlight that the role “not only had support from this student group and these faculty and staff members, but also so many students.”
The petition was a success. The Survivor Services Specialist will be a full-time employee on the CAPS staff beginning in Spring 2027. The new hire will be trained on the Title IX process but not directly affiliated with the Title IX Office. Their primary duty will be to provide trauma-informed care, crisis intervention, and individual as well as group counseling for student survivors of sexual misconduct and violence. Additionally, they will be able to support students who wish to file a report or resolution through Title IX.
The role will be accompanied by a “Restorative Practices” position that will work to provide restorative counseling to perpetrators and make further resources available to students through the Title IX office.
Quimby is a member of the specialist hiring committee, and says that she tries to offer a holistic student perspective on the skills and traits that would be ideal for the role. She hopes to hear from other students about the kind of support that they would like to see.
“It’s been nice to have some say [in the hiring process],” she says, “because it shows that this position isn’t really just for the administration to say that they did it.”
Quimby emphasizes the work that remains to be done in support of survivors on campus.
“What a lot of people don’t know is that you can report and say this happened to me … and not go through the [Title IX process] … I think people don’t realize how important this is. Because what it means is that at the end of the year, we have proof that something happened to you, and we have proof that there’s a problem with this thing at this college specifically.”
As members of the Swarthmore community, Quimby argues, students should consider how they can advocate for the prevention of sexual assault and call out the aspects of campus culture that contribute to the perpetuation of sexual violence.
“I think that there’s a problem with the culture around assault in athletics,” Quimby noted. “It’s very much a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ situation.” Regarding the history of the frats, she concluded, “cultural problems like that don’t stop existing when you remove the institution. They just spread out among the student culture and the student body.”
