Swarthmore College announced on Sept. 16 that three alumni joined the college’s Board of Managers (BoM): two new members, Jeremy Brest ’90 and Colin Convey ’97, and one returning member, Tom Hartnett ’94, P’26.
In 2005, Brest founded the investment and advisory firm Framework Capital Solutions Pte. Ltd. The firm is based in Singapore, where he currently lives. Previously, Brest worked as a director of Credit Suisse First Boston in Singapore and for Goldman Sachs in New York City, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. Brest is also a major investor in the LGBTQ dating app Grindr, with an ownership stake of over 6% of the company. At Swarthmore, Brest majored in mathematics and graduated with distinction.
Convey is also a partner at Goldman Sachs. In 2025, he was selected to assist global leadership of sponsor mergers and acquisitions in the Investment Banking division of the company. Before that, he served as a Vice President at Bank of America.
From Swarthmore, Convey earned a B.A. in political science. He played on the college’s basketball team, becoming Swarthmore’s first men’s basketball player to earn First Team All-Conference honors. Since 2024, he has remained involved with Swarthmore Athletics through the Athletics and Well-Being Campaign Committee.
Hartnett serves as co-head of Global Markets and head of Americas and EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) Fixed Income at Mizuho, a Japanese financial institution. For much of his career, Hartnett worked at Deutsche Bank as a managing director and head of Rates for North America. He has also worked at Lehman Brothers from 2005-2007.
At Swarthmore, Hartnett serves on the Admission and Financial Aid committee, which is composed of twelve board members. During his last tenure on the BoM from 2011-2023, he chaired the Investment and Property Committees. As a student, he majored in engineering.
Past Criticism of the Board
These appointments bring additional financial-sector experience to the board, though many of their former employers have come under scrutiny from students.
Brest and Convey both have professional ties to Goldman Sachs, an institution criticized by Swarthmore’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) prior to the revocation of their affiliation with the college.
In the first of their two zines distributed in 2026, SJP described Goldman Sachs as the “single largest contributor globally of war bonds” to the Israeli government. The pamphlet similarly criticized Bank of America, Convey’s former employer, for providing “$3.6 billion in war bonds” to Israel. The pamphlet cites a 2025 BankTrack article as their source for this figure.
The article also implicates Deutsche Bank, Hartnett’s former employer, as another underwriter of Israeli war bonds. These claims concern the financial institutions’ activities and do not establish any personal involvement on the part of the newly appointed members.
The appointments also come amid ongoing criticism of the BoM’s role in and influence over college governance.
In a Spring 2026 faculty poll, one respondent described the board as “undemocratically elected” and expressed a desire for Swarthmore’s next president to work “[independently] from the board of managers … and as an advocate to the faculty instead of as an enforcer of [the board’s] whims.”
Since 1910, Swarthmore’s BoM has functioned as a “a self-renewing body,” meaning new members are elected by those currently sitting on the board rather than by a broader campus community.
Last spring’s Phoenix student poll reported that the BoM had the lowest net approval (-47%) of any of the on-campus institutions included, nine points lower than its previously reported rating of -38% in the Fall 2025 poll. The results indicate significant student dissatisfaction with the board, although reasons for this disapproval were not recorded.
Criticism of the board has also coincided with student protests and acts of vandalism on campus.
Last December, the Inn at Swarthmore was vandalized with the words “Board of Butchers” spray-painted on an exterior wall of the building. The aforementioned SJP pamphlet featured an image of board members through the scope of a gun with text reading “Public Enemy No. 1.”
Last May also saw an incident of widespread vandalism on campus, including graffiti bearing slogans like “Break the Board,” and, like the incident at the Inn, “Board of Butchers.”
At the time of publication, none of the new members were able to respond to a request for comment.
