After 25 years, Swarthmore’s interpretation theory program (INTP) is closing its doors. At the end of the Spring 2027 semester, one final student will graduate with an honors interpretation theory minor and the program will terminate. The program provided students the option to take a series of five INTP-listed elective courses, across three different departments, as well as a co-taught capstone seminar with two professors.
Initially designed to cultivate interdisciplinary student interest and collaboration between faculty members of diverse departments, the program has seemed to be losing its coherence, according to multiple members of its committee.
Professor of Philosophy Tamsin Lorraine became Interpretation Theory Coordinator in the fall of 2025. She decided to initiate the program’s termination the same semester. After reaching out to the Curriculum Committee for guidance about program closures, she sent a letter to the other program faculty to gauge whether her colleagues shared her concerns about its viability.
In her letter, Lorraine noted that the program was held together by “the cross-connections among the faculty” and that the present practice of “listing a few courses under a heading does not seem to [her] enough to provide the intellectual rationale a program should have.”
Additionally, she pointed out that the structure of the program was becoming increasingly burdensome for faculty, disproportionately to its benefit to students. Lorraine cited that finding two faculty members in two different disciplines to teach the capstone course was becoming unwieldy, especially given there were no students currently slated to take that course in the spring.
Another reason for the termination of the interpretation theory program is the emergence of other programs for more specialized interdisciplinary study, including Asian American studies, cognitive science, comparative literature, global studies, Islamic studies, and Latin American and Latino studies. The college has also provided more flexibility in its concentration and special major requirements; most recently, in the spring of 2026, the faculty moved to allow students to complete a minor in addition to a double major.
“My sense is that without the living connections it once fostered — in a different time where it was more difficult to cross disciplinary boundaries and where the merit of such work was, perhaps, less obvious, and so faculty craved more cross-disciplinary connections — interpretation theory is now more a label put to a set of courses a student might take after the fact rather than a galvanizing course of study,” Lorraine wrote in her letter.
There are no minors in the class of 2028 and interested students in the class of 2029 were notified of the program’s potential closure in advance. Associate Professor of Interpretation Theory, Comparative Literature, and Dance and Associate Dean of the Faculty for Academic Programs and Research Olivia Sabee explained that she had spoken to a potential INTP minor in the class of 2029 and felt that the student’s interests could be supported through comparative literature, or a combination of philosophy, art history, and dance studies. One student graduated with an INTP minor in the class of 2026.
The Program’s History
INTP started in 1992 and, according to Sabee, “ran a strong course” amid a lack of other interdisciplinary programs. In its first appearance in the course catalogue, the program was described as providing “students with the opportunity to explore processes of interpretation, inquiring into their nature across the disciplines, forces impinging upon interpretive acts, and the results of varying forms of interpretation both within knowledge generating communities and the culture more generally.”
The description emphasized the program’s interdisciplinary nature, noting “all fields of knowledge … are wedded to interpretive processes.”
25 years later, the themes of the program highlighted in the course catalog remain largely similar: “The interpretation theory program provides students and faculty with an interdisciplinary forum for exploring the nature, ethics, and politics of representation.” The description also mentions that through the program, students will improve their critical reading and intellectual analysis skills.
Throughout its run as a program, INTP allowed students to complete a sequence of individualized courses culminating in a capstone seminar during their senior spring. Until the fall of 2023, this was a similar program of study to most other, more recently created, interdisciplinary programs which sponsored special majors but didn’t have a major academic program of their own.
Beginning that fall, the college began eliminating “regularized special majors” and establishing additional pathways of study. In lieu of regularized special majors, the college asked interdisciplinary programs to expedite proposals for majors; this eventually ended with the creation of majors in architectural studies, cognitive science, and linguistics. Sabee noted that INTP did not apply for an expedited major, “which makes sense in terms of the volume of students involved in the program.”
Interpretation Theory and the Liberal Arts
Both Lorraine and Sabee emphasized that the closure of interpretation theory was an intellectual decision rather than a resource-driven one — in other words, not due to budget constraints or lack of student interest.
In the context of Swarthmore’s position as a liberal arts institution, both professors believe that students can and will find ways to continue pursuing their wide-ranging academic interests. Sabee believes that “even without interpretation theory, if students are passionate about something — if it really drives them — students will find ways to ask the right questions.”
Sabee reflects that one of the best parts of the program was its ability to “facilitate co-teaching experiences and provide a space for students to ask big questions.” She remembers a particularly impactful course she co-taught with Professor of Linguistics and Social Justice Donna Jo Napoli in the spring of 2021, Interpretation Theory Capstone: Defying Categorization: Contemporary Dance and Sign Language Performance. “It was a really wonderful experience; what was beautiful about it was that it provided a space at Swarthmore to ask broader questions than one can ask in courses that have a traditional departmental home,” she explained.
Following INTP’s termination, she hopes that the new program of first-year seminars, which is currently under discussion in a sub-committee of Swarthmore Forward and is slated to pilot in Fall 2027, will generate opportunities for collaboration beyond individual classes.
She notes her “personal hope is that [the] program might be a venue for faculty and students to work through big questions together. These could include some of the spirit of the original interpretation theory mandate, which was ‘to explore processes of interpretation, inquiring into their nature across the disciplines.’”
For Lorraine, a significant benefit of interdisciplinary programs is that they can be flexible in places where standard disciplines cannot be: “That we can quietly shut down the program to pursue other ways of connecting the disciplines allows us to pursue living connections rather than be stuck in institutionalized formats.”
