———

You left us hanging! I’m really curious to hear what someone as intimately involved in Swarthmore and keenly observant as you meant by this. I think I could guess where you are probably going, but could be always be surprised. I’m a bit stumped to come up with something that doesn’t echo some prior Swarthmore history from Lucretia Mott’s radicalism to Alice Paul’s activism to Carl Levin’s “ethical intelligence” in delivering anti-McCarthy petitions.

I’ll throw my own surprise on the table. I would argue that Swarthmore has a fundamentally conservative culture, not in political leanings, but in a decidedly “old-school” approach to community, values, and learning.

Prodigious fundraising since an existential scare (late 1970s, early 1980s, I think) has meant that Sewanee has shed its “shabby genteel” while retaining its denominational ties and its narrow section of a social elite. (I got in on scholarship and was definitely one of the weirder ones.) And there is a certain sense of humor about the overwhelmingly conservative nature of the place; while no one could really fight the T word, it was also commonly said that doing something twice meant that you could proclaim it a Tradition.

Even at the time, I cherished its distinctive culture. You’d never mistake it for anywhere else. But these challenges — “The stronger your perceived niche or character, the more it limits the pool of potential applicants and matriculants. Moreover, the institution’s personality can become more and more exaggerated as it attracts more and more of the same kind of prospective student.” — Sewanee has in spades. No silver lining without its attendant cloud, I suppose.

As for top-mandated change, I’m reminded of a letter to Ann Landers many moons ago. A parent of a prospective Princeton (I think) student had heard about a tradition of running around outside naked after the first snowfall. The parent was predictably appalled, and Ann wrote a dean at the school to inquire. He said (I paraphrase) that yes, the stories were true; no, the administration didn’t think it was particularly scholarly; and if she knew a way to keep sophomores from acting sophomorically, he was all ears.

Otherwise, I can’t find anything about the Swarthmore culture that really differs from other points in its history.

As for “marketing”, I think Swarthmore does an excellent – and, more importantly, honest – job in selling itself to prospective students. What you see is what you get. For the most part, the students who choose Swarthmore buy into the Swarthmore ethos, which is, ultimately, the mark of an admissions office doing a good job.

Sometimes I think Swarthmore does a better job promoting it’s identity to alumni and peer institutions than it does to prospective students. I, too, was turned off by the stuffy and overly competitive atmosphere I detected during my visit and interviews, but after working at the college for the past nine years I have come to realize I would have had the same education and freedom at Swarthmore as I did at Antioch.

However, I urge you to send that email: after all, annoying the administration has always been part of the goal of campus politics. Were you at Wesleyan when someone (maybe it was two people?) decided that the way to get the administration to pay attention to issues of date rape was to leaflet campus tours of prospective students and their parents with an estimate of how many rapes occurred on campus every year (taking into account that 90% of them were likely unreported)?

One minor quibble: You may be right about Wesleyan, but Swarthmore’s brand was established before the 1960s. I think you have to go back to the 1920’s when Frank Aydelotte started the Honors program. Winning the College Bowl geek game show series on national TV in the 1950s probably helped a bit. By the 1960’s Swarthmore was already well established as an academic powerhouse.