Swarthmore College

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{{Infobox_University |name = Swarthmore College |image = Image:Swarthmore College logo.png |city = Swarthmore |state = PA |country = United States |established = 1864 |campus = Suburban |type = Private |undergrad = 1450 |staff= 167 |president= Alfred Bloom |mascot = No mascot |colors= Garnet and Gray |motto = None |website= swarthmore.edu |endowment= US$1.2 billion }} Swarthmore College is a private liberal arts college in the United States, with an enrollment of about 1450 students. The college is located in the borough of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, 11 miles (17.7 km) southwest of Philadelphia.

The school was founded in 1864 by a committee of Quakers who were members of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. Swarthmore dropped its religious affiliation and became officially non-sectarian in the early 20th century. The college has been coeducational since its founding.

The pronunciation of "Swarthmore" can be pronounced with the first "r" either vocalized or dropped due to differences in rhotic and non-rhotic accents.

A large part of the campus is part of the Scott Arboretum.

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History

The name "Swarthmore" has its roots in early Quaker history. In England, Swarthmoor Hall in Cumbria was the home of Thomas and Margaret Fell in 1652 when George Fox, fresh from his epiphany atop Pendle Hill in 1651, came to visit. The visitation turned into a long association as Fox persuaded Thomas and Margeret Fell and the inhabitants of the nearby village of Fenmore of Friendly, and Swarthmoor was used for the first Friends' meetings.

The school was founded in 1864 by a committee of Quakers who were members of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends.

Solomon Asch and Wolfgang Köhler were two noted psychologists who were professors at Swarthmore. Asch joined the faculty in 1947 and served until 1966, while Köhler came to Swarthmore in 1935 and served until his retirement in 1958. The Asch conformity experiments took place at Swarthmore.

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Academics

Image:Parrish.jpg In its most recent college ranking, U.S. News & World Report ranked Swarthmore as the number-three liberal arts college, with an overall score of 98/100 in its annual "America's Best Colleges" issue (behind Williams and Amherst, respectively). Its selectivity has been ranked number-one amongst liberal arts colleges in the United States since the initiation of the college ranking system.Template:Fact. Swarthmore is sometimes regarded as one of the "Little Ivies."

The school has an Honors Program, which allows students to take intense, double-credit seminars from their junior year and start writing honors theses. Seminars are usually composed of 8-12 students, and students in seminars will usually write at least 3 10 page papers per seminar, and oftentimes one of these papers is expanded into a 20-30 page paper by the end of the seminar. At the end of their senior year, Honors students take oral and written examinations conducted by outside experts. Around one student in each discipline is awarded "Highest Honors"; other are either awarded "High Honors" or "Honors"; rarely, a student is denied any Honors altogether by the outside examiner. Each department usually has a grade threshold to get into the Honors program at all.

Swarthmore is unusual for a liberal arts college in having an engineering program. Other notable programs include the available minors in peace and conflict studies, cognitive science, and interpretation theory.

Swarthmore is a member of the Tri-College Consortium of liberal arts colleges with nearby Bryn Mawr College and Haverford College. The consortium as a whole is additionally affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania. Swarthmore and Haverford also have an additional, separate Bi-College Consortium that allows students to cross-register at the other college.

Though students and faculty tout the College's relative lack of grade inflation,[1] Swarthmore's average undergraduate GPA increased from 2.83 in 1973 to 3.24 in 1997[2]. Swarthmore argues that the methodology overstates the change [3].

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Tuition and Finances

The total cost of tuition, fees, room, and board for a student entering in the Fall of 2005 was $41,280 (tuition and fees were together $31,516).

Swarthmore's endowment (at the end of FY2004) was about $1.08 billion, ranking 49th in the U.S.[4]

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Campus and facilities

The 357 acre campus is situated on a north-south axis, anchored by Parrish Hall. Parrish Hall houses the admissions office, the dean's offices, the registrar, two floors of student housing, and the campus radio station WSRN broadcasts from its top. From the SEPTA commuter train station and the ville of Swarthmore to the south, the oak-lined Magill Walk leads north up a hill to Parrish.

The majority of the buildings housing classrooms and department offices are located to the north of Parrish. McCabe Library is to the east of Parrish, as are the dorms of Willets, Mertz, and Alice Paul. To the west are the dorms of Wharton, Dana, and Hallowell, Sharples dining hall, the amphitheater, the fraternities, the athletic facilities, and Crum Woods.

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Clubs and organizations

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There are 100 registered clubs and organizations at Swarthmore, in addition to many other unregistered groups. Clubs and organizations are a fundamental part of the College, and the center of many students' energies and social life, contributing to the frequent characterization of Swarthmore students as both motivated and overworked.

Unusually for a small liberal-arts college, Swarthmore hosts two fraternities: local chapters of the national Delta Upsilon[5] and the Phi-Psi fraternity[6]. According to Swarthmore's student newspaper, the school's Women's Student Government Association voted in 1933 to abolish sororities on campus, reputedly in response to the suicide of a pledge[7].

Swarthmore offers the full panoply of sporting teams. Notably lacking among these teams though is football, which was controversially eliminated in 1999. [8]

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Alumni

Image:Kohlberg.jpg Template:Main Swarthmore's alumni include five MacArthur Fellows and four Nobel laureates, most recently Edward C. Prescott of the class of 1962. In addition, hundreds of prominent figures in law, art, science, business, politics, and other fields have attended Swarthmore.

The most famous Swarthmore graduates are probably Michael Dukakis, a former Democratic candidate for U.S. president in the 1988 election, and novelist James Michener, both of whom graduated with high honors. Michener left his entire estate, estimated to be worth ten million dollars and including the copyrights to his works, to Swarthmore.

Another prominent alumnus is Wall Street leverage-buyout magnate Jerome Kohlberg, Jr. '46, who in 1986 founded the Philip Evans Scholarship Foundation at Swarthmore. Alice Paul '05 was also a seminal actor in the woman's right movement. [9]

More recent graduates include Jonathan Franzen '81 , author of The Corrections, and Justin Hall '98, widely considered to be the first blogger.

Astronaut Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, attended but later transferred to Stanford University to major in physics and English.

Suffragist and founder of the National Women's Party Alice Paul graduated in 1905.

William Saletan, chief national correspondent for Slate Magazine and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War, graduated in 1987.

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Points of interest

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See also

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External links

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