On May 9, after making his intentions known to the Board of Managers, Alfred H. Bloom informed the Swarthmore community that he will conclude his tenure as president on Aug. 31, 2009, ending his remarkable 18-year era. When Bloom leaves office, only two previous Swarthmore presidents—Joseph Swain (1902-1921) and Frank Aydelotte (1921-1940)—will have served longer. [...]

“Sustaining Swarthmore’s excellence depends on a continuous process of taking stock of the present and envisioning the future,” said President Alfred H. Bloom in a recent interview. “Fortunately, we have a remarkable community of students, faculty, staff, board members, and alumni who are able, through careful and imaginative dialogue, to do that analytic work and [...]

Associate Professor of Physics Michael Brown has been honored with the 2008 American Physical Society’s (APS) Prize for a Faculty Member for Research in an Undergraduate Institution. According to the APS’s selection committee, Brown was chosen “for his outstanding contributions to plasma physics made possible by his development of a world-class spheromak laboratory at the [...]

Omer Corluhan ’08—a community volunteer in his native Turkey before coming to Swarthmore—knew that he wanted to make a difference in his country. He wasn’t sure how until a Lang Opportunity Scholarship, awarded in his sophomore year, enabled Corluhan to start Small Steps, Big Tomorrows, a project that aimed to encourage Turkish college students to [...]

Everyone says Vienna is beautiful, and it’s true, but for the most part it’s the kind of beauty that makes you feel like a little insignificant peasant instead of a human being.
As, I suppose, it’s meant to do. Take a look at the Stephansdom, mostly built by 1511, the main cathedral in Vienna, with allegedly [...]

Associate Professor of Linguistics David Harrison—already a world authority on endangered languages and the world “hotspots” in which they are spoken in ever-decreasing numbers—was recently catapulted into the world of movie-stardom.
Harrison and fellow linguist Gregory Anderson, who together co-founded and now co-direct the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, are the subjects of The Linguists, [...]

Meredith Leich’s cartoons have appeared for two years in The Phoenix. She bade farewell to the College in the paper’s final edition of the semester with this timeless coming-of-age story. Leich says she aims to be a graphic novelist.
Click the image to open a large Adobe PDF version of the cartoon for easy reading. The [...]

In April, the College announced that it will seek amendments to local ordinances and the necessary permits from the Pennsylvania Game Commission to reduce the deer population in the Crum Woods. If permissions are granted, professional sharpshooters will be hired to remove an as-yet-unknown number of deer during the College’s winter break in December 2008 [...]

At the Board of Managers meeting in May, Martha “Marty” Spanninger ’76, former senior supervising producer for the National Public Television show NOW, and Harold “Koof” Kalkstein ’78, senior vice president and head of alumni relations with the Boston Consulting Group in San Francisco, were appointed alumni managers. Guido Grasso-Knight ’00, a medical resident at [...]

“We’re not sure it’s possible to convey how rich and incredible this semester was,” wrote Reina Chano and Maurice Weeks—the first two students to sign on for Swarthmore’s new Northern Ireland Semester.
In a joint Web story (www.swarthmore.edu/x1866.xml), the two juniors wrote of “rolling hills and baby sheep, and more shades of green than you could [...]