With colleges and universities under mounting pressure to produce quickly employable grads, one wonders whether the model of the small liberal arts college—which advocates seminar-style teaching and espouses values of respect, tolerance, and living simply—is transferable.
Swarthmore President Rebecca Chopp believes it is.
She points to Patrick Awuah ’89, who started a university in Ghana modeled after [...]

The marriage equality movement in America is turning a corner. Equal rights that allow same-sex partners to wed have presidential endorsement, support from a majority of Americans, and even have elicited a surprisingly laissez-faire attitude from Pope Francis. The movement is gaining so much momentum that statistics and facts are outdated almost before appearing in [...]

Love Weaves an Intricate and Tangled Web
—Claude and Mary Roberts Smith, Class of 1914, Richard Smith ’41 and June Corey Smith ’43, David Heider ’64 and Ann Mueller Heider ’65, Daniel Heider ’96 and Rebecca Smith Heider ’96 (as told by Rebecca)
Family legend has it that when my grandfather Dick Smith ’41 was a junior [...]

With 3 million residents, Minneapolis–St. Paul has the 15th largest metro area in the United States—bigger than Pittsburgh’s but smaller than Philadelphia’s. Like all metropolises, the Twin Cities have their own histories. But they also share a larger urban history of the country, a history that for most of the last century was defined by [...]

Arianna Freeman ’01 was nervous. Here she was, a Philadelphia attorney with a client on death row, playing the ultimate waiting game. “It was harrowing for my client more than for me, but to watch a healthy, able-bodied 47-year-old man uncertain of whether he’ll live or die that day is not to be recommended,” she [...]

It’s cold in New York City. Single digits. Trains aren’t running on time. Or at all. Amtrak even has to drag an old-timer out of mothballs to replace a newer engine seized up by the cold. But here, this January, in an office suite on 9th Avenue in Midtown, you’ll hear no jokes about global [...]

The butterflies, and later the antelopes, conspired to break free of Tasha Lewis ’12’s mind and then out of Beardsley Hall. Her antelope sculptures breached walls at Hobbs Coffee in The Ville, then they galloped about in the College’s List Gallery before flocking to Old Tarble. From there, the majestic cyan herd pranced above gallery [...]

Anyone who has seen Cecil B. DeMille’s blockbuster The Ten Commandments will recall the raid on the temple granaries by overworked and underfed Hebrew slaves laboring to construct a treasure city to honor Pharaoh Sethi. They fill their baskets with grain, and, once well-fed, return to work.

Like most stories set in biblical times, the temporal [...]

In the January Bulletin, we chronicled several student activities that were prominent on campus way back when. Some still exist today. We asked readers to add to the lore. Here are their memories.
Your wonderful article, “Campus Traditions,” brought back several memories. First, regarding Folk Festivals: I attended Swarthmore from fall 1954 through spring 1958. At [...]

Few institutions of higher learning are bisected by a major highway. Dickinson College and James Madison University come to mind. But a railroad running through the campus proper? Perhaps only at Swarthmore. At least that’s what Jim Bock ’90, vice president and dean of admissions, speculates.
A peppy native Texan with an easy smile, Bock proudly [...]