Going Concern

Last week Frank Aydelotte balanced his Swarthmore books. Dr. Aydelotte, who will leave Swarthmore College to be director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, N. J. as soon as Swarthmore finds someone to fill his shoes (TIME, Oct. 23), made his last report to his board of managers, reviewed his 19 Swarthmore years.

Dr. Aydelotte had many homely achievements to report. He had rebuilt the bathrooms in old Wharton Hall, mapped the maze of pipes, wires, sewer mains, heating conduits under the campus. He had closed the college laundry and farm, saved money by buying eggs and sending the laundry out. He could truly boast that he had a good-looking campus, one of the most beautiful in the U. S. In a few weeks its apple and cherry trees and its 150,000 daffodil bulbs will begin to blossom. But his principal achievement was what he had done to Swarthmore.

Dr. Aydelotte had kept Swarthmore (opened in 1869) a small, coeducational college, permitted its enrollment to grow only from 507 to 731, although it could be three or four times as big if he took all applicants. He had improved its quality. He had increased its endowment from less than $3,000,000 to nearly $8,000,000, built many new buildings, spent $75 a year per student for books, raised teachers' salaries, gathered an exceptionally devoted and able faculty. Of his undergraduates Dr. Aydelotte happily exclaimed: "Our students speak more languages, play more games and think of more interesting things to do than any [other] group of undergraduates I have ever known." Dr. Aydelotte might have added that many an envious college president today rates Swarthmore as the most successful going concern among U. S. colleges.

Frank Aydelotte, 59, is a compactly built fellow with an athlete's crouch, a bald head and a warm, crinkly smile. His big, bold ears are a campus joke which Dr. Aydelotte enjoys as much as anybody. When he became Swarthmore's president in 1921, after teaching English at Indiana University -- his alma mater -- and M.I.T., Frank Aydelotte had two aims: 1) to make bright students study more; 2) to de-professionalize college athletics.

From Oxford, where he had been a Rhodes scholar, Dr. Aydelotte borrowed the Oxford system of pass and honors degrees.

At Swarthmore honor students, chosen by examinations at the end of sophomore year, have seminars instead of classes their last two years, study independently, are finally examined (written and oral exams) by outside educators. To carry out his second aim, Dr. Aydelotte, who is himself a crack golfer and onetime footballer, ruled that every Swarthmore boy and girl must spend some time on the college playing fields. At the same time he took Swarthmore out of bigtime athletics, restricted its games to teams in its own class. Unknown at Swarthmore are long, irksome hours of practice, subsidization of athletes. Swarthmore boys and girls play games for fun -- two-thirds of them represent their college in intercollegiate sports, on varsity, junior varsity or sub-junior varsity teams. Best Swarthmore teams are in lacrosse (boys) and field hockey (girls). Last fall Swarthmore's varsity football team was unbeaten. Dr. Aydelotte was delighted.

Dr. Aydelotte found Swarthmore ideal for his experiments because the Quakers who ran it were stanchly independent, friendly to new ideas. Today about half of his graduates get honors degrees (prized not only by students but also by prospective employers) and his honors system has been copied by scores of other U. S. colleges. Room, board and tuition cost a student $900 a year, cost the college $1,381. Of the college's 731, 288 are scholarship students. It usually has about 100 Quakers, gets many a writer's and intellectual's offspring: Heywood Hale Broun is a senior, Alexander Woollcott's niece Joan, now on the Philadelphia Bulletin, a recent graduate. Swarthmore's students study hard, take a serious interest in public affairs. Last week they heard a campus speech by Republican Senator Robert A. Taft, this week, by Democratic Congressman T. V. Smith.

The college is in the quiet Philadelphia suburb of Swarthmore, known to students as "the vill." A Quaker town, Swarthmore has no taverns, no cinemas. Students sometimes go to its two drugstores ("druggies") to quaff milk shakes. But they find plenty to do on the campus. Every Saturday night the college shows free movies (open to townspeople) in its new Gothic Clothier Memorial hall. Other recreations: concerts, lectures, teas with teachers. Swarthmore boys and girls have dates (which they call "skluking") in Crum Woods, south of the athletic field, and in corners of old "Libe" (the Library). Every evening they dance in Quaker-named Collection Hall, a room in grey, white-pillared Parrish Hall, the centre of campus life. Once or twice a week more formal dances are held. Wednesday nights, after fraternity meetings, fraternity men serenade the girls' dormitories. Curfew for freshman girls is 10:15, for upper-class girls, 12:30. Every year there is a "coed week," when girls ask boys for dates. Swarthmore girls' nickname for their college is "The Little Quaker Match Box."

Quaker meetings are held in a modest grey meeting house six days a week. Attendance is not compulsory, but every student goes at least once in his four years. Another Quakerism: a freshman who rises late gets a little note in his mailbox: "Thee is charged 30 cents for being late to breakfast." All boys and girls live in dormitories, eat together in Parrish Hall. At 10 each evening, girls get crackers and milk in their dormitories. Swarthmore girls like to wear sweaters, skirts and saddle shoes, to a girl go stockingless winter & summer.

No U. S. students are fonder of their president than Swarthmore's, no president is fonder of his students than Frank Aydelotte. By the college, his last report was sadly received. But Dr. Aydelotte believed that Swarthmore was prepared to get along well without him. His farewell: "Only one group could prove the success of our new program, and that was the students. They have, I believe, proved it up to the hilt."

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