Swarthmore's 100th

A fitting motto for Swarthmore College near Philadelphia would be the exhortation that a Quaker math professor used to give her students: "Use thy gumption." Though it seems pathetically small (547 men, 447 women), Swarthmore has such gumptious devotion to excellence that some awed academics call it the No. 1 college in the U.S. However impious this may appear to Yale or Harvard, hundreds of the country's brightest youngsters have reason to agree. Of 2,000 applicants in a typical year, Swarthmore enrolls only about 260--making it one of the toughest colleges in the U.S. to get into.

Swarthmore,* which last week began celebrating its centennial year, was founded by the liberal Hicksite Quakers to combat "a dead level of mediocrity in the education of our children." For a while it was best known as "the Quaker matchbox," a 300-acre playground for sowing Quaker oats and finding Quaker mates. But ever since the 1920s, when pioneering President Frank Aydelotte set the matchbox on intellectual fire, Swarthmoreans have won all sorts of academic honors.

Character & Compassion. U.S. headquarters of the Rhodes scholarship program, Swarthmore is a mother lode of university presidents, among them California's Clark Kerr ('32) and Cornell's James Perkins ('34). Few colleges claim more names in Who's Who; few boast alumni so diversely successful--Novelist James Michener, U.S. Budget Director Kermit Gordon, Industrialist Thomas B. McCabe (Scott Paper), and Pitcher Dick Hall ('53), Swarthmore's gift to the Baltimore Orioles.

Swarthmore attracts few rich students, prep school products or Roman Catholics, and only 12% of the students are Quakers. More often, it lures "faculty brats"--a fourth of the lowerclass-men's parents are school and college teachers. Though endowment is a relatively modest $33 million (market value), scholarships are generous--26% of the students get an average $1,000 a year.

Of this year's 280 freshmen, 84% came from the upper fifth of their high school classes, half had college board aptitude scores of 700 or above (tops: 800), 33 had National Merit scholarships. Going beyond test scores, Swarthmore also demands character, asking applicants such offbeat interview questions as "What is your principal shortcoming right now?" "We look," says the admissions dean, "for a kid with a bit of compassion."

Crackling Classrooms. What typifies Swarthmore is a passionate intellectual jousting that makes seminars crackle. When a professor recently remarked, "Rousseau doesn't make the distinctions Hume does," a typical coed fiercely whispered, "Damn right!" Although half the students are on intercollegiate athletic teams, Swarthmore is a school where varsity-lettermen refuse to wear varsity letters. An alumnus proudly recalls four years of debating with a philosophy professor on ontological proof, "with each of us reversing his position at least twice."

Swarthmore's sparks fly mainly from its famed honors program--President Aydelotte's enduring invention--which puts 40% of the upperclassmen in a literally classless battle with professors. Instead of taking formal courses, honors students spend 40 hours a week preparing papers for dissection at two weekly seminars that last for about 4 1/2hours each and often take place at a professor's house, as his wife stands by with tea and sympathy.

For two years, honors students get no exams. Then outside scholars give eight three-hour written exams, followed by eight half-hour orals. Joined in common cause, teachers and students sweat out the results as the outsiders compile a single grade for each victim. "Most students who go on to graduate school," says one who did, "are quite prepared to say that Ph.D. examinations are pale shadows compared to that terrible fortnight at Swarthmore."

Teaching, Not Research. Since all this seems too good to change, Swarthmore is slow to try curriculum "reform." As an odd result, it still lacks sociology and anthropology departments, gives no credit courses in applied art, music or drama, although it throbs with extracurricular creativity. Violently antivocational, the college rejects early specialization even though most students go on to graduate school.

Swarthmore's strong suit is a faculty obsessed with teaching rather than big-time research. To find such rare professors, Swarthmore has raised faculty salaries 89% in ten years and now claims one of the ten best-paid faculties in the country. To make it even stronger, the Ford Foundation recently gave Swarthmore a challenge grant of $2,000,000, prodding the school to tap donors for a total target of $10 million.

Quiet Brooding. Chief credit for Swarthmore's current drive goes to President Courtney Craig Smith, 47, an Iowa-born Rhodes scholar with a Ph.D. from Harvard, who was teaching English at Princeton when Swarthmore picked him in 1953. A resolutely "academic president," meaning that he shuns fund raising, Smith is a fulltime faculty recruiter. He personally interviews even temporary instructors, says that "what it's all about is how to get a student and a teacher together and ensure that something exciting happens."

Intellectually afire, Swarthmoreans are socially tame. The college bans cars and liquor; if two students marry, one has to quit school. Mixed visiting in dormitories is confined to four hours on Sunday afternoon, with doors open.

Only about half the students date frequently, usually on campus. Last year someone proposed a committee called SMOG (Students for More Outright Gaiety). It died aborning. Swarthmore is big on folk music and oldtime movies, short on sick fads like LSD. Swarthmoreans prefer quiet brooding. "The most casual-looking kids are going through the most intense self-examination," says one casual-looking coed.

By contrast, Swarthmore is endlessly involved in social action, partly because of the Quaker influence that still has the campus telephone operator say "Thank thee." Almost conventionally liberal, Swarthmore sent an ambulance to Loyalist Spain in the 1930s, began deliberately recruiting Negro students in the early 1940s. Swarthmoreans analyze disarmament, criticize the McCarran Act, lead civil rights demonstrations, from Chester, Pa., to Cambridge, Md. Last fall 60 student pickets got arrested in Chester.

President Smith, who exhorts students to "value values," is sometimes forced to blow the whistle. He warns against "unexamined liberalism," worries that activists may forsake "scrupulously legal and nonviolent" tactics. His own record is memorable. Outspoken against McCarthyism at the height of it, he led other colleges in attacking the now repealed loyalty "disclaimer oath" in the National Defense Education Act. When his students invited Communist Gus Hall to speak on campus, Smith ignored public outcries. Hall spoke. As Smith tells old grads: "Your college has guts. There are a lot of colleges that don't. Be proud of it."

*Named for Swarthmore Hall, the English home of George Fox, founder of Quakerism.

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