Talk:Swarthmore College/Archive 1

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Initial comment

1864 is the correct founding date for Swarthmore according to the NYTimes apparently: Read the first line of the second paragraph — Preceding unsigned comment added by Skyfaller (talk • contribs) 16:08, 14 March 2004 (UTC)

Opening Language

Having Williams and Amherst on the page is unnecessary. Neither Amherst nor Williams mention Swarthmore as a competitor school; there is no reason to have them on the page. The language has been changed. --Swattie 02:08, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

Any reference to Swarthmore's ranking in U.S. News & World Report should be dropped as per the September, 2007 letter signed by 19 top liberal arts colleges. Swarthmore is a signatory to that document. U.S. News rankings are terribly flawed and have little credibility.

Anthropologique 23:38, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

The information on AB recipients going on to earn doctoral degrees is not fully accurate, even accounting for school size. Among liberal arts institutions Oberlin ranks first in BA-to-PHds and Wesleyan an extremely close second (see Washington Monthly, August, 2007).

Anthropologique 11:52, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Oberlin's total numbers may be larger, but the information on PhD is a ratio. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.114.208.72 (talk) 22:39, 9 December 2007 (UTC)


Just to let you know, your motto is incorrect. as it stands, it translates into: "Our students are extremely dumb." Someone might want to change that to the correct motto.

ROFL. I've been wondering about that one for a while... :) - Emt147 Burninate! 05:48, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
The motto used to be "Mind the light", but at some point it stopped being. There never was a Latin motto -- it's in keeping with how there's no Latin on the diplomas. -Semisomna 23:10, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm too lazy to do this, but the clubs and organizations and media section is an utter mess, and it also seems a little silly to include every little organization, many of which are hardly active. People looking at this article are probably more interested in details of student culture, academics, and the history of the institution.

Agreed. Nobody interested in learning about Swarthmore gives a shit about the fricking frisbee team. Maybe we need some cleaning. Birge 22:31, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

Isn't the enrollment 1500?

Regarding the use of positive adjectives: do people always have to start a POV war over this kind of thing? If there's objective reasons to do so, why not? This thing can't be entirely written with neutral adjectives. The Princeton Review lists Swarthmore as one of the ten hardest schools to get into, as well as having one of the ten best undergrad academics and refers to it as an elite liberal arts college. Being ranked in the top three would seem to me to suggest that calling it prestigious is not unreasonable.

I'm not sure I should be stepping into the middle of what appears to be an edit war, but I removed what looked to be POV language from the article. I'm not sure that "Prestigious liberal arts college" is an appropriate college classification in the university infobox on the right. I'd also be hesitant to state "highly selective" on the very first line.

Why would you hesitate to state "highly selective" on the first line. Selectivity is rather distinguishing feature of any college. If you hear of a college for the first time, one of the more immediate pieces of information you'd like to know is its reputation. Selectivity is a politically correct proxy for saying "Swarthmore doesn't suck." So I put it back on, and unless you can argue that an admissions policy which ends up selecting for people at least two standard deviations away from the mean is not "selective" then I suggest you hesitate to change in back.

I also find the statement "Continuously ranked #1 on U.S. News and World Report's ranking" a bit odd, given that the article states " In its most recent ranking, U.S. News & World Report ranked Swarthmore as the number two liberal arts college" in the fourth paragraph.

(I also removed two arbitrary images from this talk page - I hope this was ok) — Asbestos | Talk. 17:52, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

This list of other colleges in the introduction kept being changed by people wanting their own colleges named. I think it probably better if none are named at all. — Asbestos | Talk 22:20, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Where the heck did the pictures in the article go? What was wrong with having a few nice pictures of the campus? Birge 16:18, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

Ok, I figured it out. Some crazy vandal from Bryn Mayr (the 165... IP) pretty much destroyed the article, taking out pictures and vast tracts of text for no reason, and with no explanation. (The IP is from Bryn Mayr, though that doesn't mean it was a student or even somebody affiliated with them.) Unfortunately, there were some very good edits after that, but I felt I had to revert to before the vandalism nonetheless. I'm sorry to those who made good edits after the destruction. If the anon who deleted much of the article was actually trying to make good edits, then perhaps they should consider doing so with some semblence of an explanation or discussion. Birge 16:48, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

Genocide Intervention Network

Someone added this in the last few days: "Perhaps the most notable of Swarthmore's clubs and organizations is the founding chapter of the Genocide Intervention Network". I seriously doubt it (at least the "most notable" part). Anyone want to comment? -- Gnetwerker 08:07, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

I disbelieve; if there's any activist group that's made a real name for themselves outside the bubble, that would be FreeCulture.org (that article is terrible, BTW; anyone want to take a crack at it?). Both have been featured in the NYT, but GIF's mention is sequestered behind the TimesSelect firewall, so I can't evaluate it. In any event, the sentence as it stands seems to fail the criterion of verifiability. --CComMack 10:17, 6 February 2006 (UTC)
The article is available here and the gi-net website is here (there's also a wikipedia entry -- Genocide Intervention Network 65.199.13.2 22:41, 7 September 2006 (UTC)
I split off the article for FreeCulture.org, the student organization founded at Swarthmore, from the general article on the Free Culture movement. The former is getting decent, the latter is still kind of bad. I took the liberty of correcting the link in your comment. --Skyfaller 16:09, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

Fraternities

Gnetwerker, I think the real issue with this section is "unusually for a liberal arts college". I'm not sure how one would go about verifying that, and am rather skeptical of the claim (the anon who added it is on the Swarthmore College network, and has only edited Swarthmore College and Delta Upsilon.) If it can't be verified, it needs to go. If it can be verified, then it can stay. If it could be verified but isn't true, the entire rationale (notability) for the sentence disappears, as should the sentence. The existence of the (tiny) frats is noted on the Delta Upsilon and Phi Kappa Psi (Phi Psi's former parent) pages, it needn't be mentioned here. --CComMack 23:16, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

I didn't write that phrase and don't mind if you remove it. However, before you cascade that into non-notability for the whole section, it would make sense to do a small survey of other liberal arts schools. Of those I know about, the statement is true. It is typically difficult to find a citation for a negative proposition (i.e. "few liberal arts colleges have frats"), therefore if Swarthmore has 2 of them, even if dinky little jokes, it has some claim to notability. All this having been said, I really don't care that much one way or the other. -- Gnetwerker 01:35, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
I went for a random walk through Category:Liberal arts colleges. Hamilton College and Pomona College have frats, Bowdoin College just abolished theirs in the last ten years, and Wesleyan College has a passing reference to fraternities as venues. Unless there's an objection here in the next couple of days, I'm taking this back out; please note that they're both mentioned in the clubs and organizations subpage linked immediately above, and will remain there no matter what the decision is for the main college page. --CComMack 20:30, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
Sounds like a fine decision (I would say compromise but no one is disagreeing). You may wish to mention on the orgs page that they are fraternities. It is currently not made explicit (they're listed under "interest groups"). -- Gnetwerker 21:24, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
That is, in fact, my current plan; I'm waiting a couple days to give our anon presumed DU brother a chance to object. --CComMack 22:48, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

Snipping unverified fact

I'm removing

Since the rankings' inception, Swarthmore's selectivity has been ranked number-one amongst liberal arts colleges more than any other institution.[1]

until a verifiable source citation for this item can be provided. I am annoyed that a "citation needed" tag was removed and replaced with a apparent citation that is simply a link to the home page of U. S. News and World Report. The cited web page does not even mention Swarthmore. Dpbsmith (talk) 10:09, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

It's "cited" not "citated", and MLA format does state that if a link is excessively long, you should link to the home page (I'm assuming that's what the user did). In any case it wouldn't matter because you have to pay to see the full rankings (and Swarthmore is 3rd ranked, so you can't see their "selectivity" rank). ugen64 22:05, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Swarthmore does not have a mascot -- there has been some recent fuss about this, but it has not yet changed. The student newspaper (the Phoenix) will have more details.

What a great source for Swarthmore's "well known standards" - its own newspaper.

Removed for "Self-published sources (online and paper)" [[2]]

I removed "cost" as a reason for the football cut as such was never given as a reason. In fact, reading the citations for the reasons, "Money was not an issue". I also changed "plethora" to number as two listed reasons is not exactly a plethora.

Kremlin on the Crum

A recent article in Swarthmore's Daily Gazette has been unable to verify the authenticity of the "Kremlin on the Crum" Agnew quote: http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/org/daily/index.php?year=2007&month=03&day=6#la2; the author of the usually cited book was unable to provide an original citation of the quote, so it might just be an urban legend made popular in campus culture. Or maybe we just wanted to sound cool and communist, like Harvard ("Kremlin on the Charles"). I think we should keep the quote, but mark its authenticity as questionable. UltraNurd 15:31, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

Official team name

The official team name is "The Garnet".[3]. A little research showed that "Garnet Tide" was used, maybe officially, to describe the football team in its last years. And at one time, the teams were called the "Little Quakers", which put fear in all the opponents! With some sources, maybe this could go in the sports section. Simon12 03:58, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Rigor

Swarthmore is known for its rigorous academics, symbolized and maintained by the faculty's resistance to grade inflation.

Lovely. You could say that about every other school in the nation. It's like saying a government is known for its commitment to justice. 

 (Comment added by 141.213.220.186)

Clearly, you haven't gone to Swarthmore. I graduated with a 3.3 GPA in 2008. I was originally a transfer student from Yale University, where I earned a 3.80 GPA. I can DEFINITIVELY say that Yale did not even come close to comparing to Swarthmore in terms of workload. You are an idoit, 141.213.220.186.

Grade inflation

In fact, resisting grade inflation is important. The article says Swarthmore has done so, and cites as its source Supplemental Information on the “National Grade”, Richard Sander, June 2005]. Unfortunately, it's not clear to me how the source supports the statement, and it's not completely clear to me that it meets WP:RS standards.

It seems to be the personal web page of a UCLA law professor, not a published paper. It's not linked from his home page, so it's not even clear whether he wants it to be public, or whether it is just a draft. It is not specifically on the topic of grade inflation at Swarthmore or anywhere else. All it says about Swarthmore is:

Thus, a 3.0 at Swarthmore carries a relatively high national grade (746) because Swarthmore both has very strong students and comparatively stringent grading.

In particular, it does not say how he determined that Swarthmore has "comparatively stringent grading."

Furthermore, the last paragraph seems to imply that it is part of a UCLA admissions methodology that the school wishes to keep somewhat confidential, and that his data and methods will not be published.

So, I'm going to mark the sentence as "citation needed" because I don't think the citation given is really good enough. A better one needs to be found.Dpbsmith (talk) 01:52, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

I'm unsure about the relevance of the "Princeton is superior to Swarthmore in terms of resisting grade inflation" (paraphrase) sentences—the reference to Princeton just jumps in for no reason whatsoever, other than because it's in a letter to the editor that's one of the sources. It's valid to discuss grade inflation, so I'm leaving the stat about the theoretical increase in grade inflation but removing the part about Princeton. I don't think it adds anything other to criticize. Also, the citations for students/professors touting lack of grade inflation and the inflated grade data are both out of date/bad links. I'm going to rewrite that sentence to better reflect the sources available and the actual debate over inflation at Swarthmore. Cunctatori (talk) 19:37, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

Third largest PhD. source after "normalization"

The college is, after normalization for institution size, the third largest baccalaureate source of doctoral degree recipients in the United States, and the largest such source with a liberal arts curriculum[1].

I'm moving this here pending clarification of what the source is. As presented in the linked PDF, what we have here is an anonymously authored table. It doesn't indicate where it's been published. It doesn't cite anything to suggest that this is an accepted methodology for evaluating schools.

And the text that cites it doesn't give any clear reason for choosing this particular list or this particular metric, apart from the fact it's one on which Swarthmore gets a high rank. Dpbsmith (talk) 21:12, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

Updated Daily Gazette Information

I edited the information on the Daily Gazette. Previously it stated that the DG was independent of the administration and the student government, which is not true; the majority of DG funding comes from the student activity fee, which is allocated by the student budget committee, which is overseen by student council. I changed it to say "content" was independent, and added a sentence that both the DG and The Phoenix are funded through the SAF and advertising. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.58.80.190 (talk) 14:53, 16 December 2008 (UTC)


Changed "primarily" to "partially". The Gazette gets about four times as much money from advertising as from the SAF. 130.58.231.187 (talk) 21:07, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Class Year Consistency

Can't find style guide direction, brought all of the class years into consistent style (four year indication in parentheses) as in (1985). Jingjoe (talk) 20:58, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

Lead - Prestigious?

Is it a good idea to characterize the school in the first sentence with "prestigious", "elite", "selective", or some other quality? Probably not if we aspire to NPOV. The reference given does not support "prestigious" in particular.--Albany45 (talk) 02:43, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

No, it's not a good idea. This has been discussed many times and it almost always comes out the same. WP:BOOSTER and WP:UNIGUIDE help summarize the discussion and current consensus. ElKevbo (talk) 03:30, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
Eliminated "prestigious" on the basis of boosterism, but what about the 3rd para? It's less blatant, but still judgmental. And the reference is hardly independent of the College.--Albany45 (talk) 12:24, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
While we don't want to be biased, we still need to accurately convey the view of the school. It's consistently ranked as one of the best, and this can be shown without the use of puffery.--Yaksar (let's chat) 06:04, 24 June 2011 (UTC)
Right. I agree with the paragraph's content, but we need a non-self-published source.--Albany45 (talk) 15:09, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

Most Common Grad Schools

I removed the following quote

With the highest frequency, alumni earn graduate degrees at the UC Berkeley, University of Chicago, Harvard, MIT, Columbia, New York University, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale.Swarthmore Unspun

Even though there is a citation, if you trace the source data the swarthmore.edu site uses, that list is bogus. There are 3 grads at Stanford and 2 grads at Princeton, but 13 at Columbia and 7 at UCLA. [4] Jairuscobb (talk) 21:09, 21 November 2011 (UTC)

Greeks and the Kappa Alpha Theta chapter

I've recast the fraternity section which I thought went into far too much detail over the hand-wringing over Kappa Alpha Theta's entry on the campus in 2013. Nor do I think these paragraphs showed NPV; I don't think "Students for Coal Mining" would have had as much of a negative and intolerant reaction. Not only was there a paragraph over the consternation of a faction against the lifting of the 79-year ban on sororities, but another paragraph was devoted to details of a referendum on the subject, AND a table showing the rather inconclusive results. This is overkill.

The fact is, Greeks are flourishing nationally, and a number of schools that had banned or discouraged them have backed off on this program for a number of reasons. I cited the case of Franklin and Marshall University, where alumni giving was down, but also the remarkable and successful return of Greeks to the Ivy League. I know that Greeks continue to be banned at Colby, and they exist without recognition at Amherst College. But more of a fair treatment of this issue is reasonable, I think. Here's is the cut paragraph and the table noting the non-binding referendum. I left the referendum reference in the main article. Jax MN (talk) 03:19, 16 April 2014 (UTC)

After several months of discussion, a referendum about Greek Life on campus occurred in April, 2013. Students were asked to vote on six questions. Question 2, "Do you support admitting students of all genders to sororities and fraternities?" passed, while all others failed.[2] As of April, 2013, no administrative action has been taken. The referendum was non-binding, and it is up to the board of managers to make any changes to Greek Life.[3]
Question Yes No No Preference No Answer
1. Do you support ceasing Delta Upsilon's and Kappa Alpha Theta's affiliations to their national chapters? 451 (36%) 605 (48%) 169 (13%) 43 (3%)
2. Do you support admitting students of all genders to sororities and fraternities? 668 (53%) 446 (35%) 113 (9%) 41 (3%)
3. Do you support making fraternity houses into substance-free spaces? 224 (19%) 838 (65%) 152 (12%) 34 (3%)
4. Do you support merging all sororities and fraternities into one campus building? 382 (30%) 682 (54%) 162 (13%) 42 (3%)
5. Do you support having no campus buildings expressly for the purpose of housing Greek organizations? 455 (36%) 655 (52%) 127 (10%) 31 (2%)
6. Do you support the abolition of sororities and fraternities at Swarthmore College? 369 (29%) 779 (61%) 89 (7%) 31 (2%)

Rewrite

I think the article needs some major revisions. It still looks like an advertisement. A lot of the information here is not encyclopedic content.

  • The Reputation section contains way too many rankings. This is redundant and not useful; the rankings are not really meaningful and virtually any college or other organization would be equally justified in littering its page with compliments.
  • Ditto for the "Academic Reputation" section, at least the portion about grade inflation--not that much information is needed, some of it is clearly an ad ("Current students sport Swarthmore t-shirts proclaiming, 'Anywhere else it would've been an A.'" ... they don't, and even if they did, we don't need to know what T-shirts Swatties wear). The cumulative list of scholarships Swatties have won is not needed. This sort of information, along with the information in the "Admissions" section, could be synthesized down into a sentence or two rather than a list of numbers which will always be out of date.
  • In contrast, the "Campus" section could be expanded -- there is a lot of history in the buildings, especially Papazian and Mary Lyons, some of which might be notable
  • The "Clubs and Organizations" section should be cleaned out. It reads like the similar list Swarthmore has on its website of student organizations--and is likewise out of date. I don't think the college bowl still exists. All colleges have Dems and Republican clubs on campus, there doesn't seem to be any reason to list them here. I'm not sure what the policy is for handling something like the "Publications" section, but I feel like some of these could be removed as they no longer operate. It might be worth adding some newer publications, such as Overlaps, if we are going to list the publications at all. The SCCS section is too extensive; we don't need to list the minutia of what services SCCS has offered.
  • The "Alumni" section is just a block of text, some of which is confusingly set out in a bulleted list. There are ton of alumni that have their own pages and thus should be mentioned, but maybe these should be moved to a separate list page?
  • Might make sense to add something about the Title IX/Clery complaints -- the same is described in Occidental College's page. This is the same movement at Swat, and has had a large effect on the campus culture and administration, so it is likely notable.

Going to remove the College Bowl -- pretty sure this doesn't still exist (The college bowl website stops listing Swarthmore in the late '90s). Also removing Dems/Republicans. Pogibla (talk) 20:31, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Football

Football was apparently a matter of controversy from quite early on. See "A GREAT BEQUEST LEAVES COLLEGE IN A QUANDARY: By Provisions of the Will of Anna T. Jeanes Swarthmore Falls Heir to Millions -- but Must Give Up Football. Now Students and Faculty are Plunged Into a Controversy Which Deals With the Problem, Athletics Versus Money", New York Times , 6 October 1907, p. X7. Someone may want to follow up on that as an interesting sidelight. (I ran across this while researching an unrelated music-related subject. The bequest is not discussed in our article on Jeanes, either.) - Jmabel | Talk 05:21, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

The term "Swat"

IP user 50.251.52.25 has twice deleted (without explanation) the phrase "informally known as Swat" from the lede in the past few days. This phase was added to the article in 1 July 2015. A Google Advanced Search for the word "swat" on the domain Swarthmore.edu would suggest that this phase is in fact a phrase that is used on campus for the college. I have no interest in getting in an edit war with with the IP user so I seek guidance in the forum as to how this should be resolved, since it seems to me that the phase should be included in the article.FFM784 (talk) 02:29, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

That the information is "true" and supported by one or more reliable sources doesn't necessarily mean that it should be included in an encyclopedia article. What makes this information so important that it merits inclusion here? Is the term used in this article? Is it widely used in other sources? Does it give unique insight into the history and culture of the college? ElKevbo (talk) 02:58, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

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Restrictions on the list of alumni

In light of this revert of my edits, I'll just point out that the restriction I placed to people with five Wikipedia languages in the main list is just an extension of one I earlier added while cleaning up the list. I derived it from the old page at Wikipedia:Recent years and I for one think it makes the list a lot more interesting for readers as it now contains people with more international relevance. It also eliminates the problem present in my earlier restriction of having to figure out whether an article was bot-generated, which is fairly common now (e.g. the revision history of Ruth Wilson Gilmore's page on the Arabic Wikipedia). Graham87 08:10, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

  1. ^ Baccaleureate Origins Peer Analysis 2000
  2. ^ One Referendum Passes, Students Wait to Hear from Administration | Daily Gazette. Daily.swarthmore.edu. Retrieved on 2014-04-12.
  3. ^ StuCo Report: Referendum Not Binding | Daily Gazette. Daily.swarthmore.edu (2013-02-26). Retrieved on 2014-04-12.
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