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Board Lowers Budget Adjustment Target to $8 Million

By Nancy Nowicki Nicely

At its Sept. 26 meeting, the College’s Board of Managers took new steps in an ongoing effort to bring Swarthmore’s future spending in line with expectations of future income. Although the College will still need to reduce its overall budget significantly, the message from the Board—shared with the campus community in an e-mail from President [...]

First There Was Collection—Now There’s First Collection

By Carol Brévart-Demm

On Aug. 26, members of the Class of 2013 gathered at dusk in the Scott Amphitheater for an assembly that has become a rite of initiation for all Swarthmore freshmen for the past 15 years—the First Collection.
First Collection in its current form was introduced in 1994 by Andrew Feldman ’96, now senior policy adviser in [...]

Meet the Class of 2013

Information supplied by the Office of Admissions on Sept. 17. Enrollment statistics became final on Oct. 1.

A Summer With the Swallows

By Carol Brévart-Demm

Tree swallows are not rare birds. In fact, they’re quite common across North America, reaching farther north than any other swallow to nest and breed in Alaska. That’s where two Swarthmore students studied them this summer, performing separate but overlapping research projects near Fairbanks with Assistant Professor of Biology Julie Hagelin.
Hagelin, an expert in avian [...]

Money Might Buy You Grades, But…

By Carol Brévart-Demm

We know from the old Beatles song that money can’t buy us love, but might it buy better attendance and grades in school? According to some school officials in cities such as Washington, D.C.; Chicago; and New York, paying students for higher performance motivates them to increase their effort and stay in school.
Not everyone agrees. [...]

Evolution Evolves

By Carol Brévart-Demm

“It’s been a big year for Darwin!” says Howard A. Schneiderman Professor of Biology Scott Gilbert. And it hasn’t been too bad for Gilbert either. He has become a spokes-person for “evolutionary developmental biology,” a new discipline that studies how changes in embryonic development can create new anatomical structures that can be selected.
In March, in [...]

A Boost for Swarthmore Engineers

By Susan Clarey

Swarthmore has received a welcome boost from the George I. Alden Trust in the form of a challenge grant to purchase state-of-the art equipment for the Department of Engineering’s instructional laboratories.
The Alden Trust will match every $2 raised by Swarthmore with $1 of its own up to $100,000. The terms of the challenge stipulate that [...]

Meeting Off-Campus Study Needs

By Susan Cousins Breen

Students returning to campus this fall found that the Foreign Study Office has undergone several changes. In addition to relocating to Cunningham House, the office has been renamed. Now known as the Off-Campus Study Office, it meets needs for all study opportunities abroad.
Patricia Martin became the new director of off-campus study in July. With 25 [...]

Arabic at Swarthmore

By Susan Clarey

Jane Abell ’11 began learning ’ammiyah the moment she landed in Damascus. After all, it was one reason why she came.
“At Swarthmore, we learn fus’ha, or Modern Standard Arabic, the dialect most frequently used in literary texts, media, and academia,” Abell says. Colloquial’ Arabic—’ammiyah—refers to the many different dialects of spoken Arabic in the Middle [...]

The Class of 2009’s Perfect Day

By Carol Brévart-Demm

At 9 a.m., on May 31, the day of Swarthmore’s 137th Commencement, the sky was a uniform gray. Relatives and friends of graduates, waiting in line by the Field House for the golf-cart “taxi service” to the Scott Amphitheater, looked up anxiously. At the first few drops of rain, umbrellas, held at the ready, shot [...]