Talk:Swarthmore College

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Contents

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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.