Swarthmore College

The name "Swarthmore" has its roots in early Quaker history. In England, Swarthmoor Hall in the town of Ulverston,Cumbria, (previously in Lancashire) was the home of Thomas and Margaret Fell in 1652 when George Fox, (1624-1691), fresh from his epiphany atop Pendle Hill in 1651, came to visit. The visitation turned into a long association, as Fox persuaded Thomas and Margaret Fell and the inhabitants of the nearby village of Fenmore of his views. Swarthmoor was used for the first meetings of what became known as the "Religious Society of Friends" (later pejoratively labeled ""The Quakers").

The College was founded in 1864 by a committee of Quakers who were members of the Philadelphia, New York andBaltimore Yearly Meetings of the "Religious Society of Friends" ("Quakers"/"Hicksite"). Edward Parrish, (1822-1872), was its first president. Lucretia Mott, (1793-1880), and Martha Ellicott Tyson, (1795-1873),^[14] were among those Friends, who insisted that the new college of Swarthmore be coeducational. Edward Hicks Magill, the second president, served for 17 years.^[15] His daughter, Helen Magill, (1853-1944), was in the first class to graduate in 1873; in 1877, she was the first woman in the United States to earn a Doctor of Philosophy degree, (Ph.D.) - hers was inGreek from Boston University in Boston, Massachusetts.^[16]

In the early 1900s, the College had a major collegiate American football program during the formation period of the soon-to-be nation-wide sport, (playing Navy, (Annapolis), Princeton, Columbia, and other larger schools) and an active fraternity and sorority life.^[17] The 1921 appointment of Frank Aydelotte as President began the development of the school's current academic focus, particularly with his vision for the Honors program based on his experience as a Rhodes Scholar.^[18]

During World War II, Swarthmore was one of 131 colleges and universities nationally that took part in the V-12 Navy College Training Program, which offered students a path to a U.S. Navy commission.^[19]

Wolfgang Köhler, Hans Wallach and Solomon Asch were noted psychologists who became professors at Swarthmore, a center for Gestalt psychology. Both Wallach, who was Jewish, and Köhler, who was not, had left Nazi Germany because of its discriminatory policies against Jews. Köhler came to Swarthmore in 1935 and served until his retirement in 1958. Wallach came in 1936, first as a researcher, and also teaching from 1942 until 1975. Asch, who was Polish-American and had immigrated as a child to the US in 1920, joined the faculty in 1947 and served until 1966, conducting his noted conformity experiments at Swarthmore.

Academics[edit]

Swarthmore's Oxbridge tutorial-inspired Honors Program allows students to take double-credit seminars from their junior year and often write honors theses. Seminars are usually composed of four to eight students. Students in seminars will usually write at least three ten-page papers per seminar, and often one of these papers is expanded into a 20-30 page paper by the end of the seminar. At the end of their senior year, Honors students take oral and written examinations conducted by outside experts in their field. Usually one student in each discipline is awarded "Highest Honors"; others are either awarded "High Honors" or "Honors"; rarely, a student is denied any Honors altogether by the outside examiner. Each department usually has a grade threshold for admission to the Honors program.^{[citation needed]}

Parrish Hall, the original building of the College and an unofficial symbol of Swarthmore.

Uncommon for a liberal arts college, Swarthmore has an engineering program in which at the completion of four years' work, students are granted a B.S. in Engineering. Other notable programs include minors in peace and conflict studies, cognitive science, and interpretation theory.^{[citation needed]}

Swarthmore has a total undergraduate student enrollment of 1,534 (for the 2013-2014 year) and 178 faculty members (98% with a terminal degree), for a student-faculty ratio of 8:1. The small college offers more than 600 courses a year in over 40 courses of study.^[20] Swarthmore has a reputation as a very academically oriented college, with 90% of graduates eventually attending graduate or professional school.

While many in higher education recognize the college's relative lack of grade inflation,^[21][22] there is some controversy over the accuracy of such perceptions. One study by a Swarthmore professor in 1993 found "significant grade inflation." However, other professors and students dispute the findings based on their own experience^[who?]. Some have pointed out^[who?] that statistics suggesting grade inflation over the past decades may be exaggerated by reporting practices, and the fact that grades were not given in the Honors program until 1996.^[23] In the end, many still credit Swarthmore with having resisted grade inflation, bucking the perceived trend amongst peer institutions.^[24][25]