Well, Your Humble Blogger has finally finished reading The Meaning of Swarthmore, a collection of 48 essays by alumni, published as a development tool and mailed to all the alums who haven’t told the alumni office to sod off. It’s also on-line in its entirety, or you can buy one for thirteen bucks, or have mine. It’s a book and a marketing tool. As a book, it’s interesting, but as a marketing tool, it’s completely bizarre. Seriously, what other college or university would mail a 250-page pamphlet?
Actually, the only thing that makes sense to me is that they think that one of the included essayists will cough up something in the eight digits, after seeing their baby in print. If it’s supposed to make people like me donate the twenty bucks we haven’t been donating, or make people like my friends who donate up from twenty to two hundred, it seems like an odd and expensive way to do it. Yes, the editing was donated, as were the printing costs, but that’s turning donations back into development, rather than into education. This thing must cost a hundred times what a pamphlet would cost, and admittedly nobody reads the pamphlets, but then who would read the book?
YHB, that’s who. So, then, ignoring the whole begging-letter aspect, what’s the book like? Well, it’s actually pretty interesting, but I’ll start with the negatives. There is, as you might expect, a lot of self-congratulation here. Successful alumnus (or alumna) says “Here’s how successful I am, and I like Swarthmore!” This being Swat, some of the successful alums are successful in odd fields (two NASAns, a couple of NGO leaders, Victor Navasky from the Nation, and a Musical Joke, in addition to various Judges, elected officials, and academic administrators) along with the faintly hangdog financial wizards. Still, the air of Success is a bit cloying, for my taste, over the course of the book.
In addition, it’s not all particularly well-written or interesting. Out of 48 essays, there are only a few complete duds, which is nice, but there are only a few that really made me think. Many clearly saw their job as reinforcing those thoughts the author expected me to already have (which is not altogether unconnected with its dunning purpose).
On the plus side, I was looking for two things in particular, and found them. First, the specific way in which Swarthmore molded me that seems different from other liberal arts alums is the preference for learning with other people. A Bryn Mawr alum once described her education to me as preparing her to learn anything she ever wanted to know, as long as she had access to a good library. I would need not only the library, but also another student (probably another Swattie—another thing Swarthmore does is make us unfit for the company of non-Swatfolk). Several of the essays mention this aspect of the Meaning of Swarthmore, although not in those terms. I was pleased, though, to see that I hadn’t completely generalized my own experience without any overlap with anyone else’s perceived universe.
Which brings me to my second aspect of the Meaning of Swarthmore. I think that Swarthmore, for such a small place, quite nicely allows different people to seek, and quite likely to find, their own meaning, and their own College Experience. In my time (Fall 87-Spring 91) there was little attempt to homogenize the experience. The simple fact of the size of the place, its beauty, and its rigor, combined with a certain post-Quaker attitude of the administration, was enough to give us quite a lot in common. I’m told that rooms have telephones these days, but then the mobile phone would have demolished the hall-phone experience by now anyway. Still, a school with three or four hundred students in a freshman class is going to have plenty of overlap in the students’ universes. Even in the departments, there was very little conformity or rigidity; I was in a math seminar with—off the top of my head—a rugby player, a debate geek, a jazz musician, a serious mathematician or two, and a budding doctor. A religion seminar I was in also mixed religion scholars with people for whom the course was a fascinating departure.
Perhaps our speculative fiction society tells the story, when it every two or three years rejects anew the idea that it should restrict itself, in the main, to people who enjoy speculative fiction. Or perhaps that’s something else. At any rate, as far as I’m concerned, the meaning of Swarthmore is that it allows you to take your own meaning from Swarthmore, and to do so in good company (thus invalidating most of the meanings that one might find in isolation, but I don’t mean to say the experience is or ought to be wholly unmediated). To the extent that they are trying to raise money from alumni with 48 widely varying essays on the topic, I’d say that they still understand that for Swarthmore to mean something the way a Harvard degree means something would be disastrous.
You can always tell a Swatalum; you can tell me anything you like.
,
-Vardibidian.
The book was sent even to people who have long told the alumni office to sod off. In fact, they sent me two copies. Apparently I REALLY need to read the book.
It’s actually fairly inexpensive to print a book in this quantity. If they spend $25,000 to print and mail 5000 copies, they can recoup that very quickly (and probably already have).
I like your description of Swarthmore. Related to what you describe as the student-oriented learning experience is the supporting role that many professors play at Swarthmore. Rather than seeing themselves as the source of all knowledge to be imparted, professors at Swarthmore often overtly treat themselves as one of many tools to be used in the learning process. The teaching is incredibly important, but few professors in my experience saw themselves as all-important, and that made all the difference.
Interesting; my learning experience at Swat wasn’t so much a group endeavor, and I often saw the professors as source of all knowledge, but I think those were flaws in my worldview; I think that my learning experience would’ve been signficantly better if I’d embraced the approaches y’all are talking about. Also if I’d gone to office hours instead of thinking that when I was behind on my work I had to try to keep it secret from my professors.
…As for the book, I suspect that the goal is to make people feel so nostalgic about the place that they’ll cough up money. I think that’s the goal of most of their fundraising efforts; this one does go a little overboard, but it also manages to be a bit more specific and comprehensive than a pamphlet (it seems to me the pamphlets usually just provide the usual vague phrases about how valuable a Swat education is). I don’t know for sure, but I would venture a guess that this was aimed primarily at people a few years older than us who haven’t kept up their strong ties to other Swatties, and who have enough money to donate but never quite get around to doing so.
But then, a lot of fundraising/development efforts are mystifying and/or annoying to me, so I may be way offbase.