Seated at desks arranged in a large circle, about 25 students in Professor of Education Lisa Smulyan’s class are about to put psychologist B.F. Skinner’s theory of education to the test. Skinner viewed learning as a process of making a desired behavior more likely to recur through reinforcement, both positive and negative.

Like the intertwining oak branches forming an archway over Magill Walk, the latticework of multigenerational families at Swarthmore fans out from a solid trunk of family and College history.

For a child with obsessive-compulsive disorder overwhelming worries make the already strange maze that leads to adulthood even more difficult. Life is ruled by intrusive, disturbing thoughts (obsessions), acts (compulsions), or both.

I returned not long ago from a posting in Shenzhen, a large and sprawling industrial city in Guangdong province, China. Locate Hong Kong on a map, and you’re almost there; a golf pro could drive a ball south across the irrecoverably polluted Shenzhen River to the New Territories, as I myself often tried to do in my leisure moments until the border patrol sternly warned me to stop.

A sharp drop in the number of students studying abroad this spring—combined with a larger than usual number returning from fall foreign study—caused a scramble for student housing. So many students signed up at the December housing lottery, looking for rooms for the spring semester, that the College was forced to exercise what Myrt Westphal, director of residential life, calls “the overflow option.”