At the height of the holidays, Swarthmore College received an imaginative and historic gift, bestowed in all the joyful spirit of the season: $50 million from Eugene Lang ’38.
The Board of Managers gathered for its Dec. 8 morning meeting in the Scheuer Room unaware that there would be a historic announcement. Board Chair Gil Kemp [...]
Jane McGonigal is an evangel for video games. As an award-winning game designer and author of Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, McGonigal arrived at Swarthmore to “share the good news.” Her announcement? The earth is now home to 1 billion gamers.
The Cooper Series brought McGonigal [...]
It's safe to assume that since his arrival on campus in fall 2009, no student has attended more Swarthmoreathletic events than Victor Brady '13. Actually, forget Swarthmore athletics. It's possible that no student in all of Division III athletics has seen more live college sporting events than Brady.
"I'd say I've been to more than 500 [...]
Dubbed Frankenstorm by weather experts and the media, Hurricane Sandy made a frightening impact throughout the Northeast this fall, hitting coastal New Jersey and New York City particularly hard with flooding storm surges and high winds.
Swarthmore students made the most of the storm thanks to a combination of generator power, coordination of dining services, and [...]
In October, Swarthmore’s Institute for the Liberal Arts—created to preserve and expand the relevance of liberal arts education in an environment where emphasis is shifting toward vocational learning—received a $250,000 grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations to fund institute events for the next two years.
Several programs are already being offered. In early November, campus [...]
If Swarthmore enjoys name recognition in Japan, it may be as the only American college with a Shogi Club. A Japanese variant of Western chess, shogi shares with chess a common origin in the ancient Indian game of chaturanga. Associate Professor of Philosophy Alan Baker, a logician and chess aficionado, founded the club in 2004. [...]
The evening of Nov. 6, laptops, dorm televisions, and classroom projectors all aired one thing: election coverage. The presidential race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney drew to a close, with Swarthmore students and faculty gathering in common areas to hear the news. One such viewing space, the third floor of Trotter Hall, became a [...]
When the Board of Managers was created in December 1862, Edward Parrish’s name was at the top of the list. From the beginning, he had been part of the planning and the fundraising for the new college and, in 1865, was named Swarthmore’s first president.
The College would not open for instruction until 1869, so Parrish’s [...]
When future feminist firebrand Molly Yard ’33, led the charge to abolish sororities on campus, she did so mainly because Greek organizations during that era often excluded Jews.
Now, 80 years later, the sorority of which Yard was a member—and which she helped remove from campus—is being reactivated, mainly due to the energies of Julia Melin [...]
