ALTHOUGH HOT AND HUMID, THE WEATHER WAS HARDLY AN ISSUE on the last Sunday in May when a winding black line of gown-clad seniors processed into the Scott Amphitheater on the final leg of their Swarthmore journey. Swarthmore’s 139th Commencement was under way. In a setting whose natural beauty never fails to amaze, parents, siblings, [...]
Timothy Burke, professor of history and blogger at Easily Distracted, has a new project—to post and write about pictures from a year at Swarthmore, beginning with 2011’s Commencement. Here’s an excerpt.
GRADUATIONSwarthmore’s graduation ceremonies strike me as very earnest and suited to the institution. They’re fairly low-key, relatively intimate, and focused very much on our own [...]
Swarthmore College Bulletin editor Jeffrey Lott will step down at the end of December. He will move to a part-time job at the College, serving as writer and editor of a book about Swarthmore to be published on the eve of the College’s 2014 sesquicentennial.
Lott came to the College in 1990 and became editor-in-chief in [...]
After a stellar career on the Garnet men’s soccer team—during which he broke school records in career points, career assists, and single-season points—Morgan Langley graduated from the College this spring. His days on the soccer field are far from over, though. Named All-Conference, All-Regional, and All-American in his last season at Swarthmore, Langley signed in [...]
Swarthmore awarded its first honorary degree in 1888 to Susan Cunningham, astronomer and member of the College’s founding faculty, whose former home and observatory now houses the headquarters of the Scott Arboretum. Honorary degrees were awarded occasionally until 1918 (when Isaac Clothier collected his second), after which at least one has been awarded each year.
The [...]
“I’M GLAD I'VE BEEN AT SWARTHMORE”
Charles Kelemen, Edward Hicks Magill Professor of Computer Science, has been granted tenure three times but has given it up twice. Lucky for Swarthmore, here is where he decided to stay.
In 1984, Kelemen arrived on campus to develop a concentration in computer science (CS); by 2001, he had created a [...]
By summer 1861, the founders of the yet unnamed educational institution that was to become Swarthmore College were spreading their idea though the pages of the Friends Intelligencer and at Quaker meetings throughout the mid-Atlantic. The response was favorable, but some Quakers had doubts about whether advanced learning was compatible with Quaker plainness.
One such person [...]
The Cape daisy (Venidium fastuosum) shown here with pollen-covered stamens was captured on camera by Emily MacDuffie ’13, a psychology major from Cape Elizabeth, Maine. MacDuffie’s image won first prize this spring in the Robert Savage Biological Image of the Year contest. The award honors Isaac H. Clothier Jr. Professor Emeritus of Biology Robert “Bob” [...]
The Swarthmore College Bulletin has been honored by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) with a national award for best article of the year. “Rock and an Old Place: A Family Farm Rich in History Faces the Relentless March of Natural Gas Drilling” by David Pacchioli received a gold medal in [...]
No matter how long you’ve been out of school, there’s something about the first week of September that takes you back to riding the school bus for the first time, to the first day with a new teacher, or to the day you moved into your first dorm room at college. Although the experience of [...]
