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Swarthmore: Where Not To Send Your Kid To College

Want to know how much it costs to attend Swarthmore College for a year? $55,750.  Plus, according to the college: These are the annual charges billed by the College. Students and their parents, however, should plan for expenditures associated with books, travel, and other personal items. In addition, the College will bill for unpaid library […]

Want to know how much it costs to attend Swarthmore College for a year? $55,750.  Plus, according to the college:

These are the annual charges billed by the College. Students and their parents, however, should plan for expenditures associated with books, travel, and other personal items. In addition, the College will bill for unpaid library fines, Worth Health Center fees, and other fees and fines not collected at the source.

Keep that in mind when you read about this outrage against liberal order: Swarthmore radicals taking over campus functions, and the gutless college administration doing nothing about it. As Stanley Kurtz reports:

In response to the Board takeover, the administration planned to hold open-ended “community discussions” led by students with contrasting viewpoints, so as not to “exclude or marginalize” any group. That program was quickly dismantled when radicals showed up at a planning meeting, many of them uninvited, to insist on holding “teach-ins” where their demands for transforming Swarthmore would be discussed. Student attendance must be mandatory, said the radicals. Administrators knuckled under without resistance, again leaving conservatives “excluded and marginalized.”

The radicals are demanding a massive expansion of Swarthmore’s politicized “studies” programs, with a new Latino Studies major specifically dedicated to Latinos in the United States, and mandatory classes for all Swarthmore students in ethnic studies and gender and sexuality studies. To further this process of naked political indoctrination, many radicals are calling on Swarthmore to pare back its international-relations courses, which are charged with “reinforcing Western hegemony.” The radicals also want all claims of sexual assault to be made public, thereby naming the accused before a trial even begins.

Think of these proposals as a real-time example of the story laid out by the recentreport on Bowdoin College published by the National Association of Scholars. That report describes a massive expansion of Bowdoin’s politicized “studies” programs at the expense of more traditional courses, which have been turned into isolated islands at the school. At Swarthmore, the remaining traditionalist and non-politicized islands may soon be swallowed up.

At its official website, Swarthmore’s administration played these “teach-ins” as earnest good-faith conversations, rather than what they were: mandatory re-education sessions held at the insistence of the radicals in defiance of the administration’s plans, not to mention the wishes of conservative students. The radicals themselves were furious at the dissembling. They wanted credit for having forced their demands on the school. Swarthmore quickly blocked all comments on the online article describing post-takeover events at the school, an effective way of preventing parents from finding out what was actually happening on campus.

Watch this short video of the radicals’ takeover of the Board meeting, and that mob’s drowning out of a student who stood up to them. You’ll also see the spineless administrators yielding to the mob, and a priceless whine from a black student who responds to the lone student’s complaint that the mob is intimidating her (which it obviously is) by shrieking that he’s black and somebody on campus once invaded his “safe space.” Cheers all around.

Would you spend a dime to send your kid to a college whose administration allows itself to be pushed around by radicals? Would you allow your kid to take on a huge student loan burden to get a degree from such an illiberal and intolerant place? It’s insane. Here’s the video:

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