interesteddad

Swarthmore just posted video of new President Rebecca Chopp's first public Q&A session:

Swarthmore College Video Blog Archive Impressions from First Listening Tour Event

She is an ordained Methodist minister with PhD in theology from UChicago. She was on the faculty of the Theology school at Emory and spent several years as Dean of the Theology School and then Provost of the University. She moved to Yale where she was Dean of the Divinity School. She spent the last seven years as President of Colgate before coming to Swarthmore in July.

From the video, I can see why the Search Committee was impressed.

HarrietMWelsch

She is both impressive and wonderfully personable - even though she has a really awful party trick of guessing alums' class years with deadly accuracy. Ouch.

mythmom

Congratulations alums and current students on such an august choice. Your new prez is awesome!!!!

interesteddad

Chopp is blogging her "Listening Tour" events:

Presidential Listening Tour

Comments after each event, plus audio podcasts of each event. Last week's stop in Washington DC had a huge turnout. My daughter said that Chopp was very impressive and the vibe was enthusiastic.

Chopp goes a little further into her "vision" for new initiatives in this Q&A session -- very thoughtful. Interesting comments on diversity initiatives, too.

Duhvinci

to all that have asked, i have been getting my semester in order and trying to tie up loose ends before the end of next semester, but thanks to all for asking. i have met rebecca chopp and she seems nice enough, but i personally feel that for all the high and mighty goals she espouses and how much she enjoyed that essay about swat in the middle of one of her files, i believe that the biggest task ahead of her is restoring swats standing in the usnwr. i rarely mention this because this place is filled with political correctness that is not above shouting down or intimidating one with differing views. here goes. as many have probably noticed, swat has been dropping in the usnwr on an annual basis, not in the rankings, since swat has been consistently third since i enrolled, but rather in the overall grading. i believe that while williams has a 100 score, swat has dropped to 92, perilously close to no. 4 wellesly and a fast rising middlebury. although it is true that subjective rankings do not indicate the essence of a college or university, it cannot be denied that perception is one of the most important things a university or collage has to sell itself. it is not improbable that many of my brethren made their decisions to apply and enroll at swat as much for the idyllic campus, the intellectual ferver and the sharples food, as they did with the ranking swat has in usnwr. unless swat begins to game this system as uchi and wash u have for many years, middlebury will swap places with swat in the very near future in usnwr. this will result in decreased apps, higher acceptance rates, lower yields and an overall decline in the prestige the college carries with the general populace with a modicum understanding of the reputation of a swat. in my travels over the last four years, the layman clearly has no understanding as to what swat is, but the ooh and ahhs that are elicited from the learned ones that understand the college heirarchy does provide some satisfaction to offset the oft repeated response of "where?. ooh got to go, late for a study group. be back next week during break. sorry for any spelling errors.

johnwesley

D', I'm surprised that in the course of tracking Swat's annual USNews fluctuations you didn't notice that its main hindrance is the fact that its SATs are too high for its graduating rate, a fact that Middlebury discovered several years ago and corrected by finally fessing up that it had been cherry-picking the numbers for more than a decade. The solution in Swarthmore's case is obvious: bring back football, lower your SAT scores and see your vaunted USNews ranking rise. Sheesh.

Duhvinci

i don't think that the word 'tracking' would be appropriate here. it just so happened that i walked past one of the end caps at a borders and noticed the issue and perused through. i wasn't even necessarily concentrating on swat. i was thinking about a conversation i had over the summer with a high school classmate of mine who is attending williams and the conversation of the "little three" came up and my friend stated that there was no longer a little three as it once was. now it was just williams and amherst, while wesleyan, always an afterthought, is now considered the remedial arm of what was once the little three. i protested long and loud, but let it drop until i saw the usnwr rankings and i discovered that my friend was correct. i had thought that wesleyan was at least a somewhat competitive school, but judging by their numbers, it appears it can now only be considered a new england safety school. i surmise that it must be the football players bringing down wesleyan's numbers. maybe wes should follow swat's lead and drop football so as to increase wesleyan's sat scores to be more competitive with a top tier school. my real fear for wes is that wes may be attracting football players who would have attended swat if it's football program were still intact. if this is the case, dropping football at wes may actually decrease its overall sat scores. also, it's not like their football program is flourishing, didn't they recently lose to wellesly's football team? sheesh.

i didn't mean to veer off on the problems of connecticut second tier schools, my original premise is that the erstwhile chopp needs to focus on all aspects of the school and like it or not, usnwr plays a large part in the recruiting of top notch students. it is easy to dismiss this concept and advocate the evils of usnwr, but in the real world, usnwr exists. the college issue is their best selling issue and in many instances it is the first resource for high school juniors and their parents. so college administrators can sign as many pledges of non cooperation as they want, but usnwr is not going away anytime soon and non cooperation will only relegate true "non cooperators" such as reed to irrelevant status. my concern is that there is a real high mindedness here and i am afraid that the administration may actually follow through and not cooperate with usnwr and not pay the concept of "non cooperation" lip service like much of the other signees do. rebecca chopp and jim bock need to bring swat back to the level where the hard core numbers, across the board, between amherst, williams and swat are so insignificant that applicants are left to decide between the three based upon their feel of the campus and student body.

vossron

"usnwr is not going away anytime soon"

Reports (can anyone provide a reference?) indicate that USNWR participation has fallen below 50% and is dropping. Good question: where do we hear this stuff?

relegate true "non cooperators" such as reed to irrelevant status

Applications to Reed have doubled since they stopped cooperating.

interesteddad

At least so far through two events, USNEWS has not come up as a topic in the Chopp Q&A sessions. The questions and answers have been quite substantive and thoughtful.

One that has come up repeatedly is Chopp's desire to emphasize sustainability as a new Swarthmore priority. She takes that a step further and equates it with an historic Quaker value of "simple" living. I know that she caught Tim Burke's ear with this as he has since blogged about it.

In the Washington event, she proposed this, along with two more proposed points of emphasis, when a questioner pointed out that she did not come to Swarthmore as an empty vessel:

1) Chopp said that she finds it disturbing that it is considered not cool to be intellectual at colleges these days and, that while this is not a problem at Swarthmore, Swarthmore might be able to play a leading role in highlighting this issue.

2) Chopp said that she finds the lack of civil discourse today troubling. She opinioned that it may result from the disappearence of a "strong center" (politically) so discussions occur from the extremes. She outlined a role for colleges in general (and Swarthmore in pariticular) to teach students how to have civil, respectful debate.

I thought the other interesting part of the Washington Q&A was her discussion of Damon Williams' writing the three waves of diversity in higher education and how Swarthmore is well positioned to embrace the third wave.

johnwesley

yes, we did. But, that's because in this country, it's called *soccer*. Not that Swat is any better. Didn't you just lose against the Technical College of New Jersey?

goeast

If one is going to read the usnwr ratings i suggest paying more attention to the selectivity rating and less attention to the overall rating.

vossron

^ But also realize that selectivity is a direct measure of popularity, and an indirect measure of quality (assuming that a school is popular because it is good, whatever that means to an individual applicant).

goeast

“But also realize that selectivity is a direct measure of popularity, and an indirect measure of quality”

I am confused, below is the usnwr description of how they compute the selectivity section of their ratings. If I understand the usnwr description it seems to me that 90% of the selectivity rating is some measure of academics (test scores and class ranking) and 10% a measure of popularity (admit to applicant ratio) am I misunderstanding something here?

Student selectivity (15 percent). A school's academic atmosphere is determined in part by the abilities and ambitions of the student body. We factor in the admissions test scores for all enrollees who took the Critical Reading and Math portions of the SAT and the Composite ACT score (50 percent of the selectivity score); the proportion of enrolled freshmen (for all national universities and liberal arts colleges) who graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school classes or (for institutions in the universities—master's and baccalaureate colleges) the top 25 percent (40 percent); and the acceptance rate, or the ratio of students admitted to applicants (10 percent).

vossron

No, I am confused, thinking only of "the ratio of students admitted to applicants." Ignore me.

goeast

Ignore me...

that would be foolish of me to do.....

you have too much good information for me to ignore you and as such i will not do so...