A few more questions for current students =)

JHS
Tue, 29 Apr 2008 10:01:08 +0000

Swarthmore is a historically Quaker institution; both as an institutional matter, and in terms of the students it attracts, it is going to be much more upfront about multiculturalism and social issues. Also, although Swarthmore is very diverse for a LAC, its small size means that any particular identifiable group will be relatively small, and it takes more work to make certain that everyone feels accepted and supported.

While “political correctness” is hardly unknown at Chicago, among elite educational institutions the political center of gravity of its students and faculty is probably to the right of most of its peers, and I think the relative volume of PC-speak is somewhat less than at many other places. Plus, as noted above, the Core cannot help but being a little dead-white-male-centric. So even the nonwhite students that Chicago attracts are probably, as a group, more comfortable with seeing themselves as part of the mainstream of Western Culture than students from similar backgrounds at a place like Swarthmore. Please understand: I am talking relative weights, not absolutes.

Finally, the Chicago student body, including graduate and professional students, and the city of Chicago, are very, very culturally diverse. Swarthmore PA, when you take two steps off the campus, is not. And even Philadelphia is meaningfully less diverse than Chicago. So one would expect Swarthmore to have to do more to promote diversity.

(A few years ago, when I visited Wesleyan with one of my kids, the campus was plastered with flyers proclaiming that it was GBLT Arab and Arab-American Awareness Month. We wondered what was the ratio of any particular subset of that group – say, transsexual non-American Arabs --, or even of all of them, to the number of days in their special month.)