If any place can get young minds to unplug, it's a college sitting on an arboretum

[coase]

[W]hy do you persist on coming on the Swarthmore forum and throwing out snarky comments?

@momof3sons: Prof. Barry Schwartz’s address at the 2016 Last Collection is germane. It reads in part:

A wealth of options creates a problem that has to be solved. It forces you to have to put time and effort into decisions, even trivial ones. It causes you to worry, when you finally choose, that maybe you’ve made a mistake.

http://www.swarthmore.edu/commencement-2016/barry-schwartz-last-collection

Worrying that one may have made a mistake can be overwhelming if you let it; his advice is to let it go. When D1 applied to college, she was accepted by all 10 schools to which she applied (Brown, Carnegie Mellon (SCS), Chicago, etc.) Naturally, she could choose only one, but I never felt the need to validate her decision (nor did she). As a consequence, I never spent time on those schools’ CC threads denigrating them. D2 was an ED1 applicant to Swarthmore, but I never felt the need to denigrate the other schools that recruited her. Once one’s child makes her decision, it is imperative to let it go.

I don’t think of ‘relaxed’ or ‘unplugged’ as part of the Swat culture, either.

I just reread the article but did not find any form of “relax,” nor did I find any claim about Swat culture. (Yes, I see that you used single quotes.) I am hardly averse to criticism of things Swarthmore, having been critical of Rebecca Chopp and certain campus groups for their actions, but there is no need to create opportunities for gratuitous cuts out of whole cloth.