<p>The defining characteristic of Swarthmore students is their passion—for art, for physics, for poetry, for Mountain Justice. In deciding whether to give Swarthmore a look, prospective students need to ask whether they have a consuming passion they want nurtured in college. If so, Swarthmore offers an unparalleled opportunity to pursue that passion. Speaking as a Swat mom (daughter class of ’12) and a professor at another university, I know that, above all, a college education offers students an opportunity to spend four years in a community of scholar-learners that will challenge them to reach deep within themselves to develop a potential they only glimpse as high school seniors. I don’t think a prospective student can do better than Swarthmore in this regard. Swarthmore’s faculty is extraordinary. In sharing their own passions with students unstintingly and with a level of scholarly and pedagogical expertise that arguably is the best among all liberal arts colleges, Swarthmore professors change lives. Moreover, students support each other’s learning in an exemplary manner. These defining strengths of Swarthmore risk being lost in the current focus on the difficult issues that passionate Swat students have brought into view this year. Almost invisible in the current fray are key products of Swat passion: the amazing senior art exhibitions, music performances, and honors projects, not to mention the acceptance letters to the top graduate and professional programs in the country. As for Mountain Justice, I confess ambivalence. Looking at the higher education landscape, I am deeply bothered by the lack of passion for politics, the environment, and social justice among college students. Increasingly few students at any university can be persuaded to lift their eyes from their smart phone screens to care about the world around them. The students who disrupted the board meeting reassure me that all is not lost. But I still find myself asking, does exercising their passion, which I applaud, entail actions that flirt with uncivil disobedience? I wish that conversations about this question could have stayed on the Swarthmore campus. The WSJ (especially the comments section which is itself a portrait of incivility and ad hominem attack) is not the place to address this issue. As for the sexual assault topic, I give President Chopp an A+ for how she is handling this issue. Swarthmore has actually come late to a problem that other universities have already confronted. I attribute that to the relative paucity of date rape on campus. Over the past twenty years, virtually all institutions of higher education have had to reassess their typically clunky reporting and adjudication processes. From seeing how this played out on my own campus, also with lawsuits, I well understand that the good intentions of the staff simply cannot preserve a clunky process from eventually failing and failing badly. Anyone who has had a student report date rape to them, as I and many other college professionals have, knows that such situations are extraordinarily complex and require finely-tuned protocols. President Chopp is to be applauded for hiring an outside firm skilled in best practices to advise the campus. All that has been learned on other campuses over the past twenty years, which this firm has tracked, will enable Swarthmore to develop protocols that reflect best practices and have the strongest chance of enabling the college to respond appropriately in the future.</p>