Swarthmore College

Academics:

With regard to any politically relevant topics, this place is as closed-minded as a community of stereotypical rednecks, except extremist liberal. I considered myself very liberal coming here; after seeing all the debauchery, ignorant argumentation, and naivity that this kind of extremist thinking brings, I have to consider myself a conservative only at this school.

I have trouble introducing new ideas or ways of thinking into the community because of this narrow-mindedness. And if they're not liberal enough, I get compared to fascists or various other historical oppressors.

The range of academic considerations is highly limited even in the classroom. If a class is not entirely obscure (such as 18th century lesbians in a village in France) then what is being examined by the department is. For example, there is no evolutionary psychology in the Psych department. There is no non-European philosophy AT ALL in the philosophy department (I had originally planned to be a philosophy major, but not after discovering their complete dismissal of the entire world's development of philosophy).

The sciences are strong in a strict academic sense, and much growth, but my seminar experience so far seems like lazy teaching: most seminars are simply the students giving presentations on various topics! If you think big University X was bad in having graduate school TAs teach, think about how ridiculous it is when only UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS TEACH. Or, I had to do graduate level work in designing and writing an experiment proposal. Yes, it was the proudest thing I had ever done, but I had received NO HELP AT ALL in doing it! Sure, if you gather a bunch of perfectionist hyper-motivated competitive students and give them something impossible to do, you’re going to get results no matter how bad (or absent) the teaching is. And that’s exactly what happens here.

Finally, the most infamous aspect of Swarthmore academics is its ‘rigorous’ grading. But ladies and gentlemen, this is not reasonable rigorous grading. The difference between grades often arises more to luck and random chance rather than anything else, because everyone’s academic talent and efforts are so close to each other’s. I remember when a professor decided that there were too many As (despite having been able to select her students based on interest in her subject as a result of over enrollment) and shifted all grades down exactly 1%. This was enough to go from half the class having A- and above, to less than 15% of the class having A- and above. Way to go. And no, graduate schools and medical schools and lawsuits DON’T compensate for the hard grading. That is a myth.

Social life:

Swarthmore has all the negatives of a small community environment but none of the good ones. Everyone is so damn busy with their own academic or political agenda that they leave no time to meaningfully socialize, but they spend their scant free time on the only source of socializing available: club-style parties at the same place, with the same music, and the same fifty people that attend weekend after weekend seeking a desperate hookup.

Swarthmore students as a whole also lack moral standards, and the administration is complicit in this. Men have gone streaking and actively harassed women, but were never punished. I myself have been the victim of vandalizing when a man I had never met before had gone into my room and destroyed my laptop. This person was never punished.

Some advice: if you must have some law enforcement or are in danger, skip Public Safety. Call the police.

People are only superficially friendly here, and very much in a passive-aggressive manner. I cannot say the number of times people have seemed friendly to me, to find that they have talked trash behind your back a number of times. This can affect your academic performance as well; students working in groups have gone to professors to underhandedly complain about other students in their groups without having confronted that student in the first place. And professors, like the students, lack the social intelligence to consider personal biases, group polarization, scapegoating, or other social factors.

Of course, there’s the most obvious fact about this place. Everyone lacks social skills. Yes, like most academics, and indeed, including me, but the problem is similar to that of bringing a large number of mentally ill patients to an asylum - without a normal environment, they’ll only get crazier. That’s the same with Swarthmore. The basic social skills I had coming in have degrading badly due to having just absorbed the social culture around here.

Why am I still here? I tried to transfer, but I realized that my GPA was too low to get out of here. Great.

I didn’t go to one of the best high schools on the West Coast and get to the top just to come here and be treated like this. I am greatly disappointed in Swarthmore.