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Swarthmore's sparks fly mainly from its famed honors program—President Aydelotte's enduring invention—which puts 40% of the upperclassmen in a literally classless battle with professors. Instead of taking formal courses, honors students spend 40 hours a week preparing papers for dissection at two weekly seminars that last for about 4½hours each and often take place at a professor's house, as his wife stands by with tea and sympathy.
For two years, honors students get no exams. Then outside scholars give eight three-hour written exams, followed by eight half-hour orals. Joined in common cause, teachers and students sweat out the results as the outsiders compile a single grade for each victim. "Most students who go on to graduate school," says one who did, "are quite prepared to say that Ph.D. examinations are pale shadows compared to that terrible fortnight at Swarthmore."
Teaching, Not Research. Since all this seems too good to change, Swarthmore is slow to try curriculum "reform." As an odd result, it still lacks sociology and anthropology departments, gives no credit courses in applied art, music or drama, although it throbs with extracurricular creativity. Violently antivocational, the college rejects early specialization even though most students go on to graduate school.
Swarthmore's strong suit is a faculty obsessed with teaching rather than big-time research. To find such rare professors, Swarthmore has raised faculty salaries 89% in ten years and now claims one of the ten best-paid faculties in the country. To make it even stronger, the Ford Foundation recently gave Swarthmore a challenge grant of $2,000,000, prodding the school to tap donors for a total target of $10 million.
Quiet Brooding. Chief credit for Swarthmore's current drive goes to President Courtney Craig Smith, 47, an Iowa-born Rhodes scholar with a Ph.D. from Harvard, who was teaching English at Princeton when Swarthmore picked him in 1953. A resolutely "academic president," meaning that he shuns fund raising, Smith is a fulltime faculty recruiter. He personally interviews even temporary instructors, says that "what it's all about is how to get a student and a teacher together and ensure that something exciting happens."
Intellectually afire, Swarthmoreans are socially tame. The college bans cars and liquor; if two students marry, one has to quit school. Mixed visiting in dormitories is confined to four hours on Sunday afternoon, with doors open.
Only about half the students date frequently, usually on campus. Last year someone proposed a committee called SMOG (Students for More Outright Gaiety). It died aborning. Swarthmore is big on folk music and oldtime movies, short on sick fads like LSD. Swarthmoreans prefer quiet brooding. "The most casual-looking kids are going through the most intense self-examination," says one casual-looking coed.