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Some things never change. Magill Walk will always lead from the railroad tracks to Parrish Hall, you ' ll always need a key to climb Clothier tower on bright spring days, the Crum will always be beautiful in the winter, more beautiful in the spring, and mosquito-infested in Sep- tember. The food in the dining hall will never really be good enough, Swarthmore students will always play stretch in the spring. The basket- ball team will always lose. So wrote Dave Cohen for HALCYON 1968. He was right. But some things change — and this year the chorus might well have been: Most things change. The year of the reports was left behind; the Superweek of 1967 was a one shot deal. The year of real implementation was at hand — only six seminars, pass-fail here and there, and a ravenna stashed away some- where in the closet. A noble attempt to broaden our lives— with both ur- ban sociology and 14th century mon- estaries. Yes, some things change. That peace- ful transition was background, though. The freshmen and sopho- mores viewed it as a given thing — for the rest of us, it was only half an education worth of small change. It was only qualitative, and chameleon- like when it pleased. Seminars still had indefinite reading lists, the librar- ians still acted like frustrated Prus- sian bureaucrats, PE was still there (although, if you were a boy and wore a beard, you were magnanimously ex- tended the privilege of going out and sweating for an athletic team,) and the papers were just as long as ever. We came back in the fall to find a department of Art History, to see the Knack, to throw a frisbee, to register and listen to the gods of Olympus be- ing invoked at the meeting of honors students. All that was routine. But we came to participate in a change and a process. We would not leave the same Swarthmore. President Smith had officially retired. We watched, at a distance, as a com- mittee was set up to choose his re- placement. We watched more closely and participated, when it finally came time to discuss the Student Life Re- port. Funny. we thought, that the faculty and administration should be dealing ultimately with our report ' The faculty members we knew all said they didn ' t want the final say. The administration said it only cared about institutional interests. (What the hell are those, anyway?) Funny that it took a year longer to get to this report than it did to get to the other two. All that, of course, was but of mild interest. We rolled over and yawned lightly at those on other campuses who were so depraved as to view such mundane issues as cause for dismay. We. the first generation (and the last) of the all-Hargadon Swarthmore, the generation that finally learned that ML 4 wasn ' t all that important, were concerned to sit back and play real politics. We backed )oe Clark with words, time, money. He lost. We were beaten in Chicago before we came, some of us; all of us were beaten in November (except the 15 out of 1024 of us, who in a campus poll voted for Nixon.) It wasn ' t that we loved Humphrey, and his politics of joy- not in the face of Vietnam, poverty, and all; we just hated Nixon and Wal- lace. That ' s all. This WE sounds monolithic, doesn ' t it? It was, for a while, as we watched the beard rule go, the pet rule go and come back, the question of stu- dent observers come — and go- rejected. The year ended. Students had ob- served faculty meetings — after a f ash- ion. The Student Life Report was approved — after a fashion; to our sat- isfaction—after a fashion. (Dorm autonomy? Drinking? So what?) The Board of Managers rejected a faculty resolution for the first time in memory, and we had pulled together. SAC had walked out on itself. Ashton was male, and Wharton F was female. A task force had been set up to study gov- ernance of the college. The University City Science Center had been con- quered. The faculty had rejected our conclave. The basketball team had lost -except to Haverford-and we had taken the Hood Trophy. Collec- tion was now optional, WSRN was hoping to go FM, and Cutting Collec- tion had been evicted from Bond bv of all people, the Debating Society A normal year, full of normal, progres- sive changes. We were ready to go home. We were advised at graduation (if we attended) that wholesale ad- vice is for bishops and the like... laughter is the best advice to con- tribute. Most of us went home. All that was not what changed Swarthmore. Swarthmore changed because we all changed. We changed in our own ways. Some of us were radicalized, some dropped out, some moderated. We squabbled, bickered, fought, met and hashed. Some of us sat in the Admissions Office, thought, wrote statements. Most of us were fighting for something, somewhere, in Janu- ary, 1969. We had our own crisis. Some thought of it only as a learning experience; others wanted real-world results. The roots were deep — dating over all of Swarthmore ' s liberal history, and fastened in her standards. The Ad- missions Policy Committee and SASS gradually came at each other over a period of three months. Then the take- over, the faculty action, the abrupt end. Both sides were victorious, in a qualitative sense. 31 blacks were in- cluded in the class of 1973. SASS had won some of the recognition it sought. No standards were relaxed. The Black Studies program survived. We learned what it takes to precipi- tate a crisis; we learned what a crisis precipitates. We were tense, confused, even blind at times. But now we at least knew we always had been tense, confused, and blind at times. We knew more of what we had not understood. Of course there were doom-sayers, but there were few. We had confronted each other and ourselves, and we had all won. There were, from the beginning, things that set this crisis apart from all others. No threats, guns, break- down of communication. No hostility, backbiting, withdrawal. No punish- ment, or any need for it. And very little bitterness in the end. A crisis uniquely Swarthmore.
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