Swarthmore College - Halcyon Yearbook (Swarthmore, PA)

Page 19 text:

They don ' t talk about the giants anymore. There never were any giants, of course — they were something seniors reminisced about in the Vault or ML lounge when our freshmen ears were wide open. The last of them had always just graduated, and this post-giant Swarthmore in which we had to live was, we were told, a sorry relic of past glories. Streamlined, slick, teeny-boppers, fraternity types — that was what our class was supposed to be. We were the new breed. The old traditions — ML4, the old libes, Somerville, stretch — these were crumbling and the College was erecting shiny new dining halls, libraries, student centers in their place. New traditions would probably emerge — Dave Cohen in Halcyon ' 68 thought so. But they just wouldn ' t be the same. And besides, there were no more giants . . . Somehow, it didn ' t work out that way. Before any new traditions had time to get themselves established, the real world invaded Swarthmore. The real world: we used to speak of it with terror in our voices. It was somewhere out there, waiting for us, lurking around the corner of our diploma. Now it ' s here. All the time. It came by itself and Swarthmore probably won ' t get rid of it for a long while. The problem will be what to do about it. It was not always that way. Swarthmore used to be its own little world with its built-in set of problems and pleasures. The work load was un- bearable: eight seminars, no pass fail, distribution requirements. The facilities were lousy: the old libes and its dismal stacks, the dining hall in Parrish and the endless lines stretching out into the snow. You could never get away: no car authorizations, and besides, I ' ve got this paper due . . . And people complained (they had to: that was another tradition). In fact, they revelled in it. God, the social life of this place is awful. I hope I can work this deal at room choosing to get a double in ML next year; I hear they don ' t enforce the rules there. How can I read three thousand pages and write a paper between now and Monday? This food is terrible! That was the whole point. Everyone knows life has to contain some tsouris, and the Swarthmore universe contained its share. But they were limited problems, problems which students could handle, and problems which provided a basis for shared experience. People got fantastically in- volved in the Swarthmore culture, its hardships and its traditions, and came out either loving or hating the place. This sort of involvement became increasingly difficult as the world outside more and more intruded into our lives. Problems which had heretofore existed in abstract terms for most Swarthmore students became a part of their direct experience, and something with which they had to deal. Everyone had to face the draft. Everyone had to confront racism when SASS brought business-as-usual to a halt. Everyone had to think about the purpose of their education and the very nature of Swarthmore when Superweek or Nixon ' s invasion of Cambodia stopped normal proceedures. And after considering these huge and complex problems which were nevertheless immediate and pressing to us, and recognizing that they would neither submit themselves to simple solutions nor go away, it became harder to return to the difficulties and traditions which had formed the boundaries of the old Swarthmore. Every one of the College ' s administrators had left, and the President ' s office had been emptied by the tragedy of Courtney Smith ' s death. Perhaps it was this, more than any other single event, that impressed on us the urgency, immediacy, and importance of the problems with which we now had to deal. This was no game. It was very literally a matter of life and death. So the old traditions died. In the last four years Swarthmore has un- dergone a process of constant change. Remember when room choosing was like a political convention, with intrigues and coalitions and coups and disappointments? Remember when you had to sneak a bottle of beer up to your room because the proctors or house mothers believed in rules, while the proctors in ML were cautioning couples to please use the side stairs? Remember when the Hamburg Show was the big event of the fall? Those days are gone. They disappeared when the real world invaded Swarthmore. They disappeared when students could no longer think in terms of the difficulties of honors exams because they were thinking in terms of the difficulties of war, or the draft, or an unjust society, or an unlivable environment. They disappeared when we could no longer think of ourselves in the context of Swarthmore College alone, when that context was no longer a place where we could live and play and worry and tell old tales and laugh at ourselves and everyone else. So our experience with this place tended to be private. Some still liked it, some disliked it, but there was very little way to objectify our feelings. We complained, of course, but we couldn ' t feel satisfied ex- pending our emotional energy complaining only about Swarthmore. And we played stretch or worked on the Phoenix or took part in any number of other traditional things, but we somehow couldn ' t feel that they were important enough to warrant our fullest efforts or our complete involvement. We even tried to create traditions of our own to fill the gap, traditions associated with Tarbles, with the new library, with the various Superdays and weeks. But they just didn ' t work. Whether or not they ever would have become adequate replacements for the old traditions, the developing events in the society at large did not give us time to find out. We were thrown back on ourselves and our own private experience. What is Swarthmore? What will it be a year from now? For some of us, these questions are unanswerable. Swarthmore is not a clear quantity in my mind. I don ' t know where it is going or how it is changing. There is much reason for optimism, I believe, because the sorts of changes peop- le are engaged in making are vital and significant ones. But it is an op- timism somewhat in the abstract, a hope for Swarthmore which relies more upon my thoughts than upon my feelings. I am sure, having spent four years here (and especially after the last two) that the changes Swarthmore people make in the educational process of Swarthmore College will be intelligent and important ones. All of this, however, is a hope for the future. For our class, the old Swarthmore was gone and the new one hadn ' t arrived yet. But despite the fact that the old Swarthmore was no longer something in which we could actively participate, it still hung around—in the words of upperciassmen,in the dying ML mystique, in the last year of eight seminars, in the last year of the old libes. It still suggested to some of us a way of living and relating which had worked before and which touched upon something inside of us. It seemed to have something to do with the reasons for which we had decided to come to this school in the first place. It was no longer relevant to our activities in groups, our existence as a community — those were the new Swarthmore. But in our privacy and often in our loneliness, it got us. Then it left us. Michael Wing