Swarthmore College - Halcyon Yearbook (Swarthmore, PA)

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Restructuring Society: a view from the admissions office . ' ' Take it as given that out of twenty-nine-hundred-odd appli£a| tioris the College could admit any kind of freshman clasjpp wishes. What sort of class shall it be? Whose wishes shall JtW decisions reflect? What pressures shall prevail? the Director of Athletics? Shall we put Swarthmore on the rna| as ah athletic power? The Alumni Office? What better goal thai keeping Friends and friends of the College happy and, in a period ; of financial crisis, for the private independent colleges, perhaps even open-handed? Our image? Keep one jump ahead of t tellectua! Joneses? Lift that average, raise that median score! SASS and AHBAC? We have our social consciences to thi So what if liberal has become a dirty word. We ' re committe viable Black community, Keep that minority and that diss raged enrollment climbing. (Block that backlash!) And what about those med school admissions horror s,t] Better dig through that pile of near-rejects and come up some sons and daughters of med school faculty. The classics? Can ' t let them die. Music? Trumpets aren ' t; good without trombones. Watch out! Not too many altosfi chorus. Engineers? All those buildings, all that equipment, faculty. Let them stand idle? Never. Chemists and psycholc Economists and English majors. Mathematics and mode.ri;™.. guages. Biology, sociology, political science, and art. Stop. Don ' t compartmentalize. This is a college not a graduate school: Just hold out for general academic excellence. After all there art people here who still think that when all the re-ordering of pfipri ties is no longer fashionable education ' s first order of bu will still be education. Wait a minute. That ' s a short-term view. Think beyond tha years in the Swarthmore womb to men and women who make an outstanding contribution to their communities, to their: country, to the world. Leaders in embryo. Admissions is a predie; hon— Prediction with a capital Came Theory. But what kind of world? Leaders for what? Listen to Tensor. Social committment and political activism are the only relevant criteria. What? A Whole treshman class enrolled in Philosophy 10? Don ' t you know those rads are out to destroy the College? „ C ° U n .K yOU i ust admil a few of these and a couple of those; some of this and some of that? Compromise. Try to keep every- body a little bit happy. You can call it diversity. That has a dig- nified and principled ring to it And the applicant? Is he a pawn in some kind of pol hpK 0, l? ' - K ' o ' og ' ral chess game? What about the pel. m«h„ P per? Does he have n ° claim to make on -...- „ s , in intelligent human being? Try somehow to find in that Ho thi. freque y contradictory evidence the piece of inforr thine ' V ll y »ho ' s got, or can get, his ov thing together, whatever hat may be. Somebody who, as som Nkelv n »n„ ' n an0t , her context ' is authentic. Who else is mo kely, ,n any meaningful sense, to restructure society?