Dear President Smith:

I am a second-generation alumna of Swarthmore College. Your recent attacks on the free speech rights of Swarthmore students have stunned and saddened me. On March 26, immediately after learning about your discipline – including suspensions – of Swarthmore students for engaging in protests, I telephoned your office and left a message pleading that you reverse course.

My phone call was never acknowledged, and since then you have doubled down in your assault on free speech. This letter is to reiterate how disappointed I am in the decisions of your administration to crush Swarthmore’s historic, honorable and distinctive tradition of protest.

It was painful to watch the jack-booted, methodical removal by more than 30 police of peaceful Swarthmore protestors and their encampment. In your May 3 email to alumni, you downplayed the enforcers as “Swarthmore borough police” when in fact borough police were joined by police from seven other jurisdictions. Your email trotted out the now-familiar excuse that non-students had joined the protest, omitting that many were former students. I shuddered at your admission of collaboration with the FBI. Was the renunciation of Swarthmore’s proud role in exposing the illegal FBI COINTELPRO investigations in the 1960s deliberate? And your criticism of the protestors for wearing face masks? How can anyone countenance disciplining students for that when masked federal ICE agents are terrorizing immigrants throughout the country? When else in history have armed government officials disguised their identity?

Despite the excuse that you feared for the “safety” of the campus community, there is no evidence that any protestor physically harmed a single person at the College. You decried “abhorrent statements” when surely you know that we cherish the First Amendment precisely because it protects unpopular speech.

Before your initiation of this repressive era, Swarthmore celebrated its proud tradition of activism and protest. Previous Swarthmore leaders saluted the Swarthmore Afro-American Student Society, SASS, for forcing Swarthmore to address our country’s grievous racial history more than 50 years ago. Later activists agitated for the College’s endowment to divest from South Africa, fossil fuels and private prisons. Swarthmore protestors vigorously opposed the Vietnam war, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, gender discrimination, economic inequality and lawless fraternities. Swarthmore students have previously been praised, not punished, for unwelcome speech and disruptive protests.

By contrast, your tenure has seen the unprecedented suspension of Students for Justice at Palestine and the modification of the Code of Conduct / Student Handbook to make it harder to protest and easier to punish those courageous enough to attempt it.

I was proud that Swarthmore appointed a black woman to lead the college in 2015. When in 2021 you established the President’s Fund for Racial Justice in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, I thought, “Yes! President Smith is exactly the right leader for Swarthmore at this time in history.” That makes it even more tragic how profoundly you have failed to meet this moment in history. You will be remembered for extinguishing Swarthmore’s proud tradition of courageous protest. Your presidency will be defined by the repression of free speech and the welcome of police interference. I am struck by the irony of your collaboration with an administration that would instantly dismiss you, for all your remarkable accomplishments, as a “DEI hire”.

The current leaders of Columbia University have condemned themselves to the contempt of history for their cruel persecution of free speech and appeasement of the Trump administration. I beg you not to join their craven company. Swarthmore’s reputation as a student-focused bastion of progressive thought, liberal values, robust debate and tolerance of diversity is in tatters.

It is your desecration of free speech that I have criticized up to now. However, your actions on May 3 have provoked me to point out that you are also on the wrong side of history. Instead of suspending, expelling and deporting the brave student protestors, we all should fall on our knees in gratitude for their efforts to stop the carnage in Palestine. If they shout truth to power with a megaphone, so much the better.

I have not previously called for Swarthmore to divest its endowment from the callous corporations who profit from the occupation in Palestine because I am aware that it can involve complicated calculations of a company’s revenues. However, given your escalation of harm to Swarthmore students, I am now asking for sweeping remedial measures from you and your administration, including rescission of all criminal charges and discipline, reversal of your Code of Conduct / Student Handbook changes, restoration of the Student Justice for Palestine organization and divestment.

My mother was a 1950 Swarthmore graduate. She and my father donated annually to Swarthmore all their lives. When I applied to colleges in 1973, I was fortunate to be admitted everywhere I submitted an application, including Harvard and Princeton. My father, himself a Princeton grad, believed so profoundly in Swarthmore that he prevailed on me to choose to matriculate there. I have never regretted it until now.

For several years I conducted on behalf of Swarthmore applicant interviews of prospective students in the West. I was eager to tell them “I loved it there.” Unless you take the restorative justice measures outlined above, I will never say those words again.

With sorrow and dismay,

/signed/

Kathleen MacKenzie ‘78