We are writing as alumni/ae from the classes scheduled to hold their reunions in 2025 who have been saddened and outraged as we have watched Swarthmore abandon its principles over the last year and a half. We have watched as students protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the college’s financial complicity in it have been met with repression at every turn. We have been shocked by Swarthmore’s protest crackdown, which has included a new, draconian code of conduct, disciplinary action against two dozen students for peaceful protest, and the suspension of a student for the use of a bullhorn. We have learned that these punitive actions have been disproportionately directed against the college’s Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students, contributing to an atmosphere of exclusion and fear and leading students and faculty in conjunction with CAIR Philadelphia to take the extraordinary step of filing a Title VI discrimination case against the college.
None of these actions represent the college that we chose to attend. That college took pride in its commitment to social justice, in encouraging such a commitment in its students, and its history of student protest (including bullhorns and building occupations) for civil rights, against the Vietnam War, against South African Apartheid, for a living wage, and against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The college’s website, at the time of writing this letter, includes pages on the 1969 Black Student Protest Movement and the 1982 Divestment from Apartheid, noting that the college had endorsed the Sullivan Principles since 1978 and that student activism “significantly improved Swarthmore for the better.” In recent years, that activism took the shape of a powerful movement against a culture of impunity for sexual assault, as students occupied and shut down Swarthmore’s fraternities.
Swarthmore's history also includes attempts at repression. For example, in the late 1960s, when organizers challenged the college's admissions practices in relation to Black students, the administration retaliated by publicly releasing personal information of Black Swarthmore students, among other intimidatory actions. Now, the college must choose which tradition it will follow: its publicly declared values of "peace, equity, and social responsibility," or the path of repression, retaliation, and complicity.
The stakes of Swarthmore’s repression of political dissent have grown even more dangerous with the arrival of the new Trump administration. Political repression on college campuses has increasingly dire consequences, ranging from arrest to the loss of potential jobs to deportation for non-citizens. And by charging some student protest as violent acts, Swarthmore is not only revealing its complicity with the current administration but also jeopardizing its eligibility for future student visas.
Swarthmore has shown that it is not the college that we believed it was, and so we will be boycotting our reunion this year, and/or we will not donate any money to the college until:
It drops all charges and sanctions against student protesters
It reinstates the student(s) who was (were) suspended
It revokes the recent harsh changes to the code of conduct
It commits to allowing free expression on campus
