Pursuing Excellence

Alfred Bloom is the President of Swarthmore College. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1974 in psychology and social relations; was a Fulbright-Hays fellow for study in France from 1967-1968; and received a BA from Princeton University, summa cum laude, in Romance languages and European civilization in 1967.

In a move to improve the long-term quality of Swarthmore College's athletic program, the Board of Managers acted to reduce from 24 to 21 the number of intercollegiate teams supported by the college. Swarthmore now plays 21 intercollegiate sports and no longer offers wrestling, football, or women's badminton at the intercollegiate level. Swarthmore is a very small college, comprised of approximately 1400 undergraduates and faculty members.

The decision to end the football program was extremely controversial and received a great deal of notice in the press. This is what the President had to say about this decision:

I see the decision as being principally motivated by a desire to create an athletic program that will give students across sports a sense of quality of play, a sense of accomplishment, and a chance of actually being successful in competition that they are looking for. That's one hand. And on the other hand allowing that to be the case. At the same time as allowing us to continue the diversity of the class that we want in terms of having the heterogeneity of student population that we want for the kind of education that we feel is important. And in order to have - and this is having to do with rigor and excellence in everything - our kids in most of our sports were feeling, particularly the men's sports, were feeling that they just didn't have the sense of quality and accomplishment that they had hoped to find at Swarthmore and that they had trained for as part of what they were doing in their high school careers.

And there was - and in order to have that kind of experience of quality and excellence you have in the current world, which is unfortunate, but is the case, it's more specialized in every area, in biology and economics, and athletics, you've got to recruit a certain number of students for each sport to provide leadership in that sport. And then you get kids who are really accomplished in the sport and they provide a level of excellence and quality so that everybody feels that. Well, you can't do it with only 370 students in each year for 24 sports. And you certainly can't do it if one of them is football which takes 21 males alone without cutting back on a lot of other men's sports.

And so we looked at the situation and decided we wanted a quality experience. And there were two choices, either you take more kids in terms of athletic talent as opposed to other kinds of talents in addition to being intellectually engaged and exciting and ethically responsible individuals because that's ... the basis of anyone we take. But in addition to that you want to take some kids who are interested in music and other kids who are interested in engineering and other kids who have a lot of experience in social change in poor communities and they do overlap some, but they don't overlap as much as would allow you to fill your athletic teams with leadership unless you recruit specifically taking athletic talent into account.

And we decided that we couldn't - that would be right for the school is to take 15 percent of decisions or so in admissions in which we take athletic talent into account as compared to other kinds of talents. And with 15 percent there is no way to have enough leadership for 24 sports. And so it's about creating a sense of diverse community, and at the same time having excellence in everything you do...

So, there are people who were very unhappy about it and construed some of the process differently from what I just said. But, I think there are plenty of facts to substantiate what we all think we did, and what the board thinks we did. And it's, I don't know what, I think what's important here is that people come to realize and that's what we're working on now, that it really was about providing excellence.

...It's made it, made me feel all the more that this school needs to represent leadership in being the place that demands quality, that demands educational excellence, and that educates people to see sometimes that requires change in order to preserve that mission. ... in athletics because of the degree of specialization that's taking place if you want to have excellence you have to have actually fewer teams. Because you've got only 370 kids in a class and you can't take too many where athletic consideration is an essential part of the admissions decision.