I had a brief feeling of deja vu as I set out to write about a May 31st article about the gradual elimination of swim tests in higher education in the Chronicle of Higher Education. “I’ve written about this before, haven’t I?” Not here and not at my older blog, it turns out, but instead at least twice in Facebook threads discussing the swim test at my own institution, Swarthmore College. Probably more than twice, actually.
What I find myself having to do when the subject comes up is to correct the (many!) alumni who believe that the only reason we have a swim test is because very long ago the child of a very wealthy alumnus died in a drowning accident, which led to a gift to the college that was conditionally tied to instituting and maintaining a swim test as a graduation requirement. That’s not the case. This bit of folklore also turns out to be what students and alumni at every institution that has or has had a swim test believe about their own institution.
It’s an impossible belief to correct, like a lot of folklore. If I push long enough in a given conversation, eventually many people attached to this explanation of the swim test will switch to an alternative rationale for requiring it: it will save lives, everyone should know how to swim. Folks who’ve learned to swim because of the requirement generally are appreciative that they were made to do so—it’s always good to go from not knowing how to do something to knowing how to do it, on some level.
Sure, it’s a useful skill, but the moment we switch to that lane for discussion, we have to ask why swimming should be the only practical life skill that elite colleges and universities have included in their general education requirements, a point often made when faculties have to talk about whether to keep a swim requirement. Drowning is a major cause of unintentional death in the United States, but mostly for small children. If you’ve made it to 18, drowning falls further down the list and there’s a huge margin between drowning and the top two: car accidents and poisonings. Poisoning includes drug and alcohol overdoses, which explains its dominant position. If you were going to require teaching life skills with an aim to reducing unintentional fatalities, putting a swim test ahead of requiring extended driver’s education and intensive drug and alcohol education doesn’t make a ton of sense. Or, if you were going to argue that you should know how to swim in order to feel comfortable rescuing your own future children, then we should focus on swimming and rescue, because knowing the former doesn’t necessarily entail being capable of the latter. That much stuck with me after a summer of Junior Lifeguard on the beaches of Southern California: if you just swim out to a drowning person or child, you might end up drowning with them.
If you were going to take a bigger view of mortality for college students and young adults, you’d want almost as much attention to murder and suicide, especially the latter. Why not a mandatory class on mental health? Or vice-versa, since many colleges and universities offer a lot of resources aimed at mental health and drug and alcohol abuse that are voluntary, why not the same for swimming? Encourage but don’t require?
If you’re going to decide that life skills are an important requirement, why stop at safety or the reduction of death and injury? Why not require a course on personal finance, for example? Or a course where students coming from wealthy backgrounds are forced to learn about what it’s like to survive on the minimum wage? The rationalization of the swim test as addressing a missing life skill that some students have just not had the opportunity to acquire applies equally to many other things. Once you start to consider it, you realize that this can’t be a legitimate reason to require all matriculating students to show they know how to swim by the time they graduate.
So why do these institutions have swim tests? (Thirty years ago, far more of them did. Today it’s down to a handful.) There are three non-folkloric answers, two of which kind of bleed into one another. The first, offered by Cornell University (which claims to have had the first swim test in higher education, in 1905) is that male students in the early 20th Century often had to do military drills, and that US military organizations increasingly expected enlisted soldiers to be able to swim. But that easily overlaps another line of causal explanation, which is that required swim tests were tied to eugenics and ideas about promoting physical fitness among whites as part of “race hygiene”. This is often put more politely in various journalistic summaries of the rise and fall of the swim test: “the country experienced bouts of anxiety over physical fitness”. The third explanation also overlaps somewhat: that swim tests defined the white male middle to upper-middle class student who had either attended a secondary school with a pool or who (after 1945) grew up in a suburban setting where access to home pools were common as the “norm”. That seems more like an explanation of the swim test’s longevity, however.
There’s another thing to consider, which is the way that elite colleges and universities imitate one another, a pattern that goes back into the 19th Century. What that means is that sometimes you see a practice spread through many institutions where the fundamental explanation is simply “the other guys are doing it”. What you get in those cases is often that later adopters just make up an explanation for why they are instituting a new requirement or rule, often just cribbing or copying what they’ve heard others say. I think this is why it’s actually so hard to find evidence in the archives of various institutions about the concrete, specific moment where they decided to have a swim test requirement—it was just done by fiat by someone with authority over physical education or student life, without discussion, because it was deemed important for conforming to some imagined standard. (This might explain why in 1991, Columbia University’s faculty was surprised to even find out that there was such a requirement.) And as with many things that institutions started doing a long time ago for no particular reason, there’s often someone today who perceives their job security to be tied to the continuation of that practice who will resist any reconsideration of it.
I think this more than anything else also points to another deeper reason that many people hesitate to get rid of a swim test requirement, despite the fact that the common justifications are incoherent. It’s a ritual. Colleges and universities are full of rituals of uncertain provenance and questionable justification. The value of many of those rituals is the way they perform the historicity of the institution, the sense of connection between the present life of the institution, the living past that feels connected to it, and the dead who are names on buildings, memorial statues, and paintings on the walls.
The sentimental power of institutional ritual can be a way to hide and defend concretely malevolent or abusive histories: it’s the way some people move strategically to defend Confederate memorials or fight to keep unhallowed names on buildings. “It’s part of tradition,” they say—a claim that both values the feel of historicity while derogating the actual history of how a statue like “Silent Sam” was erected in the first place. Here ritual and tradition serve to make mythic what is in fact quite concretely knowable. The mythification of tradition pretends to defang a serpent that is still injecting its venom into the body politic. In many other cases, the traditional character of ritual is used to continue violent and awful abuses like hazing (whether in fraternities or otherwise) and to put those abuses outside the space of justification or choice. “We have to,” say the current students or faculty, “it’s a tradition”. (A point that is often given even more power by alumni, wealthy or not, who insist that nothing should change from when they were students.)
But I also think ritual is important in academic life, and it does create a kind of strange covenant between us and what has come before. Universities and colleges are not politically conservative in the current American sense, but they are conservators on some level of what they’ve produced and done. We wear regalia, which are silly and profound all at once. At our various campuses we honor This Day or That Event. Students pull elaborate pranks, scream at the midnight moon, run naked around a quad, dance around the maypole and hand off lanterns. Sometimes these rituals live only for a little while, tied to the moment they were introduced. Nude runs became common in the 1970s; most of them have since disappeared. My alma mater’s annoyingly self-righteous president took aim at Zonker Harris Day, where marijuana smoking often was prevalent. (Admittedly, given the major drug scandal there seven years after the ritual was discouraged, he may have had a point.) There’s some value in a ritual that is mostly silly, largely without coherent justification, and which reeks of history without actually tying anyone down to it.
Is that what a swim test is? It’s not very common now to require participation in rituals. Even when it was, there were always students, faculty and staff who simply couldn’t stand their pomposity or ridiculousness. (It’s an identity in its own right, to grumble and eye-roll at the margins, to disdain the profligacy of some ceremony.) And even the most innocent and harmlessly silly of rituals make some people feel their outsider status. Sometimes nobody knows why everyone is wearing a crown of flowers and bright pink sunglasses at the dining hall but some people manage to wear them as if they know and others try to be good sports but feel as if everyone is staring at them all the time. (Nobody is, usually.) I can see my way to thinking about a swim test in this light, but I can’t really talk myself into holding on to it. It’s not just that its history may not be innocent, it’s that there is a non-zero set of people who find it humiliating to be required to something that they might under other circumstance be willing to voluntarily learn.
Image credit: Photo by Dallas Morgan on Unsplash
If I were making a safety requirement, it would be learning how to fall safely. As I understand it, people are apt to remember how to fall safely, and it could serve them well in later life.
I find this sort of amusing, because I've sat in a whole bunch of meetings recently where people have earnestly discussed plans to add formal instruction in the kinds of "life skills" areas you toss out as counterfactuals to our "residential curriculum." It never occurred to me to make the analogy between those and the swim test/ PE requirements at my alma mater.