We explore a project that traces the history of Swarthmore’s international students and how that cohort enriches the fabric of the College (p.32).

And lastly, the beautiful Crum photographed here by newly graduated Howard Wang ’26. Shaping and reshaping the edges of its banks, the waterway meanders through just a 0.3-square-mile portion of the 38-square-mile Crum Creek watershed.

This spring, staff, students, faculty, and citizens volunteered to clean it, amassing approximately 80 bags of garbage and invasive plant species.

“The annual Crum Creek Cleanup is critical to protecting not only Swarthmore College’s portion of the Crum Creek watershed, but also the broader ecosystem downstream,” says Beck Armstrong, assistant horticulture supervisor. By removing pollution, reducing harm to wildlife, and helping preserve the largest cold water fishery and native trout population among three local creeks, this effort has a lasting environmental impact and contributes to the health of our local waterways, she says.

All of our efforts can have an impact, often unseen. In these pages, be inspired by how Swarthmore takes on that challenge daily. That is also a milestone worth celebrating.

In the fall of 2002, then-Associate Dean Myrt Westphal assigned Nelson and Zummo, and Goddard and Muller, as roommates in side-by-side rooms. The four clicked right away — not that they were going in cold.

Nelson had already tracked down Zummo, calling the self-described “socially inept” teenager on her father’s business line from Minnesota to introduce herself before move-in. Zummo wasn’t quite sure what to make of the bold gesture.

The award, presented to Putnam by the American Philosophical Society, is in recognition of his “rigorous empirical research to identify and analyze central challenges facing democracy in the 21st century.” The Thomas Jefferson Medal is the Society’s highest award for the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

“To be put in the same class as Toni Morrison, I.M. Pei, Albert Hirschman, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and George Kennan is not merely an honor, but a surprise almost as great as having been admitted to Swarthmore 67 years ago,” says Putnam.

or the swarthmore women’s swimming program, Sunday, Feb. 22, 2026 was business as usual: during the final day of the Centennial Conference (CC) Championships, the Garnet claimed their fifth straight CC crown with record-shattering performances and NCAA qualifying times. Quinn Weygandt ’26 was named Most Outstanding Performer for the third season in a row.

Zooming out shows a different picture, one that illustrates how the Garnet have developed the team depth and mental resilience characteristic of a top Division III program.

A blizzard forecasted to bring over a foot of snow to the region forced the conference to compress the preliminary and final swims for each event into one single final.

n the home city of soccer, cricket, and tennis, pitching a baseball is an esoteric skill — a little like calligraphy or lockpicking.

That didn’t stop Matteo Sollecito ’23, who learned to fire a pitch on makeshift diamonds in muddy London parks in a country where the sport is all but invisible.

“I was named captain my senior year, which was an honor for some of those achievements and work I put in that 2022 year,” he says.

In 2025, Sollecito won the Laureate Award, given by the nationwide engineering honor society Tau Beta Pi to students who exemplify a “spirit of liberal culture” and excel beyond academics. For Sollecito, the distinction stemmed from representing Great Britain at the 2023 World Baseball Classic.

“I wanted to prove myself,” says Sollecito, whose American father introduced him to the sport in the U.K. “I wanted to show that a British boy can succeed in baseball in the U.S.”

“People have no idea,” says Celia Caust-Ellenbogen ’09, a curator at the Friends Historical Library who initiated the College’s support for the effort to recognize the site with a state historical marker.

Today on the 3200 block of Chestnut Street stands a glass and concrete landscape. A massive building, housing a student center and a series of storefronts, dominates the block. It’s the type of place Penn and Drexel students go for a hamburger or a haircut. The new historical plaque soon will make clear there’s more to the story.

Michael Ugwe ’25 tells this story about himself with a smile. The sweltering heat for which he was unprepared prefigured deeper questions about the international student experience that he went on to explore through a collaborative storytelling project — one to which he hopes many international Swarthmore alumni will contribute.

When Kathryn Melvin came to Swarthmore in 2022 to take on the role of international student coordinator (she is now the College’s student and scholar immigration specialist) she was curious about the history of international students at Swarthmore. Melvin wondered whether their stories might serve as a bridge to strengthen connections between past, present, and future students.

“It feels surreal,” says Enkhtaivan, who goes by Nara to her American friends. In Mongolia, Enkhtaivan would refer to Nara’a father. “It’s such a full circle moment. Inside I’m still that 18-year-old girl who just got accepted to Swarthmore.”

Nara is the first Mongolian student from a public high school ever to be accepted into Harvard. She chose Swarthmore instead, drawn by its Educational Studies Department. She grew up in Mongolia’s capital city, Ulaanbaatar, and lives there today.

magine this: A realistic AI-generated video appears online of the president announcing a military strike on a nuclear-armed adversary. It circulates on fringe accounts, but then it’s reposted by influencers with millions of followers. Cable news speculates. Stock markets crash. Russia and China raise their military readiness. By the time the White House denies the video’s authenticity, the damage has been done. Conspiracy theories abound. Many suspect a cover-up.

Not long ago, this scenario might have been dismissed as science fiction. But it’s now plausible — and one of many deepfake risks that concern computer scientist Sukrit Venkatagiri.

A panicked voice on the phone that sounds like your brother asks for thousands of dollars. A fake sexually explicit video of a public official is posted on X. A Fortune 500 CEO announces she is resigning in disgrace, tanking the stock price. In a society already weakened by distrust, deepfakes threaten to tip the balance.

Sitting in the familiar rehearsal space on the second floor of 715 Harvard Ave on a recent spring day, Alston was focused less on endings than on the three spring performances that remained, before his final concert on Alumni Weekend. What matters most to him now is the music itself — making these last performances worthy of the children’s efforts, and of the program he built.

“I want these shows to be the best shows ever,” he says, “and for me to be the best musician I’ve ever been at my last show.” That focus on craft over ceremony feels characteristic of Alston, whose career has been defined less by sentimentality than by steady, relentless work. Even as retirement approaches for him this summer, he speaks less about legacy than momentum.

The Committee for the Abolition of Slavery, based in England, adopted English potter and entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood’s design, which is featured on the body of this bowl. The phrase, “Am I not a man and a brother?” paired with an image of a Black person in chains became a central feature of many abolitionist objects after its coinage in 1787.

“For Quakers, consumption was political and often associated with the ethic of ‘plainness,’ but it was also deeply personal,” says Visiting Assistant Professor Art History Susan Eberhard ’09. Students in Object, Media, Matter: Introduction to Material Culture and Material Histories collaborated with the Friends Historical Library to research and curate an exhibition drawn from their objects collections. The sugar bowl is both a unique and common piece of abolitionist history that reveals how material and ideological circulation were functioning during the time of its production, 1847.

It was sent to a Philadelphia-based anti-slavery fair by Queen Victoria. It was then purchased by a Mrs. Thomas Jenkins. Anti-slavery fairs were very common in the U.S., being used by abolitionist communities as a way to disseminate political values and ideals.

How did your interests in dance and anthropology intersect?

Dance has always been part of my life. I grew up in Kolkata and trained in different styles before specializing in Kathak. As I learned, I became aware of histories, especially women’s histories, that had been erased. Anthropology gave me a way to study dance critically, connecting movement, culture, and history. At a time when non-Western dance was rarely studied in universities, anthropology — and later visual anthropology at Temple University, where I finished my dissertation — offered the ideal interdisciplinary framework, allowing me to explore ritual, performance, and ethnographic film as vital expressions of culture.