In England, Swarthmoor Hall near the town of Ulverston, Cumbria, (previously in Lancashire), was the home of Thomas and Margaret Fell in 1652 when George Fox, (1624–1691), fresh from his epiphany atop Pendle Hill in 1651, came to visit.

[17] His daughter, Helen Magill, (1853–1944), was in the first class to graduate in 1873; in 1877, she was the first woman in the United States to earn a Ph.D.[18] In the early 1900s, the college had a major collegiate American football program during the formation period of the soon-to-be nationwide sport (playing Navy, Princeton, Columbia and other larger schools) and an active fraternity and sorority life.

[19] The 1921 appointment of Frank Aydelotte as president began the development of the school's current academic focus, particularly with his vision for the Honors program based on his experience as a Rhodes Scholar.

[21] Wolfgang Köhler, Hans Wallach, and Solomon Asch were noted psychologists who became professors at Swarthmore, a center for Gestalt psychology.

[10] In 1999 the college began purchasing renewable energy credits in the form of wind power, and in the 2002–2003 academic year it constructed its first green roof.

[29] Uncommon for a liberal arts college, Swarthmore has an engineering program in which, at the completion of four years' work, students are granted a B.S.

Swarthmore was also placed on The Princeton Review's Financial Aid Honor Roll along with twelve other institutions for receiving the highest possible rating in its ranking methodology.

[9] Swarthmore ended a $230 million capital campaign on October 6, 2006, when President Bloom declared the project completed, three months ahead of schedule.

[58] At the end of 2007, the Swarthmore Board of Managers approved the decision for the college to eliminate student loans from all financial aid packages.

McCabe Library is to the east of Parrish, as are the dorms Willets, Mertz, Worth, The Lodges, Alice Paul and David Kemp.

Dormitories Palmer, Pittenger, Roberts, and the NPPR Apartments are south of the railroad station,[62] as are the athletic facilities, while the Mary Lyon dorm is off-campus to the southwest.

The collections also reflect the significant role Friends played in the development of science, technology, education and business in Britain and America.

"[69] The SCPC was started when Lucy Biddle Lewis, a member of the board of managers, discovered that Addams was burning her old papers, and convinced her to donate them instead to the Friends Historical Library.

[70][71] After World War II, the librarian at Princeton University, Julian P. Boyd, appraised the papers in the SCPC's collection and found that they were of "rare historic value".

[82] The four women who helped overturn the ban subsequently spearheaded the reestablishment of a Kappa Alpha Theta chapter the following spring.

[83][84] The announcement sparked controversy on campus; a petition seeking a referendum to continue the ban was dismissed, again citing a legal opinion that to disallow the sorority chapter would be a violation of Title IX regulations.

[85] In April 2019, two student publications, Voices and The Phoenix, published leaked minutes from Swarthmore's chapter of Phi Psi dating from 2013 to 2016.

[86][87] Students responded by calling for the college's administration to immediately terminate all fraternity leases on campus, staging a sit-in at the Phi Psi house until the demands were met.

When the college's iconic Parrish Hall was gutted by fire in 1881, it was immediately rebuilt, rising, some noted, from the ashes like the bird found in Egyptian and Greek mythology.

It has a mix of indie, rock, hip-hop, electronic dance, folk, world, jazz and classical music, as well as a number of radio talk shows.

Hank and Bernie conducted wide-ranging and entertaining interviews of sports stars and cultural icons such as Lou Piniella, Mark Grace, Jake Plummer, Greg Ostertag, Andy Karich and Mark "the Bird" Fidrych, and also engaged the Swarthmore community in discussions on campus issues and current events.

Upwards of 90 percent of the Swarthmore community would tune in to the Hank and Bernie Show and many members of the surrounding villages and towns would also listen and call in.

[101] Today WSRN focuses virtually exclusively on entertainment, though it has covered significant news developments such as the athletic cuts in 2000[102] and the effects of the September 11 attacks on campus.

Currently, the longest running show in WSRN's lineup is "Oído al Tambor", which focuses on news and music from Latin America.

In addition, Chaverim is a co-ed group that includes students from the Tri-College Consortium and draws on music from cultures around the world for its repertoire.

SCCS also provides a computer lab and gaming room, located in Clothier basement beneath Essie Mae's snack bar.

[109] SCCS was noted in PC Magazine's article "Top 20 Wired Colleges" as one of the reasons for ranking Swarthmore #4 on that list.

[116][117][118] The department also offers a number of club sport options, including men's and women's rugby, ultimate frisbee, volleyball, fencing and squash.

It is surpassed only by the California Institute of Technology and Harvard University in per capita production of Nobel laureates in the United States.

[129] Alumni also include 13 MacArthur Fellows and hundreds of other prominent figures in law, art, science, business, politics and other fields.