At a time in American history when football ruled the American campus
and fraternities dominated student life, Frank Aydelotte, through his
determination to specialize exclusively in initiating an Honors program
of study, accomplished a feat virtually unknown in American higher
education. That is, he succeeded in shaping one regional, run of the
mill, Quaker school - Swarthmore College - into an
intellectually-charged, academically-focused institution able to command
national respectability, prestige, and financial support and commit
itself to intellectual life at a time when higher education in the
United States met with pressures against such change. Under Aydelotte's
leadership, Swarthmore was able to hold out in a period of tremendous
expansion of higher education and staggering growth of intercollegiate
athletics, "student activities," and vocational education. While
oxymoronic in the early 20th century to suggest to mainstream America
that a college would define itself by a commitment to the life of the
mind, Aydelotte did just that, indelibly shaping the culture of
Swarthmore in a manner so deep-seated as to persist to the present day.
The ways in which Swarthmore changed as a college under Aydelotte's
leadership shed light on how change occurs and persists in higher
education and how change on a single campus can bring about wide-spread
educational reform that affects a nation. Frank Aydelotte returned from
his time in England as a Rhodes Scholar fully committed to affording to
America's highest achieving college students the educational experiences
that had shaped him while abroad. A complicated combination of idealism
and elitism, mixed with a deep reformer's drive to spread the Oxford
gospel in America, led to his focus on pedagogy when he returned to the
US. Aydelotte undertook concrete and highly strategic steps toward the
long-term goal of introducing to American higher education Oxford-like
methods aimed at empowering intellectually-oriented students to excel
far beyond the barriers present in American education that resulted from
high achievers being held back by the "pace of the average." This
mission became his personal crusade for the rest of his life and played
out most vividly on the campus of tiny Swarthmore College where he
served as president from 1921 to 1940.
