The vote by the Board of Managers came after a year-long investigation by the college's ad-hoc Athletic Review Committee (ARC), which formally recommended the elimination of the three programs on Friday afternooon.
"We believe that re-allocation of resources to a smaller number of sports will enable the college to achieve a level of excellence in athletics that we haven't enjoyed for many years," Swarthmore President Alfred H. Bloom said in a statement issued by the Swarthmore Office of News and Information.
"Coach Pete Alvanos and our football team have done a tremendous job during the past three seasons," Bloom said in the statement. "The team's dramatic improvement under his leadership, as well as the long tradition of football at the College, make ending this program particularly painful."
"There's pretty considerable risk in doing this," said Amherst Dean of Admission Tom Parker. "It seems to have caused considerable turmoil [at Swarthmore]."
According to Parker, 112 of the 375 Swarthmore freshmen, or 30 percent, play a sport. By comparison, Amherst's freshman class contained 74 athletes out of 425, or 17 percent.
"To me, that's baffling. It makes no sense to me," said Parker, who said that a similar percentage to Swarthmore's would mean that 128 Amherst freshmen would play on a team. "I'd get fired if I did that here."
The repercussions from the move were felt as far away as Williamstown and Amherst, where similar committees at both colleges are currently investigating many of the same issues that the ARC was charged to consider.
"I think we'd rather see reform than this kind of revolution," said President Tom Gerety. "It was a pretty hard corner [for Swarthmore] to get out of."
The Presidents of the 11 NESCAC charter schools-of which Amherst is a member-will meet on Dec. 14 to discuss the enactment of a proposition by the NESCAC Athletic Directors, who will meet on Dec. 11. Possible repurcussions of the series of meetings, geared towards the continual emphasis of academics over athletics, could include the NESCAC allowing only one team to represent the conference in the postseason for each sport. "Anything that we do we're going to do with NESCAC," said Parker. "The presidents of NESCAC are going
to talk about [Swarthmore's] decision."
The move by the Swarthmore Board of Managers was immediately met with significant student protest, culminating in a large rally on Saturday night at which members of the football and women's badminton teams spoke.
Along with the vote to remove the teams itself, students questioned the manner in which the decision was reached. Decisions by the Board of Managers at Swarthmore-which has been a Quaker-affiliated school since its inception in the late-19th-century-are supposed to occur by consensus, with no disputing votes. A petition circulated by the Swarthmore football team charged, "It is intolerably unfair to rewrite the operating procedure of the Board of Managers for a decision so important which affects such a large portion of the school."
In the staff editorial of a special issue released on Sunday, The Swarthmore Phoenix, the college's weekly student newspaper, agreed with the sentiment of the petition.
"Included in the Quaker ethic of which Swarthmore is so proud, and about which it jabbers so profusely, is the standard that decision-making should be open to everyone and based on consensus," wrote the editorial board.
The editorial goes on to conclude that, "the manner in which this decision was made amounts to tyranny and fails to meet the expectations of human principle."
In response to the controversial manner in which the decision was reached, two members of the board, including former NFL President Neil Austrian, resigned in protest. Austrian, a 1961 Swarthmore graduate, was deeply troubled by the message that the drastic action sent.
"[Bloom] has a strong belief that there are too many recruited athletes on campus," Austrian told The Phoenix Editor-in-Chief Justin Kane. "But we shouldn't put labels on people. These kids are scholar-athletes, with scholar underlined."
The move by the Board came primarily in response to concerns that athletic recruiting had gotten out of hand. In an email to the Swarthmore community on Saturday night, Bloom and College Provost Jennie Keith wrote that the intent of the decision was to curtail the students admitted on athletic merit to between 10 and 15 percent and that, to maintain 21 teams, including football, with that small of a percentage would have been impossible.
"The Board deeply regretted the need to act more rapidly than anticipated, especially in reaching a decision so painful for many in the College community," Bloom and Keith wrote. "They believed, however, that it was urgent to define the future of the intercollegiate program before prospective students for next year's entering class made decisions about coming to Swarthmore."
The Swarthmore community, traditionally somewhat uninvolved in the school's athletic program, rallied behind the football team in the aftermath of the Board's decision, with over 250 students, faculty members and administrators joining in the protest. Swarthmore football coach Pete Alvanos, who was hired in 1997 in an attempt to rebuild the Garnet Tide's struggling program, broke down at the rally. Alvanos told the assembled onlookers that he felt that "to drop this program at this point in time-I can't even fathom it. Ethically, I can't accept it as an answer."
"It was a terrible program," said Parker. "They seemed to have made a significant commitment. This seems like a pretty abrupt reversal."
Members of the wrestling and women's badminton teams, the other two programs dropped in the decision, also spoke out at the rally. Seniors Siobhan Carty and Jane Ng, the captains of the badminton team, could not understand the need to cut a team that used such a small amount of resources.
"Getting rid of any women's program at this point-I hope they consulted legal counsel," Parker said of possible Title IX implications. "I doubt women's badminton is running amok on campus, drinking from kegs."
"We don't know why our team was cut," Carty told the Phoenix.
Freshman team member Elizabeth Leininger was also stunned by the decision. "The college likes to tell us that sports are not for spectators, they are for players," she said. "Now badminton's not for anybody."