Freshmen Welcome

              Tenth Month .3, 1931 FRIENDS INTELLIGENCE'R 835
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Welcome to Swarthmore College \
By FRANK AYDELOTTE, President
Addre .. 01 Welcome Delivered to the Freshmen in the Meeting House, Swarthmore, Pa.,
September 20, 1931
It gives me great pleasure to welcome you to
Swarthmore College and to extend to you my
heartiest good wishes for a pleasant and profitable
four years at Swarthmore. I am glad to take the
occasion of the first meeting which you attend as
students of Swarthmore to say something about
the significance of the experience upon which you
are now entering. Many of you doubtless know a
great deal about college life and about Swarth­more
College; others may not; and it has been
suggested to me that many undergraduates come
to college with a conception of college life which
has been obtained mainly from the movies. I
should like to say at once that you must prepare
yourself for a very different atmosphere, a very
different kind of experience from any that I have
ever seen pictured in moving pictures dealing
with college life.
In the first place, the central fact about this
new experience is that we welcome you here as
members of the college. We welcome you to an
inheritance. This inheritance is partly material:
a campus, buildings, libraries, laboratories, and
playing fields-all yours to use. They are very
valuable, but still more valuable are the spirit and
the traditions of this college of which you now
become a part. A college is built not merely of
bricks and mortar but also of the devotion and
idealism of past generations who have labored to
create the opportunities by which you are to
profit. The past of Swarthmore College is a part
of your inheritance and likewise its future. To
you will belong in part its triumphs in the years
to come and in part the responsibility for its
shortcomings.
Swarthmore College was founded by members
of the Society of Friends, and the ideals of that
Society constitute its oldest and its most valuable
tradition. Swarthmore is not, strictly speaking,
a denominational institution. It is not necessary
to belong to the Society of Friends in order to be
a student or a member of its Faculty or even its
President. But the plainness, the sincerity, and
the spirituality of the group of Quakers who
founded and who support this College are an im­portant
part of the educational opportunity which
it offers you. If you do not belong to the Society
of Friends but are a member of some other
church, you will probably, while you are here,
want to keep in touch with your own denomina­tion,
and it is right that you should do so. I hope,
however, that you wi11 not neglect at the same
time to learn something of the Quakers, their his­tory
and what they stand for. I hope you will at­tend
Quaker Meeting, which is held every Sunday
morning at eleven o'clock in this room and the
short silent meeting from 9 :00 to 9 :15, which is
held here four mornings of the week.
When you enter college you become members of
a privileged class, but the privileges which you
enjoy involve also r esponsibilities. You cannot
have one without the other in this world, and I
hope that one of the things you wi11 learn here
wi11 be to hold in contempt the desire to enjoy
any kind of privilege without undertaking the
corresponding responsibilities. The heritage
which you receive at Swarthmore is yours to use,
to preserve, and to improve. That is obvious in
connection with the physical plant, but it is no
less true in connection with the traditions and
ideals of the College.
It is, however, one happy circumstance of your
condition that there should be no conflict between
your own best interests and those of your college.
Your first duty here is to make the most of your
own abilities; your second is, when you have left
this place, to use the training which you have re­ceived
in some manner, which only you can pre­scribe,
for the good of society.
There will be this year about a million young
men and women in our various institutions of
higher learning throughout the country. They
will enjoy educational opportunities for which
they will pay, on the whole, something less than
half the cost. On the other hand, there will be
in this country during the winter five or six mil­lion
people who are unemployed, who are looking
for work but who cannot find it. A very large
proportion of these people will suffer acute dis­tress
through no fault of their own. If all the
funds which are set aside to provide educational
facilities, for which you and your fellows in other
colleges and universities do not pay, were used
for the relief of the unemployed and you were
compelled to pay the entire cost of the education
you receive, it would make an enormous differ­ence
to hundreds of thousands of men and women