Freshmen Welcome

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'- -' ~eptember 24, 1937
Freshmen Welcome
It is a very great pleasure to me to welcome you on behalf
of the College to membership in Swarthmore Col lege . In making you a
sp~ech of welcome, I am not doing what a manager of a theatre might
do to wel come you to a theatre to their haphazard gather of guests
who support it. We welcome you into college not as guests but as
members. That is both a prevllige and a responsibility. Last week
if you had done somethlngeither worthy of special credit or blame,
it would ha~e been a question probably, if any newspaper reported it,
of your being a citlzen of a given tovm and of belonging to a certain
family. But in the future, for a very long time, If you distinguish
yourselves or if the reverse happens, your name will appear in the
newspapers as a student or a graduate of Swarthmore College--a student
or graduate of Swarthmore who did this or that. So that in coming
to this institution you have taken upon yourselves a responsibility
for what has been built up here by previous generations--generations
of students, I believe, as well as faculty and benefactors-who have
made the college into which ~ou come. You will have your sharelin
modifying it. You will not be able to revolutionize it entirely,
hut you will have your influence either for good or for bad~ everything
that you do will have some effect upon its fortunes, so that I hope
you will feel that. I hope you will always remember that you have
become today a part of a group and are not simply a person who in a
detached sort of way is attending certain academic exercises .
The purpose of this placement program, the purpose of calling
you here before the upperclassmen assemble is to get your attention
for precisely suchproblems as that, to give you a comparatively quiet