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Swarthmore College activists take their sit-in — and a bunch of frat trash — to the president’s office

School administration says President Valerie Smith is willing to meet with the protesters if they vacate her office. But they have no plans to leave.

Dozens of Swarthmore College students sit outside the school president's office on Thursday, May 2. They want her to permanently ban two fraternity organizations from campus.
Dozens of Swarthmore College students sit outside the school president's office on Thursday, May 2. They want her to permanently ban two fraternity organizations from campus.Read moreMaya Henry

Two fraternities at Swarthmore College voluntarily disbanded this week amid national outrage. But campus activists who want the school to permanently ban the organizations aren’t going away.

Dozens of activists ramped up their five-day protest Thursday by moving a sit-in from the Phi Psi fraternity house to outside the school president’s office, a move that preceded the college calling in Swarthmore Borough police, though no one was arrested as of Thursday afternoon. A college spokesperson says president Valerie Smith is willing to meet with the protesters if they vacate her office, but they said they have no plans to leave.

The protesters didn’t come empty-handed. They brought five boxes of signs they say once adorned the walls of the fraternity house they occupied as a symbolic “move-out.” A sampling of what is now in the administration building: a Natural Light banner, a stop sign, a Marlboro cigarettes advertisement, a Dogfish Head craft beer sign, and a Haverford Athletics posting that reads, “No running in the grandstand.”

“It’s relics and symbols of what [the Phi Psi] house used to be,” said Maya Henry, a junior with Organizing for Survivors, the advocacy group behind the sit-in. “Those were all the items present in the house full of harm.”

As of Thursday afternoon, Henry said there were about 60 students waiting near the president’s office in Parrish Hall, the college’s administration building. The organization posted a video on social media showing a physical encounter between a protester and an officer.

Swarthmore spokesperson Alisa Giardinelli said a group of students on Thursday entered the president’s office and refused to leave. She said they indicated they wanted to deliver a letter to Smith but hadn’t produced one. Henry said she wasn’t aware of such a letter.

Giardinelli said the borough’s police chief spoke with the students “due to safety and egress concerns.”

Thursday’s events were the latest in a weeks-long saga that has rocked the small liberal-arts college in Delaware County. About two weeks ago, two campus publications released a trove of internal documents said to be from one of the fraternities, Phi Psi, that were dubbed “historical archives" and “meeting minutes."

The documents, apparently written between 2012 and 2016, memorialized members’ racist, misogynistic, and homophobic comments and included jokes about sexual assault and illegal drug use. At one point, the author of the notes — who has not been identified — referenced a “rape attic” in the school’s other on-campus fraternity. The Inquirer has not been able to independently verify the authenticity of the documents.

On Tuesday night, both the school’s two fraternities released statements that they had unanimously voted to disband.

In a statement, Smith condemned the language used in the documents and promised an investigation into whether any current students were involved in the illegal behavior described. She also stated a task force convened to examine Greek life on Swarthmore’s campus would issue recommendations to her by Friday.

Henry said the activists want to sit in the president’s office until she makes her decision. They’re concerned the school will push off making a choice until summer, when many of the school’s 1,600 students won’t be on campus. Classes end Friday; final exams take place the week of May 9.

“If the college doesn’t take a formal stance against fraternities, then at any time they can decide to come back,” Henry said. “It’s not about these particular fraternity brothers right now. It’s the whole system that repeats itself because this is the nature of fraternities.”