The AFU and Urban Legend Archive
Collegiate
 swimming test college requirement




Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban,alt.folklore.college
From: v140pxgt@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu (Daniel B Case)
Subject: College swim tests in 10/12/94 CHE
Date: Thu, 20 Oct 1994 22:40:00 GMT

The October 12 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education has an article about something that occasionally comes up here; college swim test requirements for graduation.

Most of the schools that still require them are in the Northeast (Colgate, Cornell, and Columbia were mentioned). They're on the way out because most schools are beginning to feel they discriminate against students from disadvatnaged backgrounds who may not have been able to receive swimming instruction as children (a black student at UMass-Amherst drowned during one there in the early '70s).

At some schools, the requirement is no longer rigorously enforcedwhere it is, some people don't take the test till graduation morning. Colgate was cited as one of the few schools that are still sticklers about it and have no plans to eliminate the requirement.

The article discussed the folklore associated with them; which I believe is in the AFColl FAQ (parent of student who drowns donates $$$ to school on condition that it require swim test). While there is some coincidence to this at some schools (Harvard's Widener library was named after a drowned student; Hobart's pool building was given by another grieving family), this is just that. Most of the swim test requirements seem to have been instituted in the late 1910s as part of a national Red Cross campaign to get everybody in the country to learn to swim.

One bit of folklore, however, is true. Mortimer Adler had fulfilled all the baccalaureate requirements at Columbia save learning to swim, in the early 1920s. He went on anyway to earn a doctorate from CU. In the early '80s he informed Columbia that he had learned to swim; they mailed him his BA post haste. He is thus one of the few people to have received his PhD before his BA.

Dan "I propose the AFColl FAQ be appropriately amended" Case


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