Hamilton, New York -- A rare campus ritual is under way in Colgate University’s swimming pool.
Women in spandex suits and men in baggy trunks huddle around the L-shaped pool, waiting for the college’s swim test to begin. They must swim eight lengths, using two strokes; then tread water for five minutes; then swim eight more lengths. Those who don’t pass must take swimming lessons.
Knowing how to swim was once a hallmark of a well-rounded man or woman, and collegiate swimming requirements used to be common. But these days Colgate, whose requirement is more than 50 years old, is one of a diminishing number of colleges that won’t give a diploma to a student who can’t swim. (Exceptions are made for those with physical problems and those who still can’t swim after taking lessons for two semesters.)
Curricular battles over what students must learn, an emphasis on “wellness” programs rather than rigid physical-education requirements, and concerns that swim tests might be unfair to urban or disabled students have all contributed to the ritual’s demise.
Carl R. Samuelson, coordinator of aquatics at Williams College, defends his institution’s test whenever students challenge it. “I think we have to provide students with the capacity to survive,” he says.
Nobody seems to know how many colleges still have swim tests. The few that do include Columbia and Cornell Universities and Berea, Bryn Mawr, Carleton, Dartmouth, and Hamilton Colleges. Pennsylvania State and Princeton Universities and Allegheny, Colby, and Hobart and William Smith Colleges are among the many institutions that have dropped the requirement relatively recently.
Requirements range from two pool lengths at Williams to a 40-minute swim at the U.S. Naval Academy in which students, wearing uniforms but no shoes, must swim at least half a mile. (Some Penn State men, who took the test separately from the women, didn’t worry about clothing. They swam nude.)
Swimming requirements have a long history, embellished by myth. “Didn’t the donor of the pool require the test?” a Colgate student asks. (No.)
At Hobart and William Smith, a building that once housed the pool was given in honor of a son who drowned while skating. But the gift had nothing to do with the swim test, as some assumed.
Hobart and William Smith dropped its requirement -- initiated around World War II -- this year. The colleges decided it was “archaic,” difficult to administer, and unfair to students who had no access to pools, says a spokeswoman, Laurie Fenlason.
While looking into campus swimming policies, Hobart and William Smith officials found that apocryphal stories flourished.
At Harvard, one legend holds that Eleanor Elkins Widener, who in 1914 donated the Widener Library in honor of a son who had died when the Titanic sank, made a swimming requirement a condition of her gift. A plaque in the library attests to the gift honoring the lost son. But Harvard’s swim test -- which is recommended for all students but officially required only for those who take part in rowing and other river activities -- is in no way linked to the library. It appears instead to have been adopted around 1919, amid an aggressive learn-to-swim campaign launched by the American Red Cross.
One bit of lore that is actually true concerns Mortimer J. Adler, the prolific scholar and encyclopedia editor, who would have graduated from Columbia in 1923 had he passed its swim test. He went on to earn a doctorate from Columbia and write dozens of books. In 1983, he notified Columbia that he had learned to swim, and he was awarded his bachelor’s degree. Mr. Adler told Columbia that while it was “a trifle extraordinary” to earn a baccalaureate 55 years after a doctorate, “in my scale of values the B.A. is the higher degree.”
In some ways, swimming requirements are a vestige of an earlier era, when academics agreed more readily on what a student needed to know. Many requirements were instituted in the early 20th century, when the construction of the first public pools led to more awareness of water safety. Some colleges adopted new or tougher tests during war time.
Bryn Mawr had a different reason for a rigorous physical-education requirement -- “to offset the 19th-century myth that when women studied, their blood went to their brains and left their wombs, rendering them unfit as women,” says Debra Thomas, a spokeswoman.
Some colleges that have dropped swimming requirements have decided that sports electives or wellness programs -- which focus more broadly on health and physical conditioning -- were more appropriate.
It was a tragedy, however, that led Amherst College to drop its swimming requirement. In 1973 a student, Gerald Penny, drowned while taking the swim test. Because of glare from the building’s glass wall, nobody noticed him slip under the surface. Other swimmers, churning the water, swam over him unknowingly.
The drowning of Mr. Penny, a black man, led to broader accusations by minority students that Amherst’s culture was hostile to students from different backgrounds. The college later named a black cultural center after Mr. Penny.
A student at the Naval Academy died after nearly drowning while practicing for the required 40-foot underwater swim, officials say. But the swim requirements have remained intact -- not unexpectedly for an institution whose graduates spend long periods at sea. Some students have trouble with the 10-meter platform jump. Edwin Peery, chairman of the physical-education department, has seen students stay up on the platform for six hours before they finally jumped. One or two leave the academy each year because of problems with the swim test, he says.
Most colleges with swim requirements say the tests rarely prevent someone from earning a degree, though some procrastinators have taken the test on graduation morning. Columbia lets Orthodox Jewish and Muslim women, whose religious beliefs stress modesty, swim in an all-female setting. Students with physical problems are typically exempted from the tests. And those who flunk often learn to swim during their college years.
Mark Randall, professor of physical education emeritus and director of special aquatics activities, has taught many such students since he arrived at Colgate 50 years ago. Mr. Randall, now 84 years old, is giving the test during freshman orientation. Students are swimming four to a lane in a pool in the echo-filled hall. They’re doing the backstroke, the crawl, and some strokes never seen before. “I don’t care how sloppy the stroke is, as long as they’re not struggling,” Mr. Randall says.
For Richard Newman, a freshman, “the only insecurity is putting on a bathing suit.” Andy Janocha had to work a bit harder than Mr. Newman, but says he now wants to swim more often.
Occasionally Mr. Randall motions to a student to leave the pool. He tells Jennie Bostic, who is swimming with difficulty, that she needs lessons. She is not happy about another requirement. “I think it’s a waste,” she says.
The test is given several times a year. All but six of the 140 or so students who take it today will end up passing. Students who still can’t swim after two semesters of lessons are released from the requirement, but Colgate officials say 95 per cent of non-swimmers learn.
Mr. Randall thinks the requirement is as important now as it ever was.
As a boy, Mr. Randall saw two men drown on separate occasions in the river near his home in New York State. He vowed to do what he could to prevent such accidents, and has been doing it ever since.
