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BY ROSARIO PAZ

In print | October 12, 2006

Last Tuesday night, the wide-eyed and youthful side of Swarthmore met with its sagacious and seasoned counterpart over a tasteful buffet in the Scheuer Room of Kohlberg. Dinner with the Deans" brought together several deans, faculty members and randomly picked first-year students for an evening of casual bonding. This is the first year that the office of the deans has organized this type of event. Two more Dinner with the Deans events will occur this semester, one tonight and another after break.

Dinner with the Deans was organized by the administration as a way to foster relationships between members of the Swarthmore community, with a special focus on first-years.

The deans are attempting to give as many students as possible the chance to have the uniquely personal experience that Dinner with the Deans"provides, which they might feel is otherwise hard or awkward to attain.

“It is an opportunity to get to know some faculty and staff on a personal basis with the goal of having it be more approachable,” Dean of Students Jim Larimore said. Larimore also describes the event as having an atmosphere that is “purely informal and low-stress,” with the goal of forging a connection between two sides of the school populace outside of the classroom.

Myrt Westphal, dean of student life, describes it as an attempt to “promote togetherness with all the different sides of the community” and to “demystify the deans and faculty.” “We want the freshmen to know that we’re not as scary as they think,” Westphal said.

“Most students don’t know what the deans do,” Larimore said. “Dinner with the Deans will have some of the best people to talk to about how the college works.”

Attendees of Tuesday’s Dinner with the Deans, both students and faculty alike, had satisfactory comments about their evening.

“For me, it was a very relaxed time with two students and other faculty members,” Spanish Professor Aurora Camacho de Schmidt said. “It was a chance to be able to tell the students how we see Swarthmore.”

Deans, faculty members and students came to the realization of their similarities in coming to Swarthmore through different pathways of life and what it was that appealed to them about their home and/or workplace. They also discussed how vital it was for students to realize how easy and important it was for them to establish contact with their professors and administrators, despite previous high school experiences that demonstrated otherwise.

“I got to see a different, more informal side of the professors as they talked about their own college experiences,” Grace Kaissal ’10 said.

Because it was a first-time event, the dinner has been described as an “experiment” by Dean Larimore, from which the administration will decide whether they should continue to promote it and other relationship-building activities between the students and faculty.

Larimore also said that he would like to have the deans participate in some of the dorm events.

This first-time event catered to 24 first-year students, five deans and nine faculty members, and the deans hope to reach out to a greater range of Swarthmore students in future dinners.

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