Get Involved

We’re always looking for writing to be published here on our site. Send us a question for Dear AF or your own manifesto for liberal education. Contact us if you have an idea for a piece you would like to pitch!

Are you publishing a new book or other significant work? We can provide funding and support in developing ideas for a launch event to help disseminate your project and enrich its impact. In partnership with Swarthmore College Libraries, we’re offering support to Swarthmore faculty and staff to promote a recent publication or forthcoming signature scholarly or artistic work.

We’re offering grants to support Swarthmore faculty developing assignments, projects, or entire courses that include research, writing, discussion, and reflection on topics related to the history, present, and future of liberal arts and/or higher education. Applications are rolling and will continue to be evaluated monthly until we reach the annual budget’s limit. 

Are you teaching a course with faculty or students from other institutions? Let us know. Our primary interest is in discovering what students and faculty learn from cross-institutional courses of this kind that they might not otherwise learn; we also hope to hear what you’ve found valuable about teaching across institutions, and what resources you need to continue to do it.

We’re extremely interested in data or evidence about professional practices in liberal education, including innovative methodological strategies. Please talk to us, whether it’s about your own scholarly work or about an initiative or collaborative project you are involved in. Or just make suggestions! We want to find ways to know more about what people do in their classrooms, in their curricular designs, in planning their scholarship.

We’re thinking about what a faculty-based consultancy across institutions might look like. If this interests you as well, contact us; we’d like to hear more.

If you’re Swarthmore faculty or staff, watch for our Tuesday Cafe series, dinner discussions, research seminars, public writing workshops, and other events and programs.

Do you want to think about how demands for racial justice, labor market struggles, the changing climate, and ongoing culture wars have recast our understanding of what the liberal arts is and what it has been? Are you interested in doing research on what colleges might and ought to become in the future?

Swarthmore students can apply to be a student research fellow. We are currently accepting applications for the 2023-24 academic year. If you are interested in the position or have any questions, please send a letter of interest and resume to Marianne Dages (mdages1@swarthmore.edu), the Administrative Assistant for the Aydelotte Foundation.

Swarthmore students should also consider taking one of the courses we teach semi-regularly.