The past three years at the Aydelotte Foundation have been rich and rewarding for me, and I hope the same is true for our constituencies at Swarthmore and in the wider communities we serve. During my first term as director, Aydelotte sharpened our dual focus as a center for interdisciplinary programming and as a research institute. Remaining nimble during a time of crisis in higher education, we continued signature programs and began exciting new initiatives. One of our most high-impact endeavors, conducted jointly with the Swarthmore Libraries, is our Scholarly Promotion program. Since fall 2023, we’ve helped seventeen Swarthmore faculty and staff members reach new audiences for their scholarly and creative work through tailored events. The ongoing speaker series, Race, Racism, and the Liberal Arts brought such luminaries as Ruth Simmons to campus to engage in wide-ranging dialogue about historical exclusions and experiments in liberal arts education as well as today’s existential challenges. And, both urgent and central to our mission as a liberal arts think tank, programming on the Politics of Higher Education, under the direction of Senior Associate Director Andy Hines, included a well-attended symposium, several dynamic panels, and a live podcast.
My own location at the intersection of gender and sexuality studies and film and media studies has shaped our interdisciplinary programming over the past three years. Ramping up with a series on Media, Art, and Technology, we reintroduced faculty-staff seminars in 24-25 and 25-26 with linked themes. Just Art: Feminist Antiracist Practice gathered participants from disciplines including Art, Art History, Black Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Theatre to explore how art practice and criticism perform social justice work. Just Tech: Accessible, Sustainable Futures engaged participants from Computer Science, Education, Engineering, and History to lift up examples of ways designers, citizens, and communities are resisting AI, surveillance, and technofascism. Aydelotte programming complemented the related and ongoing themes of Just Art and Just Tech, bringing performers, filmmakers, scholars and activists to engage our wider community.
In Fall 2026, Aydelotte welcomed our inaugural postdoctoral fellow, Linda Huber. With a PhD from University of Michigan’s School of Information, Linda is appointed as Postdoctoral Fellow in Technology and Social Justice. Linda helped design the Just Tech syllabus, taught a new class, “Money, Tech, Power,” and programmed an exciting series of “Take Back Tech” events. Raising pressing issues around surveillance and data centers, these events brought in community members as well as faculty, staff and students. In Fall 2026, Linda will teach a new course in Design Justice. Both seminars and postdoctoral fellowships are features of peer institutions’ humanities centers and institutes that we are excited to be incorporating.
To help guide our evolving vision, we added five new members to our advisory board, all of them working in the front lines of higher education. And to manage all this activity, we relied on exceptional staff. We could hardly believe our good fortune in hiring artist Kati Gegenheimer as part-time Program Coordinator. Kati keeps everything going, including producing all our distinctive design work.
Working with Senior Associate Director Andy Hines has been the best kind of intellectual partnership. Andy’s research on higher education, including the collection University Keywords, is the touchstone of Aydelotte’s mission, and all of Aydelotte’s initiatives flow from his skillful management. I want to thank Andy, Kati, and Linda and all who have participated in Aydelotte’s activities as I begin a sabbatical to refresh and renew. Since August and for the rest of this academic year, Aydelotte will be in the capable hands of Andy Hines as Interim Director. With plans already underway for our Critical Health Colloquium, this year will see Aydelotte both doing and studying liberal arts in the broadest possible contexts. I look forward to returning as Director in fall 2028.
– Patricia White, Director
