There’s been a lot of talk late­ly about what it means for an insti­tu­tion to claim a Quak­er iden­ti­ty. See for exam­ple the great con­ver­sa­tion start­ed by Wess Daniels.

Here’s a refresh­ing take from an inde­pen­dent cam­pus news­pa­per from his­tor­i­cal­ly Quak­er Swarth­more Col­lege James Sutton:

I do find the rhetor­i­cal deploy­ment of Quak­er Val­ues in almost every on-campus debate to be disin­gen­u­ous, to say the least. Call me cyn­i­cal, but I seri­ous­ly doubt that most Swat­ties care much at all about the almost 400-year-old denom­i­na­tion. Out­side of hav­ing a slight­ly high­er per­cent­age of stu­dents from elite Quak­er prep schools like Sid­well Friends, it’s a safe bet to say that the vast major­i­ty of Swat­ties have gone their entire lives bliss­ful­ly untrou­bled by the Inner Light. How many even know why Quak­ers are called Quakers? 

I remem­ber being on Swarth­more cam­pus one time years ago when a prospec­tive stu­dent tour came walk­ing by. I chuck­led at the hon­esty when the tour guide men­tioned Quak­ers but quick­ly reas­sured any ner­vous tour goers that it was­n’t Quak­er any­more. As Sut­ton writes, “It would be entire­ly pos­si­ble, even easy, how­ev­er, for a Swarth­more stu­dent to spend all four of their years at the col­lege hav­ing essen­tial­ly no engage­ment with any­thing approach­ing Quakerism.”

As I wrote on Wess’s thread:

A use­ful metaphor for me is ask­ing how much “Quak­er DNA” an insti­tu­tion has. None will be 100%. Some types will on aver­age have more (eg, month­ly meet­ings vs a school) but even w/in a class some will be more in the Quak­er stream and this can change over time. 

A col­lege will always have mul­ti­ple influ­ences. The great­est will always be the cul­ture and expec­ta­tions of high­er ed. A school will also have a longer-running rep­u­ta­tion and influ­ences aris­ing from its most impor­tant aca­d­e­m­ic or sport­ing pro­grams. Some­where way down might be an ongo­ing iden­ti­ty from a his­tor­i­cal denom­i­na­tion­al iden­ti­ty. Some schools court this — Guil­ford and Earl­ham come most imme­di­ate­ly to mind In the Quak­er con­text — and some have reduced it to a vague and very occa­sion­al invo­ca­tion of “Quak­er values.”