Category Archive 'Bryn Mawr'

31 Jan 2022

Changing Times: Hillsdale, Preferable to Bryn Mawr

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Hillsdale.

Jane Kitchen, despite her humble background, got into elite Seven Sisters Bryn Mawr (Kathryn Hepburn’s alma mater) with a scholarship.

It was less fun than she thought it would be, being the poor girl at a rich girl’s school, and then came COVID and a closed down campus, leaving her trapped at home. She transferred to anti-establishment, right-wing Hillsdale and evidently found happiness.

I worked hard in school. I have a single mom and we don’t have a lot of money, so I knew that I would have to score a near-full scholarship.

When I graduated high school at 16, my mom didn’t want to send me so far away so young. I enrolled in my local school, Arizona State University, and we both agreed that I could transfer out after my freshman year.

I arrived on Bryn Mawr’s campus, a Seven Sisters school in Pennsylvania, in the Fall of 2019. I was overjoyed. The campus was gorgeous, and, to this day, it is probably the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen in real life. There were gothic towers and acres of manicured lawns. I was eager to join the other nerdy girls and to find friends I’d have for life.

I’d gone to underfunded, overcrowded public schools my whole life and this was my first experience with small classes and teachers who seemed to love teaching. I took a poetry class where the professor would sing folk songs to us in the hallway as we made our way into class. I learned to write short stories from an Italian instructor who compared writing to preparing homemade pasta. I had been nervous about not being able to keep up academically, but the calculus class I took that first year was easier than the one at ASU.

Socially, it wasn’t entirely what I expected. The people at Bryn Mawr were the wealthiest and most liberal I had ever encountered. During my first week on campus, a girl I met suggested over dinner that 9/11 was justified because the United States had meddled in Middle East politics. She went on to say that the 9/11 memorial should be changed so as to show more respect to Muslims. One of the girls in my hall casually mentioned that Michelle Obama had been in a spin class she had taken in the Hamptons that summer. At first, I thought she was kidding.

I joined a sketch comedy group, which often started meetings by asking members to answer a question. One day, the question was “How is your semester going?” A few people answered directly, and then one girl said “I’m having a great semester, but I totally acknowledge that some students, especially BIPOC students, face a lot of challenges on campus.” Then, every person after her prefaced their answer by saying that students who aren’t white were probably having a worse semester than them.

I didn’t sit around with my friends all night arguing about big questions like I thought I would. It was assumed that we all agreed on the answers. But I made friends, and I loved my classes. I went to parties at nearby colleges, and I was making plans to study abroad in Ireland, which, as someone who had only left my home state twice, was a huge deal for me.

That was supposed to be in the Fall of 2020, but of course it never happened. I remember talking about the coronavirus on the way home from a party with my friend, a self-professed germaphobe, in January of 2020. She asked if I thought we should be worried. I told her that as a campus we should be more worried about binge drinking, and we both laughed. I thought that would be the end of it. Weeks later, Bryn Mawr announced that my spring semester would be held online.

The next few months were the worst of my life. Read the rest of this entry »

08 Mar 2013

Hell Week Shocks the Administration at Bryn Mawr

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Just look at those unruly Bryn Mawr girls hazing one another in the old days!

Like most elite schools, Seven Sisters member Bryn Mawr, Katherine Hepburn’s alma mater, has certain traditions. One key Bryn Mawr tradition has always been Hell Week, a series of mock ordeals and festivities designed to provide an interlude of mid-Winter amusement as well as to welcome the freshman class to full college citizenship and to cement undergraduate ties of fellowship.

The mock hazing of freshman and (non-sexual) undergraduate festivities prove this year too dreadful to be tolerated by Bryn Mawr’s administration.

The dean of undergraduates recorded such atrocities having occurred as:

Requiring first-year students to swear alliance to Radnor over a keg.

Shouting at first-year students with and without bullhorn.

Throwing items in common room (toilet paper, cardboard). Some items thrown into audience (may have been at first-year students).

Creating potential for injury by playing wiffle beer (essentially baseball with beer cans and a wiffle bat).

Requiring first-year students to go outside for “class photo” but in reality dumping water on them. (Unclear if photo was really taken.)

Telling first-year students to stand outside, wet and some without shoes, and forcing them to listen to the Radnor goddess speech.

Smoking indoors (cigarettes during the trial; a hookah during the party).

Being on the roof (roof was accessed from second floor kitchen window).

Violating the party policy by holding an unregistered party after Trials.

Underage drinking (most sophomores and juniors are not 21) and excessive drinking during trials.

That Dean (presumably named Wormser) responded vigorously:


“It is clear from this long list of violations…that immediate steps must be taken to foster significant culture change in Radnor,” the letter states. As a result of the night’s activities, all Radnor Dorm Presidents resigned, all current Radnor customs people were relieved of their duties, and every upperclass student in Radnor is required to write a letter of apology to the Radnor first-years.

He even leaked the news of all this to the vulgar-deviant-commie blog cesspool Jezebel, which piously congratulated his pompous fraudulence for conspicuous political correctitude:

It’s definitely refreshing that there’s at least one university administration that’s actively committed to changing a culture it feels is problematic.

Regrettably, I think there is a lot more than one university administration staffed by equivalent nincompoops and adhering to the same ridiculous standards of sanctimony.

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Alumna Scarlett looks on Hell Week very differently, and testifies that it even changed her mind about the college.

Hell Week is the most complicated tradition, and very difficult to describe on paper. For me, it was the turning point when I decided that I did indeed want to stay at Bryn Mawr.


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