ABSTRACT
Woodrow Wilson discovered that alumni power could be a two-edged sword, however, when his ideas diverged from the dominant alumni mentality. Wilson’s successor, John Grier Hibben, reconciled most of the alumni and faculty factions that had been split by Wilson’s attempt to abolish the clubs. As with the rejection of ethnicity at Princeton and at Franklin and Marshall, students and alumni increasingly valued Swarthmore for its conformity to national collegiate values rather than for providing an alternative. In the 1870s and 1880s, students increasingly shunned cultural uniqueness for a student life that ignored distinctions among Protestants of northern European ancestry. Colleges founded to protect cultural pluralism had become agents promoting Anglo-Protestant upper- and upper-middle-class culture. As graduates, most entered an upper-middle class in which it was essential to be a Protestant of northern European ancestry; but denominational and ethnic differences within that group were losing their importance.
