Many colleges used to require students to be able to swim, to graduate. But in recent years, most of those colleges have eliminated the swimming requirement, sometimes after concluding that it is racist.
For example, Williams College removed its swim test from the list of graduation requirements due to controversy over its alleged racism, notes Campus Reform.
Faculty voted 103-30 in favor of removing the requirement due to racial disparities in who can swim.
Williams College is prestigious and left-leaning. It is located in the far western part of Massachusetts, not near Boston.
Williams College Diversity Advisory Research Team released a study in 2019 finding that 81% of students who took the college’s “beginner swim course” were “domestic students of color” while only 3% were domestic White students.
Students who fail the initial swim test must take the course to satisfy the college’s requirement.
Jeff Wiltse, a professor from the University of Montana, wrote in the Chronicle for Higher Education that swim tests are “clear and obvious past discrimination.”
“Clear and obvious past discrimination still is a primary, if not the primary, reason why we have these disparate swimming proficiency rates today,” he argued.
But learning to swim could benefit minorities, especially blacks. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) says minorities 28 and under are more likely to die by drowning than whites. Asian and Black students were the most likely to drown.
Professor Wiltse says “past racial discrimination” made swim lessons unavailable to many minorities, and limited their access to pools, and that was why he backed eliminating the swim requirement.
“I stated that the contemporary race-based swimming disparities (studies have found that black Americans are almost half as likely to know how to swim as white Americans) is a product of past racial discrimination in the provision of and access to swimming pools and swim lessons,” he added.
Campus Reform notes that “Swim tests have been a part of college campuses since the early 1900s but many schools have been dropping the requirement, deeming them unnecessary to graduate. Schools that still require a swim test include Cornell, Dartmouth, Columbia, Hamilton, Bryn Mawr, MIT, and Swarthmore.”
