The age-old requirement that college seniors must pass a swimming test is being dumped due to fears it discriminates against people of color.
Dartmouth College just became the latest school to drop a mandatory swimming test from its graduation prerequisite.
In doing so, the Ivy League school joins a handful of other elite institutions that have abandoned their swimming requirements in recent years, including Williams, Hamilton and Washington and Lee.
“The shift says less about the merits of staying afloat than about universities’ preoccupation with racial equity,” reports The Economist.
Schools with a swimming test as part of their diploma obligations have been doing so since the early 1900s, the news outlet says.
What changed was both statistical and cultural.
DEI fanatics suddenly began complaining that blacks are allegedly less likely to pass swimming tests than their white counterparts.
So once the academic rocket scientists heard about that potential nightmare they began looking at dropping swimming as a way to lance that festering boil.
From all indications, Maine’s elite Bowdoin College has never required swimming a pool lap to receive a sheepskin.
Good thing – otherwise Zohran Mamdani would have made a swimming argument part of the “white supremacy” manifestos he authored while a student at the Brunswick school.
Mamdani, who was recently elected as New York City’s first Muslim mayor, made claims of racism a centerpiece of his student-newspaper columns while at Bowdoin from 2010 to 2014.
Undoubtedly, if Bowdoin had required Mamdani to swim a lap he’d have played the racism card even though he isn’t black.
He actually did play that card while applying to schools in 2009, claiming on his application to Columbia University that he was black.
Once he got caught, Mamdani claimed that he was simply trying “to capture the fullness of my background” by checking the “Black or African American” box.
(He was born in Kampala, Uganda, to Indian parents.)
Young Zohran was denied admission to Columbia, which, apparently, is how he ended up in “white supremacist” Bowdoin, his alternate choice.
Elite Universities Dropping Swimming Requirement For Fear Of “Racial Inequity” Accusations; Bowdoin Dodged Bullet
By Ted Cohen
