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 i REFUSED TO PUT MY HEAD UNDERWATER. AS
an Iowan who had spent her first eighteen years far
from lakes and oceans, it seemed highly unnatural
to me. My father, a farmer who went a lifetime
without taking a dip or even a long bath, always said, "If
the Good Lord meant for us to swim, we'd have gills,
wouldn't we?"
Now, though, I was a freshman at Cornell, an institution
that would remake this Iowa girl in countless
ways--beginning with my cat-like aversion to water. As
the rest of my Beginning Swimming classmates, a mixed
group of city kids and international students, splashed
hesitantly in the shallow end of Helen Newman Pool, an
instructor had pulled me aside for remedial attention. She
eyed me as I shivered in my new bathing suit, determined
not to submerge. "All right," she sighed. "Let's
start by seeing
if you can dog-paddle."
Generations of Cornellians have dog-paddled, breast-stroked,
and butterflied their way through the University's mandatory
swim test, a graduation requirement only a few other institutions
maintain. According to Al Gantert, who has been Cornell's director
of physical education for nearly thirty years, the most popular
tale of the test's origins--that it was created to satisfy
a wealthy
donor who lost a child to drowning in Cayuga Lake--isn't true.
The first Cornell swim test was administered in 1919 by Dorothy
Bateman, director of women's physical education. "She believed
that knowing how to swim was a necessary skill for proper and
educated young ladies," says Gantert.Male students didn't
take a
swim test until the late 1930s, when it became part of Cornell's
pre-World War II military training program. Even then, it was still
tougher for women: proper young Cornell ladies had to complete
100 yards, demonstrating specific strokes, while the gentlemen
only had to make it through fifty yards (though they did have to
do it naked, since swimsuits weren't standard at the men's
pool
until the early 1970s).
In 1979, when Gantert became the first physical education
director to head up both the men's and women's programs,
he
combined the swim tests into the requirement that exists today:
one length of the pool using any front stroke (including the dogpaddle),
another using any back stroke, and a third any way you
like.Most freshmen pass the test during their first days at Cornell.
Twenty or so out of each entering class take the test and fail.
About 300 to 400 students like me head straight to beginning
swimming classes, designed to prepare you for the test by the end
of your first semester. "I have never encountered a student we can't
teach to swim," says Gantert. Most of the non-swimmers
grew up in places (foreign countries, the inner city, Iowa) without
easy access to pools or bodies of water. Gantert has noticed
another common denominator. "If your parents didn't know how
to swim, chances are very good that you don't know how to swim
either," he says. Thanks, Dad.
A handful of students are excused from the test because of
physical disability or religious restrictions. "Forgetting" about
the
requirement until your senior year? Not an excuse. Every May, a
few seniors receive provisional graduation certificates because they
haven't passed the swim test. Such students can get real diplomas
if they prove that they have taken swimming classes in their post-
Cornell lives, even years later.
Swim tests used to be common at colleges and universities,
but student complaints have led most institutions to drop the
requirement. Dartmouth, Columbia, and MIT are keeping up the
tradition, though, and Gantert doubts that Cornell will sink the
swim test anytime soon. In fact, President Skorton took the test
during last fall's freshman orientation, to show his solidarity with
other new arrivals. (He passed.) "There will always be people who
try to get out of it, but most students say they're grateful to Cornell
for making them learn to swim," says Gantert.
I can't say that I've spent much time in the pool since I did
my
three lengths (two of them dog-paddling) in Helen Newman, but
I'm still glad that I took beginning swimming, just as I'm
glad that
I learned how to use the subjunctive in my freshman French class.
I may not always make full use of my Cornell education, but at
least I can keep my head above water.
-- C. A. Carlson '93, MFA '96 |
