A student tour guide at Swarthmore College has angrily resigned from his job after admissions department officials advised him to cover up a shirt emblazoned with the words “I (HEART) Female Orgasm” before presenting information about the school to prospective students and their parents.
The student is sophomore Jordan Reyes, reports The Daily Gazette, a campus newspaper.
Swarthmore is a fancypants, politically-correct hothouse bursting at the seams with children of wealth.
Tuition at Swarthmore costs $63,550 for a single year of tuition, fees and room and board.
Reyes wore the shirt when he was presenting an information session back on April 6. The shirt looked something like this:
Later in April, Swarthmore admissions dean Jim Bock summoned Reyes for a meeting about the shirt.
Bock had received a complaint from a parent who attended the information session.
At the meeting, Reyes explained that assistant admissions dean Emily Almas had advised him to cover up the shirt. At first, Reyes agreed. But he was bitter about it, he said, and he decided he wanted to display his “I (HEART) Female Orgasm” for prospective students, parents and, in fact, the whole world to see.
“Swatties are the type of students that will stand up for what they believe in, even if they think it’ll get them in trouble,” Reyes proudly told The Daily Gazette.
“I’m covering up my own shirt, which means a lot to me,” Reyes added. “That’s just not what I should be doing.”
In a statement sent to The Daily Gazette, Bock, the admissions dean, made it clear that he did not fire Reyes.
“We do expect our student employees to be sensitive to, and put the needs of our guests before their own,” Bock wrote. “And if an employee feels they wish to resign, we of course honor their wish.”
Reyes, a neuroscience major according to his Facebook page, said he couldn’t figure out if Almas had advised him to conceal the shirt as a mere gesture of recommendation or as more as an order.
“If that’s something that you want to avoid in the future, then you need to make that clear in training,” Reyes also complained.
Swarthmore’s official Tour Guide Manual instructs students: “Clothing should not be revealing or have offensive messages. Don’t wear anything you wouldn’t wear to grandma’s house.” (Also: “Wear comfortable shoes” — but not sandals.)
All students working for the admissions department receive a copy of the manual.
Reyes charged that Bock had given him “an ultimatum” concerning his “I (HEART) Female Orgasm” shirt.
The sophomore expounded at great length about the perceived “ultimatum” in an interview with The Phoenix, a second Swarthmore student newspaper.
“This is all off memory, so I don’t remember exactly how it went down, but he was like — he didn’t explicitly say, it seemed like he was suggesting, heading towards that, because he was like well, if you can’t, he said something to the effect of I’d really rather you just didn’t wear the shirt to any more information sessions and if you can’t do that, and then just giving me almost like a shrug and a shaking his head look,” Reyes yammered.
He said he took the totality of Bock’s statements to mean: “So essentially stop wearing the shirt, or just stop working.”
Reyes is really sad now, he says, because he claims to have no source of income in the wake of his resignation from his job as a student tour guide.
He had the job thanks in part to the largesse of the federal work-study program, which provides massive government subsidies for schools to hire their own students.
“The only money I have is the money I get from working admissions,” Reyes lamented to The Daily Gazette.
Next year, he hopes to score a job in Swarthmore’s biology department.
One of Reyes’s former student colleagues in the admissions department, sophomore Nathalie Baer-Chan, lambasted her bosses for allowing Reyes to resign over his “I (HEART) Female Orgasm” shirt.
“I think the treatment and ultimatum given to Jordan was pretty infuriating and frankly hypocritical,” Baer-Chan told The Daily Gazette. “If the school wants to continue to capitalize off of the radical energy of its students, it cannot in good conscience continue to punish students for exhibiting that same quality when it’s no longer convenient or exploitable.”
Reyes obtained his “I (HEART) Female Orgasm” shirt at an “I (HEART) Female Orgasm” event held on Swarthmore’s campus on Feb. 16.
The “I (HEART) Female Orgasm” event was sponsored by Swarthmore’s Title IX House, the Women’s Resource Center for Gender Equity, and Sexual Health Advocates.
“Whether you want to learn how to have your first orgasm, how to have better ones, or how to help your partner(s), Dorian Solot & Connor Timmons cover it all with LOTS of humor, plenty of honesty, and an underlying message of sexual health and empowerment,” a description of the event on Swarthmore’s website reads. “Are you coming?….”
Also: “**FOLKS OF ALL GENDER & SEXUAL IDENTITIES ARE WELCOME**”
Dorian Solot. YouTube screenshot/TowerlightVideo
Solot has been traveling to colleges and universities of all sizes performing her well-rehearsed orgasm spiel for years.
Swarthmore’s $1.9 billion endowment is worth more than the entire annual gross-domestic product of Belize.
Just over 1,500 students are enrolled at Swarthmore.
In 2014, a then-sophomore at Swarthmore, Erin Ching criticized her school for allowing Christian conservative thinker Robert George to speak on campus. “What really bothered me is, the whole idea is that at a liberal arts college, we need to be hearing a diversity of opinion,” Ching whined — apparently without irony. (RELATED: The 13 Most Rabidly Leftist, Politically Correct Colleges For Dirty, Tree-Hugging Hippies)