Humanity evolved from wriggling sea creatures with large mouth and no anus, Photo Credit: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/humanity-evolved-sea-creatures-large-mouth-no-anus-sccorhytus-millions-year-ago-micro-fossils-china-a7552611.html
It’s late, a Saturday night near the end of January. I’ve signed up to take the swim test the next day in the early afternoon. I feel unsettled, anxious, even paranoid. Usually, to prepare for a test, I have some notes to look over—and maybe some dates, title/author pairs, or verb conjugations to learn by heart. But Columbia’s is a general education—the first in the country, claims the Core’s website—and a general education “ministers to the body as well as to the mind.” So for about 30 minutes I have been studying a video called “How To Swim Breaststroke” on YouTube. At intervals, I pause to make motions in the air like they do in the video. To practice leg movements, I have to lie belly-down on the floor with my arms out in front of me for balance. I’m working on my “pull” and my “catch” now: moving my arms in the “water” as if “scooping my hands around a large bowl.” I imagine the pool water will be very, very cold—so I brace myself in advance, preparing thoughts of soup, wool socks and balaclavas.
When I get to the locker room at around 12:30pm the next day, no one’s there. Uris Pool is located in the lowest depths of Dodge. I’ve only been here once before, just out of curiosity, two years prior. This is how I know to bring slides, a towel, and goggles; and that a shower is mandatory before getting in. I run the water cold to prepare to plunge into what I’m sure will be near-freezing pool water. When I get to the door that’s supposed to lead into the pool area, it’s locked. A chart says the space opens at 1pm. Music blares from inside. A man next to me bangs at the door, which eventually opens. I’m the first student to arrive; a few others trickle in behind me. I consider explaining to the proctor that I’ve never taken swimming lessons before and, though I definitely won’t drown, I probably won’t pass the test. Instead I practice scooping my hands around the large bowl from before.
Finally, it’s time to line up at one end of the lane farthest from the door. I get into the water slowly and find that it’s surpringly warm. As soon as I start, I forget the bowl and quickly exhaust myself swimming in what I think the freestyle stroke might look like. (I have no name for how I swim the last lap or two.) Once I’ve dragged myself out of the pool, I check in with the proctor—yes, good, done, goodbye—and toddle my way back to the locker room. I’m relieved to be graduating, relieved to wipe the bowl from my memory. But as I walk home in the rain, still a little wet and smelling chlorine on my hair, I’m left a little dazed. It’s funny, I think, that for all the pomp and circumstance of the Core, students tend to check off their last requirement deep underground with a few laps of the pool and their UNI on a spreadsheet.
As far as I can tell after a bit of research, no one knows exactly why Columbia—and a handful of other schools, mostly in the Northeast—have a swim test requirement, or when exactly this requirement was instituted. Unlike every other Core requirement, there’s little information on any of Columbia’s websites explaining why the swim test is in place. In the event that it’s challenged, as it was in 1991, when SEAS abolished the requirement, it seems to be up to the Athletics Director of the time to improvise a defense. What interests me most about the swim test, now that I can think about it without feeling my heart in my mouth, is how many myths, stories, and hypotheses have arisen to try to explain why it came about.
Some of them are just fun. According to one very popular tale—a favorite among tour guides—the administration once took an interest in what students might do if Manhattan sank, or were under seige: students in the College would need to be able to swim to New Jersey, while SEAS students could be trusted to dinghy their way out of New York. However, the myriad other, more serious stories that circulate about the swim test’s origins can be an indication of how students tend to think of the Core in general. Columbia’s swim test has been theorized (with little clarity one way or another) as: a government mandate during World War I; a government mandate during World War II; a stipulation given by a wealthy donor whose child drowned (on the Titanic?); a way to limit the number of Jewish students at Columbia (this one was theorized by Robert McCaughey, author of Stand, Columbia); a result of Columbia copying Cornell copying service academies; a result of anxiety over physical fitness during wartime; and simply to justify the maintenance of the pool. The clear, recurrent themes that emerge—war, money, prejudice—make up many of the “insistent problems of the present” and/or “humanity’s most enduring questions” that the Core is meant to urge students to think about. In this context, I wonder if the origins of the swim test might lay in what might be humanity’s most enduring question, one going all the way back to humankind’s earliest known prehistoric ancestor, Saccorhytus coronarius, “a bag-like sea creature that had a large mouth, apparently had no anus and moved by wriggling.” To sink or to swim?