Corinne Lafont ’26, the 2025 Screw Your Roommate organizer and Swarthmore senior, has never been on a Screw date. “I’ve been hesitant because it’s so public. But this year…who knows! If everyone’s on a date, then nobody’s really paying attention to me, you know?”
Lafont decided to run Screw — Swarthmore’s biannual matchmaking night — because she believes it is a reminder that even at a small school, there are still opportunities for new experiences and connections. She praised Swarthmore’s student-run culture and said the students are warm and willing to open up; this is why she thinks the tradition is still around over 40 years later.
Public humiliation is an integral part of Screw, according to former Dean Ted Goundie in a 1996 Phoenix article. Screw, Goundie said, is a Swarthmore institution. A Phoenix editorial pledging a paper-wide Screw endorsement from 1998 promotes the event as an opportunity to escape Swarthmore’s intensity and loosen up, with the embarrassment serving as a strength rather than weakness. “With Swat gossip levels out of sight, the inaccessibility of cars, and only one ‘date place’ on campus (Paces), casual dating at Swarthmore is all but extinct. Screw addresses all three of these issues.”…