About John Swallow

The 24th president of Carthage College, John R. Swallow is a strategic, relational, and entrepreneurial president, devoted to Carthage and its community, and determined to amplify its success educating students.

Recruited to be Carthage’s president in 2017, he saw in Carthage an unusual opportunity to lead an historic liberal arts college committed to an entrepreneurial and resourceful approach to the future. Under his leadership, and despite the many challenges of higher education, Carthage has become as strong as ever. Carthage now posts record first-year enrollments, record first-to-second year retention rates, dramatically reduced equity gaps in retention rates, fundraising levels nearly twice as high, and strong endorsement by alumni and friends.

Over the last seven years, the Carthage faculty has approved and launched some 17 new undergraduate majors and four new master’s degrees, athletic leaders have added four new varsity athletic teams, and leaders in Carthage advancement and facilities have invested over $80 million in the campus and its technology. President Swallow credits these achievements to the inspired work of an outstanding faculty and staff and a thoroughly committed and supportive board, and he fully expects Carthage to increase its reach and impact even further.

President Swallow has served extensively on boards connected to higher education and economic development. Today he serves as past chair of the Milwaukee-area Higher Education Regional Alliance — a collective or 17 postsecondary institutions enrolling over 125,000 students in seven Wisconsin counties, together with over 10 additional partner organizations — and as past chair of the Kenosha Area Business Alliance. His board service also includes eight years on the board of Agnes Scott College, a women’s college in Decatur, Georgia, that is recognized nationally for innovation, social mobility, and students’ first-year experience, and 10 years as trustee and regent, including as board secretary, of his alma mater, the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. Appearing on podcasts and in print, he has published articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education, The Huffington Post, Inside Higher Ed, and the Hechinger Report.

Before Carthage

President Swallow left high school before graduating in order to enroll at the University of the South, often called Sewanee, at the age of 15. He graduated in 1989 with honors in both English literature and mathematics, and then pursued his graduate studies at Yale, from which he holds two master’s degrees and a Ph.D., all in mathematics.

Recognized early for his teaching and scholarship, he held the John T. Kimbrough chair in mathematics at Davidson College in North Carolina, teaching mathematics and interdisciplinary humanities there for 17 years, and winning its Omicron Delta Kappa Teaching Award in 2010. Committed to intercultural education, he spent sabbatical years at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and Université Bordeaux I.

After beginning his career at Davidson, he was recruited in 2011 to return to his alma mater by John McCardell, former president of Middlebury College and then vice-chancellor and president of Sewanee. At Sewanee, President Swallow served as provost, and later executive vice president and chief operating officer, before assuming the presidency of Carthage.

He has published an undergraduate textbook and more than two dozen research articles in mathematics, many with former undergraduate honors students.

Personal

President Swallow has long been an amateur singer, and he and his wife, Cameron, met in choir in college. He has sung with choirs or choruses on and off ever since. He currently sings in the Midwest Vocal Express, a barbershop chorus originally founded in Greendale, Wisconsin.

Cameron has extensive experience as a secondary school math and English teacher, as well as teaching French, history, and theater. In 2018 she became Wisconsin’s state co-coordinator for Braver Angels, a nationwide organization to depolarize political conversation that held its 2024 national convention at Carthage. Cameron also serves as a board member for several area not-for-profits. Mrs. Swallow sings and plays with bluegrass band Flat Creek Highway, which performs at venues across the region.

The couple has two grown children, Bard and Sophie, and a basset hound, Watson.