A World View, Winter 2006–07

Carol T. Christ, Smith Alumnae Quarterly, Winter 2006–07

This fall, I traveled to Europe to attend the 75th anniversary of our Junior Year Abroad Program in Florence, to visit alumnae in Madrid (most of whom had participated in Smith's JYA program when it was located in Madrid), and to attend the 60th reunion of our JYA program in Geneva, a celebration combined with the biennial reunion of alumnae living in Europe. This set of visits deepened my understanding of the pioneering vision that led Smith to establish these programs.

The first of our junior year abroad programs was located in Paris. Initiated in 1925, the program was the second junior year abroad program developed by an American college or university. The Madrid and the Florence programs followed in 1930 and in 1931. The country at the time was in the midst of the Depression and an isolationist period in foreign policy. It was a bold act to send a group of young women abroad for a year in this set of historical circumstances. It was no less bold to send young women to Geneva in 1946, when that program was founded, to a Europe just beginning to recover from the war.

Smith's third president, William Allan Neilson, shaped Smith's vision of education abroad. In his view, it served three purposes. First, it developed fluency in the language. Second, it led students to appreciate a European perspective. President Neilson was accustomed to meeting with the students setting sail for their junior year in France. They were not to act like Americans in Paris, he instructed, but jeunes filles, and they were not to mistake plumbing for civilization. Third, President Neilson wanted to develop a commitment among Smith students to international institutions and international understanding.

The first generations of Smith students studying in Europe saw momentous historical events. The International Institute, which housed the Madrid program, attracted many progressive thinkers and artists who came to use its lending library, one of the few sources for foreign books in Franco's Spain. When the first Florence class visited Rome, a representative of the group had a private audience with Mussolini. The first class to go to Geneva traveled to the American zone in Germany, observed the preparatory Commission of the International Refugee Organization at the Palace of Nations, home to the new United Nations, and saw Eleanor Roosevelt conduct the first meetings of the Commission on Human Rights.

Europeans commented on the lively exuberance of the Americans, most with approval, but some not, like the anonymous "Miss X," who wrote sternly to President Neilson about the bad impression two Smithies made on shipboard on their return from Florence, by fraternizing with the bartender. And the Smithies enjoyed what one Geneva student called "Wine, Men, and Song," overcoming their initial lack of ease with "the rather conservative spirit of the Genevois," to find their social calendars become so complicated "as to warrant buying a separate notebook in which to indicate that Monday at three you have a rendezvous for tea with Pierre and not with Jean, whom you are meeting for a chat at five on Wednesday."

Learning about the early years of our JYA programs stimulates reflection on our current ambitions for study abroad. The world is strikingly different than it was in 1930 or in 1946; it is at once larger and smaller, more deeply connected and yet vehemently divided. We arrive in Europe in eight hours, not eight days, and we communicate cheaply, in seconds, by e-mail, not by letter, typed laboriously on onion-skin paper, shipped across the Atlantic. The world beyond Europe is far larger in its importance and consequence; we have students studying abroad in Africa, in Australia, in South America, in Asia.

Despite these differences, or perhaps because of them, President Neilson's goals are even more resonant today. We need to educate our students to understand the perspective of another country, and to develop in them a commitment to international understanding and institutions. Some 45 percent of our students currently study for either a semester or a full year abroad, carrying their financial aid with them when they go. Because we know that appreciation of other cultures is one of the most important capacities we must develop in our students, we have made international study, both off and on campus, one of the key directions in our strategic planning process. Smith's mission, now, as at its founding, is to educate women who will change the world. In the increasingly "flat" world we inhabit, such a goal demands international understanding.