State of the College Address 2004

Carol T. Christ, Tenth President of Smith College
Ivy Day, May 15, 2004; Second Reunion Weekend, May 22, 2004

Ivy Day has become my favorite Smith tradition. More than any other ritual, it expresses the history and continuity of the college. Today is the 120th anniversary of the first Ivy Day, celebrated in 1884, when the members of the graduating class decided to create a visible and lasting monument to their presence at Smith by each planting an ivy vine along the base of College Hall. In the years following, the ivy grew and flourished, representing at once the course of the graduates' lives and their roots in Smith soil. Nowadays we plant only a single vine of ivy for each class, perhaps because the older custom of a plant for each graduate might well cover the campus in an ivy shroud, rather like the thicket of brambles hiding Sleeping Beauty's castle. The Ivy Day parade has, in some sense, taken the place of the planting of individual sprigs of ivy. In the procession of alumnae, we all see a visible symbol of your continuing presence here and of the historical existence of the college, and all it represents, across generations of women. When the seniors follow the alumnae after lining the walk for their parade, you join the procession, becoming alumnae at your commencement.

The first Ivy Day took place five years after Smith graduated its first class, in 1879. This is, thus, the 125th anniversary of Smith's first commencement. It is also, coincidentally, the 350th anniversary of Northampton's founding, and the city has planned a grand series of celebratory events in early June. Fifty years ago, when the Class of 1954 graduated, was Northampton's 300th anniversary and the 75th anniversary of the college's first commencement. There were even grander celebrations then, including a play, Covenant, written by women from the classes of 50, 53, and 54, telling the story of Smith's early years.

The speaker at graduation 50 years ago was the broadcaster and journalist Alistair Cooke. In conversations about their upcoming reunion, several members of the Class of '54 told me how memorable a speech it was. I therefore looked it up in the Archives.

It is indeed a remarkable speech, at once dated and timely. Cooke begins by telling the graduates that the most significant event of their lives will be their marriage.
“At this moment, ridiculous though it may seem, the fortune of many of you here is being decided by anonymous young men who are packing their bags in New Haven Connecticut, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in Williamstown, Princeton, New Jersey, even perhaps in Grinnell, Iowa, or the Marine Laboratory in La Jolla, California.” In the second part of his speech, however, he turns to the subject of America's role in the world and warns of the dangers of their country's strength and dominance. “No nation has ever been given leadership to sell or coax a subordinate into the leader's ways. We shall have to learn the real customs and roots of other people's cultures.” When the Class of '54 wrote to Cooke to ask for his greetings on the occasion of their 50th reunion, he replied that he would count himself lucky indeed if he were above ground at the age of 95 and that he was sorry to say that much of the speech might have been written today.

As many of you know, Alistair Cooke died only a short time ago, at the age of 95, and although part of his speech might have been written today, part of it assuredly could not. Adrienne Rich was the graduation speaker for the Class of 1979, now celebrating its 25th reunion; she talked about men packing their bags in a different spirit.

I look back to the college's history because it provides so rich a reflection of the history of women in this century. Even in the face of the remarkable changes in women's lives over the 126 years of Smith's history, the college has embraced a single mission: to furnish an education for women that, in Sophia Smith's words, will increase their weight of influence in the world and their power for good.

In that spirit, I am now going to talk about the highlights of the year. It has been a remarkable year. It is the final year of our comprehensive campaign; through the generosity of alumnae and friends who have contributed to the campaign, Smith has launched an extraordinary set of new programs and built new facilities of immense benefit and beauty. Last year, we celebrated the opening of the Brown Fine Arts Center, the reopening of the Smith College Museum of Art, and the reopening of the Lyman Plant House. This year, we have celebrated the opening of the Campus Center. For almost twenty years, the Smith community has talked about its need for such a center. The architects, Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi, have brilliantly realized a building to fulfill this need. They talk about it as a roofed-over marketplace, where the members of the community see themselves as
a community. There's never before been a central place where faculty, staff, and students all have reason to go. Just to give you one statistic that is a measure of the Campus Center's success: last year there were 225 events scheduled at Davis; this year there have been 1,700 events scheduled at the Campus Center.

We also celebrated the opening of the Olin Fitness Center this year. I hope that you go to see it while you are here. It is a wonderful architectural achievement, an elegant glass span connecting Ainsworth and Scott gymnasiums, making them seem like one building. The facilities are so attractive that there is no longer an excuse not to exercise, and students, staff, and faculty are voting, quite literally, with their feet, and their biceps, and their triceps.

Smith also has many new programs, supported through the campaign, that are thriving: the Kahn Institute for the Liberal Arts, which brings faculty and students together in research groups, studied two topics this year: Problems of Democracy and Buddhism in America. Next year, it will focus on biotechnology and world health as well as visual languages.

The Praxis program guarantees each student a paid internship during her time at Smith. This summer more than 400 students will be working in internships in organizations ranging from the Tanzanian Ministry of Health in Africa, the Jodrell Laboratory at Kew Gardens in England, the New York City AIDS Housing Network, the Prado in Madrid, the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington D.C., the Emergency Department at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, the Williamstown Theater Festival, the Autism Research Foundation, CBS News, the Nyaka AIDS Orphan School in Uganda, the Badlands Observatory in Rapid City, South Dakota, and the Boston Red Sox. Maybe with a Smithie to help them, this year they'll win the World Series.

The Center for Women and Financial Independence has offered four very popular courses this year: Financing Life, Reading the Financial News, Investing, and Entrepreneurship, and Randy Bartlett has just given his popular workshop for seniors, From Backpack to Briefcase. The Poetry Center has just ended a seventh season of readings to packed auditoriums, and we just dedicated a physical space in Wright Hall to the Center and celebrated with a wonderful reading by the country's Poet Laureate, Louise Gluck.

The most remarkable achievement this year, however, will be the graduation of our first class of engineers, the first all-female class of engineers ever to graduate from a U.S. college. The commencement address in 1879 was given by Charles Eliot, the legendary president of Harvard from 1879 to 1909. He began his address, “The first fruits of a new orchard are singularly interesting and precious in the owner's eyes.” So we feel about this first class of graduates, almost twice the size of Smith's class of 1879.

The success of all of these initiatives owes everything to the generosity of you, the alumnae who have supported them. For this, we thank you.

The many things that we have celebrated this year do not mean we have not faced challenges. Smith, like many colleges and universities, has suffered from the difficulties of the national economy, both in the decline of the value of its endowment and in the increased financial neediness of our student body. We have had to reduce our operating budget to restore financial equilibrium to the college. We have had to make some hard decisions, including ones that have been controversial with some students and alumnae, among those, changes in dining. I want to assure alumnae of the careful and deliberate process through which campus committees and the Board of Trustees considered the changes we have made, protecting what we agreed were the college's highest priorities -- the quality of the academic program and the access and affordability that financial aid provides. We have righted our financial ship and have restored financial equilibrium to the college; we are ready to move forward.

In the area of admissions, Smith has had great success this year. Acceptance of our offers of admission has increased significantly. We have now 731 acceptances, for our first-year class, where our original target was 640. I want to thank all of the alumnae who are helping us recruit students; you have succeeded beyond our most optimistic projections.

I will now tell you about the achievements of our students and our faculty in the past year. Our faculty have continued to distinguish themselves by awards. They have been awarded $2.5 million in grants, and they have won many prestigious fellowships. Kate Queeney, a junior faculty member in Chemistry, has won a NSF Career Award. Justin Cammy, in Jewish Studies, and Helen Horowitz, in American Studies, have won ACLS fellowships; Karl Donfried, in Religion, a Fulbright, Katy Schneider, in Art, a Guggenheim, and Scott Bradbury, in Classics, an NEH. Henri Cole, who has been a visiting poet with us for three years, has won the very prestigious Kingsley Tufts Prize. Dan Horowitz, in American Studies, has won the Mary C. Turpie Prize for his career's achievements. Jennifer Guglielmo, in History, won the Organization of American Historians' Lerner-Scott Prize for the best dissertation in women's history; Justina Gregory in Classics has won a prize from the Loeb Classical Library for her work on the Blackwell Companion to Greek Tragedy. Mike Albertson, in Mathematics, will serve as the Neils R. Grabois Professor at Colgate in the fall, and Nancy Mithlo has won a fellowship from the Research Institute of Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford.

We have also had occasion to celebrate the teaching of our faculty. Kathleen Compton Sherrerd, '54, and John J. J. Sherrerd gave us a very generous gift for a set of prizes for distinguished teaching. We awarded the first set of four prizes this year to David Cohen in Mathematics, Shizuka Hsieh in Chemistry, Mahnaz Mahdavi in Economics, and Vittoria Poletto in Italian. We had an inspiring award ceremony in which the campus came together to celebrate excellent teaching. We also dedicated Wright Hall Auditorium to Leo Weinstein on April 18 and celebrated that occasion with a panel of his former students talking about his shaping influence on their lives and careers.

Faculty collaborate with students in much of the work that they do. This year, for the third time, we held a day-long celebration of student research, in which 130 students presented the independent work they had done with faculty.

Our students have achieved many other successes. We had a bumper year in national fellowship competitions. Engineering graduates An Chi Tsou and Cloelle Sausville-Giddings have both won very prestigious NSF Fellowships for graduate study. Jill Curtis and Jessica Rubin, both Class of '06, have won Boren scholarships. Emily Jones and Bryn Savage, Class of '04, and Brittany Hopkins '06 have won DAAD fellowships. A record nine students have won Fulbrights: Megan Jamieson, '03, for study in Germany, and, from the Class of '04, Marjorie Housley, for Morocco; Erica Nichols, for Cameroon; Miriam Quintal, for Israel: Rosemarie Rauer, for Germany; Ellen Smith and Julia Unger, both for South Korea; and Maryalice Walker, for South Africa; and Silvia Newell, for Costa Rica. Shiran Hastings '05 has won a Goldwater scholarship, Brooke Betts '05 has been named a Beckman scholar, and Megan Clark '97 has won a Mellon. Anne Jurkowsky '05 has won a Udall scholarship. Kate Dempsey '04 has been named a Vose Scholar in American Art, and Leslie-Ann Giddings '05 has won the Iota Sigma Pi Gladys Emerson scholarship in Chemistry.

We have also had an extraordinary year in sports. Crew has won the Seven Sisters varsity race, swept the NEWMAC races, won the New England championship, the ECAC Championship, and is now ranked number one in the nation. When Trinity heard the results of the New England championship, in which our team won the overall trophy, Trinity was heard to complain, “But they don't even have guys. ”

Softball has also won the ECAC championship. The team had the most wins in a season ever at Smith, with a record 34-6 season, and Bonnie May, the coach, was named NEWMAC coach of the year. Soccer finished second in its conference, and was the runner-up in the post-season ECAC championship. Track finished third in its conference, and the coach, Carla Coffey, was named NEWMAC coach of the year.

We had over 30 athletes named to all conference teams, five to all region, and one to All-American -- skier Kelly Duran. This is the third time Kelly has been named an All-American. Basketball made the conference tournament, and senior Dasen Woitkowski won the St. Ann's award, given to the top basketball player in the country at a woman's college. In addition, Dasen has scored over 1,000 career points, only the 7 th Smith player ever to do so, and she did it in three years. Her name is now on the wall of Ainsworth Gymnasium, along with the other 1,000-point scorers.

Smith alumnae continue to distinguish themselves in many spheres. Julia Child '34 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Marilyn Carlson Nelson '61 received the Grice Lifetime Achievement Award from the Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association. Jane Yolen '60 was named Young People's Poetry Week Poet for 2004. Shelter Dogs, a documentary by Cynthia Wade, '89, has won several awards. President Bush appointed April Foley '69 as the First Vice President of the Export Import Bank of the United States.

Each year we recognize people who have worked for Smith and are retiring. This year we lose the expertise and wisdom of three members of our Board of Trustees: Dennis Thompson, Barbara Taylor '65, and Anna Franker '02. I want to thank them for their contributions.

Seven faculty members are retiring this year: Yvonne Daniel in Afro-American Studies and Dance; Jaroslaw Leshko in Art; Lester Little in History; Elliot Offner in Art; Donald Robinson in Government; Harold Skulsky in English; and Hans Vaget in German. Molly Robinson is retiring from her position as a senior lecturer in Government and Economics. Ann Shanahan '59, who has served ably and imaginatively as the college's Chief Public Affairs Officer, is also retiring this year, and the trustees have just honored her with the John M. Greene Award.

One retired faculty member has died this year -- Sten Stenson, Professor Emeritus of Religion and Biblical Studies.

And now to the graduates. There are 688 of you, coming from 43 states, the District of Columbia, and 23 foreign countries. 73 of you are Adas. You have completed 783 majors; 94 of you have completed double majors. The most popular majors are government, art, economics, psychology, and English.

In the graduate program, 64 of you will receive degrees tomorrow, ranging from Master's in Education of the Deaf, Exercise and Sport Studies, Education, and Arts, to the Certificate in American Studies. Congratulations to you all.

You will go into the world, as the alumnae here have before you. I speak often of the Grecourt Gates at Smith, because they are so powerful a symbol of the college's mission. They were erected in 1924 as a memorial to the work of the Smith College Relief Unit. Financed by the Alumnae Association, these young women went to France in 1917 to rebuild villages that had been destroyed by the war. When they returned, President Neilson resolved to build a set of gates in their honor, a replica of the chateau gates in Grecourt where the unit had had its headquarters. At the dedication ceremony, Ada Comstock, the great dean of the college after whom the Ada Comstock scholars program is named, described their significance: “They form a wide gateway through which the graduates of this college will go out year by year, ready as were the members of this unit to dedicate all they have to the common lot.” I wish all of you good luck on that journey.