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In Brief: Fall 2002
Required Reading: As part of fall orientation, the 685 incoming students of Smith’s class of 2006 read and discussed Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, a critically acclaimed nonfiction book by Barbara Ehrenreich. The book addresses issues of class, income, poverty and housing, which have been a recent focus of student activists and faculty scholarship. Ehrenreich visited campus on September 6 for a public reading and discussion.
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Reinventing Engineering: With a $300,000 Math Excellence Program grant from GE Fund, Smith plans to reinvent the way engineering is taught. “Our goal is to create a new engineering pedagogy, from kindergarten through college, that will serve not only Smith women well, but the engineering education community as a whole,” explains Domenico Grasso, program director and R.B. Hewlett Professor of Engineering. This summer a team of professors in engineering, philosophy, education and mathematics began devising a new curriculum. The Summer Science and Engineering Program for high school girls will serve as a test site for the new teaching approaches.
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Julia Child’s Gift: A generous gift from Julia Child ’34, renowned cookbook author and star of television’s The French Chef, will support the construction of Smith’s new campus center. The $2.35 million gift represents the proceeds from the recent sale of her longtime home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Scheduled for a grand opening in September 2003, the 60,000-square-foot, $23 million campus center will serve as a vibrant, inviting meeting place for the Smith community and as a welcoming entrance for visitors to the college.
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Record Donations: The Alumnae Fund’s fund-raising efforts hit 50 percent alumnae participation in fiscal year 2001–02, thus achieving a significant milestone. A search of the archives reveals no other 50 percent record in the past 50 years. Alumnae Fund staff credit volunteers—and, of course, donors—with this success and note, especially, the class of 1952, which set an impressive 97 percent participation rate at its reunion in May. Its record surpassed the previous 92 percent rate for a 50th reunion, which had stood for 19 years.
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Betty Friedan ’42 and her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique were the focus of a live broadcast of C-Span’s American Writers series last June. Among the Smith experts featured on the two-hour program were Sherrill Redmond, head of the Sophia Smith Collection, and Daniel Horowitz, professor of American Studies. C-Span host Steve Scully (left) interviewed Horowitz from an outdoor TV studio on campus.
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