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In June 2002, Carol Tecla Christ became the
10th president of Smith College.
Born in New York City in 1944, Christ attended public
schools in northern New Jersey. In 1966 she graduated with high honors from Douglass
College and went on to Yale University, where she received the Ph.D. in English.
In 1970 Christ joined the English faculty at the University
of California, Berkeley. As chair of her department from 1985 to 1988, she built
and maintained one of the top-ranked English departments in the country. She entered
the university’s administration in 1988, serving first as dean of humanities
and later as provost and dean of the College of Letters and Sciences. In 1994 Christ
was appointed vice chancellor and provost (and later became executive vice chancellor).
During her six years as Berkeley’s top academic officer, she was credited with
sharpening the institution’s intellectual focus and building top-rated departments
in the humanities and sciences. In addition, she helped shape Berkeley’s campus
policy in response to Proposition 209, the 1996 California law barring the consideration
of race in college admissions.
Christ, who was the highest-ranking female administrator
at Berkeley until she returned to full-time teaching in 2000, has a well-established
reputation as a champion of women’s issues and diversity. Her first administrative
position was as assistant to the chancellor on issues involving the status of women.
She describes her undergraduate education at Douglass, the women’s college
of Rutgers University, as formative and has, in the words of a colleague, “an
intellectual and emotional commitment to women’s education.”
At Smith, Christ has led an energetic and wide-ranging
strategic planning process to identify the distinctive intellectual traditions of
the Smith curriculum and foster initiatives to further develop students’ essential
capacities. Issued in 2007, The
Smith Design for Learning: A Plan to Reimagine a Liberal Arts Education builds
upon Smith’s history of pedagogical innovation, identifying priority areas
-- among them, international studies, environmental sustainability, and community
engagement -- for
significant investment over the coming decade. The product of two years of intensive
work and the engagement of thousands of alumnae, faculty, staff and students, The
Smith Design advances Smith’s mission to “educate
women of promise for lives of distinction.”
In the area of capital planning, a number of major building
projects have come to fruition during Christ's tenure: the renovation of and addition
to the Brown Fine Arts Center, a dramatic new campus center, a renovated Lyman Conservatory,
the impressive Olin Fitness Center, new homes for the Poetry Center and the Mwangi
Cultural Center, and the renovation of Lilly Hall, home of the college's School for
Social Work. Christ spurred long-range planning for a comprehensive science center
and, for the shorter term, a state-of-the-art, sustainably designed classroom and
laboratory facility to be named Ford Hall, in recognition of its lead donor, the
Ford Motor Company Fund. When completed in 2009, Ford Hall will be home to the college’s
pioneering Picker Engineering Program as well as the departments of molecular biology,
chemistry, biochemistry and computer science.
In various forums, including the American Chemical Society,
the Chautauqua Institute and the Council for the Advancement of Education, Christ
has addressed such issues as women’s careers, civil discourse and the expectations
and demands of accountability in the academy. Her op-ed articles have appeared in
The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor and The Chronicle
of Higher Education. In
2004 Christ and Mount Holyoke College President Joanne Creighton co-hosted an international
conference on issues and challenges in women’s education, which also examined
women’s study of science. The resulting organization, Women's Education Worldwide,
comprises 50 colleges on five continents and is committed to developing collaborative
strategies to increase access to high-quality education for girls and women.
While developing Smith’s ties across the country
and around the world, Christ is equally committed to strengthening relations between
the college and its local community. She is a member of the board of directors of
the Western Massachusetts Economic Development Council, Clarke School for the Deaf
and Northampton’s renowned Academy of Music. In addition, she has established
a community advisory board to address such issues as affordable housing and Smith’s
support for Northampton’s
public schools. In 2007 she was named to the board of directors of Merrill Lynch
& Co., serving on its public policy and responsibility committee.
Throughout her administrative career, Christ has maintained
an active program of teaching and research. She has published two books: The
Finer Optic: The Aesthetic of Particularity in Victorian Poetry and Victorian
and Modern Poetics. She also edited a Norton Critical Edition of George Eliot’s The
Mill on the Floss and co-edited the Norton Anthology of English Literature
and Victorian Literature and The Victorian Visual Imagination. She
is professor of English at Smith and continues to teach, offering seminars on science
and literature and on the arts. In 2004 she was named a fellow of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, in recognition of her contributions as a leader in
higher education. In 2007, Yale University Graduate School presented Christ with
its highest honor, the Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal, in recognition of her distinguished
achievements in scholarship, teaching, academic administration and public service.
Christ has an avid interest in music. She has studied
the piano since childhood and learned to play the viola as an adult.
Her son Jonathan is a graduate of New York University
and lives in New York. Her daughter Elizabeth is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College
and lives in Philadelphia.
Christ resides on campus with her husband, Paul Alpers,
a scholar of the literature of the English Renaissance. He holds the title of Class
of 1942 Professor of English Emeritus at Berkeley and is professor in residence at
Smith. |
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