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October 19,
2002
Members of the Board of Trustees,
alumnae, faculty, staff, students, parents, colleagues from
other universities, and friends from Northampton. It is humbling
and inspiring to address you all this afternoon -- humbling
because your visible presence conveys how many and various
are the communities to whom Smith matters, inspiring because
you embody the idea of an institution that I symbolically
join today. Ever since I came to Smith a few short months
ago, I have been meditating on what makes it a community,
what bonds connect faculty, students, and staff across the
many years of its existence. Talking with alumnae who graduated
over the past 60 years, talking with faculty and staff, current
and retired, reading the words of Smith’s past presidents,
I have been struck by the conviction, repeated by succeeding
generations, that those who have studied and worked here
share a common experience. What explains this strongly felt
sense of commonality, this conviction that Smith is a community,
not just in the here and now, but over time?
In part, what defines Smith
as a community is an intensely shared sense of place. Smith’s
founders had a weighty sense, not only that they were creating
a new college, but that they were choosing a place for it.
President Seelye began his inaugural address -- an inaugural
address, I might note, that lasted two hours (I promise you
I won’t talk that long) -- by stating that as early
as 1762, the citizens of Northampton had presented a petition
to the General Court of Massachusetts asking for a college
in the vicinity, to be called “Queen’s College.” However,
the jealousy of Harvard, unwilling to contemplate another
institution of higher education so near at hand, thwarted
the undertaking. Although Amherst later claimed Queen’s
College as its ancestor, President Seelye questioned the
right of a men’s college to lay claim to a queen as
its patron. He declared, “With that poetic justice
for which history is celebrated, we, today...inaugurate an
institution which is to be in a truer sense...a Queen’s
College.”
For President Seelye, it was
not only history that defined Smith’s distinctive sense
of place but the landscape. The landscape, he argued, has
lessons to teach: “Nature, as if foreseeing this region
was to be a great educational center, has gathered into our
immediate vicinity some of the best illustrations of her
origins and forces. It would be difficult to find a locality
which combines, not only so many elements of natural beauty
but offers also as numerous and varied illustrations of the
natural sciences.” He speaks of the mountains in terms
that will warm the heart of any administrator. He calls them “unsalaried
professors, whose lessons richly supplement the poverty of
our human teaching.” President Seelye brought the idea
of the landscape’s pedagogical design onto the campus
itself by hiring Frederick Law Olmsted to design the landscape
master plan for the college, the arboretum that extends throughout
the campus, and the Botanic Garden.
Smith’s architecture
added to its distinctive sense of place. John M. Greene urged
Sophia Smith to house students not in one large building
but in several small ones, or cottages, to bring them more
into the social life of the town. Smith’s house system,
as well as its integration with the city of Northampton,
emerged from this vision. Smith alumnae share the special
intimacy that we feel with those who have lived in the same
house. However, it is not only a common physical place that
builds college community but intense experience in that place.
For many of us, college seems to mark the beginning of the
process of becoming who we are. When we are living away from
home for the first time, the choices we make, the intellectual
passions we discover, and the friendships we form have a
defining authority and intensity. When we have such experiences
in the same place as others, different as those experiences
may be, we feel a sense of community extending over time.
One of the great poems of the
19th century, William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” concerns
this very kind of connection, the bond we feel through identifying
our past self with someone now in the same place. Wordsworth’s
poem is occasioned by returning to a landscape that he had
visited five years before. His return stimulates a complex
meditation on the continuity and discontinuity of the self
and its connection to the external world -- a world that
is represented in the landscape that he once saw, has often
remembered, and now sees again. He finds consolation for
the distance he has traveled from his former self in his
sister Dorothy, who stands beside him and in whom he can
feel and imagine the language of his heart when he was young.
When I was describing the relationship
I saw between Wordsworth’s great meditation on place
and the continuity of the self to historic community in this
landscape, my husband remarked, “Dorothy should have
gone to Smith.” William Wordsworth’s younger
sister had no formal education after the age of fifteen.
(No Englishwoman of her time went to university.) She wrote
almost no words for publication but devoted her considerable
genius to recording the observations of nature and of people
that provided much of the material for her brother’s
poetry. Like the sister that Virginia Woolf imagines for
Shakespeare in A Room of One’s Own, she died without
ever fully realizing her own powers. The figure of Dorothy
Wordsworth could represent the deprivation that inspired
Sophia Smith to found a college for women “to furnish
for my own sex means and facilities for education equal to
those which are afforded now in our colleges to young men.”
Smith’s founding as a
women’s college occurred at an interesting moment in
the history of American higher education. In his history
of the undergraduate curriculum in American colleges and
universities, Frederick Rudolph identifies two conflicting
goals: certifying an elite and facilitating the mobility
of an emerging middle class. At the time that Smith was founded
in the 1870s, institutions designed to promote the second
goal were in more vigorous condition than those dedicated
to the first. The Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862 was encouraging
the establishment of state colleges and universities, whereas
private colleges were somewhat in disarray, as claims for
traditional classical education weakened. Smith’s founders
located the college in relationship both to elite colleges
and universities and to the democratic ideals motivating
the creation of land grant institutions. When Sophia Smith
wrote in her will of her desire “to provide an education
for women equal to those afforded in our colleges to young
men,” she had in mind institutions like Harvard, Yale,
and Amherst. However, when she wrote about increasing women’s “weight
of influence in reforming the evils of society” and
enlarging “their power for good,” she articulated
a more democratic ideal, extending the benefits of higher
education to a population often excluded from them. Through
the course of its history, Smith has defined itself both
through its relationship to the elite colleges of the east
and to the ideal of recruiting populations of women who had
less access to higher education. Writing in Scribner’s
Magazine in 1932, President Neilson made an eloquent defense
of the democratic benefits of higher education: “We
believe that to reserve educational opportunity in general
for a small class is to weaken the country and do injustice
to the individual.” President Mendenhall created both
the Ada Comstock Scholars Program and a set of programs designed
to recruit more African-American students to Smith, including
student and faculty exchanges with historically black colleges
and universities, the Department of Afro-American Studies,
and the Mwangi Center. Smith has built its distinctive sense
of community through uniting the culture of the New England
private college with a socially progressive vision. It is
a private college with a public conscience.
Up to this point, I have been
speaking about the commonality that defines the Smith community
in terms that might seem separate from the core of its mission
and activity -- teaching, learning, and the curriculum. I
want now to shift my attention to that subject, for when
I think of the years before me, and the goals I have for
Smith, they concern what we teach and how we understand what
we teach.
Smith is a liberal arts college
for women. Both of these terms are important in its vision
of the curriculum over the course of its history. The phrase
liberal arts suggests to many of us a historical stability,
extending back several centuries. Yet any history of the
American college curriculum shows that the idea of a stable
central core constituting the liberal arts is a myth. In
1754 a prospectus for the new King’s College, later
to become Columbia University, announced that the course
of study would include surveying, navigation, geography,
history, husbandry, commerce, government, meteorology, natural
history, and natural philosophy. When Thomas Jefferson reorganized
the curriculum of the College of William and Mary in 1779,
he abolished professorships of divinity and oriental languages
and added professorships in public administration, modern
languages, medical sciences, natural history, natural philosophy,
national and international law, and fine arts. These lists
show that the question in defining the curriculum was not
whether to mix the academic, the practical, and the professional,
but how to do so. They also show that disciplines that we
now regard as essential components of a liberal arts education,
like the modern languages, entered the curriculum in comparatively
recent times as disruptive innovations. There has always
been a debate about the curriculum, a debate that has been
buffered by the elective system. Ezra Cornell and Charles
William Eliot introduced the elective system as an innovation
in the late 19th century, providing a strategy of diversification
and choice that could act as a safety valve in conflicts
about content. In a history of the Yale curriculum published
in 1901 -- a century ago -- John C. Schwab described the
result: “The history of the Yale curriculum is the
story of a medieval workshop, with its limited range of simple
tools, all of which the apprentice learned to master, developing
into a modern factory, well equipped with a large stock of
tools and machinery, no two of them alike in their construction
or use, many of them delicate and complicated, and few of
them fully understood or manipulated by all the employees
of the shop.” Schwab’s metaphors are instructive;
they suggest historical change, practical application, and
the loss of commonality.
If the history of the curriculum
demonstrates such fluidity and change, what explains the
sense of imagined stability, against which battles for curricular
change are so often fought? Frederick Rudolph puts it this
way: “Assemble a cluster of professors in a country
town, surround them with scenic grandeur, cut them off from
the world beyond, and they will not have much trouble congratulating
themselves into curricular torpor.” Although it might
almost seem that Rudolph’s ironic scenario had Smith
in mind, Smith’s founders recognized that the curriculum
would change. When Sophia Smith specified the subjects to
be taught in the college that her will established, she took
care to add to the classic list a provision for new studies “as
coming times may develop or demand for the education of women.” The
stable point, in her formulation and in the words of Smith’s
presidents, was education for women. However, Smith’s
presidents had very different ideas of what was required
by an education designed for women. Smith’s first president,
Laurenus Clarke Seelye, was emphatic that the curriculum
for women should not differ from that for men. In his inaugural
address, he stressed the importance of mathematical training
and scientific knowledge. “Our aim has been to so arrange
the course in natural sciences that young ladies may become
sufficiently well acquainted with their general principles
and leading facts to feel an interest in the progress of
science; to clearly comprehend its important discoveries;
and to be prepared to make, afterward, in some chosen field,
original investigations.” As an example of the latter,
he cites “the charming essays of Mrs. Treat on carnivorous
plants.” He also insisted on the importance of classical
studies, which some male academics felt were too taxing for
woman’s more delicate constitution. Seelye questioned “whether
any greater expenditure of physical force is necessary to
master Greek than to endure ordinary fashionable amusements.” President
Neilson also spoke about the broad range of subjects essential
for the college to teach, laying particular stress on the
sciences and the arts. Like President Seelye, he was wary
of concessions to women’s difference. He placed special
emphasis on guarding against excessive docility. He argued
that the college must “seek to raise doubt, objection,
resistance, that the student may become accustomed to do
her own thinking.”
With the presidency of Benjamin
Wright, in 1949, there is a shift in thinking about the character
of women’s education. Arguing from a sense of men’s
and women’s separate spheres, he writes that women’s
education must be distinct from men’s, to suit her
for her place in society. While admitting that women’s
colleges must take into account their economic and public
activities, he goes on to say that “we must constantly
bear in mind that the great majority of women who attend
college will marry and have children, and that for most of
them their home will be the focus of their lives; other things
will be secondary. Their great responsibility will be the
organization and management of the household, the creation
of an atmosphere in which parents and children lead harmonious
and satisfying lives.” President Wright’s inauguration,
on October 19, 1949, exactly 53 years ago, marked the 75th
anniversary of Smith College. At the anniversary convocation
the next morning, Eleanor Roosevelt, then our delegate to
the United Nations, was the featured speaker. The first paragraph
of her speech takes a very different point of view in regard
to woman’s role. She begins, “Last night I heard
the Prime Minister of India, Mr. Nehru, say that the development
of India could be measured by the development of women in
India. I was very much interested in that because I think
perhaps we might say that the development of women and their
acceptance of responsibility is part of the changing world
in which we live.” Eleanor Roosevelt devoted the rest
of her speech to telling Smith’s students how best
to prepare themselves for a role in international affairs.
These two contrasting images -- Eleanor Roosevelt urging
women to go out into the world, and President Wright anticipating
their focus on home and family -- tell us a great deal about
the Smith of the fifties and early sixties. The college invited
leaders like Eleanor Roosevelt to address the women of Smith,
while it encouraged them to think of themselves principally
as wives and mothers.
Exactly 26 years after President
Wright’s inauguration, on October 19, 1975, Jill Ker
Conway became Smith’s first woman president. The women’s
movement had created a new understanding of women’s
history and aspirations, in part through the leadership of
Smith graduates of the '40s and '50s like Betty Friedan and
Gloria Steinem. When President Conway described her vision
of Smith, she imagined the college in newly utopian terms.
Like her immediate predecessors, she felt that women’s
education should be different in some respects from that
of men, but it was not a domestic ideal she described; it
was a heroic one. Because of the history of women’s
subordination, she argued, women’s colleges have a
unique role both in studying and teaching matters of importance
in women’s lives and in educating and inspiring women
to achieve everything of which they are capable. Mary Maples
Dunn and Ruth Simmons continued to shape a feminist vision
of Smith’s identity and mission. They also continued
to do the work of Presidents Mendenhall and Conway of diversifying
the Smith community, expanding the Ada Comstock program,
and increasing the racial and ethnic diversity of Smith’s
student body. Presidents Conway, Dunn, and Simmons created
the Smith that we know today and upon which we will build
in the years ahead.
What will those years hold?
Or to put the question in a more personal way, what are my
aspirations for Smith? My primary value, and the core of
Smith’s mission, is academic excellence. What will
we need to do not only to sustain but to enhance Smith’s
excellence? Providing the very best education for our students
in the decades ahead will require many kinds of fluency.
John Schwab described the Yale curriculum at the beginning
of the 20th century as a modern factory, with a large stock
of very different, complex, and delicate tools, few of which
any single employee would understand and use. I wonder if
we might imagine today’s curriculum in more electronic
terms, as a worldwide web, in which links move us into different
disciplines, different cultures, different areas of knowledge,
abruptly and with lightning speed. Professor Schwab’s
metaphor implies that you can manipulate your own set of
tools in the factory, engaging in your piece of its work,
without a great deal of concern about your ignorance of others.
The worldwide web requires that you continually change your
frame of reference. So many problems and questions today
require inter-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary analysis,
that we must develop the ability in our students to move
across disciplines and bodies of knowledge. This is more
than taking a course in music, and a course in English, and
a course in economics, and a course in biology. It involves
understanding differences in methods of inquiry and argument
and asking how the tools and materials of one discipline
can illuminate the subjects of another. The problems we face
today are complex and far-reaching; their solution requires
various modes of inquiry and multiple frames of reference.
How can biologists, geologists, and engineers work together
to understand watersheds? What can the anthropologist teach
us about literary texts and the literary scholar teach the
anthropologist? How can the philosopher help us understand
new capabilities in genetic engineering?
In teaching our students to
travel across the disciplines, we cannot hold to a falsely
stable sense of the liberal arts. The liberal arts curriculum
has never been stable. The structure of the disciplines is
a historical artifact, and it changes over the course of
time. Since I have come to Smith, I have been amused by how
often I have been asked whether Smith’s development
of the sciences, embodied in its new engineering program
and its plan for a new science center, means that it will
abandon the liberal arts. Citizens of 18th-century Virginia
could have asked Thomas Jefferson the same question when
he introduced medical science and natural history into the
curriculum. Like Jefferson, I have no intention of abandoning
the humanities; they are my intellectual passions and the
center of my writing and teaching. But surely the sciences
are among the liberal arts—fields of study that contribute
to general intellectual culture. We must hold out the same
possibility for engineering. Just as the modern languages
and the natural sciences came to be regarded as liberal arts
over the course of the 19th century, engineering and computer
science may well become part of a liberal education in the
21st. Smith will be a pioneer in this process, as one of
very few liberal arts colleges and the only women’s
college to offer engineering in its curriculum. We must determine
not only how best to educate engineers in a liberal arts
college but what role engineering might play in the education
of musicians, economists, political scientists, and philosophers.
Just as the study of literature and art enriches and deepens
the education of scientists and engineers, so the study of
science and engineering should enrich and deepen the education
of historians and poets.
Smith’s curriculum should
teach students other kinds of agility as well. In an increasingly
diverse world, we need to become fluent in other cultures.
This begins at home, with fluency in the variety of American
cultures. Increasing consciousness of the diversity of experience
of American ethnic groups has created important changes in
many disciplines; we must include that knowledge in our courses.
But we must not stop with the borders of our country. When
Eleanor Roosevelt spoke at Smith in 1949, she described the
world situation in words that apply today: “How well
prepared are we to live in a world that has constantly grown
smaller and where we must rub shoulders with people of different
cultures, of completely different customs and habits and
religions, who live under different legal systems, whose
languages are different?” I think we have to answer,
more than 50 years later, that we are not as well prepared
as we should be to live in this increasingly small and volatile
world.
Mrs. Roosevelt’s advice
to Smith students about what to learn in their years here
reflected an assumption that we test the significance and
adequacy of our knowledge by bringing it to bear on the world
of practice. We must provide opportunities for students to
do this. Definitions of the liberal arts often derive from
a dichotomy between general knowledge and knowledge that
is professional, technical, or useful. I think that this
dichotomy is a false one. College curricula have frequently
included areas of study like architecture or meteorology
that we would consider liberal, professional and practical,
and most professional education has its roots in traditional
liberal disciplines. We must strive to use the knowledge
and methods of the liberal arts to address problems of praxis
and to use practical problems to test the power and adequacy
of our disciplinary paradigms.
The ideal of academic excellence
that I have described -- agility in moving between disciplines,
between cultures, and between academic study and praxis --
leads to active engagement with the world outside the Grecourt
Gates. This is not a woman’s world, or a man’s
world; it is a human world. Understanding the specificity
of women’s experience will help us shape our work in
the world, and single-sex education develops the authority
and confidence that lead to significant achievement. By this
education, in the words of Sophia Smith, “women’s
weight of influence in reforming the evils of society will
be greatly increased, their power for good incalculably enlarged.”
Smith’s founders wanted
the college to be built in such a way that its students would
be part of the practical life of the town. We must now imagine
the town as a global village, linking the local and the distant,
the familiar and the foreign. As I look out on the Smith
community, I see in all of you the large embrace of the college.
The lives you have touched, the changes you have brought
about, the things you have created have realized Sophia Smith’s
vision, for it is not what you did here but what your education
here helped you do after that is the real measure of Smith’s
value.
I began my remarks today by
talking about the Smith community and the bonds that connect
it over the many years of its existence. To sustain the sense
of common experience across the generations, we will need
to be generous in our sympathies. In times of significant
historical change such as there have been in women’s
lives in the past 60 years, it is easy to feel alienated
from the past if you are young and alienated from the future
if you are old. But seeing ourselves in the younger sister
who stands beside us will teach us, like Wordsworth, about
the language of the heart and the imagination.
I stand before you now looking
both back and forward. I am joining at once a historical
community and a community that is present among us at this
moment. I thank you for your good wishes and ask for your
advice and support in the months and years ahead as we, together,
work to make Smith College everything to which her founders
aspired.
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