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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. |
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