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Ivy Day, May
14, 2005; Second Reunion Weekend, May 21, 2005
Ivy Day is my favorite Smith
tradition. More than any other day, it expresses the history
and the continuity of our college. On Ivy Day we connect
past and future. Anticipating your graduation tomorrow, seniors
join alumnae in a parade of classes and generations. When
you plant the ivy at the end of this convocation, you perform
an act that at once symbolizes the beginning of your own
lives as graduates and the ties that will continue to bind
you, as alumnae, to your college.
Ivy Day was first celebrated
in 1884, when the members of the graduating class decided
to create a visible and lasting monument to their presence
here. That first celebration took place on the porch of College
Hall and consisted of an ivy poem, an ivy oration, an ivy
song, and the planting of the ivy, one stem for each graduate.
I suppose my speech could be reckoned a descendent of the
ivy oration, but I have to admit to some disappointment that
Smith no longer has an ivy poem or an ivy song. The first
illumination took place in 1888; the first procession in
1894. By 1900, the ceremony was moved to Seelye Hall, perhaps
because College Hall had received its quota of ivy. Alumnae
began to attend the festivities early on. A 1906 newspaper
account states, "The
alumnae began to provide spontaneous entertainment for the crowd. As they waited
for the Ivy procession to begin, they roamed around the campus and sang songs."
I didn't encounter any alumnae breaking spontaneously into
song on my way over here this morning, but...the day is young.
My speech today, in which I
describe the current state of the college, also has some
interesting history behind it. This convocation is also called
the Last Chapel, referring back to a time when chapel was
required, and the president used the occasion of the last
chapel to recount for students and alumnae the highlights
of the year. Although the custom of chapel survives only
in the name of this event, my talk today bears considerable
resemblance to those last chapel speeches decades ago, when
President Neilson or President Mendenhall talked about the
achievements of the year.
In that spirit I am going to
take the occasion to, well, brag. This year has been a remarkable
one. On December 31, 2004, we reached the end of our comprehensive
campaign, "This Is About Smith," an effort that has raised
almost $400 million for the college, including $100 million
for scholarships. The funds we have raised have enabled
us to add programs and facilities that have had a transformative
effect on the college, and I thank you for your generosity
in supporting them. Just to list them gives a sense of
their magnitude and impact: the Brown Fine Arts Center, the
expanded Lyman Plant House, the Olin Fitness Center, the
Campus Center, the Kahn Liberal Arts Institute, the Poetry
Center, the Center for Women and Financial Independence,
the Praxis Program, and, of course, the Picker Engineering
Program. This year we are graduating our second class of
engineers; these 27 women constitute the second female engineering
class ever to graduate from a U.S. college.
Many of us have
followed with great interest the debate about women and science unwittingly
initiated by a certain friend in Cambridge. Science and engineering are
the last frontiers for women. Women are 45 percent of the
workforce, but they occupy only 12 percent of the jobs in
science and engineering. Smith is uniquely positioned to
play an even greater leadership role than it has been in
advancing women in science. We have historically had very
strong programs in science and mathematics. We are the only
women's college to offer engineering (although Sweet Briar
is following our lead and developing a program). One-quarter
of our students major in the sciences, and an exceptionally
high percentage of them go on to graduate school.
Last weekend the board of trustees
approved plans to build a 140,000-square-foot building for
engineering, computer science, chemistry, biochemistry, and
molecular biology. The building will sit across Green Street,
along Belmont Avenue, where the Quill used to be. A beautifully
designed structure of brick and glass, it will bring faculty
and students together in cross-disciplinary laboratories,
in which our undergraduates will have the opportunity to
do cutting-edge research with faculty mentors. We expect
to break ground in 2007. Over the next two years we will
be involved in an energetic effort to raise funds for this
building. Over the next two decades, we plan to build a science
quad across Green Street, seamlessly connected to the traditional
campus. This is the first step in that major plan, Smith's most ambitious
campus expansion in over 60 years.
The expanded leadership role
that we aspire to play in the education of women in science
and engineering is just one of the goals that has emerged
from a strategic review that the faculty has been conducting
of the Smith curriculum. We are asking two critical and defining
questions: What are the distinctive intellectual traditions
and distinctive opportunities offered at Smith, and, what
capacities should we strive to develop in all undergraduates
in their time here? So far, we have had extensive discussions
of the arts at Smith, of international education and Smith
as a world college, of the training we offer our students
in writing, and of their capacity for quantitative reasoning. Alumnae
voices are important in these conversations. Some of the
most powerful insights I have gained about education at Smith
have come from my conversations with alumnae. Over the next
year I will be leading a national dialogue with alumnae about
the future of education at Smith, trying to learn from your
experience in the world what capacities you think are most
important for us to develop in women in the 21st
century.
I
don't need to tell you that Smith students are an exceptional group.
In admissions we had great success this year. In fact, we had the highest
number of applications ever in Smith's history: 3,406 students
competed for 630 places in our first-year class, a growth of 13 percent
over last year.
Our current students had an
excellent year in fellowship competitions. Smith students
earned a total of 47 fellowships, 30 of them major national
awards. For the fourth year in a row, Smith has broken its own record
for the number of seniors and alumnae who have won Fulbright Scholarships,
with 13 award-winners, up from nine last year. This record puts us
among the top colleges in the United States in the number
of award-winners in proportion to the size of the student
body. The winners are Sarah Epstein, for research in Tunisia;
Stephanie Jakus, for research in Hungary; Stella Kang '01,
for community service in Russia; Michelle Medina, for study
in Morocco; Naomi Párekh,
for a project in Jamaica; MK Sagaria '04, for study
in Finland; Eliza Zingesser, for a project in France; Fiona
Somers, for teaching in Taiwan; Lauren Wolfe, for teaching
in Germany; and Ashley Blum, Julie Schaeffer, Elizabeth Whiston, and
Esther Jung '03 for teaching in South Korea.
Elizabeth
Koenig has won a DAAD fellowship for research in Germany,
and Carroll Rodrigo-Kelley '07 has also earned a DAAD study abroad
fellowship to Germany. Aditi Desai and Tatjana Johnson have won American
India Foundation Service Corps Fellowships to India. Eliza Zingesser
has earned an École
Normale Supérieure Fellowship to France. Neema Khatri has won
a Public Policy and International Affairs Fellowship. Elizabeth Tolmach
and Sarah Schweitzman have won Teaching Fellowships to France. Nadia
Benbernou '06 and Kristina
Closser '07 have both won Goldwaters. Krystal Banzon '07
has been named a Goldman Sachs Global Leader. In addition, a number
of our students have won scholarships for undergraduate study abroad:
Lauren Ingegneri '07,
a Killam Fellowship for study in Canada; Annie Alcid '07, a Boren
Scholarship for Study Abroad in Russia; Rebecca Heeb '07, a Freeman
Asia Fellowship; and Xiomara Castro '06, Shannon Foreman '06,
Tiarra Kernan '05,
and Caitlin Daniel '06, Gilman Fellowships, for study, respectively,
in New Zealand, Japan, Egypt, and Bolivia.
Taken together with our
success in the Fulbright competition, this is a remarkable record
of achievement in winning international fellowships. On my
travels this year, I visited with Smith communities around
the globe -- in London,
in Geneva, in Paris, in Tokyo and Kyoto, in Seoul, Hong Kong, and
Singapore. In Paris we celebrated the 80th anniversary of
our JYA program there. The size of our alumnae community
abroad shows the strength of international study at Smith.
We want to build on this tradition to give our students the
benefits of a world education.
Taking their Smith knowledge
into the workplace, 450 of our students will participate
in Praxis Internships this summer, all funded by the college.
The organizations for which they will work include the American
Chamber of Commerce in Beijing; the Free Clinic of Greater
Cleveland; Brigham and Women's Hospital in
Boston; the International Labor Organization in Washington D.C.;
the Santiago Times in Santiago, Chile; Project ABC in Santo
Domingo, Dominican Republic; and the Georgia Institute of Technology.
A Praxis intern will work as an assistant to Janet Reno on her autobiography,
and another will work for the Bay State Warriors in Somerville, Massachusetts,
a professional woman's football
team. Last year I announced that one of our Praxis interns was going
to work with the Boston Red Sox; I have no doubt she alone was the
reason the Red Sox overcame the curse and won the World Series.
Our
students have also won national academic prizes. Michelle Mann
'07 has won a Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize for her essay, "Demise
of the Knights Templar." Carolyn Creedon AC '06 has won
the Glascock Poetry Prize. We think the last Smith winner was Sylvia
Plath '55. Roberta Desnomie
was one of twelve students awarded a Morris Udall Native American
Congressional Internship.
We also have had excellent success
in athletics. Soccer finished second in its conference. The
equestrian team also finished second in its region, with
a record fifteen riders qualifying for regionals. The riding
team had the highest among our team GPA's,
at 3.4. Softball and Crew are both following up fantastic seasons
last year with equally impressive ones this year. Softball had
a 25-11 record and has received a bid to play in the East
Coast Tournament. Playing as we speak, softball coach Bonnie
May was named NEWMAC Softball Coach of the Year. Crew has
won the NEWMAC championship, the Seven Sisters Championship,
and the New England Women's Championship.
They won third place in the East Coast championship, and their
coach, Karin Klinger, was named NEWMAC Crew Coach of the
Year.
In quite a different area of
student activity, I want to pay tribute to the work of our
student artists. The orchestra, Glee Club, and chorus just
gave a splendid concert in Carnegie Hall of Beethoven's
Ninth Symphony, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the
orchestra. I hope you will have time to visit the senior
show in the Jannotta Gallery of the Brown Fine Arts Center;
there is also a splendid volume of Labrys, the annual journal
of student art and literature. I hope many of you have seen,
or will see, Pirandello's Six
Characters in Search of an Author, which concludes an excellent
season of student performances in dance and theater.
Our
faculty members have also garnered many impressive awards.
They have received $5 million in grants, 60 percent from the National
Science Foundation, including a prestigious NSF Career Award for
engineering faculty member Donna Riley for her work in engineering
pedagogy. Faculty have won other prestigious awards: Anne Boutelle
has won the Samuel French Morse Prize for her book of poetry, Nest
of Thistles; Justin Cammy has won the Harry and Cecile Star
Prize for the most outstanding Ph.D. dissertation in Jewish and
Hebrew Studies at Harvard University; Karl Donfried has been named
president of the Colloquium Oecumenicum Paulinum; Daniel Horowitz's
book Anxieties of Affluence has won the Eugene M. Kayden
University Press Book Award for the best book in the humanities
published by an American university press (Choice magazine
also named Professor Horowitz's' book as one of the outstanding
academic titles of 2004); Holly Iglesias won the annual St. Louis
Poetry Center Prize for her poem "Perishables"; Mary Koncel's
book of poems, You Can Tell a Horse Anything, was the
runner-up for the Norman Farber First Book Award; Dana Leibsohn
has won a Mellon New Directions Fellowship; Kevin Quashie has been
invited to give the very prestigious James Baldwin Lecture at Adelphi
University; Lynne Yamamoto won a very prestigious commission from
the City of Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs for a permanent
work for the new Central Library; and Andy Zimbalist's book May
the Best Team Win won Foreword Magazine's Silver
Award for Book of the Year in Economics and Business.
In April, we took
the occasion to celebrate the teaching of our faculty, awarding
the second set of Sherrerd Prizes for Distinguished Teaching
to Patrick Coby in government, Susan Etheredge '77
in education and child study, Dana Leibsohn in art, and Bill
Oram in English.
We have made two important administrative
appointments. Linda Jones will be the new director of the
Picker Enginering Program, and Jessica Nicoll '83
will be the new director of the Smith College Museum of Art.
Faculty
collaborate with students in much of the research that they
do. This year, for the fourth time, we held a daylong celebration
of student research, titled "Celebrating Collaborations," in
which more than 170 students presented the independent work that
they had done with faculty.
Not surprisingly, Smith alumnae
continue to distinguish themselves in many spheres. Smith
alumna Kathleen E. Damon '68, executive director of
the Carson Center for Human Services, was recently recognized
by the Massachusetts Chapter of the National Association
of Social Workers for her compassion in social work. Melissa
Cohn '82,
president and owner of Manhattan Mortgage Company, received
the 2004 Builder of the Year award from Habitat for Humanity.
After competing in a national pageant, Erin Casler '99 was
named Miss Deaf America and has been traveling the country,
visiting high schools and colleges, to raise awareness of
the unique challenges deaf people face. Jessi Witt '00 is
one of only five women selected to the US National Ultimate
Frisbee Team, which will be competing at the World Games
in Germany later this summer. While a senior at Smith, Witt
led Smith's Ultimate Frisbee team to the National College
Championships, where they finished tenth in the country.
Filmmaker Victoria Gamburg '93 won two of the highest honors
for student filmmakers in the country: a $10,000 Angelus Award
and the Princess Grace Award for her film Twilight which
follows a woman in Russia over the course of three years as
she searches for her missing daughter. Lauren Lazin '82
was an Oscar nominee for her documentary Tupac Resurrection. Joy
Hakin '51 was featured in Time magazine on a
list of innovators for her science textbooks. Linda Chatman
Thomsen '76 was named one of The Wall Street Journal's "50
Women to Watch." Thomsen
is deputy director of the division of law enforcement at the
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and overseer of the
agency's Enron investigation. Marilyn Carlson Nelson '61
was named the Small Business Association's Businesswoman
of the Year. Joan Selverstone Valentine '67 was elected
to the National Academy of Sciences, and two of our alumnae
-- Molly Ivins '66 and
Mary Patterson McPherson '57, chair of our board of trustees,
will both receive honorary degrees this year, from Haverford
College and Middlebury College, respectively.
Each year we recognize
people who have worked for Smith and who are retiring. Lindsey
Watson '03, one of our two past SGA presidents who
serve on the board of trustees, will reach the end of her
term this year. Ellie Rothman retired from the Advancement
Office this fall, where she was in charge of fund-raising
for the Ada Program that she created. We thank her for her
service. Suzannah Fabing, director of the art museum, will
be retiring this year after a term of 12 years in which
she has contributed in extraordinary ways to the distinction
of the museum. Six faculty members are retiring: Karl Donfried
in religion, Ken Fearn in music, Ann Ferguson in Afro-American
studies, Caroline Houser in art, Chester Michalik in art,
and John Sessions in music. One retired faculty member has
died this year -- Phyllis Lehmann, in art,
one of our most distinguished scholars. A memorial service
will be held for her on the second reunion weekend.
And now
to the graduating class. There are 734 of you. You come from
48 states and 31 foreign countries. Sixty-seven of you are
Adas. Together you have completed 844 majors; 110 of you
have completed double majors. The five most popular majors
are psychology, government, art, economics, and English.
You, the class of
2005, are poised to go into the world, as the alumnae here
have before you, armed with knowledge and primed for experience.
Use your gifts well, your privileges with care and generosity.
I speak often of the Grecourt Gates at Smith, because they
are so powerful an emblem of the college's
mission. Erected in 1924 as a memorial to the work of the
Smith College Relief Unit who went to France to rebuild villages
that had been destroyed by the war, they symbolize the responsibility
you have to use your education to benefit others. At the
dedication ceremony, Ada Comstock, the great dean of the
college after whom the Ada Comstock Scholars Program is named,
described their significance: The Grecourt Gates, she said,
"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."
That
is your journey as well, one that begins at Smith and that
I hope will bring you back here throughout your life. I
wish you Godspeed. |
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