By Emily Harrison Weir
To put Ruth Simmons' inaugural address in the context of Smith's history, NewsSmith casts a backward glance at what past inaugural speeches reveal about issues facing the college over more than a century.
"I had a terrible time writing this inaugural address," confessed
Mary Maples Dunn at the start of her 1985 speech. "I even considered
walking off the platform, which would have provided you the most novel inauguration
ceremony in history." Her admission of inaugural writer's block may
have been unique, but her rousing defense of women's colleges' right to
exist had been heard here before. "One hundred years ago, a female
college would have been simply an object of ridicule," declared L.
Clark Seelye in 1875. "Much as those ancient worthies would rejoice
with us in the establishment of a higher institution of learning here, it
might require a long and labored argument to convince them of women's capacity
for it."
Other current debates-whether education should be utilitarian or acquired
for its own sake, the "fight" between sciences and humanities,
whether a women's education should mirror a man's, even fear of declining
academic standards-are actually longstanding concerns voiced in many past
inaugural addresses.
Marion Burton urged practical education in his 1910 talk: "Our aim
must be to educate the individual student for something or we fail."
In 1975, Jill Ker Conway spoke of a more abstract mission: "to transmit
knowledge, to give the young a sense of the power and beauty of the life
of the mind and of the intellectual standards which must accompany the search
for truth."
In 1918, William Allan Neilson declared a truce in the "war" between
scientific and classical education proponents this way: "Both sets
of values are indispensable, and the quarrel persists because each has at
times been untrue to itself, partly because each has misrepresented the
other."
Academics always have worried that students won't be up to Smith's intellectual
challenge. Burton noted in 1910, "A student who studies is popularly
supposed to be an anomaly." And Herbert Davis argued 30 years later
that Smith should offer women "a hard life intellectually." If
the material is over their heads, he said, "We should not be too alarmed,
but ready to wait and give them the chance to discover how to stretch themselves
to reach it."
Many presidents gave ringing endorsements of academic freedom, but none
was more strongly worded than Davis': "Education of any kind can never
be a safe investment.By its very nature it must be an experiment in freedom....
The question is whether we really want to open [students'] eyes, or to cover
them with blinkers so that they will draw in the shafts quietly."
Benjamin Wright's 1949 statement--"It is not at all clear just what
American society expects of women, particularly well-educated women, or
what they can expect of society"--was equally true in 1975, when Conway
urged Smith to "take the belief in the human potential of women...and
see what its implications are if that belief operates at every stage of
women's lives."
And Mary Maples Dunn again emphasized, a century after President Seelye's
talk, why women's colleges are vital. "More than any other place, we
take women seriously," she said. "In women's institutions women
experience autonomy and power; there are no choices they cannot make freely
and without those subtle social obstacles which still suggest to women that
there are things we shouldn't do."
Though the defense of women's education continues, other attitudes have
altered dramatically since 1875. Presidents rarely argue today, as Seelye
did that year, that one might "as well attempt to learn what Christianity
is without its Bible as to seek to gain the most thorough knowledge of mind
without [studying] Greek." And there's no need to tell 1995 audiences
that mental work won't harm women physically. ("There is little necessity
of climbing stairs, none of [Smith's] buildings being over two stories and
a half high-and that is a great safeguard to women's health," Seelye
reassured his audience.)
Few would dare to suggest now, as Benjamin Wright did in 1949, that for
"the great majority of women who attend college...home will be the
focus of their lives." And presidents no longer fret, as Thomas Mendenhall
did in 1959, "With too many young women, as Premier Khrushchev so astutely
observed recently to a group of them, the first purpose of a college is
finding a husband."
And, though the debate over gender differences still rages, Marion Burton's
1910 statement seems hopelessly dated: "The precise aim of the women's
college is to differentiate the womanly ideal from the manly and to strive
in the noblest sense to deepen rather than decrease the differences between
men and women."
Many challenges facing the college's founders remain, but there has been
definite progress in women's education during Smith's history. As Mary Maples
Dunn noted, "The great revolution in 20th-century American educationhas
been that women, once so marginal in what was regarded as a man's world,
are now seen as crucial to the success of the educational establishment."
One woman--Ruth Simmons--is crucial to the continued success of this one.