The Last Frontier, Summer 2005

Carol T. Christ, Smith Alumnae Quarterly, Summer 2005

Women constitute 45 percent of the workforce in the United States, but they hold only 12 percent of the jobs in science and engineering. Why does this matter? Science and technology increasingly shape our lives. The expanding power of medicine; environmental sustainability and remediation; the supply of energy; information technology—these issues and many more will shape life on this planet. Women's voices and creativity must play an important role in their exploration.

Science is the last frontier for women. Harvard's president has done women—and women's colleges—an unwitting favor by catapulting the issue of women and science into the headlines. However much he might rue his remarks, he has accomplished what positive advocacy has not—a renewed sense of the urgency of the question.

Women's colleges have played and continue to play a critical role in the education of women scientists. Women major in the sciences in significantly larger percentages at women's colleges than they do at co-ed colleges, and they go on to graduate degrees in higher proportions. At Smith, one in four undergraduates majors in the sciences, and it is one of five liberal arts colleges in the National Science Foundation's ranking of the 50 universities and colleges producing the largest number of women bachelor's recipients going on to science and engineering Ph.D.'s.

Why do women's colleges have such success in motivating women to study science and to go to graduate school? There are several reasons, including a greater proportion of women faculty in the sciences, providing encouragement and role models; the absence of what has so blandly been termed "peer hostility" and the particular advantages that liberal arts colleges offer for the study of science.

In a recent essay, Howard Hughes MedicalInstitute President Thomas Cech addressed the question of why so many leaders in the scientific community went to liberal arts colleges. He identified two reasons: the close relationship between faculty and students, creating opportunities for mentorship and collaboration similar to those graduate students experience at research universities, as well as "intellectual cross-training," the advantages a broad education in the humanities and social sciences offers future scientists.

All of this carries weighty implications for Smith in the twenty-first century. It is imperative that Smith further solidify its leadership position in science education for women. Because of Smith's traditional strength in the sciences, because of the success that women's colleges have in motivating women to study science; because of the college's pioneering investment in engineering, we are uniquely positioned for leadership. Smith has the distinction, the position, and the resources to make an important contribution in educating women to play leading roles in science and technology, as well as the public-policy debates in those fields.

Over the next two decades, we will be planning and building a science quadrangle in the area of Green and West streets, in its full development seamlessly connected to the traditional campus. We are engaged in the detailed design of the first building now, for which we expect to break ground in 2007. The building will be home to the Picker Engineering Program, computer science, molecular biology, biochemistry, and chemistry, not in their separate corners of the building, but in integrated laboratories that bring together research and teaching and the work of related disciplines in innovative ways. It will be the campus's first "green" building, not in color, but in the design of building systems according to principles of sustainable energy and materials use. We will make these systems visible throughout the building, so that the building itself will teach. Both a structure and a symbol, the engineering and molecular science building will be a compelling statement of Smith's public identity as the women's college with the strongest programs in science and engineering.

Alumnae sometimes express a concern that Smith's emphasis on science may involve abandoning the liberal arts. Science is, and has always been, a liberal art. Its development at Smith will enhance and embrace the social sciences, the arts, and the humanities—for example, in helping develop informed and sophisticated policy analysis, in helping learn the use of the digital tools and media increasingly central to contemporary arts, in understanding the ethical and philosophical issues tied to new technologies.

Smith cannot afford not to invest in the sciences. To do less would fail Sophia Smith in her aspiration to offer at the college that would bear her name "such other studies as coming times may develop or demand for the education of women and the progress of the race."