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SMITH IN THE NEWS
STUDENTS AND ALUMNAE IN THE NEWS "[The rooms at Smith] are gorgeous
and huge and they all have a lot of character. You could play
polo in the halls. I wasn't going to be able to enjoy my college
experience if I felt like I was living in a box. I'm a person
who needs the place where I can just go and it'll be my own little
space." "Monic's hard work eventually
won her a coveted spot in the Ada Comstock Scholars Program for
older women at Smith College, which covered most of her tuition
and living expenses. Her A-plus work at community college translated
to B grades at Smith, but rather than become frustrated, she
worked harder, earning her first A there last year as a junior." "At Wesleyan University in Connecticut
this fall, a new "gender-blind" floor of dorm rooms
will welcome students who don't identify with their biological
gender. At Smith College, students voted this spring to eliminate
the word 'she' from their constitution, to be respectful of women
students who identify themselves as male. And at the University
of Massachusetts-Amherst, a handful of 'unisex' bathrooms are
being created, at the urging of a few transgender activists." "My first words were, 'Mom! Dad!'
I was so excited I wanted really badly to share the moment with
them." "[Kerry Nagle's] smiling all the
time, but don't let that fool you, she's a tough kid." "After two and a half years in
a women's school, I know that I belong to a legacy far older
than that of any college: the legacy of women supporting, teaching,
loving, befriending and sustaining other women. Every day I go
to school, I know that legacy is alive."
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR NEW CAMPUS CENTER "We want to create a space where
it is perfectly acceptable to just relax." "Smith College's new campus center
is a splendid example of the type [modern student center], a
sinuous viaduct with glazed walls and a skylight along its meandering
spine. It is not so much a building as a roofed-over street.
But that is precisely what its architects intended."
SUMMER: THE LEARING NEVER STOPS "It's not the 'real world' and
that's what makes it so good. Because if the girls are only exposed
to the 'real world' the problem is most of them will never go
on into engineering or science." "What a wonderful program. [The
Smith-Northampton Summer School] has given our children a whole
new perspective. They're all thinking about going to college." "We try to give them all the tools
they'll need so that when they leave here they can read the molecular
biological literature, set up their labs to do experiments right
away and collaborate with other scientists." "We didn't do much science in
fourth grade, so I wanted to catch up. It's been really fun."
"These girls do well in math and
science in high school. The issue is whether they decide to study
these topics in college. We want to provide them with the opportunities
to explore their interests further."
SOCIAL WORK GRADS CONFRONT COMPLEX TIMES "This is good work with
a capital G." "There is something about this
war in particular that has been very difficult. Military people
are trying to understand why they are there, why they are going
and then dealing with the uncertainties, let alone the death
that happens around them."
FINANCIAL EDUCATION CONTINUES TO MAKE NEWS "For too long women have been
told not to worry about money, that 'someone else will take care
of all that.' The reality is that you are not truly independent
until and unless you are financially independent. Financial matters
are not something to be left to others." "That the new student investment
club at Smith College turned $100,000 into $111,647 over just
eight months cut no ice with the acerbic John Kenneth Galbraith,
retired Harvard economics professor. Galbraith, whose wife attended
Smith and who has a Smith honorary degree, wrote in to a campus
newsletter to scold the students--who, puzzled Smith professors
note, produced an annualized total return of 17.5%, versus 2%
for the market. 'There is nothing reliable to be learned about
making money,' Galbraith declared in his letter. 'If there were,
study would be intense and everyone with a positive IQ would
be rich.' "Financial education at the college
level is essential for securing a young adult's financial future.
[M]any new college students are unprepared for the financial
realities that they face once they leave home. Furthermore, evidence
shows that many of today's college students will continue to
struggle with their finances throughout their lives."
FACULTY AND STAFF OFFER EXPERTISE "We do it because it is an example
of the kind of critical reading that we hope students will engage
in at college." "Perfectionistic kids get caught
in a vicious cycle. When approaching a task or project, they
feel less able to succeed, get anxious and then evaluate their
performance more negatively than their non-perfectionistic peers." "You can preach all you want about
the value of math and science and about the important role of
engineers in our society, but if kids don't see the discovery
in it and the fun they're going to tune you out." "There's a sense among larger
cities that they have some leverage they didn't use historically." "There's only so much income out
there for sports leagues, and the existing ones are using up
all the corporate and high-income dollars." "People manage to go on with their
lives. They have quite a capacity to adjust. The average Israeli
citizen tries to focus very, very hard on his job, children,
family life, on what is normal." "I've always been appalled by
the way sociologists write. It always seemed to me that you could
say profound things in straightforward ways. It doesn't have
to be in convoluted jargon." "It's troubling, because first
of all the importance and nature of the job don't justify those
kind of salaries. And secondly it's troubling because of the
message that it sends to students about the priorities and values
of the university. If an athletic director gets $500,000 and
the highest-paid professor gets $150,000, that's saying something
about the way the college values the services." "There are very few fields of
economic research that produce unanimous agreement. Yet every
independent economic analysis of the impact of stadiums has found
no predictable positive effect on output or employment. Some
studies have even concluded that there is a possibly negative
impact." "It's good to know we're getting
this stuff out to people who need it. We work hard to make sure
it doesn't end up in the dump."
DISCOVERING THE MUSEUM AND FINE ARTS CENTER "The new fine arts center is really
two buildings side by side, linked by a glass-roofed atrium.
On one side is an art museum with a terrific collection, especially
strong in American painting of the 19th century. On the other
side is Smith's teaching facility for the arts, with classrooms,
studio spaces for every kind of art, and a major arts library." "One of the first things museum
visitors at the Smith College Museum of Art ask is where the
bathrooms are located. That's because two of the restrooms there,
now part of the permanent collection, were created by artists
Sandy Skoglund and Ellen Driscoll." |
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