State of the College Address 2005

Carol T. Christ, Tenth President of Smith College
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.