Smith College

Sophia Smith was born in Hatfield, Massachusetts, on August 27, 1796, the fourth of seven children and the first daughter of Joseph Smith, a prosperous farmer, and Lois White Smith. The death of her sister Harriet in 1859, followed by that of her brother Austin in 1861, left her wealthy but alone.⁠[1]

Few family records survive and little is known of Sophia Smith’s early years; for the last nine years of her life she kept a journal, mainly a record of her spiritual development but also of the events of the day, her trips and the books she was reading. Like many girls of her time she was given a meager education, but she read avidly and widely all her life, poetry and prose, newspapers and magazines.⁠[1][2]

Three of the seven children died young, and only Joseph Jr. married; he left no heirs. Sophia shared the family homestead, which still stands at 22 Main Street in Hatfield, with her sister Harriet and her brother Austin. By the age of 40 she had become quite deaf; an ear trumpet did not offset her growing isolation, and several operations to restore her hearing all failed.⁠[1]

Her father was both prosperous and frugal; after his death Austin invested his inheritance shrewdly in the New York stock market and often traveled there to watch the family’s assets grow. Austin had the reputation of a miser without community spirit and argued at town meetings against the extravagance of public education; he paid board to his sisters for managing the household and charged them a shilling for a ride in the family carriage.⁠[1]

Their uncle Oliver Smith was likewise renowned in Hatfield for his parsimony and is said to have had the village tailoress turn his coats wrong side out and remake them; at his death he left half a million dollars to charity, and the Smith Charities, still housed at 51 Main Street in Northampton, and the Smith Vocational and Agricultural High School, which serves students throughout Hampshire County, are the results of his benevolence.⁠[1]

She consulted her pastor, John Morton Greene, and other advisers about the use of the money, weighing bequests to Amherst College, Greene’s alma mater, and to the nearby Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, and at first planning a school for the deaf; she dropped that plan after John Clarke, who died before her, endowed a school for the deaf, now the Clarke School in Northampton.⁠[1]

The college’s history page says that she inherited a large fortune at the age of 65. The page on Sophia Smith adds that she was deeply religious; that Mount Holyoke Female Seminary was not yet a full college; that a school for the deaf was a logical choice in view of her own impaired hearing; and that the final will was completed nine years, and many revisions, after her first meeting with Greene on the matter. BritannicaEncyclopædia BritannicaEncyclopædia Britannica is a general English-language encyclopedia first published in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1768; the name also refers to its publisher, Chicago-based Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. (which presents itself as The Britannica Group). The print edition ended in 2012, and the company’s main businesses since then have been the online encyclopedia Britannica.com, digital education products for schools and libraries, and Merriam-Webster dictionaries.Open the full entry’s article calls her an heiress.⁠[2][1][3]

Her final will was completed in March 1870, only three months before she died. It provided for an institution for “the higher education of young women,” meant to give women opportunities equal to those that men then had in their colleges.⁠[1]

The will also says that through the education of women their wrongs will be redressed, their wages adjusted and their weight of influence in reforming the evils of society greatly increased, and that as teachers, writers, mothers and members of society “their power for good will be incalculably enlarged”; she wished that the institution “shall do the most good to the greatest number” and be a perennial blessing to the country and the world.⁠[1][2]

Smith College was chartered and incorporated in 1871 and opened in the fall of 1875 with 14 students and six faculty under the presidency of Laurenus Clark Seelye.⁠[1][4][2]

Sophia Smith’s bequest paid for the college’s first land, its first buildings and its endowment; the college notes that the land had traditionally been the ancestral homeland of the Nonotuck people.⁠[2]

The first three buildings were Dewey House, College Hall and Gateway House: Dewey House, the former home of the Northampton judge Charles Augustus Dewey, housed the first students; College Hall was built by the trustees as the first academic and administrative building; and Gateway House was built by the trustees as a home for the first president.⁠[4]

In his inaugural address in July 1875, Seelye said that admission standards should reflect “the demands of the highest intellectual culture.” Entrance requirements covered mathematics, history, English, Latin and Greek, and only 15 applicants met them.⁠[5]

Earlier women’s colleges had followed the seminary model, with everything in one building; at Smith the students lived in several “cottages,” where life was more familial than institutional, and used the town’s public library and its churches for study and worship. The arrangement was the beginning of the “house” system that the college still uses.⁠[6][2]

The history page says that the small campus was planned to make the college part of what John M. Greene called “the real practical life” of a New England town rather than a sequestered academic preserve; College Hall, the Victorian Gothic administrative and classroom building, dominated the head of Northampton’s Main Street. Seelye’s inaugural address laid down the main lines of the college’s educational policy: admission standards as high as those of the best colleges for men and a broad curriculum of the humanities, the fine arts and the natural and social sciences.⁠[2]

The Sophian’s article notes that Smith was not the first women’s college in the United States but that Seelye wanted it to be unlike any other; when he was inaugurated in July 1875 only one student had passed the entrance examination. The college meant to give women an education equal to that offered to men at colleges such as Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry and Amherst College.⁠[5]

Kate Morris, a member of the first class, later recalled in The Smith College Monthly that the campus consisted merely of College Hall, Dewey Hall and the President’s House; that on the first night the students went to bed with candles stuck in potatoes; that the college linen was marked “Smith Colledge”; that the housekeeping did not arrive until the second term; that all classes met in a single small room; that one grand piano served the whole music department; and that at the start of the term the library held a single volume, Webster’s Dictionary. “We who tried it were the radicals of that time,” she wrote. The article adds that as of 2025 College Hall was the only one of the three buildings still on its original site.⁠[5]

A Smith College Archives collection description notes that Dewey House now holds faculty offices and meeting rooms and that the campus is a mixture of constructed and acquired buildings, most of them erected after 1875 and some dating from the early nineteenth century and a few from the eighteenth, in styles ranging from Colonial to Greek Revival and Victorian Gothic to neo-Georgian, with “modern” styles added more recently; it calls the campus an “architectural garden.”⁠[4]

Seelye led the college for 35 years. In that time its assets grew from Sophia Smith’s original bequest of about $400,000 to more than $3,000,000, the faculty to 122, the student body to 1,635 and the buildings to 35.⁠[2]

The history page on the college’s website heads his term 1873–1910, while a Smith College Archives collection description gives 1875–1910.⁠[2][4]

In its account of the growth of the campus in this period the history page mentions Alumnae Gymnasium and the William Allan Neilson Library, which it calls one of the best-stocked undergraduate libraries in the country.⁠[2]

Three of the 14 students who entered in 1875 did not graduate; the class later became known as “The Seventy-Niners,” the “Immortal Fourteen” or the “Immortal Eleven.”⁠[5]

By 1879 the entering class had more than 100 students from many states. When the first class graduated, the Boston Evening Journal wrote that “Smith College can no longer be called an experiment.”⁠[5]

Among the first graduates, Mary Gorham was the college’s first librarian; Julia Gulliver pursued a doctoral degree in philosophy and served as president of Rockford College for 17 years; and Eleanor Cushing and Kate Morris both served as presidents of the Alumnae Association and gave their names to Cushing House and Morris House.⁠[5]

The Sophian’s article adds that five members of the class became teachers in middle and high schools, although it then names six: Mary Bonney, Adelaide Edwards, Mary Adkins, Harriet Palmer, Mary Whiton and Mary Gorham (who, it notes, was also the first librarian); that Harriet Palmer, Henriette Leonard and Julia Gulliver became accomplished translators; that Sylvia Spaulding wrote political pieces for The Woman Citizen, a suffragist magazine; and that Anna Palmer studied music at the Boston Conservatory.⁠[5]

Sarah H. Gordon’s study of the first ten classes (1879–1888) finds that most students came from small New England towns, with others from farms, recently settled western states and large cities such as New York and Chicago; their fathers more often held responsible positions in business or the professions, and most began their studies at seventeen or eighteen.⁠[7]

Gordon’s study also notes that the fathers of some students were artisans or even unemployed laborers.⁠[7]

In 1892 Seelye adopted plans by the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted to turn the campus into a single large botanic garden; Francis Ganong was appointed the garden’s first director in 1894.⁠[4]

Under the plan all trees and shrubs were to be labeled, for aesthetic and educational purposes. Under Ganong a systematics garden based on the theories of Adolf Engler and Karl Prantl was added; later master planning brought new systems of walkways and lawns, the expansion of the Lyman Plant House, the construction of a Japanese tea hut and garden, and the reorganization of the herbaceous garden on more current evolutionary theories.⁠[4]

Senda Berenson started the college’s athletics program in the late 1800s and adapted basketball for women. The first women’s collegiate basketball game was played at Smith in 1893, between the freshman and sophomore teams, in Alumnae Gymnasium.⁠[4][3][2]

Marion LeRoy Burton, a graduate of Yale Divinity School, took office in 1910. Under him the college raised $1,000,000, increased faculty salaries and improved the faculty-to-student ratio, revised the curriculum, created honors programs and helped set up a cooperative admission system among Smith, Mount Holyoke, Wellesley and Vassar; alumnae were drawn closer to the college and their representation on the board of trustees increased. His fund drive helped to finance Burton Hall, the science building.⁠[2]

The history page describes Burton as a gifted public speaker with an especially acute business sense who improved the college’s financial state and business methods, and calls the four colleges of the cooperative admission system the finest women’s colleges of the day. In his inaugural address of 1910 he said: “Our aim must be to educate the individual student for something or we fail.”⁠[2][8]

William Allan Neilson became president in 1917 and retired in 1939. Enrollment stayed at about 2,000 while the faculty grew; the curriculum was reorganized as a broad foundation followed by a major, honors programs were expanded, and interdepartmental majors were created in science, landscape architecture and theatre.⁠[2]

More houses were built, mainly in the Georgian “Quad,” so that every student could live on campus. Between the world wars Neilson brought many exiled or endangered foreign teachers, scholars, lecturers and artists to the campus.⁠[2]

The history page says that when Neilson took office Smith was already one of the largest women’s colleges in the world. He was a Scotsman married to a well-educated German woman; the page credits him with turning the college from a provincial community into a cosmopolitan center constantly animated by ideas from abroad and with making it one of the leading colleges in the United States.⁠[2]

A 2023 article on the college’s website notes that Neilson’s inaugural address lasted more than two hours and that in his 1918 address he called for “a perpetual reconsideration and readjustment of our organization,” and said: “The college that regards itself as having reached the limit of improvement is in a dangerous way.”⁠[8]

During the First World War a group of Smith alumnae went to France to do relief work in the town of Grécourt; a replica of the gates of the chateau at Grécourt is now emblematic of the college. In 1918 the Rally Day Show was held to raise funds for the Smith College Relief Unit serving in France.⁠[2][4]

In 1918 the college created the Smith Psychiatric Training School, later the Smith College School for Social Work. It grew out of a summer program that trained clinical social workers to help World War I veterans suffering from what was then called “shell shock,” and it opened with an incoming class of 60.⁠[9]

The school is a coeducational graduate program. In 1930 it launched the journal Smith College Studies in Social Work and held its first Supervisor’s Conference; in 1943, because of World War II, it shortened its curriculum from 24 months to 15, returning to 24 months in 1946; and a Ph.D. program was launched in 1963. In 2024 the journal was renamed Studies in Clinical Social Work: Transforming Practice, Education and Research.⁠[2][10]

The school marked its centennial in 2018. At its commencement on August 14, 2026, 104 graduates received the M.S.W. and four the Ph.D.⁠[10]

The school’s website says that by the 1950s it had broadened its focus to social work research, social welfare, interdisciplinary collaboration and international social work; it is known for its concentrated block curriculum, offers the M.S.W. and a low-residency Ph.D. program, has a Clinical Research Institute and is housed in Lilly Hall, 23 West Street, Northampton.⁠[9]

The school’s timeline records that in 1930 the associate director, Bertha Capen Reynolds, wrote a formal letter to the director, Everett Kimball, urging the admission of Black students; they were not formally banned, but Kimball believed that placements would be too hard to find. In the same year the school began a professional education program for clinicians around the country, and the supervisors’ conference first held that year continues today as the Deepening Clinical Practice Conference. In 1939 the school offered its first multicultural course, Culture as a Determinant of Behavior, taught by the social anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski of the University of London.⁠[10]

The timeline says that Reynolds had earlier taught at Atlanta University, a historically Black institution in Atlanta, Georgia, which shaped her views; it says that her growing connection to Communism likely also influenced her, noting that the Communist Party USA was one of the few large parties actively debating how to end racism, and that she drafted the letter very carefully in order to appear rational and practical, so that Kimball could not easily dismiss her as emotional.⁠[10]

The heads listed in the timeline are Annette Garrett (associate director, 1935–1957, holder of an M.S.S. from Smith College); Florence Day (director, 1943–1956); Howard Parad (dean, 1956–1971); Kenneth H. McCartney (acting dean, 1971–1972, and dean, 1972–1976; he had taught economics at Smith College since 1954 and was dean of the faculty from 1978 to 1983); Katherine Gabel (dean, 1976–1985, a Smith A.B.); Dorcas Davis Bowles (associate dean, 1980–1990, and acting dean, 1985–1986, holder of an M.S.S. from Smith College); Ann Hartman (dean, 1986–1994, an M.S.W. of the school); Susan Donner (associate dean, 1990–1998, a Ph.D. of the school); Anita Lightburn (dean, 1994–2000); Carolyn Jacobs (on the faculty from 1980, associate dean, 1998–2000, and then dean through 2014); and Marianne R.M. Yoshioka (dean from 2014, set, the timeline notes, to retire in 2026). The timeline also records other posts some of them held at the college: Kenneth H. McCartney was a lecturer in the School for Social Work from 1963 to 1971; Katherine Gabel was a lecturer in sociology and anthropology at Smith College from 1976 to 1985; Dorcas Davis Bowles was director of special programs at Smith College in 1972, joined the school in 1975 and was its director of admission from 1978 to 1980; Susan Donner taught part-time at the school from 1980 and was director of field work from 1986 to 1994; and Carolyn Jacobs directed the Clinical Research Institute from 1990 to 1994.⁠[10]

The timeline also records that in 1960 the school’s 42nd commencement was held outside the Smith College Alumnae House — the entry’s heading gives 45 graduates — with an address by Doris Silbert, dean of the college, and diplomas awarded by Mrs. Harold D. Hodgkinson of Boston, chairman of the board of trustees’ standing committee for the school; and that from the 1960s, in concert with the civil rights movement, the school intensified its coursework on socio-cultural, economic and political environments and added courses on group work, clinical social work, families and sexual orientation.⁠[10]

In spring 2017 the school formed a team of students and faculty to develop resources on the inclusion of trans and gender-nonconforming people, prompted in part by an open letter from students in the summer of 2016; in August 2020 Dean Yoshioka announced five Core Principles, replacing the statement of commitment to anti-racism first written in 1995; for the centennial in 2018 the film Clinical Revolution was made to tell the story of the school’s creation; the spring 2022 issue of the school’s magazine, InDepth, won a Gold Circle of Excellence Award from CASE in the alumni/general interest magazines category; in fall 2024 the school set up a Committee for Program Affordability and Student Support to look for ways of making the program more affordable; and the journal was renamed under the leadership of Kenta Asakura. The keynote speaker at the 2026 commencement was James Herbert Williams, an alumnus of the school and an NASW Social Work Pioneer, and the M.S.W. and Ph.D. speakers were Gabby Samaripa and Cheryl Aguilar.⁠[10]

In 1924 the college instituted its Junior Year Abroad Program, under which students went to France, Italy and Spain.⁠[2]

After Neilson’s retirement Elizabeth Cutter Morrow, an alumna trustee, served as acting president for one year. Herbert Davis took office as the fourth president in 1940.⁠[2]

The history page says that Davis reaffirmed the contributions that a liberal arts college could make to a troubled world. In his inaugural address of 1940 he said that “Education of any kind can never be a safe investment” and that education must be “an experiment in freedom.”⁠[2][8]

Soon after the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor the college agreed to provide facilities on its campus for the first Officers’ Training Unit of the Women’s Reserve, or WAVES; it added a summer term from 1942 to 1945.⁠[2]

The summer term allowed students to graduate more quickly and go on to government, hospital or military service. Travel was restricted, but refugees still came to lecture, teach and study, and foreign films were shown regularly in Sage Hall. The Smith College Archives’ catalog gives the full name of the WAVES as Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Services and dates its files on the unit 1942–1996, the bulk of them 1942–1945.⁠[2][4]

The first dramatic productions at the college were staged by societies in the individual student houses, the first of which was formed by Hatfield House in January 1878; in 1919 Samuel A. Eliot of the Department of English Language and Literature developed the Dramatics Association. The Department of Theatre was formed in the 1942–43 academic year, and seven years later the Dramatics Association voted to merge with it.⁠[4]

In 1944 the college established the Southern Mountain Workship, awarded to a graduating senior for nine to ten months of work in isolated rural Appalachian communities through the Conference of Southern Mountain Workers (CSMW), and administered by a committee of faculty and administrators working with the CSMW; the collection description lists recipients from 1945 to 1959, with none in 1955.⁠[4]

The physicist Chien-Shiung WuChien-Shiung WuChien-Shiung Wu (1912–1997) was a Chinese-born American experimental physicist who spent most of her career at Columbia University and worked on the Manhattan Project. Her cobalt-60 beta-decay experiment of 1956–1957, carried out with collaborators, provided the first experimental proof that parity is not conserved in weak interactions.Open the full entry accepted a teaching position at Smith College in 1942 and taught physics there; the American Institute of Physics’ record lists her as assistant professor for 1942–1943.⁠[11][12][13]

The National Academy of Sciences’ biographical memoir of her says that Smith College was very supportive but had no research infrastructure.⁠[11]

The memoir says that after her doctorate she had wanted to stay at the University of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry, but major American universities were then reluctant to hire women and minorities in tenure-track positions; she and Luke Chia-Liu YuanLuke Chia-Liu YuanLuke Chia-Liu Yuan (1912–2003) was a Chinese-born American experimental physicist and the husband of the physicist Chien-Shiung Wu; he worked mainly at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he was a senior physicist. He was elected an academician of Academia Sinica in 1959 and chaired the steering committee of Taiwan’s Synchrotron Radiation Research Center from 1983 to 2002.Open the full entry married and moved east together, he taking an appointment at RCA in Princeton in 1942 to work on radar development. In order to live closer to him she left Smith in 1943, and Princeton UniversityPrinceton UniversityPrinceton University is a private university and Ivy League member in Princeton, New Jersey. Chartered on October 22, 1746 as the College of New Jersey, it moved to Princeton in 1756 and adopted its present name in 1896. Undergraduate education leads to A.B. and B.S.E. degrees and emphasizes small-group discussion, independent research and residential college life. Graduate education spans the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering. As of October 2026, Christopher L. Eisgruber was president. Its 2026–27 operating budget was $3.407 billion, including $342 million for undergraduate aid.Open the full entry hired her as the first female instructor on its faculty; in March 1944 she was invited to join the Manhattan District Project at Columbia UniversityColumbia UniversityColumbia University, formally Columbia University in the City of New York, is a private research university in New York City and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1754 by royal charter from King George II as King's College, it is the oldest institution of higher education in New York State and the fifth oldest in the United States. It was renamed Columbia College in 1784 and adopted the university name and moved to Manhattan's Morningside Heights in 1896. It has 17 schools and four affiliated colleges, with 35,978 students enrolled in fall 2025. Legal scholar Jennifer L. Mnookin became president on July 1, 2026.Open the full entry as a senior scientist.⁠[11]

The college’s list of honorary degrees has the entry “Chien Shiung Wu SCD 1959,” an honorary doctorate of science conferred in 1959.⁠[14]

Benjamin Fletcher Wright came from Harvard University to become the fifth president in 1949. The college returned to a regular calendar and built, among other things, a new heating plant; the “$7 Million Fund Drive” was completed in 1950 and the Helen Hills Hills Chapel in 1955. During the McCarthy era he defended the academic freedom of the faculty.⁠[2]

The history page adds that a student recreation center built in these years was named for the retiring President Davis; that the fund drive enabled the college to improve facilities and raise faculty salaries, and the Helen Hills Hills Chapel gave it its own place of worship; that Wright’s chief achievements were the strengthening of the college’s finances and the defense of academic freedom in the 1950s; and that the Alumnae Association was by then the most devoted and active group of its kind in the country. Before his term ended the college received a large gift for a new faculty office and classroom building to be named for him.⁠[2]

Thomas Corwin Mendenhall came from Yale UniversityYale UniversityYale University is a research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Its predecessor, the Collegiate School, received a charter in 1701. Trustees chose New Haven in 1716; the institution became Yale College in 1718 and Yale University in 1887. Yale provides undergraduate, graduate and professional education and has 14 undergraduate residential colleges. As of October 2026, its president was Maurie McInnis, who took office in July 2024. In 2026, Yale expanded aid for incoming undergraduates and celebrated its 325th anniversary.Open the full entry in 1959 to become the sixth president. In the 1960s the college revised its curriculum, removing college-wide requirements and encouraging independent study; it expanded cooperation with neighboring institutions and joined other private colleges in the Northeast in developing the Twelve College Exchange Program.⁠[2]

The college added buildings for the study of the natural sciences, the performing arts and the fine arts, and the new Fine Arts Center included the Smith College Museum of Art; the old house rules on late evenings out and male visitors were relaxed and then abandoned.⁠[2]

The history page says that the curriculum was revised in response to increasingly independent and ambitious students; that the neighbors with which cooperation was extended were Amherst, Hampshire and Mount Holyoke colleges and the University of Massachusetts; and that the Smith College Museum of Art is now one of the most distinguished college museums in the country. The civil rights, students’ rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s all took root on the campus, and the page credits Mendenhall’s wisdom, tact and humor with bringing the college through them.⁠[2]

The first Moratorium Day, October 15, 1969, was called Work for Peace Day at Smith; on the second, November 15, a contingent of 250 students joined the march in Washington, D.C. On May 5, 1970, students voted to strike by 1,547 to 437, with 12 abstentions; commencement exercises on May 31 brought the strike to a close.⁠[4]

The Smith College Archives’ note further records that on October 15, 1969, students staffed the Moratorium office on Green Street, canvassed residents and, with the cooperation of local businesses, led marches down Main Street, and the college chaplain, the Rev. Richard P. Unsworth, took part in a memorial service for Hampshire County veterans at the Unitarian Church; that 10 professors went with the students to Washington on November 15, while in Northampton there were a teach-in at Wright Hall a silent march from the Helen Hills Hills Chapel to downtown and back, and coffee klatches in several homes; and that the third week of March 1970 was proclaimed National Anti-Draft Week, with demonstrations at local draft board offices and the circulation of “we won’t go” petitions.⁠[4]

On May 4, 1970, the day of the killings at Kent State UniversityKent State UniversityKent State University is a university based in Kent, Ohio, United States, established under Ohio law in 1910 as a normal school; it now has eight campuses. On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard fired on protesting students on its campus.Open the full entry, national student leaders called for an indefinite strike; that evening about 30 people opposed to a strike gathered in front of Neilson Library, and Professor Donald Robinson presented a plan for lobbying Congress at Paradise Pond. On May 5 about 300 students rallied at Davis against United States action in Cambodia and in support of Bobby Seale; after the students’ vote the faculty voted to suspend all normal college activities from May 6 to May 10; and at about 11 that night, in a dispute over the announcement of the vote, students and professors stood in the rain outside the President’s house.⁠[4]

At the all-college meeting of May 6 there were speeches by Sid Waller of the class of 1970 and by the BSA; on May 7 the Government Department sponsored a lecture in J. M. Greene Hall on President Nixon’s policy in Cambodia, and the Rev. Mr. Unsworth and Rabbi Yechiael Lander led a meeting at which a student statement of purpose was read to 15 area clergy and 40 students; on May 8 a memorial service for the Kent State dead was held in the Helen Hills Hills Chapel; on May 9 students went to a protest march in Washington; and on May 10 students from Smith and neighboring colleges canvassed residents and the Black Panther Doug Miranda lectured in the Quad to about 300 people. On May 30 Mendenhall said that his office was receiving 10 letters a day expressing opinions about the strike. The organizations formed during the strike were the Strike Committee, the Education Committee, the Community Action Committee, the Union for National Draft Opposition, the Committee on Justice and Repression at Home, the Unofficial Committee of Concerned Citizens, the Committee on Governance and the People’s Lobby; although commencement on May 31 closed the strike, many organizations and students remained active throughout the summer.⁠[4]

When Vassar began to accept men, and Yale, Princeton and Dartmouth to accept women as candidates for degrees, some members of the college community wondered whether Smith should also become coeducational. In 1971 a committee of trustees, faculty, administration, students and alumnae studied the question in detail and concluded that “admitting men as candidates for the Smith degree would detract from the founding purpose of the college,” the best possible education for women.⁠[2]

For the centennial Mendenhall asked Jacqueline Van Voris in 1970 to undertake an oral history project, which was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and occupied her for more than four years; the interviews, conducted in 1971–1974, asked among other things why the alumnae had chosen Smith, how they judged their education and whether they had ever felt discriminated against as women. The resulting book, College: A Smith Mosaic, was published in February 1975 and was also submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for her master’s degree in education.⁠[4]

In 1975 Jill Ker Conway was inaugurated as the college’s first woman president; she came to Smith from Australia by way of Harvard University and the University of Toronto.⁠[2]

During her tenure the Ada Comstock Scholars Program, for women beyond the traditional college age, grew rapidly and the Career Development Office was expanded; Neilson Library was extensively renovated and enlarged, Ainsworth Gymnasium was built and ground was broken for new indoor and outdoor track and tennis facilities.⁠[2]

Her term ended in 1985; after leaving Smith she wrote a series of memoirs, of which A Woman’s Education (2001) concerns her Smith years.⁠[2][3]

The history page calls her a charismatic and energetic leader with a vision for women’s education and counts the renovation and expansion of Neilson Library, the growth of the Ada Comstock Scholars Program and exceptionally successful fund-raising as the three major accomplishments of her administration. In her inaugural address of 1975 she said: “Women’s lives in our culture require them to make new beginnings in their late thirties or early forties.” The college gave her an honorary degree (LTD) in 1988, when she was also the commencement speaker.⁠[2][8][14]

Mary Maples Dunn, previously a professor of history and dean at Bryn Mawr College, came to Smith in 1985. In her decade as president the college raised more than $300 million, built two major buildings, doubled the value of its endowment and drew record numbers of applicants; computer technology was introduced into campus operations, five majors were added, and more courses were offered on non-Western and previously neglected American cultures.⁠[2]

The history page notes that in its early decades the student body was overwhelmingly Protestant, that by the 1970s Roman Catholic and Jewish chaplains served alongside the Protestant chaplain, and that all racial, ethnic and religious groups are now well represented on campus; under Dunn the college also renovated many buildings and improved communication on and off campus, and it attracted record numbers of applicants while holding their quality steady. The college gave her an honorary degree (LTD) in 1998.⁠[2][14]

On February 20, 1986, before the spring meeting of the board of trustees, students and faculty held a rally and sit-in urging total divestment from South African companies that contributed to apartheid; on February 22 the trustees chose not to adopt the divestment proposal of the Senate Ethical Investment Committee. On February 24 about 200 students and faculty began a round-the-clock sit-in outside the president’s office and about 90 students spent the night in College Hall; on February 25 about 150 more students joined, the protesters formed human chains to block the entrances and kept employees out, and Dunn refused to have them arrested.⁠[4]

On February 26 the protesters held a press conference and an all-college meeting and sent a group of “presidential delegates” to read a statement defending the takeover; on February 27 they agreed to negotiate with Dunn, and a small group began a hunger strike; on February 28 negotiations continued and the protesters held a rally and announced the hunger strike to the public; on March 1 an agreement was reached between Dunn, the board of trustees and the protesters; on March 2 the occupation ended with a press conference and a victory rally; and on March 6 a required teach-in was held on South African issues and on relations between the board and the campus. An oral history project on the occupation was coordinated by Donna Kenny and Maureen Dooley Lawrence of the class of 1987 as their work in History 367b, taught by Maurice Isserman in spring 1986.⁠[4]

The Student Demonstrations Files of the Smith College Archives document the rallies and protests that students have held on national and local issues since 1933: from the 1930s to the 1960s over American involvement in the Second World War, presidential elections and segregation, and in the 1980s and 1990s against the Persian Gulf War, in support of Ada Comstock Scholars and for women’s safety on campus.⁠[4]

In December 1994 Ruth Simmons was chosen as the ninth president; the college’s history page heads her term 1995–2001. The college describes her as the first African-American woman to head any top-ranked American college or university.⁠[2]

A campus-wide self-study that she led produced a series of initiatives: Praxis, which gives every student the opportunity to take an internship funded by the college; a poetry center; a peer-reviewed journal of scholarship by and about women of color; first-year seminars; and programs to strengthen speaking and writing.⁠[2]

She left Smith in June 2001 to become president of Brown UniversityBrown UniversityBrown University is a private nonprofit research university in Providence, Rhode Island, and a member of the Ivy League. Chartered by Rhode Island's colonial legislature in 1764, it is known for its undergraduate Open Curriculum, which has no common required core. Christina H. Paxson, president since July 2012, announced on August 3, 2026, that the 2026–27 academic year would be her last in office. As of October 1, 2026, the search for Brown's 20th president remained underway.Open the full entry. John M. Connolly, the college’s first provost, then served as acting president for one year.⁠[2]

The most significant building project of the period was the Brown Fine Arts Center, a $35 million expansion and renovation of the Smith College Museum of Art, the art department and the art library; ground was broken for a campus center in 2002, and the renovation and expansion of the Lyman Conservatory was completed in 2003. The history page says that Connolly guided the college through the trauma of September 11, 2001, and its aftermath.⁠[2]

Simmons’s inaugural address of 1995 lasted about 20 minutes; in it she said that the college wanted its students “to learn well and to learn broadly.” The college gave her an honorary degree (LHD) in 2014, when she was the commencement speaker.⁠[8][14]

In February 1999 the board of trustees approved an engineering program, named the Picker Program in Engineering and Technology in honor of the late Jean Sovatkin Picker, a 1942 graduate and former United NationsUnited NationsThe United Nations is an international organization founded in 1945 under the Charter of the United Nations. It has 193 Member States, and its headquarters are in New York City.Open the full entry official, and her husband, Harvey Picker, whose $5 million gift created the program’s endowment; Rosemary Bradford Hewlett, a 1940 graduate, and the William R. Hewlett Trust also contributed. The college describes it as the first engineering program at a women’s college in the United States.⁠[15][16]

The college’s 1999 release gives the pressing national need for women engineers as the reason for the program. President Ruth J. Simmons called it “a bold venture” and observed that women were more than 50 percent of the college-going population but only 9 percent of the engineering work force; the provost, John Connolly, said that five out of six engineering students were then male and that Smith graduated science majors at two and a half times the national average for men and women combined. Serious consideration of an engineering program had begun during the college’s decennial accreditation self-study of 1996–97. Harvey Picker was chairman of the board of Wayfarer Marine Corporation and dean emeritus of the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs.⁠[15]

Under the plan set out in the release the program was to concentrate at first on computer, electrical and environmental engineering; the first course, “Designing the Future: An Introduction to Engineering,” was to be offered in the fall of 1999 and the first majors were expected to graduate in 2004 with bachelor of science degrees in engineering; once all areas were established the college expected to enroll 100 engineering majors at a time and to graduate about 25 a year. The release notes that only two other top-25 liberal arts colleges, Swarthmore College and Trinity College in Hartford, offered engineering degrees.⁠[15]

Connolly held that a student’s chances of leaving Smith with an engineering degree were likely to be much greater than at a university, and Simmons expected that some Smith engineers would be fast-tracked within agencies and corporations because of the high demand for engineers with strong liberal arts skills. A founding chairperson was to be named in the coming months.⁠[15]

Before that the college had offered an engineering minor since 1985 and, from 1976 to 1991, a dual-degree program with the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.⁠[15]

The minor had emphases in chemical, civil, computer, electrical, industrial and mechanical engineering and in operations research. Since 1998 the college had also run the MacLean Program with Dartmouth CollegeDartmouth CollegeDartmouth College is a private institution of higher education in Hanover, New Hampshire, and a member of the Ivy League. Founded by Eleazar Wheelock, it received a royal charter on December 13, 1769. The 1819 Supreme Court ruling in Dartmouth College v. Woodward preserved its private status. Alongside undergraduate liberal arts education, Dartmouth includes the Geisel, Thayer, Tuck and Guarini schools. It enrolled 7,273 students in fall 2025 and held a $9 billion endowment at June 30, 2025. Sian Leah Beilock, in office since June 2023, remained president as of October 2026.Open the full entry, in which students earned a bachelor of arts from Smith and a bachelor of engineering from Dartmouth in five years. The release describes Smith and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst as consortial partners and Smith itself as enrolling 2,800 students from every state and 50 other countries, the largest undergraduate women’s college in the United States.⁠[15]

On September 27, 1999, the college announced the appointment of Domenico Grasso, chair of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Connecticut, to lead the program, full-time from January 2000; the first students enrolled in the fall of 2000.⁠[16][17]

Grasso was appointed Rosemary Bradford Hewlett ’40 Professor and chair of the Picker Program in Engineering and Technology. A graduate of Worcester Polytechnic Institute with a master’s degree from Purdue University and a Ph.D. from the University of MichiganUniversity of MichiganThe University of Michigan is a university founded in Detroit in 1817 that moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1837; it is governed by a statewide-elected Board of Regents and also has campuses in Dearborn and Flint.Open the full entry, he was an authority on the remediation of environmental contaminants, a registered professional engineer in ConnecticutConnecticutConnecticut is a U.S. state in the New England region. Its capital is Hartford and its largest city is Bridgeport (2010 census). It entered the Union on January 9, 1788, as the 5th state, and had a population of 3,605,944 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry and TexasTexasTexas is a U.S. state in the south-central United States, with its capital at Austin and its largest city Houston. It was admitted to the Union on December 29, 1845, as the 28th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 29,145,505 residents.Open the full entry, a former visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, NATONATONATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is an alliance founded on the North Atlantic Treaty signed in 1949, with collective defence as its core principle. Its political and administrative centre is in Brussels, Belgium.Open the full entry Fellow and invited technical expert to the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, a member of the science advisory board of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and editor-in-chief of the journal Environmental Engineering Science, with more than 100 technical papers and reports; in 1998 he served on a team funded by the World Bank that established the first environmental engineering program in Argentina. His wife, Susan Hull Grasso, is also an engineer, and they have four children: Benjamin, Jacob, Elspeth and Caitlín.⁠[16]

In May 2004 the college awarded engineering bachelor’s degrees to 20 graduating seniors from 13 states and two foreign countries, the first such degrees given by a women’s college in the United States.⁠[18][19]

Commencement was held on May 16, 2004. The college’s release says that members of the class had been accepted into graduate engineering programs at Harvard-MIT, the University of Michigan, Dartmouth, Cornell, Princeton, Berkeley and Notre Dame, that two had won National Science Foundation graduate fellowships and that several had positions waiting at national firms; that the program then had 135 majors or intended majors and more than 150 students in engineering courses; and that its faculty was 60 percent female, against 4 percent nationwide. Five engineering graduate programs, at Dartmouth College, the University of Michigan, the University of Notre Dame, Johns Hopkins University and Tufts University, had direct-enrollment agreements under which Smith engineering students with a grade point average of 3.5 or above were admitted automatically.⁠[19]

The release quotes praise for the program from Carly Fiorina, chairman and chief executive of Hewlett-Packard; Bill Ford, chairman and chief executive of the Ford Motor CompanyFord Motor CompanyFord Motor Company is a multinational automaker headquartered in Dearborn, Michigan, founded by Henry Ford in Detroit in 1903, with two vehicle brands, Ford and Lincoln. With the Model T and the moving assembly line it ushered in the mass production of automobiles. Its 2025 revenue was about $187.3 billion, it has about 169,000 employees worldwide, and as of October 2026 Jim Farley is its president and chief executive officer.Open the full entry; Thomas J. O’Neill, president and chief executive of Parsons Brinckerhoff; and William A. Wulf, president of the National Academy of Engineering, along with statements by President Carol T. Christ and the program’s director, Domenico Grasso. It notes that women were only 20 percent of undergraduate engineering majors nationally and that white men made up 90 percent of practicing engineers; that the companies advising and supporting the program were Bechtel, the Ford Motor Company, GE, Hewlett-Packard, IBMIBMIBM (International Business Machines Corporation) is an American information technology company, renamed in 1924 from the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (C-T-R).Open the full entry, Lockheed MartinLockheed MartinLockheed Martin is an American aerospace and defense company whose main businesses include military aircraft, missile defense, rotary-wing aircraft and mission systems, and space systems.Open the full entry, Lucent, MITRE, Motorola, Parsons Brinckerhoff and Boeing; and that students had run experiments in zero gravity aboard a NASANASAThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the U.S. federal agency responsible for the civilian space program, aeronautics research and space science. Established by law in 1958 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., it has run programs including Mercury, the Apollo Moon landings, the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station and Artemis.Open the full entry research aircraft. The college was then raising funds for a $65 million engineering and molecular science building, toward which the Ford Motor Company had given $10 million.⁠[19]

The college invited ABET (the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology) to evaluate the program in the 2004–05 academic year; the accreditation that followed was retroactive to cover the first two graduating classes.⁠[17]

The release announcing the accreditation quotes the provost and dean of the faculty, Susan C. Bourque, and the program’s director, Linda E. Jones, and says that engineering was by then one of the most popular majors among entering students, that two new faculty members had joined that year and that two more were to be hired soon; the releases of 2004 and 2005 both give the college’s enrollment as 2,800 students from every state and 60 other countries.⁠[17][19]

Carol T. Christ, a scholar of Victorian literature, took up her duties as the 10th president in June 2002. In 2007 the college issued The Smith Design for Learning, which named international studies, environmental sustainability and community engagement as priority areas.⁠[2]

Projects completed in her tenure included the renovation of the Brown Fine Arts Center, a new campus center, the renovation of the Lyman Conservatory, the Olin Fitness Center, the renovation of Lilly Hall, home of the School for Social Work, and Conway House for Ada Comstock Scholars with children. Ford Hall, a sustainably designed building for the Picker Engineering Program and several science and computer science departments, opened in fall 2009; the college also built a co-generation facility and dedicated the MacLeish Field Station, a 200-acre woodland tract in Whately, Massachusetts.⁠[2]

The history page says that early in her tenure Christ launched an energetic program of outreach, innovation and long-range planning, including capital planning; that she encouraged coursework on fluency in American cultures and the diversity of experience of American ethnic groups; and that she had the curriculum reviewed by members of the faculty and outside scholars to determine its distinctive intellectual traditions. New homes were found for the Poetry Center and the Mwangi Cultural Center. Ford Hall is named for its lead donor, the Ford Motor Company Fund, and the MacLeish Field Station is used for environmental education and research.⁠[2]

On the opening of Ford Hall the history page gives fall 2009, while the libraries’ website gives 2010 and puts its cost at about $70 million.⁠[2][20]

In her inaugural address of 2002 Christ took up the question whether the new engineering program and the planned science center meant abandoning the liberal arts, and answered: “Like Jefferson, I have no intention of abandoning the humanities.” The college gave her an honorary degree (LHD) in 2018.⁠[8][14]

Kathleen McCartney, a former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and an expert in child development and early education, took office as the 11th president in 2013. “Women for the World: The Campaign for Smith,” which she led to its culmination in 2016, raised $486 million, including nearly $130 million for financial aid; the college describes it as the largest campaign ever undertaken by a women’s college.⁠[2]

In October 2021 McCartney announced that the college would eliminate loans from its undergraduate financial aid packages beginning in fall 2022, replacing them with college grants.⁠[2][21]

In May 2022 the college began converting its heating system to geothermal energy, toward a goal of carbon neutrality by 2030.⁠[21]

The history page says that McCartney was the first in her family to go to college, graduated summa cum laude from Tufts University with a bachelor of science in psychology and earned a doctorate in psychology at Yale University; as dean at Harvard she created a three-year doctorate in educational leadership with the Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School of Government. At Smith she led a strategic planning effort that produced new academic and co-curricular programs and formed partnerships with edX, the online education platform of Harvard and MIT, with MassMutual, which supports data science initiatives, and with the Posse Foundation; the campaign created 103 new endowed scholarships; and the college engaged the architectural designer Maya Lin to re-envision Neilson Library.⁠[2]

The college’s release of September 2022 says that applications were at an all-time high, up 63 percent since 2014. In her inaugural address of 2013 McCartney said: “Smith’s mission is resilient.” The Daily Hampshire Gazette notes that she served for ten years.⁠[21][8][22]

On May 2, 2015, the board of trustees voted to clarify the undergraduate admission policy to include self-identified transgender women; the policy applies to students applying in fall 2015 and afterward.⁠[23]

The vote followed a year of study by the board and an Admission Policy Study Group that it appointed, which gathered views from the campus community, alumnae and parents and consulted outside experts; the faculty also took an advisory vote. In the announcement, President Kathleen McCartney and the board chair, Elizabeth Mugar Eveillard, wrote that Smith remains “a college of and for women” and will continue to use gendered language, including female pronouns, in institutional communications.⁠[23]

The letter, addressed to students, faculty, staff, parents and alumnae, says that the decision affirms the college’s mission and identity as a women’s college; that the study group, besides listening to the community, conducted its own research and consulted outside experts, including legal experts; it thanks the study group and the thousands of individuals who shared their views, and observes that concepts of female identity have evolved since the college’s founding.⁠[23]

The original Neilson Library opened in 1909. Consultation with faculty and students on its redesign began in fall 2015, and a team of Maya Lin and Shepley Bulfinch was chosen after an international search; ground was broken in October 2017, and the rebuilt library opened for campus use on March 29, 2021.⁠[20][24]

The design keeps the 1909 facade and adds two new wings: the south wing, named for Mary Maples Dunn, houses Special Collections, comprising the College Archives, the Sophia Smith Collection and the Mortimer Rare Book Collection; the north wing, named for Ruth J. Simmons, includes a café and a digital media hub. The Jill Ker Conway Innovation & Entrepreneurship Center is on the first floor.⁠[20]

The libraries’ website gives a budget of about $120 million, covering new construction and renovation of Neilson, the renovation of the Alumnae Gymnasium, site preparation and landscaping; the college’s history page calls it a $110 million project. The building measures 200,000 square feet. No books were deaccessioned, and lesser-used collections were moved to the new Five College Library Annex.⁠[20][24][2]

The libraries’ website says that the old library was built in phases beginning in 1909, that the program planning document was drawn up in fall 2015 and submitted to the board of trustees in early 2016, that design work began in winter 2016 and that construction began in the summer of 2017. Building Design + Construction adds that the original building had gone through three rounds of renovation, that the project replaced wings that had blocked the view of the campus, that Shawmut Design & Construction managed the construction, that it was the college’s largest capital project in a decade, and that Edwina von Gal with Ryan Associates designed the surrounding landscape.⁠[20][24]

Maya Lin called the two new wings “jewel boxes.” Building Design + Construction describes the atrium as lit by a four-story oculus, a round skylight; the libraries’ website places it in the central hall on the first floor, extending down to the ground floor, with its top visible from the fourth floor; the building has a sunken courtyard, a wheelchair-accessible outdoor amphitheater, a Digital Media Hub, a Learning Commons, a Browsing Room and the Caverno Room, a reflection room where students can pray and meditate, and is designed to be quieter on each successive floor; the fourth-floor Skyline Reading Room opens onto a patio with views of the Holyoke Range; Special Collections is in the Gloria Steinem Reading Room on the third floor, and Building Design + Construction gives the extent of its archival materials as 40,000 linear feet. A tunnel connects the library to the renovated Alumnae Gymnasium, which contains a User Experience Lab, collaborative workspaces, study spaces, experimental studios and a computer lab and serves as a 24-hour study space. The libraries’ website says that the project restores integrity to Frederick Law Olmsted’s original campus plan; Building Design + Construction calls it a four-year project and says that the wings it replaced had blocked the view of the campus Olmsted designed.⁠[20][24]

The project was paid for from three sources, borrowing, capital project funds and philanthropy; the college used a mix of union and non-union contractors, and against a goal of 7 percent women made up 6.9 percent of the construction workers. The project aimed at LEED Gold certification. The library’s address is 7 Neilson Drive, Northampton.⁠[20][24]

On September 15, 2022, the board of trustees named Sarah Willie-LeBreton, provost and dean of the faculty at Swarthmore College, as the 12th president; she took office on July 1, 2023, succeeding McCartney, who had announced that she would end her term in June 2023.⁠[21]

A sociologist who studies social inequality, race and ethnicity, she had taught at Swarthmore College since 1997; she holds a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Haverford College and master’s and doctoral degrees in sociology from Northwestern UniversityNorthwestern UniversityNorthwestern University is a private research university founded in 1851, with campuses in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois, United States, and in Doha, Qatar.Open the full entry, and is the author of Acting Black: College, Identity, and the Performance of Race.⁠[21]

Her inauguration took place on October 21, 2023. She is the college’s second African American president, after Ruth Simmons.⁠[8][22]

The release says that the search committee was chaired by Susan Molineaux of the class of 1975, vice-chair of the board, and that the chair of the board was Alison Overseth. At Swarthmore Willie-LeBreton had chaired the Diversity Task Force and the President’s Task Force on Sexual Misconduct and, as provost, championed tenure lines in environmental studies and in peace and conflict studies; Swarthmore’s president, Valerie Smith, said that she had led with a spirit of inclusivity and compassion.⁠[21]

The history page gives her a bachelor of arts from Haverford College in 1986 and an M.A. (1988) and Ph.D. (1995) from Northwestern University; she taught at Colby College (1991–1995) and Bard College (1995–1997), was tenured at Swarthmore College, where she coordinated the Black Studies Program and chaired the Department of Sociology and Anthropology in leadership roles that together lasted seventeen years, and was provost and dean of the faculty from 2018 to 2023. She edited the collection Transforming the Academy: Faculty Perspectives on Diversity and Pedagogy, belongs to the Eastern Sociological Society, Sociologists for Women in Society, the Association of Black Sociologists and the American Sociological Association, and has served on the Executive Office and Budget of the American Sociological Association and on the boards of Pendle Hill Quaker Center, Haverford College, Benchmark School and the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation, among others.⁠[2]

The history page says that Acting Black examines the experiences of Black alumni of a predominantly white institution and of a historically Black one from the late civil rights movement to the Reagan years, and that Transforming the Academy deals with the challenges faced by faculty from previously underrepresented groups. She considers herself an applied sociologist and has worked with groups on strategies for organizational self-awareness and transformation; for several years she reviewed sociology departments as a member of the American Sociological Association’s Departmental Resources Group, and she sits on the advisory board of IIG (Integrated Impact Group), a consultancy for the educational sector. She is the author of several dozen articles, essays, reviews and op-ed columns.⁠[2]

The Daily Hampshire Gazette’s account says that she went to high school in Concord, Massachusetts, and opened her address with a quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson; at the ceremony she received the presidential medal and a key to the campus. The two days of events included a dance party at the Campus Center on Friday evening, a performance on Saturday by the West African drumming group Mbo Lette at the Julia Child Campus Center and singing at the ceremony by the a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock; Elizabeth Jamieson, an alumna and professor of chemistry, led the procession, Swarthmore’s president, Valerie Smith, and the president of the Student Government Association, Vanessa Nicole Silva-Burgos, spoke, and Ruth Simmons and Senator Elizabeth Warren sent video messages. The article on the college’s website notes that eleven presidents preceded her.⁠[22][8]

The report says that in her address she championed liberal arts education, spoke of justice and stressed the need to work together on great challenges such as climate change and ending sexism: “Education is essential if we are to create a just world.” The report sets the inauguration against continuing debates over free speech on campuses and the disruption that the COVID-19 pandemic had caused to schools. Ruth Simmons said in her video message: “The world has certainly changed in the nearly 30 years since I received a similar call to lead Smith.” Elizabeth Warren added in hers: “Sarah is going to continue that legacy.”⁠[22]

As of November 2026 Sarah Willie-LeBreton is president of Smith College; the college’s history page heads her term “2023–Present.”⁠[2]

Britannica’s article counts Smith College among the Seven Sisters schools and calls it one of the largest privately endowed colleges for women in the United States.⁠[3]

The college’s mission statement reads: “Smith College educates women of promise for lives of distinction and purpose.”⁠[2]

On the size of the student body, Encyclopaedia Britannica’s article puts total enrollment at about 2,500, without giving a year, and the college’s September 2022 press release speaks of more than 2,900 students.⁠[3][21]

The humanities, arts and sciences remain central to the curriculum, and newer majors or interdepartmental programs include engineering, the study of women and gender, neuroscience, film and media studies, Middle East studies, and statistical and data sciences.⁠[2]

Britannica’s article lists master’s and doctoral programs in the School for Social Work and master’s degrees in education, biological sciences, Italian, dance, playwriting, music, physical education and religion.⁠[3]

Britannica’s article says that bachelor’s degrees are offered in 29 departmental and 8 interdepartmental programs and that undergraduates are urged to study in seven fields of knowledge: literature, historical studies, social science, natural science, mathematics and analytic philosophy, the arts and foreign languages; it says that the college is noted for its School for Social Work.⁠[3]

The history page names three constants of the college’s history: an uncompromising defense of academic and intellectual freedom, attention to the relation between college education and the larger public issues of world order and human dignity, and a concern for the rights and privileges of women. It calls Smith “A college of and for the world,” committed to an inclusive, equitable and accessible educational community founded on the free and open exchange of ideas.⁠[2]

The college’s own releases give its size at different dates: in 1999, 2,800 students from every state and 50 other countries; in 2004 and 2005, 2,800 students from every state and 60 other countries; and in September 2022, more than 2,900 students from nearly every state and more than 75 other countries. The releases of 1999, 2004 and 2005 call it the largest undergraduate women’s college in the country, and the 2022 release one of the largest women’s liberal arts colleges in the United States.⁠[15][19][17][21]

Smith College belongs to the Five Colleges consortium with Amherst College, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College and the University of Massachusetts; the consortium provides cooperative undergraduate and graduate programs.⁠[3]

Full-year study-abroad programs are available in Florence, Italy; Hamburg, Germany; Geneva, Switzerland; and Paris, France.⁠[3]

Mountain Day has been held since it was first celebrated in October 1877: the date is kept secret, and bells ring to announce a surprise holiday on which all academic appointments are cancelled.⁠[4]

Rally Day goes back to a series of annual celebrations of George WashingtonGeorge WashingtonGeorge Washington (1732–1799) was the first president of the United States, serving from 1789 to 1797. Earlier he commanded the Continental Army in the American Revolutionary War and presided over the Constitutional Convention of 1787.Open the full entry’s birthday, the first of which was held in February 1876; a “rally” was added in 1894, and the name Rally Day was first used in 1906. The Smith College Medal has been awarded to outstanding alumnae at Rally Day since 1973.⁠[4]

On Ivy Day departing seniors plant ivy on the grounds, and since 1900 Christmas at the college has included the annual Vespers. The college also counts Friday teas among its traditions, along with the newer Julia Child Day and Cromwell Day.⁠[4][2]

The collection description cites a 1970 article in The Sophian to the effect that the date of Mountain Day is known in advance only to the president; on that day students are encouraged to take long walks or bike rides. The Rally Day celebrations grew from essentially social dinners and receptions into daylong college events, with rallies, debates, basketball rivalries, dramatic presentations, singing and dancing sponsored by the students; the day is now held on the third Wednesday in February, and the alumnae who receive the Smith College Medal speak in classes before the convocation and talk with students afterward. Since 1944 it has been the first occasion on which the seniors wear their gowns in public, and in recent years the caps have given way to inventive hats of the students’ own choosing or making. In 2019 Carolyn Kuan of the class of 1999 received a Smith College Medal at Rally Day.⁠[4][2]

Ivy Day is among the earliest special days at the college; the ivy stands for the seniors’ seed of knowledge, and cuts taken from the campus vines are now also given to first-year students. The Christmas traditions include the sending of cards, the singing of carols and the annual candlelight Vespers, at which the college’s choral groups perform seasonal songs and religious readings. Other special days named in the collection descriptions are Halloween, Thanksgiving, Easter and Float Night and the newer Celebration of Sisterhood and Otelia Cromwell Day; the former Father’s Weekend became Parent’s Weekend and then Family Weekend. The history page says that Mountain Day, Ivy Day and Friday teas have gone on for the better part of 150 years.⁠[4][2]

Intercollegiate games were first allowed in 1971, and in 1981 Smith became the first women’s college to join the NCAA, in which it remains a Division III member.⁠[4]

The collection description says that for many years all freshmen and sophomores were required to take a sport, and that the Smith College Athletic Association long prevented intercollegiate competition, holding that it would hurt the spirit of friendly intramural competition; intramural contests drew strong interest and places on the class teams were highly coveted. Once intercollegiate games were allowed the college joined the Northeast Intercollegiate Athletic Conference.⁠[4]

Alumnae featured on the college’s website include Julia Child ’34, cookbook author and television host; Gloria Steinem ’56, feminist activist; Hanya Yanagihara ’95, author of A Little Life (2015); Garrett Bradley ’07, artist and filmmaker; and Kimberly Drew ’12, writer. Betty Friedan ’42 surveyed her classmates at their 15th reunion in 1957, work that grew into The Feminine Mystique (1963); she later served as founding president of the National Organization for Women.⁠[2]

Britannica’s article also names the conservationist and editor Nancy Newhall, the anatomist Florence Rena Sabin, and the writers Margaret Mitchell and Sylvia Plath.⁠[3]

Evelyn Boyd Granville, a 1945 graduate, became the second African American woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics. The photonuclear physicist Evans HaywardEvans HaywardEvans Hayward (1922–2020), full name Evans Vaughan Hayward, was a physicist at the United States National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST) who worked for decades in photonuclear physics. She was the wife of the physicist Raymond W. Hayward.Open the full entry received a B.A. in physics from Smith College in 1942.⁠[22][25]

The history page says that A Little Life runs to more than 830 pages, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award, and that Laura Begley Bloom of the class of 1991 wrote about it in the Spring 2022 Smith Alumnae Quarterly; it also says that the answers to Friedan’s survey revealed widespread unhappiness and frustration with the role of housewife and that The Feminine Mystique was a bestseller that helped launch the second wave of American feminism. The page of the same name on the college’s website also presents Tenaya Darlington of the class of 1994, who started a cheese blog in 2009 and wrote Madame Fromage’s Adventures in Cheese. Britannica’s article likewise counts Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and Julia Child among the noted alumnae.⁠[2][14][3]

The college’s list of honorary degrees is arranged by name (the page states no ordering rule), and its award years run from 1886 (Amelia Blanchard Edwards, LLD) to 2021; it includes Julia McWilliams Child (class of 1934; LHD, 1985), Betty Goldstein Friedan (1942; LHD, 1975 — the commencement list on the same page gives “LittD ’75”), Gloria Steinem (1956; LTD, 1988), Evelyn Boyd Granville (1945; SCD, 1989), Barbara Pierce Bush (1947; LHD, 1989), Madeleine L’Engle (1941; LTD, 1986), Margaret Mitchell Marsh (1922; AM, 1939) and Hanya Yanagihara (1995; DFA, 2020), as well as Eleanor RooseveltEleanor RooseveltEleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) was first lady of the United States from 1933 to 1945 as the wife of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the 32nd president, and later a United States delegate to the United Nations and chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights, which drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.Open the full entry (LLD, 1949) and Maya Lin (DFA, 1993).⁠[14]

From 2010 to 2013 the college ran an Alumnae Oral History Project over Reunion weekend each May, funded by the President’s Office and the College Archives and coordinated by Kelly Anderson; students of the Archives Concentration and of her oral history class, with the videographers Kate Geis and Rebecca Rideout, interviewed alumnae in the Alumnae Gymnasium, in sessions averaging about 30 minutes; the narrators came from the classes of 1985–2005 in 2010, 1941–1976 in 2011, mostly 1957–1982 in 2012 and primarily 1943–2008 in 2013.⁠[4]

The Daily Hampshire Gazette’s account says that in her inaugural address Willie-LeBreton cited Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and Evelyn Boyd Granville; Senator Elizabeth Warren said in her video message: “Smith College has educated some of the smartest, toughest and most affluent women on Earth.”⁠[22]

The college’s website lists the speakers at its commencements from 1879 to 2023. Since 1950 they have been: 1950, Herbert Davis; 1951, John Huston Finley, Jr.; 1952, Sir Oliver Shewell Franks; 1953, John Jay McCloy; 1954, Alistair Cooke; 1955, Adlai Ewing Stevenson; 1956, Archibald MacLeish; 1957, Ralph Johnson Bunche; 1958, John F. KennedyJohn F. KennedyJohn F. Kennedy (1917–1963) was an American politician who represented Massachusetts in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate and served as the 35th president of the United States from 1961 to 1963. The youngest person elected president and the first Roman Catholic to hold the office, he was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963.Open the full entry; 1959, Sir Leslie Munro; 1960, Chester Bowles; 1961, James Barrett Reston; 1962, Francis T. P. Plimpton; 1963, Rev. Theodore Ferres; 1964, Dean RuskDean RuskDean Rusk (David Dean Rusk, 1909–1994) was an American diplomat and scholar who became president of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1952, served as the 54th U.S. secretary of state under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1961 to 1969, and afterward taught international law at the University of Georgia.Open the full entry; 1965, Archibald MacLeish; 1966, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.; 1967, Nicholas deB. Katzenbach; 1968, Edward J. Logue; 1969, Thomas Grey Wicker; 1970, Alan Frank Guttmacher; 1971, Gloria Steinem ’56; 1972, Dorothy Nepper Marshall ’35; 1973, Pauline Kael; 1974, Patricia Roberts Harris; 1975, Shirley Chisholm; 1976, Shana Alexander; 1977, Madeleine L’Engle ’41; 1978, Margaret Costanza; 1979, Adrienne Rich; 1980, Maya Angelou; 1981, Betty Friedan ’42; 1982, Elizabeth Holtzman; 1983, Thomas Mendenhall; 1984, Elizabeth Hardwick; 1985, Beverly Sills; 1986, Joan Ganz CooneyJoan Ganz CooneyJoan Ganz Cooney is a television producer who originated the preschool educational series Sesame Street. She co-founded the Children's Television Workshop (now Sesame Workshop) with Lloyd Morrisett and led the organization for many years.Open the full entry; 1987, Garry B. Trudeau; 1988, Jill Ker Conway; 1989, John Kenneth Galbraith; 1990, Helen Caldicott; 1991, Robert Fulghum; 1992, Ann Willis Richards; 1993, Ellen Holtz Goodman; 1994, Jane Lakes Harman ’66; 1995, Gloria Steinem ’56; 1996, Anna Quindlen; 1997, Marian Wright Edelman; 1998, Elizabeth Dole; 1999, Jane Alexander; 2000, Judy Chicago; 2001, Toni Morrison; 2002, Lani Guinier; 2003, Madeleine Albright; 2004, Judy Woodruff; 2005, Rochelle Lazarus ’68; 2006, Jane Lakes Harman ’66; 2007, Gloria Steinem ’56; 2008, Margaret Edson ’83; 2009, Tammy Baldwin ’84; 2010, Rachel Maddow; 2011, Sylvia A. Earle; 2012, Jane Lynch; 2013, Arianna HuffingtonArianna HuffingtonArianna Huffington is an author, media entrepreneur, and the founder and chief executive officer of Thrive Global. Born in Greece, she studied economics at the University of Cambridge, worked early on in writing and political commentary, and co-founded The Huffington Post in 2005. In 2016, she left the outlet and founded Thrive Global, whose business has gradually extended into employee well-being, behavior change, and AI health coaching.Open the full entry; 2014, Ruth J. Simmons; 2015, Juliet García; 2016, Megan Smith; 2017, Oprah Winfrey; 2018, Rita Dove; 2019, Ai-jen Poo; 2020, Nancy Pelosi; 2021, Joy Harjo; 2022, Beverly Daniel Tatum; 2023, Reshma Saujani. A class year after a name is the Smith class given in the list.⁠[14]

The dramatic society formed by Hatfield House in January 1878 was called the Alpha Society; Washburn House’s Olla Podrida followed in the fall of 1878 and Hubbard House’s Tertium Quid in 1879; the joint group of Stoddard, Dewey and Hatfield Houses was called Sarm Ganok, a name which, the collection description says, was adapted from the Chinese words for “Three Houses.” Senior Dramatics was added as a feature of Commencement week in 1883 and officially placed on the program in 1887; in 1889 the dramatic societies won official recognition from the administration; from 1891 performances were customarily held in town at the newly opened Academy of Music; in 1896 Phi Kappa Psi was formed as a sister organization to the Alpha Society; and by 1901 most of the academic departments were also putting on shows.⁠[4]

In 1908, when the number of productions had grown so large that limits were needed, the house groups were dissolved and replaced by four groups organized by class year, Cap and Bells, Sock and Buskin, The Players and The Mummers, each giving one show a year. In 1919 Samuel A. Eliot developed the Dramatics Association to replace that system and added a course in play production to the Spoken English curriculum; from 1927 all productions, Senior Dramatics included, were given through the Dramatics Association and the Theatre Workshop, and in the same year an exchange of actors and actresses with Amherst College began, ending the tradition of all-female casts. When the Department of Theatre was formed its chair was, in the spelling of the collection description, Hallie Flannagan; the Dramatics Association merged with the department because of flagging student interest and lack of funds, and all productions were thereafter produced by the department.⁠[4]

In 1918 students started a humorous paper, the Campus Cat, “Published when the spirit moves,” which carried campus news, poked fun at the rituals, trials and stresses of academic life and inspired offshoots such as the Freshman Eti-Cat and the Campus Cat-alogue; it ceased in 1929, was revived by students in 1949 with funding from the college and four issues a year, and, the collection description says, the issues of 1948–1952 were written by a single group of students whose graduation marked the end of the second of the Cat’s nine lives.⁠[4]

Smith College: Official website: https://www.smith.edu/ (opens in a new window).⁠[26]

X: Public account: https://twitter.com/smithcollege (opens in a new window).⁠[8]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/smithcollegevideos (opens in a new window).⁠[8]

Smith College School for Social Work: Official website: https://ssw.smith.edu/ (opens in a new window).⁠[9]

Smith College Libraries: Official website: https://libraries.smith.edu/ (opens in a new window).⁠[20]