Smith College
Smith College is a private liberal arts women's college in Northampton, Massachusetts. It was chartered in 1871 by Sophia Smith and opened in 1875. It is a member of the historic Seven Sisters colleges, a group of women's colleges in the Northeastern United States. Smith is also a member of the Five College Consortium[8] with four other institutions in the Pioneer Valley: Mount Holyoke College, Amherst College, Hampshire College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst;[9] students of each college are allowed to attend classes at any other member institution. On campus are Smith's Museum of Art and Botanic Garden, the latter designed by Frederick Law Olmsted.
For the private liberal arts colleges in Geneva, New York, see Hobart and William Smith Colleges.
Smith has 50 academic departments and programs and is structured around an open curriculum, with requirements being a writing intensive class during the first year and the fulfillment of a major. Examinations vary from self-scheduled exams, scheduled exams, and take-home exams. Undergraduate admissions are exclusively restricted to women, although Smith announced a trans-inclusive admissions policy in 2015.[10][11] Smith offers several graduate degrees, all of which accept applicants regardless of gender, and co-administers programs alongside other Five College Consortium members. The college was the first historically women's college to offer an undergraduate engineering degree.[12] Admissions are considered selective. It was the first women's college to join the NCAA, and its sports teams are known as the Pioneers.
Smith alumnae include notable authors, journalists, activists, feminists, politicians, investors, philanthropists, actresses, filmmakers, academics, businesswomen, CEOs, two First Ladies of the United States, and recipients of the Pulitzer Prize, Rhodes Scholarship, Academy Award, Emmy Award, MacArthur Grant, Peabody Award, and Tony Award.
Academic rankings
16
23
81
41
Admissions and rankings[edit]
Admissions[edit]
The 2022 annual ranking of U.S. News & World Report categorizes Smith as 'most selective'.[35]
For the Class of 2027 (enrolling fall 2023), Smith received 9,868 applications (reflecting a 36 percent increase over last year), accepted 1,875 (19.0%), and enrolled 630. Smith’s applicant pool has increased 36 percent over the past year, which the college attributes to the decision to move to ‘loan-free’ financial aid.[36] The middle 50% range of SAT scores was 670–750 for critical reading and 670–770 for math, while the middle 50% range for the ACT composite score was 31–34 for enrolled first-year students. The average SAT for Smith College is 1430 even though Smith is also a test-optional college.[36]
Traditions[edit]
Residential culture and student life[edit]
Smith requires most undergraduate students to live in on-campus houses unless they reside locally with their families. This policy is intended to add to the camaraderie and social cohesion of its students. Unlike most institutions of its type, Smith College does not have dorms, but rather 41 separate houses, ranging in architectural style from 18th-century to contemporary. It is rumored the architecture of Chapin House was the inspiration for the Tara Plantation House in Gone with the Wind. (Author Margaret Mitchell went to Smith for one year and lived in Chapin.)[46] A novelty of Smith's homelike atmosphere is the continuing popularity of Sophia Smith's recipe[47] for molasses cookies. These are often served at the traditional Friday afternoon tea held in each house, where students, faculty and staff members, and alumnae socialize.[3]
Two cultural spaces on campus are used by students of color to build their community: the Mwangi Cultural Center and Unity House. Mwangi originally opened as the Afro-American Cultural Center in 1968 but was later renamed in honor of the first female physician in Kenya, and Smith alum, Dr. Ng’endo Mwangi ('61). After loaning Mwangi to the other cultural organizations on campus for four years, the Black Students’ Alliance decided to reclaim Mwangi in April 1990. Leaders, members, and supporters of cultural organizations got together to form a group called UNITY, in October of the same year, to demand a space for other cultural organizations. Today, Unity House serves as a home to the 11 cultural organizations on campus.
Among the more notable of Smith College's alumnae in chronological order are:
In 1960, three Smith professors, one who had been there for 38 years, were fired or "allowed to retire" for being gay. This was chronicled in a book (The Scarlet Professor—Newton Arvin: A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal (Doubleday, 2001), by Barry Werth), and the PBS Independent Lens film, The Great Pink Scare.[106] It was also depicted in an opera based on Werth's book in 2017 at Amherst College.[107] In 2002, Smith, the nation's largest liberal arts college for women, acknowledged a wrong from four decades earlier by creating a lecture series and a small scholarship—the $100,000 Dorius/Spofford Fund for the Study of Civil Liberties and Freedom of Expression, and the Newton Arvin Prize in American Studies, a $500 annual stipend. But despite faculty appeals, there was no apology.[108]