Smith... A Little Bit of Everything

Smith College, the biggest woman's college in the country, is sort of a collegiate variety show.

It has neither an academic specialty, particularly distinguished landmarks, dominant style of architecture, nor a "typical student."

Probably the most consistent thing about Smith is the way the girls dress. From Sunday night through Friday afternoon, the Smith student dresses with abandon that seems almost frantic. Skirts, except for a brief period around dinner time, are as rare as television in Tibet. Instead, she wears pedal pushers, or, if still in touch with an older tradition, dungarees. Above the waist, she will wear sweater, blouse, or shirt--anything, so long as it is sufficiently aged. If she's a senior, she can throw an academic gown over the whole costume when it normally would need washing.

Friday afternoon, as if some super-charged fairy-godmother had waved the wand, girls who looked so-so start to look good and girls who looked good, look great. They become ladies all over. Sunday night, they become pumpkins again.

The weekly metamorphosis of most Smith girls is of some interest for itself, but is worth special notice as a symptom of a way of life. Northampton, Massachusetts is tucked in the Connecticut River Valley at the foot of the Holyoke Range, a two hour automobile trip from New Haven, about a two and a half hour drive from Boston, and a good deal more than that from other spots of social interest.

As a result of this relative isolation, Smith has become a community--a community of college girls. Its members see a lot of each other, play a good deal of cards, participate energetically in what the community has to offer, support an elaborate student government, and feel concern for each other's well being. It is proud of being democratic and it is. "COLLEGE NOT ELITE CLUB: NO QUOTAS, ALL CLASSES;" one of the two student newspapers, "Sean," headlined a story last fall. Students in this year's freshman class come from 40 states, (Alabama, Idabo, and Nevada haven't sent anybody to Smith for four years), their parents represent 67 varieties f income; some 55 percent come from private schools; over a third are Episcopalian, 94 are Jewish, 76 are Presbyterian, 62 Roman Catholic, and 59 Congregational. Some 90 or so others are split among several faiths. The variety show element is ever present.

Nor are these all rich men's daughters, the article proudly noted. Of Smith's enrollment of over 2,200, about four-fifths can't meet the expenses, which start with a basic fee of $1600 for tuition, room, and heard. In a later survey, "Scan" found Smith offers more self-help than any other of the "Big Seven" women's colleges. Needy students, it reported, could knock about $250 off their college fees, for instance, by living in a dormitory where students did all the housework, including the buying and preparation of food.

Said "Scan," "...a cooperative system which reduced Smith students to one of the greatest drones of the collegiate world is justified financially. It exists as one of the many ways the college can skimp enough to offer the richest opportunities to the student who must be paid for her work or renounce a life of study." The word "drones" which the "Scan" writers used refers to the four hours of work per week that every Smith girl has to put in, on watch (Smithian for bells), in the dining hall, or as housemaid.

The campus they live on straggles over Northampton in such a way as to make Harvard's layout seem orderly and well planned, Dormitories, little ones, middle sized ones, and big ones, seem to ebb all over town. A walk north from the chief administration building, College Hall, leads through a campus that isn't beautiful, in the way that Wellesley is impressively beautiful, but it is pleasant. The area around Paradise Pond is as collegiate as any Hollywood college scene.

During the week, the Pond is a place to study by, cluster to for a sunburn, and row on. Weekends, couples languish around it, properly dreamy, canoe on the Pond, occasionally go strolling through nearby Paradise Woods.

Just what the girl who decides to live in these surroundings for four years hopes to get out of them is unclear. Like their male counterparts, many Smith girls have only fuzzy notions about what they expect to do once they get their degrees. Rarely do they want a career, in a sense that a feminist of the twenties insisted upon a career. Often what they look forward to is a job which can serve as a worthwhile way to spend time between marriage and graduation, and then, preferably, between marriage and children. The mating-instinct, as one magazine writer noted, is strong; marriage is the number one topic of over-coffee conversation. But not for all of them for the variety characteristic holds true here as elsewhere.

Even more than in a men's college, Smith girls study for the sake of personal development rather than for particular gain. History and English have long been popular majors, and Government is climbing fast.

Beyond the fact that Smith's distribution requirements are very similar to Harvard's, Wright don't yet seem to have made any particular innovations resembling the General Education program he nursed through its early stages while he was still here. A few courses of a general nature exist but they do not bear the GE tag. Smith has been making a drive for "integration" of studies in the final year and has instituted a tutorial-like program he calls 40B. While 40B works like tutorial in some departments, in other it is a seminar program, or merely involves writing a thesis.

Besides some 600 courses, Smith also offers the undergraduate student the Junior Year Abroad, a plan innovated in 1935 allowing students to study one year abroad for credit. Where possible, students live with families. Currently, Smith has Junior Year groups in France, Switzerland, Italy, and Mexico. An international studies program in Geneva was set up in 1946.

Be it because of "community interest," these on her hands, curiosity, or immense vitality, nearly every Smith girl is interested in some sort of extra-curricular activity.

Two newspapers compete for the college leadership and the Northampton advertising market. "Scan" publishes twice weekly while the rival "Current," which went into business three years ago, comes out once a week. Students generally read both and favor the one their friends work for, "Current" runs an occasional feature but "Scan" gets more fresh news, has more original ideas, is better written, and certainly is more informative to the visiting reader than its competitor. Both papers ostensibly enjoy the competition but secretly wish their opponent would quit because there isn't enough advertising in the Smith community to feed two papers properly.

A humour magazine, The Campus Cat, comes out sporadically. Its best achievement to date was a parody of the article Life published a year ago on the co-ed college versus the woman's college. That story depicted life at a girl school as pretty grim by comparison and has since become infamous in Northampton.

Whether they can or they can't, every body at Smith seems to sing. The college supports nine singing groups and over 400 girls are in the them. There are two freshman choirs, a sophomore choir, the Glee Club, the Chamber Singers, the Chef Club, the Smithereens, the Octavians, and the Smiffenpoofs.

Which Aims Mater?

It was a song that generated the one major crisis between President Wright and the students, who generally love him. For a long time, Smith students had been fed up with their alma mater, which they justifiably find unsingable. Recently, the student body, after a long series of contests, proposed a new alma mater. The alumni, 27,000 strong and very active in Smith affairs, balked at this breach of tradition and Wright, who rightly looks upon them as a sort of a life-line declined to accept the new alma mater. The issue is still undecided.

Smith's finances are delicate. To make up for a piddling endowment, the smallest per capita of any girls school, it depends on tuition revenue and annual alumni gifts, which have to come to six figure sums, even after extra drives, like last year's for $7,000,000.

So far as students are concerned, the college should increase faculty salaries, provide more and bigger scholarships, and build a new scientific building, in that order, if it finds the money.

"Scan" suggested last October that the whole campus needs a going over. Noting that the Smith student had to bend to a bevy of rules that were non-existant on other campuses, the paper said editorially, "But a close breakdown reveals that it is our campus which is archaic, not the rules which are simply an adjustment to this condition. For instance smoking rules (Smith girls cannot smoke in their rooms), the paper said, exists because the dormitories aren't fireproof. Dormitory rules on returning are so rigid, it explained, because the campus is to discuss.

The rise and fall of the war scare has been an interesting political phenomenon to Smith but little else. Applications for the Class of 1955 are normal, and the college does not anticipate any faculty changes other than adjustments to demand by students on certain departments. There is, it is haltingly admitted, a slight upswing in the marriage frequency.

Meanwhile Smith starts its fourth quarter century. The atmosphere there may not be intellectually exciting, the girls often knit rather then take notes, but it is certainly intellectually alert, perhaps a little less isolation would be desirable, because after all, how far can a handful of Amherst men go around. But at least it makes sure that the cream of America's young ladies are not merely "admitted, on sufferance and made to fit as best they can," as Herbert Davis, Wright's predecessor, suggested women are in many a college