Smith College is a private liberal arts women's college in Northampton, Massachusetts, United States. 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 with four other institutions in the Pioneer Valley: Mount Holyoke College, Amherst College, Hampshire College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst; Five College Consortium website. "Accessed July 9, 2009" 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.
Smith has 50 academic departments and programs and is structured around an open curriculum. Examinations vary from self-scheduled exams, scheduled exams, and take-home exams. Undergraduate admissions are exclusively restricted to women, including transgender women since 2015. 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. Admissions are considered selective. It was the first women's college to join the NCAA, and its sports teams are known as the Smith Bears.
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.
History Early history
The college was chartered in 1871 by a bequest of Sophia Smith and opened its doors in 1875 with 14 students and 6 faculty. At age 65, when Smith inherited a fortune from her father, she decided that leaving her inheritance to found a women's college was the best way for her to fulfill the moral obligation she expressed in her will:
The campus was planned and planted in the 1890s as a botanical garden and arboretum, designed by noted American landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted. By 1915, the student enrollment was 1,724, and the faculty numbered 163.
During the 1920s, two students at the college went missing: junior Alice Corbett disappeared on November 13, 1925, and was never found; freshman Frances Smith disappeared on January 13, 1928—her body was recovered from the Connecticut River months later.
By 2010, the school had 2,600 undergraduates on campus and 250 students studying elsewhere. The campus landscape now encompasses and includes more than 1,200 varieties of trees and shrubs. Smith is the largest privately endowed college for women in the United States.
United States Naval Reserve Midshipmen's School The United States Naval Reserve Midshipmen's School at Smith College was training grounds for junior officers of the Women's Reserve of the U.S. Naval Reserve (WAVES) and was nicknamed "USS Northampton". On August 28, 1942, a total of 120 women reported to the school for training.
21st century In April 2015, the faculty adopted an open-access policy to make its scholarship publicly accessible online.
On September 15, 2022, the Board of Trustees announced Sarah Willie-LeBreton had been selected as the 12th president of Smith College, effective July 1, 2023.
In June 2025, a conservative watchdog group sued the school for alleged Title IX violations, arguing that the school's policy of admitting transgender women but not transgender men discriminated against biological females who changed genders.
In March and April 2026, some 50 Smith College students, led by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), were involved in protests that included the unauthorized encampment and occupation of College Hall, the main administrative building on campus, demanding that the college divest its endowment from companies they said were linked to weapons used by Israel in the Gaza conflict. College administrators granted SJP a meeting with the college president in exchange for ending the encampment and later rejected the divestment proposal, citing a lack of mission alignment, societal impact, and community consensus, alongside a negative financial impact concern.
Presidents Smith has been led by 11 presidents and two acting presidents. (Elizabeth Cutter Morrow was the first acting president of Smith College and the first female head of the college, but she did not use the title of president.) For the 1975 centennial, the college inaugurated its first woman president, Jill Ker Conway, who came to Smith from Australia by way of Harvard and the University of Toronto. Since President Conway's term, all Smith presidents have been women, with the exception of John M. Connolly's one-year term as acting president in the interim after President Ruth Simmons left to lead Brown University.
ImagePresidentTerm startTerm end1Laurenus Clark Seelye187519102Marion LeRoy Burton191019173William Allan Neilson1917August 31, 1939actingElizabeth Cutter MorrowSeptember 1, 193919404Herbert Davis194019495Benjamin Fletcher Wright1949June 30, 19596Thomas Corwin MendenhallJuly 1, 1959June 30, 19757Jill Ker ConwayJuly 1, 1975June 30, 19858Mary Maples DunnJuly 1, 1985June 30, 19959Ruth SimmonsJuly 1, 1995June 30, 2001actingJohn M. ConnollyJuly 1, 2001May 31, 200210Carol T. ChristJune 1, 2002June 30, 201311Kathleen McCartneyJuly 1, 2013June 30, 202312Sarah Willie-LeBretonJuly 1, 2023Present
Table notes:
Campus
Environmental sustainability
Smith has a contract with Zipcar in efforts to reduce individually owned cars on campus. The college has also promoted sustainability through academics and through the arts.
For Smith's efforts regarding sustainability, the institution earned a grade of A− on the "College Sustainability Report Card 2010" administered by the Sustainable Endowments Institute. Smith was lauded for many of the indicator categories, including student involvement, green building, and transportation, but was marked down for endowment transparency.
Architecture and grounds In 1891, Smith's trustees began planning improvements to the campus while developing a scientifically organized botanic garden for the college's recently established botany department. They commissioned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted to transform the campus into an arboretum. Olmsted arranged the upper campus as an irregular circle of buildings and favored a park-like setting with curved lines, open spaces, varied plantings, and relatively small-scale residential architecture rather than a monumental institutional plan.
A new student center, Kathleen McCartney Hall, overlooking Paradise Pond, is under construction using mass timber construction and is designed by women-owned firm TenBerke. Upon completion it will house the Lazarus Center for Career Development and the Wurtele Center for Leadership.
Academics
Smith College has 317 professors in 57 academic departments and programs, for a faculty-student ratio of 1:8.It was the first women's college in the United States to grant its own undergraduate degrees in engineering. The Picker Engineering Program offers a single ABET accredited Bachelor of Science in engineering science, combining the fundamentals of multiple engineering disciplines.
In 2008, Smith joined the SAT optional movement for undergraduate admission.
Smith runs its own junior year abroad (JYA) programs in four European cities: Paris, Hamburg, Florence, and Geneva.Smith College: Study Abroad . Smith.edu. Retrieved on September 7, 2013. These programs are notable for requiring all studies to be conducted in the language of the host country (with both Paris and Geneva programs conducted in French). In some cases, students live in homestays with local families. Nearly half of Smith's juniors study overseas, either through Smith JYA programs or at more than 40 other locations around the world.
Junior math majors from other undergraduate institutions are invited to study at Smith College for one year through the Center for Women in Mathematics. Established in the fall of 2007 by Professors Ruth Haas and Jim Henle, the program aims to allow young women to improve their mathematical abilities through classwork, research, and involvement in a department centered on women. The Center also offers a post-baccalaureate year of math study to women who did not major in mathematics as undergraduates or whose mathematics major was not strong."Smith College Women in Mathematics Program" National Association of Mathematicians, Spring 2007 . Retrieved September 3, 2008.
The Louise W. and Edmund J. Kahn Liberal Arts Institute supports collaborative research without regard to the traditional boundaries of academic departments and programs. Each year the institute supports long-term and short-term projects proposed, planned, and organized by members of the Smith College faculty. By becoming Kahn Fellows, students get involved in interdisciplinary research projects and work alongside faculty and visiting scholars for a year.
Students can develop leadership skills through Smith's two-year Phoebe Reese Lewis Leadership Program. Participants train in public speaking, analytical thinking, teamwork strategies, and the philosophical aspects of leadership.
Through Smith's internship program, "Praxis: The Liberal Arts at Work," all undergraduates are guaranteed access to one college-funded internship during their years at the college. This program enables students to access interesting self-generated internship positions in social welfare and human services, the arts, media, health, education, and other fields.
Its most popular undergraduate majors, based on 2021 graduates, were: Research & Experimental Psychology (49) Biology/Biological Sciences (48) Political Science & Government (45) Engineering Science (36) History (30) English Language & Literature (25) Mathematics (23) Economics (23) Computer Science (22)
Ada Comstock Scholars Program
The Ada Comstock Scholars Program is an undergraduate degree program that serves Smith students of nontraditional college age. The program accommodates approximately 100 women ranging in age from mid-twenties to over sixty. Ada Comstock Scholars attend the same classes as traditional undergraduates, either full or part-time, and participate fully in a variety of extracurricular activities. They may live on or off campus. Financial aid is available to each Ada Comstock Scholar with demonstrated need.
Beginning in 1968, with the approval of the Committee on Educational Policy, Smith College initiated a trial program loosely titled The Continuing Education Degree for several women of non-traditional age who were looking to complete their unfinished degrees. Their successes inspired President Thomas C. Mendenhall and Dean Alice Dickinson to officially expand the program. In January 1975, the Ada Comstock Scholars Program was formally established under President Jill Ker Conway and in the fall of that year, forty-five women were enrolled. The students range in age, background, and geographical location. The growth of the program peaked at just over 400 students in 1988.
The program is named for Ada Louise Comstock Notestein (1876–1973), an 1897 Smith graduate, professor of English and dean of Smith from 1912 to 1923, and president of Radcliffe College from 1923 to 1943. Ada Comstock Notestein devoted much of her life to the academic excellence of women. Considering education and personal growth to be a lifelong process, she stayed actively involved in women's higher education until her death at the age of 97.
Graduate degrees and study options