1922 Encyclopædia Britannica/Smith College

SMITH COLLEGE (see ).—Between 1910 and 1921 Smith College added to its equipment Burton Hall for biology, and the number of dwelling houses for students increased from 16 to 33. The library in 1920 contained 82,000 volumes and the Hillyer Art Gallery had increased its endowment to $100,000 and added largely to its collections. The college abandoned the system of admission by certificate and all students enter by examination. In 1919-20 there were 181 teachers and 2,001 students, of whom 31 were graduate students, and the endowment was $3,157,000, the total assets being over $6,000,000. A campaign for increased endowment was carried on in 1920, with the result that, when the promises were realized, the assets of the college would be over $9,000,000. The college publishes, besides its permanent bulletin, the Smith College Studies in history, modern languages and classics, and contributions of the department of biology. President Seelye was succeeded in 1910 by Marion LeRoy Burton (b. 1874), a graduate of Carleton College, Northfield, Minn., and Yale Divinity School, who resigned in 1917 and was succeeded by William Allan Neilson (b. 1869), a graduate of Edinburgh and Harvard Universities. In the World War the Smith College Relief Unit, the pioneer among American college women's units overseas, worked in 16 villages in the Somme, France, affiliated with the American Fund for French Wounded, and later with the Red Cross, from July 1917 until April 1920, with the exception of the period after the retreat of March 1918 until the following Jan., when the unit operated clubs and canteens and assisted in the hospitals at Beauvais and later behind the American front at Château-Thierry, at Nancy, and in the Argonne. A small group of the Relief Unit worked with the refugees at Orleans in the autumn of 1918. Three Smith Canteen Units were organized and operated under the Y.M.C.A. in France. Another small group worked as a Smith Unit with the Near East Relief in Armenia.


 * (W. A. N.)