Smith College President Announces Retirement

Carol T. Christ, the tenth president of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, announced that she will leave her post on June 30, 2013. Dr. Christ became president of Smith in 2002.

In a letter to the campus community announcing her decision, President Christ wrote, “I am buoyed every day by the spirit and ambition of our students, the imagination and dedication of our faculty and staff, and the accomplishments of our alumnae. An alumna recently said to me, ‘Smith is not only a college but a movement.’ As Smith’s president, I’ve had the privilege of seeing the history of women in the 20th and now into the 21st century through a unique lens — the aspirations, the achievements, and the lives of our students and alumnae.”

Before coming to Smith, Dr. Christ was a professor, executive vice chancellor, and provost at the University of California at Berkeley. She joined the faculty of the English department there in 1970 and took her first administrative post in 1988 as an assistant to the chancellor on the status of women at the university.

Dr. Christ is a graduate of Douglass College of Rutgers University. She earned a Ph.D. in English from Yale University.