In 2020, Carol Leary will be retiring as president of Bay Path University after twenty-five years. Her career in education, however, has spanned more than four decades. As she prepares to move on to the next chapter of her life, she reflects on her Bay Path journey and shares her optimism about the challenges higher education faces today. She…

For 50 years, Smith College's Summer Research Fellowship (SURF) has provided undergraduate women scientists the opportunity for an immersive experience to conduct independent research under the mentorship of science faculty and staff. This article highlights summative assessment data on SURF program outcomes as well as the institutional planning…

Since their creation in the latter part of the nineteenth century, women's colleges in America have undergone many significant changes. In 1960, over 230 women's colleges were in operation; over the next forty years more than 75 percent chose to admit men or shut their doors entirely (Miller-Bernal, 2006a). This chapter will shed light on the…

Historically, Massachusetts has been home to some of the most vibrant, viable and prestigious educational institutions for women in the country. That number has decreased over time as schools such as Lesley University, Regis College and Wheaton College, among others, have gone coed. In 1999, Radcliffe College officially merged with Harvard…

Dispelling historical narratives in composition and rhetoric that largely depict nineteenth-century student compositions as "vacuous" themes, this archival study examines women's compositions at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary as complex generic hybrids, in which the composition is fused with common social and dialogic forms. By focusing…

In this article, the author profiles Dr. Tony Martin, a historian who has spent 34 years teaching at Wellesley College, a small all-female school in Wellesley, Massachusetts. While he wishes to be remembered in his role as a prolific scholar of Marcus Garvey, the public knows him mostly as a controversial figure--his much smaller body of work on…

Many undergraduate liberal arts institutions offer computer science majors. This article illustrates how quality computer science programs can be realized in a wide variety of liberal arts settings by describing and contrasting the actual programs at five liberal arts colleges: Williams College, Kalamazoo College, the State University of New York…

Examination of foundings of four-year women's colleges in three states, 1855-1968, reveals that institutional forces (presence of elite women's colleges, development of Catholic women's colleges, and enactment of the suffrage amendment) increased the founding rate, but rising organizational density later decreased the rate. Argues that…