May
7, 2004
MHC
and Smith to Host Global Conference on Women’s Education
Joanne V. Creighton |
Mount
Holyoke and Smith Colleges will host a meeting of presidents
and academic deans of leading colleges and universities from
around the world to discuss international issues and challenges
in women’s education, as well as issues surrounding women’s
study of science.
The three-day
gathering, “Women’s Education Worldwide 2004: The Unfinished
Agenda,” will run from Wednesday, June 2, to Friday, June 4, and will likely
be the first in an ongoing series of regular conferences involving leaders of
international women’s colleges and institutions with historical ties to
women’s education. This year’s program will be divided between
the Mount Holyoke and Smith campuses.
Smith President
Carol T. Christ |
The conference will bring together heads of leading institutions from North America
with their counterparts from Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Australia,
representing nearly 30 schools. Both Smith and Mount Holyoke have long-standing
ties to the international educational community.
Two keynote speakers will address attendees and interested members
of the public. At 3:30 pm Wednesday, June 2, Dr. Amartya Sen
will
speak in Hooker Auditorium on the Mount Holyoke campus. His talk
is titled "What is the Point of Women's Education?" A Nobel
Prize-winning economist whose profoundly humanitarian work
recognizes
that the betterment of society is the ultimate duty of scholarship,
Sen has written on the economic effects of educating women.
Sen
was master of Trinity College, Cambridge University in England
from 1998 to January 2004, and is Lamont University Professor
Emeritus at Harvard University. He has served as president of
the Econometric Society, the Indian Econometric Association,
the
American Economic Association, and the International Economic
Association.
Keynote speaker Sheila E. Widnall will discuss women and science and will
speak at 11 am Thursday, June 3, in Seelye 106 on the Smith campus. Dr. Widnall
is the Institute Professor and Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has more than 30 years
of teaching and administrative experience at MIT and has also served as secretary
of the U.S. Air Force. She is internationally known for her work in fluid
dynamics and is the past recipient of the Living Legacy Award from the Women’s
International Center. Both keynote speeches are free, open to the public,
and fully accessible.
In preparation for the conference, Smith President Carol T. Christ and Mount
Holyoke President Joanne V. Creighton have asked their counterparts from
around the world to bring forward challenges confronting women’s education
internationally:
“What does your educational institution aspire to do in educating women,
and what is it able to do?” Presidents Christ and Creighton asked participants. “For
example, in the United States, women are proportionally underrepresented in the
advanced study of many sciences, particularly physical sciences and engineering.
Women’s liberal arts colleges have often done better than their coeducational
counterparts in propelling graduates into these fields, yet clearly there is
room for systemic improvement. How can we advance this agenda? More broadly,
in what productive ways could we individually and jointly promote what we are
calling ‘the great unfinished agenda’: the education and advancement
of women in the world across ethnic, racial, age, and socioeconomic groups?
How do we tackle an even more pressing issue and a much larger agenda, that
of social justice for women worldwide?”
The conference is anticipated to be a first step in building new avenues of collaboration
among participating institutions in addressing educational issues facing women
internationally.
For example, scholars and humanitarian organizations point toward a serious
and growing disparity among women in developed and developing nations, particularly
with regard to literacy. As University of Chicago professor Martha Nussbaum
noted recently in the winter 2004 issue of Liberal Education, “In about one-third
of the world’s nations, fewer than 50 percent of women can even read
and write. . . . Public universities do far too little to recruit women from
deprived rural backgrounds and to give them the remedial training they often
need.”
Professor Sen has frequently written and spoken about the lasting consequences
of educational disparity on both women and men. “Why is it so important
to close the educational gaps, and to remove the enormous disparities in educational
access, inclusion, and achievement?” Sen asked in a speech to the Commonwealth
Education Conference in Edinburgh last year. “One reason, among others,
is the importance of this for making the world more secure as well as more fair.
H.G. Wells was not exaggerating when he said, in his Outline of History: ‘Human
history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.’ If
we continue to leave vast sections of the people of the world outside the
orbit of education, we make the world not only less just, but also less secure.”
Photos
of Amartya
Sen and Sheila
Widnall available.
Conference Participants
Kiriri Women’s
University of
Science and Technology, Kenya
Ahfad University, Sudan
China Women’s College, China
Kobe Women’s College, Japan
Nara Women’s University, Japan
Ochanomizu University, Japan
Tokyo Women’s Christian University, Japan
Ewha Women’s University, Korea
Sookmyung Women’s University,
Korea
Dubai Women's College, United Arab Emirates
Effat College, Saudi Arabia
Asian University for Women,
Bangladesh
Isabella Thoburn College,
India SNDT, India
University of Notre Dame,
Australia
Women’s College, University of
Queensland, Australia
Sancta Sophia College,
University of Sydney, Australia
Women’s College, University
of Sydney, Australia
EPF Ecole d’Ingenieurs, France
University of Bremen, Germany
Collegio Nuovo, Italy
Lucy Cavendish College, UK
New Hall, UK
Brescia University College,
Canada
Agnes Scott College, U.S.
Barnard College, U.S.
Baypath College, U.S.
Bennett College, U.S.
Bryn Mawr College, U.S.
Cottey College, U.S.
Mills College, U.S.
Mount Holyoke College, U.S.
Scripps College, U.S.
Smith College, U.S.
Saint Mary-of-the-Woods, U.S.
Spelman College, U.S.
Vassar College, U.S.
Wellesley College, U.S.
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