Hobart and William Smith Colleges , located in Geneva, New York, are together a liberal arts college offering Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Science and Master of Arts in Teaching degrees. Legally, the combined corporation of the two colleges, Hobart College and William Smith College, is The Colleges of the Seneca .
History
Hobart College traces its roots to Geneva Academy, founded in 1796. Hobart College proper was founded in 1822 as Geneva College and renamed in honor of its founder, Episcopal bishop John Henry Hobart, in 1852.
Geneva at the time was a bustling Upstate New York city on the main land and stage coach route to the West. When John Henry Hobart, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, visited Geneva in 1818, Geneva Academy (founded by the Rev. Henry Axtell) had temporarily closed its doors. Bishop Hobart had a plan to reopen the Academy at a new location, raise a public subscription for the construction of a stone building, and elevate the school to college status. By 1822, sufficient community funds had been raised to complete the stone structure, Geneva Hall, still in use today.
Geneva College
Known as Geneva College until 1852, when it was renamed in memory of its most forceful advocate and founder. Hobart College of the 19th century was the first American institution of higher learning to establish a three-year "English Course" of study to educate young men destined for such practical occupations as "agriculture, merchandise, mechanism, and manufacturing", while at the same time maintaining a traditional four-year "classical course" for those intending to enter "the learned professions." It also was the first college in America to have a Dean of the College.
Notable 19th-century alumni included Albert James Myer, Class of 1847, a military officer who "invented" the United States Weather Bureau, founded the International Meteorological Organization and the U.S. Signal Corps, and for whom Fort Myer, Va., is named; General E. S. Bragg of the Class of 1848, colonel of the Sixth Wisconsin Regiment and a brigadier general in command of the Iron Brigade who served one term in Congress and later was ambassador to Mexico and consul general of the U.S. in Cuba; two other 1848 graduates, Clarence Seward and Thomas M. Griffith, who were assistant secretary of state and builder of the first national railroad across the Mississippi River, respectively; and Charles J. Folger, Class of 1836, who was United States secretary of the treasury in the 1880s.
Until the mid-20th Century, Hobart was strongly affiliated with the Episcopal Church and produced many of its clergy. This affiliation continues to the present, but the last Episcopal clergyman to serve as President of Hobart (1956-1966) was Dr. Louis Melbourne Hirshson. Since then, the president of the colleges has been a layperson.
Elizabeth Blackwell
Amid those distinguished male graduates was one woman. In an era when the prevailing conventional wisdom was that no woman could withstand the intellectual and emotional rigors of a medical education, Elizabeth Blackwell applied to and was rejected - or simply ignored - by 17 medical schools before being admitted in 1847 to the medical college then affiliated with Geneva College. The medical faculty, largely opposed to her admission but seemingly unwilling to take responsibility for the decision, decided to submit the matter to a vote of the students. The men of the College, perhaps as a joke on the faculty, voted to admit her. Blackwell graduated two years later, on January 23, 1849, at the head of her class, the first woman doctor in the hemisphere. Blackwell went on to found the New York Infirmary for Women and Children and had a role in the creation of its medical college. She then returned to her native England and helped found the National Health Society and taught at the first college of medicine for women to be established there.
Founding of William Smith
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Hobart College was on the brink of bankruptcy and suffering through a period of financial uncertainty. It was through the presidency of Langdon Stewardson that the college obtained a new donor, nurseryman William Smith. William Smith had already built the Smith Opera House in downtown Geneva and the Smith Observatory on his own property when he became interested in founding a college for women, a plan that he pursued to the point of breaking ground before realizing that the plan was beyond even his means. In 1903, Hobart College President Langdon C. Stewardson learned of Smith's interest and, for two years, attempted without success to convince him to make Hobart College the object of his philanthropy. With enrollments down and its resources strained, Hobart's future depended upon a transfusion of new funds.
Unable to convince Smith to provide direct assistance to Hobart, President Stewardson redirected the negotiations toward founding a coordinate institution for women, a plan that appealed to the philanthropist. On December 13, 1906, he formalized his intentions; two years later William Smith School for Women - a coordinate, nonsectarian women's college - enrolled its first class of 18 students. That charter class grew to 20 members before its graduation in 1912.
In addition, Smith's gift made possible construction of the Smith Hall of Science, to be used by both colleges, and permitted the hiring, also in 1908, of three new faculty members who would teach in areas previously unavailable in the curriculum: biology, sociology, and psychology.
Development of the Coordinate System
Despite some sharing of facilities, at the beginning of their relationship the two colleges were quite separate. Classes were conducted in duplicate, and women students were not allowed on the Hobart campus. Those who required access to Trinity and Merritt halls (where chemistry and physics classes were held), the library, and the Chapel traveled there on public sidewalks along the campus perimeter.
The enforced separation of the Colleges eroded gradually over the years. In 1922, the first joint commencement was held, but baccalaureate services remained separate until 1942. By then, the practice of holding duplicate classes was less observed, particularly in upper-level courses with few students. In 1938, first-year courses were held in common, without any of the dire consequences that some had predicted, and by 1941 coeducational classes had become the norm.
In 1943, during the administration of President John Milton Potter, William Smith College was elevated from its original status as a department of Hobart College to that of an independent college, co-equal with Hobart. At President Potter's suggestion, the two colleges established a joint corporate identity, adopting a "family name", The Colleges of the Seneca, which still is the legal name of the combined corporation.
World War II
Between 1943 and 1945, Hobart College trained almost 1,000 men in the U.S. Navy's V-12 program, many of whom returned to complete their college educations when the post-World War II GI Bill swelled the enrollments of American colleges and universities. In 1948, three of those veterans - William F. Scandling, Harry W. Anderson, and W. P. Laughlin - took over operation of the Hobart dining hall. Their fledgling business was expanded the next year to include William Smith College; after their graduation, in 1949, it grew to serve other colleges and universities across the country, eventually becoming Saga Corporation, a nationwide provider of institutional food services.
William Smith College
William Smith College was founded in 1908 (the charter was signed in 1903) as a women's college sharing certain facilities and faculty with Hobart College but self-identifying not as a single college but as two “coordinate” institutions.
Campus
Hobart and William Smith Colleges’ campus is situated on 170 acres (0.69 km 2 ) in Geneva, New York, along the shore of Seneca Lake, the largest of the Finger Lakes.
The campus is notable for the style of Jacobean architecture represented by many buildings, notably Coxe Hall, which houses the President’s Office and other administrative departments. In contrast, the earliest buildings and the chapel are gothic in style.
A 15 million dollar expansion of the Scandling Campus Center was completed in Autumn 2008. This renovation added over 17,000 additional square feet, including an expanded cafe, a new post office, and more meeting areas.
Other important buildings include
Geneva Hall (1822) and Trinity Hall (1837), listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.
Gulick Hall , built in 1951 as part of the post-war "mini-boom" that also included the construction of the Hobart "mini-quad" dormatories Durfee, Bartlett, and Hale (each named for a 19th Century Hobart College president), Gulick Hall originally housed the campus dining services and, later, the Office of the Registrar. Completely renovated in 1991, Gulick now houses both the Office of the Registrar and the Psychology department, which was moved from Smith Hal
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