Spring Term Montgomery Fellow Jill Ker Conway, an author and the first woman president of Smith College, said she looks forward to sharing her varied experiences and interests with Dartmouth students and faculty.
Conway, currently a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will be on campus until April 10.
Conway's schedule the next couple of weeks is jam-packed, so she could only sit down briefly for an interview with The Dartmouth yesterday in the Montgomery House on Rope Ferry Road.
Besides visiting classes and participating in Career Services workshops, Conway will also give several lectures.
Conway will speak about her most recent book "When Memory Speaks," a history of memoirs and the different ways in which men and women tend to understand and present their lives, tomorrow at 4 p.m. in Cook Auditorium.
Conway will also explain why she wrote her own autobiography, the 1989 best-seller "The Road from Coorain" and "True North," published in 1994, the second installation of her memoirs.
Conway is also the editor of two anthologies of memoirs -- "Written By Herself," containing the stories of American women and "Written By Herself, Volume II" about British, African, Asian and American women.
Conway was appointed president of Smith in 1975, a position she held for 10 years, very soon after the merger of Radcliffe College with Harvard University.
"At that time, it was really fashionable for women's colleges to merge with men's schools," Conway said. But she said she was determined to stop the trend towards coeducation in undergraduate institutions.
"As a historian of American higher education, I was intrigued by the fact that American women have had access to higher education since 1840s. In 1975, a100 years later, they were still a tiny minority in most professions," Conway said.
"I was interested in history of women's colleges because a disportionate number of women involved in jobs requiring higher education were graduates from women's school," Conway explained.
Conway remains convinced of the need for women's institutions to serve as counter-instances and reminders that women can excel at sciences.
"The assumption that women's studies programs would correct the balance at coed schools has not held up in the last 25 years. The departments exist at the whim of the administration. They have to fight to get teachers and funding. They aren't really benchmarks," she said.
Conway said she did not want to be stereotyped as only a women's studies advocate. She also teaches in the interdisciplinary Science, Technology and Society program at MIT. According to Conway, this program discusses the social and cultural context of science and applications of knowledge in society
"My teaching interest is the history of ideas. I'm also interested in the boundaries between human and non-human, especially with the current technology blurring these boundaries," Conway said.
Conway is currently working on a book titled "Earth, Air, Fire and Water" with two colleagues at MIT in an effort to present a humanist perspective on environmental issues.
Conway, who was born in Hillstown, New South Wales, Australia, attributes her interest in the environment to her childhood.
"Growing up in the Australian outback, a very arid region, I developed an abiding concern for nature in my childhood and an interest in the way climate and topography shape people," said Conway.
Conway maintains many links with Australia, one being a directorship she accepted with a large Australian property investment company.
"I realized that I had many elderly relatives who needed to keep a careful eye out for them, and their health care needs. This way my relatives won't even know that I'm checking up on them," Conway said.
While at the College, Conway will deliver the keynote address for the Rockefeller Center Conference on Leadership and participate in a Thayer School of Engineering panel titled "Engineering and Society."
Conway will also lecture on women in academia at a gathering of the New Hampshire Association for Women in Education.
Conway received a doctorate in history from Harvard University in 1960 and served as vice president for internal affairs at the University of Toronto from 1973 to 1975.
Conway is also on the board of directors at Merill Lynch, Colgate Palmolive, Nike Inc. and several other smaller companies.
