In June 2002, Carol Tecla Christ became the tenth president of Smith College.

Born in New York City in 1944, Christ attended public schools in northern New Jersey. In 1966, she graduated with high honors from Douglass College and went on to Yale University, where she received the Ph.D. in English.

In 1970, Christ joined the English faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. As chair of her department from 1985 to 1988, she built and maintained one of the top-ranked English departments in the country. She entered the university’s administration in 1988, serving first as dean of humanities and later as provost and dean of the College of Letters and Sciences. In 1994, Christ was appointed vice chancellor and provost (and later became executive vice chancellor). During her six years as Berkeley’s top academic officer, she was credited with sharpening the institution’s intellectual focus and building top-rated departments in the humanities and sciences. In addition, she helped shape Berkeley’s campus policy in response to Proposition 209, the 1996 California law barring the consideration of race in college admissions.

Christ, who was the highest-ranking female administrator at Berkeley until she returned to full-time teaching in 2000, has a well-established reputation as a champion of women’s issues and diversity. Her first administrative position was assistant to the chancellor on issues involving the status of women. She describes her undergraduate education at Douglass, the women’s college of Rutgers University, as formative and has, in the words of a colleague, “an intellectual and emotional commitment to women’s education.”

In her first year at Smith, Christ launched an energetic program of outreach, innovation and long-range planning. She spoke to more than 6,500 alumnae across the country, met with congressional and corporate leaders and conducted interviews with national media on topics ranging from college costs to minority recruitment to women’s careers. Working closely with the faculty, she encouraged the development of coursework emphasizing fluency in American cultures and the diversity of experience of American ethnic groups. She shaped dialogue and programs to address constraints on Smith’s budget caused by the nation’s economic situation. As major building projects -- the renovation of and addition to the Brown Fine Arts Center and a dramatic new campus center -- have come to fruition, she has spurred long-range planning for a $100 million science center and a permanent building for the college’s pioneering Picker Engineering Program.

While developing Smith’s ties across the country and around the world, Christ is also very committed to strengthening relations between the college and its local community. She is a member of the board of directors of the Western Massachusetts Economic Development Council, Clarke School for the Deaf, the Pioneer Valley Ballet and Northampton’s renowned Academy of Music, and is on the advisory board of the Northampton Community Music Center. In addition, she has established a community advisory board to address such issues as low-income housing and Smith’s support for Northampton’s public schools.

Throughout her administrative career, Christ has maintained an active program of teaching and research. She has published two books: “The Finer Optic: The Aesthetic of Particularity in Victorian Poetry” and “Victorian and Modern Poetics.” She also edited a Norton Critical Edition of George Eliot’s “The Mill on the Floss” and co-edited the “Norton Anthology of English Literature and Victorian Literature” and “The Victorian Visual Imagination.” She has continued to teach while at Smith. In spring 2004, she will co-teach a seminar on science and literature.

Christ has an avid interest in music. She has studied the piano since childhood and learned to play the viola as an adult.

Her son Jonathan is a graduate of New York University and lives in New York. Her daughter Elizabeth is a student at Mount Holyoke College.

Christ resides on campus with her husband, Paul Alpers, a scholar of the literature of the English Renaissance. He holds the title of Class of 1942 Professor of English Emeritus at Berkeley.