at Smith during the early 2000s.
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963), an American poet and erudite, was an English professor from 1957 to 1958.
Kurt Vonnegut, served as Writer-in-Residence during the 2000–2001 school year
Jane Zielonko, translator of The Captive Mind (1953), taught English at Smith from 1946.
In 1960, three Smith professors, one who had been there for 38 years, were fired or "allowed to retire" for being gay. This was chronicled in a book (The Scarlet Professor—Newton Arvin: A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal (Doubleday, 2001), by Barry Werth), and the PBS Independent Lens film, The Great Pink Scare. It was also depicted in an opera based on Werth's book in 2017 at Amherst College. In 2002, Smith acknowledged a wrong from four decades earlier by creating a lecture series and a small scholarship—the $100,000 Dorius/Spofford Fund for the Study of Civil Liberties and Freedom of Expression, and the Newton Arvin Prize in American Studies, a $500 annual stipend. But despite faculty appeals, there was no apology.
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