Highlights of the Centennial Celebration

At the SSW Centennial Celebration June 29– July 1, alumni, faculty, staff, current students and friends gathered to celebrate 100 years’ worth of outstanding education. Around a robust schedule of film screenings, classes, receptions, a play, a lecture, a roundtable discussion, a dance party, a barbecue dinner and more, attendees found time for socializing, networking, reconnection, reminiscence and reflection.

The weekend got off to a rousing start with the premiere of Clinical Revolution in Sage Hall. The film packs a whole lot of history into 20 minutes, but no film could tell the whole story, which is at least 7,500 stories—that’s how many students SSW has trained and graduated since 1918.

At the President’s Champagne Receptionafter the screening, Diane Gordon, M.S.W. ’71, sketched her narrative arc. Her career began at Saint Joseph Hospital in Chicago. She went into private practice in 1977 and has offered therapy to individuals, couples and families ever since. Along the way, Gordon raised a family. Daughter Ashley Adler, who’s considering a career in social work, sampled appetizers with her on the Conference Center terrace.

“Smith is a unique school and it prepared me for my career in many ways,” said Gordon. “I think the most important thing the School taught me was that every day you have thousands of opportunities to build up or destroy someone.”

Waiting for Ellen DeVoe to give the E. Diane Davis Lecture on Saturday morning, Juanita Dalton Robinson, M.S.S. ’51, echoed Gordon in characterizing the benefits of an SSW education. “It teaches you how to look honestly atyourself and to stop yourself from hurting others.”

“The School was a very intimate environment,” she remembered. “The town was sleepy. It had one movie theater— and it was closed for the summer. Some students got away on weekends, but even with my scholarship, money was tight. I had to borrow money to buy a stamp—they were 3 cents—to write to my mother.”

The only black student in her class, Dalton Robinson went on to build a noteworthy career and was instrumental in desegregating the Cleveland public schools. Her SSW experience played a fundamental role in many aspects of her life: “It helps you to understand human behavior, how and why you function. I was a very different kind of mother because of it.” The kind of mother, it seems, who leads by example. With her were daughters Rachel Robinson, M.S.W. ’94, a professor at the University of Washington, and Miriam Robinson, M.S.W. ’87, a clinician in private practice.

Ellen R. DeVoe delivered the weekend's keynote lecture.

How and why parents’ behavior affects children is a subject Ellen DeVoe has explored in depth. A professor and director of the Ph.D. program at the Boston University School of Social Work, DeVoe is known for her intervention research related to parents affected by trauma. In her lecture, “Beyond the Service Member: Working With Post-9/11 Military Families Throughout the Deployment Cycle,” she presented some of her findings.

Contemporary war is different from ones our forebears fought: there is no front line, the enemy is ubiquitous and yesterday’s friend is today’s foe. The tremendous toll it takes on military personnel can roil their families. Among DeVoe’s vivid examples: the 3-year-old who stopped talking when his father went overseas and didn’t speak again until he returned a year later; a sniper’s young daughter who climbed into his duffel bag so she could go with him when he was deployed. In her work with Veterans and activeduty service members, DeVoe has had to strike a delicate balance between raising their awareness of the impact on their children while not adding to the guilt they already carry.

Addressed to an audience of people who have made it their life’s work to ease emotional pain, DeVoe’s talk confirmed the power of therapy to alleviate suffering and, in her words, “be a vehicle for growth.”

Associate Professor Yoosun Park’s class, one of eight offered on Saturday, provided essential historical perspective on another timely subject. In the fact-filled, riveting presentation “Problematized Bodies: The Role of Race and Gender in the History of Immigration to the U.S.,” Park examined immigration policies from 1790 to today. She analyzed landmark Supreme Court rulings notable for their contradictory, arbitrary determinations about what constituted “whiteness” in a candidate for citizenship. Irish, Italians, Czechs, Chinese and others who came seeking freedom and a better life in America were labeled inferior, suspected of “moral turpitude” and subject to exclusionary regulations not so different from ones being enforced today. Yet Park’s closing question, how do we fix this?, appeared to infuse her listeners with renewed determination to speak up and act up for a more just system.

Alumni packed the Campus Center for the Saturday afternoon screening of the documentary Wild and Precious by Steve Cadwell, Ph.D. ’90. It’s an intensely personal portrayal of his life as a gay man: “Growing up a sissy boy in Vermont,” in his words; breaking down and being institutionalized as a young man, as a result of social pressures and extreme confusion about who he was; post–Stone Wall, out of the closet, onto the disco; then into the crucible of the AIDS crisis and out the other side. Cadwell is now a husband, a father and a therapist who counsels LGBTQ clients, among others.

Yvette Colón, M.S.W. ’90, was among the audience for the film. “Absolutely changed my life” was how she summed up her SSW education. At age 27, Colón was cured of ovarian cancer, but it was a social worker facilitating a young cancer survivors support group who helped her heal emotionally and inspired her to become an oncology social worker.

“My parents thought that social workers were for people who were poor or crazy,” said Colón, now an associate professor at Eastern Michigan University, with a smile. “By the time I graduated, they were enormously proud of me.”

Like many others who attended SSW, Colón couldn’t have done it without financial aid. She is committed to helping raise scholarship funds, particularly for students of color and LGBTQ students. “The needs are so great,” she noted, “we need more people out there.”

As is fitting at a Centennial Celebration, participants looked back at what has come before. But they were also looking ahead, thinking about the state of the world and pressing social issues. The eloquent words of Floyd Allen, M.S.W. ’97, expressed the collective spirit of the celebration—and the school: “We need a different reality, we have a choice, we can choose to be different and make it happen. It might take 100 years, but we can put it in motion.” ◆