Hobart and William Smith Colleges: Two Colleges, One Campus, a Two-Century History
Near Geneva, New York
Geneva, New York perches on the northern tip of Seneca Lake, and its colleges have been part of the intellectual life of the Finger Lakes region for over two hundred years.
The story begins in seventeen ninety-six with the Geneva Academy, a frontier school funded by New York State and intended to bring higher learning to a part of the state that had been Haudenosaunee territory until treaties and the Revolutionary War cleared it for European settlement. The Academy struggled and suspended operations in eighteen seventeen. What revived it was a bishop.
John Henry Hobart was the Episcopal Bishop of New York, and when he visited Geneva in eighteen eighteen he recognized in the lakeside village a natural setting for what he called an outpost for civilized and learned behavior. The college reopened in eighteen twenty-two as Geneva College, funded in part by Trinity Church in New York City. Hobart died in eighteen thirty, and more than two decades later, in eighteen fifty-two, the college renamed itself Hobart College in his honor, and the men's institution that bears his name has operated continuously ever since.
The second half of this story belongs to a Geneva nurseryman. William Smith and his brothers built one of the most prosperous nursery businesses in upstate New York, W. and T. Smith Company, starting in eighteen forty-six. Decades later, Smith decided to fund a women's college to complement Hobart. William Smith College opened in nineteen eight, offering women full access to the Geneva campus while maintaining its own dean, student government, and graduation ceremonies.
The two colleges have operated side by side for over a century as what educators call a coordinate system, distinct in identity but sharing faculty, curriculum, and campus. Students take the same courses taught by the same professors, but each college preserves its own traditions and confers its own degrees.
This unusual arrangement makes Hobart and William Smith one of the few coordinate colleges remaining in the United States, a two-hundred-year experiment in shared education on the Seneca Lake shore.
