By Paulina Gajewski
Brooklyn College faculty and students came together to celebrate the life and work of Gail Smith, a professor in the Classics Department, on Wednesday, Sept. 13, where the Wolfe Institute for the Humanities assembled a series of speakers at the Woody Tanger Auditorium. Together, they painted a picture of Smith as a professor, colleague, mentor, and classicist.
Smith joined the classics faculty in 1972, and the following year, was one of several faculty members to spearhead the Latin and Greek Institute. Then known as the Summer Latin Institute, the organization serves as a rigorous program that teaches the classical languages to students over the short span of the summer.
In 1988, Smith was the founding director of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, which aims to address underrepresentation in higher education. “The Mellon Mays Foundation, which Gail helped establish here, was very close to her heart,” said Brooklyn College President Michelle Anderson at the memorial. “It launched so many students on their way, transforming what was possible in their lives.” Since then, the program has grown to include 47 schools and produce more than a thousand PhD students.
From 1991 to 2007, Smith served as the founding director for the CUNY Pipeline Program. The program intends to break down socioeconomic barriers so that students may have fair chances of passing into the graduate world.
During the same time period, Smith directed the Office of Educational Opportunity and Diversity at the Graduate Center, which aims to promote diversity in doctoral education. The program receives $11.5 million in grants, which empowers students to have financial stability so that they can focus on their schoolwork.
In her academic work, Smith’s goal was to find connections between people of color and classics. Two of her works, “The Ethiopians and Greek Epic: Memnon at Troy” and “Phillis Wheatley and the Classical Tradition,” emphasized her work in expanding Black Classicism, along with the classics she taught in Africana Studies. Her work was pivotal for the discipline of classics.
Patrice Rankine, a mentee of Smith, gave a lecture on Black Classicism at the memorial. Just eight years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and seven after the Voting Rights Act, Gail Smith was educating in a world of social turmoil.
“I can imagine that the pressures to be exemplary pushed Gail to work extremely hard and polish her evidently intellectual gifts,” said Rankine. “Professor Gail Smith will be remembered as a figure in Black Classicism.”