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Page Smith (September 6, 1917 – August 28, 1995) was an American historian, professor and author. In 1964 he became the founding Provost of Cowell College, University of California, Santa Cruz and resigned from the university in 1973 in protest. As an activist, he was a lifelong advocate for homeless people, for community organization, and for improving the prison system.
He served in the United States Army during World War II, for which he received a Purple Heart. He was awarded his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1951 under the direction of Samuel Eliot Morison. Page Smith died in August 1995, one day after the death of his beloved wife, Eloise Pickard Smith.
After receiving his doctorate, Smith began work as a research associate at the Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg, Virginia in 1951. He then taught history at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg. From 1953 to 1964, he was a professor of history at UCLA. In 1964, he became the founding provost of Cowell College, the first college of the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). He taught history at UCSC until 1973.
For the years leading up to 1973, an issue had arisen on campus surrounding a decision of whether his friend and colleague Paul Lee would be granted tenure. He explains in his work Founding Cowell College a conversation he had with the founding chancellor Dean McHenry where McHenry noted the atmosphere surrounding Lee after a class as notably filled with "enthusiastic and excited students". Lee, however, seemed to Smith to have accumulated enough opponents in senior professorships throughout UCSC that his tenure track would ultimately be ill-fated. Smith recounts in detail his painstakingly going around to first the Philosophy Department, which had "closed its ranks to Paul", based on colleague Maurice Natanson's intense dislike of Lee, most likely based largely on Lee (as a junior faculty member) choosing to state disagreement with a Natanson appointment to the university, Albert Hofstadter. Next, he went to UCSC's Religious Studies department, as Lee's teaching style was a closer fit to theology anyway, his having been a teaching assistant of influential theologian Paul Tillich and a friend of religious scholar Huston Smith, who he infamously participated in the marsh chapel experiment with. However, Smith explains the ongoing conversations with Joe Barber in Religious Studies found Barber not budging on finding Lee a position, with the added oddity of Barber experiencing consistent Freudian mental slips throughout their discussions and calling Page "Paul" throughout his conversations with him. Then he went to Crown College, where both general faculty and students had voted to give Lee an appointment. Kenneth Thimann at Crown was fond of both Smith and Lee, but Thimann carried the message that the tenured faculty had subsequently voted quite substantially against Lee's appointment. Smith explains that this was most likely centered around Alan Chadwick's Chadwick Garden on campus and Paul Lee's role in starting it. The garden was infamous as a beginning catalyst for the organic movement and for its mystical and poetic atmosphere, which Smith explains many at Cowell were of the opinion had undermined the scientific seriousness of UCSC as an institution. He went to two other departments and had similarly found himself stymied. Then he sought the support of the "Fellowship Committee" and one of its members said they would resign if Lee was appointed. Another person then took that same stance. He explains that the senior leadership in the college did not want to "split the staff" with what was clearly such a contentious issue. Finally, he recounts, when one of the senior staff remarked that he himself would resign if Lee was appointed,
Smith then resigned from the university. He recounts this episode in detail in one of his seminal works Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in America. In this work, he describes the apostasy of institutional educational figures from their primary duty to teach students and their skewed focus on a publish or perish paradigm.
In a closing remark on his resignation, we hear,
Both before and after his resignation Smith was intellectually active as a scholar, author, and columnist. He wrote more than 20 books, including a biography of John Adams that won the 1963 Bancroft Prize, and an eight-volume A People's History of the United States.
After leaving the University of California at Santa Cruz, Smith and Lee held free, weekly, round-table lectures on American History at the Caffe Pergolessi in downtown Santa Cruz. The lectures were part of an ad-hoc series of lectures named Penny U because entrance cost one penny, a coffee-house tradition dating back to 17th Century London. Penny U still gathers as of 2022.
Smith worked as a community activist for homeless people in Santa Cruz. The William James Association in Santa Cruz helped establish a homeless shelter. It also offered work options for unemployed individuals. The Association was instrumental as well in the beginning of the Homeless Garden Project. The William James Association as of 2022 is active and continuing the Prison Arts Project which is the continuation of Eloise Pickard Smith's California Prison Arts Project that she began when she was the director of the California Arts Council.
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