Remembering Nate Smith,
Last of the Founders

By Richard De Prospo, Ernest A. Howard Chair of English Literature, Chair of American Studies

On January 16, 2026, we lost Nate Smith, professor emeritus, husband, father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and tremendous friend.

Eldest son of Abraham Smith, who reached Chicago from Ukraine after being shot at by Nazis, White Russians, Red Russians, and, as I was informed in one of our last visits, even the French, Nate Smith, a first-generation U.S. citizen, college graduate, and Ph.D., joined the faculty of Washington College in 1956 as an outsider.

He didn’t remain one for long, but he never stopped looking out for others who might feel like outsiders: ethnic ones, poor ones, newly-arrived junior faculty ones like me back in 1975. Even animals: a few of us old-timers recall Nate taking in the orphaned Washington College former fraternity canine mascot, Skippy.

Nate took care of his family, too: his parents, his brothers, his dear wife of 68 years, Jeanne, whom he cared for up to almost the minute he died, just short of his 96th birthday; his four children, Sarah, Jeremy, Karen, and Sam, their spouses, six grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.

One of so many former junior faculty Nate mentored, now emeritus Kent State History Professor Jon Wakelyn, upon hearing of Nate’s death, wrote to me that Nate was “the kindest human being he ever met.”

Also, Nate took care of Washington College faculty, for whose rights he tirelessly and fearlessly advocated throughout his career. This began in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when a new president, a new dean, and six faculty members reimagined the school’s entire curriculum—and, really, its identity—to found a genuine liberal arts college: “Amherst of the Eastern Shore.” Nate was one of those six faculty members to whom we owe the current Washington College; what we’re now fighting to preserve was their creation. Nate survived them all, the last living link to what is best and most worth bequeathing to all future Washington College faculty, alumni, and students.  

Nate was a consummate writer: of a masterful dissertation on Russian historian and liberal politician Pavel Miliukov, to whose excellence Nate’s Russian historian successor Professor Clayton Black testifies; of College Bylaws that Nate collaborated with four colleagues to configure so as to ensure they would not dilute tenure protections; of programs such as the business major that Nate designed as acting dean; of the proposal that earned faculty the sole across-the-board structural faculty pay raise that Nate as acting dean with acting president Garry Clarke got funded; of a poem—a poem!—, a 79-line poem that rhymes and scans to commemorate a colleague’s 60th birthday; of a eulogy for the late Norman James, former Washington College English department chair, that beggared every commemoration I’ve ever heard or read and that makes me more than a little ashamed to be writing this paltry one.

Finally, Nate was a stellar mandolin player and bass player; he used to accompany my piano at College cocktail parties and dances. There’s a black-and-white picture of us playing on the Hodson Hall patio in an old mid-’70s College yearbook that I copied and gave to Nate for his 90th birthday.

Tributes from former students include: “Dr. Smith was the best professor I had,” Joanne Renda Hogg ’74 P’07 said. “What a wonderful man!” Laura Chase Kurtzman ’83 recalled. “His Russian history class was incredible,” Fred Johnston ’91 said.

“Nate was the ultimate college citizen, playing a key role in the College’s long-range planning in the 1990s,” said former student, former Chair of the Washington College Board of Visitors and Governors, and former interim Washington College President Steve Golding ’72. “Nate Smith never lost his north star—he was an educator first.”  

And on a personal note, Nate pretty much single-handedly hired me, tenured me, saved my tenure, and took me in when nobody else would. After he resigned his deanships, we would attend faculty meetings together and promise to sit on one another’s tongues (often failing). I didn’t know what I was going to do without him after he retired. During his nearly 30 years of retirement, we would visit occasionally and email and phone frequently, almost daily, usually about Washington College matters. His counsel remained sharp and trenchant until the end. 

I don’t know what I’m going to do without him now that he’s gone.

I don’t know what we’re all going to do without him now that he’s gone.