Five Colleges (Massachusetts)
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The Five Colleges are affiliated colleges in the Connecticut River valley of western Massachusetts, belonging to a consortium called Five Colleges, Incorporated. The members are:
- Amherst College, Amherst
- Hampshire College, Amherst
- Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley
- Smith College, Northampton
- University of Massachusetts, Amherst
The Five Colleges are geographically close to one another, and free shuttle buses run between the campuses. Students at each of these schools often take classes at the other colleges ("cross-registration" is permitted and often encouraged). Student groups and organizations often draw participants from all five campuses. The colleges' libraries participate in an interlibrary loan program, allowing students and faculty to take advantage of all five campuses' collections. In addition, several academic programs (for example, astronomy, dance, some foreign languages, and women's studies [1] (http://www.fivecolleges.edu/academic_programs/academprog_deptprog.html)) are run by the Five Colleges jointly for the benefit of all five institutions.
Together, the Five Colleges operate WFCR, "Five College Radio", an NPR affiliate operating at 88.5 MHz in the FM band.
Two of the Five Colleges, Mount Holyoke and Smith, are women's colleges and members of the Seven Sisters.
The flagship Amherst campus of the University of Massachusetts system is the only public university among the five; the other four are private liberal-arts colleges.
Five-College folklore
A popular urban legend among Five College students holds that the characters on the Saturday morning cartoon Scooby-Doo represent the five colleges. The legend has Daphne representing Smith College and Velma as Mount Holyoke (though the two are sometimes reversed, particularly by those who perceive Velma – and Smith – as lesbian), with Fred representing Amherst College, Shaggy as Hampshire College, and Scooby as UMass Amherst. Hanna-Barbera Productions, CBS executive Fred Silverman, and some of the show's writers have said that this story is false [2] (http://halogen.note.amherst.edu/~bgjohnson/wwwfaq.html#trivia.scooby), and that the show was actually based on the radio program I Love A Mystery and the TV sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.
External links
- Five Colleges, Inc. (http://www.fivecolleges.edu/)
- Amherst (http://www.amherst.edu/)
- Hampshire (http://www.hampshire.edu/)
- Mt. Holyoke (http://www.mtholyoke.edu/)
- Smith (http://www.smith.edu/)
- UMass Amherst (http://www.umass.edu/)