The Five Colleges are affiliated colleges in the Connecticut River Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts, belonging to a consortium called Five Colleges, Incorporated, which was established in 1965. The Five Colleges are geographically close to one another and are linked by buses which run between the campuses.

Members

• Amherst College, Amherst
• Hampshire College, Amherst
• Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley
• Smith College, Northampton
• University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst

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, staff, 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 ^*) are run by the Five Colleges jointly for the benefit of all five institutions.

Trivia

• Together, the Five Colleges operate WFCR, "Five College Radio", an NPR affiliate operating at 88.5 MHz in the FM band.

• The Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory was founded in 1969 by the Five College Astronomy Department.

• 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 ^*, 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. (Note also that Scooby-Doo premiered in 1969, before the founding of Hampshire College in 1970).

The Claremont Colleges, also known as "the five-C's" may have been modeled after the five colleges, although the Claremont colleges didn't account for five schools until the creation of Pitzer College in 1963. The Five-C's have their own variations of the Scooby Doo analogy, although they do not attribute the creation of the characters to their respective schools. One commonly held version of the analogy associates Daphne with Scripps College, Velma with Harvey Mudd College, Fred with Claremont McKenna College, Shaggy with Pitzer College, and Scooby with Pomona College.

External links

• Five Colleges, Inc.

Universities and colleges in Massachusetts | Mount Holyoke College | Smith College | Amherst College | Hampshire College | University of Massachusetts Amherst