"It is not easy to speak for the Faculty of Wellesley College," remarked Katherine Lee Bates at a commencement dinner in June of 1892. "As a rule, each one of us decidedly prefers to speak for herself." Professor Bates' words are just as true today, despite the fact that the Wellesley faculty now numbers among it many more men than was the case in the early days of the College. This afternoon, however, I do wish to assume the Dean's prerogative of speaking for the faculty. Like Bates, "I do not propose, Miss President, to reveal all the secrets of our Faculty consciousness," but rather will confine my remarks to a brief and selective history of how the Wellesley faculty have wrestled with one of the central tensions of their work: defining their role as teacher-scholars.

When Katherine Lee Bates came to the college in 1885, faculty were primarily charged with the responsibility of instruction. Henry Fowles Durant brought to Wellesley a group of exceptional women he believed could instruct students, create a community, model behavior, and live together in a spirit of experimentation in women's education. While pedagogical experiments abounded in the early years of the college, little time was made available for the faculty to pursue questions of intellectual interest. As Bates put it, she and her colleagues were engaged in an "incessant struggle to secure the essential time, the essential quiet, the essential liberty of soul for genuine, fruitful study."

In her commencement address of the late 1800s Bates was making a plea for time-time for scholarly work in the form of regular sabbaticals. In doing so, she was acknowledging the complementary relationship between teaching and scholarship. "How can we communicate the passion for truth," she asked, "unless we are ourselves in very deed truth-seekers and truth-finders?" Bates' words were received with sympathy; by 1902, the Wellesley trustees had put in place a sabbatical year on half salary for all full professors.

The beginning of the 20th century was a pivotal time in the lives of Wellesley faculty, but it was, more broadly, a defining moment in American higher education. The values of the academy had begun a slow but steady shift away from an emphasis on teaching, community service, and social reform to those of scholarship and research organized about disciplinary specialization. As a result, the requisites of life in small college communities-living and working conditions that facilitated close contact between faculty and students resulting in strong bonds of community-came to compete with the attractions of scholarship and professional recognition. Successive generations of Wellesley faculty have sought to accommodate these competing demands, attempting to create a local intellectual community while playing an increasingly larger role in a community of disciplinary scholars.

One such attempt was initiated in 1916 when a committee of Wellesley faculty proposed a Faculty Shop Club, "an organization analogous to a current events club in which recent contributions to different departments of learning [were] chronicled, in an untechnical fashion, by experts in the different fields." In an article appearing in the Wellesley Magazine in 1940, Louise Pettibone Smith, then-professor of Biblical History, noted that the Shop Club brought together the oldest and the newest members of the faculty around subjects of common interest. These meetings were especially important for new faculty, Smith claimed, who "fresh from graduate schools and the accomplishments of their own first research…missed the atmosphere and excitement over new discoveries, and the daily accounts of their associates' struggles with obstinate data."

Shop talks moved freely between teaching and research interests, even though it was not altogether clear that all faculty who attended the talks were equally illuminated by the end of the evening. Take, for example, Professor Smith's account of a presentation on Einstein's theory of relativity:

We all felt delightfully intelligent during the introductory paragraphs describing the two moving trains going in opposite directions and in the same direction at different speeds. Some of us even followed a mathematical equation or two as the speaker wrote on the small blackboard imported for the occasion; but as the mathematics grew swiftly more and more complicated, we were soon left far behind. Perhaps members of the mathematics department and the rest of the physicists stayed by-I couldn't see from where I sat. But at the end we left the room, contented and proud, in the assurance that Miss Lowater herself very evidently understood Einstein.

Understanding Einstein was the least of what the Shop Club provided its members. These meetings were an important source of intellectual community for a group of faculty who were seriously interested in one another's "shop", ready, as Professor Smith put it, "to expend any amount of intellectual effort in the attempt to understand it."

Years later in the early 1970s, a group of faculty and deans convened a Wellesley College Faculty seminar to address what appeared to be a widening discrepancy between student and faculty conceptions of "what education is all about." The general subject of the seminar was "The Introductory Course" or more specifically the transition from high school to college work, with special attention to theories of human development. Seminar participants read contemporary texts in developmental psychology, listened to taped interviews with students, and watched videos of classes taught by faculty in the seminar.

The faculty seminar was animated by serious and lively discussion about student learning, variations in pedagogical approaches among faculty, and differences in expectations between students and faculty about course content and goals. In the end, however, the group could come up with little in the way of useful generalizations for how students might best make the intellectual transition from high school to college. (Is that surprising?) What they did agree on was the usefulness of a forum in which faculty members can come to know each others' minds. "The great single achievement of the seminar," the group wrote,

Was that it brought minds together on a common subject of a specific intellectual density and of a particular practical interest. The fact that the subject could be treated formally-through readings in serious books-imparted a certain rigor and definiteness to our proceedings. The fact that the subject had practical implications for teaching, and for student life in general, meant that it was easy to talk about…..There was very little departmental politicking, and there was a great deal of mutual self respect. A faculty member not known for her easy tolerance said, "I never knew that my colleagues were so intelligent."

In the last 25 years the faculty have continued the Wellesley tradition of finding out how intelligent their colleagues are. Invitations to join the Shop Club have been replaced by those to attend Shop Talks and faculty seminars. And the interplay between teaching and scholarship is evident in the variety of places these interactions have taken place. In some cases common intellectual interests that led faculty to propose a summer seminar or to form a reading group resulted in the development and teaching of new courses. In other cases the reverse occurs: teaching experiments or college programs served as the impetus for intellectual debate or scholarly collaboration. In conversations relating to new degree requirements, we puzzled over the direction and future of our disciplines. In designing new programs first year students, we voiced disagreements over why and under what conditions students learn best. In trying to understand what it means to provide Wellesley students with a global education, we have been forced to reexamine the meaning and purpose of a residential, liberal arts experience.

The tensions we have wrestled with for the past 125 years-between research and teaching, between the creation of a local intellectual community and a larger professional life-have defined our roles as Wellesley faculty. That "incessant struggle" is as unresolved and unresolvable as it was in Bates' day. And it remains equally productive in its lack of resolution. It has produced generations of excellent teachers and influential scholars; it has nourished the life of the mind of teacher and student alike. May we have the good sense, then, to embrace these tensions. To do otherwise would surely distract us from our institutional purpose.