Welcome home-to a year of celebration and remembrance, and to a year of history making.

As an institution, Wellesley has a history older than any of us, but it is a history of individuals just like us, an aggregate of the diverse lives and stories and dreams linked forever to this place and to all of us so lucky to encounter it.

Wellesley's history is one of courageous individuals, and a pioneering organization, navigating (and sometimes fumbling) their way to a day when equal access to education for the world's women is a reality. We're not there yet.

Wellesley's history is a living one.

Wellesley's history is all of us.

It is what we make it.

Congratulations to the class of 2001-you are beautiful. The gowns look great. Can you believe it? What a privilege to have had a college education. What a responsibility.

I'm hoping you'll hold tight for this last year. Please, treasure your friendships and use your strong leadership to leave this place better than we found it.

You know we don't have to wait until we leave Wellesley to make a difference in the world. We are, in fact, still in the world here, even under this grand tent, and our work in this place, if we do it right, will prepare us for the great work still in store, and perhaps yet unrevealed to us. Have a great year, Seniors.

Welcome to the class of 2004. You are so lucky. I am envying you today. You can't possibly know the adventure of a lifetime for which you have signed yourself up. Wellesley is a miraculous place, intense and spectacular, and more so because you're here with us now. I challenge you: let yourself soak up the knowledge this place has to offer. And offer up your own knowledge with courage.

If you find yourself changing your mind and your heart about the things you once held as Truth: that's good, that's healthy, that's why we're here. Please, run for Senate or your House Council this year or find another way to get involved in what College Government is doing. We have a lot of work to do and we need your help.

Welcome faculty. You too look lovely in your robes. I like what I've been hearing about some of you folks taking a greater interest in student life and what goes on at Wellesley outside of the classroom, and I hope it continues, constructively. It is only when our intellectual and emotional lives come together that we will be whole, and this has been an emotion-filled time for this community. I hope you'll be open to experimenting with us-and this will be a year of history-making experimentation-about how we might live better, more truthfully and respectfully, together.

Welcome to the Classes of 2002 and 2003. Welcome transfer students and exchange students. Welcome staff-especially the folks working so hard to make this day and year of Celebration possible. Welcome Trustees and neighbors. Thank you for being here.

I love this place, like so many of us do-you'll learn that this year. I cried when I pulled into Wellesley last week. I just felt suddenly and completely overwhelmed, so privileged, and so blessed to be here. I really can't imagine being anywhere else.

I'll tell you, I feel honored to be up here today, but also a little bit nervous.

I've been walking around to my favorite inspiration spots on campus this last week or so. Trying to feel the speech-to channel it: the perfect, visionary beginning to what I know will be a challenging and magnificent year.

What I've come up with after my little tour for inspiration is exactly what I started with before it. My instinct, my gut feeling: this is a time for me to introduce myself and offer you a vision for the year. By way of the story I know best: my own.

At Wellesley my most powerful learning-my take-home message, why this place will live in me forever-has been around developing the skills to articulate where I come from. I have learned, slowly, to be able to share my story and myself with the people with whom I come in contact.

A slower process has been learning the skills to draw out stories from other people.

But, I'm getting there. (I hope so at least.) That's why I wanted to be the President of our College Government. So, here it is: my vision and why I'm up here today.

The idea is that if we learn the skills to reveal our stories to each other, and to ourselves, then we have the skills to live in community. If we are able to live authentically, if we learn to make ourselves vulnerable, and share our weakness along with our exhilaration, then we are free. We are free because we know ourselves and in the process of getting to know ourselves we have learned that we must be humble enough to know our experience is valuable, but not the MOST valuable, probably just as valuable as any other individual's experience.

If we enjoy this kind of freedom, we can't help feeling less afraid, and more empowered, to share what we've learned in this place and these lives, and to make this a better, more just, world.

The first time I was in Wellesley I was 5 years old. My family lived in Brockton, Massachusetts, an old-shoe factory town, a city actually, about 30 minutes southeast of here. My older brother, then 15, was struggling. I didn't know with what exactly. My mom told me he was "finding himself" and that seemed sufficient an explanation.

I was 5, on my way to marrying Bruce Springsteen, my favorite rock 'n roll star, and my brother to being a musician, a bassoonist who had already played at Tanglewood with Seiji Ozawa. That summer, though, he would make a short stop at Charles River Hospital, just down the road from here. He was depressed-that was what we knew then.

I distinctly remember the town of Wellesley in my 5-year-old eyes. I don't think we quite got to the College. Mostly, I remember the peanut butter from Bread and Circus and how different Wellesley was from Brockton, how far away. I thought we had perhaps arrived in a foreign country-the car trip seemed so long and the houses so much larger here. I remember walking through the Vil at night with my mom, wondering why people seemed to walk with such a different way about them here.

By junior year in high school my mom and brother and I had moved away from Brockton and the public housing, the projects (a word I could only utter in connection with my name after getting to college) where I lived my first 11 years. We had moved to Bethesda, MD, about as far away from Brockton as you can get, and the posh Catholic high school I attended partly on a merit scholarship had made college a serious option.

I was back to Wellesley for a visit my junior year. It was perfect. (It still is). I knew. My mom knew too-She says she knew for sure that this was the place for me when she saw the mini-focus in the science center, with the light streaming in.

My senior year of high school I was the President of my senior class and the Editor of the School Newspaper and I stayed at school most of the time. I had a lot of work: that was a good reason. It was harder to explain about my brother. Shane had regressed from his time at Charles River and started revealing signs that his struggle was about more than "finding himself."

I wrote my early decision application to Wellesley the night before it was due-the dot matrix printer I used to print the essay ran out of ink so I kind of wrote in the last line or two-hopefully, it was the worst application Wellesley has ever received. I didn't get in.

My brother was diagnosed with schizophrenia the next month and I ended up spending my first year at Grinnell College in Iowa.

I transferred, arriving here at the beginning of my sophomore year, because something in me was already rowing down the Charles River and finding lifelong friends in the brilliant and diverse women of Wellesley. I was learning to value the experiences that are creating me and looking for a place of intellectual curiosity and passionate living in which to share them.

So, I took the long road, and the right road, to Wellesley, bringing with me some perspective, I hope, about just how privileged we are to be here.

I am constantly struck by the vastness of experience in the women I meet here, and the global perspectives so many of us are developing. This is really an amazing place. I find that when I'm in a room with women who have developed the skills of self-knowledge and appreciation of others, there is no better place for wisdom gathering and sharing. It's beautiful.

I have also, however, been struck by the tendency of some of our most outspoken community members (those are the ones we hear) to treat their co-community members as if they didn't have a story, or else one of lesser value (or lower status). Wellesley women, and sometimes Wellesley men, in all of their fierceness and brilliance, have too often in the past 2 years, my only years at Wellesley, fallen into reactionary, politically motivated, personally-attacking relationships. Where does that come from? How do our passion and good intentions become so misplaced?

I am hoping that we, as individuals and a community, can intentionally engage in better human relationship building this year. We need to. No one is here to make our College experience awful or out to get us. If someone makes a decision you disagree with, I encourage you to talk with them, face to face, holding tight your integrity and theirs.

These folks up here are not just the "Administration." They're individuals with their own stories and histories, just like each of us.

I have found these individuals eager to engage in a high level of integrity-honoring communication, and I think you'll find that too if you give them the chance.

They, Geneva and Diana especially, have found that I am going to be a lot of work for them this year. I take very seriously the responsibility of accurately representing the perspective and stories of students and I'm not afraid to disagree and offer up alternative action.

Relating in a way that truly values our stories takes work. It takes time. To see each other, in our wholeness, with lucidity and compassion, is our task, and it's not an easy or a quick one. It's a process.

Let's listen to each other's experiences of this place in order to make it better. It's kind of like a Big Birthday Experiment for the College. I only have one year of this "chief spokeswoman of the student body" business and I'll be using that time, with your help, to experiment with strategies for better communication within and amongst constituencies.

Are town meetings once a month something that would make this College stronger? (Shake head yes). Should we stop talking with each other altogether and rely solely on FirstClass for our every communication? (No).

I'd like us, armed with our stories and our respect of each other's stories, to be suggesting and enacting strategies for making the College a more comfortable place for all of us.

How are we to shape the history of this place?

Were you as inspired as I was that (although it was a bit controversially maneuvered) Wheaton College has recruited and hired 5 new faculty members of color this year?

Are you with me? Let me explain it a little better with one example. My story, and my experience of this place, informs me that a real weakness of the College is the fact that students who cannot afford to bring a computer to school are often less easily able to lead academic lives as productive as those of their peers with computers. I have a computer in my room for the first time in my three years of college. I can't afford a computer (a friend gave me hers when she graduated). Within a week of life with a computer in my room, I can already see my study skills and life becoming more productive and efficient.

My experience here tells me, plainly, Wellesley needs to increase student access to computers. We also need to eliminate the basic phone service charge (it's just too much), and simply talk about social class more on campus: Over 50% of Wellesley students are on financial aid, and we aren't responding fully enough as a community to what that means.

I'm curious what your experience of this place tells you. I'm hoping to find out this year, and, together, work to make Wellesley more responsive to your needs.

Treasure and engage in the history we're creating together.

Have a fabulous year.