Well, seniors. This
is it. My last words to the great and generous class of 2006.
You have been a special class—and
I do not say that lightly. Many of us have been talking about
you in recent weeks, coming to terms with the fact that we
have to let you go.
We’ve been remarking on what a remarkable class you’ve
been from the day you arrived—intelligent, curious, confident.
You’ve infused the campus with your energy, your can-do
spirit, your unconditional support of each other, and your
instinctive commitment to the purposes for which this college
exists. I want to remind you to remember those purposes, as
you prepare to go, but first I want to say a few personal words
to you.
As you know, I announced
recently that I’ve decided
to leave Wellesley next year. This was a difficult decision,
for reasons I’ve spoken
and written about, and I’ve
explained why it is right in my view—principally because
it offers us a chance to anticipate an inevitable transition
at a time and in a way that can open a path to self-renewal,
both for the college, and for me.
And yet there is so much I will miss about this beautiful
community of learning, of inquiry, of intensity, and of determination,
this college that honors women and all they can be, and do,
and all they can imagine into being. There is much that you
will miss after you leave in just a few hours. Starting with
friends and that sense of impending loss is a feeling we share
today, yours more immediate than mine, but scarcely more profound.
At the same time,
we have in common the excitement of another new beginning
(Incipit Vita Nova all over again), a chance
to surrender ourselves anew to the process of self-renewal
described by John Gardner in his book of the same name: “an
endless and unpredictable dialogue between our potentialities
and the claims of life – not only the claims we encounter
but the claims we invent.” You are setting out now on
another phase of your lives, another cycle of that iterative
encounter through which you will find your passion, the “vocation” Frederick
Buechner describes in a definition I quoted to you on your
very first day here -- “the place where your deep gladness
and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
I have such high
hopes for you and for the women you will be. Such a sense
of pride and satisfaction in the women you
are becoming. That process of becoming will unfold in surprising
ways throughout your lives—and that lifelong pattern
of forever becoming is why it’s time for me to go too,
as much as I may yearn to sojourn longer here. So I feel a
very particular kinship with you and always will, this Wellesley
Class of 2006.
Moreover, you are
a purple class as is mine—mine and
that of my classmate and trustee, and (now) our favorite building—Lulu
Chow Wang. We graduated 40 years ago almost to the day and
we will celebrate our reunion with you at five-year intervals—’66
and ’06—four decades apart.
We’ll march in the alumnae parade together, festooned
in all sorts of bizarre purple garb and gear. (I tremble to
imagine how festooned you’ll be, based on your excessively
exuberant purple-izing of the campus on the last day of classes.)
I’ll wave to you and marvel at your fascinating life
stories—graduate school, jobs, careers, families, children,
more graduate study, more children, grandchildren – the
joys and the sorrows, the setbacks and triumphs. We’ll
know we can always find our way back to this place of memory
and inspiration.
You’ll wave back to me and cheer me on (and I’ll
love that) as I move ever more slowly to and through my winter
years. We’ll note the telltale signs of life’s
inescapable transitions, as we let go of the person we used
to be and find someone new, someone deeper, more aware, more
expansive, more fulfilled—ever remaining open, if we’re
lucky and resolute, to growing ourselves forward, even as we
age.
Looking at you now,
I’m filled with the awe of that
image: generations of intrepid women outfitted in purple parading
bravely through life—the silliness of it, the poignancy
of it, the deeper potential it evokes—growing older,
saluting one another, managing life’s transitions with
wisdom, humor, and grace.
You have brought
those qualities already to your Wellesley years. You arrived
at a time of tension around the country
on college campuses, a resurgence of the bitter and polarizing “culture
wars.” We had our own local skirmishes during your first
year—Mona Lisa Smile, Baraka, Schafly, the Iraq War—and
I saw you learn lessons about the kinds of leaders I saw you
chose to become.
You resolved to
embrace and live the values of cooperation, collaboration,
and community—to exercise those values,
underscore them, work them out in intricate detail, and in
the heat of the moment—the honor code review, the national
presidential elections, the tsunami in Asia, the large party
ban, the Gulf Coast hurricanes, Sisters’ Keepers, the
Ally Conference, the Graduation Pledge, which, I understand,
83 of you have signed, committing “to explore and take
into account the social and environmental consequences of any
job [you] consider and…to improve those aspects of any
organizations for which [you] work.”
In these and in
many other instances, including moments of tragedy, you staked
out the place where this historic college
can meet the claims of a troubled world. Our deep gladness—as
you have lived it in your time here—is educating women
who can bring balance and perspective to a world dangerously
out of kilter.
My point is emphatically
not about biological destiny, but it does begin with the
reality that the Western intellectual
project, for centuries, has been predominantly a masculine
undertaking, emphasizing autonomy, individuality, self-determination,
separateness, freedom – all good things.
And it
has advanced those goals by repressing the aspects of human
striving (by women and men) that are more contextual,
more holistic, and more attuned to the environment, to connections,
and to sustaining relationships than is the patriarchal male
model within which this feminine prototype has had to make
an uneasy peace.
We are seeing the
negative impact right now of structures and cultures still
operating according to a logic of authoritarianism,
competition, isolation, domination. And we are seeing counter
movements -- feminism, multiculturalism, the new physics, Eastern
and indigenous wisdom traditions – bringing alternative
epistemologies and sensibilities to bear on questions about
what constitutes a good society … what constitutes a
good life.
It is through those counter movements that women and other
marginalized people have begun to mobilize memories of centuries
of disempowerment and invisibility to press beyond mere tolerance
of difference to true and deep engagement with that which is
other, unfamiliar, threatening.
So I see Wellesley
College—historically and prospectively—involved
in this epic struggle to introduce greater balance into the
social technologies through which we humans can lead ourselves
and one another toward peace and justice in the world.
How do we do we
do that? What’s our story? It’s
your story. When we found you, you were bright, eager to learn,
courageous, passionate. You came from many backgrounds and
brought many experiences, and you opened yourselves to one
another from the very day you arrived here.
And then through
the special alchemy effected by the faculty—and
everyone here so invested in your learning—you refined
your critical judgment, expanded your perspectives, learned
patience and persistence, connected to one another, to women
through the ages, and to the power and the sweet beauty of
ideas.
You developed a
sense of responsibility for the impact you’ll
have in any setting, and you learned how to think well, how
to learn well, and how to recognize the limits on what you
know—at least I hope you did.
And now, as you
go, you open a new chapter. As graduates of Wellesley you
will in time become leaders across a wide swath
of pursuits—in families and communities and places of
work, here and around the globe.
Wherever you go,
I hope you will carry the memory of this place where everything
you did mattered—because it always
does. I hope you will apply your critical thinking to all your
pursuits, together with your commitment to collaborating and
valuing differences.
You will be forgiving,
gentle, and compassionate towards yourselves and one another—I ardently hope—knowing that you
don’t need to do it all in the first five years, or even
the first 20. You’ll treasure your friends, prize your
families, stay together, breathe and be mindful, live in the
present, savor each moment.
So I thank you,
magnificent seniors, for all you have been, and are, and
will be—for each other and for this college,
for your families, for the nation, for the world. We celebrate
your successes and send you forth now with the pride of our
institution, and with faith in your abilities and your qualities
of mind and character. You represent our aspirations, our vocation,
our vindication. We send you out with all of that, with our
admiration and affection, and with the profound hope that your
lives will be filled with learning, adventure, and love.
Go in joy. Go in peace. Be a force for good.
I know you will
and I’ll see you again in 2011.
