To the class of 2007, we look forward to a year of adventure and discovery under your leadership. To the class of 2010, it’s wonderful to have you here. And welcome back ’08 and ’09. We are renewed by your high spirits, and high expectations, moved by your curiosity, enlivened by your energy.

I want to speak to you today about the work of the 2015 Commission – because I want to speak to you this year about the work of the 2015 Commission. Unlike a neighboring university that, according to press accounts, has bookmakers placing odds on who their new president will be, I’m hoping that we can focus our attention on the longer-term future this year.

Our task is to prepare the college for a new beginning. And what we need for those preparations is contained in the ideas and challenges that have been developed for us by 38 dedicated colleagues – trustees, faculty, staff, and students – who deliberated all through last year as members of the 2015 Commission and its two working groups.

They began in the fall by telling and hearing stories, viewing them as data to illuminate directions in which the college might want to move. They solicited stories that would illustrate -- for a variety of people -- what, to them, is good, and strong, and special about Wellesley College. We heard stories about impressive student achievements that arose out of inspiring mentoring by faculty, and stories depicting Wellesley as a community rising to a test in a way that made people proud and grateful to belong to such a place.

We heard accounts of people coming together without fanfare to make something unlikely or important happen, about individual acts of extraordinary kindness or generosity, and about simple human gestures that made some person or group feel seen and valued in a particular way, or at a time of particular need. We heard many vivid stories of personal pathways to Wellesley, of first impressions, and of a process of settling in and coming to know that “this is where I belong.”

Together, the stories weave a collective narrative of a learning community that so many of us who have spent time at Wellesley recognize as the place we treasure. This is a community that, first and foremost, values learning and knowledge, intellectual exploration, respectful and probing discourse. It affords all of us wide latitude to experiment and explore who we can be at our best.

At the same time, it offers the support of a strong and nurturing institution. Wellesley recognizes in its stories a deep sense of responsibility and a “civility and intactness” that we sometimes take for granted, but that visitors (or those who have been away for a time) often notice and commend. The college at its best is experienced as a place of warmth and caring, affection and generosity.

The picture of Wellesley that emerges from our stories, furthermore, is a scholarly community with high expectations of members who set and achieve goals. People here are purposeful and intentional (and often rather intense). The college opens many pathways to success, responds well to individual initiative, and works hard to value every member.

And Wellesley perpetuates what the commission called “cycles of empowerment” -- processes through which our students, having been empowered here, go out and find ways to empower others. The commission wondered about the extent to which any of these qualities may be influenced by Wellesley’s status as a women’s college, but drew no firm conclusions. Maybe you’ll have thoughts about that. We did conclude that we choose to remain a women’s college.

Members were quick to point out -- as we were naming Wellesley’s assets -- that we are uncomfortable making such claims for ourselves. They cautioned that a strong (“conformist”) culture tends to exclude some people, and that a “self-congratulatory” culture can stifle innovation, even become “ossified.”

In fact, this tendency towards self-critique and skepticism is another cardinal aspect of the college’s strength. It, too, is an essential thread in the master narrative. And, like any strength, both self congratulation and self criticism can become liabilities when overused.

But the story telling highlighted Wellesley’s core values and a felt sense of the college at its best. It reminded us, even as we worried that it might be masking our limitations, that if we can be these things some of the time for some of us, then surely we can be them more of the time for more of us -- if we pay attention. And this belief freed the commission to begin examining with genuine curiosity some of the places where Wellesley may be stuck or falling short.

By the end of the year, the commission was holding a blend of optimism and caution about what the future may hold, hardly surprising, given the temper of the times. On one hand, it was clear that almost all the elements of our hopes for Wellesley in 2015 are already manifest, in varying degrees, at the college now.

On the other hand, we emerged with a sense of relative urgency about the need for change. Everyone on the commission recognized the truth in the comment at our last meeting that “if Wellesley wants to remain Wellesley, the college will have to change itself – in deep, not surface ways.” The status quo began to look like a vanishing option (or a reckless one) in a world that is changing much faster than the college as a whole seems willing, or able, to move.

We find ourselves -- more than halfway through this first decade of a new millennium -- at a time of rapid, accelerating, often unsettling change. Daily we hear and see reminders of geopolitical, socioeconomic, and environmental instabilities that threaten to complicate the lives of the next generation, perhaps profoundly. (How many have seen the movie, An Inconvenient Truth? -- a sobering message).

The most influential factor in Wellesley’s future is going to be high-velocity change – technical, economic, social, ecological, and moral forces that are going to reshape the contexts in which all of us live out our lives. This means that the prime task of education (now perhaps more than ever) will be to enable students to see with new eyes.

You’ll have to be adaptable and you’ll need richer images of the future (so that you can see yourselves in it, not hold it at arm’s length). You’ll need a lot of practice testing theories and assumptions against the realities of a world that moves at warp speed, as you so often do, too.

We’ll need to figure out how to help you learn to slow down, make choices, and see that over-commitment undermines the ability to be committed and to engage fully those pursuits that matter most – intellectual pursuits, in our case, the reason we are here -- to learn and keep on learning, and to tend the flame of honest inquiry, as we see anti-intellectualism rising all around us. Nothing we do, nothing, is as urgent – or important – as student learning is. Student learning will be our top priority, the commission concluded.

To advance student learning, the college, too, will have to be flexible and adaptive, grounded in reality, able to see the future with open eyes. The two Wellesley mantras that can kill even the best idea are, first, we have never tried it and it can’t work here; it’s not the Wellesley way and, second, we tried it once 20 years ago and it was a dismal failure; it’s not the Wellesley way. The commission wished that “the Wellesley way” (used in that way to stifle innovation) will -- by 2015 -- be a faint memory.

By the end of the year, the commission had come more clearly to see what Wellesley could be, with effort and determination – an even better Wellesley in 2015 for the investment of time and effort now … and we will be circulating those thoughts widely – for your consideration and your ideas, to carry us through this new, transitional year.

The commission’s image of Wellesley’s future will be contained in a sizeable draft report we’ll be distributing widely this month. In a nutshell, we identified structures, systems, and traditions at Wellesley -- and a very strong culture – parts of which we deeply value … and other parts of which are holding the college back.

The commission discussed these impediments at length and with uncommon candor and imagined a future in which “members of the college community will have developed new ways of interacting that are under girded by trust and by the assumption that problems can be solved, barriers can be overcome, and dreams can come true. Wellesley will be a community not of competing interests but of common vision and aspirations.”

In my view, the commission’s work (on top of groundwork we have been laying for a decade or more) opens five new possibilities for the college -- if it chooses to take them up. Over the next several years, Wellesley has the opportunity:

• To release faculty creativity for continuous academic renewal;
• To reframe the question of student success & learning;
• To make of the college’s diversity a special strength;
• To stabilize Wellesley on a stronger financial footing; and
• To prepare for an uncertain future.

I spell these possibilities out in the writing I did this summer, and I encourage everyone to read, and digest, and discuss the 2015 documents when they appear later this month. The work of the commission is intended as an opening, not a closing -- as a beginning, not an ending. All of us are eager to extend outward into wider circles the honest, appreciative, and probing thought about the college’s future that the 2015 Commission found so engrossing and so meaningful all last year.

In the end, I think perhaps the most profound discovery from the year’s work was that many thoughtful and informed members of this college community have ideas about how they can be contributing more to the quality of the institution and the depth of students’ learning -- if impediments can be removed – and, further, that they have the appetite to do so. That is a remarkable asset for any organization, the more so for one whose members are as brilliant, complicated, diverse, and passionate as Wellesley’s are.

In anticipation, then, of the conversation I hope we can have, I want to leave you this afternoon with a poem by William Stafford.

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear; the darkness around us is deep.

The darkness around us is deep – I know we all sense this is true -- but I have come to know this beautiful college as one of those magical places on earth capable of holding the light. I have every confidence in the future of this extraordinary institution. I have every confidence in you.

And I am looking forward with such deep pleasure to spending one more year, awake and in your company. May it be a year of learning, exploration, discovery and growth – a new beginning -- for each and every one of us – and may it be equally so for the college as a whole.

Happy new year. Have a good one. Do it!

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