Opening Convocation 1999:
"Reasoning Together"

Wellesley College
September 7, 1999

Diana Chapman Walsh
President
Wellesley College

I want to speak today about how we reason together and what it means to be a community whose collective work involves holding an ideal, an ideal of reasoning together in a self-conscious way. And I want to keep it short so we can continue our reasoning together as we socialize, eat, and play together, something we'd like to do more.

One of the highlights of my summer was an overnight stay at the White House, across from the famous Lincoln Bedroom (where the Schechters stayed that night) and where the only signed copy of the Gettysburg Address sits in a case, under a piece of glass. That must have helped inspired me to read, among other books this summer, an elegant little study, by Gary Wills, called Lincoln at Gettysburg. The essence of its message for us is this:

"It would have been hard to predict that Gettysburg -- would become a symbol of national purpose, pride and ideals. Abraham Lincoln transformed the ugly reality into something rich and strangeóand he did it with 272 words. The power of words has rarely been given a more compelling demonstration."

I want us to be keenly aware this year of the power of our words, the poetry of our discourse, of how we converse with each other, choices we make in the way we engage our differences, and of how those choices reflect and shape our institutional purpose, pride, and ideals.

For 123 years, Wellesley College has been a special place of refuge for people committed to the life of the mind and especially for women, too long excluded from such places. Women and men crafted on these 300 rolling acres a special community to embody their deepest values and fondest hopes. They wanted to live the life of the mind and to cordon off a space where scholars could reason well together, respectfully, mindfully, responsibly, and with the eros or love of truth that animated the Greeks.

As a result, I think, of that history, we have been, to an unusual degree a college that integrates individualism and interdependence; one that promotes a communal spirit and a sense of common purpose; that encourages and appreciates everyone's contributions and accomplishments; that addresses human needs for both solitude and support; that attends, in the words of Jane Tompkins, to "social excellence as well as personal achievement." Vladimir Nabokov, who sojourned here in the ë40s, characterized this College as "a rare distinct place, outside time and space."

Now -- we hold this ideal even knowing that quotidian Wellesley is not all these things -- not all of the time for anyone, not any of the time for some. In fact, paradoxically, this caring community can be a lonely place. Feelings of isolation can be exacerbated here by a vague sense that one ought to be cozy and content, as others appear to be. Not so, I'm here to tell youóas many of you have told me.

Why is that? Another of the books I read this summer, Cultivating Humanity by Martha Nussbaum, describes the essential task of a liberal education as "becoming a citizen of the world." This is "a lonely business," she observes --

"It is, in effect, a kind of exileófrom the comfort of assured truths, from the warm nestling feeling of being surrounded by people who share one's convictions and passions. In the writings of Marcus Aurelius (as in those of his American followers Emerson and Thoreau) one sometimes feels a boundless loneliness, as if the removal of the props of habit and convention, the decision to trust no authority but moral reasoning, had left life bereft of a certain sort of warmth and security."

So, warmth and security are not the desiderata of the ideal we are holding together. Rather, we are reaching toward this notion of world citizenship, this act of "cultivating humanity," the title of Nussbaum's book, which she traces to the Roman Stoic philosopher, Seneca, tutor to the young emperor Nero:

"'Soon we shall breathe our last,' Seneca wrote at the end of his treatise on the destructive effects of anger and hatred. 'Meanwhile, while we live, while we are among human beings, let us cultivate our humanity.'"

Cultivating our humanity as informed and ethical citizens, not of some parochial and exclusive identity group but of the human race, this lies at the heart of the Wellesley ideal, the ideal of the kind of community we aspire to be, an ideal we hold collectively, and one that matters very much.

Generations of Wellesley students, faculty, and staff have held this ideal. Much has been at stake: not only civility and peace of mind, or collegiality, and the spirit of collective purpose that can inspire and energize us, as important as those leanings are. At stake has been the deepest meaning of a liberal education.

The challenge Lincoln faced at Gettysburg, as Wills tells the story, is that the founding fathers "did not accomplish the political equality they professed. They did not end slavery. They did not make self-government stable and enduring. They could not do that. The ideal is not captured at once in the real."

And so it is with the ideal Wellesley community--not captured at once in the realónor indeed likely ever to be, any more than will our national dream of radical equality. But new generations can reclaim the ideal, as Lincoln didóand later Martin Luther King--can reshape and reaffirm it, infuse it with fresh meaning, draw new inspiration from it, make it their own.

Our vision of a community that can reason well together speaks to the fundamental purpose of a liberal education, and is essential for its realization. From the beginning, Wellesley was organized around the idea, going back to Plato and Aristotle, that we humans can freeóliberate--our minds if we can develop the discipline of accepting only those beliefs that stand a test of reasonósystematic tests of consistency and thoughtful justification. As Henry Durant said in one of his more fulsome and frequently quoted phrases, "the education of women is one of the world's great battle cries for freedom."

Education for critical thinking, then, for freedom from prejudice and blind ignorance is what we are all about, education involving a special kind of human interaction, a constant testing of our most cherished convictionsóthe ones we most take for granted--against serious and disturbing challenges.

That binds us together, we members of this intellectual community, in a common enterprise. We are committed here to learning from one another everything we can about how a different experience or perspectiveóhow a new insight, argument, or data point--might fundamentally alter my own tentative and provisional notions of what is true. "No experiment can ever prove me right," Einstein said, "a single experiment can always prove me wrong."

Maintaining such a community is an endless and costly project ñ just as maintaining our physical plant is, in case you wondered why you see so much construction all over the campus this year. But we can't hire construction crews to repair cracks in our social foundations. That major maintenance job demands some heavy lifting from every one of us: being here and truly present, listening openly to others, exposing our own thinking to critical scrutiny, taking full responsibility for our truth claims, even at the risk of embarrassment or failure.

Such are the obligations and dutiesóthe ethical claims really--of a community of reason, holding as a collective project the ideal of a liberal education. Ultimately, these same obligations are the demands of citizenship in a democracy, "the great task remaining before us," in Lincoln's immortal words.

At Wellesley, these are the practices that provide opportunities for each student to learnóin a safe and accepting spaceóhow to take up and defend informed positions of her own, how to know, to the extent possible, what she knows -- how she knows it.

This year we have engrossing work to do together. We will be studying whether we need a new campus center, and, if so, what it should do and house and where it should be sited. We will be completing plans for the renovation of Pendleton Hall. We will be reflecting on Wellesley in anticipation of our 125th anniversary next year, asking where we are and have been and where we want to go.

We will be opening a new era in the Office of the Dean of the College and forging new alliances between that office and the Division of Student Life to ensure that we are educating the whole woman for a whole lifeóheart, mind, body, and spirit. "Sound body, sound mind," Tom Leherer quipped, "take your pick." We insist we can have both; so did Henry Durant.

We will weather the storms of Y2K and who-knows-what craziness associated with millennium fever, and we will experience minor disruptions from all that building renovation. Much is new or changed or in the throes of changing: the Chair of the Board of Trustees, the Dean and Associate Deans of the College, the Dean of Students (in her second year) and several members of her staff, the budget office, the treasury office, student financial services, the library, campus police (we'll soon be welcoming a strong new Chief).

We have entirely new recruiting materials and have conferred our last diploma ever in a year beginning with the numeral one. Even trusty Sallie and Lucy have had to yield their places to the more professional and slickóand far more flexible and user-friendly -- system called FirstClass. Amid all this change, our core values can anchor us.

Let us resolve together, then, on this opening day of the millennial year that, whatever else happens, we will reason well together, we will cultivate our humanity, we will hold, honor, and harvest our many differences for all that they can teach us about what we do and do not know, and all of us will ask ourselves, frequently, what we can do to maintain the structures that sustain our common life. And then we will do it.

I am looking forward to a meaningful and fruitful year. I hope all of you will find in it challenge and rich fulfillment. Thank you for coming today, and happy new year.

Betsy Lawson elawson@wellesley.edu
Office for Public Information
Date Created: September 8, 1999
Last Modified: September 14, 1999