Alumnae Leadership Council
Wellesley College
October 3, 1999

Diana Chapman Walsh
President
Wellesley College

I hope you've all enjoyed the weekend, reconnecting with old friends, making new ones (as Wellesley women always do), becoming re-energized for the work you're taking up for the College. And for your selfless taking up of Wellesley's work, I can't begin to thank you enough; it makes all the difference, this work you do for us, more than you can know.

Perhaps you've even had this weekend a few fleeting encounters with your former selves (I hope so) an ancient and vivid memory, a wave of nostalgia, or a new flash of insight into who it is you once were, or who it is you have become--or are becoming.

Speaking of becoming, it was Oct. 1, 1993, almost exactly six years ago, that I completed my first official day as Wellesley's 12th president with a speech at the opening dinner at Alumnae Leadership Council. The following year Council was held in conjunction with a celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Alumnae Achievement Award, a huge and festive affair.

Ever since, this occasion has held special meaning for me, over and above the welcome opportunity it always affords to see and thank the top volunteer leaders of the Alumnae Association, a special gathering of special supporters of a special institution. Council provides me a chance--in the company of knowledgeable and loyal observers who aren't on the campus every day--to take stock of where we are and where we are headed at the opening of each new academic year.

Today, as I reflect on where I am in the evolution of my own leadership (this being a weekend dedicated to leadership) I'm tempted to say to you that we are embarking on an exciting new adventure--phase two or act two of my presidency, Incipit Vita Nova all over again. There's truth in that to be sure, but the countervailing truth is that we can't speak it yet. It's not quite time for opening night; we are, at this moment, engaged in a backstage conversation.

A year from now, as we celebrate our 125th anniversary and publicly launch a new five-year comprehensive campaign, you will hear me giving different kinds of talks--more formal speeches invoking the history of the College--its deep purposes, high ideals, the great opportunities and obligations that lie ahead.

Instead if that, this morning, I want to bring you backstage, where I hope you will join me in imagining, in a preliminary way, the drama in which we'll be participants when the curtain goes up, the inner resources all of us can bring to the roles we'll be playing, and the satisfactions we can anticipate when we've completed a successful run.

We will be successful; of that I am quite confident. And I know our efforts will make a difference--to the future of this College we love, and to the life options of women everywhere. Last Thursday, at midnight, Radcliffe College ceased to exist. We are positioning Wellesley for another century of strength and service.

The century we're now completing, and the past two decades in particular, have been very good to this College. You've heard this weekend about some of what's been happening on campus, and you've had a chance to meet Lee Cuba, our splendid new dean, and to hear about his plans. Few things escape the notice of Wellesley alumnae, I've discovered, and I'm sure it hasn't escaped yours that these past six years at the College have been an intense period of self-scrutiny, of ferment and innovation.

Just to point out some of the most salient markers along that road (in case one or two did elude your notice), last May we saluted and thanked Gail Heitler Klapper '65 and Nancy Harrison Kolodny '64 at the close of their highly successful six- and seven-year terms as chair of the board and dean of the college, respectively.

These two powerful partners of mine helped lead the College through a remarkable period of prosperity, collegiality, vibrancy, and widely-heralded success, and a period, too, of unremitting and effective efforts to enhance the excellent liberal arts education we offer our students and to strengthen our infrastructures, material and human.

We tallied a list of some of their accomplishments--Gail's and Nancy's--in citations the Board presented each of them in May. The lists are long and impressive, but some highlights include:

a comprehensive review and reform of the curriculum and the weekly schedule--Lee Cuba spoke to you about that and about the many derivative curricular and co-curricular innovations that are under way --

• in quantitative reasoning, global education, experiential learning, instructional technology, and interdisciplinary teaching and learning, among other areas;
  
• enhanced systems of peer review of Wellesley's faculty and academic programs;
  
• new records in philanthropic giving to the College (David Blinder brought you that story yesterday);
  
• new structures for managing the endowment, which will (Wall St. willing) soon pass the billion-dollar mark (now there's a milestone!);
  
• tough new fiscal planning guidelines aimed at the affordability of a Wellesley education;
  
• a systematic study of our admissions program, new recruiting materials, and a major enhancement to financial aid (you heard from Ellen Goldberg Luger '83 about the wonderful class of '03);
  
• a comprehensive campus master plan, the first since 1921 (you've heard a lot about that);

and the successful launch of --

• the Wellesley Centers for Women, a synergistic alliance between the Stone Center and the Center for Research on Women;
  
• the Davis Museum and Cultural Center, solidly established as one of the nation's great college museums;
  
• the Multifaith Religious and Spiritual Life program, a national model of how to celebrate religious diversity and how to reconnect higher education to its spiritual roots;
  
• the Ruhlman Conference, our newest tradition, a rousing celebration of student intellectual achievement and student-faculty collaboration;
  
• the Knapp Media and Technology Center, the place to 'hang out' on a campus now touted as one of the '100 most wired' (according to Yahoo! Magazine, a scholarly source) and as a technological innovator among liberal arts colleges. At Wellesley, of course, it's the women who are the hackers and webmasters (seniors' best selling T-shirt last year: MIT: where the odds are good and the goods are odd);
  
• a new summer school, started on a pilot basis this past summer as a way to generate some new revenue, extend our reach, and use this beautiful campus better during the summer months;

and many other innovations, all designed to strengthen the quality of campus intellectual life. It is quite a story of institutional renewal and growth.

Now, I said I wanted to take you backstage, so let me say a word about how we've been working. These new initiatives, and many others like them, have come mostly through decentralized, bottom-up approaches. We've been consciously cultivating leadership wherever we find fertile soil (creative leadership from students, faculty, staff, and trustees, often working together).

We've organized ad hoc groups, task forces, multi-constituency committees to tackle big strategic questions for the college, and given them focused, time-limited assignments, sometimes with outside consultants to bring technical expertise. We've asked them to collaborate well, to consult widely, and to design inquiring systems that will challenge our assumptions and maximize our creativity.

We've linked these investigations, often, to the administrative units or standing committees responsible for making and implementing decisions on the particular topic, so that, whenever feasible, good ideas can be implemented as they emerge--the quick victories that can sometimes open a whole new vista. In this era of rapid change, organizations need planning approaches that are flexible and fluid. We've deliberately moved away from top-down models: the plan-now-act-later templates that all too often produce final reports that are too little too late.

In all of this, the north star toward which we are orienting is our burning desire to ensure that Wellesley remain as vital, vibrant, and relevant in the next century as it has been in the one about to close. We are working to find the right balance of continuity and change, to be both judicious and dogged in our pursuit of regeneration and renewal.

So, where is Wellesley headed? There's a long answer to that question, full of all the rich detail from all this planning and thinking--the 'whole big mess' (for those who were at the student panel) that Sherry Hogan--the Davis scholar--said yesterday her sociology professor, Susan Silbey encourages her to lay out on the table.

But there's a short answer too. Quite simply, where I hope Wellesley is headed is not all that different from where Wellesley has been, except that the world is changing and we need to adapt. We can ensure that in the century ahead Wellesley will continue to embody, in everything the College does and is, the very best of a residential liberal education.

We can ensure that Wellesley will be the place to look for an education that is excellent, challenging, rigorous, as well as inspiring and transformative, an education that attends to the basics and makes the vital connections that are the heart of real learning.

We can ensure that we are educating the whole woman for a whole life, a life of meaning, learning, connection. We can sustain a vibrant and cohesive community, with all its creative tension, all its passion and celebration. We can extend our reach--from South Natick to South Africa and around the globe--and we must work very hard to make a Wellesley education as widely affordable as we possibly can.

You'll be hearing more (much more) about these hopes and dreams in the weeks and months ahead, so let me circle back now to the theme of our leadership--yours and mine--as we enter this new phase of work on behalf of the College.

Last year, as I began focusing more seriously on a question that's been on my mind--who I might be as the leader of the next campaign for Wellesley--I was mindful of some of the unspoken, but potent, assumptions that structure the way such activities are generally construed. When you begin to examine critically the conceptual systems that govern the fund raising efforts of non-profit organizations, it's striking how much of the thinking is couched in a language of war.

We launch a 'campaign' when we have our 'strategies,' 'tactics,' and 'targets' lined up (strategies, we secretly hope, that will defeat our competitors).

We assemble a 'war chest' and we're careful to 'keep some powder dry.'

We structure internal contests--between donors, classes, regions. We have our front-line battalions and our headquarters staff.

In our (very legitimate) desire to 'rally the troops' and attack the target, we hope that the campaign won't assume a life of its own (as the Pentagon does); we hope it will remain only a means to a larger end.

The problem is that the metaphor of war, so pervasive in our culture, is far more than a linguistic trope. It organizes our thoughts, structures our actions, defines our reality.

And therein lies my dilemma. As I've grown in this role as Wellesley's 12th president, I've become increasingly clear that what I want to be offering is a leadership of peace. So I work very hard to avoid subtle invitations to enter a world of war. And I try to invite others to join me in a different world, one where we are asking how we can be most alive, how we can be joyful and loose, how we can deepen our relationships and support one another in an ongoing process of discovery, learning, and growth, how we can help each another find the courage to be true to ourselves.

I try to reach out to people who seem ready to explore how we can work, and teach, and learn together in collaborative teams, with wider margins for error, more room for risk and experimentation, more shared--and explicit--tasks and a clearer division of labor, greater appreciation of a whole range of contributions that are needed and available, more accountability to one another for results we produce.

Now, I trust you are not hearing me advocating a brand of leadership that is passive, soft, and placating, that avoids conflict at all costs and collapses into interpersonal fusion, confusing the relationship and the task. I mean to be saying quite the opposite. The times demand leadership that is tougher, clearer, cleaner, more honest and authentic than that.

The challenges society faces at century's end don't lend themselves to straightforward solutions where the technicians can be buffered from ambiguity and complexity to do their specialized work. Today's problems are much messier than that (Professor Silbey is right). And so are Wellesley's challenges complex and messy.

We're dealing every day with issues like the place of multiculturalism in a liberal education; the tensions between unity and pluralism; how to preserve spaces in a diverse community for respectful and honest conflict as a generative force and still maintain the trust and civility that are essential for learning to occur; the promises and perils of informational technology; the impact of globalization on what and how we teach, the commercialization of higher education and the signs of a consumer revolt. Issues like these open very quickly to questions of meaning, and purpose and value. They take us into the unknown, where we need multiple vantage points from which to see and assess reality.

I firmly believe that the organizations that will survive and thrive in these times of rapid and accelerating change will be those in which people are openly confronting the ambiguity, uncertainty, discomfort, and conflict that are the crucibles of learning, where they are thrashing out their disparate understandings and experiences and developing a common conception of where they want to go and why. And I firmly believe that this kind of respectful and tough engagement of real and meaningful difference is the true path of peace.

So that's where my head has been--incubating this metaphor of peace--and now it's time to prepare to launch a war-like campaign. How to reconcile the two? One possible way out was suggested in a lovely talk Tim Peltason, of our English Department, gave the first years last month. We inaugurated a new tradition this year as the capstone of orientation--a thought-provoking lecture, which we intend to ask one of our most distinguished faculty members to present each year. Tim's was brilliant, so much so, in fact, that Alice Hummer graciously scrambled to insert it, in toto, into the next issue of the alumnae magazine. You'll love it.

Tim organized his talk around F. Scott Fitzgerald's observation that 'The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.' Learning to hold a tension like that--to tolerate ambiguity--is the mark, too, of a first-rate education, so I could just tell myself that I will gird my loins for war even as I continue to explore what it would mean to lead from a commitment to peace.

But another option presented itself, serendipitously, last year, and I want to leave you with that story, in closing this talk, as another way of thinking about the work that lies ahead. I've told this story before, but never to a group this big.

Last October, on a very busy Friday--it was Family Weekend--I rushed home at around 2:00 to change my clothes. I had been out straight all day (indeed all week) and I still had three big obligations. I suddenly realized that I had skipped lunch, so I found a bagel, cut it in half and headed for the front door of the president's house.

The doorbell rang, and I assumed it was a delivery or a worker--someone the housekeeper could handle (I was late)--so I opened the door quickly, expecting to dash right by, only to find myself face to face with an odd entourage. I recognized our new Buddhist advisor, who said brightly, 'Oh, we're so glad you're home. We've brought you Maha Ghosananda, the Dali Lama of Cambodia. He wanted to meet you.'

This was one of those cosmic (and comic) moments that draws you up short. Here I was with half a bagel in each hand, dashing out the door, a bundle of preoccupation and nerves. I had stopped home for just a minute (which I almost never do), was late for my next appointment, and was now confronted with this unexpected delegation of serene mindfulness, assuming that of course I was at home to receive them.

I babbled a few things, feeling very silly to be so frantic and rushed, handed the better half my bagel to the sweetly-smiling monk, and dashed off. For the rest of the day I chided myself for the opportunity I had missed. I should have bagged the next appointment, invited the group in, and basked in their aura of peace and calm. I felt even worse that night when I got to the World Wide Web and discovered what an extraordinary spiritual leader Ghosananda is. But then I went on about my business and forgot the incident.

Two days later, on Sunday morning, we had a multi-faith service for Family Weekend. Afterward, Victor Kazanjian and I walked back to the president's house, again something we seldom do. We settled on the terrace, with some orange juice, and got to talking about Maha Ghosananda's visit the previous Friday. Suddenly we felt a presence and looked up to see the monk standing on the edge of the terrace. It was an awesome moment.

We ate fruit and bread together, drank orange juice and talked for about 45 minutes. He carried himself with a quiet simplicity and an utter lack of pretense or guile. He was playful, whimsical, warm, and sweet; his smile and laugh were radiant and the easy silences we shared were suffused with spirit. His presence felt like a gift to Victor and me, a generous gift that inspired gratitude and a an impulse to reach out and support his journey in whatever ways we could.

The impact of his teaching came as much from his presence as from the short lessons and parables he offered in a quirky and unstructured way, as if responding to the whim of the moment. He showed us the many pockets in his down vest, and their curious contents: a U.S. passport wrapped in an old warranty notice, the German translation of his book, folded in a scrap of bubble wrap. He laughed at himself for failing to adhere to the Buddhist injunction to travel light.

When he said good-bye, he walked down the stone steps toward the rose garden and to the path by the lake, without once looking back. We sensed that his short visit had given us something we had no way of absorbing fully right away, but something that would stay with us forever.

And since that visit, I've been wondering what it would mean if we were to conduct a fund raising campaign in the spirit of Maha Ghosananda. We would be traveling on a journey, connecting people to an institution we represent by virtue of our roles, an institution that has great meaning in our lives and theirs. We might empty our pockets for the people we meet, offering them opportunities to recall the personal meaning of the college, to reconnect to its values, to support and care for it.

We might just sit in the well of meaning with someone on a visit, leaving a silence for something unpredictable to happen, listening to discern what we could create together. There would be a continuity and an integrity to the encounters, however infrequent; they would exist in a long stream of connection, extending through many years.

This sounds a bit quixotic, I know, but it's an interesting thought experiment. I'll leave you to mull it over, as Ghosananda did for us. I'm happy to answer any questions you may have about anything you've seen or heard this weekend (or anything that was missing). But first I want to thank you, again, for your indispensable support of our alma mater. It means a very great deal to everyone here, and a very great deal to me. Thank you.

Betsy Lawson elawson@wellesley.edu
Office for Public Information
Date Created: October 22, 1999
Last Modified: October 22, 1999