Bates College
Founder's Day Convocation
"Living Our Stories Well"
April 3, 2000

Diana Chapman Walsh
President
Wellesley College

I'm deeply honored to be here for your Founders' Day Convocation. It's been a pleasure to contemplate--off and on for the past few months--what it was that drew me here.

It was not personal or family ties to Bates; regrettably, I have none. In fact, my only brother and brother-in-law went to a rival college in Maine that had best remain nameless, although it too starts with a B as does the town it's in, 17 miles east of here.

I'm told that there are at least 22 Wellesley alumnae in the audience, but that's a new piece of news; I didn't expect to find you here. Thanks for coming.

My admiration and respect for Bates were certainly inducements, reinforced by having spent some time over the past few months browsing your Web site, absorbing your presentation of self, and admiring some of your notable alumnae/i.

I, of course, was especially intrigued by Mary Mitchell from the class of '69 --1869 that is--the woman graduate, in a class totaling seven that year, from whom Bates derives the distinction of being the first co-educational college in the northeast. She earned her degree a decade ahead of our first graduate and exactly a century ahead of our most famous one (currently, anyway).

You have many other graduates worthy of admiration: Benjamin Mays '20, Edmund Muskie '36, and Peter Gomes '65 to name just three. The Reverend Dr. Gomes is another link between our two colleges. As a recent Wellesley trustee, he was instrumental in the creation of our multi-faith program of religious and spiritual life, which has much in common with the creative work being done here by Kerry Maloney and her colleagues in your chaplain's office.

One striking difference between Bates and Wellesley may have attracted me too. I couldn't help but notice how much easier you seem to be on your presidents -- or how much hardier they are, if it's nature over nurture. Your six presidents have spanned an amazing 144 years, 20 more years than twice as many presidents have logged at Wellesley. And we've always thought of ourselves as a healthy and helpful lot.

Our stories do converge again in the justified pride--and enduring inspiration--our two institutions take in our histories, and that was certainly a draw. Like Bates, Wellesley was founded by social reformers committed to egalitarian ideas and principles of social justice, people with an ardent belief that those who are rigorously educated will stand for what is right and good.

Bates prepares its graduates, according to your mission statement, for "service, leadership, and obligations beyond themselves." Wellesley's motto, selected by our founder from the book of Matthew, is "not to be ministered unto, but to minister." Students in the irreverent '70s wanted to revise it thus: not to be a minister's wife, but to be a minister.

In the letter President Harward wrote to invite me here, he described your early leaders as Free Baptists who founded the Free Party in Maine, advocated abolition and women's rights, and established the underground railroad in New England. It may have been the underground railroad that really hooked me subliminally, and I'll circle back to that.

Your president also invited me to reflect on a "new synthesis" we might envisage between the early "faith universities" and those now rooted in "reason," a question I've been thinking about. I, in turn, invite you to contemplate that question from your own perspectives, because I certainly don't profess to have it fully sorted out, yet, in my own mind.

It does seem clear that over the last century or more, institutions of higher learning in this country split off almost entirely from their religious roots, gradually and without much fanfare, first to accommodate science, and then diversity.

Our secular national educational culture gradually eclipsed religious--and spiritual--perspectives almost completely in the academy. Professional scholars felt acutely the need to be autonomous and free to pursue their causal chains wherever they might lead, to seek truth through confirmation (or reason) rather than through revelation (or faith).

Now we find ourselves in a complicated postmodern era in which such a rigid dichotomy trips us up in many ways. We see, on the one hand, rapid growth in religious fundamentalism and intolerance in a variety of brutalizing forms. On the other hand, we have a confused relativism and a soft universalism that encourage us to accept all arguments as equally valid and true.

As just one small example, I heard on the radio the other day of a recent survey suggesting that more than three quarters of American adults believe that creationism should be taught as an alternative to evolution. Others argue that the "environmentalist" perspective should be evenly counterbalanced in schools by conflicting points of view--slash and burn I guess we'd have to call it.

It's the "Nightline" model for framing public policy: polarize the debate and give each pole equal time and weight, preferably with some shouting and invective to enliven the show. This may make good entertainment and keep us up past midnight, but it's hardly a formula for carving out our common ground.

What we need, if we are to find the commonality that will keep us whole, is intensive and hard work, applying reliable empirical warrants and standards of validity and truth-seeking to the big questions that separate us. We need frameworks that build on the best insights we can glean from the scientific method while they also secure us from the harm--even at times the evil--perpetuated far too often during the 20th century in the name of objective rationality run amok.

And if these standards of validity and truth-seeking are not firmly anchored in the academy--protected, perpetuated, advanced there--then they will surely atrophy. No other institution in our society is as directly responsible for the essential task of holding open a space, in Parker Palmer's words, for a community of truth-seeking to flourish. That's uniquely our job.

So that is one element of the powerful case for conserving what is precious in the reason-based universities, and there is at least this additional one. Those of us who have made our lives in the academy treasure the refuge this pure sphere offers us. We are free in this place to be anyone from anywhere; all we have to bring are our minds. For women scholars, this liberation from oppressive social categories is all the more singular and sweet.

But we have paid dearly for our commitment to scientific rationality and our freedom from institutional constraints. The price has been a growing suspicion not only of organized religion but more broadly of the spiritual dimension of teaching, learning, and knowing.

We have emerged from the 20th century fearful of admitting (even to ourselves) that we have a place of knowing (each of us) that speaks directly from the heart and soul, not instead of the intellect--we exist to nourish that--but in harmony with the intellect in all its beauty and power.

I want to argue today--in the aura established here by your visionary founders--that one of the disciplines we can draw on in our lifelong search for that harmony is a practice I will refer to as living our stories well. What might it mean to live our stories as the German poet Rilke imagined we might live our questions? I'd like to try out an example.

I said before that it was the underground railroad reference that caught my eye. It caused me to override the strong advice of my schedulers and to accept your invitation to venture up here to the frozen north at an exceedingly busy time of the year.

And the resonance--the irresistibility--of that particular reference was a synchronicity it suggested between the story of Bates College and my own evolving story.

Shortly before your president's letter arrived in my office, coincidentally, I was copied on an e-mail exchange about the underground railroad. I want to read it to you and then reflect on how it might illustrate this notion of living our stories well.

It begins with a query from my 10-year old nephew, Gregory, in St. Louis, to my 50-something first cousin, David, in Harrisburg. Dave has taken up our great-grandfather's role as the unofficial family historian. (He went to Lehigh, but we'll forgive him that).

Greg (who is in fourth grade and could still confound his father and come to Bates) was working on his social studies homework, which asked for a series of definitions including: abolition, underground railroad, sit-in (Rosa Parks), segregation, civil rights, Civil War. His mother (my sister--the one who married the Bowdoin man) told Greg about his relatives who where abolitionists, and helped him with an e-mail to Cousin Dave.

Dave's reply was still in my mind when I received your invitation. He wrote at length. This is in part what he said:

Dear Cousin Greg:

Your family has been involved in abolition since Colonial times. I'm still active in the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (which still exists). Its full name is 'The Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, and the Improvement of the Condition of the African Race.'

Pennsylvania was a leader in opposing slavery, which had been started in the New World soon after Columbus arrived in 1492. The Germantown Friends Meeting issued the first organized protest against slavery in the New World -- in 1688 -- nearly 200 years later, but only six years after 13 Quakers, including our German ancestor, Thomas Kunders, founded Germantown. They had come to America seeking freedom, and equality, and respect for their differences. There was no place for slavery in the world they wanted to create.

In the years before the Civil War, abolitionists encouraged southern slaves to escape to the north. To help the slaves reach freedom, they organized the underground railroad, which was not a railroad at all, but a way of sneaking from place to place to get north, traveling under cover of night and hiding during daylight hours.

Among the places slaves could safely hide were homes and barns and underground root cellars of abolitionists. These safe houses were called "stations". The abolitionists who guided the escaping slaves from station to station were called "conductors." Using code words enabled them to talk about an ordinary form of transportation without using escape language that might give their secret away.

Members of our family, Thomas and Hanna Atkinson, operated a station at their farm in Upper Dublin, outside Philadelphia, where they lived beginning in 1849. Thomas was a wheelwright and a successful farmer. He is your great-great-great-great-grandfather (four greats). Your great-great-grandmother heard all about the Upper Dublin "station" from her mother-in-law. She told me the story one day when I was your age, about 10.

A secret room on the second floor had a tiny door, hidden behind a bureau. The escaping slaves were brought in at night, given food and water, and advised to be completely silent, sometimes for several days, until it was safe to move on to the next station. Their destination was Canada, where the Federal agents couldn't pursue them. If a Federal agent came to the house, a signal was given to the slaves--as many as 15 in the room--to lie silently on the floor until the danger passed. The slaves and the Atkinson underground railroad station were never discovered and many southern slaves found their way to freedom after the safe nights they spent at the Atkinson farm.

After the Civil War, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society looked back at its 1774 mission statement and realized that even though slavery had been abolished, much remained to be done to "improve the condition of the African race." They started using their money and their influence to help southern blacks. Many of your relatives remained active in the Society. Three served as president; the third, your Grandmother Gwen, was the first woman president.

Even after desegregation, the Abolition Society had work to do. In the 1950s and 1960s, civil rights leaders risked their lives to fight for a better life. One courageous example was Rosa Parks, who recently received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.

In Philadelphia, there were women--and men--like Rosa Parks. One was Gladys Rawlins, who died this year at her apartment at Foulkeways, the Quaker retirement community where Grandmother Gwen is living now.

Gladys helped organize sit-ins at restaurants in Philadelphia. She said it was very difficult. She told me that even the black waiters in the white restaurants sometimes opposed the black demonstrators because a racial problem might cost them their jobs. Black waiters would pour a whole shaker of salt on Gladys's meal before bringing it, hoping she would leave.

Gladys was one of many black leaders active in the Abolition Society. In recent years, its membership has been about half black, half white. While some blacks disapproved of her causing trouble with her sit-ins, others (more radical activists) denounced her as an "Uncle Tom."

One thing I learned from Gladys is that people can be very different in spite of their same color, or very much the same despite their different color. Gladys was a teacher and social worker who got black and white children to hold hands and called it a "Green Circle" because, she told me, "green is the color of growing things." She told children to form Green Circles wherever they went. She told me that Green Circles had gone all around the world.

Gladys told me these stories some years ago, when I had driven her home to Foulkeways from an Abolition Society meeting and visited her apartment. She went on to say that even at Foulkeways, with its Quaker values, she felt like an outsider sometimes.

I said, "Gladys, maybe you need to start a Green Circle here at Foulkeways."

"David, I am old," she replied. "I have energy only for a very small Green Circle. Before you go, have a Green Circle here with me. That would be a good start."

We laughed and were sad at what that meant, as the two of us stood there in her tiny apartment holding hands for a moment--a little Green Circle of one old black woman and one (then) young white man.

Gladys said that maybe by the time I was old and living at Foulkeways there would be many Green Circles and skin color would matter less. She also said--as she told so many school children--that I should make Green Circles wherever I went. I've never forgotten that challenge from her. You'd have a hard time finding a better person than Gladys, and a hard time finding a better idea than her Green Circle.

I hope this helps you, Greg, not only in fourth grade social studies, but in always trying to be someone as good and decent as Gladys Rawlins was, and your Grandmother Gwen, and your Quaker ancestors, extending back more than 300 years.

Love,

Cousin Dave

This struck me as a lovely interchange across the generations, not so different really from the act of assembling the whole Bates College community and asking them to take an hour out of their full lives to recommit to the story of the founding of the college.

I haven't heard yet how Greg's project came out, but he will surely come back to Dave's message from time to time. And I'm certain that many of the people assembled here today have other issues on their minds than the Free Baptists who risked their lives and founded this college, but each of you will find yourselves coming back from time to time to Bates's story as a touchstone for the meaning of your lives, and what you need to do to honor that legacy.

Because our stories--if we can keep them alive across the generations (if we can live them well, as Cousin Dave has done)--our stories help us forge our identities and organize our struggles. They embolden us to venture into new and foreign terrain. They spark our imaginations, ignite our intellect. Our stories presuppose, yet challenge and remake, the moral order out of which our lives derive their meaning and take their shape. Our stories build character … and community.

A community's stories enable it to know itself, to know what is important and what is true. Stories can weave a common identity. "I will tell you something about stories," the novelist Leslie Marmon Silko said, "They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled."

And Dave's story for Greg resonated with me to questions I face at Wellesley, wondering about my personal responsibility for the legacies of slavery, racism and intolerance. There are no simple answers.

At Wellesley we are working hard--and this is not easy work --to ensure that we continue to provide an education that is transformative--an education that frees the mind and spirit from bias and stereotype, that opens up new worlds and world views.

Surely this is the compelling rationale for assembling a diverse student body in a residential learning environment: the idea that students from vastly different backgrounds will shake one another's assumptions and spark one another's curiosity.

But people of diverse backgrounds can't come together and suspend their suspicions and hostilities, can't let down their guard to learn from one another, until they are secure enough in their own identities and bedrock commitments that they don't have to risk everything to open themselves to others.

And that kind of security emerges--slowly, tentatively--out of trusting relationships, out of ongoing dialogue exploring differences, respectful dialogue designed both to affirm the particularity of any one of our experiences and to open up a space to explore not only our differences, but also the ways in which we are interdependent. We must learn to explore the common truths that reside somewhere in the spaces between us, and our imperfect understandings of one another, as the abolitionists tried to do.

What we can hope is that those of us who persist in this hard work of differentiation and integration within the safe spaces we open up on college campuses (the stations on another kind of underground railroad) will go out into the world and work to transform it in important ways.

We can hope that those who have lived for a time in our learning communities will go out into the world and take responsibility for the contexts in which they find themselves -- in workplaces, families, communities … that they will commit their lives to the hard work of confronting their blind spots, grappling with their contradictions, and acting with courage and conviction in the larger world--as the Quaker and Free Baptist abolitionists did.

Those who succeed at this task will come to know themselves to be strong from the inside out. They will travel on a spiritual journey … liberating their own minds and spirits from parochialism and ideology, questioning assumptions, shaking loose of prejudice, exploring and discovering themselves in an expanding world of interlocking responsibilities. They will learn that when they are defeated or discouraged (as they will sometimes be) they can renew their inspiration through stories they live fully and well.

These will be the followers of Albert Schweitzer, who said, "I will make my life my argument," and of Mahandas Gandhi's dictum to "be the change you want to see." These will be the conductors who will bring the railroad to freedom, finally, above ground and into the bright sunlight where it has always belonged. You will be these people, you hardy travelers from Maine. I salute you and I thank you for the pleasure and privilege of marking this special occasion with you.

Betsy Lawson elawson@wellesley.edu
Office for Public Information
Date Created: May 3, 2000
Last Modified: May 3, 2000