Opening Convocation
"Resilience"
Wellesley College
September 6, 2000

Diana Chapman Walsh
President
Wellesley College

Welcome to Wellesley College in this our 125th year. Welcome faculty, staff and students. Welcome trustees and distinguished guests. A special welcome to all who are new today, and to those for whom this will be your final year. You will always be part of this College, wherever you may go.

To the class of 2001, we look forward to a year of growth and discovery under your leadership. To the first-years--and all the students--it’s wonderful to have you here. We are renewed by your high spirits and high expectations, moved by your curiosity, enlivened by your energy.

We have much to celebrate todayand through this anniversary year--much for which to be grateful. We honor the many people out of whose courage, intelligence, and toil this unlikely college has grown into a mighty institution. We honor our past and our future. We commemorate a proud legacy of strength and resilience.

Today opens a festive year of celebration and reflection. Our new schedule is going to be bursting with things to do, and we’ll all be making choices, daily, about how to spend our time. We relish our choices and rejoice in the options we women enjoy. It was not ever so, nor is it certain always to be.

That, in case you missed it, was a subtle subliminal hint to vote in the presidential election. So subtle it probably escaped everyone’s notice. So let me beat the drum just a bit louder. Women were not allowed to vote when Wellesley was founded. No one under 21 could vote when I was a student here (aeons ago, I admit).

Breaking down those barriers involved sacrifice and struggle. Wellesley women were in the thick of it, deeply engaged in efforts to right the wrongs of this world, as I know you students fully intend to be. We salute you for your passion and your commitments beyond yourselves. Henry Durant would have too. He said educating women was a "great battle cry for freedom, for right against might."

Wellesley was founded to educate women, to bring their voices into the public realm. Voting is a unique act in which we exercise our choices and our freedoms, an act in which we respect the past and shape the future. Please do vote.

As we recall Wellesley’s past this year, celebrate our accomplishments and mark our milestones, we also have work to do to secure our future. We all have roles to play in charting the course of this institution that we hold in trust for a time, each in our own way.

I want to speak to you today about our resilience--the transformative creativity that has carried us to the threshold on which we stand today. For I believe that resilience is the essence of the legacy bequeathed to us.

This college originated in sorrow and defeat, as the nation was recovering from the Civil War. Henry and Pauline Durant had two children, Harry, born in 1855, and Pauline two years later. Pauline lived only six weeks and Harry died of diphtheria in his eighth year. The Durants were plunged into despair.

But the legacy they left us--the story we live now--is the transformation of that grief into an inspiration. It is a story of living through the worst sort of pain, moving through it--giving it its due--and gradually converting it into a new outcropping of creativity, faith, and generosity. Out of that process of rebirth this College stands today.

The Boston Daily Globe ran a splashy front page spread describing the opening day of the Durants’ new college. It was a big event, and a reporter wrote that "the enthusiasm shown has been such as to warrant the success of the institution for all time to come."

So, was our success instantaneouspreordained, in a sense--woven into the DNA of an institution blessed from the outset by wealth and powerful connections and a depth of commitment rare in this world? Yes and no.

We had a strong start, yes, but success was far from certain, and certainly anything but effortless. Our history is laced through with darker moments, times when we lost our way, times when we turned on each other, conflicts of values and aspiration, ruptures of faith and of trust, challenges from within and without.

One study points out a basic conflict, from our very founding, between Henry Durant’s vision for the College and his wife, Pauline’s. Another argues that the all-female faculty Durant assembled grew weary of his patriarchy and evangelism and began to rebel.

In 1914, the great fire consumed College Hall. Nearly everything was lost. And yet Wellesley converted this catastrophe into a new act of creation, made it the seedbed for our spectacular campus. That story is told in a fascinating new book Professors Fergusson, O’Gorman and Rhodes have written for our anniversary.

In the tumultuous sixties, Wellesley had its donnybrooks too. Some of today’s famous alumnae cut their teeth on those. In the 70s, the wave of co-education threatened to sweep us away. Investment in South Africa split this campus in the ‘80s, as it did so many others.

And the volatile issues of race and difference have remained a crucible in which we have been called, repeatedly, to test and stretch our commitments to one another and our deepest values. But we always come through, stronger and clearer than ever.

Still we face challenges: distance learning, the costs of college, the explosion of knowledge, the culture wars, the pace of change. We can’t help but worry that something precious is being lost, that a whole way of life is being jeopardized by the forces of globalization, the imperatives of the market, the erosion of beliefs and ideals that sustained the academy.

But we know from 125 years of remarkable success that we will meet today’s challenges halfway down the road and forge the new pathways they open for us. What do we know about our resilience? It derives from our faith in ourselves and our ability to convert disappointment and defeat into possibility and hope.

Our resilience is a collective property that grows out of our connections, our values, and our norms as they evolve and change with the arrival of new perspectives. It depends on our ability to forgive one another our inevitable mistakes, to grant our human frailties, to recognize that it is the diversity of gifts that enables us to find our way.

Our resilience is an unending series of new beginnings. It’s no accident, I believe, that the motto Durant inscribed on the College seal is Incipit Vita Nova. Wellesley and Wellesley women are forever beginning new life, over and over again.

Our resilience is our commitment to stay in connection and to use our intelligence--every ounce we can muster--to engage our conflicts, confront our problems, and begin anew. And our resilience is our trust that, one way or another, we will not only prevail, but emerge deeper, wiser, and more whole.

I want to leave you with a personal story as an image for the year. Many of you know that I have been through some heavy waters of my own these past few months, my husband’s brush with death at the end of May (he’s recovering well, I’m happy to report), and the recent death of my dearest friend from our Wellesley days.

I know from the extraordinary support extended to me over these months that many of you have deep personal sorrows of your own and I speak to those now--to the pain we all endure as individuals, and to the endurance of this most resilient of institutions.

Last Thursday I was in Chicago to deliver a eulogy at this friend’s funeral. Our lives were intertwined for 38 years, from the day we arrived on campus. You can imagine how hard it was to say good-by. But the piece of our story I want to offer you is about renewal.

When I received word that Joan was dying, I didn’t know what to do, so I went for a walk, and found myself picking a rose from the garden beside my house, floating it on Lake Waban, and remembering moments we had shared. As I stood there for a moment, a hawk flew close overhead, as if carrying Joan’s spirit. I took some solace in that thought.

A few days later, after Joan died, I was out, very early, with my dog by the lake and heard a strange, harsh noise. I didn’t pay it much heed until it repeated itself three more times, whereupon I looked up and again saw the hawk, in flight, screeching, as though trying to command my attention.

In the eulogy, two days later, I mentioned the hawk and said that Joan will be with me when I see it circling the lake. After the service, we drove to the gravesite. Joan’s family and close friends were led in prayer and then invited to place a rose on her casket. As we said our good-byes, a hawk suddenly appeared in the sky just above us. It circled three times and drifted away.

I leave you with that image as we enter a year in which we know we have issues to address and wounds to heal. We will engage our conflicts with the full seriousness they deserve. I promise you that. And we will be the stronger for it, as our history attests.

I hope we will all live the mysteries of the coming year, live them in gratitude for the gifts we receive, live them in awe of the power at our command, power we owe this resilient College--and this troubled world--to use as thoughtfully and as generously as we possibly can. Have a wonderful year.

Mary Ann Hilll mhill@wellesley.edu
Office for Public Information
Date Created: September 12, 2000
Last Modified: September 12, 2000