San Diego Regional Alumnae Forum
"Conserving and Preserving Wellesley"
March 25, 2000

Diana Chapman Walsh
President
Wellesley College

I'm glad to be here in San Diego for Wellesley's 20th regional forum - with alumnae from regions 8 & 9 of our alumnae association.

These regional events are always great fun and each one is sui generis, bringing a flavor of the region, special talents and interests of the people here. This one is no exception ... with its fascinating ecological theme, Verdant Deserts, Deserted Seas. I hope you all are enjoying it and having the chance to reconnect with old friends and make new ones.

It's clearly harder for you -- from all the way across the country -- to stay connected to the College, so the connections you make among yourselves are especially important to Wellesley's future. Thank you for all the work you do to keep W's name alive way out here in the West. You do important work as ambassadors, helping to identify and bring us future generations of "phenomenal women," as our students like to say.

I've been asked to bring you an update from the College, and specifically to place my remarks within your conference themes of sustainability and conservation. "Conserving and Preserving Wellesley," is the title that was suggested for my talk. That got me thinking about the symbiotic themes of continuity and change.

Standing as we do at a remarkable moment in history -at the flex point between millennia-we are, all of us, I believe, mindful to an unusual degree that we live in a period of extraordinarily rapid social change ... change in American higher education, in the life options open to women, and in the social, economic, and political circumstances of the world we hope our graduates will develop the skills, the wisdom, and the energy to serve -- responsibly, creatively, effectively - as you all are doing: you represent the classes from '33 to '99 (spanning 66 years).

In this fluid (pun intended) environment, I believe our college's ability to continue providing leadership in higher education will depend -- paradoxically -- upon both the clarity and tenacity with which we hew to our fundamental purposes (that's your theme of conservation and preservation) and also on the flexibility and inventiveness with which we embrace an unknowable future. (There was a question to the student panel about traditions. How traditions adapt to changing times - for example, hoop rolling. A student recently emailed me to ask if the lore about walking around Lake Waban and stopping at Tupelo Point required three consecutive times around the lake). In some ways, we are making it up as we go along. Improvisation and flexibility are increasingly important, particularly in rapidly changing times.

So there's no question about it, we need a judicious balance of conservation and change, a sentiment lyrically captured in the image of Mohandas Gandhi, as recalled at Wellesley by his grandson, Arun, at a celebration on campus a few years ago of the Mahatma's 125th birth anniversary. "We must open the windows to allow the breezes to blow over us," Gandhi used to say, "but we must not allow them to blow us over."

I am now my 7th year as president. I have been doing a lot of thinking about the future over these past 6 years - opening a lot of windows-breezes haven't blown us over. Or we've righted ourselves. In that process, our challenges and priorities have become increasingly clear. Exciting time in that respect. A culmination, convergence of sorts.

The past century, and especially the last 25 years have been very good to our alma mater. Wellesley College has been a steady and respected voice for women everywhere-for the gifts they have for the world and the hopes they have for the future.

Our College has had the luxury of the time and resources (material, human, intellectual, symbolic) to engage in very deep questioning and self-scrutiny over many years. We've also felt the necessity of holding ourselves to very high standards because we've been doing an eccentric and daring thing ... no less true today (although in different ways and for different reasons) than was true when founded by Henry and Pauline Durant).

So we've been hard at work looking to the future, and a few of the manifestations of that work include:

• a comprehensive review and reform of the curriculum, new distribution requirements--and many derivative curricular and co-curricular innovations: quantitative reasoning, experiential learning, instructional technology, interdisciplinary teaching and learning, global education (about which more later);
  
  
• an enhanced systems of peer review of Wellesley's faculty and academic programs; a regular process of visiting committees;
  
  
• new structures for managing the endowment, which recently passed the billion-dollar mark (now there's a milestone! -in part because of wise investments. Also, more significant for the long-term health of the College, new records in philanthropic giving - thank you, thank you, thank you;
  
  
• a systematic study of our admissions program, new recruiting materials, and a major enhancement to financial aid (just last year);
  
  
• a comprehensive campus master plan, the first since 1921, to make sure we maintain the extraordinary legacy of our beautiful landscape, a "legacy easily lost" in the words of the master plan (will say a bit more about that, too);
  
  

and the successful launch of ...

• the Wellesley Centers for Women, a synergistic alliance between the Stone Center and the Center for Research on Women, just completed a highly successful fund raising drive: Women's Century Fund, $10M. Many of you helped with that, Peggy Keon is on the Board of Overseers;
  
  
• the Davis Museum and Cultural Center, solidly established now as one of the nation's great college museums; many of you helped with that;
  
  
• the Multifaith Religious and Spiritual Life program, a model of how to celebrate religious diversity and how to reconnect higher education to its spiritual roots; a student panelist involved in the multifaith council referred to it as her "second family;"
  
  
• the Ruhlman Conference, our newest tradition, a full-day celebration of student intellectual achievement and student-faculty collaboration;
  
  
• the Knapp Media and Technology Center, as heard from this morning's panel, 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 last summer as a way to generate some new revenue, extend our reach, and use our beautiful campus better during the summer months;
  
  
• and many other innovations, with a major focus on strengthening the quality of campus intellectual life. There is quite a story we can tell of institutional renewal and growth.
  

All of that work stands against a backdrop of five critical assumptions we make about Wellesley's future. We know that Wellesley ...

1. Played a decisive role shaping leadership models for women this century (in the work world, paid and unpaid [voluntary sector], professions, communities, families). We intend to enhance this role in the century ahead.
   
   
2. Approach the future from a position of fundamental strength: in the quality of students and faculty and learning environment that nourishes their work, in the successes of our alumnae and the credit they bring the College.
   
   
3. Face challenges rooted in large socioeconomic trends -- globalization, changing nature of work, multiculturalism, explosion of knowledge, technology, among others. Each of these could be the basis of a separate talk - that's for another day.
   
   
4. Value of even the finest liberal arts education is being questioned. Women's colleges confront special risks.
   
   
5. Our task is to address these challenges and create exciting new opportunities for our students in a rapidly changing, interconnected global community.
   
   

With this in mind, the trustees and I, with the support of senior staff, faculty, staff, and students have been identifying major needs for the future. In a not very secret "silent phase" of new comprehensive campaign for Wellesley. The trustees will vote to approve the campaign in April. We will have a public launch in October.

Purpose of that new campaign will be to ensure that the College:

1. Plays a leadership role defining changes that will be needed to ensure the continued quality and vitality of the liberal arts;
   
   Continues to assure not just competency but excellence for women in technology and the sciences, the humanities, the arts, and the social sciences;
   
   
2. Opens every opportunity to the most talented students, irrespective of their ability to pay;
   
   
3. Offers students a rich and diverse learning community in a campus that is truly inspiring in its history, beauty, purpose;
   
   
4. Provides an innovative and integrated educational experience that extends from the classroom, to the campus, to the world.
   

All this sounds familiar enough...it's what Wellesley is. So far, then, we have notions of conservation and preservation.

What about the breezes of change that we need to allow to blow over us?

How do we imagine Wellesley will have to be different in order to continue to be the great institution it has been in the century just completed?

The answer to that question is very much conditioned by Wellesley's special strengths now and historically. What's precious about the liberal arts ideal as practiced at Wellesley is the density and durability of connections (faculty-students, as our panelists demonstrate; faculty-faculty; faculty-student-staff; student-alumna). We all know about those.

But also conceptual connections -- across disciplines; across the campus (Ruhlman Conference); between curricular & co-curricular life (Dean of Students Geneva Walker-Johnson's efforts); thought & action (internships), competence and ethics (your conference theme); privilege & service.

Students certainly see the connections, sometimes better than we do: concerns about sweatshop labor being used to produce items we sell in the College bookstore; environmental issues (a slip of paper recently on my car windshield: "For every gallon of gasoline THIS vehicle burns, 19 1/2 pounds of CO2 are released into the atmosphere. CO2 accumulation caused ozone depletion. Think more; drive less. Wellesley Students for Cleaner Consumption.")

What's new is how self-conscious we are going to be about reinforcing these connections -- creating structures (physical structures like the new campus center; administrative structures like our new support of interdepartmental linkages for internships and global education; curricular structures such as interdisciplinary courses and the First Year Mentors program) to support these connections. Bringing together parts of the College that have been specialized, fragmented, separate.

I want to conclude by filling out that point of "connection" a bit more concretely with reference to two programs we are emphasizing as we look to the future, both of which resonate with the themes of this regional forum. One is the commitment we are making to invest in the place that is Wellesley -our 700 acre campus. The second is to develop a program of Environmental Studies.

First, investing in "the place." As I've already mentioned, and as you probably already knew, we now have a comprehensive campus master plan, the first since 1921.

The process of developing that plan has rekindled our awareness of the campus as a work of landscape art as well as an educational and recreational resource, an understanding summarized beautifully in the closing words of a history of the campus written by Elizabeth Meyer for the master planning process:

"Wellesley's landscape is not simply a background, is more than an open space, does more than buffer, and cannot be relegated to the role of nice amenity. To reduce [it] to these terms is to deny the long struggle to construct a campus that embodied the aspirations of a group of pioneering women scholars and students, and to provide for landscape places that instructed, inspired, challenged, cajoled, and consoled. ... The beauty [of the campus] is anything but natural. It has been cultivated and tended. As such, it is a legacy easily lost, despite the best of individual intentions."

So the restoration and maintenance of the campus is one major new theme for the upcoming decade, renewing our focus on our immediate surroundings. Dozens of projects we hope to fund and complete gradually. The reason for that is not only that we have an obligation to the future (which we do) - Nick Rodenhouse uses a slide of rooftop garden in New York City to illustrate this point.

We do have that obligation to protect the legacy - not to live off our inheritance - but we also need the campus; it's essential to the work we do reaching out to and transforming a larger world. This idea comes home to me in an invocation read by our Unitarian Universalist students at the Education as Transformation conference that we held in 1998:

Come into this place of peace

and let its silence heal your spirit;

Come into this place of memory

and let its history warm your soul

Come into this place of prophecy and power

and let its vision change your heart.

Subtly but powerfully, then, these words link the first theme (landscape restoration) to the second (environmental studies). They provide us the unifying theme of a place of prophesy and power that can embody a vision and transform a heart.

Brings me to second new initiative wanted to mention here tonight-another of the priorities for the next campaign. And I have an exciting announcement to make. You heard it first here. Breaking news.

We have been developing a blueprint for a proposed new program in Environmental Sciences. Twelve faculty from nine departments have been working on a plan. Nick Rodenhouse and Marianne Moore (who've been mentioned here repeatedly) are very involved.

We have two goals for the program: first, options for students interested in careers in environmental sciences and studies, and second, to improve environmental literacy more generally. I've been very impressed with alumnae on panels here today. We ought to be turning out more and more leaders like them.

I won't take the time now to develop details, but it will be a rich and creative program. And the brand new announcement tonight is that our own Mia Chandler Frost (co-chair of Wellesley's last campaign- someone who understands the importance of momentum early in a campaign) told me at 4:30 this afternoon that she plans to endow the Environmental Studies Program-two professorships and a program fund-with an extraordinarily generous gift of $5 million.

With this wonderful boost, my hope for this program is that it will support our students in developing a greater and more concrete appreciation of both our human diversity and the limitations of our planetary environment, developing a deeper awareness of our radical interdependence, and better ways to make sense of a world of shifting and disappearing boundaries, a world, paradoxically, larger, smaller, and more complex.

Today's students need to see themselves in a larger sphere of responsibility, one grounded in an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the diversity, the complexity, the ambiguity of our common lives.

They need to develop new understandings of citizenship, new capacities for making vital connections, new, creative responses to suffering and injustice. If a capacity for connectedness is at the heart of an ethical life, it is also the essence of a liberal education.

What Wellesley is fundamentally about, it seems to me, (always has been; always will be I hope) is the making of vital--and organic-connections, extending from the classroom, to the campus, to the world.

With that in mind, I thought I would to leave you with a poem by Marge Piercy. It's called the "Seven of Pentacles" and I hope you'll like it, as I do:

Under a sky the color of pea soup

she is looking at her work growing away there

actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans

as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.

If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,

if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,

if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,

if the praying mantis comes and the lady bugs and the bees,

then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.

 

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.

You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.

More than half a tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.

Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.

Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.

Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.

Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

 

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.

Live a life you can endure: make love that is loving.

Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,

a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us

interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

 

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:

reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.

This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,

for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting,

after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.

This, it does seem to me, is how we educate women at Wellesley. I think it is at the heart of the testimony those student panelists this morning offered about how meaningful it was for them to be at a women's college - this unspoken belief in an organic rather than an industrial model of education.

And, after a long season of tending and growth, the harvest does come. Thank you - all of you - for your TLC of our alma mater.

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