Alumnae Leadership Council
October 14, 2001

Diana Chapman Walsh
President
Wellesley College

I understand you've had a good weekend. I slipped into the back of the room at 9 yesterday morning for the council opening and to hear Laura Gates's wonderful insights on leadership -- the "liberal arts of leadership." It was a really lovely synthesis, fun, funny, wise. Many thanks for that, Laura, and for this program too.

It will amuse you, I hope, Laura, if I tell you about an experience I had with the Emerson quote you read at the end of your talk. I've been using it for years too, even had a calligraphy version framed. I wanted to read it at a big event and decided to be cautious, so I asked a librarian to run the reference down.

So, once again, the woman does the work and the man gets all the credit. It reminds me of the old cartoon -- people in a meeting, and the boss says, "Great idea, Mary; Bill, would you repeat it so we can hear it?"

Of course, the tables are turned on "America the Beautiful." Our fellow alumna and Wellesley trustee, Lynn Sherr, has just published a new book on the song. Who knows the name of the man who wrote the music? (Samuel Augustus Ward).

Emerson's purloined quote has special meaning for me now. Another of our fellow alumae, Rahma Salie from the class of 1996, was killed, along with her husband, on one of the jets that left Boston on September 11. Rahma worked in my office when she was a student here. We loved her. I had the pleasure of attending her wedding several years ago and most recently gathered with more than 1,000 of her friends, colleagues, and family members for her memorial service in Houghton Memorial Chapel.

Rahma had a magnificent smile, a quiet, elegant beauty, and an uncompromising loyalty to those she loved, who were legion. She was radiant, she was sweet, she was her own magical blend of tender and tough. She was smart and inquisitive, and willing, always, to stand up for her ideas, and always, always caring of others. She was the quintessential Wellesley woman, everything we hope this college stands for when it is at its very best. And she loved Wellesley.

She and her husband Mickey died on the hijacked plane. She was 8-months pregnant with their first child. Rahma grew up Muslin and Mickey, who had been Greek Orthodox, converted to Islam when they were married. We think they were the only Muslim-Americans who died on any of the hijacked planes, a fact Rahma's parents, who were of course devastated by their loss, decided they needed to take public in hopes that their tragedy would have a softening effect on the tendency to blame all of Islam for the unthinkable horror of the terrorist acts.

So … as far as I'm concerned, those words belong not to Emerson nor to the nameless woman who won the magazine contest; they belong to Rahma and Mickey and to the child they almost had.

To laugh often and to love much;
To win the respect of intelligent people
and the affection of children; … …

To know even one life has breathed easier
because you have lived;
This is to have succeeded.

It's been a painful month for all of us. I'm so glad you are here. At first, we wondered whether we should try to have this ALC at all, whether the trauma of September 11would be so raw that too few of you would want to travel here or it would seem inappropriate or somehow off-key to be gathering for ALC.

We checked that out with a number of you who said, "go ahead, we'll come; we want to be together, we want to reconnect with Wellesley." Down in numbers by about a third, you are the fearless ones, the intrepid travelers amid FBI warnings that the country is still on highest alert.

I can't tell you how affirming that is for us, how grateful we are that you have made that symbolic statement and traveled here to be with us. It is a ringing testimony to how seriously you take your commitments to the college. I can't thank you enough for that.

Your presence here also speaks to an even more vivid awareness, I think, that many of us have of how much both our commitments and our connections matter to us and, a sense many of us have that our work for Wellesley is more important than ever now.

Last month, I wrote to you all about immediate responses on campus. How heartening it was to be here as we all came together in a community of solace and purpose and solidarity. As Jessica described so heartfully yesterday morning (she has been leading powerfully and thoughtfully through this difficult time) all of us who were here on campus were grateful, I think, that we were in this place at this time.

This sentiment was captured eloquently in an e-mail response I had last week from the parents of a junior, who's studying abroad this semester. They were responding to the letter I sent out to the entire Wellesley community. I want to read part of it to you:

Dear Ms. Walsh,

Your letter dated September 2001, in place of the Annual Giving appeal, was one of the most moving and heartwarming I have ever read. I thank you for it.

Our daughter [a junior] is spending the semester in South America. The events of September 11 were terrifying to her and us. Having your child 4,000 miles away in a time of such terror and tragedy is very disconcerting. Fortunately, her program had her placed with a sympathetic and loving family, and they were able to support her as we could only do over the phone.

As I read your letter, I wished that, were she not able to be with us, she could have been with her Wellesley family. Her two years at Wellesley have been the best of her young life. She has become friends with young women from around the world and has relished in sharing their lives, cultures and religion. I wish she could have been on campus to be involved with and enveloped in the vigils, community action, classroom discussions, and talks I know she would have had with her friends.

I plan to forward your letter to [our daughter] and know that she will appreciate it as much as we did. Our sympathies and prayers to the families of Wellesley alumnae who were lost on the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And again, thank you and the Wellesley staff for your sensitive, proactive caring in helping our young women attempt to understand and change the world which they will soon inherit.

The response at Wellesley has been quite inspiring. And not unique to Wellesley. I've heard of strikingly similar accounts from other campuses, similar letters went out from presidents of other residential liberal arts colleges. Ours was out relatively early, though doubtless not the first. It would be pleasant fantasy to imagine that ours had some influence but probably not the case; it's more likely that we are all having independent and quite parallel experiences.

Communities are coming together all over the country. All of us have been touched by the courage and compassion so many people have shown and the ingenuity with which they have found ways to help, by the messages of solace and solidarity from around the world, and by the many voices calling for restraint and tolerance and an organized multi-national response. We are reminded of how important our connections to one another are. We are reminded of what we value, what our commitments are.

We're now entering a second phase, and it's going to be more complicated -- living with the fear, living with the war.

At Reunion each year, it's our tradition to have a special dinner for the 50th reunion classes, reminiscing with them about Wellesley when they were here. I started with class of '44, who were here through the war years. I recently went back to re-read that talk.

On December 7th, 1941, when Pearl Harbor was attacked, the Class of '45 said there was much confusion and panic about what would happen next. Some felt that the college would close and they would all be sent home.

At Chapel on Monday, December 8, 1941 Miss McAfee warned that it "would now become fashionable to hate" and urged the students to keep themselves "free from the hatreds bred by wars, to avoid hysteria, and to help preserve those values for which America was fighting."

Later, President McAfee was called into service and took a leave to lead the WAVES, as Lieutenant Colonel and later Captain in the U.S. Navy. In another memorable Chapel talk during one of her visits back to campus, she said that after the war the world "must have people who not only know they want to do good, but know what is good, and know how to do it."

Right after Pearl Harbor, no one knew the capacity of the Japanese and German bombers. One member of the Class of '45 said the house mother in Washington House gathered the students together and told them to get under the staircase in the event of an attack. The housemother was so nervous, she made everyone else uneasy. The faculty common room in Green Hall was converted into a workroom where students and faculty stitched slings, rolled bandages, and knit garments for servicemen and war refugees.

After the winter break, students were asked to bring their ration books back so the college could get scarce items like sugar and coffee. The college observed meatless days: one member of the class of '45 remembers "a lot of soybean meatloaf." In May, coffee was reduced to one cup at breakfast and one after dinner. Scarcity and rationing and a desire to support the war effort affected everything - fewer maids, more student work, recycling efforts, married students in dorms for first time, Naval officers in Caz and Pom, calisthenics in the Hazard Quad.

Extracurricular courses were offered in First Aid, Military Map Making, Cryptography, and Auto Mechanics. Several members of the faculty completed a course in air raid procedures. War bonds were sold at the El Table, and auctions were held to raise money to buy war bonds. ·

The Athletic Association decided to contribute 30 silver-plated cups to a nation-wide salvage drive, as there was a "vital need for the alloy underneath the silver plating." In November, by order of the government, the use of taxis from Boston was suspended. Any travel was very difficult and uncomfortable.

Those classes hoped that a better world would emerge from the ravages of war. They took into the world a deep sense of the value of human endeavor. Indeed, it was the Class of '45 that funded our Peace & Justice Studies program.

This will be an entirely new kind of war, we are being told, and I believe. It's unclear as yet what that means for any of us since there is much that is completely uncertain. Events are unfolding so fast; however, two new realities already seem clear:

First, a heightened sense of vulnerability, and second, a heightened sense of purpose. It seems somewhat akin to living with a life-threatening illness, an experience many of us or our loved ones have had. We will be making choices day by day and hour by hour whether we will focus on our fears or on our hopes. We'll oscillate between them (or else we wouldn't be human). We will have our fears, inevitably, but we can choose not to be them, not to let them drive us, shape our choices, deflect us from what truly matters.

Heightened sense of vulnerability

What are the new vulnerabilities the College may have to face in light of the new situation? Many are still unknowable. But a few are predicatable already. Five come to my mind. There is the possibility of …

1. Pressures on admissions, should fears about being in Boston, or near a major urban complex deter potential applicants (the safety of our environment a major attraction for parents especially). The work of the Alumnae Admissions Representatives is more crucial to us than ever.
   
   
2. Pressures on our operating budget,. We're already feeling the pinch from five years of concerted effort to slow our rate of growth. New costs already are appearing in the financial aid budget. For FY03,we estimate $1.3 million in new costs to cover high levels of need among incoming students. On the revenue side, we depend heavily on our endowment to fund our operations and if we see a prolonged period of reduced endowment returns, cost pressures will intensify.
   
   We're increasingly dependent on annual giving as well - all that work that all of you do with your classes makes a huge difference every year. We're all going to have to work harder to meet our Annual Giving goals in this unsettled environment. I'm sure you've been generating creative ideas about how to accomplish that in your discussions this weekend, and I'm grateful for those.
   
   
3. Pressures on our work with The Wellesley Campaign - as I'm certain you've been discussing too. We're all going to have to work even harder to achieve the exciting campaign goals (some of which you talked about this weekend: experiential learning, campus restoration; academic priorities). We set those ambitious goals not because we had a dollar target in mind but because we knew them to be the things we must do to keep our college strong. And we're just going to have to find a way to make those campaign initiatives possible, as I'm convinced we will - with your continued help.
   
   
4. Pressure to become diverted from the important work we need to be doing. Getting on with life as an act of defiance, an act of courage, as visibble in your coming here. The leadership of the college has a complicated and important agenda -- campaign, budget, planning the new initiatives (many possible because of the campaign, for example, the upcoming. Tanner Conference, campus center, restoration of Alumnae Valley, new interdisciplinary programs (neurosciences, environmental sciences), new internships, new pedagogies, assessments of how some of our innovations have been working (summer school, new distribution requirements). We're in a time of real ferment and forward movement, and we're determined to prevent that agenda from being hijacked.
   
   
5. Pressures, too, that will surely intensify as we discover amid our unity and sense of community, that we have some profound and deeply-felt differences about what the terrorist attack of 9/11 means: how it happened, why it happened, what may happen next (and after that), what demands the evolving events make on our country and our world, on each of us as citizens of a country and a world, and on each of us in the varied roles we play in our smaller communities. The situation is highly fluid. Issues come in and out of focus as events unfold. Emotions are running high everywhere and the bedrock commitment we have in the academy to engage the world critically, the penchant we have for digging below the surface appearances for the deeper meanings can be seen, is being seen in some quarters as unpatriotic.

As Chris Franklin and Laura Gates pointed out yesterday morning, much of what we all love about our alumnae gatherings are the intergenerational exchanges. I don't think we know yet how generational differences are going to manifest around this new war, but I do find myself worrying that our college and university campuses could become battlegrounds again, as they were in the Vietnam era, either deeply divided within as was true in Vietnam or radically cut off from mainstream opinion outside the ivy walls.

Heightened sense of purpose

The other side of that coin is that these critical engagements and passionate debates - the rough and tumble of intellectual argument -- are who we are and what we do. And we've had some truly extraordinary learning moments in the last month.

Several student organizations organized a series of programs called "First Steps," discussions to begin the process of humanizing "the other." Panels of Muslim, Arab, and Asian students spoke about their own fears and vulnerabilities. I learned so much from their stories; each one of which was different from the other.

We've had numerous panels and guest speakers. An Afghani anthropologist was here the other day, a friend of Phil Kohl in the anthropology department; who gave a fascinating history of that region of the world. Panels have been sponsored by the departments of political science, sociology, and economics.

Nicholas de Warren, assistant professor of philosophy, read from a brilliant paper of his defining responsibility -- not only for acting but also for seeing. …

"a responsibility beyond culpability, a responsibility not based on recognition of wrong doing" …

The attack … "represents a symbolic act of violence against the order of society and its legitimacy" …

"Symbolic terror is especially effective against a system that has already lost touch with its own sense of legitimacy … Terror … is only effective against a system that no longer knows what it means to be responsible for its legitimacy. We are prone to project responsibility exclusively on those who pose a threat to these values and indulge ourselves in sentiments of pity and victimization." …

He raised an arresting question that we need to ask ourselves

"Have we ourselves acted responsibility towards the values and legitimacy that we have claimed for ourselves? Have we been responsible to those values that we hold as indispensable for life?" …

"We no longer know what it means to question our own legitimacy without thereby being threatened by the very act of questioning itself." …

"At issue is the question of whether we have ourselves truly acted in a responsible way towards those values that are now exposed in the after-glow of vulnerability. We need to ask difficult questions about ourselves: what in fact have we been doing in the name of freedom and human dignity? What have we in fact taken for granted about how we have understood what is in our best interest? These questions are not questions behind which there lurks an agenda of "revolution," "rejection," or "recrimination." They are rather questions in pursuit of sincerity. For to truly question in a critical fashion is to question sincerely, that is, without any pretense of knowing better or any moralizing reproach."

I've quoted at such length to give you a flavor of the richness of the analysis and discussion that we are privileged to be hearing here on campus. All of that is happening on college and university campuses all over the country. There is an urgent need to keep these safe spaces open for the free exchange of a whole range of ideas, no matter how heated, especially at a time of high danger when an outside threat is quite understandably pushing us all to close ranks behind the experts whose protection we know we need.

We all have many questions and gaps in our understanding. Content experts are much in evidence because so many of us are appropriately hungry for the insight and information they can bring to bear on our situation.This is important, valuable, necessary. There is so much we need to learn. I fault myself, as I suspect many of us do, for my inattention. Ignoring the suffering of others, far away, is itself a passive act of violence. Putting them outside of my sphere of responsibility, of sympathy. Dehumanizing the other as not worthy of my attention.

Our Summer Symposium last June was somewhat prescient in its topic, "Finding Peace in the 21st Century." We pondered these questions: How do we break the cycles of violence: the being wounded and then wounding, over and over again? How do we carry our wounds forward, take the hit, feel it, tolerate it, and walk away wounded but lighter? How do we make a different world, starting here and now?

A hope I have is that this campus can be one context for exploring those ever more urgent questions, for engaging in conversations of a different sort from the very important strategic and political debates that are taking place elsewhere.

I hope we can carve out spaces for conversations that will produce progressively deeper levels of consciousness of our challenges, our options, our resources, our best hopes.

I hope we can find ways to experience ourselves, collectively, making our own choices, in our own time, about the future we choose to create, cognizant, but not captive, of outside pressures and forces.

Each of us needs to find our own authority and our own power -- to listen to the voices within, and to bring them out into productive dialogue. We need to understand a wide range of different perspectives and to mine them productively for the new truths we are going to have to learn, now, to see in a different light.

I've been wondering (and I really don't have the answer yet; I'd be interested in your input on this), wondering if there's something particular women have to say and are not saying yet? Another alumna, journalist Geneva Overholser, had a commentary on National Public Radio noting the absence of women's voices in the newspapers and on the airwaves. .

At our opening convocation this fall (anticipating a very different year), I asked everyone to consider whether Wellesley still has a special purpose attached to the feminist moral vision in which our college is rooted. I quoted Carolyn Heilbrun '47 from her 1988 book, Writing a Woman's Life.

"Men trivialize the talk of women, … in order to make women themselves downgrade it. … We must begin to tell the truth, in groups, to one another. Modern feminism began that way, and we have lost, through shame or fear of ridicule, that important collective phenomenon." We women must write a "narrative of [our] own."

I wonder what narrative we women would write about the condition of the world right now.

With that as a question, let me close, paradoxically, by quoting a man, Vaclav Havel. I read this passage at Flower Sunday. It has been very meaningful to me as I try to regain my bearings and discern what it is that I am called to do in my leadership role as I try to comprehend the new realities. I hope you'll find it inspiring too.

Vaclav Havel [from a letter to his wife, Olga, dated August 21,1982.]

It is I who must begin …

Once I begin, once I try---
here and now,
right where I am,
not excusing myself
by saying that things
would be easier elsewhere,
without grand speeches and
ostentatious gestures,
but all the more persistently
--to live in harmony
with the "voice of Being," as I
understand it within myself
--as soon as I begin that,
I suddenly discover,
to my surprise, that
I am neither the only one,
nor the first,
nor the most important one
to have set out
upon that road …

Whether all is really lost
or not depends entirely on
whether or not I am lost ….

I am so deeply grateful to you all and to each one of you for caring enough to come and for taking such good care of our alma mater at this time. Thank you.

For those of you who are interested in the authorship of "Success" I append the notes from our reference librarian. The most authoritative source seems to say it was Bessie Stanley in 1905.

"As of now, it seems that the quote may be traceable to a 1905 publication by a Bessie Stanley. I have not seen the 1976 book which claims to have found this -- and may well have -- but it's interesting that even that source says the earliest examples vary. It's still possible that the quotation is even earlier, and was an unconscious or conscious reworking of another piece."

Another source says "Success
"He has achieved success who has lived well,
laughed often and loved much;
who has enjoyed the trust of pure women,
the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children;
who has filled his niche and accomplished his task;
who has left the world better than he found it,
whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul;
who has never lacked appreciation of earth's beauty
or failed to express it;
who has always looked for the best in others
and given them the best he had;
whose life was an inspiration;
whose memory is a benediction."
Bessie A. Stanley (b.1879) in Notes and Queries July 1976

This quotation was tracked down for certain by Anthony W. Shipps in Notes and Queries for July, 1976. It was written in 1905 by Bessie A. Stanley and was the first-prize winner in a contest sponsored by the magazine Modern Women. Shipps notes that "It is still quoted from time to time in American magazines and newspapers, but it is now often attributed to Emerson." Shipps says that "The versions printed in the two local newspapers in 1905 do not agree, and in the many later appearances in print which I have seen, the wording has varied somewhat. However, the essayist's son, Judge Arthur J. Stanley, Jr., of Leavenworth, writes edition (1937) of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations." That's the one quoted above.

Mary Ann Hilll mhill@wellesley.edu
Office for Public Information
Last Modified: October 23, 2001