Opening Convocation
"Learning Through Challenge"
Wellesley College
September 3, 2002

Diana Chapman Walsh
President
Wellesley College

A warm welcome to everyone - students, faculty, staff - and thank you for coming out this afternoon to create this moment of meaning, and to make this gesture toward community, as we dive into another year, the 127th of the college. It's good to be assembled again, I hope you feel, as I do … even as we wonder where the summer has gone, and how so fast.

We convene on opening day in pursuit of at least four aims: to reconnect with all who have been away (in absences measured in days, weeks, months, years) and to welcome all who are new this year: beginning faculty, new staff, entering Davis scholars and transfer students. Welcome to each and all of you. And a special welcome to the great purple class of 2006 (595 strong), a class, as is already manifest, full of spirit, intelligence, curiosity and confidence. You infuse and inspire this campus with your energy. We are so glad you are here.

We assemble, third, to mark a transition in the life of the college - an institution positioned in society to hold a transitional space for the young approaching adulthood. Today's transition formally installs the senior class, the bright yellow class of 2003. You are here in force and in your commencement robes, feeling a little odd, so you say, a little old, and yet ready to assume the mantle of maturity symbolized by these traditional robes. Responsibility attends privilege, always, and both are embodied here in a formal rite of passage in ceremonial attire.

I know, seniors, that all of us can count on you to set a tone this year that will strengthen this global learning community for everyone. I know this, and am cheered by it, because I've seen you in full bore during orientation week. Already you are emerging as creative and constructive problem-solvers, eager to collaborate and to strive for the common good. I'm excited at the prospect of working and learning with you this year. And that sentiment carries, as well, to students in all four classes. We are anticipating a year of positive connection and effective communication between students and the administration. My colleagues and I are intent on this goal, and so are your student leaders.

The fourth purpose of this convocation is to pause and reflect together on the year ahead. It's off to a promising start and that's never accidental. I want to thank all who planned and participated in orientation. The feedback has been exceedingly positive and I'm especially grateful to members of the student life division, and to the many faculty who came back to offer academic advising and to lead the discussion groups that everyone appreciated so much. Thanks, too, to the many staff who labored through a hot summer preparing for these smooth opening days, and to the department, program and committee chairs who've been putting in extra hours.

Finally, and in particular, I want to recognize my fellow speakers this afternoon - Deans Shennan, Levitt and Lepore and CG president Dana Weekes. All four have been instrumental in setting the stage for the year ahead. I have enormous confidence in this team and I'm excited about working with them.

We commence the year in an unusual situation, with interim arrangements in the two principal leadership positions affecting student learning and campus life, the roles of the dean of the college and of the dean of students. In obvious respects, this presents us challenges (we're improvising in two key areas) and we'll asking for your assistance and help.

But as we improvise, we ought to experiment with an intriguing reality. We enter this transitional year with a flattening of our traditional hierarchies, with members of two central divisions functioning as interim leaders. That conjoining of membership and leadership clears the field for some play. We can try out new forms of collaboration, different moves toward partnership, openings for others to offer their leadership. And if we pay attention, we can carry the lessons from those improvisations back into our familiar structures, once they are in place again.

I want to reflect with you this afternoon for just a few more minutes on this trick of finding the learning in our challenges. I see this as a major theme for us this year. And I'd offer, as a concrete correlative in a very different sphere, the example of the paint-factory clean-up, which we'll dedicate in October. That decades-long struggle can stand as a vivid reminder that we have the capacity, the resources, and the imagination to transform even an awful mess into a magnificent new beginning if we stay with it, remember what's important, and cleave to our values.

Speaking of values, my husband and I spent a week this summer in the Rocky Mountains at the Aspen Institute's "executive seminar." The seminars bring small, diverse groups together for an immersion in the "great books" (or, as someone confessed, the great paragraphs since the tight schedule affords time only for excerpts). Still it was an intense and bracing encounter with twenty-five hundred years of classical writings - in philosophy, political economy, and social criticism … and it left me wondering.

We discussed the big questions embedded in such texts. What constitutes a good life? A good society? What's the essence of human nature? What holds a civil society together? What tears it apart? Where do such ideas originate and how have they evolved? How do we reconcile the conflicts woven into the fabric of American society from its beginnings, the tensions between liberty and equality, efficiency and community? What of justice? And of truth?

How does the intellectual heritage of the past illuminate our problems today? What's worth fighting for? Is anything worth dying for? As the film critic David Denby observes in his book called Great Books, these are questions "about self and society … we no longer address without embarrassment … questions our media-trained habits of irony have tricked us out of asking."

Faculty and students here at Wellesley do take up these questions in quite a few of our classrooms, but what I've been wondering is how well we ask them outside of the safe confines of the courses specifically organized around such topics. And so my sojourn in the Rocky Mountains heightened a nagging question that was traversing the edges of my mind all last year. It is this. Are we at Wellesley College living up to our obligations - to one another, to our students, to our country and our world? Are we delivering on our promises? Are we living our values? My concern is that if we can't, or won't, come out from behind our computer screens and talk to one another, face-to-face, about what's happening in the world, then we may be shortchanging our students - all of you.

For it's quite likely that the defining events of your generation are being played out right now. It appears that crucial and enduring decisions about our country's role in the world will be solidified while you're here in college. We're in a time of civil crisis and such times often produce a hardening of positions. Under the banner of national solidarity and collective security against an external threat there's a natural tendency to circle the wagons. Debate is polarized and discourse silenced. This fall's controversies on campuses in North Carolina, Florida, and Colorado are three of the more visible examples of these trends, but there are many other indications of a resurgence of the stifling "culture wars."

The two sides, (too) simply stated, are absolutism and relativism. Moral absolutists on the right accuse academics of being so caught up in teaching tolerance that they neglect to distinguish good from evil. Relativists on the left see complexity, context and contingency confounding any absolute judgments about the social world. That there are no absolute standards or values, they argue, doesn't mean there are no values. And college is the time and place for students to distill out their own values, steeped in the complexity of the postmodern world.

I think we might even all agree that one of the important functions of a college education is to afford students the time and space to reflect. This is your time to test your identities, to form attachments and commitments, to shape your values, your personal philosophies, and a code of moral conduct. College should also be a safe haven in which students can practice intellectual give-and-take so that you can become ever more proficient at engaging real and profound differences and at developing potent and defensible arguments. This "play of conflicting interests in a framework of shared purposes," as John Gardner has written, "is the drama of a free society. It is a robust exercise and a noisy one, not for the faint-hearted or the tidy-minded."

My concern is that unless we're vigilant - more so than we were last year -- the noisy polarizing forces from the untidy outside world will splinter us and obstruct the very discussions within these gates through which you students will have the chance to discover who you are and what you value. We have seen conflicts from outside drive us into isolation, or into insular subcultures of politicized identity groups alienated from the work of the whole. We've seen the fear of offending one other or of seeming intolerant deflect us from our collective project of pooling and probing what each of us knows.

If we do allow these fears and distractions to divert us from this task, then the students at college now - all of you -- will have lost your opportunity to prepare yourselves for that messy drama of citizenship in a free society of which Gardner wrote so well. You will be robbed of your full chance to develop here the disciplines you'll need above all others in a democratic society -- critical thinking and advancing an argument -- the prerequisites of effective citizenship in a free and open society. And those values of openness, freedom, equal access, and fair play - those commitments to respecting and engaging our many differences - are, in the end, the distinctive American values that are worth fighting for, the values for which the victims of 9/11 gave their lives.

So I hope we'll all be alert this year for moments and venues in which we can participate in meaningful dialogue about world events. Socrates, the originator of the project we take up anew today, taught that the beginning of human wisdom is awareness of our own pretenses and ignorance. He showed that knowledge is produced gradually in the give-and-take between individuals jointly and sincerely seeking understanding. I hope we'll transform the vexing challenges in the world outside into opportunities, throughout this year, to leave our computer screens, as Plato's philosophers left their cave, and create a year, here on campus, of sincere Socratic encounters.

I wish for each and all of you a year of fascinations and fulfillments.