Thank you for coming tonight - each of you and all of you, alumnae
and friends of Wellesley College, husbands - friends, in many cases,
of very long standing and of great generosity. We are so glad you
are here. All of us at the College - students, faculty, staff, trustees
-- are deeply grateful for the steadfast support Wellesley continues
to receive from the East Coast of Florida, and the many ways in which
your loyalty to our college lifts all our spirits.
We have traveled to sunny Florida to bring you news of our alma mater,
to celebrate its stunning successes and to envision and secure its
future. I hope you'll carry away from this gathering a renewal of
your conviction that Wellesley has a special role to play at this
crucial moment in history.
The story of Wellesley College, as I often say, is the story of women
who live their lives with courage, wisdom, and zest; who never stop
questioning, learning, growing ... and giving; women, who, at every
age, alive with curiosity, greet triumphs with humility and face tragedies
with dignity, who make their way through the world with generosity
and grace. This is so true of so many of Wellesley's stalwart supporters
in Florida and I'm always inspired by your stories and the example
of your lives. It's a joy to be here with you.
Last week, as you heard, we conferred this year's Alumnae
Achievement Awards on three impressive women - Luella Gross Goldberg
'58, whom many of you know as the former chair of the board of trustees
and a generous and influential civic leader, Patricia Williams '73
a distinguished legal scholar, author, and law professor, and Nayantara
Pandit Sahgal '47 a celebrated novelist in her native India.
Each recipient shared with a large audience of students, faculty,
family and friends in Alumnae Hall thoughtful and moving reflections
on her work, and her passions, and her life's journey. Nayantara Sahgal,
unable to make the trip from India, sent her reflection on videotape.
She spoke of her childhood in the turbulent era of India's struggle
for independence - a struggle in which her entire family was intimately
involved. As we watched the tape, all of us were struck by the courage
it surely took to have left home with her sister (both parents were
political prisoners) and travel half way around the globe to a place
she had never seen. She spoke of the meaning Wellesley has had for
her since, and ended with a charge to us all:
"Wellesley … gave me the quiet best of western civilization. I
hope you will go from strength to strength in this new century and
will retain your essential difference from other academic institutions,
setting your own pace, and tone, and style."
One felt the weight of responsibility, sitting on the Alumnae Hall
stage, hearing those words issue from a scratchy videotape spanning
oceans and years.
It is for us to ensure that Wellesley does continue from strength
to strength in this new century - a century that has begun with challenges
for which none of us could have prepared. We must see to it that Wellesley
does retain its essential difference, that we do set our own pace,
our own tone, our own style, for future generations of women who can
help transform our world.
Ever since the events of September, we have felt acutely the need
to address as creatively as we possibly can the new challenges our
students will face in these vexing times. Fortunately, we are making
great progress in that direction with the programs and priorities
made possible by The
Wellesley Campaign.
We have begun to launch new academic programs, for example, in environmental
studies, computer sciences, and neurosciences, three new interdisciplinary
fields on the frontiers of science. We have begun to implement a global
education program that includes new courses covering South Asia and
Arabic language, new visiting professorships, as well as new support
for studying abroad and for scholarship aid to bring extraordinarily
talented and motivated students to Wellesley from the United States
and all over the world.
We want to support student-faculty research partnerships and to develop
new internship programs - new opportunities for students to consolidate
their classroom learning through applications in practical settings.
We want to be very sure that our motto - non ministrari sed ministrare
- always has as much resonance on campus as it has through the history
of the college, and as it has today.
And we want to reinvest in our incomparable -- and irreplaceable
- campus, a crucial element of our essential difference, I know we
all agree. We need to renovate and update Houghton Chapel and Alumnae
Hall. We need to build another dorm to relieve crowding in the residence
system. We need help building
a new campus center and reclaiming the valley next to Alumnae Hall
- a large, terraced expanse of land now overrun by cars. What
should have been the last in the series of open valleys that weave
through and define the campus became, over decades, a makeshift parking
lot. We need to bring it back.
The study we conducted of the campus for the 1998 landscape master
plan identified what we must do as stewards of the Durants's original
gift of their estate to the College, a gift that has set the context
for a Wellesley education ever since. When we gathered for a candlelight
vigil on Severance Green just after the terrorist attack, I was reminded,
as I so often am, of the priceless legacy that is ours to tend and
pass along - reminded of the Native American insight that "we do not
inherit the land from our forebears; we borrow it for a time from
our children."
The world we are passing along to our children and grandchildren
is more complicated than we hoped it would be. All of us are confronted
with questions about what demands evolving world events make on each
of us as citizens of a country and the globe, and on each of us in
the varied roles we play in our communities.
But what we know when we come together, as we are doing now, is that
in this era of ours that tends to fragment and isolate, this College
of ours can still assert an exuberant and insistent "we!" And when
we gather together, joined in a collective response -- joy, tears,
cheers, communion, concentration, celebration -- we create a potent
community of women transforming the world. It is in such moments that
we experience the value of our shared life, and expand anew our aspirations
for the common good.
On one such occasion in the Houghton Chapel, not so long ago, a student
offered an invocation that comes back to me often as I walk the campus,
because it speaks eloquently, I feel, to the meaning our College harbors
for many of us:
Come into this place of peace (she said)…
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.
And so… I ask you tonight to join me, once again, in support of a
college that for generations of authentic and inquiring women has
been a place of peace … of memory … of power -- a place our graduates
have carried with them through full and meaningful lives, as a living
repository of their highest standards and hopes, a reminder to keep
on striving and learning -- and serving -- a place, paradoxically
that supplies both comfort, and unrelenting challenge.
Across the campus and in my far-flung travels for the College, the
constant that I find in interactions with today's students and with
alumnae from all is the Wellesley intensity all of us know so very
well (our men know it in us too - they live with it)-a thirst to see
it all, to do it all, to be it all, that absolute passion for living
"life to the lees" in the words Tennyson gave Ulysses-for making of
this "one wild and precious life" "something particular, and real"
as the poet Mary Oliver would have us do.
The 400-million dollar goal we have set for this campaign is ambitious,
we know. And yet it represents a fraction of what we would like to
do. It also represents what we believe we must do to secure Wellesley's
position for generations to come.
More than ever, now, Wellesley College stands as a beacon for women
around the world-for the special gifts they can bring to bear on increasingly
urgent problems we face. What it means to be a Wellesley woman--always
has, and I hope always will-is to be a woman who will … make a difference
somewhere in this complicated world.
Over the next five years we will watch unfold stories of thousands
of people stepping forward to play their part in ensuring the future
of our College by helping us transform it again to meet the challenges
of our times.
As we advance this new campaign, with panache and optimism, we owe
to everyone whose life has been - or may some day be -- touched by
Wellesley College the boldness of the vision we are daring to pursue.
And we dare to pursue that bold vision because of the history of
support we have had from all of you and from groups like yours all
over the country, and the world. I thank you from the bottom of my
heart for all you do - and are - for Wellesley. I thank you for coming
out tonight to dream a big dream with me.