Opening Convocation
"Leaps of Faith"
Wellesley College
September 3, 2003

Diana Chapman Walsh
President
Wellesley College

Welcome, everyone, and thank you for being here as we open, officially, the 128th academic year of Wellesley College. We set aside this time each fall for a ritual coming together that harks back to the founding of the college and provides us an annual opportunity to start afresh and reflect together on our aspirations for the future.

I’ve heard that the producers of "Mona Lisa Smile" have concocted their own fantasy version of our opening ceremony, with the president knocking on the side door of the Chapel, and calling out that she’s looking for knowledge (or something along those lines – pretty hokey). I won’t be doing that this afternoon, I’m happy to report (and maybe that scene ended on the cutting room floor). We already know that it will be only one of the liberties the film will take that will annoy us no end. One of my fond (and I hope not vain) hopes for the coming year is that we will find the equanimity to enjoy (dare I say smile about) "Mona Lisa Smile," celebrate our few minutes of fame and how far we have come since the fifties, even as we continue to explore its many meanings for us.

Opening convocation at Wellesley – the real thing -- is also our traditional occasion to salute, for the first time in academic attire, the new senior class as it assumes the mantle of leadership. Congratulations, Class of 2004. We are excited at the prospect of your red regime, under the close and watchful gaze of the red planet, Mars. You will set the tone for the year ahead, and we trust you will lead us with wisdom, respect, and courage – along with energy, spirit, and a sense of whimsy and play.

The year is off to a fine start already, from what I have seen and heard. I had a series of encounters last week that I found very affirming, as I went about my task of meeting and greeting everyone …

• the students, faculty and staff who made this year’s Pathways program so powerful and effective;

• the many upper-class student leaders, as well as staff and faculty, who dedicated time and creativity over the summer to anticipating, welcoming, and orienting the incoming first-year class;

• the academic department and program chairs as they began shaping and shouldering the crucial work they do for us all;

• new members of the faculty and new staff, as well as the many continuing staff who work straight through the summer to prepare for another year;

• and, of course, new incoming students: Davis Scholars, transfer students, and the Class of 2007 -- 591 strong -- bright, eager, multi-talented, and ready to take your places here and to claim and extend the proud legacy of this demanding college that exists to enable and encourage women to make a difference in the world.

The world is an uncertain place right now – increasingly so, it seems -- and my excitement about the year ahead is tempered by concerns I have about the complexities and uncertainties in what Christopher Marquis in The New York Times on Sunday called “a messy superheated reality that seems to defy neat ideological assumptions.” He was writing about the escalation of violence in Iraq, where, he pointed out:

“both left and right have viewed the situation through a prism of ideological convictions. Iraq has become a testing ground for competing notions of American power and leadership and of when the unilateral use of force is legitimate,” he wrote. “It is a Petri dish for ideas about the limits of diplomacy [and] the difference between imperialism and liberation in a unipolar world.”

The resumption of hostilities in the Middle East is equally fraught and portentous – heartbreaking, truly -- as were the terrorist bombings in Bombay last week and, on Thursday in Beijing, North Korea’s declaration that it has nuclear weapons and plans to test them. Little wonder that President Bush has been telling visitors to his ranch that “he suspects that he is in for a rough fall.” I worry that we all are.

Wellesley, too, is a Petri dish for big, consequential ideas:

• the enduring relevance of a liberal education as our culture vectors away toward consumerism, careerism, and a slick superficiality;

• the possibility that women (and men) can open up the world’s ethical, political, and spiritual crises to the values many societies have labeled feminine and relegated to the sidelines, values such as family, community, ambiguity, emotion, cooperation, unity, pluralism, maturity, listening to multiple perspectives, honoring relationships.

My hope is that the cultures we are growing in our small Petri dish may point the way, in time, to better ways to lead, and live. I hope we can incubate at Wellesley different approaches to what it means to live in community. I hope we can reframe some of the questions the world seems unable to answer right now. For example:

• Can one be a realist and an idealist and not be drawn into the dualism of war or not war?

• How can a caring community erect boundaries around the suicide bombers, symbolic and real -- the people in a system who are so wounded and attached to negativity that they can imagine only sabotage and mayhem?

• How can we recognize and refuse the provocation to ratchet up cycles of violence?

• Is there a different language for forms of community and leadership that would draw on traditions of non-violent resistance and transform them for our time?

• Are there different strategies, tactics, and rules leaders would be developing and invoking if their ultimate goal were peaceful means for peaceful ends?

Clearly, these are monumental questions without easy answers. But in the way we at Wellesley take up our own local skirmishes – the inevitable moments we have every year of conflict, confusion, and fear -- it seems to me that we do bring into focus on a modest scale some of what it might mean to make a commitment to live in peace and mutual respect, without having to sacrifice independence of mind and spirit.

I’ve spoken repeatedly on these and related themes at opening convocation over the years. I know that because I found myself re-reading my old speeches over the Labor Day weekend down on the Cape (a curious entertainment). What drew me back to them now was curiosity born of the awareness that I first addressed this assembly in September 1993 -- ten years ago almost to the day.

It’s hard for me to believe that a full decade has passed since I drew a deep breath, closed my eyes, and took what now, knowing what I know, was a bold leap of faith into a vortex of expectations, obligations, and tests.

I offer that ten-year perspective to those who are taking today what may feel like a wild leap of faith – faith in its most encompassing sense of meaning, trust and hope. Be sure to ask for help when you need it. All of us do need help, more often than we like to admit. The help I’ve had these ten years from many assembled here has made my leap well worth the risk, the doubts, and the bruises.

As I wrestled last week to let go of the pleasures and pace of summer and to beckon the inspiration for another year, part of what I found so re-affirming was a two-hour discussion on Thursday morning with 15 first-year students exploring the topic of why they (and we) are here.

The session, part of orientation, brought 44 first-year mentors into partnership with the same number of faculty and staff volunteers to lead conversations among groups of first-year students on a selection of readings we had mailed them over the summer.

There had been a flurry of controversy just before orientation over one of the readings that one of the faculty volunteers found objectionable -- “a classic piece of ideological writing,” he said, that provided “partisan prescriptions for thought” rather than “encouraging independent thinking.” He concluded that one of the reasons he is here is “to counter the ideological indoctrination that has come to characterize American higher education.”

What especially moved me in the approach my students took to their interchange was how eager and able they were to think for themselves and to really engage one another – respectfully and honestly -- in a probing exploration on some sensitive and treacherous terrain.

They spent a lot of time on Tim Peltason’s lead essay in the orientation booklet, his distinguished faculty lecture from 1999. One sentence, in particular, caught their attention and stimulated a thoughtful conversation on this question of ideology that reappeared in Sunday’s Times.

“The longer and more sincerely that you can consider the possibility that you may be mistaken in an intellectual or moral or political judgment,” Professor Peltason wrote, “the better grounded and informed and defended your judgments will be.”

The students talked at some length, and from concrete experience, about how hard it can be to muster the confidence to bring a judgment out into the open for scrutiny while still remaining open, sincerely, to the possibility that it is wrong -- that you are wrong.

The article on Iraq in the Times offered “pragmatism” as the antidote to ideology. “People on both sides are finding they must temper their beliefs for the American effort to succeed,” the reporter wrote. “Pragmatism must prevail over ideology.” But that’s not where my first-years were coming out. They were taking up Professor Peltason’s challenge in the more nuanced spirit in which he offered it.

They looked at all its facets, the way you might an interesting stone you picked up on the beach, turning it over and around, studying its planes and fissures, feeling for the full sense of it, wondering where it came from and what it might represent. They approached a complex question as a scholar does, not a pragmatist – and in that distinction resides a world of difference.

The pragmatist is an activist, impatient and quick to move, eager to take up the cudgels and advance the latest cause. Pragmatists, for example, favor "win-win” solutions. And so would we all, naturally, but for the limitation nicely captured in a New Yorker cartoon this week. “You say it’s a win-win,” one pragmatist asks another, “But what if you’re wrong-wrong and it all goes bad-bad?”

Scholars are chary of wishful thinking and the lazy, disembodied truisms and slogans that are constantly polluting our language and our thought, like the viruses and worms that keep infecting our computer files. But we can’t run programs to decontaminate our brains. For that we turn to the laborious work of education.

Scholarship requires the kind of vigilance against automatic and unmindful thinking that the engineers are now saying might have prevented the crash of the spaceship Columbia last year and the blackout last month – attentiveness to detail, to the inevitability of error and the imminence of failure, sincere and absolute openness to the possibility that we are making the fatal mistake – right here and now -- of deluding ourselves about some question, large or small.

Please hear me, I am not saying that all truth is relative, or that there is no truth, or that the only truth is that which can be quantified in an empire of fact. Quite the contrary. I am saying that truth is so precious – so vital to our very survival -- that we must pursue it with patience, humility, reverence, and the wisdom of cautious restraint.

The questions my first-year students voiced gently to one another are worthy of our carrying into the semester with that degree of care. Several wondered about our apparent tendency at Wellesley to classify one another – early and often – in racial and ethnic categories and sensed that this might make it harder for them to explore and express the many layers of their identities. Others, of course, point out their lack of choice about whether to be identified according to skin color.

Some were groping for ways to reconcile their love of the United States -- their country -- with an informed and judicious analysis of geopolitical realities and wondered how permissible it will be here to learn about things the United States has done right. Others had come from places where American might has seemed menacing.

Some were concerned about how they were going to balance a healthy pride in who they are and what they bring with the sensitivity to “unearned white privilege” they had been encouraged (and were ready) to take to heart. Others encouraged them to be proud of who they are.

These are important questions – seen through fresh eyes -- about the kind of community we are and the assumptions we make. They will become more urgent if the conflicts around the world contate. We can hope that that won’t happen, of course; we all certainly do. We have much of significance to accomplish in the year ahead.

Among those significant goals is our collective task of sustaining the community we aspire to be – attending to the possibilities we are growininue to escalg here in our Petri dish. For the sake of that all-important experiment, let us try to remember to be meticulous scholars -- thinkers, not premature knowers -- in all our interactions in the year ahead.

Please take good care, this year, of this fragile community. The most valuable resources each of us has is all of us. Take good care of one another. The world needs what we have to give, and we need what you have to give. And thank you, again, for being here this afternoon. Have a great year.