Family & Friends Weekend 2003
President’s Address
November 1, 2003

Diana Chapman Walsh
President
Wellesley College

Welcome everyone. It is wonderful to see so many of you here today. We are all very glad that you have made the trip to Wellesley for this Family and Friends Weekend.

The weekend holds a full schedule with many events and many choices to make. Not so different in that respect from experiences of your daughters (your “students” -- I am going to just say daughters and hope others with different relationships will understand). I’m assuming there are not too many students in the audience. I expect many of them are still in bed.

Their world here is characterized by a surfeit of possibilities and a shortage of time. One of the important lessons they’re learning is how to set priorities and make disciplined choices. They do it day by day and hour by hour. This whirlwind of a family weekend is a microcosm of that experience. Thanks for fitting me into your program -- and so early in the day.

It has been a very active fall so far here on campus. From where I sit, we’re off to an excellent start. Seems to be true as well from where you sit -- many of you with whom I’ve had the chance to connect personally. I am happy to hear that.

We expect much of your daughters, as you well know, and we work them hard. We do the same of ourselves. I thought I would use this time to bring you a bit of a briefing from the perspective of the college’s leadership -- senior management (deans and vice presidents) and trustees. All of us have been meeting actively these past two months, and I want to convey to you a sense of our priorities and major projects underway. In doing so, I hope to put some context around some of the things you are hearing or may hear from your daughters. And hearing this may enable you to be more persuasive as “intentional ambassadors” for the college, and for the liberal arts ideal we are working to uphold and advance.

Some of the discussion in Washington in connection with the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act has been surprisingly – disconcertingly -- hostile to basic values that we have long taken for granted, some members of Congress are distressingly uninterested in hearing about the facts or considering basic distinctions between the private and public sector of higher education. Tuition has been rising dramatically in public sector colleges and universities because of pressures on state budgets and that has created a general backlash about the costs of college. What’s lost in all of these conversations is the role that endowments and fund raising play in the leading private colleges and universities – as the engine for innovation, growth and the continuous improvement that has made the American system of higher education the envy of the world. It would be a tragedy to lose sight of that vital resource that is one of this nation’s most important sources of strength.

So let me tell you a bit about how we are thinking about Wellesley’s place in that larger context. I don’t have to tell you that we stand at a critical juncture in world history. It is a juncture at which, I believe, Wellesley has a special role to play. Our students are quite amazing – as you know better than we do – you raised them. And here they represent a remarkable cross-section of our nation, as well as more than 75 other countries, and every major race, creed, and faith tradition.

Our faculty – as you observed in your visits to classes yesterday -- teach them to question assumptions and to reason well together. In the classroom, and beyond, Wellesley students are learning to find in their differences, and in their shared values, the wisdom and the will to envision a better future. It is they who will have the task of forging a new collective vision of a world all of whose people can be safe from the ravages of violence.

And as economic and political anxieties have escalated around the world, it has become ever more important that we provide them a safe and supportive space in which to reflect, to test their identities, to form attachments and commitments, to shape their personal philosophies, and a code of moral conduct and, most of all, to hone their minds.

The intellectual give-and-take our students practice in the rare haven that is college sharpens their proficiency 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 the late 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.”

Ask any Wellesley professor what she or he is doing in the classroom and the response immediately comes back, “I am teaching my students how to think.” Education for critical thinking, for freedom from prejudice and ignorance is what a Wellesley education is all about.

This is an education that depends on a special kind of human interaction, one that encourages students to test their most cherished convictions—the ones they take most for granted--against serious and disturbing challenges, in the classroom or beyond, to ask themselves, now and always, how a different experience or perspective, how a new insight, argument, or data point, might enrich or alter their own tentative and provisional notions of what is right and true.

That commitment to critical engagement in the context of personal relationships extends across the Wellesley curriculum, and across the campus. It is a uniquely powerful way to learn. And it is expensive, as true excellence generally is, even though excellence – the real thing -- is almost never for sale.

Nor is excellence static. Our faculty are constantly exploring ways to improve what they do. This year is the fourth year in our five year campaign for Wellesley – a $400M campaign to which the alumnae and friends of the college have rallied with extraordinary generosity. We already have commitments of $328 million.

The ongoing success of the campaign is an important engine of that forward momentum for the college as a whole. The campaign is propelling the college forward now in a very real way, not only making new things possible but also shoring up our confidence in challenging times. The fact that so many donors are rallying so generously in support of our “cause” and the work we are doing buoys our spirits and sets our sights high.

In some ways, that lifting of spirits is more important, even, than the money itself (as wonderful as it is to have it and as much as it is enabling us to meet important goals). But money, after all, is nothing but a human invention, a symbol designed to be a repository of value. And this remarkably successful campaign for Wellesley speaks volumes about the values this college exists to uphold and advance – how widely they are appreciated, understood, felt – across the years, and the miles and the generations.

The campaign is an engine of change as well. Not just large construction site. Not just future impact. There are many exciting new programs here now. This is a good time to be a student at Wellesley -- not only because new programs being rolled out but also because we are thinking very carefully about what is really important. We don’t want to blow this opportunity. Today’s students are participating actively in that thinking. They are shaping the college’s future even as theirs is being shaped by it.

One important example (one of many) – and one that reverberates even more powerfully in the new world context -- is the initiative in global education the faculty has been developing over the past decade. We are strengthening our study abroad offerings and raising new funds for scholarship support to bring international students to the college, as well as an endowment to enable faculty to expand their teaching and scholarship to cover more of the world. We are developing Middle Eastern studies program, offerings in Hebrew and Arabic language, creating East Asian language department (combing the existing Chinese and Japanese and adding Korean language).

We are expanding our horizons in other directions as well, for example, in environmental studies, computer sciences, and neurosciences, three interdisciplinary fields on the frontiers of science where solutions to some of society’s most profound problems are being pursued. We want to continue to build those programs and others that cross barriers between disciplines.

We have endowed our innovative Learning and Teaching Center, as well as our Quantitative Reasoning program designed to ensure that all students have sufficient proficiency in statistical and numeric reasoning to tackle successfully any course in our curriculum.

We have a major new gift that will endow a center for the humanities that will honor and extend our exceptionally strong tradition in the humanistic studies that lie at the heart of a fine liberal education.

And we are creating new opportunities for students to consolidate their classroom learning through applications in practical settings. The Tanner Conference – coming up next week – gives us an opportunity as a whole community to explore the integration of learning in and beyond the classroom. The Ruhlman Conference in the spring is another occasion on which we celebrate student achievement and come together as an intellectual community.

We are building up our financial aid reserves to ensure access to Wellesley and to continue our vital commitment to merit-based admission and need-based aid, a goal to which many alumnae have rallied wholeheartedly and with generosity. We want to endow it fully if we can, so it doesn’t have to compete for space in the operating budget.

And we are reinvesting in our incomparable -- and irreplaceable – campus, which is why we’ve had to put up this fall with some dislocations associated with construction. Thank you for your patience and flexibility. Members of the incoming first year class are calling themselves “leaders under construction” -- and they are. They’ve brought a wonderful can-do spirit to the campus this fall.

At the same time we are reaching for the future in all these exciting ways, we are making a concerted effort to slow the growth in our administrative costs. We want to be sure we are investing our money where it can make the most difference for the quality of the education we provide. This is a challenging task, one which involves asking people to think about ways to contract and retrench even as we are expanding our vision. There’s a cognitive dissonance in that. You’ll hear frustrated accounts, I am sure, about places where we have cut back on administrative staff and costs in ways that students (and others) find hard to accept. What I can say to you is that we are working very hard to make those decisions thoughtfully, openly, and with the quality of your daugthers’ education as the driving consideration. And we are listening to their input even if we aren’t always able to act on all of their advice.

Learning from and with the smart and strong-minded young women is such a privilege for me, surely the most satisfying part of a job with more than its share of joys and pleasures. The many student leaders who are involved this year applying their talents to a wide range of activities are exceptionally thoughtful and well organized and they are committed to constructive community-building. They’re having a powerful impact already, on the campus and beyond.

I want to close with a few more thoughts about the uncertainties of the world right now and where I see our work in that much larger context. This is a message I’ve been exploring this fall with alumnae groups around the country, and I suspect you are as mindful these days as we are of what seems like a growing sense of foreboding about geopolitical instabilities. It’s hard to open the morning newspapers and to read about the mounting cycles of violence.

I said at opening convocation this September that my excitement about the future is tempered by concerns I have about the complexities and uncertainties in what Christopher Marquis in The New York Times in September 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.”

Wellesley, too, is a Petri dish for big and 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 sincere 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 simple answers. And it is the tendency to oversimplify that is part of our problem today. Oliver Wendall Holmes said he had no time for the simplicity on the near side of complexity, but what is immeasurably valuable, always, is the simplicity on the far side of complexity.

At Wellesley, we seldom make anything simple. We often make them very complex, sometimes to a fault. We have this tread of perfectionism that dogs us through our lives and it is both a gift and a curse, as all of us knows. Sometimes we worry until our heads hurt and make ourselves crazy.

But this tendency to keep questioning, second-guessing, challenging ourselves means that we take up our own local skirmishes here on this campus – the inevitable moments we have every year of conflict, confusion, and fear – in a way, it seems to me, that brings 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.

So I have come to believe, in my 10 years intensely embedded in this place, that Wellesley College can be a learning laboratory in which values of cooperation, collaboration, and mutual concern are underscored, taken for granted, encoded in the buildings, inscribed on the paths, and carried in the hearts of faculty, students, staff, and graduates down through the generations.

We are a sisterhood in all the meanings of that evocative word that our students love to use – singing “crown thy good with sisterhood” during “America the Beautiful” and creating a series of open discussions with the title “Sister Can We Talk?”

And that sisterhood, that community of women can be incubating, I believe – if we don’t lose our nerve (and if we don’t lose heart) -- a different kind of leadership – one that is more than a mere adaptation of -- or a reaction against -- the dominant male models, one that draws upon the wisdom women carry for the culture.

If ever we needed new leadership in the world, it seems to me, clearly we need it now, and urgently as so many of our social and political institutions are foundering, losing their way, letting us down, placing us at risk.

I’ve been asking myself lately whether there might be a new form of leadership that would draw on a feminine moral vision -- a consciousness, an epistemology, an ethic and an aesthetic that are prototypically female – a “morality of responsibility,” in Carol Gilligan’s words, that can stand in contrast to the masculine “morality of rights.”

As a special blend of historical conditions that have shaped women’s experiences as “the other,” Wellesley has a particular claim, I think, on those aspects of human striving that are more contextual, more holistic, and more attuned to peaceful coexistence, connections, and social and economic justice.

Our young people are going to need all the wisdom and patience they can muster. They are going to have to develop abilities our society woefully lacks to collaborate and communicate with fluency across a wide range of cultural, ethnic, racial, religious, national and socioeconomic lines, here in the United States and around the globe.

We are going to have to learn to appreciate and skillfully use conflict as a creative intellectual force for learning from our differences, for forging common values, for finding common ground.

We are going to need communities of meaning and of hope, communities that will function as holding environments for people to learn and grow, to make connections and contributions, to be seen and recognized for who they are, what they bring, who they can become.

And those communities will need to evolve new conceptions of power. In his last presidential address to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1967, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. defined our contemporary crisis in words that resonate today:

“Power properly understood,” he said, “is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites -- polar opposites -- so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love.

“We’ve got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our time.”

The crisis has deepened in the three decades since King uttered those prophetic words and now we desperately need men and women of good will -- and of subtle skill -- to be building communities of hope on principles of justice and love. The hour is late, the work is hard, and the stakes are high. But we can do all we can to forge a safer and saner world order -- one that privileges moral power and powerful morality over their opposites and that implements the demands of justice and power while it corrects what stands against love.

And that’s why Wellesley is here, now, I believe, that is the work we are doing as faithfully as we know how, not perfectly to be sure, not every day, but with a clarity of vision that is rare in these distracted and fractious times.

And that’s why I am so grateful to your daughters for the seriousness of purpose them are bringing to this important work we are doing together. It is hard work, and uncertain, and confusing much of the time, but it is the work of social stewardship this proud and resilient institution was founded to undertake.

I want to close by sharing a gift that was given to me. Since October 1, I’ve been the guest of honor at four surprise parties in honor of the 10th anniversary of my presidency. It started with the students surprising me at Lake Day on October 1 -- the sweetest afternoon I’ve ever experienced.

That evening I was given the second surprise and a most wonderful poem from three of my colleagues. There is a poet whose work I enjoy; his name is Brian Andreas. He’s a California surfer and poet, of course, whose words are quirky and beautiful. These colleagues of mine tracked him down in California and asked if he would create a poem for my anniversary. He read through lots of my speeches and writings and read about Wellesley College. In the poem he created he managed to capture the essence of this very special place and what we are doing here.

"In the heart of the world there is a place that holds the sacred names of the rocks & the trees & all the children of the earth

& around it gather women & men who hold it dear

& each night they stand together to keep it safe for as long as it takes till morning comes

& no matter what you have been told this will always be so in the heart of the world."

So … thank you – all of you -- for entrusting us with your fabulous daughters, and thank you for standing here with us in the heart of the world where I hope and believe we can play our part in living out a safer and saner scenario for the future of all the world’s people.

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