124th Annual Meeting
of the Wellesley College
Alumnae Association
Wellesley College

Reunion Weekend
June 6, 2004

Diana Chapman Walsh
President, Wellesley College

What a wonderful weekend. I want to extend my warm congratulations to the Wellesley College Alumnae Association leadership – to the board, staff and volunteers who worked so hard throughout the year to create this memorable reunion weekend for us all. Truly, it was one of the best ever, I think we all agree.

One of the most satisfying aspects of the work we do is that every year – no matter how complicated or challenging -- culminates in inspiring rituals that bring us all back together in a community of meaning and hope to celebrate the fruits of our labor and reconnect to its deepest values and purposes. Commencement completes the academic year; reunion the five-year cycle.

Last week, as I greeted hundreds of proud and grateful parents here for commencement, I was mindful of the degree to which our work mirrors the cycles of the seasons. So many of the parents brought me vivid memories of the first time we had met, when they delivered their daughters to our care as incoming first-year students. They spoke of their great pleasure in watching their daughters learn and mature over their four years here. This work we do is very much an organic process. Henry and Pauline Durant were wise to create a living garden in which to do it.

We grow our students into mature adults; we don’t make them so and, as with all work that depends on the rhythms of nature, we know there are many forces we can try to harness but will never control. We hold our students through their joy and pain, their losses and gains, their periods of darkness and light and, in all of it, hope to find the wisdom and sensitivity to help them grow toward the sun.

And we watch with pleasure as they develop intellectual maturity and moral vision, as they learn to engage their differences -- respectfully and with courage and candor -- and as they refine the knowledge and skills they will need to be constructive citizens of a complex and fractured world, a world that will need their gifts perhaps as never before.

I was so conscious, this commencement, of the challenges our students will face, sorrowful, truly, that my generation is leaving them so many big questions that they will have to live.

And this Reunion has been enormously helpful to me – bringing me back to the wider perspective that you collectively bring in your wisdom and experience – the voices from the classes here this weekend that arrived at college or left when the nation was at war; other commencement seasons in which you graduated facing uncertain times, whether wars, recessions, periods of civil and moral crisis, assassinations of national leaders, periods of fear and confusion.

And you always found ways to make your contributions, to move through life with grace and resilience always. This Reunion, then, has made me all the more grateful for the healing cycles of the academic calendar, and the continuity that carries us forward from generation to generation.

So I am especially appreciative today of a reality that’s always with me, namely the degree to which the profoundly important work that our faculty and administrators are doing with our students, year in and year out, … growing them into mature adults who can make a difference in the world … that that work would quite literally not be possible without the inspiration of your lives, any more than it would be possible without the generosity of your hearts. And before you leave today, I want to be sure you know how much we appreciate all you give back to our alma mater.

This annual meeting of the WCAA coincides with the closing of the fourth year of The Wellesley Campaign, which will continue through this time next year. Despite economic and geopolitical vicissitudes far worse than anyone could have predicted when we set out on this journey together, we are incredibly fortunate – and truly humbled -- to have $369 million in commitments already in hand toward our $400 million campaign goal.

These gifts are producing changes you have certainly observed during your weekend here, and others that are less visible but no less transformative – many enhancements to the curriculum and to the overall educational program that are broadening and deepening opportunities available to our students and to our faculty.

Among the visible changes, you certainly noticed the goings on in the 30-acre Alumnae Valley site. In February we completed construction of the Davis Parking Facility. You may even have parked in it. Even with all the extra cars here for Reunion, I hope you could sense that the new parking facility has enabled us to remove parking from the roadsides throughout the historic core of the campus and to reclaim the landscape experience for the pedestrian.

And if you had a chance to examine the new landscaping around the garage, you have a hint of how beautiful the new Alumnae Valley is going to be. It will surround and envelop the new Wang Campus Center, that tangle of concrete and steel girders now, scheduled to open next spring. The views from the Center are going to be breathtaking out into Alumnae Valley that was formerly an ugly parking lot.

Among the generous gifts from alumnae and their husbands in this year’s reunion classes are recent commitments of $1 million toward the restoration of Alumnae Valley and $2 million in support of the Campus Center construction. We’re grateful for that much-needed help with this ambitious and expensive project.

In addition, thanks to many generous alumnae celebrating reunion this weekend, we have made substantial progress this year toward realizing other campaign priorities. Among such gifts, members of reunion classes committed:

• $2 million to completely renovate and redesign the Tower Court and Tower Hill landscapes.

• $3 million to endow, permanently, the Quantitative Reasoning Program.

• $2 million to establish a professorship in political science.

• Major gifts to endow the Religious and Spiritual Life Program and to help with the much-needed renovation of the Houghton Memorial Chapel.

• A donation to the Davis Museum and Cultural Center of a collection of over 1,400 American prints spanning the 20th century, and, with it, an endowment of $3 million to support and enhance the collection.

Finally, as you know, Annual Giving is an integral part of the campaign. Your annual gifts provide vital support for the education of today's students. In these times of shrinking endowment returns and increased pressures on the budget, the flexible current-use support that annual giving provides is more important than ever.

In fact, by far the largest gift to the campaign – on the order, we hope of $50 million by this time next year -- will be the cumulative gift to the Annual Giving program from thousands of alumnae, each of whom stretched to give as generously as she was able over each of the five years of this campaign. We are so grateful for the constancy of that support, especially in these harder times, when there are so many worthy causes competing for your attention and charitable giving.

In closing, I hope that your travels across campus this weekend and your encounters with faculty, staff and students – as well as with your younger selves, and your friends who have grown older and ever more interesting – I hope all of those encounters have afforded you a glimpse of some of the exciting new possibilities that have been brought to fruition through your generous support of The Wellesley Campaign.

It is such a privilege for me to be leading our alma mater at this exciting time in its history and I am so grateful to so many people who have rallied to our support.

The opening of college this fall marked my 10th anniversary in the presidency and despite many protestations that I didn’t want any fuss (or perhaps because of them), there were, in the end, four different surprise parties, all of which took me by surprise. I was hoping no one would notice how clueless or gullible a person must be who can be so easily surprised, four times in a row.

In any case, among many wonderful gifts I received on that occasion was a commissioned work by a poet-storyteller named Brian Andreas. He immersed himself in my writings and speeches and in a very few well-chosen words, captured (I believe) the special magic that is Wellesley College. I want to close with the piece that he wrote – because I feel that he wrote it not just for me, but for us all:

"In the heart of the world there is a place that holds the secret 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."

Thank you so very much for standing together with me in the heart of the world keeping our college safe for as long as it takes till morning comes. Your prodigious support – in its many forms – makes an enormous difference … in this college and in this world. Thanks for being here. Travel safely, and come back soon.