What an amazing journey we have traveled together. And what a magnificent destination we are now drinking in—snapping photos, comparing notes, pinching ourselves to verify that we’re awake and this is real. Standing here, looking out at so many special people who have given so much of themselves to the cause we conclude this evening, I am filled with pride, with nostalgia, with the deepest affection, and with gratitude—yes, that most of all—gratitude without measure and beyond words. It has been a rare privilege—an incomparable adventure really—for me to have led this campaign for Wellesley College, truly the opportunity of a lifetime.

Now we gather in this festive space that is itself a product of our pooled stores of time, talent, and treasure. We gather in a tent pitched on a sod lawn that was mud one week ago. This instant lawn marks the heart of the new “alumnae valley,” a space that for decades had been blighted by a makeshift parking lot.

In this sculpted landscape—11 acres of “cultivated nature”—we have crafted the breathtaking new building our students are already calling, affectionately, “the Lulu.” I overheard one of them say to another on opening day, “Wow, she must really love us to have bought this building for us.” And so it can be said of all the donors to this campaign, almost 34,000 in total and over 23,000 alumnae; 10 deep behind every current student, cheering her on. The students feel your support and they are buoyed by it. All of us are.

For almost two decades, we have been imagining a center in which we could come together to enact our vision of the future. And now we have it: a building of this place and of this time—and yet timeless; a building that faces, opens, and reaches out in every direction; unowned spaces we all can own, that honor us and call us into community. This new center offers us something very rare, the opportunity to create community by design. In it we will discover and enact, over time, the intricate, fluid global learning community we can be.

As we sit here and soak up the difference in this physical space before and after—as we register the magnitude of the change we have wrought—we can experience these 11 acres as both a manifest transformation that has resulted directly from our efforts, and a symbol of less tangible, but no less magical, transformations we have effected throughout the college as a consequence of our having succeeded with this extraordinary campaign. Nearly every major aspect of the Wellesley educational experience has been enriched by our work.

And so we reconvene this evening—assembled under this tent—alumnae and friends of Wellesley College, generous and loyal supporters who have stepped forward in this campaign to play your part in ensuring the college’s future by enabling it to meet the challenges of our times.

Generations before us have done their share, faithfully and well; generations who follow will surely, too, when their turn comes. Gathered here, too, are friends and professional colleagues, as well as faculty, staff and students, partners who have brought their creativity and their energy to help us realize the big dreams we celebrate tonight.

It was at their annual meeting on April 14, 2000, that the Board of Trustees approved the plan for The Wellesley Campaign, the completion of which we celebrate tonight. That historic vote, in our 125th anniversary year, launched the most ambitious fund-raising campaign any liberal arts college had dared to undertake. The trustees that day quite literally cast a vote of confidence in the future of Wellesley College—a powerful institution with a proud history, rooted in an ethic of service and in the founding belief that to provide a great education for women is to advance the cause of justice, directly and indirectly, at home and around the world.

The campaign priorities approved by the board five-and-a-half years ago were distilled from six prior years of intense self-scrutiny. In dozens of decentralized planning efforts, trustees, deans and vice presidents, academic department chairs, faculty, administrators and students examined, argued, refined and re-shaped our impressions of Wellesley’s distinctive strengths, the challenges we faced, the obligations we felt. We emerged with five basic conclusions.

1. We observed, first, that the College played a decisive, role-shaping leadership model for women through the twentieth century and affirmed that we mean to enhance that role in the twenty-first.

2. Second, we were confident (and grateful) that we approach the future from a position of strength: in the quality of our students and our faculty; in the learning environment that nourishes their work; in the loyalty of our accomplished alumnae and the credit they bring the College; in the cycles of stewardship uniting generations.

3. We assumed, third, that the future will bring challenges, many embedded in large socioeconomic trends: globalization, the changing nature of work, multiculturalism and shifting gender scripts, the explosion of knowledge, the technological revolution, and the widening gap between rich and poor, in the U.S. and abroad—a gap, parenthetically, that has been ever more painfully salient in recent months and weeks as we’ve been shaken by epic disasters, natural and man-made.

4. Fourth, we acknowledged that the value of even the finest liberal arts education is no longer taken for granted and that women’s colleges face heightened risks.

5. And, fifth, we knew we wanted to offer all our students an innovative, integrated, and individualized educational experience, extending from the classroom, to the campus, to the world.

At a time when centrifugal forces are tearing people apart, we were determined to reinforce our connections. The density and durability of our connections—to one other and to the college—are among our greatest assets. A capacity for making connections is the heart of an ethical life, and honing that capacity is the essential task of an excellent liberal education.

So we resolved to attend to our connections in this campaign, and to do so by investing in the structures—physical, administrative, and curricular—that link separate disciplines and disparate parts of the campus; that connect curricular and extracurricular experiences; that unite thought with action, competence with ethics, and our history of privilege with our legacy of service.

We were eager to invest in our common intellectual life by connecting parts of the curriculum and the community that were in danger of becoming fragmented or isolated, eager to ensure that we are preparing the whole student for a whole life, a fully engaged life enriched by flexibility, confidence, resilience, passionate commitment—qualities manifest in so many of our alumnae.

We had equally strong ideas about how to conduct the campaign, again with an eye to the overriding goal of fortifying the college’s web of connections. We set out to reach as many alumnae and friends as we possibly could, and to present the campaign as a celebration of our immense good fortune, and an affirmation of the values the college embodies and communicates—honesty, integrity, respect.

And we took to the road, traveling hundreds of thousands of miles to host 21 campaign celebrations over the five-year period. We drew capacity crowds everywhere we went: from the British Museum in London to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland; from the Getty Museum in LA and the MOMA in San Francisco to Union Station in the nation’s capital; from Radio City Music Hall (without the Rockettes) to the Johnson Space Center (with our own astronaut). There were many memorable stops along the way, and many stories—vivid, evocative stories.

What I have most loved about this campaign, in fact, is the opportunity it has afforded us to harvest so many stories, weaving them together into a common narrative. I spoke at my inauguration (a lifetime ago, so it seems) about the role that stories play in a community, weaving a tightly textured fabric, a shared narrative. Narratives forge identities, organize struggle, contest and change. They presuppose, yet challenge and remake, the moral order out of which lives derive their meaning and take their shape. "I will tell you something about stories," wrote Native-American novelist Leslie Marmon Silko. "They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled."

Behind every gift to The Wellesley Campaign there lies a story—a very personal one—the memory of a profound encounter with a challenging professor; the imprint of an inspiring text or a hard-won experimental result; a spark of recognition, a taste of mastery; a moment in the landscape when things became clearer (or muddier) and everything shifted or settled; a friendship that has sustained a lifetime of joy and sorrow (many friendships for many lifetimes); a strong personal identity with a set of values that Wellesley represents, wherever the culture wanders; appreciation for the blessings of the past; hope for the possibilities of the future. As we close this campaign, it is the stories that reverberate in my mind and heart.

Propelled by these stories—by the vision, the energy, the altruism they fuel—we, together; all of us—have strengthened Wellesley College in myriad ways:

• We have enhanced our core academic programs and stretched them in new directions, recognizing the forces that are reshaping knowledge and learning;

• We have reclaimed whole sectors of the campus landscape and have refreshed and restored much of the rest of it, as an indispensable context for a Wellesley education;

• We have created intriguing new interior spaces for innovative learning encounters, incorporating new technologies, new teaching strategies, new conceptions of who we are and what we are doing;

• We have enlarged access to a Wellesley degree and backed our belief in need-blind admission with many newly endowed financial aid funds; and

• We have extended our reach across the country and around the globe.

You have invested your gifts—and placed your confidence—in our most precious assets: our dedicated faculty, our bright and deserving students, our irreplaceable campus, our promising future. Together we have imagined that future, and we have reached for it.

Tonight we record the story of another fund-raising triumph, breaking all the records again, as Wellesley did a decade ago, sending a resounding message that we are strong and ever stronger. We are doing the work of the world, making a difference wherever we can, each in our own, often unassuming, style.

And we mean to continue: women’s work is never done. We are introducing into the corridors of power the gifts that women have to bring. With those gifts come a yearning many of us (women and men) have and are living. We want a world that is healthier, safer, saner for everyone. We want a universe the arc of which truly does bend toward justice. Such were the stories I heard on the campaign trail.

Now the campaign is complete and all that remains for me to do is to try to express, as best I can, my profound, personal gratitude to each one of you—donors, trustees, volunteers, all my partners in this complicated endeavor—my deans and vice presidents, current and past—key faculty, students, and staff, our exceptional Resources team (dedicated and talented professionals who first made all this possible and then made it fun), architects, contractors, colleagues from the campus and beyond. You know who you are and what you did; please know that we do too, and are ever grateful.

I’ll always remember the partnerships that grounded and sustained me through this great adventure. I’ll treasure the many friendships that deepened in the shared pleasure of seeing our best hopes for Wellesley actualized, step-by-step. What greater privilege than to have created for this beautiful College—and all the hope it represents—new possibilities that will outlive us all.

I thank you, from my heart.