Standard I		Mission
Andrew Shennan		ashennan@wellesley.edu

The mission of Wellesley College is to provide an excellent liberal arts education for women who will make a difference in the world.

This statement of the College's mission has been in place for a number of years and continues to be viewed by faculty, students and staff as an accurate and succinct expression of our essential purposes as an institution. The mission statement appears in the College catalog and has been formally re-endorsed within the past year by the Board of Trustees.

By every measure, the last decade has been a highly successful one for Wellesley. By the 1980s the College had absorbed the impact of the national trend to co-education and the resulting decrease in the pool of highly qualified women who would consider applying to a women's college. In the 1990s, the number of our applicants has increased and their academic quality (as measured by standardized test scores) has improved. Our financial strength has enabled us to maintain a policy of admitting students solely on merit and aiding them based on need. This has brought us a generation of students that is as accomplished and highly motivated as ever and more culturally and ethnically diverse than at any point in Wellesley's history. On the curricular and programmatic level, the College has responded - we believe, effectively - to the challenge of adapting our education to an increasingly global and technologically sophisticated world, imparting new skills and competencies while providing students with the still indispensable values and habits of mind at the heart of the liberal arts. Meanwhile, our alumnae have continued to earn prominence in the larger world and to show remarkable loyalty to the College.

As this self-study will show, the excellence of a Wellesley education rests on many different foundations. But the fundamental one, surely, is the intellectually serious, rigorous and personal instruction that students receive from our faculty. While the scholarly profile of Wellesley faculty has risen over the past decade (thanks in good measure to the College's support of their research), student instruction has remained the central and overriding concern of this institution. We, thus, take justifiable pride in the high level of our students' satisfaction with their academic experience and with the accessibility and expertise of their professors. In these areas, COFHE surveys show that Wellesley performs as well as, or better than, peer institutions. Such self-assessments are plainly an imperfect measure of excellence, but they are consistent with other measures (such as the success of our graduates in national fellowship competitions or the reports of outside visitors to our departments and programs) which suggest that we are indeed meeting our claim of excellence.

Not surprisingly, these years of institutional success have strengthened the College's commitment to the core of its mission -- the education of women. The continuing relevance and necessity of the women's college ideal are themes perpetually re-articulated on our campus -- and not just by the leadership of the College. When students, faculty and staff discuss Wellesley's mission (as they did in an all-campus forum held in January 1998 to launch this self-study), they find it relatively easy to identify the special virtues of a women's college and of this particular women's college. The members of this community more or less agree, for example, that a women's college is particularly well-suited to developing the leadership skills and self-confidence of female undergraduates, that it encourages women to enter academic fields that are elsewhere male-dominated, and that - simply by treating women's issues and experiences as central rather than peripheral - it performs an invaluable function in a society still marked by gender inequities. At Wellesley it seems particularly important that the College should itself exemplify female leadership: our students often cite the visibility of women role models here - the president and most of the leaders on our campus are, and always have been, women - as a characteristic strength of this institution.

This fundamental confidence in our ideals does not, of course, preclude disagreement when it comes to evaluating our realization of them. The January 1998 forum raised several often-voiced self-criticisms. Some worry, for example, that the close-knit, supportive community that we aspire to create and that we rightly value may also stifle constructive disagreement, coddle instead of challenge, and transmit to our students an unhealthy sense of entitlement. Aversion to conflict is often adduced as characteristic of "the Wellesley culture" and seen as having deleterious consequences in various areas of college life, from the classroom to the dormitory.

Alternatively, some members of our community believe that we still do not live out the full meaning of our mission as an institution for women. Participants at the forum suggested, for example, that we offer our students a traditional, male model of success, that we educate women to make a difference in the world rather than to make the world a different place. Others, however, regard this distinction between making a difference in the world and making the world a different place as purely semantic. They argue that when women succeed - whatever the sphere but particularly in institutions or occupations historically dominated by men - they are making the world a different place.

Alongside this ongoing debate about what it means to be a women's college has run a more pointed and at times more painful debate about what it means to be a diverse community. Though not explicitly mentioned in our mission statement, diversity has clearly become central to the College's identity and critical to our efforts to attract the best-qualified students and educate them for the twenty-first century. On certain levels, the College's effort to become a more diverse and inclusive institution has been quite successful. Half of our current students are drawn from groups other than the white, native-born citizens of the U.S. who used to define and shape the institution. We have also made some progress in diversifying our faculty: by 1998 almost one third of tenure-track positions were held by minority faculty members, and 18 per cent of total tenured and tenure-track faculty were minorities. In the 1990s the leadership of the College has developed and articulated a vision of Wellesley as an inclusive multicultural community, in which, to quote President Walsh (January 1, 1997), "everyone can feel a legitimate sense of ownership and all can be truly themselves, secure in the knowledge that they will be respected for who they are, or are becoming." Our January 1998 campus meeting showed that people here recognize the progress that has been made, particularly in student admissions. They also credit the administration for making a sincere and consistent effort to acknowledge and address issues of diversity and to promote diversity as a fundamental goal for the College as a whole.

Again, however, some have expressed concerns about the implementation of this effort. These concerns have often surfaced periodically in the wake of particular incidents on campus and have been detailed more systematically in reports produced by members of our community (most notably, a 1989 Task Force on Racism Report and a 1997 Report of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Race and Diversity at Wellesley College). Some of the themes in these reports overlap with those noted above: for example, the sense that Wellesley is a rather conformist place in which it is difficult to express "heretical" views and in which conflict is treated always as a problem rather than as a product of real differences or real alienation. In other words, while the College's efforts to diversify continue, significant numbers of people question the pace or the reality of change.

In sum, Wellesley College's mission unites three aspirations: to educate women, to strive for academic excellence, and to produce graduates whose lives and careers will exemplify the ideal of engagement in the world expressed in Wellesley's motto Non ministrari sed ministrare. From time to time, we have asked ourselves whether one of these aspirations should take precedence over the others. In our last reaccreditation self-study, for example, we debated whether we saw ourselves first and foremost as a women's college or as an excellent liberal arts institution. The answer then, as now, is that all the elements of our mission are essential and form an interconnected whole. Together, they have produced an institution with a strong sense of identity and a long record of intellectual achievement and distinction, an institution which has played a decisive role in shaping leadership models for women throughout the twentieth century.

Our intention is to play an equally significant role in the century to come. With this goal in mind, we embark now on a new round of institutional planning, asking ourselves the hard questions about challenges we expect and opportunities we see on the horizon. We approach the future with a confidence founded on our current position of fundamental strength -- confidence in the quality of our students and faculty and of the learning environment that nourishes their work, in the successes of our alumnae and the credit they bring the College, and in the continuing relevance and importance of our mission.