September 2, 2025
Welcome, everyone, to the start of our 150th year—and what an anniversary year this is. It was in September of 1875 that Wellesley College welcomed its first incoming class.
By all accounts, it was a chaotic scene, with Wellesley’s magnificent College Hall still under construction, and workers racing to make it habitable. Over 300 students showed up that first day, with a mountain of luggage, as well as parents, siblings, uncles, aunts, and cousins. At that time, for a young woman to go off to college was a break with the past that was challenging for most families to absorb.
I hope moving in has been more drama-free for all of you—especially for our incoming green class of 2029, our new Davis Scholars, and our new transfer and exchange students. Welcome to all of you. A special welcome to our amazing purple class of 2026, resplendent in their robes. We are so happy to have you with us!
Welcome, also, to our new faculty and to our new administrative and union members. And a big welcome back to every member of this wonderful community who is returning for another year.
Since we are celebrating Wellesley’s 150th anniversary, I’d like to spend a few minutes talking about the hope and faith that built Wellesley and that have sustained it for so long. Without question, the cultural context around Wellesley has changed over its lifetime and truly has challenged it at times—including at this current moment. However, the College has remained uniquely important to the world as a source of excellent education for brilliant women and as an intellectual center for ideas and activism centered on women’s lives.
Wellesley, of course, was founded a full 45 years before the 19th Amendment gave women access to the ballot box. Two of its founding premises made it entirely radical in conception:
First was founders Henry and Pauline Durant’s certainty that one of the surest paths to a better society was educating and empowering women. The Durants saw the opportunity to educate women of all economic backgrounds so that they could be active participants in building the country and addressing social challenges. This was a revolutionary idea at the time.
The second key premise was that Wellesley students—unlike students at other women’s colleges—would be taught by women faculty and led by women presidents. This was a clear statement that women’s intellects were equal to men’s and that women’s concerns would preside here. So, Wellesley recruited as its professors brilliant women who’d been educated at pioneering coed institutions and at the older Seven Sisters—and soon, at Wellesley itself.
While the Durants worked to create a college that would surpass any men’s college—with first-rate scientific equipment, a first-rate library, and first-rate professors—they also gave Wellesley a seminary flavor, seeking to develop piety in their students.
Their vision soon encountered a challenging reality: Wellesley faculty and students rebelled against the religious discipline. These women wanted excellence and independence, not repression. Henry Durant heard these concerns and hired a charismatic young high school principal named Alice Freeman Palmer to help him steer Wellesley in a new direction. On his recommendation, she went on to become Wellesley’s second president and made Wellesley into a world-class liberal arts college.
Dr. Julie Reuben, a historian of higher education at Harvard, has chronicled a transition in American colleges and universities between the 19th and 20th centuries. Initially, they saw their role as imparting truth—including in its moral and spiritual dimensions. But during the 20th century, colleges came to see their primary role as promoting free inquiry, because only scientific facts could be proven true, not moral values. Moral education no longer took place in the classroom.
For the founders, it may have seemed like a crisis of purpose at Wellesley as the religious dimension waned. But because the Durants were so focused on service, and because the faculty embraced their power to enact social change wholeheartedly, Wellesley truly never lost its moral dimension. Even today, under Wellesley’s Honor Code, all of our students take an oath to dedicate themselves to a life of honor. This is not a trivial promise, but one we see realized by our alums over and over. Led by Chief Justice Elizabeth Chou ’26, you will take the same oath today. Throughout our history, we have embraced our cherished motto—Non Ministrari sed Ministrare—which calls on us to serve others, rather than to be served.
Wellesley’s first faculty members were sophisticated scholars who seized the rare opportunity to have academic careers as women—and who made sacrifices for that opportunity. For Wellesley’s first 25 years, faculty were expected to live on campus and to forgo marriage and children to devote themselves to the next generation of changemakers and scholars.
Our early faculty put Wellesley in the vanguard of innovation in research and education, while devoting themselves completely to their students. This was true across the disciplines.
Sarah Frances Whiting, professor of physics and astronomy, established the second academic physics laboratory in the country at Wellesley, and carried out some of the first X-ray experiments in the U.S.
Professor Alice Van Vechten Brown developed an equally hands-on way to teach art history by asking students to interact with and create art, rather than just listen to lectures, known as the “Wellesley Method.”
Professor Mary Whiton Calkins established the first laboratory for psychology at a women’s college and one of the first in the country. The sign on her office door said that her office hours were 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Other times by appointment. Now, please don’t take this as me advocating these hours! But do go to office hours!
We’ve come a long way since, in that we now see the value in hiring faculty with full lives, from different backgrounds, including all genders, and whose excellence continues to grow with each generation.
Wellesley had a different kind of crisis in 1914, when College Hall caught fire at 4:30 am. College Hall was one of the largest and most beautiful buildings in the United States, constructed initially to house all of Wellesley, with classrooms, laboratories, dormitories, and gathering spaces all under one roof. Only the columns remain today.
The student fire chief knew exactly what to do. And because she’d insisted on unannounced nighttime fire drills, so did all the students. Within 10 minutes everyone was out of the building safely.
Today, we still have student fire chiefs. And we still educate confident students likely to be cool-headed in any emergency.
After the fire, the community here only became stronger. The College was rebuilt with the advice of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. to take full advantage of its hilly site. Today, as you know, this is widely considered one of the most beautiful college campuses in the United States.
The 1910s were a turbulent decade, as the 2020s are shaping up to be. There was World War I, which coincided with the 1918 flu pandemic. Physicians, Dr. Mabel Seagrave of the class of 1905 and Dr. Harriet Rice of the class of 1887, the first Black woman to graduate from Wellesley, went to France to provide aid to the victims of war. They were joined by many other Wellesley alumnae and faculty volunteers. Their heroism—and the heroism of other women’s college graduates—helped to tip the balance for women’s suffrage in 1920.
Wellesley students and alums contributed to other social movements, including the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s.
In the 1960s, students led the charge for change. After 11 Black freshmen arriving on campus in 1966 were told they were being assigned a block of single rooms in a residence hall to “avoid conflict,” five Black students organized to address the racial discrimination they perceived. They founded Ethos, Wellesley’s Black student organization.
Ethos made Wellesley College a much better place. The race and racial preference questions were struck from the freshman housing forms. Ethos helped the College to recruit more Black students, urged it to create a major field of study called at its inception Afro-American History (now called Africana studies), and they founded Harambee House as a home to organizations today dedicated to students of African descent. Ethos helped Wellesley to truly embrace what Alice Freeman Palmer had called the “wealth that lies in differences.”
In the 1970s, Wellesley President Barbara Newell understood that the feminist movement required the kind of intellectual heft that could only be achieved through research. In 1974, the Center for Research on Women was founded. It evolved to become the Wellesley Centers for Women, which has generated extraordinary interdisciplinary research and action on an enormous range of issues critical to women. Having just celebrated its 50th anniversary, today WCW continues this work, which has become more global in nature.
Today, we remain firm in our commitment to women everywhere. One example is the founding of the Asian University for Women in Chittagong, Bangladesh, which is dedicated to providing an outstanding liberal arts education and to developing women leaders in a part of the world where less well-resourced women often have very few opportunities. Wellesley President Emerita Diana Chapman Walsh ’66 convened the meeting on the Wellesley campus where this amazing project was conceived. And today, we are proud to send our own alumnae to AUW as teaching fellows.
As I look to our future, I know that Wellesley College will continue to respond to challenges while remaining true to its belief that women’s education is the most powerful force for change in the world. This year, we will explore and celebrate our history, as well as consider our current tumultuous time, and ask the question, how does Wellesley meet the moment? What does it demand of us, collectively and individually, that will help to ensure our strength for the next 150 years?
To our faculty and staff who are new to Wellesley—you are now part of a remarkable tradition of pedagogical innovation, of fostering outstanding young leaders, and of helping them discover their own opportunities to better the world.
To the first-years among our students—you will be an important part of Wellesley’s next chapter, as it adapts to the many political, social, and moral challenges of our day.
The knowledge, skills, and courage you develop during your college years are going to be of immense benefit to the world around you, so I urge you to look on those challenges as absolutely surmountable!
For the next few years, you will have people beside you who believe in you—every step of the way—and who believe in all that you can do. I am one of them! We will do everything possible to support your growth during this important time in your life.
You are now part of this amazing institution and its amazing history. I hope that makes you feel valued, proud, powerful, and optimistic about the future.
I am so happy that we are all back together again. Now, let’s have a truly wonderful year.