President Johnson addressed the class of 2025
Thank you, Ms. Wilkerson, for that inspiring message.
To the great green class of 2025—congratulations once again.
Coming to Wellesley College was a particularly large leap of faith for you. Amid the pandemic in the fall of 2020 and the winter and spring of 2021, we couldn’t welcome our applicants for tours and visits. Most of you chose Wellesley sight unseen.
But there was another leap of faith in choosing the kind of education we offer here, an education in the liberal arts, including the humanities, social sciences, and math and science.
The term “liberal education” dates back to ancient Rome and refers to an education that benefits people of liberty—those free to decide their own destinies, free to explore the world around them, free to express themselves.
Today, the United States is a country in deep disagreement about the value of higher education, especially a liberal arts education. In fact, there is no agreement on whether colleges and universities are hurting or helping our nation. One-third of Americans now say that they have little to no confidence in us. One of the main concerns they cite is a failure to teach relevant skills.
I would say that this represents a utilitarian view of higher education, which argues that it should be a highly focused form of preparation for employment.
The problem with this view is that it fails to account for the rapid advancement of science, medicine, technology, and society itself, which is constantly changing—and which requires a different kind of education.
I think of Erna Schneider Hoover of the class of 1948, who said that her Wellesley education prepared her for a career that did not yet exist. She majored in philosophy at Wellesley and went on to earn a doctorate in philosophy and mathematics at Yale. Because the tenure track in academia was largely closed to married women in the 1950s, she joined Bell Labs, which was working to computerize mechanical call-switching.
Erna sketched out a plan for this while in the hospital giving birth and earned one of the first software patents ever issued—as well as membership in the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Graduates, you too are prepared for careers that do not yet exist. This is what the practical view of education doesn’t capture. You have received an education in curiosity, critical thinking, connecting despite differences, and communicating persuasively that represents a kind of meta-power applicable to almost any endeavor. It allows for self-reinvention whenever a new opportunity appears.
Of course, not everyone believes the purpose of higher education is purely practical.
Some cultural critics have argued that the point of your time here is learning canonical knowledge that you will then share with other educated people all over the world. In this view, a familiarity with Beowulf and quantum entanglement is the secret handshake that will admit you to the club.
I much prefer the quiet but powerful definition of value proposed by Maud Hazeltine Chaplin, class of 1956 and professor emerita of philosophy. After being appointed dean of the College in the late 1970s, she said, “We shall be graduating students who perceive education as a perpetual process, not as a preface to their lives, but as a companion.”
Indeed, Wellesley does graduate students with the intellectual humility to understand that there is always more to learn—and the outsized confidence that they can learn something entirely new.
I believe that the main value of a liberal arts education is the values it encompasses—and therefore imparts.
At Wellesley College, we seek truth, and we understand that there is such a thing as truth, even though the search for it may never end.
We perceive what our second president, Alice Freeman Palmer, called “the wealth that lies in differences.” We acknowledge that we grow when we encounter people who are unlike us in perspectives and experiences—and begin to consider all that we have in common.
At Wellesley, we know that teaching and research are part of the fabric of the College, and that students and their professors are explorers together searching for knowledge.
We also believe that academic freedom is essential if those explorations are going to contribute something new to humanity.
The concept of academic freedom was codified at the beginning of the 19th century by the intellectual founders of the first modern research university, the Humboldt University of Berlin. They argued that the pursuit of pure knowledge, essential to the purpose of a university, requires freedom.
They cautioned that the state “is never anything but an impediment as soon as it meddles directly in the production of knowledge.”
As you all know, we are in the midst of a degree of meddling that American colleges and universities have not seen since the McCarthy era in the late 1940s and 1950s. But academic freedom means that no one can force any member of this community to accept ideas that contradict the evidence or their best judgment.
It’s astonishing that it now takes courage to defend this principle—but this is a moment that calls for courage.
Graduates, you have spent four years at Wellesley College breathing an atmosphere of freedom—and you may not appreciate how truly free you are until you spend time in environments where speaking one’s mind is not always wise, not always rewarded, not always respected. Nonetheless, I hope you have developed a taste for freedom that you will never, ever give up.
Historian Timothy Snyder worries that here in the U.S., we define freedom too negatively: as the absence of oppression, as the absence of too much meddling. But he considers this just the necessary condition for freedom, not freedom itself.
As he sees it, “If we want to be free, we will have to affirm, not just deny. … Freedom is about knowing what we value and bringing it to life.”
When I think of someone who embodies that positive idea of freedom, I think of one of the most important artists ever to emerge from Wellesley College: Lorraine O’Grady of the class of 1955.
Some of you may have met her when she came to campus last year for a retrospective of her work. I am so glad that Wellesley had the chance to both host and embrace her before she passed away last December.
As a Wellesley student, Lorraine majored in economics and minored in Spanish literature. She got married and had a child during college, and went on to graduate. She then worked for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which she called “the fanciest of bureaus, where the intellectuals were.”
She was the first Black woman, as well as the first Wellesley student of any race, to pass the exam that landed her the job. She then moved to the U.S. State Department, where she was an intelligence analyst.
But Lorraine’s intellect and curiosity exceeded her work as an analyst. She had more to say! She went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and started on a novel. For a while, she ran a successful translation agency in Chicago. Then she moved to New York City and became a rock critic for Rolling Stone and the Village Voice.
Then a friend in trouble asked her to take over a course he was supposed to teach at the School of Visual Arts.
Lorraine so loved the physical and mental atmosphere of art school that she decided to learn more about conceptual art.
At the age of 45, she suddenly understood, “I have ideas like this all the time. I just didn’t know they were art.”
What followed was a remarkable career as a conceptual and performance artist that culminated with a retrospective titled Both/And. “Both/and” is, of course, the generous opposite of “either/or.”
What Lorraine’s trajectory shows us is that a liberal arts education can take you anywhere in life. Her power was that she understood that. She, too, was “both/and.”
Timothy Snyder sees “becoming individuals” as the great task of positive freedom. But he also believes that the wisest way to secure our own precious freedom is to make sure that such freedom extends to all.
Wellesley founders Henry and Pauline Durant would agree. They intended a Wellesley education to prepare women “for great conflicts, for vast reforms in social life, for noblest usefulness.” They expected Wellesley women to fight for freedom and justice and health and opportunity.
And Wellesley women have done just that, over and over, for the past 150 years, in many individual ways.
I think of Katharine Lee Bates of the Wellesley class of 1880. After winning a writing prize, Katharine studied at Oxford for two years before returning to Wellesley to teach English literature and earn a master’s degree. While at Wellesley, she published fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in the New York Times and the Atlantic.
At the same time, she participated actively in the civic life around her, co-founding a settlement house in Boston, Denison House, designed to help the urban immigrant poor.
After a trip west, she wrote the poem “America the Beautiful,” which would become, as you know, one of the country’s most beloved patriotic songs—and a Wellesley anthem of sorts. Katharine Lee Bates dwelled among spacious skies. Her Wellesley education allowed that.
Graduates, I hope you, too, always see the spacious skies above. Like the Wellesley alums who came before you, each one of you is a true original.
During your time here, we have done our best to help you find your voice. Use it with confidence, wherever you go.
Take a creative approach to life. Make things, build things, fix things. Find what you value, and stay true to those values.
Enjoy your freedom, and spread that freedom wherever you can. Stay brave, and we can expect very great things from you.
Thank you.