President Johnson addressed the class of 2026
Thank you, Dr. Simmons, for that truly moving address. May I ask you to rejoin me?
On the occasion of Wellesley College’s sesquicentennial, we are so honored you were able to return to campus to share your inspirational story and to speak to how your time here was so transformative, and to impart that message to our graduates.
In the spirit of the moment, we would like to celebrate your achievements and your ties with Wellesley with a special honor.
Therefore, Dr. Ruth J. Simmons, it is my privilege as president of Wellesley College to recognize you for your pathbreaking leadership in higher education; your dedication to expanding equity and opportunity for all students; and your profound, lasting impact on women’s leadership. Because of these contributions and the enduring bond you have to this institution, I hereby name you a Distinguished Honorary Alumna of Wellesley College.
I and the College could not be more proud to call you one of “ours.”
Finally, to commemorate this honor, we would like you to have this representation of the keys to the College.
These keys symbolize three pillars of life and learning at Wellesley:
- The key of the dormitory, with a hearth, for residential life.
- The key of the library, with an owl and a book, for intellectual life.
- And the key of the chapel, with a cross, for spiritual life.
Today, it is my honor to present these to you in full recognition of your time at Wellesley and a legacy of advancing equity, opportunity, and excellence for all students in higher education.
To the great, regal purple class of 2026—congratulations once again. I am so proud of all of you. I am sure that your professors, and clearly Dr. Simmons, will agree with me: We have soaring hopes and dreams for you. In fact—I am going to be frank here—we are counting on you, and the world needs you.
We need your creativity, your fresh perspective, and your freedom from the constraints of the past.
We need your deep engagement, your capacity to learn, and your energy, channeled into public service, our institutions, and our country’s civic life.
And I want to say, we are not just counting on you—we are with you. Even when we disagree, as we inevitably will. All of us, together, must meet the unprecedented challenges we face. And yet, the fact is, our country’s history teaches us that the courage of young people especially made all the difference.
Inspiring Wellesley students to courage was part of the very plan of the College 150 years ago. Our founders, Pauline and Henry Durant, saw that offering young women an education equal to that offered to any young man was more than a matter of justice. It was essential to our still-young democracy.
Without a doubt, there was considerable work to be done. After the Civil War, the democratizing efforts of Reconstruction met violent resistance. The Gilded Age that followed was harshly unequal and uncaring, with few protections for the rural young people and immigrants pouring into factories in American cities.
But, as our founders envisioned, Wellesley women would work to change that.
Wellesley’s remarkable economics department was already breaking new ground by 1883, when Wellesley offered its first course in political economy, taught by Katharine Coman. At Harvard, economics classes were abstract and theoretical. At Wellesley, economics was a tool to understand and improve the social conditions of women workers, immigrants, and consumers. Professor Coman herself organized women who worked in Boston’s sweatshops.
Professor Emily Greene Balch also taught social economics at Wellesley and took her students to factories, immigrant neighborhoods, and prisons. When she took them to brothels, the parents did complain.
Her tenure was cut short by the College due to her pacifist activism during World War I that took her away from her teaching, and she would go on to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946.
Professors Coman and Balch and other Wellesley faculty and alumnae went on to found the Denison settlement house in Boston, which provided health care and education to new immigrants. The explicit goal of Denison House was not charity, but improving our democracy through, as its leaders wrote, “a free-flowing life between group and group.”
These Wellesley women were part of a growing movement that organized labor, restrained industrial monopolies, reduced corruption, and gave more people their rights. The Harvard political scientist and professor Robert Putnam describes how the progressive movement spurred a more than half-century “upswing” in American life away from the callousness of the Gilded Age. Over time, many—though surely not all—Americans experienced greater prosperity and the benefits of increased civic engagement. You may be familiar with Professor Putnam from his famous book, Bowling Alone, which captures the loss of social capital and civic engagement in the late 20th century. Professor Putnam found that fewer Americans were joining parent-teacher associations in schools, civic groups, and religious congregations. Increasingly, they avoided activities that allowed them to make common cause with their neighbors.
That downward trend persists—and it has harmed our democracy. As Professor Putnam demonstrated, losing our sense of community diminishes our politics, business, and culture. Add widening economic inequality, declining trust in politics, and a culture that rewards individual performance over shared effort, and you have a dangerous mix. As Professor Putnam put it, we are witnessing the triumph of the “I” over the “we.”
It is hard to have a very high opinion of people with whom you’ve never gathered. In a recent Pew survey of 25 countries, Americans have the lowest opinion of their fellow citizens: 53% of us rate other Americans’ morality and ethics as somewhat bad or very bad. Right next door in Mexico, 83% of people believe in the goodness of their compatriots. In Canada, 92% do.
Our endemic suspicion helps to explain a moment in our politics when cruelty toward marginalized people or people who merely think differently is seen as strength—and empathy is seen as a weakness.
In the United States, we have reached a low point previously unimaginable to past generations, who fought for equity and civil liberties and the elimination of racial, ethnic, and gender disparities. Their progress is now being unraveled.
Writer Rebecca Solnit, however, reminds us that there is a larger story to be told, on a longer timeline, and even when our leaders seem to be taking us backward in some ways, that doesn’t mean a new world isn’t being born. She says, “You can take rights away, but you can’t so easily take ideas away, including people’s belief in their own rights and the rights of people they care about. … There is no going back, though how we go forward is the work.”
This year marks the 250th anniversary of the United States. Our democracy is no longer young. What lessons should we draw from our two and a half centuries of complex, irreducible history? From the Durants, Katharine Coman, and Emily Greene Balch?
When they were alive, they were as uncertain of their future as we are of ours. When they took bold steps to make deep and lasting change, their success did not appear inevitable. And yet, to them, neither did the status quo, which ultimately we overcame. A different future is always possible.
On the 250th anniversary of the United States, I urge you to seek your civic purpose, to identify the meaningful role you will play in the bold experiment that is up to each new generation to renew.
Ruth Simmons’ story of courageous leadership reminds us of the power we hold in higher education to address the challenges facing our country. From Smith College, to Brown University, to Prairie View A&M University, to many others, she has consistently shown that the status quo is not inevitable, and that institutions of higher education have the power to realize a different future.
I will raise just one of many examples: In 2003, Dr. Simmons became the first university president to reckon with Brown’s ties to the transatlantic slave trade. Her work to establish Brown University’s Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice and publish its findings exemplifies the foresight, knowledge, curiosity, and courage that is the through line of her life. It also exemplifies her belief in the power of educational institutions to seek knowledge and truth, and go where no others have. Years later, other universities followed Brown’s example.
In Minnesota, during this past frigid winter, we witnessed another powerful example of people with a better vision for our nation. The people of the Twin Cities risked their lives to protest the merciless way their immigrant neighbors were being detained.
These were people of all political persuasions coming together. And they didn’t just protest: They turned careless violence on its head, by offering decency. They organized, served as bystanders, and showed us all what it means to be a good neighbor.
Later this spring, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation will confer the Profile in Courage Award on a handful of these extraordinary community organizations, “for defending … the values that serve as the foundation for our Constitutional democracy.”
The people of the Twin Cities were able to organize so effectively because they had done so before. They had, in recent years, already established what the founders of Denison House called the “free-flowing life between group and group.” The power of such free-flowing life is immeasurable. Connections help to forge further connections and a new sense of the possibilities—until policy begins to yield to good ideas, and a better democracy is born.
The people of Minnesota knew firsthand the lesson of our history: Liberty must be mutual if it is going to survive.
Graduates, I know you already have that sense of community deep in your hearts, because of the connections you’ve made here across differences—and everything you’ve learned about making a difference in the world.
Your neighborhood expands today. You are now part of the most powerful women’s network in the world: that of Wellesley alumnae. Your classmates and fellow Wellesley alumnae will stand by you for the rest of your lives. Together, you have the opportunity to pursue real and lasting change.
I hope you never doubt that you were made for this moment. I hope you never underestimate your power to imagine new ways to move our country and world forward.
You are prepared for leadership. In these years at Wellesley, you’ve grappled with complex ideas in your classes, and learned from a diverse community of your peers. These are lessons learned through living, which no machine can truly know. You enter a world marked by division that beseeches you to find our common humanity.
This year, we celebrate our country’s 250th birthday and our own 150th at Wellesley. Both anniversaries remind us of our shared calling to strengthen our democracy. They remind us of the critical importance of independent and educated women and all people in that democracy, and how strong institutions are critical to its flourishing.
We are counting on you to help realize the founding promises of the United States: the fact that our government serves the people, and not the other way around.
These ideas of our founders are best realized by people who know in their hearts that “a free-flowing life between group and group” is possible.
Graduates, we are so proud of you. Stay true to yourselves and close to each other, wherever you go, and you will lead us to a better future.
Thank you.