Convocation 2022

Good afternoon!

Welcome to the start of Wellesley’s 148th year!

Welcome to our new faculty, and to our new administrative and union members, and welcome to all of you who are returning.

A big welcome back to all our returning students: To the green class of 2025, to the red class of 2024, to our seniors, the brilliant yellow class of 2023—it is great to be with you today.

And, of course, a special, heartfelt welcome to the incoming purple class of 2026, to our five new Davis scholars, and to our 15 new transfer students. We are so happy to have you with us!

As we start the year, we hope that the families of our students, faculty, and staff who have been impacted by the natural disasters here in the U.S. and around the world, and those whose families are in conflict zones around the world, are as safe as they can be. Our thoughts are with you and with them.

Our first-year class this year is extremely special, not merely in terms of its academic strength, but also in terms of its diversity—arriving here from high schools in 45 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, and Puerto Rico, as well as 30 countries outside the United States. 

This diversity is racial and ethnic, as well as geographic: Students identifying as Black, Asian American, Latinx, Native American, or multiracial make up 62 percent of the class.

It is cultural, too. Forty-seven percent of our first-year class speak a language other than English at home, and 23 percent are the first in their families to attend a four-year college.

Such diversity may very well be Wellesley’s single greatest strength and opportunity—something that has been recognized for many, many generations at Wellesley. 

For example, Wellesley’s second president, Alice Freeman Palmer, who was named president in 1882, wrote a famous lecture that considered why young women should be sent to college, at a time when it was so uncommon. One of the most important advantages she saw was that college allowed a young woman to encounter peers from different backgrounds: “She realizes how much richer a world she lives in than she ever dreamed of at home. The wealth that lies in differences has dawned upon her vision.” I would venture to say that Wellesley was way ahead of its time.  

In a recent communication to the community, I shared the story of one such Wellesley-inspired expansion of vision: that described by Virginia Foster Durr, class of 1925, in her autobiography, Outside the Magic Circle.  

In the early 1920s, Wellesley had a “rotating tables” policy in its dining halls, assigning students randomly to eat with each other for a month. Virginia, a white student from Jim Crow Alabama, came down to dinner the first night of her sophomore year, saw a Black student at her assigned table, and balked. 

She was quickly set straight and told that if she did not abide by Wellesley’s seating policy, she would be asked to withdraw in the morning.

For the first time, Virginia saw that racist beliefs she had never questioned were considered foolish and reprehensible by a community she adored. During the sleepless night that followed, she began to doubt those beliefs. Years later, when she returned to speak to Wellesley classes, she would retell this story and say, “And so my life began.”

And what a life it was! Virginia Foster Durr went on to become an important figure in the civil rights movement, joining the NAACP and helping to secure voting rights for Blacks and poor whites. She became friends with Rosa Parks, and in 1955, helped to post bail for her after Rosa refused to give up her bus seat.

She also inspired psychologists to take notice of what is now referred to as a “Virginia Durr moment”—an event that challenges our core values in ways that spur moral development. All of us, of every circumstance—if we are very fortunate—will have Virginia Durr moments in our own lives, when our narrow conceptions of humanity begin to crack, our hearts expand, and our lives really begin.

Admittedly, it is not always pleasant to have one’s core beliefs and values challenged. But I want to urge our students: Embrace your differences, do the hard and sometimes uncomfortable work of learning from each other both in the classroom and outside of the classroom, and you will gather the richest gifts Wellesley has to offer.

Of course, to learn from each other, we also need to be patient with each other. We still live in a society with many fault lines—including those of gender, race, income, generation, geography, and political orientation—and there is a learning process for all of us when we first attempt to build that bridge called a relationship across those fault lines. We may make mistakes, give offense. And we may need a little forgiveness as a first step on the road to real connection. 

Four years ago, Wellesley commissioned the Task Force on Speech and Inclusion to assess our community’s capacity to address challenging issues, and to recommend ways we can foster open and productive debate about them. After listening to the Wellesley community in a series of town halls, the task force found a “call-out culture” here on campus, and self-silencing as a result—people being unwilling to take the chance of saying something that might subject them to being shamed. Many of our higher education peers are finding similar issues on their campuses. 

We found that one major factor driving the call-out culture and self-silencing was mutual mistrust: As a community, we weren’t trusting the good intentions of people who say something clumsy or controversial. And we weren’t trusting that our own clumsy or controversial speech would be overlooked in favor of our good intentions. Instead of learning from each other, we were eliminating the possibility. 

In order to fight this atmosphere of self-censorship, our Presidential Commission on Ethnicity, Race, and Equity (CERE) has made trust one its core themes this year. As Professor Cord Whitaker, who chairs the commission, told me, “There is not going to be dialogue without trust, and the grace to allow people to feel free enough to speak.”

I want to emphasize that dismissing those who disagree with us is very far from a Wellesley-centric problem, but an expression of something that is happening nationwide. A recent NBC News poll of second-year college students found that almost half wouldn’t choose to room with someone who voted for a different presidential candidate.

And it is not just college students. A recent report of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences that considered ways to revitalize our democracy put it this way: “When Americans are asked what unites us across our differences, the increasingly common answer is nothing.”

Diane Hessan, a member of the Boston Globe editorial board and a market researcher who studies American voters, has found that across voters in every demographic category, there is overwhelming worry about such divisiveness. And, as much as the media and political figures contribute to polarization, voters believe that the most dominant factor is that “we, as a nation, have lost our ability to have conversations with people who are different from us, that we have lost our ability to listen to each other.” I would argue that this is not just the case in the United States but increasingly across the globe. 

Clearly, we can unite in common purpose, when our shared values demand it: All summer long, Chair Bennie Thompson and Vice Chair Liz Cheney of the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol have been giving us regular lessons in trust, respect, and the setting aside of policy disagreements in service of major principles. Rep. Thompson is the lone Democrat in the Mississippi Congressional delegation, descended from slaves, the son of a teacher and an auto mechanic who joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and registered Black voters while a student at the historically Black Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi.

Rep. Cheney, on the other hand, is Republican political royalty whose politics are extremely conservative. She is the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney and writer and historian Lynne Cheney, a descendent of William Cheney, an Englishman who immigrated to Boston in the 17th century and became a wealthy farmer. 

Despite radically different histories, backgrounds, and politics, they have demonstrated a common commitment to democracy—and a shared understanding of our national narrative that is more meaningful because it emerges from and transcends those differences. 

Here at Wellesley, we are at such an interesting moment of opportunity to create something powerful out of our own differences.  As we emerge from the social isolation imposed by this recent pandemic—all of us a little uncertain of our footing—what better time to rethink how we relate to each other? 

We are a small community of brilliant people devoted to education and scholarship. We can become a community in which everyone has the ability to express their point of view without fear, one that revives the lost art of respectful listening, one that becomes a model of civility for the larger communities all around us. Wellesley students are known for their agency, and this is well within your power. 

But building such a community requires a mindset that combines curiosity and courage. All of us have to embrace the discomfort of hearing, learning, and trying something new—and accept the risk that some of it will force us to give up cherished preconceptions and rethink everything. 

English philosopher John Stuart Mill tells us that keeping our minds open to criticism of our own opinions and conduct while seeking out a variety of views is the only way any wise person has ever acquired wisdom—“nor,” he writes, “is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner.” I promise you, the time you spend here in conversation—sometimes circular, sometimes heated, sometimes silly—will never, ever be wasted time.

Last spring, Bryan Stevenson, the public interest lawyer and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, which works to end mass incarceration and structural racism, gave the Wellesley community a slightly more emotional formula for expanding our worldview: He said that if we want to help people who have been mistreated in our society, we need to get “proximate” to them—to wrap our arms around them and affirm their humanity and dignity. “When we get proximate,” he said, “we see and understand things that are essential to our capacity to provide justice.” 

My hope for all of you is that you will get “proximate” to each other in order to see and learn all you possibly can at Wellesley. And I hope the gains are emotional and spiritual, as well as intellectual. 

I hope you build strong, enduring friendships here with people you didn’t initially expect to bond with—and that you enjoy the contrasts, as well as all you share. 

I hope that when you leave Wellesley in a few years, those friendships will have taught you so much about life and our common humanity, and that you approach all new connections with confidence, optimism, and the sense that there is something to be learned.

Thank you. Let’s have a great year!