Former Vice President Al Gore to Deliver 2018 Wilson Lecture

Former Vice President Al Gore will visit campus on April 25, 2018, to deliver this year’s annual Wilson Lecture. This is Wellesley’s premier academic lecture, and it has a long tradition of bringing internationally influential leaders, authors, and scholars to campus. Gore is known across the world for his decades of leadership and public service, and for his tireless efforts to stop the increasing threat of climate change.

“Vice President Gore is a principled leader, a person of great moral courage, and one of our time’s most important champions in the fight against global climate change,” President Paula A. Johnson said in an email to the community. She continued, “As Wellesley has dedicated this year to promoting and advancing sustainability across campus, we are especially honored to have such an extraordinary leader for change join us to discuss one of the greatest challenges we face.”

Gore is the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, and a film that premiered in July 2017, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. He is the co-recipient, with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for informing the world of the dangers posed by climate change, and the author of the best-sellers Earth in the Balance, An Inconvenient Truth, The Assault on Reason, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change, and, most recently, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.

The 45th vice president of the United States, Gore was inaugurated on January 20, 1993, and served eight years in the position. He served in U.S. House of Representatives beginning in 1976 and in the U.S. Senate from 1984 until he became vice president. He currently spends the majority of his time working with the Climate Reality Project, a nonprofit devoted to solving the climate crisis, of which he is the chairman. 

In September, the College began a campus-wide conversation about what sustainability means to Wellesley as an academic and residential community. “During Sustainability Year, we rededicate ourselves to the intentional stewardship of our home and to the ecological responsibility that we share—and we prepare Wellesley students to be active, engaged, and environmentally aware global citizens,” President Johnson said in her email.

More details will be shared in early 2018. This event is generously supported by the Committee on Lectures and Cultural Events (CLCE), who nominated Gore as this year’s lecturer.