President Nannerl 0. Keohane
Charge to the Class of 1992
At Senior Breakfast on Wednesday, the Class of 1992 began
what may become a new tradition: you used your own voices
eloquently to reflect on your Wellesley experience. In my
charge to you today, I want to pick up on that image of your
voices, both literally and metaphorically.
Throughout your Wellesley years, your voices have been
heard on campus. This spring, in the aftermath of the hate
crimes on campus and the Rodney King verdict in Los Angeles,
your voices have been especially urgent on the political and
moral front. But I must not generalize so freely. Some of
you have used your voices exuberantly over your Wellesley
years, in debate, in song, in jokes, in class; others have
found it harder to speak out. And similarly, in the events
of the past year some of you spoke out forcefully, some
spoke out more hesitantly, and others were silent.
Given what we know about society and history, the moral
and political crises you have lived through in the past year
are going to be repeated in some form or other throughout
your life. There will be many occasions when you are
challenged to take a stand, to speak up against injustice or
to work for useful change. In such situations, we need
people, who are ready to speak out and put themselves on the
line: history makes very clear that this is the only way in
which we can ever expect any significant improvement in the
human condition. So when big moral and political issues are
raised on your horizon, your first response ought to be to
get involved, to use your voice, to work for good.
But unfortunately, for most people most of the time, the
first response is usually silence. Silence is surely
appropriate in some human situations: before an awesomely
beautiful or moving scene in nature, as a companionable way
to spend time with a friend when there is nothing for the
moment to be said, as a way of enjoying your own company in
solitude. Such chosen and positive silences differ from the
absence of speech in situations of moral and political
crisis.
In crisis situations, people have a variety of reasons
for not speaking out. You may remain silent because you are
confused, conflicted; or because you feel that you have
nothing eloquent to say. You may have other priorities in
your life just at that moment that you judge are more
important than speaking out in the crisis. You may feel that
you have done your best and not been heard, and remain
silent from, bitterness or disappointment, or simply to let
new voices enter the debate. You may be afraid that what you
say will be unpopular or misunderstood. or you may simply be
too lazy, too apathetic, to take the time to be involved.
All those reasons have some validity, except the last
one. As Wellesley women, I hope that you will seldom take
refuge in laziness or apathy; there's far too much that
needs doing in the world for women with a Wellesley
education and Wellesley empowerment to sit back and let
things drift.
The other reasons for remaining silent will have some
force for even the most activist among us, given that no one
can speak out on everything without becoming cacophonous or
vacuous. But if you find yourself remaining silent all the
time, you need to find your voice.
If you are confused or conflicted, find out more, to get
a better grip on the situation so that you can decide what
you want to say. If you are afraid that you won't sound
persuasive or eloquent, remember that your voice does not
have to be raised in a large public setting in order to be
effective. Look for situations in which you feel relatively
comfortable, such as a small group of close friends; it may
be more important to affect their thinking deeply than to
make a public statement.
one reason not to speak out that must have some force for
all of us at some point in our lives is that we have other
priorities. This spring, it was hard for many of you to know
how to divide your time between the crucial issues that were
before us, and your studies, especially at the end of an
academic year. It will be rare in your lives to have time
for sustained intellectual reflection, and you and your
families have worked hard to create this opportunity. Each
of you has to make her own decision on such occasions, and
it is never easy.
In different ways, the same tough choices will always
face you. Family and job priorities create real conflicts of
interest for those who want to engage in social action. Only
saints and fanatics never let their personal priorities
interfere with their political commitments, and few of us
are either one of those.
But beware of letting personal priorities become an
excuse for apathy. If you always choose personal priorities,
and never sacrifice anything of your own time or energy for
a cause larger than yourself, you are failing to do your
part for the common good, and impoverishing yourself, as
well. At some point, for some cause, you must raise your
voice in support of what you care about.
What if you worry that your ideas will be unpopular and
excite derision or disdain? If you have not yet spoken out,
you should not let this fear deter you, for you may find
that more people agree with you than you expect, and you
may, by giving voice to sentiments that have not been heard
before, liberate others who have been similarly afraid. If
you have spoken out, and been shouted down or scoffed at
because your views are at odds with those that are at that
time in the ascendancy, this is much harder to deal with.
At Wellesley we often say that we educate women who will
make a difference in the world for good. We speak of
empowering women, of helping you to find your own voices.
That's both a statement of intention and a statement of
faith.
We have not done as well as we should in creating a
climate on campus where everyone feels free to speak out,
and this constraint operates differently for different
people and in different settings. Let me be quite direct
about what this means, within the most pressing and relevant
context, multicultural ism. For those of you who feel that
Wellesley has not moved far enough or fast enough in making
our community truly multicultural, you find it hard to let a
professor know that an example used in class struck you as
racist or homophobic. There are others who think that
Wellesley welcomes only those voices that cry out for
urgency and want us to move faster, and silences those who
question our policies or our assumptions about what a
multicultural community requires. As a result, our discourse
is dichotomized, with most of the voices we hear in large
public forums arguing for fuller and more rapid movement
towards an inclusive and diverse community, and other
sentiments being expressed privately in the classrooms and
the dormitories.
For those of us who remain at Wellesley, it is of the
first priority to address this dichotomy and have people
with different viewpoints speaking and actually listening to
each other in the same places at the same time. Genuine
listening and careful speaking are at the heart of a good
education, and we must make sure that we realize these
conditions on our campus.
For you in the Class of 1992, it will be important for
you in your workplaces and families and friendships outside
Wellesley to work for the same goals. In such settings, you
will find it even harder than you do at Wellesley to speak
up, and the temptations to silence will be great. Make sure
that you speak out yourself on crucial issues, and equally
important, that you help create safe spaces for people with
different voices to be heard, and that you listen, as well
as speak.
Several of those who spoke at the Town meeting a few
weeks ago expressed deep disappointment with Wellesley
because things are not as good here as they ought to be. In
part you are frustrated because there are still so many
problems here, and in part you are saying that we promised
more than we have delivered. This means both that we need to
work harder to deliver on what we promise, and also that we
must be more careful about how we describe ourselves. Nobody
thinks Wellesley is perfect, not even the most loyal among
US. I do believe that as an institution are trying hard to
be truly inclusive of every member of this community and to
take each person here, as far as is consistent with a human
collectivity and with our academic purposes, on your own
terms rather than on terms somebody else imposes on you.
Much of your -- much of our frustration and
disappointment this spring came from the realization that
politics and society and the economic system in this country
have their own severe deficiencies, deficiencies that were
radically laid bare by what happened in Los Angeles. This
was not news to most of us; but such events bring these
truths forcibly and visibly to mind.
For some of you who feel this way, singing AMERICA THE
BEAUTIFUL at stepsinging was impossible because the words
seemed so much at odds with what you see going on around
you. So before we sing it as we traditionally do at the
close of our Commencement, I want to say a word or two about
it.
AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL is an enduring anthem because it
voices a powerful ideal. At Wellesley, we interpret this
ideal freely in at least one way, by singing about
sisterhood as well as brotherhood in the refrain, confident
that Katherine Lee Bates would have understood. We can use
similar poetic license in thinking about the meaning of the
remainder of the hymn, especially about its social and
political messages, remembering that Katherine Lee Bates
herself in her Wellesley years was part of an indomitable
sisterhood of social reformers including Katherin Coman and
Emily Greene Balch.
Let's look at that first familiar verse, and remember
that when Katherine Lee Bates climbed Pikes Peak a century
ago the view she saw, the literal physical view, was closer
to the ideal she celebrates than the one you would see from
the same vantage point today. The skies were not more
spacious then; but they were freer of the smog that today
hovers over Denver, and obscures some of the majesty of the
purple mountains. Much of the "fruited plain" is now
occupied by condominiums and shopping malls.
Nonetheless, all of us can respond to the ideal of the
amazing, awe-inspiring beauty of this continent even as we
recognize how much it has been altered, and vow to do what
we can to preserve the beauty that remains.
The final verse of the hymn offers a much harder
challenge. How can we sing of alabaster cities undimmed by
human tears? We know all too well that our cities are
deteriorating in a most alarming fashion. The social
structure and the urban economy are threatened in every city
that we know; the schools and parks and public buildings are
rapidly decaying. The human tears flow all too frequently
from the families of those who are killed by drug dealers or
caught in the crossfire from gang-wars, from parents who
cannot find jobs or explain racism to their children when
they encounter it even in official places.
But remember that Katherine Lee Bates was offering us an
ideal: in the verse about the cities, she asks us to sing of
the patriot's dream, not of any reality we have yet known in
this world, neither in her time nor in ours. And the dream
of more livable and human cities, like Martin Luther King's
powerful dream of a more inclusive and less segregated
world, is worth singing about and fighting for.
That final verse should be a battle hymn, not a
celebration.
And so, women of the Class of 1992, I charge you all to
use your voices in working ardently for the political and
civic purposes that will wipe away some of those tears that
dim so many lives, and allow some of that gleaming actually
to occur. Use your Wellesley education wisely; there is much
work to be done. And keep the best parts of your years here
vivid in your hearts, as you work with us to change for the
better both this institution and the world.
|