Diana Chapman Walsh's Inauguration Speech

Madame chair, mister vice chair, trustees, faculty, students, staff, alumnae, thank you for your words, your gifts, and the confidence and trust you have placed in me. I shall treasure them. Esteemed colleagues, honored guests, friends, and family, thank you for joining Wellesley College for this ritual celebration of continuity and change.

I am deeply grateful to the hundreds of members of this warm community who have made this day possible -- those who, for months, have been planning, dreaming, imagining all the wonderful things we might do together to mark this occasion, those who have been waking up in the middle of the night anticipating every little horror that could possibly befall us.

Special thanks to the legions who have been laboring long hours on the physical set-up and the massive clean-up, inside and out, after a grueling winter; on the invitations, programs and written materials, on the music, poetry, dance, banners, song, parades, and performances; on the food, security, transportation and logistics; to all those who worked tirelessly on more efforts, large and small, than any of us can imagine. I'm in awe of your enthusiasm, energy, creativity, and ingenuity, and I'm deeply grateful for your determination to make this a special occasion for Wellesley College, and for me. You have succeeded. Thank you all, so very much.

One feels the force of history at a high-intensity moment like this, a brief eddy swirling in a flowing river of time. One senses the generations who molded this surprising place, with love and imagination, steadfast against daunting odds. One looks to eleven past presidents, women every one, entrusted with these keys for a leg in a relay run through the years. One prays for inspiration, and every kind of help, to meet aspirations and demands one can't have resources to match. One gropes for words that might endure in an evanescent world, grown weary of empty rhetoric and the cures that never cure.

Words that do endure issue from the mind and heart, not first from one or the other domain, but, seamlessly, from the whole. Words flow into stories, stories to narratives. Narratives forge identities, organize struggle, contest and change. They presuppose, yet challenge and remake, the moral order out of which lives derive their meaning and take their shape. Our struggles are for learning; we exist to educate. Real learning of any kind taps personal and emotional wells, mobilizes passion, feeds curiosity, emboldens the learner to venture into new and foreign terrain, sparks her imagination, ignites her intellect. Real learning, as Robert Coles has said, is "a gift of grace."

A new college president, as this celebration attests, is blessed with many gifts, from the head and heart. Something about the office invites an astounding response, in a torrential volume: words of welcome and encouragement, testimonials, advice, warnings, admonitions, a scolding now and then. Boxes, bags, briefcases full, day after day, surging over the transom, seeping under the door, through every portal and crevasse: E-mail, voice mail, old-fashioned "snail mail." Each is a story, an expression of involvement and concern, saying in a thousand voices that all of us belong to this magnificent college, that it belongs to all of us, whatever the background and baggage we bring when we arrive. Together the stories define the past of a unique institution, and warrant its future in a complex and changing world.

Scholars learn through research that illuminates the unknown; analysts formulate questions, assemble data, and synthesize. Communities are different, John McKnight has said: communities learn from stories. A liberal arts college learns in all these ways, and more, but I want to talk about stories and about community -- about stories through which the community we celebrate today has come to know itself, to know what is important and what is true. Stories can weave a common identity. "I will tell you something about stories," said novelist Leslie Marmon Silko, "They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled."

Our stories begin with extraordinary women at the turn of the last century, "purposeful women," according to Katharine Lee Bates, herself one of them, who, she wrote, "reared the college from struggling babyhood to glorious womanhood." Intrepid reformers, these women scholars embraced only those elements of the founder's vision that affirmed the intellectual potential and the autonomy of women.

Alone among pioneers in higher education in the last quarter of the last century, Wellesley's founder, Henry Fowle Durant, assembled an all-female faculty (well, all but one brave male, Professor of Music, Charles Morse). Durant's faculty developed a bit more independence of mind than he may have bargained for. Although the patriarchal cult of domesticity was as central to Durant's original vision as was equality of educational opportunity (he dreamed of educating wives, mothers, and volunteers), these women were not going to be relegated only to the private, domestic sphere. "Wellesley faculty women," as historian Patricia Ann Palmieri tells their story, "prided themselves on being the first generation of college-educated public achievers;" and Wellesley women down through the generations have found lovely and creative ways to stitch their private lives into a larger social fabric.

Our stories progress to generations of redoubtable Wellesley women who have caught the public eye -- early pioneers and contemporary leaders -- in business, medicine, science, social science, education, the media, sports, public service, every sphere of life, more Wellesley women doing more diverse and impressive work than could possibly be imagined before the stories began to flow:

... Women like Ethel Waxham, class of 1905, with whose journal John McPhee engaged in a dialogue that forms the backbone of his nineteenth book, Rising from the Plains. Miss Waxham's written words so captivated this widely-traveled man of letters that although she died before they ever met, he came to hold her in higher affection and regard, he says, than any other person encountered in his professional life ...

... Women like Marjory Stoneman Douglas, class of 1912, who at age 103 traveled to the White House just this year to accept a Presidential Medal of Freedom for a lifetime of work persuading developers and politicians that the Everglades were not an ugly swamp to be drained and eviscerated, but an utterly unique and irreplaceable ecosystem that would be conserved ...

... Women like Alice Tepper Marlin, class of 1966 (my class), founding director of the Council on Economic Priorities, a watchdog organization holding corporations to account for their social results. At Wellesley she read a report on the decline of the black family, was troubled by the report's tendency to blame the victims, pursued an independent analysis of social class factors that were undermining urban families, and concluded that economic justice was fundamental to social progress and would be the organizing focus of her life's work.

Our stories come, too, from countless Wellesley women from behind the scenes. They, no less than their more visible counterparts, have advanced the values and the possibilities that Wellesley represents. Generations have passed through these gates and been affected in subtle but sentinel ways, have carried a part of Wellesley with them throughout their lives, felt its expectation that they would give their best, do their utmost, and, in some realm or other, would fulfill the promise a remarkable college had seen and nurtured in them.

Many have moving stories to tell about time they spent on this campus and how it transformed them -- about an arresting moment that brought them up short, challenged some stereotype with which they had come to college, and forever altered their approach and understanding of themselves in relation to someone else or some other group. One was Virginia Foster Durr who, as a sophomore from Alabama in 1922, experienced what she later termed "the origin of a doubt" about race and justice that led her to dedicate her life to the cause of civil rights.

These stories of new awakenings have been possible only because of the gifts -- and the grace -- brought to Wellesley by members of this community from virtually every ethnic, racial, cultural, and national origin; people like ....

Pedro Salinas and Jorge Guillen, scholars and poets who found sanctuary here from the Spanish civil war, enriching an already prominent Spanish Department with their teaching and writing;

Vladimir Nabokov, a guiding spirit behind the nascent Russian Department, who spoke of his years at Wellesley in the 1940s as the happiest of his life, and later wrote that the college was a "rare, distinct place, outside time and space;"

Helen Lin, known to her students as "lao-hu" -- the tiger -- who founded the Chinese Studies Department in 1966, establishing at the alma mater of Mayling Soong, class of '17, one of the nation's foremost undergraduate programs in the study of Chinese.

Students from every background and culture, far too many to name, have inspired us in the essential, unending work of fashioning a common memory in which all can recognize and resonate with a "we" that faithfully represents our private experiences and hopes, and underscores those we share:

From Kin Kato Takeda of Japan, Wellesley's first international student in 1888 ...

to the five African-American women who made a pact during the turbulent 1960s that they would not leave without founding an organization for black students (they did, and called it Ethos, and it flourishes today) ...

to the Davis Scholars of various ages who enrich our classrooms and conversations with life experiences marked by dignity, intelligence and perseverance, our students, in Guillen's words, "plunge us into springtime," so that the college, like its students, is forever beginning a new life.

Partners of Wellesley alumnae tell stories too, witty and wise reflections on living with such women -- women, one husband said, who seem to surround themselves with Wellesley friends, who come out of a subversive little college west of Boston that is teaching people to think for themselves, that's turning out collaborators who find and forge communities, no- nonsense women who believe instinctively -- free of hubris, affectation, or much in the way of guile -- that of course they can and will live lives of deep personal meaning and broad social consequence.

There is a larger narrative here -- an unfolding one -- of a scholarly community, a curious collection of intense women and men. Dedicated to teaching and learning, and to excellence, they are deeply rooted in an exquisitely comfortable physical and social space, grateful for their good fortune, mindful of duties they owe. They teach and learn what they love -- the sweet power of ideas -- and they love the inquisitive, demanding environment in which they are privileged to learn and teach. And they are struggling, individually and in groups, to construct collective stories that will breathe shape and meaning into a world that seems to be spinning out of control, as we approach a new millennium.

At the turn of the last century, higher education was in crisis too. John Dewey observed in 1899 that the conditions of modernity were undermining the educational enterprise. Throughout the preindustrial era, he argued, young people had grown up naturally exposed to the workaday world in homes, on farms and close to adults who provided continuous training in modes of observation and deduction as well as practical grounding in the values and realities necessary for social and technical competence.

Now, as another century draws to a chaotic close, the contradictions and confusions of post-modernity have brought us to a deeper crisis point. We see massive structural inequities around the world that are widening the gaps and resentments between rich and poor, north and south, young and old, men and women, and a shifting array of ethnic, racial, and national identities. Too many women and families, as Ruth Sidel has written, are under siege, mired in unspeakable poverty, physical danger, and psychic despair. Economic hardship and uncertainties are everywhere juxtaposed against commercial images of luxury and abundance, feeding disaffection, disengagement, hopelessness and rage.

Dewey worried at the turn of the last century that with the forces of industrialization, young people were no longer absorbing the intellectual and practical skills they would need to function effectively in the modern world. Now, a century later, we are sharply at odds over what intellectual tools are needed to function in a postmodern world. How will today's young people find the conceptual anchors, the flexible skills, and the spiritual resilience to negotiate and find meaning and hope in such a world: one in which an optimist believes the future is uncertain, one that will not be comfortable, where interactions, often, will be charged and tense, where resources will be limited and contested endlessly, where life will not be fair, stable, or predictable, where conflicts over power will continue to mount, where strident identity politics will challenge coherent civic purpose, where isolated, disaffected individuals will disengage from community. Where will we find the hope amid such hopelessness?

Recent struggles in higher education have seemed to obviate coherence and community, underscoring a deep-seated skepticism, a pervasive relativism, and an utter lack of a unifying culture or canon that could be called a common heritage. Claims and counterclaims about the politics of the liberal arts have yielded little consensus on whether we as a society have any common values at all, and, if we did, where they would fit on the educational agenda. After a decade of acrimonious debate, it is becoming clearer now -- at least in some quarters -- that the important question is not the one that was being posed. Like the bull, who, until the very end, thought the red cape was the problem, the critics of higher education have been exhausting themselves trying to gore an imagined threat.

Asking whether higher education should be about the transmission of a core set of values or, whether -- instead -- about the inculcation of value- neutral methods of free inquiry, misses the matador's sword. Higher education -- all education -- is inevitably political. Cultural assumptions -- underlying social values -- will always be there, whether overt or covert. They can remain hidden as long as the illusion of value consensus can be sustained. But once the dominant values are scrutinized or attacked then the myth of value neutrality will inevitably be exposed -- bright sun will flash off the sword under the cape.

What seems new -- and threatening -- now is not values entering the ring but the range, complexity, and visibility of those clamoring to be heard. This has occurred as higher education has reached for the goal -- only partly realized so far -- of becoming more democratic, accessible, and diversified. We must achieve this goal, or fail at all the rest. Learning and teaching together absolutely will require a community in which many deeply authentic stories can be told and heard.

If we persist at this work honestly and well -- if we open our hearts and minds to stories of anger, frustration, exclusion, and pain -- then we can be certain that collisions will occur, and disputes will erupt. The eruptions will be signals that we have grown strong enough to face what Parker Palmer sees as the central challenge to higher education: "creating a space in which the community of truth can be practiced." Such a space is founded not on false unanimity or illusory value consensus, but on profound mutual respect for the fragile essence of each of us. Paradoxically, in the cacophony of competing claims, the most menacing danger of all is the silence of cowering individualism -- a frightened retreat from opposition as an organized "we" into a self-absorbed and radically isolated "me." The capacity for any we is a supreme achievement in a world and a culture whose values and institutional imperatives are pressing ever more forcibly toward me, me, me.

As we go forward together from this brief eddy in time, we face no more crucial challenge than the question of how to conserve the spirit of community, how to sustain the struggles for collaboration and participation when -- all around us -- any center is ceasing to hold. Wellesley College is blessed with the gift of time -- the luxury of a singular past and a future that says to us: this is a decisive moment in world history and in the evolution of higher education, there is much at stake here and great urgency, so, in all due haste, now we must take our time.

We must make time to live our stories with patience, endurance, and skill. To live our stories means we will engage and interact across all boundaries -- disciplinary, ethnic, racial, sexual, social, generational, geographic, and economic. It means suspending ancient hostilities, laying aside fears and suspicions while we learn and teach together. Living our stories means forgiving our own and others' mistakes, coming back again and again to correct errors and rectify damage we will certainly do, so that gradually we may move to deeper levels of insight and trust.

Living our stories well requires that each of us commit -- for the sake of any community, of this community, and the future it represents -- to an open process and a relationship, without the safety of knowing what outcome will emerge, or how any or all of us will be transformed along the way. We do have the comfort of knowing, though, that every one of our lives is shaping the unfolding narrative of a community founded by and for the stout of heart, founded in hopefulness and the conviction that some stories are worth living well.

What can we extract from the well-lived stories of our past? Do we have antique lanterns that will light a path to a future that is realistic and yet affords room for what Cornel West has termed "audacious hope"? Story telling is often set in opposition to rational-deductive systems of thought. But our stories are not about skeptics estranged from the Enlightenment enterprise. They give us people who have struggled successfully to apply thought and reason to the project of improving an imperfect world. They describe retreats for reflection and personal growth, for gathering data, assembling forces, honing arguments. The retreats, though, are prologues to resolute advances toward shared purposes in a social world.

Story telling, too, is often pigeon-holed in the private subjective realm, individualistic and self-absorbed. But the women and men in our stories stand out for having engaged and re-made an objective public world. They treasured their private lives -- it was through her diary, after all, that Ethel Waxham spoke from the grave to John McPhee -- and yet they were anything but detached observers or spectators on the sidelines (no couch potatoes here). Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Alice Tepper Marlin, the students who founded Ethos, the faculty who built programs in Spanish, Russian, and Chinese, all were the claims-makers and creators captured by Adrienne Rich in her evocative poem that ends: "My heart is moved by all I cannot save. So much has been destroyed. I have to cast my lot with those who age to age, perversely and with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world."

From what sort of educational experience do we who have no extraordinary power go out into a broken world sufficiently armed with skill, knowledge, hope, and confidence -- with the perverse belief in a larger social purpose -- that we can cast our lot with those who make a difference? What sort of liberal arts education can provide the balance so central in the stories we've just heard, balance between the subjective and the objective, the personal and the public, the rational and the emotional, the thoughtful observer and the engaged participant?

An effective liberal arts education must strike a delicate balance between protecting a respectful space for everyone's individual and group identity to flourish and grow, and maintaining an inclusive spirit of solidarity. Wellesley has always honored the value to be gained from voluntary associations in which one's own experiences, perspectives and special gifts can be discovered and sharpened. This institution rests on the conviction -- borne out now by a growing body of empirical research -- that women can derive great benefit from having a place of their own during decisive stages in their intellectual and moral development. At the same time, Wellesley has always expressed, expected, and reinforced by and toward everyone an abiding and pervasive spirit of generous intent.

As the so-called "culture wars" continue to escalate, our stories describe ways in which brief periods of separation can germinate lifelong friendships, and feed the healthy roots of the personal and group confidence on which cooperation ultimately depends. "We share our gifts with those who pass by," a village elder in Africa said, "our pain we save for our friends."

An effective liberal education must balance rigor and freedom. It must be grounded in standards of scholarship and an ethos of excellence, and yet remain open to innovative ideas. Wellesley treasures freedom -- of expression, exploration, and thought -- coupled with a civility and with rules of evidence that welcome serious disagreement and clarifying dialogue. As Nabokov aspired to write, we aspire to know ... with the passion of a physicist, and the precision of a poet. Our norms of respect and discourse need to function not as a price of admission or a litmus test, but as an invitation into an open-ended exchange that is interactive, creative, fluid, at its best, transformative. In such an exchange participants refine their thinking, competence, and skills by holding every story to an uncompromising test: is what I am hearing empirically grounded, logically defensible, historically sound? "No experiment can ever prove me right," Einstein used to say, "a single experiment can always prove me wrong." He didn't say, but someone did, that the only trouble with Wellesley women is that you can never get them just to accept anything.

An effective liberal education must practice and teach participatory democracy, the active and lively involvement of all constituencies in charting and forging a collective destiny. As a woman-focused community, Wellesley has evolved a distinctive style of connective leadership and engaged governance. We acknowledge, without apology, our interdependence and fallibility. We help one another recover from mistakes. But participatory systems of governance need to be re-examined from time to time, lest they become unbalanced. Plant lavishly; prune often was the maxim Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. followed in designing our spectacular grounds. A lush committee landscape can become overgrown; it needs judicious pruning to retain its vigor and assure its longevity.

In fact, in every sphere, a successful liberal education is about developing the nerve to take a risk, make a choice, and prune, about developing habits of disciplined thinking in all activities, about the systematic exercise of discretion and judgment. The ends of education, in a very real sense, are to foster supple habits of mind that are self-conscious, responsible, and responsive. Education should build the strength to think openly about collective purposes, public expectations, and the standards by which we are willing to be judged.

And here the unfolding story begins to fold back on itself, for institutions of higher learning have an obligation too to hold our own educational enterprise to the expectations we have for those we educate. As educators we must think through, much better than we have, what we are doing and why -- precisely how we justify the particular configuration of courses and experiences we offer, on what basis we contend that we are actually teaching our students, as well as we possibly can, to think and engage the world, as well as they possibly can.

Institutions like Wellesley can (and do) lean more on persuasion and negotiation than on coercion and brute competition, attending with special care to relationships, process, procedural access, expectations of fair play. But we cannot have it all (as women have always known), we cannot hide behind the cloak of participatory democracy, we cannot postpone hard choices by simply permitting undisciplined growth. There is no escaping the demand that fine leadership, no less than fine scholarship, constantly requires the exercise of critical discernment -- discrimination in the intellectual sense. Women, in particular, must be honest and clear about authority, must have the courage to acknowledge and use power with integrity, must make hard choices, openly and fairly, standing behind them and confronting and managing the unavoidable challenges and conflicts. Wellesley is strong because of the hard choices we have made; our continued strength will depend on making future choices well.

In the end, it is surely the steely "determination not to be deterred" that is Wellesley's most potent legacy. The commitment we reaffirm today to our bonds of community will demand of each of us a conscious choice, every single day, strenuous effort on everyone's part, forbearance, respect, compassion, and trust. Each responsible choice, each self-reflective act, each story of personal engagement in community will be another step toward a reconstituted world. We can continue weaving our common narrative -- disciplined, probing, generous, ever provisional. We have it within our power, together, to craft an enduring gift of grace for the generations who will sojourn in this rare, distinct, and timeless place, and who will then go forth prepared for a world in desperate need of the true and important stories they can bring and live. With all of my heart, I thank all of you for making the effort and taking the time to live this moment with me.