To: The Wellesley Community
From: President Paula A. Johnson
Re: Former Vice President Al Gore to Give 2018 Wilson Lecture
Date: December 1, 2017
It is with great excitement that I announce that former Vice President Al Gore will visit campus on April 25, 2018, to deliver this year’s Wilson Lecture.
The annual Wilson Lecture, which brings internationally influential speakers to Wellesley, is the highlight of our academic calendar and our premier academic lecture. As Wellesley has dedicated this year to promoting and advancing sustainability across campus, we are especially honored to have a true global leader for change join us to discuss one of the greatest challenges we face.
We invited Vice President Gore for his many decades of leadership and public service, and for his visionary work to halt the devastating effects of climate change on our world. He is the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, and a follow-up 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, Al Gore was inaugurated on January 20, 1993, and served eight years in the position. Previously, he was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives beginning in 1976 and of the U.S. Senate from 1984 until he became vice president.
He is cofounder and chairman of Generation Investment Management, a senior partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and a member of Apple Inc.’s board of directors. 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.
Vice President Gore’s address will serve as a touchstone event during the College’s Sustainability Year, which in September kicked off a campus-wide conversation about what sustainability means to us as individuals and 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.
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. We are delighted that he will share his insights and experiences with us, and I know you will join me in welcoming him to Wellesley in April.
We will be in touch in the new year with full event details.
