To: The Wellesley Community
From: President Paula A. Johnson and Provost and Dean of the College Andy Shennan
Re: Update on Free Expression at Wellesley
Date: March 12, 2018
We are writing to share an update regarding the future of the Freedom Project and the College’s commitment to free expression at Wellesley.
The Freedom Project is grounded in many of the foundational values of the liberal arts: freedom of speech, pluralism, intellectual diversity, freedom of expression, and tolerance. These are ideals we all embrace. For some time, we have been considering how the College might build on this initiative to more effectively include—and better engage—all voices across campus. Our goal is to create conditions that will encourage greater participation in conversations about pressing issues that reflect contemporary educational and civic challenges—and in doing so, to build community.
Thomas Cushman, Deffenbaugh de Hoyos Carlson Professor in the Social Sciences and professor of Sociology, has informed us that he will be stepping down as director of the Freedom Project at the end of this academic year and will be spending a year as a visiting scholar elsewhere. We are grateful to Professor Cushman for his leadership in founding and establishing the Freedom Project, which has become an active, dynamic program at Wellesley. We greatly appreciate his dedication to exploring the concept of freedom through discussion, debate, and scholarship, and to fostering dialogue across the political spectrum. We also appreciate the essential contributions that Wellesley faculty, visiting faculty, and Wellesley students affiliated with the Freedom Project have made to the intellectual life of our campus. And we look forward to appointing a director or co-directors to lead the project in the academic year ahead. As part of that future, we hope to support—and expand—the Freedom Project’s Scholars at Risk program and the important sanctuary it provides to scholars who face grave threats for expressing their views.
Freedom of expression is core to the teaching, learning, and production of scholarship that are at the heart of a liberal arts education—and we must all work together to create an environment in which these freedoms can flourish. In April, we will convene a multi-constituency group of faculty, students, and staff to explore the important role of free speech in an inclusive community. Through meaningful conversation—and the open, respectful exchange of differing ideas—we can learn to move beyond the polarized thinking that affects so much of today’s discourse. To make sure these exchanges are productive, we need to create the conditions in which our capacity to talk across difference can thrive. The new Task Force on Speech and Inclusion will be charged with developing a set of recommendations for broadening the opportunities to start conversations that both challenge us and induce us to consider how we talk with one another—how we listen and how we express ourselves. We will shortly put out a call for volunteers to serve on this Task Force.
We seek to broaden the range of voices, ideas, and experiences shared on our campus. There is work to be done to achieve a greater level of inclusiveness on campus that will enhance our ability to engage in discussion and debate. Achieving both will move us forward.
