To: The Wellesley Community
From: President Paula A. Johnson
Re: Celebrating 50 Years of Ethos
Date: April 6, 2018
It is with great pride that we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the student group Ethos this weekend. We welcome back to campus the group’s founding members and Ethos alumnae from the last five decades.
This is a milestone of profound significance for the Wellesley community—an opportunity to acknowledge the hard work, persistence, and resolve of our black students and alumnae who have built community and advanced diversity, inclusion, and equity on campus. It is a time to celebrate, reflect, and recommit to these values, which have anchored Ethos throughout the years and that have in turn shaped us all. I hope you will attend the weekend’s keynote lecture, open to all, given by Chirlane McCray ’76, first lady of New York City, on Sunday, April 8, at 10:45 a.m. in Tishman Commons.
Ethos began as the idea of five Wellesley students in the winter of 1966 and was founded two years later in 1968, during an era of great social unrest. Without a model or a mentor, and with only a handful of members, Ethos formed its own framework and set of values: diversity, multiculturalism, and inclusion. The group sought not simply a change in culture but structural changes to improve the lives of black students and to help the College fulfill its founding value of equity and its mission to provide an education that empowers all women.
Many of the students in Ethos, both today and when it began, have believed in the transformative potential of a Wellesley education, just as they have worked hard to create a more equitable, more diverse campus, where every student has the opportunity to thrive. In this way, they have continued one of our greatest Wellesley traditions: serving as student leaders, organizers, and activists working to make Wellesley better—the best it can be—for those who come after.
I look forward to seeing this tradition continue and grow as we pursue together the work of inclusive excellence—understanding that true excellence requires diversity, inclusion, equity, and intellectual openness at all levels of learning and in all aspects of community.
