To: The Wellesley College Community
From: President Paula A. Johnson
Re: Welcome Back
Date: August 31, 2020
Welcome back!
It is with great joy that I extend a heartfelt welcome back to our Wellesley community, both on campus and across the globe, and a special welcome to our new faculty, Davis Scholars, transfer students, and of course the red class of 2024.
What a journey these past few months have been. We have arrived at this moment thanks to the hard work and dedication of so many people who have worked tirelessly to ensure that we can offer an excellent academic program to all our students, and a residential experience to many, while protecting the health and safety of our community.
This will be a historic year for many reasons. We are still in the midst of a pandemic that has exposed the deep and growing inequities and racism in our society and led to a serious economic downturn. The loss and disruption have been felt across the globe, and yet, it is just these conditions that have led to hope and optimism. The Black Lives Matter movement, which was reenergized in response to the devastating killings of Black people by police across the United States, has ignited a powerful global movement for racial and social justice. And come November, many of us will have a chance to use our voices and vote to determine who will lead this country into the future.
Four years ago, a Wellesley alumna, Hillary Rodham Clinton ’69, became the first woman nominated for president by a major national political party. This year, which marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, gender equality is on the ballot again with Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), the first woman of color, who is Black and South Asian, to run for vice president on a national party ticket. Her nomination was a proud and long-awaited moment for the United States.
Amid this historic year of challenge and change, one thing is clear: As members of the Wellesley community, as voters, as global citizens, we are in this together.
This is certainly true here at Wellesley, where our individual choices and actions will have an impact on whether we are able to successfully complete the year on campus. It is also true for those who are studying remotely—your actions have the power to impact the health and safety of your communities. And it is true for all of us as global citizens, as we have the opportunity to advocate for and to drive change.
I look forward to joining with all of you this Wednesday, September 2, for our first virtual convocation, which will be livestreamed from the Hay Outdoor Theater on our WellesleyLIVE web page. I also encourage you to take part in this virtual celebration on social media using #WellesleyConvocation.
With all of that before us, I want to share some thoughts on the important year ahead and how we can embrace it together.
#WellesleyVotes
Last spring we announced #WellesleyVotes, a campus-wide initiative to encourage democratic and civic engagement. We see this effort as a natural extension of our work to encourage and embrace the free expression of a diversity of thoughts and opinions. As I stated in my letter announcing #WellesleyVotes, some of our most profound learning comes from living alongside each other (and now I would add—connecting in many ways, including virtually) and being open to a multitude of viewpoints and experiences. Freedom of expression is fundamental to a strong democracy, as is the right to have your voice heard through your vote.
While the transition to remote instruction meant that we were not able to do as much as we had planned with #WellesleyVotes in the spring, this fall we are redoubling our efforts. We are working with the College’s Committee for Public and Legislative Awareness (CPLA) to support voter registration and education efforts, collaborating with our Project on Public Leadership in Action (PPLA) on community organizing workshops, and hosting a series of community conversations about the issues at stake in this election and ways to drive systemic change. I will be sharing more about this initiative in the weeks ahead, but I want to make sure you know about two important upcoming events:
On September 8, I will have the pleasure of speaking with Ophelia Dahl DS ’94, co-founder of Partners In Health, and Camara Jones ’76, senior fellow at the Satcher Health Leadership Institute and Cardiovascular Research Institute at Morehouse School of Medicine, about how to confront the racial and global health disparities this pandemic has exposed.
On September 29, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a MacArthur Fellow, will be interviewed by Michael Jeffries, dean of academic affairs and professor of American studies, which will serve as both the Betsy Wood Knapp ’64 Lecture in the Social Sciences and the Wilson Lecture. She is the creative force behind “The 1619 Project,” which explores the legacy of slavery, and she will talk about the path forward to achieve racial justice in the United States today.
Advancing Inclusive Excellence and Confronting Racism
Earlier this summer, a coalition of Black students, Wellesley 4 Black Students, came together and issued a set of demands to Wellesley. Together with Dean Sheilah Horton and Dean Joy St. John, I have met with the students twice during the summer, and a broader group has been working to make progress on a number of issues to more aggressively advance our institutional goal of achieving inclusive excellence and, more explicitly, working to dismantle structural racism.
The demands from Wellesley 4 Black Students are an important reminder that we must move with all deliberate speed to tackle the issues they presented as well as those we have already been addressing. We also received a set of demands from the Native American Student Association (NASA) and will follow up to discuss and address their concerns.
We will be rethinking our model of public safety on the Wellesley campus. Lisa Barbin, Wellesley College’s chief of police, announced her departure in July, and Philip DiBlasi is now serving as interim chief of the Wellesley College Police Department. We will use this transitional period as an opportunity to explore the vision of public safety we would like to have on the Wellesley campus. Since Lisa Barbin’s announcement, senior leadership has been consulting with criminal justice scholars and leaders in campus safety to help to inform next steps.
These steps will include holding focus groups that include students, faculty, and staff to hear your ideas and concerns regarding public safety on campus. Senior leadership will use this information to develop a model for our search for new leadership. We will name a search committee to lead that process, which I envision will include opportunities for the groups representing the Wellesley community to meet finalists for the position. Given that the search process will take several months, I will also name an ad hoc committee to provide more immediate feedback, guidance, and support to Interim Chief DiBlasi, as he looks to make changes in the very near future.
We are also working to address how the curriculum will embrace multiculturalism, racism, and social justice in both a national and global context. Along with Provost Andy Shennan and Deans Megan Núñez and Michael Jeffries, we will continue the work underway through the Change Agent training, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Grant on Inclusive Excellence, and the Pforzheimer Teaching and Learning Center. This August, over 160 faculty and staff participated in structured conversations about anti-racism initiatives at Wellesley. Deans Núñez and Jeffries will continue to host these conversations during the fall, and the information and ideas we collect will be funneled into strategic planning.
The Division of Student Life is kicking off the “Twenty-one Days Against Racism Challenge,” a program to engage students and staff in the fight against racism in their various spheres of influence. Students may sign up for the program, which starts on September 7. (More details about the sign-up for staff are forthcoming.) Daily emails will be sent to program participants with a variety of print and online resources and links to weekly Zoom conversations. The challenge includes a keynote speaker, author and sociologist Crystal Fleming ’04.
We are committed to Wellesley being a college that encourages every person to bring their authentic selves to the classroom, the residence halls, the office, and to all of the places they intersect with Wellesley. We have received a philanthropic gift to allow us to establish an Office for Student Success that will be the umbrella for many of our programs focused on ensuring the success of each of our students, with a particular emphasis on our FGLI (first-generation, low-income) students. We will formally announce the creation of this office later this academic year.
For us to make progress, all at the College must take on this hard and ongoing work.
Strategic Planning
At this time of intense disruption and change, we need a strong vision for Wellesley—where we are now, and where we want to be in five years. We embarked on developing a five-year strategic plan for the College last year that we intended to finalize this fall, but COVID-19 has of course caused a delay. In many ways, the pandemic has made the need for a strategic plan even more urgent, and it will also allow us to discover strengths of our community and opportunities we could not have imagined.
I am tremendously grateful to the working group co-chairs, who have continued to work on the plan through the summer, for their energy, thoughtfulness, and perseverance, and for reflecting on ways the pandemic has accelerated and revealed the challenges and opportunities we face. I know the working groups are eager to engage the community in conversations around key focus areas of the plan and will be reaching out soon to set up a series of discussions. We hope to complete the plan by the end of this academic year.
Innovation and Wintersession
In planning for this year, we have developed an important innovation that we are calling the January Project, a new and different approach to Wintersession that will provide opportunities for all of our students to engage in programming geared toward each of the four class years. The project is designed to engage students in purposeful action grounded in interconnected communities, leadership development, and reflection. In a rapidly changing world, the January Project is a campus-wide initiative that will engage students in experiential learning specific to their own developmental journeys while bringing the entire campus together with common threads. It is a collaboration between Career Education, Student Life, the Office of the Provost, and academic departments, centers, and institutes.
As so much about the year ahead will be unprecedented, it is reassuring and important to remember that we will be making history together here at Wellesley. Whether we are learning, teaching, or working, remotely or on campus, we are all breaking new ground and finding different ways to connect, engage, and support each other.
We also have the chance to make—and shape—history at the ballot box. Congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis wrote about the importance of this moment in a New York Times op-ed, published posthumously: “Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself. Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble. Voting and participating in the democratic process are key. The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.”
My deepest hope is that this year, we will rise to the challenge and promise of this moment by embracing that spirit of shared responsibility for each other, and for our democracy, that John Lewis called for.
As we wear masks and maintain physical distance to keep ourselves, our families, and our community healthy;
As we witness the structural inequities this crisis has revealed and pledge to take on the hard work of building a better world;
As we raise our voices and cast our votes this November;
We will do it together.
