To: The Wellesley College Community
From: President Paula A. Johnson
Re: End of Term Update
Date: December 11, 2020
Congratulations everyone, we made it! Despite all the challenges of this fall, we successfully completed two terms while managing to keep our positive COVID-19 case count in the low double digits. It wasn’t easy to get here. I know how hard you worked, and the sacrifices you were required to make, even down to the last days of classes. But we came together, and together, we made history.
We are hopefully just days away from FDA authorization of the first COVID-19 vaccine. In my role with the governor’s Higher Education Working Group, I will be working on the vaccination roll-out plan for higher education. It fills me with optimism to be planning for this, but we still have many months to go, and we will need to continue to be vigilant and stay safe in the meantime.
Over the past several months, I have updated our community on health and safety protocols many times. As we mark the end of classes, I want to shift focus and talk about our students’ calls for racial and social justice and the work we are doing in response; the strategic planning process for the future of Wellesley; and our plans for the innovative new January Project and the spring terms.
In the wake of the protests against police brutality and systemic racism, a group of our Black students, Wellesley4Black Students, called on the College this summer to make changes on a number of fronts, including public safety, the curriculum, and student life. Months later, the Native American Student Association shared its concerns about the curriculum and pressed the College for a land acknowledgement. These calls for change spurred dialogue and action, and while we still have more work to do, here is what we have accomplished so far:
Response to Black Students’ Concerns
Public Safety
Wellesley4Black Students asked for changes to public safety protocols that would minimize the presence of the Wellesley College Police Department in the residence halls. Understanding that student lockouts are the primary reason police are called to residence halls, Residential Life staff worked with campus police to create a “lockout call line” that is managed by Residential Life and staffed by student workers. As a result, students handled more than 200 lockouts this fall instead of campus police.
Staff from Residential Life, campus police, and Stone Center Counseling Service have begun to train together in order to minimize the role of police in responding to student mental health crises. We continue to make progress on supporting students in their most vulnerable moments.
We have engaged the community to help us create a new vision of public safety at Wellesley. Jacquelina Marquez, dean of religious and spiritual life, and Pamela Taylor, assistant provost of institutional planning and assessment and director of institutional research, with the support of Sarah Staley, associate director of talent management and development, recently completed a series of community focus groups on this topic. They will share their feedback with senior leadership this month; we will review and share highlights with the community, and use this feedback to develop a plan for campus safety in the new year.
Student Life
Harambee House and the Office of Intercultural Education held a Black student orientation program and our new orientation retreat for students of color—THRIVE!—which took place in August. Both programs were remote so that students could connect, build friendships, and establish a network of support regardless of their location.
The Office of Student Involvement has been working with SOFC to streamline its processes to remove the burden of reimbursement.
The chief justice of the Honor Code Council has introduced bias training for all council members. The Residence Life program is also exploring restorative justice models for future social violations. The COVID-19 pandemic has slowed progress on this work, but we are continuing to engage the community in determining the appropriate responses to social violations.
The Stone Center, which has a highly diverse staff in comparison to many college counseling services, has increased its outreach to Black students this year with more group opportunities. It also offered workshops on healing and self-care in the midst of racial trauma, specifically for Black students. We continue to be challenged by the limited number of Black therapists available in the field of college mental health, but we remain committed to finding the right level of support for our Black students. The College recently hired a full-time LGBTQIA coordinator, who is helping us strengthen resources for this population. LGBTQIA counselors are also available at the Stone Center.
Academic Program
We know that when one group of students expresses concern about aspects of our academic program, the changes made often benefit the broader student community. In that spirit, we are seeking a holistic solution to our Black students’ concerns regarding the quantitative reasoning (QR) requirement. First, we are developing a summer advising process to make sure all students know what material is covered on the QR assessment and have the technological resources needed to take the test. Also, we want to connect first-year students with faculty and staff advisors early so that they can have meaningful conversations about their interests and options and end up in the appropriate class sections.
To address concerns that the QR requirement can slow a student’s progress toward a STEM major, we have created or are creating introductory sections in several disciplines (chemistry, biology, mathematics, and economics) in which first-year students can enroll right away and get extra support while still staying on track with their classmates. For students who are interested in non-STEM majors, we are exploring combining QR140 with other distribution requirements so that students can count this course toward their graduation requirements and not feel that it is an additional burden.
Response to Native American Students’ Concerns
Land Acknowledgement
The Native American Student Association (NASA) has asked Wellesley to adopt a land acknowledgement, recognizing that the College is built on land that belonged to the Massachusett people. We are exploring this issue, and I hope to meet with the leader of the Massachusett Tribal Nation in the next few weeks to better understand the history. We plan to raise this issue with the Board of Trustees early in the new year.
Student Life
NASA has been assigned advisors in the Office of Intercultural Education to support them with programming for the group and for the College community. I am grateful to Mared Alicia-Westort, assistant dean of intercultural education and advisor to Latinx students, and Karen Shih, assistant dean of intercultural education and advisor to students of Asian descent, for supporting these students.
Academic Program
Students’ concerns about the diversity of the curriculum and the lack of Black and Indigenous professors underscore challenges we have faced for many years. We will continue to focus on these issues as an outcome of strategic planning.
Strategic Planning
The strategic planning working groups have spent the last month or so engaging the community through discussion sessions and questionnaires related to key focus areas. They have been pleased with the high level of response, and they plan to incorporate this feedback into the draft recommendations they will share with the Steering Committee in January. There will be much more work and community engagement around strategic planning in January and throughout the spring. I am grateful to the faculty, staff, and students who have remained deeply engaged in this planning process and for the active participation of the Wellesley community in shaping our shared vision for the future.
Divestment
Over the last year, we have heard several demands for the endowment to divest from certain positions.
Last winter, members of the student group Renew Wellesley and faculty collaborated to request action on investments in companies that produce, refine, and distribute fossil fuel products. The Subcommittee on Investment Responsibility evaluated the request and made a recommendation to the Investment Committee. Shortly after that meeting, which occurred the day before the College was required to send students home due to the pandemic, Debora de Hoyos ’75, chair of the board, indicated that the trustees would consider all aspects of Wellesley’s climate change response at one of its meetings in the next academic year. This would allow more time to develop long-term recommendations for sustainability, and for students and the Sustainability Committee to determine community actions to reduce the College’s carbon footprint.
In response to the board’s request for a holistic solution that includes a community contribution, Casey Rothschild, Norma Wilentz Hess Professor of Economics, created a new course, ES/ECON-199, Fossil Fuel Divestment: Student Action at Wellesley, focused on analyzing the costs and benefits of various approaches to reducing campus carbon emissions. His students have completed two terms of intensive work on their report and recommendations, which the Investment Committee discussed earlier this week. The committee commended the students on their thoughtful development of actionable ideas. During that same meeting, the Investment Committee voted to move to amend the College’s investment policy to preclude investments in funds that focus on private and public investments in fossil fuel companies. Early in the new year, the Board of Trustees will consider the investment committee’s recommended actions. In addition, the Investment Office has pledged to annually disclose the endowment’s exposure to fossil fuels, which can be found here.
Dean of Students Sheliah Horton, Chief Investment Officer Debby Kuenstner ’80, and I have met several times with a group of students who advocate divestment from companies that are part of the prison-industrial complex. Debby Kuenstner shared that the College has no investments in private prison companies and that the College’s U.S. public equity managers do not own stock in companies that own or operate private prisons or that depend on supplying prisons as an important profit driver.
January Project and Spring Terms
We will kick off the new year with the innovative January Project, a true collaboration among departments, programs, and offices across the College designed to provide students with meaningful experiences that encourage them to connect and engage with each other and the world around them. So far, over 600 students have signed up to participate. First-years (and some Wellesley alumnae!) will read and discuss The Other Americans, by Laila Lalami. Sophomores will complete civic engagement projects in their home communities, and juniors and seniors will work with Career Education to identify internship and mentoring experiences in 232 different projects. The Coalition for Life-Transformative Education has provided a $25,000 grant to support students’ needs during the January Project.
This spring, we look forward to welcoming some 1,300 students to campus—slightly more than we had this fall—including juniors and seniors, along with a mix of first-years and sophomores. Faculty have designed in-person classes for juniors and seniors; first-years and sophomores will take most of their classes remotely.
We anticipate that our health and safety protocols will remain similar to what they have been this semester, but we are prepared to make adjustments if the public health situation on campus or in Massachusetts changes. The rates of COVID-19 are rapidly rising in Massachusetts, with the positivity rate near 8 percent if you remove data from the asymptomatic testing programs of colleges and universities from the calculation. We hope to see that rate go down before we resume classes on February 15. As with the fall terms, we ask for your patience and flexibility as we navigate what is still a very difficult situation.
As I look back on the past year, and forward to the next, I am filled with both gratitude for what we have accomplished and hope about our ability to meet the challenges of this moment—which go far beyond the pandemic.
I wish you and your loved ones good health and the peace of this holiday season.
