To: The Wellesley College Community
From: President Paula A. Johnson
Re: Welcome Back
Date: September 10, 2021
It is with a profound sense of joy, yes joy, that I write to welcome you back to campus for the start of the 2021 fall semester. So much effort from every member of our community went into making this moment possible, and I want to thank all of you for getting us here. Our journey will continue, and though the pandemic remains with us, the return to campus is a milestone for all of us to celebrate.
Last year was immensely challenging for the College and our community, and yet we pushed past uncertainty and fear and accomplished so much together. In the past 12 months, we protected each other’s health and safety by acting in a shared spirit of caring and concern; we put Wellesley on a trajectory toward carbon neutrality; and we finalized a strategic plan that charts a bold path for Wellesley’s future.
This year, due to the Delta variant with its high transmissibility, we are emerging more haltingly from the pandemic than we had anticipated. In recent weeks we have also seen natural and man-made tragedies unfold in Haiti and Afghanistan, and across this country in the wake of the western wildfires and the flooding in New Orleans and the mid-Atlantic region. We are also experiencing frightening challenges to our basic rights, including voting and women’s control over their reproductive health. It is a daunting moment, to be sure.
It will take collective and sustained action here in this country and globally to confront these challenges. It will take coming together and working across differences of opinion, ideology, and politics, something we practice at Wellesley every day. I believe we can continue to work together to make real change, here on campus and in the world. This year, with the energy and excitement I feel from the students and members of our campus community, I know we are going to achieve remarkable things.
In that spirit, I’d like to share with you some updates on projects and initiatives at the College as we begin the fall semester.
Health and Safety
The efforts of our community have put us in a strong position to start the semester. Our Facilities Management team has worked diligently to prepare our campus spaces to meet our rigorous health and safety guidelines, and our Student Life team has done an outstanding job welcoming students back to campus and planning activities and gatherings that are bringing the Wellesley experience to life. I want to thank our students, faculty, and staff for your patience and understanding as we navigate the evolving pandemic. I am pleased to report that we have conducted 7,504 tests since August 22, and have identified just seven positive cases. Our vaccination rate for students, faculty, and staff is 99 percent, and based on my travels around campus, it looks like everyone is doing a great job with masking inside buildings.
As I have shared, we are taking a multilayered approach to health and safety to ensure that Wellesley’s campus will be as safe as possible this fall. I’d like to remind our community, and in particular students, to be mindful of your environment when you step off campus. Boston and many surrounding towns recently reinstituted an indoor mask mandate, and we must follow their guidance diligently. Each of us has a responsibility—to each other and to the College—to maintain our rigorous standards. We will continue to monitor the evolving public health situation and make adjustments to our campus protocols as needed.
Strategic Plan
Last semester I was proud to share Wellesley’s first strategic plan, which was approved by the board of trustees in late May. It is anchored in our deep commitment to inclusive excellence and inspired by our dedication to advancing women’s education and empowerment globally. This plan was a true community effort—and that we completed it during a public health crisis is testament to our community’s devotion to Wellesley College.
Since the summer, senior leadership has been working on a plan for implementation, which we plan to share with the community in early October. Our goals and priorities are clear; figuring out how best to achieve them will take the sustained and thoughtful engagement of our community.
Many of you have already shared your excitement about the plan and the ways you are putting it into action. Additionally, I want to tell you about two important initiatives it has inspired that are now moving forward:
This fall we will launch the Anne Shen Chao ’74 Office of Student Success, created to ensure that all students are able to build community, access all the educational and co-curricular resources the College offers, and get the tools they need to manage their responsibilities as young people in a new residential setting. This office will build on the existing network of people and programs that support Wellesley’s first-generation students and students from other underrepresented groups. The new office will jointly report to Michael Jeffries, dean of academic affairs, and Inés Maturana Sendoya, associate dean of students for inclusion and engagement. We are hoping to have the new director in place later this semester.
We were awarded funding from the Carnegie Corporation earlier this summer for a Summit on Women’s Economic Inequality, which we plan to host next spring. Layli Maparayan, executive director of the Wellesley Centers for Women, and Olga Shurchkov, director of the Knapp Social Science Center, will convene this virtual event, which will focus on what is needed for a truly “she-centered” economy. It will bring together Wellesley faculty with expertise in this topic, policy-makers, practitioners, and advocates who will articulate an agenda for change. We will be partnering with the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College, Spelman College, and the White House Gender Policy Council as part of this effort. This summit is a perfect example of how Wellesley can use its institutional voice to advance women’s equality in powerful ways.
A New Approach to Public Safety
The last year has exposed the extent of systemic racism in our criminal justice system and sparked important conversations about new models of public safety and policing. Wellesley has responded by reimagining the role of public safety on our campus. Representatives from Residential Life, the Stone Center Counseling Service, and the Wellesley College Police Department have worked together to limit the presence of campus police in student spaces, as a vast majority of calls to campus police have been related to issues that don’t require armed officers, such as lock-outs, rides across campus, and non-emergent health issues. Last spring, we engaged faculty, staff, and students in the search for a new head of public safety at Wellesley. We look forward to announcing the new chief later this month.
Toward a Sustainable Future
Students, faculty, staff, and the board of trustees came together over the past year to develop a comprehensive plan for Wellesley to achieve carbon neutrality by 2040; approve endowment action to prohibit new investment in fossil fuel funds; and adopt of a set of carbon-reducing community actions approved by students, faculty, and staff.
This summer, the Office of Sustainability began to implement new measures that affect campus catering and dining, transportation, faculty travel, and how we heat and cool our campus spaces and water. The Facilities Management team has also been hard at work updating our central utility plant to make it more efficient, allowing us to reduce electrical consumption. These steps will help reduce Wellesley’s carbon footprint significantly and are all part of Wellesley’s comprehensive plan to achieve carbon neutrality by 2040.
Senior leadership and departments will work together with students and the Sustainability Committee to implement these changes this academic year, and we will continue to update you during this process.
Building the Future for STEM at Wellesley
This winter, Wellesley will complete the ambitious reimagining of the Science Center, the most significant capital project undertaken by the College in the past 100 years. The new Science Complex represents a critical investment in our students, our faculty, and our future. It will be a hub of teaching and research, where new facilities and new pedagogy will continue Wellesley’s legacy of educating women leaders in STEM, and a destination for the entire campus community to gather for lectures, explore the wonders of Global Flora, and take advantage of the light-filled spaces to study or to brainstorm with classmates.
I want to thank everyone who has had a hand in this extraordinary effort. The new Science Center will be ready for the spring semester, and we are looking forward to celebrating this important milestone together at that time.
When I consider the progress we made last year on so many fronts, I feel immense pride and a deep sense of hope for the future. The challenges of the past year have mobilized us, and strengthened our determination that Wellesley must offer a contrasting example to many of the inequities the pandemic revealed. Together, let’s throw ourselves into the affirming work of building the best version of Wellesley, and by doing that help bring a better world into being.
