The below message was sent on Friday, August 2, 2024.
Dear Bryn Mawr College Community,
A quick note after my first month on campus. I’m grateful for the warm welcome, your openness to my (many) questions, and the directions you offer as I navigate around campus. I aim to over-communicate with you this fall and to share how I have been connecting with the community and what I am learning. At heart, I am an ethnographer, trained to learn by listening, watching, and conversing about what I see with those I am learning alongside. I trust you will let me know what I am missing as we move through this transition together.
This summer, I have been:
- Walking around campus. I have been in almost every building and loved meeting with staff in Alumnae/i Relations and Development, Athletics, Communications, Enrollment, Facilities, and LITS. Meeting staff where you work is helping me begin to understand daily life (in the summer) on campus.
- In conversation. It has been so helpful to start to talk with some current and retired faculty, to spend time in Ward with colleagues in Facilities (and see the shops), to sit with Officers of the Staff Association’s Executive Council, to begin meeting individually with members of the Board of Trustees, to meet in-person with each of the former living Presidents, and to attend lunches with faculty and staff generously prepared by Dining Services staff at Wyndham. I loved meeting the STEMLA fellows, Postbac students, and student interns at the ice cream truck and look forward to meeting more students later this month.
- Learning. We had a full-day retreat with the senior staff and a half-day retreat with the President’s Office staff to begin to get to know one another and plan for the year. There was a lot of whiteboard brainstorming, sticky notes, and starting to think together about the College and what makes (or might make) it distinctive in the higher education landscape. I also attended a five-day seminar for new presidents at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University learning from faculty, experienced presidents, and fifty-plus other new presidents from across geographies and institution types.
- Traveling. In addition to getting to know the campus, a central part of my job takes place off campus as I work to elevate Bryn Mawr College, often in collaboration with our impressive list of alumnae/i and friends.
The core of my work has been listening (as a verb) for content (what is said) as well as for process (how it is said). I’m learning how the community engages with one another when we agree and disagree and how things get done here. I can see already the passion and commitment so many of you bring to our work together and to the mission of “equity across all aspects of diversity” as we prepare students for “lives of purpose.” I will continue to learn through the fall semester and will share early in the spring some reflections informed by my learning and the strategic planning work many of you contributed to before I arrived.
Faculty and staff are invited to a “Back to School” Town Hall on Monday, August 26th at 4:00 p.m. in the Great Hall. I will speak briefly about our preparations for the fall semester before we share snacks together. I will continue to host Faculty opportunities and Staff opportunities for small-group lunches as I get to know you this fall. We will also continue the weekly students/ faculty/ staff Community Coffee Hours on Thursdays this fall at 9:30 a.m. There will be programming during the first coffee hour of each month when community news and announcements will be shared. Plan now to attend the first one on September 5th.
This first month has been exciting (and exhausting) and only deepened my commitment to the College and its mission. I look forward to meeting more of our community in person as the fall semester approaches.
With gratitude,
Wendy
Wendy Cadge
President
Professor of Sociology
Bryn Mawr College
Bryn Mawr, PA
(Pronouns: she/her - why?)
