President Wendy Cadge delivered the following address at Inauguration on Saturday, October 26, 2024.
Good afternoon and welcome.
Today is an unusual day. It is a day that has happened only nine times in the 139 years since the College was founded. For the math oriented among us that is, on average, once every 14 years.
I am beyond honored to be on the stage today with nearly half of Bryn Mawr College’s presidents – Pat McPherson, Jane McAullife, Kim Cassidy and now me. When I turned ten and - many years later - when each of my children turned ten, my Dad greeted us on our birthday mornings by calling us “double-digits.” Never did I imagine I would have the honor of being Bryn Mawr College’s first double-digit president.
We are here today to celebrate Bryn Mawr College.
We are here for the light.
That light has a past. It has a present. And it has a future we are imagining together.
I want to begin by honoring and naming all who are here to see and celebrate that light:
- First, my predecessors in this role – will the four former presidents please raise their hands?
- Now, the reason we are all here - current students
- Current and former faculty
- Current and former Members of the Board of Trustees
- Current and former staff
- Alumni
- Parents and friends including our neighbors and members of the local community
- Representatives of our peer institutions in higher education including several current presidents
I want to also acknowledge those members of the College community whose stories have not always been told. The College, under the direction of my remarkable predecessor Kim Cassidy, and with a lot of work by students and faculty, has been learning and sharing these stories. This is the history of African-American women and men who worked as maids and porters for earlier generations of mostly white students. It is the history of the earliest students who came from Asia to study here. It is the stories of all who are part of the Who Built Bryn Mawr Project, an ongoing effort that gives us the opportunity to deepen and transform how the Bryn Mawr community understands the College’s history.
Who Built Bryn Mawr is, in my view, a national model for how to engage higher education communities in the excavation and crafting of layered narratives about the past and its living legacies. I encourage you today or in the future to take the Black at Bryn Mawr tour to learn more about some of these untold stories.
The College will continue to learn about and honor these stories, to bring these members into the light, when we dedicate Nekisha Durrett’s monument “Don't Forget to Remember (Me)” in April as part of the Art Remediating College Histories Project or ARCH. Plan now to join us.
I also want to personally acknowledge and thank those who made it possible for me to be here today, to join the Bryn Mawr College community and its light.
- My wife Deborah and our children Nate and Risa
- My parents, sisters and their families
- My five grandmothers including
- Phyllis Holcomb Bates Cadge Lyon born in 1920
- Elizabeth Downing Hipple Griffith Hemminger born in 1926
- I want to thank my friends here and watching from many corners of the globe including my former colleagues, now friends, from Brandeis University many of whom made the trip here. Thank you.
- I want to recognize my teachers from Springfield School District just a few miles away. I was raised in Delaware County and am thankful for several of my teachers who are with us today (and one who was recently hospitalized). I’m just as grateful for my teachers at Swarthmore College who are here and watching from afar, including my first-year adviser and my senior thesis adviser who is watching from Hungary. It is these people who led me to other teachers in Sri Lanka, in graduate school, and as a postdoctoral fellow and young faculty member.
Never – and I mean never – would I be standing here, in the light, without each of your love and support.
Today is a day for bringing communities together. To the chair and members of the Board of Trustees, distinguished faculty, curious students, thoughtful and engaged staff, amazing alumnae including more than twenty groups gathered for watch parties in San Francisco, Houston, Grinnell Iowa, Paris and more; thank you for welcoming me here today and for welcoming me and my family (including the pugs and the cats and the frog). We are honored to be on this adventure alongside each of you.
The Light
I officially joined this community almost four months ago, and I have been learning – constantly. I have a lot of questions – as many of you know – and part of my learning is trying to figure out what the most important questions are to be asking about the College at this point in its history- and in the social and political contexts in which we find ourselves.
I think about these questions as I walk the campus, sit with many of you in dining halls and meetings, work out on the elliptical machines in the Schwartz Fitness Center, attend lectures and campus events, and overhear conversations on campus pathways. I listen and watch and think. Many think the answers to questions are the most important parts. I’m not so sure. So much of what the liberal arts teaches us is how to ask the right questions – how to lead with questions and insist that questions be taken seriously.
So why are we here? Not existentially - though I am a sociologist of religion and we can talk about that later if you want. But why are we here on a Saturday afternoon dressed up in funny outfits when we could be in so many other places? Why were, and are and will people be drawn to Bryn Mawr College as a place to learn and play, to work and build lifelong communities? What makes Bryn Mawr distinctive and how can we ensure that distinctiveness makes a significant, ongoing impact in the world? What does it look like to fulfill the College’s mission, today in 2024, and to steward the remarkable resources we have been given by the past and loaned by the future to enable those who come after us to do the same? These, I think, are the most important questions. The ones I have been thinking about over the last four months.
Well-meaning people like to ask me some version of the question, “What are you going to do at Bryn Mawr College?” My answer, “I am going to do very little and we, I hope, are going to do much.”
I – in the singular – can’t answer these questions. My job is to help us answer them together as we imagine and build the college’s next chapter.
We are here because of Bryn Mawr’s mission statement, which is central to its next chapter. It led me to apply for this job and is a central part of why I accepted it when friends and colleagues, especially in this political climate, thought I must be a little nuts to even consider it. The college’s values of intellectual curiosity, independence, gender equity, resilience, and the uplift of others are my personal values too, as is the deep commitment in practice – not just words and symbols – to engage equity and inclusion as engines for excellence and innovation.
We are here because of the college’s symbols and traditions, also part of its next chapter. The owls, our new mascot Olympia – Olly for short, Athena, the school colors, the lantern. Classic traditions like Parade Night, Lantern Night and May Day; lesser-known ones like the bra tree, the friendship poles, and “Done is Good” boards at finals.
We are here because of what I believe is the college’s core, its DNA, out of which the next chapter grows. It isn’t about the owls or the presidents (older or newer) or even about the lanterns. Bryn Mawr College is very clear about what is central for us; the light. Across generations, we embody the pursuit of knowledge and the power of ideas to light and change the world.
This thirst for knowledge, this spark of curiosity, this passion for learning, oozes from every pore of the institution and community and is symbolized by the lantern. It is about what happens in English House, Park, Dalton, Tri-Co Philly, the libraries, and so many other spaces of teaching, learning, and playing. The first-year students I met and ate ice cream with on the lawn of the president’s house in August came to Bryn Mawr for this light, – some of them leaving their home countries for the very first time. Students, both graduate and undergraduate, complete their studies having learned to learn which – at least from the alums I have met so far –continues over their lifetimes. [One of them was even on Jeopardy last week!]
I spoke in my convocation address about the magic that happens at the start of each semester. That same magic happens as alums get to know one another and see the Bryn Mawr light in each other. I am yet to be in a gathering of Mawrters, of any generation, where asking about a book does not open the conversation.
This metaphor of light as Bryn Mawr’s core commitment to learning and knowledge allows us to look at the lantern in new ways. The lantern is the container for the light – that which houses it, carries it, shapes it, and makes it accessible. The lantern represents the College as an institution, shaping how the light emerges and projects out into the world. I believe that our work together is to make that lantern as effective as it can be to support, amplify, engage and share the light. How do we enable that light to burn the brightest and have the most significant impact now and for future generations?
Generations
On days like today, we especially honor and recognize our predecessors who first harnessed this light for women – who literally turned on the lights at Bryn Mawr College. Our Quaker forebearers deeply valued education, not just for individuals but in institutions dedicated to that purpose. From the beginning, the College was designed to provide access not just to higher education, but to a truly world-class education, rivaling the very best men’s institutions of the time. That’s why we are unique among our liberal arts college peers in our longstanding commitment to graduate education, today through the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and Postbaccalaureate Premedical Program. It’s why we were the first women’s college in the United States to offer doctoral degrees and why our scope has long been global.
Today the light burns brightly as our faculty and students learn and grow together. I see this in classrooms and in the fans at sporting events (many toting big textbooks to read at half time). I see it in the libraries and study carrels, and the summer work students and faculty did together and reported on at a campus-wide coffee in September. The external recognition is there in the faculty who receive Fulbright grants and funds from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and other sources and published their work in many books and articles. It is in the care our staff in campus safety, the library, buildings & grounds, the Dean’s Office, the health and counseling centers, and so many other offices across campus offer for our students, not just as scholars but as whole people.
The lanterns across the stage today belonged to undergraduates from many generations at the College. You can see they have changed. The College – like the lanterns all new undergraduates receive– is always changing because the students are always changing. Faculty, staff, and alumni age. Students never do. They graduate and new (younger) students arrive each fall with that spark of light, that thirst for knowledge, that deep zeal for learning.
As we look to the next chapter, the light will remain core and the container may change. All of the lanterns across the stage, for example, require a separate light source - a match and a candle or a battery powered candle. In talking with faculty and staff and looking at the world today, I think it is time for a solar powered lantern, one with a more environmentally sustainable power source.
It is too early for me to announce major campus initiatives – we are coming to them together. I can share that whatever they are – we will work through them sustainably. I am committed to accelerating the College’s sustainability work over the next five years. To help catalyze Bryn Mawr’s work to date, we will be increasing resources to support faculty, staff and students working on these issues and create a new position in 2025 that is 100% focused on sustainability at the college and in our local communities.
Our Adventure
I stand here today with the College community – past, present, and future - with deep and abiding gratitude:
- I am grateful for a community that – through our shared resources - enables 83% of our students to receive some form of financial aid, meeting 100% of demonstrated need,
- I am grateful for an institution that knows deep in its bones that education remains the surest tool for social mobility.
- I am grateful for an institution that doesn’t just talk the talk, but walks the walk on bringing into the light difficult and previously overlooked parts of our history
- I am grateful for an institution building new partnerships with area community colleges - including a pilot on campus-program for current community college students next summer that will further introduce students to the benefits of a liberal arts education, and maybe eventually a bachelor’s degree from Bryn Mawr.
- I am grateful for graduate schools with seven PhD programs in addition to masters degrees in social work, and an amazing post baccalaureate program in which 95% of students are admitted to medical school. As a former Graduate Dean, this warms my heart.
- I am grateful for so many generations and intellectual communities of women: those who are cisgender, transgender, and those who do not navigate within the gender binary
I experience Bryn Mawr as a place that is more than the sum of its parts. It is a beacon that not only educates but demonstrates; that changes individual lives and offers a collective vision of the difference we can make when we work together. The world needs beacons and our collective light is a source of hope for all. Our job together is to strengthen, amplify, and lift the light higher so it shines – maybe like a lighthouse - broadly and brightly, so the value of women’s colleges and the mission of Bryn Mawr is impossible for the world to miss. I want our lighthouse to have mirrors and disco balls to catch and spread the light, in all its fabulous rainbows.
The Spark
Ok, you might be thinking, enough about this light. Or you might be wondering – where does the spark that makes this light possible come from? That, I believe, is a deeply personal question, with which many of us struggle.
For me, that spark is love – love of knowledge, love of learning, love of one another, and the possibilities in loving community – the ways I have seen groups be more than the sum of their parts.
When I was fifteen, the new band director at Springfield High School (who is here with us today), selected me as a sophomore to lead the marching band in my junior and senior years (which just wasn’t done). He then sent me to summer drum major camp at West Chester University – which is a story for another day as are the boots I wore when trying to look confident walking down the 50-yard line in front of the band twirling a mace at half-time.
Our band had not been trained in conventional marching techniques. It wasn’t the new director or me - newly graduated from summer drum major camp - who taught them. It was drummers and flute players, trumpet players and members of the color guard working in small peer groups with discipline, laughter, and a lot of love and patience. All it takes is a team – or a marching band – to show how a group can be more than the sum of its parts.
I am here today because I believe love is the strongest force in the universe. It is the glue that turns a marching band that doesn’t really know how to march into something I am talking to you about thirty years later.
As my colleagues, now friends at the Fetzer Institute, say in their mission statement, “we believe in the possibility of a loving world: a world where we understand we are all part of one human family and know our lives have purpose. In the world we seek, everyone is committed to courageous compassion and bold love—powerful forces for good in the face of fear, anger, division, and despair.”
I am here because of a student I met on campus at Hillel a few weeks ago who told me, “When you meet anger with anger, the result is anger. And when you meet anger with love something radical can happen.” Yes.
I took three honors seminars in college titled “Love and Religion,” “Religious Belief and Moral Action,” and “Liberation Theology.” My classmates and I read the Song of Songs and other sacred texts, and learned from Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., Gustavo Gutierrez, Thich Naht Hanh, and so many others who dedicated themselves to the hard and radical work of love. That is my personal spark.
Toni Morrison wrote about the importance of institutionalizing this radical work. “Inviting compassion into the bloodstream of an institution’s agenda or a scholar’s purpose is more than productive, more than civilizing, more than ethical, more than humane;” she wrote, “it’s humanizing.”
To conclude:
I am here because it takes all of us - staff, faculty, Board members, alums, donors, former presidents, neighbors and friends. We believe in the light and, I believe, together will create the solar lanterns that will illuminate the college’s next chapter, will transform lives, and will continue to change the world.
I am here for all of you, and I’m grateful to each of you for being here today – and every day- for each other.
I am here and grateful for friends and colleagues on the stage, watching from afar on their laptops, and in the audience who are here to support me personally.
I am here and grateful for the entire Bryn Mawr College community, in whose legacy we stand and whose next chapter we are writing collectively.
I am here and grateful for the light…for when we bring our lights together, we are - and will continue to be dazzling.
