Does the College President Know the History of Her Own College?
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SPECIAL EDITION (November 2016) D. Bruce Lockerbie, Chairman/CEO/Editor DOES THE COLLEGE PRESIDENT KNOW THE HISTORY OF HER OWN COLLEGE? A recent SPECIAL EDITION of THE PAIDEIA LETTER offered a glimpse at the folly being perpetrated on many university campuses in the name of “democratic protest” by students and their professors disappointed by the results of the presidential election. Today the woman cutting my hair told me that another cli- ent’s daughter is enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (photo left) where, the student reports, she has had no classes meet since Election Day. “Every class has been cancelled or devoted to coloring books and weeping,” she says. “Yesterday it was free cocoa to soothe our spirits.” This undergraduate continues, “My parents are spending $60,000 a year for my education, and it’s being stolen from me by radicals!” With the support and collaboration of adminis- trators, no doubt. At least, so it appears at Wellesley College (photo left), one of MIT’s neighboring colleges, whose President Paula Johnson (photo right) defends her institution and her “serious concern” over multiple reports of “adverse incidents” on many campuses. Her letter appeared on November 15, in The New York Times. President Johnson—a distinguished cardiologist and new president—speaks of her college’s founding as “a revolution- ary act inspired by a vision for democracy and equal opportunity for women across all socioeconomic back- grounds.” Perhaps so, but Johnson’s emphasis on politics and sociology more nearly reflects the philosophy of Wellesley’s most famous current alumna, Hillary Rodham Clinton (photo right), Class of 1969, than that of its founders. Indeed, such a statement would have come as a surprise to the husband-and-wife team named Henry Fowle Durant and Pauline Durant. Henry Durant was a wealthy Boston attorney who, as a professing Christian, became a financial supporter of Dwight L. Moody and his evangelistic endeavors. Soon after the Civil War ended, the Durants—following in the tradition of Mary Lyon, founder of what is now Mount Holyoke College, and Catherine Beecher, older sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe and advocate of broader vocational opportunities for Christian women—determined to found a 1 college for young women to prepare them for meaningful lives of service to Jesus Christ. Florence Converse, official historian, records the day that Mr. and Mrs. Durant arrived on the construction site to lay the cornerstone of the chapel in College Hall: “On the afternoon of Thursday, September 14, 1871, the cornerstone was laid by Mrs. Durant, at the northwest corner of the building. Each workman was given a Bible by Mr. Durant, and a Bible was placed in the corner- stone.” On December 18, 1914, a disastrous fire consumed the building (photo left). But, as Converse writes, “the stone was uncovered, and the Bible was found in a tin box in a hollow of the stone. President [Ellen] Pendleton read aloud the inscription [in the Bible]: This building is humbly dedicated to our Heavenly Father with the hope and prayer that He may always be first in everything in this institution; that His word may be faithfully taught here; and that He will use it as a means of leading precious souls to the Lord Jesus Christ.” How did the intentions of the Durants affect Hillary Rodham of Park Ridge, Illinois? She had arrived at Wellesley College in the fall of 1965, the daughter of parents who were faithful members of a Methodist church and staunch Republicans. Her youth pastor Don Jones took a group of teenagers from the church to hear Martin Luther King, Jr. speak in Chicago, introducing them to social change as a religious cause; but in Hillary’s case, not immediately activated. Having been a “Goldwater Girl” during the recent 1964 Presidential campaign, she joined and eventually became president of the college Republican club. Thus her transformation—first evident in her rude and shocking 1969 Commencement speech (photo right) attacking in person the official speaker, Senator Edward Brooke, Massachusetts Republican and only African- American in the United States Senate—can accurately be attributed to those contrary influences at the college. The rest is history, including the college’s 2014 decision to admit and retain transgender students—women who become men or vice versa. 25 years later, in November 1994, the Public Broadcasting System aired a TV documentary called “Whatever Happened to the Class of 1969?” It featured several classmates of Mrs. Clinton—among them, Janet Hill, wife of NFL star Calvin Hill and mother of NBA star Grant Hill and a suite-mate of Rodham in college, as well as Martha Teichner of CBS News—not the former First Lady herself. Of course, the film showed many views of the beautiful campus and gave a version of its founding and culture but said nothing about its original Christian purposes. On the day after the program, I called the Admissions Office and asked two questions: “What is the source and English translation of Wellesley College motto Non ministrari sed ministrare”? “What can you tell me about the cornerstone contents and the text from 1871?” The Wellesley College representative was baffled by the Latin motto. She did not know its origin, to be found in the New Testament (Matthew 20:28), “The Son of man came not to be ministered unto but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many,” but she volunteered that its common understanding was something like “Not to be passive but to be active.” More recently, in checking the Wellesley College web site, I find this explanation—but no source given: Non Ministrari sed Ministrare. "Not to be ministered unto, but to minister," proclaims Wellesley's motto, capturing in four Latin words the College's mission: To provide an excellent liberal arts education for women who will make a difference in the world. Read more at http://www.wellesley.edu/about/missionandvalues. Really? How so? Is that what the text from Scripture means? Or implies? “Make a difference in the world”? What about serving instead of being served? How well does the career of the Most Famous Alumna exemplify this ideal? Regarding the cornerstone Bible and its inscription, she had no hesitancy whatever: “Oh that! Today we regard that mostly an embarrassment.” Do you hear that, Mr. and Mrs. Durant? Your hopes and prayers are an embarrassment! 2 In a comprehensive biographical article, “The Whole Woman,” introducing Dr. Johnson to the Wellesley community (Wellesley Magazine, Summer 2016), the new president gave a very frank summary of her family and childhood in Brooklyn, New York, during the 1960s and mid-1970s, until she enrolled at the Harvard Radcliffe Colleges at age 16. But in all her candor about her home life and the influence of her mother upon her cultural awareness, Johnson makes not one reference to any religious instruction, experience, or affiliation. Yet in that same feature story, the 14th president of Wellesley College expresses her desire to become well informed about the institution she now leads: “I think having a deep appreciation of the history of Wellesley— all of the history, in various periods—is so important to how we move forward. What’s worked, what’s failed, where we’ve moved things forward, where we haven’t,” Assuming her sincerity, will she include learning about the faith of Henry and Pauline Durant? Will she study the root and passion they had for preparing generations of young women to serve as followers of Jesus Christ? Or will that phase of the college’s history be classified as “mostly an embarrassment”? Will the cornerstone Bible and its inscrip- tion fall among “what’s failed” or “where we’ve moved forward”—meaning, I fear, those matters that been discarded as no longer relevant in a secular progressive society and its institutions of higher education? Prior to publishing this issue of THE PAIDEIA LETTER SPECIAL EDITION, I sent the following message to the Wellesley College president. Receiving no reply, I sent the message again on December 7. Fair warning! November 21, 2016 PRESIDENT PAULA JOHNSON: I am an educational consultant serving primarily Christian independent schools but also colleges, universities, and seminaries—including several institutions in the Boston/New England region. This is my 61st year in the business of educating young people in what is now called “a faith-based environment.” I publish THE PAIDEIA LETTER as an occasional commentary on matters of interest or concern to my worldwide clientele. I read your recently published Letter to the Editor in The New York Times and noted your reference to matters of politics and socioeconomic issues as significant to Wellesley College. Of course, these are important 21st century concerns—part of what contemporary theologians might call “progressive revelation” of our human responsibilities to each other, as in “love your neighbor as yourself.” But, having made it my field of scholarship to know the history of such institutions as Wellesley College, I believe the legacy of its founders (wife and husband) extend at least as deeply into spiritual concerns addressed by what the Bible identifies as “the good news.” Thus I became curious to know more about the new President. I read with interest the profile (“The Whole Wom- an”) in the Summer 2016 issue of the College magazine. I too am a product of Brooklyn public schooling (Fort Hamilton High School, Class of 1952), and reveled in my NYC opportunities, as did you; but I was disappointed to learn nothing about your parents’