President Wendy Cadge delivered the following remarks at Convocation on Tuesday, September 3, 2024.
Good afternoon. To our first-year students and new faculty members and staff, I’m so happy to officially welcome you to campus and to the opening of Bryn Mawr’s 140th academic year. This is the start of your Bryn Mawr story (and mine). To returning students, faculty, and staff – it’s my pleasure to welcome you back. Welcome to the magic. Look around. We are wearing robes, at a formal ceremony that involves bagpipers, in surroundings that look pretty Harry-Potteresque to me.
Convocation symbolizes the start of something magical each year. It is one of Bryn Mawr’s most important traditions. Standing here for the first time has me thinking about the magic that happens when students, faculty, staff, alums, neighbors, donors, community partners and friends come together into what we call our community. I think about these as layers of the community that include our first-year graduate and undergraduate students who arrived last week, and women who fifty years ago started their senior years in this space and will return to campus next summer for reunion. The layers include generations of faculty who have occupied the offices and classrooms in which we learn; and facilities workers who maintain our historical campus buildings originally built by people now long gone.
Just as institutions have layers, each of us is influenced by our own layered experiences. In starting the year together at Bryn Mawr, we are adding another layer to our stories and those of our families – we are making magic – but I’m getting ahead of myself.
I can best illustrate the magic with a story I came across this summer. It starts with a nonprofit called Narrative 4 whose mission is to use the power of stories to enrich lives. A few years ago, Narrative 4 facilitated a group of face-to-face dialogues between people who approach questions of guns in the United States from different places. In one of those dialogues, Carolyn Taft, a self-employed artist and mother of four who dedicated herself to gun control after losing a child and being seriously injured in a mall shooting, met Todd Underwood, a supporter of open gun laws who founded an online marketplace for buying and selling firearms.
Carolyn and Todd discussed and argued. They tried – and failed – to change each other’s minds. Other participants in the gathering "broke down in tears, fought with each other in front of the group," or stormed out in anger. Carolyn and Todd persisted – they stopped trying to win and they started listening, trying to understand each other. "I wanted him to feel what it was like to be me," Carolyn said; "I wanted him to feel my heart. And he did." Seeking common ground and understanding does not always lead to changed minds; but for Carolyn and Todd, it led to new perspectives and a friendship.
Fast forward a few years and Rev. Amy Butler, then Chief Minister at Riverside Church in New York City, read about this story in New York magazine. She recounted it in a sermon, to illustrate the importance and complexity of the Biblical teaching to love one’s enemy. Not long after, Todd messaged her on Twitter. He had seen video of the sermon online and wondered if he was the “enemy.” He wanted to talk it through.
Amy and Todd spoke by phone, and then met in person when he visited New York. They quickly found disagreement on a wide range of social and political issues. They also surprised each other by finding common ground. That common ground was in love of family, spirituality, deep concern about escalating gun violence, and a commitment to listening – which changed their perceptions of each other and themselves. In Amy’s words, “I started the [conversation] believing Todd was a terrible person. And I knew he was surprised at the conversation, too. He had also labeled me as a bleeding-heart liberal… Both of us were wrong. We were far apart on many things, but … we stepped onto a small piece of ground that was shared, where each of us was able to move over to make room for the other, and where we understood each other in ways that surprised both of us.” I read about all of this over the summer in Amy’s book, Terrible and Beautiful Things: Faith, Doubt, and Discovering a Way Back to Each Other.
Do you see the layers? From Carolyn’s and Todd’s personal experiences, to their engagement with Narrative 4, to taking a risk to really listen to one another, to building a friendship and sharing that friendship with a reporter for New York magazine, to Amy Butler reading the article, to Todd reaching out to Amy, to Amy writing about it in her book, to me reading her book this summer and now sharing it with you.
This story illustrates some of the magic – though it needs a bit more data and analysis for my taste as a sociologist – that we mark today with the start of the academic year.
Stories of people finding common ground as a starting place for disagreement model some of what we do at our best in the liberal arts. We teach and learn, think and communicate. We engage rigorously with texts, data, knowledge, and experiences – and we do all of this through our deep engagement with each other. In the words of poet, activist, and thinker, Audre Lorde "Without community, there is no liberation."
It isn’t instant magic like with a magic wand or in the movies – it takes time and a lot of hard work. Our goal in higher education is not necessarily to change each other’s minds, at least not in any direct or immediate way. Our goal is to help and support one another as we learn and dynamically explore how we want to be in the world – over four years, and over the fifty years between when the class of 1975 sat in these seats to start their senior years and when they will sit in them again this summer.
So welcome to the magic we make together at Bryn Mawr College as we officially start the academic year. May we read carefully, calculate creatively, listen intentionally, engage respectfully. May the research for your senior theses and dissertations change you (and help you get a job!); the Emily Balch Seminars strengthen your skills and ties; the person you sit down with at the dining hall that you don’t know surprise you. May we have patience and courage with difficult ideas (and with each other) and the sparkle in our eyes that help us to see and experience the magic.
Welcome to the fall semester.
