President-designate Lynn Pasquerella’s Remarks

November 2, 2009
Chapin Auditorium

As someone whose life is ruled by the academic calendar, the beginning of the fall semester always evokes in me feelings of optimism, excitement and renewal. That sunny, September day in 1979 was no exception. Sitting in Skinner Hall, I watched as light streamed through the leaded-glass windows of our second-floor seminar room and waited with great anticipation for Professor Grayson’s arrival. The class was a Five College comparative religion course exploring the philosophies of Frederick Douglass, St. Augustine and the Bhagavad Gita. It was team taught by professors from Mount Holyoke, Hampshire, and Smith, with rotating meetings on each of the three campuses. Soon after Professor Grayson’s arrival, however, my excitement turned to dread, as he issued an edict that struck fear in the heart of every student.

No one, he said, would be allowed to take notes in the class. He wanted to give us a glimpse of what it was like for slaves, who were prevented from learning to read or write, to be forced to recollect and recount their experiences through oral traditions. By the end of the class, I came to understand what it means to be unfree with regard to education. This simple but brilliant teaching technique was just one example of many that provided me with the education that both shaped my career and enabled me to find a purpose for which our founder, Mary Lyon, enjoined us to live.

The concept of “freedom to be educated” is one that has stayed with me throughout my life and has resulted in my commitment to political scientist Benjamin Barber’s notion of colleges and universities as “civic missions.” Barber’s Jeffersonian contention is that neither education nor research can prosper in an unfree society. Schooling, he thinks, is society’s most promising, perhaps its only, way of producing citizens who will uphold freedom. Expanding beyond Jefferson, Barber suggests that we “not only have to educate every person to make her free, but we have to free every person to make her educable.”¹

Barber’s message resonates with me deeply because I was a first-generation college student who was raised in a single-parent household, a student who relied on Pell Grants and the Comprehensive Employment Training Act (CETA) to get an education. Needless to say, I have a profound appreciation for the challenges surrounding access. At Mount Holyoke, I was introduced to extraordinary mentors and role models who engendered in me the sense that I truly deserved a place in the academy. The confidence they instilled in me was not the result of a single experience but rather the outcome of aggregated experiences that arose in the context of a vibrant community of intelligent, creative and socially-conscious women.

After my first year, I was chosen as an undergraduate teaching assistant for introductory philosophy courses and then as a research assistant in the Religious Studies Department. As graduation approached, on the eve of my interview for a prestigious fellowship, faculty members and students from my department surprised me with flowers and a subscription to a philosophy journal. Their care for me as a person, their pride in my achievements, and their generosity of spirit are all hallmarks of Mount Holyoke—symbolic of true liberal education in its ability to traverse the personal and the professional. The unwavering support of my peers and the faculty encouraged me to take up the challenge to excel, and the educational opportunities at Mount Holyoke gave me the academic and leadership skills to succeed. I was, in the end, one of only five Ph.D. students accepted by Brown University to receive a full fellowship, an aspiration and accomplishment I would never have imagined for myself prior to enrolling at Mount Holyoke. I had, in essence, been afforded that freedom Barber speaks of, the freedom to be educated.

Beyond opening the doors to graduate school, Mount Holyoke provided me with a distinctive education—one that has resulted in my unyielding advocacy for liberal learning. Mount Holyoke offered, and I am convinced continues to offer, what philosopher Martha Nussbaum refers to as “an education for human development.”² In arguing for the critical importance of the humanities and the arts in a world where educators are encouraged to engage in the rush to profitability, Nussbaum reminds us that even if the arts and humanities don’t make money, they “do what is much more precious: the humanities and the arts make a world that is worth living in, people who are able to see other human beings as equals, and nations that are able to overcome fear and suspicion in favor of sympathetic and reasoned debate.”³

Nussbaum cites the development of critical thinking skills, cultural understanding and “narrative imagination” as the basis of an education for human development, which in turn remains crucial for responsible global citizenship. By “narrative imagination,” Nussbaum means the capacity to “think what it might be like to be in the shoes of a person different from oneself, to be an intelligent reader of that person’s story, and to understand the emotions and wishes and desires that someone so placed might have.”⁴ The significance of Nussbaum’s concept was revealed to me long before I had encountered her written philosophical work. It came to me first in that classroom on the second floor of Skinner, where we were proscribed from taking notes in order to understand the lived experience of those who were denied the education we were so privileged to receive.

This long-ago epiphany formed the heart of my response to an uncommon request from the Presidential Search Committee: they asked me to write a memo describing a transformative undergraduate experience. As you can see from their originality, this was no ordinary search committee, for they were not only thoughtful and deliberative, but innovative, designing an assignment during the search process that caused me to reflect in new ways about the power of a Mount Holyoke education. The task was one that provided me with insights into why I hold certain values so dear and why the opportunity to give back to Mount Holyoke as its 18th President is so meaningful to me.

Throughout the search process, we talked about the singular value of women’s education and the challenges of articulating the worth of liberal learning in contemporary society. In this sense, my vision for higher education aligns perfectly with Mount Holyoke’s mission of “educating a diverse community of women at the highest level of academic excellence and to fostering the alliance of liberal arts education with purposeful engagement in the world.”

Such an alliance characterizes, for example, my own recent work leading an inter-institutional, vertical research team in Kenya. Working with the Africa Center for Engineering Social Solutions (ACESS), our focus is on women empowering women, with the goal of identifying simple engineering solutions both to deliver clean water and to promote sustainable agriculture and entrepreneurship in the West Lake District (see photos from the Kenya project). Our primary project area is the Aluor Widows’ Group, established by Jemima Odoo. Jemima was the first person in Kenya to publicly declare her status as HIV-positive. Allow me to share with you the challenges faced by Jemima, for hers is one of thousands of emblematic stories illustrating that need for a freedom to be educated.

The mother of ten children, Jemima discovered in 1999 that she was infected with HIV, following a decision to get tested when her husband died from AIDS. Within 24 hours of her husband’s death, Jemima lost both a son and daughter to AIDS-related illnesses, and indeed nine of her ten children would eventually be diagnosed as HIV positive, with two more dying subsequent to the initial tragedy. As a result, Jemima became the caregiver to thirteen of her grandchildren.

Told upon her diagnosis that she would not be able to support herself and her family because of the stigma of AIDS, Jemima formed the Aluor Widows/Women’s Group to empower HIV-positive women to make informed choices for improved life-styles and to combat discrimination based on HIV status. Since its inception, the group has grown from four HIV-positive women to 32. They now support 120 HIV-positive orphans and have been joined by six widowers.

The ACESS team’s engagement with this Community Based Organization has inspired us to work toward addressing the multiple needs of Jemima’s community. In a region where there is a 33 percent HIV rate, 67 percent poverty index, which means they are living on less than a dollar a day, and 80 percent of the families are polygamous, there is an abundance of work to be carried out, and this is where the superior commitment to liberal learning at Mount Holyoke is instructive.

Our team has discovered that bringing a humanistic and social scientific perspective to bear on the psycho-social issues endured in this community is as important to women’s motivation and empowerment as is the utilization of their technological skills in developing engineering solutions. And this is Martha Nussbaum’s crucial point: alongside and not beneath the applied and natural sciences, the humanities and social sciences have essential, even galvanizing contributions to make to human progress. I cannot wait to have Mount Holyoke join ACESS as we continue our work in Kenya and doubtlessly elsewhere as the freedom to be educated grows beyond institutional and national borders.

This is such an amazing homecoming and a privilege and honor for me to be with you here today. I owe a debt of gratitude to President Creighton for her gracious hospitality and for the exceptional model of leadership that she provides for all women. I also want to thank President Walter Harrison and my colleagues at the University of Hartford for making my tenure there the most professionally satisfying time of my life. My husband John and our twins, Pierce and Spencer, are here today, as always, to cheer me on. I’d like to ask them to stand and be recognized.

In addition, I want to acknowledge my other family members here today—my sister Keli (the cute baby in the picture), my stepfather, Henry Lemoi, my sister-in-law, Pam, and her husband, Jack—and all of my friends, both here and at home who along the way, through their love, have erased that line between friendship and family. I am, of course, grateful to the Board of Trustees for their confidence in me and to the Presidential Search Committee for the remarkable dedication, integrity and level of commitment each and every one of them has exhibited. Despite minor disagreements with respect to the Red Sox, Yankees, and Phillies, and then later over the Patriots and Broncos, the more time we spent together, the more thrilled I became at the prospect of working with such passionate, dynamic and truly remarkable individuals, and indeed with all of you.

Finally, I want to address just the students for a moment. I often have the pleasure of recruiting prospective students and sending them to Mount Holyoke. Most recently, I had the honor of writing a recommendation for my friend Nina, who is currently a junior with a self-designed major in American History. When she was accepted, I sent her a card that depicted a bouquet of roses on the cover. Inside, I wrote that while I would respect her decision regardless of the college she chose to attend, if she enrolled at Mount Holyoke, no matter what, I would be there at the Laurel Parade to sing “Bread and Roses” with her. And now, I can promise all of you that I will be there to sing by your side, as well. I look forward to working with each of you toward achieving our common objectives, not least that freedom to be educated which lies at the heart of women’s education here as elsewhere, today and tomorrow, building upon the traditions of yesterday. I thank you for this opportunity and accept the honor of its bestowal with enthusiasm and the promise of my wholehearted, honest commitment.

1 Barber, Benjamin. An Aristocracy of Everyone: The Politics of Education and the Future of America. Oxford University Press. 1994.

2 Nussbaum, Martha C. “Education for Profit, Education for Freedom.” Liberal Education: Association of American Colleges and Universities. Volume 95. No. 3 (2009): 6.

3 Ibid. 13.

4 Ibid. 12.