Wellesley College
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Wellesley College is a women's liberal arts college that opened in 1875, founded by Henry Fowle Durant and his wife Pauline Fowle Durant. Today, the mission of the college is to "provide an excellent liberal arts education for women who will make a difference in the world." The college's motto, "Non Ministrari sed Ministrare" (not to be ministered unto but to minister), reflects this purpose.
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Overview
The private college, located in Wellesley, Massachusetts (13 miles west of Boston), grants four-year baccalaureate degrees and is one of the Seven Sisters. Approximately 2,300 students attend the school. The college has a cross-registration program and a five-year dual degree program with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and houses the Wellesley Centers for Women, which consists of the Center for Research on Women and the Stone Center for Developmental Services and Studies. Based on rankings by U.S. News & World Report, Wellesley consistently ranks among the top five liberal arts colleges in the United States, and as the highest ranking women's college in this category.
The current president of Wellesley College is Diana Chapman Walsh, class of 1966. Throughout its history, the college has always had female presidents. The average class size at Wellesley College ranges from 18 to 21 students, and there are approximately 9 students for every faculty member. Wellesley's libraries contain over 1.5 million catalogued books, journals, media recordings, maps, and other items. As of 2002, the endowment for the college was about $1 billion. Half of all students receive some form of financial aid.
Wellesley is the college in which the 2003 film Mona Lisa Smile was set; some of the outdoor scenes were filmed on campus. The college is renowned for the picturesque beauty of its 500-acre (2 km²) campus which includes Lake Waban, evergreen and deciduous woodlands and open meadows. Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., Boston's preeminent landscape architect at the beginning of the 20th century, described Wellesley's landscape as "not merely beautiful, but with a marked individual character not represented so far as I know on the ground of any other college in the country."
Wellesley and MIT were the two primary institutions Benson Snyder studies in The Hidden Curriculum (1970), in which he concludes that a mass of unstated requirements and expectations thwarts students' ability to think creatively or develop independently.
The charter for Wellesley College was signed on March 17, 1870 by Massachusetts Governor William Claflin. The original name of the College was the Wellesley Female Seminary, and the renaming to Wellesley College was approved by the Massachusetts legislature on March 7, 1873. Opening day was September 8, 1875. The first president was Ada L. Howard. There have been eleven subsequent presidents: Alice E. Freeman (later Alice Freeman Palmer), Helen Almira Shafer, Julia Josephine Thomas Irvine, Caroline Hazard, Ellen Fitz Pendleton, Mildred McAfee (later Mildred McAfee Horton), Margaret Clapp, Ruth M. Adams, Barbara Wayne Newell, Nannerl Overholser Keohane, and Diana Chapman Walsh.
Famous alumnae
- Katharine Lee Bates (1880) (author of the words to the anthem America the Beautiful)
- Marjory Stoneman Douglas (1912) (conservationist and writer)
- Bing Xin (1926) (famous Chinese poet, essayist, short-story writer)
- Annie Jump Cannon (1884) (astronomer)
- Madeleine Albright (1959) (former U.S. Secretary of State)
- Madame Chiang Kai-shek (1917) (former First Lady of the Republic of China)
- Hillary Rodham Clinton (1969) (U.S. Senator; Former First Lady of the U.S.)
- Nora Ephron (1962) (movie screenplay writer: When Harry Met Sally; Writer and Director: Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail)
- Judith Martin (1959) (newspaper columnist: Miss Manners)
- Cokie Roberts (1964) (journalist)
- Diane Sawyer (1967) (journalist)
- Lynn Sherr (1963) (journalist)
- Pamela Melroy (1983) (astronaut)
- Virginia Abernethy (1955) (anthropologist)
External links
- Wellesley College (http://www.wellesley.edu)
- U.S. News & World Report's Best Colleges Index (http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/rankindex_brief.php)
- How to Succeed? Go to Wellesley (http://www.wellesley.edu/BLC/Public/nytimes95.html) is an article by Judith H. Dobrzynksi which appeared in the N. Y. Times on October 29, 1995; it discusses the college's large number of top-level executive alumnae.
References
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| Seven Sisters Colleges |
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| Barnard | Bryn Mawr | Mount Holyoke | Radcliffe | Smith | Vassar | Wellesley |