(audience applauding)
- Thank you.
(audience applauding continues)
Good morning.
- [Audience Members] Morning.
- My name is Sarah Willie-LeBreton.
I use she/her/hers pronouns, and I'm honored, and delighted
to accept the invitation of the board of trustees
to serve as the 12th president of Smith College.
Smith alums I have known are among
the most thoughtful, energized,
intellectually curious, and determined people on the planet.
So your reputation precedes you.
This is clearly a place where smart,
passionate students come to learn, to grow,
and to prepare themselves for lives of meaning and purpose.
I need to say just a bit about the smart passionate women
who made applying for this position so compelling.
Mary Gorman and Panay Avaro of Spencer Stuart
Executive Search Firm engaged me
in wonderful and searching conversations.
Board of Trustees Chair Alison Overseth
and Search Committee Chair Susan Molineaux
described Smith with love and candor.
President Kathleen McCartney extended her friendship first
on the phone and then in person.
Secretary of the college, Elena Palladino
and Vice President for College Relations and Communications,
Julia Yager have moved mountains to help me be here today.
But I'm especially grateful to the members
of the search committee, your search committee,
who represented Smith admirably, asking difficult questions
and, perhaps since the easy questions never came,
preparing me for life among Smithies.
(audience laughing)
And life among Smithies includes a beautiful mission.
The seriousness of Smith's mission cannot be overstated
in a society whose highest institutions reveal
a tragic ambivalence about the value and humanity of women.
We live in a country that today, is largely invested
in three fictions: that we all get what we deserve,
that we are beyond race, and that the real reason
women continue to earn less than men are underrepresented...
Excuse me, are underrepresented everywhere
from Congress to the boardroom
and the executive suite is because we want it that way.
It's time to expose this genuinely fake news.
Of course...
(audience applauding)
Of course, it is not just these fictions
that need to be challenged, the nation
and the world call for recalibrations
of educational communities where mutuality
is a higher good than greed.
Where belonging is a higher value than fitting in.
Where competition is for the playing field,
the debate, robotics, and chess clubs,
but not for invidious distinctions
of student against student.
We must communicate with our friends
and neighbors in op-eds and wherever we can
about the transformational power of higher education
from the collaborative approaches
in which it trains students to the intellectual flexibility
that is a byproduct of the liberal arts.
For a public suspicious of what we are doing here on campus
we must be bold in showing how we are offering ideas
to attack the most vexing problems of our day.
Rather than offering ideas about attacking each other.
That our approach to knowledge co-creation leads
to solutions that help everyone and artistic experiences
that increase our collective insight and joy.
We need to remind each other and our audiences off campus
that while the work of making decisions for the common good
is labor intensive, it is as gratifying as tending a garden.
And where our approaches to research, scholarship,
the creative endeavor and the classroom have
the potential to inform how we also resolve conflict,
not just on a beautiful campus
in North Hampton, but everywhere.
If like any great teacher, we assume that we have
as much to learn from each other as to teach,
that showing respect for each other is as important
as requiring it for ourselves,
if we pursue approaches to life, discovery
and learning that are joyful, persistent, and curious
we cannot help but end up in a place
where reconciliation is as important as accountability.
This is work that our larger society
is sorely in need of and work that Smith can lead.
I cannot tell you how much I look forward
to learning from all of you how Smith
is already engaged in some of this work
and how we might lean further into it together.
Let me tell you just a bit about my history.
I am from a family of educators.
My paternal grandmother was born in 1891
and graduated from Wiley College, one of the first
Black women to earn a bachelor's degree in Texas.
She was trained as a teacher but could not find a job
in the Dallas public schools initially because she was Black
and, eventually, because she was married.
But she put her education and her gifts to work
homeschooling my father and his siblings
until they were old enough to ride
the street car to the segregated school.
My paternal grandfather went to work when his mother died
and therefore, had only an eighth grade education.
But he and my grandmother sent my father
and his three brothers and sister
to college and to graduate school.
My dad became a sociologist and a university professor.
My maternal grandmother attended Keuka College,
a women's school in upstate New York, for only one year
before marrying my maternal grandfather.
He too had only one year of college at Colgate
before needing to leave for financial reasons.
But the two of them sent their two children to college
and their daughters too earned advanced degrees.
My mother is a retired church musician
and teacher of singing.
So while education was always the backdrop
to my parents' aspirations for me
and my siblings, most of all my parents hoped
that my brothers and I would live our best lives.
With each passing year, I have come
to understand that best is not
to be confused with easy, or special, or deserving.
To live one's best life, they taught us,
meant to stay in relationship even with the people
we are most annoyed by in our community.
(audience laughing)
It meant to discover ourselves and the world
by engaging with work and the creative process.
It meant remaining curious, assuming
that we belonged no matter where we were.
It meant delighting in unexpected friendships,
living authentically and ethically, taking the values
of the places we found ourselves seriously,
offering and receiving help graciously
and being a person for others.
While I was an undergraduate at Haverford College
I took courses at Bryn Mawr and Spelman Colleges.
I am so pleased to call myself a graduate of Haverford
and I also know that the classrooms
of Bryn Mawr and Spelman, it was in these places
that I began to truly feel this experience
that my parents hoped I would own,
a sense of belonging and the right to a place
at each table where I found myself
even if a place had not been set for me.
And that feeling grew a confidence in me to participate
in the consequential conversations at those tables.
Encouraged me, in other words, to live my best life.
These women's colleges provided me
with more models of women faculty,
women provosts, women presidents
and classrooms where the majority of students were women.
They were not magical spaces in the sense that
the deep roots of sexism, racism, classism, heterosexism
and other systems of inequality had vanished.
We know that when we swim in these waters,
each of us gets wet.
But they were and continue to be spaces
where a kind of magic is always possible.
Where faculty and students alike assume
that women are capable, creative, persistent,
insightful and will become leaders in their fields,
in their communities and the world.
Oh, that everyone could know that kind of magic.
I thought it was magic when one day
an advertisement popped up while I was browsing
on social media and offered me the opportunity
to purchase a sweatshirt that seemed
as though it had been created just for me.
It read "Just a Massachusetts Girl in a Pennsylvania World."
(audience laughing)
It took me a long moment to realize
with no small amount of discomfort
that its algorithms had my number.
(audience laughing)
Needless to say, I bought the sweatshirt.
(audience laughing)
And on those rare Saturdays or Sundays
when I'm at home in the fall and winter,
not heading to Swarthmore for a game,
or a performance, it's a favorite.
I grew up in Massachusetts, I went to school in Concord,
attended church in Cambridge, my mother now lives in Boston.
My spouse and I applied for our marriage license
in Great Barrington, our son was born in Beverly.
And on trips to visit my folks
we cut through Connecticut to be delivered
to the Mass Pike at Springfield or Worcester.
All to say, that Massachusetts is home
and it will be wonderful to put
the sweatshirt away and actually be home.
(audience chuckling)
That this is a place where students are exposed to
and prepared for lives of creativity,
research, lives of the mind and citizenship,
active engagement with their communities
where they are expected to discover themselves,
expected to become leaders who are as inclusive
and collaborative as they are filled with conviction.
And when they are not leading, expected to become
the kind of followers who are passionate and prudent,
analytical and inclusive, where the traditions and cultures
of women across the globe are not only celebrated
for what they once were, but studied and understood
for how they are now and how they are likely to change.
Smith has made of itself something so much more
than Sophia Smith probably ever dreamed.
If we were to rely only on typical performance indicators,
Smith's success has not been guaranteed.
Fewer students each year choose liberal arts colleges.
And fewer students still, choose women's colleges.
And yet, here is Smith continuing to attract
more students than it can admit
to steward its healthy endowment with care,
to hire and retain gifted faculty
and to graduate outstanding alums.
Here is Smith with co-educational graduate programs
and a commitment to helping adult students
whose education has been interrupted
to complete their degrees.
Here is Smith with an international reputation.
Clearly, there is nothing typical
about the transformative education offered by its faculty,
the ambition and creativity of its students,
the acumen of its administrative leadership,
the loyalty and work ethic of its staff,
the generosity of its board, and the devotion of its alums.
When students matriculate at Smith
they make a choice not just for themselves,
but for their communities, and for the future.
How lucky are we to be part of this whole gig?
(audience laughing)
One can simply not repeat enough,
students who study at Smith change the world.
And I am honored to play a role in continuing this work.
Thank you for your faith in me.
I look forward to meeting each of you,
and to beginning our work together next year.
(audience applauding)