I'm excited about this role in part because Radcliffe feels like home to me
as a scholar who has devoted her career to interdisciplinary study, I fully and
enthusiastically embrace Radcliffe's mission, which is to bring scholars
together across disciplinary boundaries, across professional areas. I can remember
my own experience there: when, I'm a historian, I'm a constitutional scholar,
I'm working on a project though that requires me, as a matter of my own
methodology, to essentially tell stories and one of the most rewarding parts of
the community that I found at Radcliffe was learning about storytelling from the
perspective of, say, a novelist or a poet or someone who was directing a play. It's
that kind of cross fertilization that I think is uniquely available at Radcliffe
and I'm really excited to not only be a part of that community but to have the
privilege of leading Radcliffe.
I had the privilege of being among the first African-American students to
attend desegregated schools in my district. I was able to observe, to
experience what you might call the promise and the peril of our nation's
experiment with school desegregation. Very important, life-changing for me and
it's that experience of understanding that there were lawyers, there were
judges who really stood up for me and so many other students, and change their
lives and created pathways of opportunity where there had been none.
Some of the people that I think about who inspire me, people like Charles
Hamilton Houston, one of the great graduates of Harvard Law School; Thurgood
Marshall, Constance Baker Motley; these are people who sacrificed, but also are
models for how to use one's intellect in the service of others.
Law is foundational to every other discipline in some way, to our public
policy, to the way that we live, and that's true of law in schools or law in
relation to the healthcare system or the criminal justice system. I have been for
a very long time interested in the relationship between law and society, and
matters of equality and opportunity and I do hope that that perspective as well
will inform Radcliffe in any number of ways, from the scholars that we bring on
to campus, to the conversations that we have, to our commitments to the broader
community. In every challenging time, there's great opportunity and I think
that Radcliffe has a great opportunity in this moment to continue its role as a
convener, bringing people together to talk about issues of the day whether
it's leadership, climate change, or social change, the social determinants of health,
citizenship, there are any number of matters that I think Radcliffe can do a
great job of bringing people together and really trying to build some
consensus.
I am driven by the example of my own parents who grew up in the deep
south under Jim Crow and who imparted to me the values of hard work, the pursuit
of education, but at the same time it wasn't enough for them if I, their own
daughter, achieved a measure of success. They taught me to give back, to serve, and
that value of serving the community is very much a part of who I am
and it speaks to why I'm interested in and excited about the role as the new
leader of Radcliffe.