It is my honor and pleasure to welcome the class of 2020. It is also my pleasure to welcome members of other classes who have transferred to Lesley. We are thrilled to have all of you here.
Welcome to the Lesley community to both you and your families. You join a Lesley family that is over 86,000 strong—leaders in education, counseling, art, design, writing, business, and myriad other professions, dedicated to excelling at their work, but also to having impact on the communities around them and to effecting social justice.
I also have the privilege of welcoming in our 108th year. It is humbling to think of how long we have been working on honing an educational experience that blends excellent teaching, deep scholarship, and extensive practice aimed at producing a college experience, the goal of which is to not simply to build knowledge and develop skill, but to inspire and transform.
Thank you to all of the parents and other family members brought together here for entrusting us with our students, and for the role you play in continuing to support, advise, and guide them. Thank you to our world-class faculty who make the Lesley educational experience (inside and outside of the classroom) what it is, and to the staff and administrators who care passionately about and enable the many other critical parts of life at Lesley. Thank you to our Sophomores, Juniors, and Seniors who serve as campus leaders, advisors, mentors, classmates, and friends.
As you begin your Lesley experience, let me share a few pieces of advice. When we gather together in just shy of four years, and we are able to look back with “2020 hindsight”, I hope you will each report having tried out, and having grown from trying out, the following:
First, push open doors and explore what’s behind them. College provides many open doors and some that are ajar. Find them, push them open, and explore. You will never be at a time or a place where there are so many opportunities for learning, inspiration and fun. Try a class you never would have imagined taking, an activity that just does not seem like it’s you, an internship that engages you in doing something you never had imagined, or simply go to a play, movie, exhibit or presentation whose announcement poster you initially walked right by.
Second, expect to be surprised. In finding your passion, you may find a new part of yourself. Be open to challenging your assumptions, perceptions, and world view. Embrace the surprise, explore it, learn from it, grow and be excited. Share your learning and passion with others. It will be contagious, and they will help you figure out what it means and get inspired themselves.
Third, define your community broadly. We have a tremendous amount going on within our three campuses, and there are causes to embrace, internships in which to engage, new foods to explore, plays and exhibits to be enjoyed, wonders to see, real problems from which to learn (and that need our help), and diverse wonderful people to meet in Cambridge, Boston, and beyond.
Fourth, take responsibility for you. We are here to provide education, opportunities, support and guidance, and you can and should take full advantage of all of the resources Lesley has to offer. And, you are responsible for making your college experience what you want it to be. Don’t sit back. Go for it! Listen, learn, explore and dive in. Make your experience at Lesley what you want to it be. Let us know how we can help.
Fifth, go beyond yourself. I challenge you for each of your years at Lesley to define one way you can make the lives of others around you better. It could be your roommate, teammate, or classmate. It could be a person or family or group in our surrounding communities. It could be contributing to making Lesley better. It could be working with others to find a new, creative approach to understanding or solving a complex problem. Or it could be through simple acts of kindness and generosity to those around you.
Sixth, build your “other skills." Be respectful, ethical, and use good judgment. If you find that you have strayed off this path, reflect, learn, and seek to improve. Be collaborative, engage in joint problem-solving, and develop your leadership and followership skills. If these all sound like nice words, but you’re not entirely sure how to do this, you’ve taken the first step – humility, an openness to learning, and asking a good question. Set the goal of developing these skills, begin the journey, and we will help you along its paths.
Seventh, lastly, and most importantly, embrace difference. We live in complex, challenging, and highly polarizing times. Our leaders speak in right and wrong, black or white, correct or incorrect. Our technology enables people like all of you to engage with others from throughout society and across the globe, and yet more often than not we “friend” our friends, create groups of those who “like” what we like, and spend our time with those who think, look and sound like we do. We need a change, and I expect that change to begin with us at Lesley, a school who helped invent the concept of “social justice”. I challenge you to seek out people who don’t seem at all like you and get to know them, their story, how they think, what worries them and why, and what energizes them and why. I challenge you, inside and outside of the classroom, to engage in deep inquiry, dialogue and an exploration of difference of backgrounds, views, beliefs, identities, opinions, and answers … to begin by building real understanding of new (perhaps even foreign and perhaps, at first, even deeply troubling) concepts and people, to share of yourself, to find ways to embrace these differences and see the power within them and in having them, and to then make use of these differences to build new relationships, break down problems in new ways, and find truly creative solutions.
Good luck. Have fun! Make Lesley your own, and let us know how we can help you. Keep the advice I have shared in mind and try it out. I may well stop you on the path or sit with you in the dining hall and ask: what door did you push open this month? what did you do to make a difference beyond yourself last week? what surprised and inspired you earlier today?
And, I will absolutely ask you, and you can ask me: how have you recently embraced difference, learned from it, and solved a problem or developed an important new perspective or insight by putting those differences to use.