Uncovering the Heart of Higher Education

Dear fellow conferees:

This is my first-ever attempt at blogging ... so here goes. My first challenge is that I can't figure out how to left-justify the text. That in itself is an interesting metaphor.

I wanted to let conference participants know that my plan for the closing keynote is quite different than one might imagine from the conference program. I'll post below a few paragraphs of the introductory remarks I plan to make on Sunday morning, to give you a flavor of what I – with a lot of terrific help – will be trying to accomplish in that sesssion.

I didn't want participants to think that I would be "delivering" an oral version of the booklet you received in your bags – far from it. The keynote is evolving and morphing hour by hour and minute by minute and will become something entirely new by the time it happens. So I hope you'll be able to stay for it – and participate with us in what we hope will be an adventure.

Best, Diana Walsh

Having written and rewritten this talk many times over in my mind, I threw all the drafts away about a month ago and focused on the words: “integrative learning for compassionate action in an interconnected world.” Every one of those words matters, as do the synergies among them – even as those who selected them freely admit that they are no more sure of their meaning than anyone else here is; these are words into which we will feel our way, slowly, from the inside out. Certainly, the power of language has been one of our major themes.

Meditating on those words clarified how this closing could be faithful to the intentions they had set. It should enable us to integrate our learning – compassionately, with a delicate touch. It should encourage each of us to re-experience the interconnections we’ve discovered for ourselves over the past few days, and support us in interweaving into the fabric of our lives something particular and vital to take out into a frenzied world.

With the task defined, I decided to enlist the help of my friend and colleague, Richard Nodell, who has worked closely, as an organizational consultant, with me and my leadership team for more than a decade at Wellesley. With Dick’s expert guidance, we have developed practices and disciplines at Wellesley to excavate and mine the deeper meanings of the work we’ve been doing there. Some of those are alluded to in my essay entitled Trustworthy Leadership – the pamphlet you received in your conference bag.

The more Dick and I thought about how to close this unusual conference, the more appealing – and ultimately correct – it seemed to think of ourselves – all of us – as a transitory organization emerging from a collective experience that we want to be sure to capture, in its fullness, before we disperse back to our separate worlds.

And so we decided we would pay careful attention during the conference not only to the intellectual content and the many intriguing and novel ideas – the models, theories, data, insights and questions that arose in the sessions – but also (at the same time) to the emergent history of the group qua group. And that would open questions like the following:

• How have we as a group led ourselves through this inquiry we’ve been pursuing together? How have we shared our experiences and expertise, negotiated our differences, wrestled our doubts, managed our fears? What can we learn from answers to questions like that? Where have we found inspiration? What’s been discouraging or disorienting? Where have we become stuck? What do we do when we’re stuck?
• How did our stories unfold – individually, in small groups, and as a collective entity – a temporary organization existing in a moment in time?
• What meanings do we find in those stories – the big ones and the small ones – and what sentinel themes?
• Where – and who – were we when we arrived in this place? Where and who are we now as we prepare to leave it? Who do we want to become? What is this “we” and who does it exclude?

We’ve been tracking these kinds of questions with a group of volunteer “story catchers” and – with great thanks to them – what Dick and I want to offer you now is an opportunity to locate your own individual stories in the larger narrative – perhaps to ask yourselves what the deepest meaning is for you of the experience you’ve had here – the deepest meaning for you personally (at least for now), and for all of us as a group, in the context of the larger story of this unusual gathering of diverse and now interconnected colleagues, inquirers and fellow travelers. I'll end by telling you my own story, while inviting you to reflect on your own.