by Sally Roesch Wagner

I asked to have dinner in the cafeteria with the senior class officers who had made the decision to bring me. “What do you want me to say?” I asked, and more importantly, as Gwen Webber McLeod suggested, “What do you want me NOT to say?” I got my answer. No “reach for the stars.” No “your life awaits you.” No “we’ve messed up the world totally and now we’re turning it over to you to straighten it out.” Fair enough. “So what DO you want me to say?” I asked. “Mandate better food in the cafeteria.” Putting a second forkful of a mouth-watering Thai vegetarian dish into my mouth, I declined. I’m doing field research in the cafeteria here, and the results are positive.

We shared our histories, my story of being told I was committing academic suicide when I forged out a doctorate for work in women’s studies before there was a program anywhere in the country. Women’s Studies might prove to be just a flash in the pan, what would I do then, my sensible friends questioned? You will never find a job, my wise colleagues counseled. My heart, my passion, was women’s studies. I followed it and in the process inadvertently received one of the first two doctorates awarded in the country for work in women’s studies. I didn’t listen to the sensible. And I made history.

The students could relate. They took an academic risk when they came to a small woman’s college in an upstate village. “Don’t you want to go to a larger college? With boys? They were constantly asked by their sensible family and friends.

What if they had spent the last four years in a co-ed college? I asked them. Or at a larger woman’s college?

Their answers were immediate, firm, and unanimous. We might not have found our voices, they said. For four years learning has been at the center of your existence, and you have been nurtured by a faculty who have taken their own academic risk by coming here, devoted teachers who have caught the Wells vision of a radically old idea: that of educating the entire student - heart and mind - within a warm, encouraging community.

You seniors did not swim in a sea of 500 faces in lecture classes. You do not join the thousands of graduates around the country today who sit in their caps and gowns leaving a university without having had a single meaningful and extended conversation with a professor in their entire four years.

You didn’t listen to the sensible, and your professors have become your friends. They will miss you, and you them. “Be yourself,” they have encouraged. “Find your own niche.” By your own testimony, you have been pushed personally as well as academically. Two of you told me how you had been in high school, in the background, and would have continued that pattern in a large college. Here, where the cacophony was stilled, you found silences into which you could speak, and you became student leaders. You didn’t listen to the sensible and you found your voice. You had to, you told me, to amuse yourself and others in the middle of nowhere.

You took a risk coming to the middle of nowhere to go to college, and in the process you found community, where you know everyone, at least by sight. You are not leaving college; you are moving away from your community. Your challenge, you said, was this: Now that you’ve found your voices, how not to lose them?

Let me tell you a secret. You don’t have to be anything; you just have to keep following your heart. We just put one foot in front of the other and we end up as pioneers. The courage rests in taking that first step toward your passion when common knowledge tells you you’ll fall off the face of the earth if you do. It helps to know where you are and whose footsteps you’re walking in.

This campus is here because the founder didn’t succumb to peer pressure. His buddy, Ezra Cornell, pooh-poohed Henry Wells idea of founding a college for women. Yours “will be but one of a hundred like institutions scattered over our state,” Ezra counseled, which “might soon dwindle and droop when your fostering hand [is] withdrawn by death.” Instead, he sensibly suggested, bring your money over to Ithaca and “engraft female education” on our dream. Create “The Wells Female Department of the Cornell University.”

Cornell gallantly ate crow as he toasted his friend Henry Wells at the laying of the cornerstone at Main Hall in 1866. Mr. Cornell had recently, the Rochester Democrat reported at the time, given half a million dollars to found an institution in Ithaca “to furnish” as was said, “good husbands for Mr. Wells’ good girls.” Cornell, fortunately, is today still in that business. And we gather on this campus that has flourished for 137 years.

What do we know about the history of this place? We are in Deawendote - Where the Day Breaks - named by the Cayuga because the eastern ridge hides the rising sun and extends the dawn over that horizon. This is the land of the Cayuga, one of the six nations of the Iroquois confederacy - a governmental system based on everyone having a voice, a wonder to the Europeans who had only known power from above, from the King. This is what equality looks like, they marveled. Oh, no, the sensible piously pronounced. Every country must have one leader who rules over us like the father watches out for the family. We are in the Cradle of Democracy, for the Founding Fathers saw how well the Iroquois system of a government of the people, by the people and for the people worked and they decided to try it. For white men, anyway.

100 years later, the Founding Mothers of equality, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage - who all lived in this area - saw what women’s equality looked like and they decided to try it. Matilda Joslyn Gage - a white woman, a suffragist, was adopted into the wolf clan of the Mohawk nation in 1893 - a nation where each clan mother had the responsibility for nominating the chief and holding him in his position, removing him if necessary - a nation where everyone, even the children, had a say in choosing the chief. The same year, 1893, Gage was arrested for voting in her own village of Fayetteville. It was a crime for women to vote in her nation; it was the responsibility of women to do so in her adopted nation. Despite all the dire warnings of the sensible and pious that God’s divine order of woman’s subordination to man would be destroyed if women voted, she knew better. She had seen votes for women in action.

In nearby Seneca Falls, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott never set out to make history in the summer of 1848. They hadn’t seen each other for years, and over tea with mutual friends, Mott told of visiting the Seneca, where she had watched women equally with the men decide the political future of their nation. She knew women’s equality was possible. She’d seen it. Stanton was frustrated with the demanding life of raising a growing flock of children - she eventually had seven - and a husband who was gone most of the time. She just wanted a minute to herself to curl up with a good book. The demands on women weighed heavy on her, along with their powerlessness in all aspects of their lives, and she poured out her discontent to her friends. Mott’s vision of a better lot for Native American women contrasted with Stanton’s discontent. One thing led to another, and the women decided to call a convention to talk about woman’s condition. They never dreamed the resulting 1848 Seneca Falls convention would be lauded around the world as the cornerstone laying of the woman’s rights movement.

A few years before, just down the road from here, some students at Cayuga Academy decided to form a club. I’m sure you students identify. You need to find some way, as you told me, to entertain yourselves in this village. So these boys formed the “New Confederacy of the Iroquois,” a secret society pretending to be Indian chiefs holding Grand Council. Their “Supreme Chieftain” had the good sense to realize that if you were going to pretend to be part of a group, it would be a good idea to meet someone from that group. Ignoring the advice of those sensible and pious elders who no doubt told him to grow up and stop pretending to be a Godless savage, he became friends with a Tonawanda Seneca, Ely Parker, and began to attend actual Iroquois council meetings with him. He learned what it was to be Indian. For one thing, white people were intent on stealing your land. This Cayuga Academy student became a corporate lawyer and represented the Tonawanda Seneca in their ongoing legal battle against the Ogden Company’s land grab. But that’s not what he’s known for. His campfire talks to the yearly “Grand Council” meetings, when he and his buddies dressed up like Indians in the woods around Aurora, formed the nucleus of the League of the Ho de no saw nee or Iroquois, published in 1851. That book became the foundation for anthropology. Lewis Henry Morgan didn’t set out to invent a new discipline, but he followed his interest, listened to people who were the experts, and today Morgan is known as The Father of Anthropology. Lewis Henry Morgan was also the first elected trustee of Wells College.

We all have the potential to be pioneers. Some of you are - the first college graduate in your family. You didn’t set out to be a pioneer. You just wanted to go to college and in the process, you made family history. Sometimes life just happens to you.

If you have as a goal to be the first woman President of the United States, you will be a lousy one. But if you leave here, have children, get involved in their education, find that the school doesn’t have enough money to properly educate them, wonder if we couldn’t take away a few pennies from our weapons of mass destruction to educate our kids, and run for President on that platform, you’d change history.

How do you tell if you’re on the right path? Well, if you’re following one foot in front of the other in the direction you think you should be going, you probably are. If sensible and pious people tell you you’re going the wrong way, then you know you’re heading where you should be going. Sensible and pious people are the canaries in the mine of social change. They have a nearly perfect track record of being on the wrong side of every single social justice issue for over 200 years.

If Elizabeth Cady Stanton and I and every woman who has taken her licks because of our work for women had listened to the sensible and pious folks who told us that our role was to obey men and live as their help-mates, you’d leave here to spend the rest of your corseted days tatting. If Henry Wells had listened to Ezra Cornell you would be graduating from the female appendage of Cornell -- which by now, however, would probably be defunct. If the country had followed down the road of the sensible and pious, who placed obedience to their government -- even when it is wrong -- above all else, no one might have pushed the envelope, and we could still have slavery.

There is a plaque on the third floor of the McMillan Building, -- this building behind us -- which is dedicated to Lewis Henry Morgan, the Father of Anthropology, Trustee of Wells College from 1868-1881, adopted into the Hawk Clan of the Seneca Nation, and given a name which translates as One Lying Across. A bridge-maker between cultures. On the plaque, you will find these words, read by over 20 generations of Wells’s students, which I read to you today:

“Democracy in government, brotherhood (and sisterhood) in society, equality in rights and privileges and universal education foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending. It will be a revival in a higher form, of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient nations of this land.”

You leave this community in which you have lived now for four years and go off to create the next higher plane of society -- the replica of what you have known here. Sirens will replace the birds that wake you in the morning. You won’t hear the sound of your own footsteps at twilight walking down the hill. Never again will you walk through the esophagus on your way to the gourmet Thai food in the cafeteria.

But of course you will. You can, and will, come home again, back to your community. And you will take the community with you. It lives in you. You will find likeminded others and create community wherever you go. It will not happen all at once, but little by little. You will put one foot in front of the other and, disregarding the sage and safe advice of the sensible and the pious, you will make history.

(Thanks to Jane Marsh Dieckmann, whose Wells College: A History (Wells College Press: 1995) provided much of the Wells College background and to Brooke Andersen, Katie Lysyczyn, Meghan McCune and Lauren Tipton, Wells students who worked with me in creating the ideas of this speech. Deborah Tall, in From Where We Stand: Recovering a Sense of Place (Knopf: 1993) brilliantly models how to tell the intriguing story of this area.)

- Delivered on Saturday, May 24, 2003, in Macmillan Hall’s Phipps Auditorium at Wells College.