Weissman Center Celebrates Tenth Anniversary

Posted: April 7, 2009

A “birthday bash” is how Lois Brown, director of the Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts, described the events to mark the tenth anniversary of the institution she has led for the last four and a half years. It was also a feast of ideas and a celebration of activism. Guests of honor were Harriet Weissman ’58 and her husband Paul Weissman, the prime movers behind what has become a cornerstone of academic life at Mount Holyoke.

“Those of us who had a role in birthing the center are very proud of our baby, which is now full grown and established,” Joanne V. Creighton, president of the College, told those gathered not only to fete the Weissman Center but to taste the intellectual nourishment it has infused into campus life for the last decade. It was a day full of intellectual ferment combined with expressions of respect and admiration for the ideals of the center and women who embody them.

The night before, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, a civil rights figure and pioneering journalist, spoke in Gamble Auditorium on the topic, “From Jim Crow America to Apartheid South Africa and Beyond: A Journalist’s Journey.” As a young woman she was at the heart of a tumultuous chapter in American history as one of the first two African American students to desegregate the University of Georgia. She now lives in South Africa and has been reporting for many years on signature events such as the transition from apartheid, the big and small stories of upheavals and victories all over the continent, and global trends.

Organizing public forums with prominent national and international leaders in their fields has been a staple of the Weissman Center’s activities almost since its inception. So has been a sharp and persistent focus on delving deeply into the meaning of leadership, and how to imbue women with the habits and skills that leaders draw on. The Speaking Arguing, and Writing (SAW) and the Community-Based Learning (CBL) programs, now firmly embedded in the Weissman Center, have been important vehicles for helping to spread the core values and lessons of the center to every part of the College. The SAW program employs 40 peer mentors. It trains these students in the philosophy of learning, and it teaches them practical techniques for helping fellow students hone their public speaking and written assignments.

Underlying this basic pedagogy is a desire to give young women the confidence to seek and accept leadership roles for the betterment of the larger society. Mary Kelley ’65, a professor of history at the University of Michigan, gave a learned disquisition tracing the roots of the Weissman Center’s core principles to the founding in 1837 of what would become Mount Holyoke College. “Liberal learning and the aspirations that learning generated played a key role in the entry of women into the nation’s public life,” said Kelley during a panel titled “Women’s Voices and the Public Sphere.” She shared the stage with Hunter-Gault and Escape author Carolyn Jessop, who had given a public lecture as part of the Body Politic(s) series earlier in the academic year.

Teachings in what was called moral philosophy were basic to the early days of the institution founded by Mary Lyon, according to Kelley. This pursuit provided “the crucial linkage between the liberal arts and leadership,” she said, adding in her conclusion that she was struck by how “the Weissman Center as a legacy, is something Mount Holyoke had been coming toward for such a long time... What Harriet and Paul Weissman have made possible is a bit like Mary Lyon’s culminating experiences.”

Also among the speakers was ten-term United States Congresswoman Nita Lowey ’59. She was part of a panel titled “Leadership in the Liberal Arts,” moderated by the award-winning broadcast journalist Maria Hinojosa. Lowey pointed out that as the representative for parts of Westchester and Rockland Counties in New York she counts Harriet and Paul Weissman as her constituents along with other notables such as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and her husband Bill, former U.S. president.

Lowey spoke of the current economic and environmental crisis and “the growing sense that basic structural and institutional changes are required to restore long-term prosperity.” These changes will “require a revolution in the way all of us conceive of public policy and how we apply critical thinking to the common good,” Lowey said. “That is why access to a high-quality liberal arts education is so essential today.” She praised “the spirit of intellectual exploration that informs every class and every discussion” at Mount Holyoke.

Hunter-Gault, whose career has included being a national and foreign correspondent for NPR, CNN, and PBS, spoke of the reverence for education she has seen and experienced among African American families. Her speech spanned her life as a participant in and an observer of three revolutions, the American civil rights movement of her youth, the toppling of apartheid in South Africa, and the inauguration of Barack Obama as president. The native of South Carolina told the story of how her grandmother went back to school after having children, in her case it was to sit in on her son’s third-grade class. “I asked my uncle, ‘Weren’t you embarrassed to have your mother sitting there in the third-grade class?’ ” said Hunter-Gault. “He looked at me like I had lost my mind and said, ‘embarrassed? Oh no, we were so proud.’ ”

She drew a direct line between that kind of an attitude and the election of the first African American president of the United States. “I look at Barack Obama today and I know how he got to be who he is. Because of these timeless and transcendent values,” said Hunter-Gault. She went to visit the grave of her mother, “a woman who never told me not to dream,” the morning after the election.

Another panel featured four alumnae and students telling their stories as leaders within the Weissman Center and how each of them has become socially active in keeping with the center’s ideal of “purposeful engagement with the world.”

The culmination of the day was a social hour followed by a banquet in the Willits-Hallowell Center at which formal honors were bestowed on Hinojosa, Lowey, and Hunter-Gault and the winner of an essay contest was revealed. Lois Brown, who recently announced that her tenure as Weissman Center director is ending, introduced Harriet Weissman to cap off the event. “Please know that there is much love that envelops you, that we are what we are in large part because of what you invite us to be,” Brown told the Weissmans before inviting Harriet Weissman to the stage.

Speaking of what led her and her husband to make a founding grant of $4 million ten years ago, Weissman said, “I became intrigued with the descriptions of two programs [in the planning stages], Speaking, Arguing and Writing, and the Center for Leadership and Public Interest Advocacy.” The two were melded into what became the center. Now, at what she described as, “talk about a birthday party,” Weissman, who has also been an active trustee of the College, said, “Paul and I are deeply privileged, proud, and honored to have our names attached to the center.”

Creighton said, “The Weissman Center is literally and figuratively at the center of the College. It’s the core of the core idea, the mission that inspires us all,” before turning directly to the Weissmans to continue, “Harriet, you are a true daughter of Mary Lyon. Paul, you are her true son.”

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