Paula A. Johnson, MD,
President, Wellesley College
AUW Commencement Speech
I am so honored to be here—to be awarded an honorary degree alongside your founding chancellor, the remarkable Cherie Blair,—and to once again take inspiration from founder Kamal Ahmad.
I am truly humbled to share this day with our graduates—young women of such courage that they were willing to leave their families—and some of them, their countries, and their languages and cultures—for a university education. Some of you, I know, even risked your lives to arrive at this day. Congratulations to all of you—and to the families that raised such extraordinary young women. The entire Wellesley College community is united in its admiration for you.
As the United States’ preeminent women’s college, Wellesley is proud to serve alongside the Asian University for Women. We are also proud that Wellesley President Emerita Diana Chapman Walsh convened the meeting where Kamal Ahmad launched this amazing project—built on the vision that when you educate a woman, you empower and elevate families, communities, and nations.
We are proud to have mobilized our powerful network of alumnae to join AUW’s effort to help its students and alumnae escape Kabul after the Taliban took over. And we are proud to send our own alumnae here as teaching fellows.
Although Wellesley was founded 150 years ago, in an atmosphere of much less geopolitical turbulence than many of you have experienced in your lives, the United States was nonetheless just ten years past a terrible civil war fought over slavery. This was not yet a society that saw people of color or women as equal in their humanity and dignity—and, frankly, we still struggle towards this ideal.
In 1875, powerful men in the United States could say without shame that women didn’t have the intellectual capacity for higher learning; or that women’s roles in society didn’t require them to be so highly equipped; or that allowing women to learn alongside men would be a dangerous distraction for their male peers.
Wellesley founders Henry and Pauline Durant, on the other hand, saw higher education for women not just as a matter of justice for individual women—but also as a force for justice—one of the best possible ways to achieve social transformation and create a better world. History has proven them right. There is ample evidence by now that investing in the education of girls and women pays enormous dividends for an economy and society. And over the past 150 years, Wellesley women have contributed to groundbreaking advances in politics, in medicine, in science, in business, in education, and in the arts.
It is obvious that AUW’s graduates are going to do just as much –or more– to prove that women’s education is the world’s most transformative force. Some AUW graduates are already doing it—for example, using their education to train 1,200 Upper Primary School teachers in the Rohingya refugee camps.
All of you have already accomplished something extremely important in showing the world an excellence that cannot be denied. You are going to diminish the power of prejudices through your own personal power.
I am sure that some of you have already changed the way your communities view the possibilities open to girls and women.
Like Wellesley College in 1875, AUW has redefined who gets the benefit of a superb liberal arts education. Believing that every young woman who enters its doors has tremendous potential, AUW has recruited gifted people like you from many and often neglected communities. It has offered you an education steeped in academic freedom and the spirit of intellectual exploration—the kind of education that produces leaders.
AUW is international in essence, understanding that educating students side by side from different cultures and different countries is a crucial aspect of a liberal arts education. By developing tolerant and empathetic people, such an education helps to make the world more inclusive and just.
I feel a closeness to the Asian University for Women and resonate with its bold mission and with your journeys—because my own history has been one of rising against the odds, and then turning that opportunity into a life focused on advancing the health and well-being and education of women. Please allow me to tell you the story that set me on my own path.
Like many of you, I am a member of the first generation of my family to go to college. I grew up in New York City, in Brooklyn, a part of New York City where immigrants and others striving for a better life made their way.
I went to the local public school, which began tracking students in terms of academic potential in the first grade. Even though I arrived at school already able to read, they placed me one group up from the very bottom—which is, I guess, where they thought Black girls naturally belonged.
Fortunately, my mother was prepared to fight for me when I was too young to fight for myself. By the fourth grade, she had found a much better public school for me. From home, I had a strong sense of belief in what I could do. Part of that confidence came from my grandmother.
Some of my most wonderful childhood memories are of spending time with her in the house we shared. She was warm and exuberant, a force of nature. Then, when I was eight and she was 60, something changed. She became listless and withdrawn and stopped eating. Her care consumed my family, but it took forever for us to receive a diagnosis.
Even today in the United States, Black women often find their symptoms ignored by the medical system. In my grandmother’s case, she’d been hit by a deep depression, and by the time she was finally diagnosed, she was in a downward spiral from which she never recovered.
Her experience sparked an aspiration in me to keep similar things from happening to other women, even if I didn’t know exactly how I could do that. But I did manage to get from my Brooklyn public high school to Harvard University.
I went on to Harvard Medical School and a residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, one of the main Harvard teaching hospitals, where I found my path into academic medicine. As I was completing my cardiovascular fellowship, I was chosen to be Chief Resident, the first Black person in that role.
Near the end of my chief residency, I decided that I would combine the field of clinical epidemiology with cardiology—an unusual combination at the time—and research disparities based on sex, gender, and race. I was told by a powerful mentor that this was not a good idea and that it would be viewed as “self-serving.” In other words, my interest in improving heart health for women and minorities was discouraged—presumably because I was also a woman and a minority!
The paradigm then was that you could not study the group you belonged to, especially if it was an underrepresented minority group. But I saw charting this path as important, so I followed it. –A significant part of my work was helping the medical and scientific establishment to rethink. At the time, American medicine saw men’s biology and experiences as normal—and women’s as a mere deviation from the norm. In truth, however, women and men are not just different in their reproductive organs, but in every cell in their bodies.
By failing to pay attention to these biological differences, the American medical establishment had been leaving women’s health entirely to chance. While we haven’t entirely eliminated this bias in medical research, we have come a long way. The paradigm-breaking that I helped to lead follows a well-established pattern in the sciences. Scientists make progress by noticing evidence that doesn’t fit the prevailing theories and then questioning the fundamental assumptions of their fields.
But this same sense that paradigms can be broken is so important in society as well. There is so much power in one simple question: “Does it really have to be this way?” As Bangladesh’s chief advisor to the interim government , Nobel laureate and economist Professor Muhammad Yunus has pointed out, there is no inevitability to poverty, for example. Please allow me to quote him: “Poverty is not created by poor people. It is created by the system we have built, the institutions we have designed, the concepts we have formulated. Poverty is an artificial, external imposition on a person. And since it is external, it can be removed.”
There is no inevitably to so many of the world’s problems—from ethnic and sectarian hatreds, to oppression and war, to rising greenhouse gases and plastic pollution and the squandering of natural resources. None of these has to be. They are all the products of institutions and ideas—of faulty human decisions and frameworks built on weak intellectual and moral foundations. So, they can be challenged and reversed by people of courage, tenacity, and vision—which all of you are.
You have lived in this wonderful community of scholars from many different countries and found ways to communicate across differences and to forge profound friendships. You have pursued your passion for learning, inspired your families, and inspired the world. Your education is already opening up enormous opportunities for you as individuals, as some of you head off to the world’s best graduate programs and others accept important positions in and outside academe.
What I wish most for you on this joyous day is that you continue to see yourselves as agents of change moving forward. I hope you continue to lean on each other. Like Wellesley graduates, AUW graduates are destined to become an extremely powerful network of women.
I hope you question those certitudes that deserve to be questioned, that you work to decide who is going to lead your communities and how they must lead, and that you come into your own as leaders yourselves.
The world truly needs young women to set us on a better path, and no one is more qualified to do that than the courageous and brilliant graduates of the Asian University for Women.
Congratulations, once again, and thank you for making me part of this inspiring ceremony. |