Opening Convocation Speeches
Stephens College held its opening convocation on Wednesday, Sept.
17, 2003, in Windsor Auditorium. Below are the speeches read by
members of the College's community.
Emily Heffner :: John Bennett :: Dr. Alan Havig :: Dr. Wendy Libby
Emily Heffner, Student
Government Association president
Good morning! I'm confident
that your year has gotten off to a good start. I can say that because
it's an exciting time to be a student at Stephens College. We are
an integral part of an institution that has a one-hundred and seventy
year tradition of excellence in women's education and that is entering
a new phase.
Being a student when the school began meant something very different than it does today. You would've been twelve years old or younger. You would've been the daughter of a leading Columbia family, and you would've been learning to be an intelligent wife and mother. When the school was the Columbia Baptist Female College, you would've been learning the traditions of the Baptist religion. At a later point in our history, you would've been allowed two unchaperoned dates a week. In 1912, you got up at 6:30 in the morning for breakfast. If you didn't, they assumed you were sick and gave you a dose of castor oil. As late as the 1940s, you would've had to get a permission slip to go downtown. In 1833, I would not have been wearing my hair down this morning or wearing a short skirt - a student certainly would not have been standing up here speaking before a group of people this large. That's because the institution wasn't this large when it began; that's also because it wouldn't have been my place. Women were supposed to be pious, pure, submissive, and domestic.
However, when there were rumblings of change in
a woman's status, they were felt on this campus. As early as 1912,
Stephens women were voicing their own opinions. Students were required
to wear uniforms then when they went out. They decided that they
didn't like the uniforms, they thought they were ugly and weren't
going to wear them. So the students
got together, put the uniforms into a pile on campus, and burned
them. In the 1950s, Stephens women were expected to wear stockings
to meals, and in protest they wore the most torn-up pairs they could
find!
We've come a long way. We are celebrating our
one-hundred and seventieth anniversary with a new president. Stephens
has come this far because it has always been able to adapt to changing
times. With a new president, we will again be establishing a new
vision. Students today are just as much a part of deciding where
this school is headed as those
who serve in administrative positions, because though Stephens has
gone through many changes, its focus has always been, and will remain,
on its students.
With the privilege of setting the tone for
our future comes the responsibility of taking an active part in
our education today. This includes your work in class, in campus
clubs and organizations, and even in the larger Columbia community.
I've been inspired by our amazingly motivated freshman class, and
I believe it's a challenge we're ready to meet. The Stephens focus
on its students has taken it through one-hundred and seventy years;
we will be a part of leading it into one-hundred and seventy more.
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John Bennett, associate
professor of Business Administration
John Bennett's remarks are currently unavailable.
Please check back again soon.
Dr. Alan Havig, Trustees
professor of International Studies, Languages and History
Stephens Convocation, To Open
New Year and Celebrate 170th Birthday
Our College acquired the name "Stephens College"
in 1870. Its predecessors were: The Columbia Female Academy, 1833-1855
and The Columbia Baptist Female College, 1856-1870. We were a 4-year
college from 1856 to 1905 and from the early 1960s to the present.
Stephens was a junior college from 1905 to the early 1960s. Our
college was affiliated with the Missouri Baptists from 1856 to 1935.
Too many facts, right? That’s why you dislike
history. Too much detail. It is the 1833 that intrigues us the most
on this day and during this year, so let us focus on that.
How long is 170 years? How long ago was 1833? I’ll
tell you how long.
In 1833, Thomas Jefferson had been dead for only 7 years. The Lewis and Clark expedition had ended only 27 years earlier.
In 1833, Abraham Lincoln celebrated his 24th birthday, and wondered what he would make of this life.
In 1833, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was 18 years of age and Susan B. Anthony 13. The world’s first women’s rights convention, which Stanton would help to organize, was 15 years in the future.
In 1833, the railroad nearest Columbia, Mo., was more than 500 miles away. Columbia would not receive its first rail service until 1869, the year before the Baptist College changed its name to Stephens College. Before 1869, students traveled to Columbia’s colleges on horseback or in wagons-or perhaps by steamboat to Rochport.
In 1833, a trans-Atlantic trip to Europe took several weeks, and once there a traveler would discover that Germany, Italy, and other modern nations had not yet formed.
In 1833, the first U.S. automobile was still 60 years away from design and assembly.
In 1833, the start of the Civil War was 28 years in the future. Perhaps 2 million human beings were held in slavery in the United States, some of them in Columbia, Missouri.
In 1833, Columbia’s location was on the United States’ western frontier. Texas and everything west of the Continental Divide was claimed by Mexico, Russia, and Britain. Native Peoples ranged freely across those lands.
In 1833, women were still 87 years away from voting under the 19th Amendment.
In 1833, Columbians and Boone Countians still hunted wolves and black bear.
In 1833, most of the sports we know, including football and baseball, had not been invented. The University of Missouri would not play its first football game until 1890.
In 1833, the students of the Columbia Female Academy did not enjoy indoor plumbing. Buckets of well water, chamber pots, and outhouses were essential parts of daily life.
How long is 170 years? 170 years from now, if a generation is 23 years of time and if a young woman in this audience had children, her great, great, great, great, great grandchildren will be walking the earth. Stephens College and its predecessors have survived for that length of time.
Communicating across 100, 150, 170 years would be very difficult. Our world is not the world of our educational ancestors. In many ways our world would confuse and frighten them, and theirs would frustrate and mystify us.
Still, our ancestors would recognize and generally agree with what Stephens College stands for today. Here are some of the important commitments we share with those who preceded us across 17 decades of time.
We share with our ancestors the belief that education must be more than training for a job, including the job of home manager and mother, which most early graduates filled. Whatever its students’ life-roles would be, Stephens required of them the study of mathematics, philosophy, foreign languages and cultures, and other liberal arts. This is an enduring tradition.
We share with our ancestors the belief that women deserve as rigorous an education as men, in every academic discipline and occupational field. At our beginning, only a single-sex institution could give them an equal education.
Why was that? Why are we a woman’s college? Because women were excluded from 19th Century schools. The University of Missouri, for example, did not admit women until 1867, and them only in the teacher-training program. But if gender segregation was forced on our predecessors, over time the college found that to be one of our greatest assets, rather than an unavoidable necessity.
We share with our ancestors a commitment to social change. Once a college believes that women’s roles must undergo positive change, the next steps follow naturally-promoting equal rights and obligations for everyone. We have not always lived up to that high calling. Perhaps it is time that Stephens redirected itself to social justice. Women’s colleges should not be satisfied with the status quo, since the status quo for so long denied women full participation in American life. Women’s colleges should be disturbers of the peace.
We share with our ancestors a willingness to innovate: to take a chance not only on new teaching technologies and student career options, but also to venture across intellectual frontiers. The teaching of evolution was not a problem at Stephens College in the 1920s, the decade of the Scopes Trial in Tennessee and similar efforts elsewhere. This institution respected academic freedom.
We share with our ancestors a freedom from outside control. State legislators have not controlled Stephens College. Although Stephens was a junior college for 60 years, it was not answerable to the taxpayers in a community college district. We were a private junior college. Our ties to a religious denomination, which ended in 1935, were loose and informal. The independence to set our own course is sweet liberty, indeed.
What, then, do we celebrate today? A long life, to be sure. But even more, a life of quality, a life guided by enduring principles.
We may be a small college, but no one can
ignore our achievements or doubt our future.
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Dr. Wendy Libby, Stephens
College president
Remarks on Stephens College
in her 170th Year
In early 1971, Yiddish writer Sholom Aleichem’s stories about
Tevye the Milkman came to the screen. Tevya was a Jewish peasant
in pre-Revolutionary Russia, coping with the day-to-day problems
of "shtetl" life, his Jewish traditions, his family (wife
and daughters), and state-sanctioned pogroms. In one of the most
rousing songs, he sings about "tradition!" How it impacts
daily life, how interwoven it is with daily life, how inseparable
it is from daily life.
So it is with the traditions of a higher education institution. And so it is with this unique institution we call Stephens College.
Yet, just as life changes on the Shtetl—Tevye’s daughters marry, they leave home, they stay home, he and his wife age—so does life change at Stephens College.
Indeed, the very essence and heart of an institution such as Stephens are its culture as formed by its traditions. We are formed by these traditions just as we are reforming them to fit the Stephens of today.
So, we meet today to celebrate our founding 170
years ago and reinvigorate the tradition of a founder's day convocation,
so that we can share in this experience together and make it part
of the new traditions of the 21st century.
We started on August 24, 1833, with a fateful meeting of Columbia’s
business and professional leaders. Their discussion centered on
how to provide for the education of their daughters. The outcome
of their meeting was the establishment of the Columbia Female Academy
– the predecessor of Stephens College as we know it today.
Alan Havig covered the highlights of the past 170 years. Historically, Stephens has been known for a strong tradition of innovation – our creation and implementation of educational innovations in past years has led to who we are today, manifesting itself in the academic and co-curricular offerings of the college as well as in the intangible qualities possessed by our alumnae.
In my brief 10 weeks as your president, I have
visited with more than 200 alumnae in cities as diverse as New York,
Denver, Cheyenne and Portland, Ore.
This is what I have heard:
Must they still wear hose and skirts to dinner?
Do you still have Vespers?
Are the residence halls still closed to men?
Do you still operate the Aviation School?
Do you still serve the Stephens Special at dinner, and is the food
still served family style at tables for eight?
Of course I must tell them that these things have
changed.
But more importantly, they ask:
Is the education still inspiring?
Is Searcy still there? It meant everything to me.
Is a particular professor still teaching? He or she opened the world
to me.
Is a certain staff member still there? He or she was my surrogate
dad or mom.
And here I can tell them that nothing has changed.
So where does this lead us?
As a community, celebrating traditions are vital to an institution’s
future: we will continue this new tradition of Opening Convocation
and Founder’s Day next year. Faculty, staff and administration
are focused on our mission: educating young women (and men) to be
good citizens – leaders and contributors to society.
Liberal arts is the linchpin to taking
our roles as community citizens. You will be the ones to lead us
through the next 50 years. That is why a liberal arts education
matters—learning to think and write critically, to analyze
and reformulate and to put forth a well-reasoned opinion and defend
it.
Students: I encourage you to become involved with Stephens and Columbia.
Participation can reap rewards far beyond your expectations, especially
in a small college and relatively small community. We are a community
in the fullest meaning of the word. Supportive, concerned, accepting—willing
to question and improve.
Embark on the rest of this academic year with full knowledge of
where we’ve been and be full of hope as we meet the challenges
and celebrate the triumphs of the coming year together. We may feel
bound by tradition, but we cannot be straitjacked by it—so
innovate and breathe within the home that is this college.
Through my travels meeting alumnae, I’ve also come to understand
the importance of another Stephens tradition, and that is singing.
As you move through your experience here, you will get to meet our
fabulous alumnae and many of them will tell you how important singing
has always been. Apparently there’s something about Stephens
that made our students sing everywhere they went. Somehow that fell
by the wayside, and it is taking a frustrated thespian to bring
it back.
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So, please join with me as a first step in reinvigorating our singing
tradition, by singing the Stephens Hymn, our alma mater, led by
Tracy Tackett, a Stephens senior, and Kelly Archer.
