Staff, faculty, and other community members filled Old Library’s Great Hall on Jan. 27 as Bryn Mawr President Wendy Cadge continued to share her thoughts about and visions for the College’s future as she reached the six-month mark of her presidency.
“I want to think with you today about how we dream and innovate to expand the College's excellence and illuminate its reach,” she said. “I want to think about how to strengthen the light, to enable it to shine well beyond our campus and to show in our actions that people from all backgrounds are invited and able to be here.
“I'm pushing myself to share these thoughts with you here after just six months, so that I can get your reactions and we can continue to think and talk and develop them,” she said. “I'm going to say more at the end about how we’ll do that, mindful always about what I said at the inauguration, which is that it is we together are building the College’s next chapter.”
Cadge discussed four interlocking areas of focus for that next chapter and shared a key question for each of them to be examined in the months ahead.
- Academic excellence: How can we strategically enhance and strengthen the academic excellence made possible in and through the College?
- Student Experience: How do we ensure that our students—undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate—have the most positive holistic experiences possible at the College?
- Access and Inclusion: Diversity, equity, and inclusion are core to the College. How do we ensure it is “the engine for excellence and innovation”?
- Transformation in Our Facilities and Operating Systems: How do we move towards ensuring that our buildings, grounds, operational systems, and technical infrastructures are states of the art, attract the next generation of students and faculty, and are efficient, sustainable, and cost-effective?
“The transformation of facilities and operating systems is the soil and the other pieces are the plants, light, and water,” said Cadge, referring to a garden metaphor she used in talking about the growth and development of the College’s future.
Cadge ended her remarks by laying out the next steps in her process toward a strategic plan for the College. These included the Current Topics in Higher Education events, continuing to work with a wide range of standing groups and committees, meeting with and talking to students and academic departments and programs, and another event at the start of the fall 2025 semester to offer updated reflections and more details on the topics she discussed.
“Why engage with me and the College in shaping this next chapter,” she asked those gathered. “Dreaming and change requires effort. It can be challenging and exhausting. We are all, in some ways, creatures of habit. For me, these are questions about Bryn Mawr and bigger questions about higher education as public confidence continues to decline. We know that higher education is the most reliable path to social and economic mobility, but this isn't all about mobility. It's about knowledge, creation, discovery, and sharing. It is about the quality of our experiences and relationships, the texture in which we move through the world and plant and tend our vegetable gardens, the seeds that grow when we're on campus and flower throughout our lives. I believe all of us can make a difference, and we stand at Bryn Mawr on a legacy of generations who did just that.”
About that solar powered lantern...
During her inauguration address, President Cadge talked about solar-powered lanterns as an example of looking to the future. She returned to the topic on Monday. "I learned afterwards that Dawn and Robbie in facilities made this one several years ago. They took a standard lantern and modified it with a pre-made top. They’ve loaned it to me, and it sits on the windowsill in my office. On some days – if there is enough sun – it glows green and speaks to me in metaphor. Most of the ideas I shared this afternoon – like this solar-powered lantern – are not mine; they are yours, and they have been here much longer than I have."
