Articles

As we celebrate our 150th year, Wellesley’s founding mission is more relevant than ever. Henry and Pauline Durant were inspired to create Wellesley College because they saw that our American democracy required educational opportunity to be spread as widely as possible.

I had the dream again. I’ve been having it for years, about once a week. It goes something like this: I’m about to start my senior year at Wellesley. I’m always incredulous about it, like I woke up on the starting line of an Olympic sprint as the official is raising the pistol. Wait! How did three years go by so quickly? Why didn’t I appreciate them sufficiently? Why did I waste my time?

“Because I grew up in Dhaka, in Bangladesh, right in the middle of the smoggy, light-polluted city, I do not remember seeing any star,” says Lamiya Mowla ’13, assistant professor of astronomy. That changed when she arrived at Wellesley.

Tributes to members of the Wellesley community

What do whaling dories, Longfellow, Bizet’s opera Carmen, and the Whitin Observatory have in common? They are all part of the story of Float Night. The story began in 1875, when Wellesley co-founder Henry Fowle Durant purchased three ungainly boats for the College.

While Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician is a very different kind of work from Dan Chiasson’s previous five books—all collections of poetry—as soon as you hear Chiasson discuss it, you know that he was destined to write this book.

As fertility rates plummet in much of the world, Wellesley experts explain why it’s happening and what might be done to address it, and alums tell their own stories about their winding paths to becoming parents—or not.

“I was wrong” is one of the most difficult things for a human being to say. Imagine saying it when you have been a conservative public intellectual and expert on public education for decades. Yet that is exactly what Diane Silvers Ravitch ’60 does in her engaging new memoir, An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else.

In November 2025, the Hillary Rodham Clinton Center hosted the “We the People” summit, bringing together diverse leaders to discuss bridge-building across political divides.