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International Sisters

By President Joanne V. Creighton

Over the years, alumnae have asked me about our “sister” college in Madras (Chennai), India, Women’s Christian College (WCC). The institutional connection goes back to 1921 when each of the “Seven Sisters” adopted an Asian “sister.” But we heard little from our sister in recent years until WCC’s principal, Dr. Ridling Margaret Waller, visited Mount Holyoke last spring and invited me to her campus for an international conference in August. I’m pleased to report that our Asian sister—now ninety-two years old—is a thriving, selective, well respected liberal arts women’s college of some 2,000 students that shares our dedication to intellectual rigor and purposeful engagement in the world. My husband, Tom, and I were thoroughly impressed with the engaging spirit and warm hospitality of everyone we met.

Mount Holyoke is clearly revered and bound into the fabric of the institution. A student residence is named “Holyoke Hostel,” and an annual cultural event is called “Mount Holyoke.” Their student senate, I learned from talking with delightful students, is structured exactly like ours—not surprising, since it was started during the tenure of its third beloved principal, Mount Holyoke alumna Eleanor Mason ’19. In fact, it was my honor to participate in the naming of a building after her. Proudly on display in WCC’s modest library are books and periodicals purchased with proceeds of the endowed fund established by Mount Holyoke alumnae, grown now to over a quarter million dollars. Women’s Christian College is just one of countless examples of the powerful influence our pioneering college has had in shaping a distinctive tradition of women’s education around the world.

Everywhere I go in the world, I encounter alumnae and the palpable influence of the college. Indeed, vacationing in Cape Town, South Africa, a few years ago, I found when I checked into my hotel a note from three alumnae, saying, “We know you’re there and we want to see you!” Eager for news of the college, they impressed upon me their enduring bond with Mount Holyoke. On that same trip, I happened to meet an administrator of Kennicott College— recently absorbed into Cape Technikon—who told me of the founding of this college for Afrikaner women in the late nineteenth century by Mount Holyoke alumnae who modeled its campus and mission on ours. Within the past few months I’ve met with alumnae in London, Athens, New Delhi, and Geneva, the last the host site of the spirited biennial European Alumnae Conference.

As part of the international emphasis of the Plan for Mount Holyoke 2010, we have taken up with renewed affirmation our legacy as a formative founding “mother” of the women’s college move•ment. In 2004 we formed, along with Smith College, a new alliance of women’s colleges from around the world, called Women’s Education Worldwide. We now have nearly fifty institutions from five continents in this alliance. This past summer a core group of us met, with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, at its gorgeous retreat site in Bellagio, Italy, to plan our organization’s future. Included in our gathering were several of the founding heads of newly emerging women’s colleges in countries where opportunities for women’s education have been limited: Kenya, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. They regaled us with stories of the challenges and the triumphs of their efforts. Mary Lyon’s spirit lives!

Deep affinities unite women’s colleges old and new. I have had the opportunity to visit a number of these new women’s colleges such as Kiriri Women’s University for Science and Technology in Nairobi, Kenya, which perhaps faces the most daunting of challenges and is the most inspirational in the dedication of its founders. Emergent women’s colleges in the Middle East—such as Royal University for Women in Bahrain, Effat College in Saudi Arabia, and Dubai Women’s College—face the challenges of a highly patriarchal, gender-segregated society. Yet their courageous, pragmatic, and entrepreneurial leaders are determined to make their colleges not just equal to but better than those of their male counterparts. They continue to look to us for models of leadership and integrity.

We envision more student, faculty and staff exchanges with our sisters abroad—in fact, we will hold an international conference for student delegates from WEW member institutions at Mount Holyoke and Smith College in early June 2008. Our goal is to work together to build understanding, to share best practices, and to advocate for the education and advancement of women of the world, the great unfinished agenda of the twenty-first century. Along with Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, keynote speaker at our first conference, we believe that “few subjects match the social significance of women’s education in the contemporary world.”

From its earliest days, Mount Holyoke graduates ventured all over the world, founding well over forty schools and colleges across this country and in Canada, Argentina, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, Armenia, Persia, India, China, Japan, Hong Kong, and South Africa and serving as president or principal of over one hundred others. Now, women from all over the world find their way to the college. Per square mile, this little college in western Mass. is one of the most cosmopolitan places on earth! With 25 percent people of color and 30 percent foreign born, our faculty—which collectively speaks forty-three languages—is the most diverse among any of our peer colleges, coed or single sex, and with 40 percent of our student body either ALANA or international (from over seventy countries), our student body is the most diverse as well. This is deliberately so. Our goal is to build a diverse community that works amid countless examples throughout the world of communities that fail. This is not always easy. But it is always worthwhile. In short, there is no better place to learn to be a global citizen than at Mount Holyoke College.