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Dear Members of the Sarah Lawrence Community,
As we return from Thanksgiving break and enter the final frenetic weeks of the semester, I wanted to take a moment to share my gratitude for the Sarah Lawrence community. Living on campus, I have the dual privilege of experiencing many aspects of the daily lives of our students and of working to support and enhance those lives.
In the days leading up to Thanksgiving, I have a tradition of baking pies to share with students who are going to be on campus over the break. This tradition took shape in its present form in the fall of 2020. I can’t help but reflect on the stark difference between then and now (and all that has happened in between) as we have all worked to keep our students safe and healthy: our current seniors, the Class of 2024, arrived that fall during the fraught days of early COVID, when campus life necessarily focused on separation, distance, isolation, and quarantine. At a time when students weren’t allowed to travel away from campus, I baked pies as a small gesture aimed at easing isolation. I have continued to do so each year since as a tangible personal gesture of appreciation for our students (and also because I find the whole activity genuinely fun!). This year I baked 40 pies (a personal record), which were claimed in under an hour of my posting the list on Instagram. This simple gesture affords me a powerful way to connect with students and to encourage their connection with each other over the break.
Such a gesture, in turn, helps me especially appreciate the significant day-to-day, and deeply thoughtful and intentional, work of our staff and faculty to support our students individually but even more so to help them build community, recognizing that creating and living in a healthy community is a critical component of academic success. Several dedicated staff members live on campus, serving in “on-call” roles to assist our students and create programming for them throughout the academic year. This care was especially evident last week in the various measures provided for students who remained on campus over the Thanksgiving break. To encourage students to share meals together, the Student Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Belonging team provided gift cards to DoorDash or Stop & Shop for students staying on campus. And our Residential Life and Student Involvement & Leadership teams prepared and hosted the second-annual Friendsgiving for undergraduate and graduate students last Friday.
What pie-baking and Friendsgiving—and so many other activities on campus—have in common is an intentionality in creating opportunity for intersection, conversation, and connection as a basis for building hard-won community. When I welcome first-years to campus I am in the habit of saying: “It starts with ‘hello,’ with recognizing the humanity in one another through simple acts of greeting. Each time we take that step, we have a further foundation for the hard work of difficult conversations.” With that in mind, I am especially proud of the work presently underway on the reimagined Siegel Center as a critical and much-needed “home” to practice and share traditions, to encounter difference, to make connections, to build understanding, and to break bread with one another. Plans for the Siegel Center include a home for the Spiritual Space, Common Ground, and the LGBTQIA+ Space, along with WSLC, the college radio station. Most importantly, the center will include common spaces for meeting and greeting, for intercultural dialogue and programming, and for preparing and sharing food.
Watching these plans come to fruition fills me not only with appreciation for today’s Sarah Lawrence community, but with great hope for the important work that this College will and must continue to do as we enter our second century. In addition to advice about the value of “hellos,” I also share with our incoming students thoughts on the meaning of the College’s motto, Wisdom with Understanding. This motto serves not merely as a quaint reminder of Sarah Lawrence’s past, but as a directive for our time. It points to the essence of a Sarah Lawrence education: discovering which questions to ask and how to follow them relentlessly, digging deep to pursue a possibility, bringing all of one’s creative energies to bear… but it also signals a way of proceeding—with understanding—that reminds us of the necessity for empathy, for generosity and grace when encountering competing views, for an inclusivity that is itself deeply and openly inclusive, for an absence and abhorrence of hate in any form. For only then can we learn to speak to one another across deep ideological divides and to create a society that can transform itself peacefully rather than violently. This is a tall order for a campus to model, but it is the one to which we must continually aspire – together.
Yours,
Cristle Collins Judd
President
president@sarahlawrence.edu
Instagram: @slcprez
Friendsgiving
While Merriam Webster dates the term “Friendsgiving” to 2007, I think we can claim its unofficial roots at SLC thanks to alumna and author Ann Patchett ’85. I invite you to read (or re-read) the charming essay Ann penned in The New York Times in 2016 about Thanksgiving as a first-year student in 1981. And in her now-famous 2006 commencement address, immortalized in her book What Now, Ann relayed a story about stumbling, as a first-year student, into the President’s House in the early days of Alice Ilchman’s tenure, looking for an oven in which to bake cookies. I wish she had been here to stumble into the President’s House kitchen when I was baking all those pies!
Students, Faculty & Staff: Make Your Voice Heard
Community involvement has been—and will continue to be—a crucial part of the Siegel Center renovation and campus space planning. Recently, the Siegel Center user-group committee, including four students, met with our architectural firm DIGSAU. Earlier this week, a survey on campus needs went out to students, staff, and faculty. And tomorrow, students are invited to an in-person listening session with the architects. I encourage all students, staff, and faculty to make their voices heard!