or is it just too much freaking pressure.
I remember when DCW took down the “women who will” banners from the lamp posts, around finals time in 2006-2007, because students were feeling overwhelmed. as we continue to forge our life paths, does that pressure still exist or is that a bygone “wellesley” experience?
I have to say I have never dreamt of it and am almost positive that, even if I were to attain a high degree of excellence and recognition within my chosen field, I wouldn’t get it.
Let me explain. I want to be a philosophy professor. The Alumnae Achievement Awards almost never recognize strictly academic achievement in the humanities. Scanning through the award winners, only one was a humanities scholar (Mary Rosenthal Lefkowitz ’57, classics professor) and the description of her on the Alumnae Acheivement Awards site seems to go out of its way to characterize her as a “public intellectual.” It’s as if being an important and influential scholar within academia isn’t enough; there needs to be some broader affirmation of your importance from the non-scholarly community in order for it to count.
This probably has to do with Wellesley’s hope that we are all going to “make a difference in the world,” and what is probably an underlying assumption that humanities scholars are too cloistered in academia and too isolated from “the world” to do this. But while this makes sense on some level, given that “making a difference in the world” is the official W motto, it is also sort of bizarre, considering that we are supposedly a liberal arts college, where academic knowledge is attained and valued for its own sake.
