Diana Chapman Walsh | |
|---|---|
| 12th President of Wellesley College | |
| In office 1993–2007 | |
| Preceded by | Nannerl O. Keohane |
| Succeeded by | H. Kim Bottomly |
Diana Chapman Walsh was President of Wellesley College from 1993 to 2007. During her tenure,the college revised its curriculum and expanded its programs in global education,internships and service learning,and interdisciplinary teaching and learning. The faculty established new majors in environmental studies,quantitative reasoning,cinema and media studies,neurosciences,and astrophysics. Japanese,Arabic and Korean languages were added to the curriculum as well,and a new department of East Asian Languages and Literatures was launched. [1] [2]
Other innovations included the opening of the Davis Museum and Cultural Center, [3] the establishment of the Religious and Spiritual Life Program, [4] the creation of the Knapp Media and Technology Center, [5] the Knapp Social Science Center, [6] a center for the humanities,the Ruhlman and Tanner conferences,which are annual day-long events to showcase student learning in the classroom and beyond, [7] and other initiatives designed to strengthen the quality of campus intellectual life. Many of the college’s administrative structures were strengthened and major landscape restoration and building projects were completed across the campus. The college raised over $700 million in new gifts during this 14-year period,strengthened the management of the endowment and increased it fourfold,to over $1.6 billion. [1] Additionally,applications to Wellesley increased by 42%. [8]
Wellesley's Alumnae Hall was renamed the Diana Chapman Walsh Alumnae Hall in Walsh's honor after its 2010 renovation. The hall was originally constructed in 1923,but was cramped and inaccessible. Following its highly successful renovation,it is now home to a 1,000-seat auditorium and the college's Theater Studies Department,and is the site of many of the college's most important events. [8] [9]
Previously,Walsh was the Norman Professor at the Harvard School of Public Health,and chair of the Department of Health and Social Behavior. [1] There she developed and led an interdisciplinary program in society and health,an educational initiative in cancer prevention,a program of studies on social norms and substance abuse,and a project on social marketing for public health.[ citation needed ] Before that,she was at Boston University,as a University Professor,and Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences in the School of Public Health. [10]
Walsh is a 1966 graduate of Wellesley College,as an English major. [1] At Boston University,she earned an M. S. degree in journalism in 1971 and,in 1983,a Ph.D. in health policy from the University Professors Program. [1] She received the Wallerstein Award for the distinguished graduate thesis in journalism in 1971 and the Alumni Merit Award for the best graduate dissertation by a University Scholar in 1983.[ citation needed ]
She spent five years,in the early 1970s,as the information and education director for the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts,on whose board she continued to serve for a decade.[ citation needed ] She was senior staff associate of the Massachusetts Commissioner of Public Health and then associate director of the Health Policy Institute at Boston University,where she developed and ran a fellowship program in health policy for corporate executives.[ citation needed ] As a Kellogg National Fellow,from 1987 to 1990,she traveled extensively (to Spain,Russia,Iceland,Norway,Brazil and throughout the United States) studying workplace democracy and patterns of leadership,and writing poetry. [1]
Walsh has published on topics related to the organization and financing of health care services,the conservation of health,the prevention and treatment of substance abuse,the health effects of work and on a number of issues in higher education. Her empirical studies have appeared in professional and scholarly journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Health Affairs and the Journal of the American Medical Association,and she is the author of reviews,essays,commentaries,and case studies. She has written,edited and co-edited twelve books,including a nine-volume series on industry and health care published by Springer-Verlag,a study of the practice of medicine within corporations,Corporate Physicians:Between Medicine and Management,Yale University Press,1987,a co-edited monograph entitled Society and Health and published by Oxford University Press,and an essay,"Trustworthy Leadership",published by the Fetzer Institute. [1]
The MIT Press will publish her memoirs,tentatively titled The Claims of Life:A Memoir,in Fall 2023.
Walsh currently serves as chair of the board of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard,as a member of the corporation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a trustee of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. She was a director of the State Street Corporation from 1999–2007 and a trustee of Amherst College from 1998-2010. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of Phi Beta Kappa. [11]
Her husband,Christopher T. Walsh,was the Hamilton Kuhn Professor in the Department of Molecular Pharmacology and Biological Chemistry at the Harvard Medical School. Their daughter,Allison Kurian,is an associate professor of medicine and health policy at Stanford University. [12] [13] Walsh's sister,Sally Chapman,was a professor at Barnard College. When she died in 2012,Walsh accepted the Barnard Medal of Distinction on her behalf. [14]
Wellesley College is a private women's liberal arts college in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Founded in 1870 by Henry and Pauline Durant as a female seminary, it is a member of the Seven Sisters Colleges, an unofficial grouping of current and former women's colleges in the northeastern United States.
Radcliffe College was a women's liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that was founded in 1879. In 1999, it was fully incorporated into Harvard College.
The Seven Sisters are a group of seven liberal arts colleges in the Northeastern United States that are historically women's colleges. Barnard College, Bryn Mawr College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and Wellesley College are still women's colleges. Vassar College became coeducational in 1969, and Radcliffe College was absorbed in 1999 by Harvard College and now offers programs in advanced study.
Nannerl "Nan" Overholser Keohane is an American political theorist and former president of Wellesley College and Duke University. Until September 2014, Keohane was the Laurance S. Rockefeller Distinguished Visiting Professor of Public Affairs and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. She is now a professor in social sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, where she is researching the theory and practice of leadership in democratic societies.
Alice Freeman Palmer was an American educator. As Alice Freeman, she was president of Wellesley College from 1881 to 1887, when she left to marry the Harvard professor George Herbert Palmer. From 1892 to 1895 she was dean of women at the newly founded University of Chicago.
Women's colleges in the United States are private single-sex U.S. institutions of higher education that only admit female students. They are often liberal arts colleges. There are approximately 26 active women's colleges in the United States in 2024, down from a peak of 281 such colleges in the 1960s.
Dorothy E. Roberts is an American sociologist, law professor, and social justice advocate. She is the Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, George A. Weiss University Professor, and inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at the University of Pennsylvania. She writes and lectures on gender, race, and class in legal issues. Her focuses include reproductive health, child welfare, and bioethics. In 2023, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society. She has published over 80 articles and essays in books and scholarly journals, including Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and Stanford Law Review.
Perri Klass is an American pediatrician and writer who has published extensively about her medical training and pediatric practice. Among her subjects have been the issues of women in medicine, relationships between doctors and patients, and children and literacy. She is the author of both fiction and nonfiction novels, stories, essays, and journalism. Klass is Professor of Journalism and Pediatrics at New York University, and Medical Director of Reach Out and Read, a national childhood literacy program that works through doctors and nurses to encourage parents to read aloud to young children, and to give them the books they need to do it. She is a member of the National Advisory Council of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and has been nominated by the President of the United States to the Advisory Board of the National Institute For Literacy.
Alicia Haydock Munnell is an American economist who is the Peter F. Drucker Professor of Management Sciences at Boston College's Carroll School of Management. Educated at Wellesley College, Boston University, and Harvard University, Munnell spent 20 years as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, where she researched wealth, savings, and retirement among American workers. She served in the Bill Clinton administration as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and as a member of the Council of Economic Advisers. Since 1997 she has been a professor at Boston College and director of its Center for Retirement Research, where she writes on retirement income policy.
Barbara Warne Newell is an economist, career professor, and higher education administrator. Notably, she served as the tenth President of Wellesley College from 1972 to 1980 and was the first female chancellor of the State University System of Florida from 1981 to 1985.
Christopher T. Walsh was a Hamilton Kuhn professor of biological chemistry and pharmacology at Harvard Medical School. His research focused on enzymes and enzyme inhibition, and most recently focused on the problem of antibiotic resistance. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1989.
Jean Baker Miller (1927–2006) was a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, social activist, feminist, and author. She wrote Toward a New Psychology of Women, which brings psychological thought together with relational-cultural theory.
Helen Kim Bottomly is an immunologist and the former president of Wellesley College, serving from August 2007 to July 2016. Bottomly was the first scientist to become a president at Wellesley College. She has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2009. She chaired the board of directors of the Consortium on Financing Higher Education and was a member of the advisory council of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health. In May 2018, she was appointed as the chair of the board of the trustees for the Fulbright University Vietnam, which she stepped down from in 2019.
Ann Beha is an American architect. She is founder and partner of Ann Beha Architects in Boston, Massachusetts.
Paula Adina Johnson is an American cardiologist and the current president of Wellesley College. She is the first Black woman to serve in this role. The first Black graduate of Wellesley College came in the year 1887, and 129 years later President Johnson became the first Black leader. Prior to her role as president of Wellesley, Johnson founded and served as the inaugural executive director of the Mary Horrigan Connors Center for Women's Health & Gender Biology, as well as Chief of the Division of Women's Health at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Johnson was the Grace A. Young Family Professor of Medicine in the field of women's health, an endowed professorship named in honor of her mother, at Harvard Medical School. She was also Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and has been featured as a national leader in medicine by the National Library of Medicine.
Camara Phyllis Jones is an American physician, epidemiologist, and anti-racism activist who specializes in the effects of racism and social inequalities on health. She is known for her work in defining institutional racism, personally mediated racism, and internalized racism in the context of modern U.S. race relations. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Jones drew attention to why racism and not race is a risk factor and called for actions to address structural racism.
The Madeleine Korbel Albright Institute for Global Affairs is an international studies institute based at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. The Albright Institute was established by former United States Secretary of State and Wellesley College alumna Madeleine Albright in 2009 to support the interdisciplinary study of global issues within a liberal arts framework.
Allison Walsh Kurian is an American medical oncologist. She is a Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology & Population Health at Stanford University and an oncologist at the Stanford Cancer Institute.
Evelyn Ann Pottinger Saab was an American historian, professor, and college administrator based in North Carolina. She published three books of nineteenth-century European history and one novel, and was head of two departments at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG).