Back to Noah Porter’s Yale

Yale under President Noah Porter in the post–Civil War decades illustrates the problems in trying to retain the old-time college ideal and a distinctly Christian viewpoint in the age of Darwinian science and the rise of the modern university. The most notorious challenge that Porter faced was that posed by a leading professor, William Graham Sumner. Sumner was an agnostic ex-clergyman, and a social Darwinist, and wanted to use Herbert Spencer’s The Study of Sociology as a textbook. Porter tried to disallow that text. At the time of the controversy, Porter specifically reiterated his the idea of a “Christian College” in a speech at Wellesley College. Wellesley had strong evangelical connections, and the new women’s colleges emphasized building Christian moral character. Porter hoped for the same for men’s colleges. But his arguments for Christian perspectives did not stand against more inclusive scientifically based university ideals. So the agnostic Sumner stayed at Yale.

Grade Sensitivity and the Economics Major at a Women’s College

We use a regression discontinuity design to estimate the causal effect of letter grades in introductory courses on the probability of choosing an economics major at Wellesley College, a highly selective women's college. We find that women just above letter-grade cutoffs are 18 percentage points more likely to major in economics than women just below, a 50 percent increase. The effects are larger among financial aid recipients. Grade sensitivity among women is not explained by the presence of male students or instructors; it is more plausibly explained by lower precollege preferences for the major and gender-specific responses to noisy signals like grades.

KURO-ARAK MONUMENTS NORTH-EASTERN AZERBAIJAN: ISSUES OF HISTORICAL, CULTURAL AND CHRONOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION (based on the materials of archaeological exploration 2001-2002. on the International project IPARC).

The article is devoted to the results of exploratory archaeological research in 2001-2002. in North-East Azerbaijan, incl. Khachmass-Cuban zone, within the framework of the IPARC project (The International Program for Anthropological Research in the Caucasus; project leader - Professor Wellesley College, USA F.L.Cole). Along with the study of the medieval Gilgilchay defensive system, an international expedition, in which Azerbaijani, Dagestani and American scientists participated, conducted an exploratory survey of 15 famous settlements of the Early Bronze Age. At one of the sites (Serkertepe), a deep exploration pit was laid, which gave a fundamentally new archaeological material. The first part of the article deals with the issues of the historiography of the archaeological study of this region of Azerbaijan, adjacent to Dagestan; provides an overview of exploration and monitoring of known Kuro-Arak settlements; outlines the prospects for their further scientific study. In the second part of the article, much attention will be paid to the characterization and analysis of the materials of the exploration pit at Serkertepe, and also a new concept of the historical, cultural and chronological interpretation of the Kuro-Arak monuments of Northeastern Azerbaijan in the framework of the Great Archaeological culture will be proposed.

Elizabeth Barrett and the Making of Browning’s Dramatic Romances and Lyrics

Reconstructing Robert Browning’s creative methods is a difficult task because the only manuscripts that survive, almost all at Balliol, are of late poems that even now are scarcely read. All the same, this chapter will discuss the germination of Browning’s early poems. It will rely principally on EBB’s notes on the poems that Browning went on to publish in Bells and Pomegranates VII that were brought together in the 56 page manuscript now held at Wellesley College. In the absence of surviving manuscripts this evidence offers the best clue as to Browning’s processes of revision. By examining Browning’s responses to EBB’s suggestions and the revisions he made to his poems after their first publication in periodicals I hope to show how his interest in the relationship between the poet and the reader is carried through into his compositional practice.

Up to speed: Library staff and first-generation students get together

Developing campus-wide programs to foster equity, diversity, and inclusion continues to be an ongoing priority for many colleges and universities across the country. Academic libraries are well positioned to support this work because they are embedded in so many of the functions of their institutions. Moreover, academic library staff have been writing about and practicing critical information literacy and intersectional feminist pedagogy in service of creating spaces in which all patrons can learn and grow. For example, the Oberlin Group, of which Wellesley College is a member, has collaboratively drafted a guide specifically for aggregating resources that promote equity, diversity, and inclusion in libraries.

Lisa Alther

Novelist and nonfiction writer Lisa Alther was reared in Kingsport, Tennessee. For college, she moved north to attend Wellesley College, where she received a BA in English in 1966. After college, she lived in Vermont, New York City, London, and Paris. In the 1990s, Alther returned to live part-time in Tennessee (Vermont remained her other home), and southern Appalachia became an increasingly central topic in her writing....