December 2006

Dear Friends,

As the semester and the year draw to an end, I have chosen a beginning as the topic of my regular letter to you. If you were anywhere in the world within the reach of the news media in mid-September, you probably heard about the launch of the College’s Katharine Houghton Hepburn Center. Stories about the launch ceremony and the awarding of the first Katharine Hepburn Medals to Lauren Bacall and Blythe Danner appeared in thousands of media outlets in every corner of the globe.

The Hepburn Center challenges women to lead publicly engaged lives and to take on important and timely issues affecting women. It honors the actress Katharine Hepburn and her mother, an early feminist activist, both Bryn Mawr College alumnae who defied conventions. It draws its focus from the life work of its namesakes — film and theater, civic engagement and women's health.

Upwards of 700 people attended the inaugurating events. It was a delight to see so many members of the Bryn Mawr community splendidly arrayed in celebration not only of the Hepburn women, but of the College itself. For those of you who missed this opportunity to be dazzled and inspired, I recommend a visit to the Hepburn Center’s Web site at http://www.brynmawr.edu/hepburn/, where you will find photographs and video clips of the proceedings. The clips include what for many in the audience constituted the most moving part of the evening: brief remarks made by six Bryn Mawr seniors, the sort of young women who, as mistress of ceremonies Cynthia McFadden pointed out, will carry the Hepburn legacy into the future.

But now that the confetti has been swept up, you might wonder, what will the Hepburn Center do for the ongoing life of the College?

The Center gives us a formal structure for many of the activities and programs I have long believed to be important – such as encouraging the growth of leadership skills among our students, bringing real-world practitioners of civic engagement to campus to work with students, and recognizing women of extraordinary accomplishment. All of these efforts will be rendered far more visible and exciting to the public by virtue of their association with the Hepburn name. Three major programs are planned:

• The Hepburn Medal recognizes women whose lives, work and contributions embody the intelligence, drive and independence of Katharine Hepburn ’28. It is to be awarded annually, placing the College repeatedly in the public eye in association with perhaps its most charismatic representative; 
• The Hepburn Fellows Program brings to Bryn Mawr’s campus individuals who bridge academics and practice in nontraditional or unconventional ways in any of the three broad areas the Hepburn Center supports: film and theater, women’s health and civic engagement;
• A Hepburn internship program will provide funding and direction for Bryn Mawr students who wish to investigate careers in any of the three areas of the Center’s focus.

As Center Planning Director Michelle Francl announced at the launch, a generous gift from Carol Yoskowitz '71 will enable the Center to bring three Hepburn Fellows to the campus for each of the 2006-07 and 2007-08 academic years. This year, we will be joined by Jane Eisner, vice president for civic initiatives at the National Constitution Center; Shannon Hader, a physician with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, who has just returned from an appointment in Zimbabwe; and Karen Stephenson, the CEO of Netform, Inc., a corporate anthropologist who has developed mathematical models for mapping social and informational networks in workplaces.

Next year’s Fellows will include Judy Wickes, the founder of Philadelphia’s legendary White Dog Café and founder of the national Business Alliance for Local Living Economies; Cynthia Eyakuze-Di Domenico ’94, the acting director of the Francophone Africa Program at Family Care International, an organization that works to ensure that women and adolescents have access to lifesaving services and information to improve their health, experience safe pregnancy and childbirth, and avoid unwanted pregnancy and HIV infection; and Susan Wood, who last year resigned her post as assistant FDA commissioner for women's health and director of the Office of Women's Health to protest the agency’s delay of a decision on whether the “morning-after pill” should be made more accessible. The Fellows are uniformly enthusiastic about working with our students and with each other, and their activity on campus has already begun. Bryn Mawr undergraduates, too, are excited by the opportunity to participate in the highly visible and innovative projects the Fellows have designed.

The Center’s programming will, we hope, aid us in retaining students, one of the primary goals outlined by the Plan for a New Century. But at least equally important is the attention it will draw to the College.

The Center celebrates the character of the Hepburn women -- indomitable, purposeful, articulate women who were capable of taking risks and challenging conventions. Those women are important to Bryn Mawr students and alumnae because that character resonates with their own; in these distinguished figures, they see themselves. At the exhilarating moment when Bryn Mawr was the cynosure of the world’s eye, this character is what we communicated to the world. It would be difficult to overstate the benefits of this sort of visibility, particularly to our recruiting efforts. The Hepburn connection is a marvelously efficient way to telegraph Bryn Mawr’s message to young women who recognize that character in themselves.

It is gratifying be involved in the development of these valuable opportunities for Bryn Mawr students and to see the unique virtues of this eminent institution communicated so effectively to the world. Little wonder that the words of praise most often spoken by alumnae who attended the event were “It made me proud.”

Sincerely,

Nancy J. Vickers
President