The below message was sent to faculty, staff, and students on December 8, 2025.
Dear Bryn Mawr Community,
I woke up on Saturday to snow flurries and, like every morning, to the beauty of our campus. My daughter spotted one of the foxes that lives near the ravine by our house, and we saw rabbits and deer, regulars in our yard. These small, daily routines – and the creatures in them – are comforting. They remind me that communities, like seasons, are sustained by witness and shared rhythms.
I write this morning to reflect on a different kind of routine. One that is less nourishing for us as individuals and as a community. I have watched a pattern take hold across campus, during each of my three semesters, and I worry about the fear, distrust, and distance it sows among us. The details change, but the storyline rarely does.
The most recent episode focuses on claims about surveillance, student protests, and private investigations at the College. This episode has been building throughout the semester and was escalated last week based on partial information, rumors, and the speed of good old-fashioned gossip. What follows is an attempt to name the pattern, correct misinformation, and offer an invitation: we can choose a different way of being with one another. We will be stronger as a community if we learn to handle conflict and disagreement based on facts, free from personal attacks, and commit to building the trust that holds us together.
Reflections on the Pattern
In my time here, I've noticed a familiar pattern emerges when the community is faced with conflict and uncertainty.
It starts with a small group of people on campus raising a claim or concern—sometimes based on facts, sometimes on opinion or assumption or incomplete information. Typically, that claim is directed at another person or group but not in conversation with them. Often, but not always, a student or campus leader becomes the target of the claim, which quickly turns personal.
From there, the claim travels and amplifies through social media or word of mouth. Vilification follows—occasionally with names attached, often without. Rarely is the claim checked for accuracy. Even more rarely is it brought directly to the person or office that could clarify it.
The next stage predictably issues demands, heightened by emotions, and evokes a golden age without conflict (an age no one can historically identify). The semester ends; the episode quiets for a while, and when we return, we are left with tensions, frustrations, and a growing distrust.
Based on my conversations with many of you, as well as the written record, this pattern has been repeated in some form or another for several years. It cuts across students, faculty, and staff on campus. It creates expectations without shared learning about how colleges function. And Bryn Mawr, like all institutions, is complex. Without change, trust, and accurate information, these cycles will, unfortunately, continue.
Transparency
Campus Safety Upgrades
This fall, we began a series of upgrades to campus safety, announced September 4, with an update on November 21 and another update scheduled before the semester's end. These changes align us with peer institutions and strengthen our ability to better protect our campus, especially the most vulnerable in our community. I have heard concerns from students that information gathered by these cameras may record private moments or that data from card readers or cameras may be shared with authorities.
We are committed to safeguarding the personal welfare of our students, faculty, staff, and guests on campus. I want to reassure our community that these systems are designed to protect, not intrude, and that any information they gather is governed by strict limits on access and use. We will offer more guidance on camera usage in the update planned before the semester's end.
Protest and Demonstration Guidelines
We updated our Guidelines in Support of Protests and Demonstrations earlier this semester. The national landscape and federal actions toward peer institutions required timely action on our part. Accessible guidelines protect the College's autonomy at a critical moment when higher education is under extraordinary scrutiny.
The changes focused on the use of the bullhorn in specific campus areas and encampments, while the remainder of the guidelines clarified existing policies and procedures. I understand that these changes may be considered controversial. The reality is that we are in community with one another. Some dislike viewpoint-neutral rules; others dislike being interrupted by noise during study or sleep. Both concerns have merit. However, the opportunity to engage in free expression goes hand in hand with our responsibility not to interfere with the safety of others or disrupt College operations.
In the last 18 months, the College has not encumbered free expression at any campus protests. When behaviors on campus violate College policies and Pennsylvania laws, we act as documented in communications on December 10, 2024, April 21, 2025, and June 1, 2025. Those incidents resulted in considerable property damage, as well as harm to people and reputations. While I cannot comment on specific investigations or student cases, several claims in the Bi-Co News greatly misrepresent our processes.
Before the semester's end, we will also announce an interim discrimination-response policy, until we can obtain campus-wide feedback to inform a more permanent policy. The faculty were briefed at the last faculty meeting; opportunities for community feedback will follow early next semester. As with the Guidelines in Support of Protests and Demonstrations, this policy enhances our ability to define community expectations and establish our own policies rather than having them imposed on us.
Student Journalism
We remain committed to supporting and investing in student journalism. Our pilot Journalism Mentorship Initiative includes a new course in Spring 2026, Political Journalism: Reporting, Analysis and Investigation. The course will be taught by Erin Arvedlund, a professional journalist and author who has contributed to Barron's, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. In the Spring, we will also host a visit from Arwa Mahdawi, a writer for The Guardian.
We continue to actively encourage student journalists to abide by best practices: multiple sources, accurate quotation, opportunities for comment, and consistent, accurate use of those comments, as well as whether information provided is understood to be on or off the record.
Invitation to a Forward Path
We can grow stronger and more capable of withstanding external pressures as a community if we learn to engage conflict with greater humanity and realize we are not an existential threat to one another. Make no mistake, the external threats to higher education are real. I'm reminded of a t-shirt I wore as a high school lacrosse player that read "Offense wins games…defense wins championships." The message holds. Our best defense is a campus that knows how to listen, speak respectfully and clearly, and trust one another enough to disagree in good faith. Trust in organizations comes from understanding the whole picture through shared learning about roles, responsibilities, and governance.
Trust further grows from real relationships. This semester, we created the Presidential Student Advisory Council and a Leadership Conversation Team of faculty, both of which I meet with monthly to foster conversation and collective learning. Senior administrators meet regularly with the Student Government Association, faculty, and the Staff Association. In October, our senior administrators met with 35 student leaders to discuss priorities and collaboration—two groups engaging in meaningful dialogue.
The Current Topics in Higher Education series invites us to learn together about the forces shaping our sector, from institutional governance to public scholarship to the liberal arts of the future. Last month, Marjorie Hass, president of the Council of Independent Colleges, spoke candidly about the pressures on institutions like ours. The colleges navigating most successfully in the current environment are those that are nimble, willing to adapt, experiment, and tolerate failure – all practices that depend on trust.
We are continuing to increase opportunities for informal interactions across units. Shared meals, cross-campus events like the Convocation picnic, Owls Fest, Bryn Mawr's Got Talent, and the Midnight Breakfast this Thursday, 12/11, in Erdman Dining Hall from 10:00 p.m. - 11:30 p.m. are key. Community is an everyday event, not simply an official moment.
We Are One Bryn Mawr
I am grateful for the passion that fuels us. Passion is part of what makes Bryn Mawr an exemplar. But our passions must be paired with responsibilities to truth, to one another, to the challenges of this moment, and to the world in which we all live.
If we want change, we must choose conversation over accusation. We need good-faith interaction, not bad-faith. We must ask ourselves whether we want to be right or be in community. Compromise is possible, but only if we speak with one another, not at, around, or about one another.
I truly believe that no one in our community intends harm to it. We share the same hope for a future and for the possibilities of learning and discovery for every student, faculty, and staff member. That hope is the reason all of us are here. And in service to hope, we must rely on full information, accurate accounts, and mutual trust. As we head into the final days of this Fall 2025 semester, I invite each of us to approach one another with curiosity rather than suspicion, compassion rather than certainty.
Daily rituals and unrealized patterns are the warp and weft of our community. We are weaving, with each new day, this 140-year-old blanket of trust that warms us all. Let’s weave it together.
Sincerely,
Wendy Cadge
President and Professor of Sociology
Bryn Mawr College
101 N. Merion Ave., Bryn Mawr, PA 19010
Pronouns: she/her
brynmawr.edu
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