Remarks: Worrell House Alumni Gathering
Remarks given at the Worrell House in London, England on Monday, September 25, 2023 to mark the 45th anniversary of Wake Forest University’s Worrell House.
Good evening to you all and welcome back to Worrell House!
As Kline noted, I’m Michele Gillespie, Provost at Wake Forest University, and believe it or not, although I’ve been at Wake Forest for 24 years, this is my first time at Worrell House.
It’s such a pleasure to be with you all tonight here in London in this spectacular space, this newly refurbished, beloved home away from home, full of rich memories for decades of stellar Wake Forest students and resident faculty members. Because I am a historian, I can’t help but share a little Worrell House history with you this evening, but before I do that, let me update you on some of the exciting things happening back at Wake Forest.
Let me start with our strategic framework. Over the past year, over 100 faculty and staff leaders worked collaboratively on a strategic framework process which resulted in what we are calling “Framing Our Future.” This framework is a living document. It will change over time as faculty, staff, and alumni bring thinking and new ideas to it and we adapt to the changing needs of our students and the changing landscapes of higher education.
Thousands of our stakeholders, and I hope at least some of you in this room, provided critical input into this new framework for our future. At a high, 20,000 foot level, we have worked to align our shared academic vision across our entire Wake Forest community as we approach the institution’s 2034 bicentennial and prepare for Wake Forest’s third century.
If you have read this framework, you already know that our commitment to Pro Humanitate is at its center. Our unique value proposition, “Wake Foresters will embody Pro Humanitate at home and in the world,” underscores our strong community identity and our commitment to reckoning with our past to inform our present and future. This commitment, and our three thematic goals of creating communities of learning, communities of inquiry, and communities of sustainable partnerships, will pave the way for us to achieve our strategic aims. Wake Forest will be a catalyst for learning and discovery, for innovation and society, and for access and opportunity.
Over this next year, our deans in each of our schools and the College will be using “Framing Our Future” to develop and create their own frameworks. I just recently reviewed their plans for doing this work with their faculty, students and alumni and am so encouraged by their enthusiasm and vision.
The deans’ commitment is especially important because they are critical leaders, and in many cases, very new leaders! Since becoming Provost last year, we have welcomed three remarkable deans to Wake Forest – Andy Klein in the School of Law and Jackie Krasas in the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences on July 1, and Corey Walker in the School of Divinity on September 7.
Meanwhile, the School of Business, led by dean Annette Ranft, now in her second year, will celebrate several significant milestones this fall, including the 75th anniversary of business education at Wake Forest University and the 50th anniversary of the first graduating class of MBA students.
Our newest school, the School for Professional Studies in Charlotte led by former business school dean Charles Iacovou, is growing fast with a total enrollment of nearly 300 graduate students and will celebrate its third birthday this coming January.
I am so proud of the great work we do at Wake Forest. We are so clear that our academic mission lies at the heart of the Wake Forest community. Our students, faculty, staff, deans, vice presidents, president and the board of trustees believe in the kind of outstanding teaching, learning and research that are Wake Forest’s calling cards. Our commitment to the teacher-scholar ideal, student-faculty engagement, small class sizes, the whole student and tenured permanent faculty is unwavering.
On Friday afternoon of Family Weekend, just three days ago, I attended Wake Forest’s undergraduate research day in Sutton Center. Nearly 150 students displayed their research, their posters explaining their mentored independent research projects in virtually every major in the College and with research labs in the medical school and with academic partners around the country and even the world. The aisles were thronged with supportive faculty, family members and students’ friends eager to learn more about these exciting research projects that reshape what we know about the world, and may very well be a springboard for a Wake Forest Nobel Prize winner or two in the next few decades. Last week the Center for Energy, Environment, and Sustainability hosted seven college-aged Indigenous leaders from the Peruvian Amazon. The visit, co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, sparked important conversations about leadership skills and solution-finding for pressing environmental and cultural challenges.
Wake Forest continues to create exciting new learning opportunities and at the same time to deliver on students’ post-graduate success. Across the last decade, 96% of each year’s graduating class reported having a job or admission to graduate school within 6 months post-graduation. In more recent years, that number has been 98%. Moreover, the post-graduation career outcomes of Wake Forest College of Arts and Sciences majors, our so-called liberal arts majors, are equivalent to those in the School of Business. And we continue to strengthen our commitment to access and opportunity. Slowly but surely, our underrepresented, first generation and Pell enrollment numbers continue to rise, our graduation rates, which have always been good, continue to rise as well, and this year our admissions office is launching an Early Action option specifically for first-generation students to provide an additional pathway of opportunity.
Now, let me bring us back across the pond.
Worrell House sits at 36 Steele’s Road the street name references the essayist and playwright Sir Richard Steele, who occupied a cottage in this neighborhood some 300 years ago. By the late nineteenth century, the neighborhood had become a destination for prosperous London artists, including Charles Edward Johnson, a landscape painter who exhibited at the Royal Academy, who was Worrell House’s first resident. A prominent London surgeon would live in the home for much of the 20th century.
Then, in the Fall of 1976, Wake Forest President Ralph Scales sent Pete Moore, the director of the Physical Plant, to London, to look for a house in which to start our second overseas program after Casa Artom in Venice.
Mr. Moore heard about the brick Victorian on Steele’s road in Hampstead, so close to the Chalk Farm underground station, in a neighborhood full of British historical and literary memories, including John Keats’ house. The house was purchased for ￡67,500 through the generosity of alumnus Eugene Worrell, and journalism professor Bynum Shaw and his wife were sent to the house in the spring of 1977 to ready it for its first program that summer. On July 4, 1977, President Scales, Eugene Worrell and his wife Anne, trustees, and representatives from Oxford, Cambridge, the University of London and the London School of economics officially designated the living room the Churchill Room, and Sarah Churchill, the daughter of Sir Winston Churchill, unveiled a bust of her father sculpted by Winston-Salem artist Earline King.
Worrell House and Casa Artom spawned what has become an incredibly impressive far-reaching global studies program at Wake Forest. With over 75% participation, we’re a national leader in global education.
For 45 years, Worrell House has been a beloved academic hub in Hampstead where Wake Forest resident professors and London-based professors have taught hundreds and hundreds of bright students about history, literature art, theatre, music and culture, using London and its surrounds as a living and learning laboratory – experiential learning at its finest. Retired Professor of History Jim Barefield relished the ways he could bring British history, culture, art and politics to life during his semesters as a resident faculty member here, and the escapades he and his students experienced. He still chuckles about the scavenger hunts he created that spilled Wake Forest students across the city, where they would get temporarily lost, giving them unexpected adventures he and they still talk about to this day.
Worrell House alumni have told me again and again how much they loved their semester living in this lovely house on a quiet street in one of the nicest neighborhoods in the city just a 15-minute tube ride from central London. One of those alumni has never stopped talking about his Worrell House experience in the fall of 1984, making me especially envious, and that is my own husband, Kevin Pittard, who is here tonight. He grew up in Atlanta, was a first generation history major, and had never left the country before. His experience was truly transformative, compelling him to become an educator.
They have told me how much they loved their shared meal preparations for their special American Thanksgiving together; they loved the massive skylight and high ceilings that reminded them of the house’s origins as an artists studio; they loved the few warm nights they could grill out on the patio, and they loved snuggling up inside on a cold night with steaming mugs of Cadbury hot cocoa watching movies on the massive projector.
And they have told me that mostly they have loved their time learning with incredible teacher-scholars who have helped them see themselves and the world with new eyes and they have loved the lifelong friendships they formed in this very special program in this very special place.
Let me close by thanking Kline Harrison, Vice Provost for Global Affairs, David Taylor, Assistant Dean, for Study Away Programs, our wonderful Worrell House staff, and our resident faculty member, Stephanie Koscak. And thank all of you, our Wake Forest Worrell House parents and alums and students for your commitment to this exceptional program and its transformative impact on generations of Wake Forest students – past, present and future.
– Michele Gillespie, Provost