Diana Chapman Walsh

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.

Other innovations included the opening of the Davis Museum and Cultural Center, the establishment of the Religious and Spiritual Life Program, the creation of a media and technology center, a social science center, a center for the humanities, annual day-long conferences to showcase student learning in the classroom and beyond, 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.

Previously, Dr. Walsh was the Norman Professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, and chair of the Department of Health and Social Behavior. 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. Prior to that, she was at Boston University, as a University Professor, and Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences in the School of Public Health.

Walsh is a 1966 graduate of Wellesley College, as an English major. At Boston University, she earned an M. S. degree in journalism from in 1971 and, in 1983, a Ph.D. in health policy from the University Professors Program. 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.

Diana Chapman Walsh began her professional career, in the fall of 1966, at Barnard College. 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. 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. 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.

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