MEET YOU IN …. GENEVA?

By now you will have heard the news that many of Wells’ artifacts — including Minerva — as well as the endowment are to be sent to a new home in Geneva, on the campus of the Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Plans are underway for the legacy of Wells to continue, with both a physical presence of parts of the college, as well as space for alums to once again gather. But just how effective will this “lasting” legacy be? While it is certainly a better choice than exile hours and miles away at Manhattanville University, why was it seen as the only extant option for the Trustees to choose?

What the new and allegedly “better” choice of Hobart and William Smith over Manhattanville means is that the Wells Board of Trustees and the administration, left to their own devices, have finally had to back away from their original bad choice.

And it is abundantly clear that they have been making bad choices for Wells for a very long time. Should we applaud them for a “better” legacy partner when we could and should have had the best choice, and still be enjoying our alma mater and its treasures in Aurora, where they — and we — belong? The Board of Trustees is now poised to take that from us and from future generations.

Two to three years of welcoming displaced, tuition-paying Wells students (67 in total) does not make HWS the optimal choice. It does not ensure that a vibrant Wells memory and living culture will flourish. In three years, all former Wells students will have graduated. There will be no one who studied on the Wells campus. The Wells Legacy will soon become extinct.

We need to imagine what a visit to some other campus that is not Wells will feel like. Will our pulses race with anticipation? Will we recognize what was familiar and what we loved during our four years there? Will we feel like we’ve come home?

For nearly all of us, the memories of where we once studied will be gone. Not one footstep will feel familiar. We will not encounter students who live in our old dorm or who share a favorite professor. We won’t be able to ask a student if they are an Odd or an Even. No echoes of times past will come to our ears. And the bells will be silent, now forgotten and orphaned miles away. And we will be hard pressed to find anyone who knows more about Wells than its name.

Don’t let them get away with jeopardizing our campus, the village, the lakefront; don’t let them leave what should be our legacy to dusty, unvisited realms and auctioned-off isolation. There are four bids that want to keep the campus intact, accessible to alums, and as a place of learning that keeps alive a vibrant Wells legacy. CCFW believes that our bid is the best and most sustainable. Our commitment to potential collaboration with other bidders, the Village of Aurora, and community stakeholders is a solid and carefully planned one, and it preserves the Wells legacy where it belongs: IN AURORA.

We deserve a better future than what is being proposed. Alums should have both voice and agency regarding our many concerns. We ARE Wells: We are both its past as well as its future. Please voice your support for the next chapter of Wells — in Aurora — by supporting CCFW’s plan.