Ten years to 200: Founding our future
Speech delivered by Shea Kidd Brown, Vice President for Campus Life, at Founders Day on Feb. 15, 2024; remarks as prepared
Good afternoon, my name is Shea Kidd Brown, and I serve as Vice President for Campus Life. Just two years ago or 780 days – for those who wonder if I’m still counting – I joined this community. I am incredibly honored to be asked to reflect on the importance of today, and you can imagine that all of my newness came to the surface as I questioned if I had enough history at Wake Forest to speak on its behalf.
Thankfully, I heard President Wente’s speech just 48 days into my tenure. There, at her first Founders’ Day address, she introduced the fluidity of founding as a concept. In particular, she asked the question, “What does it mean to be a founder?” She also reminded us – then and today – that the act of founding is continuous; that we are a place with many foundings and many founders and she encouraged us to be founders for the future. As a creator who was trying to find my place at Wake Forest while helping students find theirs, this resonated with me then and now.
Today, I’d like to reflect on the power of story. The then, the now, and the future.
Over the past two years, I have spent a lot of time getting to know Wake Forest. And, whenever I have the opportunity to meet someone here, I often ask a simple, yet sometimes complex question.
Where is home for you?
Home.
Home is this weighty word that rarely stops at Holstein, Iowa, if you’re President Wente or Hurdle Mills, N.C., if you’re senior psychology major and today’s senior orator, Austin Torain, or Hattiesburg, Miss., if you’re me. Asking “where’s home for you?” invites an origin story. And learning that story builds a connection to it and an affinity for it.
Our origin stories are important. Many know that in addition to the Mississippi roots I mentioned earlier, I grew up 60 miles from the Gulf Coast, the granddaughter of the assistant to civil rights leader Medgar Evers. The daughter of a kindergarten teacher and clothing connoisseur. The sister of football coaches. The mom to Jack Wilson. The wife and partner to Ryan. The enjoyer of sea and soul food. The person who got “talks too much” as comments on her report card then became a communication studies major and used the strength of “talking” in my scholarship and even now, as I talk to you today.
Though it may be tempting to think of my story as linear, the truth is that it is filled with complexities. Intertwined in my story is a thread that questions my belonging. Where I fit. My failure. My success. My strengths.
And, a number of questions connected to identity that have surfaced throughout my life.
Learning to embrace all parts of my story helps me stand up straighter, connect to and through imperfection, and understand my place in the world. It gives me great clarity as I move through various places and spaces. But this clarity didn’t just happen. It took reflection. Reckoning. Naming the hard, moving forward with heart.
As I reflect on our university’s founding and what it means to be a founder, I find many parallels to our personal connections to home and story. Understanding our beginning as a university and where we’ve been matters. And like our own stories, it’s tricky, filled with complexity, and we cannot move forward with clarity and confidence if we don’t hold space for all the ways we got here and all the ways we have evolved.
The beautiful and the broken. The mistakes and the missteps. The scars and the healing.
And the hope.
The Wake Forest story certainly has all of those parts. With humble beginnings in Wake Forest, N.C., our Dear Old Wake Forest began in 1834 as Wake Forest Manual Labor Institute. The then college is very different from the now University. Our origin story is one that began on a plantation to train Baptist ministers and laymen.
Now, if you’ll allow me, I feel the need to meander for a moment before I continue. As I stand before you today, I am moved by these first few phrases about our history, specifically, as I juxtapose my lived experiences and the identities I hold as your Vice President for Campus Life.
A campus that was built and maintained by the enslaved.
Early in my tenure here and even before, I noted, quite clearly, the University’s efforts to – and I quote – “reclaim the histories silenced through the years,” as described in Beyond Nostalgia Towards an Inclusive Pro Humanitate, an essay from the Wake Forest University Slavery, Race, and Memory Project.
Today, I am moved by the reality that our founding and the celebration of it cannot and does not stop with our origin story, yet we also can’t, fast forward to 190 years without owning that part of it.
Maya Angelou once said, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” And as a university, we have learned that owning it can be both hard and liberating.
Like our personal narratives, we stand taller when we name these important elements of our evolution. I am appreciative of the work we have done and will continue to do to memorialize that part of our story.
So with this in mind, let’s pick up where I began.
With enrollment of only men at the time, students and staff were required to spend half a day working, and as is the case today, the college experience was academically rigorous. I read that “discipline was strict … with most offenses handled simply by expulsion.” Thankfully that part of the educational process has changed!
And, speaking of change, I’m struck by what it must have been like to consider the bold move from Wake Forest, N.C., to the “metropolis” that was Winston-Salem. Can you imagine the questions, perhaps concerns, anxiousness, excitement, hopes and dreams?
In simple terms, this was kind of a big deal.
So much so that President Truman spoke at the groundbreaking ceremony in 1951.
And, in a 2015 Our State article, Kate Quine wrote, “When Truman spoke that day, a mix of nostalgia and excitement clung to the air as faculty and students gathered on an empty field with no buildings — only dreams of what was to come. Nothing lay before them, yet at the same time, everything did.”
While those empty fields have been replaced with our beautiful landscape and Georgian architecture we all appreciate, we are in this moment of building again.
In this period of innovation, creativity, dreaming, and strategic framing, I can’t say nothing lies before us, but it certainly still feels like everything does.
We are 10 years to 200.
We’ve come a long way from Ed Reynolds’ admission in 1960 and the civil rights movement, the dancing ban of 1967 or allowing women to wear pants on campus but not to class in 1968 or lifting the visitation policy in 1984. Today, we aspire to be an inclusive campus where all matter, belong, and thrive. In a moment, you will learn much more about our important milestones.
The point that I want to make is that Founders Day, and really every day, requires that we hold this tension between the past and the present. Holding on to the very best of our past and making new mistakes as we look to the future.
In these moments, we recognize, with more clarity, from where we have come, always looking forward. Reckoning with the past requires that we reflect upon parts of our story that are painful, and looking to the future requires being comfortable with change, ambiguity, and the unknown.
Which brings me to my reflections about our present and future.
We are 10 years to 200, and the ever-changing landscape of American higher education and in the Forest may be the only constant in our narrative. The list of intersecting challenges and opportunities is long and gives life to our compelling “why.”
Founders Day is personal. Today, I am ever mindful that I am a founder, as are you. Each of us has a role to play in shaping our university. As we found our future together, I harken back to the sentiments that might have been in the air on that field in 1951. I am excited about our place in the world. Wake Forest University is a model for good, and this has been an enduring value since Pro Humanitate first adorned the Wake Forest College seal in 1908. And, it continues to be our North Star.
No doubt, the ground will shake and shift and our grounding and continued founding will come from understanding our story, who we are, and who we will become. As we look forward, 10 years to 200, let us continually look backward and forward at our evolving story to remain firmly planted in the Forest and to embody Pro Humanitate at home and in the world.
As I alluded to when I began, when I arrived at Wake Forest, I kept track of my days by intentionally counting them. As you might remember, Day 1 on campus was filled with eagerness, anxiety, and promise. Day 100 allowed for more confidence, comfort, and community building.
And after counting to 365, we knew there would be growth – but we did not know what the amount or pace of that growth would be.
Because on Day 1, it is impossible to know what Day 365, or 780 or Day 1000, or Day 10,000 will look like, but we hope that it will be good, maybe even better than we had hoped or even imagined.
During the 2023-2024 academic year, Wake Forest and our many organizations, departments, and people are celebrating significant milestones. When these organizations and departments were formed on Day 1, it was impossible to know what they would accomplish in the years to come, or the impact they would have on Wake Forest. And taken together, we can see the founders of our past, present, and future. When you hear your organization or department being recognized, please stand so that we may celebrate these milestones with you.