Since 2005: More than you really want to know about Wellesley, Mass.
Riley McNair, an art history major and soccer player Wellesley College, earlier this month beat the field—many breaking in their commencement gowns—at the 130th annual hoop rolling competition.
The event takes place at Tupelo Lane, and the winner gets dunked in Lake Waban to celebrate.According to the school, “the winner will be the first to achieve happiness and success, whatever that means to” that individual.
Thank you to Wellesley College student Iris Zhan for sharing photos.
For over a century, the Clapp Library at Wellesley College has stood as the intellectual heart of Wellesley College. But after an ambitious 18-month renovation, the building has emerged, fresh from library staff is calling “a complete glow up.” Reopening its doors this past September, the 180,000-square-foot facility now blends its historic 1910 roots with the needs of the 21st-century student.
The original plan was for modest, low-key updates to address deferred maintenance. As with most renovations of historic buildings—the thoughtfully designed ones, anyway—a lick and a promise wasn’t going to cut it. The project quickly morphed into a full-building intervention as the project team realized the library required the kind of transformation that meets modern needs—and must conform to modern rules. So many building code requirements. So much for a low-key, easy-peasy reno job.
Alexis Veigas, Clapp’s Office and Building Manager and Jenifer Bartle, Director of Library Collections took time out of their day to show me around a renewed space of which they’re rightfully quite proud.
Boston-based Shepley Bulfinch was the architectural firm chosen for the job. The Boston-based company has over 100 years of history with the College. The original library building was designed by Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge and opened in 1910. Two subsequent additions were designed by Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson and Abbott, opening in 1959 and 1975, respectively.
Walking into the refreshed lobby, visitors are immediately greeted by a vibe that is both welcoming and professional. Student-staffed kiosks and a redesigned service desk anchor the main entrance which, for the first time, is wheelchair accessible. In fact, the whole building now features new accessibility features. All four floors of shelving are now wheelchair accessible, and the building was designed to support both neuro- and physical diversity.
The jewel in the Clapp Library crown has always been the Presidents’ Reading Room. But over the years, some hodge-podge elements had infiltrated. After consulting historical photographs, the team tracked down and returned original study tables that had been dispersed throughout the building over decades.
“This space is one of my wow factors for sure,” said Jenifer Bartle, Director of Library Collections.
The room now features new chandeliers—replacing outdated, “big-box store” fixtures—along with lighting that highlights the portraits of Wellesley’s 14 presidents dating back to 1875. Bookshelf-lined walls give the space a classic reading room feel while modern comforts were added. Those original study tables are as cool as they were 100 years ago, but the vintage straight-backed wooden chairs—not so much. So new chairs were tested by students and staff for comfort, promptly replacing the old back-breakers.
History has been preserved, but modern technology certainly was not left behind. The new Knapp Makerspace and Multimedia Center has been added, equipped with fabrication tools and high-end creative software. A new equipment check-out desk allows students to more efficiently borrow Chromebooks, laptops, and professional media gear like cameras and audio recorders.
The much-anticipated cafe opened last month, because who wants to venture outside for a bite to eat during a marathon study session? When we were there, the cafe and lounge area looked like it had been discovered. Although the cafe won’t be staffed all 20 hours per day the library is open to students, there is a vending area for those late-night nosh needs. While the wider Wellesley community is welcome from 9am to 4pm to the library or the cafe, the Clapp Library is truly a student space.
The renovation was made possible through the generous support of Trustee Emerita Lia Gelin Poorvu ’56 and her husband, Bill. Their contribution allowed the college to go beyond surface-level repairs and address critical, “invisible” infrastructure including new HVAC systems, two new elevators, and fresh paint and carpeting throughout, along with enhanced humidity and temperature controls to protect the archives and special collections—and, as Bartle noted, “our people too.”
Sustainability was also at the forefront of the new design. Green features include all-electric HVAC systems and energy efficient lighting. Ignoring the siren call of teardown/rebuild, and instead reusing the existing structure to minimize new embodied carbon, was another key move that also kept as many materials as possible out of the landfill.
Flexibility, adaptability, and student-facing were the watchwords that informed every feature of the design. With a couple hundred additional seats added to the footprint (which, by the way, remained intact), Clapp Library is ready for the future. The design philosophy centered on flexibility and adaptability. Rooms that serve as faculty-student consultation areas during the day easily transition into student-led group spaces on evenings and weekends.
“We needed flexibility in space, and flexibility in how the spaces are used over time,” Bartle said. As the college moves forward, Clapp Library stands as a testament to the idea that a historic building can evolve, providing a light-filled sanctuary for generations of students to come.
Our Wellesley College insider, Iris Zhan, shared a bunch of great photos from the Boston Marathon’s Scream Tunnel that we didn’t get into our earlier coverage…
Wellesley College students are looking forward to the Puerto Rican band Chuwi performing on campus as part of its Last Day of Class celebration at Munger Meadow. The event, on April 30 at 7pm, is open to members of the Wellesley College community and guests.
Chuwi has toured with Bad Bunny and their collaboration with him—WELTiTA—appeared on the superstar’s award-winning 2025 album, Debí Tirar Más Fotos.
According to The Wellesley News, Chuwi will be the first Spanish-language performers to headline the annual spring concert.
All three Wellesley college—Babson College, MassBay Community College, and Wellesley College—have revealed this spring’s commencement speakers for the classes of ’26.
Babson of course is going with a couple of entrepreneurial leaders for its May 16 ceremony.
C. Dean Metropoulos, Babson ’67, MBA’68, is executive chairman and CEO of the family-owned investment firm Metropoulos & Co. and minority owner of the New England Patriots. He’ll speak at the undergraduate ceremony, recognizing more than 740 students.
Adriana Cisneros, CEO of global enterprise Cisneros, will speak at the graduate ceremony, where 540 students will receive their diplomas. The Cisneros business spans media and entertainment, consumer goods, digital innovation, global connectivity, and real estate.
MassBay, the state-owned school with a Wellesley campus, has tapped Lt. Gov. Kimberly Driscoll as its commencement speaker for the May 28 ceremony.
Wellesley College has invited Rice University distinguished fellow Ruth J. Simmons to speak at its commencement ceremony on Friday, May 15. Simmons has served as president of Smith College, Brown University, and historically Black university Prairie View A&M.
On Sunday March 8 at Wellesley College‘s Jewett Auditorium, Castle of Our Skins presented a performance lecture of Derrick Skye’s “American Mirror” String Quartet that engaged audiences in cross-cultural music traditions. Part of the Wellesley College Concert Series, the performance involved audience participation, with attendees singing and clapping to support the musicians.
Castle of Our Skins, based in greater Boston, celebrates Black artistry through concerts and education.
The event began with an introduction of Derrick Skye’s “American Mirror” by co-founder, artistic director, and violist of Castle of Our Skins Ashleigh Gordon, followed by guided demonstrations of different ornamentations and rhythms used in the two-part piece.
The piece is divided into two parts, with the first featuring Bulgarian choral influences. Gordon invited the audience to softly hum in the first part and played the exact notes to hum on her viola. She also pointed out how the cellist Francesca uses her instrument as a percussive instrument, mimicking the sounds of various hand drums like the tabla, congo, or jembe. The quartet played small sections to allow the audience to practice their participation, then returned to talking about the piece.
“We will mark the shape of the adita with our hands. So it’s a shared cultural practice highlighted in the piece all about communities coming together, cultures coming together. The Adi Tala is counted with four beats, Lahu, meaning on the fingers, and two Dru tons, which are clap and away.”
On Monday March 2, Wellesley College Professor Petra Rivera-Rideau and Loyola Marymount University Professor Vanessa Díaz debuted their book P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance in Wellesley College’s Alumnae Ballroom.
The authors developed the first and second courses about Bad Bunny in the United States respectively. In 2023, they created the Bad Bunny syllabus, a website with resources that contextualize Bad Bunny success in relation to Puerto Rican politics. They selected a few chapters from their book to talk about how Puerto Rican resistance has shown up in every stage of Bad Bunny’s career, with each chapter assigned to a Bad Bunny song that represents that theme.
“‘Send me your syllabus right now. I’m about to meet Bad Bunny.’ I was so weirded out, and I was like, ‘Do you mean the website or the PDF, but are you joking?’ I think to myself, it’s April 1, this is an April Fool’s joke. Students are playing a practical joke on me. She wrote back to me ‘No, I’m serious.’ And then the next thing you know, I get a video of her having Bad Bunny scroll through the Bad Bunny syllabus website and going, ‘Wow, this is amazing.’”
Chapter two is called “Estamos Bien” and touches on Bad Bunny’s mainstream rise to fame and how it relates to Hurricane Maria. For Bad Bunny’s first time on American TV on Jimmy Fallon, he made an effort to speak English, which he doesn’t do often, and called out Trump for his negligence of Puerto Rico during Hurricane Maria, all before performing “Estamos Bien.” The song title roughly means “we will be alright,” focused on community resilience post-Hurricane Maria. The authors elaborated on the significance of this moment at this point in his career.
“He’s not a superstar at this point. The risks he’s willing to take as a new artist really show he is going to be showing up for his homeland,” Rivera-Rideau shared.
Bad Bunny has also made a lot of statements around gender identity and advocating for LGBTQ communities, particularly in Puerto Rico. Following the brutal murder of a Puerto Rican trans woman named Alexa Negron, he shows up on Jimmy Fallon with a T-shirt that says “they killed Alexa, not a man in a skirt,” but in Spanish, cementing his reputation for advocating for LGBTQ communities on the island.
His music video for his 2018 song “Caro” is one of the reasons Rivera-Rideau made her Bad Bunny class, because about 75% of her students wrote a paper about this music video for her Latin music class. This music video starts with him getting his nails painted, a reference to when he was denied entrance into a nail salon in Spain. He swaps places with a model and the pair appear to be an androgynous couple, and the viewer sometimes can’t tell who’s who, on purpose. Later in the video, he gets kissed by a man and by a woman. For a genre like reggaeton that’s hyper masculine, it was a profound moment.
These were just some of the fruitful discussions which concluded with a book signing and celebratory cake eating.
As visitors came into the lobby, student workers gave out feather boas to guests in an homage to the new exhibit “The Immortal Magu” and were welcomed with remarks from Wellesley College faculty and Davis Museum staff, celebrating the significance of the Davis Museum exhibitions as part of the 150th anniversary of the college.
The new exhibit on Wellesley College traditions contains artifacts, records, and pictures of how student traditions have evolved over time. Some traditions highlighted include Flower Sunday, hoop rolling, step singing, and marathon Monday. They also included lesser known traditions that have been discontinued such as the Wellesley fudge cake and float night. Pictures of students ranged from the 1900s to the 2010s, showcasing the longevity of some traditions.
The Davis Museum will be doing curatorial tours of these new exhibits as well as drop-in public tours across different themes throughout the museum. You can visit the Davis Museum website to find more information.
