What’s in a translation? And don’t forget about Monday.

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A quick reminder that two members of our SimpsonScarborough team are visiting campus Monday, 2/26, to present the final round of Positioning Platform work. If you would like to attend, we’ve changed the format slightly to be more of a workshop than a presentation, and we could accept a small list of new RSVPs.

Monday, February 26th
Faculty/staff session
1:00 pm – 2:00 pm
Choose one: Guild Room 203 or Zoom
RSVP your choice to info@brynmawr.edu

This week, I led several sessions to review the second round of Platform work with faculty, staff, trustees, senior staff, and representatives from multiple offices. What I like about iterative work like this is finding where different people’s feedback align, so our direction to SimpsonScarbough is clear and actionable. We had many thoughtful discussions about what students look for in their Bryn Mawr College experience, and how that experience can be described in a few words. We’ll see the final round of this work Monday.

However, I wanted to tell you about something else I found out about last week. Many of you know that the College seal has a motto in Latin: veritatem dilexi. The question I have for you is this: what is the translation of that motto in English? My understanding is that Latin can have variance in a translation, and that seems to be true in this case.

Round seal with text and owls inside

There is a webpage on the College website, written long before my arrival, that speaks to the origin of our College seal and it’s an interesting read for you Bryn Mawr history nerds out there. Oh, just me? Okay. Well, basically it says the minutes of the Board of Trustees meeting in 1903 where the seal was proposed suggested the motto translation would be “I have chosen truth.” But is that still our translation?

More modern reactions seem to indicate that somewhere along the way, the translation for our Motto became “I delight in the truth” or even “I love the truth.”

I think all those translations are interesting and relevant. Does anyone know anything about this evolution though? Ping me directly or leave a comment on the blog.