Right before Rosalind Wiseman ’91 was about to go home for Thanksgiving her first year of college, a group of her friends pulled her aside in her first-year dorm.
In Pauley Hall, Wiseman said her friends shared that they had worked really hard to make her a nicer person — they were afraid that she would go back home to Washington, D.C. and go backwards. Wiseman admitted that before she came to Occidental, she was not “nice” — a D.C. native, she described the crowd at her East Coast high school to be preppy, arrogant and “name-drop-y.”
Wiseman said this heart-to-heart was an important moment that demonstrated the sense of community at Occidental.
“I really was like, ‘Oh my God, thank you so much for investing in me,” Wiseman said. “It was really powerful because I had people saying to me like, ‘You’ve become part of our community,’ and I think that’s what I credit Occidental with — really being a part of a community where people were very smart [and] were very genuine.”
Wiseman said she graduated from Occidental in 1991 as a political science major with a focus on political theory. According to Wiseman, the academic environment at Occidental and in her major made her become much more careful, insightful and aware of the things that she believes and why.
“One of the best things about being at Occidental was that in my political theory program, there were a lot of people who didn’t necessarily agree with me about my politics, but we had amazing, amazing debates and discussions,” Wiseman said. “I think it was where I really realized and felt it on a day-to-day basis, in an academic sense, […] the joy of being able to learn from people who disagree with you.”
Wiseman said she has carried what she learned and experienced at Occidental throughout her life.
“My whole career is about being with people and being in spaces where there is disagreement,” Wiseman said. “That started at Oxy.”
Outside of academics, Wiseman found herself coping with personal struggles as a member of the Occidental tennis team.
“Playing tennis just became an enormous burden for me — self-esteem or the lack thereof, I was never good enough,” Wiseman said. “All the joy of being a good athlete or working hard at something, getting better at something, just absolutely disappeared in tennis because everything just connected to my pain and it was really, really devastating.”
After Wiseman decided to quit the tennis team, she said she began to frequent the local martial arts school in Eagle Rock. This new hobby soon led Wiseman to a second-degree black belt and a new source of empowerment.
“I very quickly realized the smaller, political power of teaching girls about girls’ empowerment through their mind and body,” Wiseman said. “The martial arts gave me the ability to remember that I was a good athlete and feeling powerful because of my physical ability.”
Carrying what she learned from martial arts back to D.C. after graduation, Wiseman said she began teaching self-defense and social-emotional learning (SEL) to girls.
“I was already really focused on [how] people have rights, but people also have the responsibility to stand up for themselves and do their best to be able to advocate for themselves so that people respect their rights,” Wiseman said.
In a 2002 article from The New York Times, writer Margaret Talbot wrote about the particular course that Wiseman taught at a private girls’ school in Washington.
“Wiseman’s class is about gossip and cliques and ostracism and just plain meanness among girls,” Talbot wrote. “But perhaps the simplest way to describe its goals would be to say that it tries to make middle-school girls be nice to one another.”
A few months after Talbot’s article, Wiseman published “Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends and other Realities of Adolescence,” a self-help book that focuses on the aggression, exclusion, gossip and manipulation that are prominent among teenage girls.
Who took interest in the New York Times article and Wiseman’s class? Tina Fey.
Wiseman said Fey, who was writing a screenplay, saw the article and asked to buy the rights to “Queen Bees and Wannabes.” The book and Talbot’s article then helped inspire the 2004 comedy “Mean Girls.”
Today, Wiseman is the best-selling author of nine books and serves as a senior leadership consultant in the U.S. State Department’s Office for Overseas Schools, according to an email sent by President Tom Stritikus to all Occidental students. Stritikus said he was inspired by the way that Wiseman has helped others find solutions to a range of challenges and is confident that she will likewise inspire the Class of 2025.
“Rosalind Wiseman has dedicated her career to educating others about the importance of communication and community, and as an Oxy alumna, her work represents our core values of excellence, equity, community and service,” Stritikus said via email.
Alongside Wiseman, retired civil rights lawyer Peter Roos ’64 will be honored with an honorary degree from Occidental at commencement on May 18.
“As a renowned civil rights lawyer, Peter Roos fought to ensure that all students would have meaningful access to education, and his work has made a lasting impact on educational equity,” Stritikus said via email. “His service exemplifies the College’s unwavering commitment to providing all of our students with a meaningful, interdisciplinary, experiential education, with equal protections for all.”
Looking back, Wiseman said she would tell her graduating self that good role models are there, and people must seek them. Wiseman said it is too easy to be vulnerable to chasing superficial success or finding poor role models.
“Define what it looks like to you: a role model that you truly respect, that you admire the way that they conduct things — not just what they achieve, [but] how they have achieved it,” Wiseman said. “And then you come up with a list of the people that you want to emulate or that you want to learn from as you come into your adulthood.”
Contact Emma Cho at echo2@oxy.edu
