NORTON - Postage stamps cost 6 cents when Wheaton College's commencement speaker was an undergrad.

Trips to the post office, she says, were priceless. "One of my highlights at Wheaton was walking to the post office to get mail," Duke University Law Professor Katharine Bartlett said.

The 1968 graduate of Wheaton College will reflect on the past 40 years, and speculate about the next 40 at her alma mater's 173rd commencement Saturday.

She also will compare and contrast 1968 and 2008, and discuss how Wheaton has prepared the graduating class for the challenges facing it.

The ceremony begins at 10 a.m. in the Dimple, a green space in the center of the campus, on Route 123. In the event of extreme weather, the ceremony will move to the Beard Field House in the Haas Athletic Center.

This marks 40 years since Bartlett and about 430 classmates - all women - celebrated their rite of passage together.

The campus was "a pretty quiet place," much like her hometown of North Guilford, Conn., where her family owned a lumber mill and lived on a farm where they grew their own food, she said.

Wheaton "was a little community, being all women and not having easy ways out. But I loved it there," Bartlett said.

And home was only about a three-hour drive away.

"For me, coming out of a fairly rural background, it was not too big a step," said Bartlett, who added that she held work-study jobs on campus.

"The academics were fabulous. The professors were fabulous. I had opportunities to learn about things and think and study a lot," she said.

Bartlett said she has visited the campus a few times since.

"A couple of people I've kept in touch with are going to be at reunion, so I'm looking forward to seeing them," she said.

"That's kind of exciting, to give that graduation talk." Reunion weekend runs Friday through Sunday.

Bartlett can tell her former classmates about her own changes since graduating 40 years ago.

She served as dean of the Duke University School of Law from 2000 to 2007.

She now is the school's A. Kenneth Pye Professor of Law. She teaches family law, gender law and contracts, in addition to publishing widely in the fields of family law, gender theory, employment law, theories of social change and legal education. She has the leading casebook (with Deborah Rhode) in the area of gender law.

Bartlett's message to the Wheaton class of 2008 will focus on how times have changed since her college days.

Computers, for example, didn't exist on the scale they do today.

"What occupies most of people's time now really didn't exist," Bartlett said.

And Bartlett recalls writing her senior thesis on a manual typewriter with four sheets of carbon paper.

She added, however, "I don't want the talk to be either 'the good old days' or 'the Dark Ages.'"

"It's not better or worse," Bartlett said. "It's just different."

MICHAEL GELBWASSER can be reached at 508-236-0439 or at mgelbwasser@thesunchronicle.com.