Wesleyan Alumnus-Greenpeace Activist Jailed in Russia

This morning I read a moving op-ed in the Washington Post about Dima Litvinov ’86, a Greenpeace activist recently arrested in Russia. Having organized protests against Russia’s exploitation of the Arctic, Dima was originally arrested with several others on charges of piracy. After protests against this dramatic over-reaching, the charges were reduced to hooliganism. The charges in this case were prompted by Greenpeace activists trying to put a banner on a Russian oil rig.

The op-ed piece is by Dima’s father, and this is how it concludes:

Dima and the others are threatened with long prison terms because they love and defend nature. That includes the Russian Arctic, which is threatened by senseless and dangerous drilling.

I know only too well what a prison term in Russia means. I was arrested for participating in 1968 in a demonstration against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Lev Kopelev, Dima’s grandfather on his mother’s side, a Soviet writer, spent eight years in Soviet prison camps because he protested the looting and raping of the German population by Soviet officers and soldiers during World War II, when he fought the Nazi army.

Dima’s grandfather was arrested under Joseph Stalin, and I, Dima’s father, was arrested under Leonid Brezhnev. The Soviet Union doesn’t exist anymore, but Dima has been arrested under Russian President Vladimir Putin — a former member of the Soviet secret police, the KGB. Is it not the time to break the cycle?

The Wesleyan community has been asked to support Dima and the other Greenpeace activists. They were peacefully protesting, but they are no hooligans.

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(Igor Podgorny/Associated Press) – In this photo released by Greenpeace International, activist Dima Litvinov in a defendants’ cage at the district court, in Murmansk, Russia, on Oct. 23.

Re-Imagining the Residential

In mid-September I put out a call to faculty, staff and students for “1-2 page proposals for initiatives that have the potential to significantly improve the distinctive educational experience of Wesleyan students by leveraging its residential dimensions. What kinds of programs should we strengthen or create to offer our students deeper opportunities for learning? What kinds of programs should we create or strengthen to extend the impact of the years spent on the Wesleyan campus?” We already have heard about some exciting ideas, and we look forward to receiving more proposals by the end of this week.

During a time of enormous change in American higher education, there is a great opportunity to rethink how we can make the most of our work together on campus. How do first-year students become part of an inclusive, creative community? How do the possibilities for campus learning change as students move through the curriculum? What is the role of the faculty in the residential life of the university? How do student interests while they are on campus affect the evolution of the curriculum, or specific course offerings? How are the arts, athletics, and independent research encouraged by our residential facilities, and how can we do even more in these areas?

These are only some of the questions we will be thinking about as we read the proposals. If you are thinking about submitting your ideas, please get your 1-2 pages in by the end of the week to 2020@wesleyan.edu!

 

 

 

Bioethics and the Limits of Experimentation

Since coming back to Wesleyan in 2007, I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Joseph Fins ’82, who was on the Board of Trustees (and the presidential search committee) when I was hired. Joe is a proud graduate of the College of Letters, a physician and a bio-ethicist. I just read his powerful critique of experiments in Romania on children who had the misfortune to grow up in that country’s orphanages. Joe questions the ethics of randomized studies with children, when it is very likely that those children will be harmed by the conditions being studied. In a recent Hastings Center forum he writes:

One of the salient lessons of twentieth-century bioethics is that scientists cannot always do the experiment they would like to do. When you are not in a lab and unable to control all the variables, if you try to control all the variables, people can get hurt. That is what happened in Romania. And it is a double tragedy because investigators could have had the same policy impact if they had done their research in a different way. They could have been more attentive to the fact that some of the children suffered harm from ongoing early exposure to the orphanages that could have been interrupted.

Joe quotes his COL teacher, philosopher Elisabeth Young-Breuhl:

It is the great task of human beings–the essential task–to understand what adults should give children; what is–to use a legal phrase–“in the best interests of the child.” The basic needs of all children are the same; there are universal needs. And it should be the task of any and all adults to understand those needs and meet them. Children depend upon adults for this understanding, and if it is not applied, not translated into the actions of child-rearing and education, children cannot grow and develop freely and become adults who, in turn, give such understanding and action to their own children.

I sit on the Board of Trustees of the Hastings Center with Joe and Joshua Boger ’73. I so value the way these Wes alumni (and other members of the Hastings Center) connect a deep knowledge of science with questions of politics, policy and ethics. This is at the core of a liberal education. You can read more of Joe’s essay here.
Joe Fins will be on campus to hold a WesSeminar on medical writing, consciousness and human rights over Homecoming Family Weekend. You can find out more here.

Fall Break Travels — Amherst, Washington, San Francisco

Fall break is usually a busy time for me, and this year is no exception. It started off with a bang at Amherst. All our athletes competed superbly, and our football team won at Amherst for the first time in many years. It was an exciting game, and there was a great Wesleyan turnout in the visitors’ bleachers. I’m not sure if our lusty cheering helped all that much, but it didn’t hurt. In the end the team left Amherst at 5-0. This is a result for which Alumni Director John Driscoll ’62 has been waiting for a long time!

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This morning I headed down to Washington, D.C., to talk about improving learning outcomes in higher education at an event sponsored by the Hamilton Project. Our session was chaired by former Secretary of the Treasury Robert E. Rubin, and I was joined by University of North Carolina President Thomas Ross and Chancellor Francisco G. Cigarroa from the University of Texas. Although the challenges of these large public systems are quite different from those we face at Wesleyan, I was proud to learn that many were looking to our work at Wesleyan for innovative ideas that might translate to a variety of educational contexts.

Hamilton Project Panel on Higher Education
Hamilton Project Panel on Higher Education

Tomorrow I head West for a great THIS IS WHY event in San Francisco with Michael Pollan P’15 and Jonathan Bloom ’99. They will be talking about food as pleasure, necessity, and industry. I can hardly wait!

UPDATE:

We had a great turnout last night for the conversation about food, politics, culture and the environment. I saw several recent alumni and alumni from decades back (some who are also current Wes parents). Jonathan was a wonderful interviewer, and Michael described both the systemic issues in the way we produce (and waste) food and what we can do about it. I was particularly glad to hear him describe the massive political challenges while also analyzing the positive steps that we can take that make a difference immediately. And he gave a great shout-out to Wesleyan farmers at Long Lane and to our environmental activists more generally.

Michael Pollan P'15 and Jonathan Bloom '97
Michael Pollan P’15 and Jonathan Bloom ’99

This is Why.

 

New Opportunities for Winter Studies

Today we sent an announcement to the campus community about new offerings for early January.

We are introducing Winter at Wesleyan – academic offerings and Career Center programs designed to provide students with immersion-style classes and a variety of opportunities to help with life after Wesleyan.

The faculty has approved Winter at Wesleyan, which will run for two weeks beginning January 8. We will be offering four Winter Session classes for full credit at a cost of $2,900 per course, and students may live in residence halls at no additional cost. An optional meal plan is available. These classes will be small, allowing for close interaction with faculty, and registration is now open. Limited financial aid will be available to students receiving aid during the academic year.

This is a small pilot program, and the faculty discussed at length the pros and cons of intensive courses of this kind. After thoughtful deliberation, they decided that we ought to proceed with this experiment to determine how effectively these kinds of classes complement the courses offered during the semester.

Winter on Wyllys includes a variety of career-related initiatives. For the first time, the Fullbridge Program will run its “internship edge” intensive at Wesleyan, which provides intensive training in business fundamentals. In addition, Career Center staff will be presenting two concurrent, week-long intensive programs: CareerLab for those preparing to enter the job market, and Choosing Good Work for those students trying to make sense of their options and personal goals. The Career Center also will offer their WEShadow externship program, as well as an alumni guest speakers series. For more information, please contact the Career Center.

I’m pleased to see the beginning of 2014 bringing to Wesleyan students new options and opportunities.

Celebrating Co-Education and the Navaratri Festival

Today alumni, faculty and current students will be meeting to discuss the impact of coeducation on education at Wesleyan and across the country. Forty years ago Wes graduated its first class with a substantial number of women who began as frosh. We should also acknowledge the several women who had previously transferred to Wes, or who had registered here through exchange programs. Today Dr. Sheila Tobias, our first woman Provost, will help lead “Campus Transformation Through Coeducation,” a daylong event including a panel discussion with female change agents from the 1970s and discussions with alumni and faculty about campus culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s. As I wrote in a blog post this summer, Wesleyan began an experiment with co-education in the late 19th century that lasted until 1912. At that time, alumni groups put pressure on the administration to return to the status quo embraced by the all-male schools with which the university compared itself. In reaction, a more adventurous group of alumni joined to help found Connecticut College as an institution for the education of women.

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In 1968, at a time when many schools were considering co-education, Wesleyan began admitting women as transfer and exchange students and two years later admitted first-year female students for the first time since 1909. I began as a freshman in the fall of 1975, shortly after those students had graduated. By then, in just those few years, co-education had made great strides, so much so that I wasn’t aware of how recently women had become part of campus culture. Looking back, many of my women friends were doubtless more aware than I of the barriers to inclusion that still existed for female students – and for students of color, and gay, lesbian and trans students. There was certainly an active feminist movement on campus, but (as I recall) the primary focus was on global issues of patriarchy with some activists taking on local issues of campus discrimination and sexual harassment.

Today’s discussion will focus on the transformation of education through co-education across the country. Many of the sessions will be held in Beckham Hall.

 

The Navaratri Festival‘s celebration of Indian music and dance continues today. This is the 37th annual festival, and the concerts, lectures and dance are always at the highest level. Here’s a taste from an earlier festival.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwdDm3UO5WM[/youtube]

 

 

On Tyranny (and Collaborative Research)

When I was a student at Wesleyan in the 1970s, I had the extraordinary experience of taking a very small seminar (a tutorial really) on the philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel with  Victor Gourevitch — now William Griffin Professor of Philosophy Emeritus. Prof. Gourevitch taught classes in political philosophy, but also on the ancient Greeks. He had been a director of the Center for the Humanities, and students circulated tales of his biting wit and demanding assignments. He didn’t seem to fall into the conventional categories of campus politics in those days; my peers didn’t know what to make of him.

The Hegel seminar was life changing for me. There were only a few of us, and we worked our way through the major texts in the late afternoon hours. I don’t know if I’d ever worked so hard before, or if I’d ever felt that lost in a book. I remember Prof. Gourevitch once noticing my underlinings on the text and asking me if the passages I hadn’t underlined were the ones I wanted to remember. Hegel saw history as the realization of truth. Making sense of past, he taught, gave one the opportunity to be fully alive to the present. This was very heady stuff for someone with my interests in psychology and history. During one of our seminars he also mentioned one of the great 20th century readers of Hegel, a Russo-French philosopher named Alexander Kojève.

Years later I would write my Ph.D. dissertation on Kojève and other French Hegelians. In the course of the research I asked Kojève’s widow, Nina Ivanoff, if she had ever found letters among his papers from Leo Strauss, a German-Jewish philosopher who’d emigrated to the United States. “Why would I have,” she said with some impatience, “the papers have already been thoroughly studied by other scholars. But come back tomorrow and we’ll talk.” When I arrived the next day there was a stack of letters from Strauss. In them the two mentioned the young Victor Gourevitch, who had come from Strauss’ classes at the University of Chicago to study with Kojève (and translate some texts). Eventually, I went to Chicago to find the other side of the correspondence.

In collecting these letters, I knew I had come upon something very important, and I turned to my teacher to ask for help. Prof. Gourevitch and I (mostly, he, really) deciphered the letters as best we could, and he translated them from the German. We wrote an introduction together, sitting in his Middletown living room, getting agreement on each sentence. The correspondence deals with some of the great questions of political theory, most centrally the relation of philosophy to society and to history. Strauss argues that philosophy abdicates its responsibility when it bends to the will of society, or tries to articulate truths that will be confirmed by historical events. From his perspective, philosophy’s questions will always challenge convention, and they will often challenge those self-styled radical thinkers who pride themselves as being unconventional. Kojève, by contrast, argued that philosophy was its time articulated in thought. Echoing Hegel, he insisted that philosophy divorced from history led to irrelevance or madness. He also argued that meaningful historical change had reached its end, though he recognized that we might continue to polish up our conveniences and distractions. A meaningful debate over time between people with such different, basic and passionate commitments is very rare. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why so many have been drawn to our edition (1991) of Strauss’ On Tyranny, which includes the StraussKojève correspondence.

Without that seminar on Hegel, I would never have pursued the research that led to Kojève’s widow and eventually to On Tyranny. More broadly,  it was the inspiration, guidance and friendly counsel I received from my Wesleyan professor that helped shape much of my orientation to teaching and thinking about philosophy and political theory. The Wesleyan in which we worked together was a place for this kind of intellectual camaraderie  not limited (so it seemed to me) by bureaucratic borders or campus politics. Students and faculty (who often disagreed about other things) worked side by side on issues that mattered to them, and that sometimes  would wind up mattering a great deal to others.

Prof. Gourevitch, ever careful, has made some amendments to our earlier edition, and we have decided to include a paragraph by Strauss that illuminates aspects of his objections to Kojève. The University of Chicago Press has just brought out our “corrected and expanded edition.”

 

 

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Strauss and Kojève held positions about as far apart as two people could hold within philosophy, and yet they engaged in discourse at the very highest level. Right now at Wesleyan, as in the past, students and faculty are working together on issues, concepts, and data about which people can passionately disagree. New discoveries and original arguments will be developed, sometimes about the past, often about the present and future. What remains steady is a devotion to learning together in ways that matter beyond the college years and beyond the university. Even when one works on tyranny, engaged cooperation can be the most enduring lesson.

 

Volleyball, Tonight…Football, Field Hockey and Soccer Tomorrow

Tonight at 8 pm, the volleyball team takes on Middlebury in the Silloway Gymnasium at Freeman, and they face off against Hamilton there tomorrow at 2 p.m. The team has played some tough matches this season, and Kim Farris ’14 was recently named a NESCAC Player of the Week.

Speaking of Players of the Week, Jesse Warren ’15 leads a powerful Cardinal offense tomorrow against a tough Colby squad at 1 p.m. at Corwin Stadium. LaDarius Drew ’15 and Kyle Gibson ’15 have been a terrific pair running the ball. And we’ve had the ball a lot because the defense has been awesome so far this year, with Nik Powers’15 recording eight tackles last week against Hamilton. Men’s and women’s soccer play tomorrow as well, and both teams have been ultra-competitive this year. Victoria Matthews ’16 put on a great display this week for the women, and Emmett McConnell ’15 in goal was yet another Player of the Week for the men. Field Hockey has simply been tenacious, with Sara Grundy ’16 and Sarah Prickett ’17 shining in goal. You can see them all play tomorrow (Saturday).

As usual, there’s plenty of great music on campus this weekend. Art House and Buddhist House are hosting concerts that will be the envy of Brooklyn, and tomorrow at Long Lane Farm there will be the annual Pumpkin Festival. Should be some great sounds at eats at the farm…

Pumkpin Fest 2013

 

Do it in the Dark for Financial Aid

A group of Wesleyans have gotten together to address two core priorities: sustainability and financial aid. Their idea is that students compete to save energy — turn off those lights and turn down the heat or a/c. The money on energy that the university saves by reducing our carbon footprint will be put in a special scholarship endowment so that more students in the future will have access to financial support (not loans). Pretty cool. Kate Weiner ’15 sent me a video that showcases their project.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JOvI5NrV1k[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWD2oo02KVg&src_vid=0JOvI5NrV1k&feature=iv&annotation_id=annotation_2704154419[/youtube]

You know why? This is Why.