From Shopping to Giving — Support GIVING TUESDAY

As we move into Thanksgiving-Hanukkah week, many of us are struggling to finish academic work (studying, writing papers, grading) while also thinking about the holidays to come. The newspapers have squeezed out even more substance to make room for advertisements, and we may also find ourselves thinking of the gifts we have to buy. We have plenty of encouragement to do so. After all, there is Black Friday, when we are to line up early to grab deals in our favorite stores. Then there is Cyber Monday — when we can feel hipper about rushing to find gadgets without having to line up with the techless.

A couple of years ago, The 92nd St Y helped launch Giving Tuesday, an effort to turn attention away from buying stuff we may not need to giving resources to those who really do need them. This is from the organization’s website:

We have a day for giving thanks. We have two for getting deals. This year help us create #GivingTuesday. A new day for giving back.  On Tuesday December 3, 2013, global charities, families, businesses, community centers, students and more will come together to create #GivingTuesday.

It’s a simple idea. Just find a way for your family, your community, your company or your organization to come together to give something more. Then tell everyone you can about how you are giving. Be a part of a national celebration of our great tradition of generosity.

Wesleyan signed on as a partner institution for Giving Tuesday this year. On that day, Tuesday, Dec. 3, the Wesleyan Fund is conducting a one-day campaign to support our alma mater through contributions. Your gift through the Fund, no matter how small, helps the university with its current needs, including financial aid. Without the $5, $10 and $25 gifts from thousands of alumni (that accumulate to more than $10 million each year), the Wesleyan experience would not be what it is.

Of course, there are many worthy causes to support on Giving Tuesday. If Wesleyan is our cause, we are likely to have many others. From supporting the fight against long-term perils like climate change and extreme poverty to dealing with acute crises like the situation in the Philippines, there are many ways to participate in Giving Tuesday. As we celebrate the holidays, let’s remember to sustain our causes with energetic generosity! Whether you support financial aid at Wesleyan or other great organizations led by Wes alums, like  SHOFCO, MINDS, RefugePoint, Brighter Dawns; tutoring in Traverse Square; or volunteering at Green Street Art Center and Macdonough School… PLEASE PARTICIPATE in Giving Tuesday.

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College of East Asian Studies Approved

On Tuesday the faculty approved a proposal for a College of East Asian Studies. This program will gather together some of our existing resources and help us to bring additional support to campus. Here’s the proposal summary:

We propose to merge three existing units—the East Asian Studies Program (EAST), the Asian Languages and Literatures Department (AL&L), and the Freeman Center for East Asian Studies (FEAS)—into a single unit, the College of East Asian Studies (CEAS). The CEAS primarily will be housed in the Freeman Center (which will retain its name, though no longer have its own Director), with additional offices in Fisk Hall. We also propose moving Korean language instruction from Less Commonly Taught Languages into the CEAS. The CEAS will feature an enhanced major as well as a new minor, together with enhanced curricular and co-curricular offerings for students across the university. We also expect that the CEAS will further enhance our outreach activities serving the campus, community, and alumni.

CEAS will have a minor, extensive language training and six core areas of study in a major:

i)     Art History and Art

ii)     Language, Literature, and Film

iii)     Music

iv)     History

v)     Philosophy and Religion

vi)     Political Economy

There will be many occasions for students and faculty to work together, and to join in community-building activities on and off campus.

I’m delighted that in the coming year Wesleyan will open its fifth interdisciplinary college, with CEAS joining the College of Letters, College of Social Studies, College of the Environment and the College of Film and the Moving Image. This represents a substantial effort at collaboration, experimentation, exploration of tradition and instigation of innovation. I am confident that these colleges will join our existing programs and departments to energize the distinctive education experience of Wesleyan students and expand recognition of the university.

Welcome to the new College of East Asian Studies!

Artful Wesleyan Weekend

What a weekend of arts activity at Wesleyan! Pam Tatge, Director of the Center for the Arts, continues to combine campus energies with amazing performers from around the world. For me, it started out at a faculty social event at the Zilkha Gallery at the end of the day on Friday. Have you seen the alumni exhibition there yet? It’s terrific. The work repays reflection, and it also made me laugh and squirm (those rats!). The show runs through early December.

Speaking of running, there were packed houses for Abraham in Motion at the Patricelli ’92 Theater. Kyle Abraham is a force of nature, and he brought that force to Middletown big time for three sold out performances. Speaking of sold out performances, Kari and I had the great pleasure of seeing the Theater Department’s production of The Seagull. Directed by Yuri Kordonsky, the show was brilliantly staged, and we saw inspired performances by the talented cast. The show had energy and conviction, passions and ideas.

While we were taking in the Chekhov, more than 300 gathered to hear the rejuventated Wesleyan orchestra. I only wish I’d heard what I’m told was a lovely and thoughtful musical program. Congratulations to Nadya Potemkina, the orchestra’s new director.

Many of these events are the result of faculty/student collaboration, one of the great features of our artful campus. Whether pondering Kyle Abraham’s moves or Chekhov’s moods, it’s been a weekend of creativity at the highest level on campus. I just have to figure out how to be in more than one place at a time.

 

 

Red and Black Turns Blue

This week I was in Boston for a fundraising event to raise money for financial aid. Chris Wink ’83 is one of the founders of the Blue Man Group, and he arranged for us to have a night in the theater packed with Wesleyan folks whose ticket purchases went to support our scholarship program. There were alumni representing at least the last four decades, along with current students and some kids who might already be dreaming of becoming part of the class of 2024.

Chris explained that his Wesleyan experience resonated as he began to work with some friends on the Blue Men. He drummed here, and he also studied history, music, psychology and a host of other subjects. I was particularly impressed with his description of a campus where the elemental worked side by side with the avant-garde. This reminded me of something that has been important at Wes for more than 60 years: a combination of the deeply traditional with the wildly experimental. THIS IS WHY.

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Celebrating with Joshua ’73 and Amy Boger P’06, ’09
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Celebrating With Two Great Wes Athletes

 

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Talking with Chris Wink ’83 after the show

Photographs by Olivia Drake

Liberal Education and Thinking for Oneself

I published the following op-ed piece in Inside Higher Education this morning. I’ve drawn on my new book,  Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters, which will be published by Yale University Press in the spring.

 

Over the last year there has been a steady stream of articles about the “crisis in the humanities,” fostering a sense that students are stampeding from liberal education toward more vocationally oriented studies. In fact, the decline in humanities enrollments, as some have pointed out, is wildly overstated, and much of that decline occurred in the 1970s and 1980s. Still, the press is filled with tales about parents riding herd on their offspring lest they be attracted to literature or history rather than to courses that teach them to develop new apps for the next, smarter phone.

America has long been ambivalent about learning for its own sake, at times investing heavily in free inquiry and lifelong learning, and at other times worrying that we need more specialized training to be economically competitive. A century ago these worries were intense, and then, as now, pundits talked about a flight from the humanities toward the hard sciences.

Liberal education was a core American value in the first half of the 20th century, but a value under enormous pressure from demographic expansion and the development of more consistent public schooling. The increase in the population considering postsecondary education was dramatic. In 1910 only 9 percent of students received a high school diploma; by 1940 it was 50 percent. For the great majority of those who went on to college, that education would be primarily vocational, whether in agriculture, business, or the mechanical arts. But even vocationally oriented programs usually included a liberal curriculum — a curriculum that would provide an educational base on which one could continue to learn — rather than just skills for the next job. Still, there were some then (as now) who worried that the lower classes were getting “too much education.”

Within the academy, between the World Wars, the sciences assumed greater and greater importance. Discoveries in physics, chemistry, and biology did not seem to depend on the moral, political, or cultural education of the researchers – specialization seemed to trump broad humanistic learning. These discoveries had a powerful impact on industry, the military, and health care; they created jobs! Specialized scientific research at universities produced tangible results, and its methodologies – especially rigorous experimentation – could be exported to transform private industry and the public sphere. Science was seen to be racing into the future, and some questioned whether the traditional ideas of liberal learning were merely archaic vestiges of a mode of education that should be left behind.

In reaction to this ascendancy of the sciences, many literature departments reimagined themselves as realms of value and heightened subjectivity, as opposed to so-called value-free, objective work. These “new humanists” of the 1920s portrayed the study of literature as an antidote to the spiritual vacuum left by hyperspecialization. They saw the study of literature as leading to a greater appreciation of cultural significance and a personal search for meaning, and these notions quickly spilled over into other areas of humanistic study. Historians and philosophers emphasized the synthetic dimensions of their endeavors, pointing out how they were able to bring ideas and facts together to help students create meaning. And arts instruction was reimagined as part of the development of a student’s ability to explore great works that expressed the highest values of a civilization. Artists were brought to campuses to inspire students rather than to teach them the nuances of their craft. During this interwar period a liberal education surely included the sciences, but many educators insisted that it not be reduced to them. The critical development of values and meaning was a core function of education.

Thus, despite the pressures of social change and of the compelling results of specialized scientific research, there remained strong support for the notion that liberal education and learning for its own sake were essential for an educated citizenry. And rather than restrict a nonvocational education to established elites, many saw this broad teaching as a vehicle for ensuring commonality in a country of immigrants. Free inquiry would model basic democratic values, and young people would be socialized to American civil society by learning to think for themselves.

By the 1930s, an era in which ideological indoctrination and fanaticism were recognized as antithetical to American civil society, liberal education was acclaimed as key to the development of free citizens. Totalitarian regimes embraced technological development, but they could not tolerate the free discussion that led to a critical appraisal of civic values. Here is the president of Harvard, James Bryant Conant, speaking to undergraduates just two years after Hitler had come to power in Germany:

To my mind, one of the most important aspects of a college education is that it provides a vigorous stimulus to independent thinking…. The desire to know more about the different sides of a question, a craving to understand something of the opinions of other peoples and other times mark the educated man. Education should not put the mind in a straitjacket of conventional formulas but should provide it with the nourishment on which it may unceasingly expand and grow. Think for yourselves! Absorb knowledge wherever possible and listen to the opinions of those more experienced than yourself, but don’t let any one do your thinking for you.

This was the 1930s version of liberal learning, and in it you can hear echoes of Thomas Jefferson’s idea of autonomy and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s thoughts on self-reliance.

In the interwar period the emphasis on science did not, in fact, lead to a rejection of broad humanistic education. Science was a facet of this education. Today, we must not let our embrace of STEM fields undermine our well-founded faith in the capacity of the humanities to help us resist “the straitjackets of conventional formulas.” Our independence, our freedom, has depended on not letting anyone else do our thinking for us. And that has demanded learning for its own sake; it has demanded a liberal education. It still does.

 

Getting Help to the Philippines

Our hearts go out to those whose lives have been devastated by the super-typhoon that struck the Philippines. We are reaching out to our students and alumni from the region to see if we can be of help.  For those of you looking for ways to send assistance to the Philippines, you can find information here.

 

Student Workers

We see them all the time around campus: students who are holding down jobs either as part of a financial aid package or just to make ends meet while they pursue their studies. They may be sitting at the information desk at Usdan, passing out appetizers at receptions, assisting faculty or athletic teams, or working as RAs or in Admissions helping others find their way. These jobs can be pretty challenging, and it’s important to remember that many hold more than one – and all are full-time students.

I worked in the kitchen at the Star and Crescent Eating Club when I was a student, and it was an important part of my undergraduate experience. I usually had a pretty good time with my fellow dishwashers and waitresses, but once in a while we had to deal with the ‘unpleasantly entitled.’ Recently I was hearing from student workers about how things are today on campus. The anecdotes below are (loosely) derived from what I’ve been told.

Think of the student, “Enrique”, who passes out appetizers at receptions, usually wearing a crisp white shirt and a bowtie. Sometimes he sees classmates at the receptions and often his teachers. Usually these interactions go smoothly, but occasionally people he thought he knew pretty well act strangely. They aren’t exactly rude, but they look right through him. Enrique likes his job, the other waiters are fun, and the boss makes sure they eat well. But it’s disturbing when students or faculty seem embarrassed to see him or just pretend they don’t seem him.

Or consider “Anna,” who works at the information desk at Usdan. Most of the time things are pretty slow. She gives directions, helps folks find the restrooms, matches visitors to campus with some of the things going on that might interest them. Other student workers hang out from time to time, and they can even get some schoolwork done. But sometimes on the weekend shifts, drunk students come through and act like jerks. Anna says that isn’t as upsetting as the fact that the sober bystanders just stand there and pretend not to notice. She isn’t invisible, she knows.

“Alex” works two jobs –she is a research assistant in a lab on top of being a Resident Advisor. Most of the time she manages to juggle her various obligations, but recently there was a crisis in her residence unit and she was up much of the night talking a first year student out of doing something really stupid. The frosh gave her a big “thank you” and a bigger hug, but by that time it was 4 am. Even coffee didn’t allow her to mask the yawns the next day in the lab. “Too much partying, Alex?” asked her professor. This was the first personal comment he’d made that semester. No big deal, Alex said, but she felt rotten the rest of the day, and she didn’t have the energy to study for her history exam.

On a daily basis student workers just do their jobs, finish their homework, write their papers, but once in awhile, the conditions on campus make it extra difficult for them. Some of us forget that many here are under more than the usual pressures. What should we do about that? For starters, let’s just treat student staff, like all who work here, with respect and kindness. The whole university benefits from their contributions. Taking the time to acknowledge those contributions is a benefit as well.

 

Residential Innovations: More than 60 Proposals Received!

We have received more than 60 proposals for improvements to the campus that would enhance the university’s ability to make the most of our residential dimensions. These range from very specific facilities improvements to programs that would allow students to learn all sorts of specific skills. I’m delighted to see the range of topics covered, and the input from staff, students, faculty — and even some alumni.

Provost Ruth Striegel Weissman will lead a group from various constituencies to discuss the merits of the proposals. When we narrow down to a group of “semi-finalists,” we will ask for more detailed proposals. After getting input from students, faculty and staff, I expect to be announcing some pilot projects early in 2014.

Wesleyan’s residential dimensions foster a learning, research and creative culture that is one of our greatest assets. We will use those strengths in even more intentional ways in the future. Stay tuned!

What a Great Homecoming!

It was an amazing weekend, filled with artistic, athletic and academic achievements. It was great to see the crowds at the Alumni Show II art exhibition (which you can still see at the Zilkha Gallery), and I enjoyed meeting some of the artists there. My early bedtime prevented me from seeing the play in the Olin stacks, but I heard it was an enlivening experience.

John Ravenal ’81, P’15
John Ravenal ’81, P’15

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I was also thrilled to learn that Gail Jenkins Farris ’84, P’14, P ’16, one of the founders of our volleyball program, was awarded a special Letter over the weekend. A great athlete herself, Gail has been a tireless advocate for women’s sports. She was still pretty jazzed about being recognized for her work when I saw her at a reception later in the day.

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This swim team had a successful meet, and men’s soccer won a tough match against Connecticut College in the first round of the NESCAC tournament. We were all very excited by football’s first Little Three championship in over forty years! Lacrosse, softball, soccer, and baseball have won Little Three crowns in recent years, and we are delighted with football’s success. I was very moved when Coach Whalen presented me with the game ball.

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Alumni Association Chair Megan Norris ’83, P’17 distributed a very cool video today on football’s victory. You can see it here.

 

 

Welcome Home!

Today marks the beginning of Homecoming/Family Weekend. There are many great seminars, concerts, sporting events and recitals planned. Some families will just want to spend time together enjoying Connecticut in the fall, and many alumni will simply want to re-visit their favorite haunts. Whatever your pleasure, I hope you find Wesleyan welcoming, stimulating and festive.

I’m particularly excited about the Dar Williams concert Friday night at 9 pm in Crowell Concert Hall. I’ve been listening to Dar’s CDs for a long time, and recently I’ve been able to hear her play live on campus. It’s great to have her back at alma mater, especially since this concert is a fundraiser for financial aid. We are all working hard to establish more scholarships that meet student needs without high loans, and this concert is an important addition to our efforts.

There are some great seminars, panels and lectures during the weekend. One of the highlights: the 21st Annual Dwight L. Greene Symposium: Women of Color: 40 Years at Wesleyan, and Beyond will take place at 4 pm in the Chapel. You can find a list of events here.

There will be plenty of sports excitement over the weekend. The volleyball team will be in the Silloway gymnasium battling Little Three Rivals, while cross country, women’s soccer and field hockey are playing in NESCAC tournaments on the road. Men’s soccer will have a home contest in the tournament on Jackson field Saturday at 12:30. The mighty Wes football team will take this year’s undefeated streak into a battle against Williams. The game starts at 1:00 pm at Corwin Stadium. Connecticut Public Television is broadcasting the game, and we will have a video link here.

I’m looking forward to seeing old friends and meeting new ones. THIS IS WHY!