Wes-Tech celebrates Dana Royer

Not long ago I wrote about Wade Hsu, a recent grad who was honored as having done the best undergraduate physics work in the country. This past weekend Dana Royer, an assistant professor in the Earth and Environmental Science department received the Donath Medal from the American Geological Society. The award recognizes young scientists (aged 35 or younger) for outstanding original research marking a major advance in the earth sciences. I’m delighted to cite the press release announcing the award.

“Dana is a true innovator who successfully tackles extremely important questions in paleoclimatology and paleoecology, in part using paleobotanical proxies calibrated with a remarkable series of careful modern analog studies,” said Peter D. Wilf of Pennsylvania State University in nominating Royer for the honor. “He often connects the deep-time climate and CO2 record to the present day in highly societally-relevant ways that are widely cited in the ‘modern’ climate change literature.” Wilf also said, “Without Dana’s contributions we would know much less about Earth’s climate history and its great importance to today’s world.”

“In the rapidly developing field of plant paleoecology and ecophysiology, Dana Royer stands out in terms of innovation and sheer breadth and depth of knowledge. He is truly an emerging leader in the geological sciences,” said Leo Hickey, professor of geology and Curator of Paleobotany at Yale University.

Dana is also part of our new College of the Environment. He describes his research as exploring “how plants can be used to reconstruct ancient environments and the (paleo-) physiological underpinnings behind these plant-environment relationships.” This basic research about our deep past is very relevant to understanding our contemporary ecological context. Isn’t that what our scholar-teacher model is all about? A dedicated teacher doing advanced research that opens onto pressing issues relevant to all of us.

And Dana received his award in Colorado, where a former Wesleyan geology student is the mayor of Denver and (today!) collecting votes in hopes of becoming the state’s next governor. How cool is that!

Bringing the Sounds of the World to Wesleyan

Wesleyan has long been a center for ethnomusicology at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Many think that the very idea of “world music” began here in Middletown, and our students and faculty have been active participants in playing and doing research on music from all over the world. When I was a student, Javanese Gamelan and African Drumming were very popular among my friends, and it has been wonderful to see how these programs remain vital parts of our campus culture. Over Homecoming/Family Weekend, the Wesleyan Taiko drummers were out in force at the soccer game — a wonderful example of the integrated nature of arts and athletics here at Wes.

This weekend Wesleyan hosts the 34th annual Navaratri Festival. This may be the largest gathering of Indian arts and music outside the subcontinent. There will be world class players, singers and dancers performing from Thursday through Sunday, with concerts by students as well as by some of the great emerging artists in India.

When I traveled in India last year, I heard that a video of some of our students performing South Indian music had been seen by tens of thousands of viewers there. Someone asked me how it was possible that these students in Middletown CT had mastered the intricate melodies and rhythms of this music? Had they really been studying in India, I was asked?

In Mark Slobin’s recent book on the history of the Wesleyan music program, he shows how the infusion of world music and avant garde Western music transformed our curriculum and our culture. This year’s Navaratri Festival continues the tradition with a stirring array of performances in a variety of genres. There’s even a dance party Saturday afternoon at 2 pm in the World Music Hall!

One Week Before Elections – Don’t let Cynicism Win!

On Sunday I published an op-ed in the Atlanta Journal Constitution about the dangers of becoming cynical in this period of intense negative campaigning. The level of public discourse has gotten so low, so mean-spirited, that it is turning off people who might otherwise want to participate in the public sphere. Traveling to various cities, I am more aware than ever of the waves of negative advertising washing over the country. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s embrace of anonymous influence, we often don’t know who is paying for the mud that’s being tossed around, and the result is a general decline of confidence that anything important and meaningful is to be found in the public sphere. The Wesleyan Media Project, led by Professor Erika Fowler, has been offering important data on how money is being spent by independent groups this fall. The massive amount of money washing over the political system turns many of us off from wanting to engage with the electoral process. Should we describe this decline of confidence as the growth of cynicism, or just as an intelligent reaction to our contemporary context?

Cynics are no fools, and one might even describe cynicism as the effort to protect oneself from appearing foolish. One of the hallmarks of contemporary cynicism (with ancient roots) is the rejection of conventional standards. The cynic delights in rejecting the criteria of those with power and privilege, and this rejection is often mixed with contempt. Cynics “know” that the established order is wrong — corrupt, unnatural and unjust — and their knowledge can give them a sense of superiority. We reject the established ways of the world because we know better.

But cynicism about politics and the public sphere doesn’t lead to efforts to change the way things are. Instead, it leads to a withdrawal from public life, a withdrawal that is justified by the cynic’s belief in his or her own superiority. We cynics know better, and we know that participation in public life is for those who just don’t understand the ways things really work.

Another dimension of cynicism is the belief in one’s own self-sufficiency. Cynics don’t have to engage in the public sphere because they have developed a way of life that doesn’t require engagement. They have nothing to gain from interacting with others who don’t share their views, and they find reinforcement from other cynics who also reject this kind of interaction. A community based on rejection reinforces its members’ contempt for the dominant culture and their proud alienation from it. They feel they don’t need to engage because their cynicism gives them a sense of self-righteous autonomy.

Cynicism may be particularly prevalent among young people, and psychologists even have a specific measure for adolescent cynicism, Acyn2, on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. As an educator, I find this youthful attitude to be particularly worrisome, because above all it protects students from learning. Behind the façade of the knowing rejection of the status quo, behind the defense of the self-sufficient community, is the fearful refusal to engage with new possibilities. Cynics have already made up their minds, and people who have made up their minds believe they have nothing to learn.

When you participate in the public sphere, you have to open yourself up to the views of others, and real engagement means being open to change. That’s why political participation should be part of every student’s education. Participation is a public experiment through which you discover things about the world, about yourself and about the possibilities for change. Public engagement is challenging because you may be surprised that the people or systems about which you’ve already reached conclusions are more complex than you’d ever imagined — more complex and more important for shaping the future.

In this age of degraded political discourse and anonymously funded attack ads, it’s easy to see the reasons for the cynical withdrawal from public life. But we must turn back the tide of cynicism; we must show our jaded, withdrawn young people that they are not self-sufficient, and that if they don’t engage in shaping their future, somebody else will do it for them. When students turn themselves off to engagement and participation, they are cutting themselves off from learning. They are also depriving our public sphere of their energy and ideas. There is comfort in belonging to a community of cynics, but there is much more stimulation and rewarding work to be found by engaging with others in trying to make the public sphere a more meaningful environment for all of us.

One step in that process is to get out and vote next week. Voting, of course, is just one dimension of political engagement, but it is a crucial one. Two years ago groups of Wes students worked to help get people to the polls, and I hope to see them out there again. Those who participate in the system know it isn’t perfect, but they also know that if they don’t play a role in these elections, someone else will be only too happy to do it for them.

Coming Home to Wesleyan

I returned to Middletown late Tuesday night after my annual fall break trip out West. This year I spent a couple of days in Denver visiting with alumni before heading to my old stomping grounds in the Bay Area. In Colorado I saw some happy Wes parents and our two candidates for state-wide office, Michael Bennet ’87 and John Hickenlooper ’74. They both have serious races on their hands, and I was impressed with the fervor and the organization of their teams. I met some recent graduates who are committed to public service as well as alumni from decades ago who have combined very successful careers with deep civic engagement. Colorado is Wesleyan country.

In San Francisco Jack Mitchell ’61 hosted a Wes gathering in his store, Wilkes Bashford, in the Union Square district. About 100 local Cardinals came out to hear what’s happening on campus. They are eager to learn more about what faculty and students are up to — eager to understand how what made Wesleyan such a special place in their day is continuing now in new and exciting ways. As I returned to campus, I was busy re-reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which I had assigned my students for The Modern and the Post-Modern. Going to class Wednesday morning to talk about knowledge and intimacy, consciousness and gender, dynamic change and aesthetic contemplation, I was so grateful to be back on a campus where literature, ideas and history could be expected to prompt intelligent, sustained engagement from a large group of students.  At a time when one reads a lot about the crisis in the humanities, I am always encouraged by my encounters with Wes students.

In just a day or so there will be a few thousand folks coming home to campus for Homecoming/Family Weekend. Here are just a few of the events we have planned: the opening celebration for our new College of Environment that includes a Friday reception and two seminars on Saturday; an evening with Bill Cosby to support the Green Street Arts Center (Sold Out); The Dwight L. Green Symposium “Media Innovation and Democracy” featuring Alberto Ibarguen ’66;  Athletics Hall of Fame induction/dinner on Saturday night (Sold Out); and 17 Wes Seminars on Friday and Saturday on subjects ranging from music to war, from food to archaeology in Middletown. Broadway star Lin Manuel Miranda brings his  Freestyle Love Supreme on Saturday for a sold out hip-hop, improv, rap, concert. The complete schedule is online.

On Friday I have the pleasure of welcoming Trustees Emeriti back to campus for a reunion and a series of discussions. In addition to getting their advice on a number of the important issues facing Wesleyan, I’m sure we will catch some of the action as our Wes athletes take part in a great weekend of competition. Things get underway in the Silloway Gymnasium Friday night as the volleyball squad takes the court against Trinity. Runners, field hockey, soccer and football players will all be fighting for the Red&Black, while the crew teams are busy this weekend at the Head of the Charles Regatta.

If you can’t make it back to campus this weekend, look for clips of the various events online in the coming weeks. We’ll use the Wesleyan YouTube channel and iTunes University to share the excitement!

 

Recognizing Academic Achievement: Slotkin, Hsu, Fins

In the last few days I heard about three major academic awards garnered by members of the Wes family. The first went to an emeritus faculty for a lifetime of scholarly contributions; the second went to a recent graduate whose achievement and promise are remarkable by any standard; the third went to an alumnus and former trustee whose work on medical ethics is having a profound effect on his professional and our public life.

This past weekend Richard Slotkin (Olin Professor of English, Emeritus) was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. This society, founded during the revolutionary period, has as its mission “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honour, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.” Richard Slotkin is one of the founding figures in American Studies, and his work on politics, popular culture and myth has played a decisive role in shaping our understanding of how the idea of the frontier shaped American self-consciousness. A cultural critic of insight and wit, he has also written novels, such as the recent The Crater. At Wesleyan he helped create the American Studies Program and was a stellar contributor to Film Studies. Richie has long inspired students, faculty and readers, and you can see his film class on Westerns at iTunes University.

Chia Wei “Wade” Hsu ’10 has won the LeRoy Apker Award of the American Physical Society for his extraordinary undergraduate work in physics. Wade graduated in the spring after four years as a Freeman Scholar. He was a member of Francis Starr’s theoretical/computational physics group, and, as Brian Stewart recently told me, rapidly established himself as a force of nature, publishing five papers while an undergraduate, including a paper each in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA and Physical Review Letters, the most prestigious journals in physics. Wade received the award by competing against students from Ph.D.-granting institutions.  That means that Wade was chosen over students from, among other places, Harvard, Caltech, MIT and Princeton. Francis Starr calls him the “best of the best.” While at Wesleyan, he was also involved with the East Asian Studies Center, studied languages, tutored and played lots of music. Wade has begun his graduate work at Harvard this year. (I hope he’s not too bored.)

I met Joe Fins when he served as a trustee on the presidential search committee in 2007. Joe is a COL grad who has served alma mater with energy and distinction. He is also a physician and professor of medicine, authoring more than 200 publications in medical ethics and health policy. Joe was just elected to the National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine, powerful recognition of his remarkable contributions. He is a professor at Cornell Medical College, President-Elect of the American Society for  Bioethics and Humanities, a Governor of the American College of Physicians  and a member of the Hastings Center Board of Trustees.

We know there is great work being done all around the campus. It’s especially gratifying to see these accomplishments recognized at the highest levels!

[tags]academic awards, Richard Slotkin, Chia Wei Wade Hsu, Joe Fins[/tags]

Young Profs Making a Difference in the Public Sphere

Just a quick addendum to my last post on participation in the political sphere. This weekend two of our young professors in the social sciences weighed in on important national/international issues in the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. In an OpEd for The Los Angeles Times, Laura Stark, who teaches sociology and is part of the Science in Society Program and the College of the Environment , explained how the current research review system in the United States remains inadequate. On the heels of a US apology for dangerous and cruel medical research in Guatemala, the US now has on opportunity to overhaul ethics rules. Stark makes specific recommendations as to how we can avoid both the steamrolling of subjects and an echo chamber of assent on ethics review panels.

As I drank my morning coffee and read the New York Times on Sunday, I saw Erika Franklin Fowler’s research with the Wesleyan Media Project cited once again. In this instance, she was discussing how China has become the scapegoat for many desperate candidates in this election cycle. Fear of China’s recent economic progress seems to have re-ignited traditional anti-Chinese racism, and many political advertisements are tapping into this cauldron of hate and anxiety.

Political scientist Elvin Lim continues to offer trenchant analysis and thoughtful opinions on his blog, Out on A Lim. Today he wondered if President Obama has been too quick to back down when challenged by a forceful opposition. He concluded his reflections on transformations in White House staffing by saying: “There can only be as much change as that which the president himself ultimately believes in.”

How much change do you believe in? Whatever you hope to see happen in the public sphere, I hope you will be inspired by our young social science faculty and get engaged!


Participation in Fall Politics

Wesleyan students are known as a political group, and often this means that we have been the scene of plenty of campus activism. I’d like to think that as an educational institution we develop capacities for citizenship in our students (and not just the capacity for protest), and that we have a culture in which people take seriously ideas from various points in the political spectrum. Sometimes schools like ours are criticized for being too homogeneous politically, and we should recognize that we have often been a place that has marginalized conservative voices. In recent years I have sensed a change in that regard, as groups of students who identify as conservatives have organized and gained more of a presence on campus.

Now we are little more than a month away from national elections, and we are being bombarded with advertisements. Since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that deemed money to have the protections of speech, the pace of “investing” in the political arena through large donations has accelerated. The Wesleyan Media Project, under the guidance of Prof. Erika Fowler, is tracking these expenditures and getting a lot of attention in the press. Who is trying to influence us, and for what purpose?

All of this mass media politicking can seem like so much noise after a while, and there is a tendency to tune out. I want to remind the Wes family, especially our students, that this is precisely the time when you should be paying the most attention to politics. I want to remind our students, whatever their political affiliations, to get their absentee ballots or arrange to vote here in Middletown.

Please don’t neglect political participation because of some general dissatisfaction with the whole system. It would be a terrible waste if our campus community became merely skeptical about politics and didn’t participate. If you don’t exercise your power to vote, someone else will be making decisions for you.

[tags]politics, vote, Wesleyan Media Project[/tags]

Virtuous Circle of Teaching and Research

Over the last thirty to forty years, higher education in America has viewed contributions to research as an essential part of its mission. Professors are expected to participate in shaping their scholarly fields, and students are expected to learn not just the wisdom of the past, but how to produce knowledge in the present. At large universities, though, the research function often seems to dwarf the dedication to undergraduate education. At several of the Ivies and other schools that compete for academic prestige, senior faculty often have little to do with teaching those preparing bachelor degrees, and graduate students or other part-time instructors wind up taking on the bulk of college teaching. The tenured professors work mostly with graduate students, preparing them for careers that, too, are expected to center on research.

In recent years the folly of this system has become increasingly evident: there are few tenure-track jobs for the graduate students being trained to work in the most specialized domains, and undergraduates are often left to wonder how courses taught by these narrowly trained specialists are supposed to connect to their lives after college. As smaller institutions emulated the research universities, the publish-or-perish mentality became a core part of faculty culture, with specialized journals publishing for small groups of colleagues offering the most professional prestige.

There has recently been plenty of strong criticism of the cultivation of esoteric research in higher education. Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus have argued that universities are wasting resources and failing students, in part because of the premium put on faculty research rather than teaching. Hacker and Dreifus have been teaching in New York for decades, and they have also been prolific authors. But in their recent book,  Higher Education? they argue that schools have been distracted from their core educational mission by adding on the obligation to contribute to scholarly fields.

Mark C. Taylor, Wesleyan graduate, long time professor at Williams and now Chair of the Religion Department at Columbia University, has recently published what he calls a bold plan to respond to the contemporary crisis on campus. Noting how the focus on research has driven a wedge between faculty and student interests, he diagnoses “the identification of specialization with expertise.” Narrow specialization should be the great enemy of educators because it leads to silos of inquiry with little opportunity for surprising intellectual exchange. But specialization has gone hand in hand with professional prestige, something that schools have been chasing for decades.

Taylor’s main argument is that our overspecialized colleges and universities are increasingly divorced from the hyper-connected world defined by “webs, not walls.” Networks of interconnectivity rather than isolated expertise are defining our world, and higher education will become obsolete if it doesn’t plug into these new forms of knowledge creation. (I’ve taken my comments here from my review of the book in the LA Times.)

How are these critiques relevant to Wesleyan? To be sure, our university prizes research because we believe that it informs and enlivens pedagogy. I often talk about the “virtuous circle” of teaching and research, and many of my Wesleyan colleagues have been deeply affected in their scholarly work by what they learn from students in the classroom. Similarly, our students know that we continue to learn with them through the work we do in our fields…we are not just imparting information to them that somebody else imparted to us.

Some of Wesleyan’s best teachers are also our most serious and original researchers, and all of us remain dedicated to undergraduate education even as we produce scholarship for specialized audiences. So, even though I think Hacker, Dreifus and Taylor are right to worry about severe overspecialization (with its associated bureaucracy) in certain fields, I think they might say more about the positive feedback loop that can connect the classroom and the archive, the science lab and the lecture hall. And we should note that these contemporary critics of education are themselves also researchers, and this hasn’t seemed to undermine their professed love of teaching.

I just attended part of the Molecular Biophysics and Biological Chemistry retreat, and I saw great evidence of how well the scholar teacher model is working here at Wes. This year’s gathering honored David Beveridge, Joshua Boger University Professor of the Sciences and Mathematics. David’s pioneering work in computational biology and biophysics has had a powerful influence in the classroom and the research lab, and I saw several fine examples of Wes student research in the poster session. Sure there is specialization, but there is also an understanding of what is at stake in the experiments and an ability to describe the work for the non-expert. Showing a wonderful talent for translating their efforts to this layman, students explained to me their work on RNA, on modeling the structure of particular carbon based molecules, and on the translation of proteins. My head is still spinning!

There are plenty of things in American higher education that can be improved, but we must be careful to preserve our ability to educate students broadly and deeply by engaging faculty in projects that are both scholarly and pedagogical. Specialization without the capacity for translation (without “intellectual cross-training,” as Wes trustee Geoff Duyk calls it) does undermine effective teaching at many schools, but Wesleyan professors who remain active scholars, scientists and artists exemplify a love of learning that can be made powerfully relevant to their undergraduate students.

[tags]research, specialization, Mark Taylor, David Beveridge[/tags]

Wesleyaning into the Future!

Last weekend the Wesleyan Board of Trustees was in town for its annual retreat. The trustees, almost all alumni along with several parents of Wes students, gathered this year to focus on two major topics: building the long-term economic health of the university, and imagining how Wes will look 30 or 50 years from now. We were joined by faculty, staff and students, and the discussions were animated and productive.

On Saturday we looked at the general profile of the endowment — past, present and future. There are three key ingredients to building an endowment strong enough to provide annual revenue for the operations of the school: gifts, spending, and investment performance. Over the last three years we have shifted our fundraising priorities so that we now invest more of the gifts we receive rather than spending them, and we have reduced the percentage that we draw from the endowment. Finally, we have hired Anne Martin, formerly a Director in the Yale Investment Office, to provide wise stewardship of our investment portfolio. Anne led the retreat participants in some exercises that explored how we choose the asset classes in which we invest, and how we choose managers within those classes. Everyone left with a greater understanding of how our investment operation works.

We also discussed endowment fund raising at some length, since all trustees are active friendraisers and fundraisers for the university. Chair Joshua Boger led us in some creative exercises in which we thought about our highest aspirations for Wes and how we might envision taking steps to act on them. One trustee suggested that we find a way over the next decades to do so much good for our students and the world that Wesleyan becomes a verb!

This week we had our inaugural faculty meeting of the year. Department chairs introduced more than a dozen new professors who are joining our ranks across all divisions. These are extraordinary scholar-teachers who have already begun making their mark. Listening to the descriptions of their research and the classes they are teaching filled me with confidence in the ongoing rejuvenation of our curriculum and of our ability to shape scholarly fields through original contributions.

I was Wesleyaned!

[tags]Board of Trustees, endowment, Anne Martin, Joshua Boger, fund raising[/tags]

Sharing our Loss: Nora Miller

Late this morning I sent the following message to the campus community:


Dear Friends,

It is with great sorrow that I inform you that Nora Miller, a Wesleyan student from the class of 2012, died late Monday afternoon. Nora was a film major of great talent and energy, an athlete of distinction, an engaged contributor to our community, a devoted friend and a loving daughter and sister. Her parents, Jeff and Patricia Miller, are former Wesleyan employees close to many here. We have offered to help the Millers in any way we can.

Our hearts go out to Nora’s family and friends in this terribly painful moment. When someone takes her own life, the entire community is shaken. I have no doubt we will be more mindful than ever of those who are suffering around us, and, I trust, we will console one another and take care of one another. Student Affairs staff have been providing support to some of Nora’s friends. I encourage anyone who is seeking help to speak to the Office of Behavioral Health for Students (always available via the 24 hour on-call system 860-685-2910) or to one of our class deans.

We will soon begin working with Nora’s friends and teachers on an appropriate service on campus.

We grieve for Nora, and we grieve with her parents, sisters, friends. May we find some consolation in making our memories of her gifts and her contributions a blessing for the future.


Sept. 17, 2010 Update: Monetary donations to Middletown’s Amazing Grace Food Pantry can be made in Nora’s memory by visiting the following site.

 

[tags]Nora Miller, Office of Behavioral Health, Amazing Grace Food Pantry[/tags]