Roth on Wesleyan

The alumni are coming! The alumni are coming! Starting today, many Wesleyan grads will be coming home to connect with one another and with that special campus vibe. The fiftieth reunion class of 1963 is connecting with the about-to-graduate class of 2013, and alumni from across the decades will be connecting with old friends and [...]

Early in the morning this week as I take Mathilde for her walk, I’ve been encountering students who are waiting on Foss Hill to watch the sunrise. There’s been some fog, the air is still, and one feels the peacefulness of nature (sometimes punctuated, this week, by music and dancing). How different are the images [...]

Kari and I were walking Mathilde last night when we bumped into several students studying for their last exams or finishing up their final papers. It was a beautiful day, just the hardest time to keep you nose in a book or your hands on the computer keyboard. The Wes students we saw were doing [...]

Wesleyan softball star Allee Beatty ’13 was named NESCAC player of the year, fitting recognition for this senior who has established new Wesleyan records for her offensive production. Allee was also named defensive player of the year by the conference for her standard of perfection out in the field. Pitching sensation Su Pardo ’16 was named [...]

While the Spring Fling bands were heating up the Freeman Athletic Center, the Freeman Center for East Asian Studies began hosting a remarkable group of scholars from China and the United States to discuss a comparative approach to the Enlightenment. My Wesleyan teacher, Hayden White, the most important theorist of history of the last 50 [...]

Station manager Ben Michael alerted me to WESU’s spring fund drive (you can give here) with the following announcement: Just 10 years ago WESU was in disrepair. The institutional memory was shot and the studios, music libraries, and business records were in shambles. The station’s license was nearly lost. Fortunately a dedicated group of student [...]

Last night we had an energetic kickoff event in Hollywood. About 100 Wesleyans showed up to drink a toast to alma mater and listen to a conversation with Julia-Louis Dreyfus P’14 and Governor John Hickenlooper ’74. Julia talked about her career in comedy — leaving Northwestern before her senior year to pursue theater and television in Chicago [...]

From Sunday’s WashingtonPost Review of Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition. By David Nirenberg. Norton. 610 pp. $35   Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics, And the Catholics hate the Protestants, And the Hindus hate the Muslims, And everybody hates the Jews. So sang Tom Lehrer in his satirical song “National Brotherhood Week.” It’s no news that [...]

The Wesleyan baseball squad took two out of three games from Amherst this weekend to secure first place in the NESCAC West division and gain the Little Three crown for this semester. Donnie Cimino ’15 had a powerhouse weekend at the plate, while Jeff Blout ’14 and Nick Cooney ’15 were all but unhittable from the [...]

Last night a few hundred Wesleyans gathered at the Director’s Guild Theater in New York to hear from Matthew Weiner ’87, creator of Mad Men. This was one of the kickoff events for our THIS IS WHY fundraising campaign, and the energy was terrific. I met some recent graduates who were eager to hear how Matt [...]