Commencement 2013 — Tradition, Activism, and Living With Contradiction

Presiding over the Commencement ceremonies is one of my most moving and fulfilling duties. Each year I not only get to congratulate several hundred deserving Wesleyan students and their families, but I also get to soak in speeches from wonderfully interesting honorees. This was a year of many highlights, from Jim Dresser’s reminder of the deep traditions of excellence (and humor) on which we draw still today, to Majora Carter’s reminder that we must continue to struggle against long odds if we are devoted to change that matters. Joss Whedon had me in stitches when he told us gravely that our commonality was based on the fact that we were all going to die. His killer address brought home the importance of living with contradiction, with the energetic ambivalence that we should never try to smother.

I can’t reproduce the honorees remarks here, though soon we will have videos to share. Meanwhile, I humbly present some excerpts of my own remarks to the class of 2013.

During your four years here, Wesleyan has been largely isolated from many of the troubles of this world. While you have been students, the United States has been engaged in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and on this Memorial Day Weekend, I begin by asking us all to take a moment to remember that these wars have cost the lives of thousands of American soldiers and tens of thousands of civilians in those countries.

Economic times have been difficult as well. When you first arrived, in the fall of 2009, the global economy was reeling from the most massive disruption since the Great Depression. Unemployment in this country quickly skyrocketed and is only now slowly receding, while the distance between the very wealthy and the average American has increased enormously. 2009-2013 has been a good time to be in a bubble—even a pretty leaky bubble like our own here on campus.

You have spent four years taking advantage of an education that we believe is devoted to boldness, rigor, and practical idealism, and now as I speak to you for your last time as students here, I’d like to underscore three ideals that I hope you will take with you and make practical in your lives going forward: non-violence; diversity; and equality.

Campus culture is something that students, faculty, and staff create together, and for all the glories of the culture we’ve created here, it has not been immune to violence. Whether the subtle aggressions of institutionalized racism or the trauma of sexual assault, we have witnessed how violence disrupts lives—how it infects our heads and hearts. One of the tragedies of university campuses across this country is that, for all their purported liberalism, they often cater to a culture of privilege in which under-represented groups and women are subjected to forms of violence that preserve social hierarchies as they destroy individual lives. I trust we have learned at Wesleyan how important the aversion to violence is for education. The free inquiry at the core of learning certainly depends on vigorous discussion and debate; it depends on our willingness to take risks and to discover that even our deepest convictions may be mistaken. But learning also requires freedom from the senseless wounding of aggression.

In a land all too prone to pointless violence, I trust that in the future you will work to create non-violent communities that promote creative experimentation, and that you will reject cultural tendencies that subordinate patient inquiry to macho projections of force.

A second ideal I hope you will make practical in your lives after graduation is the value of diversity as anti-conformity. At Wesleyan our commitment to diversity is related to our belief that we have a better chance of developing powerful ideas and practices if we work through a multiplicity of perspectives. We know that homogeneity kills creativity and that diversity is a powerful hedge against the “rationalized conformity” of groupthink. Productively connecting things that had not previously been brought together is very much in the Wesleyan spirit. For example, think of your experience with Wescam these last few weeks Of course, not all combinations will be productive—some creative experiments fail. But without divergent thinking we will be more likely to fall into patterns of enforced conformity that undermine our potential for the future.

You are beginning your post-collegiate years at a time when the phrase “potential for the future” points to something extremely fragile for many young people in this country. This brings me to the third ideal: equality. I trust you have experienced a spirit of egalitarianism here at Wesleyan—a spirit that celebrates great performance rather than great privilege. But while you have been in college, the privileged have become more and more powerful across this land. And this may well continue as entrenched elites forge better and better tools to protect their advantages. Access to a real education is the best antidote to the unnatural aristocracy of wealth. Education creates opportunity, allowing for the experience of freedom as one’s capacities are enhanced and brought into use. Access to education has never been more important, and that’s why I pledge to you today that as long as I am president, financial aid will remain my highest fundraising priority.

Wesleyan will remain a place where students from diverse backgrounds come to rely on themselves, their neighbors and teachers in a context of non-violent egalitarianism and community. Having made this education your own, I am confident that you will resist the trends of inequality that are tearing at the fabric of our country.

Non-violence, diversity and equality…these are ideals shared by generations of Wesleyan alumni. As I say each year, we Wesleyans have used our education to mold the course of culture ourselves lest the future be shaped by those for whom creativity and change, freedom and equality, diversity and tolerance, are much too threatening. Now we alumni are counting on you, class of 2013, to join us in helping to shape our culture, so that it will not be shaped by the forces of violence, conformity and elitism.

We are counting on you because we have already seen what you are capable of when you have the freedom and the tools, the mentors and the friendship, the insight and the affection to go beyond what others have defined as your limits. What you can do fills me with hope, fills me with confidence in the potential of education. I know that you will find new ways to build community, to experience the arts, to join personal authenticity with compassionate solidarity. When this happens, you will feel the power and promise of your education. And we, your Wesleyan family, we will be proud of how you keep your education alive by making it effective in the world.

My dear friends and colleagues, four years ago we met while unloading cars together here on Andrus field. Later that day, many of your family members sat teary-eyed in the chapel as we spoke about how they would be leaving you “on your own” at Wesleyan. It seems like such a short time ago. Now it’s you who are leaving, but do remember that no matter how “on your own” you feel yourselves to be, you will always be members of the Wesleyan family. Wherever your exciting pursuits take you, please come home to alma mater often to share your news, your memories and your dreams. Thank you and good luck!

 

 

It’s Reunion Time

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 making new ones. There are many special events (like the super cool concert with Amanda Palmer Friday night), culminating in Commencement on Sunday.

Wonder why you should make the trip to Middletown? Check out the program. THIS IS WHY.

 

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Our Hearts Go Out to Oklahoma

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 coming to us from Moore, Oklahoma. The terrifying tornado reminds us of how easily lives are destroyed when the weather turns deadly.

Our hearts go out to those who have lost their homes, and our thoughts and prayers are with those killed or injured. Many in the Wesleyan family will want to help in any way they can. You can send assistance to victims of the tornado by texting REDCROSS to 90999, which will donate $10 to the response effort. More about making donations through the Red Cross can be found here.

 

Last day of Finals: Good Luck and Have a Great Summer!

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 just that, but also looking forward to a break. Some will start summer session after Commencement to take a class they really need for their majors or to grab an elective they hadn’t had time for during the regular semesters. There is still room in some summer session courses, and you can access them here and on Wesmaps.

Professors don’t tend to sit out on Foss Hill reading, and this time of year most are super busy reading papers and grading exams. Many on our faculty double down on their research efforts during the summer, going more deeply into their fields of specialization or expanding their intellectual horizons by turning to new subjects. These sorts of research endeavors invariably find their ways back into the classroom, connecting teaching and scholarship in a very virtuous circle.

I’ve got papers to grade myself! If YOU have the time, check out these videos of Wesleyan faculty members. Happy almost-summer!

http://www.wesleyan.edu/video/faculty/nerenberg.html

http://www.wesleyan.edu/video/faculty/adelstein.html

 

Wes Stars: Softball, Baseball, Filmmakers

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 NESCAC rookie of the year.

The baseball team had a tremendous season that led all the way to the conference championship game. This was our first trip to the final match-up, and we  got there the hard way, having dropped a nail-biter against Amherst College in extra innings on Saturday. Donnie Cimino ’15 was one of many stand-out performers over the weekend, capping off his stellar season. The young Cardinal team will be back in the mix for years to come!

The art of film making is certainly a team sport. Over the weekend I also had the opportunity to take in some of the senior productions made by this year’s film studies majors. Whether working in 16 millimeters or video…whether putting together animation, musicals, comedies or existential thrillers, the Wesleyan film auteurs (and their teams) display craft and ingenuity. If you didn’t see the screenings over the weekend, there’s usually another chance over Commencement/Reunion weekend.

Rethinking the Enlightenment with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

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 years, helped to get things started with a talk that focuses on the intersection of history, science and aesthetics in the modern West. We also heard a provocative, important paper by Professor Gao Xiang on the the intersection of Chinese traditions with European Enlightenment thought. Both papers addressed the shadows produced by a systematic, rationalist approach to society and culture.

Poster

The seminars continue today and tomorrow with our distinguished group of scholars. We all have problems of translation, and one of the most interesting aspects of our exchanges with the the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences is teasing out the subtle meanings in our different approaches to what at first seem like common research topics. At our first meeting in Beijing in the fall of 2011 we discussed the status and function of tradition, and the papers for this meeting are all the more interesting when seen in the context of the Enlightenment’s battle with an attachment to the past.

There are several scholars of great distinction presenting their work today and tomorrow, but I can’t help but single out our very own Vera Schwarcz, Freeman Professor of History & East Asian Studies, who has been working on the Chinese Enlightenment for decades. Her historical work has earned her international distinction, as her teaching has garnered her the lifelong appreciation of her students here at Wesleyan.

Speaking of students, one of the most impressive parts of the day yesterday was the performance of our student translators. Through their efforts, we all overcame the language barriers!

 

 

WESU: Support College Radio at its Best

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 and community volunteers worked hard with the Wesleyan University administration to develop a plan to get the station back on its feet.

Currently, WESU operates  24 hrs per day, seven days per week, and is supported by a volunteer staff of over 150 student and community volunteers, two part-time paid staffers, and one full-time general manager. WESU is supported by a partnership between Wesleyan University and listeners, organizations, and businesses throughout the Connecticut River Valley. As evidence of WESU’s transformation over the last decade, for the first time, WESU was crowned “The Best College Radio Station” in the 2013 Hartford Advocate’s Annual Readers’ Poll!

WESU receives no federal funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting or any other grant or foundation sources. WESU depends on listener support to cover roughly one third of its lean $120,000 annual budget. When other public radio stations around the country, including right here in Connecticut, have budgets so huge they can afford to pay their general managers more than twice WESU’s entire annual budget, WESU continues to grow and develop as a community service. With public affairs programming from NPR, Pacifica, local and independent sources in addition to a plethora of free-form music and community programming, WESU offers more perspectives than any other radio station in the region.

In addition to bringing listeners hard-to-access news, music, public affairs, art, and perspectives from across the world, WESU enables our local communities to inform, share, organize, educate, celebrate life, and connect with the world around them. Thanks to the growth in internet broadcasting, WESU now also serves thousands of listeners from around the globe each month. WESU has come a long way since a young student named Arch Doty built that first one-watt radio station in his Wesleyan University Clark Hall dorm room back in 1939.

As an innovative listener-supported community radio station, WESU is constantly exploring new ground. This spring, WESU is taking another risk by exploring a kinder, gentler approach to fundraising in an effort to avoid disrupting the airwaves with another traditional on-air public radio pledge drive.  You can help prevent an over-the-top pledge drive from taking over the WESU airwaves by donating online at www.wesufm.org  or by sending a check to WESU Radio, 45 Broad St, 2nd fl, Middletown, CT 06457 . WESU is also asking supporters to help spread the word throughout their communities and social networks that reaching new donors is critical to sustaining WESU. Past donors will be receiving letters of appeal in the mail as well.

Community support during this drive specifically supports locally produced free-form radio created by student and community volunteers.  WESU offers a truly unique mix of public affairs and cultural programming that reflects the diversity of the communities we serve. With your support, WESU can further distinguish itself from the radio pack and avoid resorting to interrupting regular programming in order to continue doing what it does best!

Hollywood THIS IS WHY Event: Politics and Entertainment for Financial Aid

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 (and SNL).  John discussed his amazing variety of jobs: from geologist to brewer/restaurateur to mayor of Denver and now governor of Colorado. What’s next for Julia?  She loves her award-winning HBO show, VEEP, and with some film work between seasons is plenty busy. And what’s next for John?  He is very happy being governor and will be running for re-election next year.

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It was great fun to see old LA friends and to meet new ones. Julia and John had much to say about contemporary politics, education, and the connection of cynicism to laughter. In their case being funny is just part of  being engaged in their communities. They came out last night to help us raise more money for financial aid. The group there has already donated more than $1.4 million for scholarships.

THIS IS WHY.

 

Review of Nirenberg’s ANTI-JUDAISM

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 even those who preach “love thy neighbor” have often combined their striving for community with the hatred of a scapegoat, the Jews. David Nirenberg’s “Anti-Judaism” is a thorough, scholarly account of why, in the history of the West, Jews have been so easy to hate. And this story goes back a very long way.

Nirenberg returns to ancient Egypt to examine traditions that portray Jews as “enemies of Egyptian piety, sovereignty, and prosperity.”This was already old in the 7th century BCE! Ancient Greeks and Romans would have their Jews, too; they found use for an “anomalous” people who stuck together and followed their own rules, who were “neither disenfranchised nor citizen, neither conquered nor conquering, neither powerless nor free.” Over the centuries, when there was trouble in the kingdom, be it corruption or military threat, famine or political chaos, pagan ideologues developed a handy solution: Attack the Jews.

Jews were useful for those who were contending for power in the ancient world, and the Egyptian model of scapegoating was often repeated. But it was the Christians who refined anti-Judaism into a core theological and political ideology. Christianity had a particular problem: to show that it had overcome Judaism — overcome its adherence to the laws of the “old” testament, overcome its tribal particularity with evangelical universalism. The idea of Judaism — together with the fact that there were still people in the world who chose to remain Jews — was an affront to that universalism. “To the extent that Jews refused to surrender their ancestors, their lineage, and their scripture, they could become emblematic of the particular, of stubborn adherence to the conditions of the flesh, enemies of the spirit, and of God.”

Throughout the centuries theologians returned to this theme when they wanted either to stimulate religious enthusiasm or quash some perceived heretical movement. Not that you needed any real Jews around to do this. You simply had to label your enemies as “Jews” or “Judaizing” to advance the purity of your cause. In the first through fourth centuries, Christians fighting Christians often labeled each other Jews as they struggled for supremacy. And proclaiming your hatred of the Jews became a tried and true way of showing how truly Christian you were. Centuries later, even Luther and Erasmus agreed that “if hatred of Jews makes the Christian, then we are all plenty Christian.”

Islam followed this same pattern of solidifying orthodoxy by stoking anti-Jewish fervor. Muhammad set Islam, like Christianity, firmly within an Abrahamic tradition, but that made it crucial to sever the new religion from any Judaizing possibilities. Rival Islamic groups, like rival forms of Christianity, often painted their adversaries as hypocritical Jews scheming to take the world away from spiritual truths essential for its true salvation.

Nirenberg shows how consistently the struggle for religious and political supremacy has been described as a struggle against the “Jews.” The quotation marks are especially important as his account moves beyond the medieval period, because between 1400 and 1600 Western Europe was more or less “a world free of Jews.” Banished from most countries, and existing only in the tiniest numbers through special exemptions, actual Jews were hardly ever seen. But it was in this period that “Christian Europe awoke haunted by the conviction that it was becoming Jewish.” In this period of cultural change and doctrinal and political disputes, patterns as old as the age of the pharoahs were reactivated: My adversaries must be extinguished for the polity to be purified; my adversaries must be Jews. And in early modern European eyes, the adversaries were especially dangerous if they were secret Jews who appeared to be Christian. Were Jews hiding everywhere?

Martin Luther brought this rhetoric to a fever pitch. In 1523 he accused the Roman Church of becoming “more ‘Jewish’ than the Jews,” and as he grew older he tried to convince his contemporaries that “so thoroughly hopeless, mean, poisonous, and bedeviled a thing are the Jews that for 1400 years they have been, and continue to be, our plague, pestilence, and all that is our misfortune.” Don’t believe in conversions, the aged Luther urged; the only way to baptize Jews was by tying millstones around their necks.

Nirenberg’s command of disparate sources and historical contexts is impressive. His account of the development of Christianity and Islam is scholarly yet readable. And his portrayal of the role that Judaism has played as a foil for the consolidation of religious and political groups is, for this Jewish reader, chilling. Nirenberg is not interested, as he repeatedly insists, in arguing that Christianity and Islam are “anti-Semitic.” Instead, he is concerned with tracing the work that the idea of Judaism does within Western culture. He shows that many of the important conceptual and aesthetic developments in that culture — from Saint John to Saint Augustine to Muhammad, from Shakespeare to Luther to Hegel — depend on denigrating Jews.That’s what’s so chilling: great cultural achievements built on patterns of scapegoating and hatred.

In the modern period, revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries continued to employ “the Jewish problem” as something to be overcome. “How could that tiny minority convincingly come to represent for so many the evolving evils of the capitalist world order?” Nirenberg asks. He shows that for thousands of years the patterns of anti-Judaism have evolved to provide great thinkers and ordinary citizens with habits of thought to “make sense of their world.” He doesn’t say that these patterns caused the mechanized, genocidal Nazi war against the Jews in the 20th century, but he argues convincingly “that the Holocaust was inconceivable and is unexplainable without that deep history of thought.”

Presaging Tom Lehrer, Sigmund Freud in 1929 wrote ironically that Jews, by being objects of aggression, “have rendered most useful services to the civilizations of the countries that have been their hosts; but unfortunately all the massacres of the Jews in the Middle Ages did not suffice to make that period more peaceful and secure for their Christian fellows.” Even when “everybody hates the Jews,” patterns of intolerance and violence remain intact. Nirenberg offers his painful and important history so that we might recognize these patterns in hopes of not falling into them yet again.

Baseball on a Roll: Another Little Three Crown!

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 mound.

Wesleyan Baseball Little Three Champs
Wesleyan Baseball Little Three Champs

We will be hosting the NESCAC baseball tournament, while the softball team will be traveling to the playoffs. The men’s lacrosse team will also be on the road for the semi-finals of the conference tournament, after a thrilling overtime victory against Bowdoin Saturday. Mike Giambanco ’14 and Quentin DellaFera ’15 had hat tricks for the Cardinals. All three teams were Little Three champs this semester.

Men’s and women’s tennis had shutout victories against Colby yesterday. Both teams have been having great seasons. Did you forget about rugby? The rugby men had an amazing come-from-behind victory against Williams over the weekend.

Go WES!!