Science, Ethics and Liberal Arts Education

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I’ve recently had a series of talks with education officials, journalists and families about liberal arts education. There are international dimensions to these conversations that are exceptionally interesting to me, and I want to return to those in some future blog postings. Some of these discussions have concentrated on contrasts between a broad liberal arts education and a focused, technical study of STEM fields. This has struck me as odd because broad liberal learning also serves these fields so well. Today I am thinking about the ways in which the sciences are linked to the other liberal arts. In some contexts, people talk about the liberal arts and the sciences, as if biology and chemistry, physics and astronomy weren’t already part of the liberal arts. Even at Wesleyan there had been a tendency to make this two cultures mistake, which risks separating the sciences from our liberal arts mission. Regardless of which disciplines come to mind when we hear “liberal arts,” the fact is that almost all our science majors take classes in the social sciences, arts and humanities, and that there has been increasing interest among humanists, artists and social scientists in scientific research practices.

Many of our scientists have been interested in the intersection of their work with the broader community. Peter Patton, long-time faculty member in Earth and Environmental Sciences, recently led a field trip with students to study changes to some deep-rooted ecosystems in Puerto Rico. Last week biologist Janice Naegele spoke with a group of faculty from across the curriculum about her lab’s stem-cell work on brain seizures, and she also teaches classes that emphasize writing about science —   translating research into clear terms for the generally educated reader. Suzanne O’Connell, a scientist now directing our Service Learning Center, has a similar concern about the dissemination of research. You can tune in to her “Science on the Radio” class. And there are plenty of other science faculty I could mention in this regard, as well as students who are helping to teach science to youngsters in Middletown.

Wesleyan’s Science in Society Program is at the heart of our efforts to maintain robust interconnections between the sciences and all the other fields on campus. For example, for many years philosopher Joe Rouse (who heads the program) has explored how scientific legitimacy is achieved, and how specific disciplinary practices in the sciences create modes of understanding. Laura Stark, a sociologist who also teaches in the SiSP program, has just published Behind Closed Doors: IRNs and the Making of Ethical Research. Laura’s work explores how institutional review boards come to approve some experiments and not others, and how their criteria for decision making reflects conceptions of what it means to be human and to have rights. In history, Bill Johnston, Paul Erickson and Jennifer Tucker all connect the sciences to their cultural contexts, as does Gillian Goslinga in anthropology. Jill Morawski, another member of SiSP and a psychologist who has been directing the Center for the Humanities, has been linking the topics at CHUM with issues in the sciences that intersect with philosophy, history, gender studies and ethics. Speaking of ethics, philosopher Lori Gruen’s work in animal studies has been very much influenced by her team teaching over the years with scientists. She has been at the forefront of the university’s curricular development in ethics.

Last year I joined the board of the Hastings Center, a non-partisan research institution dedicated to bioethics and the public interest.  The president of the organization asked me to address the links between its mission in bioethics and the mission of universities and colleges dedicated to liberal arts education. The founders of the Hastings Center knew that science was too important to leave in the hands only of specialists, and over the years the staff has developed a robust research organization that connects advanced scientific work with ethical and policy issues. In a similar vein, I think it’s crucial that liberal arts colleges and universities ensure that higher education isn’t left in the hands only of specialists. We are connecting our schools to the worlds of public life, the economy and the broader culture. These connections will make for healthier and more successful scientific and educational institutions.

Here’s a link to my talk for Hastings:

 

 

Go Positive!

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It’s been more than a little depressing to listen to debate performances over the last couple of months, in which candidates seem to gain in popularity by refining a formula of indignation and hostility. “How dare you,” says the candidate, puffing out his chest, wondering how any questioner could sink so low to ask about a character flaw. The same candidate then dives even lower to cast aspersions on anyone who might be considered a rival.

The research tells us why the candidates “go negative.” It works. SuperPac donors know where to invest, and they are investing in negativity in a big way. The Wesleyan Media Project research shows outside money “went from about 3 percent of total ad airings in the 2008 race to almost half, about 44 percent, in 2012.” As we leave Florida and head out to Nevada, I’m afraid we can only expect more of the same.

I’m embarrassed to say that one of the key places where candidates and citizens acquire a taste for — and skills in — negativity is higher education. For decades now, we have promoted a culture of criticism in which you show how smart you are by tearing apart somebody else’s ideas. That’s a lot safer than showing how you might build your own set of ideas into something meaningful. In my recent book, Memory, Trauma and History: Essays on Living with the Past, I urge my colleagues to go beyond this culture of criticism to practices of creative exploration. The first off-campus reviewer of the collection couldn’t resist bringing up my dust-up with Zonker Harris. Here is an excerpt from one of the essays in the book, “Beyond Critical Thinking.”

 

I doubt that this [cultivation of negativity] is a particularly contemporary development. In the eighteenth century, there were complaints about an Enlightenment culture that only prized skepticism and that was only satisfied with disbelief. Our contemporary version of this trend, though, has become skeptical even about skepticism. We no longer have the courage of our lack of conviction. Perhaps that’s why we teach our students that it’s cool to say that they are engaged in “troubling” an assumption or a belief. To declare that one wanted to disprove a view would show too much faith in the ability to tell truth from falsehood. And to declare that one was receptive to learning from someone else’s view would show too much openness to being persuaded by an idea that might soon be deconstructed (or simply mocked).

In training our students in the techniques of being critical, we may be giving them reasons to remain guarded — which can translate into reasons not to learn. The confident refusal to be affected by those with whom we disagree seems to have infected much of our cultural life: from politics to the press, from siloed academic programs (no matter how multidisciplinary) to warring public intellectuals. As humanities teachers, however, we must find ways for our students to open themselves to the emotional and cognitive power of history and literature that might initially rub them the wrong way, or just seem foreign. Critical thinking is sterile without the capacity for empathy and comprehension that stretches the self.
…
But the contemporary humanities should do more than supplement critical thinking with empathy and a desire to understand others from their own point of view. We should also supplement our strong critical engagement with cultural and social engagement by developing modes of teaching that allow our students to enter in the value-laden practices of a particular culture to understand better how these values are legitimated: how the values are lived as legitimate. Current thinking in the humanities is often strong at showing that values that are said to be shared are really imposed on more vulnerable members of a particular group. Current thinking in the humanities is also good at showing the contextualization of norms, whether the context is generated by an anthropological, historical, or other disciplinary matrix. But in both of these cases, we ask our students to develop a critical distance from the context or culture they are studying.

Many humanities professors have become disinclined to investigate with our students how we generate the values we believe in, or the norms according to which we go about our lives. In other words, we have been less interested in showing how we make a norm legitimate than in sharpening our tools for delegitimization. … If we humanities professors saw ourselves more often as explorers of the normative rather than as critics of normativity, we would have a better chance to reconnect our intellectual work to broader currents in public culture. This does not have to mean an acceptance of the status quo, but it does mean making an effort to understand the practices of cultures (including our own) from the point of view of those participating in them. This would include an understanding of how cultures change. For some, this would mean complementing our literary or textual work with participation in community, with what are often called service-learning courses. For others, it would mean approaching our object of study not with the anticipated goal of exposing weakness or mystification but with the goal of turning ourselves in such a way as to see how what we study might inform our thinking and our lives.
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The fact that language fails according to some impossible criterion, or that we often create misunderstandings in our use of it, is no news, really. It is part of our finitude, but it should not be taken as the key marker of our humanity. The news that is brought by the humanities is a way of turning the heart and the spirit so as to hear in the languages people use the possibilities of various forms of life in which we might participate. When we learn to read or look or listen intensively, we are not just becoming adept at exposing falsehood or at uncovering yet more examples of the duplicities of culture and society. We are partially overcoming our own blindness by trying to understand something from another’s artistic, philosophical, or historical point of view. … Of course hard-nosed critical thinking may help in this endeavor, but it also may be a way we learn to protect ourselves from the acknowledgment and insight that humanistic study has to offer. As students and as teachers, we sometimes crave that protection because without it we risk being open to changing who we are. In order to overcome this blindness, we risk being very uncomfortable indeed.

My humanities teachers enriched my life by showing me details and patterns and relations. In so doing, they also helped me to acquire tools that have energetically shaped my scholarship and my interactions with colleagues and students. It is my hope that as guides, not judges, we can show our students how to engage in the practice of exploring objects, norms, and values that animate diverse cultures. In doing so, students will develop the ability to converse with others about shaping the objects, norms, and values that will give substance and character to their own lives. They will develop the ability to add value to (and not merely criticize values in) whatever organizations in which they participate. They will often reject roads that others have taken, and they will sometimes chart new paths. But guided by the humanities they will increase their ability to find together ways of living that have meaning and direction, illuminating paths immensely practical and sustaining.

 cross-posted from Huffingtonpost

Sundance Champ, National Academy Selection

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Last night my old friend Joe Wallace ’79 sent me a message to say that Benh Zeitlin ’04 won top honors at the Sundance Film Festival. Check it out on the Huffingtonpost.  Benh is no stranger to awards, having won the Grand Jury prize at Slamdance just a year after graduation for his senior thesis film. Check out the Argus story on that one. Joe himself is a wonderful writer, whose novel Diamond Ruby continues to collect fans young and old.

The recognition keeps coming! Professor Jeffrey Schiff, who has taught sculpture here for many years, has had his work  selected as part of the National Academy Museum’s annual exhibition.

Speaking of recognition…Women basketball players from the last 40 years came back to campus this past weekend. They got to see the Wes Women grab a victory against Connecticut College, and to reminisce with one another and our super coach, Kate Mullen. It was great to see all this Cardinal Spirit…even if I did take a lot of ribbing about not seeing enough b-ball when I was a student (“Roth,  you were such a nerd!”)

Congratulations All!

 

A Tale of Three Alumni

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Last night the folks on Wesconnect were all a-twitter because Bill Belichick ’75 during one of his many press conferences picked out a reporter wearing a Wesleyan University sweatshirt. It’s not unusual for the smartest coach in the NFL to acknowledge alma mater. Bill has great affection for Wes, and has been supportive of our efforts in athletics and financial aid. Kimberley Martin ’03, a reporter from Newsday, was wearing the red and black.

This week the Middletown Press named Izzi Greenberg ’05 “Person of the Year.” Izzi has been a force for good things in Middletown’s North End for many years. Along with her organization NEAT (North End Action Team), she helped Wesleyan start the Green Street Art Center, and she has worked on behalf of her neighborhood every chance she gets. As The Middletown Press puts it: “Greenberg said her biggest success in 2011 was perhaps the North End Farmers Market, where NEAT saw visitors from 42 different municipalities. The North End Farmers Market doubled the value of federal benefits, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, essentially giving families on assistance 50 percent off their purchase, she said.”

This morning’s New York Times featured Lael Brainard ’83, U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Under Secretary for International Affairs. The Times described Lael, also a former Trustee at Wes, as our chief financial diplomat. At Davos this week she is playing a crucial role in negotiating with European countries as they struggle with debt relief. According to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner: “They trust her, they reach out to her, they talk to her for ideas and to get us to engage.”

Three very active alumni in three very different spheres of public engagement. If I had enough time, I could list hundreds more..

Time Passes, Classes Begin (and so do exhibitions)!

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Today classes get underway, and for me that’s always an exciting time. I re-tooled the Past on Film quite a bit this semester, and I am eager to see how the course develops in its new incarnation. I know many of my faculty colleagues have been developing new versions of old favorites, or developing new courses that address issues that have recently come to the fore. We are building a syllabus library, and you can check out some examples of what’s being taught at Wes here.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of greeting Wesleyan’s graduate students as they finished a day long symposium exploring career options in the sciences and music. Graduate students are not always very visible at our small university, but they play a vital role in our educational ecology. MA and Ph.D. students in ethnomusicology, chemistry, liberal studies, biology or experimental composition (to name just some of their fields) are all developing as scholars and teachers even while still being students. James Ricci, the head of the Graduate Students Association, heads up a vibrant, diverse and dedicated community. Bill Herbst, astronomer and Director of Graduate Studies, and Cheryl-Ann Hagner, who is in charge of graduate student services, are providing greater visibility and support to this important area at Wesleyan.

As classes get underway, there is a most interesting exhibition set to open in the Zilkha Gallery. The show is entitled “Passing Time,” and it features some extraordinarily gifted contemporary artists. Here’s a description of the show from the Center for the Arts: “The multiple and converging meanings of the phrase “passing time”–spending time, time to die–are explored in the evocative imagery of recent art by fourteen international artists working in video, photography, sculpture and works on paper. Some artists turn to sport, some to music; some refer to nature and its rhythms to explore concepts of time–short term, long term and terminating. Others partner with time itself in their making of art. Time is a concept that philosophers and physicists ponder. Time provides a framework that orders, measures and defines. We spend time, we waste it, we keep it; time flies, it drags. It is elastic in its perception–long when we are young, gaining momentum as we age. This exhibition explores the relationship between the time of our life and the time of the eons. The exhibit features works by Rineke Dijkstra (The Netherlands), Shaun Gladwell (Australia), Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Stefana McClure and Bill Viola (United States), among others. The exhibition is curated by Ginger Gregg Duggan and Judith Hoos Fox of c2—curatorsquared. Faculty members from six disciplines have written reactions to the show: Lutz Huwel (Physics), Bill Herbst (Astronomy), John Seamon (Psychology), Sara Croucher (Anthro), Uli Plass (German) and Janne Hoeltermann (Studio Art). Check out the website, or better yet, see the work at Zilkha.

The doors of Zilkha open on Friday, and the official opening celebration is Tuesday, January 31, from 5-7 pm.

Best wishes to all as the new semester begins!

 

 

 

Deb Olin Unferth Nominated for National Book Critics Circle Award

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Deb Olin Unferth, Assistant Professor of English, was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award for her memoir, Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War. Deb’s book recounts how as a teenager in 1987 she and her boyfriend headed to El Salvador and Nicaragua to join the revolutionary forces fighting against military and paramilitary groups. Deb has also written a novel, Vacation, and a collection of short stories, Minor Robberies. She publishes lots of “short shorts” and has been working on a graphic novel. Deb teaches creative writing and contemporary literature at Wes.

Congratulations, Deb!

Book Review: “The Castrato and his Wife”

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Yesterday the Washington Post published my review of this wonderfully interesting book of European history. In my Modern and Postmodern class we kept coming back to what it means to talk about the “really real.” So did Ms. Tenducci in the 18th century, and the historian Hellen Berry today.
 bookworld@washpost.com
In 1775, Dorothea Maunsell and her new husband, William Long Kingsman, went to court to show that they were indeed legally married. They had already had two wedding ceremonies (one in Italy, the other in England), but there was a problem: a long, public record of Dorothea already being married to opera singer Ferdinando Tenducci. Those two had eloped in 1766 and had lived as a couple in England and then Italy. But Dorothea and William went to court to argue that the earlier liaison was in fact no real marriage. Tenducci had been castrated as a boy so as to preserve his pure voice. As a eunuch, he was deemed physically and legally incapable of being married.
Helen Berry, a gifted historian with a great story to tell, relates that the intentional removal of testicles was banned by the pope in 1587, as was the marriage of eunuchs. But the surgical mutilation continued for the next two centuries because, as Berry writes, “The fully trained castrato voice epitomized everything about Baroque style — artifical, sensuous, luxurious, and exotic.” As a youngster Tenducci was singled out for his lovely voice, and “someone in authority” probably suggested that having him castrated could lead to some money for his poor family.

 

(Oxford University Press) – ’The Castrato and His Wife’ by Helen Berry

Tenducci became a well-known singer in Italy, and his fame grew as he sang opera and more popular material in London and Dublin. He excited admiration and affection from men and women alike, and he was known to boast that he could satisfy women without risk to them. Berry describes him as having become a “celebrity pin-up,” and she explores how women who flirted with him (and other castrati) “found a loophole that was an escape from the sexual double standard.” Women could intimately associate with castrati, since these were not supposed to be “real men” who could ruin their reputations.

Dorothea had been one of these women. She studied music in Dublin with Tenducci in 1765 when she was about 15 years old, but not too long afterward asked him to take her away as his wife. Their elopement was scandalous, but the notoriety didn’t hurt Tenducci’s career. They eventually escaped the wrath of Dorothea’s father (and some of Tenducci’s debts) by moving to Italy. There the young woman was sometimes described as the singer’s student, often as his wife. In early 1768 Dorothea published in London a 68-page pamphlet, “The True and Genuine Narrative of Mr. and Mrs. Tenducci.” Of course there was gossip, but Dorothea accompanied Tenducci to his concerts and even sang with him to critical acclaim. Dorothea had escaped her Dublin family and was a part of Tenducci’s operatic life. Berry reports the astonishment of the famous Casanova, a man not easily shocked, at meeting Tenducci and his wife. Casanova even remembers them having children. How was it possible for a castrato to be a husband, let alone a father? What was a real husband, anyway? In any case, the couple seemed happy. They were on stage.

The sources are silent on why Dorothea left Tenducci. We know that she was alone in Florence, and she may have resented being left behind while her famous husband went away on tour. Perhaps the reports of her being a mother indicated that her relationship with Kingsman was longstanding. In any case, in November 1771 she sneaked to Naples to meet up with Kingsman, who had just received his inheritance. The following spring she married him in an Anglican ceremony in Rome. She begged her father’s forgiveness and asked to return to Dublin. He sent money for the trip, and the couple had another marriage ceremony in the summer of 1773. They wanted their child to be granted legitimacy retroactively — not an unusual occurrence in the 18th century.

In early 1776 the court ruled that Dorothea had never been married to Tenducci because the singer was incapable of being a husband. The judge had considered much detailed testimony on the opera star’s anatomy, including a salacious report that Tenducci carried his surgically removed testicles with him in a red velvet purse. Dorothea’s legal marriage was to Kingsman. He, a normal man, eventually died in a debtor’s prison. We have no records of Dorothea continuing to write or sing.

Tenducci is reported to have lamented the loss of his wife, but he did not contest the verdict. He went on to a distinguished if tumultuous late career, including concerts with J.C. Bach at Versailles and Paris in 1778, where Mozart composed a piece for him. When the French Revolution raged, the singer retired to Italy, where he gave music lessons and the occasional concert as “Count Tenducci.” Upon his death, a mass featuring “the finest musicians” was celebrated in his honor in Genoa.

In the 18th century, questions about identity, freedom, love and nature were inflected by the beauty of performance made possible by mutilation. Are the contemporary versions of these questions so different? Berry’s meticulously researched yet very readable story of Tenducci and Dorothea resonates across the centuries to our own time. What makes a marriage real? Do we want our celebrities (or spouses) to be “natural” or eccentric?The Castrato and his Wife is a fascinating account of how masculinity, femininity and marriage were being reshaped in 18th-century Europe just when modernity was taking shape.


Re-Accreditation Thoughts

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This week I met with staff at a convocation for the new semester. We shared the good news that the Old Squash Building has been beautifully reconstructed (on time and on budget!) as the new home for the Career Resource Center, the College of Letters and the Art History department. We also talked about the continued growth in our application pool and the flurry of generous giving that came at the end of the calendar year. The Physical Plant team, the Admissions Office and the University Relations Office have been awfully busy during this long winter “break.”

I shared with the staff some quick thoughts about the re-accreditation process now underway with the Northeast Association of Schools and Colleges. During our self-study, we are asked to assess and reflect on our progress on 11 “standards”. We are using this process to find places where we can improve the university’s operations, and in that spirit I mentioned a challenge for each of NEASC’s standards.

Mission and Purpose

In a joint community effort we created a Mission Statement about two years ago. This is it:

Wesleyan University is dedicated to providing an education in the liberal arts that is characterized by boldness, rigor, and practical idealism. At Wesleyan, distinguished scholar-teachers work closely with students, taking advantage of fluidity among disciplines to explore the world with a variety of tools. The university seeks to build a diverse, energetic community of students, faculty, and staff who think critically and creatively and who value independence of mind and generosity of spirit.

Planning and Evaluation

How do we plan with data? How do we maintain tradition without carrying dead weight?

There are many things we do at Wesleyan because we’ve “always done them this way.” We must use data in order to plan programs that will give maximum support to learning and research.

Organization and Governance

How do we involve faculty and staff in planning for the future of the organization when contemporary needs are so pressing?

We have seriously reduced annual spending and the size of the support staff. This makes day-to-day operations more challenging. In this context it is imperative to involve faculty and staff in planning the long-term future of the university.

Academic Program

How will the liberal arts remain relevant for the future? What is curricular coherence?

In 2007 we were challenged by NEASC to articulate our view of the coherence of the curriculum. We believe that students at Wes should own their own education, but to do so requires serious advising and mentoring. By giving students the tools to develop their own education, we strive to provide intellectual cross-training –liberal learning that will shape the future.

Faculty

How do we support a scholar-teacher model in a world increasingly concerned with immediate results?

We believe that students learn from the example of dedicated scholar-teachers. But much of scholarship is not immediately relevant to the classroom, and we know that deep research is not best judged by popularity. Our challenge is to maintain the subsidy for advanced research as a vehicle for first-rate undergraduate education.

Students

How do we maintain vibrant student life in the face of a culture of entitlement and excessive drug and alcohol use?

Wesleyan has long been known for its progressive, creative and productive student culture. Like most colleges and universities, we also have a student culture plagued by abuse of alcohol and drugs by people who feel that this is “their time” to do whatever they please. How can we balance the forces of creativity and our responsibility to maintain a safe, educational environment?

Library and Info Resources

How do we maintain vibrant up-to-date access to the best information across a wide variety of fields?

The Wesleyan Library is one of the jewels of the campus, and it remains a great study space and intellectual resource. It is also part of a network of resources that connect student and faculty to the materials they need for study. Increasingly, this means access to information rather than ownership of materials.

Financial Resources

How do we rebuild our endowment base while competing right now?

For the last few years we have been focused on building our endowment, so that the financial strength of the university will be at least as great 25 years from now as it is today. We must balance that long-term building with the needs of the students, faculty, and staff today.

Public Disclosure

Can we maintain a culture of transparency in a highly political environment?

Since the financial crisis, we have been making all our financial and planning materials as public as possible. We must continue to do so, even in a context of competition and critique.

Physical Resources

We have a beautiful campus that thousands consider home. It is aging. How do we maintain it and modernize it?

Many say that Wesleyan’s campus has never looked more beautiful, and the new buildings work well side-by-side with our historic structures. We must continue to maintain our history even as we modernize our physical plant to become more energy efficient and networked to the wider world.

Integrity

How can we be honest about our challenges and forthright in our commitments?

I am very proud of the achievements of our university — from staff and faculty members who go far beyond the call of duty to students who achieve focused excellence while broadening their educational experience. I am also proud of the ways that our community prods us to do even more, pointing out where we fall short and encouraging us to live up to our mission to: think critically and creatively and… value independence of mind and generosity of spirit

In a few weeks, new drafts of our accreditation self-study will be posted online. I hope many of you will comment on our work thus far. Together, we will make Wesleyan a university that can be an ever deeper resource for its students, alumni, faculty and staff — a university that can be an admirable example of the best in American progressive liberal arts education.

MLK Day: Now is the Time

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The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.”

Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for the law.
— Letter from Birmingham Jail, 1963

If the cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. . . . Because the goal of America is freedom, abused and scorned tho’ we may be, our destiny is tied up with America’s destiny.
— Letter from Birmingham Jail, 1963

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. –Strength to Love, 1963

We must use time creatively, and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy, and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.” Letter From Birmingham Jail, 1963

 

Big Wesleyan Sports Weekend: Go WES!!

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It’s still winter break, but the athletes have been working hard and are already competing in important games and matches. This weekend all the winter sports squads will be matching up with tough opponents. Tonight (Friday), for example, the women’s and men’s basketball teams will be matching up with Little Three rival Williams college. The women’s and men’s hockey squads are away at hockey powerhouse Bowdoin. All our squads will be at it again tomorrow, with Middlebury meeting the hoopsters in Middletown while the hockey Cardinals head to Colby. Swimming and track are at home tomorrow, and wrestling and squash are on the road. Come to Middletown to cheer on the Red and Black!

You can find the schedule for upcoming athletic events here.

I am on the road myself, and am sorry to miss these contests. Last night I interviewed Carter Bays ’97 and Craig Thomas ’97, the creators of How I Met Your Mother in front of an audience of a couple of hundred Wes folks in Los Angeles. It was a great evening, and I’m sure we’ll have some pics to post soon. California is certainly Wesleyan country. I run into alumni, students and their families everywhere I go!

 

Wesleyan men win big over Williams! GREAT victory!

 

AND LESS THAN A WEEK LATER A THRILLING WIN OVER AMHERST IN THE LAST SECONDS!!