I write from Shanghai, where I have been meeting with prospective students, alumni, parents….lots of interest in Wesleyan here in China!! Last night about 50 folks gathered under the Red and Black to hear about the latest news from Middletown. Thanks to the high school students who already have the Wesleyan spirit, the parents eager to learn more about liberal arts education, and our wonderful alumni who made all of this possible, especially Sha Ye MA’96 and Yinghai Xie ’97.
Have you heard the news? Wesleyan’s volleyball team has been on a tear. The women are undefeated thus far in NESCAC play and are riding a seven game winning streak! Frosh sensation Gabby Bennett ’20 was named the NESCAC Co-Player of the Week for her outstanding play. I’m about to get on a plane for a long Wesleyan trip, but I wish I could be in the Silloway Gymnasium to watch this exciting, young team do its thing!
Come to cheer them on: Friday night at 7 pm against Tufts and Saturday at 1 pm against Bowdoin.
And let’s not forget the stellar women’s tennis team. Eudice Chong ’18 and Victoria Yu ’19 had a dominant tournament last weekend at the ITA Regional Championships, claiming the doubles crown while Eudice finished second in singles.
Go Wes!!
Like many citizens around the country, I have been deeply disturbed by the reports of African-American men being shot by police officers. Of course, the words “deeply disturbed” fail to convey the pain and anger generated by the latest violence. At lunch time today students and others stood in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. There is so much eloquence in their shared, communal silence.
This afternoon a group of Cabinet members and I sent the following to the campus:
As we continue to witness acts of violence around our country – especially toward black and brown and other marginalized persons – we are filled with many strong emotions based upon our own identities and experiences. But, we all worry about those of us and those in our communities who are impacted by these events in myriad ways.
As a sign of our solidarity and our commitment to do whatever we can to address bias and inequity in our hearts, on our campus, and in our communities, we ask you to gather in the Huss Courtyard outside of Usdan on Tuesday 9/27 at noon. Immediately after this moment of silence and reflection, members of the CAPS team will be available in Boger 111 and staff from the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life will be available in Usdan 104D for faculty, staff and students who may want to (or need to) talk about recent events.
Beyond this visible sign of solidarity, we commit to continue our personal and institutional work toward peace, justice, equity and inclusion. We hope that you will too.
I will be traveling for Wesleyan on Tuesday, but I will be with the group in spirit in the Huss Courtyard at noon. Solidarity is crucial to building our community and to making a difference.
Solidarity is crucial and so is engagement. This is a season of change, an election season. I urge all our students, as well as faculty and staff, to play active roles as citizens. The stakes are so high.
The MacArthur Foundation today announced its class of 2016 Fellows — commonly known as the genius awards — and there are two Wesleyan alumni among them.Vincent Fecteau ’92 is an artist of distinctive subtlety, craft and care. I visited his studio in San Francisco when I was president of California College of the Arts, and I have long admired his work. Here’s part of what the foundation said about his practice:
Fecteau imbues his work with philosophical content, just as the work assumes psychological dimensions through its uncanny correspondences with the human body. In our age of ever-increasing distraction, Fecteau’s sculpture offers a place for the sustained experience of thought and observation to unfold and flourish.
You can read more about Vincent’s work and see some images here.
Maggie Nelson ’94 is a writer of uncommon gifts, able to blend theory, memoir, poetry and criticism into new genres of expression and insight. Kari and I were reading her work during the summer a couple of years ago, and recently my son gave me a copy of Bluets. I passed it along to our daughter Sophie, who was inspired by it (and made friends in NYC just carrying and reading it in public!).
Reading Bluets made me aware of my color-blindness more than anything I’ve ever encountered. Here’s part of what the foundation said about her work:
Nelson remains skeptical of truisms and ideologies and continually challenges herself to consider multiple perspectives. Her empathetic and open-ended way of thinking—her willingness to change her mind and even embrace qualities of two seemingly incompatible positions—offers a powerful example for how very different people can think and live together. Through the dynamic interplay between personal experience and critical theory, Nelson is broadening the scope of nonfiction writing while also offering compelling meditations on social and cultural questions.
You can read more about Maggie’s writings here.
Congratulations to our new alumni MacArthur Fellows! We are so proud!!
Fall semester schedules are now set, and students are preparing for their first exams, finishing problem sets and writing essays. Just a few weeks ago I gave a talk to family members dropping off their new students in Middletown. It was a time of joy and poignancy, and a time for remembering those core things one should discover while at college: what you love love to do; how to get better at it; how to share it with others. Here’s a video of the talk.
Today is the fifteenth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center. It is a day of pious remembrance of the thousands who were killed in that awful act of terrorism, of the courage and care of first responders, of the brutal aftermath of continued terrorism and the war against it that has scarred countless lives around the globe.
This week a photography exhibition marks this anniversary at the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan’s Center for the Arts.
here is new york: a democracy of photographs is an exhibition of photographs made in response to the events of September 11, 2001. What began as one photo hung in the window of a SoHo storefront directly after the attacks became a means for everyone to have a voice beyond the conventional networks of reportage. Marking the fifteenth anniversary of September 11, this is the first time the photographs have been exhibited in Connecticut. At Wesleyan, the exhibition will replicate the democratic setting of the original exhibition, featuring photographs given to the Davison Art Center at Wesleyan University by Charles Traub and Aaron Traub in 2014.
Charles Traub and I will have a public conversation about the exhibition at the gallery on Tuesday, September 13th at 4:30 pm.
Photographs are a crucial way of directing attention, of creating a recollection, of paying respect. They seldom speak for themselves, but speak they do. Mark the day with remembrance in ways that feel appropriate. A democracy of memory, if you will.
This afternoon, on the first Friday of the school year, the Wesleyan campus hosts The Mash — a music festival that showcases plenty of student talent. There are stages at various places on campus, and this morning at 6:30 am Mathilde, Kari and I heard a lone guitarist on Foss Hill playing some sweet tunes. Come on out and listen. Or come on out and make some music!! It will be hot out there, but it should be a great day!
Kari and I are sitting in with The Highlanders at 5:00 pm at the base of Foss Hill. We are followed by some great student groups and an alumni band.
Here’s the schedule:
Olin Library
2pm-2:20pm Slavei
2:30pm-2:50pm Hari
3pm-3:20pm Slender James
3:30pm-3:50pm Birchbark
4pm-4:20pm Fortune Plays Sax
4:30pm-4:50pm Anna Savage
North College Lawn (Rain Site: Patricelii ’92 Theater)
2pm-2:20pm Sneaky Boy
2:30pm-2:50pm MEG
3pm-3:20pm Dinomanic
3:30pm-3:50pm Yer Trash
4pm-4:20pm the good lonely
4:30pm-4:50pm Mom
Center for the Arts (Rain site: World Music Hall)
2pm-2:20pm Rui Barbosa
2:30pm-2:50pm BOSSY
3pm-3:20pm Lo-Qi
3:30pm-3:50pm McCleary McCleary
4pm-4:20pm Going Up North for the Weekend
4:30pm-4:50pm Slouch
Main Stage on Foss Hill (Rain site: Crowell Concert Hall)
5pm-5:20pm The Highlanders
5:30pm-5:50pm Jal & Locus
6pm-6:20pm Chef
6:30pm-7:30pm El Niño
The semester is finally underway, and I am delighted to greet students on campus as they make their way to classes. The First Year Seminars are particularly attractive this year; they are a great way to improve one’s writing while also learning about a fascinating subject area.
I was excited to meet my Virtue and Vice class yesterday, and we had an animated conversation about the traditional virtues, and an even more pointed back and forth about the vices that are linked to them. When I asked the class about who they most admire, celebrities got by far the most votes. I wonder if that will change as we dig into the texts about moral philosophy….
Our athletes are already working hard at practice, and try outs for music and theater groups are getting underway. What performances will stand out this year? Maybe something from Friday’s MASH music festival…
This first Tuesday of the semester is a VEG OUT! day. You’ll find a cornucopia of vegetarian options at our dining facilities. Here’s what I heard from a student organizer:
Our Green Fund sponsored campaign “Veg Out” launched last October as a subcommittee of the Real Food Challenge student group, which aims to shift Usdan purchasing to socially & environmentally responsibly sourced food. The goal of Veg Out is to spread awareness of the negative impacts of the animal agriculture industry (both social & environmental), which we’ve done through a public forum, film screenings, posters, photo campaigns, an official Bon App banner in Usdan, a publication, an all school event, and most recently with the establishment of Veg Out Tuesdays. Starting on September 6, every other Tuesday for this Fall 2016 semester, Usdan will serve more vegetarian options (and no meat options). The upcoming dates are: September 20; October 4 & 18; November 1 & 15; December 6. We’re excited to Veg Out together! For more information, or to get involved, people can reach out to either Ingrid Eck ieck@wesleyan.edu or Mya Valentin mvalentin@wesleyan.edu or check us out on facebook at https://www.facebook.com/vegout.wesleyan/.
Eat plants!
Soon I meet the faculty for the first meeting of the year. And we’re off!!
Updated with more information on VegOUT
In the past week the University of Chicago made big news by defending academic freedom in a letter to incoming students. “Finally,” a distinguished alumnus wrote in a subject line of an email to me, “some sanity on campus.” Really? How is it possible that a distinguished university polishes its own apple by stating the obvious, that freedom of thought and expression are essential to its mission?
Well, last year was a tumultuous one for campus politics. Events from Claremont California to the University of Missouri to Yale gave plenty of fuel to older pundits already asking, “What’s the matter with kids today?” A chorus of critics of political correctness found common ground in mocking students’ desire for “safe spaces,” their concern over micro-aggressions, their need for trigger warnings. Kids today are coddled, we were told, and when they get to college, they fail to respect the rough and tumble contest of ideas that middle-aged alumni remember as being part of their own college experience. No matter that when most of us oldsters were in college, the campuses were far less diverse places than they are today. There were many voices back then that none of us got to hear.
Why did the Chicago’s Dean of Students feel the need to remind the happy few chosen to be part of the class of 2020 that the university does not support trigger warnings, intellectual “safe spaces” or the cancelling of visiting speakers? What if a faculty member wanted to give students a heads up that they would be reading a racist text or a book about rape so as to help them understand the reasons why it was part of the work of the class? Would giving this “trigger warning” not be part of the professor’s academic freedom? And what if students, as Northwestern’s president Morton Schapiro explained in an op-ed last year, sometimes wanted to hang out in the university’s Hillel so as to feel comfortable (safe) in discussions about Israel? What if students decided to protest a visiting war criminal who has been invited to lecture? Would these run afoul of Chicago’s posture of intellectual toughness?
When confronted with issues of power and inequitable distribution of resources, it’s far too easy to fall back on talk about abstract commitments to freedom and procedures. At a time when violent racism has been exposed as a systematic part of law enforcement, at a time when the legitimation of hatred in public discourse has become an accepted part of national presidential politics, it seems more than a little naive to tell incoming frosh that “civility and mutual respect are vital to all of us.” These students are coming to Chicago, after all ― one of the most violent cities in America. But perhaps the Dean’s letter was aimed at a different audience ― those concerned with the bogeyman of political correctness and those who worry that free speech isn’t the absolute value it used to be. That would explain the concerted efforts of the University of Chicago’s administrators to push for their unfettered marketplace of ideas version of free speech.
That said, I agree that freedom of expression is essential for education and for democracy. But speech is never absolutely free; it always takes place for specific purposes and against a background of some expression that is limited or prohibited. Hate speech and harassment fall into these legal or procedural categories. And there are some things, after all, that a university should refuse to legitimate or dignify by treating them as fit subjects for academic discussion. When we make a subject part of a debate, we legitimate it in ways that may harm individuals and the educational enterprise. We must beware of the rubric of protecting speech being used as a fig leaf for intimidating those with less power.
Last year at Wesleyan University, we had an intense debate about freedom of the press. Some students initially wanted to defund the student newspaper because they found it offensive, but others rushed to its defense. At that time, I wrote:
Debates can raise intense emotions, but that doesn’t mean that we should demand ideological conformity because people are made uncomfortable. As members of a university community, we always have the right to respond with our own opinions, but there is no right not to be offended. We certainly have no right to harass people because we don’t like their views. Censorship diminishes true diversity of thinking; vigorous debate enlivens and instructs.
It’s still the case that the great majority of those studying on American college campuses would agree.
Over time, our students realized that censorship in various forms is antithetical to our educational mission, and they also recognized that the school newspaper could do a better job soliciting diverse of points of view. Rather than merely affirming abstract principle, they worked through an on-the-ground commitment to freedom of expression along with the cultivation of diverse points of view and a sense of belonging. This is not “free speech absolutism” or even a pure standard for campus decision makers to apply. But it is a winning combination for those entering a university, in Chicago or anywhere else.
Cross-posted with the Washington Post.
