Students have been trickling in over the last several days, and now the big day is here when the class of 2021 arrives. I’ll be heading out soon to help our athletes assist in the move in process. Welcome to Wesleyan!
If you have Arrival Day photos you would like to submit to Wesleyan’s Communications office, please send them to newsletter@wesleyan.edu.
Images from Arrival Day 2017:
Today, I sent the following message to the campus community:
Dear friends,
Welcome to our university’s 186th academic year!
This fall marks my tenth year as president of Wesleyan. I’m using this occasion to try to look at our university with fresh eyes: What could we do better? What should we preserve, and what should we change? I look forward to feedback from all around campus and will be meeting with a wide variety of groups throughout the fall.
In recent months, we’ve worked to strengthen the curriculum – hiring new faculty and preparing new programs such as the minor in integrated design, engineering, and applied sciences. I’m also particularly excited about changes to the Shapiro Writing Center (now located at 116 Mt. Vernon) that reflect the importance we place on writing here. There have also been positive developments in the Theater Department, including the hiring of Kathleen Conlin as the new department chair, and several additions to the curriculum.
Promoting equity and inclusion on our campus remains a primary focus. Thanks in large part to input from students, faculty and staff, our new Resource Center will open September 11 at 167 High St., the former home of the Shapiro Creative Writing Center. We’re pleased to welcome Demetrius J. Colvin as the director, and invite everyone to visit the Resource Center. An open house will be held in the fall.
The good folks at Allbritton are hard at work on a Civic Action Plan, which will guide Wesleyan’s future engagement with Middletown. Based on conversations on campus and in the city, this plan will determine how to best allocate our resources in order to have the greatest impact on the surrounding area.
We have begun preparations for some major facilities projects, beginning with the Film Studies, the CFA and the PAC. We are also starting long range planning for a new science building. As you might guess, given these projects and the ongoing need to raise funds for financial aid, we are beginning to plan the next university fundraising campaign.
As the academic year begins, our hearts go out to those facing the consequences of Hurricane (and Tropical Storm) Harvey. As I write this message, the waters are still rising and the forecasts are not promising. My blog has some links to how one might help.
We’ll be getting the new year started on a musical high note, with the sixth annual The MASH festival and the Main Street Stroll both happening on September 9. Campus and downtown will be filled with music, street performers, specialty workshops, and much more!
Wesleyan has the well-deserved reputation of being a caring community, and I am confident that we will all be looking out for one another. Sometimes a friendly, helping hand is all someone needs to get on the right path.
Let’s make the university’s 186th year a great one. If we take care of one another, the boldness, rigor, and practical idealism of a Wesleyan education will surely come through!
Michael S. Roth
President
We watch with horror as floods continue to ravage East Texas. Many are homeless, and the continued rains in an already saturated landscape are sure to result in more suffering. Our hearts go out to those struggling with this historic catastrophe.
Many Wesleyans want to find ways of helping those in the path of the storm. You can find lists of relief agencies working in the area here, here and here.
Having spent a productive and rejuvenating time in the Berkshires, I came home to Wesleyan early this morning. Lake Garfield is a lovely spot, as you can see from the picture below, but I always get a thrill coming back to this campus I love.
Staff are busy finishing summer projects and planning for the students’ arrival, and faculty are finishing up their preparations for classes that will soon be animated by discussion.
The virtues of a pragmatic liberal education are more evident when aggressive ignorance abounds. One doesn’t have to look too far to find examples of the perils of narrowness, close-mindedness and obfuscation. Our educational project is vital, and we will pursue it with energy and empathy.
Summer is winding down, and I am excited about the fall semester to come!
“If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” These were, according to several reports, the words of a recent Facebook post by Heather Heyer, killed yesterday in an act of domestic terrorism. White supremacists marched in Charlottesville threatening violence while evoking their Nazi heroes; with torches and fascist salutes, they call for the restoration of regimes of racial terror. “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.”
“It is disheartening for black folk to see such a vile and despicable replay of history,” writes Michael Eric Dyson. I know that Jews, gays and many other Americans also feel disheartened — we feel our hearts ripped apart when we watch the torches, the Nazi “Heil!” salute, the sickening displays of resentment and anger. Prof. Dyson goes on to say that “facing this unadorned hate tears open wounds from atrocities that we have confronted throughout our history.”
But face it we must, and we must reject the rise of unadorned hate and American style Neo-Nazism. As educators and students, as participants in our local communities and in our national polity, we must confront those who would restore violence and terror as mechanisms for fulfilling their contemptible fantasies of white supremacy.
And we must remember Heather Heyer, whose outrage led to action in Charlottesville, and who lost her life fighting for what she believed. May her memory inspire others and be a blessing to her fellow Americans.
This morning I published this op-ed in Inside Higher Education on the importance of defending (and, I think, expanding) our programs aimed at creating a dynamic, diverse student body. I cross-post it here.
Even after weeks of macho vulgarity, preening and unruly incompetence, this week the Trump administration still managed to send shock waves through the higher education and civil rights communities. The New York Times reported that the White House wants the U.S. Department of Justice to “redirect resources” of its civil rights division “toward investigating and suing universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants.” Subsequently, the DOJ announced that it was really just seeking “volunteers” interested in a lawsuit alleging discrimination against Asian-Americans.
Perhaps this is a move by the White House in concert with Jeff Sessions, playing to their shared political base. Under the guise of protecting the rights of Asian-Americans, this could save the beleaguered attorney general by making him the defender of white people who feel threatened by opportunities given to minorities. But apart from the cynical political opportunism of this move, we can also see the threats against affirmative action as another effort to use higher education to protect those who already have key social advantages.
Ever since the founding of this country, we have recognized that education is indispensable to our vision of a democratic society. All men may be created equal in the abstract, but education provides people concrete opportunities to overcome real circumstances of poverty or oppression. Thomas Jefferson argued that the talented poor should be educated at public expense so that inherited wealth would not doom us to rule by an “unnatural aristocracy” of wealth. A few years after Jefferson’s death, African-American shopkeeper David Walker penned a blistering manifesto pointing out that “the bare name of educating the coloured people, scares our cruel oppressors almost to death.” Some years later, the young slave Frederick Douglass received a “new and special revelation,” namely, that learning “unfits” a person for being a slave.
Promoting access to a high-quality education has been key to turning American rhetoric of equality into genuine opportunity. And throughout our history, elites threatened by equality, or just by social mobility, have joined together to block access for groups striving to improve their prospects in life. In the 20th century, policies were enacted to keep immigrants out of colleges and universities and to limit the number of Jews who enrolled. In more recent decades, referenda and legislators in states red and blue have attempted to block consideration of race at public universities, undermining opportunity for minorities, especially African-Americans.
Residential colleges and universities have for many years emphasized creating a diverse student body because we believe this results in a deeper educational experience. In the late 1960s, many institutions steered away from cultivated homogeneity and toward creating a campus community in which people can learn from their differences while forming new modes of commonality. This had nothing to do with what would later be called political correctness or even identity politics. It had to do with preparing students to become lifelong learners who could navigate in and contribute to a heterogeneous world after graduation.
Creating a diverse campus is in the interest of all students, and it offers those from racial minorities opportunities that have historically been denied them. That’s why governing boards and admissions deans have crafted policies to find students from underrepresented groups for whom a strong education will have a transformative, even liberating effect. Education, as Douglass said, makes you unfit for slavery.
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has written that the equal protection clause of the Constitution “guarantees that the majority may not win by stacking the political process against minority groups permanently, forcing the minority alone to surmount unique obstacles in pursuit of its goals — here, educational diversity that cannot reasonably be accomplished through race-neutral measures.”
Many citizens, but particularly citizens from racial and ethnic minorities, have often had to depend on the federal government to ensure that states provide access to political and economic opportunity. That’s why it’s particularly appalling to see the Trump administration commandeering the civil rights division of the DOJ to shore up privilege. This latest threat to higher education — like recent decisions undermining voting rightsand plans for a “merit-based” immigration system — is at its core another attempt by elites, scared “almost to death,” to hold on to their privileges by limiting access to political participation, social mobility and economic opportunity.
President Trump has become the leader of what Jefferson called an “unnatural aristocracy,” and perhaps we should not be surprised that it should attempt to increase its privileges. We who work in educational institutions must push back against this attempt, recognizing our responsibility to provide real opportunity to those groups who historically have been most marginalized.
College and university admissions programs are not the place to promote partisan visions of social justice, but they are the place to produce the most dynamic and profound learning environments. Higher education institutions need more (not less) diversity broadly conceived — including intellectual diversity — and we should enhance our efforts to make them inclusive, dynamic places of learning through difference. A retreat from affirmative action will just return us to the orchestrated parochialism of the past. We must resist it.
